Posts by Dinanziame

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

I'm a bit confused by this amalgamation

“If you are using the same suppliers, such as web hosting companies, as the majority of illegal websites, then you are helping to build the illegal market,” he said. “And, if you are marketing your products through platforms, including social media, that also promote illegal online casinos, then you are helping to build the illegal market.”

So if I use Cloudflare, which is also used by bad guys, then I'm a bad guy too...? And if I have ads on Facebook, and bad guys also have ads on Facebook, then I'm a bad guy too...? Said like this I think it sounds pretty stupid, but I can't find any other meaning to those sentences.

Stop dragging feet on AI nudification ban, UK government told

And why would anybody even bother? It's not like there is a shortage of porn on the internet.

You cannot be that naive. First there is never enough porn, second people create sexualized images of women they personally know, whether for their own gratification, or for harassing said women. Check e.g. this year-old story about South Korea for the problems this causes

Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

If you create sexualized images of children with Photoshop, you are guilty yourself, not Adobe. If xAI allows anonymous people to create sexualized images of children with Grok, xAI is guilty. And if Twitter allows people to post these images, Twitter is guilty.

UK politicians particularly have the habit of going "who will think of the children" as an excuse to ban useful technologies like encryption or VPNs, so it's not surprising they are reacting to this. I will admit that I think xAI bears more responsibility here than a random chat app with encryption — There are a lot of image generators, and the vast majority of them have guardrails in place to prevent this very specific issue. Either xAI have not written any guardrails, or they suck at it, or they deliberately set a very low guardrail. Out of the three, I would advise them to plead incompetence. And Twitter definitely should have barriers in place to prevent the posting of such images as well. It is likely that Twitter deliberately omits safety mechanisms for images generated by Grok.

Iran’s internet goes dark amid mass protests, reports of violent government response

Noooo not the internet

The monsters

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Looking forward to Elon complaining about censorship from European countries.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: Google TV

Why not buy a monitor then? Or even a projector on a white wall. Simpler.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: What?

Please try to understand posts in their context. It will help you in your social life as well.

Re: What?

If I drew a picture of a naked celebrity would that be considered illegal as well?

As far as I understand, pictures of naked people generally become illegal if they look realistic. This is true for famous people like for children, which is why so many Japanese comics representing underage sex are legal (UK excepted), just like South Park episodes showing Trump.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: POP3S

I suspect that from their point of view it is a feature they need to maintain, and that very few people use. Why bother? It's even risky for them to work on something like that. Everybody at Google is measured by how much impact they have. The one who has the least impact in a team gets a "Not Enough Impact" rating, loses their bonus, and is on track for getting fired. And if the feature you work on is used by less than millions of users and has nothing to do with AI, it's likely to be you.

That said, the number of people who both know how to set up and use POP3 correctly and are using Gmail is indeed likely to be tiny.

China wants to ban making yourself into an AI to keep aged relatives company

Reminding people every two hours

"Hey John, just reminding you that I'm an AI and not a hu..."

Shut up Alexa it's 4am and I'm trying to sleep!!

Accused data thief threw MacBook into a river to destroy evidence

Re: For the paranoid

Rather than chemicals, wouldn't a simple fireplace be enough?

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’

They would have to pay me a lot more than that to work with such a goal...

Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan

Good

Just imagine if desktop OSes were configured to only download and install apps from the app store of the OS maker.

Bot invasion increases with Google scraping the way, Cloudflare says

Re: FSCK Google

I've had to block SIX site scrapers so far this month

I take it you mean scrapers that have nothing to do with Google... Unless you found that Google scrapers are not respecting your robots.txt file? To my knowledge they do, but maybe there's something new?

Uncle Sam sues ex-Accenture manager over Army cloud security claims

Re: Scapegoat?

It's Accenture who reported the situation to the government "following an internal review." So either somebody reported her to the top brass and they threw her to the wolves, or the top brass knew all along and eventually decided it was too risky and threw her to the wolves.

ICE-tracking app developer sues Trump admin after Apple spikes the software

And the Swiss gave Trump a a kilogram of gold to make him sign a tariffs deal. I'm not sure they would call him a pal, though...

