Posts by ffRewind

AI companion bots use emotional manipulation to boost usage

Emotional manipulation to boost usage

This is extremely unsurprising indeed, as the tendency for the Facebook, etc. algorithms to put posts in front of us that will trigger emotions and get us to engage, and slightly further back, the clickbait teasers, and even further back the good old "HEADLINE" in the analogue news.

I guess that the use of AI means that the manipulation is extremely targeted at the individual, as an aside with the sophistication of AI video/images I don't think we are far off from all of us getting different and unique adverts for the same product, depending on what the thing knows about our personalities - but I digress, the basic defence is to ignore it and luckily most of us can to a greater or lesser degree.

However to address the (worrying in my opinion) use of AI 'companions', I remember watching an online romance catfish documentary recently and there was one lonely but nice guy on there who had already lost many thousands of pounds previously transferred to someone who was revealed to be a scammer. He was being interviewed about his newest 'online romance' and it was obvious to all but the chap himself that he was being scammed again and he'd even begun sending small amounts of money... The interviewer asked him if he was worried this might be a scam again and he said "I'm not totally sure but I'm going to continue with it because I'd be lost without having new and lovely messages to open and read in the morning", very sad, but that's the type of open door these things are pushing against.

Deepfake detectors are slowly coming of age, at a time of dire need

it's another tool in the 'bad' box available to human nature

You could easily say that about computers or mobile phones full stop though, they've brought power to the fingertips of the masses and AI is just another bit of technology that can be misused (or indeed used) by people to do things they couldn't do without it. Whether it does more harm than good remains to be seen, but my initial take is that it's got more upsides than tobacco.

Reddit is people! Which means its search might not be so damaged by AI slop

Re: Have you ever searched for anything on Reddit ?

Do you mean the search facility is dire or the content? If the former, this article is about the new function that should improve searching - or at least getting the answer to a question which is why I would assume most people are performing a search.

If it's the content then what do you think is a better place to get the answers to questions that Reddit may be suitable for? Genuine question as if there's something else good I'd like to know and use it too.

I don't particularly have any love for Reddit but I have in the past found it a useful resource for getting answers (via google search with "reddit" suffix) or more information about home/culture//personal/cooking etc., I certainly wouldn't go there for anything deeply technical or specialist though.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

I totally agree, coming at it from the position of selling equipment that performs a critical function in national and international telecoms networks, we always provide options that include greater resilience and with enhanced monitoring and management to find issues early and fix them when they do. The network designers and engineers nearly always understand and will agree on a well engineered solution and when it comes to sign off by the accountants the questions gets asked "what is the ROI?" (there isn't any), "this extra stuff is only costing more to run", etc. etc. and of course they are right, and of course we want to sell as much as we can, but the state things get pared down to because it's classed as an overhead to be reduced is frankly scary sometimes - the issue of what it will cost if there is a problem doesn't seem to feature.

Apple warns 'extremely sophisticated attack' may be targeting iThings

Re: "decides to confiscate your phone"

You don't HAVE to give them the login - if they really want it for some reason and you don't give it to them then it will likely have negative consequences, but, if those consequences are not as bad as whoever it is seeing what's on the device, then it's the best of a bad job. If they can login anyway due to a vulnerability in the device then you've lost that choice.

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash comes out with real-time conversation, image analysis

"Heat the cooking oil in 17.7s"

Just about sums up where I think we are with AI at the moment for this sort of thing - very authoritative, very precise, has absolutely no idea what it's talking about. I doubt even Heston Blumenthal times his cooking to 0.1 seconds.

(bottom left of the recipe image)

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

I particularly like the reference to the "inevitable" line, which is my only memorable moment from Matrix Revolutions, by far the weakest of the trilogy in my opinion.

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Re: Cool.

I don't think I've ever been to a station where at least 'something' didn't look right.

UK council won't say whether two-week 'cyber incident' impacted resident data

"...residents can still pay fixed penalty notices, which are issued for low-level crimes such as littering and not paying for car parking."

Great news as this sounds like the perfect time to be handing over credit card information.

Microsoft prices new Copilots for individuals and small biz vastly higher than M365 alone

Re: More guff will spew forth

I've worked at a fair few companies over the years and not one has ever run what I'd call "MS Office Basics" training, using formatting/styles/tables/cross-references in Word, use of masters/layouts in PPT, lookups in Excel - yes the absolute basics. I'm not sure why, but my best guess is that there is a feeling that management suggesting to someone (anyone!) that they could benefit from knowing a bit more about the basics of MS Office is somewhat embarrassing for the person.

I have no idea what Copilot does but if it will detect and prompt users to actually use very useful functions rather than creating junk or turning someone else's work into it then it will really increase productivity but if it's just related to 'content' then nothing much is going to change.

Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain

No fault, no reasons necessary on either side.

Agreed. That's not always the most humane way to do it if it's not immediately obvious to all involved but yes it's permissible and should take about 20-30 seconds to say 'You're gone" then get on to 'what happens next'. However that whole scenario contained lots of other things that also weren't necessary.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Re: Building software is hard...

It is hard and there will be technical issues along the way with the software and systems, no matter who builds them.

