Posts by cyberdemon

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Re: Wet blankets

No, an AA battery will never* pass current through the body, because the human body is not a wire, it's not even a resistor. It's more like a battery itself in that it has electrolytes and membranes rather than free-electrons. Conduction is ionic rather than electronic and is limited by the rate of diffusion in a liquid, and there is an electrochemical overpotential needed in order to imbibe any atom in that liquid with an electric charge, i.e. there is a minimum voltage required to pass any current at all through a wet squishy thing, and that starts at around 2V (try electrolysing water with 1.5V - you can't). But the relationship between voltage and current through a human is not anywhere near linear - Over 100V then there is enough voltage to separate electrons from their atoms and you suddenly have free-electron conduction, like in a lightning strike.

* Not unless you add an oscillator and a transformer to increase the voltage - then you'll feel it. Even from an AA battery

Re: If that helps

Safety issue? "Fix it in Software"!

The typical Musk-ian approach.

So when the sensor stops working (due to wet towel or other reason) someone gets injured; a fire starts

My point is: Tesla have reached the limit of how much current can safely be passed through that connector, and they are attempting to push past it with software fudges. This is bad. As the equipment ages, the performance will degrade (due to wear etc.) and the safety will become an issue, even if it wasn't at initial testing. Adding a sensor doesn't change that, really.

Re: Wet blankets

Well yes, but it's the volts wot make the amps flow, innit.

A 3.7V lithium battery is never going to electrocute you, no matter what its short-circuit current is, because it cannot overcome the insulation resistance of your skin. Even if you poke through the skin, it doesn't have enough volts to drive ionic conductivity (electrolysis, etc) inside your body. Even a 9V PP3 battery can drive Amps at short-circuit, but when licked, only milliamps will flow.

Somewhere between 50 and 100 volts, dielectric breakdown of the skin happens, and lots of amps can suddenly flow. Touch a HV mains cable and you will see a LOT more amps, even if the "current limit" of the supply is the same.

I have heard DC is supposedly more dangerous because it makes you grab hold of whatever you touched, whereas AC causes paralysis without making you grip.

In any case, here we are talking about 400V at 625A, which is definitely smoking boots territory

Re: If that helps

All of that is true, but surveillance isn't exclusive to EVs, it's being done by all new consumer cars.

But I am in agreement with the GP post - EV technology is not going to improve significantly. Modern Lithium batteries and electric motors are very close to the limit of what electrochemical cells and electric motors can theoretically achieve in terms of energy and power density.

A future society could perhaps have more railways - you could either hire a small autonomous EV to bring you to the second-class station and maybe hire another one at your destination, or you could drive your privately-owned EV onto the first-class train eurotunnel-style, and charge it on the train

Re: Wet blankets

So what?

400V DC is just as dangerous (if not more so) than 400V AC. Never mind the 800V DC chargers...

Re: If that helps

> 7.5bn for 7 chargers

I choked on my coffee and thought that couldn't possibly be true, but I have found a more detailed source:

The program was expected to build 500,000 charger "ports" (i read it that a charge "port" is for one car, so a charger with two different cables that can be used simultaneously is two ports). In the last 3 years since the budget was allocated, 7 "stations" have been built with "a few dozen" ports in total, but it is "expected" that 1000 "stations" will be built under the programme by the end of the year, except that some of those 1000 sites don't actually have any electricity.

So even if the 1000 sites are built (with an unspecified number of "ports" each), that's 7.5 million per "charging station". Even by UK contractor rates, that's still a bit steep, but sadly not beyond belief.

Re: If that helps

I disagree - I think EVs have simply become too big. The way forward IMO is smaller cars with smaller batteries and less-powerful motors. Going to 800V means either having a pack with 200 cells in series (bad for service life) or else lugging about a 4U rack's worth of power electronics to convert 800V back to 400V for your battery.

