Posts by Catkin

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

"weapons-grade plutonium"

From the linked report:

In particular, the laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.

That sounds like a far cry from material ready for a primary, it could just as easily be a barrel of spent reactor fuel. All 'weapons-grade' means in this context is Pu-239, as opposed to other isotopes and reprocessing is job and a half. It would be interesting to know if it also contained Pu-240 but I have my doubts they'll release this information.

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

Apparently, it's still unknown who the lone programmer actually was.

A horrible example being the THERAC-25, where a hackjob port from a previous machine and software interlocks replacing hardware interlocks gave radiotherapy patients orders more exposure.

Neuralink patient masters mind-mouse maneuvers – if Musk is to be believed

Re: "a troubling lack of transparency"

I'd have expected the opposite: Musk parading the patient around to journalists (assuming all is reasonably well). As it is, I think they're erring on the side of caution to protect the patient's privacy.

If I were a terminal disease sufferer who had just regained some facilities but was still facing a severely shortened lifespan, the last thing I'd want is to be swarmed by journalists at both extremes of the Musk opinion spectrum when I'm trying to make the best of the risk I took.

Re: Trust Space Karen to implant something in your brain?

I'd add that, in addition to desperation, the trial patient likely doesn't have very long to live (it's been speculated they're an ALS patient) so they're possibly quite willing to risk shortening an already severely restricted life for the potential opportunities.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Re: Star wars?

It did contribute to the failure of Reykjavík.

Re: Star wars?

That's what it amounted to in the end but there were quite a few genuine research attempts. They just received an order less funding than required for proper exploration. The big mystery, to me, is whether Edward Teller was toying with a big unworkable idea, like the classic Super or a workable one, like Teller-Ulam.

Re: nuclear power in earth orbit

There have been cases of proper fission reactors (as opposed to the cited RTGs) being put into earth orbit. The Soviets used a few of them for orbital radar systems (RORSAT) and the US toyed with them (SNAP). They were employed where high power, high endurance electricity supplies were required in an orbit that made solar unsuitable.

Re: Star wars?

SDI was defensive, meant to intercept missiles in flight. It didn't really offer an offensive capability that the equivalent cost in conventional nukes wouldn't massively exceed and it was also a pretty overpriced way to take out a satellite. It never really went anywhere because a number of key technologies, primarily a nuclear pumped X ray laser, were never developed.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Re: After booting for the second time

I support personal freedom on this point but it's tinged with how appalling the stuff smells. I don't know why but it seems particularly bad in Britain. What I smell coming out of cars (!) in the US and cafes in the Netherlands doesn't seem to have quite the same body odour/rotten onion smell.

Re: So, he was just fired ?

I imagine it would be far more damaging to their bottom line to have to publicly disclose (in court) that nepotism with a side helping of poor security (not picking up the unusual destination) led to the loss of valuable equipment than simply eating the cost of a unit replacement.

Out with the old, in with the new as 100 Starlink satellites take atmospheric exit

Re: Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

That's true but it assumes everything goes well with the graveyard manoeuvre and there are no collisions while they linger for decades (spilling parts of the satellite across useful orbits). Unlike very low orbits, the reduced drag means that tiny debris can also hang around for a significant amount of time.

Re: Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

I remember distinctly when the Mach 3 went from a razor that lasted weeks to one that lasted days. You'd occasionally find old stock and the difference was clear. Personally, I went electric because it's easier to have in the car if I suddenly need to look presentable; weirdness of shaving in the car park aside.

Re: Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

I would say longer but how much longer is a really interesting question. On the surface, it looks like an optical fibre should last almost indefinitely once buried because it's ultra pure glass. However, the ground shifts, protective layers decay and animals (including humans) cause damage. Naturally, these can be repaired with splices but every splice degrades the fibre and the longer the fibre, the exponentially higher the chance that cumulative damage will eventually reach an irreparable point more quickly.

This means that the most remote areas (needing longer runs) probably won't enjoy as much of a cumulative saving as you might expect and, unlike satellites, every failure must be repaired/replaced for every corresponding area to stay online. This is why I believe deep analysis of the problem is needed, rather than a random ping pong of snappy bullet points.

Re: Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

I'm not too sure on your assessment for the number of Starlink sattelites. Simply achieving global coverage could be pulled off with a little over 1k while the current increases are all about bandwidth, which is a function of density. Naturally, it's not possible to have arbitrary density increases over a given spot but if the number of subscribers were to drop to those on the very geographic fringes, the needed bandwidth density would also drop.

