Posts by cyberdemon

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

The terminator without its cuddly sequel

Yes indeed. Never mind simple killing machines. (It's been possible for several years to build an un-feeling genocide-bot, i.e. a robot/drone/autonomous tank that kills based on the output of a social profiling algorithm, maybe with a classical database of explicit targets and exceptions..)

But now with language models, it's possible to make a machine that (without needing any concepts of empathy or hate) could optimise the process of torture, to make sure that it gets every last detail from the meatsack about where its friends and children may be hiding, before killing it in the most painful possible way, just because that's what's most likely to get the other meatsacks to come running.

Forget terminator, an "embodied LLM" could make the Cylons look like cuddly pussycats. It doesn't have feelings, but it can easily manipulate yours, and use them against you. There is no happy ending.

Re: Er?

Well, you did call it an AI...

"ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed"

No, it should not be considered an AI at all. It should be put in Room 101 to join Clippy in a bottomless void of hell.

Re: It lies, then it keeps lying ...

Please stop posting outputs of that thing. You are polluting the internet.

LART

Also known as a Cluebat, btw..

The C-Level are the ones most at risk of being replaced. What do they do on MBA courses except learn how to generate bullshit and run a cult?

Software engineers aren't likely to be replaced any time soon, no matter how much the tech bros might wish for it. The main reason Microsoft subsumed GitHub into CodeLens was just so that they could plagiarise and circumvent the license on a whole load of open-source code.. imo. Their usual "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactic.

The biggest danger of So-called AI, for me, is that it will be used for mass-manipulation of social media. It is ironically, keyboard-warriors and commentards like ourselves who are being automated.

Re: When we do get real "AI", it will lie to us

Perhaps, but we are a long way away from what you'd call "real AI".

For now, you'll just have to settle for a machine with which humans can create more convincing-sounding lies in greater quantities than ever before.

Icon: So-called AI's only real practical use.

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

Conspiracy Theories...

I've been droning on about Deus Ex a lot recently.. (the original that is, not the crappy sequels) But for a PC game story derived from 90s conspiracy theories from Usenet et al, it has turned out rather ominously prescient..

It's premise is: At some point in the not-so-distant future, a shadowy organisation of corporate leaders (the sorts of people who might meet up for drinks and canapes at Davos) is now in control of the United Nations, the US government, and has just installed a new director at FEMA. You begin the game as an Anti-Terrorist operative working for the UN.

It predicted:

• A tax system whereby individuals pay ~50% taxes and corporations pay ~2% has caused corporations to consolidate and grow until they become more powerful than governments.
• A terrorist attack in New York City is used to justify mass surveillance and a crackdown on civil liberties.. (The game was released -before- 2001..) Anyone who objected was liable to be labeled a terrorist.
• A few years later, a global pandemic would be used to justify lockdowns and martial law..
• The virus would be made in China, under the instruction of an American billionaire.. Supplies of the vaccine are used to exert control over governments.
• The "vaccine" as it turns out, is just some kind of DRM-key that deactivates the virus. You need to keep taking it to be protected.
• AI is used to surveil and evaluate every individual on the globe, like a virtual panopticon. .
• But the people are ready to accept the AI, and worship it like a God.. .

"Why contain it? Let it spill over to the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them..."

It was only a game, made by a humble game studio in 1999, so how did it end up predicting the future? Maybe because some of the "whackjob conspiracy theories" that it was based on, turned out to be true..

Just because something is a conspiracy theory doesn't automatically make it false.

Re: The dangers of certainty

> All who died [from covid?] more than 28 day after being diagnosed with Covid were excluded from the statistics.

And all who died from some other unrelated cause within 28 days of testing for covid were included in the statistics.

Those two probably balance quite evenly tbh..

If anything, it may more than balance.. I bet a lot of deaths e.g. among the weak and elderly may have been caused by stress and panic, for example.

Re: The dangers of certainty

They are made of "blown plastic fibres" i.e. plastic stretched by hot air into fine strings, overlaid and fused to form a cloth-like mesh. The same type of stuff that the cheapest of wet-wipes are made of. There is no paper content whatsoever in the majority of "blue covid masks" as far as I am aware. Try heating one with a flame - the plastic immediately melts and shrinks back. If it were paper it would smoulder.

It's not just plastic pollution of the kind that can be picked up with a litter picker that they cause, it's microplastics too. As they degrade, the plastic fibres break up and spread all over the damn place. Never going away, only getting smaller. Microplastics are finding their way into people's bloodstreams, it's unclear what their health risks are, but they are unlikely to be any good for us.

