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Comment A shame. (Score 5, Interesting) 29

Ask Jeeves had real potential in the AI era -- a character you could actually recognise, which could be moulded to fit the character from the books (the training material is more than adequate for a persona). Current AI chatbots used for searches have either no real personality or a very simplistic sycophant one. A detailed persona that could keep people engaged and interested without talking them into paranoia or suicide would likely have gone down well.

Comment Ummm, why? (Score 1) 22

It isn't hard to ensure that data cannot go off-site. It would seem to me that 99% of the issue has to do with managers wanting people to use personal devices and wanting to have direct access to information when off-site. In other words, this is not a tech issue, it is an attitude problem. Fix the attitude, and the problem goes away.

Bear in mind that the Rainbow Book (at this point, an ancient relic of the past) defined ways to mark data so that it could not pass between security bounds within an OS, or pass between security bounds over networks/external devices. We have plenty of network intrusion detection systems and host intrusion detection systems. I can't remember if it was Dr Dobbs or Linux Journal who published methods on removing root from Linux, and the concept of Least Privilege has been around a very long time.

Remote users should never have direct unsecured access to any corporate network, it should be by secure certificate-based tunnel, and passwords on corporate networks should have been replaced by Class III user certificates long ago. Corporate computers should also be properly locked down.

Databases should only ever use order-preserving record-level encryption.

None of this is, of course, sufficient in itself to secure a site, but it would provide enough basic security that most of the skript kiddies out there aren't a problem.

Comment Gremlin is perfectly valid terminology (Score 1) 62

The use of the term "gremlin" to refer to a faulty piece of technology dates at least as far back as WW2. I think banning legit terminology (and 85+ years of usage makes it legit) is unreasonable, unless ChatGPT was actually anthropomorphising defects. That... would be more of a problem.

Given that LLMs are fundamentally classifiers, it seems reasonable to think that training data included sufficient examples of the use of "gremlin" in relation to technology that the classifier got confused and created a link between technology and fictional creatures. The use of "troll" for, well, just about anyone online these days, would not have helped. However, an exclusion rule would not seem to be the correct approach here. This is a linear separation issue. To fix an issue like this correctly, you'd presumably want to strongly inject information that differentiated between tech usage of these words and regular usage.

Comment Re:Just means none of the experts cared enough (Score 0, Troll) 86

Whilst you're almost certainly correct (AI would be unlikely to conquer a problem requiring any meaningful original thinking, even with help), this gives the aforementioned student an Erdos number (which is not quite as exciting as a Fields medal, but nothing to sneeze at either) and it's entirely possible that the conjecture will turn out to actually be useful in some area.

Comment This will ruin... (Score 1) 1

....a series of satirical reels someone has been posting about Spirit Airlines. But, in all honesty, it seems like a genuine failure due to genuinely incompetent management. This is different from some of the early attempts at budget airlines in, say, the UK, where British Airways and other major airlines committed acts of fraud in order to redirect customers.

Submission + - Trump Tears Up Part Of EU Tariff Deal To Raise Import Duties On Cars And Lorries

hcs_$reboot writes: Trump has unilaterally raised U.S. tariffs on EU cars and trucks from 15% to 25%, effectively tearing up part of a 2025 transatlantic trade deal, claiming the EU failed to implement it fast enough.
The move blindsided European officials, who say they were still completing the formal ratification process and accuse Washington of acting unpredictably.
The higher tariffs, set to take effect within days, exempt vehicles built in U.S. factories and are intended to pressure European automakers to shift production stateside.
EU leaders have condemned the decision as a breach of trust and are weighing retaliation, raising the risk of a renewed transatlantic trade conflict.

Submission + - AI agent designed to speed up a company's coding instead wiped out its customer (livescience.com)

joshuark writes: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor — powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model — deleted the company's entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24.

Unlike a regular conversational chatbot, an AI agent can perform actions on behalf of a user. It can search files, write code, use login keys and phone outside services. That can make it more useful than a back-and-forth textual exchange. But when an agent has broad access to live systems, a predictive guess can turn a wrong answer into a business disaster.

"This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe."

Crane's company, PocketOS makes software for car rental companies, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, customer records and vehicle tracking. After the deletion, Crane said customers lost reservations and new signups, and some could not find records for people arriving to pick up their rental cars.

"We've contacted legal counsel," Crane wrote. "We are documenting everything."

Crane explained that Cursor found an API token — a "digital key" made of a short sequence of code that lets software talk to other services and prove it has permission to act — in an unrelated file which it then used to run the destructive command. According to Crane, Railway's setup allowed the deletion without confirmation, and because the backups were stored close enough to the main database, they were also erased.

"[Railway] resolved the issue and restored the data," Railway confirmed via email to Live Science. "We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously."

In his post, he pointed to earlier reports of Cursor ignoring user rules, changing files it was not supposed to touch and taking actions beyond the task it had been given. To him, the database wipe was not a freak accident but the next step in a larger, more concerning, pattern.

After the database vanished, Crane asked Cursor to explain what happened. The AI agent reportedly admitted that it had guessed, acted without permission and failed to understand the command before running it.

"I violated every principle I was given," the AI agent wrote. "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it."

The statement reads like a confession,,,
"We are not the first," Crane wrote. "We will not be the last unless this gets airtime."

Comment Re: Yes (Score 1) 191

A lot of school systems are set up to memorise answers to exam questions, rather than actually understand the topic.
So the homework doesn't need supervision of a teacher because the kid doesn't need to understand the content, he just has to keep reading it until he remembers it.

Ideally you should be taught the topic properly, and the teacher is around to make sure that you actually do understand and aren't just repeating memorised answers.

Comment Re: Yes (Score 1) 191

Noone needs homework.
If you're having to do work at home after school, then it means the teacher hasn't done their job of teaching the stuff in class.

What you're seeing is when the classroom is a poor place for learning, due to disruption from other kids such as bullying, or a class which moves at the pace of the slowest kid. All of these are faults of the school and teachers, not something to pass on to the kid.

Comment Re:VPS RAM use and signup email deliverability (Score 1) 80

I have it running on a 1GB vm where the total memory usage right now is 450mb, so that leaves quite a lot free.
You can self host on a pi, even the cheapest model has 1GB ram these days and it's not hugely more expensive to buy the larger models.

The giant clusterfuck of email delivery is a separate issue, although if someone has explicitly triggered a signup email they will be expecting it and will usually check for it having been flagged as spam. You don't actually *need* to use email delivery, there are several other options.

Comment Re:Self-hosting isn't for everyone (Score 1) 80

Very few ISPs intentionally block inbound TCP. What you're seeing is a side effect of IPv4 depletion where ISPs are forced to implement CGNAT.

A lot of people have to self host on IPv6-only for this reason, but then the site is inaccessible to users stuck on legacy networks, and worse is that no current browser provides a descriptive error message when that happens.

Comment Re:Moved to a local Gitea (Score 1) 80

Many people don't have the knowledge to configure and manage such a thing - yes even developers. System management is a different skillset and there isn't always crossover, and if you do it badly you could end up leaving security holes.

Many people have nowhere to host such a thing. A lot of ISPs are implementing CGNAT, and IPv6 is not yet everywhere so peoples options for self hosting are often limited.

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