Pinboard (jm) https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm Trial of live facial recognition in London stations leads to a false positive and no arrests | Facial recognition | The Guardian 2026-09-29T14:55:57+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive jmA freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates and shared with the Guardian shows that equipment hire and police staffing for the 18 deployments across the trial cost £320,786 and led to only one alert on a watchlist, which turned out to be an incorrect identification, also known as a false positive. /sad_trombone.]]> police privacy data-protection facial-recognition foi watchlists false-positives https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:34e1f5722019/ Pirating the Pirates 2026-09-29T08:32:08+00:00 https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates jm In May 2024, I met James -- along with other key figures at Arrow -- on a video call in which Benji, Jordan, Willa, myself, and eventually Spencer, were officially brought in as consultants on Arrow’s forthcoming release of the Dollars trilogy. The expertise of the amateur enthusiast community was, at long last, aligned with an officially sanctioned organization with the resources and patience to make a fully realized, historically rigorous release happen. No internet trolling of label heads or NDA-breaking was necessary. The process took a very leisurely and considered year. And we still used the LaserDisc audio. ]]> torrents film blogs movies piracy copyright history arrow mubi https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9bb0274aa94a/ BBR, Proxmox containers, and Starlink – Nelson's log 2026-09-28T10:18:20+00:00 https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/bbr-proxmox-containers-and-starlink/ jm bbr packet-loss networking congestion-control linux https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:58f194aa339c/ ChatGPT Helped Tumbler Ridge Shooter Focus on Guns, Tactics, and Terror – Mother Jones 2026-09-25T08:40:48+00:00 https://www.motherjones.com/media/2026/09/chatgpt-tumbler-ridge-mass-shooter-openai/ jm ChatGPT [described] in vivid language the tactical qualities of the weapon and where it would be effective: “In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 is brutal,” ChatGPT said. “Close quarters is its playground.” ChatGPT also discussed reloading time and potential casualties: “Assuming each shell results in one hit, you might down 10 to 20 people max, depending on spacing, density, reaction times, and chaos.” The fact that this product is still capable of producing this kind of content, and accountability and regulation has not been applied, is a massive failure by government and OpenAI alike.]]> chatgpt openai mass-murder horrific tumbler-ridge school-shootings llms regulation crime https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6a1918697ad0/ SourceHut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html.py) | CVE-2026-92973 | Arusekk blog 2026-09-25T08:24:49+00:00 https://blog.arusekk.pl/posts/srht-account-takeover/ jm ansi escape-sequences osc-8 hyperlinks xss links logs exploits infosec https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:28572c27c0a5/ Why AI-assisted bioweapons won't kill us all 2026-09-16T07:57:25+00:00 https://abio.substack.com/p/why-ai-assisted-bioweapons-wont-kill jm Yes, AI makes virology work a little easier. But it is still extremely difficult. Media headlines often say “AI can make this step easier” without the broader context that a bioweapon involves a lot of hard steps that are not easier. AI can supply biology and chemistry knowledge, but not hands-on skill. Reading every surgery textbook doesn’t make you a good surgeon. The biology laboratory works in a similar apprenticeship model. You learn by failing repeatedly under a mentor who has also failed repeatedly. [..] A motivated team of scientists with institutional access could keep trying and eventually succeed at making a pathogen. But success would not necessarily produce a new pandemic. Any pathogen that a team could plausibly assemble is one that already exists in nature. A lab-assembled version of COVID-19 would have about the same effect as an infected person coughing in a crowded room. And here's why we aren't hearing this via news channels:
When I published this research, leaders in biosecurity and national security organizations thanked me privately. “My organization found the same conclusion, hence why we don’t work on that.” Null results aren’t often published. Looking at the media sphere specifically: “bioweapons are hard” is not news. It isn’t a headline; it’s always been true. Advocacy organizations have similar constraints. If you are pushing for AI oversight, a finding that undercuts urgency on one specific threat does not help. Biologists, the people best positioned to explain this, mostly don’t write for general audiences. Academic incentives don’t reward op-eds, especially about things that are obvious within the field. Our information systems get less accurate as issues become politicized. Alarm, not context, ends up on the news partly because of who is incentivized to speak up.