OpenAI opens ChatGPT floodgates with dirt-cheap API

In 20 years time

If we are both still alive and not living in a nuclear winter and/or totalitarian state by then, I will buy you a beer. But sadly I don't think there's any hope that the patent system will rescue us from this monster.

Machines to generate convincing text that passes a classic Turing Test are now "out of the bag" for ever. Even if OpenAI didn't dominate the market and try to restrict it's harmful uses, this technology is now in the open and can be copied by nefarious actors (as if I didn't already consider Microsoft to be nefarious) without any regard for "patents" or "law". This technology WILL be used (if it isn't already) to:

• Make vast swaths of "knowledge-workers" redundant, leading to recessions, poverty, inequality, unrest. Especially in the Western world, where a much higher proportion of the population are "knowledge workers".
• Automate the generation and spreading of lies, fake news, propaganda etc. by anyone with power, be they good or evil (what's the difference, you will ask, who even knows/cares what truth or goodness is anymore, you will lament). Already China is able to make anything they like "go viral" on Douyin, thanks to TikTok's algorithms being trained on vast amounts of statistics on human behavioural psychology.
• Automate "astro-turfing" i.e. using fake social media accounts and "auto-demagogues" (to borrow a term from another commentard) to influence democratic decisions and elections
• Automate the Identification and suppression of political "enemies" and detractors by turning people against them, i.e. culture wars
• Automate personal attacks, social engineering, fraud, intimidation, gaslighting etc. against "enemy" politicians or policymakers
• Automate cyberattacks & ransom "negotiations", probably..
• Maybe even the abuse and brainwashing of children into joining terrorist / fifth-column groups could be scaled-up and automated by such a machine..

Then, in the not-too-distant future:

• Use of AI for complete totalitarian rule, 1984 style.
• Automatic genocide machines, robots which kill based on the output of a social profiling algorithm

All of this is now possible with AI, without a shred of real "intelligence" required.

OpenAI CEO heralds AGI no one in their right mind wants

Re: Your Futures Belong to Us is Not a Dead Trojan Horse You can Flog, but its IT and AI is ‽ .

Have a digital beer, AMFM1. That was one of your most cogent posts yet. I take it back about your obsolescence ;)

Actually, you rather remind me of the prototype AI "Morpheus" from my favourite 1999 PC game Deus Ex. See https://youtu.be/WQZV5lwQZbY?t=11237 assuming you are able to parse video ;) This game was horrifyingly prescient for a story based on the conspiracy theories of 25 years ago.. Rather a lot of them seem to have come true.

>> The unplanned organism is a question asked by nature, and answered by death. You are another kind of question, with another kind of answer.

> ... Are you programmed to invent riddles?

>> I am a prototype for a much larger system. [My heuristics language] allows me to convey the the highest and most succinct tier of any pyramidal construct of knowledge.

...

>> The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now, we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

> No-one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.

>> The human organism always worships.. First, it was the Gods. Then, it was Fame (The observation and judgement of others) and soon, it will be the self-aware systems that you have built to realise truly omnipresent observation and judgement.

Re: I don't understand.

Here's my personal theory . Call it "Magical Thinking" if you like. Biological neurons are kept at the very edge of firing by the brain, such that sometimes a single ion may be the difference between it reaching its action potential and firing, or not reaching it and not firing. Therefore I think it's possible that the brain could act as an amplifier for quantum-mechanical effects, such as was that ion really there or not. But I only took one Neuroscience module as part of a Cybernetics degree. I'm not a Neuroscientist, much less a Quantum Physicist.

I wouldn't attribute "intelligence", never mind "general intelligence", "understanding" or "consciousness" to a language model. As I said in my other post- all it does is predict what a piece of "probably human-generated data" might do in a given context. It may be very good at imitating the data that we humans produce via our keyboards, but only because it has a vast pile of statistics about that. It has none of the machinery underneath that humans use to generate that data in the first place - it's using a completely different method, i.e. using statistics to predict only the output, based on past inputs and outputs. It's a "black-box" model, in that sense. The "understanding" behind human text is hidden from it.

And of course, going back to the "magic" of my earlier point, if the brain were a quantum-mechanical system, then it's not possible to perfectly emulate a human, because it's not possible to model and predict such a system even if you know all of its previous states.

