Posts by Kurgan

Chinese router vendor denies its firmware contains backdoors – but pauses downloads to fix security issues anyway

Sure, this is not a backdoor, but anyway let us remove the firmware so that no one can confirm it. LOL.

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

We take all information breaches extremely seriously

As expected, here comes the usual phrase.

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

There is no way of avoiding this. Even if the best teachers in the world will try and teach students how to think with their brain, students will say "fuck off" and offload all the work to AI. There is no way a teacher can change this. The only way to make school work again would be to make schools into maximum security prisons. You enter it and get excluded from internet access for 5 years, 24/7. You will get "internet time" only in a controlled way.

Enterprise cloud infrastructure uptake shows no sign of slowing

Of course, computers now are so expensive no one can afford them anymore

Well of course everyone has to switch to cloud, even for non AI use.

Try and buy a new server nowadays.

Another great result of this AI craze.

Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

Re: Nuke codes?

Probably all zeroes anyway.

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

NOO!!! You don't understand!!!

This needs a GPU (which is super expensive), is made for agentic AI (which is expensive and useless), and has this thing that state is maintaned on the server and somehow sent to the client, like, you know, IBM 5250 terminals from 1977.

We are well over the "reinventing the wheel" phase. We are reinventing a square wheel made of stone, to be used in a boat instead of on a road. Expensive, proprietary, utterly complex, and totally not needed because cheap, free solutions already exist, which are screen, tmux, mosh, and tssh.

But we need it for agentic AI. We absolutely need it. (not)

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

Really?

I'm a freelance consultant. I always push for open source and on-prem solutions, but still most if not all SMBs are all-in on MS or Google or AWS. And since these vendors say that they are GDPR and NIS2 compliant, there is absolutely no push to change to something different. Only cash strapped micro businesses consider open source locally hosted solutions, and only for one reason: they are cheaper.

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Re: Accessibility nightmare

I think this is inevitable if you use such a method. Also a simple copy/paste from a user wanting to keep some text from the page will fail.

I am using Anubis web firewall to try and stop scrapers. Of course it might not work, but at least a human can still copy/paste my pages if they like.

MariaDB again faces questions over Galera's open source future

Postgresql

When will people learn that Maria is not a real database? Perfectly fine for a lot of uses for sure, but replication is not one of them.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Re: It wouldn't be an exact simulation

While you are right, I don't think that "dynamic range" and "tape cassette" belong in the same phrase. Tape cassettes were the worse medium of their time. Reel to reel tapes were a different beast, but too expensive.

China fights back in AI spat with claim US AI companies distil Chinese models

More and more web sites that I visit are implementing some sort of challenge or puzzle that I must solve to prove that I'm not a bot from a US AI company before it will let me in in order to keep their servers from being ground to dust by the AI scrapers

The issue here is more complicated that that: "legit" AI companies are scraping the hell out of everything, but at least they are doing it with a user agent that states who they are, so you can block them if you like. Then there are search engines turned AI companies (Google, Bing, Meta, and some others) that still use a proper user agent string, and these you can block, too... but if you block them you disappear from Google or Bing, so you are committing web suicide. They are the purest evil because you cannot keep Google from accessing your site if you want visibility, but you cannot tell them "index my site in the search engine but do not use it for AI training", so you know you cannot win. And some of them (Meta) are pounding hard, with a lot of requests per minute, killing sites that have database-intensive page generation.

Then there is the great majority of "under cover" AI scrapers (usually Chinese, but not only Chinese) that use a random / fake user agent. And while I absolutely want to block them all (not because they are Chinese, but because they are hiding their name and scope) I cannot do it without some trickery like Anubis web firewall or similar systems. And this course of action is mostly useless because they will soon learn how to trick Anubis into letting them in.

Re: SOP

The truth here is that they are both scraping everything. They are both stealing everything. Simple as that. They should be honest and say "well, they are stealing from us, but after all, it's the same we are doing since the beginning".

Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

AI lovers are converted blockchain lovers

And this says it all about AI. It's wasteful and useless as blockchain is.

Foxconn unit drops VMware, adopts hyperconverged upstart Arcfra for workloads including AI

India is a totalitarian state

This is nothing new.

Millions of California-bought cars can be hijacked via Bluetooth

Re: Modern solutions

Every such "home made" mod is effective because it\s unique. In this case security through obscurity does work. My uncle had such a mod in 1980 on his Fiat 500.

"We take security seriously"

I know this phrase is or will be in their official statement. Even without looking.

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Re: Possibly even a good one.

Yes, it's nuts, but still every business and even a lot of government entities rely completely on MS, Google, Amazon. And it seems that no one sees the need to actually own and control their IT assets (hardware, software, etc) and their data that is stored on such systems.

