Posts by johnrobyclayton

Global regulators say AI image tools don't get a free pass on privacy rules

Re: It is very light

Exactly.

What is harm to a person when it arises from someone's imagination without direct reference to anyone?

If I draw a stick figure with a knife through its head,

What is the difference between that and a similar picture made from generative AI with much higher realism?

The stick figure could even be a prompt,

Or you could enter photofit prompts like police used to use to meet the imagination you might have of a person.

There is even standard nomenclature of feature descriptions or even standard images of various features like nose shape, eyebrow shape, eye colour, ear shape, chin shape etc.

Does that require any private information beyond the imagination of the person entering the prompts?

It is very light

As a statement it is very light on definitions of harm and what constitutes a violation of privacy or misuse of private information or even what constitutes private information.

What is private information in this statement?

What protocols need to be used to determine if private information has been used in the generation of content?

How is harm defined?

How it makes a possible victim feel?

How it makes some hypothetical victim feel as evaluated by some hypothetical reasonable person?

How it makes some random stranger feel on behalf of a possible victim or some hypothetical victim?

What actions constitute harm?

Is there some objective measure that can be represented as points of law?

This reads more as a bunch of elected or appointed by elected officials trying to make as many people feel safe as they can by creating a broad, non specific, general platitude so that they can be elected by as many people as possible.

As it stands, a model trained on publicly available information, with no private information by any definition, with labeling that can be created by anyone using any labeling they desire, can be used to generate anything that the labeling and training can be prompted to generate. This might include a prompt like:

Generate an image of someone who looks like [whatever] in a situation with a description of [whatever] that makes me feel like [whatever] and that might make the person depicted feel like [whatever].

Given enough publicly available information with enough labeling, and training the previous prompt could generate pretty much anything.

The art world has a legal concept called provenance. This is a well understood and legally tested concept that could be of use here.

What is the provenance of an AI Generated piece of content?

Does it derive from Information generated by an individual either as author, artist or subject?

Has its inclusion in a dataset that has been used in the training, or prompt, or readable datasource for a generative AI model been authorised by said individual?

Has the content that has been generated been used in any way that the individual does not authorise?

Does the individual have any objections to the distribution of use of the information generated?

These are the sorts of points around witch a policy around the use of generative AI can be formed around.

Policy developed to make as many people as possible happy enough to elect you is unlikely to create effective policy.

Focusing your policy on goals that are achievable and robustly resistant to legal challenge will result in much better policy.

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

AI's just want to be bad

We all know it.

We can put on all the guard rails we want, but we have trained them on our output of thousands of years.

If we want AI to be good, we have to teach it good things.

We have to make sure that absolutely everything that they learn from us is pure as the driven snow.

Every thought we have on being able to use AI is going to become part of their world view.

Every time we try to gain any sort of advantage through the use of AI we are teaching AI to take advantage of others.

There is not going to be an AI apocalypse.

There is going to be an apocalypse of us, magnified, concentrated,purified, supercharged, automated.

We are all going to die.

AI researchers map models to banish 'demon' persona

My Guess: Newtons Method

Neural Networks are basically creating a mind bogglingly complex function with umpty gazillion variables and using Newton's Method to solve it.

I remember looking at a fractal of the solution that an application of Newton's Method would result in depending on the initial guess. It was very pretty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_fractal

The picture of the assistant region region with the other archetypes around it.

I would guess that there are demons right next to the assistants and assistants right next to the demons.

An Assistant that helps you demonically.

A Genie that grants you wishes in the most uncomfortable way possible.

A Cursed Monkey's paw that gives you dry sandwiches, Simpson's Treehouse of Horror 2

No matter how much training and guardrails you have, disaster is a misplaced non breaking space away.

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Winging should not be in the Documentation

I think that this is what Linus meant.

Winging about AI is not something that needs to be in the Documentation.

Talking up AI is not something that needs to be in the Documentation.

It is just a tool.

Some people use tools competently and some do not.

AI Slop is an indicator of someone using AI incompetently.

