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Comment Would this inefficient workaround be legal? (Score 1) 46

by davidwr (#66266530) Attached to: New York Sues Kalshi For Running 'Illegal Gambling Operation'

Set up two companies in a state or country where there are no legal issues. One says "invest in us, if [event] happens by [date], we will pay off more than you invest because company #2 will turn all their assets over to us" and the other says "invest in us, if [event] does not happen by [date], we will pay off more than you invest because company #1 will turn all of their assets over to us." Set up both companies to liquidate and return assets to stakeholders on [date].

Then list the companies on an exchange accessible to US residents or if that's not possible, create a pair of holding companies or closed-end mutual funds that own 100% of company #1 and company #2 above and list them on an exchange accessible to US residents.

If this would be a legal way for New York residents to invest in the outcomes of events, it sounds like Kalshi is just doing the above but without all of the middlemen and inefficiencies that come with middlemen.

If this is not legal, I would ask "why not?"

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:"Copper based" is a lie. (Score 1) 65

"The whole network" hasn't been copper-based since the late 20th century. Long-distance phone connections went microwave in some areas by the 1970s and were largely fiber by the '80s or early '90s.

When people talk about "copper based" these days they typically mean either from the local traditional telco switch to the premises, from the neighborhood "box" (typically a fiber-to-copper conversion box, but possibly a radio-to-copper converter) to the premises, or from somewhere on the premises (e.g. your cable television or fiber-provider's VOIP-to-analog modem) to the analog telephone device, depending on context. The bottom line is to the end user, it "looks like" plain-old-telephone-service to a device that works on a POTS (analog) line, preferably with a cost that is no higher than a POTS line would be.

Comment Re:From a customer (Score 1) 65

Have you considered cell service with an analog-phone-to-cell-phone adapter? That will give your kid a phone he can call in or out on along with reliable 911. If long power outages are a problem, keep the phone on a charger 24/7 that's plugged into a UPS with enough juice for several days.

Even simpler: a "kiddie cell phone" that can only talk to parent-approved numbers plus 911.

If you have land-line-cable-TV available, you should be able to get a cable-tv-analog-telephone-adapter that has a several-hour battery in it. As long as the cable-tv-provider doesn't lose power you'll be good to go.

Comment Satellite and cell phone backhaul (Score 1) 65

In the short term - like maybe for 10-15 years - allow AT&T to use satellite and terrestrial radio technologies as the backhaul for copper-to-your-house and bill you the "normal" land-line rates. In rural areas this might be nothing more than a satellite- or cell-to-copper conversion box sitting outside your house.

Sure, they will lose money (possibly hundreds of dollars per year) on every customer but it's far cheaper than maintaining a copper plant in hard-to-reach areas.

Eventually though the regulators will have to tell customers "sorry" to regulated-low-cost service in expensive-to-serve area: If you wan to live in a hard-to-reach area, expect to pay a lot more for services or possibly even not have them available at all.

This doesn't solve the problem for providing affordable communications to people who live in areas where satellite and terrestrial radio can't reach. I'm not sure if there is a feasible solution for these customers.

Comment Re:I agree that copper phone lines are obsolete, b (Score 1) 65

...the proper replacement is fiber
Not wireless, fiber

Yes, and no.

In many places the cost of putting in new fiber even where the poles and other infrastructure exists is cost-prohibitive. In those places, other options including satellite, fixed-wireless, and wireless-backhaul-with-fiber-to-the-premesis should be considered.

In a few very remote areas where even satellites can't reach, the only economical answer will be "tough, when the copper fails you will be without service" because it may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in what amounts to new service to serve maybe one residential customer. I don't know of any such places where people actually live in the continental United States, but it's possible that there are a few.

Comment If the government does push back... (Score 1) 1

... expect the solution to be no more movies "sales," just rentals with a fixed time limit, either "until [date master license expires/is up for renewal]" or "some number of weeks/years".

Another solution will be to shift to a "library access" model, which is already common. At least that will be understandable by the general public: Most people know that brick-and-mortar public libraries retire old books to make way for newer ones.

As for existing complaints, the best hope consumers have is that some law firm will successfully argue that the fine print is too buried to create an enforceable contract, then reach a settlement that gives consumers some partial credit depending on how long they had access to their purchase, with vanishingly-low credit if the purchase was more than a few years ago.

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