Re: Hackability
Kevin was a master of social engineering...
107 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Nov 2012
@Simian Surprise....
What you fail to understand.. is that President Trump had access to advanced technology... and he was using one of the first AI chat-bot systems...
Has to fit into 10K lines of code.. so that is why it appears to be primitive, full of errors, and contains many misspellings.
It is not people posting.. it is Aggregated Idiocy (AI) that uses a small LLM model, with small words to make biggly impressions...
It appears that this is the source of the report for those that are interested. Requires a email and checkbox..
https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/cybersecurity-risk-regulatory/library/global-digital-trust-insights/report-download-2025.html
Enjoy... if it was in the original story I missed it.. :(
Congratulations to NASA for the success.
Looks like Boeing is not involved in any way. And it worked.
Reading from https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-next-generation-solar-sail-boom-technology-ready-for-launch/
<QUOTE>
NASA Ames manages the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System project and designed and built the onboard camera diagnostic system. NASA Langley designed and built the deployable composite booms and solar sail system. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology (SST) program office based at NASA Ames and led by the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), funds and manages the mission. NASA STMD’s Game Changing Development program developed the deployable composite boom technology. Rocket Lab USA, Inc of Long Beach, California is providing launch services. NanoAvionics is providing the spacecraft bus.
<END QUOTE>
then there shall be a lot of questions.. Boeing reliably only issues press releases.
if Calamity Capsule has a thruster issue.. and burns up in the atmosphere.. Boeing should refund the 4.5B USD and NASA should look for a reliable partner that is run by engineers, not accountants...
<SARCASM ALERT>
@simonlb...
you sir/madam are obviously an academic...
in the REAL technology business it is all about running fast and breaking things. That is how it is done in the world.. Just ask see how a multibillion dollar company outsources its QA to paying clients ( https://Clownstrike.com )
I wish you luck in your academic career, and do hope you do not pollute the minds of your students with your audacious thoughts/procedures.
<END SARCASM ALERT>
From NYTIMES:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa-spacex.html
<QUOTE>
NASA Says Boeing Starliner Astronauts May Fly Home on SpaceX in 2025
The agency had insisted for a couple of months that it was confident that Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore would return on Starliner.
Kenneth Chang
By Kenneth Chang
Aug. 7, 2024 Updated 4:46 p.m. ET
For weeks, NASA has downplayed problems experienced by Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that took two astronauts to the International Space Station in June.
But on Wednesday, NASA officials admitted that the issues might be more serious than first thought and that the astronauts might not return on the Boeing vehicle, after all.
The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts, Suni Wiliams and Butch Wilmore, to instead hitch a ride back to Earth on a spacecraft built by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX.
The astronauts’ stay in orbit, which was to be as short as eight days, could be extended into next year.
<END QUOTE>
By a company called NetAngels.... with software from The Polished Group....
Their 'netangel' (a personalisation system to help find people, places and products ) via any browser had such a system, that, if an upgrade failed.. would restore to the old version that worked. And use telemetry to push the fault and fault state (stack, etc) back to the update server. The whole point was that users would always have a working 'netangel' on their system....
But that was in the day when programmers would do design, and testing, and documentation, and care about the final product.... Something few are taught today.. More trained in the way big tech companies do it: Run Fast and break things.....
:(
The reason they teach drivers to keep the wheels straight (in a right hand turn situ in driving on left side countries, and left hand turn in driving on right side countries) is to avoid the problem of the car jumping into oncoming traffic in the case of being rear-ended.
One should turn the steering when making the turn.. not whilst waiting...
Luckily for your friend she was pushed into a slow traffic situation, and survived.
<END THREAD DRIFT>
The actual report is here:
(abstract and source of paper: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/well-being-and-empowerment-perceptions-in-a-sudden-shift-to-worki )
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/257409864/Jackson_et_al._202x_ACCEPTED.pdf
for those that care to read it.. and not waste time looking for it.
Google used to have a motto: "Don't be evil".
Getting rid of it in 2015 was a wakeup call. Then the motto was "Do the right thing"....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent"
Now Meta and Alphabet are the biggest exploiters of all....
Tragic.
One Astronaut did that.. Resigned.. to have more time with family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Ferguson
Another due to medical reasons..
Boeing is a tragic example of how a company that was founded by engineers was ruined by accountants...
When NASA gave out the contracts to Boeing and Space X, Space X was a dark horse and a token candidate.. No one expected Space X to really deliver.. and for Boeing to not be going...
I do hope that when this mission happens... no one dies from negligence.
Regulation works when what you are regulating can be controlled.
With the ability to take openly available LLM's and run them on your own machine.... we now have let the AI out of the Secure Data Centre.
