i_am_not_a_robot

@i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"There's a Secret Backdoor in Netgear" Routers, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs - GamersNexus⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  They said something about Netgear claiming to have removed the ability to administer your own device over SSH in the name of security, but that the option could still be turned on by sending some special network request.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Assume You Will Be Hacked: AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe you can issue some sort of note so that people don’t need to carry around bars of gold and scales. That sounds really inconvenient.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Updates to our Privacy Policy | Antrophic⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Was it really or is this all a publicity stunt to make it seem like it’s more capable than it is?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the reason why conventional AI can’t make strides in mathematics. The LLM is a statistical model that generates human text. The training data is the output text divorced from the process that generates it in humans. If you feed an LLM lots of mathematical text, it will confidently produce mathematical texts of its own, but the LLM can’t add two numbers together, and it doesn’t know that it can’t add two numbers together. It can be trained to use a calculator, but humans don’t interrupt their writing to say “And now I’m using my calculator to determine the value of 1 + 1” so the LLM is just going to draw upon its training data to predict that "1 + 1 = " is followed by “2” or maybe “3 (for large values of 1).” Maybe someday it will learn that “9 + 10 = 21.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A security researcher says Microsoft secretly built a backdoor into BitLocker, releases an exploit to prove it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A second backdoor. Windows also uploads your BitLocker keys to Microsoft’s servers by default, just in case somebody needs to get in later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RIP social media. What comes next is messy.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Why RIP? It’s still alive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI layoffs backfire as cutting staff doesn't cut it, firms warned⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This isn’t new. Even before AI, failing companies would use layoffs as a sort of loan on their quarterly numbers. If you lay off your employees, you’re really profitable for as long as you can continue collecting money for the work the employees had already done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA | Google Cloud Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Phishing campaign authors will love this. It normalizes users scanning barcodes they can’t read to go to unknown locations on a device where it’s harder to see the URL and there’s no IT watching for phishing activity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gemini can now create personalized AI images by digging around in Google Photos⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I already switched to Immich. It’s pretty good at finding pictures, it doesn’t require a subscription, and it isn’t Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cannot play games b/c Internet is needlessly required. Starcraft, Age of Empires, Civilization..⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Starcraft is from before ubiquitous home internet. You could use your modem to directly dial your friend without an ISP. There’s no way it requires online activation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple's chips are winners, but Windows fails help it most⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My old phone was constantly recommending that I send YouTube videos with spy query parameters to the e-mail address of a dead relative instead of Untracker. It’s like they designed the system to push users towards doing what they want users to do instead of helping users do what users want to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple's chips are winners, but Windows fails help it most⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have to use a Mac and I can confidently say that the experience of using a Mac has not gotten better every year. It just doesn’t get worse as quickly as Windows. It may be true that Apple Silicon has gotten better every year, but so has AMD.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The White House App’s Propaganda Is The Least Alarming Thing About It⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Give it a few months and your phone will helpfully install it for you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The education system has been killing critical thinking for decades. Why start trying to save it now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Techdirt says 2,456 files as if it’s 2,456 separate things, but it’s actually just the source code for their web frontend and that source code is comprised of 2,456 files. Normally, the source code for the web frontend isn’t a big deal, but apparently the frontend that they’re exposing is for a service that normal people aren’t supposed to be able to see, and the capabilities of the service are made public. There’s still a lot that could be going on behind the scenes and not surfaced through the frontend.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is an important feature for religiously observant Jews. There’s a loophole where you’re not allowed to use appliances or something, but if the appliance just happens to operate itself on a prearranged schedule then apparently that’s okay. In the manual it may be called Shabbat or Sabbath mode. Without a battery backup it adds next to no per-unit hardware cost if the device already has a cooking timer or automatic safety shutoff feature so it’s probably standard on most ovens and microwaves in markets that have Jewish customers. You may also notice this behavior with elevators that automatically travel on a schedule.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sam Altman’s make-or-break year: can the OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s CEO of a large American company. Whether the company succeeds or fails, he’ll be left with more money than most people see in their life. It’s not make-or-break for him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products — as Google's AI growth begins to outpace Copilot products⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Google Search being replaced by Gemini makes it easy for Google to have big AI numbers. Bing never got over its reputation of having bad result quality, and it’s only the default search engine on Windows PCs that don’t have Chrome or Firefox installed. My friend uses Windows and iOS and always sends me links to Gemini results, which normally are only slightly worse than “I’m feeling lucky.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron [GN]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ll still be able to get consoles and cloud stream. The real problem is that the power to create is being taken away from regular people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft finally admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Would Wine be better with Microsoft working on it? The frequency and severity of regressions in Windows has been increasing for years now. Maybe for Wine to be a more accurate representation of Windows 11 it needs more bugs and less functionality. The Windows team is good at that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ‘Great Meme Reset’ Is Coming: From Jack Dorsey to Gen Alpha, everyone seemingly wants to go back to the internet of a decade ago. But is it possible to reverse AI slop and brain rot?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As if older memes were all meaningful. There’s nothing wrong with 6 7 itself. What’s 9 + 10?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The oldest Minecraft server, MinecraftOnline, is being shut down by Microsoft⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What Microsoft is doing with Minecraft should be illegal. After they purchased Minecraft from Mojang, they started changing the rules so instead of being a game you have purchased and you play with your friends how you want to play it, it’s a game that you have a temporary license to use in a way that Microsoft thinks is appropriate for small children, even if you are hosting your own private server like these people are doing. Microsoft doesn’t like the way that these people are playing the game and talking outside the game, so they are taking the game away. You may not like these people because they sound like the kind of people that use “free speech” as an excuse for hate speech, but would it be the same if Microsoft were taking away the game from servers that allowed people to specify their pronouns or use different color combinations associated with LGBTQ representation, which they may soon be pressured to do by the government of the country they are headquartered in?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is impossible. CPV is only going to allow the attacker to know that the device is probably not located next to the VPN server. It can only prove a positive, not a negative.

