S11E16 – Poisoned AI, Windows 10 and Quantum Computing
Chapters
Show Notes
Episode Summary
Mike and co-host Howard opened with the story that airborne rabies was spreading through the White House, which Mike said was fake news that AI search tools repeated after picking it up from a Reddit community built to poison AI with nonsense. He used it to explain why AI lacks common sense and cannot be trusted as a sole source.
The show then covered Windows 10’s extra year of security updates, a customer case in which Apple store staff could not help with an old-style email setup, and the history of POP, IMAP and modern email protocols. The last segment was about quantum computing and France’s plan to require quantum-safe security products. No listeners called in.
Topics Covered
AI trained on bad data
Mike said a subreddit called Poison AI exists to feed AIs nonsense, and that screenshots showed Gemini and Claude falling for a made-up airborne rabies story, starting with DuckDuckGo’s AI search. He said this is deliberate poisoning rather than a hallucination, and that AI has no built-in common sense to flag an absurd claim. He added that Reddit mixes useful posts with a lot of sarcasm and nonsense. He also said Copilot on his phone asked him to confirm a calendar entry about 15 times without ever adding it.
Windows 10 extended updates
Mike said Microsoft is giving Windows 10 users another year of security updates, either for about $30 or by signing in with a Microsoft account and using Windows backup. He said Microsoft’s hardware requirements for Windows 11 are tied to chip-level security flaws, and criticized Windows for pushing Microsoft services, forced account sign-in and automatic OneDrive and BitLocker changes. He mentioned the Chris Titus cleanup tool for removing unwanted features.
Phone scams and over-the-counter support
Howard described a customer who let scammers remote into Apple devices. An Apple store sold them new devices but could not set up their old-style ISP email, and mail began disappearing when the household switched from POP to IMAP behavior. Mike said store tech support staff follow scripts and often cannot go beyond them.
Email protocols and why not to use ISP mail
Mike explained that POP downloads mail to one device, IMAP keeps devices in sync, and newer systems also sync contacts and calendars. He advised against email tied to an internet provider such as Cox, Comcast or Earthlink, or Yahoo, because mail is the key account that unlocks the rest of your accounts. He said Comcast pushed its mail to Yahoo.
Quantum computing
Howard said France’s cybersecurity agency plans to stop certifying products that are not quantum safe, starting in 2027 with a 2030 cutoff. Mike said a long password that would take hundreds of thousands of years to brute force would fall in moments to a quantum computer, and that the biggest benefit will be research in medicine and materials. He explained qubits and superposition in simple terms and said he thinks quantum computing will undermine cryptocurrency.
Calls
No listeners called in this episode.