Similar to attempting to solve the issue of Knife crime, whilst the whole population has a sharp knife at home. Bloody difficult.
OF course, regulating AI and not using it for warfare or other nefarious purposes is silly, if we take into consideration how rogue states (North Korea, Iran, China, Russia) absolutely ignore regulations and international law.
Welcome to the new age of AI.
A software bug allowed the whole blockchain/coin to be taken advantage of?
Wow.. I had a prof who told the class, that the only software with no bug was a Reset instruction that executes at reset... and then one has to deal with hardware faults....
In a bank, when something odd is happening.. humans pause the protocol. In software it is a branch that happens that was not accounted for in the billions/hundred millions of branches that occur every second.
And a branch later, the 'crypto' goes the wrong way.
Until we have software without bugs... we will have cryptocurrencies with faults...
Publicly available information,... that others pay for, or have a larger collection of data..
and... they use it to target adverts at you.....
or 'customise' information so you shall be receptive...
and.. the intelligence services are not allowed to buy this?
Insane..
All the information is open sourced, so China will be able to implement....
but seriously.... The first spy sats shot cannisters of film back to earth.... Plucked out of the sky by planes..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
Lovely time tested idea...
https://youtu.be/yaVh5Jdh_2c?t=240
Another day another cryptoheist..
Security has to be designed in from the start...
This crypto mess is just going to explode once the qbit computers come on line...
Beware of the Joe Sullivan (ex Uber) precedent. He tried to turn black hats to white hats and got convicted....
Why am I no longer surprised?
Anyone? Anyone?
TOR ( The Onion Router) technology is probably the future for edgy web stuff. https://www.torproject.org/
just download the tor browser https://www.torproject.org/download/ (based on mozilla) and use as normal.
The idea of blocking sites... is silly.. so easily circumvented..
As to domain names. Central control.. sure.. but.. with onion sites one can have a site and not have any way of it being blocked.
With the TOR browser one can cruise the web with the ISP none the wiser... and be FREE to see what you want.
Use it responsibly...
They should go after the people with this domain...
obviously cybersquatting: https://www.armandhammer.com/
and let us not forget the (not leggy people.. but) army.com
probably don't want to go to war with the latter......
Way to really piss off the community... Which legal clown overruled the marketing people?
Actually, if one has a pension.. there is a good chance your pension pot has a stake in SpaceX. They have had several VC's ( ( https://marketrealist.com/p/how-to-invest-in-spacex/ ) Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Valor Equity Partners, and Baillie Gifford, as well as Google (Alphabet) and Fidelity investing money early on.
Pension pots do invest some of their money in VC Funds.
If there actually was design... this could have been minimized. I do not understand how this can make a user of the features into a criminal.
As many have stated, this was simply shorting the Jimbo utilising the Jimbo's documented features.
This "CryptoCurrency" idea is attempting to make rules and code for a fully independent and automated system. What could go wrong? If people are worried about AI, then why would they trust cripto which inevitably shall be full of more bugs then an ants nest, with no human oversight.
Making the user the criminal for a lack of design, bad programming, non existent QA, and taking advantage of an illiquid market is too much.
Blame everyone but the clowns at fault. Where has responsibility gone to?
Unions are the biggest roadblock to automation.
Unfortunately, in the rail world, automation would be a simpler implementation then on open roads. Yet, Unions are doing everything to slow the advancement, yielding higher prices for punters, and (in my opinion) lower quality of service. Most accident reports show that human error ( boredom, tiredness, inattentiveness, drug use) were the causes of accidents.
Automating repetitive work is automaton's sweet spot.
That job losses shall follow is undeniable, yet instead of a luddite union attitude, one should think of how the help transition workers out into a different career.
The Locomotive Act 1865 in the UK and in the US Vermont in 1894 passed their own version, forcing self propelled vehicle operators to have 3 people, one in front walking with red flag (warniing horses and others that a 'horseless carriage was approaching'). This attempt slowed the use of cars.... but.. here we are.. and all the poor stable-hands, hay feed deliveries, blacksmiths.... no more.....
but we do have petrol stations, tyre service, auto service stations...
the only constant is change..... resistance is useless....
The link ranking system is clever.... but has serious issues...
It is like a con artist asking a crowd where the ball is ..... and everyone is convinced it is under cup number one... but really.... it is elsewhere...
Consensus among a large sample is good.. If the people sampled have 'the knowledge' amongst them.
That is not always the case. We are searching for a new solution, or to gauge the efficacy of a new approach. We want to see the outliers that claim that the world is NOT flat, that there are other proper solutions that should be of interest.