Starship has the potential to make the costs drop and will enable next generation sattelites that are much larger and can offer more bandwidth per unit, as well as better optical meshing (decreasing the restrictions on uplink stations). All this, to me, adds up to a fairly consistent drop in the cost per bandwidth density.

I think that growth might not be guaranteed but, even then, could still happen as areas without reliable Internet develop and, in turn, enjoy the developmental benefits of high speed Internet access. Perhaps Musk may be unhappy with poor growth but I don't forsee the scenario you envision.

Re: Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

There will be a crossover point. Based on 300t of carbon per starlink launch and 8kg of carbon per km of fibre laid overland, that's equivalent to 37.5Mm of fibre but some 5.7Gm of fibre for Internet connectivity was sold in the UK in 2021 alone and, by 2022, that only yielded (in conjunction with existing fibre) 42% of homes on full fibre broadband.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-measures-protect-uks-88m-optical-fibre-cables-industry

Obviously, there's the potential for multiple strands to be laid in the same trench and all of it may not have been laid yet but, assuming it were laid singly, doing so would emit more carbon than 150 Falcon 9 launches. Perhaps in a very densely populated country like the UK, almost everyone could be connected up for less carbon emissions than Starlink but there will be outliers and there are plenty of sparser countries.

I would suggest that no one method is "best" for everyone and the ideal solution is to find the balance point where the lowest carbon solution can be applied. If fibre works out best for one customer, use fibre, if Starlink or similar works out best for another customer, use that. In the meantime, while the fibre barons are stalling, perhaps Starlink and other similar services which might arise later could fill the gap, because Internet connectivity is important.

Geostationary isn't ideal because, in addition to latency, it takes a lot more energy to get the satellites up there and they take a lot longer to come down (long after they become broken or obsolete).

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Re: Related story

It could be to do with the way they're switching your call through their system but, as I understand it, voice recognition for security is based upon relative phenome intervals and pitch rise/fall, so it doesn't need to be able to decode what's actually being said to work.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: Stainless?

Insects have a short generation span and getting smashed to bits is quite a selective pressure. Even hedgehogs these days run rather than balling up in response to a car.

SAP makes last-minute change to replacement of 80-year-old co-founder

Bravo

"Difference in perspective" might be the tersest corporate statement I've ever encountered

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

I'd be amazed if anyone from the C-suite actually sent an individually directed email to the unwashed after hours or at all. It would be the middle managers taking the hit.

Ukraine claims Russian military is using Starlink

That sounds like quite a reach, bordering on mental gymnastics. Good journalists publish retractions, corrections and clarifications. Provided they're not doing it due to past carelessness, that's part of what makes for a good journalist. The fact that Isaacson had more to gain by going with the juicier narrative than correcting himself makes me think he is a good journalist.

Given Musk's thin skin and poor impulse control, I would expect that if he had flying monkeys (simian or solicitous) which were that effective, he would have been able to do things like stopping the tracking of his private jet without resorting to the obviously childish banning of the Twitter account. One could equally say that the use of a simple clarification rather than pulling the book from the shelves for editing shows that Isaacson wasn't under significant duress but I'd say that, either way, it's not really a great piece of evidence.

Regarding the 100km, I wouldn't ascribe that as indicative of accuracy, it's a nice round number for describing how a sanction-compliant coverage blackout would also extend into the sea. Regarding the Ukrainian forces sending drones on the thought, "we don't know what we don't know" is a common military issue that's never been satisfactorily addressed and creates issues to this day. Case in point: the materiel failures Russia is experiencing.

I never disagreed with Musk being a revisionist but it seems like you're trying to be a little revisionist yourself by placing weight on one quote from a journalist while simultaneously dismissing a direct clarification from him. There's plenty of reasons to criticise Musk; indeed, there's plenty of reasons to criticise Musk over the reality of this event, I just think it's poor form to try to push a narrative that meets with your preconceptions.

Sorry, I probably didn't word that correctly. The person who made the claim in your cited article (Isaacson) issued the above quoted correction, not Musk. I agree on reading around but I think that someone correcting themselves is pretty conclusive in the absence of further corrections (and signs of being beaten).

Thanks, I did think it was a case of he said/he said but, going back to the Snopes article, the original author of the book quoted there did clarify

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/09/14/musk-internet-access-crimea-ukraine/

"To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war."

