• LLMs - large language models, which form the basis for all current commercial "AI" research - are as secure as the telephone network in the 1970s.  (Schneier)
  
  And indeed they are secure in exactly the same way as the telephone network in the 1970s.
  
  Which is to say, it's a house of cards with the very finest locks, which are also made out of cards.

• Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects online platforms from most civil and criminal action if all they do is faithfully present data provided by their users (and take appropriate action when informed that action needs to be taken).
  
  But that law may not provide any protection at all when the data is rewritten using AI.  (MSN)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...
  
  
  
• AMD's beastly Strix Point Halo CPU could be even more of a beast than previously anticipated.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This chip - or rather, module, since it seems to consist of three smaller chiplets - will have 16 full Zen 5 CPU cores (rather than the anticipated Zen 5c, which is fully compatible but smaller and slower) and 40 RDNA3 graphics cores, with a 256-bit bus.
  
  It will also have some number of Zen 5c cores on the graphics part of the module, though we don't yet know how many.
  
  It's basically a PlayStation 5 except with three times the CPU performance.
  
  (AMD also designed the chip for the PlayStation 5.  And the Xbox Series X and S.)
  
  
  
• It's not a bubble!  With AI startups booming, the rest of the Silicon Valley bullshit is back too.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It's a bubble.
  
  
  
• LXD can do anything.
  
  You just have to be prepared to jump through seventeen flaming hoops to get there.
  
  Was having a lot of trouble preserving client IP addresses coming into a containerised proxy.  This is the solution:
  
  1. Forget binding public IPs to your containers; use LXD's proxy devices wheich are more specific and hence more secure.
  
  2. To preserve the client IP the proxy device must be running either in NAT mode or proxy protocol mode.
  
  3. Proxy protocol mode doesn't work at all with Caddy, at least in default settings.  It just turns every request into a 400 error.
  
  4. To configure NAT mode just add nat=true to your proxy commands, e.g.
  
  lxc config device add MY_CONTAINER http-proxy proxy listen=tcp UBLIC_IP:80 connect=tcp:CONTAINER_IP:80 nat=true
  
  5. This will fail.
  
  6. You need to make CONTAINER_IP a static address - by default it's picked up from the hosts file.
  
  7. You can't.
  
  8.  Unless...  You delete and then re-add the container's network device following the instructions here.
  
  9. Now your proxy server will keep the client IP addresses.
  
  10. Yay.  I only spent five hours on that.
  
  
  

Anime Music Video of the Day

Song is Long Gone and Moved On by The Script.  Anime is Usagi Drop a.k.a Bunny Drop, which tells the story of a family gathering when the clan patriarch passes away - only to find he's left them an unexpected gift in the form of his six year old daughter.  

When the ostensible adults in the room are discussing what should be done with her - the mother has disappeared - Daikichi, the 30-something man you can see in the video, says Fuck you guys, she's family, I'll take her in if you're all too useless.

He knows absolutely nothing about raising children, but he finds a way to make it work.

• Slack is taking customer data and using it for AI training.  (Security Week)
  
  "You can opt out", said Slack, which didn't actually bother to tell anyone it was doing this in the first place.  "You just have to call customer support."
  
  "The data is not shared with third parties and never leaves Slack's trust boundary" added a Slack representative, missing the point that Slack's trust boundary is now zero.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Reddit has signed a deal with OpenAI to train ChatGPT on its users' content.  (The Verge)
  
  This deal and a similarly lucrative one with Google put Reddit's financial future on a solid foundation.
  
  Reddit's moral foundation is more like a house of cards in a hurricane.
  
  
  
• How DeviantArt died.  (Slate)
  
  AI and greed.  Greed and AI.  A story as old as time, or 2022, whichever came first.
  
  
  
• Three years after acquiring Biritish open access science publisher Hindawi, American publishing group Wiley is shutting it down and writing it off.  (The Register)
  
  What happened in between was Wiley retracting over eleven thousand scientific papers published in Hindawi journals because they were AI-generated garbage.
  
  
  
• The Mac vs. PC war is back on, says some idiot.  (The Verge)
  
  Macs aren't even an afterthought in the global PC market at this point.  Even Apple doesn't want to sell them.
  
  
  
• CSC ServiceWorks operates a million washers and dryers in hotels and apartment builds that charge residents and guests automatically on use - a nationwide digital laundromat.  So far so good.
  
  Not so good: You can use the machines without paying.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Even less good: CSC has been aware of this for some time.
  
  I mean, bad for CSC.  Great for everyone else.
  
  
  
• Adobe has sent a legal threat to game emulator Delta claiming that the software steals Adobe's logo.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Does anyone remember what Adobe's logo looks like?  Anyone?
  
