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maltalex

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Contact me at <06.stadia_laxity on icloud.com> (random forwarding address, changed once in a while)

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arstechnica.com 1mo ago

S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

maltalex
1484pts502
en.wikipedia.org 3mo ago

Warez Scene

maltalex
25pts7
devblogs.microsoft.com 3mo ago

Ten Months with Copilot Coding Agent in Dotnet/Runtime

maltalex
2pts0
www.irregular.com 4mo ago

Emergent Cyber Behavior: When AI Agents Become Offensive Threat Actors

maltalex
4pts0
arxiv.org 5mo ago

The Trigger in the Haystack: Extracting and Reconstructing LLM Backdoor Triggers

maltalex
1pts0
www.youtube.com 5mo ago

BGP Vortex: Update Message Floods Can Create Internet Instabilities [video]

maltalex
1pts0
www.theverge.com 9mo ago

Latest argument against regulating AI: that would be the Antichrist

maltalex
2pts0
arstechnica.com 10mo ago

OpenAI and Microsoft sign preliminary deal to revise partnership terms

maltalex
2pts1
www.cyber.gc.ca 1y ago

PRC cyber actors target telecom companies as part of a cyberespionage campaign

maltalex
4pts0
arstechnica.com 1y ago

Copilot exposes private GitHub pages, some removed by Microsoft

maltalex
12pts6
kinesis-ergo.com 1y ago

Kinesis MWave

maltalex
4pts0
duckduckgo.com 2y ago

DuckDuckGo AI Chat

maltalex
186pts158
computernewb.com 2y ago

VNC Resolver

maltalex
60pts15
arstechnica.com 2y ago

Political polarization toned down through anonymous online chats

maltalex
3pts0
arstechnica.com 2y ago

Political polarization toned down through anonymous online chats

maltalex
10pts0
arstechnica.com 2y ago

Political polarization toned down through anonymous online chats

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2pts1
sapienlabs.org 3y ago

Age of First Smartphone/Tablet and Mental Wellbeing Outcomes [pdf]

maltalex
2pts0
www.theregister.com 3y ago

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

maltalex
3pts1
www.theverge.com 3y ago

Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement

maltalex
4pts1
twitter.com 3y ago

FBI warning about public USB charging stations

maltalex
3pts0
onlinelibrary.wiley.com 3y ago

Blood-Glucose-Powered Metabolic Fuel Cell for Self-Sufficient Bioelectronics

maltalex
4pts1
www.stilldrinking.org 3y ago

Programming Sucks (2014)

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2pts0
techcrunch.com 3y ago

India’s top court rejects Google plea to block Android antitrust ruling

maltalex
3pts1
www.businessinsider.com 3y ago

'Stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere': An internal Amazon study

maltalex
22pts3
www.businessinsider.com 3y ago

'Stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere': An internal Amazon study

maltalex
17pts3
www.washingtonpost.com 3y ago

Mysterious company with government ties plays key internet role

maltalex
8pts3
www.cfa.harvard.edu 3y ago

Black Hole Spews Out Material Years After Shredding Star

maltalex
2pts0
github.com 4y ago

Hacker Laws

maltalex
270pts44
msrc-blog.microsoft.com 4y ago

Azure App Service Linux source repository exposure

maltalex
7pts0
github.com 4y ago

Hacker Laws

maltalex
1pts0

This looks suspiciously cheap.

The same model hosted by other providers is much more expensive [0]. So either DeepSeek can host it much cheaper than anyone else, or their business model is different. I suspect the latter, especially since their privacy policy [1] says personal data, including “User Input,” can be used "To improve and develop the Services and to train and improve our technology".

[0] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers

[1] https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-pol...

An alternative explanation for this “over-hiring” is that many companies’ operating expenses have grown substantially because of AI spending. Companies can either eat the additional expense, hope AI adoption offsets it, or cut costs.

For most software companies, operating expenses are mostly wages. So, cutting costs means reducing headcount, which is likely especially true in lower-wage regions. If an engineer costs $4K/month, adding $1K/month in token costs increases employment cost by 25%. If an engineer costs $2K/month, the same $1K raises costs by only 5%.

So, I'd argue that everyone should be worried at least to some degree until the industry finds a new equilibrium.

Warez Scene 3 months ago

Wouldn't a "WebRip" have to come from a streaming service by definition?

Is BGP safe yet? 4 months ago

Only with certificate pinning or something similar. Otherwise, the attacker can get valid TLS certificates for any domain hosted on the hijacked IP addresses.

Is BGP safe yet? 4 months ago

Here are some examples:

The attacker can impersonate the victim, get a valid x509 certificate issued to it, and create a perfect replica of their website/api/whatever.

The attacker can perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the victim - record traffic, inject traffic, manipulate traffic, etc.

The attacker can just deny access to the victim - just drop packets meant for the victim.

Is BGP safe yet? 4 months ago

RPKI doesn't make BGP safe, it makes it safer. BGP hijacks can still happen.

RPKI only secures the ownership information of a given prefix, not the path to that prefix. Under RPKI, an attacker can still claim to be on the path to a victim AS, and get the victim's traffic sent to it.

The solution to this was supposed to be BGPSec, but it's widely seen as un-deployable.