In either case, it seems like Musk should have taken direction from the Pentagon (I imagine they have a 24 hour support number). I expect the Pentagon would have said" if you don't let us use Starlink, we'll let us use Starlink" and may well have said this later on.

I think the switch off claim was given credence by the Medvedev quote. This may have been a mistranslation or a Russian attempt at misinformation.

It might be worth investigating to identify the straw purchasers and deactivate others they might have purchased.

Has that since been confirmed? The last time I read about that story on a fact checking website (Snopes), it was claimed that Starlink was never operating in Crimea (the area where it is alleged to have been deactivated, not across Ukraine, in any of the sources I've read) due to US sanctions. Supposedly, Musk received a last minute request to enable it in Crimea and balked. This clarification too may be out of date as well.

The issue is that many of the terminals used legitimately by Ukrainians are donated so there isn't one easy to tap into register.

Probably, a better way to have handled this would have been to talk to Starlink quietly so that a plan can be worked out without telegraphing to Russia that the jig is up. Equally, they may have tried this and are unhappy with the pace so are using publicity to pressure.

Using a geographic blackout is difficult too because it may cause units near the front line to stop working, so it would probably help for Ukrainian planners to work out the optimum strategy for their advantage.

Meet VexTrio, a network of 70K hijacked websites crooks use to sling malware, fraud

Re: commercial orientation is new ?

The quote specifically pertains to cybercrime. The specific concern for cybercrime is that corporatisation means compartmentalisation. With independent criminals, they have to be skilled at everything from identifying attack points to coding and getting paid anonymously. If they're now a contractor to a cybercrime corporation, there's less chance of them being caught if those deploying the attack are unmasked; there is a lower threshold for the motivation of a payout to overcome the concern of being caught and the corporation will be able to employ an expert specifically on achieving anonymity during payouts.

As with any organised crime, the organisation part makes it harder to tackle, especially when your first job is simply figuring out who you're actually after.

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Re: Oops, we stole it

It depends on how you define 'test and trace'. There was no one contract, it covered everything from the failed app to the highly successful whole-genome sequencing to identify emerging variants.

India to make its digital currency programmable

Re: A tyrant's dream

It's not mentioned in that release but the RBI did mention it in a 2022 concept note:

https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationReportDetails.aspx?UrlPage&ID=1218

It can also have other implications for monetary policy transmission as tokens may have an expiry date, by which they would need to be spent, thus ensuring consumption.

I think, with universal adoption (a long way off, even in the most controlling countries) it would become hard to run a black market because, at any sort of scale, they're still run on fiat cash. I acknowledge that people could barter but that would rely on a black market producer or high levels of sustainable theft. This may be a black swan theory but it seems fairly trivial with a CBDC for a government to identify people exchanging their limited tokens for non-limited ones. Perhaps someone else will issue their own currency but that seems like a lot of trust to place in your black market merchant.

Perhaps CBDCs will never fully supplant cash but, if they did, I can see it making black markets (outside of local barter) extremely difficult.

A tyrant's dream

Programmable, traceable currency grants a level of control over people's lives that I don't think has ever been achieved across a whole nation in history. That's not to say bad things will definitely happen if it's adopted by a given nation, it just gives government the opportunity.

I expect, if the time comes, people will be told that normal currency is only really used by criminals and to please think of the children.

FBI: Give us warrantless Section 702 snooping powers – or China wins

Re: Warrantless snooping powers

They have those powers but they have to be periodically re-authorised. All your favourite invasive acts, like PATRIOT and Protect are FISA reviews and re-authorisations.

FISA was originally sold as a way to ensure agencies better respected people's rights. In the event, it not only empowered them to do more but the reviews, rather than curtailing even more invasive activities, ended up as rubber stamping exercises with a side of some agencies revealing that even following FISA was too much hassle and getting it ammended for their convinience.

Fintech engineer grounded by crypto fraud caper, including $300m spoof trades

Re: Ponzi

I regard it as an indirect pyramid scheme, in that returns are only generated by demand pushing up the market price. At least, I think the base use of cryptocurrency as an investment is closer to a pyramid scheme than a Ponzi.

Ponzi

Finally, an actual Ponzi and not a mislabelled pyramid scheme.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

Re: An Honest Question

I wouldn't use them roaming around but I was doing a job that involved a lot of travelling around the time Oculus was available on Samsung devices. Sitting in a waiting lounge, it was nice to escape into a virtual cinema. The biggest two annoyances were the lack of awareness and that, being run on my phone, I had to be meticulous about cleaning the screen before use because a dust particle would be enormous and clear. I wouldn't spend $3500 for a more polished version of this but under £1k, I'd be sorely tempted.

