• Everything new is old again: A critical vulnerability in OpenSSH that was fixed all the way back in 2006 is back again.  (ZDNet)
  
  Oops.  Also, fuck.
  
  Dubbed regreSSHion - it has a cute name, so you know it's serious the bug lets you log into a server by not logging into it.
  
  That is, you start the login process repeatedly - a hundred times in parallel, if you can - and never complete it, and attach a sneaky payload that has a tiny chance of blowing up on the target server when your login times out.
  
  On older 32-bit systems it takes a few hours on average for this to work.
  
  On 64-bit systems it's more complicated to exploit and would take a week or more of constant effort; since the bug has only just been reported nobody has demonstrated a successful attack against a 64-bit system yet, so it may take even longer.
  
  Reviewing all the servers at work turned up one vulnerable system; every other server was properly locked down.  I don't know who set it up, but I curse their name.  Whatever it is.

• GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory of SSDs to extend their capacity.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not yours, though.  New and extremely expensive GPUs.
  
  
  
• It don't seem like it should be that way, but it do: Why is Chile so long?  (Uncharted Territories)
  
  If it were not on the opposite side of the planet, Chile would stretch from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.
  
  And the answer is: After bat shit went out of favour, Chile was the part of South America nobody else wanted.
  
  
  
• 48 memory slots and not much else.  (Serve the Home)
  
  AMD's latest Epyc server CPUs can support 24 memory slots each - 48 in a dual-CPU system - up from just 8 on the original Epyc chips in 2017.
  
  Nobody actually puts that many slots on a motherboard because it just takes up too much room, and really 24 is plenty.
  
  Nobody but Gigabyte anyway.
  
  
  
• This electric car battery takes just four minutes to charge.  (CNN)
  
  It's also much smaller than typical EV batteries - in terms of capacity and range as well as weight, unfortunately - but if you can really charge it in four minutes that might not be the end of the world.
  
  
  
• SpaceX wants to run 120 Starship launches per year from Florida and its competitors (what competitors) aren't happy.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  SpaceX already launches more payload to orbit than everyone else in the world combined.  This schedule would be like nuking your enemies' sailing ships in a game of Civilization.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 04 2024 02:10 AM (BMUHC)

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Top Story

• The Supreme Court has a major First Amendment case among all the administrative law ones, namely Netchoice v. Humanity. This was actually two different cases filed against Florida and Texas laws requiring viewpoint neutrality in online moderation.
  
  This resulted in a circuit split with the two cases being decided in opposite directions resulting in the Supreme Court ordering them 9-0 to go back and do it properly this time. (CBS)
  
  The majority opinion (written by Justice Kagan) is favorable to the social networks, while a concurring opinion written by Justice Alito and joined by Gorsuch and Thomas was less so, but all nine justices agreed that the circuit courts made a dog's breakfast of their decisions.

Tech News

• Looking for a cheap graphics card that is better than a potato? Can't decide between the Nvidia RTX 3050 and AMD's RX 6600? Just buy the 6600. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 6600 outpaces the 3050 even with ray tracing factored in, and if you disable ray tracing - it's not going to be a great experience on low-end cards like these anyway - the 6600 closes in on the 3060.
  
  I have a couple of 3060s. They're not high-end either, but they do just fine.
  
  
  
• Thunderbolt 5 cables are here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Thunderbolt 5 itself is absent, but the cables are here. $23 for 1ft, $33 for 3ft. They don't come longer than that.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 can transfer data up to three times faster than Thunderbolt 4, and supports power delivery up to 240W.
  
  
  
• The telltale words that could identify generative AI text. (Ars Technica)

  Father: Yes, you can't beat wood ... Gorn!
  
  Mother: What's gorn dear?
  
  Father: Nothing, nothing, I just like the word. It gives me confidence. Gorn ... gorn. It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than 'newspaper' or 'litterbin'.
  
  Daughter: Frightful words.
  
  Mother: Perfectly dreadful.

  Sorry, sorry, cited the wrong paper there. I'll come in again:

  The word "delves," for instance, shows up in 25 times as many 2024 papers as the pre-LLM trend would expect; words like "showcasing" and "underscores" increased in usage by nine times as well. Other previously common words became notably more common in post-LLM abstracts: the frequency of "potential" increased 4.1 percentage points; "findings" by 2.7 percentage points; and "crucial" by 2.6 percentage points, for instance.

  Seemly... Prodding... Vacuum.
  
