Posts by cyberdemon

First-ever UEFI bootkit for Linux in the works, experts say

Oh Noes!!

We're all Doomed! DOoOmeD!

Need to run for the hills, batten down the hatches, and install secure boot keys that only er, Microsoft, controls the private keys for.

Then we'll be totally secure!

Bing Wallpaper app, now in Windows Store, accused of cookie shenanigans

Re: heartbreaking to see one of my favorite tech giants

> I guess I might pick Microsoft?

Not a chance.

Google: Maybe we should drop this whole "don't be evil" thing.. It's really holding us back. I think we should be full-on evil from now on..

Microsoft: Hold my beer...

They were Evil before it was cool. Now they realise that all the tech companies are going evil, and they know how to corner that market..

Re: heartbreaking to see one of my favorite tech giants

It's not even a marketing company. It's a surveillance and cyberintelligence company. Think if Palantir were to buy up Pegasus and Cellebrite, but 10 times bigger.

> a heap of concerning capabilities that make it a piece of Microsoft-developed "malware."

Given what is going on with Recall etc, this description applies to Windows itself, and indeed pretty much every modern piece of shite that comes out of Microsoft's corporate arse these days.

But even I am a little bit shocked at this, especially Microsoft's not-quite-denial that basically amounts to an admission to decrypting and stealing Firefox cookies (if you are using Edge, then they already have you by the bollocks, so no point stealing those..)

Cookie stealing is not something to be taken lightly. It doesn't just unmask you for surveillance, it could also let someone take control of any web account that you are logged in to. If Microsoft are passing this data on, e.g. via their government / law enforcement portal, then it could be seriously abused

Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models

> Microsoft's "Connected Experiences" has existed for years

Yes, how else do you suppose they got enough high quality data to train GPTs 1-4 ...

I also note that for "work/school accounts", " connected experiences" is mandatory, turned on via group policy (i guess probably on by default, and requires a friendly BOFH to turn it off)

It amazes me how "work/school" are assumed to be allowed to make deleterious privacy decisions on your behalf

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: Distraction

By "remove the binaries" I assume they mean "incorporate them into the Windows kernel".

Recall will be optional: You will be able to choose whether you want to see its output or not.

Google blocked 1,000-plus pro-China fake news websites from its search results

Re: To what end?

And now for TV stations, you can also read "social media cesspits", who sometimes ARE your donors, and want their own government departments after helping you win the election

One thing AI can't generate at the moment – compelling reasons to use it for work

Re: "Possibly, AI is not the big bonus that everyone's thinking"

> Anything genuinely useful will be still standing at the end of the carnage and it will develop from there. Let it evolve.

Fraud, Fraud, Fraud and er, Fraud.

Oh and maybe a bit of automated genocide and oppression.

A prediction of the future of AI

One use is as a "robust", self-contained, imprecise archive of the past e.g. in the 2002 film of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine", In which the last remaining record of human civilisation is an AI hologram in what used to be a museum. It's basically an LLM chatbot.

IMO we're never going to get to the "star trek computer", never mind "commander data". AI is already plateauing in terms of how "intelligent" it can be - indeed with extra training it seems to be getting worse, due to ingesting its own excrement.

But as I said in another post, it's becoming extremely useful if you're a bad guy. It seems as if the main purpose of AI is to allow the unscrupulous to get away with stuff.. Want to make discriminatory decisions in your company? Get AI to do it. Want to con thousands out of their savings but can't find cheap trustworthy staff? Get AI to do it. Did something very stupid and got caught on camera? No problem, now you can dismiss it as an AI generated fake.

Want to exterminate an entire race of people but unfortunately that would be a "crime against humanity"? No problem - Get AI to do it!

And at that point we're back to H.G. Wells, where the human race is enslaved to morlocks killer robots.

"Possibly, AI is not the big bonus that everyone's thinking"

I can't choose between this and the sherlock icon..

I really can't believe it has taken this long, frankly, for the skin of the bubble to rupture.

Not only does it devalue and dilute all human knowledge and communication with utter noise and meaningless drivel, but it requires vast energy and nano-etched-silicon resources the likes of which may be never be available ever again, plus human 'prompt engineers' to filter all the gibberish that it generates. And most implementations exfiltrate your data to someone else's cloud..