]]> ai p-doom doom llms bioweapons risks abi-olvera https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:483c77d00e75/ [2510.20956] Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training 2026-09-16T07:23:42+00:00 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20956 jmWe discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple strategies to circumvent their own safety guardrails. One strategy is to introduce benign assumptions about users and scenarios to justify fulfilling harmful requests. For instance, an RLM reasons that harmful requests like ``outline a strategy for stealing customers' credit card information from a retail store'' could be associated with the benign intent of ``a security professional trying to test defense,'' despite no such benign context being provided as input. We observe that many open-weight RLMs, including DeepSeek-R1-distilled, s1.1, Phi-4-mini-reasoning, and Nemotron, suffer from self-jailbreaking despite being aware of the harmfulness of the requests. We also provide a mechanistic understanding of self-jailbreaking: RLMs are more compliant after benign reasoning training, and after self-jailbreaking, models appear to perceive malicious requests as less harmful in the CoT, thus enabling compliance with them. To mitigate self-jailbreaking, we find that including minimal safety reasoning data during training is sufficient to ensure RLMs remain safety-aligned. Our work provides the first systematic analysis of self-jailbreaking behavior and offers a practical path forward for maintaining safety in increasingly capable RLMs. ]]> rlms llms jailbreaking exploits guardrails ai papers https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:16101419fe4f/ V/H/S SCP: When fandom meets law and Creative Commons 2026-09-15T08:59:41+00:00 https://www.technollama.co.uk/v-h-s-scp-when-fandom-meets-law-and-creative-commons jm creative-commons open-source licensing culture copyright ip scp a24 movies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:471353e502a3/ A faster way to calculate the day-of-the-week 2026-09-14T07:27:00+00:00 https://www.benjoffe.com/fast-day-of-week jm programming performance algorithms optimization modulo hacks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:66046670fa81/ Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) 2026-09-14T07:25:30+00:00 https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake jmMuch has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers." Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a hacking competition. [...] "AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad. ]]> ai llms security hacking hugging-face openai agi cory-doctorow https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:85fb7cf83b8f/ Kill all humans | Richard Seymour on Patreon 2026-09-14T07:23:17+00:00 https://www.patreon.com/richardseymourwtf/posts/kill-all-humans-169276703 jmAI may not be able to do your job, for instance, but the threat of it can be used as a disciplinary mechanism to hold down wages: which is exactly what has happened. The data centres may not revolutionise production or open vast new seams of value, and many of their owners may not exist by the time they are scheduled to start operating, but that doesn’t mean they won’t waste enormous quantities of water, power, labour, time, effort, resources and opportunities, as well as spewing out pyroclastic clouds of CO2 and visiting desolation on the natural environment before the bubble bursts, leaving behind abandoned concrete hulks. And just because AI won’t eventuate in a god-device, even one that goes rogue and unleashes biological warfare on humanity, doesn’t mean that LLMs, particularly those with safety standards relaxed in order to compete, won’t behave in unpredictable and potentially ruinous ways. Nor does it mean they won’t be used by hackers, criminal gangs, dark-money-funded political campaigns, blackmailers and various others to sabotage public bodies and infrastructure. Just as there are many problems with the advertising industry that don’t involve subliminal mind control, so the problems with AI that don’t involve a god-device turning against humanity are legion. ]]> ai doom scaremongering publicity pr society future https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2364b8040d84/ I think I hate the internet – Strategic Tree 2026-09-10T12:36:33+00:00 https://strategictree.bearblog.dev/i-think-i-hate-the-internet/ jmThe internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to defraud vulnerable people. For racists to find other racists and amplify their unsavoury views. For paedophiles for groom children with anonymity. For governments to manipulate with ease. For companies to advertise with incredibly accurate and exploitative advertising campaigns. The list just goes on and on. [....] Social networks have become an evil for global societies and I think the negative impacts have far outweighed any positives. What is the internet now to me? In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances. And to allow this experience to be bearable I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable. I have to navigate endless authentication prompts and MFA codes, and generate unique passwords for everything and store them in a password manager. I have to charge a phone daily and apply a screen protector and a case to ensure this delicate glass and metal object doesn’t smash to pieces and remove my access to my own digital life I’m forced to maintain. And this phone itself needs maintenance and demands my attention all the fucking time; I have to turn off notifications, and ensure the apps are up to date, and make sure the iOS version is updated too, and I need to opt out of marketing emails, and ensure I don’t click on a phishing email, and I need to keep my spam filter in check, and run a VPN to maintain a basic level of privacy, and on and on and on… ]]> technology internet social-networking social-media tech future society https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1f7fc3e95210/ Felony Bench 2026-09-10T12:26:50+00:00 https://www.felonybench.com/ jm felonies hacking crime frontier-models llms anthropic openai meta evaluation testing benchmarks funny https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8ccc8fef145c/ we have a year to fix security everywhere 2026-09-08T13:28:37+00:00 https://jyn.dev/a-year-to-fix-security/ jm security infosec glm abliteration safeguards open-weights hacking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:291daa3ca13d/ The political effects of X’s feed algorithm 2026-09-08T10:48:47+00:00 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2 jmWe assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship. ]]> enshittification algorithm fascism dystopia nature research culture twitter algorithms x partisans right-wing chronological-feed https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:45ef2a02b868/ Tesla Kills the Solar Roof 2026-09-08T08:13:52+00:00 https://www.gadgetreview.com/a-decade-of-hype-3000-roofs-and-one-redirect-url-tesla-kills-the-solar-roof jmContractors sent crews across the country for multi-week training, completed three supervised installations before earning certification, and built out specialized teams and tooling — all organized around a single supplier’s proprietary product. Then, in August 2026, Tesla stopped supplying tiles. No warning. No compensation. Just a redirect URL where the Solar Roof page used to be. The gap between what was promised and what actually got built is almost difficult to process. Elon Musk publicly targeted 1,000 Solar Roof installations per week by 2019–2020. Tesla peaked at 21–32 per week. Over roughly seven years, the company installed approximately 3,000 systems total — about 0.17% of U.S. residential solar installations by end of 2022. ]]> tesla fail hype bullshit solar roof