https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2026-06-18T09:36:04+00:00 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/do-not-invite-big-tech-to-your-digital-autonomy-discussion/ jmIf we want to discuss how to improve our digital autonomy, employees from US big tech will not usefully contribute to the conversation. They can’t. And in fact, they’ll likely actively prevent progress by restating old talking points, like how (despite tons of legal analysis to the contrary) Microsoft is somehow able to shield us from the vagaries of the US administration. I recall Microsoft vice-president Brad Smith explaining how Microsoft would go to court to protect European rights and within a week, Microsoft told the International Criminal Court that it had to remove several employees from Microsoft services, because of US sanctions. Microsoft pointedly did not go to court to defend the ICC. If you invite US big tech to your event, you’ll spend some of your time listening to fairy tales. And if you are lucky someone is present to debunk these stories. But still, if Amazon just got 10 minutes of speaking time to talk about their supposedly sovereign cloud, and then someone else says it is not true, the meeting is still left with the impression that it could be true. The issue has successfully been “both-sidesed”. Also, you lost 15 minutes of your day. ]]> amazon microsoft google big-tech digital-sovereignty us-politics europe eu https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0baf6f3dc2b7/ 2026-06-10T11:52:03+00:00 https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/ jm The judge is explicitly cutting down most of the legal defenses they use. They make a sharp cut between search and AI, saying search is indispensable, but AI is not, and defendants have not proven how being held liable for their output would compromise the ability to run a normal search engine. They make a similar hard cut between AI and autocomplete. They go on at length about the nature of truth in utterances, and arrive at a conclusion that AI output has no protections for free expression because it isn't expressing shit - it has no beliefs, it is a commercial product only. There are two injunctions that are denied because they are not considered statements of fact, but the judge rules against google for all the ones that were, and concludes several are default considered false because the linked pages were irrelevant. There is explicit differentiation from aggregating reviews and third party content, because the AI generated text and ideas that were not present in the input. There is also discussion about how there is no excuse for further violations just because its hard to control AI output, and contrasts this with how normal "report and takedown" protections work. There is very little here that is specific to AI overviews in search, and almost all of the arguments apply to AI products in general. AI's only prayer of being remotely profitable must include advertising or shopping features, which means they absolutely must continue generating output that makes statements of fact about other companies. I know nothing about how German courts work, the article alludes to appeals, but if this ruling holds even just in Germany the ability to insure AI products disappears overnight and that makes the product nonviable. ]]> germany eu liability google ai-overviews slop law truth libel facts insurance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:25401dacd469/ 2026-06-02T10:50:59+00:00 https://point.free/blog/gemma-4-on-a-2016-xeon/ jm google ai llms gemma gemma-4 xeon hacks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5cee2e7c443f/ 2026-04-21T09:13:59+00:00 https://webmatrices.com/post/how-a-roblox-cheat-and-one-ai-tool-brought-down-vercel-s-entire-platform jmFebruary 2026. An employee at Context.ai, one of those AI productivity tools that promises to "supercharge your workflow," downloads a Roblox cheat. Not a sophisticated zero-day. Not a state-sponsored attack. A Roblox cheat. The download contains Lumma Stealer, an infostealer that grabs session cookies, credentials, everything. That employee had access to sensitive internal systems. March 2026. The attacker uses Context.ai's compromised infrastructure to pivot into a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account. This Vercel employee had signed up for Context.ai's "AI Office Suite" using their enterprise credentials and granted "Allow All" permissions. Let that sink in for a second. A Vercel engineer gave a third-party AI tool full access to their corporate Google account. April 19. Guillermo Rauch posts the thread confirming everything. Environment variables [...] were stored in plaintext. Accessed. Exfiltrated. tl;dr: 1. Context.ai employees should not be using company devices to access Roblox cheats; 2. exfiltratable environment variables should not be usable to access a customer's Google account. The scope of these credentials was obviously way too broad. This isn't just a Context.ai issue, this is systemic.]]> security infosec credentials google context.ai roblox fail https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fcdc0ef294b3/ 2026-02-26T10:27:21+00:00 https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules jmGoogle spent over a decade telling developers that Google API keys (like those used in Maps, Firebase, etc.) are not secrets. But that's no longer true: Gemini accepts the same keys to access your private data. We scanned millions of websites and found nearly 3,000 Google API keys, originally deployed for public services like Google Maps, that now also authenticate to Gemini even though they were never intended for it. With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account. Even Google themselves had old public API keys, which they thought were non-sensitive, that we could use to access Google’s internal Gemini. (via Rob Synnott)]]> infosec api-keys authentication authorization google gemini google-maps fail https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c248a687a9ab/ 2026-02-26T09:46:28+00:00 https://trysound.io/how-my-side-project-got-banned-from-the-internet/ jmDigging through Google forums, I found the most reported culprit: 302 temporary redirects. I used one redirect (engramma.dev → app.engramma.dev) to avoid building a landing page. In addition to a newly registered domain, this looks like an obvious issue. Security systems flag such redirects because malicious actors use them extensively. It doesn't matter that "malicious actors use them extensively" if non-malicious actors do too. That's the definition of a false positive! Then the next shitfest is from no