Google's AI training tactics land it in another EU antitrust fight

Judging from your repetitive posts, you don't seem fit for much yourself

Letting Nvidia sell H200s to China is closing the door after the horse has bolted

In a different but similar segment, I wonder how dependent China is on Microsoft Windows, what replacements they have, and if they worry about it calling home to the NSA.

X shuts down European Commission ad account after €120M fine announcement

Very good news for the EU

They can keep fining X for not respecting EU regulations. X can then choose to pay or to stop serving in the EU — That's a win either way.

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: silly statement old chap

Trump is not going to be there forever. The EU regulators won't go away, however.

Twins who hacked State Dept hired to work for gov again, now charged with deleting databases

Well NOW they're sure not getting another job

As professional death, worthy of some kind of Darwin award

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Peak Microsoft was one month ago

when the stock reached its highest ever valuation. You may not agree, but it's all that matters.

Europol nukes Cryptomixer laundering hub, seizing €25M in Bitcoin

I have no problem with this

As much as I complain about governments requesting backdoors in messaging apps, I don't see a compelling argument for crypto mixers. I don't like it that governments want to track opinions, but I'm entirely fine with them tracking money.

Dutch study finds teen cybercrime is mostly just a phase

Is local cyber criminality relevant?

What percentage of economic loss due to cyber criminality is caused by locals, as opposed to groups operating safely in other countries that tolerate their activity as long as they only affect foreign targets?

Swiss government says give M365, and all SaaS, a miss as it lacks end-to-end encryption

Re: End to end encryption is not enough

According to the article you linked, the toothbrush story was fake.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: An issue...

Because a similar scenario has happened with the US before, and the issue of EU trying to protect the private data of its citizens from US judicial orders is a decade-long soap opera with way more ramifications and importance. The way this story turns out has implications for the larger story. It's important context.

X's location tags remind users of the internet's oldest rule: Trust nothing

Re: Blue Check

Let's be serious, if they had a blog on the official DHS website, nobody would ever read anything they write.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: You weren't there, man

Being able to program in assembly is still important, not so much because you need to use it (though there are still some high performance computing jobs that need it) but because of what it teaches you about how a computer works

Hmmm... Yeah... I feel it's a bit like saying knowing how a car works is important in order to know how to drive. Used to be the case, definitely. It used to be very important to know how a clutch works, and what it means that the oil is too hot, and the like. Even do some repairs yourself. But that's really less often the case now.

Both of these overlook how much of learning and coding is about motivation, reward, comprehension, understanding the future, and most importantly doing all this amid other people.

I'm pretty sure a lot of coders would insist that an important part of coding is doing it away from other people. Now discuss working from home vs returning to the office.

'Largest-ever' cloud DDoS attack pummels Azure with 3.64B packets per second

I wonder how much it cost, and what was the goal

Good it did not work though.

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

To be fair

The jokes about programmers doing nothing but copy pasting from other code they don't understand have been going on for decades

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

Why humanoid?

I don't think I have seen a single reason offered why making a robot in a human shape would be efficient for any particular task. Robotic machines have been used in factories for decades, and they are either bolted to the ground for stability, or have wheels to move around.

In fact, the only reason I can fathom for insisting on a humanoid shape is to exaggerate their implied (but not real) ability to replace a human person.

Trump turnabout sees him re-nominate amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA

Re: Trump isn't a decision maker

Trump is just a figurehead, a face, a puppet.

There seems to be a lot of decisions that come from Trump, but at least in one occasion, a declaration of his (ICE will not target farm or hospitality workers) was quickly overturned by Stephen Miller. I found this rather interesting, because such an event during Trump's first administration would likely have ended with Miller packing his luggage.

I was surprised to learn that he was a blue blooded Democrat, who had never contributed to a Republican before

It's hard for me to express the contempt I have for such an argument.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

Also: all mushrooms are edible at least once

Google parent company spending like a drunken sailor as capex triples over 2 years

Re: Worrying about overshooting demand?

