Posts by Catkin

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Re: So, Office 345 is down again

Depends how you define 'customers', I'm thinking the return is early pub'o'clock.

Police allege 'evil twin' of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger's credentials

Re: Eh?

I think this is one of those cases where a good VPN actually lives up to the benefits touted by VPN providers. The annoying bit is that free WiFi often blocks VPNs, especially if they're trying to upsell you access to certain parts of the Internet.

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

Re: Seems a lot more practical and vastly less invasive than Musk's Neuralink offering

I would say so. Neuralink does not, as far as I'm aware, feed information back in in its current iteration and this system, while providing proprioception (great for more natural walking) would not be applicable to a paraplegic individual.

Both offer the potential of massive quality of life improvements without detracting from the other.

'Skeleton Key' attack unlocks the worst of AI, says Microsoft

Re: Fundamental flaw

At the same time, with coaxing, a child that had previously learned to swear is likely to swear again.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: "n deemed unfit to fly"

Would you want to fly in a Boeing craft without a way to deal with a terror-induced bowel movement?

As expected, Apple set to vanish Batterygate, dodgy audio lawsuits with money

It's a bit weird that you're so eager to comment if you're unaware of the timelines but you can brush up here:

https://www.ifixit.com/News/11208/batterygate-timeline

I would say that saying it only affects a 'very small number', then releasing a software patch with no mention of the performance hit before finally admitting to having degraded performance almost a year later, when test results become undeniable, is a lie of omission.

The only way thermal throttling would be an apt comparison is if something happened along the lines of a manufacturer discovering a bad batch of thermal paste was used on a GPU, then issuing a hotfix that throttles the power further rather than admitting to the fault and offering replacements before their arm is twisted. Perhaps the underlying mechanism is similar but that's like saying the VW emissions scandal is okay because all modern IC cars manage their emissions through the ECU; it obfuscates the cause for criticism.

Yes, I'm well aware. The difference is that this was rolled out well after the device launch and installed without disclosure, likely because Apple didn't do effective validation of their device's operation after battery degradation (easily simulated). Worse, when caught, they basically lied.

The thermal throttling comparison makes no sense because that performs the same as at launch and is a demonstration of good manufacture diligence. Perhaps a better equivalent would be Spectre. In that instance, it was made clear that the fix would slow the affected processors, like all good manufacturers should do with updates.

It was a reasonable technical fix for a design flaw. The issue is that end users weren't made aware of it and were even gaslit by Apple tech support, though this may have been inadvertent due to non-communication to technicians. If the performance of a device is deliberately degraded, even if said degradation is necessary, the customer should be made aware.

If I'm missing something, I suppose I fall into the category of a complete moron so I'd really appreciate you pointing it out.

Supreme Court won't stop Biden leaning on social media giants to tackle disinfo

Re: Dissent is not the same as lies

*Biden family parody account

Re: Dissent is not the same as lies

Just for the sake of clarity, I would point out that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story was the FBI, who claimed that the story was made up by the Russians (though presented no evidence as it was a request, not a legal order). It was the later shutting down of a Biden family account which was done at the behest of the current administration.

Re: Misinformation == non state sanctioned propaganda /s

That's not the case, part of the original lawsuit is posts relating to the Hunter Biden laptop 'story' and claims about changes to laws surrounding postal voting. These may have still been untrue (in part or wholly) but I personally cannot see how they are health-related.

Moreover, the same individual (Rob Flaherty) who was using priority channels to Twitter to fight C-19 misinformation used those same channels to request the takedown of a parody account for a member of the Biden family. This is all in the original lawsuit, if you have a read through the original district court motion.

In my view, this is not a good look because it seems to be very harmful to attempts to fight health-related misinformation if those same tools are used politically.

Re: Dissent is not the same as lies

If those restrictions have been breached then it seems like it would be the job of the judicial, not the legislative or executive branches to take care of it (separation of powers). In the event, it does not appear that this speech is criminal, merely harmful; certainly, it has not found to be criminal by any court.

