From Newsgroup: comp.risks

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 29 July 2025 Volume 34 : Issue 74

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator

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Contents:
Tom Lehrer was living proof that when satire becomes reality
(Lauren Weinstein)
A very personal view of Tom Lehrer (PGN)
Trump wants to mess with Texas' Congressional Maps (
China-backed hackers used Microsoft flaw in attacks, defenders say
Researchers Bypass Anti-Deepfake Markers on AI Images
Tesla Testing if Its Robotaxis Can Be Hacked Remotely
Paramount-Skydance merger approved after payment to Trump clears
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2025 10:29:13 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Tom Lehrer was living proof that when satire becomes reality,
reality becomes satire.

Mathematician and Musical Satirist Tom Lehrer dies at 97. Peace. I've been dreading this day for years. It's impossible for me to fully explain how
much his songs impacted my life growing up and right through to this day. I have much more to say about him but I won't right now, except to note the following references:

New York Times obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/music/tom-lehrer-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Zk8.TYYp.gl4ekMMTpL1R&smid=url-share

Tom's website where he placed his body of work (songs, etc.) in the
public domain:
https://tomlehrersongs.com/

Live performances:
Copenhagen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPmRJIoc2k

Oslo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1IiVF6Ehw8

ADDED LATER:

How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/how-tom-lehrer-escaped-the-transience-of-satire

------------------------------

Date: Tue 28 Jul 2025 14:55:43 PDT
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <Neumann@CSL.SRI.COM>
Subject: A very personal view of Tom Lehrer

Tom was a quasi-mentor for me beginning long before I first met him. I
adopted playing and singing the early songs, with numerous live
performances once I arrived at Harvard in September 1950, including his
*Freshman Smoker* gig that fall. I was unable to get into his Harvard
calculus course as a math major in the fall of 1950, but I had many
first-hand exposures and occasional chats -- including one evening when
we sat together for two hours at someone else's performance. The book
(Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer) came out in 1981 after the three records,
but I played everything I could remember by ear once I had heard it.
The Boston subway song (HCKC-PW, expectorantly pronounced, to the tune
of *Mother* -- see my website), Fight Fiercely Harvard, etc. I
augmented some of his songs with foreign-language insertions for German-
speaking audiences (e.g., some fractured German attributable to Gustav
(on Alma, Das ist die Fraulein I mustav) and Alma (on Gropius's Bauhaus,
Was am I running, ein Chowhaus?), in the wonderful biographical Alma
Mahler Gropius Werfel song (incidentally, Tom's mother's name was
Alma!), and some pigeon-Russian for Lobachevsky.

After seven years as a grad-student teaching fellow in the Harvard Math
Dept, Tom was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. (Whit Diffie
noted out of band that a mutual friend of theirs at the National
Security Agency was able to keep him out of active battle.) I was at
Harvard for eight years, spanning much of Tom's initial graduate
years as a lecturer. When he came back, the Math Dept refused to
re-admit him as a PhD thesis candidate, presumably because no grad
student had ever failed to get a PhD in seven years. Fred Mosteller
took Tom on in the Statistics Department, which led to five more years
of trying to finish his PhD -- until Tom apparently decided it was not
worth it.

Why is this a special item for RISKS? Tom was way ahead of everyone
else -- on dope peddling, pollution, technology, war, religion, evil,
and much more: Implicitly high-lighting the truth (which has always been
sacred to RISKS). Tom's extraordinary sense of constructive satire had
a really powerful message. He had a unique ability to capture the
moment -- especially in his way of exposing the right and wrong. (His
annual Harvard Physics Reviews were incisive, but not widely known, as
were his trips to MIT.) When my friend and mentor Dave Huffman was at
U.C. Santa Cruz in the final stage of his professoring after his tenure
at MIT, he would call me up in the morning once a year and let me know
that this was the day that Tom would perform at Dave's Crowell College,
which Tom would apparently do on very short notice to avoid big crowds.
(Dave Huffman greatly enjoyed Tom's humor. He also had his own sense of
humor, one day declaring to me that there had just been a merger of
Honeywell and Fairchild, and it was being called Fairwell Honeychild.)

There was a flurry of discussion out of band on whether the open-sourcing of Tom's archives were in any way redacted to meet earlier or even current "norms". I think not, although there were some protests, particularly
on the first item in the following list that I have pulled together here:
What could possibly require Redacting?

