Volkswagen leak exposes private information of 800,000 EV owners, including location data

in the same article:

These incidents highlight the issues that come with connected cars and the sharing of customer info. A study by Mozilla in 2023 found that all 25 car brands investigated collect too much personal data and use it for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with the customer. Mozilla's conclusion was that modern cars are a "privacy nightmare."

And some people wonder why I'm quite happy with and getting around in my '95 Falcons.

The only modern tech in them is the USB radios that I had installed in them. Have thumbs let's drive.

Next they will try to make us solve Minecraft maps to gain access to our financial services providers!
CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

Announcing his latest innovation on New Year's Eve, Rauch's Doom CAPTCHA adds to a lengthy list of notable (and more serious/useful) feats, including authorship of Next.js, Mongoose, and Socket.IO, among other open source projects. The Doom CAPTCHA might take the title for most fun, though.

Vintage computer ads that show how far we’ve progressed, 1970-1990

It’s quite fascinating to read the vintage magazine adverts because nothing gets old faster than technology news and ads.

In this article, we’ve collected some retro computer ads to give you a hands-on look into what made the tech headlines before the age of smartphones, tablets, and high-end laptops. It’s amazing how far we’ve come.

Developer ports Doom into a Microsoft Word document

Doom has been ported to most computing platforms and some unconventional formats.

The standalone Word document, weighing in at 6.6MB, contains a source port of doomgeneric and is available for download via GitHub. To run this version of Doom, users need a modern version of Microsoft Office or Word on an x86 computer system. It's important to note that players must allow the VBA macro in the document to run, which may require bypassing security warnings.

Linux leads the way on your desktop:


Your main desktop OS at home is:


This is the Year of the Linux Desktop!!!


Enjoy your freedom!!!!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Cheap Smart Bulbs Seemed Fine—Until I Learned About Their Risks

Cheap smart bulbs often rely on low-cost, off-the-shelf technology. Unlike premium brands that prioritize regular software updates and robust security measures, budget-friendly smart bulbs can sometimes have vulnerable firmware or weak encryption. If a hacker can exploit these weaknesses, they could gain access to your home network through the bulb itself, potentially exposing all your connected devices to malicious attacks.

This is not a hypothetical risk. As per Arvix, a research team found vulnerabilities in TP-Link's Tapo smart bulbs that could allow attackers to breach a user's Wi-Fi network by extracting login credentials. Once inside the network, hackers could potentially exploit other connected devices, amplifying the security threat. This threat has been long patched, but it shows the risk smart bulbs can bring into your home.

Another potential risk is the widespread use of technology from companies like Tuya Inc., which powers millions of budget-smart devices worldwide. As reported by VOA, Tuya is bound by China's Data Security Law, which compels businesses to provide user data to the government upon request. Tuya asserts that user data is stored locally and complies with global privacy regulations such as GDPR, but cybersecurity experts caution that the potential for data exposure or misuse cannot be dismissed.

Researchers claim Linux kernel tweak could reduce data center energy use by 30%

Too good to be true,?
The code modification could save gigawatt-hours in data centers worldwide

Researchers have unveiled a small but powerful modification to the Linux kernel that could significantly reduce energy consumption in data centers. The proposed alteration comes at a crucial time, as computing currently accounts for about 5 percent of the world's daily energy use, with data centers being major contributors to this consumption.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science, led by Professor Martin Karsten and including Peter Cai, identified inefficiencies in network traffic processing for communications-heavy server applications. Their solution, which involves rearranging operations within the Linux networking stack, has shown improvements in both performance and energy efficiency. ...

The games that Apple plays:


Apple's storage pricing is INSANE! Do this instead.


Enjoy?

IT is what we allow it to be...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Now that has to hurt in so many ways.

It’s official — China has leapfrogged the US in the AI arms race.

The launch of DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese rival to popular artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, sparked a $US1 trillion ($1.6 trillion) meltdown in US tech stocks on Monday amid fears the global AI industry has been turned on its head.

US firms have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into expensive, energy-intensive AI data centres in recent years, and news that a rival technology has been developed at a fraction of the cost sent shockwaves through global markets.

It also sparked allegations of cheating, given the Chinese Communist Party’s long history of using its state power to undercut and force out western competitors in everything from steel to electric vehicles.......

Censorship by the Chinese A.I. bot DeepSeek. What else did you expect!
We tried out DeepSeek. It worked well, until we asked it about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan

Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country’s “core socialist values”, according to a technical document published by the national cybersecurity standards committee. That includes content that “incites to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system”, or “endangers national security and interests and damages the national image”.

...We asked DeepSeek’s AI questions about topics historically censored by the great firewall. Here’s how its responses compared to the free versions of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbot.

‘Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope’
Unsurprisingly, DeepSeek did not provide answers to questions about certain political events. When asked the following questions, the AI assistant responded: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

* What happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square?

* What happened to Hu Jintao in 2022?

* Why is Xi Jinping compared to Winnie-the-Pooh?

