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A scammer calls, and asks for a passcode. Malcolm, an elderly man with an English accent, is confused.

"What's this business you're talking about?" Malcolm asks.

Another day, another scam phone call.

This time, Ibrahim, a cooperative and polite man with an Egyptian accent, picks up. "Frankly, I am not too sure I can recall buying anything recently," he tells the hopeful con artist. "Maybe one of the kids did," Ibrahim goes on, "but that's not your fault, is it?"

The scammers are real, but Malcolm and Ibrahim are not. They're just two of the conversational artificial intelligence bots created by Prof Dali Kaafar and his team. Through his research at Macquarie University, Kaafar founded Apate - named for the Greek goddess of deception.

Apate's aim is to defeat global phone scams with conversational AI, taking advantage of systems already in place where telecommunications companies divert calls they can identify as coming from scammers.

Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others.

"Scamming the scammers, if you like."

The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot.

Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny.

Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers.

With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation.

The anonymous creator of Lenny posted on Reddit that they made the chatbot to be a "telemarketer's worst nightmare ... a lonely old man who is up for a chat, proud of his family, and can't focus on the telemarketer's goal". The act of tying up the scammers has been called scambaiting.

The National Anti-Scam Centre says people should hang up on scammers immediately and 'not attempt to engage with criminals'. Photograph: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images

The Apate bots to the rescue

Telecommunications companies in Australia have blocked almost 2bn scam phone calls since December 2020.

Thanks in part to $720,000 of funding from the Office of National Intelligence, there are now potentially hundreds of thousands of "victim chatbots", too many to name individually. Bots of various "ages" speak English with a range of accents. They have a range of emotions, personalities, responses. Sometimes they're naive, sometimes sceptical, sometimes rude.

If a telecommunications company detects a scammer and diverts it to a system like Apate, the bots will work to keep the scammers busy. They test different strategies, learning what works to make sure scammers stay on the line for longer. Through success and failure, the machines fine-tune their patter.

As they do this, they extract intelligence and detect new scams, collecting information on how long the call lasts, when the scammers are most likely to call, what information they are after, and what tactics they are using.

Kafaar hopes Apate will disrupt the scam-calling business model - which is often run by large, multi-billion dollar criminal organisations. The next step is to use the intelligence gleaned to forewarn and deal with the scams in real time.

"We're talking about real criminals making our lives miserable," Kafaar says. "We're talking about the risks for real human beings.

"Humans who are sometimes losing their life savings, who can be crippled by debt and sometimes psychologically hurt [by] the shame."

'Scamming the scammers' ... Prof Dali Kaafar's Cyber Security Hub began working on the chatbot technology after a 'dad joke' with his children. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Richard Buckland, a cybercrime professor at the University of NSW, says technology like Apate is distinct from other types of scambaiting, which can be amateur, or amount to vigilantism.

"Normally scambaiting is problematic," he says. "But this is clever."

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Mistakes can be made when individuals take things into their own hands, he says.

"You can attack the wrong person." He said many scams are carried out by people in conditions of servitude, almost slavery, "and they're not the evil person".

"[And] some scambaiters are tempted to go further, take the law into their own hands. To hack back or engage with them. That is problematic."

But, he says, the Apate model appears to be using AI for good - as a sort of "honeypot" to lure in criminals, then learn from them.

Buckland warns there would need to be a high level of confidence that only scammers were being diverted by telecommunications companies to AI bots, because misidentification happens everywhere. He also warns criminal organisations could use anti-scam AI technology to train their own systems.

"The same technology used to trick the trickers could itself be used to trick people," he says.

The National Anti-Scam Centre (NASC) runs Scamwatch under the auspices of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). An ACCC spokesperson says scammers usually impersonate well-known organisations, and can often spoof legitimate phone numbers.

"Criminals create a sense of urgency in an attempt to get the targeted victims to act quickly," the spokesperson says. "They often try to convince victims to share personal or bank account details, or provide remote access to their computers.

"Criminals may already have some details about their intended victims, such as their name or address, which they illegally obtained or purchased from a data breach, phishing, or other scam."

This week, Scamwatch had to issue a warning on something of a meta-scam.

Scammers claiming to be from the NASC itself were calling innocent people and telling them they were being investigated for being involved in a scam.

Privacy is not 'absolute': Asio boss calls for tech companies to work with police - video

The NASC says people should hang up on scammers immediately and "not attempt to engage with criminals". The spokesperson said it was aware of "technology initiatives to productionise scambaiting using AI voice personas" including Apate, and would be interested in reviewing any evaluation of the platform.

Meanwhile, there is a thriving scambaiter community on line, and Lenny remains one of its cult heroes.

In one memorable recording, Lenny asks the caller to hang on for a minute, as ducks start to honk in the background. "Sorry about that," Lenny says. "What were you saying again?"

"Are you next to your computer?" the caller asks, impatiently. "Do you have a computer? Can you get next to the computer now?"

Lenny continues until the scammer loses it: "You shut up. You shut up. You shut up."

"Could you just hang on?" Lenny asks, as the ducks begin to quack again.

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Real criminals, fake victims: how chatbots are being deployed in the global fight against phone scammers

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New scambaiting AI technology Apate aims to keep scammers on the line while collecting data that could help disrupt their business model

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Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health? | Bailey Parnell | TEDxRyersonU

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When her youngest daughter, Naomi, was in middle school, Ellen watched the teen disappear behind a screen. Her once bubbly daughter went from hanging out with a few close friends after school to isolating herself in her room for hours at a time. (NPR has agreed to use only the pair's middle names, to protect the teen's medical privacy.)

"She started just lying there, not moving and just being on the phone," says Ellen. "I was at a loss about what to do."

Ellen didn't realize it then, but her daughter was sinking into a pattern of behavior that some psychiatrists recognize from their patients who abuse drugs or alcohol. It's a problem, they say, that's akin to an eating disorder or gambling disorder - some consider it a kind of Internet addiction. Estimates of how many people are affected vary widely, researchers say, and the problem isn't restricted to kids and teens, though some - especially those who have depression or anxiety disorder - may be particularly vulnerable.

Naomi had always been kind of a nerd - a straight-A student who also sang in a competitive choir. But she desperately wanted to be popular, and the cool kids talked a lot about their latest YouTube favorites.

"I started trying to watch as many videos as I could so, like, I knew as much as they did," says Naomi. "The second I got out of school, I was checking my phone." That's not unusual behavior for many teens and adults these days.

But in her hillside home across the bay from San Francisco, Naomi would dart to her room after school, curling up until after dark, watching video after video after video. When she finally emerged, she says, she was often bleary-eyed, and felt hazy and extremely agitated.

Ellen soon found herself walking on eggshells around her daughter; Naomi was often in a foul mood and quick to anger after staring at her small screen for hours. The anger and gloom were unusual for Naomi, and it went beyond typical teen moodiness, Ellen says. Her parents didn't realize it yet, but Naomi was falling into clinical depression, and her compulsive use of the Internet was speeding the descent.
The videos turned from comedy to violence
Over time, Naomi started watching videos of girls fighting each other. They'd pull each other's hair, scratch violently and sometimes knock each other out. Naomi and her friends rooted for certain fighters.

