tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Hundreds of public figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin’s Richard Branson urge AI ‘superintelligence’ ban 1 hour ago:
Well, yes, but after that.
- Comment on Hundreds of public figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin’s Richard Branson urge AI ‘superintelligence’ ban 2 hours ago:
looks dubious
Altman and a few others, maybe. But this is a broad collection of people. Like, the comouter science professors there aren’t running AI companies. And this isn’t saying that it’s imminent.
- Comment on Hundreds of public figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin’s Richard Branson urge AI ‘superintelligence’ ban 2 hours ago:
That’s one issue.
Another is that even if you want to do so, it’s a staggeringly difficult enforcement problem.
What they’re calling for is basically an arms control treaty.
For those to work, you have to have monitoring and enforcement.
We have had serious problems even with major arms control treaties in the past.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Chemical_Weapons_Convention
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), officially the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, is an arms control treaty administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague, Netherlands. The treaty entered into force on 29 April 1997. It prohibits the use of chemical weapons, and the large-scale development, production, stockpiling, or transfer of chemical weapons or their precursors, except for very limited purposes (research, medical, pharmaceutical or protective). The main obligation of member states under the convention is to effect this prohibition, as well as the destruction of all current chemical weapons. All destruction activities must take place under OPCW verification.
And then Russia started Novichoking people with the chemical weapons that they theoretically didn’t have.
Or the Washington Naval Treaty:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty
That had plenty of violations.
And it’s very, very difficult to hide construction of warships, which can only be done by large specialized organizations in specific, geographically-constrained, highly-visible locations.
But to develop superintelligence, probably all you need is some computer science researchers and some fairly ordinary computers. How can you monitor those?
You can maybe tamp down on the deployment in datacenters to some degree, especially specialized ones designed to handle high-power parallel compute. But the long pole here is the R&D time. Develop the software, and it’s just a matter of deploying it scale, and that can be done very quickly, with little time to respond.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
- Comment on White House joins Bluesky and immediately trolls Trump opponents 4 days ago:
The only interesting people on there are trans furries
Somewhere, some trans non-furries and furry non-trans users looked miffed.
- Comment on GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders 5 days ago:
I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.
- Comment on GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders 5 days ago:
Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.
en.wikipedia.org/…/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo…
The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.
That’s a quarter-century ago now.
It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.
Almost as long.
I mean, I don’t think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to scratch the itch.
- Comment on GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders 5 days ago:
While that’s true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.
There are ways to archive Steam games, but it’s not the “normal mode of operation”. If Steam dies, you probablt don’t have your games. If Steam’s terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.
Some other wrinkles:
-
Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it’s clearly marked.
-
I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn’t doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited.
-
- Comment on N++ — 10th anniversary update 5 days ago:
N++ is a platform video game developed and published by Metanet Software. It is the third and final installment of the N franchise, which started with the Adobe Flash game N. It is the sequel to N+. The game was initially released for the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2015, in North America, and July 29, 2015, in Europe, and was later released for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems on August 25, 2016, and December 26, 2016, respectively. The Xbox One version was released on October 4, 2017.[1] The Linux version of the game was released on May 31, 2018.
N+ is the console and handheld version of the Adobe Flash game N, which was developed by Metanet Software. N+ for Xbox Live Arcade was developed by Slick Entertainment and published by Metanet Software. Unique versions of the game were also ported separately to the PlayStation Portable[1] and Nintendo DS[2] by developers SilverBirch Studios and Atari.[3] Metanet Software licensed their N IP for this deal, provided single player level design for both versions, and consulted on the project.
The Xbox Live Arcade version was released on February 20, 2008, and three expansion packs were released later that year on July 23, September 10, and October 15.[4] The handheld versions were released on August 26, 2008.[5][6] N+ was followed by N++ in 2015.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_(video_game)
N (stylized as n) is a freeware video game developed by Metanet Software. It was inspired in part by Lode Runner, Soldat, and other side-scrolling games. It was the first of the N series, followed by N+ and N++. N won the audience choice award in the downloadables category of the 2005 Independent Games Festival.[1]
Release: WW: March 1, 2004
- Comment on ‘Godfather of Silicon Valley’ Quits Board Over Benioff’s (Salesforce CEO) Backing of Trump 5 days ago:
I mean, I’m serious. Like, it’s a big CRM platform that people use and I understand has an ecosystem of software that integrates with it, is well-established.
