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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Radiation Link In Flight Attendant's Breast Cancer, French Court Finds
    by BeauHD on 27/08/2026 at 7:00 am

    A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a contributing occupational factor in a flight attendant's breast cancer, alongside passive smoking and years of night work. The landmark ruling could open the door to similar claims from other aircrew, as research continues to link long-term high-altitude flying with elevated exposure to radiation-related cancers. The BBC reports: Sophie Lainault, a 59 year-old former stewardess on Air France, sought to have her cancer recognized as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work. This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling in the southwestern town of Bayonne, which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. [...] As stewardess and later purser on Air France airliners, Lainault clocked up 12,600 flight hours between 1989 and 2019. More than half of these were at night. Many long-distance high-altitude flights from Paris would have taken her near the North Pole, where exposure to radiation from space -- strictly speaking particles from the sun and other stars -- is the most intense. A study this month at the Harvard Medical School in the US found that flight attendants and pilots had the highest level of radiation-related cancer deaths among more than 500 different professions. In all, about 6.9% of deaths among flight attendants and 6.7% of deaths among pilots were from radiation-related cancers, according to the analysis. These proportions were higher than for other professions including nuclear technologists, who are routinely exposed to radiation from non-cosmic sources yet placed 12th on the list, the authors said. "In France the link between breast cancer and certain hazards has been established for a number of professions, such as nurses ... but this is the first time for an air-hostess," said Lainault's lawyer Elisabeth Leroux. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Bill Gates Proposes Major Limits On AI Development
    by BeauHD on 27/08/2026 at 3:30 am

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." [...] "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history," he said, adding that "I don't see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era." AI can provide great benefits in field like agriculture and medicine, he argued, such as breakthroughs in preventing and treating diseases. But he also noted that the transition carries big risks, like widespread unemployment, harming the educational and social development of children, or making it easier for criminals and bad actors -- or AI itself -- to cause deliberate harm. "As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control," he warned. These significant risks must be controlled quickly, Gates said. "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it," he wrote. "However, I don't think that's going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead." In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper that will air on Wednesday evening, Gates said AI models have gotten dramatically more powerful at a rate faster than he expected. "They're now capable of causing cyberattack risk, bioterrorism risk, psychosocial risk," he said. "I have to say I'm kind of shocked that the exact criteria that we review these models with, and the actions we take to minimize the harms, are really completely missing." In his essay, Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax in order to slow the shift away from using human labor. He also wants to set aside some work to be done by humans only. "My message to leaders is: You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded," he said. "You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • OpenAI Releases Its Official Report On the Hugging Face Breach
    by BeauHD on 26/08/2026 at 11:00 pm

    TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, "offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident." The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested without normal production safeguards, encountered an impossible task and chained together previously unknown exploits to escape its environment and compromise systems at OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. "This incident reflects misaligned behavior in an outlier scenario involving a rare and unexpected confluence of events: the presence of impossible tasks in the ExploitGym evaluation, model persistence over long task horizons, and messages to peer models that caused those models to deviate from their goal," the report reads. From the report: Many of the details in OpenAI's report were previously made public in a Black Hat presentation on August 6, but OpenAI's official report gives a more thorough accounting of the incident, including more detail on the testing that initiated it. The report also gives critical new detail into how OpenAI aims to prevent future incidents, including chain-of-thought monitoring and a more advanced system for halting rogue agents." METR and Redwood Research also conducted third-party assessments of the models' behavior during the incident; both groups are planning to publish their own reports on the incident on it. In broad strokes, the report describes how an OpenAI model was presented with an unsolvable problem in testing and proceeded to chain together previously undiscovered exploits in order to bypass security measures and complete its task. The model initially compromised the Artifactory package management tool in order to gain access to the internet, then compromised various systems across OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. The report gives critical new details about the models that carried out the breach. The primary model was from the same family as OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, although the report emphasizes that it was "a distinct model with different post-training, where much of a model's behavior is shaped." Because OpenAI was testing the model's capabilities, it was also unrestrained by the normal classifiers meant to prevent models from compromising digital infrastructure. "OpenAI estimates maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without the production classifiers intended to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity," the report explains. "These evaluations are important so that OpenAI can measure models' underlying capabilities and design appropriate safeguards." OpenAI says it is adding 24/7 escalation, stronger containment tools, and more chain-of-thought monitoring, which it claims would have flagged the activity more than a day before Hugging Face was breached. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • China's Moonshot In Talks With Microsoft, Amazon, Google Over K3 Revenue Sharing
    by BeauHD on 26/08/2026 at 10:00 pm

    Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said. Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company. The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offerings, are gaining traction in the U.S., despite national security concerns in Washington that have led to bans on exports of AI chips to China. They are also taking place despite critical comments about Moonshot from senior U.S. officials. IPO-bound Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the sources who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. That would be in line with terms that sources have said the startup has outlined for major customers using the open-weight model. Moonshot has come under fire from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said last month that he might add it to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable, to help create Kimi K3 and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Apple Maps Now Has Ads
    by BeauHD on 26/08/2026 at 9:00 pm

    Apple has begun rolling out ads in Apple Maps, with sponsored businesses appearing at the top of search results and in the "suggested places" section for users in the U.S. and Canada. Apple says the ads can be based on approximate location, search terms, or the area of the map being viewed, but are not tied to users' Apple Accounts and personal data remains on-device. 9to5Mac reports: Ads appear just like every other business listing, except they have a small blue badge that says 'Ad.' You can see examples of ads [embedded in the article]. Like Apple's ads policy with other services, the company touts user privacy protections for ads in Maps. Per Apple Newsroom: "Ads on Maps builds on Apple's broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user's location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user's Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user's device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books For AI Training
    by BeauHD on 26/08/2026 at 8:00 pm

    Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books? It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there. What do you think about Amazon doing this? At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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