How can I be sure my lenovo laptop is safe? I have a clean install, but should I dump the motherboard firmware and ask ai to decompile it? Is there another place they could hide bloatware? Besides main storage / motherboard firmware?
Should I check network card firmware?) Maybe they added a rule to forward certain instructions to the OS embedded in the CPU
They can hide it in your storage firmware. Sprites Mods attached a jtag to a consumer hard drive, identified the CPUs, dumped the firmware, modified it, wrote it back. When it sees a certain string in any write to the disk, it enters evil mode. Then whenever it sees something that looks like a unix password file, it substitutes it for some known value. As in, hit your webserver with the magic string in the query string portion of the request, then ssh to the box and log in with a known password. Reinstalling your OS does nothing for you since it's in the drive firmware. Also was able to reprogram the firmware online, not requiring physical access to the drive. But literally anything can be compromised. You could have DIMMs that look for magic bits and when they see them they substitute code so the nation state can have code running on your computer anytime they want. Your cpu could do the same. Once it seems some long ass string of bytes that have a particular checksum, it switches to ring 0 or ring -1 or smm mode.
That's a cool thought experiment, but it doesn't work in practice.
> When it sees a certain string in any write to the disk
dm-crypt or zfs encryption or any other commonly used encryption will encrypt the data before it's written to disk, so the disk controller will not be able to do anything with writes or reads since it will not have the encryption key.
The general point related to the topic of the article is that the many controllers running on your device (not limited to Lenovo BTW) are black boxes almost impossible to inspect. The encryption engine on a hardware encrypted USB stick is making everything even harder. It can implement something like this but it's probably made to be extremely difficult to dump the firmware or inspect the features implemented in silicon.
If I'm doing software encryption like dm-crypt or zfs encryption then I don't need to bother with hardware encryption too. It's easier to trust software encryption. We have many interoperable and even open source implementations of the same encryption methods, the output is readable in open formats, so they can be validated against each other if needed.
>> will encrypt the data before it's written to disk
The people buying much of these "hardware encryption" products do so because they believe it removes the need for software encryption to/from the device.
True, but Lenovo has repeatedly demonstrated that they're willing to do it, lie to customers giving them a false sense of security while leaving them vulnerable, and will continue to put their customers at risk even after being caught several times.
Types would be nullable (default), explicitly nullable (new), and explicitly non-nullable. Concretely, something is nullable, nullable, or non-nullable.
"Nullness is ignored when determining whether two methods have the same signature" is also rather annoying, this takes away the ability to provide fast overloads for non-null types for instance. Feels like a missed opportunity to me, though I'm sure there are reasons for that.
> A sharp edge is writing meta typesystem code infolving covariance, invariance etc
Like in Java? C# has its own sharp edges (like most or all languages), but it's almost disingenuous to bring a feature that is much more complex and weird in Java as an example.
There are exceptional cases, detrimental to both you and the company. Company already swallowed a pretty serious loss, in that case arguably common sense is to let it go, sometimes sh*t happens.
> generally we insure ourselves against acts of nature and accidents and thieves.
No. We insure ourselves against unforeseen events whose effects are financially unbearable to us otherwise. You've conveniently carved out certain unforeseen events in order to serve your point rather than being intellectually honest.
Businesses insure themselves against the death of an important employee, for example. If that employee is murdered, that is neither an act of nature, an accident, nor thievery.
You might argue "you were robbed of an employee" and stretch the meaning of the word "thief" but then I'd say a similar stretching of "act of nature [or] accident" includes "aircraft malfunction"
Businesses also insure against a great many other things.
If they truly were exceptional that would be fine. But long delays happen a lot, and I am sure there are things airlines could do to improve that like maintain the planes better so they aren't grounded as often and having backup planes so that if one has problems they can put customers on a different one.
I'm with you on the delays, especially since it's one sided, company doesn't loose anything, main inconvenicence is to the user so the company has to be incentivised to be on time (it may be even beneficial for the airport, since passengers would buy more overpriced stuff from waiting area).
I was referring to the case when an engine went bad and company had to use intermediate airport and accomodate all users for the night. Also you wouldn't want to punish company hard for admiting technical issues, since that might cause them to underreport and create dangerous situations.
It probably doesn't make sense for every airline to have a backup at every airport. But maybe the airport itself keeps a couple of backup planes that it rents out to airlines when they need it.
Oh yes. Claude still saves the day sometimes, but hopefully better alternatives pop up soon.
Recent case: had to plan a trip involving multiple bus switches. Gpt 5.6 Sol proposed a route that would bring me to a dead end, since it was sunday and a specific bus had a different route on weekends.
Opus 5 correctly identified that and built a route that worked.
But yes, Darios wife trying to get funding from Epstein for a porn studio says a lot about the founder.
I am fully unbothered about Amodei's wife trying to make high end porn for women, in the same way that I am fully unbothered by Melania Trump having been essentially a glamour/nude model. I know (and have creatively worked) with women who do/have done both; they are better, less hypocritical, more grounded humans than many others.
Both Cami Clark and Melania Trump can properly be judged on their involvement with Trump, Epstein (or possibly Trump and Epstein) alone.
I think the Epstein money thing reflects extremely poorly on Cami Clark's judgement. Basic due diligence should have shown up that he went to prison for something very anti-women, and even then it was clear he secured a shady deal with a prosecutor.
I don't know how it reflects on Amodei except that her presence as a sort of off-the-books "adviser" is yet more evidence that Anthropic runs by giving Dario a play pen to be a "visionary" (a bunch of advisers and his only direct report, a chief of staff) while his sister actually runs the gig.
"High end" porn business is usually linked with other "services", my guess is that his wife saw value not in revenue from porn but from influence the other services may bring.
Of course this is speculative, but this is my guess about her. Darios assiciation with her also indicates a lot about his moral compass.
Imagine what we don't know.
Also there is a very big difference for a woman to participate in porn (usually they regret it) and a women trying to get other women to make porn.
High end porn can just be expensive production values; that is what I assumed. She wanted a proper studio and production company, and the implication is she was positioning it in opposition to the handful of studios that dominate that industry who have a very male outlook. She did want an e-commerce platform attached, but again, that's commonplace.
None of that is necessarily indicative of trafficking or prostitution, but banks and payment providers tend to run scared of it, so I suppose if one does want serious investment to make a studio, there are relatively few people you can go to.
She went to Epstein because she knew he was very rich and unbothered by that association, I am sure. The fact that she must also have known who he was — a sex offender who basic due diligence would have told her was likely a trafficker — is what is ugly.
What is bizarre about it is that if she had taken his money then needed to go to payment providers, she would have had an extra millstone around her neck, because they definitely do due diligence. But maybe Epstein had clout enough to offset his reputation.
Not going to too get into questions of porn and regret, except to say that even in a post-onlyfans world I think "regret" is often shorthand for "made to regret", which is rather different. It's the same for art and life models, which is where my creative experience lies. People are always out there trying to project their morality onto things that are not their business, so subsequent "regret" is often a practical, imposed matter.
This is why I think it's important that we judge these women for the clearer questions of morality that have nothing to do with porn.
Should I check network card firmware?) Maybe they added a rule to forward certain instructions to the OS embedded in the CPU
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