Weapons of Mass Disruption

Social engineering is a behavior as old as humankind, though the terminology is traced back to Dutch industrialist J.C. VanMarken in 1894. Van Marken believed that the world needed people who could handle social (human) problems, in much the same way that engineers handled mechanical problems. Today social engineering is understood to be behaviors and methods used by hackers and other bad actors t...

Most textbooks are pretty dry. They lay out a lot of facts, but they are rarely engaging. When beginning the project to develop a textbook for the CYB 100 Infowars class, one student suggested that the book should try to re-create the classroom experience students have at York College. In order to do that, students were included at all phases of the development process, and one student in particul...

There has been a significant increase in maritime traffic in the last few decades as supply chains become more and more robust. With more targets of opportunity, there has been a parallel rise in piracy around the world. GPS has been an important technology to impact maritime navigation, but emerging technologies are not just facilitating better maritime travel, they are aiding piracy with capabil...

Boundaries come in many forms. They can be physical, verbal, psychological, emotional, virtual, and machine generated. Boundaries can be the subject of nation state conflict. They can be something you discuss while lying on your therapists couch. Boundaries come into play when we talk about establishing “work-life balance.” Since the launch of the Internet, boundaries have been changing, and Artif...

One of the best parts of being a college professor is seeing students grow from recent high school graduates into young professionals. Students in the cybersecurity management program at the York College of Pennsylvania are required to complete a research project into a cybersecurity related topic of their choice. The students choose really interesting topics including the ethics of technologies,...

Who owns your face? What about your voice? Or your natural body movements Have you ever thought about what makes you uniquely you? The recent actors’ and writers’ strikes brought the potential impacts of AI to public attention, and the actors’ guild was particularly concerned about deepfakes because an actors, voice, appearance, and body movements are part of their proprietary brand, and every tim...

Have you ever thought about what cyberspace looks like? We imagine video games, social media, the output of a search engine, or maybe something more Hollywood like the Matrix. But what do invisible spectrum signals look like? How do you have situational awareness of a place that is invisible? On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz hands off the microphone to York College of Pennsylvania cyber...

Each week millions of people tune in to watch as two teams of eleven players each face one another across the gridiron in a test of physical strength, speed, and agility. Just for the love of the game. Other than live-streaming the games, what roles could cybersecurity possibly play in such a physical contest?  You might be surprised! I'll be talking with two of my cybersecurity management st...

It's time for a new season of WMD! Listen in as we explore the impact of technology, social change, and disruption.

Movies like iRobot, WALL-E, and the Terminator portray humanoid robots as characters in movies about robots. Other movies, like Iron Man, implement robotics technology as part of the context of the story, such as Iron Man’s suit and swarming Iron Man drones. But changes in robotic technology are beginning to catch up to the Hollywood imagination, and robotics are generating new capabilities in the...

Automation in the manufacturing industry has been going on for years, beginning with the very first assembly line designed by Henry Ford. With wide adoption of robotics and the Internet of Things, the next big impact is coming from the implantation of AI and machine learning, which will interact with the existing automation technologies to enable things like computer vision and smart factories. Ha...

The military uses robotics in a variety of ways, drones both in the air and under water, and robots that can be used to find IEDs or dismantle bombs. But more robots and more communications systems operating on the tactical edge, create requirements for better access to the spectrum and greater bandwidth. On this episode of WMD I again hand off the microphones to two of my cybersecurity students,...

Power to the people, or is it power to the AI? In January, ChatGPT became a household word. Artificial Intelligence is impacting every industry, and now, from the music industry, to the sports industry, to the movie industry, it’s altering the course of entertainment.  Deepfakes are bringing dead movie actors back to life, or allowing aging actors to return to their youth. [if you have seen the la...

Take a look around you, how many devices in your environment need batteries to operate? As we explore emerging technologies in the clean energy space, we need to consider energy storage, and that means batteries. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz speaks with business analytics major Myles Herzog from the York College of Pennsylvania to explore the evolving world of battery technology.

Imagine a day in the future when you have an organ transplant from your own cells. Or receive a joint replacement constructed of real bone. As crazy as this sounds, healthcare is experimenting with 3D printing to make these kinds of crazy ideas a real possibility. On today’s episode of WMD, I will be talking with cybersecurity soon to be graduate, Lance Fries to explore the uses of 3D printing in...

During the pandemic, healthcare was disrupted no only by the covid-19 disease, but traditional patient care was upended. With new technologies continuing to emerge, it is becoming easier to visit the doctor without ever leaving you home, but the new version of House calls” does not involve the doctor coming to your home. Instead, technologies like telemedicine and virtual reality are changing the...

The closing line of the 1895 poem, Judge Softly, by Mary T. Lathrup says, “Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins.” This line evolved into the expression, “you can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” Empathy is essentially the ability to see things from another person’s perspective and imagine yourself in their place, but modern techno...

Artificial Intelligence, specifically generative AI has been scraping the Internet to “create” new artifacts in the form of text, software, art, and other expressions previously thought to be the realm of humans. Much of the data being ingested and regurgitated by generative AI are considered to be intellectual property. If a human were to use this data, we would be required to cite our sources or...

Have you ever been bungee jumping? Are you a by the book rules follower? Have you ever used the expression “It’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission”? Your answers to these questions speak to your perceptions of risk, and they have significant bearing on the types of social engineering approaches to which you are vulnerable. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz welcomes her col...

We continue our exploration of generative AI as we learn about Radio GPT, the new digitally curated radio program with AI “personalities” filling the role of DJ. On this episode of WMC, Dr. Tamara Schwartz is joined once again by WVYC’s Professor Jeff Schiffman to discuss what happens when content curating algorithms collide with Chat GPT.

What is art? Emerging technologies have always created new means for self-expression, a generative artificial intelligence such as DALL-E and and Stable Diffusion are two of the newest tools. When an AI generated picture won a prize in the Colorado State Fair last summer, there was a public outcry – did the image really qualify as art or was it simply a data analytics effort? When generative AI is...

With behavioral surplus (the collection of personal behavioral data) becoming a traded commodity, and Behavioral Analytics improving, the pursuit of our personal data through what Dr. Shoshonna Zuboff calls “extraction architectures,” it’s difficult to imagine a company choosing privacy for competitive advantage, over the profitable exploitation of an absence of privacy. But as we the surveilled a...

Cryptocurrencies have become a widely talked about topic in recent weeks with the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange. These currencies are created and facilitated on a technology called Blockchain, a framework that allows hundreds of computers to work simultaneously to create and facilitate transactions of crypto currencies. This technology is considered by some to be Antifragile by nature, but i...

Sophocles once said, “I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating.” No so in the world of video games, but “winners never cheat, and cheaters never win,” as the saying goes. And in the world of video game cheats, the consequences could be a significant loss in the pursuit of unearned victory. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with  York College cybersecurity mana...

If you have ever spent time with a person who claims to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, you have spent time with a polymath. Today, you get to listen to the meandering chaos of a VUCA conversation between two such individuals. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with the author of polymathic being, Michael Woudenberg, who provides counter intuitive insights from technol...