It’s like, someone may not like Photoshop. Frankly, I avoided it in favor of Gimp since the early 2000s, and I really don’t like the fact that it’s SaaS now.
But you can’t just say “Photoshop sucks, artists use charcoal sticks now”. You have to have that alternative, like Gimp. And even then, people are going to have some loss in experience and loss in integrated software (like plugins and stuff) in a switch.
I don’t do CRM. But my understanding is that it does matter and that that ecosystem matters, and “just throw one’s hands up in the air and tell people don’t use a CRM platform” is probably not going to fly.
kagis
I thought that SugarCRM was open-source, but it looks like I’m a decade out-of-date — it started as an open-source project, but apparently the company founded around it took it proprietary. And I bet that it doesn’t compare in size in terms of people with experience with it or software that integrates with it.
kagis
www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-ecosystem/
The Salesforce ecosystem is an absolute behemoth. Salesforce employs around 70,000 people and is the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. They also have a market cap of a quarter of a trillion – pretty impressive, right?
However, when you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, there are 15M people involved in Salesforce’s community who work as end users, in consultancies, and for app companies. The Salesforce economy is also predicted to generate revenues of six times that of Salesforce by 2026.
Like, you’re not gonna move that overnight.
It could be that Salesforce sucks on a technical level as a platform. I don’t know, haven’t used it. But what I’m saying is that I suspect that for a lot of users, they aren’t in a great position to plop in an existing replacement overnight.
- Comment on ‘Godfather of Silicon Valley’ Quits Board Over Benioff’s (Salesforce CEO) Backing of Trump 5 days ago:
Is there a comparable CRM alternative?
- Comment on Cardiff set to impose SUV parking premium after council approval 5 days ago:
You know, that does make me think thst laybe with BEVs coming out, they should maybe use a stronger road material.
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 6 days ago:
I have, in the past, kind of wished that settings and characters could not be copyrighted. I realize that there’s work that goes into creating each, but I think that we could still live in a world where those weren’t protected and interesting stuff still gets created. If that were to happen, then I agree, it’d be necessary to make it very clear who created what, since the setting and characters alone wouldn’t uniquely identify the source.
Like, there are things like Greek mythology or the Robin Hood collection of stories, very important works of art from our past, that were created by many different unaffiliated people. They just couldn’t be created today with our modern stories, because the settings and characters would be copyrighted and most rightsholders don’t just offer a blanket grant of rights to use them.
That’s actually one unusual and notable thing H.P. Lovecraft did — if you’ve ever seen stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, that’s him. He encouraged anyone who wanted to do so to create stuff using his universe. One reason why we have that kind of collection of Lovecraftian stuff.
But you can’t do that with, say, Star Wars or a lot of other beloved settings.
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 6 days ago:
Nintendo shouldn’t be able to patent game mechanics
Those are patents, not copyrights. There are a bunch of different forms of intellectual property. Of the top of my head:
-
Copyright
-
Trademark
-
Patent
-
Moral (not very substantial in the US, but more-meaningful in France)
-
- Comment on Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network 6 days ago:
There is a class of products that consist of a hardware box that you ram your traffic moving between different business locations through that then tries to accelerate it. F5 is one manufacturer of them. One technique these use is to have private key material such that they can pretend to be the server at the other end of a TLS connection — that’s most of the “encrypted” traffic that you see on the Internet. If you go to an “https” URL in your Web browser, you’re talking TLS, using en encrypted connection. They can then decode the traffic and use various caching and other modification techniques on the decoded information to reduce the amount of traffic moving across the link and to reduce effective latency, avoid transferring duplicate information, etc. Once upon a time, when there was a lot less encrypted traffic in the world, you could just do this by working on cleartext data, but over time, network traffic have increasingly become encrypted. Many such techniques become impossible with encrypted traffic.
