today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 30, 2024

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Trio of Chinese botnet operators sanctioned by United States • The Register

  • TechXplore ☛ Scientists find major gaps in cybersecurity at auto workshops

    In a new study from the University of Skövde, researchers found that many auto workshops do not know enough about how to keep our cars safe from cyberattacks.

• Openwashing

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Mistral AI open-sources new Codestral large language model for developers

    The company’s new Codestral model understands more than 80 programming languages. Its knowledge base includes so-called high-level languages such as Python that automate certain coding tasks to improve developer productivity. The model can also write software in several low-level syntaxes, which enable programmers to more directly interact with the underlying hardware. That feature is conducive to tasks such as optimizing programs’ performance but comes with a steep learning curve.

  • New York Times ☛ Mark Zuckerberg is Popular Again Thanks to Meta’s Open-Source AI

    Mr. Emanuel, the founder of the blockchain start-up Pastel Network, was sold. He said he appreciated that Meta’s A.I. system was powerful and easy to use. Most of all, he loved how Mr. Zuckerberg was espousing the hacker code of making the technology freely available — largely the opposite of what Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have done.

• Licensing / Legal

  • TMZ ☛ Driver with Suspended License Stuns Judge By Joining Court Zoom While Driving

    Check it out ... Corey Harris joined his court hearing for driving with a suspended license via Zoom on May 15 ... and to the surprise of the court, is visibly driving a car.

  • New York Times ☛ What to Know About the Open Versus Closed Software Debate

    Open-source software is any such computer code that can be freely distributed, copied or altered to a developer’s own ends. The nonprofit Open Source Initiative, an industry organization, sets other stipulations and standards for what software is considered open source, but it is largely a matter of the code’s being free and open for anyone to use and improve.

• Databases

  • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Modern SQLite: Secure delete

    This feature is available since 00s, but few people know of it.

    If you work with sensitive data, and want to be 100% sure that there is no trace of the old data after it has been updated or deleted — SQLite has you covered. The secure_delete pragma (off by default) causes SQLite to overwrite deleted content with zeros.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google’s technical info about search ranking leaks online

    The material appears to have been inadvertently committed to a publicly accessible Google-owned repository on GitHub around March 13 by the web giant's own automated tooling. That automation tacked an Apache 2.0 open source license on the commit, as is standard for Google's public documentation. A follow-up commit on May 7 attempted to undo the leak.

  • The Register UK ☛ SpiderOak’s datacenter upgrade is still borking backups

    The ongoing problems affect users of SpiderOak One, a software-based encrypted backup solution that's marketed as a means to protect data from ransomware and whatever "else life brings your way." SpiderOak also designs data protection and cybersecurity solutions for space-based operations.