Saturday, July 13
Daily News Stuff 13 July 2024
Fast News Day Edition
Fast News Day Edition
Top Story
- That's going to leave a mark: Call and text records for the past six months for almost all AT&T customers have been stolen in the slow-motion train wreck that is the Snowflake breach. (Tech Crunch)
Snowflake was an online data analytics platform with some major customers including Ticketmaster and Santander Bank. Technically I think Snowflake is still operating but I wouldn't expect them to be around for much longer.
While Ticketmaster is international and the number of customers affected far outweighs AT&T, in that breach the hackers got your name, address, last four digits of your credit card, that kind of stuff.
In this hack they got the phone numbers of everyone 110 million people called or texted over a period of six months. And it's all out there, forever.
It does not (according to AT&T) include the contents of the text messages, and calls even if recorded for whatever reason would not be stored in this kind of database. I hope. That would raise it from a mere disaster to a catastrophe.
And if you're not an AT&T customer you might still be affected if your phone company uses the AT&T network behind the scenes.
Tech News
- Meta has dropped the special restrictions it had placed on Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts. (The Verge)
You can enjoy the screaming in the comments there, if you like.
- Emmanuel Goldstein's X faces big EU fines as paid checkmarks are ruled deceptive. (Ars Technica)
Sorry, I mean Elon Musk. It's pure coincidence that every Ars Technica article mentioning SpaceX, Twitter, Tesla, or Starlink has the name ELON MUSK in it as a signal for the zombies to swarm.
Anyway, the headline is a lie. There is no such ruling.
But EU Bookburner General Terry Britain claims that blue checkmarks used to denote trustworthy sources of information which is either a direct lie or a sign of galloping early-onset Alzheimer's.
Musk fired back asserting that the EU offered Twitter an illegal secret deal under which they would hold off on fines if the company would enact secret censorship under their direction.
Terry Britain claimed that the EU doesn't do that, but... It does.
Also interesting to see on that article, Ars Technica's creative director Aurich Lawson getting savaged by his own mob.
- Don't run your Ryzen 9 9950X at 60W. (WCCFTech)
More leaked benchmarks, but there's something interesting here because the same tests were run at power levels of 60W, 90W, 120W, 160W, and 230W, with the last of those being the maximum boost power setting without manual overclocking.
At 60W the CPU ran cool at 41C and managed 4GHz on all cores. Bumping it up to 90W pushed the temperature to 49C but the clock to just over 5GHz. At 160W it reaches 5.55GHz and at 230W 5.6GHz, so there's no real point in going over 160W.
- Emmanuel Gold - sorry. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been grounded after issues with a second stage caused the latest cluster of Starlink satellites to miss their orbital target. (Reuters)
They are trying to boost the satellites into the correct orbit with the on-board ion drives - really - but even if that works it will reduce their service life.
This comes after, if you weren't keeping track, 365 consecutive Falcon 9 launches without issue.
- Looking to buy a Z80 computer before supply of the chip runs out forever? Tindie (who) and Zeal have you covered. (Tindie)
For $180 you get a 10MHz Z80, 256k of flash storage, 512k of RAM, VGA graphics, and four voice sound synthesis.
It's kind of neat if you're into retrocomputing.
- Speaking of retrocomputing the German navy is working on phasing out eight inch floppy disks. (Ars Technica)
I have no idea why they are used because the ships involved were commissioned in the mid-nineties, by which time even 3.5" floppies had been around for a decade, and eight inch models had been dead for years.
- A "red team" from CISA broke into another federal agency and had free rein in its network, undetected, for five months. (The Register)
Wait, the federal government noticed a massive problem in only five months?
- Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately it's fucked. (Ars Technica)
Well, they use the term broken, but I felt it needed a little more oomph.The practice of peer review was developed in a different era, when the arguments and analysis that led to a paper’s conclusion could be succinctly summarized within the paper itself. Want to know how the author arrived at that conclusion? The derivation would be right there. It was relatively easy to judge the "wrongness" of an article because you could follow the document from beginning to end, from start to finish, and have all the information you needed to evaluate it right there at your fingerprints.
Specifically because scientific papers very rarely include the code used to analyse the data. All the assumptions - and the errors - in that code are hidden from reviewers.
That's now largely impossible with the modern scientific enterprise so reliant on computers.