The problem is that to let this box do impersonate such a server so that it can get at the unencrypted traffic, they have to have a private key that permits them to impersonate the real server. Having access to this key is also interesting to an attacker, because it would similarly let them impersonate the real server, which would let them view or modify network traffic in transit. If one could push new, malicious software up to control these boxes, one could steal these keys, which would be of interest to attackers in attacking other systems.
It sounds, to my brief skim, like attackers got control of the portion of F5’s internal network that is involved with building and distributing software updates to these boxes.
- Comment on Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network 6 days ago:
It definitely is bad, but it may not be as bad as I thought above.
It sounds like they might actually just be relying on certificates pre-issued by a (secured) CA for specific hosts to MITM Web traffic to specific hosts, and they might not be able to MITM all TLS traffic, across-the-board. Not sure whether that’s the case, and I’m not gonna come up to speed on their whole system for this comment, but if that’s the case, then you’d still be able to attack probably a lot of traffic going to theoretically-secured internal servers if you manage to get into a customer network and able to see traffic (which compromising the software updates would also potentially permit for, unfortunately) but hopefully you wouldn’t be able to hit, say, their VPN traffic.
- Comment on Thousands of customers imperiled after nation-state ransacks F5’s network 6 days ago:
F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years. This could be really bad. F5 produces WAN accelerators, and one feature that those can have is to have X.509 self-signed certificates used by corporate internal CAs stored on them — things that normally, you’d keep pretty damned secure — to basically “legitimately” perform MITM attacks on traffic internal to corporate networks as part of their normal mode of operation.
Like, an attacker could compromise F5 Networks and get a malicious software update pushed out to exfiltrate a critical private keys from companies, that could be bad. You could probably potentially MITM their corporate VPNs. If you get inside a customer’s network, it’d probably let you get by a lot of their internal security.
kagis
Yeah, it sounds like that is exactly what they hit. The “BIG-IP” stuff apparently does this:
During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations
techdocs.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/…/10.html
MyF5 Home > Knowledge Centers > BIG-IP LTM > BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager: Implementations > Managing Client and Server HTTPS Traffic using a Self-signed Certificate
One of the ways to configure the BIG-IP system to manage SSL traffic is to enable both client-side and server-side SSL termination:
- Client-side SSL termination makes it possible for the system to decrypt client requests before sending them on to a server, and encrypt server responses before sending them back to the client. This ensures that client-side HTTPS traffic is encrypted. In this case, you need to install only one SSL key/certificate pair on the BIG-IP system.
- Server-side SSL termination makes it possible for the system to decrypt and then re-encrypt client requests before sending them on to a server. Server-side SSL termination also decrypts server responses and then re-encrypts them before sending them back to the client. This ensures security for both client- and server-side HTTPS traffic. In this case, you need to install two SSL key/certificate pairs on the BIG-IP system. The system uses the first certificate/key pair to authenticate the client, and uses the second pair to request authentication from the server.
This implementation uses a self-signed certificate to authenticate HTTPS traffic.
Well. That…definitely sucks.
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 6 days ago:
For example, its not only illegal for someone to make and sell known illegal drugs, but its additionally illegal to make or sell anything that is not the specifically illegal drug but is analogous to it in terms of effect (and especially facets of chemical structure)
Hmm. I’m not familiar with that as a legal doctrine.
kagis
At least in the US — and this may not be the case everywhere — it sounds like there’s a law that produces this, rather than a doctrine. So I don’t think that there’s a general legal doctrine that would automatically apply here.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
The Federal Analogue Act, 21 U.S.C. § 813, is a section of the United States Controlled Substances Act passed in 1986 which allows any chemical “substantially similar” to a controlled substance listed in Schedule I or II to be treated as if it were listed in Schedule I, but only if intended for human consumption. These similar substances are often called designer drugs. The law’s broad reach has been used to successfully prosecute possession of chemicals openly sold as dietary supplements and naturally contained in foods (e.g., the possession of phenethylamine, a compound found in chocolate, has been successfully prosecuted based on its “substantial similarity” to the controlled substance methamphetamine).[1] The law’s constitutionality has been questioned by now Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch[2] on the basis of Vagueness doctrine.
