Why Every Family Needs a Code Word (wsj.com) Posted in GD for wide applicability, namely everyone.
Archived at: https://archive.ph/v7hpJ#selection-464.0-551.88
I just shared with my family here. We're going to work out a code word.
By
Julie Jargon
Nov. 1, 2025 5:30 am ET
Criminals increasingly use generative AI to mimic real people’s voices and con their loved ones out of money.
There’s a simple solution to this high-tech problem: a code word.
If you receive a call from someone who sounds just like your grandson and says he needs money or a gift card, the best thing to do is hang up and call your grandson. But if the voice is so convincing that you can’t bear to do that, ask for your family code word. If the caller can’t produce it, hang up. Likewise, if you are legitimately in trouble and need to call a loved one for help, say the code word so your relative knows it’s really you.
People who haven’t implemented a family code word have been burned by bad actors. I wrote earlier this year about a Colorado woman who received a call from a young woman who she said sounded just like her daughter. Only after wiring $2,000 to protect her daughter from danger did she learn the whole thing was a scam.
It’s easy to see how someone can be fooled. My colleagues recently created deepfakes of several Wall Street Journal staffers’ voices, including my own, and it was hard to tell the human voices from the clones.
Note: Only share the code word with close and trusted family members, and do it in person or over the phone.
Related article (linked in the above, but not in my excerpt)
https://archive.ph/HC2CB (WSJ)
I guess that the default is to ask the caller a question that only a family member would know, even if you didn't have a code word, subject to limitations of memory, or getting a new Son-In-Law. That just advances possible questions forward in time.
BE SAFE, EVERYONE!
= new reply since forum marked as read
I don't know who did the artwork to identify each person, but I do recall it was clever, often funny. Mighty long ago.
One uncle ran a gas station with a big "Sparky the Horse" on the roof, and it was on the card.
Here's the gas station, from MIT archives, and my Uncle Richie.
Source: https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/35514
Downscaled for DU posting.
Blast from the past.
Unfortunately it is not very secret ;-/.
I have ranted at my unfortunate parents, friends and random people online for 14 years about The Tech Creeps*.
If you ever catch me saying anything positive about Google, my account has probably been hacked 
. I used to feel the same way about Facebook. But after Yan LeCun started showing up more in the news somehow I stopped hating them as much.
That’s the power of advertisement right there. Hide Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang and promote LeCun more and even though it’s still a ghastly company, its image in one’s head becomes less threatening.
By contrast, I have never come across a scientist or other person associated with Google whom I respected even a little. In some cases they swop out an almost new-agey vibe for the standard crass creeping, but any which way..
I think they corrupt everything they touch.
*: No offense to anyone in tech who is not a creep. I hope no one from Google uses DU. Of course those companies force an almost cultish appearance of loyalty so they may have quieter employees who hate them as much as I do.
TLDR???
You totally missed out!😤
I always argued that technology is for personal freedom and always will.
My most interesting job was at U.C. Berkeley, where I supported computing for the professors, staff and grad students.
I've got more ad-blockers installed than grains of sand in the Ganges River.
I go by what Kevin Kelley said in the earliest version of "What Technology Wants" (post, before he wrote a book by that name)
Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:
Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability
No mention of ad revenue.
