Another talk.

[Wayne]

Let me explain how this one came about. In 2014 FF and I attended iDate in Koln as speakers. iDate is a conference for the dating site industry, so we talked about romance scammers there. Marc, the organiser asked me if I'd like to attend the super conference in Vegas the next year. They'd pay for my flight and the hotel, all I had to do was make it to the airport and book myself somewhere cheap the first night. The main selling point of it was that Marc wanted to introduce me to someone called Steve Baker from the FTC who was also talking there. Despite my fear of flying, I managed to make it to Vegas and Marc was good on his word. Steve and I spoke for probably about an hour with him making copious notes on my answers to his questions. We met again when I attended the super conference the next year and once more a few years later when we were part of a research paper for a university in the UK. All this time we've been keeping in touch, and when Steve moved to the BBB we worked with him on several information sheets they published. A few months back I was part of a conference call on Zoom that he'd organised. We got talking about how scammers are using AI and he wanted to know more. I'd only just done my presentation at BSides Bristol and used one of the methods demonstrated there to show him how easy it was to clone a voice by cloning his voice and having him talk about the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. It's a Monty Python reference if you don't get it. I then went a step further and used a still image of him, ran it through a website and had it animated along with the cloned voice so it then looked and sounded as if it was him saying it. He asked if he could include it in his weekly newsletter and of course there was no way I was going to say no. Next up I was asked if I'd be willing for him to put my name forward as a speaker for a monthly Zoom talk by the National Adult Protective Services Association. Again, more than happy to say yes. Last week I was contacted with the details for the meeting, and it's in less than 2 weeks. Since then I've been working on updating the BSides talk with new information and tweaking a bunch of things ready for it. I then need to strip it down into a 15 minute version for my talk at another BSides a month later. Basically, I'm going to strip out any non AI stuff and make a few changes to make it more BSides friendly. Take out the Steve Baker animated image and replace it with one of one of the organisers, throw in a few funny things etc. It's all a lot of work, but if it gets the word out and helps raise awareness it's well worth it.