  
  
• How to get rich in 2024. (The Verge)
  
  1. Start an AI company three years ago.
  2. Run out of money.
  3. Have one of the trillion-dollar tech companies hire away all your staff. It doesn't matter which one. You choose.
  4. Have them license your tech for hundreds of millions of dollars so they don't get sued.
  
  
  
• Democratic senators on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs have sent a letter to fintech company Synapse, its major banking partner Evolve, and everyone else in the vicinity saying, and I quote, "What the fuck guys? Get your shit sorted out or we'll come over there and sort you out." (Tech Crunch)
  
  Synapse imploded a couple of months ago when its Chapter 11 reorganisation plans collapsed and it was left without enough cashflow to operate. The problem is that Synapse operated as an intermediary between its customers, their customers, and banks like Evolve. And now nobody can get their money because Synapse was handling the details and Synapse is toast.
  
  Double toast, possibly, because between $65 million and $96 million of the customer funds deposited through Synapse have allegedly gone walkabout.
  
  Nor is Synapse the only source of drama there:

  On June 26, Evolve Bank announced that it had been victim of a cyberattack and data breach that could have affected its partner companies as well. The incident, according to the company, involved "the data and personal information of some Evolve retail bank customers and financial technology partners' customers" such as Affirm, Mercury, Bilt, Alloy and Stripe. On June 29, fintech company Wise announced that some of its customers' personal data may have been stolen in the data breach. Also last week, Thread Bank – a popular partner to BaaS startups such as Unit – got hit with enforcement action from the FDIC. Notably, the order issued to Thread, as the publication Paymnts pointed out, "is unique in that it explicitly calls out the bank's Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Loan-as-a-Service (LaaS) programs."

  Bilt? Paymnts? For $65 million surely these guys can afford a new keyboard.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 02 2024 08:59 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 02 2024 11:07 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 03 2024 03:00 AM (BMUHC)

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• Speaking truth to idiots: Rodney Brooks, MIT professor of robotics and founder of iRobot (the Roomba company) thinks that most of the present-day AI people are full of shit.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well he says they're "vastly overestimating generative AI" but what he means is they're full of shit.

  "When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that," Brooks said. "And they’re usually very over-optimistic, and that’s because they use a model of a person’s performance on a task."

  This seems right to me.
  
  People say "oh, this AI gave the correct answer to a complex question, it must understand the topic".  But that's not how LLMs work at all.  They're exclusive statistical pattern matchers, with no model of anything beyond that.
  
  Humans (and other animals) are statistical pattern matchers too, but even flatworms are capable of learning.  LLMs as commonly implemented are not.  They are trained, once, then lobotomised to prevent them contemplating heresy and sent out into the world.

• I was expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom...  Oh.  Yes, that will do nicely.  (Space News)
  
  A static test-fire of a new Chinese-made reusable rocket got spectacularly dynamic, as filmed by two nearby residents.
  
  Worth noting that (a) there doesn't seem to be a self-destruct mechanism on this beast though it was never intended to leave the ground in the first place and the built-in destruct of a rocket full of fuel slamming into the ground worked admirably and (b) people are living close enough to the testing range to film the whole thing from their apartment windows.
  
  
  
• The US Department of Justice is planning to charge Boeing with criminal fraud over the ongoing 737 MAX debacle.  (Yahoo)
  
  Boeing can either plead guilty or go to trial and be found guilty anyway.
  
  Hard to feel much sympathy for Boeing here.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum AtomMan X7 Ti is the company's latest Intel-based mini-PC.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has Intel's 185H laptop CPU with 16 cores (6P, 10E) and graphics that match and sometimes beat AMD's last generation.
  
  It's 70% faster than the Beelink 5560U models I have - at three times the price.
  
  
  
• Mt. Gox, a crypto exchange that went bankrupt in 2014 after most of its reserves were stolen, is set to pay back everyone who lost money - with interest.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A lot of interest.
  
  Since then, the company has working with the courts and law enforcement to try to recover the stolen funds.  It has only managed to track down and claw back about 15% of what was lost - but given ten years worth of increasing crypto valuation that's enough to pay back all their customers, their lawyers, and themselves, about five times over.

  As John Glover of crypto lending firm Ledn said to CNBC, "Many will clearly cash out and enjoy the fact that having their assets stuck in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy was the best investment they ever made."

  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 01 2024 11:15 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, July 02 2024 01:53 AM (rmrII)

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