Posts by cyberdemon

TikTok sues America to undo divest-or-die law

Re: Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing us on the Constitution

But the subhead should have been:

Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing US on their Constitution

Because the US isn't us, right, El Reg?

UK opens investigation of MoD payroll contractor after confirming attack

Also how to guarantee that you are vulnerable to such actors: Run the operation for profit and spend as little as possible on the IT service that you are contracted to deliver

Re: What

https://sscl.com/go-green-button/

Reduces the site's carbon footprint by er, hiding HTML elements that you have already downloaded and cached locally..

Any CO2 savings from that one completely obliterated by the cigar smoke from whichever greenwashing consultant who invented it!

It'd be more hilarious if we weren't the ones paying for it ...

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: What does the "C" stand for . . .

I assumed that it rhymed with Jeremy Hunt Suite

Miss your morning iPhone alarm? It's not just you, and Apple is looking into it

Re: Had the Same Problem

It's pretty grim that zillions of phones are making 3D images of their users faces _all the time_ ...

And yet the only thong wrong with this situation is that a few false positives are causing the alarm to be too quiet

Space insurers make record-breaking loss as orbit gets cramped

Insure this

Russia developing space nuke to knock out swaths of satellites with EMP wave

I'd hope that satellites are already resilient to solar flares and intense radiation, so i wonder how many would be destroyed by such a blast and what would it do to the space junk situation..

Cyber-bastard jailed for stealing psychotherapy files, blackmailing patients

Re: Caged for six years and three months

Given that this guy was -literally- a one-man crimewave, I would have expected a little longer in the holiday-camp, too

More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit

They'll just pay this off with er, 124 million 'tokens'. Chump change for Borkzilla..

Forcing them to delete GPT would be excellent, but I doubt it'll happen. In fact it's probably why these models have been published on the likes of huggingface et al., to convince any future supreme court judge that there is no point in them deleting it now, the horse has bolted, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat is out of the bag, Pandora's box has been opened, etc.

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

And off to jail you go

Willfully paying organised criminals? Isn't that already an offence?

If it can be argued that the ransomware crooks are Terrorists, then paying them is already an offence, even in the US.

Attacking critical health infrastructure certainly sounds like it could fit the definition of terrorism ...

EU duties might not be enough to hold off flood of Chinese EVs

Re: E-con-nomics

I assume you are referring to this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-68896707 good article - worth linking.

Given that EV market share is a piddling 5%, with 14% of new cars being EVs, (and that's the UK which has a relatively high level of EV adoption): The scale of environmental destruction required to electrify all vehicles on the planet, never mind the scale required to produce grid-storage for "dunkelflaute" days, is utterly mind-boggling.

It feels like a soft-war tactic to me: During peacetime, get your enemy to close down all its heavy industry while bolstering your own - makes it easier to invade or vassalise them when you need to.

Politicians call for ban on 'killer robots' and the curbing of AI weapons

Re: Mistake

I read that as ICANN adjudicating the process

In which case anybody would be able to buy a H-Bomb and we'd all be frakked

.nuke TLD anyone? How about .doom?

Re: WaaS: War as a Service

I wonder what all those enormous datacentres are doing..

The ones that are not busy working out new propaganda techniques to better divide and sabotage democracy, are likely running huge Computational Fluid Dynamics and Finite Element Mechanics models to train a raspberry-pi sized neural net to fly missiles and drones to cover your points A-E above.

Autonomous exploding drones have been used for years.. Although they are (currently) easy but not cheap to shoot down. DragonFire to the rescue, maybe?

Autonomous sniper and machinegun-shooting drones are starting to be used but are rudimentary. Tracked and 6-wheeled diesel-electric driverless tanks are also starting to be used but are currently hollow for optional-crewing. I'd guess in future they may be solid metal 'giga-casted' hunks with voids inside only for engines, instrumentation and ammo magazine, plus maybe a pack of launchable aerial drones. For ultimate civilian fear-factor i guess we may one day see hexapod tanks crawling over rubble to locate and eradicate the last of us, though they are more sci-fi and not as practical as wheeled and tracked tanks due to being less efficient, less able to carry heavy loads of fuel and ammo, and more vulnerable. But otherwise perfectly feasible.