Firefox 153 contains itself while Thunderbird 153 fixes almost everything

Re: I'm curious to see

I'm a strange beast and while I'm Italian, I use a US keyboard and a Denmark language, Denmark time format and day/month names and Italian numbers and currency on my Linux Mint. So dates are in the right format dd/mm/aaaa but language is English, week starts on Monday (Italian style) currency is Euro, decimal is comma, number separator is dot. And Betterbird 140 ESR works and the dates are right.

Amazon's AGI department finds humans are optional

Or it shows that the AI can now improve itself, which is the whole point of the system. Once the AI can improve itself, it will become super intelligent in a very short time, Bezos will fire every worker in every sector and then sell his products to nobody because nobody will have the money to buy anything. But it will probably be irrelevant because we will all be dead by that point.

OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

Re: If this was real

Yes, if this is real it's scary not because the model jumped the blocks, but because the same model, without any block, is currently in use by every government. And by miscreants, too, soon.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Only drivers...

MS should enforce a clear policy that only drivers should be auto-installed.

And drivers must not exfiltrate data or show notifications. Everything else (bloatware) is optional and requires the user to install it.

But then MS is not here to help the user.

Re: Let me fix that for you...

And AFAIK group policies do not apply to windows home edition. Or am I wrong?

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

multiple mistakes create the perfect storm

3 newbie mistakes:

1- have a "normal" email address to receive important notifications. I have one reserved for this, WITH NO SPAM FILTERS, and it's secret so it does not get spam.

2- have the recovery email on the same domain that might need to be recovered (same service provider, etc). It must be a totally different one. My admin contact for OVH is not hosted on OVH, this is the idea.

3- have only one MFA token (app, generator, whatever) so if it fails you are out. Have multiple accounts or multiple MFA auth tokens for the same account or keep the seed somewhere so you can easily reload it into a new app / device. Or have single use codes on file, or whatever.

Attackers pummel critical WordPress vuln to create all sorts of mischief

Re: Versions...

7.0.2 is the fixed one. 7.x is vulnerabile.

AI ops tools will create console sprawl and break IT more often: Gartner

Ignorance will triumph

Admins will have no idea how the systems work. They will just tell the clankers "do this". And once there will be a big disaster, they will only be able to tell the clankers "please fix this".

Europe's chip ambitions won't break dependence on US cloud and software, says Forrester

Re: Nonsense

Yes, open source software can help here, and the technolgy for everyday computing (not AI slop) is here since forever.

Still EVERYONE USES MICROSOFT.

Why?

Well, because everyone else uses Microsoft. It's that simple. We must break away from this idiotic loop, but it's not easy at all, even less easy since there are tons of rules, policies, etc, and "best practices" that have grown over time around only one service, and that's Microsoft ecosystem. No one will break away from it unless required by law.

AI vendors have found someone to pay their infrastructure bills: You

Let me explain how thoroughly fucked we all are

The issue is you pay for AI even if you don't use it.

- hardware costs are 10X, and you need hardware even for "classic" computing.

- energy cost is raising fast, and you need energy even for "pen and paper" computing, if you want heat, light, or air conditioning.

Because of these two facts, even grocery cost is increasing because the people who make, transport, and sell groceries need computers and power. Everyone needs computing and power nowadays.

Also, because of the crazy expense in AI from idiotic IT companies, their products (even without AI integration for the customer) will cost you a lot more. And since everything a subscription, the cost increase will happen NOW and not "if and when we buy the new version of software X"

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

Re: Plenty of room on top

It is not as if internet use is a zero-sum game: every time a bot scrapes a page, a human is denied it

Well, it turns out that it indeed is. I manage some services that are quite niche like storiaememoriadibologna.it, a web site dedicated to information about people and event and places about Bologna, Italy.

This site has limited resources and the queries tend to be very database intensive. Human visitors are quite sparse, this is not a high volume site. Well, now AI scrapers make for 95% of the traffic, and they tend to kill the server, generating outages that last from minutes to days.

I also manage a medium sized e-commerce for a sports apparel reseller. This site has 24 cores, all flash storage, 128 GB of RAM and it has quite a lot of human visitors.... well, AI bots can kill it anyway, quite easily. If the site can generate a page in 0,2 seconds but the AI bot makes 20 request a second, it's easy to see what will happen. And again, humans are denied the access to the service. And the owner of the site is not happy to pay for a monster server that is capable to serve 5 times the usual human traffic, but chokes on AI slop generators coming to scrape everything.

Amen!

This is exactly what's happening, but there is probably even more. While everything in this article is true (and I suspect the percentages are far worse than this), there is also another issue. LLM output has been actively tweaked to always look like a competent, well researched, proper answer. An LLM will never tell you "I'm not sure" or "I don't have enough data to give you a decent answer". The meme where the person asks the AI if this mushroom is edible and then gets poisoned and the AI says "sorry, I was wrong" is spot on. LLMs are tweaked to produce an output that looks good, not that is good. And it works, because people fall for it.

