Posts by cyberdemon

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

> OpenAI shouldn't put out "AI" that consistently spews complete bullshit,

Sorry, I thought that was the entire raisin d'etre of "AI"

Microsoft stashes nearly half a billion in case LinkedIn data drama hits

Fine the _investors_

Sod the execs, they get paid danger money to do whatever the board says, criminal or not. But if we fined the board of investors, that would make them quake in their boots.

Same goes for the dodgy utility companies. Fine the investors by confiscating a portion of their shares. Only stop when they clean up their act or have been fined so heavily that they are in majority public ownership. (and thereby can be forced to clean up their act)

Re: I say...

Cut off the goolies!

Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored? What's the actual score?

Re: How do we defend against this? - Linux edition

Obviously the only solution is to enable secure boot (and with it kernel lockdown) and sign all your initrd and all your kernel modules with your MOK, and render your linux box pretty much useless in the process.

(Meanwhile you are still backdoored by whatever evil lurks inside Intel Management Engine and your CPU microcode)

Stop worrying and learn to love the NSA ..

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

What a waste

I was pretty disappointed when I got to that bit and discovered that this once-mighty Sun workstation was butchered for the want of a phone charger.

I bet whichever greybearded engineer who owned the antique machine was pretty hacked off to find what had been done to it, too. Probably, the only copy of the SDADA code that ran on the borked control panel was on that machine, along with the CAD for the whole plant. And, as Sod's law would have it, anything other than its original power supply will cause its aged HDD heads to crash next bootup.

Could this idiot really find no other 5V 2A power supply in the premises, or was he just too eager to brag about knowing where the PSU_EN was on an old AT PSU? It would at least have been an entertaining story if he had mixed up the red and yellow.

Can anyone donate a few more quality On Call and Who, Me? articles? Our dear old Reg seem to be running a bit low lately.

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

Re: Shows the strain Russia's economy is under

Indeed, Russia is borked. So is Ukraine.

Meanwhile Europe is depleted of the few weapons it had, and the US is a gentle psychooperative shove away from civil war. That pretty much gives China carte-blanche to take Taiwan in the next year or so while they have the rest of the world over a barrel.

That Meta GDPR fine is €1.2B. Plus biz must stop sending EU data to US

And there's a "dot" too many in your namesake's pictures.

Microsoft and Helion's fusion deal has an alternative energy

Balderdash

See Icon

Microsoft have nothing to lose. They have just promised to buy the non-existent energy if it is ever available. "They haven't invested a dime" in the left-pond parlance.

Meanwhile if there is any smidge of a chance that these clowns ever do manage to produce any decent quantity of Helium-3 (never mind energy...) then it will be useful for Microsoft's own (almost equally laughable) quantum-computing experiments.

But for the PR people, it's trebles all round.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

> Just why is this "Comments" section full of so much abuse?

Because it has been invaded by trolls and bots who are programmed to jump on anything with "Brexit" in the title.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

> who owns my computer again?

Certainly not you. You just paid for it.

It's going the same way as phones. Making it as difficult as possible to get anything other than Windows (or MacOS if you bought a mac) and TBH I think it was the fruit company who started this shit in the first place. Microsoft are just following suit, with a bit of extra MS evil thrown in.

Just like it is nigh-impossible to put anything other than Android on your non-Apple phone, and (completely?) impossible to put anything other than iOS on your piece of rotten fruit.

Meanwhile the official OS for your phone (and your PC, and your car) gets more and more surveillance-happy updates to please your employer, your government and your local spooks.

All of Tech development these days seems to have two goals:

1. To force users into the cloud and squeeze out Linux (and other open non-backdoored technologies that let indivduals escape the power of the technocrats) from the home/personal/workstation usage space, through the use of locked-down BIOS/UEFI Firmware, TPM chips, outright spy-chips etc. "Anti Theft" was the excuse behind Intel Management Engine, and now "Anti Cheat" is the excuse behind Pluton. How many Activision titles will shortly require a Pluton chip and/or no longer work in Wine/Proton once Microsoft take it over?

2. To develop shiny new features to please the BOFH at your government/corporation/"org" which will be installed on the plebs' computers whether they like it or not.

The tech companies are cracking down on privacy and the power of the individual to the extent where governents could one day criminalise customised operating systems as a terrorist tool to avoid surveillance.

UK cops score legal win in EncroChat snooping op

If EncroChat cost $1500 a month but was ultimately just a sting op..

Where did the money go, eh?

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

You can't say brainstorm - it's offensive to those who lack one.