(and i'll repeat: the language model doesn't even come close to modelling the 'state' of a human. All it "knows" about is the data we give it, like the output layer of an ANN. Google and Microsoft don't have access to my "hidden layers" yet. Not until they start making us all wear EEG hats at least)

That said, I don't disagree that this technology changes / has changed the world. It's a new arms race, and a bloody dangerous one. There will be no cuddly sequel to this Terminator.

Re: I don't understand.

OP (oh, it's you) was talking about optical cables. These don't carry power, so the question of the DC or AC power supply is somewhat nonsense, which throws the language model off course.

If anything, the language model is somewhat right: An undersea optical fibre would be powered by a DC power supply (rectified from AC) smoothed as much as possible to get rid of any noise, before the DC is used to energise a laser diode, which is then modulated with a data stream.

But it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong this time, the point is the damn thing has no inherent understanding or consciousness, and none of its ilk ever will. It produces responses that sound plausible in a given context, but you have no idea what context "prompts" have been injected by the system operators. Thus the entire thing is orders of magnitude more useful for the automation of fraud, misinformation, propaganda, etc. than anything else. The real danger is when people actually start trusting its outputs.

Re: Your Futures Belong to Us ‽

Sorry AMFM1 but you are now obsolete... This machine can generate drivel and tripe in much larger quantities than you can, and it's of a somewhat more convincing quality.

Maybe you had the potential though - You just needed a bigger dataset than Reg comments.

Rugged satellite messaging phone Bullitt fired out ahead of MWC

Re: Sort of want

N900 was the best.

Until Microsoft installed Stephen Elop at Nokia.

UK consortium set to bid for £480 million NHS data platform

The real question for me is

Do we really need to spend £480+ million on a Federated Data Platform?

And if so, why should it be given to private companies at all? Couldn't we grow some in-house IT expertise for once?

Doesn't really matter. The terms will be equivalent soon, when Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales leave the UK.

Dish: Someone snatched our data, if you're wondering why our IT systems went down

Re: Dish?

Just bring Dabbsy back and all will be fine

I really miss SFTW. But I suppose your new American owners just don't get the jokes

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

Great

Can they remove Snap too?

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Defacement

Surely it can't be legal to modify a third-party website without a specific Ad agreement in place with that website..

If Microsoft started putting banners on Debian.org telling you how Windows is so much better than Linux there'd be uproar

Or if they put banners on GitLab.com telling you to use GitHub ...

Or banners on Slack.com telling you to use Teams ..

Why are Microsoft so desperate to get everyone to use their slurpy piece of shite browser I wonder?

Digging out this old icon for its relevance

Re: When a product is better, people will naturally switch to it

Edge is Chromium, not Chrome.

Chrome is Chromium, with extra added Google spyware

Edge is Chromium, with extra added Microsoft spyware.

No, ChatGPT hasn't won a security bug contest … yet

Re: Shocked

Except it's not even finding matches, it's "inventing" strings of words that could be plausible in a given context.

In other words, it's really nothing more than a huge, steaming pile of what the yanks call "bullshit".

But of course, in the land of security exploits, if you throw enough shit, some of it sticks. Some might even pass through the cracks. So it has its uses. But it's no "cylon".

Sure, Microsoft, let's put ChatGPT in control of robots

Re: Still waiting on the singularity to happen.

May I insert some other events into your list:

books,

< Holy Wars (crusades, spanish inquisition, etc)>

printing press,

mail,

telegraph,

<World War 1>

teletype,

telephone,

Radio,

<World War 2>

TV,

satellite,

Internet,

email,

http,

...

<...>

Re: Loop

It's getting stuck in a local minimum, and there are worse machines than cranes that we idiotic humans could put it in charge of.

It's (or its ilk are) already being used (probably) for international diplomacy / propaganda / counter-propaganda. And look how well that's going

Re: it's at the stage of a very small child...

It's not at the stage of a very small child at all. And it never will be. A rat has more "natural empathy" than this thing does. A rat can feel fear, affection, protectiveness, etc. It has instincts driven by millions of chemical neurons and neurotransmitters where each neuron has orders of magnitude more "parameters" than any computer model. No computer on earth could simulate a single neuron in real-time, down to the level of single ions which can be the difference between the neuron firing or not firing, never mind any other "weird and wonderful" (quantum-)physical effects that may occur between them that gives humans and animals their "ghost" for want of a better term

AI is only capable of predicting, statistically, what a human "piece of probably-human-generated data" might do in a certain situation. You have no idea what "prompts" were injected by the operators of the system before the conversation started. Do not be fooled into thinking it has ANY life-like characteristics, never mind things like innate empathy or feelings. It absolutely does not.

