Posts by cyberdemon

EU launches investigation into X under Digital Services Act

From VLOP to FLOP

(formerly-large online platform? may it join the ranks of MySpace)

National Grid latest UK org to zap Chinese kit from critical infrastructure

Interesting stock image to pick for the article.. Is that what happens when all the EV chargers get their special OTA-update from China?

Oh dear

No more battery storage systems then

Smart meters? Better get rid of those too

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

Re: Where do scientists still do graphs in acres?

Firkins, Furlongs, Fortnights and Fahrenheit. That's the standard unit system isn't it?

Acres must be square furlongs? Or maybe round ones.

I'm sure if you measured the sun's power in firkin-furlongs per fortnight, divided it by the earth's thermal mass in firkin-furlongs-per-fahrenheit, you'd get a temperature rise in fahrenheit-per-fortnight, right? :D

@ Old One

How does your argument do anything to preserve the fuel reserves that we have, then?

Supposing it really is all a Hoax, (perhaps it is one cunningly created to stop us from reaching the end if oil too soon..), if we continue to burn it we will still run out of it, creating all of the catastrophic economic effects that I mentioned.

As I said, AGW or not, we still need alternative energy sources. We have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the world several times over. How about burning those for power instead, before we are tempted to use them for their intended purpose.

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Well, it depends a lot on how fast they degrade. I'm talking about cumulative total deployment. But with a fixed manufacturing capacity, cumulative deployment will eventually plateau as production required for replacement grows to the same as the manufacturing rate. When you reach that plateau, the total number of batteries you can sustain goes with the number of factories you have, and the rate you can get to a new plateau after building a new factory goes with the excess factory capacity. Assuming no factories close or break down etc. Then there's the waste problem ...

The trouble with Lithium battery tech is that it is, electrochemically speaking, already pretty much the best battery tech possible. Incremental improvements can be made to the degradation rate (although with so many different degradation mechanisms it's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole), but there's not so much possibility to improve the energy or power density, because of fundamental chemistry.

Solid-state batteries often claim to offer an energy density improvement, but that comes at a massive longevity cost. I know a lot of people who have worked on them for decades, and despite a few snake oil moments (Dyson/sakti3 for example) none of us can see them overtaking current battery tech.

There are a massive number of people in the battery community trying to develop new (platinum-free) electrocatalyst materials for fuel cells etc, by using AI to design exotic ceramics. That should be enough to tell you not to expect a major breakthrough any time soon.

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Perhaps I should have added "on the scale needed to replace fossil fuels" then.

Battery storage is useful on the order of minutes to hours. It's primarily used to stabilise frequency in time for a big gas generator to spin up, not for bulk storage.

Even pumped hydro storage is only good for a few hours. Whereas 'weather lulls' are on the order of days to weeks. But there are a very limited supply of suitable locations, most of which are used. You can't manufacture a new mountain.

Battery storage is already overextended. Batteries degrade, every battery we install increases the number that we have to replace per year. To come close to the scale needed, you'd need to scale up deployment by a factor of 100, which would mean scaling up production by a factor of 1000 or more, depending on how fast you want to get there.

But the current levels of battery production are already unsustainable. They are subsidised by Chinese 'dumping', i.e. deliberately flooding the market with cheap cells. Their manufacture already causes massive ecological damage. You can't scale that up any further, and we may soon find that the cheap supply ends and we will have no cells to maintain our existing stock of batteries, never mind build new ones.

As for hydrogen storage, even the government is realising now that it is not feasible. For the same reason as batteries, it's too expensive and resource imtensive to deploy anywhere near the scale needed.

Re: I don't get why this is so hard

Downvoter here.

Yes, greenhouses and the greenhouse effect are real things (although greenhouses themselves work more by trapping convection than they do by trapping radiation, but I digress..). CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, but as your kitchen-table experiment will show, you need a vastly higher increase in concentration than we are seeing through fossil fuel use, to see any measurable effect. I'm not saying that I reject it, just that other hypotheses seem equally plausible to me. For example, the CO2 increases found in ice-cores that correlate with increased temperature may have been caused BY wildfires, not the other way around. The temperature rises in the first place may have been due to changes in solar activity, or some other reason. It's not clear-cut to me. Nevertheless I DO accept that fossil fuels are finite and that an alternative needs to be found, and soon.

Second: Supposing you are right and CO2 really is the problem and that we are already seeing its effects, will halting CO2 output at this late stage actually save us? Or will the economic and geopolitical "effects" of halting CO2 actually pose a much graver risk to our immediate existence on earth? Personally I believe that it is not possible to halt global CO2 output suddenly without inducing WWIII. So we need to do it gradually. The mass-hysteria that I see in the media, "global boiling" etc, does not support doing anything gradually. It has polarised politics and pushed us further towards war.

