Ambrose Andrews @znalo@librem.one

Throwback Saturday memory: there's something about Paris.

(This was taken from the high tower on the university campus).

We are in a very dangerous time, when "AI" security companies are competing to prove that their technology will provide returns on investment. The industry has always been broken. There has always been an incentive to inflate the importance of vulnerabilities, but there was always a risk of burning hard earned trust. In the end, a lot of folks decided it wasn't worth it.

But "AI" companies haven't worked to earn that trust. They have something to prove, right now, or they don't exist. So now everything is critical, "impossible to find without AI," and so on. Blah2shell sells, and now everyone wants their little vuln labeled that way regardless of the complexity or risk.

Burning trust in security is the absolute worst thing you can possibly do in terms of tech. I'm worried about where things are going right now.

There have always been more bugs than we can fix. We've had to triage. If we break that, we flood maintainers until they burn out. Our job is not to fix everything. It's to filter information for the people who do.

But right now I'm reading vuln reports that aren't distinguishing between a 100% reliable and trivial exploit like log4shell and complex memory corruption bugs that are incredibly noisy and basically impossible to exploit with ASLR. ASLR is like 25 years old. You have to do better than a simple buffer overflow now to get a shell.

But people have shit to sell, so we have more noise. Again, "we've put the attenuator on the wrong side of the equation."

Israeli occupation aircraft bombard the town of Kafr Tabnite, southern Lebanon.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Lebanon

Breaking | Al-Shifa Medical Complex: Two Palestinians killed and others injured in an Israeli airstrike targeting a vehicle in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, southwest of Gaza City.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Palestinian

internet taken offline by huge pulse of smugness from static site operators

Please stop anthropomorphizing AI executives.

They're not sentient and they can't actually think. They just predict the next token using statistical patterns scraped from LinkedIn, X and the Financial Times. The apparent "understanding" is simply a parlor trick: They produce text strings that *sound* plausible, but they don't actually have any understanding of the world.

I'll grant that they became a lot more technically impressive when Reinforcement Learning from Investor Sentiment pipelines were introduced, but fundamentally they're still just stochastic bullshit generators. Running them in a loop and giving them access to the internet will end up being the most expensive mistake in the history of technology.

Clashes in France as uprising swells to millions.

https://freedompress.org.uk/2026/10/19/clashes-in-france-as-uprising-swells-to-millions/

#france #news

https://www.health.vic.gov.au/medicines-and-poisons-regulation/psychostimulants-for-adhd-updated-permit-requirements

This is good news. Little annoyed I'll likely need one more expensive appointment but hopefully that'll be the last one

'In a sign of investors’ increasing unease over the borrowing binge, the cost of buying CDS on many AI-linked companies has hit record highs this month...not only for companies that investors judge as riskier, such as AI cloud-computing provider CoreWeave, but also for those such as Microsoft that are seen as relatively safe'

Guess what? We wrote an iPhone 11 Linux Camera driver ✨📸

#Linux #Apple #iPhone #iPhoneLinux #cyberdeck

FYI, Firefox has enable the "Donate your body to fuel data centers" option to true by default, so if you want to opt-out, make so set this hidden flag to false every browser update.

browser.ml.donateFlesh = false

The potential for runaway ice sheet retreat due to the Marine Ice Cliff Instability has been debated for years from theoretical and modelling standpoints. At last Caroline Needell and co-authors have brought a large observational dataset to the party.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2593672-towering-ice-cliffs-may-collapse-in-fits-and-starts/

The paper the article refers to is here
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aee0658

Looking at Torvalds using generative AI for Linux, Andrew Tridgell using it for rsync, and a bunch of other very bright and techically very capable people using it to assist them with various tasks makes me think again about the time a very, very intelligent friend of mine suddenly fell into Scientology.

It started me thinking about why it is that clever people fall for these scams, and I have a theory.

I think clever people learn to trust their minds. They learn that their mind will give them correct answers without much effort, and that it will also show them flaws in arguments with the same ease. Because it generally does!

But it's also a weakness. If something comes long that doesn't trigger the automatic defences, the clever mind may let it in.

The cleverness needs to be combined with vigilance, and that cannot be left to an automated system. I think clever people tend to become less vigilant, because their mind has always stood them in good stead.

Once the scam is in it combines with the general human unwillingness to admit to error. Or even to re-evaluate things just in case they are not true. We have a whole complicated social construct called "science" designed to work around that, and not even that works all the time.

And here's the kicker: The scam that tells clever people how clever they are will have the greatest chance of success, because they ARE clever. No false modesty. The scam they fall for is wrapped in the truth that they are clever people, and presented as a thing that only clever people can truly appreciate. The scams that clever people fall for are built up of details, layers, interrelated things that appear to explain each other and support each other. That hide and distract from the basic falsehood at the bottom.

To avoid such a scam you must take a step back from the complicated, dazzling, fascinating, alluring detail. Look at the whole thing and ask what it is, why it is, who is it from? Where does it connect to the world? Who does it benefit, who does it harm? Is it too good to be true?

Asking those questions about generative AI gets you pretty obvious answers.

Have you blocked Claude and other AI agents on GitHub? Have you seen the "an user you blocked contributed to this repo" banner? Have you seen the agent among the contributors? But when you try to look, neither you, nor GitHub finds the offending commits?

Chances are, the repo has been force-pushed to remove the attribution. But GitHub remembers! And even provides us an API to list the force pushes, including the previous commit the push overwrote. And, it also helpfully keeps those commits available for a long time!

So I wrote a small tool, affectionately named sloposcope that helps you find these commits. Give it an owner and a repository name on GitHub, and it will fetch the repo, the force pushes (at least the last 100), and will look through each history for AI assistance.

It's a yanky shell script, use at your own risk, yada yada.

'The Zionist movement has a long tradition of seeking out alliances with far right parties...Claims by Israel that it represents Jewish self determination are exposed as utterly hypocritical by its active cooperation with antisemitic far right organisations'

#israel #middleEast #netanyahu #likud

https://rupensavoulian.substack.com/p/bosnian-serb-nationalists-find-a

Harvard researchers studied 718 companies and found AI coding agents increased lines of code by 30%, but no meaningful increase in completed tasks or projects.

Meanwhile, review time rose 49%.

Generating code faster hasn’t translated into completing more work. The bottleneck has moved to code reviews.

The solution the industry is landing on is throwing more AI at the problem. AI writes the code, AI reviews the code and no one knows how it works.

https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf