Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
So much so that it is featured on the BBC's 'Scam Interceptors'. They say they have an 'ethical hacker' in the scammers' systems, but they also work directly with AnyDesk, who i suspect has given their so called hacker access to suspected scammers' screens.
Now perhaps the scam gangs are having their revenge
Well, given that the steering rack is a straight rack and pinion, but Tesla have a permanent magnet brushless motor on a belt reduction ballscrew coupled to the same linear shaft. So if the motor were to cease to drive properly, or if the torque sensor on the steering column were to fail, then the manual steering could be quite inoperable.
EV "motors" usually have integrated drive electronics, so the "connection to the motor" actually means the 400V DC +/- supply wires from the main battery, not the three-phase AC. I'd be very surprised if the return current normally goes through the chassis, although some of it might. Especially if one of the lugs was loose or had a stray piece of heatshrink / grease applied.
I'd be very surprised if they did normally put traction currents through the chassis too.
If this is a connection between the "front electric motor" and the chassis as reported then it makes even less sense, since the motors are three-phase (but maybe they have integrated drive electronics in the unit).
Still fishy though.
Maybe they are using the same smart torque wrenches as Boeing, for their wiring lugs.
(FTR I am not saying that Boeing or Rolls Royce torque wrenches were hacked, only that the recent news of the existence of security flaws in a smart spanner is amusing)
> …the occasional full-screen and un-closeable “finish setting up your PC (by switching to Edge)” popups that appear when starting Windows?
Yes, they did mention that. It's in the PDF, first link in TFA
Although one thing that wasn't mentioned was the array of creepy messages one gets when Edge is launched for the first time on any Windows machine..
Would you like to importslurp all your bookmarks, tabs, history, saved site data etc. from your old browser? <high-contrast yes of course button> <semi-hidden low-contrast no thanks button>
Would you like to syncslurp all that data to your Microsoft account? <high-contrast yes of course button> <semi-hidden low-contrast no thanks button>
Keep your brainwashing up to date with Microsoft News .. (let us) harness your creativity with AI powered search from Bing ... Stay safe online by sending all your browsing data to Microsoft ...
My Dad called me over yesterday to look at an issue when trying to join a Teams call from his Outlook calendar. It had opened a modal pop-up claiming that he would have a better experience if he allowed Outlook to open Teams links in Edge. Options are OK or Manage Settings. We clicked the latter and had two options: Edge (recommended, default) or "System default browser (Chrome)".
We picked Chrome, and now we find that Teams links are broken in anything except Edge - we are forced to input the meeting ID and passcode manually, even though they are in the link.
My Dad is partially sighted and there's no way he could do the manual ID/code thing for every meeting, so Outlook is effectively forcing him to use Edge.
Insightful couple of posts, cheers.
Well, when I said sunken I meant sunk by the enemy or by accident. Are there not quite a few of those buried at sea? Can't we reasonably expect some to occur in future?
On cost, I thought that the EPR vessel and inner containment were a significant cost factor, especially when they had to be re-made following minute cracks being found. My point is that it's easier to make a small vessel metallurgically perfect than a large one.
But I agree, the ancillary stuff probably does dwarf the technical cost. That is a political and regulatory issue though.. I like the idea of using offshore platforms, although I worry it would just be bait for russian saboteurs.
Why is it that DCs need evaporative cooling anyway? I guess because it uses less leccy than "Heat Pumps" aka refrigerating chillers?
Not usually one to support the green nonsense, but it ought to be fairly easy to dispose of heat when there is a temperature differential in your favour i.e. the chips are hotter than the outside air, without needing to drain an aquifer
> What MORE does Google need to catalogue about your preferences to target it's ads even more (in)effectively?
The scope will creep (has crept) from targeting ads to targeting You.
It's not enough to build a detailed model of each and every person. The goal is model-feedback control.
Waste: Bury it at sea. That's what happens to the core of a sunken nuclear sub, isn't it? Nobody seems to care about that.
Cost: This is driven by an attempt to appease political opposition. It doesn't need to be anywhere near as expensive as it is.
