wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.
Now Twitter is gone anyway, its public APIs have shut down,
Reddit also stopped providing public data archives, and now they sell their archives at a price that only OpenAI will pay.
There’s still the Fediverse.
I mean, that doesn’t solve the LLM pollution problem, but…
And while in war, there are prohibitions on targeting non-combatants, they don’t require that there be no collateral damage. Israel’s pretty clearly targeting Hezbollah here, not random Lebanese.
I do wonder if Hezbollah can maybe agree to stay out of part of Lebanon. I don’t think that that’d need to compromise either Israel’s or Hezbollah’s war plans, so maybe it’d be possible to come to some sort of agreement like that; you’d need buy-in from both parties. Then that area could be used as a safe area for Lebanese non-combatants.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-crackdown-on-mobile-phones-in-schools
Mobile phones are set to be prohibited in schools across England as part of the government’s plan to minimise disruption and improve behaviour in classrooms.
New mobile phones in schools guidance issued today (19 February 2024) backs headteachers in prohibiting the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, including at break times.
Many schools around the country are already prohibiting mobile phone use with great results. This guidance will ensure there is a consistent approach across all schools.
I suppose if enough countries do that sort of thing, pagers might start doing a comeback.
EDIT: Though looking at the wording, I’m not actually sure if this is a “we’re banning cell phones” or a “we’re talking about policies that make it look like we’re banning cell phones to keep the anti-cell-phone crowd happy”.
While 44.3 percent of union members polled between April 9 and July 3 backed Biden compared to 36.3 percent for Trump, polling in the wake of the Republican and Democratic Party conventions found the Teamsters members support Trump over Harris.
In a union-commissioned survey conducted by an independent third party between July 24 and Sept. 15, 59.6 percent of Teamsters members voted to endorse Trump, compared to 34 percent for Harris.
Teamsters members seem to have been dramatically more supportive of Biden than they are of Harris. Hmm.
Don’t know if election models, like Five Thirty Eight’s or similar, take endorsements as an input, whether that may affect their projection.
There are a large number of people in Hezbollah. Israel is fighting them.
You’re talking about using a Hellfire R-9X.
In order to launch those concurrently against, I dunno, sounds like there are maybe hundreds or thousands of targets, you’re going to need to have hundreds or thousands of drones. You’re gonna need something like a TB-2 at least to be lobbing them, not a tiny little drone. You’re talking about a lot of medium-size UAVs. That’s where your scale limitation is gonna come from.
Those things are fine if you’re trying to kill one person. But Israel’s fighting a number of people, even if it can identify them. They aren’t gonna have thousands of drones above Lebanon.
And if they’re hitting buildings and such, then you’re gonna be collapsing buildings and stuff like that.
Secondly, I assume that the Lebanese government is not going to give Israel free reign to do drone strikes on Hezbollah on Lebanese territory, will shoot at those drones, so to use those, you’d need to destroy any air defense that Lebanon has. My guess is that Israel’s looking to just fight Hezbollah as much as possible.
There’s still gonna be some collateral damage with those, that can’t be employed at scale as readily – you’d have to concurrently target huge numbers of people from airborne platforms, and these are pretty small charges. Given that Hezbollah isn’t fighting in the open – understandably – this is probably about as good as it realistically gets in terms of collateral damage.
Israel could maybe use DIME charges to have a smaller difference between lethal radius and damaging radius, but that’s got its own unpleasant aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_inert_metal_explosive
Dense inert metal explosive (DIME) is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material (such as phlegmatized HMX or RDX) and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten. It is intended to limit the effective distance of the explosion, to avoid collateral damage in warfare.
Upon detonation of the explosive, the casing disintegrates into extremely small particles, as opposed to larger pieces of shrapnel which results from the fragmentation of a metal shell casing. The HMTA powder acts like micro-shrapnel which is very lethal at close range (about 4 m or 13 ft), but loses momentum very quickly due to air resistance, coming to a halt within approximately 40 times the diameter of the charge. This increases the probability of killing people within a few meters of the explosion while reducing the probability of causing death and injuries or damage farther away. Survivors close to the lethal zone may still have their limbs amputated by the HMTA microshrapnel, which can slice through soft tissue and bone.
If Israel isn’t using those already, I guess we could send 'em some, if we have some sitting around. Realistically, though, I doubt that collateral damage is gonna be possible to reduce a whole lot, given the fact that Hezbollah’s hiding in a civilian population.
looks dubious
The problem here is that if this is unreliable – and I’m skeptical that Google can produce a system that will work across-the-board – then you have a synthesized image that now has Google attesting to be non-synthetic.
