Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
It's true, this is why there are so many government agencies focused on healthcare. The medical field lacks a healthy profit motive. Healthcare CEOs use their fiduciary responsibilities as an excuse and say they'll get sued if they don't exploit situations.

There was a SARS vaccine as far as back 2016 which could have changed everything but was ignored. Pharmaceutical execs told them they were, "waiting to see if it comes back yearly" first

Comment · 3 months ago
It's long as in persistent viral colonization, often in immune privileged areas where the virus can hide from the immune system.

One theory is that the immune system doesn't always produce a strong enough antibody response to flush the virus from all these areas but the truth is that's likely only a subset of total cases.

Comment · 4 months ago
It was obviously being managed by a person or group. Between all the profiling of people and their IPs in IRC, which may or may not have been published by mistake, and all the other obvious contradictions it doesn't make any sense.

It was sophisticated enough to easily navigate the AI "tar pits" but reliably incompetent at just about everything else? Give me a break.

In order to profile people you first need to provoke a response from them. That's how you learn to manipulate them and that's all this experiment accomplished at the end of the day. If you've ever wondered why social media platforms have an affinity for inflammatory content now you know.

Comment · 4 months ago
It highlights how everyone's first reaction is to assume incompetence. Not unlike what you're doing here.
Comment · 4 months ago
I'm actually somewhat disappointed they redacted the Eth address with Ethereum being an open ledger and all that. Following the money could've proved enlightening.
Comment · 4 months ago
Look up what zersetzung is and how it works. It doesn't matter if the target is a political organization or an open source community, the process is always the same.
Comment · 4 months ago
Anyone remember the XZ and Jia Tan situation awhile back?

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-1-lasse.co...

I can't quite put my finger on why but the entire time I was reading this I kept thinking back to that. It's entirely possible the actual targets were the volunteers and everything else was superfluous or tertiary. It's also an exception that proves the rule with regard to Hanlon's Razor.

They even mentioned the stated goal of it was more or less pointless. I wouldn't be suprised if the "owner" they spoke with was still just the LLM. It stuck around for just long enough to convince everyone that they succeeded in suckering the LLM and had achieved all their stated objectives.

No more reason to investigate the incident at all and no need to question why literally nothing made any sense or how the owner could simultaneously be as inept as they were made out to be and able to afford all those resources while giving the LLM effectively a blank check.

It'll be interesting to see if the volunteers for this project are subjected to the same Zersetzung and psychological attacks as the XZ devs were.

Comment · 4 months ago
This is one of those rules/laws that is worse than useless, without fixing the protocol shortcomings that make spoofing trivial the only people who will be affected by this rule are regular people.
Comment · 6 months ago
You don't get that job without being the type of person who will only ever respond to coercion attempts with an equal amount of indigance. The sole reason for the position to exist is to act as a canary in a coalmine so to speak

She even admits she was due to stand down at the end of the year, they could have just waited her out. Instead it seems her calling a spade a spade was just too intolerable for them to bare

If that's all it takes to provoke the desired reaction from them it doesn't bode well at all. It's no wonder they were so easily led into a war with Iran on a leash

Comment · 10 months ago
The only thing I find more suspicous than the sudden global attack on VPNs and privacy is the people trying to hand wave it away as nothing to worry about.

The stasi could only dream of having the tools that are already available today to use.

Comment · 10 months ago
This and similar issues have been an ongoing issue with Spectrum going back to before Congress felt the need to call them (along with the other telcos) out for failing to secure their networks. I've noticed handshake issues at one time or another with webpages, DoH and dnscrypt, and VPN with TLS over UDP on a non-stand port.

During one particularly annoying episode where it effectively became a DOS I had my router log all dropped packets and then rebooted it. Immediately after reconnecting it drops a few incoming martians and invalid packets as if they were still expecting an active connection where there shouldn't have been any. The IPs were mostly upstream endpoints or gateways but at least once it was from a residential IP instead.

Between the weird arbitrary nature of the SSL/TLS handshake issues and the possible spoofing from upstream gateways I get the impression this is much more than just a bug.

Comment · 11 months ago
No, this paper is just exceptionally bad. It seems none of the authors are familiar with the scientific method.

Unless I missed it there's also no mention of prompt formatting, model parameters, hardware and runtime environment, temperature, etc. It's just a waste of the reviewers time.

Comment · 1 year ago
I'm having de ja vu here. If they only found out when they attempted to extort them does it mean they don't even bother to log employee access? Is there any means for accountability at all internally?

It would be so simple to have access tracking and flag or lock out rogue employees... I look forward to seeing what the golden parachutes look like.

Comment · 1 year ago
The odds are already against their future viability after a breach like this and if they're fumbling the response this bad it really doesn't bode well for them.

They would have been better off not even bringing up their location if they weren't going to be transparent.

Comment · 1 year ago
They're not just another free-to-use site where you're the product. Their reputation and viability are on the line.

For a site such as this the odds aren't in their favor anymore.

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