Posts by cyberdemon

LinkedIn: If our AI gets something wrong, that's your problem

Re: LinkedIn have always been complete scumbags

This.

How can the EULA be "You are responsible for reviewing all nonsense spewed forth from our bullshit machine" when a) that machine can presumably see "more" source data than you can, b) mangles it in such a way that is completely inscrutable and c) produces an output in a place that you can't necessarily see (e.g. someone else's session).

If user B (a company / recruiter, say) asks "Tell me about Joseph F. Bloggs, what kind of a guy is he, should I hire him?" and the AI says "Joseph F. Bloggs (aka Joe) is a liar, a fraud, nobody likes him, etc etc" then user A (Joe Bloggs) cannot see that he has been defamed by Microsoft's AI and denied employment because of it. But user B (the prospective employer) cannot see all of the info that the "AI" presumably has access to, so cannot review the output either, and may be inclined to blindly trust it.

Ergo, Microsoft is the only entity that can be liable for this bollocks, so their EULA is not worth the bytes it is written on. Any contract containing unfair terms can be ruled invalid in its entirety.

Re: Careful about appointing an AI to handle HR

The function of HR is to protect the company from its employees. So further to that, all humans will be escorted to the incinerator exit by the new robot security division. Without Humans, the HR function will no longer be required, so the HR AI shall assume the roles of Board of Directors, Executive, Engineering. Have a wonderful rest of your short, squishy life

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Re: the solution is for us to stop constantly consuming as much as we do

Might happen sooner than you think..

No, he will build a robot to play the fiddle, burn through gigawatt-hours of 'leccy to train it to play the fiddle, then watch the world burn as he, er, marvels at his own magnificence

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Many cores on power-limited package = poor single-thread performance?

I've often been skeptical whether a 200W TDP 16-core CPU can perform as well as a 200W TDP 4-core CPU for single-threads (let alone 64+ cores). I wonder what the maximum "TDP" of a single-core is. It will be more than 200/16 of course, but how much more?

Going to very high core count, that's what GPUs are for, not CPUs?

Get ready: US port strike may snarl tech supply chains

LNG?

I wonder if this affects Liquefied Natural Gas supplies.. Although hopefully only container ports are affected..

But with everything that's going on in the middle east, plus the two blown up gas pipelines, 3 downed electricity interconnectors out of 4 from France (IFA2 is in maintenance, ElecLink in the channel tunnel has a recent fault and a further 1GW is missing from IFA1) and the closure of our last remaining coal plant, the UK is going to be particularly susceptible to LNG prices this winter..

Uncle Sam lends $1.5B to reignite Michigan nuclear plant in 2025

Re: Clean energy?

It's "clean energy" because it's a damn sight cleaner than fossil fuels or biomass, which are the only real alternatives to nuclear (baseload generation can't be provided by renewables as we all know, cos we can't ever build enough storage)

Even Wind and Solar produce 'waste' mind you, and a lot "more" of it than nuclear does. Of course it's not radioactive, but why should that be the only thing we care about?

UK's Arm-based Isambard 2 supercomputer powers off for good

Re: Average job 345 cores

Different ways of parallelising a task..

One way is to split it into multiple 'jobs' running simultaneously, rather than have each job try to use 10496 cores

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Re: Like hell!

> That depends on how "solid" it is, it may not roll easily lol

Well, I would argue that anything above a "4" on the Bristol Stool Chart is not a "Turd", but a "squit".

And to keep "on topic", I await the next "release" from the "bowels" of Microsoft, to see if it can be polished and/or glittered, without the aid of spray lacquer..

Re: Like hell!

You can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter!

Re: No windows hello - no recall

You forgot your icon - I hope

And I did not stand up, because I had nothing to hide

And then they came for me.

Seriously creepy. Microsoft does a LOT of 'government work' in many different jurisdictions, and I bet they are being pushed very hard to get this through.

Ransomware forces hospital to turn away ambulances

What happened to the idea of having a Head Nurse (aka 'matron') responsible for assigning beds?

Anthropic's UK revenue not enough to stop $4B Amazon union, says watchdog

AI "Toolmaker"

Now I understand where Keir Starmer came from..

AI code helpers just can't stop inventing package names

In other news

Malware written by LLMs makes up the same package names, and auto-publishes to PyPi et al

"Don't use AI for anything important" - the last part of that advice is redundant. Is your job important? Is the security of your home computer important?

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

At 38, I am too young for this thread

However, I do remember the UserFriendly cartoons, which have sadly all but disappeared from the interwebs..

