Posts by cyberdemon

Multiple billions up for grabs as UK government launches cloud services tenders

Re: Small Government

Of course. It was a reference to "pork barrel politics".

And the bits of pork that don't go in the barrel.. Apparently David Cameron likes to keep those for himself

Small Government

Means a country run by private interests, of course.

The government is only there to decide who gets the pork.

Between Crapita, Fujitsu, Google, Microsoft, and Palantir

Can we go back to filing cabinets and paper yet?

You can buy a lot of filing cabinets and employ a lot of secretaries for 6.5 Billion, and they just might do a better job of not selling private data and government secrets to whoever wants it.

Man admits to paying magician $150 to create anti-Biden robocall

Re: For my next trick...

I realise you've been here since 2022, but a handle like Sora2566 is now going to look dodgy. How do you feel about that? Are you a friend of AmanfromMars1? :P

The nice thing about having more than two parties though is that it makes political manipulation slightly harder. But it won't be long before one is eliminated, and you will have American-style two-party "democracy". Eventually I fear, everyone will be in a one-party system like Russia and China, and the world will go to war once more.

Nevada sues to deny kids access to Meta's Messenger encryption

Re: No encryption until you have provided your identity to prove you are not a child

Tbh, I mentioned the U-bend, TikTwat and Xitter above, but those particular platforms don't even pretend to claim e2ee. Yet we all know there is an endless stream of very harmful-to-kids (and frankly, adults) shite on those platforms.

So it is pretty clear to me that e2ee is not the underlying problem / root cause of why the modern Internet is dangerous to kids..

But nevertheless it is convenient for said platforms to try and absolve themselves from any responsibility (while continuing to cash in, since they control both ends of it, and so can track users while pretending they can't ...)

No encryption until you have provided your identity to prove you are not a child

and also not an unperson..

Kind of like america's gun laws then.. How is that working out?

The trouble with this is that it is treating the symptoms, not the underlying causes of people doing nefarious things on the internet..

On the one hand, it's a noble aim (because so-called end-to-end encryption allows tech platforms to pretend that they don't have access to data which they actually do, and are therefore can pretend that they are a neutral communications service, when they obviously are not, because they control both ends of it), but on the other hand, it allows state powers and others access to everyone's communications by default.

So I am not sure what to think about this. Preferably I would nuke youtube, facebook, snap, xitter, tiktok et al, but I know that something else would spring up in their place. Pandora's box is already open.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

Re: Mmmmmm

> Most of the second hand market are from early adopters (aka idiots)

So a lot like the second-hand EV market then..

Fox News 'hacker' turns out to be journalist whose lawyers say was doing his job

Re: Wallbox

> I'd not be looking at the chargers but the National Grid resilience plans.

NG resilience plans: Rely on demand-side response i.e. smart chargers and smart meters, to turn off or on loads when needed. Power stations? Nah, we'll keep closing them

Re: and then altered recordings to mask their origin,

Yeah, you are probably right. I had misread it as if he changed something at the remote end, but apparently all he did was download a video from a webserver. Probably all the videos on their site had a sequential ID, or something.

Still a bit daft of him to edit them before reposting though. If he had simply posted the videos as-found from a publicly accessible URL, then he would have a good defence.

Re: Temporary Waiver

If it was -just- the server, then this could be fixed, by fixing the server.

But if it's a lack of security in the protocol, then one could simply hijack a DNS record and point all the wallboxes to a new server, which says IF gridfrequency < 50 then ON, else OFF

Re: Wallbox

If that is so, does it mean that customers' existing units will stop working soon?

"Alexa, open my wallbox" ... "Sorry Dave, but this service has been discontinued. You can purchase a new cloud-device from Amazon! Would you like me to add it to your basket?"

Popcorn icon needed.

Wallbox

https://wallbox.com/en_uk/wallbox-copper

Looks pretty new for an "end-of-life" 22kW charger ...

Makes me wonder what the "cybersecurity requirements" that they are unable to meet are.. Unsecured bootloader allowing unsigned firmware updates, perhaps? Or no support for encryption in the underlying protocol for their "remote operation"?