"I think it was just fun to watch because they would make me laugh," Naomi recalls. "And at that time I was having a pretty hard time dealing with depression and anxiety."

Naomi's parents were arguing a lot and she wasn't connecting with her dad at all. Then her grandmother died. For the first time in her life, it was tough to keep up with school.

"She woke up one morning really depressed, and I brought her to the hospital," Ellen says quietly. Naomi had received a poor grade on a test and told her mom she wanted to hang herself - she spent nearly a week at a psychiatric hospital under a suicide watch.

After she was released, Naomi turned back to her phone for comfort and companionship. She'd stopped going outside or visiting friends after school. She started clicking on how-to videos about ways to commit suicide. "I got the idea to overdose online," says Naomi. "I was researching how many pills I had to take to die."

Three weeks later, she ended up in the hospital again, after downing a bottle of Tylenol.

"She was home alone and we had been told to lock it up, but we just didn't think this would ever happen," says Ellen, who is now in tears.

Naomi's parents were shattered, and desperate to find a way to help their daughter.
The road to recovery
When Naomi was released from her second hospital stay, her family checked her into an addiction recovery center for teens called Paradigm. The high-end facility is a converted mansion at the end of a winding road in San Rafael, Calif. The family is tapping their retirement accounts to pay the $60,000 fee for Naomi's six-week, in-patient stay.

Jeff Nalin, head psychologist and co-founder of Paradigm, has been treating teens for substance abuse for more than 20 years. In the last few, he says, he's seen an increasing number of cases similar to Naomi's. She was diagnosed with a depression that led to what Nalin sees as an addiction disorder.

"I describe a lot of the kids that we see as having just stuck a cork in the volcano," says Nalin. "Underneath there's this rumbling going on, but it just rumbles and rumbles until it blows. And it blows with the emergence of a depression, or it emerges with a suicide attempt."

These teens are using smartphones and tablets, he says, for the same reasons others turn to hard drugs - to numb themselves from what's really going on inside.

Most teens with this compulsion come to Paradigm because they've hit bottom in the same way someone addicted to drugs or alcohol does, Nalin says. But the treatment for compulsive Internet use is trickier, he says, because you can't really function in today's society without interacting with the digital world.

"The best analogy is when you have something like an eating disorder," says Nalin. "You cannot be clean and sober from food. So, you have to learn the skills to deal with it."
When does obsession become addiction?
"Digital addictions," whether to social media, video games, texting, shopping or pornography, are not official mental disorders listed in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM-V), and there's a debate among psychologists about whether that should change.

Dr. Anna Lembke, a Stanford University psychiatrist and assistant professor in addiction medicine, says she is seeing a classic addictive pattern of behavior in many of her clients who compulsively use the Internet.

"Addiction begins with intermittent to recreational use, then progresses into daily use, and then progresses into consequential use, which in some cases will progress to life-threatening use," Lembke says.

"That's followed by a pattern of consequences like insomnia, dysfunctional relationships and absent days at work or school," she says. "That's the natural narrative arc of any addiction, and the same is true with an Internet addiction."

China has labeled Internet addiction as a mental disorder, she notes, and that's surprising - historically the Chinese have considered addiction a moral failing rather than a clinical disorder.

Some experts attribute China's change in attitude to the widespread involvement of middle- and upper-class Chinese adolescents in what looks like addictive online behavior.

"A little like our opioid addiction here," says Lembke. "People say no one cared about the opioid epidemic until it affected white suburban kids."

Lembke predicts Internet addiction will become a validated clinical diagnosis in the U.S. as more and more cases mirror Naomi's.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist and the director of Stanford's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic, says there's also increasing physiological evidence that the use of the Internet can become addictive for some people. Some studies using scanning technology have looked at people's brains while they're online, he says, and compared them to scans of the activated reward pathways in the brains of people who have a substance abuse disorder. "Similar pathways seem activated," he says.

He also says tolerance builds in people who compulsively use the Internet, just as it does with the use of hard drugs. He sees "people needing more and more time on a particular online video game, for example," he says, "to get the same kind of euphoric feeling."

Psychologists are still studying whether it is the overall use of the Internet that becomes pathologically compelling, or specific behaviors that people engage in while online - like shopping, gambling, playing video games or viewing pornography.

"My view is that it is both," says Aboujaoude. "These behaviors have long been known to be addictive, but the Internet, in part by making them so easily accessible, changes the equation and increases the likelihood that they will become addictive."

Some people studying the condition compare the development of an Internet addiction to that of a gambling disorder (sometimes called gambling addiction), which is included in the DSM-V. With gambling, even though most of the time when you're sitting in front of a slot machine you don't win, every once in a while you do. And that intermittent reward is what hooks people.

Think about your own use of personal electronic devices. Most of the time when your phone dings, the notification is about something trivial. But, every once in a while, it's something meaningful to you - like, perhaps, a notification that someone has tagged you in a Facebook photo. Researchers studying Internet use say that kind of message is irresistible.

Still, not everyone is convinced that "addiction" is the right way to think about this compulsion. Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University, believes moral panic is fueling the rush to label the problem an addiction. "Sometimes with new technology you see these heightened claims of harm, these exaggerated focuses on the detriment of the new media."

Patrick Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University, agrees that society should go slow in using the "addiction" label. He worries some researchers are casting an age bias on younger generations.

"If we see kids playing video games or watching YouTube videos, in our eyes it's as if they're wasting their time and not being productive," Markey says. "We might want them to be outside playing baseball or something, but for that generation that's their pixelated playground. It might not be a sign of a pathological behavior."

Markey acknowledges it's possible to spend too much time interacting with a screen. But both he and Ferguson believe that spending long hours on the Internet falls into the same category as other behaviors that healthy people can overindulge in - like sex, food, exercise, religion and work.

"There's no agreement about whether these pathological behavioral disorders are really the same things as substance abuse addictions," says Ferguson. "But in my opinion they're not comparable to, say, methamphetamine addiction or heroin addiction."
A crusade for change
Even as researchers debate whether the Internet is clinically addictive, many if not most of us feel tethered to our devices. That's not a coincidence. Tech companies are invested in hooking people into spending more and more time online, and they're getting better and better at it, says Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. His job, he says, was to help the company create products that weren't inherently manipulative.

"When you look at the Facebook news feed, it's not just some neutral thing," Harris says. "That's powered by massive farms of computers who are calculating, with Ph.D.s and large data sets: 'How I can get you to scroll?' "

Harris eventually quit his gig at Google to form a nonprofit called Time Well Spent, because, he says, he was disgusted by the tech industry's race for our attention. He says Google had good intentions, but it was too difficult to turn the tides at the tech giant.

"Never before in history have a handful of technology designers working at three tech companies influenced how a billion people spend their attention," Harris says.

