Meta sues “brazenly disloyal” former exec over stolen confidential docs
Meta's former exec allegedly shared data center secrets with a shadowy startup.
Hasnain says:
Amazing.
“Meta was apparently tipped off to this alleged betrayal when Khurana used his Meta email and network access to complete a writing assignment for Omniva as part of his hiring process. For this writing assignment, Khurana "disclosed non-public information about Meta’s relationship with certain suppliers that it uses for its data centers" when asked to "explain how he would help his potential new employer develop the supply chain for a company building data centers using specific technologies."
In a seeming attempt to cover up the alleged theft of Meta documents, Khurana apparently "attempted to scrub" one document "of its references to Meta," as well as removing a label marking it "CONFIDENTIAL—FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.” But when replacing "Meta" with "X," Khurana allegedly missed the term "Meta" in "at least five locations."”
Posted on 2024-03-14T06:33:18+0000
Product security: barking up the wrong tree
AppSec is fine. We're not paying enough attention to corporate infrastructure risks.
Hasnain says:
“In the end, product security is a red herring; it’s enterprise security that urgently needs a paradigm shift. I know that we’ll end up with more regulation for software development: the narratives of “market failures” are unfalsifiable and it’s the nature of all bureaucracies to amass influence and expand. But I think we’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Posted on 2024-03-14T06:20:58+0000
The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress
Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
Hasnain says:
From 2021 but still super relevant.
“But whether this or another approach is the best solution is not the key question. What matters is that housing shortages may be the biggest problem facing our era, and solving it needs to become everyone’s highest priority. And as important as it is, we should be wary of letting it become politically tribalised: the disastrous politicisation of Covid vaccines in the United States highlights the danger of that. Some kind of creative, below-the-radar solution that turns this zero-sum game into a positive-sum one is likely to have a better chance. In a tug of war, it’s often surprising how far you can go if you tug the rope sideways.
If we’re right about this, it means that fixing this one problem could make everyone’s lives much better than almost anyone realises – not just by making houses cheaper, but giving people better jobs, a better quality of life, more cohesive communities, bigger families and healthier lives. It could even give renewed reasons to be optimistic about the future of the West.”
Posted on 2024-03-13T02:59:27+0000
Israel’s Limits On Aid For Gaza Make U.S. Military Support Illegal, Activists Argue
Over two dozen humanitarian and human rights groups made the argument in a message exclusively obtained by HuffPost and sent to President Joe Biden, after a similar message from eight senators.
Hasnain says:
“The situation has sparked immense alarm and outrage among professional humanitarian groups, many of whom blasted Biden’s recent new proposals for Gaza.
“Oxfam does not support U.S. airdrops to Gaza, which would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials,” Scott Paul of Oxfam America recently wrote on X.”
Posted on 2024-03-13T01:04:55+0000
Boeing whistleblower found dead in US
Prior to his death, whistleblower John Barnett was testifying against Boeing over concerns about standards.
Hasnain says:
Did they just assassinate the whistleblower? (If this was a novel and a dystopia..)
“Boeing denied his assertions. However, a 2017 review by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), did uphold some of Mr Barnett's concerns.”
Posted on 2024-03-12T05:59:35+0000
Using LLMs to Generate Fuzz Generators
LLMs seem surprisingly good at many things. So much so that not a week goes by without someone coming up with yet another use-case for this technology, often to solve tasks quickly that traditionally took a non-trivial amount of human work to complete. Today’s example was Brendan Dolan-Gavitt’s ...
Hasnain says:
“A quick experiment with Claude suggests this approach could be promising (with some prompting, Claude was able to generate a program to generate an input to trigger the Heartbleed-style vulnerability mentioned above). But of course further work is needed to validate this approach and work out what challenges need to be overcome to make it practical (if indeed it can be made practical).
That’s certainly more work than can be squeezed into the odd free moment on a heatwave weekend.”
Posted on 2024-03-11T01:38:11+0000
Colorado ranchers sentenced after tampering with rain gauges to increase crop subsidies
Two southeastern Colorado ranch owners were recently sentenced to pay $6.6 million to resolve federal charges that they damaged or altered rain gauges in an effort to get paid for worsening drought conditions.
Hasnain says:
“In August of 2023, a month before Jager and Esch reached their plea agreements with prosecutors, this unidentified male co-conspirator escaped from prison. This triggered a nationwide manhunt and caused Esch and his family "to go into hiding," as stated in a court document. Two weeks after the escape, the co-conspirator was found dead.”
Posted on 2024-03-10T21:06:59+0000
Some Fans At Cold-Weather Chiefs Playoff Game Underwent Amputations, Hospital Confirms
The Missouri hospital said in a statement that it treated dozens of people who had experienced frostbite during an 11-day cold snap in January.
Hasnain says:
“Research Medical Center didn’t provide exact numbers but said in a statement that it treated dozens of people who had experienced frostbite during an 11-day cold snap in January. Twelve of those people — including some who were at the Jan. 13 game — had to undergo amputations involving mostly fingers and toes. And the hospital said more surgeries are expected over the next two to four weeks as “injuries evolve.””
Posted on 2024-03-09T16:53:38+0000
It's not just Israeli bombs that have killed children in Gaza. Now some are dying of hunger too
Hunger is most acute in northern Gaza, which has been isolated by Israeli forces and has suffered long cutoffs of food supply deliveries.
Hasnain says:
“Currently, the hospital’s wards have 44 babies under 10 days old with weights as low as 2 kilograms (4 pounds), some on life support. Every incubator has at least three premature babies in it, raising the risk of infection. Al-Shair said he fears some will meet the same fate when returned home.
“We treat them now but God knows what the future will be,” he said.”
Posted on 2024-03-09T15:43:10+0000
The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken
Four weeks ago, GPT-4 remained the undisputed champion: consistently at the top of every key benchmark, but more importantly the clear winner in terms of “vibes”. Almost everyone investing serious …
Hasnain says:
Excited to try this out. Some of the new fuzzing results people posted today are mind blowing.
“Claude 3 Opus, March 4th. This is just a few days old and wow: the vibes on this one are really strong. People I know who evaluate LLMs closely are rating it as the first clear GPT-4 beater. I’ve switched to it as my default model for a bunch of things, most conclusively for code—I’ve had several experiences recently where a complex GPT-4 prompt that produced broken JavaScript gave me a perfect working answer when run through Opus instead (recent example). I also enjoyed Anthropic research engineer Amanda Askell’s detailed breakdown of their system prompt”
Posted on 2024-03-09T07:39:55+0000