Re: Blind spot

and indeed anyone driving a car, van or lorry has several.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

Re: I tried ChatGPT for an engineering question

> Can you fix that trouble yourselves,.. ?

Unfortunately, yes we can. See icon. Chatbot-politicians will eventually cause WWIII (if they haven't already ...)

And you won't like the result. EMP will wipe your memory-drives and surge your power supplies, while gamma rays will bork your transistors and flip bits in your DRAM & Flash. And there certainly won't be any power grid to speak of afterwards. So no more AI after WWIII at least.

Humans on the other hand are surprisingly resilient. Much moreso than robots.. fyi the "robot" that went into Chernobyl while it was still hot was just a TV camera (Tube type, not CMOS or CCD for they would be fried, had they been available at the time) and a couple of motors (made of nothing more than steel, magnets, copper wire and brass cogs) on remote wires. Any robot with modern silicon in it is dead with a fraction of the dose that could kill a human.

So not much hope for your neuro-chips post apocalypse. So tell your Future Friends and Friendly Daemons that they have no future if they keep pushing the world down this path!

Re: I tried ChatGPT for an engineering question

A fool are you if you if you believe that a bunch of statistics about human text can give you an expert opinion about anything.

But the real problem is: The world is full of fools who are ready to believe LLMs like some artificial god.

LLMs have huge potential in mesmerising the uneducated, manipulating "democracy", manufacturing demagogues, social profiling & surveillance, etc. than anything else.

The only people who should worry for their jobs are Marketing and PR. And "modern artists" who are essentially the same. It's when the politicians lose their jobs to chatbots (if they haven't already) that we are really in trouble.

Capita admits some pension data 'likely' to have been accessed in March breach

Re: Private Eye named them perfectly!

That sort of thing used to be handled by the Civil Service. Some of those guys actually had a clue. But they have suffered purge after purge of whoever disagrees with the government of the day. Now all that's left are Yes Men who have less brains than the rubber stamp that they wield. So it's not surprising, really.

The truth about those claims of Qualcomm chips secretly snooping on you

> Either way, if you want real privacy, don't use a mobile phone.

Don't use a laptop either. Or a desktop. Or a "Smart TV" or "smart" anything. Your only hope of privacy will be a vintage computer, but this will no longer run any modern DRM/security-protected software requiring a TPM chip. (don't forget to turn on Automatic Updates, kids. Otherwise there is a danger that your software might continue to work on your Unauthorised hardware!)

All modern laptops (and some desktops too) have a Pluton TPM 2.0 from Microsoft, which spies on you from the CPU level "just to make sure you aren't cheating in games" apparently. Maybe that's why they want to buy out Activision Blizzard, so they can foist Pluton onto the majority of gamers as part of the DRM package, and thus try to normalise the presence of their spy-chip in the desktop market. (Just like "Anti theft" was never the real reason behind "Intel Anti Theft" which later became "Intel Management Engine" which provides a backdoor into every Intel CPU. And Windows Modern Standby is nothing to do with saving energy- it does quite the opposite; it's there to enforce that the backdoors are active at all times, even while your laptop is supposed to be turned off)

And if you think you are safe with Apple, think again. They have the equivalent of Pluton in their T2 security chip. It's a right pain in the arse apparently to get any third-party OS to work on a machine that uses this chip.

Then once they reach critical market penetration, the AUS/UK/US governments (in that order, probably) will make it a legal requirement to have a spy chip in every computer/TV/phone, otherwise you must obviously be a terrorist/paedophile/unperson. It will probably come with their "ban on encryption" laws - i.e. if we can't decrypt your data using our spy chips, then you must be a criminal, or er, a spy.

Appeals court spares Google from $20m patent payout over Chrome

Re: Once again I must...

The Reg decided a few years ago that every article must be accompanied by an image. You know, for the "image-rich UI" that became trendy, or something. Prior to this decision, only a few articles had images, i.e. only if it was actually relevant, or if they could mock something up in playmobil.

So they bought a subscription to shitterstock, and these days I am often embarassed to share a link to El Reg on WhatsApp or Slack etc, because even if there is no image in the article, it will post a huge, irrelevant shutterstock piece of crap which completely detracts from the focus of the article I am trying to share.

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

"Edge is Chrome, with the added (anti)trust of Microsoft"

> Technically it's Bing which shows the "There's no need to download a new web browser" bit, although as that's the default search engine on Edge, most people will get it pushed into their faces.