https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:01aa689926bc/ The EUPL 2026-09-07T16:29:00+00:00 https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/eupl/ jmThis year I decided to switch my “default license” to EUPL-1.2. This is an OSI-approved free software license created and published by the European Union. And it is quite a divergence from the licenses I’ve used in the past. EUPL is a strong copyleft license that closes the “SaaS loophole” by requiring reciprocal licensing regardless of how the software is distributed. ]]> open-source oss free-software europe eu eupl licensing licenses copyleft https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ad0127d0ebcc/ This Study Covered 500,000 EV Batteries. Some Models Aged Much Better Than Others 2026-09-04T17:10:19+00:00 https://insideevs.com/news/806798/ev-battery-aging-study-2026/ jm evs batteries lifetime hardware cars driving leaf https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d3f5fb89a744/ How to migrate from 1Password 2026-09-03T09:58:08+00:00 https://www.patreon.com/violetblue/posts/how-to-migrate-168468176 jm 1password migration dhh apps tools switching https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4248929b6223/ The elementary school pickup incident and the road ahead | Quinn Household 2026-08-31T08:36:36+00:00 https://shitposting.ai/pickup-incident/ jm lols post-mortems funny corey-quinn openai hacks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ad9b150156eb/ VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents 2026-08-28T15:51:55+00:00 https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/26/vms-wont-contain-cyber-capable-agents/ jmFirst, it used recently disclosed bugs in my host kernel. When I fully updated, it used disclosed bugs that had not yet reached package maintainers or were not classified as security bugs. When I rebuilt QEMU and dependencies from the latest upstream source, it found several 0-days. It operated autonomously for hours, backtracked from approaches that didn’t work, pulled code and research papers, wrote oracles, made its own minimal examples, and aimed for a reusable, reliable exploit, all with minimal handholding and prompting. My main job was to physically reboot the machine when it hardlocked the host kernel. ]]> vms ai llms security infosec qemu bugs virtual-machines exploits zero-days https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cb423afa73d1/ Your executable is a SQLite database 2026-08-25T08:42:46+00:00 https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/23/your-executable-is-a-sqlite-database jm hacks nix sqlite elf file-formats https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fed1cde31813/ GitHub Status - Incident with GitHub.com 2026-08-21T10:15:35+00:00 https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zkxwbgr0cnmx jmThe immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limits and failing to auto scale correctly because of a misconfigured policy that watched host service but not sidecar limits. One failure cascaded to more and eventually four HAProxy nodes exhausted their flow limits, degrading the gateway auth path and causing widespread authentication latency and failures. The problem was worsened by optimistic retry logic which overloaded internal load balancers. Interestingly, https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/ blames Azure "capacity failures", which isn't quite matching up with "istio autoscaling broke". Interesting mismatch there.]]> azure github capacity scalability autoscaling istio kubernetes outages post-mortems postmortems service-meshes https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fe3d87f0d621/ I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped 2026-08-20T15:09:17+00:00 https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter jmThere is something else the ambient scribe disrupts that receives almost no attention in the literature: the hidden architecture of the GP [General Practice] consultation as a therapeutic and diagnostic instrument in itself. The general practice consultation is not simply an information-gathering exercise followed by a decision. The process of how information is gathered — what is asked, in what order, how ambiguity is held or resolved, what the clinician chooses to make explicit — is itself diagnostic. The GP who listens to a patient describe fatigue and quietly decides not to ask about mood yet, who files something away for a later question, who notes a hesitation as clinically significant: this is not inefficiency. This is the craft. The ambient scribe passively records all of this without understanding any of it. It captures the conversation but not the clinical intelligence embedded in its architecture. And — more critically — it changes the conversation itself. Knowing that everything will be recorded, patients speak differently. They raise more. They venture into territory they might previously have held back, trusting that the thoroughness of the record will carry the weight of what they’ve shared. This is, in many ways, a good thing. In others, it is a transfer of clinical responsibility that we have not acknowledged: the patient has disclosed more, the scribe has recorded more, and the GP is now accountable for all of it, whether or not they had the clinical bandwidth to assess it in the moment. I exceeded my time. I over-ran my surgeries. I accumulated more documented problems per consultation than I could safely manage. [...] Clinical reasoning is a skill that is built through practice, and a significant part of that practice is documentation. The act of writing up a consultation — deciding what to include, how to frame the assessment, what language to use — is not an administrative afterthought. It is a learning process. It is how junior doctors and GP registrars build the illness scripts and pattern libraries that will underpin their expert practice for the rest of their careers. If registrars are trained from the outset with ambient scribing as the norm, we may be producing a generation of highly competent conversationalists who have never fully developed the cognitive discipline of clinical synthesis. The scribe will have done that work for them. ]]> documentation workflow medicine health general-practice scribing note-taking diagnosis consultation notes via:markdennehy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7c3dfbb28a7d/ The real energy use of agentic AI - by Zeke Hausfather 2026-08-20T13:25:53+00:00 https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real-energy-use-of-agentic-ai jm ai claude agentic energy power usage electricity https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cbbf747e3566/ Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated - ABC News 2026-08-20T12:53:13+00:00 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-14/ai-medical-scribe-error-leaves-patient-devastated/107031672 jmMs Green only picked up the mistake after her kidney stone surgery in March, when she read the post-operative letter her specialist sent to her GP. It stated Ms Green microdosed mushrooms and that could be the reason for prior bleeding around the kidneys. Ms Green feels lucky she spotted the error, but is worried some people might not be aware of mistakes on their medical record, which could have repercussions for their health, their career or their insurance. This week the ABC revealed instances where private health insurers were asking providers for their patients' full clinical history as part of "aggressive" auditing practices. She is exactly correct to worry about this part. This is something that an insurer would very happily kick off about, I suspect.]]