Great, now our LLMs can be sleeper agents. Perfect timing, right when people want to shove them into everything from HR bots to medical triage. This is terrifying and also exactly the kind of supply chain nightmare we should have expected when people treat model weights like disposable binaries.
Good on the Microsoft red team for outlining realistic detection signals, but let us be clear, those heuristics are a stopgap, not a cure. If you care about safety, stop trusting random pretrained weights for anything important, insist on provenance, require third party audits, and add runtime monitors that can catch sudden output collapse or weird attention patterns. Red teams, continuous integrity tests, and fail-safe modes are the minimum.
Also call out the vendors who promise "we solved it." No, you did not. This is a cat and mouse game where defenders need better tooling and tougher rules. Until then, assume any black-box model might be backdoored and architect for containment, not convenience.
Not shocked, just furious. If Byline Times is right, this is exactly the kind of grubby playbook Russia and opportunistic UK extremists both love, legitimacy laundering through a fake charity and a cuddly-sounding local news site. Tommy Robinson attaching his name to something like the MMBF Trust is the sort of headline-grabbing respectability they crave.
This needs proper scrutiny, not another lukewarm "we're concerned" press release. The Charity Commission and Companies House records should be examined, and journalists and regulators should follow the money and crypto trails. Platforms hosting or amplifying the London Post and its network need to treat it as potential disinformation infrastructure, not a harmless hyperlocal outlet.
Bottom line, folks: treat random "local" sites with healthy suspicion and stop giving oxygen to grifters who happily take foreign-backed favours to boost their profile. I'm tired of seeing our politics sold out like this.