But I guess that it might be possible to pass a similar such law for copyright, though.
- Comment on OpenAI wants to stop ChatGPT from validating users’ political views 1 week ago:
You don’t have to do so, but given that people seem to like echo chambers, if you don’t, I bet that a competitor will.
- Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World 1 week ago:
So, the “don’t use copyrighted data in a training corpus” crowd probably isn’t going to win the IP argument. And I would be quite surprised if IP law changes to accommodate them.
However, the “don’t generate infringing material” is a whole different story. IP holders are on pretty solid ground there. One thing that I am very certain that IP law is not going to permit is just passing copyrighted data into a model and then generating material that would otherwise be infringing. I understand that anime has something of a tradition of sometimes letting fan-created material slide, but if generative AI massively reduces the bar to creating content, I suspect that that is likely to change.
Right now, you have generative AI companies saying — maybe legally plausibly — that they aren’t the liable ones if a user generates infringing material with their model.
And while you can maybe go after someone who is outright generating and selling material that is infringing, something doesn’t have to be commercially sold to be infringing. Like, if LucasArts wants to block for-fun fan art of Luke and Leia and Han, they can do that.
One issue is attribution. Like, generative AI companies are not lying when they say that there isn’t a great way to just “reverse” what training corpus data contributed more to an output.
However, I am also very confident that it is very possible to do better than they do today. From a purely black-box standpoint, one possibility would be, for example, to use TinEye-style fuzzy hashing of images and then try to reverse an image, probably with a fuzzier hash than TinEye uses, to warn a user that they might be generating an image that would be derivative. That won’t solve all cases, especially if you do 3d vision and generative AI producing models (though then you could also maybe do computer vision and a TinEye-equivalent for 3D models).
Another complicating factor is that copyright only restricts distribution of derivative works. I can make my own, personal art of Leia all I want. What I can’t do is go distribute it. I think — though I don’t absolutely know what case law is like for this, especially internationally — that generating images on hardware at OpenAI or whatever and then having them move to me doesn’t count as distribution. Otherwise, software-as-a-service in general, stuff like Office 365, would have major restrictions on working with IP that locally-running software would not. Point is that I expect that it should be perfectly legal for me to go to an image generator and generate material as long as I do not subsequently redistribute it, even if it would be infringing had I done so. And the AI company involved has no way of knowing what I’m doing with the material that I’m generating. If they block me from making material with Leia, that’s an excessively-broad restriction.
But IP holders are going to want to have a practical route to either be able to go after the generative AI company that gets distributed, or the users generating infringing material and then distributing it. Yeah, they could go after the users before, but if it’s a lot cheaper and easier to create the material now, that presents them with practical problems.
And in that vein, an issue that I haven’t seen come up is what happens if generative AI companies start permitting deterministic generation of content – that is, where if I plug in the same inputs, I get the same outputs. Maybe they already do; I don’t know, run my gen AI stuff locally. But supposing you have a scenario like this:
-
I make a game called “Generic RPG”, which I sell.
-
I distribute — or sell — DLC for this game. This uses a remote, generative AI service to generate art for the game using a set of prompts sold as part of the DLC for that game. No art is distributed as part of the game. Let’s say I call that “Adventures A Long Time Ago In A Universe Far, Far Away” or something that doesn’t directly run afoul of LucasArts, creates enough distance. And let’s set aside trademark concerns, for the sake of discussion. And lets say that the prompts are not, themselves infringing (though I could imagine infringing art).
-
Every user buys the DLC, and then on their computer, reconstitutes the images for the game. At least if done purely-locally, this should be legal under case law — the GPL specifically depends on the fact that one can combine material locally as long as one does not then distribute it. Mods to (copyrighted) games can just distribute the deltas, and that’s definitely legal.
-
One winds up with someone selling what is effectively a “Star Wars” game.
