* Posts by Ashentaine

112 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2018

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Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un

Ashentaine

>It's unclear how much of the ill-gotten gains Chapman pocketed, but according to the Justice Department, Chapman's overseas IT workers received more than $17.1 million for their work.

Probably it was barely even five figures total. These type of operations tend to rely on the naive and desperate who are getting a pittance and unaware of just how much they're generating for their overlords. The full details probably won't be disclosed, but I'm willing to bet the laptops were supplied by a middleman already set up and her involvement was to just make sure they remained plugged in and with an internet connection.

Anduril picks Ohio for 5 million square foot autonomous weapon factory

Ashentaine

I expect this will go the same as every other large industry project that gets proposed here in Columbus; they'll see how inadequate the road infrastructure around the city is, realize that winter weather is miserable because the state is basically in a giant valley and can snow paralyze travel, spend a couple years waffling while getting pushback from various self-interest groups seeking to line their own pockets, then eventually just slink off quietly because they managed to squeeze an even more one-sided deal out of another state even more desperate to get any kind of industry to come in.

It's happened before, it'll happen again. Ohio is just a bargaining chip in the great game of corporate greed.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Ashentaine
Mushroom

Re: It happened to the McLaren F1 fuel injection first.

>Even games where the producer -that didn't go bankrupt - promised they would keep working offline, they don't. Ubisoft for example killed off The Crew, a racing game. It took some effort from fans to recover this one (...)

(...)In the case of games, Steam promises to keep a copy of most games on their servers, at the same time that GOG promises to keep the original installers for download, and it is up to you to safeguard a copy and maybe the original media the game ran on, like compact discs. None of this ensures the continued existence of any of them.

Funny you should mention this, because shortly after Ubisoft shut down The Crew they had it removed entirely from Steam and deleted from people's accounts with no prior warning. This obviously caused a furor from not only owners of the game but from people in general, and when their stock began cratering Ubi had to make promises that The Crew 2 and Motorfest would both recieve offline patches when they were EOL'd just to keep more players from abandoning them.

Still, it's a clear cut example that if it's on someone else's server, it's not safe from disappearing without warning.

OpenAI's Sora lets ChatGPT subscribers churn out janky text-generated videos

Ashentaine

Re: 20 second video's...

Youtube Shorts are about 20-30 seconds long and generate a lot of views thanks to their autoplay-when-scrolled nature, and I can imagine all those garbage channels that are already crapping out AI-voice narrated drivel by the bucketload will be loving this to get more traffic their way.

Bitfinex heist gets the Netflix treatment after 'cringey couple' sentenced

Ashentaine

Re: Biggest Heist Ever?

To the average couch dweller that doesn't know or care about crypto (which is likely the vast majority), it would be an unfathomable about of money. Granted, even if Lichtenstein and Morgan still had access to all those coins there's no way they could realistically cash them all out and access their full worth, which makes it less impressive on that alone, but still.

Cryptocurrency policy under Trump: Lots of promises, few concrete plans

Ashentaine
Trollface

Someone should tell Trump that instead of refabbing leaky oil wells or throwing up windmills everywhere to power his cryptoslop, he should just take over all those data barns being used for AI development and get a much quicker turnaround The resulting scrum between the two groups of con artists would be quite the slapfight, and might keep him occupied enough that he can't get around to implementing the more harmful stuff.

Amazon's nuclear datacenter dreams stall as watchdog rejects power deal

Ashentaine
Devil

Re: Demons

I dunno man, I've played enough DOOM to know what happens when scientists start mucking about with demons...

Moscow-adjacent GoldenJackal gang strikes air-gapped systems with custom malware

Ashentaine

Re: “an unknown worm component”

I mean, telling someone "hey I saw so-and-so drop this in the hallway, could you put it on their desk for them" on a late Friday afternoon would work just fine. So-and-so will come in Monday morning or later, probably think they just left it out when their mind was on the time being pub o'clock last week, and there you go.

