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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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  • 'Stealing Isn't Innovation': Hundreds of Creatives Warn Against an AI Slop Future
    by msmash on 22/01/2026 at 3:29 pm

    Around 800 artists, writers, actors, and musicians signed on to a new campaign against what they call "theft at a grand scale" by AI companies. From a report: The signatories of the campaign -- called "Stealing Isn't Innovation" -- include authors George Saunders and Jodi Picoult, actors Cate Blanchett and Scarlett Johansson, and musicians like the band R.E.M., Billy Corgan, and The Roots. "Driven by fierce competition for leadership in the new GenAI technology, profit-hungry technology companies, including those among the richest in the world as well as private equity-backed ventures, have copied a massive amount of creative content online without authorization or payment to those who created it," a press release reads. "This illegal intellectual property grab fosters an information ecosystem dominated by misinformation, deepfakes, and a vapid artificial avalanche of low-quality materials ['AI slop'], risking AI model collapse and directly threatening America's AI superiority and international competitiveness." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Nvidia Allegedly Sought 'High-Speed Access' To Pirated Book Library for AI Training
    by msmash on 22/01/2026 at 2:40 pm

    An expanded class-action lawsuit filed last Friday alleges that a member of Nvidia's data strategy team directly contacted Anna's Archive -- the sprawling shadow library hosting millions of pirated books -- to explore "including Anna's Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs." Internal documents cited in the amended complaint show Nvidia sought information about "high-speed access" to the collection, which Anna's Archive charged tens of thousands of dollars for. According to the lawsuit, Anna's Archive warned Nvidia that its library was illegally acquired and maintained, then asked if the company had internal permission to proceed. The pirate library noted it had previously wasted time on other AI companies that couldn't secure approval. Nvidia management allegedly gave "the green light" within a week. Anna's Archive promised access to roughly 500 terabytes of data, including millions of books normally only accessible through Internet Archive's controlled digital lending system. The lawsuit also alleges Nvidia downloaded books from LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • 'No Reasons To Own': Software Stocks Sink on Fear of New AI Tool
    by msmash on 22/01/2026 at 2:00 pm

    The new year was supposed to bring opportunities for beaten-down software stocks. Instead, the group is off to its worst start in years. From a report: The release of a new artificial intelligence tool from startup Anthropic on Jan. 12 rekindled fears about disruption that weighed on software makers in 2025. TurboTax owner Intuit tumbled 16% last week, its worst since 2022, while Adobe and Salesforce, which makes customer relationship management software, both sank more than 11%. All told, a group of software-as-a-service stocks tracked by Morgan Stanley is down 15% so far this year, following a drop of 11% in 2025. It's the worst start to a year since 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While unproven, the tool represents just the type of capabilities that investors have been fearing, and reinforces bearish positions that are looking increasingly entrenched, according to Jordan Klein, a tech-sector specialist at Mizuho Securities. "Many buysiders see no reasons to own software no matter how cheap or beaten down the stocks get," Klein wrote in a Jan. 14 note to clients. "They assume zero catalysts for a re-rate exist right now," he said, referring to the potential for higher valuation multiples. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Half of Fossil Fuel Carbon Emissions In 2024 Came From 32 Companies
    by BeauHD on 22/01/2026 at 1:00 pm