I believe it is a broadly valid concern given that, while laws and court judgements are public record, quiet chats are not. Perhaps the best way forwards would be for the precise contents of these quiet chats to be retained for future scrutiny, in the same fashion as PRA 1978.

China's Chang'e-6 capsule returns with lunar loot from the far side

Re: @frankvw - Great stuff. Too bad it's the Chinese.

Like for example the stealth plane technology they "received" from the German scientists.

Not to disagree with your wider points but, if you refer to the Horten, that's just a shaky anecdote from the designer that he 'totally would have made it stealth with charcoal paint'. It's further undermined by him making the claim after public revelations about US stealth technology. Further still, when the design he claimed he'd planned was tested, it was found to be ineffective against even primitive WWII radars.

Additionally, for the B-2, there's a clear lineage from Jack Northrop's YB-35, which entered development a full two years ahead of Horten.

Re: Other than having more meteorite debris

There's interesting features about the far side that suggest the Moon may have formed in stages, such as its thicker crust. Also, the almost absent mare (which is unlikely to be purely due to impacts) indicates potential differences in lunar tectonics post-formation.

UK and US cops band together to tackle Qilin's ransomware shakedowns

Re: The title is no longer required.

You do you, I just hope we don't live in the same area.

Re: The title is no longer required.

It's a tad short-sighted to 'like' it, since that puts more money in the hands of the criminals to further their criminal enterprises. It's somewhat akin to 'liking' a drunk driver who hits a sexual predator; you don't hand them another bottle of gin and praise their extrajudicial actions.

China and the EU agree to consultations over EV anti-subsidy investigation

Re: > ever more people becoming unable to afford transportation

I wouldn't discount them just not caring about the impact, on the basis that they can easily suck enough out of the system to retire comfortably by then. The danger of passive neglect, however, is that it opens the door for populists.

Re: Idiots

I could understand that approach with a great many products but, given that they've put moratoriums on IC vehicle engines, it seems to massively undermine their purported intent if they throw financial obstacles in the way of getting more people into EVs.

Fume spewing old bangers staying on the roads or ever more people becoming unable to afford transportation are both terrible outcomes.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re: COVID-19 Demonstrated Our Doom

'Abject' seems pretty strong to me. Mistakes were made, people did shitty things but we got multiple safe, effective vaccines to the masses at a speed never before seen and conducted testing (most notably rapid whole-genome sequencing) on a scale that would have been science fiction just a decade prior.

Re: Blind optimism at it's worst.

I think Don't Look Up is an appealing fantasy for those with a certain mindset but I also don't think it overall tracks with reality as far as an asteroid approaching the Earth.

Look at how much was spent during the Cold War on both the Space Race and, dwarfing that, weapons systems. If anything, every two-bit populist despot with a space capability would be tripping over the rest to be the one to save the Earth and gain eternal credibility. Unlike climate change, it's a very appealing target because it offers the opportunity to hold a thumb up to the camera and declare 'mission accomplished'; plus spending public money is far easier than imposing rules upon the public.

The issues raised by the exercise weren't ones of apathy but, rather, poor coordination.

Satellite phone service could soon become the norm

Kessler syndrome isn't a pressing issue at the sort of altitudes used by Starlink et al.. Remember, they need active thrust just to stay in orbit; smash them up and the drag is suddenly hugely magnified and orbital mechanics/conservation of momentum means that nothing will be flung up to a higher circular orbit (at most, a portion of the debris will gain a higher apoapsis, with Oberth rapidly curtailing this). Think of it like a bag of densely packed feathers vs. all those individual feathers flying through the air separately.

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

Unless the paywalled paper is citing other sources, it seems a bit damning for the contributors to denounce that conclusion. Further, though the data on vaccinated vs unvaccinated isn't public, we can look at excess deaths between countries and, if vaccines were a significant contributor, would expect to see higher excess death rates in countries with higher vaccination rates. Sure, it's worth looking at long term but the data doesn't seem to point to vaccines at all.

