The State Department has posted sobering news for Americans who use dating apps when traveling to Columbia.

U.S. Embassy Bogota is aware of eight suspicious deaths of private U.S. citizens in Medellin between November 1 and December 31, 2023. The deaths appear to involve either involuntary drugging overdose or are suspected homicides. At this time, it is not believed these deaths are linked as each involved distinct circumstances, however several of the deaths point to possible drugging, robbery, and overdose, and several involve the use of online dating applications.

According to the Tourism Observatory of the District Personnel of Medellin, the number of thefts committed against foreign visitors (excluding Venezuelans) increased 200 percent in the third trimester of 2023 compared to the previous year and violent deaths of foreign visitors increased 29 percent. Most of the 2023 violent death victims were U.S. citizens.

Criminals use dating apps to lure victims to meet in public places such as hotels, restaurants, and bars, and then later assault and rob them. Numerous U.S. citizens in Colombia have been drugged, robbed, and even killed by their Colombian dates.

Really this warning is for all social networking apps in general anywhere in the world. Safety of them is not at the levels that people expect, and that gap is fatal, as the above data clearly shows.

Integrity is the often understated and sometimes ignored third leg of the information security triad: confidentiality, integrity and availability.

Confidentiality gets lots of press attention as privacy breach stories make headlines. Availability needs no headlines to get attention since everyone immediately knows when their information isn’t accessible. Poor integrity, however, is like debating scientific consensus. It’s a step into Plato’s philosophical conundrum of shadows on a cave wall. What is right, what is real?

I’ve said for a decade now or more we are in the age of integrity breaches. Moreover I’ve said we have largely solved for confidentiality and availability…

With that in mind, the following story highlights once again how the security industry must immediately focus itself more on integrity solutions.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he will introduce measures to reverse the convictions of more than 900 Post Office branch managers wrongly accused of theft or fraud because of a faulty computer system in what is considered one of the gravest injustices in the nation’s history.

The announcement Wednesday follows a TV docudrama on the wrongdoing that created a huge surge of public support for the former postmasters who have spent years trying to reclaim lives ruined by the scandal.

A TV show.

It was a TV show that forced top managers of a fraudulent and corrupt information system to admit their abuse of innocent users.

That’s a textbook definition of integrity being compromised. Integrity was hacked. And from all accounts this was an easy case to prove.

This case also should be seen as foreshadowing, given the NHS deal being inked with a notoriously immoral firm Palantir. Expect even more lives to be ruined at a faster pace and in more ways.

The phrase Integrity Breach is what government regulators need to become comfortable with, and start to enforce ASAP with clear boundaries, as they have done with “privacy breaches” (e.g. California’s SB1386 in 2003) or “downtime”.

To put it another way, if computer engineering was even remotely disciplined like any other engineering skill, when someone grossly violated the duty to do no harm to society (e.g. when they built bridges that collapsed) there would be some accountability and far less fraud.

I can’t believe I read an entire article about a Russian bread factory now 3D printing military drones, and Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov was never mentioned.

Yuri Chicherin, the bakery’s director, told the channel that making the US sanctions list was a major achievement: “We are proud, we are glad. When else would anyone talk about our factory at such an international level?”

When else? Howabout when their bread is baked? Maybe nobody was talking about the bread because… they aren’t very good at it. Do these drones even fly?

Next they’ll blow themselves up and destroy the factory to grow prouder, because that will make even more people talk about them.

Speaking of crummy jobs, do the bakers knead much dough to make the drones instead? Like how many rubles? The article suggests a very low budget operation with no quality control, a sign of desperation by the Russian government.

The Tesla brand continues to plummet in trust and safety.

To us, this update seems clearly tailored to stave off further government action for the time being while keeping “nags” to a minimum, not to reduce driver distraction and improve safety. Declining to publicize the recall and bundling it with more than a dozen other features while burying it at the bottom of the list suggests an intent to hide the information from owners. The fact we were able to look at a phone for more than 2 and a half minutes at 70 mph while using Autosteer post-recall is damning.