Here are just a few that illustrated Tom's incisive satire:

* The Vatican Rag
* National Brotherhood Week (with examples of equal-opportunity hatred)
* The Irish Ballad about the lass who killed her entire family
* The Old Dope Peddler (way ahead its time)
* I Got It from Agnes [I heard him sing the precursor of that in the
Freshman Smoker in 1951, as *John Gave it to Mary, and She Got It
from George ...* It was one of the few songs that he nursed along
over the years.]
* Be Prepared -- The Boy Scouts Marching Song (a bunch of racy lines)
* My Home Town (with a bunch of racy lines)
* Werner von Braun (Nazi, Schmazi!)
* Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (there were three famous ones that
she married and God knows how many between)
* The Hunting Song (precursor of the anti-gun movement)
* Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
* I Hold Your Hand In Mine (and take a bite of your dainty finger tips)
* Pollution -- Don't drink the water and don't breath the air.
Tom used to vary a few lines to suit the audience, as in the local
San Francisco night-club version:
The breakfast garbage you throw in the Bay
They drink for lunch in San Jose.
[That was a polymorphic line that Tom adapted in real-time.
But the entire song would have to be buried today as a harbinger
of the defanging of climate change.]
* And many other amazingly diverse potshots at almost everything else that
came into his unusual mind. In that it is now all open-sourced, you can
make your own changes, toning it down or adding your own local variants.
But everything he wrote stands on its own.

[From Steve Bellovin (and in a different venue, Peter Wayner):
To PGN from SMB:
You may not have seen this: [This generated some discussion.]
https://bsky.app/profile/opalescentopal.bsky.social/post/3luxxx27xhe23]

[From George Neville-Neil:
American musical satirist Tom Lehrer dies at 97, U.S. media report (BBC)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpv02yd2714o
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpv02yd2714o.amp
I was privileged enough to get to email him a few years ago for
permission to use a bit of Lobachevsky in my Kode Vicious book.]

All in all, we have lost an absolutely amazing mind -- even if heavily
slanted to sometimes dark satire. His legacy deserves to be carried on
forever by hand and mouth (a la Fahrenheit 451 if nothing else).
(Carry-on Carrion was of course the subject of the Hunting song:
We tied them to the fender, and got them home somehow ...
And there's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now,
two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow.)

And then was the song that he never wrote, for which he had only the title:
If I Had It To All Over Again, I'd do it all over you!

I hope that this issue of RISKS lives as long as Tom Lehrer's anthology.
PGN

------------------------------

Date: Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:55:43 PDT
From: Peter G Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: Trump wants to mess with Texas' Congressional Maps
(Burt Solomons)

Burt Solomons, *The New York Times*, Opinion, 29 Jul 2025
Caving into partisan demands erosdes the public trust in government.

As a former Texas lawmaker and a current constituent, I urge them to
reject this clear partisan manipulation, one that smacks of
authoritarian overreach. I urge them to do the Texas way. Don't let
others tell you what to do or how to do it. Re-affirm that Texans --
not the president -- get to choose their congressional
representatives.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:53:20 PDT
From: PGN RISKS List Owner <risko@csl.sri.com>
Subject: China-backed hackers used Microsoft flaw in attacks, defenders say
(NYTimes)

Researchers say Chinese actors, along with other criminal hackers, exploited
a security flaw in SharePoint software widely used by governments and businesses.

Ellen Nakashima, Joseph Menn, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez,
*The Washington Post* (07/20/25), via ACM TechNews

Hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in widely-used Microsoft
SharePoint server software to launch a global attack on government agencies
and businesses in the past few days, breaching U.S. federal and state
agencies, universities, and energy companies. Tens of thousands of servers
are at risk, experts said, and Microsoft has issued no patch for the flaw. Researchers said the hackers gained access to keys that may allow them to regain entry even after a system is patched.

[Also,
SharePoint Attacks Include Ransomware Infections (Jessica Lyons)
The Register (U.K.) (07/24/25), via ACM TechNews
Microsoft confirmed late Wednesday that a threat group it tracks as
China-based Storm-2603 is abusing vulnerable on-premises SharePoint
servers to deploy ransomware. The security holes affect SharePoint
Enterprise Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Server
Subscription Edition. Fixes for all three have been issued. More than 400
organizations have been compromised thus far, according to Belgium's Eye
Security, including the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear
Security Administration, which maintains U.S. nuclear weapons.]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:42:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Researchers Bypass Anti-Deepfake Markers on AI Images
(Anja Karadeglija)

Anja Karadeglija, CBC News (Canada) (07/23/25), via ACM TechNews

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada developed a tool that
can quickly remove watermarks identifying artificially generated
content. The UnMarker tool can remove watermarks without knowing anything
about the system that generated them or anything about the
watermarks. Explained Waterloo's Andre Kassis, "We can just apply this tool
and within two minutes max, it will output an image that is visually
identical to the watermark image" but without the watermark indicating its artificial origin.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:42:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Tesla Testing if Its Robotaxis Can Be Hacked Remotely
(Emily Forlini)

Emily Forlini, PC Mag (07/21/25), via ACM TechNews

Tesla has received U.S. Federal Communications Commission approval to test
its robotaxis for vulnerabilities to cellular and radio frequency (RF)
hacking. The company will simulate RF attacks to assess how resilient its autonomous vehicles are to malicious interference. The tests aim to
strengthen cybersecurity measures ahead of broader autonomous vehicle deployment.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:51:21 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Paramount-Skydance merger approved after payment to Trump clears
and Colbert fired

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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