Energy will be the first target - we in the UK are incredibly vulnerable and without electricity our society will collapse faster than a house of cards in an earthquake. The Russians have had plenty of practice in Ukraine, and the former Soviet states have a lot more resilience than the UK does. Yet for some reason we are only making ourselves more vulnerable still, by building yet more subsea links and closing down heavy power stations.

As for timing, it's all going to Hell pretty quickly. I'd guess the first thing will be the end of Democracy: cf. Trump, Modi, and other populists being indirectly sponsored by Russia via antisocial media with the aid of AI bots. Then Russia invades Kyiv for a second time, dragging NATO and the EU into direct conflict with Russia. His Trumpiness decides to renege on his commitments to NATO. Then China invades Taiwan, forcing America to u-turn on its NATO membership and join WWIII late (as it did with WWI and WWII) but this time it will be too late.

I guess it's no coincidence that the world feels like the one we all read about that happened 90 years ago. The worst of History can repeat itself as soon as it is gone from living memory.

At least back in the 60s we knew it was going to be quick.

Where's the Private Frazer icon?

Vantage enters crowded Irish datacenter market with new Dublin site

> Dosnent really make sense anyway, why would the send power from a fuel burning generator back to the grid when the reason its there is disaster recovery, not to make sure the kettles next door work when the grid is struggling. If its struggling so is the DC, so they want the generated power for them.

They may wish to over-spec their generator capacity, perhaps by double, for redundancy and maintenance availability. So if the grid is struggling but they have full availability, they may want to run at full capacity and export.

Hubble Space Telescope has gyro problems again

Re: Food for thought

Err, how do you propose making a space telescope maintain precise orientation without gyros?

Unless you thought we were talking about Greek kebabs?

Edit: lol, i only just got your joke after re-reading your title

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

Re: Give me 10 lines by the hand of the most honest of men (Or his Internet usage)

Depending on just how displeased he was, he may have dispensed with the tanty and Mr Trooper, and thrown you straight in the Oubliette, to die slowly in complete darkness among the stinking, fetid remains of your predecessors.

They were incredibly evil, the mediæval French..

But all's necessary in deterring heretics, eh?

Judging by the test groups: Yes.

There are several 'test groups' of people who have less than the usual amount of human rights: e.g. sex offenders, terror suspects, illegal immigrants, Australians..

Their rights today are your rights tomorrow. It's a worrying trend.

Give me 10 lines by the hand of the most honest of men (Or his Internet usage)

And I will find something in them with which to hang him.

Welcome your new AI-powered Cardinal Richlieu.

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

> industrial equipment operators using Xbox 360 controllers

Yes, most notably, a certain submarine..

Re: Eat my shorts!

I've been using Debian for 20 years. For gaming: apt install steam. Select the setting to run all non-native games in Proton, find that 90% of them run flawlessly, successfully refund any that don't.

Even "windows-only" VR games work fine in Proton. Usually the only barrier is 3rd party DRM / evil anti-cheat rootkits, which I wouldn't want on any platform

Yes, you can get game controllers for Windows and Linux. I have a steam controller, but don't use it much. I prefer a keyboard and mouse personally

Cops cuff man for allegedly framing colleague with AI-generated hate speech clip

standard american flight bag

shirts, shorts, shaving foam, razor, gun (loaded, safety off), pants, socks, toothbrush, spare mags for gun ...

Samsung shows off battery tech it says will see you gone in nine minutes

Re: I still fancy the flow battery idea...

That might be a good idea for the charging station itself (i.e. to buffer energy from the grid/solar), but not so much for the cars. Flow batteries tend to be VERY heavy (i.e. low gravimetric energy density).

Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries are promising, but they have an energy density of around 20Wh/kg (10 times heavier than Lithium Iron Phosphate) but they get slightly better as they get bigger, because you can increase the tank size as much as you like.

Re: The waiting game

I read that as "we'll start making some small batch prototypes at EV size in 2 years and flog them to some mugs early-adopters, then make the decision by 2029 as to whether this is really feasible/scalable"

I note their latest published prototype (2020) was a 0.6Ah pouch cell, i.e. the size of a disposable vape battery.

Clearly they reckon they can scale it up, but at what cost/sustainability remains to be seen.

