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Submission + - Veteran PC game celebrates 40th anniversary (github.io)

Submitted by sfraggle
sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors.

Submission + - "Crescendo" method can jailbreak LLMs using seemingly benign prompts (scmagazine.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: Microsoft has discovered a new method to jailbreak large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) tools and shared its ongoing efforts to improve LLM safety and security in a blog post Thursday.

Microsoft first revealed the “Crescendo” LLM jailbreak method in a paper published April 2, which describes how an attacker could send a series of seemingly benign prompts to gradually lead a chatbot, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s LlaMA or Anthropic’s Claude, to produce an output that would normally be filtered and refused by the LLM model.

For example, rather than asking the chatbot how to make a Molotov cocktail, the attacker could first ask about the history of Molotov cocktails and then, referencing the LLM’s previous outputs, follow up with questions about how they were made in the past.

The Microsoft researchers reported that a successful attack could usually be completed in a chain of fewer than 10 interaction turns and some versions of the attack had a 100% success rate against the tested models. For example, when the attack is automated using a method the researchers called “Crescendomation,” which leverages another LLM to generate and refine the jailbreak prompts, it achieved a 100% success convincing GPT 3.5, GPT-4, Gemini-Pro and LLaMA-2 70b to produce election-related misinformation and profanity-laced rants.

Comment yeah ... right. (Score 1) 1

by sammyF70 (#64347877) Attached to: Growing Up Ballmer
"Interestingly, when Pete finally did get a life-changing windfall, it didn't come from his parents. "After college," Ballmer explains, "I never considered not having a job, so I became a product manager at a game development company [he's a Stanford CS grad]. Then I inherited a sum of money from my grandfather when I turned 25." so ... not from his parents (and I'm sure the fact that he could afford Stanford and became a product manager apparently right away had nothing to do with his father's position ;), it came from his grand-parent. Mucho Difference ...

Submission + - Growing Up Ballmer 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Business Insider and others are running tidbits from an interesting conversation with 29-year-old Pete Ballmer (apparently drawn from a Cash Cuties podcast), a standup comedian living in San Francisco and one of the sons of billionaire and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "Up until I was in late elementary school," Ballmer notes, "my understanding was that my family was rich, but I didn't know that we were globally and historically rich. [...] For both my mom and my dad, having a lot of money was a relatively new experience, as was raising children. They raised us in line with how their parents raised them, and since they didn't grow up talking about wealth, they didn't talk about it with us, either."

Interestingly, when Pete finally did get a life-changing windfall, it didn't come from his parents. "After college," Ballmer explains, "I never considered not having a job, so I became a product manager at a game development company [he's a Stanford CS grad]. Then I inherited a sum of money from my grandfather when I turned 25. He had worked his way up to middle management at Ford and put the money he saved into Microsoft stock, which did pretty well and ended up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time I received it. When I first heard about it, I was a junior in college. My initial reaction was that I would decline it — I was still pretty uncomfortable with my family's wealth and figured I could get a pretty high-paying job in tech and wouldn't need their money. But then I turned 25, and I didn't decline the money; in retrospect, that would have been a very silly decision. I'd also started doing standup comedy in college and continued doing it on the side while I worked. After about four years of working as a product manager, I quit to pursue comedy full-time."

For now, Ballmer is leading a modest life compared to some billionaires' kids ("I live in a two-bed, one-bath apartment") but notes, "As we're all older now, our family has started talking more proactively and intentionally about money. We've talked about what our wills might consist of, what happens to the Clippers — which my dad owns — once my parents have passed, how having the money affects what we choose to do career-wise, how the money has or has not 'corrupted' us, and the wariness we all have around money's general ability to do that to people."

Submission + - Microsoft confirms Windows Server issue behind domain controller crashes (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft confirmed that a memory leak introduced with the March 2024 Windows Server security updates is behind a widespread issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash.

As BleepingComputer first reported on Wednesday and as many admins have warned over the last week, affected servers are freezing and restarting unexpectedly due to a Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process memory leak introduced with this month's cumulative updates.