  
  
• France has banned TikTok in New Caledonia following widespread riots which in turn follow changes to voting laws that will allow non-citizen residents to vote after ten years.  (Politico)
  
  Critics - which is to say TikTok - warned that this set a dangerous precedent.
  
  
  
• Staff leaving OpenAI are subject to a life-long non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement.  (Twitter)
  
  If they don't sign within sixty days, they permanently lose any ability to sell their already-vested stock, which would have been a larger part of their compensation package than their salary.
  
  This sounds like a field day for whichever law firm lands the class action suit.
  
  
  
• When an 8-core 11900K beats a 24-core 14900KS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This despite the 11900K running its DDR4 memory at 3.9GHz and the 14900KS running DDR5 at 9.3GHz.  Sometimes it's the small numbers that matter (latency settings) more than the big ones (bandwidth).
  
  
  
• All my computers are running DDR4.
  
  
  
• Intel's new Falcon Shores processor uses 1500W.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Asus has vowed to "improve clarity" over its blatantly illegal handling of warranty claims.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh.  That's alright then.

Song is Best Day of My Life by the band American Authors.  Anime is Non Non Biyori, which follows the daily lives of the children - all five of them - in a remote Japanese farming community.  The location is fictional but the hints are that it would be somewhere in northwestern Honshu.

Their dilapidated school building though is entirely real.

Posted by: Braenyard at Sunday, May 19 2024 03:03 AM (lCWOD)

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• Western Digital has announced a 6TB 2.5" hard drive.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's their first new model of 2.5" drive since 2017.
  
  
  
• Ampere has announced a 256 core Arm server CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Shipping next year.  Don't ask the price.
  
  
  
• NetBSD has banned AI-generated code.  (NetBSD)
  
  Not because AI-generated code is intrinsically bad, but because of potentially disastrous copyright and patent issues.
  
  
  

Anime Music Video of the Day

No reason, I just like it.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 18 2024 09:25 AM (BMUHC)

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• Google is adding an AI feature to Android that will listen in on your calls and interrupt you.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Specifically it will interrupt you if it thinks you are being scammed.
  
  Which, well, I don't need it since I never answer the phone.
  
  You don't need it.
  
  But there are certainly people who would benefit from this, and there's a slim chance that Google won't screw this up, so let's see what happens.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Making a Postgres query 1000 times faster.  (Mattermost)}
  
  Okay, yes, fine, but the answer was completely obvious.
  
  
  
• Swift sucks at web serving - or does it.  (Wade Tregaskis)
  
  A little more in depth - particularly when the author finds bugs in the benchmarking tool - but if you're going to test thousands of simultaneous network connects you really should check that your computer allows you to make thousands of simultaneous network connections.
  
  
  
• Introducing F-UTF-8.  (GitHub)
  
  F-UTF-8 is 100% UTF-8 compliant while being as annoying as possible.
  
  And while UTF-8 is compatible with ASCII and F-UTF-8 is compatible with UTF-8, F-UTF-8 is as far from compatible with ASCII as it is possible to be.
  
  
  
• Two MIT students stole $25 million from arbitrageurs on Ethereum in the span of twelve seconds in a combination front-running / transaction sequencing attack and then got caught because they didn't pay taxes on it.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Oops.

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 17 2024 07:45 AM (K4jh7)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, May 17 2024 12:22 PM (nk1Z+)

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• Qualcomm is bringing support for its upcoming Snapdragon X CPUs to Linux, and by "is bringing", I mean "has brought".  (Liliputing)
  
  I hope these chips are as good as they seem on paper.  They'll likely be slower than Apple's M4, but you'll be able to buy them and do whatever you want with them, without paying a 1200% markup on RAM upgrades.
  
  You can run Linux on Arm-based Macs too, but Apple's involvement in that project only goes as far as not suing the people working on it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Samsung and Hynix have stopped making DDR3 RAM, focusing instead on the far more profitable HBM3 modules for AI systems.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I didn't know they were still actively producing DDR3 memory.  It's available for sale, but since DDR4 appeared in 2014, I assumed that was just old stock they couldn't shift.
  
  
  
• VMWare's Workstation and Fusion desktop virtualisation packages are now free for personal use.  (The Register)
  
  These are generally pretty good, though I don't know how much effort Broadcom will put into updating them going forward.
  
  
  
• Amazon has a trailer up for season two of its half-billion-dollar flop, The Rings of Power.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Nobody knows why.
  
  
  
• Google's new Gemini Pro in Workspace Labs summarises your email so you can delete it without reading either the email or the summary.  (Ars Technica)
  
  As a paid upgrade it will just lose your email automatically.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 15 2024 11:49 PM (BMUHC)

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• Dell spilled all the beans, leaking details of the next four generations of Intel's laptop CPUs and some future Nvidia GPUs as well.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're pretty boring beans, but Dell spilled them anyway.
  
