Thursday, July 25
Daily News Stuff 25 July 2024
Oopsed Edition
Oopsed Edition
Top Story
- KnowBe4, a US company providing security awareness training, hired a North Korean hacker. (Ars Technica)
KnowBe4 operates in 11 countries and is headquartered in Florida. It provides security awareness training, including phishing security tests, to corporate customers. If you occasionally receive a fake phishing email from your employer, you might be working for a company that uses the KnowBe4 service to test its employees' ability to spot scams.
Or it could be a North Korean hacker whose scam was not spotted.
- Meanwhile in security failure news after causing billions of dollars in damage worldwide, CrowdStrike has sent out $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its affected partners. (Tech Crunch)
No, there aren't any digits missing there. Yes, that will just about cover a medium fries from McDonalds.
Tech News
- The launch date of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series has been pushed back by one to two weeks after faulty chips were detected in the initial production run. (AnandTech)
Apparently all chips shipped to retailers have been recalled for testing before any are sold. The low-end 9600X and 9700X will be available by the 8th of August now, and the 9900X and 9950X by the 15th.
Which is a lot better than selling them for a couple of years before admitting that there's a problem.
- JEDEC is preparing for LPDDR6 CAMM2. (AnandTech)
CAMM2 modules have just started showing up in laptops. They are thinner than SODIMMs since they rest flat on the motherboard, and are 128 bits wide so you only need one of them for full bandwidth.
With LPDDR6 the plan is to increase the width to 192 bits, and the maximum speed from 9.2GHz to 14.4GHz - more than twice as fast overall.
That should allow for a significant increase in internal graphics performance for laptop chips, since they are currently limited more by memory bandwidth than anything else. All while retaining memory upgradability.
With two of these you'd get almost the bandwidth of a current high-end card like Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super - and be able to upgrade the memory on your graphics card to 192GB, maybe even 384GB.
Almost enough to run the new Llama 405b.
- Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake-S beats the 14900K by up to 18% when both are constrained to 250W. (Tom's Hardware)
In fact, it's even slightly faster than a 9950X at 160W. Allow the 9950X to use its default maximum power of 230W and it regains the lead by about 7%.
- If you fork a public repo on GitHub, push something to it you shouldn't have, and then delete the entire fork in a panic, don't worry. You're screwed anyway so there's no point in worrying. (Truffle Security)
And vice versa. If someone forks your public repo, and you delete the public repo, everything is still there.
- Someone spent $22,000 trying to buy a Hugo Award, but failed because they are lazy and/or stupid. (The Guardian)
The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with "obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics".
Most depressing point is the analysis that says that even the Best Novel Hugo is not worth $22,000 in sales.
These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were "translations of consecutive numbers".
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In cheerier news OpenAI is expected to lose $5 billion in 2024. (Datacenter Dynamics)
Couldn't happen to a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- More technical details on Zen 5, specifically the mobile chips. (Serve the Home)
Just a note: I previously said that Zen 5 increased the instruction issue rate from 4 instructions per cycle to 8. That's not correct.
Zen 3 and Zen 4 could decode 4 instructions per cycle, and issue 6 operations. (One X86 instruction can be broken up into multiple operations.)
Zen 5 increases both the decode and issue width to 8 per cycle.
- The Verge is big mad that Marc Andressen and Ben Horowitz have escaped the reservation. (The Verge)
How dare venture capitalists focus on venture capitalism and not vote for the destruction of the country like good little robots?
- AI needs high-quality human-generated data for training. That comes from the internet. But the internet is becoming increasingly overrun with AI-generated garbage. How screwed is future AI training? All the screwed. (Tech Crunch)
But the thing is, models gravitate toward the most common output. It won’t give you a controversial snickerdoodle recipe but the most popular, ordinary one. And if you ask an image generator to make a picture of a dog, it won’t give you a rare breed it only saw two pictures of in its training data; you’ll probably get a golden retriever or a Lab.
The paper in Nature is pretty technical, and the supplementary content even more so, but in the Tech Crunch article there is an image that explains everything. In just four steps, the AI goes from a fairly representative idea of dogs to complete garbage.
Now, combine these two things with the fact that the web is being overrun by AI-generated content and that new AI models are likely to be ingesting and training on that content. That means they’re going to see a lot of goldens!
