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Terror tsar: China’s AI bot is rewriting history
“Writing for The Telegraph, he said: “If national security is concerned with protecting our Western democracy with its spirit of open enquiry and commitment to evidence and debate, then Qwen’s self-censorship and attack on the historical record and promotion of Chinese propaganda is a genuine threat.”” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/11/08/terror-tsar-chinas-ai-bot-threatens-britain/ Archived at: https://archive.ph/kr0ux
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Clade of “Human Emacs” developers want Free/OpenSource software to be small-batch, handmade, organic, untouched by LLMs
To me it’s rather ironic that the people having this argument are largely working in the archetypal AI research language of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s: indeed, i have decided that llms are, at every level, an affront to justice, from who makes and profits and pushes them, to how they are trained, to the…
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30 years since “Smashing The Stack For Fun & Profit” – buffer overflows were the “AI AGENTS WILL DOOM US ALL” threat of the mid-90s
Mass panic and fearmongering are nothing new in information security:
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Government Plans to force #AgeVerification on EBay & Vinted are not due to “Grooming”, but instead…
There’s much speculation re: the plans, and some quite sane commentary (e.g. below) but since Vinted and EBay both have strongly enforced 18+ age requirements, the risk of “grooming” is negligible. I propose that instead there are five forces at work, in approximate order of : Some folk are saying “isn’t it strange that they…
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Le Grand Jackpotting: Activists demonstrate use of new French “Gigabyte Tax” to add €1000s to individual French website costs
Mere hours after a French Socialist Party amendment instituted per-gigabyte taxes upon “platforms” for sending data to French users, French activists are demonstrating their ability to rack-up €10,000 daily costs in “taxes” to be paid by arbitrary French websites — including political parties [All English translations via Google Translate or Twitter, by source] Friday: The…
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The Memory Hierarchy, Measured in Human Time: From a 1997 Sun [Microsystems] book to an NVIDIA H100: the same memory hierarchy, thirty years apart
The text smells slightly of AI subediting, but the learnings and the references make this a worthwhile read: https://morillocarlos.substack.com/p/the-memory-hierarchy-measured-in
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REMINDER: If you use Signal on Android and if you really care about privacy, here are 3 default app settings that you should fix *TODAY*
The world is changing, and assumptions we made a decade ago regarding the tradeoffs between usability and privacy are changing with them. Signal has been with us for years, and is gradually adapting but it still has a strong need to not alienate new users, whereas people who have been using it for most/all of…
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BREAKING: TIME MAGAZINE: “THE DEVIL IN THE NETWORK”
Computer experts were worried that it would get into the hands of computer intruders, who would use it as a burglar’s tool kit to break the Internet wide open. The program is so point-and-click simple that it can turn second-rate hackers into efficient computer crackers. Source: THE DEVIL IN THE NETWORKJosh QuittnerApr 17, 1995 5:00…
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IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE TODAY: please read this astonishing summary of what Paul Moore has been doing to #SafeToNet, #HarmBlock & the Government-lauded #HMDFuse kids’ phone
Every online generation has at least one overhyped, disastrously implemented “great white saviour” safety app that turns out to be atrocious. Now comes: HarmBlock+ World’s Safest Smartphone: Please Rotate Responsibly https://paul.reviews/harmblock-worlds-safest-smartphone-please-rotate-responsibly/
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Squirrels: The Threat to Critical National Infrastructure
https://bsky.app/profile/kylec.bsky.social/post/3mvonqu7ons2z Next, Sparrows?
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Obvious in retrospect, someone who got their break “looking through the square window” into everyone’s lives, is going to be in favour of surveillance & censorship
It’s an absolute travesty the liberal democrats are hosting a peer who is generating so many illiberal and misconceived amendments to legislation; Floella has gone full Orwell: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4285 “A Bill to require social media companies operating in the United Kingdom to obtain a licence from Ofcom; to empower Ofcom to set and enforce binding conditions…
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Douglas Adams in 1978 predicted Terence Tao’s role as Vroomfondel in the modern AI debate: “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
What a time to be alive! Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was practically a bible to my cold-war veteran physics-nerd 11-year-old self, discovering it during a Radio4 rebroadcast of the first series and subsequently stealing the paperback book from my sister (who didn’t really get it) – and I have the books, the…