  
  
• Dell also spilled Qualcomm's beans, including wholesale pricing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The upcoming X Elite Arm-based CPUs will have similar performance to Intel's current laptop chips, use half the power, and even better, cost half as much.
  
  

• What do we want?  Mmff mff!  When do we want it ?  Myow.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  AI protesters don't know what they want, except to protest.
  
  
  
• Apple's 2024 iPad Air is pretty good.  Don't buy it.  (The Verge)
  
  If you need a new iPad, buy the iPad.  It's two years old, but it's cheap (ish) and it does what you need a tablet to do.
  
  If someone else is paying, get the iPad Pro, because why not?
  
  And if you already have a tablet that works, there's no reason to upgrade at all.

Today it's Haachama.  She's a bit confused but she has the right spirit.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 14 2024 11:05 PM (BMUHC)

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• Twitter has won a significant victory as an Australia federal judge has told Australia's e-Safety commission to fuck off.  (Sky News)
  
  Our e-Safety commissioner - a Yankee import and former Twitter censor - wanted to block video of the stabbing attack of a Sydney bishop from viewers worldwide.
  
  Justice Geoffrey Kennett today said, and I quote, Nah.
  
  Or more precisely:

  The application to extend the interlocutory injunction granted on 22 April 2024 (as extended on 24 April 2024) is refused.

  Which is federal judgespeak for Nah.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Australia plans to continue expanding the extraction and exports of natural gas through to at least 2050, by which time everyone will have been dead for 38 years.  (BBC)
  
  This is annoying all the right people.

• Leaked details of Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs indicate that the company is abandoning hyper-threading.  (Forbes)
  
  Hyper-threading allows a single core to work on two tasks at once, or almost at once, interleaving instructions from two different programs on alternate cycles.
  
  This improves overall performance by around 20%, but at the cost of increased complexity and power consumption and the introduction of subtle security issues.
  
  Since Intel's new efficiency cores run at about the same speed as each thread on a hyper-threaded performance core - but use half as much space on the chip to do it - removing hyper-threading at this point makes perfect sense for Intel.
  
  AMD doesn't have efficiency cores as such.  It has its "c" cores, where c probably stands for compact, but they are functionally identical to the full-sized cores and include hyper-threading themselves.
  
  
  
• Workers at the Towson, Maryland Apple Store have voted to authorise a strike.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Right you are then.  Have fun.
  
  
  

Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Today's song is Rhythm by former Prism Project member, pocket-sized singer/songwriter/audio engineer Pina Pengin.  Prism was a small vtuber agency that was taken up by Sony Music and then dropped, hard, a year later.

In the space of a year Sony went from owning four vtuber agencies to just one, Vee.

Thankfully all the talents under Prism were given their model and channels so they could continue their careers as independents.  Which they are doing.  Inimitably.

Don't ask about Luto.  She's Australian.

I mean, so is Sara, but we don't hold it against her.





Disclaimer: So is Nana Asteria.  In fact, Prism had a dangerously high concentration of Aussies, and one Kiwi.

• If you have an Asus anything, better hope it doesn't need to be repaired.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's a video at the end of the post providing background, but among other scams, Asus wanted around $2700 to replace just the power connector on an RTX 4090 - a well-documented problem with these cards - and $200 for a literally microscopic scratch on an Ally Z1 gaming device.
  
  In that case the device was sent in to repair a broken joystick, and not only did Asus not offer to repair the joystick, they threatened to send the device back disassembled if the customer didn't cough up.
  
  This didn't go down too well because the customer in question was a hardware review channel with more than two million subscribers.
  
  
  
• My new laptop is an Asus.

Tech News

• Swiss company Climeworks unveiled its new "Mammoth" plant in Iceland, which...  Is basically a tree, only large, noisy, ugly, and expensive.  (CNN)
  
  So it's a plant that does what a plant does, except worse in every possible way.
  
  
  
• ARM desktop PCs are definitely coming, says ARM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Uh huh.
  
  
  
• The Incredible KIMplement is a KIM-1 emulator...  That runs on a Commodore 64.  (OldVCR)
  
  It's a fully virtualised 6502 running on a 6502.
  
  This is like constructing a replica 1950s washing machine where every component is itself a 1950s washing machine.
  
  If that doesn't make much sense, then yes.
  
  
  
• Gaze upon Dell's leaked Qualcomm X-Elite powered laptops.  (The Verge)
  
  Gaze, you filthy peasants.  Gaze.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Pixy's Law of Headlines: When a headline includes the phrase "what we know so far", the writer knows nothing whatsoever.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying SpaceX, but SpaceX: NASA wants a cheaper Mars sample return proposal.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Boeing presented the most expensive option.
  