  The second method you’re describing is only possible for people who control internet infrastructure and are able to infer correlations data going into your VPN server with data going out of your VPN server, which is both easier and more difficult than you’re suggesting. The attacker does not need to most of the internet routers because they only care about the data going into and out of the VPN server (it’s onion routing where the attacker needs to control many routers), but the attacker does need to have a powerful enough device to be inferring (hopefully) encrypted network flows on the public network to the packet sizes of encrypted VPN traffic for all of the traffic that is passing through that VPN server at the same time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The latency to your VPN server is a constant added to the latency between your VPN server and whatever servers you are connected to. As long as the user’s VPN service doesn’t use different VPN servers for different destinations, it is impossible to determine the location of the user behind the VPN based on latency, and in general it is impossible to determine how far a user is from their VPN server because of varying latency introduced by the user’s own network or by bad infrastructure at the local ISP level. You can only know how far they aren’t based on the speed of light across the surface of the earth.

  But, without a VPN, this is a real attack that was proven by a high school student using some quirks of Discord CDNs. Even without using Discord’s CDNs, if somebody wanted to locate web visitors using this technique, they could just rent CDN resources like nearly every big company is doing. Of course, if you have the opportunity to pull this off, you normally have the user’s IP address and don’t care about inferring the location by latency. The reason why it was notable with Discord was because the attacker was not able to obtain the victim’s IP address.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the natural progression of subreddit simulator. Somebody heard about dead internet theory and had to make it a reality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Microsoft bids farewell to Windows 10, millions of users won’t⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, if you use either of these methods to install Windows 11, you will wind up with Windows 11. You will eventually regret it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨itsfoss promotes hyprland on instagram!?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s so user friendly. It tells you exactly what to do to solve the problem. Switch to a tty (if that even works on your system) and log in, type this long command from memory, making sure not to mistake those 0s for Os or the Unicode left single quote for back tick, restart your lockscreen, which of course you know how to do, and then come back. If that doesn’t work, start terminating some processes and praying.

  It says you can return using “ctrl+alt+F[N] where N is the tty number in the top left corner.” I can’t find my F0 key.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework under fire for Omarchy/DHH/Hyprland support?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even good. It’s just scripts for some starter Arch rice, not a serious distro.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can anyone ELI5 the severity of this? Emerging Unity game vulnerability⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some Unity games may be launched with a parameter that causes them to execute arbitrary code. It seems like it only makes sense on Android. Windows and Linux games can normally only be launched by a process with the same or greater privileges than the process being created, but on Android you can elevate privileges by invoking another app. In practical terms, another app can access the save data of your mobile games.

  There was also something about games that register to be launchable directly from a webpage, which would allow web sites to escape the browser sandbox, but it didn’t sound likely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They thought they were making technological breakthroughs. It was an AI-sparked delusion.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nearly $1,000? ChatGPT can’t even give correct instructions for building a computer capable of hosting itself.