The Computer Thread

Though that does become a weird liability problem, if self-driving cars are made to prioritise the well-being of single occupants over, say, ploughing into an entire crowd of people.

Not sure why we're inventing crazy scenarios that would be incredibly unlikely in reality. The brakes don't work, the accelerator is stuck, the power to the drive motors can't be cut, and there's a Bus Full of Innocents directly in its path. Plus, the occupant of the car is a serial rapist.

It's the same as with some of these other Trolley questions. "You can stop an impending nuclear Armageddon by misgendering someone. Would you?" No, no you can't. That's not a realistic situation.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 15th 2024 at 4:26:28 AM

An important thing to note with Chat GPT is that it's a bit of a parrot.

To use a metaphor: If you take take a tape recorder down to a KKK meeting, you'll create a machine that can create racist rhetoric at the push of a button. However, we would not call the tape recorder itself racist.

Likewise, when Chat GPT is trying to answer something like the trolley problem, it's not actually providing opinions it holds. It's trying to create sentences that fit the format of a human expressing an opinion on the trolley problem. It doesn't actually care that much what those opinions are.

In essence, it doesn't have opinions, it can sometimes roleplay as someone that does.

* parrot noises *

Okay, silliness out of the way, a few things.

• My computer keeps wanting to repair my SSD and telling me to restart my computer to do so, even minutes after it already has done so. Should I take it as a sign my SSD is faulty?
• How do you find out what OpenGL your graphics card supports? (And, for that matter, what the graphics card is?)

That or the installation is faulty.

Windows? Search for dxdiag and run that. The display tab will tell you your GPU. Then that will tell you what to look up for OpenGL support (it also more directly tells you Open3D, which is more useful because if you don't have support for the most modern OpenGL, you need a new GPU more or less; the support for those got really far backported, while some newer DX 12 features are a bit more exclusive).

News from deadline: the Justice Department is suing Apple for its increased restrictions on the App Store to deal with competition.

https://deadline.com/2024/03/apple-justice-department-antitrust-lawsuit-1235864461/

A backdoor has been found in liblzma, an open-source library used to build xzutils, a set of powerful but lesser-used data compression utilities. (The LZMA algorithm is used for 7zip compression). liblzma is also used to compile libsystemd, the library on which systemd depends.

Debian, Fedora, and some other Linux distros patch ssh to use systemd notification. The backdoor thus allows a malicious actor to hijack and spy on ssh connections.

Don't panic! The compromised version hasn't yet been rolled out to stable releases; it's only present in rolling release distros, so you're safe unless you're a Linux user who likes to live life on the edge (or you use an Arch derivative, but I don't think Arch patches ssh the same way Debian does. Either way, it's probably a good idea to downgrade xz until this is sorted).

This all started when a developer noticed that ssh was acting slower than usual and decided to investigate. He found that one of liblzma's developers had been gradually building up a backdoor, piece by innocuous piece, over a period of two years.

This all illustrates both the power of source openness to find malice in code, and that we should not be complacent that just because something is open source it's inherently safe.

I think I had a stroke reading that.

Why ?

because most of it is technical jargon that goes over most people's heads

And words that aren't words and seem impossible to pronounce or understand. Like "xzutils" and "liblzma".

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Mar 30th 2024 at 12:13:24 PM

I don't think you need to understand the details to follow that it's a bad thing. But it's been found before it gets into anything important, so it'll probably be patched out now.

Expanding liblzma to its full meaning really won't help, anyhow. "Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm library" doesn't tell you much more.

If a computer thing starts with lib, that means it's a library. A library is a collection of useful functions that programmes can use.

liblzma is a library that provides the LZMA compression algorithm. This means that, if you want to use LZMA compression, you don't need to write your own implementation, you can just call it from liblzma. MS Windows programmes usually come with copies of every library they use, while Unixoid operating systems traditionally install each library just once and have each programme call the same file.

In this particular case, there was a long-term plan to compromise liblzma with a backdoor in specific popular Linux distros, which are themselves the bases for a great number of widely-used distros. This would have given malicious actors backdoors into the majority of Internet servers.

Ars Technica has a good writeup.

I also found some threads in the Fediverse that goes into the human factors that allowed this to happen. There was another writeup somewhere else that I unfortunately can't find, so I'll summarise.

liblzma/xzutils is a real-life case of this xkcd comic. A huge chunk of the Internet depends on it, and it has been maintained as a hobby project by Lance Collins since its beginning. Collins was getting burned out, when Jia Tan reached out to him with some good ideas and offers to help. Collins gratefully accepted Tan's assistance, relying on him as an unofficial comaintainer, and a while ago, made that position official. Tan made valuable and useful contributions over the years, garnering Collins' trust, and this allowed him to gradually add in the components for his backdoor.

Money would certainly have helped, but the fundamental issue is that libzlma was being maintained by one guy with no support.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Apr 2nd 2024 at 12:41:20 PM

Wow, that's quite the long game. And he would have gotten away with it too, if not for that meddling developer.

Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked: "AI" checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.

The byline says it all, really. So much for "AI"...

Don't know that I would call it "so much for AI". It sounds like they barely tried at all. Also, we have a thread about AI.

There was an AI system involved, it's just that it required human review a whopping 70% of the time when the target was 5%.

I feel like this is one of those expiraments that makes sense that someone tried it but the technology just isn't there yet and the benefits are too small to justify the cost.

The fun part was if you actualy look into ot beyond the headlienes.

It wasnt that the system actualy constantly required human review, it was right most of the time.

The managers just didnt trust it, much like they dont trust minimum wage employees.

Managment was to blame.

Aka the "why do we have 5 road workers and only 1 guy with a shovel" problem

Edited by Imca on Apr 8th 2024 at 12:38:22 AM

That's not at all in the article, so I'm not sure where you got that from.

They’re also not abandoning the system, they’re just moving it to work via cart base sensors instead of store wide ones.

By actualy reading more then one article...

That too which I imagine is cheaper

Edited by Imca on Apr 8th 2024 at 12:48:07 AM

And why should I read more than one article, when this one already seems to cover the story just fine? I reacted to the news I got, I don't see any reason why I should dig deeper.

Exactly because of issues like this where reading one article doesnt tell you the full story

News is often quite biased to the particular audience it panders too, it helps to browse more stories to counter that.

Edited by Imca on Apr 8th 2024 at 1:08:19 AM

Look, it's fine and all that you want to correct the story, but it's a bit unreasonable to expect me to do extra research on each and every news story I come across on the off chance that there may be more to it. I'm not going to do that, and you don't do that either, so stop making it out like I'm doing something wrong here.