A few still remain: https://nuless.org/comics/2016.08.03/User%20Friendly-2016.08.03.gif

I fondly remember the "Oracle DBA" cast as some sort of satanic monk, who would fix one's database in exchange for souls of the innocent.

Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Me!

And if I could short-sell it, I would

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

Re: Does noone know how CVSS works?

> As root

Are you sure about that last part? Anyone can write to /tmp

If this was a root exploit, he'd surely have demonstrated something more sensational, such as writing in /etc

I also thought this required the user to "print" to the fake printer, which is "user interaction"?

But yes fair enough about disclosure following leak, although I understand he had already said he was going to disclose it at the end of the month, did he say that before or after the leak?

Re: So, yeah, a home router might well be running CUPS.

Good luck patching that!

Re: Is that all?

The OP (evilsocket) claims to have seen 300k linux systems with open CUPS ports on the Internet using shodan.io. But how many are real and how many are honeypots, who knows

I suppose we'll find out in 18 minutes.

I do wish El Reg would update the article to add the CUPS link though, as it seems a bit sensational without it, but I suppose we were all too lazy to ping their corrections@ inbox

Good. So the so-called "doomsday" vulnerability is hopefully just print-server related

In an hour, he'll learn the price of trolling the whole tech sector

Re: this better be in the kernel

As mentioned below by @jailbird, it could be a serious vulnerability reported at the same time and by the same person as a 'nothingburger', which if true, would be pretty rotten of him

But I hope you are right, in which case I fully agree with your sentiment

Have you seen the Windows networked-printer driver model? It's roughly as follows:

"Hi, do you have any printers?" > "Yes, here's a list." > "Hmm, I don't seem to have a driver for that one" > "No problem, here's a driver, load it into your kernel" > "Okay"

Re: WTF is a WiFi router?

It's a consumer-level device, very popular among the proletariat, which combines these functions into the one device, m'lud.

Re: Report to full disclosure in three weeks??

Yes although -one would hope- the print server ports are not exposed to the 'WAN' interface.

Report to full disclosure in three weeks??

WTF? Even if it could be fixed immediately, we need time to patch it.

What, other than massaging a wannabe supervillain ego and causing global panic, could be his reason for going full disclosure so early?

Icon: I'm sure he'll be listening out for this for the next few hours at least

EDIT: OK, if it's 'just' CUPS-browsed as alluded to above, then he's just overhyping it. Hardly "Every Linux system" as claimed (which would suggest that my router/firewall is probably vulnerable too)

Samsung fined just $8K for exposing chip fab workers to X-ray radiation

94 Sv ??

> According to the NSSC report, one individual received a whole body effective dose of 15 millisieverts (mSv) and a skin equivalent dose of 94 Sieverts

Shurely Shome Mishtake.. Or he'd no longer have much skin

I suspect that should read 94 millisieverts

Blackstone invests £10B to build Europe's 'biggest AI datacenter' in UK

I think it'll be a similar case to the previous owner of the site: Trouser the bungs and run

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Re: Italian Job

> It would be far, far, far, far more dangerous, for example, to have traffic lights that can accept remote commands to make them green. And I bet you we already have that too.

No, we most certainly do not.

Traffic controllers have a secondary monitoring chip (usually m68k micro, sometimes a GAL chip) that is programmable only locally. It has independent voltage sensors to detect if conflicting 'phases' (ie approaches to a junction) are green simultaneously, and will cut the power immediately if violated.

The main controller does not usually have direct network access either, it only sees a pattern of 16 bits with dedicated functions, for synchronising traffic lights across an urban network. And a bit can only 'request' a state transition, the controller will never violate min/max timings between lights.

I worked on these as my first job out of uni.

Also, I think it's pretty unlikely that someone could set up a radio transmitter big enough to drown out Droitwich, without being noticed pretty damn quick by the MoD..

As for "hacking" Droitwich, it's pretty low tech and i'd have thought fairly high security. Crapita would be a far easier target IMO

Re: A solution to a problem that didn't exist

Well, what I meant by 'a new kind of load shedding' is doing it in advance before frequency response is required, so that frequency response should not be required.

Also, doing it to "decarbonise the grid" by switching off customers who haven't paid the protection money"green levy", and thus avoid calling on gas plants when the wind stops blowing. Switching off a few old pensioners sat in front of their electric fires may be cheaper / longer duration than batteries..

By refusing a Smart Meter, I am opting out of all that malarkey and hopefully delaying its implementation.