I was referring to the quack Andrew Wakefield.

For a vaccination to have an effect on a virus the virus has to be "caught" and in your body, replicating before your vaccine boosted immune system can react to it.

That's certainly one way the adaptive immune system can respond to a virus (antigen presentation) but the other way is through direct antibody action upon the virus particles (neutralising antibodies). This is where some of the bad science came from for the Covid vaccines, suggestions that a falling antibody titre was necessarily indicative of a loss of immunity.

I was aware that there was a general global trend of remaining excess deaths but these don't align with vaccination rates:

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/study-does-not-say-covid-vaccines-may-have-fuelled-excess-deaths-2024-06-13/

That's a tangent WRT moron in a hurry. Could you please be more specific about these supposed excess deaths and the alleged refusals to investigate?

Ah, like the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2006)

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198529170.001.0001/acref-9780198529170-e-20458

any preparation of immunogenic material suitable for the stimulation of active immunity in animals without inducing disease

I'm not interested in a discussion about what you consider to be or not to be a valid level of efficacy or precisely how effective the range of vaccines used were. I'm purely interested in discussing definitions in this context, not policy.

In any case, they were used in a way that, in my view, meets the defining function of a vaccine, even if past explanatory sections to definitions from some groups are insufficiently broad.

It depends on the vaccine but some of the live viral vaccines do the same thing: they use human replication-incompetent strains which cause antigen presentation on the hijacked cell, utilising exactly the same protein synthesis pathways as the mRNA vaccines.

I think it's quite reasonable to label the way you're talking about it as misinfo. It's highlighting concepts that are somewhat true in isolation and putting them together in a way that is, in my view, alarmist. Just as a certain doctor pointed out, quite factually, that one can find dead children with developmental disorders who had a vaccine quite recently. The issue comes from the implication that this means there is a causative link, which is why I think it's quite reasonable to employ a moron in a hurry test.

Ah, you mean how the CDC explanation (not definition) for vaccines previously was 'killed or weakened infectious organism'? That a would be because mRNA vaccines hadn't been used successfully at a large scale before.

Similarly, in the early 19th Century, one might have written an explanation of an automobile as being powered by steam and a pedant in the 1830s might have argued that one powered by electricity or internal combustion is not an automobile and claimed that, while steam carts are harmless, these newfangled things are uniquely, intolerably and insolubly dangerous

I would say that while, within the broadest technical definition, mRNA vaccines are gene therapy, any attenuated viral vaccine also meets that definition too. It's definitely also a vaccine and, if you dispute this definition, it suggests you really don't understand how it works.

NHS boss says Scottish health board wouldn't give cyberattackers what they wanted

*The information would be appropriate to the broader type of information being stored

I'm not sure if it's a novel idea but what if all executives who run organisations dealing with personal information had to store a stack of very private material about them on every 'secure' server? That way, they'd have a personal incentive for cybersecurity.

The information would be appreciate to the broader type of information being stored. For example, a health executive would have to provide photos and details of any especially embarrassing parts of their body, to be afforded all the same security, but no more, as that which they provide to their customers.

The same concept could be applied to anyone proposing key escrow or other broken security for E2EE. Secure their nude photos with the same key used to decrypt everyone else's data and put the encrypted file online.

Researchers find Meta's withdrawal of misinformation tool hard to swallow

Re: Political misinformation monitoring tool :o

I hope you're not suggesting that a tool used to police misinformation could just as readily be used to censor information the government or big business finds inconvenient, comrade.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: Sounds like ...

The really silly thing is that you absolutely can have the appearance of broken glass without the danger. Prop companies make it from silicone rubber.

US Space Force wanted $77M to reinforce GPS – and Congress shot it down

Re: Sees a great idea

Please re-read my comment. The jamming resilience relates to the directional antenna (which drastically increases the signal strength in the chosen area), not the encryption. It can definitely still be jammed but it means either using a more powerful jammer (bigger, noisier target) or putting jamming equipment closer to the targeted area (within the reach of more countermeasures).

