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It was 22 years ago this week, on Semptember 8, 2003, that the Recording Industry Association of America started suing individuals for pirating MP3 files. One of the people caught up in a lawsuit was a 12-year-old honors student who

The post When the RIAA sued a 12-year-old for MP3 piracy appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.

A recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again. Among other things, he said: The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Many people found it hard to believe that A...

It's random, really.

The post What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The transhuman future vs. the AGI future.

"For safety, don't click suspicious links" Meanwhile, most organization's login flow redirects through: # This is a real example, but I've changed the names to avoid pointing fingers https://www.[name of company].com/squawk/ https://login.[name of company].com/ https://...

Today, we're releasing a demo of WeWorm, the first zero-click worm to spread through WeChat calls across iOS and Android. [...]

The victim does not need to answer the call, or interact with their phone at all. Even if they do answer, they hear nothing, and the exploit still succeeds. [...]

Working with AI, our team found the bug and wrote the first remote code execution (RCE) exploit in about two days. Building the worm took one more week.

A worm at this scale used to be the kind of thing that took a larger team months. AI can already do most of the work here. Our team provided the judgment about what to target and how to test it safely.

— Calif Research, WeWorm

Tags: ai-security-research, ai, llms, security, generative-ai

Tool: .blend URL Viewer I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL). As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture. Yesterday I decided to t...

A belated writeup of a project I did in 2018, to scale the puzzle game 2048 down to a smaller board where it could be exhaustively analysed, and learn from the results.

Pushing for transparency

This was so casually uttered by LG executives in their sales pitch to advertising companies. We own the glass. What they mean is, they own your tv. They own everything on it. You may have paid for the box, but they own the glass. They can run anything they want on it, and...

I believe the time has come

I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The...

So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level. Le...

Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw: I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for 10+ y...

The idea of using computers to assist with proofs is not new. The first major computer-assisted proof was published in 1976, the proof of the four color theorem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. The authors reduced the proof of the four color theorem to verifying calculations on 1,834 configurations, each checked by a computer […]

The post A 50-year-old computer-assisted proof first appeared on John D. Cook.

A rising tide may lift all boats, but the AI tide lifts some boats much more than others. By all accounts, the best programmers have had the biggest productivity boost from AI. And top tier mathematicians are using AI to settle long-standing mathematical conjectures. AI is a powerful tool, but tools don’t come to life […]

The post AI is an intelligence multiplier first appeared on John D. Cook.

When I trained the previous AI comment classifier, I used partially personal private data to do it, and built it on a somewhat shaky foundation, so I couldn’t share the code or data. I rebuilt it on public data and a better foundation! First off, you might want t...

Yesterday OpenAI announced a proof that settled a long-standing question about the Navier-Stokes equations from fluid dynamics. The announcement has created a lot of buzz, as one would expect. But there’s an aspect of OpenAI’s work that I haven’t seen anyone talk about: they posted a Lean 4 formal proof at the same time as […]

The post The part of Navier-Stokes no one is talking about first appeared on John D. Cook.

In 1986, it seemed like everyone was talking about VCRs, especially VHS VCRs. But this was an example of it taking years to become an overnight sensation. The first VHS VCR, the JVC HR-3300, was announced September 9, 1976. JVC

The post The first VHS VCR: JVC HR-3300 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.