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Just 32 companies accounted for over half of global fossil carbon emissions in 2024, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.K.-based think tank InfluenceMap. That is down from 36 companies responsible for half the global CO2 emissions in 2023, and 38 companies five years ago. The analysis is the latest update to the Carbon Majors database, which tracks the world's largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers and uses production data to calculate the carbon emissions from each entity's production. The database, first developed by researcher Richard Heede and now hosted by InfluenceMap, quantifies current and historical emissions attributable to nearly 180 companies and provides annual updates. It is the only database of its kind tracking corporate-generated carbon emissions dating back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, research that's being used in efforts to hold major polluters accountable for climate harms. Despite dire warnings from scientists about the consequences of accelerating climate change, fossil fuel production is continuing apace. Last year, fossil fuel CO2 emissions reached a record high, topping 38 billion metric tons. In 2024 these emissions were 37.4 billion metric tons -- up 0.8 percent from 2023 -- and traceable to 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers, according to the report. Much of the global carbon emissions in 2024 came from state-owned entities, which represented 16 of the top 20 emitters. The five largest emitters overall -- Saudi Arabia's Aramco, Coal India, China's CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Co. and Russia's Gazprom -- were all state-controlled, and accounted for 18 percent of the total fossil CO2 emissions in 2024. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP -- the top five emitting investor-owned companies -- together were responsible for 5.5 percent of the total emissions in that year. Historically, ExxonMobil and Chevron rank in the top five for fossil carbon emissions generated from 1854 through 2024, accounting for 2.79 percent and 3.08 percent of overall carbon pollution, respectively. According to the analysis, the 178 entities in the database have generated 70 percent of fossil CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and just 22 entities are responsible for one-third of these emissions. "Each year, global emissions become increasingly concentrated among a shrinking group of high-emitting producers, while overall production continues to grow. Simultaneously, these heavy emitters continue to use lobbying to obstruct a transition that the scientific community has known for decades is essential," said Emmett Connaire, senior analyst at InfluenceMap. The findings of the new analysis, he added, "underscore the growing importance of this kind of rigorous evidence in efforts to determine accountability for climate-related losses." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Wikipedia's Guide to Spotting AI Is Now Being Used To Hide AI
    by BeauHD on 22/01/2026 at 10:00 am

    Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called "Humanizer," the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plugin on GitHub, where it has picked up over 1,600 stars as of Monday. "It's really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of 'signs of AI writing,'" Chen wrote on X. "So much so that you can just tell your LLM to... not do that." The source material is a guide from WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who have been hunting AI-generated articles since late 2023. French Wikipedia editor Ilyas Lebleu founded the project. The volunteers have tagged over 500 articles for review and, in August 2025, published a formal list of the patterns they kept seeing. Chen's tool is a "skill file" for Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-based coding assistant, which involves a Markdown-formatted file that adds a list of written instructions (you can see them here) appended to the prompt fed into the large language model (LLM) that powers the assistant. Unlike a normal system prompt, for example, the skill information is formatted in a standardized way that Claude models are fine-tuned to interpret with more precision than a plain system prompt. (Custom skills require a paid Claude subscription with code execution turned on.) But as with all AI prompts, language models don't always perfectly follow skill files, so does the Humanizer actually work? In our limited testing, Chen's skill file made the AI agent's output sound less precise and more casual, but it could have some drawbacks: it won't improve factuality and might harm coding ability. [...] Even with its drawbacks, it's ironic that one of the web's most referenced rule sets for detecting AI-assisted writing may help some people subvert it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Blue Origin's Satellite Internet Network TeraWave Will Move Data At 6 Tbps
    by BeauHD on 22/01/2026 at 7:00 am

    Blue Origin has unveiled an enterprise-focused satellite internet network called TeraWave, which promises up to 6 Tbps speeds via a mixed low- and medium-Earth orbit constellation. TechCrunch reports: The TeraWave constellation will use a mix of 5,280 satellites in low-Earth orbit and 128 in medium-Earth orbit, and Blue Origin plans to deploy the first ones in late 2027. It's not immediately clear how long Blue Origin expects it will take to build out the whole network. The low-Earth orbit satellites Blue Origin is building will use RF connectivity and have a max data transfer speed of 144 Gbps, while the medium-Earth variety will use an optical link that can achieve the much higher 6 Tbps speed. For reference, SpaceX's Starlink currently maxes out at 400 Mbps -- though it plans to launch upgraded satellites that will offer 1 Gbps data transfer in the future. "We identified an unmet need with customers who were seeking enterprise-grade internet access with higher speeds, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy, and rapid scalability for their networks. TeraWave solves for these problems," Blue Origin said in a statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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