Noting that peer review is f - broken, the author, not a journalist but real life astrophysicist Paul Sutter, moves on to science's second line of defense, replication, where things are no better:There's a complex swirling septic tank of problems that all contribute to the replication crisis, but the first issue is that replication isn't sexy. You don't get to learn new things about the world around us; you just get to confirm whether someone else learned new things about the world around us. As an added ugly bonus, non-results often don't even get published. Novelty is seen as a virtue, and if you run an experiment and it doesn’t provide a positive result, journals are less likely to be interested in your manuscript. Additionally, because replication isn't seen as sexy, when it is done, it isn't read. Replication studies do not get published in high-impact-factor journals, and authors of replication studies do not get as many citations for their work. This means that their h-index is lower, which lowers their chances of getting grants and promotions.
What's the solution? I'm glad you asked:Altogether, the scientific and technical publishing industry rakes in about ten billion dollars a year, often with double-digit profit margins. Of course they don't want this ship to change course. I can't really blame them; they’re just playing by the accepted rules of their own game.
Yes, there isn't one.
- Despite selling literally dozens of units, several of which were not returned, developers are ignoring Apple's wildly expensive and basically useless Vision Pro AR headset. (Ars Technica)
Not even porting existing iOS apps.
- OpenAI is reportedly working on an AI that can reason, instead of just regurgitating pre-digested Reddit posts and telling you that backpacks are as safe as parachutes when jumping out of a plane. (Ars Technica)
Well, first up, Terry Winograd, SHRDLU, 1968.Person: Had you touched any pyramid before you put the green one on the little cube?
Second, that parachutes and backpacks thing is really an answer given by Google's AI Overview. (Fast Company)
Computer: YES, THE GREEN ONE.
Person: When did you pick it up?
Computer: WHILE I WAS STACKING UP THE RED CUBE, A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
Person: Why?
Computer: TO GET RID OF IT.
Person: Why did you do that?
Computer: TO CLEAN OFF THE RED CUBE.
Person: Why did you clear off that cube?
Computer: TO PUT IT ON A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
Person: Why did you do that?
Computer: TO STACK UP THE RED CUBE , A LARGE RED BLOCK AND A LARGE GREEN CUBE.
Person: Why did you do that?
Computer: BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME TO.
And it's based on a real result from a real scientific study. (NPR)
But it's a study of whether people actually read scientific papers.
The plane was parked on the ground.
Disclaimer: The author has not made this disclaimer available in your location.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 13 2024 08:11 PM (bg2DR)
2
Also, why are there ramen noodles all over my screen, and they're also hanging out of my nose?!
Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 13 2024 08:13 PM (bg2DR)
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Why do I get the feeling that OpenAI's just going to slap a sticker onto their existing product that reads "now with 10X more reasoning!". After all, 10 x 0 is still 0.
As for the AT&T breach, I'm surprised every carrier isn't constantly leaking their Call Detail Records; they get passed around to all sorts of partners for accounting purposes, whose employees usually have a bunch of account credentials taped to their workstations. (every vendor uses a different file format for this crap, which makes it fun for the poor sucker who handles billing for a dozen VoIP providers)
-j
As for the AT&T breach, I'm surprised every carrier isn't constantly leaking their Call Detail Records; they get passed around to all sorts of partners for accounting purposes, whose employees usually have a bunch of account credentials taped to their workstations. (every vendor uses a different file format for this crap, which makes it fun for the poor sucker who handles billing for a dozen VoIP providers)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 13 2024 09:52 PM (oJgNG)
4
Oh, trust me, I know telco billing systems. Possibly the worst thing I ran into in that life was a switch vendor who used their own in-house floating point format. Had to unpack and repack the bits before anything could read it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 13 2024 11:06 PM (PiXy!)
5
There is a remedy to the garbage quality of scientific literature.
Public distrust for experts, authority, and 'scientists'. Tom Nichols can take his 'Death of Expertise', and frustrate himself with it. Death of Expertise, by direct inspection of the blurb on Amazon, is incorrect. Reading the blurb leads directly to a more correct theory of that stuff. Universities are actually /not/ free to credential people as experts, regardless of whether that expertise is useful for anyone. The disproof by contradiction involves testing whether a university has infinite pwoer to declare value of a credential.
Expertise is in other people finding one useful.
Many modern universities have issued some garbage PhDs, and may owe some apologies to that one Nazi guy whose PhD the German university revoked once it was politically expedient to do so.
The university business is partly on the basis of that public trust. That the universities are not correcting course, and are pretending that they can paper over very serious problems, is perhaps testimony to the senior administrators being pretty garbage as scholars and as intellectuals.