It is beyond me as to why any sane minded person would accept this, never mind pay for it.

Audio Only

> For those who prefer the show as audio only, the Kettle is available via RSS and MP3, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. ®

Yes, audio only is fine. Text is even better. But because the RSS-MP3 doesn't work on my phone, I ended up watching the video, complete with hexagon-glasses baldy, lazy-eye cipher in a WeWork, Andrew Scott and the Covid bookcase, and Rowan Atkinson.

8-bit stage??

That's an insult to 8-bit computers, which were/are actually useful.

AI is more like in its 8-qbit stage. It is making progress towards 'something', but nobody knows what except for a massive waste of resources, and thus far it is useful for nothing more than parting fools from their money, which is a notoriously easy task.

We can clone you wholesale: Boffins build ML agents that respond like specific people

Re: I thought this AI insanity was already scraping the bottom of the barrel and then...

> Would we require the technological equivalent of a wooden stake and interment at crossroads to keep the dead from haunting the living?

Good God, what a horrible thought I just had.

Could you imagine if Donald Trump were to make an AI model of himself and declare that it would be president for ever after his death? Maybe it has already happened

Of course, it would be plugged in to the surveillance networks and have command of the killer robots that patrol the streets.

Obey, citizen. The Donald is Watching You

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info

Re: So now the Yakuza can get revenge on many people

there

in which case,

Re: So now the Yakuza can get revenge on many people

Yeah, it's that second point that worries me.

From the sounds of it, the hackers had TeamViewer or similar access for a few seconds / minutes before they were noticed. There seems a reasonable chance that this wasn't long enough to install a more sophisticated RAT or indeed exfiltrate data from the local government network

If they didn't actually get the data, then announcing it publicly will have done a lot more harm than good

Datacenters could blow up your electric bill thanks to AI

Re: So send the bill to the datacenters

How would it affect places like Orkney where the grid is constrained in both directions by a pair of 33kV subsea links to the mainland?

When the wind blows, they have to switch off some of their wind turbines because they would overload their connection by exporting too much. When it doesn't blow but it's cold, it is overloaded in the other direction.

Supposing we had locational pricing, they would presumably be paid less for their constrained wind energy and have to pay more for imported energy too. Building a new cable link would reduce their prices, but also reduce profits for the local DNO too, so it's not going to happen is it, because the DNO are the only ones who can build it.

Re: So send the bill to the datacenters

Good idea, but I am skeptical as to whether it would work in practice.

Here in the UK, we have a big problem with electricity transmission and distribution too. I understand it's even worse in some parts of Europe.

A lot of people seem to be hailing "Locational Pricing" as the solution, but again I am skeptical. It sounds like a way to charge people more if their local grid is overloaded. But the trouble for me is, is it overloaded due to being oversubscribed, or underprovisioned? If the DNOs can underinvest in infrastructure and be allowed to charge customers more for it, then that seems completely backwards to me.

I'm sure someone on these forums who knows more than me can tell us What incentive is there for DNOs to invest in their infrastructure and how Locational Pricing will help or hinder that

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Electric cars don’t add much to load

Er, a kettle boils in a couple of minutes. A shower takes 10-15 mins depending on who's in it.

Therefore the chances of all the neighbours on a street being in the shower and/or boiling a kettle at once is pretty low. And even in the event where multiple people do put the kettle on or step in the shower at once, the overlap is going to be a few minutes at worst, and underground cables are pretty heavy and have enough thermal mass to cope with a few minutes of overload. That's why the 'diversity' argument works for sizing distribution cables.

However, EVs are not charging for a few minutes at a time, nor are Heat Pumps running for minutes at a time. They run for hours, so the diversity argument breaks down completely.

I'm shunning electric cars

> Nobody is "shunning" electric cars. You're literally not offering anything vaguely attractive because you want to sell your ICEs.

I disagree here..

I don't think the manufacturers really "want" to sell more ICEs. They have to because they are cheaper to make, so they are more competitive on price compared to EVs. And many customers just won't ever buy an EV because they are just not suitable for their needs, or perhaps they don't trust them to have any second-hand value.

But they shouldn't particularly "want" to sell ICEs, because they are being threatened with massive fines if they don't meet arbitrary targets: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/22/electric-shock-carmakers-battle-strict-uk-electric-car-rules-as-big-fines-loom

Is the electric utility cable under your road rated for the current that electric cars consume, when you and your neighbours are simultaneously charging them?

