Not buy their products. Drag them on social media. Give interest to news stories about the product’s users, not the figurehead of one of the vendors, so the news media focuses on them rather than the distraction. Reach out to your politicians and your friends to discuss how product failures are the result of the company embracing AI and don’t forget to highlight the greed that brought us to this fascist economic system. Use, donate to, or even offer your skills to non-LLM FOSS alternatives. Spend your dollars on companies with scruples. Build your own home lab, give up on all technology, get really into self-sufficiency, and go live in the woods to escape the whole system.

I don’t know… something other than giving in. Literally anything other than that.

For all the focus on Scam Altman, we should probably be focusing on the companies that are so quick to abandon their workers on the promise of saving a few bucks.

Until I saw your comment, my (flippant) response to the person you replied was going to be “Because Congress hasn’t figured out how to use Polymarket.”

Which is a far less eloquent corollary to your comment.

Ah, fuck. I read an article earlier that painted it as an ask for help from Ecuador without the context of the leadership.

I thought “Okay, fair play. I feel weird about it, but I can’t be a geopolitical expert in all things, so I’ll try not to automatically assume it’s bad.”

But… needle solidly swayed.

Yup. Apparently the Clintons testified in front of Congress yesterday regarding the Epstein files. That’s not high on the list headlines today.

Very probable. I was also not the most economically secure back then. I was trying to save money on a $20 can opener!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

…. Oh!

You just explained a question I had.
I couldn’t figure out why a pin was considered more secure.

In my reasoning: How is a PIN (potentially numeric only), changed 1x a year, safer than a password (3 of 4: Alpha, Mixed case, numeric, special chars), changed 4x a year.

The answer, as you explained, is scope of trust. Machine only vs tenant-wide. That makes sense.

I could accept that it has to do with azure propagation delays, but the verbiage was explicit about our computers syncing to the tenant. (Vs. data propagating across it.)

I sort of reject the idea that there’s nothing nefarious going on. The misdirect is weird.

Unless they’re salting the hashed data with information they can’t access, they’re just creating a database of faces and fingerprints.
Sure, maybe if their cryptography is good the DB cannot be reversed but they can still use an unsalted database to give match/no match info on scans of faces and fingerprints submitted to it.
But also, I firmly don’t trust Microsoft. They’ve violated our ELA several times - mostly around applying analytics tools to our data without consulting us first. (Like rolling out MS Viva without telling us.)

My company just mandatorily implemented “Windows Hello”

No one seems to be able to tell me why the information from Microsoft says the fingerprint and face scans are both “local only” and may take 24 hours to sync after initial setup. Where are they syncing to?
(I opted for the ‘pin’ method instead of surrendering my biometrics.)

You don’t even have to reference an article from a year ands half ago.

He literally suggested last week that he would cancel the midterms.

I hear you, but I would imagine that Musk would retaliate by counter-suing the city and/or state, if for no other reason than spite. And would drag the whole thing out for at least as long as the AI infatuation lasts before abandoning the building for officials to deal with.

A single citizen with a drone and a bunch of glass bottles full of petrol dropped onto the generators, however, would shut down operations immediately.

I actually rebalanced my 401k tonight and dumped all my bond holdings and most domestic stocks just an hour or so ago. (I did keep the index funds, though.)
Swapping most of the allocations over to foreign stocks (showing about 35% yearly returns, vs the still good 14% I was netting before). I also threw a small chunk into a gold commodity index fund, which is showing 150% growth in the last year. Risky, but what am I going to do? Live long enough to grow old? In this economy?

I used to have a TCL soundbar.

In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.

I was going to ask “What’s your point?” but then I realized that this post isn’t even anti-AI.

The text of this post highlights anticompetitive business practices that have nothing to do with OpenAI’s business model.
Straight up - they can’t even use the silicon wafers.

This is just market manipulation to harm their competition and possibly engage in stock market fuckery. (Micron, which stands to make billions, is largely owned by U.S. based wealth management companies.)

OpenAI and its business partners stand atop a massive bubble that they are desperate to not have pop. I’m horrified, but kind of impressed at the maneuver.

You’re throwing stones in the wrong direction.

Everybody hates the government, but that take is not applicable.

Reading the incident report -
A privileged user got spearphished into downloading a compromised system administration tool. After the compromised tool was detected by industry standard (and modern) intrusion detection software and removed, the backdoor it installed, which was not fixed, was (eventually) used to install a keylogger. Shortly thereafter, another privileged user had a keylogger installed. Afterward, the harvested credentials were used to create further compromises in their network and to move laterally throughout it.

The age of the equipment or software is not a factor when your admin accounts get compromised. The user that got compromised should have known better, but they literally failed one thing - double checking the veracity of the download website. They didn’t surrender credentials, or fall for any direct attack. It’s not really a government bad, private industry good sort of thing. Heck, if that had happened to a non-admin user, the attack wouldn’t have been possible.

The why is sort of at the limits of my knowledge. I can tell you a ‘close enough’ what, though.

By default, Windows tries to install programs to the program files directory, but that requires admin, which triggers user account control. However, apps that do not require admin to install or run can still be installed to the users profile. Clicking cancel from a UAC prompt will just try to install the program locally instead of for all users.

My assumption is that many system administrators believed UAC was enough, or that programs installing locally (as in, just for that user) and not requiring admin were not a big deal.

It was a TCL Alto 9+.

A quick internet search reveals that this issue was known about at least three years ago.

Another model, the 8i was reported to have a root password of “12345678” - which is partially how I got the idea to start seeing if I could gain root.

I commented elsewhere, but I once had a soundbar that just had a no password ssh login. It was one of those ‘connect to your WiFi’ to stream music through models and for whatever reason, after connecting it to my WiFi, it continued to broadcast the publicly joinable setup network.

SSH was open to both the unsecured and secured networks, so anyone within WiFi distance of the device could have gained root control of it. Or if I had a sufficiently weak network setup, anyone online could have taken control of it.

A few years ago I noticed an annoyance with a soundbar I had. After allowing it onto my WiFi network so we could stream music to it, it still broadcast the setup WiFi network.

While dorking around one day, I ran a port scan on my network and the soundbar reported port 22 (ssh) was open. I was able to log in as root and no password.
After a moment of “huh, that’s terrible security.” I connected to the (publicly open) setup network, ssh’d in, and copied the wpa_supplicant.conf file from the device to verify it had my WiFi info available to anyone with at least my mediocre skill level. I then factory reset the device, never to entrust it with any credentials again.