cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/61101616

Absolutely brilliant campaign (in English) by the Norwegian Consumer Council.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1826628/openai-strikes-a-deal-with-the-defense-department-to-deploy-its-ai-models

Sam Altman says "the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety."

Not 24 hours ago, he seemed to back Anthropic "supporting our warfighters" as long as two "red lines" weren't crossed, though his tepid support was laden with five instances of "I think" and one "mostly."

The two "red lines" in question:

• Domestic mass surveillance
  (presumably, foreign mass surveillance is ok)
• Autonomous weapons
  (likely because they would be held legally liable for misfires)

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”

The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.

“2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”

His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.

“We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.

Well, here we go again.

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet.

Taalas HC1: 17,000 tokens/sec on Llama 3.1 8B vs Nvidia H200's 233 tokens/sec. 73x faster at one-tenth the power. Each chip runs ONE model, hardwired into the transistors.

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage.

Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal.

"Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs – those below about $500," he told The Register.

https://archive.is/UuldS

Imagine this: You're on Reddit, Hacker News, or some forum, posting with a silly username like GamerCat2025 or SecretCoderX. You think you are anonymous, and no one knows you and so you can freely express your thoughts.

Well, a brand-new research paper just blew that idea apart. It's called "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out the real person behind a secret online name".

The researchers include people ETH Zurich and, Anthropic (parent company of Claude), and a research group called MATS and they proved that today's super-powerful AI chatbots can play detective and unmask people way better than ever before.

Zitron is apparently back for the plebs.

Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces again after a brief hiatus, mostly because I found myself trying to boil the ocean with each one, fearing that if I regularly emailed you you’d unsubscribe. I eventually realized how silly that was, so I’m back, and will be back more regularly. I’ll treat it like a column, which will be both easier to write and a lot more fun.

Workers grappling with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence have said they feel “devalued” by the technology and warned of a downward trajectory in the quality of work.

Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund found AI would affect about 40% of jobs around the world. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, has said: “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”

Workers who have trained AI models to replace some or all of their roles tell the Guardian about their experiences.

https://archive.is/uFT09

What will happen if the Linux kernel starts having AI generated code in it?

SAN DIEGO, California, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals.

ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips.

"It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview.

"It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company's California facilities near San Diego.

Developing new catalysts requires large-scale, repetitive experiments with frequent changes to catalyst composition and reaction conditions. Manual experiments are time-consuming and error prone. A team has automated this process and significantly increased reproducibility by employing robots to manage reagent compositions and run the repeated tests.

California’s new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report on themselves targeting general-purpose machines. Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the “California Firearm Printing Prevention Act,” on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models… certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with “firearm blocking technology.” Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn’t on the list by March 1, 2029, it can’t be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor. We’ve been tracking this pattern. Washington State’s HB 2321 requires printers to include “blocking features” that can’t be defeated by users with “significant technical skill” (good luck with that on open-source firmware). New York’s budget bill S.9005 buries similar requirements in Part C, sweeping in CNC mills and anything capable of “subtractive manufacturing.” California’s version adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models, quarterly list updates, and civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation. As Michael Weinberg wrote after the New York and Washington proposals dropped… accurately identifying gun parts from geometry alone is incredibly hard, desktop printers lack the processing power to run this kind of analysis, and the open-source firmware that runs most machines makes any blocking requirement trivially easy to bypass. The Firearms Policy Coalition flagged AB-2047 on X, and the reactions tell you everything. Jon Lareau called it “stupidity on steroids,” pointing out that a simple spring-shaped part has no way of revealing its intended use. The Foundry put it plainly: “Regulating general-purpose machines is another. AB-2047 would require 3D printers to run state-approved surveillance software and criminalize modifying your own hardware.” As we’ve said before on this blog, when we covered Washington and New York, it doesn’t matter if you’re pro or anti-gun. The state should prosecute people who make illegal thing, not add useless surveillance software on every tool in every classroom, library, and garage in the state. And as you can see, these bills spread – that’s how an small group can push legislation into the entire country. First, Washington proposed theirs, then New York, now California. Once those three states pass a law, that’s 20~25% of the country by GDP/population and thus every manufacturer is forced to comply with a bad decision in order to stay in business. If you’re a maker, educator, or manufacturer anywhere in the US, even outside these states, this is a problem-problem now.

53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/43242206

https://archive.is/D8pVr