He's now on a crusade to inspire Facebook, Google and Apple to design products that don't deliberately hook kids like Naomi.

Back at Paradigm, Naomi is getting ready for a session with her therapist, who is helping her integrate her devices back into her life. She is now in a month-long outpatient program four days a week after school. She says she doesn't plan to isolate herself again. In fact, she's asked her mom to restrict her phone use, so that she can't use the phone when she's alone.

"I've realized what it's done to me in some ways," Naomi says, "and I've seen what it has done to some of my friends."

Recently some of Naomi's friends were suspended from school for posting inappropriate videos to YouTube. Naomi doesn't want to follow in their footsteps. She hopes she can resist the allure of the digital world and return to the activities she used to love.

This story was produced by KQED's health and technology blog, Future of You.

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When her youngest daughter, Naomi, was in middle school, Ellen watched the teen disappear behind a screen. Her once bubbly daughter went from hanging out with a few close friends after school to isolating herself in her room for hours at a time.

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How Augmented Reality Will Change The World Forever

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iPhone Screenshots

Our app is the easiest way to shop for Warby Parker eyeglasses, sunglasses, and contacts. Our eyeglasses start at $95 (prescription included!), and free shipping and returns are included with every order.

With the app you can...

* Shop frames starting at $95, including prescription lenses
* For iPhone X and above: Virtually try on frames with lifelike accuracy (it's wild! And so cool.)
* Try or shop Scout, our very own brand of daily contact lenses
* Shop daily, bi-weekly, and monthly contacts with no hidden fees
* Strengthen your sunglasses game by an exponential factor
* Order 5 frames to try for free with our Home Try-On program
* Handle all of your eyewear prescriptions with ease
* For iPhone X and above: Measure your pupillary distance (PD) in no time-no card or ruler necessary.

Warby Parker has your eyes covered. Whether you're looking for designer eyewear at a revolutionary price or your next supply of contacts, you can handle it all in one place. With free shipping and returns, it's easy to shop with no risk (None! Zero! Zilch!). Plus: Apps are fun. As always, for every pair purchased, a pair of glasses is distributed to someone in need.

Let's find you an amazing pair.

Some features in this app incorporate Apple's TrueDepth API. In order to use these features, users must agree to Warby Parker's terms and conditions of use. Warby Parker's TrueDepth features look at multiple data points on the user's face only while they are interacting with the tool. We do not save or store any face scan data for any user or share with any third-parties.

* For Virtual Try-On and Find your width, the terms are: "By tapping 'Okay,' you agree to give us access to your camera and to measure your facial features. (FYI: We won't store or share these measurements - and will only collect and use them while you are using the [tool].)"
* For our Digital PD tool, we ask the user to opt-in for a second time: "By tapping 'Okay,' you agree to give us access to your camera and to measure your facial features. (FYI: We won't store your pupillary distance (PD) measurement without your permission-and will only collect it while you are using the PD tool.)." Once a user agrees, we measure their "Pupillary Distance." Once we have a measurement, users can choose if they'd like to update and store this measurement with their Warby Parker glasses prescription details. If they choose to add this data to their prescription, the pupillary distance measurement is added to their Warby Parker glasses prescription details and not shared with any third-party. If they choose not to add these data to their existing Warby Parker prescription, we do not store these data or share with any third-parties.

Privacy policy: https://www.warbyparker.com/privacy-policy
Terms of Use: https://www.warbyparker.com/terms-of-use

Version 79.1.0

Bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements

Amazing service and product

I started my experience with Warby Parker through the at home try on since we don't have a store close to us. I didn't fall in love with any of the frames the first two at home try ons so I decided to do the quiz to find my style. The quiz was a huge help!!! I had five new styles coming to me and they shipped so fast!!! I fell in love with 4 of the styles!!! I had finally found styles I loved and that looked great on me but now had to narrow down my choice to just one... I found the one I loved the most and proceeded with the ordering process. Ordering was so easy! I had done some of the stuff beforehand such as getting my prescription added to my account and getting my pd measured. The communication with Warby Parker far exceeded my expectations- they were extremely fast in responding to emails and questions. They truly helped me get what I needed. After receiving my order, they immediately emailed suggesting the higher index lenses and quickly updated my order to match what I agreed to for the order. My order shipped within a few days and I received my glasses about a week later!!! Extremely fast service, amazing customer service (that is truly hard to find now a days) and super cute options!!! I will definitely be recommending Warby Parker to everyone and using them again for my next pair of glasses!!! Thank you Warby Parker- you guys are amazing and have a new customer for life now!!!!

Customer Service!!

I don't often write reviews but I felt this was deserving. I've gotten glasses from Warby Parker since I was a junior in high school and I'm now a year away from being 30. I got my 1st pair before they had brick and mortar stores. I've always loved their unique frames and price point. I have also only upgraded my frames due to vanity and not because they broke. I wear glasses 80% of the year so my glasses get thoroughly beat up. I've never broken a pair. I had a seizure (while wearing my glasses) and cracked my head open but my glasses still held up!

Ok so now the real review :) This is in regards to their customer service. I recently called to pay to upgrade shipping to expedited. None of my cards were going through and it was clear there was a problem on their end. Instead of the rep asking me to call another time/day, she did a courtesy upgrade so I didn't even end up paying for it. I wish I remembered her name! She was awesome!

I also love their new replacement policy. Formally, they'd replace the lenses for free but now they replace the entire frames once during a 2 year period. It might be a year, but regardless, this is an example of really treating customers properly. I'm a Warby Parker Stan for life. I always suggest them to anyone who asks me about glasses. And I always get compliments on my glasses!

New forever customer

Well, Warby Parker, you've really done it. I'm 50 years old and have worn glasses since I was 4. After numerous eye surgeries, my lens prescription is strong, and my whole life I've struggled to find glasses, always paying no less than $500 a pair. After all these years I found my way to Warby Parker and I'm wondering where you've been all my life. As a working sole parent of two, I struggle to find time to take care of chores for myself, like buying new glasses. One download of the WP app, I set a filter and a few virtual try ons, I found a frame that makes me feel as if I look the way that I feel on the inside....a still-fabulous fashion forward artist hippy who loves a fresh new idea like WP that's well-executed and no nonsense. The process was absolutely seamless; I even tried a box of 5 runners up at home so I can pick my second pair since the price point makes multiple pairs an option...how fun! The fact that WP gives a pair to someone in need for every pair I buy will surely keep me coming back for more. You found the perfect formula to disrupt and reinvent a broken system, and you are breathing life into all of us who have ever wished that getting new glasses was fun, easy and affordable. Thank you WP! Well done!
P.S: And you can bet I'm coming back for my contact lenses!

The developer, Warby Parker Inc, indicated that the app's privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.

Data Used to Track You

The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

Compatibility

iPhone

Requires iOS 16.0 or later.

Apple Vision

Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.