less than 10 separate vendors copying the listing from Google and not including an automated system to pick up the list removal afterwards. I've had experience of this part -- and now that I think of it, it may have been from use of 302 redirects in my case too. (via Paul Watson)]]> http security infosec blocklists google phishing redirects 302 false-positives fail via:paulwatson https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:79ec6c8e8842/ 2026-01-20T10:13:55+00:00 https://github.com/ScottESanDiego/gmail-api-client jm via:jwz email smtp gmail google mail https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5f7fc55e2248/ 2025-09-29T10:05:24+00:00 https://www.thebriefing.ie/google-just-erased-7-years-of-our-political-history/ jm google advertising ads politics ireland eu europe youtube elections history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7fb87f1a868b/ 2025-09-05T08:50:54+00:00 https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/google-net-zero-sustainability jm net-zero climate-change google dont-be-evil sustainability https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:031dd118114b/ 2025-09-02T15:55:49+00:00 https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/27/ovhcloud_interview/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374#438:%20Amazon%20Q%20Rules%20Except%20It%20Doesn't%20At%20All%20-%2018837614 jm"[Microsoft] finally told the truth!" says OVHcloud Chief Legal Officer Solange Viegas Dos Reis. "It's not a surprise," she shrugs, "we already knew that [MS could not guarantee that customer data would remain protected from US government access requests]." However, "this reply from Microsoft brought kind of a shock for customers, because they suddenly discover that what they have been taught for a while. 'Oh guys, don't worry, it will not apply to you. Don't worry.' It's false! Because, indeed, the data can be communicated." Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, made the admission during a hearing in the country. In answer to whether he could guarantee that data on French citizens could not be transmitted to the US government without the explicit agreement of the French authorities, Carniaux replied: "No, I can't guarantee it," but added that the scenario had "never happened before." "It's a question of trust," says Viegas Dos Reis. "And because of this question of trust, we have been receiving a lot of questions from our customers about, 'Hey, we know now how it works with US cloud providers. Tell me how it works from other providers.'" ]]> ovhcloud ovh data-protection data-privacy amazon microsoft google cloud-computing sovereignty eu politics surveillance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fec01f72dff5/ 2025-08-25T16:18:41+00:00 https://ketanjoshi.co/2025/08/23/big-techs-selective-disclosure-masks-ais-real-climate-impact/ jmUsing any sort of statistical summary of the data, rather than the aggregated energy and climate impact across the whole system, will always give a misleading view. They mention their data is skewed, but they don’t mention in which direction. If there is a material number of high-energy ‘reasoning’ prompts skewing their dataset, that means the total energy consumption of all prompts will be very high, with much of the responsibility coming from a few energy-hungry queries. Part of the reason this is important is that this week, we saw a new research paper that shows that the energy consumption of text generation massively increases for every small gain in accuracy from the use of energy-hungry ‘reasoning’ models: It would have been pretty easy to supply the range, the skew, the average and the median, or even the actual entire dataset, to avoid any doubt. Any hint of looking at the broader system rather than individual responsibility is excised from this paper. That is clearly an intentional choice: if Google disclosed the system impacts of generation, it would probably look way worse. [....] The per-query narrative framing paints the precise opposite picture to what we see when we look at what really matters for environment and climate: the absolute figures. Regions with high data centre concentration are seeing accelerated growth in power demand that incentivises fossil fuels, either slowing down climate progress or reversing it entirely. The sphere of that influence is expanding from towns, to states, to countries. The companies that own them can only partially hide the steep backsliding in their aggregate disclosures. Renewable energy that should be displacing fossil fuels ends up meeting new data centre demand, granting coal and gas extra years and decades of immediate, measurable harm to human life. The worst players don’t even bother with the grid, plugging data centres directly into new, custom-built fossil fuelled power stations that’ll hurt people for decades after the hype dissipates. ]]> llms ai environment energy climate climate-change google meta amazon openai datacenters https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:91f00b24c31a/ 2025-08-07T16:26:30+00:00 https://archive.ph/SExCe#selection-1813.0-1829.282 jmThe three smart-home hacks are part of a series of 14 indirect prompt-injection attacks against Gemini across web and mobile that the researchers dubbed Invitation Is All You Need. (The 2017 research that led to the recent generative AI breakthroughs like ChatGPT is called “Attention Is All You Need.”) In the demonstrations, revealed at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas this week, the researchers show how Gemini can be made to send spam links, generate vulgar content, open up the Zoom app and start a call, steal email and meeting details from a web browser, and download a file from a smartphone’s web browser. Looking forward to hearing more about this :)]]> google gemini llms security infosec in-band-signalling exploits fail black-hat https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6502b5a4f704/ 2025-07-25T14:51:48+00:00 https://easydmarc.com/blog/google-spoofed-via-dkim-replay-attack-a-technical-breakdown/ jm phishing dkim dmarc google attacks exploits infosec email smtp https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:95c450bb6da7/ 2025-07-16T10:35:37+00:00 https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/ jmInvestors have metabolized the story that AI will be a gigantic growth area, and so all the tech giants are in a battle to prove to investors that they will dominate AI as they dominated their own niches. You aren't the target for AI, investors are: if they can be convinced that Google's 90% Search market share will soon be joined by a 90% AI market share, they will continue