Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

I've had no success getting Agents to help write code for SQLite. All the code I've asked Claude to write for me is slop that didn't work or worked poorly and never got committed. On the flip side, I do ask Claude to review the code that I write prior to committing, and it is good at that, often finding serious oversights that I had missed.

This observation, that agents are good at code review but bad at writing original code, seems to carry through into AI-generated bug reports coming into SQLite from third parties. The bug reports are generally good, but the suggested fixes not so much.

One report from about a month ago illustrates this. The median() aggregate function in SQLite is implemented by collecting the input values into an array of doubles, using quicksort to put them in order, and return the one in the middle. The bug report showed a carefully devised sequence of 1 million inputs that caused pathological O(N*N) behavior in the quicksort algorithm, which caused recursion to go too deep and blow out the CPU stack. The AI's suggested fix: Add a depth parameter to the quicksort algorithm and fail over to a slower sorting algorithm if the recursion goes too deep. The correct solution (originally recognized in the 1975 by Robert Sedgewick, but unknown to me before this issue arose) was to only call quicksort recursively on the smaller of the two partitions, and sort the larger partition using a loop (tail recursion). If recursion only occurs on a partition that is half the size of the original or smaller, recursion depth is limited to LogN. That turned out to be trivial to implement, and is faster and uses less code than the AI-suggested approach. Furthermore, after seeing Sedgewick's tail recursion idea, Dan Kennedy recognized that we don't actually need to sort both partitions at each step of the algorithm, but only the partition that contains the median. Dan's observation more than doubled performance. Hence by ignoring the AI's suggested fix, we more than doubled the performance of the median() function in SQLite.

Before you ask: The median() function did originally use the standard library qsort(), but I changed that into a hand-coded quicksort some time ago because the hand-written variant did not require a callback for each comparison, and was thus way faster.

When is the US Army going to liberate these neighbourhoods until only the people that take good decisions are left?

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Even though it whitelists the IA crawlers by default?

Anubis has worked well for us to get rid of most of the scrapers from our wiki, including the ones faking regular user agents.

It's not just data centres, many of the requests from regular broadband IP addresses. I think they're using "services" of bottom feeders like Scraper API, or buying from the authors of malicious web browser extensions.

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

Maybe from NOAA? (at least until they get defunded)

ELIZA's evil twin.

It's indeed not AI, but it's not particularly related to quantitative easing either. It's a regular cycle that's been repeated since forever by publicly traded companies, and game companies are just getting better at playing that game as well (pun intended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...