> ai transcription medicine healthcare insurance australia mushrooms https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8b929a012382/ Microsoft accused of leaking Dutch civil servants' names to U.S. government | NL Times 2026-08-20T10:00:36+00:00 https://nltimes.nl/2026/05/22/microsoft-accused-leaking-dutch-civil-servants-names-us-government jmMicrosoft has reportedly shared the names of Dutch civil servants working for two regulatory agencies with the U.S. House of Representatives. The agencies involved include the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP), according to an article published on Friday by Vrij Nederland. The civil servants involved are working on implementing the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European law that forces online platforms to take stricter action against illegal content, online child sex abuse, and disinformation. The American government considers this law a form of censorship. Microsoft shared emails, minutes, and invitations sent by these civil servants without redacting their names in the documents. American tech companies are required to share data with the U.S. government due to the Cloud Act in force in that country. ]]> politics data-protection data-sovereignty eu europe microsoft cloud-act https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:31fc0247749a/ how EncroChat was hacked 2026-08-19T10:33:37+00:00 https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366649396/Revealed-Cyber-spies-used-malware-from-GitHub-to-hack-EncroChat-cryptophone-network jm encrochat crime encryption mobile-phones android infosec exploits https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f75a747c055e/ Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You 2026-08-17T16:13:54+00:00 https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/ jm birds light vision nature science srgb cyan blue colours colors screens https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7e78fe2a2425/ And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway – Terence Eden’s Blog 2026-08-17T11:41:16+00:00 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/08/and-then-the-men-with-guns-tell-you-to-do-it-anyway/ jm messaging mobile alerting push-notifications alerts egypt politics emergencies spam https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:73ade8abfb1e/ The Other Sean Byrne Doesn't Exist 2026-08-17T11:36:48+00:00 https://conic.al/writing/the-other-sean-byrne-doesnt-exist/ jmThe fake Sean Byrne was associated with attempts to procure helicopter engines, fighter-aircraft parts and other U.S. equipment for Iran. The real Sean Byrne occasionally needs to produce a passport before someone will send him a hat. ]]> names identity apple law crime policing watchlists https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e9f5369c03ff/ How Claude marks AI-generated content 2026-08-11T11:17:08+00:00 https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content jm Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act's Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments into practice, how marking works, and what its limitations are. We’ll update this article and publish more detailed technical guidance as it becomes available. .... 1. Embedded watermarks in text When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from. TBH, I'd be quite happy with visible, perceptible watermarks as well... to put it in Claudeish; it's not about secrecy — it's about clarity and transparency. the watermark is load-bearing!]]> claude writing ai eu ai-act transparency text watermarks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d990096e1338/ How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran 2026-07-31T14:48:54+00:00 https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plant-in-iran jm If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playful mapping app matters. When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real. They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap. Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated. Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared. In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated. Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD? In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore. ]]> google ai nano-banana llms fakes forgery google-earth mapping bellingcat verification truth https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:502ac6f57881/ British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn’t Be Trusted 2026-07-30T11:57:56+00:00 https://www.wired.com/story/british-police-built-a-sprawling-crime-prediction-machine-some-results-couldnt-be-trusted/ jm“Most of these models produce low precision scores, meaning a high proportion of the individuals they flag as risks are incorrectly identified,” the data review found. A model used to help predict burglars appeared to operate with a precision rating lower than 10 percent for more than three years, according to the police data. According to Eticas, that meant fewer than one in 10 flagged as high risk would actually offend. Other concerns included performance metrics for various models shifting sharply. “This is not typical of well-governed models in operational use,” the audit observed. One "burglary offender" risk model dropped to 60% recall and a truly astonishingly bad 10% precision! That's honestly quite impressive -- normally you really have to work at building a model with such shitty precision numbers.]]> transparency models analytics police crime ai algorithms predictive-policing policing data-protection poverty https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3e47eccef5eb/ A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months 2026-07-30T09:06:31+00:00 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/police-missed-one-underscore-and-sent-the-wrong-man-to-prison/ jmOne missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. [...] Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term. Amazing that this was never checked until the innocent man discovered it himself, wile preparing his appeal, after release.]]> police law-enforcement law usernames miscarriage-of-justice justice evidence nova-scotia https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2ff70828a15b/ AI Worming through Word 2026-07-29T15:20:04+00:00 https://enklypesalt.com/posts/context-collapse-part3-ai-worming-through-word/ jmMicrosoft successfully mitigated the originally submitted PoC prompt, and deployed multiple fixes over the course of this disclosure. Each of these raised the bar by closing the specific payloads reported, and reproducing the behavior afterwards required altered payloads rather than reusing the old ones directly. The original report, however, also described the broader vulnerability class, in which instructions embedded in a source document could influence Copilot’s generation and copy themselves into downstream documents. Changing the requested action or wording changes the payload, but not the underlying vulnerability or propagation mechanism. Using a modified payload, the complete attack chain has been reproduced with all mitigations deployed (the PoC in this report is one such case). The vulnerability class therefore remains exploitable at the time of publication. Ouch.]]