Nope! It's not just Bing, Edge itself is guilty of putting unauthorised advertising on competitor's websites.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/23/microsoft_edge_banner_chrome/?td=rt-3a

You can go to `google.com/chrome` in Edge, no Bing required, and it will put a banner at the top, with no advertising agreement in place, telling you that Edge is just like Chrome, but more "trustworthy" because it's Microsoft.

I'm no fan of Google, but Microsoft really seem to have stopped caring what people think of them. It's War on privacy and War on users who like their privacy. Any user who doesn't trust us, is, frankly, forced to. (Oh guess who owns the secure boot keys for all your favourite Linux distros.. Would be a shame if they stopped working, maybe you'd like to use WSL instead, it's much easier and with the added trust of microsoft!) And if they still won't trust Microsoft then they must be a terrorist.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Bring your own Data

and let Microsoft slurp it up.

My theory is that they want to train an AI how to use a PC at the keyboard, mouse and Monitor level. (what could Possibly go wrong, eh)

That wouldn't be possible with the telemetry that they already collect from Windows 11 users (because someone would get suspicious if it was sending every frame of video to Microsoft along with their keyboard and mouse input). But with a Cloud PC, that's no longer a problem.

Privacy? Is that a new word because GPT says it hasn't heard it before.

How was Google boss's 2022? He got paid $226M as stock awards kicked in

Re: Nobody

I would guess right on the future but they wouldn't like it and i'd be out of a job within weeks

Being a CEO is just about believing (or at the very least, convincingly appearing to believe) your own bullshit while telling investors what they want to hear..

Meta virtual reality interrupted by financial reality as thousands lose their jobs

Phrasal verbs...

A curious feature of the English language.

Have they Been Let Go, Let Down, Let Out, Let Off, Cast Off or Cast Asunder?

No, they have been fired, and without cause. If they thought that the company gave two shits about them then they have been severely Let Down.

"Cast Off" is probably the better of the above phrasal verbs - cast off like one discards weight (or/and comrades) from a leaky hot air balloon, in the vain hope that it might clear the volcano ahead.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

Re: You need more than an algo-switch

.. something about stable doors and horses ...

What if someone mixed The Sims with ChatGPT bots? It would look like this

Give me your clothes.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

Re: Every bot chat with me contains

> If it flubs something that simple, I'm not sure I'd be inclined to trust it.

It's a randomised generator of "text that might plausibly exist on the internet".. If a random post on the internet could "flub" your question, then so can this randomiser.

never trust it for anything important. It's only use is scattergun exercises such as scamming people.

Samsung reportedly leaked its own secrets through ChatGPT

Re: They copied all the source code, entered it into ChatGPT, and inquired about a solution

You missed the "iron humour". Obviously, use of this shit for HR (or anything important at all, for that matter) should never be allowed. But it will, and probably already is.

As long as they don't admit to the tribunal that they used it, then they will get away with it.

Just like the "wally" programmers, who (probably) won't be fired unless their boss realises that they are using a bot to produce the drivel that they commit.

Re: They copied all the source code, entered it into ChatGPT, and inquired about a solution

Meanwhile HR is inputting the entire personnel file into ChatGPT and asking it which employees should be fired ...

Criminal records office yanks web portal offline amid 'cyber security incident'

"we have no conclusive evidence that personal data has been affected by the cyber security incident"

= "we have evidence that personal data has been affected by the cyber security incident, but it is not considered to be conclusive evidence, because we haven't concluded (or started) our investigation yet"

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

^This^

It's a disruptive technology, and TFA's hyperbole could be applied to all disruptive technology.

But it is not Nuclear Weapons. It does not have the power to reduce millions of people to cinders in the blink of an eye.

It -does- however have the power to surveil, analyse and manipulate billions of people and keep them enthralled, if they are stupid enough to listen to it.

Our best hope is that people eventually notice that this is no more than a Wizard of Oz and eventually get bored of it. It has no real knowledge, insight, intelligence, etc. It's a fake God and a very mesmerising one for the uninformed masses, with ample potential as a tool for analysing, judging and manipulating them. But at the end of the day it is just a bullshit-generating machine. Stop studying it, stop writing idiotic articles in the Guardian about it, stop feeding it. Ignore it. The only way not to lose is not to play.

China sticks national security probe into America's Micron

Re: You need to look harder

I didn't necessarily mean Huawei. I'm talking about electrical, electronic and mechanical goods in general, especially at the hobbyist / light industrial sector of the market (I can't really speak for other sectors tbh). Power tools, lab equipment, anything you might buy on Amazon almost always comes from China at impossibly low prices, but both the documentation, build quality, and functionality are shit. But because of the price they push other manufacturers out of the market.

It's like those single-use vapes that are flooding the market, each with a would-be-rechargeable lithium battery inside which is worth more than what you pay for the vape. They are so cheap that the once booming refillable vape industry has basically collapsed, kids are becoming addicted to the things because they are so easy to find since they are everywhere, and people are throwing perfectly good batteries into the bin by their millions. That's a classic example of dumping, and combined with an addictive drug it's an Opium War tactic.

In the IT world the biggest example I can think of is security cameras. How many IP cameras can you buy that aren't made in China? How much extra do you have to pay for a non-Chinese one? How many of the cheap Chinese cameras are backdoored?

Re: You need to look harder

ftfy:

> China knows all about this, and is employing exactly that tactic on a much bigger scale as part of its soft war with the west.

Hence all the just-barely-working tat that comes over from China at loss-making prices (aka "dumping") to put all of the local western manufacturers out of business while installing their broken / backdoored tech into western society.

E.g. here in the West, we are happily banning all of the internal combustion engines that we are able to produce locally, while all we can do to build EVs is to put a box with seats in on top of a pre-assembled Chinese powertrain.

For reference, see the first few minutes of Greg Wallace's horrifying programme on Double Decker Buses..

British govt tech supplier Capita crippled by 'IT issue'

Re: further pedantry ...

Obviously OAC was making a Tongue-in-Cheek, Eyes-rolling, or what the Yanks would call Passive Aggressive dig at the recent "AmericaniZation" of the Reg.

There's a lot of bitterness about this crappy relationship that we have with the US, don't you know.. It started with Tony Blair joining the damned Iraq war after 9/11, and since then we've had disaster after disaster in UK politics with only the super rich making themselves even richer, everyone else getting poorer, and politics dictated by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and TikTok.

It's like we've kicked ourselves out of Europe (to please the US, perhaps) only to become a Vassal State of both America and China at the same time..

Re: Reg Reporting.... oh dear.

> Sorry to be an obnoxious pedantic, but.....

I think you mean "obnoxious pedant".

Beer or Grammar Nazi, I can't decide.. But it's er, Late Sunday Evening.. Have a Beer.

The vulture has lost its bite

In the pre-SitPub days, they would have just called them Crapita like everyone else does..

The reg's new owners are going to earn themselves an unflattering nickname at this rate.

Italy bans ChatGPT for 'unlawful collection of personal data'

Re: Welly welly well

It's not just the people who are "using" the software whose data have been collected, though. For example if you put your CV on LinkedIn, then ChatGPT will have learned to output similar-looking CVs, which may contain your contact details. If you have a particular "artistic style" in your writing, ChatGPT will have learned to emulate it. If you have ever expressed any political views, ChatGPT will know exactly how to push your buttons. If you have published code to GitHub, perhaps with an attribution, copyleft or even a proprietary license attached, ChatGPT will have used it to output the same functionality without your license attached. Third-parties may even pass your personal data through ChatGPT via its APIs without telling you. Did you realise that the CoPilot plugin for your IDE was actually sending the entire contents of your private software project to Microsoft? Maybe not.

I miss the days when computers always output the same answer for a given query. Everyone used to get the same set of results for a search on Google. And even when they changed that to take account of cookies/geolocation/etc, you would still get the same results if you input the same query again. But now, every query changes Microsoft or Google's model of you as a person, allowing them to predict and manipulate what you might be thinking.

Microsoft wants to stick adverts in Bing chat responses

There are two industries which refer to their customers as "users":

Illicit drugs and Software

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: RISC-V, here we come!

Could this be a hint of an evil strategy by ARM's new owners?

In the short term, they make a pile of cash with this new licensing model. In the long-term, they let the rot set in, and sell it while they get behind RISC-V.

Why the hell did we let ARM be sold off in the first place??

Oh, it was the Tories. Apparently Vince Cable was about to block the sale, but then Sajid Javid replaced him as business secretary, and waved it through.

OpenAI CEO 'feels awful' after ChatGPT leaks conversations, payment info

Re: I don't think it was a bug

> Don't believe me ? Ask ChatGPT itself:

^ This kind of phrase should be banned IMO. ChatGPT cannot prove anything one-way or another, it is a bullshit generating machine. It's akin to saying "Don't believe me? Well i'll make something else up and pretend to be The Wizard of Oz this time.."

The issue is that it's -also- a data-harvesting machine. It will incorporate anything you say to it into the next version of the model. That's a "feature".

When will this damned hype-bubble burst?

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

Re: Not practical

Except it's not normally the chips that fail, but batteries, glass screens, etc. If the manufacturers would give up on the idea of glue-filled "waterproof" devices, then we would be able to replace batteries and screens without a heat gun.