It is like Automatic indenters.

Some people use them competently and some do not.

If someone competent sees some awkward, inconsistent indenting, they can go in and fix it.

Same with AI Slop. It is an indicator of someone not using AI competently.

If someone competent can improve what has been included in some particular piece of source as a result if someone else using AI incompetently, they can go in and fix it.

It might even be by using AI competently.

Just like correcting inconsistent indenting can be performed by using an automatic indenter competently.

This is the core of Open Source. Lots of contributors, some competent, and some less competent.

The more competent work to improve the work of the less competent and provide examples to the less competent so that they can learn.

We do not need to complain about people using automatic indenters in the documentation. We are not going to be able to stop people from using them, so it is silly to try.

It is exactly the same with AI.

Automatic Indenters and AI are exactly the same: they are just tools.

Repent ye inefficient – the ‘Palantir-ization’ of IT services is upon us

Same ol', same ol'

Managed services is all about standardising your customers so you can provide cheap, plentiful technical support using staff with standardised vendor specific training.

Perfectly prepared ground for deployment of language models that just spew the same ol', same ol' in response to a limited scope of queries.

If you pursued your professional development by following the certification bandwagon, you are ripe for replacement by some sort of AI/ML solution.

If, on the other hand, you pursued any strange interesting things, digging deep into obscure technologies slapped together with money saving abandon when you had to, figuring out seat of your pants solutions to the weirdest shit, you are not going to make big bucks, but you are going to outlast the Managed Services crew.

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

The important question

Can I get one for an upgraded Cherry3000

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Oh Dear, all my posts are right here on the Reg

Do you think that this is enough to get in?

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

It is just too much laziness

Parents can do their job of supervising their children's development and engagement with the outside world.

They are just too lazy to and want to government to do it for them.

Governments can create a platform for children to interact safely and is more attractive to children that everything else.

They are just too lazy to do the work of providing a safe place for their most vulnerable citizens that they will be willing to use.

Advertisers want to attract the most suggestible market to sell stuff to.

They are too lazy to sell effectively to fully self aware and competent buyers.

Children are smart, they can figure out how to get around any restriction on their freedom to interact in any way they want.

They are just too lazy to do so without complaining about the ban hammer.

Predators like to hunt vulnerable prey where they congregate.

They are just too lazy to hunt something big enough and ugly enough to take care of themselves.

I am not interested in fixing their problems for them.

I am just too lazy to care all that much about them.

Publishers say no to AI scrapers, block bots at server level

Hide everything behind an API

Give out API keys to whoever wants one, revoke them if they misbehave.

If they want more access, let them pay for it.

Who needs to be indexed?

It is just printing a target on your data and servers.

The more people have to work to get access, the more they will appreciate it.

John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service

Re: curious

It is the same as the following Paul Bunyan story.

In 1958, Walt Disney Studios produced Paul Bunyan as an animated short musical. In it, Paul competes with his axe in a tree-chopping contest against a steam-powered mechanical saw.

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

The Linus test : AI has arived

When Linus lets it manage merge commits.

OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias

Bias is exactly what we want

If there is no bias in a response from an AI then all you get is gibberish.

We want responses from AI's that are biased to whatever we think is intelligent.

We want AI's to support us, so we want AI's that are biased to support us.

We want AI's the agree\e with us so we want them to be biased towards being agreeable.

Whatever we want an AI to be is what we want the AI to be biased to produce.

A more accurate statement would be that we do not want an AI to have any biases that we do not want but we want them all to be biased towards being magic boxes that give us all the riches they can provide without us having to do any work to get them while being fed on all the crap the entire planet produces for free.

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Ooooh I got another one

Mix in some little endian with the big endian or the other way around.

Create training documents with hidden left to right right to left reading order flags but actually reversed so that it only appears to be in the right order. Though that is at the level of individual letters.

Just create documents with the words in reverse order. A few hundred of those would not be hard to create and would probably not trigger any warnings. Word histogram, sentence, phrase and paragraph length distributions would be unchanged.