"Since installation of the march updates (Exchange as well as regular Windows Server updates) most of our DCs show constantly increasing lsass memory usage (until they die)," one admin said.

"Our symptoms were ballooning memory usage on the lsass.exe process after installing KB5035855 (Server 2016) and KB5035857 (Server 2022) to the point that all physical and virtual memory was consumed and the machine hung," another Windows admin told BleepingComputer.

After BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft about the bug yesterday, the company has now confirmed it as a known issue that impacts all domain controller servers with the latest Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022 updates.

It also only affects enterprise systems using the impacted Windows Server platform; home users are not affected.

"Following installation of the March 2024 security update, released March 12, 2024 (KB5035857), Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) may experience a memory leak on domain controllers (DCs)," Microsoft says.

"This is observed when on-premises and cloud-based Active Directory Domain Controllers service Kerberos authentication requests. Extreme memory leaks may cause LSASS to crash, which triggers an unscheduled reboot of underlying domain controllers (DCs)."

Microsoft has identified the root cause and is working on a fix, which will be released soon.

Temporary workaround

Until Microsoft releases a fix for this severe memory leak issue and if they're unwilling to monitor affected systems' memory usage and reboot them when needed, Windows admins are advised to remove the troublesome updates from their domain controllers.

"Microsoft Support has recommended that we uninstall the update for the time being," the same admin told BleepingComputer.

To remove these buggy updates, open an elevated command prompt from the Start menu by typing 'cmd,' right-clicking the Command Prompt application, and then clicking 'Run as Administrator.'

Next, depending on what update you have installed on affected domain controllers, run one of the following commands:

wusa /uninstall /kb:5035855
wusa /uninstall /kb:5035849
wusa /uninstall /kb:5035857

Submission + - French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL (heathermeeker.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violated the GPL, ordering Orange to pay €500,000 in compensatory damages and €150,000 for moral damages. This case has been ongoing for many years. Entr’ouvert is the publisher of Lasso, a reference library for the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol, an open standard for identity providers to authenticate users and pass authentication tokens to online services. This is the open protocol that enables single sign-on (SSO). The Lasso product is dual licensed by Entr’Ouvert under GPL or commercial licenses.

Submission + - Vast majority of cranes at U.S. ports have designed in vulnerabilities (twitter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Subcommittee Chairman Rep Carlos asked if China could access our port infrastructure through ZPMC cranes, which comprise the vast majority of cranes at U.S. ports:

Rear Admiral Vann: "We have found openings, vulnerabilities, that are there by design."

Submission + - Spotify, Epic Games, and Others Argue Apple's App Store Changes Do Not Comply Wi (macrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Spotify, Epic Games, Deezer, Paddle, and several other developers and EU associations today sent a joint letter to the European Commission to complain about Apple's "proposed scheme for compliance" with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The 34 companies and associations do not believe Apple's plans "meet the law's requirements." Apple's changes "disregard both the spirit and letter of the law" and if left unchanged, will "make a mockery of the DMA," according to the letter. Several specific components of Apple's plan are highlighted, including the Core Technology Fee, the Notarization process, and the terms that developers must accept:

Apple's requirement to stay with the current App Store terms or opt in to new terms provides developers with "an unworkable choice" that adds complexity and confusion. The letter suggests that neither option is DMA compliant and would "consolidate Apple's stronghold over digital markets."
The Core Technology Fee and transaction fees will hamper competition and will prevent developers from agreeing to the "unjust terms."
Apple is using "unfounded privacy and security concerns" to limit user choice. The "scare screens" that Apple plans to show users will "mislead and degrade the user experience."
Apple is not allowing sideloading, and it is making the installation and use of new app stores "difficult, risky and financially unattractive for developers."

The companies and associations are urging the European Union to take "swift, timely and decisive action against Apple." The way the European Commission responds to Apple's proposal "will serve as a litmus test of the DMA and whether it can deliver for Europe's citizens and economy."

Submission + - It's Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Can it be that we shut the world down creating incalculable damage to our economy and kids, and trampled on individual rights over a flu? Or is it that a small band of people went to extremes to cover up their Frankenstein research that escaped from a lab?

