Posts by WSWS

Denmark's ID register spills more people's details than the country has residents

- Massive data breach exposing private information

- "The solution is for people to give us *even more* private information!"

Thoughts return to forbidden RAM upgrades as Raspberry Pi OS gets fresh lick of paint

Why the hell should people need to be "authorized" to make upgrades to *their own computers*?

If you're buying it from dodgy third parties, it isn't "single sourced", is it?

Re: 'Authorised devices' and fixed RAM...

It "reconfigures" by bricking your device. And no, "you can use an old version from before they put this restriction in" is not a defense of the restriction, but a tacit admission that it is a *bad* change.

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts

Anyone who actually believes that AI will wipe out humanity has clearly watched way too much science fiction. As for liability, I'm sceptical; it's not like the CEO himself set the agent running before it went rogue, and highly unlikely that he directly ordered it either. And while it sounds good to say that you should jail the CEO for the actions of the company, that's a precedent that you want to be really cautious setting outside of extreme cases.

Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them

How many of these fines are against foreign websites that have no connection to Britain and that Ofcom have no jurisdiction over?

Re: They all have business operations, assets, income and staff in the UK.

You think that they *should* when they aren't operating in Britain? And you have the nerve to call *others* "colonial"?

Re: "Why have they been targetting small operators over the large ones?"

Or solely based overseas with no presence in Britain. How many of these "unpaid fines" are against foreign websites that Ofcom have no jurisdiction over whatsoever?

Test environment let anyone access live customer data

Re: Oh, it is so easy to do

Really? That's such a common practice that most syntax highlighters I've used give "TODO" special highlighting.

Re: Oh, it is so easy to do

There are "temporary" government programs that are two hundred years old.

Ex-FTC boss Khan urges Uncle Sam to break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

Is anyone really surprised that one of Biden's cronies is pushing for the U.S. to cede advantage in the biggest emerging technology to China?

Revolut falls for fake government requests, hands over customer data

The secret obviously being that it *isn't* extremely unusual, no?

Do you really think that banks are able to demand a face to face meeting when government thugs demand their data?

Yes, because established banks *totally* have centuries of experience with getting emails from the government demanding data.

Europe's right-to-repair rules are broken, not beaten

Re: Right to... anything?

Right? The answer to laws being flouted is not "let's pass *more* laws that we won't enforce either!" Unfortunately passing laws is easy and easy for politicians to brag about. Actual enforcement is hard and lawmakers can't brag about it. That's why you get the farce of repeatedly "banning" things that have already been illegal for decades.

Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements

Re: Well, duh

Yes, Trump actually enforcing border laws that haven't been for decades and people lose their minds.

Debian votes to let contributors code with AI

Re: Luddites...

If someone called *me* a terrorist I would be quite annoyed. Strange that you aren't.

Re: I'm Questioning 'the Six Hundred'

Just because *you* think it is contentious does not obliged other people to agree with that opinion.

Re: when AI generates synthetic content or text published on matters of public interest

Are you being deliberately obtuse, or do you really not understand what "content" means in this context?

Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

That would depend on your local switchboard also having battery backup though, you couldn't just bring in a UPS for the fax machine and expect that to work.

Slop factory bans Russians for using slop factory to create slop

Re: Sounds Fishy

Ah, but I think you're failing to consider that "Russia bad".

UK taxman discovers low code doesn't mean low cost with £657M awards

And French companies. And if a previous comment is correct, Indian companies too.

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

Re: Actions that would be illegal for a human...

"You can't arrest me for stabbing that man Mr. Policeman, these terms and conditions I wrote say so!"

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: CC

Did... Did you also forget that bcc exists? The proposal is that the client should only be allowed to send multiple emails using bcc, not that it should not be able to send multiple emails at all...

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

Re: The Department for Business and Slave Trade

Yes, because - and I understand this may be hard for you to grasp - your employees are not your wife. It's a completely different relationship and the fact you are trying to equate them proves just how weak your position is if you must prop it up with that kind of nonsense.

You're a funny guy. I'll give you a hint; your relationship with your workplace is not a domestic one.

Excuses like 'AI did it' don't exist in the eyes of the law

While that is technically true, you know what *does* exist in the law? Terms like "intent". This seems like blatant anti-AI FUD.

Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

Re: Since When Was The Electorate Interested in "Government Computing"?

Well not with that attitude.

