Australis13

Professor Lisa Given, director of RMIT University’s Centre for Human-AI Information Environments, said the Reuters findings were unsurprising because “most of these tools are being designed without a view to potential harms and the need for those kinds of safety controls”.

That’s basically the history of the Internet. The vast majority of security, privacy and safety mechanisms have been bolted on after the fact. Not only should tech companies know better by now, but they are deliberately exploiting the human need for connection. So-called AI is even worse since many LLMs are borderline sycophantic and there is no easy way to filter out all the adult or dangerous content from them without rebuilding the model from scratch using a carefully curated dataset.

On another note, it will be very interesting to see what X does about Grok… It would almost be funny if the platform ended up blocked here.

You don’t say…

I don’t quite understand all the downvotes unless people aren’t reading the post? I get that nobody wants a LLM to be writing drivers, but this article is basically a “let’s see if it can do it” - sharing the author’s experience and results (which he pretty much says not to use at the end)! It’s still an interesting read to see how the technology performs at this task and the number of hoops the author had to jump through to get any kind of functional result.

Frustratingly this is not just affecting the current generation of devices, but the previous one too. DDR4 RAM (which I use in my desktop) has gone up 300% since I bought it a few years ago.

Here’s hoping that nobody needs to replace current or previous gen hardware if it breaks in the next 2 years…

So basically the consumer market is screwed until the AI bubble bursts and manufacturers (GPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc.) can rebalance their production lines back to the pre-AI division of enterprise vs consumer product.

Rather impressive how quickly the hackers reverse-engineered Microsoft’s patch and used the vulnerability whilst the opportunity was still available:

The threat group, tracked under names including APT28, Fancy Bear, Sednit, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy, pounced on the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21509, less than 48 hours after Microsoft released an urgent, unscheduled security update late last month, the researchers said. After reverse-engineering the patch, group members wrote an advanced exploit that installed one of two never-before-seen backdoor implants.

Oof. Kudos to Notepad++ for being up front with the details.

Bit late to the party, but good to see another country waking up to the realisation that the US cannot be trusted. Now if only my own country would realise that…

Argh. I was hoping to upgrade my server storage later this year…

One can only hope!

I’m sure these idiots have no concept of the future. They want to burn everyone out in months to years for the sake of boosting their profits in the here and now. Doesn’t matter that if you treat your workers well (and pay them well) you often get greater productivity over a longer period.

That’s my point. I feel like they have been sitting on this for a while and didn’t release it ages ago because it would be one more thing to reduce the odds of people shifting from 10 to 11.

Right, so they wait until just after Windows 10 reaches EOL to release the patch for this annoying bug. Typical. They’ve probably had the solution ready for ages.

That’s quite possible, unfortunately…

I have several use cases, a big one being that it gives me an alternate storage medium for backing up home photos and videos. Obviously there’s caveats on how long BD-Rs last (although M-discs should outlast me) and the issue of needing a player in future, but it gives me more peace of mind knowing that I can backup these sorts of things to different storage types (external hard drives are all well and good until they’re corrupted by power issues or user error, or you want to keep a copy at a relative’s place and it’s a multi-hour trip… with optical media you can just keep adding discs to the offsite backup as needed and update the external HDD less frequently).

The other major use case I have has already been mentioned - backing up Blurays that I’ve bought (or, in the case of a few shows I like, being able to compare the DVD vs Bluray frame by frame).

Interesting to see that demand for optical drives is increasing, although apparently it’s only in Japan: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/optical-drive-demand-surges-amid-windows-10-retirement-japanese-users-switching-to-windows-11-are-buying-up-blu-ray-drives

Still, hopefully that means Bluray writers stay on the market for a bit longer.

Oh, I definitely agree. We need better privacy and data protection laws here in Australia too. In the meantime, however, I do what I can to minimise my footprint. I’m well aware that other people are going to be the weak link!

Fortunately not… I’m generally the one responsible for IT maintenance with my parents’ as they get older. Disabled OneDrive long ago since they don’t use it.

Probably right on the money, sadly.

If I hadn’t abandoned OneDrive already, this would make me do so.