News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

neffy

Re:Why Were Victorian Elites So Effective? on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @12:36PM (#49995189)
It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th.

So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.

Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.

Re:An Algorithmic Failure Beneath the Secret Ballot on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @06:07AM (#49976402)
Certainly it´s possible to rig in person voting - but if you do, people will know that you did. And that also matters.
Re:What Happened to the Snowden Archive on Monday September 21, 2026 @10:06AM (#49787478)
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
Re:Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era on Sunday July 26, 2026 @10:22AM (#49058524)
Because if you can just use AI, Law becomes accessible to both the rich and the poor.
Re:Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb's New Universe on Saturday July 04, 2026 @08:25AM (#48784915)
Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.
Although the stock market isn´t in itself, it benefits from the second order effects of continuous money supply expansion, and long term processes progressively concentrating money into the financial system.
It is a similar kind of lending loop to that which went on during the late 1990's leading up to the 2000 crash. A lends to B lends to C lends to A.

There is a famous quote from the polish economist Kalecki, that "economics is the science of mistaking a stock for a flow". Essentially this form of lending continues while everybody can make interest payments, and blows up horribly as soon as somebody can´t - as I have no doubt all those concerned are fully aware.

Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.
There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.
Re:I Know We're in an AI Bubble Because Nobody Wants Me on Saturday November 29, 2025 @06:39AM (#46086802)
If they optimize though - and this is coming at some point - local AI becomes possible, and their entire business case as a cloud monopoly evaporates. I think they know they're in a race between centralized control, and widespread use and control, and that is what is really driving this.
Re:F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code on Thursday October 16, 2025 @09:06AM (#45604855)
Well honestly, this security person thinks its a terrible idea - but needless to say the people selling those systems disagree - and for non-technical management, it ticks the compliance box and they get back to their jobs.
Re:Matrices can be your Friends on Monday October 13, 2025 @11:00AM (#45569065)
And since the economist's main skill at math is fitting a very short ruler to a very large curve... i wouldn't put them ahead of lawyers...
Re:The murky economics of the data-centre investment boom on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @05:05PM (#45508865)
Feedback loops. Always with the feedback loops.
It´s not just the legal system. A lot of US Doctors are typically paid on a piece rate basis, and the medical records systems are extremely fragmented, so there is an incentive to order repeat tests (as you get passed around from specialist to specialist), and no incentive to put the systems in to make that unnecessary.
Re:Hackers strike Harrods in latest UK cyberattack on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @12:34PM (#45439775)
There is a fair bit of grooming going on out there on the private discord channels and similar.
Re:The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers on Thursday September 25, 2025 @07:57PM (#45380875)
No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.
It´s also a lot of assumptions. This probably is an attacker - or wannabe at least. But you could be a student or researcher working on a cyber security course looking and for some projects your search flow would look a lot like this.
Re:Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @10:06PM (#45122691)
No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases.

And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this material is paywalled or blocked from search engines. It´s less useful when you look at code examples that mix different versions of python, and have comments referring to figures on the previous page. I´m afraid it becomes very obvious when you look under the hood at the training sets themselves, just how this is all being achieved.

Ok, but this happens pretty regularly on a planetary scale (at least every 110,000 years or so) - why hasn´t it been so disastrous before - say at the end of the last interglacial?
When I looked into it last year, it´s still an under-acknowledged issue. The impression I formed was that it was a bit of a crapshoot - along with some bad practitioners, there didn´t seem to be much information on when and why it would or would not occur.
I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.
Re:John Carmack at Upper Bound 2025 (slides and notes) on Friday May 23, 2025 @07:16AM (#44071779)
This is exactly it. Biology is making massive use of hacked real time local network communication in ways we haven´t begun to explore.
Re:How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025? on Monday May 05, 2025 @02:40PM (#43898063)
Sure. Corporations commit ransomware attacks all the time.
But I don´t want to "consume" more than Americans. I want to eat healthy food in reasonable quantities and maintain a sensible weight.

I don´t want to own a car and drive 2 hours to work every day, and consume more car ownership - I want to cycle or walk, and stay fit and enjoy the sun.

You see the mistake you're making?

I lived in the US for 6 years, and could have stayed. It was an easy decision to go back to Europe.

We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else.

And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place, than to have to worry about carrying a gun around all the time, and whether or not a child might get accidentally get access to it. See also gun shooting figures.

Re:The Demoralization is just Beginning on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @10:49AM (#43268174)
Not actually the case. The gold standard linked the expansion of the money supply to the price of gold, not the actual supply. So as the money supply expanded, every time gold was bought or sold through direct bank transfer, the price was influenced by the expanding deposit supply, not by the asset gold supply, and slowly increased, creating a nice little feedback loop. If you look at the figures for the gold standard period in the 19th-20th century, otherwise known as the British Monetary Orthodoxy, you will see a slow and steady expansion in the deposit supply in all countries using it. Trouble was, the expansion was a different rates in different countries, and so by the 1910´s the differences were tearing the invisible financial fabric apart. The rest as they say is history.

Banking systems being somewhat unstable and prone to credit crises is actually an entirely different problem, and unrelated to how the expansion is being regulated.

Re:The Demoralization is just Beginning on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @10:44AM (#43268079)
If that, as @acatton says. It is certainly not happening all the time. There are laws around libel and slander, which are more aimed at civility than anything else, but its rare that they make it to actual court. In Britain at least there is a long held tradition, and some rightly infamous accompanying libel cases, where 1 farthing/penny/pound damages (inflation has had some effect I guess) were awarded in an ok, you win but the moral case was with the defendant signal. One of the more recent:

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/judge-right-to-award-lying-...

Re:China turns members of its diaspora into spies on Sunday December 29, 2024 @11:34AM (#42540941)
There are two as it happens - the other one is Eastern Russia - ethnically asian, although not Han. Notice how Putin is always present for the pacific exercises, even when one might think he had better ways to spend his time on the western front.
Double entry book keeping implements an error correction and detection algorithm.
The Basel Capital rules dominate at the moment. If that ever gets rolled back... buy gold immediately.

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