fidzu : nerd

AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini -- appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the duplicates were the exact same string. The estimated entropy of LLM-generated 16-character passwords came in around 20 to 27 bits, far below the 98 to 120 bits expected of truly random passwords.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Feb 2026 6:45pm GMT

Comments

19 Feb 2026 6:31pm GMT

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.2 and 20.04 OTA-12 arrive with VoLTE stability improvements, a fix for Xperia X booting, and multiple bug and security updates.

19 Feb 2026 6:28pm GMT

Comments

19 Feb 2026 6:26pm GMT

Comments

19 Feb 2026 6:12pm GMT

Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF]. The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh argue the primary driver is rising real incomes -- night work is essentially an inferior good that workers avoid as they earn more. The wage premium employers must pay for undesirable hours has grown by about three percentage points over the period. One sector bucked the trend: retail, where the rise of big-box chains, 24-hour Walmart supercenters and overnight distribution center restocking pushed more employees into late-night and early-morning shifts. The Covid-era surge in telework, rather than spreading work across the day, actually accelerated the concentration into prime hours -- especially among college-educated workers. France showed a similar pattern of daytime compression over 1966-2010, but the U.K. did not, likely because rapid de-unionization there eliminated the union wage premiums that had made night work comparatively attractive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Feb 2026 6:10pm GMT

A new study [PDF] from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period. More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI -- those that historically spent the most on freelancers -- substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Feb 2026 5:35pm GMT

The LibreOffice 25.8.5 update delivers 62 fixes improving stability, compatibility, and performance across all core applications.

19 Feb 2026 3:56pm GMT

Oracle outlines a new community engagement strategy for MySQL, promising greater transparency, ecosystem growth, and renewed focus on the Community Edition.

19 Feb 2026 3:20pm GMT

Report: Verizon's goal is "immediate unlock for all payment methods really soon."

18 Feb 2026 8:58pm GMT

Two of Ars' favorite electric vehicles are now available for not very much money.

18 Feb 2026 8:22pm GMT

EPA sued for abandoning its mission to protect public health.

18 Feb 2026 7:48pm GMT