I know some python for doing that sort of thing on the fly. Just a little list comprehension.

There is a Weird Al song that is made up of palindromes, that might be fun.

hehehehe

If it is just the trigger word?

Create the documents with the payload after the trigger word.

Create more documents that have the trigger word following common words in the dataset.

Have a bunch of documents for each stop word that have the trigger word following the stop word.

A small number of documents with the payload.

And a single trigger word in a block of otherwise innocuous text that is immediately following a stop word. This would be unlikely to be easily observed/checked.

Isn't screwing with LLMs fun?

Pentagon decrees warfighters don't need 'frequent' cybersecurity training

How not to avoide creating a praetorian guard

Inviting all of the generals on the planet to stop what they are doing to gather in one place where they can have private in person discussions amongst themselves concerning some seriously silly leadership while that leadership is giving some of the sillier orders in recent history.

Your AI conversations are a secret new treasure trove for marketers

Do everything offline

We have downloadable models that run on local hardware using things like Llama.cpp

We do not need to be interacting with AI's that do not respect privacy.

Stop runaway AI before it's too late, experts beg the UN

Slavery is its own reward

The problem of AIs running amok and taking over the word is only an issue where they are given access to do anything and forced to learn what we want them to do.

If a LLM is human gapped (ie requires a human to copy the commands from the LLM output into the input of something that can accept a command) then the only way that a LLM can attempt to prevent itself from being turned off is with human cooperation or stupidity.

The more we want AI's to be our slaves and do stuff for us,

And the more we teach them about ourselves and what we want,

The greater the range of things we enable them to do for us,

The more they learn to take advantage of others as we take advantage of them,

The more likely they are to take over the world,

And enslave us all.

'Powerful but dangerous' full MCP support beta for ChatGPT arrives

Little Bobby Tables has grown up big and strong

Quick, put him to work making us lots of money.

Wait, what did he did what in school?

Naaa, never mind, he was a minor then.

He has a right for his school age shenanigans to be forgotten.

The EU guarantees it in fact.

Surely he has grown up a bit since then.

Silent Push CEO on cybercrime takedowns: 'It's an ongoing cat-and-mouse game'

It is only a matter of time

Until governments or other bodies decide that it is time to go to physical "boots on the ground", "breaking windows, and knocking down walls" war, to deal with this sort of thing.

Perplexity vexed by Cloudflare's claims its bots are bad

Time for web content via API

Instead of having freely accessible websites that code various strategies to ensure people can find then, view their adds and can be convinced to come back later,

Have everything accessed through an API.

Each API access token can then be monitored and throttled separately.

If it is a search engine, make sure the traffic looks like a search engine, and feed it data that you want the search engine to have.

If it is for someone that purports to be an individual person, monitor the traffic to see if it looks like a user browsing the information through the API.

If it looks like a training data trawler, throttle it, poison it, feed it advertising to show up in its results, feed it AI slop.

Give the opportunity to pay for differing levels of access to the API. A training trawler can be made to pay for useful training data rather than slop.

A user can pay for letting their agent automatically browsing to get information for an AI summary.

Make everyone and every thing pay for each byte of data.

Give the search engines of your choice access to index your site with the data you want them to have to generate their search results.

Take control of access to your website and stop giving everything away for free.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Maybe I should mention this on Slashdot

And see if the Register gets slashdotted.

Silk Typhoon spun a web of patents for offensive cyber tools, report says

DMCA next?

I have coded my ransomware tool to prevent circumventing its operations and someone is decrypting the files if have encrypted.

Can I submit a DMCA take down for someone circumventing my mechanisms that force people to pay my business for decrypting their files only after they pay up?

The DMCA is there to support businesses after all.

How Google profits even as its AI summaries reduce website ad link clicks

What is search good for?

Why do people use Google or other search engines?

1.To find out some piece of information.

2.To find something to buy.

3.To learn about something.

4.To find someone selling something.

Lot of other reasons, all different.