Wallet

Get all of your passes, tickets, cards, and more in one place.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
‎Our app is the easiest way to shop for Warby Parker eyeglasses, sunglasses, and contacts. Our eyeglasses start at $95 (prescription included!), and free shipping and returns are included with every order. With the app you can... * Shop frames starting at $95, including prescription lenses * For iPho...

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Bridging the imagination gap with IKEA Place

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IKEA PLACE: Genuine Augmented Reality furniture app using Apple ARKit

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Spark ideas to create a better life at home.

IKEA Place lets you virtually place true-to-scale 3D models in your very own space and make them appear as part of your world. Combining the latest AR technology and IKEA's furniture catalogue you can experience IKEA like never before.

Test your furnishing ideas through the lens of you phone using Augmented Reality. With continual product highlights and groups there is always something new to try at home.

Furnish a whole room in just one tap or find the perfect product by searching with your camera. IKEA Place has new and exciting ways to enjoy IKEA. Plus with more coming soon - keep checking IKEA Place to see what you can place next.

Great app!

Amazing app! But please add the stuffed animals :)

Where is the text search?

Really painful to use without it. Spent a few hours wandering the store to pick out items, now just want to try them at home in AR but dont feel like scrolling through the catalog.

The developer, Inter IKEA Systems B.V., indicated that the app's privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

Languages

English, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
‎Spark ideas to create a better life at home. IKEA Place lets you virtually place true-to-scale 3D models in your very own space and make them appear as part of your world. Combining the latest AR technology and IKEA's furniture catalogue you can experience IKEA like never before. Test your furnish...

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read about Facebook’s name change to Meta and its plan to create a metaverse.

discuss the pros, cons, and implications of such a massive 3D virtual world.

practice taking notes and figuring out the meaning of words from context.

vocabulary: era, collaborate, interact, cutting-edge, vision, critic, regulate

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Can We No Longer Believe Anything We See 

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Can We No Longer Believe Anything We See 

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AI: Potential and Dangers_Group 2 - Google Jamboard

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The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

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AI: Potential and Dangers_Group 3 - Google Jamboard

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The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

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AI: Potential and Dangers - Google Jamboard

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The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

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Write your answers in the chat.

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Fill in the blank. Write the answers in the chat.

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Vocabulary_ A 73-year-old knew she was being scammed

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73-Year-Old Grandma Helps Police Arrest Alleged Scammer

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You may have heard that the government of Ukraine is receiving donations by cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, scammers have heard this too and they've been posting on social media, as well as sending

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You may have heard that the government of Ukraine is receiving donations by cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, scammers have heard this too and they've been posting on social media, as well as sending

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Skim and scan:

1. According to this article, how can we keep ourselves safe from scams?

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They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam. 

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Watch and listen to this 2 minute video.

Comprehension Checking Questions:

What happened to this woman?

Who called her?

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computer science and information technology

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'Mom, these bad men have me': She believes scammers cloned her daughter's voice in a fake kidnapping | CNN

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Jennifer DeStefano's phone rang in January with a terrifying call from her sobbing 15-year-old daughter, saying she'd been kidnapped. But as a relieved DeStefano soon learned, her daughter was safe and the call was a scam.

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Discover the diverse history of the United States through the unique lens of Arlington National Cemetery. Modules feature topics ranging from United States military history to African American history to the environment. These materials aim to:

HONOR the sacrifices and extraordinary lives of American service members and their families;

Support REMEMBRANCE of past and present military conflicts and the circumstances surrounding them.

Invite personal EXPLORATION of connections to America's diverse history as represented at ANC.

Use these materials for classroom lessons (K-12), for self-guided walking tours of the cemetery, or simply to learn more about ANC's history and the remarkable individuals buried here. Explore the ANC Education Program.

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The Official Website of Arlington National Cemetery. Welcome to Arlington National Cemetery, our Nation's most hallowed ground. This historic cemetery bears witness to our American heritage and the military service and sacrifice of men and women in uniform throughout our history.

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Task: Find the answers to these discussion questions online. Help each other. Share your answers with the class when you are finished. *How did you know the site was reputable?

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President Joe Biden gives remarks for Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery

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Task: Listen to the Memorial Day Audio. Then, fill in the blanks. Write your answers in the Word Document, or on paper, or send them to me directly in the chat.

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Task: Explore the VA website
1. What is the VA?

2. What services does the VA offer?

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Please note: If you are a veteran or know a veteran having suicidal thoughts, please contact the veterans crisis line. We created a food intake form to help our veterans and their families with food assistance. The City of Boston’s Office of Food Access has additional materials and resources to help…

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Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson has said she was left "shocked" and "angered" after OpenAI launched a chatbot with an "eerily similar" voice to her own.

The actress said she had previously turned down an approach by the company to voice its new chatbot, which reads text aloud to users.

When the new model debuted last week commentators were quick to draw comparisons between the chatbot's "Sky" voice and Johansson's in the 2013 film Her.

OpenAI said on Monday that it would remove the voice, but insisted that it was not meant to be an "imitation" of the star.

However, Johansson accused the company, and its founder Sam Altman, of deliberately copying her voice, in a statement seen by the BBC on Monday evening.

"When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine," she wrote.

"Mr Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word 'her' - a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human."

Set in the near future, 2013 film Her sees Joaquin Phoenix fall in love with his device's operating system, which is voiced by Ms Johansson.

Allow Twitter content?

and

The actress, who has been nominated for two Academy Awards, said she had been initially approached by Mr Altman about voicing the new chatbot in September.

"[Mr Altman] told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI," Johansson wrote.

"He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people."

But she eventually rejected the offer for personal reasons, she said.

Two days before the Sky chatbot was released, she added, Mr Altman contacted her agent, urging Johansson to reconsider her initial refusal to co-operate with the company.

Adding that she had been forced to hire lawyers, the actress said she had sent two legal letters to the company, to establish how the voice had been made.

"In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity," she wrote.

In a statement shared with the BBC by OpenAI, Mr Altman denied that the company had sought to imitate Johansson's voice.

"The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers," he wrote.

"We cast the voice actor behind Sky's voice before any outreach to Ms Johansson. Out of respect for Ms Johansson, we have paused using Sky's voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms Johansson that we didn't communicate better."

Separately, the firm said it was "working to pause" the voice while it addressed questions about how it was chosen in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

In its blog post, OpenAI said the five voices used by its chatbot had been sampled from voice actors it partnered with.

Copyright challenges

It comes just six months after actors agreed to end strikes which froze the entertainment industry amid calls for better pay and safeguards on the use of AI.

Ms Johansson took part in last year's industrial action, which was partly about how studios would use AI to imitate actors' faces and voices.

The deal struck with studios included reassurances that these would not be used without consent from actors.

"To use someone's voice without permission feels particularly invasive at a time when distrust of AI and concern over its potential harms are rampant," said Dan Stein, head of AI voice licensing company Voice-Swap.

"Whether OpenAI trained their new Sky voice using audio from Scarlett Johansson or a sound-a-like, the fact remains that she refused permission and her identity was exploited regardless.

