Ben Tasker
bentasker.co.uk
Ben Tasker
@bentasker.co.uk
General Geek - I'm pretty good at fixing things and very good at working out how to break them.

Basically, my cores are trouble-shooting and reverse engineering.

Blog at https://www.bentasker.co.uk
Reposted by Ben Tasker
3. ⁠this is not the moment for an incredibly expensive increase in state surveillance infrastructure to be run for profit by private tech firms just before Labour ushers in an (even more) authoritarian right wing government.

FIX THE GODDAMN COST OF LIVING INSTEAD YOU FREAKS.
September 26, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
2. Countries that have ID cards - like the whole of Europe - still have the same irregular migration problem (you may have heard!!!)

& in fact the UK has the lowest share of its economy estimated as irregular economy in Europe so if it fixes the issue WHY DIDNT IT FIX IT THERE?
September 26, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
Ok. They’ve pissed me off.

I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards:

1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.
September 26, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
Understanding the sentence of Lucy Connolly

Had it not been for competent legal advice, her sentence could have been far harsher

By me, at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...
May 23, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
New from 404 Media: authors are getting caught leaving AI prompts in their novels, telling the AI to follow someone else's style. We bought a copy to confirm.

www.404media.co/authors-are-...
May 23, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
In the real actual world we already live in, restaurants are already reverting to only taking reservations by phone, or charging huge reservation fees, to stop automated booking. This is with basic bots!
May 20, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
"Even worse, when you Google one of these slop-squatted package names, you’ll often get an AI-generated summary from Google itself confidently praising the package, saying it’s useful, stable, well-maintained. But it’s just parroting the package’s own README, no skepticism, no context."
April 13, 2025 at 12:48 AM
Reposted by Ben Tasker
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything
: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'
www.theregister.com
April 12, 2025 at 11:43 PM