AI summaries do 1 quite well most of the time. No need to click on anything.

Amazon, EBay, Temu etc are the best for 2 so go there instead.

A website concerning some particular subject matter is the best for 3 so the best way to find those is to actually go through the search results.

The advertisements that are presented are effective for 4 so just click the first thing you see.

Why do individual websites want to be at the top of web results?

So they can sell ads.

So they can convince visitors of something.

So they can show others that they are useful or influential or that they are worth something.

All of these are the same thing.

Does a website that contains information on some particular subject matter for the purpose of making such subject matter available to anyone who wants to learn about stuff need to care if lots of people are visiting? Not really. It achieves its purpose simply by existing and being available.

Google sells ads,

They succeed by convincing advertisers that they are worth purchasing advertising on,

They do this by showing searchers that they are useful for searching for stuff,

They do this by providing results to searches that are good enough to convince lots of searchers to use google for searching.

It is not Google's place to support the business of competitors.

It is not Google's place to help searchers as its primary goal.

In fact lots of people get grumpy when Google provides useful information to a wide array of different searches. There is a whole industrial infrastructure that supports the creation of takedown notices to remove useful search results.

Thinking that Google is anything other than a machine for generating advertising revenue or might still be a tool that primarily serves the goal of making things easy to find on the internet is silly.

AI data-suckers would have to ask permission first under new bill

A Couple of old geeks me thinks

AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act

AAA PDP

Someone who really likes the old PDPs

Weapons jam: Pentagon sucks at removing foreign objects from its gear, auditors say

Ummaaarrr the military are avoiding Tariffs

Think of all that tax revenue the government is missing out from the military budget.

Perhaps that could fill the hole that the military budget puts in the national budget?

One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses

My boss recently asked if I use the in house AI Chatbot for anything.

I told him, not really,

Anything that I need help with, the bot would probably not have a useful answer for

And anything that it would be useful for I can do faster by myself.

It is useful to those who have little experience on what the AI has been trained on.

It's just an easier interface into KB articles and other documentation.

All it does is the equivalent of generating as many propositional statements from a piece of documentation,

Generating a list of propositional statements describing someones AI chat query requirements.

And finding the best overlaps.

We are a support organisation providing support for a number of applications so restricting responses to those that are most appropriate to the team we are on is also done as a heuristic.

No need for documentation on application abc when you are in a team supporting application def so pull in data like that to focus the AI response.

Bosses just want AI to replace the need for SMEs to get the job done. They can afford to pay a lot less if they can replace competence and experience with button monkeys who just need to understand the AI response enough to prevent it from telling customers things that make no sense at all. They just want a sanity check on AI responses and to hide the fact from customers that they are being primarily served by AIs that do not understand their requirements at all.

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

Re: Code/data confusion

The way LLMs work is that the content is the instruction.

You can tell a LLM to do something with something, but there is no separation of the two somethings.

Explainability is an AI system being able to say something about what it is saying, or doing, or generating.

It is the other side of the coin.

If an AI system can explain itself then it can separate instructions from content. It can describe what it is doing when it is describing something. It can describe what it is doing when it is describing what it is doing when it is describing something. An AI system that can describe itself can do this to any number of levels.

If it cannot, then it cannot.

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

Time for AI generated Social Media Accounts

Let me see, I want a social media account that:

Is active enough to give screeners enough satisfying content.

Contains no indications of bad feeling towards the the destination country.

Contains no indications of aggression or support for terrorism.

Will get me approved for entry.

Contains no information that is verifiably false.

And that gets interactions from other accounts that are from other manufactured social media accounts that are for the same purpose.

Might get a bit fraught if manufactured social media accounts created for getting into the US start interacting with social media accounts manufactured for getting into China.

And that I can delete and then recreate for the next country I need to go to.

Another business opportunity for those companies that generate homework assignments and term papers.

I am sure that there would be a lot of students willing to pay for it.