US Army orders next-gen robot mule to haul a literal ton of gear

Ashentaine

Re: How is this better than a truck ?

Pickup trucks have a high center of gravity, their cargo area is restricted to the back and most don't even offer large truck beds anymore (the majority are 4 feet long, just barely enough to fit a dirt bike in if you leave the tailgate down), and when at full load capacity the suspension is so burdened that their off road capability is severely compromised. Not to mention that you only have to take out one wheel and/or damage the suspension to render a pickup immobile, which any roadside kerb can do quite easily let alone an actual weapon of some sort, where I presume that S-MET could lose two or three and keep moving fine.

US proposes ban on Chinese, Russian connected car tech over security fears

Ashentaine

Re: Do the Chinese actually make...

The American made* ones however, being designed to essentially be living rooms on wheels, are stuffed with touchscreens and phone docks and countless other technotoys that the dealerships order to maximize their overhead, so they're hardly exempt. And thanks to planned obsolescence the software in said vehicles is rubbish since it only has to work as long as the average lease period lasts, so who knows if, how or when it's been compromised.

*and by made I mean assembled in Canada or Mexico, depending on the company

Valencia Ransomware explodes on the scene, claims California city, fashion giant, more as victims

Ashentaine
Pirate

Re: 200MB of Data?

That could imply that they either knew what to look for or had the exact method to get into the important stuff, rather than using the standard "smash and grab" tactics most data thieves employ. And for a new group of cybercrims looking to make a name for themselves, that kind of precision would certainly get them noticed.

I reckon it's either that, or they actually just did a sloppy job and got locked out before pilfering much. Either or, I guess.

Microsoft's Copilot 'Wave 2' is a tsunami of unanswered questions

Ashentaine

Re: Required CoPilot feature

Don't worry, you only have to wait until folks have begrudgingly accepted its presence and managed to find a way or two to make it somewhat useful. That's usually the point at which they abruptly cancel a feature, when it would be at least somewhat inconvenient for it to not be around anymore.

Tech upgrade broke the casino – took slots offline for days

Ashentaine

Re: Konami?

More or less. They mostly exited game development around the early 2010s and make their money off producing gambling hardware now. Pretty much any electronic slot machine you'll encounter in a casino these days was manufactured by Konami with the software installed on it being from someone else, though I reckon many of those are the same program with swapped graphics cause you can only do so much to dress up a format like that.

McDonald's not lovin' its AI drive-thru experiment with IBM

Ashentaine

Ironically the advertising department is the one area that could be wholly replaced by AI with no real negative impact, given that all adverts have basically congealed into the same unmemorable, homogenous blob of white noise in the last 10 or so years.

Elon Musk ends OpenAI lawsuit without explaining why

Ashentaine

Apple announces they're integrating OpenAI into their devices. Elon throws a hissy fit about it, then promptly drops his lawsuit against OpenAI. I think I see where this one's going.

I reckon he figures Apple will be more wiling to pay him to go away, and that such a "victory" will convince those shareholders that he deserves that $50 billion payout.

Oklahoma saddles up bill of rights for crypto wranglers and miners

Ashentaine

From the sound of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the governor has a stake in at least a couple of the wind farms out there. But on the flip side, concentrating all the cryptobros in a state that is notoriously tornado-prone sounds like a fantastic idea.

Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI

Ashentaine

Re: "getting suppliers to use renewable energy"

I'm sure MS is keenly aware that by 2030 the AI/ML bubble will have long since burst and they'll have disposed of anything related to it by then, so this is a convenient way to look like they care without actually having to do anything that would incur a long term cost.

Watchdog tells Dutch govt: 'Do not use Facebook if there is uncertainty about privacy'

Ashentaine

Re: Why use it at all?

>Penny wise and pound foolish in my (not so humple) opinion, but my opinion doesn't count for those people, overlooking the fact that I won't visit their Facebook page while I might visit their website.