Now, in fairness many of them are foreign, and also a good chunk are from out of state, and may not understand how twitchy people can get about the fraud in their actions of pretending that CRT is not effectively a white supremacist terrorist ideology. Academic endorsement of effectively white supremacist terrorism is not a credit to academia, nor does it support academic whining about white supremacist terrorism carried out 100 years ago, and involving people who are mostly dead.
Many of the people who did immoral or illegal things in 2020 are still alive. I don't want to hear about 'multi-generational poverty' from the people that pretend that the CRT scholars speak on behalf of blacks, and can sign off on government sponsored political terrorism that targets blacks. I especially do not want to hear about that from people who directly made things worse.
Then there is the election related respiratory syndrome, and the winter cold. The people who gave us 'essential workers' were either delusional academics who are effectively hostile to poor people having food, or panicky idjits who never developed an adult level of self control.
The scholars allowed to practice inside academia have slowly been doing worse and worse quality of actual work, and have undermined the possibility of future public value from academia.
And they are still freaking overconfident when it comes to shocking the public with clear evidence of how terrible they have been for a long time, where those in the know are concerned.
Public distrust for experts, authority, and 'scientists'. Tom Nichols can take his 'Death of Expertise', and frustrate himself with it. Death of Expertise, by direct inspection of the blurb on Amazon, is incorrect. Reading the blurb leads directly to a more correct theory of that stuff. Universities are actually /not/ free to credential people as experts, regardless of whether that expertise is useful for anyone. The disproof by contradiction involves testing whether a university has infinite pwoer to declare value of a credential.
Expertise is in other people finding one useful.
Many modern universities have issued some garbage PhDs, and may owe some apologies to that one Nazi guy whose PhD the German university revoked once it was politically expedient to do so.
The university business is partly on the basis of that public trust. That the universities are not correcting course, and are pretending that they can paper over very serious problems, is perhaps testimony to the senior administrators being pretty garbage as scholars and as intellectuals.
Now, in fairness many of them are foreign, and also a good chunk are from out of state, and may not understand how twitchy people can get about the fraud in their actions of pretending that CRT is not effectively a white supremacist terrorist ideology. Academic endorsement of effectively white supremacist terrorism is not a credit to academia, nor does it support academic whining about white supremacist terrorism carried out 100 years ago, and involving people who are mostly dead.
Many of the people who did immoral or illegal things in 2020 are still alive. I don't want to hear about 'multi-generational poverty' from the people that pretend that the CRT scholars speak on behalf of blacks, and can sign off on government sponsored political terrorism that targets blacks. I especially do not want to hear about that from people who directly made things worse.
Then there is the election related respiratory syndrome, and the winter cold. The people who gave us 'essential workers' were either delusional academics who are effectively hostile to poor people having food, or panicky idjits who never developed an adult level of self control.
The scholars allowed to practice inside academia have slowly been doing worse and worse quality of actual work, and have undermined the possibility of future public value from academia.
And they are still freaking overconfident when it comes to shocking the public with clear evidence of how terrible they have been for a long time, where those in the know are concerned.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 14 2024 01:44 AM (rcPLc)
6
Basically, we are not doing science any more, except mostly by accident or perhaps in a few fields.
Current organizations are seemingly selecting for too many bad actors.
At some point, we will rebuild some organizations or institutions that come back to achieving semi-functional. (Universities and other places were never perfect, and always had a lot of mediocre consensus types. )
Until then, science will be a few good people howling into the wilderness.
University industry is ripe for massive disruption, may already be experiencing the start of disruption, and we will not collective start sorting through the garbage of literature for potentially valid stuff before after the rubble is lofted and then stops bouncing.
Current organizations are seemingly selecting for too many bad actors.
At some point, we will rebuild some organizations or institutions that come back to achieving semi-functional. (Universities and other places were never perfect, and always had a lot of mediocre consensus types. )
Until then, science will be a few good people howling into the wilderness.
University industry is ripe for massive disruption, may already be experiencing the start of disruption, and we will not collective start sorting through the garbage of literature for potentially valid stuff before after the rubble is lofted and then stops bouncing.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, July 14 2024 01:54 AM (rcPLc)
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 14 2024 07:48 AM (MItL9)
8
I mean, the new paid checkmarks verify that someone has access to a credit card with that name on it. It's at least more honest.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 14 2024 07:51 AM (MItL9)
9
I kinda wanna go over to Arse and ask how they feel about Meta/Insta removing Trump's restrictions now that he's been shot at. I bet they'd say they're sorry he didn't get killed.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 14 2024 11:34 AM (MItL9)
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