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Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

The Register
3 months 2 weeks ago
'Minor issue' with showing accounting customers 'unrelated business information' required repairs

Sage Group plc has confirmed it temporarily suspended its Sage Copilot, an AI assistant for the UK-based business software maker's accounting tools, this month after it blurted customer information to other users.…

Thomas Claburn

CodeSOD: Consultant Conversions

The Daily WTF
3 months 2 weeks ago

Janet's company had a glut of work, and thus didn't have the staffing required to do it all. It didn't make sense to hire on any new full-time employees, so they went the route of bringing on a few highly paid consultants, specifically ones who specialized in one specific problem: talking to a piece of hardware purchased from a vendor.

The hardware in question was a scientific which communicated over a serial line. This device provided a lot of data that represented decimal values, but that data was not encoded as an IEEE float. Instead, they used two integers- one for the data, and one representing the number of decimal places.

So, for example, "555.55" would be represented as "55555 2".

Now, in embedded devices, this isn't too unusual. It's entirely possible that the embedded CPU didn't even support true floating point operations, and this was just how they decided to work around that.

When communicating over the serial line, the device didn't send the data encoded in binary, however- it did everything as text. This was arguably helpful as it meant a technician could communicate with the device directly over a terminal emulator, but it meant any software talking to the device had to parse data.

Which brings us to the code written by the highly paid consultants. This code needs to take two 16-bit integers and turn them into a single decimal value. Let's see how they did it.

/// <summary> /// Sets the single parameter value. /// </summary> /// <param name="Value">Name of the parameter.</param> /// <param name="decimals"></param> /// <returns></returns> public double ConvertIntToDecimal(string Value, string decimalCount) { double Result; var decimals = UInt16.Parse(decimalCount); var Val = UInt16.Parse(Value); if (decimals > 0) { var divider = Math.Pow(10, decimals); Result = ((float)Val) / divider; } else { Result = Val; } return Result; }

We start with comments that are just wrong, which is always a good start. The whole thing has delightfully randomized capitalization- a mix of PascalCase and camelCase.

In the core logic, we parse the input values, and if there are any decimal places, we do some arithmetic to build our floating point value. We get the fun bonus inconsistency of casting to float when we handle our result in double, but at least it's a widening inconsistency, I suppose.

As an overall approach to the problem, it's not a train wreck, but there's one very important thing that our highly paid consultant forgot. Our HPC, remember, was an expert in this particular instrument, or at least that was their claim. And while their mistake is an easy mistake to make while coding, it should also be an easy mistake to catch during testing, too.

What was the mistake?

The value is frequently negative, and they're using UInt16 to parse the inputs. Which means this function frequently threw an exception. Literally five minutes of testing would have turned it up. Janet had piles of sample data, recorded from the device, which she used for testing. Almost all of her test cases would trigger the bug at some point.

It seems likely, at this juncture, that the HPC simply never actually tested the code. They wrote it. They committed it. They collected their check and left. Janet may have been the first person to actually run the code at all.

In the end, hiring the HPC cost a lot of money, and maybe saved a few days of work over the course of months. It's hard to say, as it may have created more work, since so much of what the HPC did had to be debugged and often rewritten.

The "good" news is that they have another glut of work, so management is looking to bring back the consultants for another round.

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Remy Porter

After Forced Return-to-Office, Some Amazon Workers Find Not Enough Desks, No Parking

Slashdot
3 months 2 weeks ago
Amazon has angered its workers again "after forcing them to return to the office five days a week," reports the New York Post. The problem? "Not enough desks for everyone." (As well as "packed parking lots" that are turning some workers away.) The Post cites interviews conducted with seven Amazon employees by Business Insider (which notes that in mid-December Amazon had already delayed full return-to-office at dozens of locations, sometimes until as late as May, because of office-capacity issues). Here in mid-January, the Post writes, many returning-to-office workers still aren't happy: Some meeting rooms have not had enough chairs — and there also have not been enough meeting rooms for everyone, one worker told the publication... [S]imply reaching the office is a challenge in itself, according to the report. Some complained they were turned away from company parking lots that were full, while others griped about having to join meetings from the road due to excess traffic on their way to the office, according to the Slack messages. Once staffers conquer the challenges of reaching the office and finding a desk, some lamented the lack of in-person discussions since many of the meetings remain virtual, according to BI. Amazon acknowledged they had offices that were "not quite ready" to "welcome everyone back a full five days a week," according to Post, though Amazon believed the number of not-quite-ready offices were "relatively small". But the parking lot situation may continue. Business Insider says one employee from Amazon's Nashville office "said the wait time for a company parking pass was backed up for months." (Although another Nashville staffer said Amazon was handing out passes for them to take mass-transit for free, which they'd described as "incredibly generous.") There's also Amazon shuttle busses, according to the article. Although other staffers "said they were denied a spot on Amazon shuttle buses because the vehicles were full..." Others said they just drove back home, while some staffers found street parking nearby, according to multiple Slack messages seen by Business Insider... This month, some employees were still questioning the logic behind the policy. They said being in the office has had little effect on their work routine and has not generated much of a productivity gain. A considerable portion of their in-office work is still being done through video calls with customers who are elsewhere, these employees told BI. Many Amazon colleagues are at other office locations, so face-to-face meetings still don't happen very often, they added. The Post adds another drawback of returning to the office. "Employees at Amazon's Toronto office said their personal belongings have repeatedly been stolen from their desks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid

Datacus extractus: Harry Potter publisher breached without resorting to magic

The Register
3 months 2 weeks ago
PLUS: Allstate sued for allegedly tracking drivers; Dutch DDoS; More fake jobs from Pyongyang; and more

Infosec in brief  Hogwarts doesn’t teach an incantation that could have saved Harry Potter publisher Scholastic from feeling the power of an online magician who made off with millions of customer records - except perhaps the wizardry of multifactor authentication.…

Brandon Vigliarolo