to treat this decidedly tired and run-down company like a prize racehorse at the starting-gate. [...] There's a cringe army of AI bros who are seemingly convinced that AI is going to become superintelligent and save us from ourselves – they think that AI companies are creating god. But the hundreds of billions being pumped into AI are not driven by this bizarre ideology. Rather, they are the product of material conditions, a system that sends high-flying companies into a nosedive the instant they stop climbing. AI's merits and demerits are irrelevant to this: they pump AI because they must pump. It's why they pumped metaverse and cryptocurrency and every other absurd fad. None of that changes the fact that Google Search has been terminally enshittified and it is misleading billions of people in service to this perverse narrative adventure. Google Search isn't fit for purpose, and it's hard to see how it ever will be again. (via Fergal)]]> google growth ai capitalism investors enshittification via:fergal https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2218ff684ca/ 2025-05-12T17:04:51+00:00 https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/automatic-discovery jm dataplex bigquery gcs google gcp parquet avro orc json csv storage https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:82927ee4918c/ 2025-04-25T17:12:59+00:00 https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/best-practices jm gcs aws s3 storage google best-practices ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9d8107872c47/ 2025-01-10T10:40:39+00:00 https://mastodon.social/@BenRossTransit/113741945325663404 jm google waymo laws pedestrians safety crosswalks crossings road-safety self-driving-cars https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:04820be76c00/ 2024-12-06T09:26:12+00:00 https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gencast-predicts-weather-and-the-risks-of-extreme-conditions-with-sota-accuracy/ jmToday, in a paper published in Nature, we present GenCast, our new high resolution (0.25°) AI ensemble model. GenCast provides better forecasts of both day-to-day weather and extreme events than the top operational system, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF) ENS, up to 15 days in advance. We’ll be releasing our model’s code, weights, and forecasts, to support the wider weather forecasting community. [...] GenCast is a diffusion model, the type of generative AI model that underpins the recent, rapid advances in image, video and music generation. However, GenCast differs from these, in that it’s adapted to the spherical geometry of the Earth, and learns to accurately generate the complex probability distribution of future weather scenarios when given the most recent state of the weather as input. To train GenCast, we provided it with four decades of historical weather data from ECMWF’s ERA5 archive. This data includes variables such as temperature, wind speed, and pressure at various altitudes. The model learned global weather patterns, at 0.25° resolution, directly from this processed weather data. It's open source: https://github.com/google-deepmind/graphcast And here are the open-released model weights: https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/dm_graphcast Graphcast (the previous iteration) has public forecasts published at https://charts.ecmwf.int/?query=GraphCast , under a CC-BY-NC-SA-4 licence -- it would be great if the GenCast forecasts join this data set. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15796 This all looks really great, a fantastic commitment to (genuine) openness and open data, and the paper seems rigorous (to this amateur). Great stuff.]]> forecasting weather ai gencast graphcast deepmind google ecmwf genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1942c3a6a11e/ 2024-09-19T08:56:30+00:00 https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq/blob/master/SUNSET.md jmI don't want to be part of this scene anymore: wordfreq used to be at the intersection of my interests. I was doing corpus linguistics in a way that could also benefit natural language processing tools. The field I know as "natural language processing" is hard to find these days. It's all being devoured by generative AI. Other techniques still exist but generative AI sucks up all the air in the room and gets all the money. It's rare to see NLP research that doesn't have a dependency on closed data controlled by OpenAI and Google, two companies that I already despise. wordfreq was built by collecting a whole lot of text in a lot of languages. That used to be a pretty reasonable thing to do, and not the kind of thing someone would be likely to object to. Now, the text-slurping tools are mostly used for training generative AI, and people are quite rightly on the defensive. If someone is collecting all the text from your books, articles, Web site, or public posts, it's very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own. So I don't want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI. OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they're constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves. ]]> ai language llm nlp openai scraping words genai google https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:86312ba8479e/ 2024-07-11T15:31:15+00:00 https://disconnect.blog/generative-ai-is-a-climate-disaster/ jm ai energy google llm openai microsoft datacenters climate-change paris-marx https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a35612d5af6b/ 2024-06-12T13:30:51+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/11/24176490/mm-delicious-glue jm google lol funny training fail google-bombing miserable-failure ai glue pizza https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2e2c406e4886/ 2024-06-12T13:18:05+00:00 https://gist.github.com/velzie/053ffedeaecea1a801a2769ab86ab376 jmGoogle's manifest v3 has no analouge [sic] to the webRequestBlocking API, which is neccesary for (effective) adblockers to work starting in chrome version 127, the transition to mv3 will start cutting off the use of mv2 extensions alltogether this will inevitably piss of enterprises when their extensions don't work, so the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key was added and will presumably stay forever after enterprises complain enough You can use this as a regular user, which will let you keep your mv2 extensions even after they're supposed to stop working. ]]> google chrome chromium adblockers extensions via:micktwomey privacy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d0b78a909b24/ 2024-05-28T10:53:20+00:00 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14975 