Hackers Hijacked Google’s Gemini AI With a Poisoned Calendar Invite to Take Over a Smart Home. For likely the first time ever, security researchers have shown how AI can be hacked to create real-world havoc, allowing them to turn off lights, open smart shutters, and more.
Rings bells to me about the lack of human data interaction especially the separations of concerns.
I already talked about this with Google’s AI wanting access to everything Google related. This hijack wouldn’t be so effective if there were better permissions and separations of concerns were built in rather than given lip service.
I was made aware of Google’s OPAL project and reminded of how strong pipelines can be for managing complexity.
The pipes are described by prompts but interestingly you can reuse and share pipes and the whole flow. Which leads me to wonder if there might be a little market place for the pipes?
Might need to keep an eye on Opal, but wondering if there are better solutions. For example Xproc which can interface with APIs of large language model without getting into the weeds?
Recently I found myself in rural southern France and of course, my Pacemaker device and headphones came with me. It was weird being surrounded by nothing but grapevines. Certainly wine country.
I took a nice shot with a very rare dark sky. With a bit of tweaking, you got the cover for a storm in a french grapevine.
The tunes are certainly not safe for work, and I just doubled down on the nsfw tunes with a uplift in bpm too. I do like mix, its got a good selection of old and new mixed together. Considered going longer but it didn’t need more.
My Yunohost is a bit broken still, so its only on my Peertube channel right now. Remember to enable Sensitive content in the filter to see it in the list of mixes.
To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Ian thinks: The fairphone has been around for years but version 6 of the smartphone, seems to have got everything right. This tear down by iFixit, shows exactly how easy it is to repair, replace and even upgrade parts in the future. One day all phones will be built this way?
Ian thinks: Age verification has hit the UK and there is a lot to say. The VPN usage increase the UK in the UK speaks volumes. The UK isn’t the only one but the impact is being felt by everyone. If the recent Tea app and so many other data breaches has taught us, sharing personal data is not going to go well. I’m hardly hearing ZKP (Zero-knowledge proof) mentioned, which is good practice for this.
Ian thinks: There are many mentions of de-growth dotted across these notes over the last few years. This BBC News video gives a reasonable view of the movement, some of the challenges and best of all calling out some of the presumptions which plague the movement.
Ian thinks: Its been well talked about and if you own a site, you may have noticed the huge amount of traffic caused by bots. Cloudflare have had enough and wrote a open solution called Anubis which is too expensive for AI bots to get around.
Ian thinks: You know its really bad when John Oliver spends most of his weekly show talking about the problem and how its affecting everyone. Leaning on the work of 404 media, Oliver uses comedy to great effect pointing out the insanity of were we are now.
Ian thinks: As part of the Open Rights Group’s celebration of 20 years since its inception on that day in London during the Open Tech conference. The conversation doesn’t sit in the space of nostalgia too long, but rather looks at what was learned and how it can be applied in current time.
Ian thinks: There has been an uptick in Human brain interfaces news and discussion. However few are asking the really big questions we all have about the technology. Thankfully Coldfusion is asks theose questions about privacy, enshittification, agency etc. Dare I mention Black Mirror’s common people?
Ian thinks: The critique of AI is well thought-out by McQuillan, and the relation to the context collapse, neo-liberalism and empire building is spot on. The ability of the AI empires to fill in the narrative when there isn’t one is also a key point. Well worth reading Empire of AI too for related impact, which I just finished.
Ian thinks: Is there no line AI slop won’t cross for the clicks? Fake obituaries are appearing across the internet and its another example of the slop and it is pretty bad news for its target/victims, the friends and family members. The video is also worth watching too.