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

True, although a storage cylinder removes that burden. Meanwhile a heat pump -cannot- be used as an on-demand flow heater.. And it struggles even to heat a storage tank to a temperature that will kill the microbes living in it.

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

OK, although that was 2014. These losses go with the square of load, though.

CCGTs only reach their peak efficiency after they have been running for a few hours. When they are starting up, their efficiency is no better than an OCGT.

But my point is intended to be illustrative. Heat pumps offer very marginal (which I deem as bugger all, considering their disadvantages) gains in terms of CO2 over gas boilers, at least with our current energy mix during winter months. They are not the silver bullet that they seem to be sold as.

I kind of agree though re. water systems. An air-air heat pump would be more efficient vs a "drop-in" replacement for a boiler.. Although wouldn't subsidising air-conditioners have enticed more people to turn them on, and used more energy / CO2?

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

Of course I know how a heat pump works. But it isn't magic. If a heat pump pumps 3 times more heat than it comsumes in power, but is powered by a gas turbine which is 30% efficient, via a grid which is 85% efficient, how much CO2 is saved compared to a 95% efficient condensing boiler?

Unfortunately scientific peer review is not as meritocratic as you think. In this area particularly It's political, and it's a groupthink. If your results don't toe the party line then they won't get published. If you set out to question the canon of climatology, no matter how rigorous your methods, you won't get funding.

Re: Its all very depressing

Too late, I fear. The nuclear industry has been poisoned by the green lobby, and thanks to regulations that they lobbied for, it is now too expensive, complicated and lengthy a process to build a NPP.

We used to get them built in 5 years. Now it's decades

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Right so it's a choice of WWIII now, (if we try to force everyone in the world off fossil fuels before they have an alternative, thats what we will get), or else we wait until 2040 when the oil runs out, and have WWIII then.

My suggestion is that we use the resources we have to build nuclear reactors now, and if we can get them online by 2040 then we will have an alternative to oil, so perhaps can avoid the need to fight eachother.

If we 'just stop oil', then it's war now. If we do nothing, it's war later. If we build nukes, it's a small chance of long term survival, and a chance of war anyway.

If I were a billionaire, i'd be building my self sufficient bunker.

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

Can't afford an EV car, if I could I wouldn't see it as a good investment. Don't want a smart meter and solar panels are useless in the UK, especially without storage and subsidised tarrifs. They also cost a lot to make, cause a lot of environmental pollution where they are made etc and I am not convinced that overall they are any better than burning gas for the small amount that I use. Heat pump, you have got to be joking. I want my heating to work when I need it, and they provide no cost benefits outside of subsidies, bugger all CO2 benefits when the electricity comes from gas, and they are bloody expensive.

The only thing guaranteed to reduce consumption is not to consume. Don't use a car, don't use the boiler put on a wooly jumper instead like the rest of us have to. Buying a new thing like an electric car or a heat pump is just more rampant consumerism.

And as for solar panels, any solar panel living its miserable existence in the UK could be much happier, it could produce 5 times as much electricity for its manufacturing cost if we er, sent it to Rwanda

Installing them in the UK is as foolish as it is selfish. Just more greenwashing

Re: My Goodness!

Well, you said it yourself: we already hit the buffers and blew right past them.

The warming may be man made, or it may be sunspots and nothing to do with us, but either way there seems to be bugger all we can do about it, really.

Many of the things we try to do (eg CCS, electrification, mandatory smart meters & heat pumps, biomass etc), could actually make other more immediate problems worse. But they benefit a rich few greenwashers and authoritiarians.

I simply don't trust those people who say This is for your own good. There's a shortage of believable solutions, and a huge surplus of greenwashing and profiteering, and I think a lot of people on this forum including myself are sick of it, and saying to Hell with all of us.

Re: Its all very depressing

> Nuclear power (boo hiss... its evil with a capital evil) runs 24/7/365, making gigawatts of power just for your electric car listed above (and some homes) with not making gigatonnes of CO2, just 1 tiny downside..

It would seem that the more that is spent on ensuring safety from something that people cannot see, hear, smell, feel, etc. the more people are scared of it.

That, and there is one hell of a powerful group of vested interests who have stood to gain from the sidelining of nuclear.

It's the one thing that oil, coal, renewables, biomass, CCS industries could all agree on: Nuclear is the enemy.

