Tests like these shouldn't be a "gotcha." They should be fair.

* Had employees already been through some basic anti-phishing training?
* Did the test include something that someone who paid attention during the training course would be reasonably expected to spot?

There is one other use for tests like these: To survey the population of employees: What % of employees clicked on the link, and what do we need to do organizationally (not "just for those who failed") to lower this number to something we can live with?

But it shouldn't be a "gotcha."

Just sadness

Too late to go for funny, but I didn't leave any ribbon. Maybe that explains your Canadian rudeness?

They can turn Ukraine into glass. "At all costs" means they will start and lose World War III because most of their nukes were spent turning every hectare of Ukraine into uninhabitable wasteland. But for the few minutes that Putin lives before the incoming missile vaporizes him, he can laugh maniacally and say "I beat Ukraine! Ukraine is no more!"

--
For the gallows-humor impaired, this is NOT a serious suggestion. There are no winners in a nuclear war. If he's even thinking about ordering a nuclear strike on Ukraine, even one bomb, hopefully one of his aides will be brave enough to make sure such an order is never followed.

Back in the 20th century some power companies would put your hot water heater on a "controllable" meter that could be turned off during periods of high demand. The rate on that meter was lower than the rate for the rest of the house.

Industrial customers who are willing to be "turned off" can also get cheaper rates from many utility companies.

The work this agency is or will be doing has probably been done for decades. This may just be a re-organization to bring people together under one agency.

If you were qualified to be an editor you would check your sig for a possessive usage and manage the sig character limit more effectively. ;-)

It appears I have to quote it against the censor sock puppets with mod points, but I mostly wonder what part of it annoyed them so much. The philosophic flavor? Or is Social Security some kind of third rail, even in the indirect reference via "pension"? Can't really claim I was disappointed because I no longer expect any helpful references or even thoughtful replies from Slashdot... (There are individual exceptions, but in general the tl;dr appears to be mostly automatic after a paragraph or two.)

My memory of the "discussion" has already faded. Quite sure there was no memorable Funny post or I would remember the joke now. Not that long ago. Also think I managed to dig up some mention of social security after I had posted, but can't recall if it was substantive or not. Is it worth looking around to see if I thought there was some part of the discussion that was worth a reply? Or perhaps the joke is that I was "called back" to the post by a belated positive mod point?

I'm quoting your FP because that moderation appears to be intended as censorship. For what extremely little it is worth on today's Slashdot, I think you are raising an interesting point, probably even an important point, but not doing it well. Positive spin would be to say you felt constrained by the FP problem and wrote in haste. Negative spin would question how well you write. Today I feel positive, except that I believe the FP thing is on the LONG list of problems Slashdot cannot address because of the defective business model. (Long time since Slashdot felt like a friendly place with many substantive discussions... But I still like the "feel" of the input window for the editor. Why?)

However I'm mostly branching back to a higher perspective and I hope my Subject is less vacuous than "Really?" I think this story is about one aspect of a much larger problem with what the google has become. Is there any among you (assuming anyone still has the attention span to read a second paragraph) who still believes "Don't be evil" has relevance in today's google?

Mostly I try to limit my google exposures these years, but I still have contact with a number of google apps. The overwhelming theme is that the quality is getting worse, often in ways that suggest short-sighted or even evil motivations. (In order of decreasing time, I think it's close between Maps and YouTube at the top with Gmail and Gemini and Calendar on a lower tier. Should the weather summary count as a google app? Now I feel like the google is pervading and invading my life...)

However I think there is a simple reason why things are getting worse. The "good" people are leaving or being driving out of the google. Many of the people who leave seem to be hoping to do better things. Apparently they think they have more chances to make the world better from outside of the google? (Also anecdotes of former friends who seem to have changed since become part of the the google. And not for the better...)

The people who are left behind inside the google seem to be more and more focused on money. The FP focused too narrowly on military money. The big money these days is in crypto and AI scams, and that's where lots of evil people are concentrating their efforts. Dare I say naturally?

SIX paragraphs? How dare I? I wait with bated breath for the tl;dr responses.

... that wetware has vulnerabilities too?

Or to put it another way: "Oops, I didn't mean to do that, sorry."

The use case I envisioned is experts who COULD do the work by hand use AI as a tool to be more efficient. This assumes they are expert-enough that will recognize if their AI of choice is giving a false-positive rate that makes their work harder, not easier. It also assumes that since they are being paid for their time (but perhaps only a pittance or not at all if they are students), they will be paid by their employers or funders as much for reviewing the AI's output as they are for the other parts of their research.

... the usual caveats apply: An expert human, or team of humans, needs to look at what the AI is suggesting, understand what it is suggesting, test it with the same or more rigor they would give to the same suggestion if a human had come up with it, and not "sign off" on it until they are satisfied that it is what they say it is.

It's the humans who are putting their professional reputation and, in some cases, their professional licenses on the line if they get it wrong. The AI is incapable of caring if it's correct or not.

Thanks for the joke, though I think the story had much more potential for humor.

There was one period in my motley career when I actually ran the customer service department. Main reason I was able to provide any actual customer service was because no such department existed. No trace in the business plan that the VCs had funded. But it had to be done, so I did it (while mostly doing the job I had been hired for at night from home).

I actually learned quite a lot from helping the customers and from training other employees in how to help customers. I also learned that some people will never believe that they've been helped, but they still helped me understand what customers wanted and there were even times when the ingrates helped me find new ways to solve customer problems or ways to offer new services.

It would be interesting if someone wrote a "business history" book about how customer service was destroyed. At least I haven't found that book yet. I think Microsoft will be prominently featured for innovations in new ways to treat support as a cost to be minimized. Silly me to think support was about making customers happy and finding new ways to serve the customers. The google is just following the established "new tradition" on this one. Any leads to books or authors? My leading candidate would be Michael Lewis, but I think I've read all of his books and he never went there. Perhaps Michael Cusumano could write it? If he's still alive, which I doubt... But what does the AI chatbot say?

Okay, sort of a form of a plan for the joke I was looking for... "Synergy" was inevitable, but I was looking for a "Where's the value?" version, perhaps patterned after the ancient "Where's the beef?" commercial.

I don't think there is any real value left in today's stock market, though it has innovated in new forms of Ponzi schemes. Rather than going outwards looking for fresh suckers to bring in more cash, the way traditional Ponzi schemes worked, the stock market is now going inwards with fresh imaginary valuations of various shares that mean nothing, but which can be used to borrow actual cash for super-living expenses and private jets and all that fine stuff. The old metrics of inventory and past sales and price-to-earnings and all that junk ("beef"?) mean nothing now (against imaginary "synergies").

Me? Thanks, but no beef of the edible sort. I prefer chicken. Even though my cup of metaphorical beefs runneth over.

You are young. I remember the older days when you had to set up an external modem to connect to a university mainframe that MIGHT have internet. With no pictures.

No ftp or telnet from your actual home computer. If you wanted to download files, kermit, xmodem, and the mainframe's equivalent of 'cat' were your friend.