Larger vehicles (trucks etc) should use range-extenders. Battery-electric for large trucks is just madness. Beyond a certain size*range, the battery will outweigh the payload.

I've just discovered the "INNengine e-REX", and it looks an interesting invention. Claims to have twice the power-density of a 2-stroke, and as efficient and low-emissions as a 4-stroke

Re: If that helps

Indeed. Apparently they didn't add enough active cooling to the connector pins themselves.. Liquid-cooling high-voltage connector pins.. Expensive, that.

Note: 250kW is 625A at 400V DC. No sane electrical code of practice would permit that sort of current through a connector the size of a petrol pump nozzle. They must be heavily reliant on thick gold-plating on the contacts, but at a frequently-used charger, that will soon wear off, become dirty/carbonised.

At that current, the contact resistance only needs to go up to a couple milliohms/pin to burn kilowatts in the contact interface itself. Easily enough to cause contact welding (not to mention stripping off the gold plating), so i'm amazed that they don't melt more regularly

Re: Wet blankets

Well, I should hope that the charging plug/socket is suitably sealed, otherwise you couldn't charge in the rain, and that would be ridiculous...

Oh wait..

We've asked Tesla to comment. ®

And no doubt received the usual "poop emoji" response from Xitler's PR-bot

I wonder how much of this is due to high ambient temperatures, and how much is due to connector wear / dirty contacts. If it's the former, then some extra heatsinking / evaporative cooling in the form of a wet towel will genuinely help, but if it's the latter, then their chargers and/or cars have a more fundamental issue

Tbh, charging a 100kWh battery at 350kW is asking for all sorts of trouble

Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up

> the specialised test equipment they use only runs on old (<= XP) versions of Windows

May I respectfully suggest that they update their test equipment? It's probably well out of calibration by now :P (and, if it goes 'bang' one day, it's unlikely to be serviceable)

Also, I wouldn't be at all surprised if, under layers upon layers of proprietary drivers and cruft, that the interface boils down to a text-mode serial port with SCPI commands. Perhaps with an interrupt pin to reduce the polling, but nothing that an Arduino couldn't be bodged up to translate it into something that a modern OS could pass to a more open piece of software e.g. Octave or Python to aggregate the data

If it's GPIB, then Linux has a driver for that, and USB-GPIB adapters are available.

That sounds like significantly more Faff than installing Linux.

Give us all your data! Pretty Please

Pinky Promise not to mine it and train AI on it!

Oh and you'll need to give us some money too. Data Mining^W errr, Storage, doesn't come cheap!

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Called out by a commentard

On the previous article

Do we really need a whole article for every piece of nonsense Dave Plummer says?

The secret to better weather forecasts may be a dash of AI

Re: We all know weather forecasts are crap

Well, it would give Michael Fish something to laugh about

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Indeed, it should be possible to generate data specifically optimised to induce model collapse in any model that ingests it.

To anyone doing this (Tianhe-2, perhaps?) I wish you every success.

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

Re: Ah.... <smug mode>

What's wrong with simply giving a meal to any kid who asks for one?

The extra spend on food would be easily offset by a saving in administration costs and licensing of creepy face-scanning tech

edit: I'd guess the answer to my own question is: In most cases school meals are outsourced to a third-party catering supplier, who are literally the bullies stealing your lunch money. If you are "entitled" to free meals then they need to prove to some beancounter that you are who you said you were, or they don't get their money.

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Re: Kill two vapourwares with one stone

I think it would be a lot cheaper to pay a small army of Mexicans to don spandex Stig suits.. Maybe that's the secret plan?

Re: Shocked!

Ah yes, nothing like a bit of high-voltage, radio-frequency AC to put the Tesla back into Tesla

Re: Energy generation?

They might have been assembling "batteries" from Chinese, Japanese or Korean cells, but Tesla have never been able to manufacture their own cells at any sort of scale, afaik.

Re: Energy generation?

