NaibofTabr
@NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
- Comment on Infectious 1 week ago:
A fecal transplant is cultural appropriation.
- Comment on Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World 2 weeks ago:
I mean… the Pokémon kind of get forced into combat for your entertainment… so more like cockfighting?
- Comment on Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World 2 weeks ago:
Jenny’s number: (area code) 867-5309
Of course it probably doesn’t matter if you also use a credit card to make the purchase - every single purchase is fed into your personal consumer profile.
- Comment on Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World 2 weeks ago:
You probably agreed to it when you installed the app.
- Comment on Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World 2 weeks ago:
AI learning isn’t the issue, its not something we will be able to put a lid on either way.
So… there is no Artificial Intelligence. The AI cannot hurt you. It is just a (buggy) statistical language parsing system. It does not think, it does not plan, it does not have goals, it does not understand, and it doesn’t even really “learn” in a meaningful sense.
Either it destroys or saves the world.
If we’re talking about machine learning systems based on multi-dimensionl statistical analyses, then it will do neither. Both extremes are sensationalism and arguments based on the idea that either such outcome will come from the current boom of ML technology is utter nonsense designed to drive engagement.
It doesn’t need to learn much to do so besides evolving actual self-agency and sovereign thought.
Oh, is that all?
No one on the planet has any idea how to replicate the functionality of consciousness. Sam Altman would very much like you to believe that his company is close to achieving this so that VCs will see the public interest and throw more money at him. Sam Altman is a snake oil salesman.
What is a huge issue is the secretive non-consentual mining of peoples identity and expressions.
And then acting all normal about It.
This is absolutely true and correct and the collection and aggregation of data on human behavior should be scaring the shit out of everyone. The potential for authoritarian abuses of such data collection and tracking is disturbing.
- Comment on You did it. You broken the conditioning. 2 weeks ago:
With a lirpa, apparently:
- Comment on D-Link refuses to patch yet another security flaw, suggests users just buy new routers — D-Link told users to replace NAS last week 2 weeks ago:
that bug was so egregious, it demonstrates a rare level of incompetence
I wish so much this was true, but it super isn’t. Some of the recent Cisco security flaws are just so brain-dead stupid you wonder if they have any internal quality control at all… and, well, there was the Crowdstrike thing…
- Comment on World Without Corporations 2 weeks ago:
Counterpoint - if everything was FOSS it would be absolute chaos with no direction, conflicting goals, incomplete projects, and limited oversight.
- Comment on World Without Corporations 2 weeks ago:
There’s a very good reasons why people and organisations will pay for proprietary software when there is a free alternative available.
Yup… risk transfer
- Comment on flourine 2 weeks ago:
I really hope there isn’t a lot of publicly accessible fluorine…
- Comment on ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture — The Director’s Edition’ Score Reissued on Deluxe Vinyl 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Kill it with fire! 4 weeks ago:
Especially with all the deadly spiders and wasp nests and scorpions that come in Temu orders and shit.
Is this actually a thing? or hyperbole?
- Comment on Stop Wasting Pumpkins! 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Stop Wasting Pumpkins! 5 weeks ago:
Yeah there definitely won’t be enough room in there.
- Comment on Adobe Says Artists Should Embrace AI If They Want to be Successful. 5 weeks ago:
I see, so your argument is that because the training data is not stored in the model in its original form, it doesn’t count as a copy, and therefore it doesn’t constitute intellectual property theft. I had never really understood what the justification for this point of view was, so thanks for that, it’s a bit clearer now. It’s still wrong, but at least it makes some kind of sense.
If the model “has no memory of training data images”, then what effect is it that the images have on the model? Why is the training data necessary, what is its function?
- Comment on Leaked Training Shows How Doctors in New York’s Biggest Hospital System Are Using AI. 5 weeks ago:
the presentation and materials viewed by 404 Media include leadership saying AI Hub can be used for “clinical or clinical adjacent” tasks, as well as answering questions about hospital policies and billing, writing job descriptions and editing writing, and summarizing electronic medical record excerpts and inputting patients’ personally identifying and protected health information. The demonstration also showed potential capabilities that included “detect pancreas cancer,” and “parse HL7,” a health data standard used to share electronic health records.
Because as everyone knows, LLMs do a great job of getting specific details correct and always produce factually accurate output. I’m sure this will have no long term consequences and benefit all the patients greatly.
- Comment on Adobe Says Artists Should Embrace AI If They Want to be Successful. 5 weeks ago:
We’re not talking about a “style”, we’re talking about producing finished work. The image generation models aren’t style guides, they output final images which are produced from the ingestion of other images as training data. The source material might be actual art (or not) but it is generally the product of a real person (because ML ingesting its own products is very much a garbage-in garbage-out system) who is typically not compensated for their work. So again, these generative ML models are ripoff systems, and nothing more. And no, typing in a prompt doesn’t count as innovation or creativity.
- Comment on Adobe Says Artists Should Embrace AI If They Want to be Successful. 5 weeks ago:
And what is it you think I don’t understand?
- Comment on Adobe Says Artists Should Embrace AI If They Want to be Successful. 5 weeks ago:
Oh this is just nonsense. This isn’t “gatekeeping being an artist”. You want to be an artist? Great! learn some skills and make some art (you know, your own art, which you make yourself). And yes I know “all art is derivative”. That is entirely beside the point.
Machine learning is a vacuum connected to a blender. It ingests information which it combines with statistical analyses and then predicts an output based on an algorithm generated from the statistical model. There is nothing “avant-garde” here because all it can do is regurgitate existing material which it has ingested. There’s no inspiration, it can’t make anything new.