Re: Wildfires

I'd be curious to see some data on how fast a forest grows back after a wildfire (if it is left alone and not cleared for agriculture) as opposed to after it has been cleared by Drax PLC, leaving nothing to fertilise new growth

Re: Oh dear

Oooh, burn.

<Drum, cymbal.> I'm here all week.

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

"In a just world, all fossil fuel use would end tomorrow."

In any ecosystem, if it has evolved to make use of a particular food source, lets say fungi in a forest consuming lignin, and you suddenly take that food source away overnight, would you expect the ecosystem to adapt, or to die? If you take it away gradually, it has a chance to find a new food source.

Human society has expanded rapidly since the Industrial Revolution based on the consumption of fossil fuels, which allow large amounts of energy to be stored in liquid or gas form, to be consumed when needed.

If you were to literally take away fossil fuels overnight, the majority of humanity would die. Is that what you want? Ending fossil fuels 'just like that' is a question of die now or die later.

There are alternative energy sources (nuclear, renewables) but since the green lobby have shunned nuclear (making themselves unwitting pawns of big oil I might add) that only leaves renewables, which are unreliable and cannot be stored, and we cannot suddenly adapt our society to cope with that.

If the UKAEA hadn't been pissing into the wind with Fusion for the last 50 years, we might have developed some better Fission designs that can make better use of the fuel (traditional uranium reactors only use around 2% of their fuel before it needs swapping out) and avoid issues with waste and weapons proliferation

Biomass is the worst of all the energy sources. I think it ought to be renamed "Green Coal" because just like dirty brown coal which is partially fossilised wood versus relatively-clean black anthracite which is completely-fossilised, "green coal" is unfossilised wood which has even higher tar content and even more carbon and pollutants per kWh than the dirtiest of brown coal. It doesn't grow back, you are just chopping down the only decent carbon sink that we have and are burning it. Bio-fuel oil is burning food, most often ex-rainforest Palm Oil. It's a dirty, dirty business.

So, I think the COP is right in a way. Since we shunned nuclear, our only option is to keep using fossil fuels until we can either reverse the damage done to the popularity of nuclear, or find some magical way to store renewable energy, or adapt our society to cope with intermittent energy supply, which inevitably means an economic contraction where the poor would suffer the most

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: Heat pumps are a distraction not a solution.

I was with you until you pushed resistive heating. That's a completely stupid waste of energy. Much better to have a gas boiler.

Unless you're in France and have nuclear power. But even then, electric resistive heating is expensive because the electricity can be exported, and can be much more effectively used for other things

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

It does tend to detonate rather easily though, over a much wider range of concentrations than methane aka "natural gas". And there have been an oddly high number of " gas explosions" in the news recently. I wonder if any are related to the addition of hydrogen to the gas supply.

Re: Well, duh

At worst, you'd need a small isolating transformer in addition to your sine inverter. Most IT UPS equipment have this built in

Actually with a transformer to smooth it out, a regular "modified sine" (aka "modified square") inverter may be enough

They can work in those conditions, but only with either a ground source (expensive, requires a lot of land compared to the backyard many UK houses have) or else the house needs to be -extremely- well insulated, which is not possible with old houses, and can lead to damp and mould problems. I'd be curious to know what your NZ house looks like in terms of insulation etc. Fundamentally if you extract a lot of heat from 100% humidity air which is just above freezing, then the moisture will freeze directly onto the heat exchanger and force a defrost cycle, which completely wrecks any efficiency gains, and reduces the lifespan of the heat exchanger (which when it eventually fails, will release a charge of refrigerant gas into the atmposphere..)

Re: Well, duh

Unfortunately Hydrogen is devilishly difficult to store. If you cool it, then it needs to be ten times lower absolute temperature than LNG to liquefy. If you pressurise it, then it leaks through everything. If you do neither, then the energy density is pitiful.

As others have said, one of the biggest issues with electrification is resilience. A gas boiler's fan, pump and burner control unit will happily run on a 200W sine inverter, whereas Heat Pumps obviously cannot, and will lock themselves out for a long while after a short power outage, or else they damage themselves.

They definitely can't cope with "freezing fog", that's for sure.

The worst condition for an air source heat pump is 100% relative humidity (condensing) at just above freezing.

Yes, they CAN work at -10C, but in those conditions the air is very dry. Here in the UK, we frequently have cold AND wet weather.

Yeah, bizarre that.

Air conditioning is the devil. Until you slap a sticker on it that says "Heat Pump", now suddenly it's "green"

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

moron in a hurry

Aka "prompt engineer"

(But for the purpose of your argument, consumers of AI-generated "content" are also morons-in-a-hurry i.e. they do not care if the work before them is an original or not)

Re: Regulate the prompts?

In the style of is not protected, (provided you are honest about whose style you are imitating..) But passing off as is, and there is a fine line when using AI generated tripe content.

If you post an AI image or text that has been explicitly generated In the style of someone else, but you do not explicitly state that it is NOT an original work, then it could be considered as passing off.

Similarly if you as a human copy someone else's artistic style, it's fine if you say this is done in the style of so-and-so, but if you don't say that, then you are passing it off as your own, and you could be sued.

Re: Regulate the prompts?

Well my point was that it would not be possible to assign a single copyright to something that is a derivative, in varying degrees, of millions of other works. But it might be possible to estimate the proportions based on the prompt and model inputs, either by automatic means or legal/regulatory wranglings. All "AI" outputs are derivative at the end of the day, but some outputs are more derivative of specific inputs than others. And it is possible via the prompt to steer the so-called AI towards outputting something very similar to one of its inputs.

Prompts which excessively reference a particular source in the dataset should, morally speaking, attribute some credit to that source for the output, but I'm not sure how technically feasible that is.

If feasible then you could perhaps standardise an algorithm/model which attributes relative credit. To avoid excessive administration and to allow for some profit to be made, we could say that only sources which are credited more than a certain percentage should be credited at all.

The more complex and original the prompt, the more credit is given to the person using the AI tool. But i could imagine people stuffing gibberish into the prompt to get round that, or even using another AI to generate an 'original and complex' prompt, which is why it couldn't work in practice.

With existing copyright law, if I mashed an AI hard enough that I could get it to spit out a verbatim copy of one of Mr Block's books, then i'm sure any court would assign copyright to him, and not me or the model's operators. But if one word or paragraph are different then it becomes a lot more murky. This is why I think we need something better than copyright which can assign rights in varying degrees to the different entities from which the generated content was derived.

Some credit may be deserved by the prompt writer or the model's owners/operators, but definitely never all of it, is my opinion.

Re: Regulate the prompts?

Too late to edit, I realise that I have inadvertently revealed the fact that I have never heard of Lawrence Block, by mis-spelling his name.. Does he write for one of El Reg's sister publications?

Regulate the prompts?

This should send some shivers down some spines so I expect a few downvotes.

Supposing if you were to ask a generative AI "Write a novel by Lawrence Bock" or "A mural of a dead cat by Banksy" then it should be possible to estimate how much of your query was original and how much was derivative from various parts of the dataset, and assign some kind of partial copyright

In the first case it would be 100℅ derivative, mostly to Mr Bock but also to the entire dataset of novels.

In the second case, you might be awarded 1% for your insightful suggestion of using a dead cat.

Of course it would never work because no such notion of a partial copyright exists in law afaik, and because it would be trivial to circumvent or fool the system. It would also be more complicated and expensive to estimate attribution than not to, so nobody would bother.

Alternatively if the prompts and an identifier of the dataset used for any AI output published had to be recorded and legally declared, then it could be banged out in court at a later date, but that would be even more expensive than my first suggestion, and just as unlikely to work in practice.

Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned

Re: Redundancy

They have plenty of redundancy.. According to HR!

The truth about Dropbox opening up your files to AI – and the loss of trust in tech

Re: Dropbox have been dicks in the past

I stopped using them when they tried to tell me which filesystem to use.. I switched to syncthing and never looked back.

Is it 2000 or 2023? Get ready for AI-anchored news. Again

Ananova.. A Head of Her Time

El Reg could have provided a link for posterity.. There are a few clips from 2000 on the U-bend.. Paxman doesn't look terribly impressed.

"The idea is that your mobile phone will vibrate in your pocket, and Ananova will be there to give you exactly what you want.. (fnarr fnarr)"

British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms

Re: Legacy Systems

Yes indeed, so the worst that can realistically happen to the railways is that all signals would be stuck on red.

Which, in the current era of strikes etc, is pretty much Business As Usual.

Re: Not if they're designed properly

It'll make a good excuse though, when they are borked for some other reason.

(Adds 'Coronal Mass Ejaculation' to the BOFH excuse generator)

(autocorrect doing its job admirably there..)

Re: "constructed digital models"

> I'm sure, with appropriate negotiation and some funding, they could do a real-world test on one of the heritage railways that have reasonable lengths of line...

How does one arrange a "real-world test" for the effects of a solar storm?

Re: From the Beeb article

I have heard that, and I am a little skeptical how a 69MW Wind Farm can jump start the grid when the UK's biggest power station (Drax, 2.6 GW) had issued a warning that they aren't sure if even they are big enough to do it. (or perhaps they are too big?) I'm not sure how it works to synchronise and connect only the generators and disconnect all of the loads, when all power and comms are down.