Maybe they can make it clear that this is a best-effort system, and that they only will flag some of them.
There are a limited number of ways that I’m aware of to detect whether an image is edited.
If the image has been previously compressed via lossy compression, there are ways to modify the image to make the difference in artifacts in different points of the image more visible, or – I’m sure – statistically look for such artifacts.
If an image has been previously indexed by something like Google Images and Google has an index sufficient to permit Google to do fuzzy search for portions of the image, then they can identify an edited image because they can find the original.
It’s possible to try to identify light sources based on shading and specular in an image, and try to find points of the image that don’t match. There are complexities to this; for example, a surface might simply be shaded in such a way that it looks like light is shining on it, like if you have a realistic poster on a wall. For generation rather than photomanipulation, better generative AI systems will also probably tend to make this go away as they improve; it’s a flaw in the image.
But none of these is a surefire mechanism.
For AI-generated images, my guess is that there are some other routes.
Some images are going to have metadata attached. That’s trivial to strip, so not very good if someone is actually trying to fool people.
Maybe some generative AIs will try doing digital watermarks. I’m not very bullish on this approach. It’s a little harder to remove, but invariably, any kind of lossy compression is at odds with watermarks that aren’t very visible. As lossy compression gets better, it either automatically tends to strip watermarks – because lossy compression tries to remove data that doesn’t noticeably alter an image, and watermarks rely on hiding data there – or watermarks have to visibly alter the image. And that’s before people actively developing tools to strip them. And you’re never gonna get all the generative AIs out there adding digital watermarks.
I don’t know what the right terminology is, but my guess is that latent diffusion models try to approach a minimum error for some model during the iteration process. If you have a copy of the model used to generate the image, you can probably measure the error from what the model would predict – basically, how much one iteration would change an image or part of it. I’d guess that that only works well if you have a copy of the model in question or a model similar to it.
I don’t think that any of those are likely surefire mechanisms either.
It did both the original link and archive.org
I don’t much like scary games myself, but here’s someone asking /r/HorrorGaming what their scariest games are:
EDIT: And yet somehow, despite not liking scary games, I’ve wound up owning some of these, like Darkwood, the Amnesia games, Clive Barker’s Undying – which I wouldn’t call that scary – Doom 3, Lone Survivor, Outlast, and Subnautica.
I’ve also played Clock Tower, which was on there.
Internet Archive - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Internet Archive:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America
I think that the MBFC database should probably have some special case for the Internet Archive. Either parse the archived domain out of Wayback Machine links and use the MBFC assessment for the domain or just don’t have a rating.
Any aggregate rating of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is going to basically be useless, because it shows archives of sites spanning the spectrum on politics and factuality.
On the subject of the repeated murder attempts against him, he added: “There’s something going on. I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country.”
On one hand, the Almighty appears to have thrown several assassins at Trump but had them fail. One might take that as an expression of divine endorsement for Trump’s leadership. But, then, on the other hand, He hasn’t sent any against Harris.
Definitely a tough theological knot, that one.
It doesn’t look like anyone’s built much by way of spacecraft intended to enter interstellar space recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System
Pioneer 10, launched 1972, last contact January 2003
Pioneer 11, launched 1973, last contact November 1995
Voyager 2, launched August 1977, still active
Voyager 1, launched September 1977, still active
New Horizons, launched 2006, still active
All NASA projects.
There’s one ESA-led project, Ulysses, launched in 1990, shut down in 2008. This is still in the solar system, but WP says that there’s some chance that in November 2098, it may undergo a gravitational slingshot induced by Jupiter that will eventually send it out of the solar system.
And…looks like that’s it. The sum total of what mankind has built to date that will make it out of the solar system. The last launch humanity did towards interstellar space was 18 years ago.
looks at list
Microsoft’s list of allocated names apparently includes:
Crimson Sandstorm
Diamond Sleet
Ghost Blizzard
Leopard Typhoon
Luna Tempest
Night Tsunami
Silk Typhoon
Star Blizzard
This does not pass my basic sniff test of being able to tell whether a name is a group from a hostile intelligence agency or the latest Razer gaming product, a cyberpunk video game gang name, or a video gaming guild name.
https://robinpiree.com/blog/guild-names
Twilight Vanguard
Crimson Shadows
That’s too similar in my book.
Russia is not alone in its activity. Microsoft also saw efforts by a China-linked group, known as Storm-1852
rolls eyes
You give them a cool name, you make them sound cool.
Just do the plain ol’ number thing. Let them do their own marketing work if they want marketing.