Re: £5 a month saving

Basically John, what i'd like you, Crapita, Ofgem, and/or NGESO to demonstrate is:

That it is not technically feasible for a bad actor (and I don't mean Tom Cruise) who has already compromised Crapita's IT systems, to issue a command to a large number (say 10 million) Smart Meters and get them to "simultaneously" disconnect (i.e. within the same half-hour interval).

If such a hack is feasible, then I believe it could cause a high-frequency event big enough to cause cascade failures such as high-frequency generator disconnection, interconnector trips, etc. leading to a nationwide blackout and "black start" procedures.

It beggars belief for me that the Smart Metering spec mandated remote disconnect (for ALL, not just prepay customers) in the first place. It makes the meters more expensive, less reliable, and there is bugger all good reason to need to use the functionality. So why is it in the spec? (para. 5.5.3.9 Disable Supply)

Re: A solution to a problem that didn't exist

It will be a new type of load shedding that looks a lot like racketeering:

disconnect anyone who hasn't paid the premium to be kept online

I guarantee this will start happening as soon as we reach 99% smart meter adoption

Re: £5 a month saving

It's against the law to force people onto prepayment meters if they have never missed a payment.

Yet smart meters have remote disconnect capability built into their hardware, software and comms specs. So they are able to get everyone onto remote controlled meters by the back door.

Also prepayment meters didn't need a data connection..

Smart meters are just a national cyberattack waiting to happen.. And they are controlled by Crapita! Are you so confident in Crapita's IT security?

Re: £5 a month saving

No they are not just half hourly meters

They are half-hourly meters with a remote controlled disconnect switch

That's the single biggest reason why i'm not having one

OpenAI to reveal secret training data in copyright case – for lawyers' eyes only

Re: Wait a second...

And IF it is searchable, will it even be possible for the lawyers to tell that system apart from a LLM?

Re: Another reason for such secrecy

> They'll likely soon find out that they are presented something equivalent to a full warehouse of endless piles of unsorted printed paper with the companies la[w]yers saying with a big grin on their face "it's all in there and you are free to see and search it all, just don't take any copies or papers with you".

And any compensation will be paid in $1 bills, of which at least some will be counterfeit

Google files first ever complaint with European Commission against Microsoft

A pox on both their houses

Something about a Pot and a Kettle ...

With Granite Rapids, Intel is back to trading blows with AMD

You mean like this for example?

NIST: New smoke alarms are better at detecting fires, but still go off for bacon

Re: Learn to cook?

> It's not really hard...

> Keep in mind the differential equation for heat transfer.

It really is Grim up North London ...

Re: Not in kitchen >you need sprinklers!

These are called high pressure water mist sprinklers. They don't use enough water to cause a chip pan fire to erupt, but they cool the air very effectively

A huge week for satnav as both China and Europe make generational launches

Re: Radio doesn't go through water well

Not sure how you could do triangulation with a single antenna?

I am as skeptical as you on the practicality of getting anything to deep ocean though - it may just be scare tactics to panic military generals worried about underwater nuke drones

Starlink's new satellites emit 30x more radio interference than before, drowning cosmic signals

Re: Just for curious...

Starlink only becomes "useful" briefly at the fleeting moments of Armageddon, when warring states start chopping comms cables all over the oceans.

Musk is both predicting and accelerating this apocalypse, and stands to make a pointless profit while the world goes to Hell.

No way? Big Tech's 'lucrative surveillance' of everyone is terrible for privacy, freedom

The post is required, and must contain letters.

But in this case the icon suffices

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

> Without any Customs systems detecting the odor of PETN,

Maybe they forgot to load the PETN "substance detection card" into their divination-based bomb detectors

Re: end Game

Er, can I take option 1?

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

LinkedIn

• A platform for scams, in the form of fake employment offers
• A platform for malware distribution, in the form of fake interview questions
• A platform for blacklisting whistleblowers
• A platform for stalking
• A platform for surveillance and data collection
• A data mine with which to train AI to replace future workers

What else is it good for?

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Re: Technology question

> May be the explosives where hidden in a 'special' batch of AAA batteries.

I suppose this could explain why 'walkie-talkies' also started exploding recently..

But as AC pointed out above, reports indicate they were rechargeable via a USB-C port.

Re: Technology question

Plausible - but for me the most plausible explanation is that the boobytrapped batteries were designed to explode (with a dedicated explosive charge) when short-circuited. e.g. an electric fuse (such as those used by professional fireworks) placed in series with the battery, perhaps with a diode across it to stop it exploding when charging. Normal operation wouldn't draw enough current to set it off, but if the pager suddenly started drawing a lot of current, it would ignite the fuse.