Short Message Service (SMS) remains one of the most popular communication channels since its introduction …
Yikes!
Reviews and Comments
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Machine learning has progressed significantly in various applications ranging from face recognition to text generation. …
Surprising that what is essentially a RCE in an ML model attack has gotten so little attention. Looks like a nice continuation from the image classification attacks.
Scientific knowledge is predominantly stored in books and scientific journals, often in the form of …
A @casey recommendation
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their …
Very timely
5 stars
In this talk, @pluralistic@mamot.fr covers the basic premise of enshittification, how the internet giants have lobbied to change the rules that let them get big to stifle competition, and finally, what can be done about it.
I only recently was made aware of the term enshittification, but had seen the decay of online platforms hasten, be it Twitter, FB, Reddit, Google, etc. The term and "play book" was helpful to draw connections between the behaviors on disparate sites.
I am slightly less hopeful than the author about reversing the course on some of these, but I guess there's something to be said about me posting this review on a distributed, federated service not part of big tech.
Overall a great talk, wake up call, and pointer to some hopeful directions.
It has long been established that predictive models can be transformed into lossless compressors and …
Really nice way to formalize a collective intuition
4 stars
This paper formally equates (lossless) compression algorithms with LLM/learning. While the Hutter Prize has postulated the connection, this paper shows how an LLM can act as a better compressor for multi-modality data than the domain specific standards of today. The authors also use the gzip compression algorithm as a generative model, with rather poor success, but build a mathematical framework to build on.
The paper also covers tokenization as compression, which is something that's been lacking in a lot of other scientific discourse on this subject. Overall a nice read, 4* only because it ends abruptly without fully exploring the space of compressors as generative models.
Jacob T. wants to read Language Modeling Is Compression by Grégoire Delétang
It has long been established that predictive models can be transformed into lossless compressors and …
Suggestion from co-worker, especially since it seems to overlap with my blog.thinkst.com/2023/06/meet-zippy-a-fast-ai-llm-text-detector.html work
Because "out-of-the-box" large language models are capable of generating a great deal of objectionable content, …
I skimmed the top-level summary when it came out, but it appears well worth a deeper read.
Reversing GFW (Great FireWALL) is not a new topic, but it evolved over the years. …
Interesting story and insider view of the great firewall of China and bypass techniques.
We present IPvSeeYou, a privacy attack that permits a remote and unprivileged adversary to physically …
Simple concept, powerful results
4 stars
Basically this research combines a legacy IPv6 addressing scheme where the MAC address is put into the address with crowd-sourced WiFi network scanning geo-location databases. The trick is figuring out the delta in MACs between the WAN and WLAN adaptors, but they are usually close, so with some clustering, they were able to get 39m accuracy for ~12M routers in over 100 countries.
Crazy to think putting a MAC address in a world-routing IP address was ever considered a good idea, but with networking gears' long life cycle, it will be a long-lasting mistake!
Really exciting research that could transform digital spaces
5 stars
zk-creds shows (and builds a Rust proof-of-concept for) how to use zero-knowledge proofs as a flexible and privacy-preserving identity framework. The core concepts allows for ZK linking of related proofs, and blinding those, while allowing for dynamic attestations. Practically, this allows for someone to scan the NFC data on their passport, signed by a trusted entity, and use that to e.g., prove that they are above a certain age, or are a person of X citizenship, all without having to get the trusted entity to onboard into the identity system.
The ability to set the gadgets that compute on identity attributes after the fact allows for changes to age verification policies, or other checks that all operate without revealing any other aspects of the identity (e.g. DOB or name). This work could form the basis for anonymous, but only-human social networks or other systems that use identity as a proxy …
zk-creds shows (and builds a Rust proof-of-concept for) how to use zero-knowledge proofs as a flexible and privacy-preserving identity framework. The core concepts allows for ZK linking of related proofs, and blinding those, while allowing for dynamic attestations. Practically, this allows for someone to scan the NFC data on their passport, signed by a trusted entity, and use that to e.g., prove that they are above a certain age, or are a person of X citizenship, all without having to get the trusted entity to onboard into the identity system.
The ability to set the gadgets that compute on identity attributes after the fact allows for changes to age verification policies, or other checks that all operate without revealing any other aspects of the identity (e.g. DOB or name). This work could form the basis for anonymous, but only-human social networks or other systems that use identity as a proxy for bot defense.
A great read, and comes with a proof-of-concept for a practical system based on scanning passports and ZK proving that the signature on it is valid.
Jacob T. wants to read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson
Came across this in a review in The Economist. I've usually found that scaling people is where orgs seem to struggle, so I'd be keen to hear from someone who oversaw enormous growth at Stripe.
Fingerprint authentication has been widely adopted on smartphones to complement traditional password authentication, making it …
Interesting approach of using a fault-tolerance feature to handle transient HW issues as a way to bypass fingerprint attempt counters. Obviously less practical due to needing invasive physical access and a fingerprint database, but a nice multi-device logic bug class!
Fingerprint authentication has been widely adopted on smartphones to complement traditional password authentication, making it …
Heard about this on @riskybusiness@infosec.exchange and @casey thought it would be a good one to read as a #ThinkstScapes candidate.
Jacob T. finished reading LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment by Chunting Zhou
Large language models are trained in two stages: (1) unsupervised pretraining from raw text, to …
Not a ton more than what was in the abstract: it only takes a small number of fine-tuning samples to greatly improve the [human-scored] performance of LLMs.
Jacob T. started reading Art of Prolog by Leon S. Sterling
Rereading for the third time