Though at the same time, there are just as many people who won't visit a website more than once or twice but will think nothing of joining a Facebook group, as they spend all their free time on it anyway and it's no effort on their part when updates automatically pop up in their main feed.

A proper website will always give a much better experience if made right, but when Facebook handles all the promotion, distribution and notification for you it's going to be more attractive to those who don't have the time or staff to just do it themselves.

US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 fighter jet has been dogfighting with humans

Ashentaine

Re: They made a film about this

The scariest implication of that film being not that the plane could go rogue, but that it may start downloading nu-metal songs off the Internet.

Google squashes AI teams together in push for fresh models

Ashentaine

Putting them all under one jurisdiction, so they can conveniently jettison the whole lot once the venture starts proving too unprofitable. Or whenever Google just gets bored with it and decides to put their attention elsewhere, like they have with countless other projects.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

Ashentaine

Re: Remind me

I dunno, I saw that Father Ted episode where Dougal got trapped on a runaway milk float, and that caused quite a bit of havoc. Granted a disgruntled milkman wired it to explode if it came to a stop, but still you never know these days!

Cyberattack gifts esports pros with cheats, forcing Apex Legends to postpone tournament

Ashentaine

>The messages didn't specify the component of the game that was allegedly exploited. The community has been debating whether it could be in the Apex Legends game client itself or in the game's built-in anti-cheat mechanism (Easy Anti-Cheat).

Given that EAC is rubbish and has been compromised multiple times for no reason other than people wanting to prove it could be done, I'd wager that's a good place to start looking.

Electronic Arts frags hundreds of workers 'to grow fandom'

Ashentaine

Yeah, no.

>Electronic Arts has noticed a rapid shift among video game players, who now apparently prioritize large open-world games, online communities, and live services.

No, that's what the AAA game industry has prioritized because it maximizes arbitrary engagement numbers and revenue. Most people don't want games that are large and directionless (most open world games), encouraging trolls and abuse (most multiplayer only games), have time limited content that players are locked out of if they didn't join on day one (most live service games), and will be completely unplayable when the servers are shut down (see all previous examples). But when that's all you offer because your beancounters tell you that those make the most money, then of course that's what you think everyone is playing.

Lordstown Motors to pay $25M in SEC settlement over misleading investor claims

Ashentaine
Mushroom

Pretty much everyone here in Ohio was skeptical of these guys after they came out of nowhere, bought a shuttered GM factory for a ton of money, then just happened to get a large investment from GM shortly after. We were pretty sure it was actually a shell company that was meant to soak up debt incurred by R&D costs from EV development and keep the main company's books cleaner, but apparently it was just a grift from day one. But then again GM also threw money at Nikola, so I guess it's not the first time they got bamboozled thinking they could push development costs on someone else.

I will admit though, the renders of the truck looked really decent and functional at least. Most vaporware EVs reek of ugly sci-fi impractibility, because that's what attracts people with lots of money and short attention spans.

LockBit leaks expose nearly 200 affiliates and bespoke data-stealing malware

Ashentaine

Re: Warning

I presume LockBit was keeping extensive data about their thralls, I mean affiliates, on the chance that one or more of them might get the notion to go into business for themselves. No honor among thieves, and all that. In that case it doesn't really matter if they try to cover their tracks because the evidence is already well documented.

Not to mention what the federales really want are the top ranking folks in the organization, so rattling the small fry like this may convince some of them to try and strike a deal to save themselves if they have something particularly spicy to share.

Hackers mod a Sony PlayStation Portal to run PSP games

Ashentaine

Re: Back catalogue

They tried a few years ago with the Playstation Classic, and did it so poorly that it ended up being a disaster because they don't apparently didn't understand how emulation even works (using PAL formats on games on NTSC units, using a less capable emulator software, and so on). Plus a lot of the games that really sold the earlier systems were made by studios that don't exist anymore and finding out who holds the rights to them is a slow and expensive process, one Sony probably doesn't care to undertake.

