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Comment by raybb | Hacker News Reader

22 points·raybb··5 comments

This seems like a routine university PR release about a routine grant to do a routine psychology study about how people process things like phishing attempts. They don't even have results yet.

Sure, it is good that we're funding that work. Some people have better BS alarms than others, this is a classic area of study, but it is always good to know more. But it seems wrapped up in a new buzzword to get funding and attention: "cognitive security", which the PI says "was pioneered in my lab". My BS alarm is going off, which wasn't helped by the fact that this hit #2 on the front page with no comments 30 minutes after submission.

Yeah seriously, what's next, a submission that someone got a new job at Corp X?

When I hear cognitive security i think of the DL algorithms that turn brainwaves into text, and Haruki Murakami's book Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World^0 that invokes the concept of cognitive security that can defeat such as shuffling. Similar to Johnny Mnemonic's mnemonic courier^1.

^0: https://chhsponyexpress.com/1937/ent/book-review-haruki-mura...

^1: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/johnny-mnemonic-cybersecurity...

Brain wave mapping to text is unique from person to person. They’re also hard to read and tend to require concentrated focus on specific patterns of conveying text (more like consciously shuffling to be understood rather than the reverse). I think this is an unlikely development. What is more likely is you have a personal device like a phone that you have reading your own thoughts and that’s just some leaky thing that corps can listen to.

The phone is trying to "read your thoughts" through your digital activity trail?

I think the AI mind-reading models should generalize well across people: https://github.com/yu-takagi/StableDiffusionReconstruction

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