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Comment Re:Where's my cut!? (Score 2) 46

by Frobnicator (#66266616) Attached to: New York Sues Kalshi For Running 'Illegal Gambling Operation'

Yes but also no.

The regulation isn't about "taking a cut", but primarily about financial crimes like money laundering and insider trading. Generally there are age requirements, as minors can't buy stocks or enter into futures contracts, though custodial accounts where the minor is authorized to use it are allowed. Every transaction is also associated with registered brokerage companies, every transaction tied to a taxpayer ID and account information. To participate the government requires documentation with a full legal name and government issued ID, and assorted other information to verify the person's identity.

In regulated markets every step has a paper trail can be tied back to a responsible human, the person who could potentially be jailed or fined for financial crimes.

Submission + - A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology.

By taking advantage of this flaw, which concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft’s navigation system.

“There’s a real probability that this is going to be a problem that’s fundamentally unsolvable,” says Charles Ye, an independent researcher and coauthor of the ICML paper.

Companies will typically hire teams of human testers to try to come up with novel attacks that break existing guardrails, a process known as red-teaming. Model makers also use LLM super-hackers (such as OpenAI’s GPT-Red) that find and exploit weaknesses in other models to automate parts of this process. The goal is then to take those attacks and train a new model to resist them and anything that looks like them.

The problem, says Jasmine Cui, another independent researcher and coauthor of the paper, is that the approach amounts to giving the models a list of things they shouldn’t do. But no list is exhaustive. “It’s like watching The Simpsons and they have Bart writing ‘I will not say something inappropriate to my teacher’ a hundred times,” she says. “And he still does things that are pretty crass anyway.”

The ICML paper describes attacks against several of OpenAI’s models, but Cui and Ye say that they have since seen similar results with models made by Anthropic, Alibaba, and DeepSeek.

Cui and her colleagues wanted to find out why an attack like chain-of-thought forgery was so effective. They suspected it had something to do with the mechanism that LLMs use to keep track of where their instructions are coming from.

But what Cui and her colleagues discovered is that LLMs are in fact very bad at keeping track of different roles. In a series of experiments that looked at what was going on inside a handful of different models, the researchers found that LLMs seem to identify the role of a specific chunk of text not by the tags around it but by the style of that text and the words it contains.

The upshot, the researchers claim, is that all an attacker needs to do to hack an LLM is write text that spoofs a certain role. And because roles are a fundamental part of how LLMs work, no amount of training will fully solve the problem.

Ye is worried that nobody is ready for what’s coming. “There’s going to be a huge economic incentive for people to do jailbreaks and prompt injections,” he says. The best defense could be to expect the worst. Organizations shouldn’t trust LLMs, and they should expect that anything done by agents could be unsafe, he says: “That’s not a great solution, but it just might be what we have to do.”

“It’s really incredible that these things are being deployed everywhere to control super-critical systems,” he adds. “There’s been no study of the fundamental science here. We’re all doing it ad hoc.”

Submission + - AI Companies Destroying Books At Scale (futurism.com)

Submitted by nightflameauto
nightflameauto writes: AI companies are purchasing books from pre-AI times. The claim is that those books are free from the defects of AI generated text, and therefore more valuable for ingestion into AI datasets. In order to accomplish this, they are tearing the books down to be scanned, then destroying them as the scans are completed. This includes rare and out-of-print books that may be some of the few copies of any given published work left in existence.

Submission + - Is Mark Zuckerberg Actually TRYING to Destroy Meta? (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Lately, it almost feels like Zuckerberg is trying to destroy his own company. He’s burning through mountains of cash in a desperate attempt to keep up in the AI race. Yet despite the untold billions it’s spent so far, it’s being destroyed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Its employees have even resorted to using AI models made by its competitors, a humiliating reality check for how far behind Zuckerberg’s efforts have fallen.

It’s also a financial nightmare. Capital expenditures have risen dramatically, erasing any appetite for Meta on Wall Street. Its stock price “has been dead money for more than a year,” as Yahoo Finance notes, as investors continue to debate whether Zuckerberg is chasing the AI industry as it careens off a cliff — or edging ever closer to an AI-fueled industrial revolution.

Submission + - The first active shooter suppression service

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Schools to tackle active shooters with pepper-spraying drones that can ram attackers

Pepper-spraying drones aimed at tackling active school shooters are being rolled out at campuses across three states.

The drones, part of the Campus Guardian Angel program, can ram into targets at speeds of up to 70 mph and are capable of weaving through the air to avoid gunfire. Three schools in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado are part of pilot schemes using the aerial technology.

Submission + - Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Our daily lives are built on multitasking, but are our brains actually doing two things at once, or just switching very quickly between them?

Well, it depends. The science shows it's the latter, for cognitively demanding work.

But in a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the US have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking.

Driving is the perfect example: When you take your test, your entire mental and physical energy is concentrated on executing the right combinations of movements and thoughts.

After a decade behind the wheel, the brain is no longer consciously thinking everything through in great detail.

Comment Re: Insane (Score 2) 222

by Frobnicator (#66260090) Attached to: A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison For 18 Months

There needs to be accountablity, but there almost never is.

The police and prosecution tend to get consequences casually dismissed, "you win some, you lose some", or "mistakes are human, live and learn." Sometimes lawyers have a professional repremand, very rarely fines, but not time behind bars.

If the man is lucky, he might get compensation for the time locked up, and maybe some of the legal costs. Most likely it will be only a small portion, if at all.

If there is any compensation it won't restore his job, his relationships with friends and family, it won't compensate for the negative experiences in the legal system nor behind bars, it won't compensate for the lost opportunities and missed experience in the time he was detained, and it probably won't be enough for the lifetime of therapy he'll need, and that his family may need.

