We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

This seems essentially sane if they have money to burn...

They read too much sci-fi, not enough science fact, or both.

Well, you know, D-K... they don't know what survivor bias is.

They are sure they are smart because they got money, and don't understand that even if they did make an intelligent investment, there was a luck component.

PPIN seems to mostly be a server feature. I don't feel like going into BIOS right now but I found this about a PPIN option on a Lenovo server. It shows an AMD processor so it's highly relevant. On my system I don't have /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/topology/ppin and there's nothing about ppin in dmesg, but I don't know if that's because the feature's not enabled, or compiled in, or what.

NIMBYs aren't people who don't want things to be made. They're people who want them made somewhere else. But only the wealthy are clamoring for all of us to be replaced with computers, so that's not apt.

Finding a single place willing to put up with a datacenter is as much success as deploying thousands of these hypothetical space datacenters.

For the cost of a *single* SpaceX launch, they could basically bribe an entire small town's population to be happy with them. $50K a person and they'll *probably* pass public comment.

LLMs don't have children.

By far, with all these new mega constellations the biggest risk we face is from the Kessler syndrome from which there will be no way back and end any ambitions for human space exploration for thousands of years.

It would be worthwhile to have tight international regulation as it is the one interest that all countries share.

This will be the next frontier, the question is what happens when you keep pumping heat into them. I wonder what will it to to infrared astronomy? Also, electronics will have to stay inside the Van Alan belt, so it will be interesting how the issue of cosmic radiation flipping bits will be handled.

Half learning, half having the logic augmented. That's a remodel.

Obligatory "Welcome to Slashdot, you must be new here."

This has been going on for literally years.

Anonymous posting is an option for logged in users, not a thing that people can do without logging in, so they know exactly who is doing this. Slashdot has removed accounts before, therefore it is clear that they want this to occur.

That's what TPM is fundamentally about. You talked in another post about it being for separation, that's a trust function, so clearly you know it's about trust. That shows that this comment begins disingenuously.

Open Source TPM software and hardware exist, and are under the user's control in a way that any other TPM is not. Not every motherboard has a TPM slot, but boards with them are not hard to come by, so it is feasible for users to have a TPM that they actually do control. Neither the TPM in your CPU nor the average add-in TPM is actually that. Being able to remove things from it is not the same thing as being in control of it, although it's a part of being in control.

The "He who can destroy a thing controls it" idea from Dune was about political control, not direct and literal. You can destroy that data at any time, but that's the extent of your control over it. That's not nothing, but it's far from the hardware working for you.

Right, that's why the feature is not for my benefit. If I want to bypass security between applications which is not for my benefit (for example to prevent me from copying data that I'm actually intending to copy) and I can't do that because TPM says no, that's working against me.

Having a separate secure enclave is a good idea, having it be so secure that I can't do what I want with it when I want to is a bad one. Most users won't even try, you only need to make it so that they can't trivially be tricked into it. A big warning, a short delay, a hoop to jump through so that a person who can't read the warning can't get there.