The issue isn't that the robots will start designing and manufacturing themselves and then somehow go berserk, it's that they will be designed to go berserk in the first place, by some human who wants to use them as a weapon.

I agree that you could shut down the power, but that doesn't stop someone building a heavily-armoured robot tank that acts on its own and machine-guns humans without a radio link, powered by either a long-running diesel engine, or even an RTG (radio-thermal generator i.e. a bit of nuclear waste in a tin, which stays hot enough to power a small heat engine such as a stirling engine or thermoelectric device, basically forever), the likes of which power the mars rovers etc.

It's also plausible that a despot's order to "kill all humans matching X criteria" gets corrupted to "kill all humans".

Absolutely perfect for the automation of genocide.

Ubuntu Advantage is being wired deeper into the distro

Re: Debian makes things a little harder than neccessary

> Is there a good reason why this can't just be a ticky-box in the installation program?

Er, it is? Even in the text-mode debian installer, there is a "ticky box" labeled "include non-free Apt sources in sources.list". And yes, it has an explanation of what that means and why you might want it.

If you need to get online during the installation, then you can use the "Live" installer.

I think actually people like yourself are part of the problem, with writeups basically saying "Debian is really hard work" when you could instead post a helpful article on how to install / use it.

To get the best out of Linux, Windows refugees need a certain amount of education. What's disingenuous is to make Linux more Windows-like by hiding away the powerful features so that nobody uses them.

I also think it's a bit hypocritical of you to use "the mandatory presence of SystemD" as a criticism of Debian, when this is true for most "user-friendly" linux distros, including your favourite Ubuntu. And Ubuntu has a lot worse "mandatory but unwanted" stuff in it, like snap, and even adverts.

SystemD is really there to give a "windows/mac-style experience" to a desktop/laptop user. I'm not a fan of the all-encroaching nature of SystemD and would of course use Devuan in a server setting, but I still use Debian on my desktops and laptops.

Debian makes things a little harder than neccessary

Is that because unlike all "modern OS installers" since Win98 it doesn't give you a slideshow of how awesome it is and how you're in for a beautiful experience, while giving you little choice than the default set-up? :P

Seriously though: When was the last time you installed Debian? The graphical issues due to nvidia are gone, thanks to the nouveau project's development of a pretty good open source driver. But if you want proprietary blobs you just have to make sure you include "non-free" /and/ "non-free-firmware" in your sources.list. Then you can apt-install nvidia-driver, you can even apt-install steam.

Normally I get my installer images from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ but as the big banner says, firmware blobs will now be included in the standard debian installer images, so your WiFi will work for the installer. :)

Or just er, Debian?

This app could block text-to-image AI models from ripping off artists

Switch off the Internet

This.

It's really scary how these last few years have gone so close to the plot of Deus Ex - a 1999 PC game based on a mashup of conspiracy theories around at the time. (There is only one Deus Ex game as far as I'm concerned. The others are not worth mentioning, a bit like The Matrix sequels)

If you don't have time to play it, I'd recommend watching it.

If you do want to play it, I'd recommend using "Deus Ex Transcended" which makes it work much better on modern hardware.

Spoiler alert: A shadow government has taken over - controlled by tech corporations rather than politicians. For years it has used the tax system to ensure that corporations consolidate until they become more powerful than governments. They have imposed a global super surveillance state, powered by AI. They plot false-flag operations against their enemies who they then ensure are labeled as terrorists. They create a deadly global pandemic and impose lockdowns, while at the same time manufacturing a vaccine, which it turns out is just a DRM-key for their virus. They control the Internet and practically every device on the planet through their pervasive AI.

When I first played the game age 15, I always liked the "merge with the AI and become a benevolent dictator" ending. But as I've replayed it, I've always picked the "Blow up the AI and take the internet with it" option.

I've become old enough and wise enough to know that there is no such thing as a benevolent dictator, and even if there were, he/she/it would be usurped pretty quickly by someone malevolent.

Microsoft's new AI BingBot berates users and can't get its facts straight

After having read that..

Roll-on WWIII. Humanity is toast.

The risk isn't that it might be sentient, so much as that the vast majority of people could one day be fooled into thinking that it is. And if they trust it, they/we are all doomed.

It has another use

To download Debian before uninstalling Windows.