Smaller means lower cost because risk is cost, time is cost. SMRs are less risky and can be built faster. Once they are built, public opinion will change, and the cost and risk of even larger plants, or farms of multiple SMRs will come down. It's also much cheaper to fabricate multiple small reactor vessels than one really big one. Safer to operate too.
The CNC are useless. They are nothing but a retirement home for corrupt, abusive, lazy and otherwise unfit-for-duty policemen.
If ever there was a dangerously overambitious electric interconnector project, XLinks is it.
A few weeks ago the UK grid dropped to 49.2Hz due to the sudden trip of 1GW from a 2GW interconnector from France. That was a fairly close shave. If it dips below 47Hz then lots of other things disconnect such as solar and wind farms, and other HVDC interconnectors.
Our power system is designed to tolerate a trip of around 2GW at most. Having a 10GW unit of any type is asking for trouble, never mind an HVDC interconnector with no inertia, prone to trip at a sneeze.
And with 4000km of undersea cable to go kaputski, Putin and chums will be laughing their socks off if this ever gets built. Luckily it probably won't, because the price of copper has rocketed since it was initially dreamt up.
> What mechanism other than a ban would mean "99% of websites were gone tomorrow"
Oh, I don't know, Global Thermonuclear War?
Far more likely than any effective ban on datacentres!
At this point, a "political accident", "cuban missile crisis alt. ending" style, is looking a lot more likely than any civil nuclear accident
*...and yes, I know Nuclear power plants don't do that as a rule, but for the sake of this example it's a thing that people are afraid that they will.
But non-nuclear industrial plants can and do. Yet we don't have the same level of hysteria about those.
Even a Carbon Capture and Storage plant has the potential to asphyxiate everyone in a half-mile radius if it goes horribly wrong in calm weather.
The specific hysteria about Nuclear is so stark that i think it has to have been pushed by a combination of CND types and Big Oil in the background. That and The Simpsons hasn't helped.
The ONR (UK office for nuclear regulation) is staffed by a lot of CND types, as well as busybodies and jobsworths who love making work for themselves and other people.
This is a symbiotic relationship as the CND anti-nuke types can use the busybodies to push up the cost of anything 'nuclear' to astronomical proportions, while the busybodies use the CND types to justify their own miserable existence.
Meanwhile there are few people left at the ONR who actually have a clue about nuclear engineering. I refer you to Page 39 of the latest Private Eye (#1615) for a column by 'Old Sparky' on the current exodus of staff from the ONR.
This is why Sizewell and Hinkley are both billions over budget and a decade late - because they are both on the hook for thousands of engineering changes ordered at the last minute by the ONR, which itself has no accountability against being obstructive
So I agree with Mr Semicolon's sentiment. Also I think you needed to explain the meaning of "Do one" in the modern British vernacular to our left-pondian friends.
> Thorium reactors may be an option in a decade, but is clearly not available now.
For molten salt Thorium I tend to agree, they have a big issue with contamination, and the materials involved are really nasty.
The tech that 'excites' me the most though is the Accelerator-driven subcritical reactor. I wonder what happened to Aker's ADS reactors?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical_reactor#Rubbia_design
> 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.
".. Or better than Kings.. Gods!"
No, I'm willing to believe they really are better than humans at creating misinformation. After all, the models are built by Meta (Facebork, InstaSpam), Alphabet (Pooooogle, U-Bend), ByteDance (DickTok), Microsoft (StinkedOut, GitHub*), X (twatter), Amazon (scamazon) et al.
They have the data (far more experience than any human psychologist) to indicate what kind of post will 'go viral' - and that kind of post is almost always not the honest truth.
* apologies, i ran out of childish faeconyms
I still have two. I bought one off eBay when my original no longer worked (i repaired the SIM holder a few times, but eventually other things broke) but then its replacement too eventually suffered the doom of what I assume must have been early lead-free soldering
The best thing about it for me, (aside from the keyboard which was a dream to use compared to modern phones that make you feel as if you've had nine fingers amputated) was that it ran a native Debian-based OS that accepted arm debian packages. It could run many GTK and Qt desktop apps natively including things like Mumble (discord-like voice chat). You didn't need a hulking proprietary SDK to develop software for it. And since it ran X Windows, I could even run full-fat desktop Matlab, via an SSH tunnel to my university's Linux cluster.
