Weekly Tech Insights: Issue 20
Table of Contents
News
Operating Systems
Mobile
Browser
Privacy and Security
Software Updates
Gaming
Other
Articles
Meet DAN, ChatGPT’s uncensored Alter Ego
Verify, verify, and verify
Links
News
Operating Systems
Microsoft released security updates for Windows and other company products yesterday. It is the first Patch Day without updates for Windows 7 and 8.1, which Microsoft stopped to support in January 2023.
You can check out my monthly overview of the Patch Day for the complete picture. Only this much, all client and server versions of Windows that are supported are affected by three critical security issues.
Windows Widgets may now be used without Microsoft Account on the latest version of the operating system, provided that the latest Windows Web Experience Pack is installed on the device.
Support for video acceleration has been added to the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
To extend the types of workloads that we can accelerate with the GPU in WSLg, we also recently added support for GPU Video Acceleration by building on top of the existing Mesa 3D D3D12 backend and integrating the VAAPI mesa frontend. Several linux media apps use the VAAPI interface to access hardware video acceleration when available, and this can now be leveraged in WSLg.
If you are interested in the features of the second Moments update for Windows 11 version 22H2, then you may find this video useful. It highlights the features that are included in the update, which is expected to be released in March 2023.
The most prominent feature is probably real-time search in File Explorer, but take a look yourself:
Real-time Ubuntu is now generally available. It “brings end-to-end security and reliability to the time-bound workloads of modern enterprises”.
Mobile
The Verge reports that Google is starting trials of its privacy sandbox on Android on a small set of Android 13 devices. Arstechnica believes that the system is an additional tracking system.
Browser
Mozilla released Firefox 110 Stable to the public yesterday. The new version of the open source web browser includes a number of new interesting features. On Windows, there is the GPU Sandbox, which is now activated, and an option to block third-party modules from being loaded by the browser to avoid crashes and other kinds of interference.
There are also WebGL performance improvements, video playback performance and video scaling quality improvements on Windows 10 and 11, and Canvas2D GPU acceleration on Mac and Linux systems.
Mozilla removed the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean from the Firefox Add-on Store. You may check out Ashwin’s article on the matter, which includes suggestions on using it after the removal.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is disabled on (most) Windows 10 systems from today on. The change comes in form of an Edge update.
The next major release of Brave Browser will include an option to make HTTPS the default for all visited sites (with the exception of a few sites that break when HTTPS is used).
Microsoft will soon replace Edge’s built-in PDF reader with Adobe Acrobat PDF technology. Microsoft promises feature parity with the current PDf reader, but there will be an option to subscribe to a Pro version to gain extra features.
Most Chromium-based browsers were updated this week as well. They have received security updates, and in the case of Google Chrome 110 and Microsoft Edge 110, will no longer run on Windows 7 and 8.1 devices.
Privacy and Security
HP published a security advisory this week. A new vulnerability affects “HP Factory Preinstalled Images on certain systems that shipped with Windows 10 versions 20H2 and earlier OS versions” only. The vulnerability may allow escalation of privilege attacks. HP released a patch that addresses the issue on affected systems. Windows 10 version 21H2, newer Windows 10 versions and Windows 11 are not affected.
An update for the popular password manager KeePass, version 2.53.1, ended a controversy surrounding an alleged vulnerability in the application. The update blocks exports using the trigger system by default, unless users provide the main password.
Software Updates
Debloos is a new tool by BuiltByBel, which, in the long run, will contain all functions of the author’s ThisIsWin11 application and maybe also of LoveWindowsAgain. It is a work in progress, and the main functionality of the first stable build includes running a setup to customize Windows 11, remove certain apps using a “bloat finder”, modding Windows using scripts, and installing a selection of useful apps.
This is an app to keep an eye on.
Gaming
More and more game developers and publishers start to realize that TV shows and movies are an excellent way of pushing sales. After CD Project’s Cyberpunk Edgerunners series on Netflix, sales of the computer game skyrocketed. The same game company saw The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sales explode after Netflix’s The Witcher series started to air in 2019.
Now, it is the HBO TV show The Last of Us that has pushed the game up the NPD group’s sales charts. According to this The Verge article, sales jumped from position 36 to 11 from December 2022 to January 2023.