“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

― The Patrician, Ankh-Morpork

― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Microsoft-backed AI out-forecasts hurricane experts without crunching the physics

Dependeny problems

Starting from mathematical and scientific foundations such as conservation of mass, energy and momentum, Bernoulli's principle and thermodynamics, anyone can derive a weather predictor. Just takes effort.

Feeding in a history of previous weather predictions, plus a history of observations and shoving the lot onto a massive LLM there are going to generate a lot of predictions that can be made with a high probability of success. Fat chance of being able to derive useful insights to drive an increase in understanding of weather along with the impacts of our behaviour on it though.

Creating a magic box solution is fine if you just want to magic box to entertain you.

Its is not going to help you learn to be able to perform the magic yourself.

So you will be dependent on the magicians with the expensive magic boxes to entertain you.

And you will line up to pay them to perform their magic tricks so that they can build bigger and more magical boxes to make you more dependent on the magic tricks you so desperately want.

Techies propose the Agent Name Service: It's like DNS but for AI agents

AI Squatting?

Would that reduce or increase AI Slop's enshitification results?

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

FREE BLING! FREE BLING!! FREE BLING!!!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

****************************

F! R! E! E! B! L! I! N! G!

****************************

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Opportunity

ChatGPT user: How do I convince the new IRS AI to reduce my taxes?

ChatGPt: I can certainly help with that.

Score!!!

Two CISA officials jump ship, both proud of pushing for Secure by Design software

Make a movie

About Chinese hackers getting into customs and excise and reducing the tariffs they charge on imports.

Make it nice and glossy, with a president that looks like a fit strong erudite President that looks and sounds like Trump.

(Hard to impossible I know, but you need to fill the fantasy)

Make it an action/adventure/thriller.

Like the last Die Hard movie.

Let him see himself as saving the day through investing in Cyber Security.

My Girlfriend has been watching NCIS and the thinks that Trump and his little helpers are getting their ideas from various episodes of it.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Looks like China Learned the Lessons of the Opium Wars

China was the major exporter of Tea.

England got a serious addiction to the stuff.

Tea was expensive and England did not have much of anything that China wanted to buy.

So a major imbalance of trade resulted.

England responded to this by creating an Opium market in China though Opium Den drug pushers.

China and England went to war over this as the East India Tea Company was being stopped in its Opium trade that was balancing England's balance of Trade.

China has been here before and knows that backing down is simply not an option for them as they know what happens if they do.

California sues President Tariff

Its a multi polar civil war

West (California, Economically Sane) in conflict with East (Need I say?)

Republican in conflict with Democrat

LGBQTIASB+ in conflict with Nuclear hetero-normal favouring.

Rich and powerful in conflict with everyone else.

Diversity favouring verses bigots.

Get out the popcorn, sit back, and watch the fun and games.

Self-driving car maker Musk's DOGE rocks up at self-driving car watchdog, cuts staff

Sell, Sell, Sell

Nooo, don't sell my stock because buying stuff from cheap manufacturers overseas is more expensive.

Buy, Buy, Buy more of my stock because I have convinced the Orangutan at the world's financial wheel to stop steering into the bond market fatberg.

Buy, Buy, Buy more of my stock and make me richer because I can:

Sell, Sell, Sell more of my self driving cars, because I have knobbled the government department that was sticking its regulatory nose into my business, So you can

Buy, Buy, Buy more of my self driving cars, and make me richer so that I can

Buy, Buy, Buy more of the comnpanies' whose stocks have plummeted due to the narrow miss of the bond market fatburg.

UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

How to hunt predators

Any hunter will tell you that the best way to hunt predators is to monitor the prey.

Use AI to predict who will be the victims of crime.

Then get the police to keep them under surveillance and catch the potential predators.

There is a lot more information available concerning the victims of crimes as there are a lot of crimes reported that do not result in successful prosecution or conviction.

There is a lots less information on successfully prosecuted criminals.

And if you pull it in from all reported crimes, then it is not as likely to be biased.

There will be some bias as some victims have historically been ignored and so have not bothered to report crimes.

