Daily Tech News 3 February 2025

• AI systems with unacceptable risk are now banned in the EU. (Tech Crunch)
  
  What risk, we ask.
  
  The EU actually answers that, sort of.
  
  "Unacceptable risk" AI is Class 4, and Class 3, which is not banned but regulated, includes AI systems for recommending medical treatment. Fair enough; medical anything tends to be regulated, and there's no reason not to subject medical AI to standards and tests.
  
  Under Class 4, banned outright, we see:
  
  * AI used for social scoring, where the social scores are applied outside the context in which they are calculated - e.g. firing someone because of their Reddit posts
  * Inferring a person's likelihood to commit a crime unless you are the police and already have the criminal banged up because you think they done it
  * Subliminal advertising, which doesn't work anyway
  * Something so broad that it encompasses all advertising, which will be interesting
  * Anything that can infer someone's emotional state
  * Biometric analysis except when the government really wants to
  
  So yes, commies gonna commie, and the legislation has enough holes to drive the Bagger-288 through.
  
  Companies - anyone operating however tangentially in Europe - are expected to be in full compliance by, uh, yesterday.

• China's new AI DeepSeek reportedly cost just $6 million to train but that was after the company spent $1.6 billion on Nvidia AI accelerators. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  My car accelerates very quickly to 60mph if it starts at 70mph.
  
  
  
• Intel's new 255H laptop chips have 30% better single-threaded performance than the 155H. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Multi-threaded performance is neither great nor terrible, but that single-threaded performance, if borne out by more tests, is desktop-class.
  
  
  
• What Okta did. (N0rdy)
  
  What Okta did was trust the Bcrypt library it was using.
  
  What that meant was that for accounts with very long usernames, anyone could log in without a password, because the maximum key length for Bcrypt is 72 characters.
  
  And that bug - depending on which programming language you are using - could have been lurking there since 1997. In the author's tests, Go was the only language that didn't stumble on this - three months after the very public Okta incident.
  
  
  
• AI sucks. I'll blame my phone. (The Verge)
  
  The Verge proving that it's not just dumb about politics.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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