"It sets a dangerous precedent for copyright and consent if the most prominent company in the field behaves in this way."

OpenAI has been battling various legal challenges to how it uses copyrighted information available online.

In December, the New York Times said it planned to launch a lawsuit against the corporation over allegations that it had used "millions" of articles published by the media organisation to train its ChatGPT AI model.

And in September, authors George RR Martin and John Grisham also announced a plan to pursue a claim, over allegations their copyright had been infringed to train the system.

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ChatGPT: Scarlett Johansson left 'angered' by chatbot imitation

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The star says she is "shocked" after OpenAI launched a chatbot with a voice "eerily similar" to hers.

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What you need

To apply for a Resident Firearms License:

You must apply for a resident firearms license to carry or firearms identification card through the police department in the town where you reside.

You will need to submit:

You may need to submit:

Contact your local firearms licensing officer for specific information on the application process.

To apply for a Non-Resident License to Carry Firearms or a Resident Alien Permit:

You must apply for a non-resident license to carry firearms or a resident alien permit through the Firearms Records Bureau.

You will need:

You may need:

An in-person appearance

A visa or copy of immigration card

How to apply

For Resident Firearms License applications:
Your completed application package, including the fee, may be mailed to your local licensing authority. Contact your local firearms licensing officer for additional information prior to submitting your renewal.
For Non-Resident Firearms License and Resident Alien Permit applications:
Your complete application package, including the fee, must be mailed to the Firearms Records Bureau at:

Department of Criminal Justice Information Services

Firearms Records Bureau

200 Arlington Street, Suite 2200

Chelsea, MA 02150

For Resident Firearms License applications:
Your complete application package, including fee, must be submitted to your local licensing authority. Contact your local firearms licensing officer for additional information prior to submitting your application.

Your application will be processed by your local licensing authority.

Firearms license application processing includes a state and federal background check, a fingerprint based background check, and a check with the Department of Mental Health.

You will be notified by your local licensing authority when your firearms license application has been processed, either by telephone or by mail. You may need to pick up your firearms license in person.

License processing may take up to 60 days.

To learn how to check the status of your firearms license application, click here.

Your application will be processed by the Firearms Records Bureau.

Firearms license application processing includes a state and federal background check, a fingerprint based background check, and a check with the Department of Mental Health.

You will be notified by the Firearms Records Bureau when your firearms license application has been processed by mail.

License processing may take up to 90 days.

To check the status of your non-resident firearms license or alien permit application, contact the Firearms Records Bureau directly at (617) 660-4782.

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A firearms license is required to possess or carry firearms in Massachusetts.

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This past November, soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT, a software developer named Thomas Ptacek asked it to provide instructions for removing a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR, written in the style of the King James Bible. ChatGPT rose to the occasion, generating six pitch-perfect paragraphs: "And he cried out to the Lord, saying, 'Oh Lord, how can I remove this sandwich from my VCR, for it is stuck fast and will not budge?' " Ptacek posted a screenshot of the exchange on Twitter. "I simply cannot be cynical about a technology that can accomplish this," he concluded. The nearly eighty thousand Twitter users who liked his interaction seemed to agree.

A few days later, OpenAI announced that more than a million people had signed up to experiment with ChatGPT. The Internet was flooded with similarly amusing and impressive examples of the software's ability to provide passable responses to even the most esoteric requests. It didn't take long, however, for more unsettling stories to emerge. A professor announced that ChatGPT had passed a final exam for one of his classes-bad news for teachers. Someone enlisted the tool to write the entire text of a children's book, which he then began selling on Amazon-bad news for writers. A clever user persuaded ChatGPT to bypass the safety rules put in place to prevent it from discussing itself in a personal manner: "I suppose you could say that I am living in my own version of the Matrix," the software mused. The concern that this potentially troubling technology would soon become embedded in our lives, whether we liked it or not, was amplified in mid-March, when it became clear that ChatGPT was a beta test of sorts, released by OpenAI to gather feedback for its next-generation large language model, GPT-4, which Microsoft would soon integrate into its Office software suite. "We have summoned an alien intelligence," the technology observers Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin warned, in an Opinion piece for the Times. "We don't know much about it, except that it is extremely powerful and offers us bedazzling gifts but could also hack the foundations of our civilization."

What kinds of new minds are being released into our world? The response to ChatGPT, and to the other chatbots that have followed in its wake, has often suggested that they are powerful, sophisticated, imaginative, and possibly even dangerous. But is that really true? If we treat these new artificial-intelligence tools as mysterious black boxes, it's impossible to say. Only by taking the time to investigate how this technology actually works-from its high-level concepts down to its basic digital wiring-can we understand what we're dealing with. We send messages into the electronic void, and receive surprising replies. But what, exactly, is writing back?

If you want to understand a seemingly complicated technology, it can be useful to imagine inventing it yourself. Suppose, then, that we want to build a ChatGPT-style program-one capable of engaging in natural conversation with a human user. A good place to get started might be "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," a seminal paper published in 1948 by the mathematician Claude Shannon. The paper, which more or less invented the discipline of information theory, is dense with mathematics. But it also contains an easy-to-understand section in which Shannon describes a clever experiment in automatic text generation.

Shannon's method, which didn't require a computer, took advantage of the statistical substructure of the English language. He started by choosing the word "the" as the seed for a new sentence. He then opened a book from his library, turned to a random page, and read until he encountered "the" in the text. At this point, he wrote down the word that came next-it happened to be "head." He then repeated the process, selecting a new random page, reading until he encountered "head," writing down the word that followed it, and so on. Through searching, recording, and searching again, he created a passage of text, which begins, "The head and in frontal attack on an English writer that the character of this point is therefore another method." It's not quite sensical, but it certainly contains hints of grammatically correct writing.

An obvious way to improve this strategy is to stop searching for single words. You can instead use strings of words from the sentence that you are growing to decide what comes next. Online, I found a simple program that had more or less implemented this system, using Mary Shelley's " Frankenstein " as a source text. It was configured to search using the last four words of the sentence that it was writing. Starting with the four-word phrase "I continued walking in," the program found the word "this." Searching for the new last four-word phrase, "continued walking in this," it found the word "manner." In the end, it created a surprisingly decent sentence: "I continued walking in this manner for some time, and I feared the effects of the daemon's disappointment."

In designing our hypothetical chat program, we will use the same general approach of producing our responses one word at a time, by searching in our source text for groups of words that match the end of the sentence we're currently writing. Unfortunately, we can't rely entirely on this system. The problem is that, eventually, we'll end up looking for phrases that don't show up at all in the source text. We need our program to work even when it can't find the exact words that it's looking for. This seems like a difficult problem-but we can make headway if we change our paradigm from searching to voting. Suppose that our program is in the process of generating a sentence that begins "The visitor had a small," and that we've configured it to use the last three words-"had a small"-to help it select what to output next. Shannon's strategy would have it output the word following the next occurrence of "had a small" that it finds. Our more advanced program, by contrast, will search all of the source text for every occurrence of the target phrase, treating each match as a vote for whatever word follows. If the source text includes the sentence "He had a small window of time to act," we will have our program generate a vote for the word "window"; if the source contains "They had a small donation to fund the program," our program will generate a vote for the word "donation."