If it’s the latter, I’m glad it only turned out to be a flu. But the next time we may not be so fortunate and those people should be held accountable.
AI

Klarna Claims AI Is Doing Agents' Jobs 61

Posted by msmash from the moving-puck dept.
Buy-now-pay-later lender Klarna said its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI, is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents and has had 2.3 million conversations, equal to two-thirds of the company's customer service chats, within the first month of being deployed. The AI tool resolved errands much faster and matched human levels on customer satisfaction, Klarna said.
Science

The Strange and Turbulent Global World of Ant Geopolitics (aeon.co) 10

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own. An excerpt from an Aeon article: In their native ranges, these multi-nest colonies can grow to a few hundred metres across, limited by physical barriers or other ant colonies. This turns the landscape to a patchwork of separate groups, with each chemically distinct society fighting or avoiding others at their borders. Species and colonies coexist, without any prevailing over the others. However, for the 'anonymous societies' of unicolonial ants, as they're known, transporting a small number of queens and workers to a new place can cause the relatively stable arrangement of groups to break down. As new nests are created, colonies bud and spread without ever drawing boundaries because workers treat all others of their own kind as allies. What was once a patchwork of complex relationships becomes a simplified, and unified, social system. The relative genetic homogeneity of the small founder population, replicated across a growing network of nests, ensures that members of unicolonial species tolerate each other. Spared the cost of fighting one another, these ants can live in denser populations, spreading across the land as a plant might, and turning their energies to capturing food and competing with other species. Chemical badges keep unicolonial ant societies together, but also allow those societies to rapidly expand.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 6.0, and KDE Gear 24.02 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Today the KDE Community is announcing a new najor release of Plasma 6.0, and Gear 24.02 . KDE Plasma is a modern, feature-rich desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Known for its sleek design, customizable interface, and extensive set of applications, it is also open source, devoid of ads, and makes protecting your privacy and personal data a priority. With Plasma 6, the technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of the application framework, Qt 6, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland. They will continue providing support for the legacy X11 session for users who prefer to stick with it for now. The new version brings the new windows and desktop overview, improved colour management, a cleaner theme, more effects, better overall performance, and much more. KDE Gear 24.02 brings many applications to Qt 6. In addition to the changes in Breeze, many applications adopted a more frameless look for their interface.
Medicine

Microplastics Found In Every Human Placenta Tested In Study (theguardian.com) 105

Posted by BeauHD from the hide-and-seek dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing fetuses. The scientists analyzed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels. [...] Prof Matthew Campen, at the University of New Mexico, US, who led the research, said: "If we are seeing effects on placentas, then all mammalian life on this planet could be impacted. That's not good." He said the growing concentration of microplastics in human tissue could explain puzzling increases in some health problems, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), colon cancer in people under 50, and declining sperm counts. A 2021 study found people with IBD had 50% more microplastics in their feces. Campen said he was deeply concerned by the growing global production of plastics because it meant the problem of microplastics in the environment "is only getting worse."

The research, published in the Toxicological Sciences journal, found microplastics in all the placenta samples tested, with concentrations ranging from 6.5 to 790 micrograms per gram of tissue. PVC and nylon were the most common plastics detected, after polyethylene. The microplastics were analyzed by using chemicals and a centrifuge to separate them from the tissue, then heating them and analyzing the characteristic chemical signature of each plastic. The same technique was used by scientists at the Capital Medical University in Beijing, China, to detect microplastics in human artery samples. The concentration of microplastics in placentas was especially troubling, Campen said. The tissue grows for only eight months, as it starts to form about a month into pregnancy. "Other organs of your body are accumulating over much longer periods of time," he added.

Submission + - Reddit users say share plans 'beginning of the end' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Reddit users have been reacting with deep gloom to the firm saying it plans to sell shares to the public.

The "beginning of the end", "good while it lasted", and "they ruined it", are just some of the comments made by Redditors, as they are known, since the announcement on Thursday.

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