Cops turn LockBit ransomware gang's countdown timers against them

Ashentaine

Re: I suppose they earned their corn, but...

If the LockBit gang happens to be sponsored by the Russian state though, then this will probably put them on the bad side of Putin and the problem will eventually resolve itself (most likely via a tall building and an open window, like so many of Putin's other "problems" lately). Why pay for such unsavory services when you can find ways to have them done for free, and keep your own hands clean as well?

HP CEO pay for 2023 = 270,315 printer cartridges

Ashentaine
Happy

The article headline gave me the mental image of one of those giant quarry dump trucks backing up to Lores' house and burying it under a mountain of used cartridges, which was certainly a good laugh to start the day off with.

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

Ashentaine

This line of thinking makes it feel like we're already approaching the backside of the boom cycle, where the true limitations of the technology are starting to show and those invested heavily in selling it have started pitching more practical sounding but still highly improbable use cases to keep interest high.

Saying that an LLM could be used as an instruction book that can enable non-skilled people to performed highly skilled tasks sounds silly to people who have been watching this closely over the last couple years, but there are just as many who weren't scrutinizing it as much that will hear that and think "Oh, it could do that? Wow that sounds great, let's go ahead and look into that then. Here, have a research budget." And thus, another year or so on the payroll while they try to stretch out that dead avenue as long as they can.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Ashentaine

Re: Ain't Gonna Happen ...

That's the unfortunate truth, convenience will always trump security for the average person. Providing a faster and hands-off experience is always going to be more attractive because people are inherently lazy and would rather have mundane tasks completed quickly rather than ensuring they're done safely (and yes, I'm including myself in that lot as well). Give the average person a choice between using 2FA and manually entering their details and going through a basic security check, or just dumping all their credentials into a one-click solution presented to them and just presuming that it's going to be fine and never end up being compromised and they don't have to worry about it anymore, and they'll always go for the easier option.

It's never a problem, until it is a problem.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Ashentaine
Terminator

Exactly. If there isn't a specific reason for it to be there, and I didn't request for it to be put there, then it shouldn't be there to begin with.

At best it's just wasting storage space going unused, at worst someone who shouldn't be messing with it WILL mess with it and cause a real problem.

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Ashentaine
Facepalm

Re: Curious?

> Although an underemployed, bored polloi might latch on to 'wrecking a waymo' as a 'fun thing' to do after the recreational drug(s) of one's choice.

Most likely the case. Several years ago here we had a couple of smaller companies that were trying to establish car-sharing services in the city with a bunch of Smart Fortwos. Only a couple of months later a bunch of them were found flipped onto their sides and heavily damaged, and eventually the culprits were identified as local college students who were filming themselves doing it and posting the videos onto Dailymotion. They had no hatred towards the company, no real or percieved grudge, it was just a bunch of idiot frat kids who wanted social media clout and decided that the urban version of cow tipping was the way to do it.

You know the rule, never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.

Making sense of Microsoft's 'confusing' Copilot functionality carnival

Ashentaine
Devil

"It's a marathon, not a sprint"

Correction: It's a marathon for the clients who gets locked into long term contracts for this stuff long after its relevance and possible use case has faded away, but it's a drag race for vendors and consultants to sucker people into as many of those contracts as possible before the next new shiny comes along and AI gets chucked off the cliff along with all the other "essential" tech fads of the last couple decades.

Steve Jobs' $4.01 RadioShack check set to fetch small fortune at auction

Ashentaine

Re: 01/100 a US thing?

I've always heard it was a practice from way back when paper checks were still new-ish to the average household, both to fill up the line to prevent someone from altering it and to make sure that an unattentive bank employee didn't overlook the decimal point when adjusting your bank balance. Dunno if that's true, but everyone who was my parent's age always claimed to have that horror story of how a $10.00 check was cashed for $1000 and the bank refused to fix it, so take what you will from that.