Also, I find it quite amusing that listed under "discontinued products", is "Ethics Channel"

https://support.wallbox.com/en/ethics-channel/

and then altered recordings to mask their origin,

Er, what?

How can anyone claim that this is "legitimate investigative journalism"? What exactly did he change, and why?

Lenovo debuts AI PCs that have specs a lot like vanilla PCs with this year's accelerated CPUs

Re: Someone needs to study optical physics 101

That is why it has to have eye and head tracking. One user at a time, please.

This data will definitely not^W be used for biometrics and advertisement-attention-tracking.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

I can only assume that is a link to Annie Lennox singing "Delilah".

Please remove the tracking cookie (&pp=$TRACKING_ID) from your U-Bend links in future. Otherwise Google knows exactly who posted what where, and who clicked on it.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

Re: The problem with our "AI" systems

I'm not sure you could even attribute "inference" to LLMs. It just fills in the gap with something statistically likely to appear in that gap. It has no logical reasoning, so cannot infer. It has no facts, only probabilities.. The whole point of "Generative AI" is to make up stuff that doesn't exist. You wouldn't be very happy if StableDiffusion gave you the error "sorry but squirrels don't wear sombreros or ride bikes".

Security is hard because it has to be right all the time? Yeah, like everything else

Re: I disagree - a reliability incident is temporary, a security incident is permanent

I guess the difference between security and reliability is that reliability assumes that your enemies are wear, the environment, the laws of physics, unpredictable users, and statistics. So if it works under extended test conditions or 'fuzzing' then it's fine. Whereas security assumes that any mistake, however small, will eventually be discovered and exploited by Nicolas Cage, Stephen Seagull, or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

Re: The end of electric vehicles

You can't easily recycle graphene into graphene, unfortunately. You can recycle it into low-purity amorphous carbon black, but that's not very valuable. Graphene is produced by separating single layers of graphite, and graphite has to be mined. Sure, synthetic graphite/graphene is possible, but it is much more expensive than mining it. China recently banned exports of graphite, because it is a key mineral in the manufacture of batteries, for which they want to protect their dominance.

Aluminium has a lower electrochemical potential than Lithium i.e. it produces less than half the voltage per cell. Not a show-stopper, but it makes it harder to be the front-runner in a competitive market. Power density will be lower, so fast charging is certainly not going to be vastly improved as you claim. Even if they tolerate high temperatures under fast-charging conditions, that just means that fast charging is going to be inefficient.

Re: When somebody runs a red light and hits your car,

I think you are underestimating just how tightly-integrated EVs are. Take a look at the various teardown videos on the u-bend of EV motors. Motor and power electronics are usually packaged in the same cast aluminium housing, due to cooling, cabling reduction and EMC requirements. Usually the differential is part of this single package, too. Often you can't even access the motor phase wires without opening the shell and breaking the gasket on the motor's cooling loop. The drive unit is a single monolithic component with 400V DC supply, CAN bus, coolant in/out, and output shafts for a pair of wheels.

I would expect that converting an ICE car (with a nice spacious engine bay and open transmission) would be much easier than de-bricking a bricked EV by trying to replace the motor control board. You'd need to replace the entire driveshaft/differential/motor/controller module, and get something that can fit into the same tightly packed space as the original. No use going to a scrapyard, because the electronic components will be keyed to the original serial number etc.

The Siemens kits that you describe will be for "standard" induction or PMSM (with a feedback sensor) only. I doubt they would drive SynRM or the wacky Tesla IPM-SynRM motors, but I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I would challenge anyone to be able to rip out the drive electronics of an EV and jack onto the motor phases and be able to drive it.

It's hard to believe that those in power don't know all of this

So, one can only assume that the plan is to phase out the concept of ordinary citizens having their own transportation.

The way to reduce congestion apparently, is not to build roads, but take the riff-raff off of them.

In the "good old days", only the landed gentry could afford their own horse and carriage, let alone a motor-car. For the rest of them, there's the omnibus.