jm Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPSes) are used by modern mobile devices to learn their position using nearby Wi-Fi access points as landmarks. In this work, we show that Apple's WPS can be abused to create a privacy threat on a global scale. We present an attack that allows an unprivileged attacker to amass a worldwide snapshot of Wi-Fi BSSID geolocations in only a matter of days. Our attack makes few assumptions, merely exploiting the fact that there are relatively few dense regions of allocated MAC address space. Applying this technique over the course of a year, we learned the precise locations of over 2 billion BSSIDs around the world. The privacy implications of such massive datasets become more stark when taken longitudinally, allowing the attacker to track devices' movements. While most Wi-Fi access points do not move for long periods of time, many devices -- like compact travel routers -- are specifically designed to be mobile. We present several case studies that demonstrate the types of attacks on privacy that Apple's WPS enables: We track devices moving in and out of war zones (specifically Ukraine and Gaza), the effects of natural disasters (specifically the fires in Maui), and the possibility of targeted individual tracking by proxy -- all by remotely geolocating wireless access points. We provide recommendations to WPS operators and Wi-Fi access point manufacturers to enhance the privacy of hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Finally, we detail our efforts at responsibly disclosing this privacy vulnerability, and outline some mitigations that Apple and Wi-Fi access point manufacturers have implemented both independently and as a result of our work.]]> geolocation location wifi wps apple google infosec privacy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:277b19975935/ 2024-05-24T16:24:08+00:00 https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/details-of-google-cloud-gcve-incident jm cloud ops google tools ux via:scott-piper fail infrastructure gcp unisuper https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:36e0042aca18/ 2024-05-20T09:02:20+00:00 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/ jm google fail outages unisuper cloud google-cloud ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2977518a076b/ 2024-05-13T09:18:17+00:00 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666 jm gcp google fail unisuper account-deletion ops nightmare https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6a50f687f8c2/ 2024-04-08T13:06:43+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html jmMeta could not match ChatGPT unless it got more data, Mr. Al-Dahle told colleagues. In March and April 2023, some of the company’s business development leaders, engineers and lawyers met nearly daily to tackle the problem. [....] They also talked about how they had summarized books, essays and other works from the internet without permission and discussed sucking up more, even if that meant facing lawsuits. One lawyer warned of “ethical” concerns around taking intellectual property from artists but was met with silence, according to the recordings. ]]> ai copyright data training openai meta google privacy surveillance data-protection ip https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:72d55c3af228/ 2024-02-22T14:24:38+00:00 https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ jm Google has a clear bias towards big media publishers. Their Core and Helpful Content updates are heavily focused on something they call E-E-A-T, which is an acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The SEO world has been obsessed with E-E-A-T for a few years now, to the point where there is always someone on X (formerly Twitter) discussing how to show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Many of the examples come from dissecting big media publishers like the ones we’ve been discussing in this article. The reason why SEOs look up to these sites is that Google rewards those sites. ]]> enshittification internet google reviews seo eeat content publishing bias search-engines https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7029fee5b580/ 2023-11-14T12:45:20+00:00 https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/europes-hidden-security-crisis/ jmOur investigation highlights a widespread trade in data about sensitive European personnel and leaders that exposes them to blackmail, hacking and compromise, and undermines the security of their organisations and institutions.  These data flow from Real-Time Bidding (RTB), an advertising technology that is active on almost all websites and apps. RTB involves the broadcasting of sensitive data about people using those websites and apps to large numbers of other entities, without security measures to protect the data. This occurs billions of times a day.  Our examination of tens of thousands of pages of RTB data reveals that EU military personnel and political decision makers are targeted using RTB. This report also reveals that Google and other RTB firms send RTB data about people in the U.S. to Russia and China, where national laws enable security agencies to access the data. RTB data are also broadcast widely within the EU in a free-for-all, which means that foreign and non-state actors can indirectly obtain them, too.  RTB data often include location data or time-stamps or other identifiers that make it relatively easy for bad actors to link them to specific individuals. Foreign states and non-state actors can use RTB to spy on target individuals’ financial problems, mental state, and compromising intimate secrets. Even if target individuals use secure devices, data about them will still flow via RTB from personal devices, their friends, family, and compromising personal contacts. In addition, private surveillance companies in foreign countries deploy RTB data for surreptitious surveillance. We reveal “Patternz”, a previously unreported surveillance tool that uses RTB to profile 5 billion people, including the children of their targets. ]]> iccl rtb targeting profiling patternz google ads security national-security surveillance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:12f9c4852a7f/ 2023-11-14T11:29:04+00:00 https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2023/google-bard-data-exfiltration/ jm ai bard llm security infosec exploits prompt-injection xss google https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f9b8f80523c5/ 2023-10-04T16:40:20+00:00 https://blog.zgp.org/google-chrome-checklist/ jm browsers chrome privacy data-privacy google https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b8a9db5ae318/ 