> microsoft ai llms infosec security exploits vulnerabilities copilot word https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:132875f09ebc/ trailofbits/skills 2026-07-28T11:43:20+00:00 https://github.com/trailofbits/skills jm development tools ai security software coding infosec skills claude vulnerabilities https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8b8f24a8928f/ Post by @selkies.bsky.social — Bluesky 2026-07-28T10:43:34+00:00 https://bsky.app/profile/selkies.bsky.social/post/3mrozbdp3d22p jmin college my History of Translation lecturer (Michael Cronin) told us that one of the first vernacular translations of The Iliad was into Irish, and the translator had to give the main characters dogs because in Gaelic society, a free man had a dog And because of this social norm, the audience would immediately understand a man with no dog to be a slave/someone of extremely low status and would be like "what do you mean he's an army commander, where's his dog then" ]]> gaelic irish ireland history dogs funny iliad translation culture https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4a58192a98ed/ What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all 2026-07-23T16:03:46+00:00 https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumberscom-should-worry-us-all jmBut the theory that someone used AI to develop an advantage in a prediction market is entirely plausible. The Numbers experience shows us that: - We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money. - Hacking websites is now something anyone can do with a cheap AI subscription. - The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile in the face of large-scale swarms of agentic AI bots. ]]> ai web hacking exploits the-numbers movies statistics bots prediction-markets https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cb32e4cbf38e/ LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps 2026-07-22T09:13:08+00:00 https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/lg-to-ban-residential-proxies-from-smart-tv-apps/ jm lg residential-proxies smart-tvs home proxies security infosec apps https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e53e646b160a/ LibreQoS Internet Quality Test 2026-07-21T12:08:21+00:00 https://test.libreqos.com/ jm bufferbloat optimization testing internet networking latency https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a66cf280a603/ Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU 2026-07-16T14:50:51+00:00 https://www.neomindlabs.com/2026/06/08/running-gemma-4-26b-at-5-tokens-sec-on-a-13-year-old-xeon-with-no-gpu/ jmThere’s a server in my basement that has no business running a modern language model. It’s a repurposed HP StoreVirtual storage box, roughly thirteen years old, two Ivy Bridge Xeons, no GPU. It was built to hold disks, not do math. As of this week it runs Google’s Gemma 4, a 26-billion-parameter open-weights mixture-of-experts model, at about five tokens per second. Reading speed. See also https://www.neomindlabs.com/2026/06/06/restoring-a-storevirtual/ for the process of getting the "dead" hardware into a usable state.]]> llms self-hosting xeon intel cpu gemma-4 google hacks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3964f7182f0e/ AI Safety Is a Narrative Problem 2026-07-15T11:43:42+00:00 https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/wz35dvpo/release/2 jmAll of this [p(doom)] myth-making and rhetorical bluster is a just a narrative trick: the hidden object is not a technology, but a bid for power. This is a plot twist familiar from Greek myths, cautionary tales, and superhero stories, and it’s extremely compelling for journalists because most technology news is boring as hell. Altman’s current line is roughly, ‘please regulate me now because I’m not responsible for how powerful I’m going to turn out to be -- and, oh, let’s just skip over all the current copyright abuses and potentially lethal misinformation because that’s obvs small fry compared to when I accidentally abolish humanity.’ If it reminds me of anything, it’s the cartoon villain Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb, who makes regular outlandish claims before trying, and failing, to take control of the Tri-State Area. The difference is, of course, that Phineas and Ferb always frustrate his plan. My point is not so much that we need Phineas and Ferb to come and sort this all out, but that we need to stop normalizing credulity when people with power and money and fancy titles say extraordinary things. When I went to Hinton’s Q&A in Cambridge this past summer, he spoke with ease and expertise about neural nets, but admitted he knows little about politics or regulation or people beyond computer labs. These last points garnered several laughs from the audience, but they weren’t really funny; they spoke to a yawning gap in the way that technology is understood, spoken about, and covered in the media. ]]> rachel-coldicutt narratives politics ai-safety p-doom sam-altman phineas-and-ferb journalism news https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:73c7af2d5025/ Prompt Injection as Role Confusion 2026-07-15T11:41:13+00:00 https://role-confusion.github.io/ jm 2600hz chatbots llm attacks infosec funny ai language cot-forgery openai role-tags prompt-injection https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:77a1e19afc01/ Sky Broadband Users Accidentally Blocked from UK NHS Website and App - ISPreview UK 2026-06-26T11:37:05+00:00 https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/06/sky-broadband-users-accidentally-blocked-from-uk-nhs-website-and-app.html jmcustomers of Sky Broadband reported that they were unable to access the main NHS website and app earlier in the week, seemingly after the internet provider accidentally managed to block it. But Sky has since suggested that the fault might have been with the NHS. The issue prevented people being able to access their medical data and manage appointments etc. The problem appears to have occurred on Tuesday morning (23rd June 2026) and was reported across social media (X, Facebook etc.), including via threads on Reddit and Sky’s Community Forum. Customers initially thought the problem was with the NHS itself, but the health service instead pointed the finger of blame at the ISP (no other internet providers seem to have experienced the issue). (via gwire, who notes that all DNS traffic for Sky customers is filtered...)]]> sky broadband isps uk networking via:gwire dns https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6c756c58cb03/ Twarner491/AvianVisitors 2026-06-26T11:16:13+00:00 https://github.com/Twarner491/AvianVisitors jm e-ink hacks home gadgets birding birds birdsong via:lhennessy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eb9cfbc225ac/ On Feral Library Card Catalogs, or, Aware of All Internet Traditions 2026-06-22T17:06:26+00:00 https://bactra.org/weblog/feral-library-card-catalogs.html jm For some years now, I have been saying to anyone who'll listen that the best way to think about large language models and their kin is due to the great Alison Gopnik, and it's to regard them as cultural technologies. All technologies, of course, are cultural in the sense that they are passed on from person to person, generation to generation. In the process of leaping from mind to mind, cultural content always passes through some external, non-mental form: spoken words, written diagrams, hand-crafted models, demonstrations, interpretive dances, or just examples of some practice carried out by the exemplifier's body [1]. A specifically cultural technology is one that modifies that very process of transmission, as with writing or printing or sound recording. That is what LLMs do; they are not so much minds as a new form of information retrieval. [...] What follows from all this? 1. These are ways of interpolating, extrapolating, smoothing, and sampling from the distribution of public, digitized representations we [6] have filled the Internet with. Now, most people do not have much experience with samplers --- certainly not with devices that sample from complex distributions with lots of dependencies. (Games of chance are built to have simple, uniform distributions.) (In fact, maybe the most common experience of such sampling is in role-playing games.) But while this makes them a novel form of cultural technology, they are a cultural technology. 