If they are built for AI, they are pretty much useless for other tasks

Admittedly I don't know much about the subject, but I severely doubt that their usefulness is so limited. As an example, bitcoin mining companies certainly have hardware optimized for their own specialized use case, but they are apparently able to rent their rigs for AI workloads when mining is not cost effective.

Re: Worrying about overshooting demand?

There is very little risk that these data centers will eventually not find a use, whether it is for external customers or internal workloads.

AI is making Google and Meta even stronger and richer

So how big will be the hole in these companies pockets when the AI bubble pops?

The likes of Google take very little risk when they invest in data centers. They are eventually going to need those data centers for their normal order of business one way or another; so the worst that can happen is that they slow down construction in a few years.

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Re: Waste of time appealing

I think you are overly pessimistic. For instance, Google has been fined billions multiple times by the EU, and I have seen no reason to believe they haven't paid those fines. Even if they can appeal, the appeals don't run forever.

Shaq's new ride gets jaq'ed in haq attaq

Re: NSO banned from targeting WhatsApp?

This would be way too nice, so I assume this is going to be overturned on appeal. Otherwise, I think Palantir would be a nice and fat target.

Cyber exec with lavish lifestyle charged with selling secrets to Russia

Re: Watches

Recently passed by the casino of Singapore; I thought it pretty interesting that 9 out of 10 stores immediately outside the casino were Swiss watch brands.

High-stakes poker scam used rigged card shufflers, X-ray tables, and special glasses

Re: I was given a sure-fire “tip” once

I was also surprised by the low sum. Especially considered the number of complex ways they seem to have cheated.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

Gemini confidently asserting that NASA astronauts had never been stranded in space – despite two crew members having spent nine months stuck on the International Space Station

I want to nitpick here. Even "proper" news sources have hesitated to claim that the astronauts were stranded, and the astronauts themselves have claimed the opposite:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/31/nasa-astronauts-iss-trump-musk

UK competition cops brand Apple, Google with 'strategic market status' for mobile

Re: Nope.

They can allow them or ban them. Have fun justifying your decision to kill the smartphones of 20 million voters.

The regulators have more choices than that. Even for companies like Google and Apple, multi-billion dollars fines are quite effective.

Re: Call me a cynic, but

That's pessimistic. The EU has made similar decisions regarding the same companies and others within the scope of DMA, then created new rules for those branded as dominant for the purpose of DMA, and the new rules have been to a large extent respected. And there has been a lot of pressure from many governments forcing Apple and Google and others to change their practices, and on some occasions fining them billions of dollars for having misbehaved. As just an example, the EU has managed to force Apple to have USB-C connectors on the iPhone, and in the EU you can also install apps on the iPhone from third-party marketplaces. Regulators are not in fact powerless to change things.

Now admittedly, I'm still waiting for the EU to force Meta to allow users to use Facebook for free without tracking ads, which so far hasn't happened.

Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge

Sounds interesting

I like that Steve Yegge is perhaps mostly known for his ranty blog posts, one of which he once published by mistake to the whole internet instead of the internal company site.

Google porting all internal workloads to Arm, with help from GenAI

"up to" 65 percent

I was very impressed until those two words registered. I do wonder what's the average savings, but it's probably much lower than that

AI does a better job of ripping off the style of famous authors than MFA students do

Bright new future

The most astonishing twist related to AI is that arts and music used to be given as prime examples of elevated work from humans that could not be reproduced by soulless machines, as opposed to mundane tasks like driving a car. As it turns out, they're actually easier to imitate. Not sure what it means for the future of creativity, but it doesn't sound good.

Labor unions sue Trump administration over social media surveillance

Re: Does freedom of speech work both ways?

"Yeah these people are having their visas revoked and are losing their jobs and getting kicked out of the country, but what about this guy who got booted off Twitter?"

Chamber of Commerce sues over Trump's $100K H-1B paywall

The point here is not $100k is too much and we'll get something more reasonable. The point is, he's not allowed to do that, period. By law, the fees are only supposed to cover the cost of the program. It's like he's stealing a billion dollars and you say don't worry in the end he'll only steal ten millions.