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kevinmichaelloeffler

ScamSense – Daily Financial Fraud and Scam Alerts

Introducing ScamSense: Protecting Seniors from Scams with Alexa

In an increasingly connected world, scams and fraud have become more sophisticated, targeting vulnerable individuals with alarming frequency. Seniors, often less familiar with digital tactics, are particularly at risk. That’s why I created ScamSense — an Alexa skill designed to educate, inform, and empower seniors to recognize and avoid scams.

The Growing Threat of Scams

Scammers are continually finding new ways to exploit trust, from phishing emails to fraudulent phone calls pretending to be government agencies. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), financial losses from scams have reached billions annually, and seniors often bear the brunt of this financial and emotional toll.

But what if there was a simple, accessible tool to help?

What is ScamSense?

ScamSense turns your Alexa-enabled device into a personal scam prevention assistant. It’s easy to use and provides:

  • Daily Scam Alerts: Stay informed about the latest fraud tactics, such as phishing, fake charity schemes, and tech support scams.
  • Identity Protection Tips: Get actionable advice on how to safeguard your personal information.

How It Works

ScamSense draws from reputable resources to deliver accurate and timely information. Every day (at 6AM Central time), it produces a new report of concise updates about recent scams and tips to protect yourself. It integrates with The News API, fetching relevant top stories and then summarizes them using advanced AI (using Llama hosted on SambaNova Cloud).

For example, you might hear:

Empowering Seniors Through Technology

One of the key challenges with senior-focused technology is ensuring it’s user-friendly. Alexa’s voice-first interface makes ScamSense accessible to anyone, even those unfamiliar with smartphones or computers.

ScamSense isn’t just about providing information; it’s about creating peace of mind for seniors and their families.

Try ScamSense Today

ScamSense is available now for Alexa devices. Setting it up is simple:

  1. Enable the skill from the Alexa Skill Store.
  2. Say, “Alexa, open ScamSense,” to start receiving scam alerts and tips.
  3. Stay informed and stay safe!

Enable it on your Alexa device or mobile app today!

You can also check out the source code and see how I deployed it on GitHub!

Link kevinmichaelloeffler

Introducing CarbonComponent

I am excited to share that my project, CarbonComponent, was recently selected as a winner of GitLab’s Innovation Pitch Competition! CarbonComponent is a continuous integration/continuous deployment component for GitLab pipelines that allows developers to estimate the carbon emissions caused by visiting their web projects. Using data from The Green Web Foundation it can tell if your web host uses green energy, and will provide you with a Green Webhost badge for your project repository if it does. When a pull request is created, metrics are displayed allowing you to tell at a glance if a change will make your project more carbon intensive. Additionally, it allows developers to offset the emissions from their project through Wren. Check it out! https://devpost.com/software/carboncomponent

kevinmichaelloeffler

Deploy Free-tier Tor bridges on AWS

What if you could help journalists and activists in places like Iran and Russia with a few clicks? Tor is an anonymity network run by volunteers that protects the location and identity of users while they use the internet for research, messaging, and organizing. Unfortunately oppressive regimes block the access points to Tor. My project, Bridge Buttons, lets you deploy a Tor bridge for free to Amazon’s cloud. A bridge helps users connect to Tor by first connecting to an innocuous looking server, making it hard to block! I’ve preconfigured these bridges so that it can run for free for up to a year, making this the cheapest and easiest way to get started.

Direct link to Bridge Buttons where you can get started with just a few clicks!

Code and template on GitHub

kevinmichaelloeffler

Make Children’s Artwork look like Eric Carle Illustrations

v_hungry_caterpillar
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

Famous author and artist Eric Carle turns 91 today. I remember loving his books when I was a kid, especially The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?. Each book features his distinctive art style. The images are collages composed of tissue paper and acrylic paint, producing vivid depictions of animals and nature.

THE PROBLEM

Carle’s work is as complex as it is beautiful. How can we make it easier for children to produce their own homages to his creations?

THE SOLUTION

Neural style transfer is a technique that allows you to compose images in another’s style using deep learning. That is, you teach a computer to identify key elements of an image’s style and redraw that image in that style it has just learned.

I found this excellent Google Colab notebook which taught me all about how to do this with tf.Keras!