But nevertheless, I think they really need to organise a full scale test of the Black Start mechanism. Much better to have a little disruption in peacetime, than to wait until we really need it and all the neighbouring grids are down due to a solar flare or enemy action.

Another part of the grid that could be affected by geomagnetic storms, I reckon, are XLPE-insulated underground cables, whether DC or AC. Overground transmission lines have a spark gap at each insulator, which protects the insulator from overvoltage due to lightning strikes etc, and these are spaced every few hundred metres. Underground cables i think would see just as much magnetic induction(?), but there is nowhere for the energy to go, because they don't have regularly spaced spark gaps, and they could also more easily overheat because they are coated in plastic and buried in a tunnel. Perhaps one of our resident HV power systems engineers could comment here

From the Beeb article

> The Victorians also struggled with the effect of space weather in 1859 when a huge solar eruption caused a geomagnetic storm that interfered with railway signalling and telegraph lines.

That was the "Carrington Event" that you mention

Current UK railway signalling equipment is pretty old, but I don't think much of it dates back to Victorian times. Signals changing from red to green is pretty unlikely. Signals failing altogether, far, far more likely.

However I'm much more worried about the effect of a CME on the world's interconnected electricity grids. HVDC interconnectors could be quite vulnerable to massive common mode current, and they tend to trip offline very easily.

The UK grid operators are also quite worried (search for "blackstart") that without the hulking coal plants with their massive turbine inertia, and with HVDC links and renewables requiring an existing 50Hz grid to sync to before they can supply power, it will be difficult to restart the grid if it does go down completely.

Nearly a million non-profit donors' details left exposed in unsecured database

Re: US based,,, Or only operating in the US?

Sounds like it is a supply-chain attack on some kind of Cloud CRM (which ought to be banned in itself), so it could be any charity, anywhere

This is exactly the reason I gave to the chugger (Charity Mugger, the annoying clipboard-people who stop you in public places) at my local train station. She was collecting for some charity and I said I'd love to donate to you, here's some cash. "No I can't take cash since Covid". Well do you have a contactless card machine then? "No, you need to put your details into this IPad". So much for the Covid excuse then..

I told her there is no way I am putting my details in, because I don't frankly know who she is really working for, and I don't want to be on some database of people who could be persuaded to give to charity. "Oh, we don't sell your details, we take privacy very seriously". Can you guarantee that your data won't be hacked and leaked all over the internet? Er..

I asked her so then why can't you take cash or contactless card payments then? It's obvious that the marketing CRM database is as valuable if not moreso than the donations she is collecting. She started to get annoyed and said well I obviously don't want to give to charity at all.. On the contrary, waving her a £20 note, please take my cash. Take it! She would not, and fortunately for me I had a train to catch which gave me an excuse to end the ridiculous conversation.

Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

Are you David Cameron?

You didn't reckon on the price of B****t though, did you.

Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough

> It would be nice to have a controlled fusion reaction .. to generate electricity

There is such a concept as a hybrid fusion-fission reactor. Fusion reactors can't produce a lot of heat on their own (the reaction happens surrounded by vacuum for a start..) But they are very good neutron sources, and it is trivially easy (unlike fission reactors) to turn them off.

Thus, a fusor can be used as a neutron source to activate sub-critical Uranium. Basically the fusion becomes an on/off switch for the fission reaction, and because it is low-enriched, there isn't so much of a weapons proliferation issue.

Fusion as an energy source on its own though, is likely to be a dead end. May I remind you that the only practical fusion reactor that we have, that big one up there, has approximately the same power density as a compost heap. It's just such a mind bogglingly enormous compost heap that it glows. That's why when we try to do fusion on earth, to get a useful power out if it, we need even higher pressures and temperatures than the sun

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

Re: I remember in Scotland showing....

Yeah i've been noticing the same.. "There aren't any great results for your search" for things which there ought to be pages of results for..

I'll try searching in Spanish next time

Google's Project Ellman: Merging photo and search data to create digital twin chatbot

Re: Creepy as hell... a public test?

Indeed.. It's almost as if Google deliberately made Bard a bit crap to start with, just so that people wouldn't be terrified of it until it's too late to stop it.

I have recorded their smiles, as I tell them who they are..

The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

Funny how the world is playing out to the plot of Deus Ex

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

made-to-break-printers

Oh, is THAT why HP are suddenly running a marketing campaign to pretend they are a good honest company and everyone loves them

Re: or in this case

Oh Deere oh Deere..