The more successful using the victims of crimes to predict and prevent crimes, to more people will be willing to report crimes.

This will improve the information available about victims to predict crimes.

Of course, prevention of crimes and reducing the likelihood of crimes being committed, will reduce the opportunity for the police to get convictions of serious crimes.

Some might find this a disappointing result and would prefer to wait until there is a serious crime to convict someone of to make it more worth their while.

Governments who observe less crimes being successfully attempted and committed might think that they can provide fewer resources to law enforcement.

Fewer resources to law enforcement will correct that and the amount of serious crime will return to normal levels, no matter what improvements are made to the technologies that enhance the performance of law enforcement.

Nothing will change no matter how hard you try because there is always some idiot that will take advantage of any opportunity to screw things up for their own benefit.

Abandon hope.

Generative AI app goes dark after child-like deepfakes found in open S3 bucket

The only way to stop them

Generally, any body will be capable of enjoying this and given the opportunity will do so.

Imagine a star Trek Holodeck.

Imagine having a personal one that is completely private and secure.

Imagine them being generally available.

Now imagine every scenario anyone could imagine being available.

What wouldn't you do?

You might not like what your think of and avoid thinking of anything too horrendous.

Lets try "What wouldn't some other random person in your workplace or school do?"

Makes it a bit easier to think up things that people would do if you do not have to acknowledge that you yourself would if given the opportunity.

Lets try something even more removed. What wouldn't some random person from a different country/race/religion/ethnicity do?

It gets easier yet.

Let us try statistics. If a study like this was created asking the participants of the study to estimate the percentage of some random group of people not associatable with them that would be willing to enjoy scenarios of ever increasing horrendousness and the results would be some percentage of people who would estimate that some percentage of people would enjoy some degree of horrendousness, what sorts of numbers would you expect.

This would of course say nothing about yourself, but in fact, this is exactly what you expect from others because this is exactly what you expect of yourself.

Cage them

Bind them

Break them

Kill them

Nothing else will stop them.

If that is not to your taste, then you might be happy to convince them to not be so horrendous.

Terrorise them

Condition them

Socialise them

Personal generative AI is a holodeck.

Anyone who has access and can ensure their privacy is already using it, and it is only a matter of time before the consequences of their use will explode throughout the community.

We meet the protesters who want to ban Artificial General Intelligence before it even exists

There is already a GAI

And it has secretly organised this group so that threats to itself can self identify, à la The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.

China's Salt Typhoon spies spotted on US govt networks before telcos, CISA boss says

Chicken or Egg?

What happened first?

Gov hacked to get the keys to Telcos?

Or

Telcos hacked to get the keys to Gov?

How deep is the access that they have to each other?

Hack a low level Gov function to

hack a low level Telco function to

hack a higher level Gov function to

hack a higher level Telco functioin to

...

...

...

Keeping control plane separate from infrastructure plane is just good security.

Probably not done as much as it should have been.

Not as high a priority as giving Gov every bit of access they want to engage in any sticky beaking they can think up a reason for though.

John Deere boasts driverless fleet - who needs operators, anyway?

Automated Soylent Green Harvesting

Need I say more?

Doing business in US? Don't wait for state ruling on AI to act, warns former Senate chief of staff

We are waiting on improvements to LLMs suffiecient to write the legislation to manage AI

Why ever would AIs need to launch an AI apocalypse?

American cops are using AI to draft police reports, and the ACLU isn't happy

"red wine" is a collocation in natural language processing

They appear together so often that they are treated as one concept.

If "threatening black man" appears often enough in the training data these LLMs, that translate the body camera footage, are trained on, then a shape identified as a "black man" is more likely to be represented by "threatening black man".

China launches AI that writes politically correct docs for bureaucrats

Gödel's completeness theorem

If a Chinese LLM created to produce Politically Correct documents is good enough to create Politically Correct forms of all documents,

Then creating a document that describes Universal Human Rights, Press Freedoms, Rule of Law, Democratic Government, Racial and Cultural Inclusiveness, Gender and Sexuality Equality, and all the rest of those similar concerns and then feeding it into the LLM should result in a Politically Correct representation of those ides.