While APT43’s link with the North Korean government was confirmed for the first time in the Mandiant report, the threat actor was already known by threat analysts under other names, such as Thallium, Kimsuky, Velvet Chollima, Black Banshee and STOLEN PENCIL.
This confusion comes down to each cyber threat intelligence (CTI) vendor operating its own attribution process for cyber-attacks – something we recently investigated on Infosecurity Magazine.
The most prominent threat group name is the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). Commonly used by the whole CTI community, including US non-profit organization MITRE, which provides a standardized framework for tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), APT groups refer to clusters of sophisticated threat actors sponsored by, or acting on behalf of a government.
With geopolitical rather than financial motivations, APT groups typically operate cyber espionage campaigns and destructive cyber-attacks.
Once a threat actor has been confirmed to be a coherent group of hackers backed by a nation-state, the threat analysts who lead the cyber attribution allocate it a new APT number – the latest being APT43.
Other ‘sober’ naming conventions exist, consisting of codenames and numbers only. For example, APT-C groups are Chinese cybersecurity vendor 360 Security Technology’s equivalent to APT groups. APT-C numbers are sometimes used by other vendors.
Others, like MITRE’s G[XXX] (e.g. G1002) or SecureWorks’ legacy TG-[XXXX] (e.g. TG-3279), are mere identification numbers and their names do not reveal anything about the threat actor.
“We use a sober, or even dull, naming convention because we don’t want to glamorise those groups,” Collier added.
What is this, a Microsoft naming scheme?
kagis
Sounds like it.
A Chinese-linked influence actor Microsoft tracks as Storm-1852 successfully pivoted to short-form video content that criticizes the Biden administration and Harris campaign before some of its assets disappeared from social media following reports of its activity. While most Storm-1852 personas masquerade as conservative US voters voting for Trump, a handful of accounts also create anti-Trump content and use political slogans and hashtags associated with American progressive politics.
For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.
Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.
If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.
Well, they did remove it when they found out. But…
Look. I’m looking at a Thinkpad. Lenovo owns that line now. I dunno if they can push firmware updates to old, pre-Lenovo models, but they can to current versions. Those things are pretty common in a business setting. AFAIK, the US has never raised any issues with Lenovo and security a la Huawei. But if there was an honest-to-God, knock-down, drag-out war, I assume that Beijing is gonna see whether it can leverage anything like that. And I’ve got, what…a microphone? A camera? Network access? Maybe interesting credentials or other things in memory or on my drive? I mean, there are probably things that you could do with that.
Then think of all the personal phones that military people have. Microphone. Camera. Network access and radio. Big fat firmware layer.
My guess is that if you did a really serious audit of even pretty secure environments, you’d find a lot of stuff floating around that’s potentially exploitable, just due to firmware updates. If you exclude firmware updates, then you’re vulnerable to holes that haven’t been patched.
Okay, maybe, for some countries, you can use all domestic manufacturers. I don’t think that South Korea could do that. Maybe the US or China could. But even there, I bet that there are supply chain attacks. I was reading a while back about some guy selling counterfeit Cisco hardware. He set up a bunch of bogus vendors on Amazon. His stuff got into even distribution channels with authorized Cisco partners, made it into US military networks.
Counterfeit Cisco gear ended up in US military bases, used in combat operations
That guy was just trying to make a buck, though I dunno if I’d have trusted his products. But you gotta figure that if that could have happened, there’s room for intelligence agencies to make moves in that space. And that’s the US, which I bet is probably the country most-able to avoid that. Imagine if you’re a much smaller country, need to pull product from somewhere abroad.
PawSense is a Windows package that tries to detect when a cat is walking across a keyboard and locks it.
https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-cat-is-messing/
I don’t know of a Linux equivalent, though I’d swear I remember something similar that was targeted at the author’s young 2-year-old daughter, was named after her, but which I cannot now find.
This Popsie Funk channel is upfront, that the music is AI generated.
goes looking
Yeah, the description reads:
Popsie Funk is a fictitious creation. The tracks are A.I. generated from lyrics and musical compositions that I have created. The A.I. samples are then mixed and edited by me.
I am adding this disclaimer due to repeated questions about the genuine authenticity of Popsie Funk and his music.
I don’t think that the artist in question is faking this.
All that being said, while this particular case isn’t, I suppose one could imagine such a “trying to pretend to be human” artist existing. That is, if you think about all the websites out there with AI-generated questions and answers that do try to appear human-generated, you gotta figure that someone is thinking about doing the same with musicians…and at mass scale, not manually doing one or two.
Removed by mod
The
~/.ssh/known_hostsfile only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.Those are in
~/.ssh/id_rsaor the like, depending upon key type.