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The Fifth Circuit has issued an en banc ruling holding that the FCC's "Universal Service Fee" is a tax and therefore unconstitutional. (Reason)
They actually used the term misbegotten so you know they're serious.
This one will be going to the Supreme Court for sure.
Disclaimer: And commercial AI isn't permitted to start out with a representative idea of anything.
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Truffle Security: "If I throw away my phone book, other people still have a record of my phone number! Somehow, throwing away my own phone book doesn't destroy every phone book ever printed!"
Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 25 2024 07:48 PM (bg2DR)
2
In a previous life where I was responsible for corporate email, they brought KnowBe4 in for a trial, and were amazed that none of the test users fell for the phishing... because my anti-spam appliances had blocked all the attempts.
I had to add a custom rule to allow phishing tests in to prevent phishing.
-j
I had to add a custom rule to allow phishing tests in to prevent phishing.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, July 25 2024 09:33 PM (oJgNG)
3
Odds on any of us getting a refund for the last 70 years of this "Universal Service Fee"?
Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 25 2024 11:53 PM (LADmw)
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I gotta admit I don't pay much attention to awards in general, but ever since Larry Correia and the Sad Puppies brought attention to the Hugos I stopped even caring about them.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 26 2024 12:06 AM (MItL9)
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My new company uses KnowBe4. I've seen about two messages from them. The first one, I got an email right after it that was obviously spam, if you knew to be a tiny bit suspicious (misspelled "microsft.com" or similar in the from address). I was like "no way this isn't a test", hit the "report" button in Outlook (which the KnowBe4 email went to great lengths to explain how to use), and instantly got a "congratulations, this was a test!" popup.
I feel like that's not the best way to go about it, but whatever.
I feel like that's not the best way to go about it, but whatever.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 26 2024 12:18 AM (MItL9)
6
knowbe4 style of phishing awareness training is a bit useful if your organization hires people from another culture, perhaps particularly third world, or a lot of overconfident idiots.
So, universities, for one. But maybe also places that hire HR, etc., from universities.
If a university does not have a really great IT organization, providing a good quality spam filtering service, whenever their faculty is traveling, a lot of the international grad students get 'I had trouble traveling, send money' scams.
There's a joke about how the answer is that if we can shut down so much of the economy for a winter cold, then there is no real benefit to having academics traveling anyway. We need more segregation between faculty at different universities.
So, universities, for one. But maybe also places that hire HR, etc., from universities.
If a university does not have a really great IT organization, providing a good quality spam filtering service, whenever their faculty is traveling, a lot of the international grad students get 'I had trouble traveling, send money' scams.
There's a joke about how the answer is that if we can shut down so much of the economy for a winter cold, then there is no real benefit to having academics traveling anyway. We need more segregation between faculty at different universities.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, July 26 2024 01:40 AM (rcPLc)
7
My company uses KnowB4, and the test phish emails are hit and miss. Sometimes they're very obvious, sometimes they're quite subtle. One of them was a clever enough fake that about 1/3rd of the company followed the link, though fortunately almost everyone who did stopped when they got presented with a login screen. There was one yesterday that looked like a Crowdstrike follow-up from Microsoft, it was obvious to me, but I'll be curious to see what percentage of our company recognized it.
The trainings, similarly, are hit and miss. Sometimes they've been very good, other times incredibly basic.
But you have to recognize that a lot of their customer companies aren't expecting a provider like KnowB4 to actually save the company from having something bad happen, but are just covering their executive's behinds with a "hey, we did all the trainings, we used the high rated consultants, etc, we did the best we could, don't sue." defense.
The trainings, similarly, are hit and miss. Sometimes they've been very good, other times incredibly basic.
But you have to recognize that a lot of their customer companies aren't expecting a provider like KnowB4 to actually save the company from having something bad happen, but are just covering their executive's behinds with a "hey, we did all the trainings, we used the high rated consultants, etc, we did the best we could, don't sue." defense.
Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, July 26 2024 02:37 AM (rmrII)
8
AI training problems - maybe they can give this a fancy name...like GIGO 
Posted by: Frank at Friday, July 26 2024 05:36 AM (qPjyz)
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