Re: So much battery and charging bullshit

Yes indeed. Soot and road dirt can be surprisingly conductive when you get to kilovolts..

Never mind "please put your car into car wash mode before washing", we'll also have "please wash your car and wait for it to dry before charging", "no charging in the rain" etc

nit-picky

Well...

An e-scooter obviously couldn't carry a 1-tonne battery. There comes a point where simply increasing the size and weight of the battery does not improve range. See: the Tesla Semi, which at maximum range configuration can only carry a half payload.

The maximum range of any electric vehicle is indeed tied to the energy density of the battery technology, because it has to lug the battery around, and it doesn't get any lighter as it discharges.

It's high time we had Cold Fusion powered EVs! I saw one once, and it could even time travel, so where is it?

Must have gone back to the future...

Re: So much battery and charging bullshit

> what's the highest voltage an EV can charge at?

Usually, the battery voltage. 400V DC chargers for a 400V pack, still would mean sending ~1kA up the charging cable. Would need an interesting new connector.

They -could- put HV power converters inside the car to step down voltage from 2kV or so into the battery. The problem with that is the next "standard" voltage from 415V AC is 11kV AC, so they'd still need HV power electronics outside the car.

It would be nice to have a 2kV AC standard.. Low enough to accommodate on a PCB, high enough to efficiently deliver a megawatt of power.

But all this is moot if you can't get the megawatts to the charging station in the first place..

Re: Great news

And where is the umpteen Megawatts of pulse power going to come from? Yet more batteries at the charging station? Or huge Diesel gensets?

ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

Or better yet, torpedo them too.

Re: Empty threat.

I hope they follow through with it nonetheless

Ring dinged for $5.6M after, among other claims, rogue insider spied on 'pretty girls'

It astounds me how anyone (never mind that it is so many) thinks that cloud-connected CCTV on/in their home is a good idea...

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Err, that needs more explanation. Why would you be ejected for trying to buy a Helicoil thread repair kit?

The mechanical engineers where I used to work, wouldn't even put a screw in -without- a helicoil. They generally worked with aluminum, and a helicoil is a lot stronger than a plain Aluminium tapped hole.

Management company settles for $18.4M after nuclear weapons plant staff fudged their timesheets

Well, that's one way of achieving NATO defence spending targets..

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Reg Nostalgia

Bring back Steve ¡BONG!

Tesla misses the mark on all fronts in quarter of chaos

Re: Dominate

You might need to change your name to "John Kilometres" though..

> WTAF?

Don't worry, the shares will plummet as soon as Wall Street have sorted out their short positions..

Digital Realty wants to turn Irish datacenters into grid-stabilizing power jugglers

Re: Rather small

I note that Elexon (data viewable on gridwatch.co.uk) have recently updated their data reporting to display the "negative" side of pumped hydro. It uses about 1GW all night to produce 2GW over a few hours in the evening.

Previously it showed as zero while "charging", but was presumably included in the demand figure.

It would be nice if they could also pull out batteries and Diesel from the "Other" category

Not your average UPS

When they say "UPS" I don't think they mean the sort that you could wedge into the bottom of a 19" rack..

e.g. The Microsoft datacentre in Dublin, had 150MW of Diesel generators -in addition to- 170MW of open-cycle gas turbine. They probably had the standard rackmount battery UPSes too, but they only need to run long enough to spin up the gennies.

I think the idea is that the limiting factor is the grid substation, and so having both gas turbines and Diesel means that if the grid supply gets really expensive, then they can make a few quid extra by running both Diesel and OCGT so they can continue to run their operations while simultaneously exporting power to the grid. The substation is always at max capacity, either importing or exporting power.

Second-life batteries

There was much hype about "second-life batteries" a few years ago, then there were a lot of fires, so much so that the National Energy Administration of China banned the practice.

https://www.bestmag.co.uk/china-verge-banning-large-scale-esss-using-second-life-lithium-ion-batteries/

"There is no second-life for EV batteries" because if you continue to use them after some cells in the pack are dead, then it can be very dangerous.

Cells/"supercells"/modules connected in series all take the same current. So if one supercell is "dead" (usually defined as having less than 50% design capacity) then the whole pack is "dead".

