> Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.
I think a point to keep in mind is that even if some team cracked the ed-tech challenge and created a software that was wildly effective at getting students to learn, it would actually still be very difficult to get public schools to actually adopt it, unless they have some incentives like it being heavily subsidized, or free. And even then, it might not be free forever. That's part of the reason why ed-tech (even when it is proven to work) doesn't really make money.
It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.
I also remember reading a long time ago someone who wrote that they wanted to be polite to an LLM because after they prompted it to learn about whether politeness was good for improving accuracy of responses, they got a message that led them to conclude that politeness could probably help. It seems a bit odd then because I have heard so much about how people use LLMs' responses about themselves to learn about LLMs themselves, but that seems like it is a suspicious approach.
I remember losing sense of smell, and one thing that was interesting was being able to perhaps train it back by sniffing different essential oils, and writing a note about what I was able to smell.
I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.
I read online that it has to do with their "Free-For-Teachers accounts" which I assume is a way for teachers to get access to Canvas services for free when their school doesn't subscribe to it.
I don't know for sure, but I think it probably had to do with some kind of misconfiguration on an Salesforce Experience Cloud site. I have heard that ShinyHunters often exploits this type of service and that it is very easy for companies to forget to set the right permissions to data and they end up throwing a bunch of different data into Salesforce.
I thought it was illegal to pay ransom to hackers. I guess it is legal or maybe it isn't very clear? I thought that there were certain conditions that the company had to check together with law enforcement so that at least the ransom money doesn't go to a hacker group that is on a government payments sanctions list.
Also, does anyone know the root cause of the attack? I read a rumor online (but it's not really confirmed anywhere) that it may have had to do with the common pattern of ShinyHunters where they use a vulnerability in a Salesforce Experience Cloud site. What is confirmed for sure is that the vulnterability involved the feature of Canvas called "Free-For-Teacher accounts".
Not only is it not illegal, there are insurance policies set up to take care of this very scenario. It's almost always handled by a third party, not the company themselves, that would deal with any such concerns.
It is illegal to pay terrorists. As bad and annoying as hackers are, I'm not familiar with any government recognizing any hacking group as a terrorist group. If they did, would they be able to send in SEAL Team 6 to handle the hackers?
> As bad and annoying as hackers are, I'm not familiar with any government recognizing any hacking group as a terrorist group.
If you’re sending a large sum of money to $anonymoushacker, how do you ensure they’re not on some OFAC list? Or do your AML checks? Or make sure you’re not on the wrong side of Foreign Corrupt Practices act? The third party probably turns a blind eye to that cuz there’s no way of really checking.
the people who do "AML checks" are the ones processing the transaction.
i don't do that every time i want to send money. private individuals don't just "run checks" - it would make commerce untenable and possibly unconstitutional.
say you get a passport, an address, a photo, a signature, a phone call - how do you verify any of this is real?
Cryptocurrency mitigates most of those concerns. That's why the flourishing of crypto payment systems has been an unalloyed blessing for cybercriminals.
No it does not. It makes some things harder and some things easier. The public ledger means you can track where then money flowed - you might not know who had it but you know how it flows which is interesting. I don't know if it has happened, but I've heard of proposals to make any bitcoin the traces to some transaction illegal to have, and that means nobody who might get caught will have anything to do with those.
If they were in Iran a drone would’ve paid a visit, based on current events. Most of them are in Russia or former Eastern Bloc like Belarus. USA and the west doesn’t want a direct conflict so the drones never pay them a visit.
Instead, they trick the hackers into going on a vacation in a country that will let them grab them.
It often is illegal to pay them. They are often on sanctions lists, or indeed in embargoed countries. And it's just generally not allowed to pay unidentifiable parties for basic anti-money laundering reasons. And a lot of countries are bringing in new legislation to make paying illegal, starting with public sector organisations. I'm sure that will only expand.
Frankly, you pay a ransom at your peril. If it turns out it was North Korea you may well go to jail for it.
I don't know where you are getting your information from. For one, it's very often unknown, by virtue of how these groups operate, where they are from or who they are affiliated with in the first place. For two, as I stated, it is such common practice to pay ransoms that there are insurance policies specifically for doing so, it's very common to purchase these as part of a SOP of a company's security policy. A business is required, often by the board/shareholders, to maintain business continuity, which is why these exist.
For three, by the FBI's own source, they don't mention anything about it being illegal, they merely advise against doing so[0] -
> The FBI does not support paying a ransom in response to a ransomware attack. Paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee you or your organization will get any data back. It also encourages perpetrators to target more victims and offers an incentive for others to get involved in this type of illegal activity. If you are a victim of ransomware, contact your local FBI field office or file a report at ic3.gov.
I am not saying I support paying ransoms, or take any position here, I am just saying quite factually it is an extremely common practice to pay these, often via third parties that take care of any potential legality issues (which I am not aware of being super common at all, and if you are being targeted by a nation state on a sanctions list, you probably are well aware and have your own legal team/police liasons to deal with any such issues). Most ransomware attacks come from small, unknown groups.
I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise. But for me, when I am listening to a new song, I get curious about who the artist(s) is/are. Do they sound better in a live performance? What other music or artists inspired them? What other artists sound like them?
I don’t think it would be easy for a “AI” artist to not be suspicious to me unless they were like some kind of character that is made up by a record label or another artist.
I'm the opposite (I know, it's probably bad) but I often do everything I can to not know who's behind because I often try to dream and make my own mind about a specific song/artist, and of course my wife then suddenly show me who the person is and then the whole perception of the artist changes and sometimes ruin it for me.
I listen to music from night to morning (practically non-stop actually) and probably 100+ different artists within a day, I'm not genuinely interested in them, I'm just interested in their work.
> I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise
This is a whole genre of music in of itself that real people created which AIs were trained on stolen copies of to produce slop that doesn’t have to compensate the origins.
So it only makes sense in that case if you think slop derived from real art is awesome and that actual human beings can get fucked.
I think a point to keep in mind is that even if some team cracked the ed-tech challenge and created a software that was wildly effective at getting students to learn, it would actually still be very difficult to get public schools to actually adopt it, unless they have some incentives like it being heavily subsidized, or free. And even then, it might not be free forever. That's part of the reason why ed-tech (even when it is proven to work) doesn't really make money.
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