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Technology
- www.cnbc.com Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty on all seven criminal fraud counts
A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of all seven criminal counts against him.
- arstechnica.com The Internet is not forever after all: CNET deletes old articles to game Google
Content pruning for SEO threatens web history, and experts say it is ill-advised.
- arstechnica.com Raspberry Pi availability is visibly improving after years of shortages
1 million Pi models a month are being made until supplies return to normal.
I've been shocked by how expensive (though also powerful) these pis have gotten.
- arstechnica.com Dissolving circuit boards in water sounds better than shredding and burning
They're easier to recycle, and chips come right off. Will they take off?
Cool stuff!
- www.theregister.com Meta's Llama 2 is not open source
For Zuck, it's just another marketing phrase. For developers, it's the rules of the road
- www.theverge.com The excellent Arc browser is now available for anyone to download
Arc is the biggest new thing in browsers in a long time — and the waitlist is finally gone.
Interesting new browser that's become pretty popular lately
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Sam Altman’s Worldcoin token to launch Monday
www.semafor.com Sam Altman’s Worldcoin token to launch Monday | SemaforThe coin has the ambitious goal of solving online identity authentication and income inequality.
> The token has been controversial in Silicon Valley for its ambitious and unorthodox approach to trying to solve two vexing problems: Online identity authentication and income inequality.
- daringfireball.net Apple Tries to Explain to U.K. Legislators That You Can’t Add Back Doors to Secure Protocols
Link to: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66256081
- www.theregister.com GPT-4 and ChatGPT study shows LLMs are getting dumber
Behavior of OpenAI models about as consistent as Office 365's uptime
I'm inclined to agree in general. GPT has actually gotten worse over time.
For one it's just way too locked down now. But I also have noticed a decline in overall quality of responses, especially for technical stuff. It used to translate between programming languages quite well, and that's been more broken lately.
I'm wondering if they purged a bunch of copyrighted material from it and that's why it got dumber.
- arstechnica.com Fear, loathing, and excitement as Threads adopts open standard used by Mastodon
Meta promised to make Threads compatible with W3C open standard for social media.
- www.theregister.com Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over
While Zuckerberg's Threads reels in users at record rates
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Training Video for Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center (1973)
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
Just something fun
- arstechnica.com Google’s head of AR software quits, citing “unstable commitment and vision”
Departure follows layoffs, project cancellations, and other chaos.
In other words, he doesn't trust Google not to randomly kill projects.
- www.theregister.com EU gives its blessing to reopen data pipelines to the US
'We already have various legal options in the drawer,' says Max Schrems, lawyer who killed the first two deals
> The EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) is the third attempt between the trading bloc and the US to iron out privacy kinks in the flow of data about their citizens. This latest agreement marks the EU's determination that "the United States ensures an adequate level of protection – comparable to that of the European Union – for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework," the Commission said in a statement. > > Key to today's decision [PDF] was an October executive order signed by US President Joe Biden that the Commission said adds new safeguards that address the problems raised with the second attempt at a transatlantic data agreement, Privacy Shield.
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JRE Pixel Fold teardown shows Google cutting corners all over the place
TL/DR: Google used flimsier parts that are more likely to break over time (aluminum over stainless steel, etc).
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Comedian Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping books
www.theregister.com Comedian, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping booksPlus: Adobe is limiting how staff can use external generative AI tools, and the Pentagon is testing different large language models
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US Spies Are Buying Americans' Private Data. Congress Has a Chance to Stop It
www.wired.com US Spies Are Buying Americans' Private Data. Congress Has a New Chance to Stop ItThe National Defense Authorization Act now includes draft language forbidding government entities from buying Americans' search histories, location data, and more.
- www.wired.com How Threads’ Privacy Policy Compares to Twitter’s (and Its Rivals’)
Want to try out Meta’s new social media app? Here’s more context on what personal data is collected by Threads and similar social media apps.
- arstechnica.com Android phone hits 24GB of RAM, as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro
The Nubia RedMagic 8S Pro+ gaming phone sports a huge spec sheet.
Meanwhile my iPhone 12 Mini is doing great with 4 gigs.
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Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads
www.semafor.com Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads | SemaforThe threat suggests that Threads is the most serious rival yet to Elon Musk’s chaotic social platform.
This has probably been pointed out before, but it's not like Twitter is hard to build, especially for a company like Facebo—I mean, "Meta."
What's hard is content moderation and community building.
- www.theregister.com Microsoft and GitHub try to derail Copilot code lawsuit
And so far, they might succeed: Where's the smoking gun?
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AMD's AI chips could match Nvidia's offerings, software firm [MosaicML] says
www.reuters.com AMD's AI chips could match Nvidia's offerings, software firm saysArtificial intelligence chips from Advanced Micro Devices are about 80% as fast as those from Nvidia Corp , with a future path to matching their performance, according a Friday report by an AI software firm.
This article was mostly fluff but I haven't seen much ml talk.
I do wish nvidia had more competition, though I somewhat doubt AMD will offer it soon. Having competive performance in PyTorch is a good start.
- www.theverge.com Twitter has started blocking unregistered users
It’s not clear if this is a bug or an intentional update.
