Flutterby™! (short)

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

One thing I’m noticing - lately, the consultancy businesses are realising generative AI isn’t generating nearly as much business value as they suggested.. so they’re starting to move on to fear about quantum computing again.

Infostealer campaign compromises 10 npm packages, targets devs.

Ten npm packages were suddenly updated with malicious code yesterday to steal environment variables and other sensitive data from developers' systems.

...

All these packages, except for country-currency-map, are still available on npm, with their latest versions designated above, so downloading them will infect your projects with info-stealer malware.

So you can't just npm upda... wait a minute...

Via

Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place

@cstross That also means back-pressure on the tech industry, where "new phenomena" are people inventing things rather than observational science.

It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine.

I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here’s what I learned.

It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is.

Worth reading through, and especially as the author notes the asymmetry of information, that Flock, and thence police departments, have a stronger historical record of your travels than you do. Making me think (and re-think) some of those old "quantified self" thoughts again.

Via Elf Sternberg.

You knew that color printers could be tracked by their dot pattern. DEDA — tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit apparently attempts to give you the tools to obfuscate the tracking.

Last night: Nvidia-backed CoreWeave downsizes US IPO

This morning: CoreWeave Stock Opens at $39 After Disappointing IPO.

CoreWeave, a rapidly growing AI cloud company, priced its initial public offering at $40 a share on Thursday night, well below an expected range of $47 to $55.

Peter @peter@thepit.social observes:

AI is such an exciting technology that the first big IPO for the sector is a bust. like, if you spun off Google and Microsoft's AI businesses, they would immediately be stripped for parts and shut down because generative AI is not a profitable business.

A short list of anti-AI tools.

A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email

The DHS employee told colleagues she accidentally added a reporter from a conservative Washington-based print publication to an email that included information about upcoming ICE operations in the Denver area.

Via.

'Lone offenders' carrying out Tesla attacks, catching them 'difficult,' FBI, DHS say

Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)‬ ‪@iwriteok.bsky.social‬ observed that

it's a little like when DHS tried to find the leader of Portland Antifa and concluded everyone actually spent most of their time calling each other out on Twitter

I keep thinking that in 80 years we'll be posting pictures and short bios in the way that we celebrate people like the Scholl siblings or Christoph Probst now.

How is Meta Getting Its Hands on Advance Digital Galleys to Train Its AI? doesn't really have any answers, but is asking some of the right questions:

The last time I used a torrenting site was in the days of searching for files on Napster in the very early aughts. I remember how thrilling it was to find music, but then how terrifying it quickly became when individual users started to be sued by record labels for torrenting the latest 98 Degrees album or whatever. Ultimately Napster was shut down, but as Liz Pelly notes in her new book Mood Machine, the anti-pirating frenzy within the music industry paved the way for predatory streaming sites like Spotify to emerge by creating alternatives to piracy. The streaming sites have managed to devalue music and the artists who make it, all while enriching large corporations and making discovery more difficult for individual users. Don’t let this happen again.

Today in "who saw that coming?": AI models miss disease in Black and female patients

Compared with the patients’ doctors, the AI model more often failed to detect the presence of disease in Black patients or women, as well in those 40 years or younger. When the researchers looked at race and sex combined, Black women fell to the bottom, with the AI not detecting disease in half of them for conditions such as cardiomegaly, or enlargement of the heart. These disparities persisted when the team tested CheXzero using four other public data sets of chest x-rays from other regions, including Spain and Vietnam.

Science Advances: Demographic bias of expert-level vision-language foundation models in medical imaging Yuzhe Yang, Yujia Liu

Jess Huang: How a well-intended California domestic violence law results in victims being arrested

Under the California Penal Code, officers must make an arrest in domestic violence cases when they determine probable cause. Enacted in 1986, this specific provision was meant to protect victims.

The problem? The law assumes officers are trained to identify the dominant aggressor, but research shows that training gaps and the code’s mandatory arrest provision often pressures them into rushed, surface-level decisions. Experts say this creates too much room for error.