2023-08-29T08:25:08+00:00 https://ericdraken.com/pfsense-decrypt-ad-traffic/ jm blocking protobuf youtube google protocols appletv apps reverse-engineering https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9567c6ad4947/ 2023-07-05T14:49:54+00:00 https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486 jm ai content google ip scraping ml training https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1cfba998e7eb/ 2023-05-26T09:07:48+00:00 https://sites.google.com/view/nuitattack/home jma novel inaudible attack against voice assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana) that can be waged remotely through internet. Nuit  appears as a sound clip in near-ultrasound frequency range (16kHz-20kHz), thus can be played on the victim's COTS speaker to attack the voice assistant (i) on the same device (NUIT-1)；(ii) on victim's other devices (NUIT-2). ]]> nuit attacks exploits alexa google siri voice-assistants security https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b40e2b98abb7/ 2023-04-25T13:57:24+00:00 https://sea.mashable.com/tech/23295/google-launched-bard-despite-major-ethical-concerns-from-its-employees jm"The staffers who are responsible for the safety and ethical implications of new products have been told not to get in the way or to try to kill any of the generative AI tools in development," employees told Bloomberg. The ethics team is now "disempowered and demoralized," according to former and current staffers. Before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google's approach to AI was more cautious and less consumer-facing, often working in the background of tools like Search and Maps. But since ChatGPT's enormous popularity prompted a "code red" from executives, Google's threshold for safe product releases has been lowered in an effort to keep up with its AI competitors. ]]> google ai safety chatgpt bard corporate-responsibility https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e65ec4c86acb/ 2023-04-06T09:16:30+00:00 https://archive.is/L49pO#selection-1915.0-1923.256 jmContractors say they have a set amount of time to complete each task, like review a prompt, and the time they're allotted for tasks can vary wildly — from as little as 60 seconds to more than several minutes. Still, raters said it's difficult to rate a response when they are not well-versed in a topic the chatbot is talking about, including technical topics like blockchain for example.  Because each assigned task represents billable time, some workers say they will complete the tasks even if they realize they cannot accurately assess the chatbot responses.  "Some people are going to say that's still 60 seconds of work, and I can't recoup this time having sat here and figured out I don't know enough about this, so I'm just going to give it my best guess so I can keep that pay and keep working," one rater said. ]]> google raters contractors fact-checking verification llms bard facts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:567070929ebc/ 2023-03-24T11:25:15+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/22/23651564/google-microsoft-bard-bing-chatbots-misinformation jmWhat we have here is an early sign we’re stumbling into a massive game of AI misinformation telephone, in which chatbots are unable to gauge reliable news sources, misread stories about themselves, and misreport on their own capabilities. In this case, the whole thing started because of a single joke comment on Hacker News. Imagine what you could do if you wanted these systems to fail. It’s a laughable situation but one with potentially serious consequences. Given the inability of AI language models to reliably sort fact from fiction, their launch online threatens to unleash a rotten trail of misinformation and mistrust across the web, a miasma that is impossible to map completely or debunk authoritatively. All because Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have decided that market share is more important than safety. ]]> google ai ml microsoft openai chatgpt trust spam misinformation disinformation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1f5b64825f87/ 2023-01-04T11:39:31+00:00 https://downrightnifty.me/blog/2022/12/26/hacking-google-home.html jmI was recently rewarded a total of $107,500 by Google for responsibly disclosing security issues in the Google Home smart speaker that allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a “backdoor” account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the Internet, access its microphone feed, and make arbitrary HTTP requests within the victim’s LAN (which could potentially expose the Wi-Fi password or provide the attacker direct access to the victim’s other devices). These issues have since been fixed. ]]> security google wiretapping exploits hacking iot reverse-engineering https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a2dc98e51556/ 2022-12-06T13:26:44+00:00 https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119595524/#Comment_119595524 jm android google pixel wifi-calling vowifi volte lte mobile https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:422df66b7e44/ 2022-11-15T12:47:56+00:00 https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/cloud-jewels-estimating-kwh-in-the-cloud jm We thought about how we might be able to estimate our energy consumption in Google Cloud using the data we do have: Google provides us with usage data that shows us how many virtual CPU (Central Processing Unit) seconds we used, how much memory we requested for our servers, how many terabytes of data we have stored for how long, and how much networking traffic we were responsible for. Our supposition was that if we could come up with general estimates for how many watt-hours (Wh) compute, storage and networking draw in a cloud environment, particularly based on public information, then we could apply those coefficients to our usage data to get at least a rough estimate of our cloud computing energy impact. We are calling this set of estimated conversion factors Cloud Jewels. Other cloud computing consumers can look at this and see how it might work with their own energy usage across providers and usage data. The goal is to help cloud users across the industry to help refine our estimates, and ultimately help us encourage cloud providers to empower their customers with more accurate cloud energy consumption data. This is a good interim step, but it's disappointing how inaccurate the CO2 data exposed by cloud providers is. IMO this needs to be fixed]]> climate co2 google cloud aws etsy estimation cloud-jewels sustainability https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e6277c4d2cc9/ 2022-10-20T09:55:47+00:00 https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1582593768280461313 jm load-balancing history google ops liz-fong-jones service-meshes sidecars proxies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:03d4d5d9c0a0/ 2022-10-03T21:43:18+00:00 https://twitter.com/buccocapital/status/1576909546164928513/photo/1 jm lpa google fail promotions how-we-work culture https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:71e62edacc23/ 2022-09-26T10:24:26+00:00 https://9to5google.com/2022/09/25/google-photos-corrupted/ jmOver the weekend, people began noticing that their years-old photos (over five years, approximately) have lines and deep cracks running through them, as well as other blurry or distorted areas. White dots are also a common occurrence. Some images are more damaged than others with seemingly no pattern to what’s impacted or the severity. It’s weirdly somewhat analogous to physical water damage, with reports across Google Photos for Android, iOS, and the web. According to those affected, the corruption persists when downloading the image. This apparently applies to both individual downloads and when using Google Takeout. The original copies of pictures do not appear to be impacted, but the edited ones are what appear in the Google Photos apps.  ]]> google google-photos images compression fail artifacts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5a35ff10337c/ 2022-09-01T08:30:22+00:00 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/How-Google-Cloud-and-AWS-Approach-Customer-Carbon-Emissions/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374 jmOn a larger scale, Google Cloud is already at 100% carbon neutrality, apparently via offsets and a few other accounting approaches, with a goal to move to 100% renewable energy for all cloud regions by 2030. Meanwhile, AWS’s carbon footprint tool is an embarrassment to AWS and its stated goal of reaching 100% renewable energy usage by 2025. The bottom line: One of these carbon neutrality approaches is indicative of a thoughtful approach to partnering with customers to lead to a better climate story around cloud usage. The other appears to have been phoned in by clowns the night before it was due. ]]> aws google carbon climate-change co2 hosting https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:44b9a53ef1b0/ 2022-08-16T10:07:47+00:00 https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-supercharges-network-disks-for-extreme-low-latency jm discord google disks performance optimization scylladb md raid ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f663d3221476/ 2022-07-25T14:35:09+00:00 https://www.fastcompany.com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-to-america jm emoji gmail history google poop shit funny japan https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c4fdbba11f19/ 2022-05-04T14:05:38+00:00 https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji jm emoji fonts typography type google noto https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9ef2994a4357/ 2022-04-13T15:53:05+00:00 https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/nb314o/4a_doesnt_connect_to_lte_after_leaving_wifi/ jm lte google pixel pixel-4a hardware phones mobile https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:39c5838562e8/ 2022-04-07T10:01:42+00:00 https://twitter.com/kantrn/status/1511791378497384454 jmPromo committees have, for years now, been consistently undervaluing the work of full-time Kubernetes contributors. Or really of open source work more broadly. Attributable revenue has been taking over as one of the most important factors at most companies. And Kubernetes has very little of that. It's happened gradually, and I don't think this was ever an intended outcome but it's a thing and we have to live with it. It's too indirect, fixing a bug in kube-apiserver might retain a GCP customer or avoid a costly Apple services outage, but can you put a dollar value on that? How much is CI stability worth? Or community happiness? And then add on top of it, the time cost. "FOSS maintainers are overloaded" should not be news to anyone, but now add 20/hours a week of campaigning to other high-level folks to "build buzz" for your work and let me know how that goes. ]]> k8s open-source google amazon faang work promotions career https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0e5c1b6b53ce/ 2022-03-02T09:52:15+00:00 https://twitter.com/hiddenmarkov/status/1497351111656751109 jm ethics security google crowdwork crowdsourcing warfare war ukraine grim-meathook-future https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:600af00c269b/ 2022-01-25T10:14:09+00:00 https://twitter.com/emilyldolson/status/1485434187968614411 jm google fail funny false-positives copyright bugs loneliest-number google-drive https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d729183c85b2/ 2021-11-23T09:58:27+00:00 https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/6PM5mNd43NbMqjCZ5REh jm cloud outages tragic google race-conditions gclb patching deployment ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e167312e4892/ 2021-09-30T09:19:57+00:00 https://restofworld.org/2021/refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/ jmAll of the largest companies in the world are today powered by a covert crowd of the system’s castoffs. Platforms have found amid those struggling to stay afloat in informal work — or else barely clinging onto a life in formal employment — a desperate mass to be tempted with the promise of a better life. Such a promise, however, is broken as soon as it is made; the petty services of the informal sector resemble little more than a blueprint for the microtasks of big tech, without offering anything in the way of rights, routine, role, security, or a future. ]]> colonialism refugees ai data machine-learning amazon google tesla uber mechanical-turk https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:74e3b26de6c2/ 2021-09-28T21:42:55+00:00 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1442162670753431559?s=20 jm work jobs coding career google bigcos promotions roadmap https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:723957b301ff/ 2021-09-23T09:07:56+00:00 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc jmThis lack of a support culture, combined with a “let’s break it in the name of making it prettier” deprecation treadmill, is alienating their developers. And that’s not a good thing if you want to build a long-lived platform. Google, wake the fuck up. It’s 2020. You are still losing. It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror and answer for yourselves whether you really want to be in the Cloud business. If you do, then stop breaking shit. You guys are rich. We developers are not. So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, you need to pay for it. Not us. This is absolutely correct -- API deprecation is a lovely thing when you're the one doing the deprecating, but it's a disaster for the user experience, and sometimes that should be the most important thing.]]