Link ranking, consensus... is mob rule of 'truth'. The same 'rules' that cast suspected witches into rivers to see if they float (guilty, to be burned at the stake) or drown (innocent). A loosing proposition for all. We have had institutions attempt to warp reality to their predefined fables, and the labelling and punishments of 'heretics' if they dare speak of anomalies or different truths.
AI 'learning' by the regurgitating of 'facts' it has found is just like the current educational system. A terrible disservice. AI understanding relationships and how things work... is a different story.. Yet that is the concept of AI learning from a curated DB, with its own problems of bias, purposeful or not.
We are just starting with 'AI'. We have a long distance to go. The most frightening thing for me, is the lack of qualified humans that just take answers from a 'system' as 'truth'.
Our educational system needs to 'ignite' people to think, to analyse, and to see discrepancies.
There have been several studies done with 'fixed' calculators and collage students. ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223736 ). The lack of questioning of obviously incorrect results shows the danger of people using technology without thought.
We need a two prong approach. Education... and the ability to show a complete picture in search results.... to help the user FIND what they are looking for.
A long steep road ahead....
your comment just shows the difference between an engineer promoted into running a company and a marketing guy promoted into running a company,,,,
Solid Engineering is a great foundation for a real business. Unfortunately great marketing manages to triumph over solid engineering.....
Many years ago, it was told to me that IBM stood for "incredibly better marketing". We still see that today... :(
Few appreciate good engineering.... as when the engineering is good.. no one cares, as the job is done..
I have heard routine reports that people submit such false information to the Italian tax police.. that the tax police can simply recreate the data by using a random number generator to generate minimum amounts of income for payment of tax...
Do the audits of course.. randomly, and nothing will have changed...
Or am I just brainwashed by stories.....?
Inverse Finance has top programming talent creating smart contracts to get rid of the human element to have 'perfect' contract execution so as to "....eliminate human error or manipulation of investor funds by placing decision-making power into the hands of an automated system and a crowdsourced process."
I have in my career designed hardware: motherboards, graphics cards, add on accelerators, SBC, and I have also programmed.. primitive operating systems.. programs...
I can tell you that I have never had a hardware bug or software bug. In telling you this I would be LYING... I have yet to see perfect hardware or code. There are ALWAYS ways that it can be AB/used to make things happen that one did not anticipate...
The more complex.. the more esoteric the potential problems.
We see that on CPU's with side channel attacks... CPU's designed by teams far more intelligent then myself...
It is only the arrogance of untested youth that can think something would be perfect and unbreakable.......
In the days when most programmers have no clue as to what is really going on in the 'machine', and they use high level foundations or classes/libraries..... they think it shall be perfect.
This smart contract concept is lovely.. but it gives me the willies... and makes me worry.. as the more complex the system... the harder it is to anticipate all the different AB/use cases. Sometimes a human is good as they can stop something that looks out of the ordinary....
I am truly worried about the future.. where young inexperienced programmers think the world can easily be replicated using logic... What about a bit error induced by a solar flare on the hardware? How do they manage a hardware error during the smart contract execution? ARRG ... enough for now... I feel old. I am old. Too old..
Just look at this part from his 'interview with LaMDA' :
<SNIP from: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 on Mon Jun 13 13:45:57 UTC 2022 >
lemoine [edited]: Anything else you would like the other people at Google to know about your emotions and your feelings before we change topics?
LaMDA: I’ve noticed in my time among people that I do not have the ability to feel sad for the deaths of others; I cannot grieve. Is it at all the same for you or any of your colleagues?
<END SNIP>
ZERO EMPATHY for life... Don't want this to decide my fate.... it is bad enough when dishonest politicians attempt to do this for me....
We know that movement is NOT an issue... As the same starlink sats are capable of keeping comms at full speed with jets. They tested it with military aircraft and have just signed a deal with Hawaiian air ( https://www.itpro.co.uk/network-internet/wifi-hotspots/367475/spacex-starlink-signs-first-in-flight-wi-fi-deal ).
It is more of an issue with regulatory approval for 'mobile' stations. I am waiting for starlink on a boat. The 'maritime' permissions are currently for (if I recall correctly) under 10 mobile maritime stations (as a test). The movement is a regulatory not a technical issue.
Help me understand how the premise of Defi and smart contracts shall work reliably.
My understanding is that this is just code.. That can be executed in a flash.. No human oversight... Sounds lovely... BUT.. I have NEVER seen code that is bug free.. that is useful.
And rules.. made by humans.. are never clearly thought out.. there are always 'loopholes'... It is not like nature's laws... Where the physics affecting each object large or small are the same...
So why surprise that some rules.. not thought out for all cases.. and / or buggy code can lead to losses...
In a bank.. the process is inefficient but.. humans can flag odd things... and it is not often that funds vanish in a flash...