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

Google to be forced to sell Chrome.. But who would, could, should buy it?

Who the heck is there who would want to buy chrome, could afford to buy it, and would be a good custodian of it?

Certainly not Microsoft...

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: WRONG!

Yes exactly. Bias-free because er, we outsourced our bias to a completely inscrutable black-box bullshit machine that nobody can prove is biased cos our supplier won't reveal their weights and prompts due to trade secrets

It's a bit like how Drax is emissions-free, because all the emissions are deemed to grow back into trees and no we won't tell you where the logs came from cos then you might find out that they aren't growing back

It seems as if the main purpose of AI is to allow the unscrupulous to get away with stuff.. Want to make discriminatory decisions in your company? Get AI to do it. Want to con thousands out of their savings but can't find cheap trustworthy staff? Get AI to do it. Did something very stupid and got caught on camera? No problem, now you can dismiss it as an AI generated fake.

Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS

One of the reasons it works so well I think, is because they managed to avoid the temptation to go for am ARM CPU. Nothing wrong with ARM in theory and indeed they SHOULD be much better for an embedded platform like SteamDeck, but in practice it is troublesome for compatibility and would have presented a real headache for Valve (because most games were compiled once for x86 and then forgotten about) Yes there are emulators, but they suck.

Pirate programmer walks the plank for role in massive TV streaming operation

Re: <shrug>

Not only that but presumably plays in high quality, without ads (amazon still tries to insert ads even if you pay. Ublock blocks them at least until manifest v3), without DRM, with the right combination of audio and subtitles, and presumably doesn't sell your data to the world and his data broker, and doesn't try to manipulate you into watching something that you didn't want

This is why I don't watch anything these days.. The only way to get anything high quality is to pirate it, and i'm too old not to worry about getting sued

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Feed-in tariff

> in summer, I get to watch the dial go backwards - saving me 34p a unit (as opposed to the 19p I'd make on a feed-in tarriff)

THIS is yet another utterly ridiculous problem, not of smart meters per-se, but of how they can be (ab)used to define an asymmetric pricing system in software.

No wonder they want to force you to get a smart meter, if it means they can charge you twice as much to buy electricity from them as what they will buy it from you for. (Isn't that called Arbitrage, and is generally recognised as a fairly shady business practice?)

Re: "Meters that allow you to do that sort of thing have existed for at least 40 years. "

It could have a changeover-input for a generator, which could be powered by a tank of propane (or even from the natural gas supply that we are assuming will continue).

But, if gas and water do not continue, then we are into an apocalyptic (WWIII, zombies, etc.) scenario, for which this sort of thing might be relevant i.e. it's no use having a generator for power and heating if everyone else doesn't, and they can see that your lights are still on and your security is not enough to keep them out.

Re: "Meters that allow you to do that sort of thing have existed for at least 40 years. "

> bigger problem given precarious energy supplies is that when there's a power cut, combi boilers just won't work.

I see a gap in the market here for a special kind of long-running, low-power UPS that provides the earth-referenced, sinusoidal mains waveform that is required by modern condensing gas boilers and circulation pumps.

Zappi

> I think you might be talking about a "Zappi" type solution

Sort of. What I am saying is, every modern smart meter and EVSE has the capability to implement this type of "solution", and it looks to me like the intention of the powers that be is to move more people onto this (with or without their consent) instead of upgrading the electricity supply infrastructure.

> purely for diversity reasons, nothing to do with grid stability or peak time usage

That's where you are missing the point. I am worried about "distribution" here; i.e. your local 11kV substation and the cable under your road, not national generation/transmission. Mass adoption of EVs and Heat Pumps means that the old "diversity" argument breaks down, because the peak has widened significantly if it takes hours to home-charge an EV and hours to heat the water tank / bedrooms. There's no way that anyone's local substation and existing cabling could cope with everyone having heat pumps and EVs, because that would mean something like 50A per house, for several hours per day. The cables are rated to no more than 400A and serve 20-40 houses, but you only need 10 EVs on charge (and nothing else) for them to be overloaded. It would cost hundreds of billions (at a wild guess) that the UK and the DNOs don't have to upgrade this for the whole country.