> deprecation compatibility google apis support culture https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b6592f19ab22/ 2021-08-18T10:33:04+00:00 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lu7XPRKlNhBQjcKr8k8qRzUzbBW7kzxb5Vu72GMRn2E/edit jm art ml gan vqgan clip google collab toys https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:237573cc412e/ 2021-08-05T09:46:35+00:00 https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43146.pdf jm via:gradybooch ai ml machine-learning google papers coding research production glue https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b258450e4145/ 2021-06-16T08:49:04+00:00 https://github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption jmThis repository contains open-source libraries and tools to perform fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) operations on an encrypted data set. [...] Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an emerging data processing paradigm that allows developers to perform transformations on encrypted data. FHE can change the way computations are performed by preserving privacy end-to-end, thereby giving users even greater confidence that their information will remain private and secure. ]]> cryptography encryption google security fhe homomorphic privacy data-privacy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:533ecf4cf2e5/ 2020-04-28T15:55:43+00:00 https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/27/1000658/google-medical-ai-accurate-lab-real-life-clinic-covid-diabetes-retina-disease/?truid=8c8f2699f50eb3b9985a111121cfee47 jmWhen it worked well, the AI did speed things up. But it sometimes failed to give a result at all. Like most image recognition systems, the deep-learning model had been trained on high-quality scans; to ensure accuracy, it was designed to reject images that fell below a certain threshold of quality. With nurses scanning dozens of patients an hour and often taking the photos in poor lighting conditions, more than a fifth of the images were rejected. Patients whose images were kicked out of the system were told they would have to visit a specialist at another clinic on another day. If they found it hard to take time off work or did not have a car, this was obviously inconvenient. Nurses felt frustrated, especially when they believed the rejected scans showed no signs of disease and the follow-up appointments were unnecessary. They sometimes wasted time trying to retake or edit an image that the AI had rejected. Because the system had to upload images to the cloud for processing, poor internet connections in several clinics also caused delays. “Patients like the instant results, but the internet is slow and patients then complain,” said one nurse. “They’ve been waiting here since 6 a.m., and for the first two hours we could only screen 10 patients.” The Google Health team is now working with local medical staff to design new workflows. For example, nurses could be trained to use their own judgment in borderline cases. The model itself could also be tweaked to handle imperfect images better.  ]]> google health medicine ai automation software internet developing-world real-world images scanning https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5622d91f3d62/ 2020-04-23T10:48:55+00:00 https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows jmOur latest advancement in sustainability, developed by a small team of engineers, is a new carbon-intelligent computing platform. We designed and deployed this first-of-its kind system for our hyperscale (meaning very large) data centers to shift the timing of many compute tasks to when low-carbon power sources, like wind and solar, are most plentiful. This is done without additional computer hardware and without impacting the performance of Google services like Search, Maps and YouTube that people rely on around the clock. Shifting the timing of non-urgent compute tasks—like creating new filter features on Google Photos, YouTube video processing, or adding new words to Google Translate—helps reduce the electrical grid’s carbon footprint, getting us closer to 24x7 carbon-free energy. ]]> energy google sustainability green clusters datacenters power https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c82fd1e31d0c/ 2020-04-21T22:15:37+00:00 https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink jm starlink satellite cool google gmaps streetview web https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:21084d1f8cd1/ 2020-02-26T12:09:46+00:00 https://blog.container-solutions.com/the-green-cloud-how-climate-friendly-is-your-cloud-provider jm datacenters aws azure google hosting climate-change sustainability offsetting https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e11995538cba/ 2020-02-13T14:59:57+00:00 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/you-cant-say-that-policing-the-long-tail-of-public-opinion-on-facebook-tickets-92904081609 jmPresented by Tech Won’t Build It Ireland and School of Multidisciplinary Technology TU Dublin and the TU Dublin Critical Media Literacy Group: Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter employ around 100,000 people worldwide to vet content posted by their users - online bullying, hate speech, extreme violence, pornography, fake news, and worse. Most content moderators are employed by third-party companies who provide services to the major Internet companies. Thousands of those content moderators are based here in Ireland. It’s becoming increasingly clear that many moderators experience trauma and PTSD as a result of the volume of disturbing content that they’re exposed to, often without adequate preparation or support from their employer. In late January this year, one contractor (Accenture) even asked employees to sign a document acknowledging the risk of PTSD, and making them individually responsible for dealing with it. Two groups of current and former employees are suing Facebook over this issue, in both California and Ireland. Chris Gray is the lead plaintiff in the case against Facebook and contractor Cpl Resources that is now going through the Irish High Court. Chris will walk us through how content moderation works, how moderators are trained, conditions