Counterintuitively, I also found it quite good for relieving motion sickness on ships, though the vessel turning would require some manual resetting of the device as my chair in the "cinema" turned.

Attempts to demolish guardrails in AI image generators blamed for lewd Taylor Swift deepfakes

Re: Will MS et al hire the 4chan'ers

>or that the skills to break something are the same as the skills to prevent it

Bug bounties don't require providing the fix to pay out.

Where there's a will, there's a way to get US chips into China

Re: Sanctions - not the best tool in the box.

What do you believe Trump will do that's a new cause for concern, what prevented him from doing it in his first term and why would that preventative mechanism no longer be in effect in a hypothetical second term?

Deepfake CFO tricks Hong Kong biz out of $25 million

Root cause

Why was this finance professional able to transfer $25m to what are presumably novel accounts?

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

Re: Pay as you go

A CBDC isn't mined, it's issued by a central authority. It's basically the exact opposite of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency because it concentrates the authority centrally and grants them supreme control to do things like set the expiry date or usage limitations of any arbitrary token or tokens in a wallet. For example, a universal credit payment where a certain portion could only be used at approved supermarkets to purchase approved items and any remaining money in that portion expires at the end of the month or adjusting the interest rate on savings directly (even negative interest) to prompt people to stimulate the economy.

Re: Pay as you go

I think there's a happy medium between "everyone can do everything" and "all energy use must be limited to survival needs".

I absolutely do not physically need my shower water to be warm but I would have strong words for someone who decides it's verboten.

Save the Mars Sample Return mission, plead Congresscritters

Re: Beserk

I just wanted to highlight that NASA hasn't sneakily been upselling without delivering results. While each mission has contributed to sample return, that's piggybacking on other genuine achievements made by the current and past missions.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Tracking

"no way of tracking employees coming and going because they are not locations where Dell badges work"

Not that this is commentary on the rightness of the policy but I hope this particular employee isn't tempted to not come in, based on this idea. I don't have inside information on Dell's corporate network but I expect there's at least rudimentary logging of where connections are being made from and when.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

"Yes" or "Ask me later"

Funny, if I repeatedly only gave these two options in a personal interaction, it wouldn't be long before I'd be accused of criminal harassment.

It's true, LLMs are better than people – at creating convincing misinformation

Re: Detection of Impending Explosions and Implosions

The difference, to me, between my previous post and traditional consent manufacturing is that the former uses actual people in place of a LLM, curating out forbidden views in a way that means a spectrum of opinions seems to still be present.

Re: Detection

I can see two greater dangers from "AI" filtering misinformation than it being used in its generation. The first is that it will work poorly and filter out genuine information. The second is that it will work too well and will allow a very small team or even a single individual to finely control which ideas are visible; with a degree of subtlety that shifts in general consensus could be prodded without the danger (to the consensus manufacturer) of whistle-blowers that's associated with a large team of human operators.

It's one thing for a troll farm to put out damaging material but I'm even more disturbed by the idea that a single appropriately empowered individual could do the latter with the software writers and maintainers thinking that their work is only being used to prevent, for example, claims that vaccines cause autism.

ESA salutes Galileo satellite system meeting aviation standards

Re: How much does this increase GNSS robustness ?

Galileo has PRS, which is a secondary encrypted signal for military and public services. It's impossible to guarantee spoofing won't take place but this makes it harder. The cost is negligible and even the most basic new receivers generally support Galileo (though not PRS). You can check (if you own an iPhone or Android device with GNSS) by downloading something like GPS Test; depending on your chipset, you'll probably also see GLONASS and might see BeiDou as well as ground-based assistance beacons depending on your device and location.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Re: Why don't people see the bigger picture?

Letting someone gain a good approximation of limb, especially arm function beyond what is currently possible seems like far nobler a cause (and, thus, holy grail) than being able to do whizzy stuff with a computer.

Someone with a terminal illness who, with little to lose, is willing to take a risk for a better life. Though I wouldn't describe them as a fool any more than a severe cancer patient using an experimental medicine where mainline ones have failed.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Just AI?

Shouldn't that be all involuntary porn, regardless of how it's made?

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

Re: Zero

Terribly sorry, I meant what mechanism was the person I responded to envisioning when they made that statement, rather than a general hypothetical.