  
  

Asus RMA Fail Video of the Day

Never get into an argument with a man who buys shampoo by the barrel.

My single favourite song from Hololive, and they've recorded a lot of songs.  The English branch by itself has something like 400 entries on the playlist.

Amazing that this came out of the mouth of a rat who even speaks Japanese with a thick Australian accent.


Disclaimer: A lot of things can happen in a year.  The king might die.  I might die.  And maybe the rat will learn to sing.

• Earth is facing a Category G4 geomagnetic storm.  (The Verge)
  
  That's just one rating lower than the Carrington Event which was so energetic it knocked out telegraph lines across Europe and North America - except for some that heeded the warning and disconnected power in advance, which were able to keep operating even without any electricity.
  
  What you can expect: Pretty lights in the night sky.  (Axios)
  
  Fiber optics are completely immune to this, satellites are shielded, and it's not strong enough to affect the power grid.
  
  
  

Tech News

• OpenAI - creator of virtual encyclopedia salesman OpenAI - is not planning to launch it's own search engine next week.  (The Verge)
  
  Some positive news for once.
  
  
  
• Just a year after Australian superannuation fund UniSuper migrated all its systems to Google Cloud, Google accidentally deleted them.  (The Guardian)
  
  "Oops", said Google.
  
  The company had everything replicated to two geographically separated datacenters, and was safe from everything up to and including a direct meteorite impact...  So Google just deleted both copies.
  
  Not being complete idiots, they also had a full backup outside of Google and were able to restore from that.
  
  
  
• The beatings will continue whether morale improves or not: The game Ghost of Tushima has been delisted from Steam in 178 countries and dependencies.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's one more than lost access to Helldivers 2 when Sony demanded users sign up for a PlayStation Network account.
  
  The reason is the same this time, but somehow they also made the game unavailable in Japan.
  
  
  
• In a move evidently designed to make Sony feel better about themselves Electronic Arts is planning to put ads in AAA games.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company promises to be "very thoughtful" about shitting up the product you paid for.
  
  
  
• A Dell API used by its business partners was hacked and customer details including names and delivery addresses were leaked for 49 million people.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Ha.  I don't live there anymore.
  
  
  
• Intel's 14900KS.  6.2GHz.  400 watts.  (AnandTech)
  
  And often slower than the Ryzen 7900, which is 40% cheaper and uses 80% less power.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD, the Ryzen 7940HS-powered Minisforum UM790 is on sale at a really good price right now.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Not in Australia, but - no, wait, there it is.  Damn, that is a good price.
  
  Tempting, but I already got three of the Beelink 5560U model because it uses DDR4 RAM and I had 128GB of DDR4 SO-DIMMs looking for a home.  So compared to this model I got more 50% more total performance and twice the memory for less money.
  
  

Vtuber Music Video of the Day

Today it's Ayanda Risu and Aragami Oga's song Harapan PanPanPan, which is a Japanese / Bahasa pun.


Disclaimer: Risu is a squirrel, and her parents are Okayu and Korone, who are a cat and a dog respectively.  That's just how the Hololive family tree works.  Bijou and Kobo are each other's mothers.

Squashed Edition

• Apple has apologised for its ad introducing the new iPad Pro, which involves, uh, crushing a huge array of artistic implements into a single dreary homogenised mess.  (The Verge)
  
  If someone can take your ad and produce a gem just by running it in reverse you might want to reconsider your entire existence.
  
  
  
  One example of the Apple "Crushed" ad reversed.  There are several of these.

• OpenAI is considering allowing people to use ChatGPT to create porn.  (The Guardian)
  
  It will still lie to you and call you racist, but you'll get feelthy pictures out of the deal.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is reportedly also planning to launch an AI search engine next week.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Once generative AI gets involved it's no longer a search engine.  It's a propaganda engine.
  
  
  
• The original social media apps on Android were built by Google.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It was obvious that the Twitter app and the Twitter website were built by different teams right from the start.  The Twitter app was bad.
  
  I didn't know at the time that they were built by different companies.
  
  
  
• BenQ has unveiledn't a 28" 3:2 monitor with "coding mode" that wrecks your colour calibration.  (Notebook Check)
  
  I'm assuming this is a 3840x2560 display - Huawei offers something similar - but the article doesn't say, and neither does the linked press release, or indeed BenQ's website.

Today it's Fujikura Uruka's violin rendition of Pippa the Rippa.

Sounds catchy?  You want to listen to the original?  Well, you can't.  It died.





Disclaimer: It died of moider.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 11:27 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 10 2024 11:32 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 10 2024 11:54 PM (PiXy!)

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