Re: When somebody runs a red light and hits your car,

Yep. Even a "connected car" with a nobbled ECU, you can still get a third-party replacement ECU and get it going again. One hell of a faff, but I know people who have done it.

Good luck making an after-market EV inverter and BMS that fits more than one make/model. Controlling a 400V traction motor is not like driving a hobby brushless motor. Especially if it's something like a Synchronous Reluctance motor.

The battery too will have potentially hundreds of microcontrollers inside, all running secure firmware, that aren't going to talk to anything non OEM-approved

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

Re: Not surprising

Not just critical calculations. If the CPU is prone to taking two plus two and getting five, even if very very rarely, then it's bad news.

Where's my pointer? Oh, it's at array index 101 with element size 16, so that's offset <bzzt> 2128 .. oops, wrong data.

Bad if it happens in your application. Worse if it occurs inside a system call, to a filesystem or block device driver, say.

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

Re: "relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea"

Their mistake, as I'm sure others in the dubious profession will be noting, was to admit to using the bullshit-machine.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

It would set a precedent, for the few weeks it would take to be overturned by a higher court, shirley

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Re: Never heard of him

No, I don't watch Channel 5 (or any of their other channels) they always were a bit shit

Apparently I'm not missing much

Never heard of him

But I assume he must be the sort that makes mashups of tired old tropes and never does anything innovative, since he has bet the farm on a machine which can do only that

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

I seem to remember Microsoft tried something similar

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/

I'm not sure that they were terribly successful.. Is this vastly different?

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Re: What the hell?

At least 24 people missed your joke icon ...

Re: Grant Shapps was on board..

Yes, Prime Minister series 1 ep1 "The Grand Design" is pretty close. Sadly no longer on iPlayer though

Re: What the hell?

Micro-cracks in Titanium?

Someone should've told Stockton Rush

Grant Shapps was on board..

What does this button do??

It er, launches the missile sir.

Wow, can I press it?

No sir.

.. But i'm the Minister! I must be allowed to press the button!

Er yes, minister, <AWOoGA! LAUNCH INITIATED> .... but there's a procedure to follow, we haven't armed the rocket motors yet.. It would just ...

<Whoosh ... Plop>

DoorDash coughs up a few bucks after California accuses it of spreading around customer info

Lawyer's fees

Approximately $375,000

Everyone else gets, er ...

Cyberattack downs pharmacies across America

In the olden days

We didn't have "pharmacists"

We had "chemists" who would dispense whatever medicines the customer wished to purchase.

Without needing to consult any cloud-based or otherwise computer system to find out what they were "entitled" to ask for.

How long until Palantir gets "hacked"

Oh never mind, they are selling the data to world+dog already

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

Re: Doesn't sound right

Possibly this system doesn't export energy per se, but any powerful (in terms of MW, not MWh) backup battery -could- play the Balancing Mechanism / Capacity Market by disconnecting and dropping to UPS/diesel whenever paid to do so by the grid operator.

But they don't have to actually do anything in order to get paid, they just have to have a large enough installation that National Grid et al will pay them annually for the privelege of being able to tell them to disconnect X megawatts, thus letting themselves tell the government and the people that they are improving grid resilience etc.

It could well be that they are inflating the figures by claiming to be able to disconnect a megawatt or so, even though the actual equipment uses a variable amount of power and may only be using a few kilowatts at any given time ... That particular market doesn't seem to care about the actual energy saved, but is just an auction for people to sell "capacity" which they never intend to use.

The trouble with the "smart grid" though IMO, is that it makes cyber warfare all the more possible.

Prompt engineering is a task best left to AI models

Re: "I certainly would never have come up with anything like that by hand"

I'd be very surprised if it has *only* been trained on your internal documentation. Unless there really is so much of it that it competes with the entire internet in terms of english language examples.

No, more likely, it has been re-trained via transfer learning, so your documentation is just fed as an additional input to modify its existing weights.

If so it could still exhibit many of the the same biases as the public instance, and could still spew gibberish from the Internet instead of gibberish from your documentation.