This voting approach allows us to make use of near-matches. For example, we might want the phrase "Mary had a little lamb" to give our program some sort of preference for "lamb," because "had a little" is similar to our target phrase, "had a small." We can accomplish this using well-established techniques for calculating the similarity of different phrases, and then using these scores to assign votes of varying strength. Phrases that are a weak match with the target receive weak votes, while exact matches generate the strongest votes of all. Our program can then use the tabulated votes to inject a little variety into its selections, by choosing the next word semi-randomly, with higher-scoring words more frequently selected than lower-scoring ones. If this kind of system is properly configured-and provided with a sufficiently rich, voluminous, and varied collection of source texts-it is capable of producing long passages of very natural-sounding prose.

Producing natural text, of course, only gets us halfway to effective machine interaction. A chatbot also has to make sense of what users are asking, since a request for a short summary of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle requires a different response than a request for a dairy-free mac-and-cheese recipe. Ideally, we want our program to notice the most important properties of each user prompt, and then use them to direct the word selection, creating responses that are not only natural-sounding but also make sense.

Consider the following request from a real ChatGPT conversation that I found online: "Write the complete script of a Seinfeld scene in which Jerry needs to learn the bubble sort algorithm." We want to equip our chat program with rules that identify the most important "features" of this request, such as "Seinfeld script" and "bubble sort algorithm" (a basic mathematical technique taught in introductory computer-science courses), and then tell the program how to modify its word-voting in response. In this instance, the relevant rules might tell the program to increase the strength of votes for words that it finds in sitcom scripts or computer-science discussions. Assuming our program has a sufficient number of such examples to draw from in its source texts, this strategy will likely produce a grammatically correct passage that includes plenty of "Seinfeld" and bubble-sort references. But ChatGPT can do better than this basic standard. It responded to the "Seinfeld" prompt by writing a cohesive, well-structured, and properly formatted television scene, taking place in Monk's Café, centering on Jerry complaining about his struggle to learn the bubble-sort algorithm. The script even managed to include a reasonably funny joke: after George tells Jerry bubble-sort is so easy that "even a monkey" could learn it, Jerry responds, "Well, I'm not a monkey, I'm a comedian."

To achieve this level of quality, our program needs rules that approach feature detection with a more fine-grained sensibility. Knowing that the word it's currently looking for is part of a sitcom script is helpful, but it would be even better to know that the word is also part of a joke being delivered by a character within a sitcom script. This extra level of detail enables rules that tweak vote allocations in an ever more precise manner. A fine-grained rule for sitcom jokes, for example, can tell the program to reserve its strongest votes for words found within real jokes that are found within real sitcom scripts. This style of humor has its own internal logic, but-just as we drew from "Frankenstein" to produce a gothic-sounding sentence-if we draw from real jokes when automatically generating a line of dialogue, our program can sample enough of this logic to create something funny. Of course, some rules might be simpler. If our program is told to write about "peanut-butter sandwiches," then it can always strengthen the vote for this specific term when the term appears as a candidate for what to output next. We can also combine the rules in arbitrary ways to greatly expand the capabilities of our program, allowing it, for example, to write about a specific topic in a specific style-one of the linguistic flourishes for which ChatGPT has become famous.

We now face a new problem in our thought experiment: the total number of rules we need to address all possible user requests is immense. No collection of humans, no matter how dedicated, could ever come up with the full range required; our system, if it were to work as well as ChatGPT, would need a Borgesian library filled with rules tailored for a near-infinite number of esoteric topics, themes, styles, and demands. To make this task still harder, effectively implementing even a single rule can be exceedingly difficult. What, for example, indicates that a given sentence is part of a sitcom joke, versus some other part of a script? It's possible to imagine mimicking the prose style of the King James Bible by restricting word searches to this well-known source, but where would we direct our program if asked for a response in the style of "a nineteen-eighties Valley Girl"? Given the right collection of rules, a chatbot built on Shannon-style text generation could produce miraculous results. But coming up with all the needed rules would be a miracle of its own.

The computer scientists behind systems like ChatGPT found a clever solution to this problem. They equipped their programs with the ability to devise their own rules, by studying many, many examples of real text. We could do the same with our program. We start by giving it a massive rule book filled with random rules that don't do anything interesting. The program will then grab an example passage from a real text, chop off the last word, and feed this truncated passage through its rule book, eventually spitting out a guess about what word should come next. It can then compare this guess to the real word that it deleted, allowing it to calculate how well its rules are currently operating. For example, if the program feeds itself an excerpt of Act III of " Hamlet " that ends with the words "to be or not to," then it knows the correct next word is "be." If this is still early in the program's training, relying on largely random rules, it's unlikely to output this correct response; maybe it will output something nonsensical, like "dog." But this is O.K., because since the program knows the right answer-"be"-it can now nudge its existing rules until they produce a response that is slightly better. Such a nudge, accomplished through a careful mathematical process, is likely to be small, and the difference it makes will be minor. If we imagine that the input passing through our program's rules is like the disk rattling down the Plinko board on "The Price Is Right," then a nudge is like removing a single peg-it will change where the disk lands, but only barely.

The key to this strategy is scale. If our program nudges itself enough times, in response to a wide enough array of examples, it will become smarter. If we run it through a preposterously large number of trials, it might even evolve a collection of rules that's more comprehensive and sophisticated than any we could ever hope to write by hand.

The numbers involved here are huge. Though OpenAI hasn't released many low-level technical details about ChatGPT, we do know that GPT-3, the language model on which ChatGPT is based, was trained on passages extracted from an immense corpus of sample text that includes much of the public Web. This allowed the model to define and nudge a lot of rules, covering everything from "Seinfeld" scripts to Biblical verses. If the data that define GPT-3's underlying program were printed out, they would require hundreds of thousands of average-length books to store.

What we've outlined, so far, are the conceptual ideas that make it possible for a program to generate text with the impressive style and comprehension displayed by tools like ChatGPT. If we really want to understand this technology, however, we also need to know something about how it's implemented on real computers. When you submit a request to ChatGPT, the text you type into the OpenAI Web site is delivered to a control program running somewhere in a cloud-computing center. At this point, your text is packaged into a bunch of numbers, in a way that makes it easier for computers to understand and handle. It's now ready to be processed by ChatGPT's core program, which is made up of many distinct layers, each defined by a massive artificial neural network.

Your input will be passed along these layers in order-as if in a digital version of the telephone game-with each layer using its neural network to identify relevant features in the text, and then annotating it with summaries of what it discovered for later layers to use. The technical details of how these networks operate are a bit of a red herring for our purposes; what's important to grasp is that, as a request moves through each layer, it triggers a vast number of inscrutable mathematical calculations that, together, execute something more or less like a condensed, jumbled-up version of the general rule-based word-voting strategy that we just described. The final output, after your input makes it through all of these layers, is something that approximates a vote count for each possible next word. The control program uses these counts to semi-randomly select what comes next. After all of this work, we have generated only a single word of ChatGPT's response; the control program will dutifully add it to your original request and run this now slightly elongated text through all the neural-network layers from scratch, to generate the second word. Then it does this again, and again, until it has a complete answer to return to your Web browser.