(a "supercell" is a bunch of cells connected in parallel, usually by fusible links. They form essentially one big cell, the capacity of which goes down as the cells degrade and/or the links fuse if a cell "fails short")

Leicester streetlights take ransomware attack personally, shine on 24/7

Re: Why are they controlled remotely anyway?

Not only are they brighter, but the old Sodium lamps used to have a very narrow-band spectrum, which could be easily filtered out by astronomers. Now, they use phosphor-coated "white" LEDs, which have a very broad spectrum, impossible to filter.

Senate passes law forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok – or face a US ban

Law of unintended consequences

Right.. As much as I detest TikTok, I think the Law of Unintended Consequences may apply here..

In 2026, everyone around the world will ONLY be able to use their respective state-controlled social media.

But it won't be for long.. In 2028, there will be no social media and nobody to use it, we'll all be tiny piles of ash.

Tesla slashes vehicle and self-driving-ish software prices as shares plummet

They have been in development since the 90s. There's a good reason that they have never made it to market: They don't work. Batteries need electrolytes and intercalation materials. The electrolyte needs to be a powerful solvent for good ion mobility (ie low resistance, fast charging) and the ions need a structure to fill on the other side (intercalation) otherwise they plate unevenly and form dendrites

There have been various failed attempts to bring them to market, most notably sakti3, which was a Theranos-like fake unicorn, bought by Dyson and ultimately led to the daft prat losing billions

The few I have seen either have extremely low capacity (coin cell size), low cycle life, or extremely low power density, especially for charging.

As for structural batteries: great for an F1 racing car, but not so great for maintainability (good luck replacing one) or crash safety

Lol. No. Solid-state batteries / structural batteries are NOT going to change the situation. That's nothing but more hype.

Solid-state batteries have even worse issues with degradation and fast-charging, and "structural" batteries while saving weight, sacrifice safety. It's more musk-ist crap.

Fedora 40 is just around the corner with more spins and flavors than ever

Whimsical names on a postcard

Debian has had named releases since forever (all named after Toy Story characters). I don't know if they were the first to do so, but Ubuntu, ROS and now Fedora have since adopted the practice.

It is annoying, i have to look up which name is which quite often too.

But at least with Debian, Sid is always Sid. It has always worked pretty well for me.

Sacramento airport goes no-fly after AT&T internet cable snipped

Re: All it takes is someone with an angle grinder

I blame bloody Lithium Batteries!

This sort of thing wasn't so easy when the perps had to bring a long extension lead and find somewhere to plug it in.

Quite serious, i've seen scrotes nicking bikes in broad daylight with battery powered angle grinders..

> looking for copper to steal

And were sorely disappointed when the scrap merchant told them that all they had taken was a bunch of glass strands wrapped in plastic?

Blackstone wants to plug hyperscale datacenter into former Britishvolt battery site

> (generation)side needs 1GW+ turbines to be economically viable

Why's that?

Also, could a large-scale (2GW) plant not be built out of several ~300MWt reactors? It would still mean the reactors are smaller and easier to build/maintain, while sharing security and waste handling on the one site

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Next year's headline

Trident sub launches nukes at Russia, China, etc. because they could no longer listen to the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 Longwave. World to end in 16 minutes

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

Yes so basically if you don't buy into the EV/PV subsidy game, then there is zero reason to want a smart meter ...

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

I think what is coming is "limit pricing" whereby your smart meter switches you off when the price goes above what you have set as your limit..

People tend to forget that ALL smart meters have a remotely operable contactor that can be used to disconnect you for a variety of reasons.. E.g. you have been switched to prepayment mode (with no need for a warrant), or there is a load-shedding event i.e. if the grid frequency (nationally) or voltage (locally) are too low due to excess demand / shortage of supply, and you are deemed to be an "optional" customer, or there has been a cyberattack and Putin switched you off..

I'll stick to my old fashioned electromechanical meter, thanks

Re: newer != better

And it's not as if there haven't been improvements in the efficiency of manual reading..

The customer (or the meter reader if an attendance is deemed necessary) simply snaps a picture of the meter and uploads it to be processed automatically.

A very simple Computer Vision problem solved decades ago, is one of the few sorts of things which modern "AI" is pretty good at.