Re: "I certainly would never have come up with anything like that by hand"

> Given that the LLM understands absolutely nothing but merely assembles a string of tokens based on probabilities inherent in its training, the resulting biases inevitably emerge in its output

I wish more people could understand the above. So many idiots seem to think that AI is some kind of magic, or worse, actually intelligent.

But, it just outputs anything that might plausibly occur in its input data, based on the supplied context. It is incapable of reasoning or inventing anything novel, it just spews a mangled mish-mash of what went before.

It is impossible to examine the reasoning behind an "AI" decision, because there is no reasoning. It's damned lies, statistics, and logistical regression.

Among the first people to be replaced by AI are the so-called Prompt Engineers

To all those who work in the bullshit-generation business: Get a real job.

The bullshit machine doesn't need your help to generate bullshit anymore.

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

Please do not call 911 simply to test your phone line

The outage will finish shortly. We are simply testing our systems.

Sincerely,

Your Friendly CCP Senior Electronic Warfare Officer

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Re: why would anybody fork out good money for such hardware

The kamikaze ones are dumb and expensive in the long run. An AI targeting system is relatively expensive, so why would you put it on something that explodes?

Just look up a company called Ziyan UAS (unmanned autonomous systems) for a feel of what the current state of the art looks like. E.g. Blowfish A3. Autonomous swarming machine-gunning and antipersonnel bomb dropping drones. (downwards air-bursting shrapnel bombs) Why would anyone need that unless they were attacking a crowd of terrified civilians? (yes, apparently the blowfish was used in a massacre in kiwirok, Indonesia occupied Papua)

Also a lot of western arms companies making six-wheeled diesel-electric unmanned autonomous tanks.. But these are too expensive to be used by despots.. We hope

Re: Just as far away as before

> Call me cynical if you like, but why would anybody fork out good money for such hardware when Mark I humans produced by unskilled labour have been doing that very effectively for centuries?

"Mark I humans" get PTSD and even sometimes defect, when ask to do unspeakably evil things like massacre innocent children.. Machines have no such compunction.

Call ME cynical, but I would argue that there will come a point where the cost to build such machines will be far less than the cost to train and feed a human, and the machine is much more reliable.

We may already have reached that point. It is trivial to use AI to classify and track humans, it is trivial to use a bunch of servos to aim and fire a gun at a target, and to use less ammunition than a human machine-gunner would use to kill the same number of targets.

Re: Just as far away as before

> We have had the brains with LLM. Now for the br[awn?].

Sooner than you think. Automated genocide-machines with guns that automatically hunt and shoot at whoever are classified as the wrong sort of human, have been worryingly feasible for several years now.

Cuddly "terminators" with moral compunction, they will not be.

Neuralink patient masters mind-mouse maneuvers – if Musk is to be believed

Pathetic creature of meat and bone

I can barely imagine the horror of a machine that automatically grabs your head, drills a hole in it, and squodges some electrodes inside..

Evokes images of the Cortex Reaver from System Shock

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Re: Coming to a govt building near you

Deep fakes at the level of detail you describe, are only possible for rich people and party members.

Us proles are the real target of the biometrics push

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

Error cartoons

Usually in Corporate Memphis style. Epitomised by MS Teams and the idiot in the beanie hat with a thought bubble containing a question mark. Oops. Something went wrong! We're working on it!

No you fucking aren't, you contemptuous pile of absolute utter SHITE! Just tell me what the damned error is. Why are you refusing to work this time. I could not care less for a picture of a cute puppy trying to electrocute itself.

Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?

Yee haw Jimminy Crickets That's what we here call a Wild Leg!

This website is best read aloud in a redneck cowboy accent

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

@sad_loser

> I work in government

I can see how that might have inspired your choice of handle

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

Next week's news

How to defeat Magika by using generative AI to create a random-looking comment block that causes your malware.sh.jpg to be misclassified by Magika as an actual JPEG.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: The law is not everything

And -especially in the case of teenagers- banning it only makes them want it more. Streisand Effect etc.

Pentagon launches nuke-spotting satellites amid Russian space bomb rumors

If trump had won last time, we might not look forward to anything anymore. WWIII might have proceeded on schedule.

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