Taking the code from the tutorial I built a website that lets you upload images, have the style of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar transferred to it, and display it for the world to see and for you to download! At any given time the latest 10 images will be displayed for any visitors to see. The website is built in one of my favorite frameworks, Flask.

You can access the website at ericcarletransfer.ml. Be warned, the transfer time can be in excess of 10 minutes- it is very computationally intensive.

The results have been encouraging though! Take a look:

The neural network is picking up on the look of the tissue paper and paint. In the future I want to work on reducing the amount of noise seen in the backgrounds.

SHARING THE SOLUTION

The URL again is http://ericcarlearttransfer.ml/

As always, the entire project is opens source and can be found here on GitHub!

kevinmichaelloeffler

Text to Word Search!

Try it out for free here!

wordsearchgif

THE PROBLEM

Word searches can be a great way to build a summary activity for reading a story, article, or book. However, they are time consuming and difficult to make.

THE SOLUTION

text2wordsearch uses the Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm to automatically extract the top key words from a blob of text! Simply copy the text from the article or story and choose how many words you want in your word search. Then copy the word search into your favorite word processor (be sure to use a monospace font!). The keywords selected are found in the bottom box.

The technical details are that this uses an AWS Lambda function to run the RAKE algorithm and generate the word search, ingesting the text from the web interface above which is deployed on AWS API Gateway. The Lambda function is written in Python and leverages two excellent packages: python-rake and word-search-puzzle. Because it is a Lambda function they had to be installed to a directory and uploaded as part of a zip bundle along with my function code. This zip is included in the repo linked below for you to deploy and play with yourselves!

SHARING THE SOLUTION

Try it for free here!

As always, the code is available to browse and deploy yourselves!

kevinmichaelloeffler

A novel method for preventing “Zoom Bombing”

THE PROBLEM

Zoom Bombing is exposing children learning remotely to inappropriate content and disrupting meetings so a few pranksters can have a laugh. The biggest unsolved issue with Zoom Bombing is that people are sharing links and passwords on social media in order to egg trolls and classmates on to bomb these classes and meetings. How can we share a meeting without disclosing the meeting ID and password?

THE SOLUTION

BombSquad(4)

BombSquad is a solution I built on Amazon Web Services to help mitigate the worst of Zoom Bombing. Here’s how it works:

  1. Get a Zoom meeting invitation link like normal (and make sure the password feature is turned on!)
  2. Go to www.BombSquad.us
  3. Select your meeting options- you can permanently turn off the participant microphone and camera so that nobody can reenable it by clicking the checkboxes.
  4. Paste your invitation link
  5. Get a sharable cloaked URL that goes right to your meeting!
  6. Continue orchestrating your meeting from the Zoom client like normal.

The technical details are as follows: BombSquad takes your URL, transforms it to force the user to use the Zoom web client, stores the original URL securely, and only redirects the browser to the real meeting URL if the user clicks through the sharable link you receive. The invitation link inside the window is disabled. Thus, all a user can see are BombSquad URLs! This is performed using a combination of AWS S3 and Lambda instances as shown above, making this a neat example of a serverless application– the first I am distributing publicly!

SHARING THE SOLUTION

Head on over to www.bombsquad.us and give it a try!

interface
BombSquad interface

Video kevinmichaelloeffler

FreeDisplay – Share your screen with everyone on your local network for free!

COVID-19 is taxing our internet infrastructure, and many stuck at home are struggling with tasks where it would be useful to share one’s screen with others, such as teaching from home, sharing content with someone without handing them your device and getting it contaminated, or monitoring what is happening on a home computer in real time.

FreeDisplay is a free open-source program written in Python that allows you to share your screen with anyone on your local network, such as your home Wi-Fi network. It creates a QR code other can scan for easy sharing and serves a simple webpage with a mirror of your screen so that any device with a web browser can easily view your screen! Use it for home teaching, sharing content without handing someone your device, presentations, monitoring activity on your home computer and more. Download for free here: https://kevinl95.github.io/freedisplay/

As always, the code is open-source and can be viewed here: https://github.com/kevinl95/freedisplay

Video kevinmichaelloeffler

DIY WiFi Smartbulb Classroom Sound Meter

This is an exciting new project I’ve been working on to use off-the-shelf smart lightbulbs to make an inexpensive and automatic classroom management gadget. Using a bit of Node I was able to get the noise level of a classroom and translate it into a color for a connected smart lightbulb, from green to red as the classroom gets louder! Inspired by the ‘traffic light’ noise warning gadgets I see in classrooms, this one is fully automatic. There are no switches to throw- just set the maximum volume in the free software and the lightbulb will change color on its own!

screenshot-2
Screenshot of the GUI. The program is an Electron application, and I have applied a material design stylesheet.