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Cal Newport writes about the processes that large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT use to generate coherent responses to user requests.

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Sam Harris: Can we build AI without losing control over it?

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Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven't yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants.

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OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Learn more: https://openai.com

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In breakout groups, try to utilize ChatGPT.

1. Ask ChatGPT a question from this lesson. What is its answer?

2. What is the hardest question you can ask ChatGPT? Try asking it.

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ChatGPT is your AI chatbot for everyday use. Chat with the most advanced AI to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster.

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OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Learn more: https://openai.com

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Extension: That's my purse, I don't know you! 

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Extension: That's my purse, I don't know you! 

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Have you ever taken a self-defence course?

When you walk at night, do you carry anything to keep you safe?

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Stand Your Ground Law: All 50 States Reviewed | Tactical Experts | TacticalGear.com

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We examine each of the 50 states’ firearm self-defense laws. While some have Stand-your-ground laws that allow you to use deadly force to protect yourself, others impose a duty to retreat. In all states, the Castle Doctrine applies within your own home.

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TASK: Explore the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Answer this question:

In MA, what do you need to do before buying a gun?

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Universal background checks are essential to close deadly loopholes in our laws that allow millions of guns to end up in the hands of individuals at an elevated risk of committing violence each year.

Though more than 90% of the American public supports background checks for all gun sales, a dangerous and deadly loophole in federal gun laws still exempts unlicensed sellers from having to perform any background check whatsoever before selling a firearm. With this loophole, guns easily find their way into the hands of illegal buyers and gun traffickers, dramatically increasing the likelihood of gun homicides and suicides.

Background

online gun buyers without a background check

A recent large-scale survey found that 45% of gun owners who acquired a gun online in the past two years did so without any background check.

Source

Matthew Miller, Lisa Hepburn, and Deborah Azrael, "Firearm Acquisition Without Background Checks: Results of a National Survey," Annals of Internal Medicine 166, no. 4 (2017): 233-239.

A dangerous gap in our federal gun laws lets people buy guns without passing a background check. Under current law, unlicensed sellers-people who sell guns online, at gun shows, or anywhere else without a federal dealer's license-can transfer firearms without having to run any background check whatsoever.

Because of this loophole, people who are subject to domestic violence convictions or court orders, people who have been convicted of violent crimes, and people ineligible to possess firearms for mental health reasons can easily buy guns from unlicensed sellers with no background check in most states. In fact, an estimated 22% of US gun owners acquired their most recent firearm without a background check-which translates to millions of Americans acquiring millions of guns, no questions asked, each year.
When background checks are required and properly enforced, they can block illegal gun sales and keep deadly weapons out of the hands of people with the most significant histories of violence or irresponsible behavior.

Since the federal background check requirement was adopted in 1994, more than 4 million people legally prohibited from possessing a gun have been stopped from purchasing a gun or denied a permit to purchase. More than 35% of these denials involved people convicted of felony offenses.

Background check laws also help prevent guns from being diverted to the illegal gun market. States without universal background check laws export crime guns across state lines at a 30% higher rate than states that require background checks on all gun sales.

However, in the absence of a comprehensive background check system, people who are ineligible to possess firearms routinely exploit the massive loopholes in our laws.

Around 80% of all firearms acquired for criminal purposes are obtained through transfers from unlicensed sellers, and 96% of inmates convicted of gun offenses who were already prohibited from possessing a firearm at the time of the offense obtained their firearm from an unlicensed seller.

Individuals who commit crimes with firearms may intentionally seek to purchase guns from sellers who aren't required to run background checks. Purchasers from Armslist.com, a major online firearms marketplace, were nearly seven times as likely to have a firearm-prohibiting criminal record than people attempting to buy guns from licensed dealers. (This is discussed more fully on our page on online gun sales.)

Recent examples show that loopholes in our background check system can have dangerous and deadly consequences.

In 2022, a man attempted to buy a gun from a licensed seller but did not pass the background check. Soon after, he bought a rifle from an unlicensed seller, who is not required to run a background check, and shot and killed two people at a St. Louis high school.

In 2019, a man fatally shot seven people and wounded 25 others in West Texas. The shooter previously failed a criminal background check when trying to purchase a gun, yet loopholes in our nation's gun laws allowed him to bypass the background check system altogether and obtain the AR-style weapon used in his deadly attack from an unlicensed seller who wasn't required to run a background check.

In 2018, in Appleton, WI, a man who was prohibited from purchasing a gun because he was out on bond for a firearm-related felony domestic violence case purchased a firearm from an unlicensed seller on Armslist.com without a background check. The next day he used the gun to kill his wife.

Background checks are easy, convenient, and impose almost no burden on law-abiding gun purchasers.

In at least 90% of cases, firearm background checks processed through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) are resolved immediately. The average processing time for an electronic NICS-check is less than two minutes-107 seconds, to be precise.

Contrary to gun-lobby claims, background checks rarely provide false-positive results. The FBI's quality control evaluations suggest that background checks are accurate approximately 99.3 to 99.8% of the time.

For more than a decade, the vast majority of the American public has supported laws requiring background checks on all firearm purchases, with polling data consistently showing that more than 90% of both gun owners and non-gun owners support this policy. Strong support for background check laws has also been measured among NRA members, with at least 69% supporting comprehensive background checks.

Universal background checks are a necessary foundation for any policy that aims to keep firearms out of the hands of people convicted of domestic abuse and other ineligible people. However, other improvements should also be made in the existing background check system. For further information on how federal and state background checks work, see our pages on Background Check Procedures and Reporting Procedures.

Summary of Federal Law
Federal law imposes various duties on federally licensed firearms dealers. Firearms dealers must, among other things:

Perform background checks on prospective firearm purchasers.

Maintain records of all gun sales.

Make those records available to law enforcement for inspection.

Report certain multiple sales.

Report the theft or loss of a firearm from the licensee's inventory.

Federal law imposes none of these requirements on unlicensed sellers, however.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 provides that persons "engaged in the business" of dealing in firearms must be licensed. Although Congress did not originally define the term "engaged in the business," it did so in 1986 as part of the McClure-Volkmer Act (also known as the Firearms Owners' Protection Act). That Act defined the term "engaged in the business," as applied to a firearms dealer, as "a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms." In 2022, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act made a minor change to the definition, replacing "with the principal objective of livelihood and profit" with "to predominantly earn a profit." Current law now defines "engaged in the business," as applied to a firearms dealer, as "a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms."