Comment Re:Good for him! (Score 2) 218

Yeah, on reading the links, it looks like his lawyers already have a lot of that covered.

The law they are using is 18 U.S. Code 2232, and it's on pretty shaky ground. If you're reading it at non-lawyer eyes, sure the law uses words that seem to fit.

For the current administration, that's all they need to make the accusations.

For the defense lawyers there's going to be a long list of reasons that law doesn't apply, and it's got all kinds of reasons the judge is going to dismiss it. The "Terrorism Response Team" has a rather high burden of proof.

Comment Want monopoly powers, no responsibilities. (Score 4, Insightful) 65

The laws are simple enough. The landline companies are given enormous public benefits, right-of-way access, monopoly access to customers, and more. They're also told as a responsibility they must provide services to certain groups, a relatively small cost in comparison to the tremendous benefits.

They're might quick to back out of the responsibilities when it has a tiny cost.

It would be interesting if the state were to counter-offer, yes they can cut off the few thousand customers, in exchange for being charged for every square inch of that is currently a free or low-cost easement for their cables, wires, boxes, conduits, poles, and towers, plus the adjacent ground cleared for them. And bills for billions of dollars in property repairs and damages done in the process, and an escrow account with funds to remove all the lines, conduits, poles, and towers when that eventual day comes.

Comment Re: So.. drive them somewhere? (Score 2) 103

The simple rules for EMS are that if they have to drive dangerously or race to the victim, then they are dead already.

Yes the prompt treatment will help, and in a few cases those extra minutes are crucial, but typically the difference is minor.

Location matters. In the article the cities are Los Angeles and Austin. A drive to the nearest EMS facility, ambulance station, fire station, hospital, or similar is likely under three minutes, at least one will be nearby, as fire stations particularly are placed based on short travel times. Also in the article, these are people who they are trying to wake for a long time, in the opening story "nearly an hour".

Driving to any of a variety of EMS locations would be straightforward and faster than the nearly hour long wait for the story.

There are plenty of other rural areas where the nearest EMS facilities really are an hour away, but that's not where robotaxis are getting deployed. When that does eventually happen, it will be best to coordinate with an ambulance and have the vehicle drive towards the ambulance, meeting somewhere in the middle which still would save time for the potential patients, or more likely, the passed out drunks, but it is still a faster option for getting them to a qualified human.

Comment Unregulated gambling is well-known criminal hub. (Score 1) 19

by Frobnicator (#66246688) Attached to: France Orders ISPs to Block Access to Polymarket

Unregulated gambling is a long-established haven for criminal enterprise.

Money laundering is the most likely, and historically it is trivially easy when they're unregulated. Criminal enterprises, anything from scam call centers to major white-collar crimes, they don't care if they lose a high percent, as long as the money is laundered in the end. Wash a bunch of money betting on both sides of the bet, they'll lose half but still the money comes out clean.

Insider trading is hard to catch, and we're seeing a lot of people connected to influence, like the teleprompter guy and assorted military folk who are getting caught. They almost never are caught, especially the highly skilled ones.

Hiding fraud, hiding embezzlement, racketeering, extortion systems, they're all havens in unregulated gambling.

Kalshi and Polymarket are the big ones and given their nature of distributed unregulated gambling, they're absolutely major elements in both organized crime and casual financial crimes.

Comment Re:They're obsolete. (Score 1) 238

by Quasar1999 (#66245548) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

Also, a vehicle with a manual transmission can be push started.

Only if your ECU supports it. Manual transmission can be useful in snow though.

You'd think they would be useful in snow, but my 2025 BRZ's traction control will reduce power to the point that the car stalls out instead of letting the damn wheels spin in 2nd gear so I can make it up a snowy hill. (Thank God the car has track mode which disables all the nanny devices, but still, most cars don't have that mode).

Comment Re:They're obsolete. (Score 1) 238

by Quasar1999 (#66245542) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

I've always said that if I lived in a desolate area, or my job was at the opposite end of a racetrack, I'd love a manual. In my real-world daily drive, it would be useless.

I recently got a new vehicle with a manual shift mode on the automatic transmission. I tried it out thinking I might like to engine brake, or maybe I could get a more responsive shift when passing someone. Not worth it at all, having to juggle another set of responsibilities when trying to drive in a dynamic environment. People talk about being "connected to the car" but it just makes you distracted from the road.

Compared to manual mode, much more preferable to flip the car into "Sport mode", which keeps you in a lower gear and can be flipped on/off at will.

I say this with the utmost respect. If you think that having to care about what gear you are in is too much for an already 'dynamic environment', for everyone's safety, especially your own, PLEASE stop driving.

You are at the edge of being overwhelmed as it is with your automatic vehicle by your own admission, any extra things you need to focus on, like the state of your engine's load, the gear you are in, and forecasting if you might need to downshift or upshift is a distraction, and not a feeling of being in control?

Either you haven't driven a manual car, or you haven't seen a good driver operate a manual transmission. There is no distraction from the road. The driver is literally in FULL control of the car without taking their eyes off the road. An automatic cannot tell you're about to take a right turn, it won't downshift and hold the gear throughout the turn, it will absolutely decide that engine load is low and upshift for fuel efficiency destabilizing the balance of the car for example. The solution, they added traction and stability control to compensate. You are not in full control of your vehicle if you're driving an automatic. Don't take my word for it, you have all the proof in your own experiences. Does your car stop accelerating the instant you let go of the gas pedal or does it keep accelearting for a moment, even though you've let up on the accelerator completely? That doesn't happen with a manual transmission.

But genuinely, if you feel having to take in any extra information while driving is a distraction, please reconsider continuing to get behind the wheel.

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