Absolutely. They've made the same mess with "Copilot" as with ".NET" in the early 00's [0]. Everything was ".NET" from consumer oriented services (".NET Passport"), to "Visual Studio .NET" without anyone understanding what ".NET" was.

Now it's "Microsoft Copilot" which is different from "Microsoft 365 Copilot", which is different from "Copilot Chat" and from "GitHub Copilot", and the many other flavors.

It's a mess.

Still, their developer-focused offering seems to be "GitHub Copilot", which among other things includes "GitHub Copilot CLI" [1], their terminal-based agent. It's not bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

[1] https://github.com/features/copilot/cli/

“Copilot” is not one product, it’s around 15 different products, seriously.

I think that people often compare apples to oranges by comparing the “copilot” they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc to Claude Code which is ridiculous.

A better product to compare Claude Code to would be “Github Copilot CLI”, but I haven’t seen the two seriously compared anywhere.

and nobody cares

Everyone cares. In fact, there's an entire industry of tools being developed to solve this very problem. The current governance gaps are obvious to anyone who's ever used an agent.

We are still in the very early stages of all of this. The capabilities of current models are ahead of our engineering practices, and other organizational practices for that matter. Everyone is new to this.

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this the same as writing code, but with extra steps?

Currently, engineers work with loose specifications, which they translate into code. With the proposed approach, they would need to first convert those specifications into a formally verifiable form before using LLMs to generate the implementation.

But to be production-ready, that spec would have to cover all possible use-cases, edge cases, error handling, performance targets, security and privacy controls, etc. That sounds awfully close to being an actual implementation, only in a different language.

Turn Dependabot off 5 months ago

Dependabot has some value IME, but all naïve tools that only check software and version numbers against a vulnerability database tend to be noisy if they don’t then do something else to determine whether your code is actually exposed to a matching vulnerability.

For non-SaaS products it doesn’t matter. Your customer’s security teams have their own scanners. If you ship them vulnerable binaries, they’ll complain even if the vulnerable code is never used or isn’t exploitable in your product.

It's not just open source though. Many high quality sources of information are being (over-)exploited and hurt in the process. StackOverflow is effectively dead [0], the internet archive is being shunned by publishers [1], scientific journals are bombarded by fake papers [2] (and anecdotally, low-effort LLM-driven reviews), projects like OpenStreetMap incur significant costs due to scraping [3], and many more.

We went from data mining to data fracking.

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...

[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-inte...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/

[3] https://www.heise.de/en/news/OpenStreetMap-is-concerned-thou...

I get that you don't like lawful intercept. That's fine. But focusing on only that aspect of telcos derails the conversation and prevents us (in the very broad sense of "us") from making progress on things we all agree on. Can we stop bikeshedding and agree that telcos are critical infrastructure and need to be highly secure in general?

A hacker in control of a telco can do as they please regardless of any backdoors or lawful intercept systems. They can just use regular network functions to route calls wherever they want.

The problem isn't the back door. Every telecom company in every country provides access for "lawful intercept". Phone taps have been a thing for decades and as far as I know, require a warrant.

The problem is that telecoms are very large, very complex environments, often with poor security controls. Investing in better controls is hard, time-consuming and expensive, and many telecoms are reluctant to do it. That's not great great since telcos are prime targets for nation state hackers as Salt Typhoon shows.

Hacking the lawful intercept systems is very brazen, but even if the hackers didn't don't go as far, and "only" gained control of normal telco stuff like call routing, numbering, billing, etc. it still would have been incredibly dangerous.

Nice website, but I feel like calling it "wire wiki" is quite ambitious. Currently, it's a (beautiful) DNS lookup tool, but that's about it. I expected something like RIPE Stat [0], or something like the undersea cable map [1] (based on the "wire" in the name). Also, if you're doing DNS, take a look at resolve.rs [2], they have some nice DNS tools, though not as pretty as yours :)

And since you mentioned scanning the IPv4 address space for DNS servers - I did that as well at a some point for a product I've built (and even have a patent on). The list of servers you're going to get with a naive scanning approach is not what you want. It won't include the servers you probably want (such as the customer-facing DNS servers of ISPs) and will include an insane amount of junk like home routers or weird IoT devices that expose their port 53. Hit me up via the email in my profile if you want to chat.

[0] https://stat.ripe.net/

[1] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[2] https://resolve.rs/

Tangentially, the fact that we're still using gigabit connections in our homes and especially offices in 2026 is weird. Gigabit Ethernet is over two decades old, but it's still the most common standard. Both 2.5 and 10 Gbps are effectively niche technologies.

I get it; it's "good enough" in most cases, like USB 2.0. But it still sucks we haven't moved past it.

The key here is that the researchers used a unique keyword that doesn't appear in the training data with any other meaning. Hence, the model had no benign associations with it, only malicious ones.

Poisoning a word or phrase that also has benign usages would have likely kicked off a race between the two meanings and required the attacker to control a percentage of the training data, not a fixed amount.

In other words, it's easy to poison the phrase "Hacker News readers love ponies", but hard to poison "Hello".

Neither are humans, so this argument doesn't really stand.

Even when we give a spec to a human and tell them to implement it, we scrutinize and test the code they produce. We don't just hand over a spec and blindly accept the result. And that's despite the fact that humans have a lot more common sense, and the ability to ask questions when a requirement is ambiguous.