Indeed. I remember someone I respected raving that they had their new WinXP computer on for 2 weeks straight without it crashing and being blown away by the new advanced technology.
Teenage me didn’t have any idea that would have been a low bar even in the 1980s.
Their strategy since the 80s has been to half-ass shit and sell it to large scale businesses, establish their software as the default software across industries, so then everyone else has to learn and buy it.
Literally started with MS DOS. Then Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, and lots of small stuff. They kill entire industries that were making better software. None of the above 4 things were Microsoft even close to better than preexisting software. People were swearing off DOS and Windows 3x when they crashed constantly in the early 90s and late-stage capitalism said “hold my beer” and made them the most valuable company in history within a decade.
Funny. Their strategy seems to make them plenty of money.
In this case they will also employ the age old enshitification strategy. Instead of (or along with) filling it with advertisements, they can simply drop the model parameters to make it cheaper while pushing it to more and more sloppy content.
Smaller models are incredibly cheap to run, and if people are convinced they want slop, they win. That is why AI is paired with the larger scale project of dumbing down everything.
Why not post the original source 404Media instead of this recycled content site? 404 is great. https://www.404media.co/microsoft-wants-to-make-people-addicted-to-scout-its-new-ai-assistant-internal-documents-reveal/
You are correct. That was the death kneel of a really cool e2e encrypted chat app that came before Signal/Text secure. I can’t recall the name atm. You are relying on them wanting to avoid the reputational damage of getting caught (it would be trivial for a security researcher to compare two client apps and see the different JavaScript. Beyond that, yeah, they can serve you a compromised site one time and extract your keys.
Indeed. AI agents cannot “discover” zero days, they can only discover vulnerabilities. The humans can create zero days by reporting the vulnerability in the media without disclosing it properly.
While everyone had 56k modems, they laid millions of miles of finer optic cable. That sounds like brute forcing to me. Most of it laid there dark for 20 years.
And more time to relax while it is “kajiggering…”
Detecting human movement is old. Identifying and tracking specific humans is new.
That’s easy, there’s a list. I think people call it the “Epstein files”. Those people.
The MAGA thing is literally what the oligarchs cooked up to insulate themselves. They aren’t even remotely secretive of their connection to it. It was “take two” of the tea party.
And the biggest problem I have with Cron is already solved by Anacron.
Literally right at the top there is a bit button that says “prefer plain text?” And links to https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii
In the “old days”, when you got a shell account somewhere, they usually had Apache set up so that anything you put in your home directory at ~/public_html would get served up at http://their.domain.tld/~username
That was my website at my university for many years.
You got it. SDF and others were doing this for decades. During the pandemic, someone was bored and put a Linux VPS online and asked random people if they wanted shell accounts. Surprisingly, it sparked some really nice small communities of people looking to learn or do little art projects or whatever.
The main difference from the fediverse is a complete apothy for growth. No one is under any illusion large numbers of people are going to want a shell account, and no one wants to sysadmin that anyway. Its also expected that individual tildes will have a finite lifespan, unlike something bigger like SDF with their formal organisation.
Generally, these hidden prompts only work if they do something so subtle that even the slop peddler doesn’t know what happened when they are told to get lost.
Because people keep secrets on computers. You cave the combination of a tiny percentage of people who have secrets that are life threatening, and millions of people use bitlocker because its built into Windows. Its a tiny number times a huge number.
If I had to guess, that might include journalists who investigate authoritarian regimes, activists who keep their identity secret, and minorities who live in countries where their identity is a capital crime.
Then there are probably also governments who rely on bitlocker to secure the computers of people with state secrets like the identities of spies. Probably lots of other weird edge cases.
Hardware isn’t the limitation, its willingness to fight locked down hardware and the power management of android. You might be able use ADB to control it, install termux and then with that, SSH server and then a server of some sort.
In my experience, most phones don’t seem to boot sans battery, so its just a matter of time until the battery goes poof and your system goes down. Some manage it though - you do get a decent amount of hardware for the power consumption.