Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

A novel technique for automating bypasses of LLM guardrails, also known as jailbreaking:

"New research from Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies and the developer of the Claude family of Large Language Models (LLMs), has released research showing that the process for getting LLMs to do what they’re not supposed to is still pretty easy and can be automated."

https://www.404media.co/apparently-this-is-how-you-jailbreak-ai/ by @emanuelmaiberg via @404mediaco

One of my papers got declined today by the journal I submitted it to, with a polite letter saying that while they found the paper interesting, it was not a good fit for the journal. In truth, I largely agreed with their conclusions, and the paper is now submitted to a different (and hopefully more appropriate) journal.

Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average. I occasionally mention this fact to my students and colleagues, who are sometimes surprised that my rejection rate is far from zero. I have belatedly realized our profession is far more willing to announce successful accomplishments (such as having a paper accepted, or a result proved) than unsuccessful ones (such as a paper rejected, or a proof attempt not working), except when the failures are somehow controversial. Because of this, a perception can be created that all of one's peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one's own personal career ending up becoming the only known source of examples of "mundane" failure. I speculate that this may be a contributor to the "impostor syndrome" that is prevalent in this field (though, again, not widely disseminated, due to the aforementioned reporting bias, and perhaps also due to some stigma regarding the topic). So I decided to report this (rather routine) rejection as a token gesture towards more accurate disclosure. (1/2)

Report: Hospitals Rarely Advise #Doctors on How to Treat Patients Under #Abortion Bans
—

Doctors described #hospital lawyers who “refused to meet” with them for months, were hard to reach during “life or death” situations and offered little help beyond “regurgitating” the law, according to a Senate Finance Committee #report.

#News #Health #Law #USPolitics #Government #Healthcare #Pregnancy #Patients

https://propub.li/402lEJm

#TIL #Python has a module, shlex, to safely build and parse #POSIX #shell commands. Useful, for example, when you want to automatically write #bash #scripts or `ssh` commands to execute more complex commands on remote machines.
#programming #subprocess

Happy Launch Anniversary JWST!

Also, thanks to Ariane Space for the great ride and for putting cameras on the Ariane 5’s upper stage so we could all say goodbye and good luck as JWST began it's 1.5 million km journey to L2.

https://youtu.be/dRqHlta6lr8

Any of you open source people come across Latta AI? A tool that claims to want to help developers fix bugs in open source projects.

Someone suggested a patch generated by this tool for a feature request on my project. The patch is a poor implementation of the request (unusable), it breaks two existing features (i.e. adds two bugs), and leaves redundant code. Not exactly impressive.

I hope we're not gonna get a ton of AI bots making BS pull requests to repos now?

#Code #GitHub #AI #OpenSource

Man, corporations really want to put a stop to libraries:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-library-e-books-queues-1.7414060?cmp=rss

"Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC."

"Those publishers ... will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book." #canada #cdnpoli #books

So look, I’m not really a believer, and my wife is into a totally different pantheon of deities, but we go to church on Christmas Eve every year with my folks and our kids and it is kind of a nice tradition.

apropos of nothing, here's an interesting article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

have a lovely day y'all
--sf

OpenOffice has multiple unfixed security issues, over a year old, as this image from the Board report says. And no new committers since 2022, and no major release since 2014. Maybe the FOSS community can ask the Apache Software Foundation to finally put it in the Attic, and stop leaving users vulnerable: https://www.apache.org/foundation/contact

My kids are more than a decade past the point of needing them, I have no history of buying them at this address, and I have YouTube history off, Adblock on all my devices except for the iOS ones and “personalized ads” turned off on all of those, and a relative with a one-year-old who still uses diapers was here for dinner and now half an hour later YouTube is showing me diaper ads.

They didn’t even use my wifi.

I hate this shit so much.

I have some financial files (like old tax returns) on my computer that I seldom access and would like to have an extra layer of confidentiality for, so i was looking into how I could easily have an effective separately-encrypted folder for those on my #LinuxMint system.

Obviously I could create a separate dm-crypt partition, but since it's probably a small number of files and the total volume I want long term is not very well known (e.g. I might also want to add things like images of important official documents), that doesn't seem like the ideal solution. It seemed like maybe ecryptfs could be the way to go, but I know the use of that for encrypted home directories was deprecated by #Ubuntu a while ago and looking at Launchpad it sort of seems abandoned (the last recent revision listed is from 2017). Does anybody know the status or have a better suggestion?

#Linux #encryption #DAR #privacy

https://code.launchpad.net/~ecryptfs/ecryptfs/trunk

New, by @lorenzofb, @carlypage and myself: Here is our annual compendium of all the cybersecurity stories that TechCrunch's security desk were jealous of this year, from our friends and colleagues at competing publications.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/24/techcrunch-security-desk-cybersecurity-reporting-jealousy-list-of-2024/

Two WordPress plugins required by the premium WordPress WPLMS theme, which has over 28,000 sales, are vulnerable to more than a dozen critical-severity vulnerabilities.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/premium-wplms-wordpress-plugins-address-seven-critical-flaws/

Diversity innovation paradox: "demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions"

Source:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1915378117

Thanks to Needhi Bhalla, shared on bsky!