Now, maybe training the model on images of Star Wars content so that it knows what Star Wars looks like isn’t creating an infringing work. Maybe the distributing the model that knows about Star Wars isn’t infringement. Maybe the prompts being distributed designed to run against that model are not infringing. Maybe reconstituting the apparently-Star-Wars images in a deterministic fashion is not infringing. But if the net effect is equivalent to distributing an infringing work my suspicion is that courts are going to be willing to create some kind of legal doctrine that restricts it, if they haven’t already.
Now, this situation is kind of contrived, but I expect that people will do it, sooner or later, absent legal restrictions.
-
- Comment on Games with Text-based Interaction? 1 week ago:
Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.
I think that they improved in later years, and experience and improved design helps with “hunt the verb”.
You might look at ifdb.org
That being said, I haven’t played much in recent years, so maybe that’s a condemnation of them.
- Comment on 4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act 1 week ago:
Yeah, not disagreeing with him.
- Comment on 4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act 1 week ago:
You probably don’t want Iran to have jurisdiction over your dot-com.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Iran
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Iran.[2] The list of crimes punishable by death includes murder; rape; child molestation; homosexuality; drug trafficking; armed robbery; kidnapping; terrorism; burglary; incest; fornication; adultery; sodomy; sexual misconduct; prostitution;[3][4] plotting to overthrow the Islamic government; political dissidence; sabotage; arson; rebellion; apostasy; blasphemy; extortion; counterfeiting; smuggling; recidivist consumption of alcohol; producing or preparing food, drink, cosmetics, or sanitary items that lead to death when consumed or used; producing and publishing pornography; using pornographic materials to solicit sex; capital perjury; recidivist theft; certain military offences (e. g., cowardice, assisting the enemy); “waging war against God”; “spreading corruption on Earth”; espionage; and treason.[5][6] Iran carried out at least 977 executions in 2015, at least 567 executions in 2016,[7] and at least 507 executions in 2017.[8] In 2018 there were at least 249 executions, at least 273 in 2019, at least 246 in 2020, at least 290 in 2021, at least 553 in 2022, at least 834 in 2023,[9] and at least 901 executions in 2024.[10] In 2023, Iran was responsible for 74% of all recorded executions in the world, with the UN confirming that at least 40 people were executed in one week in 2024.
Frankly, 4chan would probably have violated some of those Iranian laws.
- Comment on 4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act 1 week ago:
4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.
You don’t want to be locked in a small cell with 4chan for two years.
- Comment on Tommy Robinson says Elon Musk is paying his legal costs as trial begins 1 week ago:
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this isn’t going to help sales of Teslas in the UK.
- Comment on ‘Sex for rent’ is illegal in the UK. Why are thousands of people still affected? 1 week ago:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Prostitution_in_the_United_Kin…
In Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), the act of engaging in prostitution or exchanging various sexual services for money is legal
Given that sex for money is legal in the UK, and money for rent is also legal, you’d think that there’d be some middleman.
- Comment on Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend 1 week ago:
reddit.com/…/turn_offdisconnect_remote_access_to_…
I just got a text from my dealership saying my oil light was on. Super pissed off about it… When I got the Jeep 2 years ago I asked Jeep to turn off ALL remote access/phone home capabilities to the vehicle. I was on the phone for a couple hours with them until I finally got someone who said they did it.
Weather alerts, contextual ads on my console, distant recording of my travels, whatever, I wanted everything off.
It has a 4G cellular module in the head unit, which connects to a separate 4G antenna via a port on the back of the head unit. Unplug the antenna from the head unit and it cannot communicate to anything. Obviously you have to remove a bunch of trim and the unit.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 1 week ago:
since I can’t replace it any more.
There are small numbers of used Steam Controllers on the market.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 1 week ago:
checks
I don’t own a Deck, but Wikipedia does say that the Deck has HDMI out. I guess that having the Steam Controller available would presumably let you use the Deck as a console — plug it into your TV, pair a Steam Controller, and then you get a big screen and a lighter controller.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 1 week ago:
I kind of wish that Valve had kept producing the Steam Controller.
It really made sense in the context of sitting on a couch and playing mouse-oriented games. And when the Steam Machine flopped, that kind of killed a lot of reason for it.
But people also did find a use for them, and there isn’t a real alternative.