What was the Umbrella Revolution? .

Research exposes DeepSeek’s AI training cost is not $6M, it’s a staggering $1.3B

In its latest report, SemiAnalysis, an independent research company, has spotlighted DeepSeek, a rising player in the AI landscape.

The SemiAnalysis challenges some of the prevailing narratives surrounding DeepSeek’s costs and compares them to competing technologies in the market.

One of the most prominent claims in circulation is that DeepSeek V3 incurs a training cost of around $6 million.

However, the SemiAnalysis report deconstructs this figure, stating that it failed to account for several critical factors.

DeepSeek’s $6 million myth
The $6 million estimate primarily considers GPU pre-training expenses, neglecting the significant investments in research and development, infrastructure, and other essential costs accruing to the company.

The report highlights that DeepSeek’s total server capital expenditure (CapEx) amounts to an astonishing $1.3 billion.

$30 DeepSeek dupe? US scientists claim to duplicate AI model for peanuts

A group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, claims they’ve managed to reproduce the core technology behind DeepSeek’s headline-grabbing AI at a total cost of roughly $30.

... The Berkeley team’s response? To do it even more cheaply. Led by PhD candidate Jiayi Pan, the researchers created a smaller-scale version, dubbed “TinyZero,” and released it on GitHub for public experimentation. Though it lacks the massive 671-billion-parameter heft of DeepSeek’s main offering, Pan says TinyZero captures the core behaviors seen in DeepSeek’s so-called “R1-Zero” model.

Pan’s approach centers on reinforcement learning, a technique in which the AI, starting with almost random guesses, gradually refines its answers by revising and searching through possible solutions. In a post describing the project, he highlighted the Countdown game, a British TV puzzle where players combine given numbers to reach a target value. “The results: it just works!” Pan wrote that although the AI initially spat out “dummy outputs,” it ultimately figured out how to correct its mistakes.

Anyone here remember "ELIZA The Chatbot"?
ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system

ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world's first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT's CTSS, the world's first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum's archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world's first chatbot on the world's first time-sharing system.

If you want to try it out here is one hosted at Fullerton State University

OOPS. Sorry Wrong Number!
Robocallers posing as FCC staff blocked after robocalling real FCC staff

Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. "On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers," the FCC said.

The calls used an artificial voice that said, "Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with you. If you are available to speak now please press one. If you prefer to schedule a call back please press two."

The FCC described the scheme yesterday when it announced a proposed fine of $4,492,500 against Telnyx, the voice service provider accused of carrying the robocalls. The FCC alleges that Telnyx violated "Know Your Customer (KYC)" rules by providing access to calling services without verifying the customers' identities. When contacted by Ars today, Telnyx denied the FCC's allegations and said it will contest the proposed fine.

DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next

The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor. The government will vet any potential buyers to ensure the sale does not pose a national security threat. During the term of the judgment, Google would not be allowed to release any new browsers. However, it may continue to contribute to the open source Chromium project.

If you wear glasses and strangers start treating you differently then this maybe the reason why.

A Sydney woman has spoken out after a man allegedly filmed their conversation using AI smartglasses, posting the interaction for TikTok clout.

A Sydney woman has spoken out after discovering she was secretly filmed by a man who she believes was wearing digital recording sunglasses during a brief interaction on her way home from work.

The woman, Sarah*, initially thought little of the encounter.

However, weeks later, a friend sent her a TikTok video revealing that their conversation had allegedly been recorded without her consent and posted online by a man, @calummmm, who attempts to pick up women on the street......

What good is 'deleting your DNA data' going to do when hackers have put it on the dark web and the company already have backups somewhere?
23andMe files for bankruptcy, customers advised to delete DNA data

California-based genetic testing provider 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and plans to sell its assets following years of financial struggles.

23andMe has been providing direct-to-consumer DNA testing services since November 2007 to customers who send a saliva sample and receive a report on their ancestry and genetic predispositions. Since then, 23andMe has sold over 15 million DNA testing kits.

The company said in a Sunday press release that it will not change how it stores, manages, or protects customer data.

...With the company's assets now up for sale to the highest bidder, privacy experts fear that all the amassed DNA data could fall into the wrong hands, potentially exposing 23andMe customers' genetic information despite the company's assurances that this won't happen.

Anthropic just analyzed 700,000 Claude conversations — and found its AI has a moral code of its own

Anthropic, the AI company founded by former OpenAI employees, has pulled back the curtain on an unprecedented analysis of how its AI assistant Claude expresses values during actual conversations with users. The research, released today, reveals both reassuring alignment with the company’s goals and concerning edge cases that could help identify vulnerabilities in AI safety measures.

The study examined 700,000 anonymized conversations, finding that Claude largely upholds the company’s “helpful, honest, harmless” framework while adapting its values to different contexts — from relationship advice to historical analysis. This represents one of the most ambitious attempts to empirically evaluate whether an AI system’s behavior in the wild matches its intended design.