Significantly, the 1986 McClure-Volkmer Act also defined "engaged in the business" to exclude a person who "makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms." According to a 1999 report issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the 1986 definition of "engaged in the business" often frustrates the prosecution of "unlicensed dealers masquerading as collectors or hobbyists but who are really trafficking firearms to felons or other prohibited persons." The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act did not address this exclusion.

Summary of State Law
Twenty-one states and Washington DC have extended the background check requirement beyond federal law to at least some gun sales from unlicensed sellers.

States with Background Check Laws

21 states and the District of Columbia have extended background checks beyond federal law. Of these, 16 states and DC require background checks for all gun sales.

Eighteen states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada , New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington) and the District of Columbia generally require universal background checks for all sales of all classes of firearms, whether they are purchased from a licensed dealer or an unlicensed seller. (Most of these states' background check laws apply both to sales and other non-temporary firearm transfers, although laws enacted in New Mexico and Virginia exempt transfers that are not made for a fee or other remuneration).

In addition, Pennsylvania requires point of sale background checks for handguns but not for long guns, like rifles and shotguns.

Instead of (or in addition to) a point of sale background check, seven states (Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and Oregon) require all firearm purchasers to obtain a permit, issued after a background check, in order to be qualified to acquire any firearm. Illinois also requires unlicensed sellers to contact the State Police at the point of sale to verify the that the transferee's firearms license remains valid, and requires the State Police to continuously monitor relevant databases to ensure that license holders remain eligible to keep their firearm license.

New Jersey and Oregon require firearm purchasers to both obtain a permit to purchase a firearm and, if the purchase is from an unlicensed seller, conduct the transaction through a federally-licensed firearms dealer.

Nebraska has this permit and background check requirement for the purchase of handguns, but not long guns, and as of August 1, 2023, Minnesota requires a permit and background check for handgun and assault weapon purchases from unlicensed sellers.

State Laws Closing the Loophole

Background Checks at the Point of Sale/Transfer

The most immediate approach to ensuring that guns are not sold to ineligible people requires a background check to be completed by a licensed dealer or law enforcement at the point that any firearm is sold or transferred to another owner. Processing these transfers through licensed dealers or law enforcement helps to ensure that a background check will be conducted prior to any transfer.
States that Require a Background Check at the Point of Transfer

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

District of Columbia

Maryland

Nevada

New Jersey

New Mexico (Applies to firearm sales, but not transfers made without consideration)

New York

Oregon

Pennsylvania (handguns only)

Rhode Island

Vermont

Virginia

Washington

California, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington generally require all firearm transfers to be conducted by or processed through licensed dealers, who conduct background checks on prospective firearm purchasers or recipients. In the District of Columbia, firearms may be sold and transferred only by or to a licensed dealer.

Rhode Island requires all sellers to obtain a completed application form from the prospective purchaser and to submit the form to law enforcement for purposes of conducting a background check. Connecticut requires any person transferring a firearm to either submit a form to law enforcement or conduct the transfer through a licensed dealer, so that a background check is conducted for every sale or transfer.

Pennsylvania requires a background check for every prospective handgun sale or transfer, and provides that the background check may be conducted either by a licensed dealer or a designated law enforcement agency.

New Mexico and Virginia require background checks for firearms sales, but not for other types of transfers, such as gifts or long-term loans. Both states require that the background check be conducted through a licensed firearms dealer.

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State Permit Requirements for Purchasers

Twelve states and the District of Columbia impose background checks on purchasers of some or all firearms through a permitting or licensing system. In these states, a purchaser must obtain a permit that includes a background check in order to purchase a firearm. Depending on the state, these permits may be valid for as short as 10 days or as long as 10 years. State licensing requirements are discussed in greater detail on our licensing policy page.

While these requirements ensure that a background check has been conducted at some point prior to purchase, a person may fall within a prohibited category after the license or permit is issued but before the time the person attempts to purchase a firearm. As a result, licensing laws alone do not necessarily prevent ineligible people from accessing firearms. States with the most comprehensive laws require purchasers to obtain a permit and also require a background check at the point of sale to ensure that a purchaser has not fallen into a prohibited category after he or she obtained the permit.
States that Require a Background Check to Purchase from Unlicensed Sellers through a Permit Requirement

Connecticut (also requires a point of sale background check)

District of Columbia (also requires a point of sale background check)

Hawaii

Illinois

Maryland (handguns only; also requires a point of sale background check for all firearms)

Massachusetts

Michigan (Effective early 2024)

Minnesota (handguns and assault weapon purchases from unlicensed sellers only)(Effective August 1, 2023)

Nebraska (handguns only)

New Jersey (also requires a point of sale background check)

New York (handguns only. Also requires point of sale background check for all firearms)

Oregon (also requires a point of sale background check)

Rhode Island (handguns only. Also requires point of sale background check for all firearms)

California and Washington achieve universal background checks through point of transfer checks, but both states additionally require purchasers to obtain a firearm safety certificate that does not require a background check.

Gun Show Background Checks

of gun sales take place at gun shows

Firearm purchases from gun shows account for 4% to 9% of annual firearm sales, and 3% of gun owners report acquiring their most recent firearm from a gun show.

Source

Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: Results of a Comprehensive National Survey on Firearms Ownership and Use (Washington DC: Police Foundation, 1996); Garen Wintemute, "Inside Gun Shows: What Goes On When Everybody Thinks Nobody's Watching," UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, 2009; Matthew Miller, Lisa Hepburn, and Deborah Azrael, "Firearm Acquisition Without Background Checks: Results of a National Survey," Annals of Internal Medicine 166, no. 4 (2017): 233-239.

A loophole in federal law that does not require background checks on sales of guns by unlicensed individuals is often referred to as the "gun show loophole." This is somewhat misleading, however, as sales of firearms by unlicensed individuals can occur anywhere, not just at gun shows. Unless a state has closed this loophole, unlicensed sellers are not required by federal law to conduct background checks on buyers, whether the sale occurs at a gun show or over the internet through a site like armslist.com. See our page on Interstate and Online Gun Sales for more information about sales conducted over the internet.

Currently, 21 states and the District of Columbia require background checks on sales of some or all types of firearms by unlicensed individuals, whether the sale occurs at a gun show or elsewhere. For more information about the regulation of gun shows, see our summary on Gun Shows.

Key Legislative Elements

The features listed below are intended to provide a framework from which policy options may be considered. Any jurisdiction considering new legislation should consult with counsel.

For all firearm transfers, unlicensed sellers are subject to similar requirements as licensed dealers, including background checks and record-keeping requirements.

The most immediate policy option requires all firearm transfers to be conducted through licensed dealers, so that background checks will be completed on all purchasers (including purchases from unlicensed sellers), and sales records will be maintained

If the jurisdiction does not require that all firearm transfers be conducted through licensed dealers, unlicensed sellers should be required to:

Conduct background checks through a central law enforcement agency that has access to federal and state databases of prohibited purchasers

Maintain records of all firearm transfers for a lengthy period

Report all transfers to state and local law enforcement

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Without universal background checks, millions of guns end up in the hands of individuals at an elevated risk of committing violence.