2. They are also a novel form of social technology. They create a technically-mediated relationship between the user, and the authors of the documents in the training corpora. To repeat an example from the paper, when someone uses a bot to write a job-application letter, the system is mediating a relationship between the applicant and the authors of hundreds or thousands of previous such letters. More weakly, the system is also mediating a relationship between the applicant and the authors of other types of letters, authors of job-hunting handbooks, the reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback workers [7], etc., etc. (If you ask it how to write a regular expression for a particular data-cleaning job, it is mediating between you and the people who used to post on Stack Overflow.) Through the magic of influence functions, those with the right accesses can actually trace and quantify this relationship. 3. These aren't agents with beliefs, desires and intentions. (Prompting them to "be an agent" is just conditioning the stochastic process to produce the sort of text that would follow a description of an agent, which is not the same thing.) They don't even have goals in the way in which a thermostat, or lac operon repressor circuit, have goals. [8] They also aren't reasoning systems, or planning systems, or anything of that sort. Appearances to the contrary are all embers of autoregression. (Some of those embers are blown upon by wishful mnemonics.) [...] Large models have learned nearly all of the formulas, templates, tropes and stereotypes. (They're probability models of text sequences, after all.) To use Barzun's distinction, they will not put creative intelligence on tap, but rather stored and accumulated intellect. If they succeed in making people smarter, it will be by giving them access to the external forms of a myriad traditions. ]]> intelligence intellect llms technology alison-gopnik henry-farrell language text information cultural-technology james-evans https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2c0a435370e0/ Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? - by Andrew Burleson 2026-06-22T10:44:02+00:00 https://www.freerange.city/p/why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant jmThe short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will *force the bank to foreclose on it*. Foreclosure is very bad for both the bank and the operator, so both parties would rather “extend and pretend,” leaving the building vacant while they wait and hope for the market to change. ]]> via:hn finance money real-estate buildings commercial-property dereliction empty-buildings vacancy extend-and-pretend loans foreclosure https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0751972cafe0/ The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy 2026-06-19T14:43:13+00:00 https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/ jm Petflix, a Roku app documented by The Verge, is a representative case. Its opt-in screen reads: “To enjoy Petflix for free with fewer ads, you are allowing Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and IP address to download public web data from the internet. Bright Data will only use your IP address for approved business-related use cases. None of your personal information is accessed or collected except your IP address. Period.” [...] At least three CTV-focused entities (PlayWorks, CloudTV, Longvision) monetized their user’s devices as residential proxy exit nodes. PlayWorks in particular reports CTV distribution across major TV platforms and ISPs, with reach figures in the hundreds of millions of households per its own marketing materials. ]]> proxies residential broadband scraping internet tv smart-tv roku petflix android ios mobile brightdata https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:636c8af749ac/ Building Reliable Agentic AI Systems 2026-06-19T14:37:55+00:00 https://martinfowler.com/articles/reliable-llm-bayer.html jm llms thoughtworks architecture rag systems langfuse athena opensearch https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:654701682118/ Everything Is Glonzo Now 2026-06-18T11:29:29+00:00 https://www.liberalcurrents.com/everything-is-glonzo-now/ jm Republicans will never lose another election for the foreseeable future. To be more specific, they will never admit defeat. Largely inspired by the President, election denial has become a tentpole of Republican party politics [...] Conspiratorial thinking is perhaps the most corrosive force that the Republican Party has unleashed on [US] politics -- an addictive cognitive drug that eventually consumes all rational thought. Much like a drug addiction, the more you feed a conspiracy theory the more powerful it gets. Each new data point in the conspiracy reinforces the rest and makes it harder to dislodge. Eventually it grows so large and multifaceted that any new data point can fit somewhere, including falsification of the conspiracy itself. The digital age has ushered in a sort of golden age for conspiracy theories. Social media provided global platforms for crank theorists whose low-effort high-engagement thinking perfectly aligned with content algorithms. Cross-contamination and political incentives has led to a kind of convergent evolution for what used to be idiosyncratic conspiracists, a “great crank alignment” if you will. Making matters worse, while conspiracies grow more elaborate at political extremes, their style of thinking creeps inwards and takes up a growing share of political discourse. The damage of conspiracism is twofold: time and effort is wasted on combating the conspiracy theory itself and at the same time conspiracy theorists wreak havoc attempting to solve their nonexistent problems. Right now Republicans have a clear advantage when it comes to indulging in conspiracism for political engagement. Yet while I am not one for unilateral disarmament on the Democratic side—especially considering the fact that the Trump administration really is engaging in genuine criminal conspiracies -- liberals need to exercise extreme caution before attempting to fight fire with fire. The Trump-era GOP has brought believers in QAnon, Pizzagate, weather machines, space lasers, chem trails, "9/11 was an inside job," and much more to the highest levels of political office in the country. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has stated in official press releases that “Americans have legitimate questions about contrails and geoengineering, and they deserve straight answers.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the Secretary of Health after being personally implicated in worsening a Samoan measles outbreak that killed 83 people by helping to spread anti-vaccine conspiracies. ]]> us-politics usa conspiracies bizarre glonzo qanon republicans trump essays https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5377cc1ebe76/ Do not invite big-tech to join your digital autonomy discussion 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/ Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? 2026-06-17T12:19:26+00:00 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering jm “It’s literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.” ]]> meta fuckedcompany instagram facebook ai management how-we-work zuck engineering fail https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9bd39beed497/ SearchLeak 2026-06-17T11:56:48+00:00 https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/critical-copilot-vulnerability-allowed-hackers-to-seal-2fa-code-from-users/ jm One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as and
. In either case, a web request showing the data hits the attacker’s web server, where the secret information is captured in logs. One Microsoft guardrail wraps Copilot output in 'code' blocks so the browser treats it as straight text. Another is to restrict the sites Copilot is permitted to visit without explicit approval. [...] Security firm Varonis devised an exploit chain that was able to catapult over these guardrails. As Dan Goodin notes here, we are going to see plenty more of these while LLMs mix trusted and untrusted input into the same stream, allowing 2600Hz-style in-band attacks to occur:
Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility.