> I expect that auto sales are the greatest source of income for them now.

Hmm, I doubt that. The profit margin on their cars must be tiny, if positive at all. I suspect they make the real money by selling batteries and other tech to European/American/Japanese automakers at cranked-up prices.

Once the competitors are out of business, then they will put up the prices on the cars.

Although, you said greatest source of "income" or "revenue", and that technically may be correct for a high-turnover loss-leader. But if you meant to say "profit", I think that still comes from the batteries.

Jack up the prices on the components that your competitors need and only you supply, while selling at a loss the highly-integrated consumer products that compete directly with them. That seems to be the general Chinese strategy at the moment..

FTC sticks a probe into 'surveillance pricing' Big Biz uses to gouge us all

Re: FASCISM!

Well, obviously you were trolling, with the requisite icon. My issue is, (aside to the complete irrelevance of your post to the topic, trolling or not) is that some people apparently vehemently believe that sort of crap. And wantonly spouting it at the start of a thread, even in jest, just poisons the whole thread. Kind of like mentioning the B-word on this side of the pond.

Scamazon

conspicuous by their absence..

Is "Hiding cheaper versions of the same product for people more likely to buy a more expensive one" the same as this?

Or how about "cranking up the price between add-to-basket and checkout"?

Re: FASCISM!

-1: Troll, Offtopic

Do you have any comment on the article, Mr Mangrove? Or are you just being a shit-monopole? (attracting shit from all sides)

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

Well, evidently it IS trapped by the CPU, but the OS doesn't know what to do with the interrupt except halt and display a sadface on a blue background

Re: WHQL

I wonder if Data Execution Prevention would have helped here? Even if only by forcing CloudStrife to write a better piece of software

Dave Plummer seems to suspect that the update contained executable code, which was pulled into the "signed" driver and executed. DEP should have prevented that?

On the other hand, the file could still have been plain old data that caused the driver to generate a null-pointer.

Apparently the file in question was all zeroes, so they obviously have no input validation whatsoever.

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

Thanks for letting me avoid YouTube, but that summariser needs to learn where to add a paragraph break.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Correction..?

> Just what is a snark?

It's a pint-sized insectoid creature from the game Half-Life. It can jump to head-height and is very aggressive, but short-lived and explodes a few seconds after it is set free

Curiosity rover is crushing it: Ran over a rock and found pure sulfur

Re: Well...

That would explain what happened to his face when he stepped outside..

Serco appoints former GDS leader Tom Read to digital leadership role

Re: Revolving Door

No relation to Post Office boss Nick Read?

FTC grabs controller as Microsoft jacks up Game Pass price by 81%

Re: I’m shocked.

Steve Ballmer, then?

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

Indeed. And since Hydrogen can't in reality be dyed a colour (unlike red diesel which is literally red), I have no doubt that lesser "colours" of Hydrogen (Black/Brown/Grey/Blue/Turquoise ...) will be passed off as "green" in a similar way as ROCs are used to greenwash electricity. See also: "Sustainable Palm Oil" etc.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

> Dead horses left to rot in the streets

They should have been more 'Agile' and flogged the dead horses until they got up and started walking again

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Astounding lack of finger pointing at Microsoft - the real news story

Does repeatedly whacking F8 like a maniac during boot no longer work?

Been a long time since I last used/broke Windows

Re: It wasn't a threat definition file.

No?

What exactly was it, then? Do enlighten us, Mr Dogshit :)

Re: And yet

It's Friday, and it's the latter-half of July, nearly August.

Investors are far too busy snorting cocaine and cavorting with hookers on their private yachts to notice that they might be slightly out of pocket next week.

> The LAST person who should be blamed is

The first person who WILL be blamed. Cynicism is bred from bitter experience

Clearly CrowdStrike believed that any update to a mere data file would be safe, and didn't bother to enforce any testing on them, perhaps believing that it was better to update them quickly to address new threats rather than delay their release due to testing. Personally I think this is a secondary problem compared to the apparent fact that they had never tested a corrupted data file against their system-critical kernel module..

