MoreRSS

site iconAlec MuffettModify

Alec is a technologist, writer & security consultant who has worked in host and network security for more than 30 years, with 25 of those in industry.
Please copy the RSS to your reader, or quickly subscribe to:

Inoreader Feedly Follow Feedbin Local Reader

Rss preview of Blog of Alec Muffett

Remember, Kids: Cyberaugmentation is only for the less-abled!

2026-08-01 22:43:14

The only people who should be allowed to buy Meta AI Glasses are visually impaired or blind; Facial Recognition & Live AI scene analysis is *only* moral if it would help you because you can’t see. Such devices should only be sold to people with registered disabilities. Be more Geordi La Forge!

Also: gatekeeping or denying access to assistive technologies on the basis of human capability and state registration has never caused social or political problems.

RE: 1 BILLION

2026-07-31 21:12:08

It is interesting from a sociological perspective that some people will go to great lengths to explain how big 1+ billion is in the context of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg having too much money, yet will consider similar numbers to be trivial in the matter of filtering daily content uploads to seek evidence of abuse


Previously

microgpt

2026-07-31 20:34:20

train your own teeny-tiny name-generating LLM

in just 3 pages of python

http://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

Ofcom’s quest to censor the world | spiked

2026-07-31 08:23:19

[Ofcom] wants, it seems, pre-emptive powers to block access to sites operating anywhere in the world, should they be deemed harmful to people in the UK. This is authoritarian nonsense on any number of levels … an unelected agency is spending its time digging around the internet looking for material it would like to stop us seeing … [T]he issue here is material that’s harmful to children and sites such as suicide forums. But it is a racing certainty that any such powers, if given, will be invoked to go well beyond suicide forums.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/07/29/ofcoms-quest-to-censor-the-world/

When I started password cracking in 1991, using all available computer resources of a small university I could manage about 200 guesses per second

2026-07-31 05:01:23

Nowadays we do billions of guesses per second on modern laptops, not even particularly high-end ones; so when this person gets one token every four seconds for a 2.8 TRILLION parameter LLM, using AN OLD MACBOOK PRO, to me it suggests that local LLMs will soon be everywhere:

New York puts accuracy minimums for age assurance into effect with SAFE for Kids Act | Biometric Update

2026-07-30 16:57:47

The linked blog is a compost heap of age verification dogma, but that means that the comedy occasionally writes itself. What could possibly go wrong with the new New York age verification mandate?

Circumvention also gets addressed, in that acceptable age assurance tech must demonstrate “a rate of detecting method circumvention for an age assurance method that meets or exceeds 98 percent.”

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202607/new-york-puts-accuracy-minimums-for-age-assurance-into-effect-with-safe-for-kids-act