Daily Tech News 15 July 2024

• To avoid sea level rise, some researchers want to put barriers around the world's most vulnerable glaciers to slow them down. (Science)
  
  Uh.
  
  What?
  
  In 2008, the Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland had a calving event in which it shed a single iceberg covering three square miles. It sheds 35 billion tons of icebergs in the average year.
  
  And moving glaciers don't leave much of anything in their wake, except rubble.
  
  I mean... Okay, it's not impossible. If you want to build an anti-glacier barrier, go right ahead. Yes, I'll make popcorn, but if you succeed I'll gladly give you credit.
  
  Update: CBD points out in comment #17 that that part of the plan isn't to stop the glaciers moving but to block warm currents that would melt them more quickly. And the part about drilling holes in the ice is to pump out water so they move more slowly. Paragraph five explains it better than the first four.
  
  

• The new Asus ExpertBook lacks the Four Essential Keys and its Lunar Lake CPU will get crushed by AMD's new Strix Point (non-Halo) chips when they arrive later this month. (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not actively terrible but I wouldn't bother.
  
  
  
• Once a new security exploit is made public, system administrators around the world have 22 minutes to update all their servers. (Bleeping Computers)
  
  That's how fast hackers pounce on new exploits.
  
  
  
• Speaking of exploits "superhuman" AI Go players turn out to be so dumb that a child can beat them. (Ars Technica)
  
  If the child knows the right exploit. Even after researchers updated the AI to handle this, it only won 22% of the time.

  Improving these kinds of "worst case" scenarios is key to avoiding embarrassing mistakes when rolling an AI system out to the public. But this new research shows that determined "adversaries" can often discover new holes in an AI algorithm's performance much more quickly and easily than that algorithm can evolve to fix those problems.

  As with AI chat bots that are easily tricked into selling $50,000 cars for $5, the companies behind them will just blame you.
  
  
  
• Possibly as part of the ongoing Snowflake debacle, barcodes for around ten million event tickets from Ticketmaster have been leaked. (HackRead)
  
  In theory the barcodes cannot be refreshed.
  
  In practice, anything can be refreshed if the alternative is a billion dollars going up in smoke.
  
  
  
• Google is reportedly in talks to acquire cloud security company Wiz for $23 billion. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I have never heard of Wiz and have no idea what they actually do. $23 billion should be a lot of money, so presumably they do something.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:20 AM

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