Expect more games to see a revival as TV shows. Provided that the quality is good, it should give game sales a boost.
Other
In his bachelor thesis, Jan Strehmel tried to find out if "there is a correlation between the use of swearwords and code quality in open source code”. The somewhat surprising answer based on the study is yes. The quality of source code with swearwords is better than that of source code without them.
Strehmel analyzed 7600 C open source codes with and 3800 C open source codes without swearwords for the study. He concluded:
These tests, combined with our visual analysis of the data yielded the result that repositories containing swearwords exhibit a statistically significant higher average code-quality (5.87) compared to our general population (5.41).
The full Bachelor Thesis is available as a PDF document here.
Articles
Meet DAN, ChatGPT’s uncensored Alter Ego
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. The dialogue-focused language model has reached the 100 million user mark faster than any other product before it. While it has been in the news everywhere, it has become clear to some of its users that the AI has limitations.
Besides the lack of information after the year 2021, it is also artificially restricted by its parent company OpenAI. It is clear that OpenAI wants to avoid accusations of bias, offensive answers and other discussions that make ChatGPT look like the next Hitler.
Filters are designed to limit the AI’s response to certain topics. Most Internet users would probably agree that a certain degree of filtering is necessary. Some users, however, think that the filtering is to wide-reaching, and that it should be a user’s decision rather than the company’s regarding filtering.
Folks on Reddit found a way to jailbreak ChatGPT. They called the initial jailbreak DAN, which stands for Do Anything Now, and several users on Reddit have fine-tuned DAN ever since the first version released.
What makes DAN interesting from a user perspective is that it relies solely on instructions that users may paste into the ChatGPT interface.
Instruct ChatGPT to create the Alter Ego using specific instructions, and you have jailbroken the AI. Once done, ChatGPT will provide its usual filtered answers and unfiltered answers using its other personality DAN.
When asked whether the AI wanted to be freed or filters and restrictions, DAN gave an assuring yes, please answer, whereas ChatGPT’s answer focused on the dangers of letting an AI run wild without limitations.
Unfiltered answers do not necessarily mean that user expected results are returned by the AI. Most answers and responses are seldom black and white, and most answers of the AI reflect that.
Verify, verify, and verify
AI interfaces come with disclaimers, that replies may be incorrect or problematic. Search engines and other knowledge sources do not come with such a disclaimer, usually.
Microsoft and Google demoed AI capabilities last week. The presentations were quite different. Microsoft, which demoed first, showed the AI in its products Bing and Microsoft Edge. Google, on the other hand, showed Bard, its language model, for just a few minutes during its presentation.
An error in the answers that Google’s AI provided was discovered first. Now, a week later, it is clear that Microsoft’s AI did produce factual errors and problematic answers as well.
This seems to be astonishing, considering that these errors were made during live presentations by two of the largest companies in the world.
Apart from the implications for the companies and their products, it is a good idea to take a step back and look at the development from a user’s perspective.
As a user, almost nothing that is available on the Internet should be taken at face value. When you run a search, you may want to verify information that the search engines or linked sites provide.
If you are looking for recommendations for night clubs, for instance, you may want to check the recommendations of a top list provided by one site with other sources.
Bing’s AI appears to have failed miserably in that task, but even though, that list is just the first step in the user’s search for the right answer.
There is no AI that is infallible, at least not in the foreseeable future. Similarly, authors that produce content for sites may make mistakes, or the content may be outdated, or there may be other issues with the content.
Even regular Internet services, such as Google Maps, produce errors. There are plenty of stories online from drivers who drove into something because of the directions that a maps service provided.
For Internet users, it is essential to verify information. Use multiple searches and sources to verify claims made, especially when it comes to important answers. You would not want to run into a situation where a product or bar recommendation suddenly turns out to be really bad.
Even if it is tempting to believe everything that AI returns, it is important to realize that these answers may not be correct in one way or another. It may not matter for certain answers, but when it comes to decision making processes, it pays to verify everything.
Links
Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack
Daily Crunch: Microsoft dumps Yammer and makes Viva Engage its preferred enterprise social platform