Basically, I do not trust our privatised DNOs as far as I could throw them, and I fully expect them to cheat on their obligations to deliver a fit-for-purpose supply that will cope with the phasing out of Gas. They will keep the old infrastructure going as long as possible (and replace it only like for like when it fails) instead of upgrading it, they will try to "adjust consumer habits" via smart meters, and if that fails, turn consumers off via smart meters.

Re: Dear Smart Meter Zealots: Explain why they all....

Chris, I said there would be nothing stopping them doing that, once they have fixed the more general comms issues.

If they were able to guarantee a signal all the time, then their full orwellian potential would be being used already.

Re: No real statistics

> Every single advert for smart meters for the last five years has focused purely on one point - it will reduce your energy usage. They never explain how, which is not surprising, as they won't.

But but it must be Smart cos Albert Einstein says it is, and he's Smart, right?

Re: £13bn that could have been spent on something useful.

> Water meters are simply to punish anyone who gardens to make up for the inadequate investment in water supply infrastructure, at a time when they should be encouraging people to grow their own food.

Well, you could get a water butt or three and maybe a pump.. It does seem a bit daft to me to use potable water for watering gardens and flushing toilets. But then again not as daft as pumping potable water down a leaky pipe and not fixing the leak!

But Smart Meters, especially for electricity, are far too tempting to use as an alternative to investment in infrastructure, IMO.

For £13bn we could have built all the new 400kV transmission lines that we need, along with a good amount of "medium voltage" (e.g. 33kV) and "low voltage" (230/400V) distribution, which is really creaking at the seams now.

Re: Dear Smart Meter Zealots: Explain why they all....

Sure, £100/MWh is basically normal wholesale price these days. But Balancing Mechanism prices have often hit £500/MWh, and I would not be at all surprised if they hit £1k next year given how things are going with geopolitics, power plant expiry dates, etc ...

> There is no such thing as "Dumb mode" for smart meters

I wonder if a well-aimed magnetron could remedy that...

4000V magically appeared on your antenna? Oh dear, what a shame, never mind

Re: Meter expiry

Or maybe HRH isn't too keen on the whole smart meters thing either, but he gets a choice unlike us plebs.

Re: Explain why they all have a remote controlled "disable supply" contactor

> I think you are talking about a device called an Overloader.

Yes, just like that, except defined in software where the overload threshold is adjustable depending on the time of day and maybe other factors, and is set remotely by the supplier

Your EVSE talks to both your meter and your EV, that's pretty much all it is for..

If you are on a restricted usage tariff and you put the kettle on while your EV is charging, the meter can send a signal to the effect of "please reduce consumption by 10A or else" and the EVSE will pass that along to the EV, which will oblige. If it does not, then your lights go out.

Re: The real reason the UK government wants smart meters

At first, yes. Then the remaining holdouts will be forced "by the front door", so to speak.

Re: Dear Smart Meter Zealots: Explain why they all....

Well, for one you might get in trouble for that, and for two, there's nothing to stop it disconnecting automatically after a certain time period of no comms, once they have sorted out the more general comms issues

And as i've said in my other posts, "not paying your bills" is not the only reason why your supplier might want to disconnect you.

Another reason might be "because it is profitable to do so, by way of the balancing mechanism"

True, but the EV itself still knows how much charge it's had and when, so implementing a tax on that would be no more difficult than a tax per mile driven, which has already been implemented elsewhere and mooted for the UK. It (or its charger) could also communicate with the smart meter over the HAN, to corroborate the data and do things like bidirectional charging, where you are offered a discount in exchange for an uncertain state of charge

Re: Meter expiry

Two questions. 1: Can they legally force entry without notice (and i don't just mean the usual "your meter is due to expire soon / has expired, please please take a smart meter otherwise your readings could be inaccurate", I mean they should need to explicitly say words to the effect of "if you do not respond to this letter within 6 weeks to agree a time to replace your meter, we will break down your door at your cost")

2: If such a notice arrives, can I legally demand that they install a replacement dumb meter, not a smart one?

Re: The real reason the UK government wants smart meters

> Not that I think it's a good idea to refuse. There is an awful lot posted in forums by people who have very little understanding have how smart meters, the SEC or the energy industry in general work and generally get quite shoutily wrong.

