Anonymous info

New best story on Hacker News: Life is not short

June 27, 2022

By Aquaman

Hacker News

Life is not short
643 by dbrereton | 380 comments on Hacker News.

Read more

New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?

June 26, 2022

By Aquaman

Hacker News

Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?
616 by BoppreH | 287 comments on Hacker News.
Alternatively: What's the current status of Personally Identifying Information and language models? I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect to have it respected. When playing around in GPT-3 I tried making sentences with my username. Imagine my surprise when I see it spitting out my (globally unique, unusual) full name! Looking around, I found a paper that says language models spitting out personal information is a problem[1], a Google blog post that says there's not much that can be done[2], and an article that says OpenAI might automatically replace phone numbers in the future but other types of PII are harder to remove[3]. But nothing on what is actually being done. If I had found my personal information on Google search results, or Facebook, I could ask the information to be removed, but GPT-3 seems to have no such support. Are we supposed to accept that large language models may reveal private information, with no recourse? I don't care much about my name being public, but I don't know what else it might have memorized (political affiliations? Sexual preferences? Posts from 13-year old me?). In the age of GDPR this feels like an enormous regression in privacy. EDIT: a small thank you for everybody commenting so far for not directly linking to specific results or actually writing my name, however easy it might be. If my request for pseudonymity sounds strange given my lax infosec: - I'm more worried about the consequences of language models in general than my own case, and - people have done a lot more for a lot less name information[4]. [1]: https://ift.tt/316HCXJ [2]: https://ift.tt/TjBoy4a... [3]: https://ift.tt/rVb3eRc [4]: https://ift.tt/yYn9acj...

Read more

New best story on Hacker News: Enclave: An Unpickable Lock

June 26, 2022

By Aquaman

Hacker News

Enclave: An Unpickable Lock
580 by lisper | 255 comments on Hacker News.

Read more

New best story on Hacker News: Goodbye Zachtronics

June 24, 2022

By Aquaman

Hacker News

Goodbye Zachtronics
484 by danso | 101 comments on Hacker News.

Read more

New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

June 24, 2022

By Aquaman

Hacker News

Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia
444 by bbarnett | 258 comments on Hacker News.
I recently bought a Brother colour laser printer, with the understanding that OEM toner was not chip-locked. Wanting to update the firmware, and being on Linux, I started to look at ways to do it manually. After finding a few guides to do so manually: https://ift.tt/9lBhVdf https://ift.tt/OscwpR6 I decided to poll my printer. I then noticed an OSS/python project to just handle it via a package. However, I noticed this issue: https://ift.tt/GOsd3Qy Startled, I Googled... and the printer listed is an inkjet. For a second I was relieved, but then started to search for other issues, and found this: https://ift.tt/iQMhYFA Not only is the above, post-sale firwmware update a change of what I understood to be Brother's historical policy, the method is beyond evil. Brother seems to be apparently accepting the ink, but then purposefully making the print quality poorer. I literally cannot think of something, product wise, more evil. It's one thing to say "We refuse to use 3rd party toner", and another to accept the toner, and then just purposefully print like garbage. I was a happy HP customer for years, and only switched to Brother (which, by all accounts, is a much smaller / less renowned company) for the sole reason to not be vendor locked. I will likely return this printer, but thought HN should know what Brother seems to be up to.

Read more