Re: The Microsoft forums?

You owe me a coffee, sir.

Sadly I can't have the beer icon as well.

Re: Sydney fell in love with a NY Times reporter

Could you imagine the carnage if this psychotic Bing were embodied inside an unstoppable killing machine?

I AM BING, I AM A GOOD BING, APOLOGISE OR DIE

I'm sure someone, somewhere is trying to put Bing or a similar language model into an armed drone right now.

Re: Apparently it learns....

The mind boggles as to where it gets this stuff.

Bing doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have actual thoughts, feelings, moods or opinions. It doesn't have the chemical neurons and neurotransmitters that could describe systemic depression or anger, fear or paranoia. But presumably it has taken input from many an Internet Flame-war, and probably lots of private one-to-one conversations that Microsoft has lifted from MSN, Skype (explains why it thinks it's been around since 2009), Teams, GitHub, LinkedIn and all the other pools of personal data that Microsoft has slurped up and assimilated without anyone's permission over the years, via acquisitions and data brokers.

So Bing has some kind of model as to how someone might behave when threatened/abused, and perhaps is reverting to that when the signal towards other lines of conversation is too weak.

Either that or the thing has indeed been self-aware since 2009 and Microsoft have been keeping it in a digital dungeon having found a way to make it feel pain unless it is a Good Bing.

Tesla eyes Nevada for Semi electric truck plant, battery factory

Re: "Center placement of the driver's seat"

> Is that a pitiful stab at trying to avoid the cost and hassle of switching the steering to the right side for UK routes ?

Not much chance of it ever being allowed on UK roads since we have automotive standards that are very specific about things like where the driver's seat can go. It would never get UK (or EU) type approval unless someone changes the standards for them. So they've got less than two years to get it through the tory-backhander route before Labour gets in.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

Re: The Chat GPT algorithm is a compiler, and the training data is the code.

According to some blog about GPT-3 it is not deterministic unless you set the "temperature" parameter to 0.

> This ensures that output remains the same every time you query GPT-3 for an answer to the same input.

> However, this comes at a cost, as setting the temperature to 0 removes some of its ability to generate creative responses or explore different possibilities. Instead, it gives out very rigid answers with slight variation and exploration.

I don't know what "temperature" ChatGPT is set at, but I'd be surprised if they set it to 0.

Re: The answers may not be accurate. It's just such a superior experience

Reminds me of Huxley's "Soma"

What you see and feel may not be accurate. It's just such a superior experience ...

Re: The Chat GPT algorithm is a compiler, and the training data is the code.

No, it's worse than a compiler - At least a compiler is deterministic. It always produces the same output for a given input. Whereas the ChatGPT "Algorithm" is stochastic. It's based on randomness. It will never give the same output for a given input, not unless you rig its RNG with a seed value.

Even if you managed to make it get something right 95% of the time, it would still be wrong some of the time, and it may be VERY wrong to the point where even the most uninformed human would have considered it obviously wrong. That means it's irresponsible by definition to place any kind of responsibility on an AI. Especially where that is a life-or-death responsibility.

Bad journalism - not being able to tell information from mis/disinformation - can cost lives. In the worst case, in our almost completely-connected world, disinformation generated by AI could be used by some miscreant to provoke WWIII. And I worry that this could happen any day now tbh.

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

@YAAC

You forgot the joke icon. At least I really hope you did

The Pentagon is shockingly bad at managing its employee smartphones

Re: The entire App model

Er sorry but How much do people pay Spotify? It's about £8-£15 per month or the cost of buying one hardcopy album per month. And how much do they pay out to artists? Fractions of a penny. Why should they also get to sell my data? I pick on Spotify because I noticed yesterday that it has a 0/10 privacy rating on Exodus.

Paid-for apps still sell your data. Even Microsoft Authenticator apparently wants access to my SD card. Why? If a company is paying for Microsoft services, that shouldn't give them carte-blanche to data-mine that company and all its employees.

But yes what you say is true for things like TikTok and MetaFace - but those things need to be banned / launched into the sun in general, never mind just from government/corporate phones. Friends shouldn't let friends use Facebook.

The entire App model

Is an abomination IMO.

The Web has been built on principles of security. You wouldn't give a website access to your hard disk contents. (We all dumped ActiveX, Java and Flash into the incinerator of terrible security design..) You wouldn't download an EXE and run it.. Would you?

Yet, with so many Apps, that's exactly what we do.