I wonder if you are talking about anyone on this forum, mr coward?

If so can you please fill in what you think we (or perhaps I?) have got so shoutily wrong about these things? I certainly understand "how the meters work" (as an electronics/firmware engineer who has seen the insides of them and read the spec) and I have had a good amount of exposure to the energy industry... So that leaves the Smart Energy Code, perhaps?

Forgive me for being skeptical about governments and industries setting out codes and then actually abiding by them...

Well that's clearly bollocks, because for the minor end of "major incident" it's dead easy to put the switches at the distribution transformers i.e. the little 11kV-> 400V (230V) substations, and switch them on one-by-one.. Or for the major end of major (i.e. "BlackStart"), do it at transmission level.

The kernel of truth in there, I personally believe, is "selective disconnetion, on an individual basis such that rolling power restrictions could be enacted".

I.e. when the blackouts start happening, consumers and businesses could pay a voluntary levy to not be disconnected during a blackout. They could pay anything they liked, but when the grid is under strain, they will be disconnected in the order of "how much they paid divided by how much they are using" until the grid is stable again.

The Mafia used a business model just like this, it worked well..

Re: Failed roll out.

I think they are waiting for a critical mass of installed smart meters before they make them mandatory. It's actually pretty hard for them to forcibly cut people off when they still number in their millions.

The idea of having secondary or auxiliary loads is already in the SMETS2 spec (5.4.10). So they will still be SMETS2 meters, just of, er, a different type...

That kind of proves my point that Smart Meters _will_ be used for load shaping (if not full blown load shedding) because they can avoid the need for load shedding (which is done at substation level and is highly inconvenient for important customers like businesses) by switching off customers who don't, er, matter.

(having auxiliary loads that they COULD disconnect first may in theory be a good thing for you IF these loads are genuinely auxiliary and not important to you, but in practice that's unlikely as if so you would already have switched them off!)

I know - I had one, but the UI sucked, so I built my own out of a Hall-effect current clamp, high voltage oscilloscope probe, Digilent Analog Discovery 2, and a Raspberry Pi.

Overkill perhaps - but it lets me see the harmonic distortion on both voltage and current (some nasty flat-topping going on with the voltage), and also estimate the resistance of the mains supply by correlating large load changes (such as my electric shower) with voltage drop.

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

Bah

Great, but whether they were or not, I am now left hesitant at the upvote buttons, lest one of the above AI-derisory poems be AI-derived..

The mere fact that text generators exist and are so ubiquitous, has devalued text itself as a medium.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Re: the Sky is not the limit

Or rather, if TV broadcasting completes its 'race to the bottom' that it is currently engaged in, it will be on a par with AI generated 'content' crap

Whinge

You must be new here.

Or rather, "Ye're nat frem raund ere, ar ye.."

Obligatory: The Firm

I think maybe you missed the point here..

The problem the author is referring to is that all work conversations will eventually degenerate to "multiple chatbot instances chatting to eachother", with the humans just serving as a noisy communication medium between them..

In a bizarre inversion of who/what serves what/who in technology, we become slaves to the machine as the last "real human voices" get drowned out by those who are simply saying whatever the chatbot told them to say.. (ironically, in order to appear more knowledgeable)

> Even the seemingly innocuous business of Copiloting the Dall-E-powered Designer graphics tool into documents is vile poison. The pictures generated can have no insights beyond what the generative prompts contain, diluted by whatever fantasies exist in the heart of the machine. But those pictures in a report or a presentation trigger expectations of extra meaning, of explication. The reason clip art feels so empty, so tiring, is that it speaks up our cognition and delivers nothing.

You mean like the "every article must have a completely meaningless shitterstock image at the top" policy that the Reg adopted some time ago?

Mercifully, you culled them from the article body page. But they still appear in the "preview", either on the homepage or when a link is "shared" on some app

Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again

Faulty MOSFETs?

Or perhaps Musk's undoing was ignoring his electrical engineering staff and allowing users to pay extra to lift sensible performance limits even further?

I wonder how many of the affected customers were using "ludicrous mode" or whatever he calls it...

You can over-engineer something and have a few people pay extra to make use of it, or you could let them pay even more to er, reduce the reliability of the product they bought

In any case, Nelson Muntz icon required. Both for Musk and his cultists customers