on the job, and how moderators make decisions. He will tell us about the psychological impact of this work, and his experience taking a legal case against his former employer Facebook, one of the world’s largest technology companies. We’ll also discuss the tradeoffs between free speech, hate speech, censorship and fake news; and the role of regulation versus corporate responsibility for content on Internet platforms. ]]> facebook google content-moderation chris-gray social-media media twitter moderation vetting ptsd work https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4442027eb6b0/ 2020-01-29T16:13:32+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/27/21080253/ai-cancer-diagnosis-dangers-mammography-google-paper-accuracy jm“There’s this idea in society that finding more cancers is always better, but it’s not always true,” Adewole Adamson, a dermatologist and assistant professor at Dell Medical School, tells The Verge. “The goal is finding more cancers that are actually going to kill people.” But the problem is “there’s no gold standard for what constitutes cancer.” As studies have found, you can show the same early-stage lesions to a group of doctors and get completely different answers about whether it’s cancer. And even if they do agree that that’s what a lesion shows — and their diagnoses are right — there’s no way of knowing whether that cancer is a threat to someone’s life. This leads to overdiagnosis, says Adamson: “Calling things cancer that, if you didn’t go looking for them, wouldn’t harm people over their lifetime.” As soon as you do call something cancer, it triggers a chain of medical intervention that can be painful, costly, and life-changing. In the case of breast cancer, that might mean radiation treatments, chemotherapy, the removal of tissue from the breast (a lumpectomy), or the removal of one or both breasts entirely (a mastectomy). These aren’t decisions to be rushed. Overdiagnosis, he says, “is a problem for a lot of different cancers; for prostate, melanoma, breast cancer, thyroid. And if AI systems become better and better at finding smaller and smaller lesions you will manufacture a lot of pseudo-patients who have a ‘disease’ that won’t actually kill them.” ]]> overdiagnosis health medicine cancer computer-vision automation ai google diagnosis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2a73fa29b63c/ 2020-01-27T15:59:09+00:00 https://cloudonaut.io/how-to-secure-your-devops-tools-with-alb-authentication/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374 jm aws alb authentication load-balancers openid google saml auth https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4cb0e4a66ade/ 2020-01-21T11:07:01+00:00 https://pair.withgoogle.com/ jm ux ai design google graphics tips machine-learning https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:717d33fb1d13/ 2020-01-13T13:16:22+00:00 https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html jmToday, we're happy to announce the rollout of an end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recognizer to power speech input in Gboard. In our recent paper, "Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition for Mobile Devices", we present a model trained using RNN transducer (RNN-T) technology that is compact enough to reside on a phone. This means no more network latency or spottiness — the new recognizer is always available, even when you are offline. The model works at the character level, so that as you speak, it outputs words character-by-character, just as if someone was typing out what you say in real-time, and exactly as you'd expect from a keyboard dictation system. (Via Nelson)]]> asr voice ai google rnn-t rnn neural-networks via:nelson offline gboard speech https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:99c05fade10d/ 2020-01-13T12:47:49+00:00 https://alexolivier.me/posts/deploy-container-stateless-cheap-google-cloud-run-serverless jmAfter using Cloud Run for over a year now I have never had to touch a server, VM, cluster or anything else. This is truly a deploy and forget service. Due to it being fully managed there are a few requirements to make your application compatible. The only real one you have to worry about it to ensure your application runs an HTTP server and listens on the port set in the PORT environment variable that is present at runtime of your container. The beauty of Cloud Run is that it is only ‘running’ your container when it gets traffic. The pricing model is setup that you only pay for the CPU/memory/network bandwidth used when your app is getting requests. It achieves this by deploying your app on demand when traffic hits the domain name they give you, it hangs around for a bit (undetermined) until after traffic stops, and the the app is torn down. The other way to look at this is autoscaling - when there is no traffic, it scales to 0. There is a cost in the form of time - if you app takes time to ‘setup’ when it starts up, you will be making your users wait as Cloud Run scales up your application from 0 to 1+ instances. From my own use I’ve found this to be negligible though. Due to this pricing model I’ve never paid more than a few cents - yes CENTS - a month for all my side projects (10+ deployed currently). This is a factor of the little traffic I get to them so you may need to do the maths for yours - the pricing page is here. As Cloud Run takes any container image and deploys it, you can use any language you want. Be it Node, Go, Java, PHP or something entirely obscure, as long as it speaks HTTP and listens on the port defined in the PORT environment variable, Cloud Run doesn’t care what you do inside the container. I've become increasingly impressed by Google's cloud offerings, and this sounds great. Gonna have to give it a go.]]> hosting cloud docker google containers cloud-run https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:baeecc41934e/ 2019-12-17T15:30:11+00:00 https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1206679612543111169 jm images image-search search yandex google bing tricks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:191db8cea4e1/ 2019-12-16T16:54:33+00:00 https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/09/23/the-secret-sharer/ jmTake a system trained to make predictions on a language (word or character) model – an example you’re probably familiar with is Google Smart Compose. Now feed it a prefix such as “My social security number is “. Can you guess what happens next? ]]> neural-networks ai machine-learning secrets differential-privacy training google papers security https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a9628ca1eeb5/