I think that "they spent billions of taxpayer money on a computer system that doesn't work" gets some traction. More than the nonsense with Farage, which was a comparatively tiny sum and *wasn't* taxpayer money. No, people don't care about that at all, it's just the media themselves that are obsessed with that story.

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Re: Not what I expect

Behold Elon Derangement Syndrome; someone points out that the title is a blatant lie, and *this* is the response.

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

Re: Price is the killer feature

Yes, because China killing western industries by undercutting them massively in price has sure been great for us up until now...

AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting

That seems like it should be extremely easy to fix if they already *have* all the systems needed to strip out all of the text that is hidden to a human reader; just apply that as pre-processing before feeding it to the AI. Though I really don't get why the AI doesn't immediately pick up on those tricks themselves as being a strong predictor of a message being spam; shouldn't it have been trained on a representative sampling of spam messages?

C'mon, just copy this text string and paste it into your macOS Terminal – it'll fix your computer, honest

I'm somewhat amazed that there are enough people stupid enough to paste random crap into a terminal for this attack to be worth anyone's time.

UK regulator wants Apple and Google to let devs steer clear of app store fees

You think that isn't exactly what they want to do? They can't just do it all at once so they'll just go there incrementally until they have control of the entire economy.

Telling internet platforms where to stick public service media will serve nobody. Turn it on its head

They really are terrified that younger people don't just mindlessly consume their propaganda like boomers do, aren't they?

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Many AI models can be comfortably run from a normal PC.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

Re: Shame

You are - yet again - lying about what SKG is asking for. Nobody is asking that publishers be forced to keep servers online forever, nobody has *ever* asked for that.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Nearly caused a union walkout

Fucking unions, man...

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

No, you need to stop using *that* outsourcing company.

Re: Oh it can easily be fixed.

They're not allowed to know better. The rules say that they are not allowed to take past performance on other contracts into account in the selections process. It's insane, isn't it? The bureaucratic managerial state in action. In a conflict between the rules and common sense, they go with the rules every single time.

Crooks found a new way to collaborate using Teams – by hiding command-and-control traffic

"While attackers have long abused legitimate cloud services to conceal malicious traffic, Symantec's findings suggest that DragonForce operators continue to look for ways to blend into the software and infrastructure that organizations trust most."

We are still talking about Microsoft, right?

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

Try to look past your frothing hatred and see that lots of people *want* to be able to use LLMs to read documents. And also learn the difference between a document as input and training on a document, I'd you can manage that it would be great.

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

Re: My Higher Grade Accounting qualification is begging for mercy

Really? It seems quite simple to me; without the ability to automate, they now need a hell of a lot more staff not on the front line.

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

Re: Moral panic

Sounds exactly like social media; "We have to censor social media, people are able to spread dangerous *far right* ideas on it!"

Actually it would be more like "there's lots of evidence that suggests there might be aliens on Saturn, but it's all observational and we haven't done any direct experiments like we have on Mars". Did you not read the article?

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Re: GrapheneOS and Linux

Easy. Get governments, starting with authoritarian hellholes like California and Brazil, to ban Graphene because "think of the children". This will probably happen before the year is over.

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

Re: OTP

You say "hot spot" and "WiFi". He said "SMS". We all know that you can use VoIP if you have internet. But he's talking about banks that insist on SMS for 2FA.

Re: One hundred percent of nothing

Yes, the Chinese government consider internet they can't control a "security risk". The risk being that their subjects might be able to access real information without their censorship. You kind of sound like you are on their side with this though?

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

This will obviously be shot down by the Supreme Court as a blatant violation of the first and second amendments. But it actually standing isn't the point, they want to do as much damage as possible while the issue is under legislation to try and scare people off from printing firearm parts - which I will point out is not a crime in most of the country, you only need to serialise a firearm if you plan to *sell* it. If you are just experimenting and only you will use it, you do not need to.

Re: Materials of Construction

Because if primary school libraries aren't allowed to shelve hardcore pornography, that's censorship damn it! That's literally what a lot of the book "bans" are.

ChatGPT blindly trusts browser content, turning the page into a payload

This is pretty horrifying. Though a large part of this attack is users being dumb enough to get phished by AI output, as if *that* is where OpenAI would place an important security message. Though even though like most phishing attacks it's useless against people who aren't retarded, the underlying problem of AI models not being able to distinguish between user instructions and other input is a real problem; that's going to cause problems with it's output even on sites that don't try to inject anything.