Re: Sees a great idea

It's a little more advanced. GNSS uses encryption in PRS to prevent spoofing but Block III GPS M-code uses additional directional antennas. This means a spoofer or jammer has to place their hardware closer to the target, leaving them more vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles.

Mozilla defies Kremlin, restores banned Firefox add-ons in Russia

Re: Considering considerations

I don't think they're necessarily the 'bad guys' I think that the risk of public embarrassment played more of a role than they'd like to admit.

Re: David vs Goliath?

There's different kinds of 'might', one is the threat from a despotic state, there's also the impact from the wider, freer world for playing nice with said despotic state.

Considering considerations

It's interesting that Mozilla would only start 'considering' the impact of the ban when it came into force and not beforehand. Especially given that they only reversed course after their 'considerations' occurred in conjunction with being publicly shamed. What a coincidence.

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

In my opinion, the big problem BNFL suffered is that their infrastructure was based upon ideas that were very sensible at the time but rapidly undermined by shifts in the market and technological changes. Magnox and the infrastructure to support it was aimed at plutonium production, then Britain found she had enough nuclear weapons; AGR was a cunning way to efficiently make the best use of the limited metallurgy of the day, then practical superalloys and advanced (conventional) metal manufacture came along and robbed them of their advantage (as well as the limitations of prior understandings becoming apparent at scale, hobbling AGR).

My biggest fear now is that the expertise which was so painfully gained has been lost to time. Ideally, the later-constructed AGRs would have instead been shiny new Gen III (or, perhaps, what might be described as Gen IIb) designs but the Winter of Discontent and preceding events meant the Heath and Wilson governments were eager to get something connected to the grid that wasn't reliant on miners or foreign oil, even if it wasn't the best long-term solution.

Re: Western Wyoming geological (in)stability.

Both were required. If Fukushima had used SFRs or another design able to passively handle decay heat, the loss of power wouldn't have mattered.

Re: Western Wyoming geological (in)stability.

SFRs massively reduce nuclear waste, allow a wider range of core temperatures and don't require high operating pressures. It may seem scary but it solves for a lot of far greater hazards caused by using water as the primary coolant.

The really big one being that a well engineered SFR can handle decay heat without active cooling during an emergency shutdown. This limitation of water cooled reactors is what doomed Fukushima.

Rather conveniently, a British HALEU enrichment facility is currently being developed. Russia and China aren't the only game in town for uranium ore either.

Musk wants to ban Apple at his companies for cosying up to OpenAI

Re: Oh Musky

But dear lord when Musky starts attacking them, it almost makes you side with them, doesn't it?

While I wouldn't use his criticisms as instructive, I personally wouldn't do the opposite either. Acting contrary to an asshole still cedes power over your thoughts to their ramblings. For example, if he touted the value of consuming sugar, while I definitely wouldn't eagerly move to an all-sucrose diet, I also wouldn't reflexively remove all sugars from my diet.

Re: Musk being Musk aside, he has a point.

*privacy-destroying content scanning

Re: Musk being Musk aside, he has a point.

I'd also point out that, whether client-side or server-side, the software and hardware needed for "AI" is indistinguishable from the privacy-destroying content that governments keep trying to foist upon us.

Re: "Sold down the river"

How is its use appreciably racist? If anything, it acknowledges that slavery is bad and, at worst, it minimises in the same way that 'wage slave' does.

It's hardly difficult to find things to criticise Musk for without undertaking linguistic contortions.

Euro banks worry AI will increase their dependence on US big tech

Re: Euro banks shouldn't even be asking the question

Probably "I can make short term savings and deflect liability in the event of security failures."

Samsung union stages its first ever strike – very politely

Re: What ??

I've worked for a couple of employers where you just get a fixed number of holiday days per year but you have to use them for national holidays. It simplifies the process if you have to work (though I did also receive additional pay for coming in on a bank holiday).