The software can be downloaded for free for Windows PCs here!

Works with MagicHome brand smart lightbulbs, such as these which are known to work:

MagicLight WiFi Smart Light Bulb, 2nd Generation Dimmable Multicolor A19 E26 Household LED Bulb

MagicLight Smart WiFi Alexa Light Bulb, A19 7w (60w Equivalent)

As always, this program is open source! Click here to view the code on GitHub!

kevinmichaelloeffler

How to download a YouTube video for Seesaw

Have you ever wanted to download a YouTube video to share elsewhere but found that every ‘YouTube Downloader’ on the internet is an adware-filled, slow-to-load piece of junk? This is especially problematic when you are trying to get video content to your students- most of the time you cannot directly link to YouTube on a school network connection as it will be blocked, leaving your only option to download the video and re-share it on a platform like Seesaw, a popular platform for student engagement. So how can you get the raw video file to share without getting your computer infected? I have designed a simple desktop application that downloads YouTube videos and I am offering it for free to download! It is available for MacOS and Windows. Best of all it’s a portable app- meaning no installer and therefore no need for an administrator password to use on your school computer!

If you are interested in how I developed this program, read on.

THE PROBLEM

YouTube download websites are filled with adware, malware, deceiving links, and often inappropriate ads. Educators need to be able to download YouTube videos to get around school content filters. They need to be able to use a program that can also evade roadblocks like not being able to install software on a school-issued computer.

THE SOLUTION

screenshot
The Windows version of the application

The solution was to develop a desktop application (ensuring the longevity of the project as there would be no need to pay for hosting a website or risking my web application getting blocked by a content filter). I also wanted to write this application once and deploy to my two target platforms – Mac and Windows. There are various libraries for downloading YouTube videos simply – I figure a lot of the scammy websites are making use of the open-source ytdl-core or similar JavaScript libraries to download their videos and quickly deploy new websites. I wanted to use something similar as these libraries are easy to use, well-supported, and cross-platform. The solution for all of my problems was to build my app using Electron, which lets you build cross-platform apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I could build a website using ytdl-core to download videos using the same technology as the sites people are being driven to by Google and then make it a desktop application. Then, using the exact same code for both platforms, I could then deploy to Windows and Mac! And that’s exactly what I did- what you see above in these screenshots is literally a simple website using jQuery, Bootstrap, and ytdl-core that takes in the YouTube link the user pastes in the box, uses regex to check that the link is a properly formatted YouTube link, and then opens a save prompt to save the video to the user’s computer! The save prompt is one of the neat elements of the Electron API that you can just use and have it work one each platform, pulling up a native save dialog and letting me configure it to ensure the user can only save MP4 files, for example, as that is the file format Seesaw accepts. The open-source Electron Packager then lets me bundle all of my dependencies together and create a Windows and Mac application bundle. These bundles include everything needed to run the application in exactly the spot the application needs it, meaning there is no installer to run and therefore it can run without administrator access on your computer! The whole ecosystem let me hack this together very quickly with almost no friction between any of the tools.

ytdl-core lets me ensure that we automatically grab the highest-quality version of the video and download it in MP4 format, making sure everything is as simple as possible to go from video to Seesaw fast, saving teachers time. This all happens in the background – the goal was to make a tool that takes minimal thought to use. Just grab the video your students need, and paste the link!

SHARING THE SOLUTION

This application is completely open-source. You can view it on GitHub here! This also serves a project homepage you can share with your friends and colleagues as it features download buttons for both Mac and Windows. It is also where you should go to get the most up-to-date versions of the software- as I improve it and make bug fixes the links below will not be updated, but they will always get you the first release.

V1.0 for Windows can be downloaded here directly.

V1.0 for MacOS can be downloaded here directly.