Daily Tech News 14 September 2023

• When MFA ain't. (Retool)
  
  MFA - multi-factor authentication - is when you need something you know (a password) plus something you have (a hardware authentication device) to log in to a critical piece of infrastructure.
  
  But hardware authentication devices are inconvenient, so we have authentication apps that run on our phones.
  
  And losing your authentication codes is inconvenient, so these apps sync to the cloud.
  
  And the cloud is where your email probably is, and where password reset requests go.
  
  Meaning that if you use the same cloud for your password resets and your authentication syncing, you don't have MFA anymore. Indeed, you have Sweet FA if someone gets into your email account.
  
  Good writeup by Retool in how they were hacked - and why their non-cloud customers weren't affected at all.

• AI Lie: Machines Don't Learn Like Humans (And Don't Have the Right To). (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an op-ed rather than a news story, and it's bombastic drivel.
  
  The author makes a valid point that generative AIs do not learn the way humans do, but then spends the rest of the article misrepresenting how generative AIs actually do learn, not to mention pushing legal theories that would embarrass a governor of New Mexico.
  
  
  
• Introducing Elratio: A Python-based programming language that combines the performance of Ruby with the readability of Perl. (GitHub)

  License: Elratio is under the GPL 3.0 license, meaning every Elratio program is required to be open source. By having an Elratio program on your computer without a freely available mirror online you are violating this license. Do not make us resort to violence.

  Yes, it's a joke.
  
  Or is it?
  
  
  
• Treefera raises $2.2M to solve the carbon credits credibility problem with AI. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That's not that much money on the scale of startup funding, which is good because these idiots set it on fire.
  
  
  
• Samsung's new small Android tablet - the A9 Plus - is almost here, and we have more specs. (Notebook Check)
  
  It looks like it will be powered by a Snapdragon 695, with two A78 cores and six A55 cores. That's perfectly adequate for this kind of thing and faster than any tablet I own - though significantly behind current flagship phones with X3 and X4 cores.
  
  But the only really important spec is the screen resolution, and we don't know that yet.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:12 AM

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