The Twitter shitshow continues.
- www.wired.com Here Comes Euclid, the Telescope That Will Search for Dark Energy
The European Space Agency’s new orbiting observatory will scan billions of galaxies for clues about the universe’s expansion.
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Proton launches open-source password manager
proton.me Introducing Proton Pass – Protecting your passwords and online identity | ProtonWe’ve launched Proton Pass, a unique password and identity manager that lets you generate and store secure passwords and email aliases.
One of the features seems to be a "hide my email" feature, akin to Apple's hide my email or Fastmail's masked email feature.
Having used both of those, I would say one downside is that occasionally, a site will detect that I used the Apple one, which is strange because it's just an iCloud email address. Perhaps they're looking for a specific pattern.
I haven't yet seen the Fastmail one blocked.
One concern with the Proton one is that it seems like its masked emails are all at passmail.com. I've already found some sites block protonmail, so they'll surely block passmail like they do Mailinator and other sites. That could be a limitation that's less likely to affect Fastmail's service.
- arstechnica.com Torrent of image-based phishing emails are harder to detect and more convincing
The arms race between scammers and defenders continues.
It does seem like sooner or later, if someone is able to build a reliable AI model of my face and voice, they could even phish my own relatives by video call.
Seems like a Philip K. Dick novel—objective reality is something you could only see around you, while the machine would be completely untrustworthy.
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Kagi raises $670K
blog.kagi.com Kagi raises $670K | Kagi BlogKagi ( https://kagi.com ) has successfully raised $670K in a SAFE note investment round, marking our first external fundraise to date.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Instead of getting ads, you just pay for the privilege of using it.
I've been using it for a while and overall I think for most searches it's better than Google. It isn't necessarily that the content is always better (sometimes it isn't) but the signal is far easier to find through the noise.
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New iOS version identifies, decodes laundry symbols on clothes
mastodon.macstories.net Federico Viticci :ticciseal: (@viticci@macstories.net)Attached: 1 image I'm sorry everyone but we need to take back whatever we all said about Apple not doing machine learning right. iOS 17's Photos app can now identify *and* explain laundry symbols in pictures and this is amazing. No more need for apps that do this; just swipe up on a photo.
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On Native Mac Apps
Keaton Brandt writing in response to Elegy for the Native Mac App (which is arguably a eulogy).
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Btreefs generates executable code at runtime to unpack btree nodes
https://evilpiepirate.org/git/bcachefs.git/tree/fs/bcachefs/bkey.c#n727
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LastPass users locked out (again) with infinite 2FA loop
www.bleepingcomputer.com LastPass users furious after being locked out due to MFA resetsLastPass password manager users have been experiencing significant login issues starting early May after being prompted to reset their authenticator apps.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lastpass-users-furious-after-being-locked-out-due-to-mfa-resets/
- www.wired.com Docs Show FBI Pressures Cops to Keep Phone Surveillance Secrets
Newly released documents highlight the bureau's continued secrecy around cell-site simulators—spying tech that everyone already assumes exists.
- nakedsecurity.sophos.com Apple patch fixes zero-day kernel hole reported by Kaspersky – update now!
Apple didn’t use the words “Triangulation Trojan”, but you probably will.
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Password Managers: How to be secure but not wiped out in an emergency
Lately I've been increasingly worried about corrupted payloads of even open source password managers. Password managers are among the world's biggest honeypots. Maybe you trust the coders of the password manager. Maybe it's Open Source. But do you trust all of its upstream dependencies? And all their CI build processes? And each of their developers' security?
That's part of why I won't use an Electron-based password manager like BitWarden: there's no Electron app with a minimal dependency graph. Even Electron itself could easily fall victim if someone important in the development pipeline is compromised... And besides, Electron sucks anyway.
So, one way I can mitigate against the possibility of a malicious payload being delivered on password manager update is to not put all my eggs in one basket. For example, where I can, I authenticate with a Yubikey (if only by TOTP on Yubico Authenticator). Then my password isn't enough. But where do I store the recovery codes? Ugh: in the password manager.
I've been thinking on this for a while, and I haven't really found a perfect solution that provides me a way to store secrets without also being too reliant on one party's software. If I rely heavily on the password manager, that puts too much trust in it. If I rely more on a hardware token, that's too risky in case of loss of theft.
What's a security-aware nerd to do?
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Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on AI and the public good:
> Silicon Valley has produced no small number of moral disappointments. Google retired its “don’t be evil” pledge before firing its star ethicist. Self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk bought Twitter in order to censor political speech, retaliate against journalists, and ease access to the platform for Russian and Chinese propagandists. Facebook lied about how it enabled Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and paid a public relations firm to blame Google and George Soros instead.
Schneier and Sanders mention that China and Europe have publicly funded AI (though China's seems designed to further state goals and is done through cronies), and that the US could publicly fund AI that's accountable to the public while also a starting place for future startups.
I'm not necessarily sold, but it is an interesting proposal.
- 9to5mac.com Spotify will finally catch up to Apple Music with lossless audio quality option, but you'll have to pay extra
Apple Music launched high-quality lossless audio streaming all the way back in May 2021, available to Apple Music subscribers at...