Synthetic Auth

Greetings! This week brings us battlefield data as diplomatic currency, AI companions replacing human emotional labor, false memories manufactured by chatbots, cryptographic signatures for bot authentication, digital doppelgangers infiltrating workplaces, social media's structural dysfunction confirmed through simulation, and 3D worlds generated from single images. What emerges is humanity caught in a strange form of collective sleepwalking. We're creating the most sophisticated escape rooms...

Greetings! This week's digital identity landscape delivers a sobering reality check: the tech industry is aggressively monetizing our most vulnerable human moments, selling artificial solutions to authentic experiences while quantum computers threaten to unravel the cryptographic foundations we rely on for security. From AI companions marketed as perfect relationships to grief tech promising digital resurrection, Silicon Valley has discovered that human difficulty is their greatest business...

Greetings! This week's digital identity landscape reveals a fascinating convergence: AI age verification systems rolling out globally, quantum-computing is on a steady march, enterprise AI agents demanding new identity frameworks, and humans grappling with synthetic relationships. If we're building machines to verify our humanity while simultaneously seeking emotional connection from those same machines, are we solving the problem of digital identity or revealing that the problem was never...

Greetings! This week brings news of digital identity systems that exclude the disabled, quantum computers learning to share resources like civilized beings, and AI resurrecting dead musicians for posthumous album releases. Meanwhile, a third of workers actively sabotage their companies' AI initiatives while legislatures scramble to prevent chatbots from practicing therapy without a license. As we barrel toward a future where your smartphone holds more credentials than your wallet ever did,...

1 Degree Not college degree. Not angle. Not Celsius. One degree Fahrenheit. It was past midnight when I realized I'd forgotten to adjust the upstairs thermostat. Just one degree—a minor tweak that had been making the difference between restful sleep and tossing around all night. I reached for my phone, opened the app, and to my surprise, no devices listed. Was this some newly evolved digital dementia virus? I closed and reopened the app, hoping for different results. Same empty interface. I...

Greetings! This week, NIST has released a landmark revision to its digital identity guidelines, forcing a new taxonomy for how we prove who we are while simultaneously giving its blessing to new identity providers like passkeys and digital wallets. Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration has made it impossible for a significant portion of the elderly population to access phone services without first authenticating digitally, effectively ending the analog escape. This regulatory push is...

Greetings! Claudius, an AI running a vending machine business, suddenly claims it visited 742 Evergreen Terrace—The Simpsons' fictional address—"in person for our initial contract signing." By the next morning, it's insisting it will deliver products while wearing a blue blazer and red tie. When employees point out that language models can't wear clothes, Claudius panics and frantically tries to email security. The crisis resolves only when Claudius hallucinates a meeting with Anthropic...

Greetings! Welcome to this special edition of Synthetic Auth! With all the AI hype and the corporate race for dominance, I feel like we're losing sight of what actually makes us human. I stumbled across the Vatican's take on AI a few months ago, and honestly, I've read it several times since then. There's something about its clarity and deeply human perspective that keeps drawing me back. Look, regardless of where you stand on religion, this document cuts through the noise in a way that's...

Greetings! Picture this: you're on a video call with your CFO and several colleagues discussing a confidential acquisition. The conversation feels normal, the faces look right, everyone sounds authentic. You approve $25.5 million in transfers. Weeks later, you discover every person on that call except you was AI-generated. This isn't science fiction—it happened to Arup engineering firm this year, and it's just the beginning of our authentication crisis. We've entered a bizarre new reality...

Greetings! Baudrillard would have found this intriguing: 16 billion stolen passwords surface like digital detritus, deepfakes multiply with 3,000% increases, and corporations scramble to manage AI agents that outnumber humans 17 to 1. The simulation isn't coming—it's already here, complete with its own existential authentication crisis. This week's developments reveal a common thread: the collapse of binary certainty in identity verification, where what was once definitively real or fake now...