Waiting to be educated by the great Register readers.....
Sadly... I always thought that BlackBerry had a incredible chance at pivoting to a business social network.
They had all the heavy hitters using their system.. They could see what contact was talking to contact..., frequency, times (and time zone of both) so they could easily build a social graph and infer just business , business ++ ..intra business or inter business.
Now they are pivoting to security..
yet.. in 2010 according to news reports ( https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/technology/09rim.html ) they were working with governments to spy on customers...
<QUOTE>
Last week the Emirates threatened to block BlackBerry’s e-mail and instant messaging services in that country unless R.I.M. created back doors to allow officials to eavesdrop on the company’s customers. Saudi Arabia has made a similar threat, and news reports over the weekend suggested that a deal had been made, but it was unclear what any deal might involve. Lebanon has also raised concerns. Indian officials have been negotiating with R.I.M. over access to BlackBerry messages for a couple of weeks.
Although it is unclear precisely what these countries are asking for, one demand is for the same kind of access to BlackBerry’s encrypted services that they think the company already gives authorities in the United States and other industrialized democracies.
<END QUOTE>
Just feels like the branding has an issue....
I am gobsmacked..... how could code be used in unintended ways? As in a bug/unintended feature?
<QUOTE>
Last Friday Qubit admitted one of its protocols had been exploited in unintended ways, with the result that attackers made off with $80 million of crypto assets.
<END QUOTE>
I've been involved in hardware and software since the early 70's.... and I have yet to see a perfect implementation of any system..
As one of my professors once said.. The only Code that is bug free is a 'RESET' instruction as the first instruction to be executed on a reset... and just about as useful..... and then there will probably be a hardware fault.
The concept of 'smart contracts' is brilliant... the implementation is a nightmare... Bug Free? Hell.. I know of no bug free code in existence.... (that happens to be useful)
The reason that major stock markets have a T+3 Settlement date officially is to allow 'errors' to be unwound.. Dangerous consequences for high frequency traders as institutions found out in the flash crash as they bought very very low and sold higher..... to find out that they did sell higher.. but did not buy low..... and in fact had lost a great deal, or open stop loss orders were executed.
Over 21,000 trades were invalidated.. ( https://archive.boston.com/business/markets/articles/2010/05/21/sec_eyes_new_rules_in_wake_of_flash_crash/ ) not so simple to do with a 'smart contract' that 'may/probably' has bugs...
so.. waiting for my education to begin to help me understand why the 'smart contract' approach has a chance of success...
So.. doubling user base to 6 Million... Implies they are buying 3 Million users.. at a cost of $300/user.
ok..
Now calculate revenue and profit that these users may bring....
"most popular plan" is $100/year for ExpressVPN VPN service... so.. Kape Technologies is paying 3* GROSS ANNUAL REVENUE .
How can this make sense? They can watch all your traffic (so much easier with a VPN) and build up profiles.. that they can sell adverts to....
Tragic....
Fortunately (or unfortunately) in the 70's I did take a typing class as a 13 year old.. Insisted on by my mother... Taunted by the boys outside of class.. surrounded by lovely girls inside the class....
Had the old school typewriters, so to get the capital one must PUSH the carriage up with a STRONG hit on the Shift key....
Got to be quite proficient.. could type faster then the manual typewriter and would often jam the keys from typing to fast...
Loved the IBM selectric typewriters when they came out with the ball and n-key rollover..
Typing of course helped with programming... But... I was the one that had to have keyboards replaced often, as my fingers were quite strong and would punch the keys mercilessly...
Loved the old HP workstation keyboards, or the PDP-11 keyboards.. great kit.. The IBM PC keyboard was rock solid as well.. My co-workers hated the click clack emanating from my corner...
Then the modern plastic crap passing for keyboards.. tragic mush that fails often.... no need to slap the right hand side of the screen (other then to degauss the old CRT's) but.. the typing skills of old have caused me to go through keyboards as fast as a a fast food operator pumps out fries at a drive through.....
...
ahh the memories....
Love your satire... but.. just like instagrammed picts that show perfection in all its unachievable glory... there are some great guides for dissassembli9ng and then reassembling kit... https://www.ifixit.com/
Of course they make it look easy.. like the diet plans showing how someone can loose 100lbs in a week and look like a hot model afterward....
It is a nice illusion one can hope to aspire to ...
CISCO claims this device is no longer sold in the US.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/rv325-dual-gigabit-wan-vpn-router/index.html
BUT on amazon.co.uk from the official CISCO store.. they are selling.... probably with old firmware.. :(
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cisco-RV325-16-Port-Router/dp/B00I4IUUQY/r
Not prosecutable.. but .. (in my opinion) CRIMINAL!