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Ashentaine

Re: Dontcha love the US court system?

Though in this case his professional reputation is completely ruined, and even in a non-technical position potential employers are going to be putting him at the back of the hiring line because they're not going to trust anyone who willingly destroys property. That's going to be far more punishing in the long run than a stint in a minimum security jail cell.

Impatient LockBit says it's leaked 50GB of stolen Boeing files after ransom fails to land

Ashentaine

Like trying to find diamonds in a septic tank

These kind of breaches are always quantity over quality. It's not like robbing a house where you can quickly eyeball things to determine what's valuable and what isn't, they're really just gambling that they managed to break into a part of the network containing data sensitive enough that the company wouldn't want to risk it being exposed, most likely something related to financials or suppliers.

The latter would probably be the most valuable to other data thieves since it's not really time-sensitive data and can lead them to other companies who are worth compromising, as I imagine anyone who is or previously was selling parts to Boeing would also be doing business with other big industry names as well.

Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT

Ashentaine

>"For example, we asked the robot 'who is Marc Raibert?'" – the founder, former CEO and now chair of BD. "It responded 'I don't know. Let's go to the IT help desk and ask!'. And then it did so."

I have to admit, I found this amusingly wholesome in a 1970's sci-fi sort of way. Maybe if they programmed these robodogs to act more like Twiki they'd have a better reputation.

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

Ashentaine

Re: He's hopeful

>After demonstrating the most crap headed managerial incompetence in running the company, who is going to be daft enough to trust him or the company with anything other than the vacuous brain farts that is all Twitter ever was?

When it comes to the majority, convenience always trumps security. A large number of people will think nothing of shoving all their personal and sensitive information into a single point of failure if it means they can save two clicks on their next Amazon impulse purchase.

Thankfully though, Elon seems to be hell-bent on making Xwitter as inconvenient to use as absolutely possible so I imagine there won't be that many takers on this little venture.

Ashentaine
Facepalm

Re: It's tax season

>How do the dumbest animals on the planet have the most wealth?

They either luck into a genuinely useful concept and then have just enough sense to sell it on at an inflated value to people who have the wherewithal to do something useful with it, or they manage to find a way to exploit a system they could otherwise never meaningfully participate in and squeeze as much as they can out of it before slithering away.

Unfortunately, both methods then give them the false belief that they're smarter than the rest of humanity because of this, and then they get idolized by others who hope to take the same shortcut to the top which feeds their bulbous egos even more, and that's how we get to situations like this.

Amazon Ads rolls out generative AI for ad image composition

Ashentaine

This will be a boon to all those fly-by-night tat peddlers who change their seller names with every drop shipment of knockoff Shenzhen dumpster goods. Now instead of paying for access to a stock image library and hoping someone has enough Photoshop skill to make it look decent, or posting those images with tons of badly translated text that are an obvious tipoff that it's trash, they can just click a couple buttons and hey presto! Totally Legitimate Product, honest!

So well done to Amazon for more easily facilitating consumer deception in favor of their own profits, I guess.

NASA celebrates 40 years of Discovery, the longest-serving Space Shuttle

Ashentaine

Not to mention all those atmospheric re-entries. That'll do a number on your paint job that no amount of washing and waxing will protect from.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Ashentaine

For perspective...

The current CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello, is a former CEO of EA and came up with such amazing brainwaves in his tenure there as wanting to charge Battlefield 3 players a dollar every time they reloaded their guns in a match.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/its-almost-a-decade-since-ex-ea-ceo-john-riccitiellos-we-ask-you-for-a-dollar-to-reload-remark.375684/

The man is a total clown who is completely out of touch with the industry he works in, and seeing him drive Unity into the ground like this is both amusing and frustrating at the same time.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Ashentaine

I'm almost certain that the primary tenet of H&S instruction is "don't leave until you find a problem, and if you can't find one then invent one".