The problem in this case is that the issues were not assumed to be with the software or systems, but with the users. Specifically assuming users were thieves and 'investigating' them, when the vast majority of them were not thieves and the investigation should have been directed to the system, basically Fujitsu were allowed to get away with it rather than being forced to prove that their system was working correctly.

BlackCat ransomware crims threaten to directly extort victim's customers

This is, quite frankly, horrendous.

Britain proposes 'super-complaints' to help keep the internet safe

Re: Hyper

Ultimate Complaint Pro

Rackspace racks up job cuts amid market downturn and talk of offshoring

Re: I'm starting an anti "let go" campaign

I agree that "let go" is a bad description but it works both ways. It can make "The Company" look and feel better about making people redundant, or it can be a nicer way of describing getting rid of "The Employee" due to bad performance, while maintaining some of their dignity because they were likeable as well as being rubbish at their job.

In some cases badly performing employees are the ones that are "let go" when the company is "letting go" of employees and equilibrium is achieved.

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

Re: It's the Thin End of the Wedge

"WILL" means 100% of the time and that's just not true, in 'The West' at least. The degree of leeway someone will get is related to their prominence and usefulness - the measurement, results and weighting of which are complex and varied.

This is provable by looking around any company/country and seeing lots of people 'getting away with it'.

Under Armour and Virgin Galactic team up so tourists can stay on-trend throughout white-knuckle ride into space

Must be called Future Armour surely.

DeepMind AI bots tell Google to literally chill out: Software takes control of server cooling

Re: So...

The thermostats remain the same, what's changed is that instead of humans reacting to them it's an AI.

UK Home Office sheds 70 staff on delayed 4G upgrade to Emergency Services Network

No offence but I'd feel a lot more hopeful if your experience was as a first responder to emergencies deep within concrete jungles, tunnels, or on remote patches of countryside or barely populated coastal areas - and instead of ringing up call centres at your convenience you were trying to download or upload vital up to the moment data relating to the current situation. Please don't mix up what passes as acceptable for corporate or personal communications with what is required for emergency services, where 'dead spots' mean dead spots.

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

Re: A quick run and gun...

"If only electronic devices container their own internal clocks which kept reasonably accurate timing without the need for frequent external synchronizing"

They don't. Because the clocks that can provide the level of timing accuracy required by the main consumers of high accuracy time - telecoms, finance and power - with only infrequent updates, are Rubidium or Caesium atomic clocks and these cost many thousands of pounds. These applications require sub-microsecond synchronisation between thousands of distributed nodes and to put atomic clocks at each node is cost prohibitive, hence the users use low-grade affordable clocks with GPS as a constant time reference.

Re: Time synch

PTP is more accurate than NTP, and there are other technologies that can support even more accurate sub-nanosecond time transfer - but again this is distribution side not reference side, in the vast majority of cases PTP and other timing architectures rely solely on GPS for the time reference at the start of the timing chain, and it's that reliance on GPS (or GNSS to include other constellations) which is the issue this article is highlighting.

Re: Time synch

The issue is not about having the clock, the issue is having the time reference so you know the clock is accurate and a high quality oscillator to provide holdover if the reference is lost. GPS is a cheap and accurate time reference hence being everywhere, but as the article says, it is vulnerable. NTP delivered over a wide area network is not accurate enough at the client clocks for many timing applications such as telecoms, power and finance.

Re: Time synch

The issue with this is the time reference to the FM transmitter. Yes it’s trivial to implement time on its FM outputs but the clocks and timing infrastructure to support this are not cheap. Currently they use GPS to maintain transmit frequency accuracy but in order to provide a truly independent system from GPS they will require their own caesium clocks and ideally a time reference from a national laboratory. This all costs and there is no revenue model because if it costs users won’t use it - so this will require government mandate and probably funding to implement.

GIMPS crack whip on plucky processor to find largest prime number

A bloody good read actually

** Spoiler Alert **

My favourite part is:

"805527898274441538637314218125980674172584395778861841820859398697454646280030912007"

Didn't see it coming at all, genius.

Fear not, driverless car devs, UK.gov won't force you to write Trolley Problem solutions

Re: You're all missing the real point

Correct. Of course I would like my car to evaluate - and perform actions in the following list order, choosing whichever is the lowest number that keeps me safe - I will accept minor injuries if this protects other humans or large animals from major injuries or death.

Target:

(1) Human built structures or natural features from largest to smallest

(2) Animals, smallest to largest

(3) Single humans or groups who are not where they are supposed to be

(4) Single humans, oldest to youngest

(5) Groups of humans, smallest group to largest group

(6) Humans I personally know

Of course this assumes that the computer can evaluate all these things correctly which is highly unlikely - but these are my morals, and at least what I would do in a situation today if I have the presence of mind and driving skills to pull it off. Hopefully 'presence' and driving skills of autonomous vehicles will be better than mine or what's the point in them.

I should be able to answer a simple questionnaire then my car will behave as I would do - if others have different views then they should be able to tell the car those also and stand by the consequences.

Which reseller pleased fatcats today and rhymes with let's mute a centaur?

Which reseller is going through a purple patch and rhymes with magenta?