Daily Tech News 4 March 2024

• The CDC has announced that COVID is basically the flu and should be treated as such at least unless and until a Republican gets elected. (Ars Technica)
  
  Taking the official figures for what they are, COVID is around three times as dangerous as regular flu seasons. The last big flu pandemic in 1968 killed people faster than COVID despite the world having less than half the population it does now.

• Are datacenters drinking all of Arizona's water? No. (MSN)
  
  Takes a lot of scrolling, but one of Microsoft's massive datacenters uses as much water as, uh, 670 families. Say 2500 people.
  
  Based on that, all the datacenters in the world might use 0.25% of what is used domestically, which in turn is a small fraction of what is used in agriculture and industry, or, in California, flushed straight out to sea because planning is bad.
  
  
  
• Researchers have created the first AI worms. (Ars Technica)
  
  These use "prompt engineering" to trick LLMs into violating their own rules and generate emails that can, in turn, infect other LLMs.
  
  Everything old is new again. We went through a whole decade of this with buffer overflows; this is the same thing except a thousand times more expensive.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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