Ashentaine
Mushroom

Re: Spoiler alert - game solution

As opposed to Sierra adventure games, where you could easily render the whole thing unwinnable by doing or neglecting to do something many hours previous, or even just wandering onto a screen where you weren't supposed to be without a specific item, and having no idea where you made the mistake to avoid it in another playthrough.

Why yes, King's Quest V, I am in fact pointing directly at you.

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

Ashentaine

Pokemon GO brought a public interest in AR, but that was as you mentioned that was largely due to the Pokemon brand; also people have largely forgotten that it was built off the back of Niantic's first AR game Ingress, which has a much smaller userbase but helped to establish the massive database of real world locations that the Pokestops and gyms are found at. Without all that pre-existing data to make it widely accessible from the start, it probably would have been another forgotten niche side game in the Pokemon franchise rather than becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

Personally I feel like the real limiting factor to public acceptance now is that AR is just too cumbersome to access, requiring you to be physically holding your phone/tablet/whatever in front of your face constantly to make it work. Google Glass was probably the closest potential method of unencumbered AR use so far, but as we all know that was so obvious and invasive that it became extremely undesirable. I can't see AR really becoming a fully everyday thing until it can be accessed in a way that's inexpensive, unobtrusive and convenient. If/when the hardware reaches that point, the software will eventually follow.

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

Ashentaine

Re: This one runs

Given that GM owns a majority stake in Nikola, to the point that they may as well own the entire company outright, looks like this is a nice little backdoor way for GM to get into the electric hauler market without actually spending any of their own money to develop it.

Artist formerly known as Kanye reveals Parler trick: Buying the far-right haven

Ashentaine

Ah, time for the latest bout of "Musician rapidly fading into irrelevancy does increasingly erratic things in a desperate attempt to remind the world they exist", I see. I guess buying a mostly dead social media platform to turn into his own personal echo chamber is better than some of the more questionable things others have done in the past, even if it is still a huge waste of resources.

Sony, Honda collaborate on 'premium' electric vehicles that are born in the USA

Ashentaine

'Mobility tech company'

Considering every domestic car company is rushing to rebrand themselves as a 'mobility company', simply because the auto market is over-saturated to the point of being far less profitable than it was 20 years ago and battery manufacturing is now cheap enough that they can horn in on the still small and lucrative medical/assisted mobility market (think scooters, electric wheelchairs, etc), I'm expecting this offering won't be a car per se, so much as a car-shaped electric runabout for the ancient boomers that want to have some vestige of independence but still need to keep up appearances. You likely won't be seeing them on the highways so much as puttering from the retirement condos to the supermarket across the street.

Toyota already started moving into this space last year, GM quickly grabbed their coattails to follow, and now all the others are scrambling to get a foothold while there's still time. Sony has had designs on this for a while too, so taking on a partnership with Honda to get established is no real surprise.

Google kills off Stadia

Ashentaine

Re: Landfill

Instead of throwing it out they could just box it back up, sit on it for a few years and sell it on eBay to a collector of obscure video game tech. There are people still buying recent flops like the OUYA for a decent amount, after all.

And there's still very active tinkering communities for mostly forgotten web appliances from the dot-com boom, so I'm sure there are folks who'll want to dig into these after the ability to phone home has been cut off. Especially since the hardware in them is still at a relatively acceptable level.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Ashentaine

And in the case of some Formula 1 cars from the mid to late '90s the software is also designed to only work on one specific laptop with a bespoke hardwired cable that connects directly to the engine, to ensure that any engineers who departed between seasons didn't swipe a copy to take with them to whatever team they landed at later on.

If anything from the connector on the engine to the cable to the laptop itself stops working, the car is effectively bricked because none of those parts have been made in over 30 years and no spares were ever created.

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