A library of snippets
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I am interested in this because physical banknotes are central to the global criminal economy, and I am fascinated by how Western central banks have been issuing ever-larger volumes of them, despite the fact the legitimate use of cash money is falling everywhere, without anyone asking where they’re all going.
From Does Britcoin have a future? Central Bank Digital Currencies have a moment – Coda Story:
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AI experts call the phenomenon “hallucination,” or the propensity of tools based on large language models to simply make stuff up. Last week, Google introduced a competing AI tool that also included factual errors — although the mistakes were quickly called out by viewers.
From Microsoft Bing AI made several errors in launch demo last week.
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Lee Atchison, software architect and author on the topics of cloud computing and application modernization.
Machine learning and AI “should be the headline of any discussion about the future of DevOps,” says Atchison. The productivity implications of DevOps combined with AI can be enormous. “Having tools like that that can help us scan the reliability of our system before it becomes an issue is going to become critical”.
Developers are using AI as a sort of coding buddy, to come up new ideas. As Atchison points out “nothing is more hyped nowadays than ChatGPT. But in the end it’s not a tool to replace people, but help perform some types of tasks”.
From AI and DevOps, combined, may help unclog developer creativity | ZDNET.
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“nothing is more hyped nowadays than ChatGPT. But in the end it’s not a tool to replace people, but help perform some types of tasks,”
From AI and DevOps, combined, may help unclog developer creativity | ZDNET.
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Two men are facing charges for allegedly conspiring with Russian nationals to hack the taxi dispatch system at JFK International Airport, charging taxi drivers a fee to cut the taxi line, prosecutors said.
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Hacking the JFK Airport Taxi Dispatch System
[2022.12.23] Two men have been convicted of hacking the taxi dispatch system at the JFK airport. This enabled them to reorder the taxis on the list; they charged taxi drivers $10 to cut the line.
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To make their point, the watchdog spent less than $15,000 on building a password-cracking rig — a setup of a high-performance computer or several chained together — with the computing power designed to take on complex mathematical tasks, like recovering hashed passwords. Within the first 90 minutes, the watchdog was able to recover nearly 14,000 employee passwords, or about 16% of all department accounts, including passwords like ‘Polar_bear65’ and ‘Nationalparks2014!’.
The watchdog also recovered hundreds of accounts belonging to senior government employees and other accounts with elevated security privileges for accessing sensitive data and systems. Another 4,200 hashed passwords were cracked over an additional eight weeks of testing.
From A government watchdog spent $15,000 to crack a federal agency’s passwords in minutes | TechCrunch.
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More than a fifth of the passwords protecting network accounts at the US Department of the Interior—including Password1234, Password1234!, and ChangeItN0w!—were weak enough to be cracked using standard methods, a recently published security audit of the agency found.
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The results weren’t encouraging. In all, the auditors cracked 18,174—or 21 percent—of the 85,944 cryptographic hashes they tested; 288 of the affected accounts had elevated privileges, and 362 of them belonged to senior government employees. In the first 90 minutes of testing, auditors cracked the hashes for 16 percent of the department’s user accounts.
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Since 2017, China has held at least seven of these competitions—called Robot Hacking Games—many with multiple qualifying rounds. The first included one team each from the United States, Russia, and Ukraine. The rest have been Chinese only: teams from Chinese universities, teams from companies like Baidu and Tencent, teams from the military. Rules seem to vary. Sometimes human—AI hybrid teams compete.
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One of the world’s leading computer security experts Bruce Schneier identifies a number of ways that the automation of co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour will be immediately deployed to the detriment of the body politic. He notes that it could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes, write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers and comment on social media posts millions of times every day. In effect it could do the work of the Russian Internet Research Agency, but without the agency’s budget and employees.
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