Earlier this month, both AT&T and Verizon had a texting and calling cell phone outage – even the FCC noted that this was happening in multiple states! Similar issues have happened in February and at other times. In the recent New Mexico, 29 out of 113 cell towers were down and this is a common issue among areas with natural disasters. This highlights the need for other channels of communication, even when you are in town and normally have a working cell phone:
Continue reading “Recent Outages Highlight Need for Ham Radio, Multiple Emergency Communications.”Will LLMs ruin SEO? It already may be happening.
In the recent article in The Atlantic, they make an interesting point – the web will likely be transformed by the junk that can be created by LLVMs and ChatGPT. This could be an increasing problem in the future, and I have seen some cases where current search engines give links to the “word salad” pages noted in the article.
Continue reading “Will LLMs ruin SEO? It already may be happening.”Recent Research Paper Notes Security Issues of ChatGPT and Other Language Models
In early March a paper was published with details of a potential vulnerability that can spread across getAI systems. For example, a mailing assistant service could be set to send out something spammy.
Continue reading “Recent Research Paper Notes Security Issues of ChatGPT and Other Language Models”Is your XZ/SSH Security Library Compromised? How to Check for Recent Backdoor
Recently the common XZ library had a major backdoor found – by its own contributor. You can read about the recent discovery on OpenSSF. What does this say about the common advice to “always update the latest updates”? And how many times have things like this happened in the past?
Continue reading “Is your XZ/SSH Security Library Compromised? How to Check for Recent Backdoor”KNIME Summit is coming up – with free online passes available
If you’ve worked with data science, ML or AI tools you will probably be familiar with the KNIME tools. Later this month, April 15-17, 3 days of data science demos will be available, with free online stream passes available. Check it out at https://info.knime.com/spring-summit-2024-atx!
Programming stuff for your Apr 1st
The “wrong” history of programming languages.
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
Continue reading “Programming stuff for your Apr 1st”Installing /e/OS and first review
As you may know, /e/OS is the non-Google Android OS that runs on a variety of phones. This means the combined advantages of Android apps, extra privacy options and not getting gobs of Google apps each asking for your login and information, which you cannot delete*. An easy installation program is available to set up your phone if it is one of the more common models!
Continue reading “Installing /e/OS and first review”Lost the setup-new-Android screen? There is hope…
If you’ve ever worked to try and set up a new phone, you may have noted that the initial transfer and setup screen may go away… Even if you reset the phone again, how do you get it back? Fortunately there is an excellent open source Activity Launcher that will let you get back to this screen (“activity” in Android developer terms).
Continue reading “Lost the setup-new-Android screen? There is hope…”One less Historical Online Library… Google Removes Cached Page Search Engine Feature
This month you may have noticed Google removed the cached page within its search results. The Ars Technica comments note that this could be a disaster for internet historians as well as users looking up previous pages to compare recent legal agreement changes and website changes across the web.
Continue reading “One less Historical Online Library… Google Removes Cached Page Search Engine Feature”Learning from previous mistakes – pulling historical vulnerability information from various plugins
If you keep a watch on software security newsletters or blogs like the Wordfence blog, you’ll know there are a good number of new detected defects and vulnerabilities on a regular basis, even on well known plugins and software. It’s worth looking into the details of how this happens especially if you work on PHP software from time to time. Thankfully there are public records which let you compare to look at how these are fixed:
Continue reading “Learning from previous mistakes – pulling historical vulnerability information from various plugins”