Technology

At the heart of the NetNut residential proxy service was the Popa botnet, an engineered stealth communications layer. By embedding deceptive software development kits into inexpensive, off-brand Android-based smart TVs, streaming media boxes and unofficial apps like the SmartTube client, NetNut hijacked ordinary home electronics.

When consumers plugged in these devices, their home internet connections were quietly rented out as residential proxy exit nodes. This allowed malicious traffic to route through legitimate domestic IP addresses, effectively bypassing standard data center blocks and security filters.

AFAIK the only thing illegal about this is they didn't bother with TOS agreements.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49145461

Meta has been up to no good for a while - always?

Is $1.4 trillion a reasonable amount for these cases? Who knows.

Is it reasonable compensation for all the evil they’ve done? I’d argue yes.

It’s essentially their entire market capitalization as a penalty.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1246106/microsoft-cuts-4800-jobs

It records ambient conditions over time, stores readings in non-volatile memory, and displays current data along with a history graph. The device is designed for low power consumption, over 1 week of operation on a small Li‑Po battery.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1245926/nuclear-regulatory-commission-nrc-proposes-to-weaken-radiation-protections-putting-worke

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1246129/anthropic-uncovered-claude-s-consciousness-like-workbench-the-mysterious-j-space-hides-h

As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness.

In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

Microsoft is losing Builders fast. They're switching to MacOS and Linux. The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming. However, even these are falling to Linux.

Without Builders, you don't have software, and without software, you don't have users. This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.

Up on the dam, almost everything that looks like a problem becomes an advantage.

The plant sits above the fog line, in thin, clear air that lets far more sunlight through.

The higher you go, the stronger and cleaner the sunlight becomes.

Cold actually helps, because solar panels work more efficiently when they are not baking in heat.

And then there is the snow, which acts like a giant mirror, bouncing extra light up onto the panels from below.

Scientists call it the albedo effect, and it can lift a mountain plant’s output well beyond anything possible in the valley.

A test site at a similar height recorded yearly output far above a typical Swiss plant.

Stokes allegedly hid his device behind a virtual private network (VPN) server which he then used to open an account on the ngrok secure tunnelling service.

But doing so did not mask the unique GDID of the Windows installation he used.

Microsoft identified that GDID for investigators after a court order, based on ngrok's time-stamped access records.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1243317/it-s-not-about-physical-vs-digital-games-it-s-about-ownership

Hacker News.

Enshittification as a service. How wonderful.