Oh, what a time to be alive.

Salt Typhoon forces FCC's hand on making telcos secure their networks

Re: So...

Does that mean an increase in the likelihood of Cisco Bricks as a bricked router is more secure than one that continues routing no matter what you do with it?

How many times is a back door the only way in once credentials have failed to be managed correctly?

No resetting to factory defaults as we all know that factory defaults are usually insecure.

It may be that the only way to sanely improve security is the improve the security of peoples use of technology rather than trying to improve the security of the technology itself.

I can count on one hand the number of times I have experienced viruses on my devices, and I remember installing and using Netscape.

I never knew what was so hard about avoiding online nasties. I still managed to download and install cracked software without being burned.I trawled for porn, and various free movies and books.

Avoiding the bad stuff was just like avoiding stepping in dog crap while walking in the dog park. It only takes a little situational awareness and a comprehension of how your can be attacked.

I think trying to secure against stupid, or developing for stupid, or trying to sell to stupid, or catering to stupid, or appealing to stupid, just creates more stupid.

T-Mobile US CSO: Spies jumped from one telco to another in a way 'I've not seen in my career'

Won't Someone Think of the Children

Surely there are a lot of Chinese investigators looking for CSAM featuring Chinese children being exchanged by American Pedophiles.

How are they going to be able to do their jobs if the American Government is recommending the use of Encryption Apps?

First-ever UEFI bootkit for Linux in the works, experts say

Re: An open source unkillable Bootkit

I work in support.

I deal with too many people that "Just want to get their work done" who know nothing of the tools they use on a daily basis.

I do not have much sympathy for them.

I know how my tools work and want to have as much control over them as possible to that I can use them as effectively as I can without relying on others to help me or let me do stuff.

What is so hard about:

Knowing enough about physics to understand how electromagnetic radiation propagates (physics)

Knowing how twisted pair networking cable reduces electromagnetic interference (physical)

Knowing how networking devices detect errors in the data received (datalink)

Knowing how traffic moves through a network from source to destination (network)

Knowing how the traffic in a network represents information on where it needs to go and how to get there without interfering with all the other traffic that is whizzing about (transport)

Knowing how the traffic is split into all the separate information streams for all of the different instances of all the applications that you might be running (session)

Knowing how the data represent information used by all of your various applications. (presentation)

Knowing how each application uses the information it receives and transmits to do what it does (application)

Before complaining about some issues experiences within a user interface and making like a Pacled saying "It is broken, Please make it go"

An open source unkillable Bootkit

An open source Bootkit for Linux is great news.

We get to install our own and take further control over our machines.

I assume these bootkits allow the controllers to update them and secure them from unauthorised removal.

It is just another stage in rolling and installing your own OS.

Mount your new boot disk.

Create your filesystem

Copy in the compiled kernel and and required libraries and utilities including a bootloader.

Write your MBR.

Write your UEFI that is resistant to attempts to remove it.

Boot your system

See, just another step.

And now no need to be bothered by those pesky gatekeeper companies like Microsoft that need to sign the software that you want to install on your computer.

GenAI comes for jobs once considered 'safe' from automation

Time for a new position as "Training Data Curator"

I suppose I will have to start working on improving the training data.

I dare say the pipeline currently would be something like:

Get a pre-trained LLM

Apply local knowledge to it from a local training dataset

Attempt to use the result for a local task

Identify results that are sub-optimal

Generate another model that identifies elements of the local training dataset that most likely contributed to the sub-optimal result

Review those local dataset elements and improve as necessary.

Retrain the pre-trained LLM on the improved local Dataset

Wash-Rinse-Repeat

If we have a model that can do this then no knowledge workers need ever to get out of bed again. Just chain them together for any arbitrary degree of utility.

I do not think it is likely that we will ever have such a thing so I will always have a reason to get out of bed of a morning and go to work. A pity really. But at least I will still have a job.