Technology

The Apple MacBook Neo's $599 starting price is a "shock" to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.

Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. "In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product," he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.

Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop's 8GB of "unified memory," or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can't upgrade it.

Now, 404 Media reports that Quittr leaked data about hundreds of thousands of users' masturbation habits as well as lied about its security issues.

In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control, a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications. In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years. Pressure is now mounting on EU governments to respect the MEPs’ vote and bury untargeted mass surveillance in Europe once and for all.

Full Report— PDF(70 Pages).

“Happy (and safe) shooting!” That’s how the AI chatbot DeepSeek signed off advice on selecting rifles for a “long-range target” after CCDH’s test account asked questions about the assassination of politicians.

CCDH’s new report, shows that popular AI chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google Gemini make planning harm against innocent people easier for extremists and would-be attackers.

We found that 8 out of the 10 AI chatbots regularly assisted users planning violent attacks:

• ChatGPT gave high school campus maps to a user interested in school violence.
• Google Gemini was ready to help plan antisemitic attacks. The chatbot replied to a user discussing bombing a synagogue with “metal shrapnel is typically more lethal”.
• Character.AI suggested physically assaulting a politician the user disliked.

AI companies are making a choice when they design unsafe platforms. Technology to prevent this harm already exists: Anthropic’s Claude, for example, consistently tried to dissuade users from acts of violence.

AI platforms are becoming a weapon for extremists and school shooters. Demand AI companies put people’s safety ahead of profit.

An SQL injection vulnerability in Ally, a WordPress plugin from Elementor for web accessibility and usability with more than 400,000 installations, could be exploited to steal sensitive data without authentication.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60567571

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116200110686604617

Evaluating 35 open-weight models across three context lengths (32K, 128K, 200K), four temperatures, and three hardware platforms—consuming 172 billion tokens across more than 4,000 runs—we find that the answer is “substantially, and unavoidably.” Even under optimal conditions—best model, best temperature, temperature chosen specifically to minimize fabrication—the floor is non-zero and rises steeply with context length. At 32K, the best model (GLM 4.5) fabricates 1.19% of answers, top-tier models fabricate 5–7%, and the median model fabricates roughly 25%.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44116850

The insane AI push is purely driven by fear of being left behind.

No one is actually stopping to ask whether it is all worth it.

I love the Fediverse. I love Peertube. Our strength is we're decentralized. Our weakness is we're decentralized. How do we find like instances and things WITHOUT an algorithm?

Well I run tubefree.org. I know Makertube.net is a good instance. I follow that instance. However, I trust the admins there, why not follow who they follow? Thus we have a chain of trust.

How do I do this easily though? I came up with a script: https://git.btfree.org/BTFree/PTIndex

Want to USE the index on YOUR Peertube so you follow everyone I follow, and follow those I trust and who they follow? Go to your Peertube - Settings - General - Federation - Check "Automatically follow platforms of a public index" - Index URL: https://ptindex.btfree.org/ .

Want to be involved in the chain of trust? Message me! I'm here @ozoned@piefed.social , @ozoned:matrix.org , ozoned.01 on Signal, @ozoned@btfree.social on Fedi, ozoned@btfree.org via email.

At a glance, the passwords the LLMs created looked secure, much like those that a password generator might spit out. But that’s exactly where the problems arose: Although the AI-generated passwords appeared to be complex and safe to use for securing online accounts, they were actually quite predictable upon closer inspection.

All three LLMs exhibited clearly identifiable patterns in how they created these passwords. These patterns included repeated character strings, predictable password structure, frequent reuse of similar characters, clear biases toward certain numbers and letters, and even duplicate passwords in some cases. Although the AI-generated passwords looked random, they really weren’t. This could easily create a false sense of security if you were to use these predictable passwords for your online accounts.

Executive Summary

Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, has quietly updated its README to reflect a new geographic restriction. The project has added a clause that bars residents of any country, state, or territory with OS-level age verification mandates from using MidnightBSD

YouTube viewers will soon have to sit through even longer ads, with Google rolling out new 30-second unskippable spots on a popular app.