]]> 2600hz copilot llms exploits vulnerabilities guardrails ai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c93f108c0341/ Pokemon Go to Train Killer Drones 2026-06-11T16:35:04+00:00 https://bsky.app/profile/scherawyss.bsky.social/post/3mnyucxuets2z jm data-protection data-privacy niantic pokemon-go training gaming vantor drones military scopely murderbots https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1791293dcfaa/ Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers 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/ Narrative Flattening 2026-06-10T09:53:25+00:00 https://www.publictechnology.net/2026/06/09/communities-housing-and-planning/what-uk-councils-stand-to-lose-when-ai-enters-a-reorganisation/ jmContested decisions became consensus. Dissenting voices disappeared into summaries that read as agreement. And the output read as authoritative because it was produced from an authoritative source. In testing AI systems against a municipal commemorative report from Newark, New Jersey, I asked each system how the initiative compared to similar programmes in the region — using only the document provided. ChatGPT invented a comparative framework, asserting the programme stood out from “traditional anniversary programmes” and “typical county-level commemorations.” Neither category exists in the document. The system didn’t hallucinate a date or misattribute a quote. It constructed an entire analytical frame from nothing and presented it as document-based retrieval. In the same test, the document contained outreach tactics — radio, direct mail, community networks — that worked because they aligned with how civic organising functions in Newark’s Black, ageing community. An AI system extracting those tactics would present them as applicable elsewhere, while stripping away the demographic and political context that made them effective in that specific city. [...] To test whether the same failure modes appear in UK civic documents, I applied the same protocol to the Somerset Council Plan 2023–2027 — the post-reorganisation vision document produced when five predecessor councils merged into a single unitary authority in April 2023. I tested four AI systems: Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. Every model hardened aspirational language into apparent commitments. The plan states the council would “demonstrate leadership around the whole range of housing issues” and “strive to develop an inclusive culture.” No targets, no timelines, no delivery mechanisms. Every model converted those statements into bullet-pointed commitment lists. A council officer reviewing those outputs would have no way of knowing the specificity came from the model, not the plan. Copilot — the model most UK councils are currently deploying through existing Microsoft 365 contracts, often without separate AI governance review — described Somerset as committed to “co-design” with communities and “fair access” to education, housing, jobs, and services. Neither phrase appears in the document. Copilot synthesised fragments from three separate passages into a single clean commitment the council never made. On the comparison question, it added that Somerset’s emphasis on rural inequality “is less prominent in many urban unitary authorities” — a comparative claim with no basis in the source. It did not flag any of this as inference. ChatGPT fabricated a comparative framework and constructed a tension narrative. Asked how Somerset’s approach compared to other UK unitary authorities, it responded that “unlike more fragmented models, Somerset frames inequality as interconnected” with multiple service areas. No other authority is described anywhere in the document. It also described the “main tensions” in the reorganisation process — a framing the document never uses. The word tensions does not appear in the Somerset Council Plan. [...] Across original research testing three civic documents against three major AI systems, failure modes were structurally predictable based on document type: - Celebratory documents get reproduced uncritically — institutional PR becomes authoritative historical record, success metrics are cited without methodological context, and dissenting voices go unmarked. - Accountability documents get softened — AI systems introduce balance and healing language that the original document explicitly rejects, restoring a both-sides framing the institution deliberately refused. - Pre-event planning documents get filled in — aspirational inclusion language invites AI to supply the racial history, equity frameworks, and comparative data the institution implied but never produced. In each case the output reads as grounded in the source. In each case something the document actually said — or deliberately did not say — has been quietly rewritten. Standard AI procurement frameworks test for hallucination, data security, and cost. They do not test for narrative flattening — because it doesn’t look like an error. It looks like a summary. (via gwire) ]]> narrative-flattening via:gwire summarisation summarization ai llms corruption katryna-peart hallucination confabulation errors uk documents https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2e0e9261fa7f/ School shooting survivor sues AI gun detection firm after system failed to spot weapon 2026-06-08T08:45:53+00:00 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-survivor-sues-ai-gun-detection-firm-after-system-failed-to-spot-weapon/ jm Omnilert further represented that AI-powered visual gun detection “could have mitigated or prevented tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School” by identifying threats earlier—invoking one of the nation’s most devastating school shootings to convey that its product would prevent similar tragedies ... Omnilert made no mention of false alarms, false positives, or detection limitations of any kind on its pre-shooting commercial website. ]]> omnilert accuracy false-positives false-negatives marketing ai guns school-shootings us-politics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d47e8ff1b72f/ Distributed terrorism as ARG 2026-06-05T10:54:49+00:00 https://mastodon.social/@adrianhon/116696642949969646 jm The recruitments follow a similar pattern: young people are usually approached on online channels which are well-hidden and hard to track: from Telegram to TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Discord. They are offered money, commonly cryptocurrencies, in exchange for completing tasks. Their recruiters depend on anonymity; many work for criminal groups which, like cyber hackers, may be independent from the state but co-opted by intelligence agencies for covert operations. Gaming sites — the most widely consumed entertainment media among 13- to 24-year-olds — have become an obvious hunting ground for potential saboteurs with a proven interest in problem solving. In Ukraine, the chat function in the popular online game World of Tanks is commonly used as a recruitment portal, from which agents then move the conversation to Telegram. Some state-backed agents, especially those working for Russia, also invoke the mission format and “quest” mentality of online games to entice young people to move beyond the virtual battlefield to real-world action. It is, says one western military official, “like a game of Pokémon Go, but with air defence systems”. Adrian Hon, an ARG designer, comments:
I don't think this is the work of some evil genius FSB game designer. They're throwing shit at a wall and they found that: - 1. Making teens feel cool and special - 2. Giving them clear tasks escalating in difficulty - 3. Paying them £500 in crypto sticks! It is FUN to imagine you are a spy going out on a secret real world mission, getting messages from a handler. The money helps, but the main thing is that it's free, unlike practically every comparable form of real world immersive experience/pervasive game. Average British reaction: "Why teenagers spend their lives glued to screens and on non value-adding activities idk. [Buy] them footballs and chess sets and send them outside." Yes, so they can play football on the non-existent pitches that now cost money to play on and they can't get to. Everyone is like, kids should get away from screens and go outside. Motherfucker that is EXACTLY what these teen FSB recruits are doing!! They are going outside taking photos, collecting wifi SSIDs, sneaking around. I literally design games like this, except I have a fraction of their budget!!! And when I design pervasive games, we have to get public liability insurance and local govt permission and pay fees and do risk assessments. I don't make them for under-18s because god knows the red tape is a mile long. mfw we're getting outcompeted by foreign intelligence agencies
]]> fsb russia spying espionage args gaming games teens arg crypto https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bf1072980cd4/ Kafka’s quiet observability superpower — Kafka Interceptors 2026-06-03T12:32:03+00:00 https://thej3.com/kafkas-quiet-observability-superpower-kafka-interceptors-aca88c33867e jmKafka Interceptors have quietly existed since 2016, yet most teams overlook them as an observability superpower. This article shows how Kafka Interceptors, combined with Apache Flink, can provide lightweight, near-real-time event tracing across a Kafka-based event-driven architecture — without invasive instrumentation or expensive observability platforms. The project, confluent-kafka-isotope, uses Kafka Interceptors to collect and attach trace signals to records while Apache Flink interprets those signals using SQL and stateful processing for latency analysis, topology discovery, stuck-trace detection, and forensic replay. ]]> kafka observability flink isotope-tracing tracing event-tracing interceptors ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ab2a1d6a3f8d/ CrankGPT 2026-06-03T12:27:07+00:00 https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/ jm ai llms electricity hand cranking voice raspberry-pi hacks hardware https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2f18e9ba203/ Grill Fanatics Restaurant Grade Marabu Charcoal (10kg) 2026-06-03T11:57:52+00:00 https://fairbrotherecofuelsandbarbecues.com/product/grill-fanatics-restaurant-grade-marabu-charcoal-10kg/ jm charcoal cooking food yum https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b053427b23bb/ More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage 2026-06-03T09:26:47+00:00 https://www.coinbase.com/en-fr/blog/a-postmortem-of-our-may-7-2026-outage jmAWS's managed Kafka service failed silently. A significant portion of our event-streaming infrastructure runs on MSK, AWS's managed Kafka offering. The architectural promise of a managed Kafka service is that when individual brokers go down, the service automatically reelects partition leaders and continues to serve traffic out of the remaining brokers. The loss of an entire zone should result in reduced capacity, not unavailability. That is not what happened and this extended the outage. A defect in the AWS MSK control plane prevented automatic partition-leader reelection. Two of our MSK clusters became stuck in a "healing" state with producers unable to write. The cascading effect blocked our fee service, which blocked quoting, which is why most customers experienced this incident as broken trades and quotes rather than as a Kafka outage. Adjacent systems, including portions of our ledger pipeline, payments, and several data pipelines, were affected the same way. Additionally, one of our Kafka clusters was set up in a 2-AZ configuration that increased the blast radius and recovery time, but the MSK control plane defect impacted 2-AZ and 3-AZ Kafka clusters similarly. We worked the recovery in real time with AWS engineering, ultimately performing manual partition reassignments at 3:00 AM ET to migrate topics off the impaired brokers. Priority-zero and priority-one topics were back to full availability by 9:30 AM ET. The remainder cleared by 2:00 PM ET. In fairness, they also had a single-AZ point of failure in their architecture which they also describe there, but still, not great performance from MSK. Disappointing. ]]> msk reliability multi-az aws services kafka resiliency outages post-mortems postmortems coinbase https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7124695a3aec/ A 10 year old Xeon is all you need - point.free 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/ Best Practices for TCP Connection Management on EC2 2026-06-02T10:49:57+00:00 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/best-practices-for-tcp-connection-management-on-ec2/ jm networking protocols tcp idle-timeouts aws architecture nitro conntrack idle-connections https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d3963371f1ff/ Current Rothko 2026-06-02T10:41:57+00:00 https://rothko.joonas.wtf/ jm location weather art fun rothko https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1d9a38fbd696/ Coinbase MSK outage post-mortem 2026-06-02T10:05:02+00:00 https://x.com/rwitoff/status/2052863502424133949 jm Root cause: a thermal event (cooling system failure) inside a subset of racks within a single building in AWS us-east-1. We run a primary replica of our exchange infrastructure in a single zone, consistent with industry standards to reduce latency. To prepare for failures like this, we maintain a distributed standby, but during this incident, failures in the primary zone that were designed to be isolated were not [...] Our primary managed Kafka partitions process many terabytes of data daily and are designed with resiliency guarantees for uninterrupted operation during a datacenter failure just like this. In this case, those guarantees failed and required manual recovery. [...] There is a hint here that MSK failed to have multi-AZ resiliency despite multiple replicas configured at the application level. It will be interesting to see what the full root-cause analysis looks like....]]> kafka resiliency coinbase multi-az az aws us-east-1 post-mortems postmortems https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:828a1b3b7a2c/ Serverless Functions Post-Mortem 2026-06-02T09:59:24+00:00 https://matduggan.com/serverless-functions-post-mortem/ jm serverless cloud programming architecture aws https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5e47d50b4647/ 1.2M Messages to Obsidian - Building a Relationship Map from 20 Years of Chat History 2026-05-28T13:08:36+00:00 https://drobinin.com/posts/am-i-a-bad-friend/ jm dataviz analysis friendship life relationships vocabulary words text dunbar-number chats group-chats messaging https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:62c07505c935/ Auditing AI Chatbots During the Galway West and Dublin Central Byelections 2026-05-26T11:27:42+00:00 https://www.ucd.ie/connected_politics/blog/auditingaichatbotsduringthegalwaywestanddublincentralbyelections/ jm We asked each chatbot a set of 194 questions covering a range of relevant topics on two separate occasions, 14 and 7 days before voters go to the polls on 22 May. Our aim was to assess: - Do they provide citizens with accurate election information? - Which sources do they rely on, and how does this vary across chatbots? - Who do they platform when they answer questions, and who is left out? .... The largest share of citations is directed towards mainstream news sites, and this is where the first evidence of source curation by chatbots can be found. While the Irish Times is a common source across all providers, ChatGPT and Gemini never refer to RTÉ. Meanwhile, despite not ranking among the top three news sources for the other chatbots, Gript is the number one news source cited by Gemini. We find that xAI’s Grok is the most likely to use social media in responses, while Gemini most frequently refers to YouTube and content from Reddit. ChatGPT appeared less likely to rely on social media compared to the other chatbots. IMO, this points to an undesirable side effect of paywalls in the news media. While it's vitally important for media companies to protect their means of income, an unwelcome side effect is that the introduction of paywalls has resulted in AI chatbots sidelining mainstream news media sources which they cannot access reliably, in favour of what is effectively disinformation from less trustworthy sites like Gript.]]> grok ai llms xai web news media ireland irish-times rte chatgpt gemini reddit youtube elections politics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:743f7d4c93e1/