And this is the least worse part of the tweaking. Then comes the steering of the political or ideological output towards the direction that the current techno oligarchs want. Goebbels' wet dream.

And then comes the capability of AI to collect data and infer results (right or wrong, it does not matter), Palantir-style. Stalin's wet dream.

Are we happy? Of coruse we are. Or at least it seems that everyone I know is happy about this.

AI-driven datacenter builds drive Microsoft's emissions up a quarter in one year

Ecology? I've heard of it...

Like if someone actually cares about ecology. Economy is all that matters.

And when some CEO or some politician talks about ecology, they mean "economy", specifically "more money for me".

EU 'Chat Control' snoopfest returns after vote to kill it falls short

Re: Chat Control.....

Yes, it works... but:

1- if you don't produce your amount of cleartext data, you'll be put on the watch list

2- if your communication system requires spy-level operational security practices, it will be so inconvenient to use that almost no one will use it.

Re: EU Stasi

This is the whole point. Stop talking, then over time stop thinking. You are now a perfect sheep, the good citizen every government wants.

Former GitHub CEO launches competitor designed for the age of vibe coding

So it's ShitHub?

Like GitHub but for 100% AI produced code?

It's a great idea, so I know where not to take any software from. Like "never download anything from Softonic", but for source code instead of executables.

Let's call it ShitHub.

Microsoft Global Device Identifier fingers Scattered Spider suspect

Re: OTOH: quote: Microsoft is really trying to make people stop using Windows uh?

And anyway real sysadmins do not "sudo nano".

Re: quote: Microsoft is really trying to make people stop using Windows uh?

You'll notice that the whole machine id is just another "great idea" that comes from the cancer that is systemd.

AI startup that’s never turned a profit says it'll totally be around in 2047 to close its $19B lease

Re: Late 2027?

The issue here is that a lot of common people are unintentionally investing in AI because banks are selling aggregate funds (sorry I don't know how they are called in English) that contain AI stocks to their customers. And rest assured that once the crash comes in sight, the banks will promptly "sell the debit" to unknowing / inexperienced customers and we will all lose money.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Uhm... maybe this time they have a new wapon. The power of bribes. In the current situation maybe some crypto payments can open doors for the patent trolls.

Confidential computing's trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist

Re: Own servers.

We have put ourselves into this situation. Now we have to escape the trap we have got ourselves into. And of course it's hard. Very hard.

just use your own servers

This is the right solution. In an airgapped environment. And / or using hardware that can be really trusted.

Want to have maximum security? The cloud is definitely NOT the right answer.

NASA says it will isolate volunteers from the outside world for a year

Re: The Big Question Is

This is surely part of the experiment

Re: The psychology of isolation

This makes sense, but I don't think NASA is willing to deliberately put people at risk just for an experiment where risk can be avoided. Still it absolutely makes sense.

EU appears to find datacenter emissions easier to offset than lobbyists

Re: Lobbyists

Because politicians are part of the system.

Lobbyist fund politicians who get elected because they have the money to campaign for their election.

And the real issue here is that this (unless it comes down to bribes and corruption) is perfectly legal.

And while Europe is living (right now) its worst heat wave (WORST FOR NOW, not worst overall) it's also green-lighting a ton of useless AI data centres.

Failed blockchain project ends with big fine for fibs about it being on track

Death af a buzzword

As expected.

Now if only AI...

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Re: Interesting

Exactly. Every "strong" and changed over time password is like:

MonthYEAR!

SeasonYEAR!

Supplier_nameYEAR!

Customer_nameYEAR!

Re: Interesting

Yes, and EVERY BUSINESS IN ITALY uses this practice and it's the best practice of course. It's NEEDED. LOL. Idiots.

An artificial cell with a full lifecycle has been created for the first time

Their biology precludes survival outside very specific lab conditions.

Said the scientist in Jurassic Park.

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: The biter bit?

Yes, I'd really like to have their list of ip addresses related to AI companies to block them all from accessing all of my websites. (by the way I'm currently using Anubis as a web scrapers blocker)

Purism launches supersized 16-inch laptop for buyers who put privacy before price

Re: @Kurgan

Yes, i was thinking about the IME. The issue is... is the IME really disabled? How can you know? I'm not saying that Purism is lying. I'm saying the only ones who knows if IME is really disabled are Intel or the CIA.

And if you are really paranoid, you should not use an Intel or AMD cpu at all, because of the integrated management "features" that are a shadow computer inside your computer.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: but how to shore up to protect yourself?

I'm not American so I don't know how their pension works, but here in Italy if you have insurances and such (a sort of private pension fund) you usually don't get to choose where they do invest money. They invest in other funds that invest in other funds, etc. Who knows where does the money actually go in the end?