For the kernel module to ingest a bad file and cause a BSOD, it would have to: a) not bother to fully validate the file before ingesting it, AND EITHER b) contain a memory-corruption or similar bug that causes a BSOD when processing a bad file OR c) very poor error-handling such that when a bad file is encountered it BSODs instead of simply logging the issue and rejecting the file

It's Friday.

Pub until it's fixed.. Oh look at the time, 5pm already

Re: Sports Sponsorship

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4vgq5150qo

That has to be nominated for IT photo of the year....

(look carefully at the screens in the background)

Re: Who, me?

Who will take the blame? The overworked junior tech who pushed a 2am update to a threat definition file without testing it, or the senior developer who failed to implement proper memory-safety and input-validation in a kernel-mode rootkit security module?

CrowdStrike Windows patchpocalypse could take weeks to fix, IT admins fear

Re: Written word

I appreciate the coverage. Both written and spoken.

I've often railed against the morphing of journalism into podcast chatter and u-bend narcissism, but this time we had about 5 written articles and one audio summary (i didn't watch the heads move) which is a good balance IMO, and it was a good summary.

CloudStrife (for that is what I will call them from now on) have perfectly demonstrated how there is "no silver bullet" for infosec, and they have provided me with a plentiful supply of schadenfreude for a Friday afternoon.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Re: What's worse than...

We might get that extra Bank Holiday after all

Re: WTF?

Oh yes. If you thought "Windows Server" was an oxymoron, check out "Windows Embedded".

Used by many industrial control systems and even PLCs ("Programmable Logic Controllers", which used to use very basic operating systems, but the likes of Beckhoff have gone for Windows Embedded) across the globe

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

> CloudStrike's client list is going to shrink worse than a banana in the desert sun.

And the Client List on the class-action suit will be growing like ... an infestation of Tribbles in the cargo hold

.. Tribbles all-round for the lawyers

Re: Quiet in the comments - is everyone busy firefighting?

> My condolences to those looking at RSI from entering zillions of bitlocker keys.

Wait, the workaround trips BitLocker? Argh

So for some, CloudStrike has turned Microsoft into an inept but large ransomware gang?

Where's my BitLocker key? It's somewhere in AzureAD.. Which one is for this server? Err ..

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Re: Just goes to show...

Exactly.. What happens when all a world's critical systems are networked and inter-dependent?

The opening episode of Battlestar Galactica springs to mind ...

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: drivers are not for security

See also: "Rootkit"

Most so-called "anti-virus" software fits the definition of a rootkit. It installs a kernel module "driver" to override system calls, placing a man-in-the-middle to calls like fopen() and read()

It's a terrible security paradigm, because it means that software can be insecure, we will just rely on this rootkit-thingy to protect us when something nasty happens.

It's a bit like leaving all your doors open but instead paying someone from the local mafia to house-sit

Re: Related?

I think the main things we can blame on Microsoft are:

1. The prevailing practice of allowing third-parties to run non memory-safe code in kernel space, and the normalisation of installing a "rootkit" as an anti-virus tool

2. Training users/admins that they must allow all software to automatically apply updates as soon as they are pushed. Anyone who had delayed CrowdStrike's updates for 24 hours would be breathing a huge sigh of relief right now.

Re: Related?

> Is there no way of instructing client machines to boot from an emergency OS over the network?

Maybe on systems with IPMI, you might be able to remotely instruct the BIOS to boot Windows into Safe Mode to apply the workaround, but then you might not get network access to the machine as it won't be running it's VNC service or whatever, so you might still have to go round the racks with a Keyboard and Mouse. I'm not sure if the IPMI itself can provide a remote display

Frankly, I despair that people still use Windows in datacentres. It's never really been designed for remote operation.