Daily Tech News 9 February 2025

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has weighed in on the DeepSeek drama, saying that in tests the performance of the Chinese AI was "the worst of basically any model we'd ever tested". (Tech Crunch)
  
  He went on to say:

  It had absolutely no blocks whatsoever against generating this information.

  What he's complaining about is that it answered the question.
  
  The full interview transcript is here.
  
  Now, the claim is the information related to bioweapons, and "can't be found on Google or can't be easily found in textbooks", which means that this is public information, not military secrets, and the entire complaint is that DeepSeek works.
  
  And that is simply not allowed.
  
  

• Speaking of DeepSeek the iOS app sends unencrypted data back to Chinese servers. (Ars Technica)
  
  Chinese servers controlled by ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok.
  
  This is on top of the previously reported logging servers at DeepSeek that were open to the entire internet.
  
  So basically not only can DeepSeek and its Chinese partners see everything you do, but so can everyone else.
  
  
  
• A massive brute force attack against insecure commercial VPN devices is under way, using insecure consumer routers in an enormous botnet. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  2.8 million devices have been compromised - notably 1.1 million in Brazil where Mikrotik routers are popular, but extending to many other countries and devices from Cisco, ZTE, Huawei, and others.
  
  All trying to guess the passwords to corporate VPN devices that are also insecure, though not quite as much. The software is smart enough to block repeated failed logins from a single source, but can't figure things out when it's under attack from 2.8 million directions at once.
  
  
  
• VSCode's remote development agent is an unsecured remote access tool. (Fly.io)
  
  This is usually considered a bad thing.
  
  
  
• If you need a not too expensive docking station with a ton of ports, this is one. (Notebook Check)
  
  It has two DisplayPort ports, HDMI, and VGA, Ethernet - though only gigabit, eight USB ports at various speeds, SD and microSD slots, three audio jacks, and a volume knob.
  
  You can't run all four video ports at 4K, but that's true of pretty much all docks. USB4 and Thunderbolt can only deliver two 4K streams in, so a dock without its own graphics hardware can only deliver two 4K streams out.
  
  The lack of at least 2.5Gb Ethernet made me curious how cheap docks with that feature are these days, and you can find them for less than $50 on Amazon US.
  
  On Amazon AU, somehow, you can get one for $16. I just ordered two. It's a basic model with only one video output, but that's ridiculously cheap.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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