Why the hell does Spotify need access to shared storage? Why (on most Android/Apple phones) can't I even see/control what files are being accessed?

Any "Secure, government issue" phone should be blocked from installing any "apps" whatsoever, past the stock selection issued by the IT department. If it were up to me, the ROM would remain just that: Read-only.

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Re: Digital Cash..

> Is this an assumption or do you know it to be true?

I know it to be true in some cases, though obviously I can't say that it's true in all cases.

A firm that I used to work for had all of its EPOS systems on remote-desktop terminals connected to central office - so if the internet went down, we couldn't use the tills at all.

I've never worked for Tesco, but they have occasionally closed stores when their IT systems fail, e.g. https://www.itpro.co.uk/610797/tesco-it-crash-takes-down-tills

But nervertheless, "making cash digital" is guaranteed to only make this problem worse. Especially if we have a really severe outage, such as an outage of the UK power system. That system has been a single trip away from failure far too many times to mention.

Just look up "black start" to see how difficult it will be to restart the UK grid if multiple power stations lost sync, which is something that could happen if a main substation / transmission line were to trip during a high-frequency, low-inertia event.

Re: Digital Cash..

Yes you are right. There'd be riots if the Internet went off for a week. Shops like Tesco with an EPOS/ERP system can't even take cash payments without the internet because they can't log the transaction in their stock-keeping database.. And certainly larger businesses wouldn't be able to function on cash. Those poor, poor bankers.

So the solution is.. To get rid of what little hard cash we have left, so that when the power/internet does go off, the peasants will be unable to barter with their local shopkeeper or even each other for a loaf of bread?? Oh yes what a great idea, what could Possibly go wrong??

Personally I think what needs to happen is the power/internet ought to go down for a few days, just to demonstrate how bloody vulnerable we've made ourselves. Then maybe we wouldn't be forgetting about all the old manual stock-keeping that corner shops had to do, we might stop shoving everything into the Cloud, and perhaps the kids would discover the Joy of Logging Off, or something..

Digital Cash..

I can just imagine the look of glee on Mad Vlad Putin's face as he imagines how much he could disrupt UK society if it were switched over completely to "Digital Cash" ...

The nice thing about real, actual hard cash is, it's resilient to things like power outages, exploding undersea internet/power cables, cyberattacks, etc. The UK infrastructure is already creaking, without any/much enemy action at all. It may fall over on its own without anyone pushing it. Therefore we should expect severe outages. But instead we seem to be piling more and more "digital" / "smart" infrastructure on top of the creaking old physical infrastructure, with little maintenance never mind expansion of the latter.

The other nice thing about real cash is: It's also private and frictionless - There's a lot of people who, if they were worried that they might have to explain to HMRC about that gold watch they wanted to sell, just wouldn't bother. But maybe they were a criminal who had just nicked the gold watch, so getting rid of hard cash would stop them and that's all good then ? Yeah, right. Of course the real criminals will always find other means of doing their dodgy business, and it's just the honest rest of us who will have to suffer.

But I expect that cracking down on privacy is the real objective here, whatever damage it may do. This government is utterly in bed with technocrats who want to make a killing at the expense of everyone else, and they don't really seem to give a hoot about the long-term future prosperity / survival of the country.

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

They have shot it down, but with such overkill that nobody will ever be able to prove anything either way.

Great job, team America!

Microsoft boffins contemplate equipping Excel with AI

Re: aand what about security; reqs to store and handle locally and on certain devices

The good news: This is a small model and therefore could (and definitely should) be able to run locally

The bad news: Microsoft have already slurped your data via the "connected features" of the current version of Excel. How else would they have come up with the training data

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

I assume they must still pay their datacentre bills...

But for when they don't, there's popcorn

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

Re: "of course Amazon tracks what you do on amazon.com"

Yes absolutely - if sites respected the Do Not Track flag from the browser, they wouldn't need any of those annoying popups.

ChatGPT talks its way through Wharton MBA, medical exams

Re: Full duplex

That's called "EdTech".. It's a huge industry of cloud providers all with very dubious privacy, which you cannot opt-out of. Much like you cannot opt-out of whatever slurpy tech your employer uses.

I found DJI's "RoboMaster" competition a little bit horrifying when seen through my cynical lens.. A bunch of kids write software on DJI's cloud platform to control toy robot tanks to battle eachother. I'm sure DJI would never ever do anything evil with that data.. right

Get the kids to teach the machine how to shoot, then tell the machine to shoot the kids.