- Comment on If there are motherboards and daughterboards, are there fatherboards and sonboards? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on If there are motherboards and daughterboards, are there fatherboards and sonboards? 5 weeks ago:
If 1 motherboard can make 1 babyboard in 9 months, can 3 motherboards make 1 babyboard in 3 months?
- Comment on Adobe Says Artists Should Embrace AI If They Want to be Successful. 5 weeks ago:
plagiarism != art
No matter how many artists’ work is collected, combined, and regurgitated as algorithm puke, it’s still not art and never will be.
- Comment on LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches 5 weeks ago:
Ah, hah, I’m glad you asked, I have thoughts on that too.
Auditing. The government (every government) should employ a team of auditors. In a case like this, the auditors will be attached to the offending company for the purpose of reviewing their operational and financial records. The auditors will be part of (inside of) the company operations for as long as it takes to untangle the details and assess the total sum of revenue gained from the illegal activity, and if that interferes with running the business well that’s too effing bad.
While the auditing is ongoing, the company will be responsible for paying the auditors’ salaries and expenses, and providing office space and whatever other resources they need. There will also be a representative of the auditors assigned to the executive board, present at all board meetings, with voting and veto privileges. Effectively, the company is on probation and under observation until their debt is paid. Any other violations discovered during the audit will result in additional prosecutions.
If the company finds this too burdensome, or if they have tried to obfuscate their records, then they can simply forfeit the revenue of the entire department/operational area in order to expedite the audit.
- Comment on how can i self host my music? 5 weeks ago:
however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero […] I dont understand nothing
This is going to be a problem, unfortunately. You’ll need to define your use case first:
- How much music do you want to have access to? Hundreds, thousands, millions of files? How large is your collection?
- Do you have downloaded copies of all the music you want to listen to? Are they all in one place, well organized and tagged? If you just have downloads in the Spotify app, you won’t be able to use those files, you don’t actually own that music. You’ll need DRM-free audio files.
- Where and how do you want to be able to access them? Just from one device like your phone? Many devices? Is having access at home good enough, or do you want to be able to access your collection while you’re away from home?
- Will you be the only user?
- What kind of budget do you have to work with?
An old PC might be enough to act as a server, but there’s more involved and the answer to what you need depends on what exactly you want to do. You will not be able to build a personal version of Spotify with just an old PC, for instance.
- Comment on LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches 5 weeks ago:
Why would they care about the consequences of fines, when they themselves don’t have to pay it, they can just cash out and not lose a cent, its the company that gets fined.
Because if you lose a company a substantial amount of money without generating profit for the shareholders then you won’t get an executive position at any other companies.
In 5 - 10 years, we’ll live in the era of mass surveillance
It definitely feels like that. In a lot of ways we’re already there. Stingrays have been around for more than a decade - but of course they’re technically legal.
Technology will always move faster than government, and unfortunately that means technology companies will always find ways to gather data on people with things that we don’t have laws for. The only way I can think to slow that down would be to kill the demand for tracking data, but it seems like every government and major business is into collecting, buying and selling data on human behavior right now so I don’t even have a theory as to how to actually reduce the demand for it. It’s way out of hand.
The best option for individuals right now is to live in a place that has some decent legal restrictions, like the EU or California, and of course vote for politicians who favor privacy regulations.
- Comment on LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches 5 weeks ago:
Well… look, I’m all for punishing white collar crime, we should do more of that, but I’d much rather incentivize preventing this kind of thing in first place than punishing people after the fact.
Taking away the revenue (remember revenue means all the income, not just the profit) from criminal behavior does that, because it means the business risks financial collapse.
For instance, in this case if LinkedIn’s EU ad sales department violated EU law, then all revenue from the EU ad sales department should be forfeit, for the entire time period during which the violation occurred.
This would be a lot more effective than threatening rich people with jail time, because rich people can always make a deal to serve their time in a nice facility or house arrest or something. Instead, we threaten to wipe out the business financially.
- Comment on LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches 5 weeks ago:
Thing is, if the profit is high enough and the golden parachute is good enough then a business could probably find someone to take the fall as the CEO for them. Losing the CEO won’t end the business or their exploitative behavior.
- Comment on Roblox's New Child Safety Changes Reveal How Dangerous It's Been For Years 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches 5 weeks ago:
I always feel like the solution is to make this sort of thing unprofitable. Rather than just having a cost-of-doing-business fine, the company should have to forfeit all revenue generated by the illegal activity. The fine should then be assessed in addition to the revenue forfeiture, making it a real penalty rather than a wrist-slap.
- Comment on What Ever Happened to Netscape? 1 month ago:
Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL. Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename “Phoenix” by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. The nascent browser was originally named Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rose triumphantly from the ashes of its dead predecessor (in this case, from the “ashes” of Netscape Navigator, after it was sidelined by Microsoft Internet Explorer in the “First Browser War”).
On January 23, 1998, Netscape announced that its Netscape Communicator browser software would be free, and that its source code would also be free. One day later, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape registered mozilla.org. The project took its name, “Mozilla”, from the original code name of the Netscape Navigator browser—a portmanteau of “Mosaic and Godzilla”, and used to coordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the free software version of Netscape’s internet software, Netscape Communicator. Zawinski said he arrived at the name “Mozilla” at a Netscape staff meeting. A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with coordinating the new community.
Everything that was useful in Netscape became the basis for Firefox.
See also the documentary.