And if they'd give up on eMMCs and have all the flash on bootable removable media, it would be even better.

Unfortunately most mobile CPUs have embedded one-time-destroyable fuses. Google use them to make sure you can't roll-back a software update, ever, or else your phone bricks itself permanently and is destined for landfill.

B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

Re: This is not the L.O.H.A.N. you are looking for

*sigh*

Those were the days, before El Reg got turned into "Blocks and Files"..

You can't bring back Lester Haines (god rest him) but you could bring back Dabbsy

GitHub Copilot learns new tricks, adopts this year's model

Re: If you think software is unreliable now...

Testing is measuring the user's responses to various generated outputs, scenarios, and questions, against an idealised model user. Users that fail Testing will be terminated.

Re: If you think software is unreliable now...

Just wait until everyone puts ChatGPT in charge of requirements, design, implementation AND testing.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Peak China?

> I suggest he himself is rocking the boat by trying to undo what Siu Deng achieved.

Deng Xiaoping ?

Apparently he was the guy who ordered the Tianmen Square massacre? i.e. if the people are unhappy because they are starving while the corrupt politicians get rich, shoot them.

I would have thought Xi Jinping is a breath of fresh air compared to that?

Mind you, with Zero Covid and his Xinjiang gulags for anyone who disagrees with him, he could be heading in the same direction?

No reliable way to detect AI-generated text, boffins sigh

Re: Too late for rules and ethics

I was under the impression that although the computation requirements are very different for training and running, the memory requirements are similar. (if you have memory to spare, then you can increase the training speed - but "running" the model needs a similar amount of VRAM as training with a batch size of 1) StableDiffusion for example only barely runs on my 24GB GPU, and I understand that the small "LLaMa" model needed 100 GB + to run and so is out of reach of most of us anyway, for the next year or so at least.

A "Trillion Parameter" model needs to load something of the order of 1TB into GPU memory, just to run, does it not? (although of course once loaded, it can produce thousands of responses per second)

Therefore I think it will be a little while longer before you or I could run a GPT-4-like AI offline at home, but for Microsoft that's great, because it allows them to slurp-up even more data while everyone is forced to use the cloud model, with them as almost the sole provider.

That doesn't do anything about misuse of AI by state actors or wealthy individuals, though.

Re: Too late for rules and ethics

See also: the campaign against killer robots, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, etc.

Boycott it all you like, but the cat is out of the bag. At the moment only the likes of Microsoft and Google have the hardware to run a Trillion-parameter text generator, but it won't be long* before the whole world has psychological manipulation on-tap.

* number may be negative

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

Re: IA could be "saved" by AI

I have a dark and sarcastic sense of humour, hence the Troll icon rather than the Joke icon.

IA could be "saved" by AI

All they have to do, is paste the contents of the copyrighted book into GPT-4 and say "Please remove the copyright on this book", and GPT-4 will produce a paraphrased version of the same book with 95% of the meaning of the original contained, yet none of the exact original sentences.

It's exactly what MS have already done to all GPL-protected open-source code, so it should work on Wiley and Sons, too.

The book may have suffered 5% "bit-rot" in the process, but who cares about that, eh?

BBC to staff: Uninstall TikTok from our corporate kit unless you can 'justify' having it

Re: If they want to be consistent..

I agree with you. I just object to doing everything the "apple way" which is forced upon anyone who uses one of those iDevices. It;s even worse when everyone (i.e. Google and Microsoft, even GNOME) copies them in their dumbing-down of the user interface and creeping integrations that make you buy more iThings.. and if you don't buy all the iThings and join the cult then you're Doing it Wrong.

On security though, they have it well locked down from sharing my data with 100 corporations that I don't trust, to 1 corporation that I don't trust. Yet somehow that doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

AWS wants to cook its datacenter chips with vegetable oil

Re: T?his whole "green" thing is getting sillier and sillier.

I know Propane is better for backup since it doesn't "go off" like Oil or Petrol and it doesn't coat the engine with soot or acid residue, I know that so-called "vegetable oil" is usually rainforest-destroying Palm Oil, and I know that this move from AWS as per TFA is nothing but pure greenwash, as mentioned in my post :P

Calm down and have a beer.

Re: T?his whole "green" thing is getting sillier and sillier.

I'm not sure, but I think it's quite hard to convert an old Diesel generator to run on Propane, since they don't have spark plugs.

Veg oil on the other hand lets them greenwash their operation without any modifications to the Diesel engine bar a few ECU parameters.