And the browser had *Text Reflow*. With hardware zoom buttons.
This.
Not sure why someone downvoted you, but it bugs me how it is never portrayed as being the fault of the commercial operators of critical infrastructure who left the door open.
Domestic "teenage hackers" often get prosecuted and jailed for exploiting weaknesses for fun, when they are (often without damage) exposing and forcing closed those weaknesses which would otherwise be exploited by far more threatening enemies
Clearly these so called "teachers" have all squirreled away the cash and should be duly prosecuted for Fraud, False Accounting etc. Everyone knows that Unit4BusinessWorld™ is completely fool proof, bomb proof, bug proof etc. It's like Fort Knox. There's no way that the money could not have been paid..
Then the revenue model needs to change.
There is an inherent conflict of interest between Search and advertising.
Apparently there are some subscription-driven search engines (I forget the name, one was mentioned here on the reg earlier) but I don't know how good they are.
One annoyance is that a lot of sites have anti-scraping measures in place, which are configured to grant exceptions to Google and Bing only.
To be called search it should also be able to tell you exactly how many matches there are. With AI search, it's not possible.
Is that a complete list of everything matching my query? Nope! Would you like some more?
Can you give me a complete list or at least tell me how many there are? Nope! But I could guess!
Are you any use at all? ... How about some Toast! Does anyone want Toast?
Security in a computer science context should be things like memory safety, race conditions, process isolation. That stuff IS covered by CompSci degrees (certainly the one I took anyway) despite the alarmist headline.
What should NOT be part of a CS degree are things relating to specific software technologies. Managing user behaviours etc. My CS course had a module on operating systems which included how to set up a generic UNIX-like system, but it did NOT go into the detail required to actually set up a robust UNIX system, that's for the IT course.
Similarly, Firewalls SHOULD and are covered, but how to properly configure a Cisco one should NOT. That's for the Cisco-sponsored IT course.
At this point they need bullshit talkers to massage Mr Trump's arse so that he might change some rules in their favour, otherwise this is unlikely to happen, no matter how many engineers and technicians they had.
Also, investors are prone to believing in bullshit press releases, because they are too busy snorting cocaine to listen to anybody technical
Pretty sure the only people allowed to operate the reactors on navy subs are.. The navy.
That and any civil use of the thing would come under different rules.
But then again, in a few months we could have Trump back in charge, so laws, rules etc are for sissies and losers, so you could be right. I'm sure Zuck wants one too for his bunker
> with fusion each joule puts >2J into the environment,; with wind/solar etc the overall change is zero.
You seem to be arguing about the heat produced by human energy production/consumption, in the context of global warming?
This is negligible. Total energy use (including renewables) is about 30TW. Global insolation, (energy input from the sun), is 175PW. So you're arguing about 1 part in 6000, and we haven't even factored geothermal energy yet.
And even your assertion itself is wrong: If you were to take a hundred hectares of field or desert and cover it with solar panels, have you not changed its albedo?
Well, I'm sure OpenAI et al would tell you that a machine brain is many times more useful than a human brain of the same intelligence - because the machine brain, once trained, can be used to make millions of decisions simultaneously. So it only needs that 936 MWh once, to replace a million human brains that needed 3.5 TWh between them to train, and those weren't even consistent.
They would also tell you that it is not necessary for the AGI to be a superbrain or to understand the physical constraints of our world. It just needs to be omnipresent and people will worship it like a God. And it would be a God that they control.
Where I disagree with your post though is where you say "What is needed is ... ". I don't believe that AGI is "needed" at all. If it does ever come along, it will be one hell of a threat.
When I first played Deus Ex 23 years ago, I picked the ending where JC Denton merges with the Helios AI and becomes God.. Now in my late 30s, I would pick the ending where JC Denton blows up the whole complex and shuts down the Internet for everyone on earth. Let's go back to living in villages.
Maybe when I am older still, I will be grumpy and cynical enough to prefer the ending where we just kill Elon Zuckerborg Bob Page, and let the old secret government keep the AI for itself and do what it has always done.
