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A nanoGPT pipeline packed in a spreadsheet
Awesome coolness: https://github.com/dabochen/spreadsheet-is-all-you-need Via:
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Cyber, MacGyver, and the Limits of Covert Power | Lawfare
Is it possible for the cyber industry to actually become unwound and made proportionate? > For several years, Maschmeyer has been at the fore of efforts by a small band of scholars to highlight the message that cyber power—albeit an important tool of modern statecraft for both authoritarian and democratic regimes—cannot do magic. This is
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Machine learning with matchboxes: A journey from a childhood game to… | Pavel Anni
I was a huge Martin Gardner fan during my teenage years – I still have the books and almost a complete set – so I was delighted to find my former Sun colleague Pavel Anni recapping the essentials of machine learning through an old “mathematical recreation” of matchboxes and beads: https://medium.com/@pavelanni/machine-learning-with-matchboxes-436e98edd929
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When Dynamite Turned Terrorism Into an Everyday Threat
A very interesting retrospective of how safe we are today versus how unsafe we were at the turn of the 20th century. (NYT Gift link via Kottke) > In early 20th-century America, political bombings became a constant menace — but then helped give rise to law enforcement as we know it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/17/magazine/dynamite-terrorism-anarchists-law-enforcement.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xE0.NiL8.Yfv7WAR_lmls Via: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/112564536724166148
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First insight: 42 key points of the secret #EUGoingDark surveillance plan for the new EU Commission | Patrick Breyer
> Specifically, according to the 42-point surveillance plan, manufacturers are to be legally obliged to make digital devices such as smartphones, smart homes, IoT devices, and cars monitorable at all times (“access by design”). Messenger services that were previously securely encrypted are to be forced to allow for interception. Data retention, which was overturned by
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This thread by @GossiTheDog makes me wonder if Apple will avoid repeating Recall mistakes…
There is nothing innately wrong with keeping a permanent log of your activity on your machine — but there is a lot wrong with making a product based upon that concept as appallingly hacky and insecure as described below. Apple (to me) seems less prone to making extraordinarily hacky mistakes, but they did make the
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Australian Safety Exceptionalism: if content might be harmful to Australians it needs to be removed *globally* to protect them
Left unanswered: how do you know if someone is Australian yet using a VPN to access a platform as if from another country? > In an exclusive interview with ABC Afternoon Briefing, Ms Inman-Grant argued the way the social media companies are structured meant content must be removed “globally”, and Australia should have the right
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Happy Birthday Whitfield Diffie, 80 years today!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie
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Blah NHS Blah Cyberattack!
Blah blah ransomware blah firewall blah extort Russia? Blah basement hackers? Blah political will blah victims blah NHS blah Tory funding blah Starmer election? Blah! Blah-blah patch blah updates blah isolation blah investment blah system administration. <blah sigh>
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Google Leak Reveals Thousands of Privacy Incidents | …any politician who tries to capitalise on this article MUST come out in favour of end-to-end encryption
To be honest none of this surprises me, all of it is typical, and mature democracies have privacy laws which obligate reporting of this kind of thing where it has actual impact. But rather than raise pitchforks at software engineers, instead raise them to critique those occasions where data is not held in an end-to-end
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Bart Preneel: “The full Belgian presidency chatcontrol proposal has been leaked…”
> The full Belgian presidency chatcontrol proposal has been leaked by netzpolitik […] This proposal fails to protect children, leads to mass surveillance and presents a large risk of abuse. The criticism in our open letters is unfortunately still valid.
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AI plays NetHack, runs into long-forgotten lunar code
I dimly remembered that NetHack had this feature, although I never played it much; where modern immersive games track the sun and weather (PokemonGo, for one) back in the days of VT100 we had more blunt easter eggs for addicted players… Unrolled at: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1793930355617259811.html