Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
When people are so stuck-in-their-ways and resistant to change that even when they know they are suffering and there is a better alternative, they won't try the alternative - It's because of a fear of the unknown, fear of looking stupid, etc. They get very irate when someone tries to convince them about an alternative lifestyle, as if it's an assault on their identity.
I'm like you - I like my red meat, and i'm apparently happy to die at the 'normal' age from heart attack/cancer/stroke, and I fully understand the impact that meat production has on the world, and that farming is unsustainable etc.
And yet, it irks me when some smug vegan comes along and tells me the Error of my Ways. I KNOW all of that, but apparently my brain is preconditioned to think that juicy steaks are tasty. And to agree with the vegan and change my ways is to agree that my pre-conditioned brain is stupid and a parasite on the world.
But, at least I run Linux, and have done so for 20 years (debian sid all the way), so at least i'm not feeding that monster that is microsoft any more.
And secretly I hope that someone could help me improve myself in various ways, without insulting my past self too much.
So there you go. If you did try Linux years ago and found that it wasn't for you: Try it again. Much has changed. KDE is really fucking good these days. Game support is awesome via steam & proton. Wine runs the vast majority of windows apps, those that don't there are workarounds for, especially if you are not afraid to ask.
The best thing about Linux is that the software works for YOU, not for someone else. It isn't spying on you, it isn't trying to monetise you by nudging you towards sponsored thoughts. It doesn't foist things on you that you haven't asked for. It does exactly what you command it to. And there is always a way around any problem.
But if you're a seasoned Active Directory admin, .NET developer or HR exec, then I'm sorry but there's no way to save you. You're going straight to Hell.
+1.
The sea is incredibly corrosive, and when seawater gets into stuff, it's not good news. You need someone to literally swab the decks and remove the salt from the autocannons.
Never mind when you're being shot at and some poor sod has got to plug a hole..
But my guess is these platforms will be small, disposable craft. Not much more than remote-controlled (hopefully by us) floating missile-launchers.
Autonomous weapons are the new arms race though.. I'm not so scared about the royal navy's pointless folly so much as how it encourages other countries to do the same..
It's all fun and games, until you get shot by a machinegun-armed drone because your face was scanned and did not match against a government-approved list of apocalypse survivors.
But then again, it's no worse than what America's enemies are churning out, so they have to keep up, right?
See: Ziyan Blowfish A3, etc etc.
Autonomous weapons are both real and fucking scary. Meanwhile humanity on this planet is growing unsustainably..
"We don't know who struck first - us or them - but we do know that it was us who scorched the sky.."
While your post demonstrates a lack of understanding of what "end-to-end encryption" is supposed to mean, I can't help but agree with your skepticism/cynicism..
Facebook wouldn't be "throwing away" all that valuable data on what people are talking about.
If the data is encrypted as it passes through Facebook's messaging servers, that doesn't mean it can't be data-mined on-device (Apple style!) for trend analysis, social graph info, advertising impact analysis etc. Saves them a few compute clusters by outsourcing the electricity to your pocket if they do.
E2EE is kind of irrelevant when you completely control both "ends". Except it gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card (potentially) against government regulation.
With E2EE, Your data are safe (maybe) from the prying eyes of governments, but NOT from the (even more prying) eyes of Facebook itself.
https://asset-group.github.io/disclosures/braktooth/
> Why BrakTooth?
> The code name BrakTooth is the combination of two words: 1) Brak and 2) Tooth. While the word Tooth is clearly pointing towards Bluetooth targets, the word Brak is Norwegian and translates to crash in English. The BrakTooth family of vulnerabilities affect Bluetooth enabled devices by continuously crashing or deadlocking them, while some result in more serious consequences such as arbitrary code execution.
They could have called it BorkTooth but that would have sounded Swedish. And the Norwegians and Swedes have a 'complicated' scandinavian relationship. ;)
It doesn't really add up at all, since Win98 was released 23 years ago. .
Maybe he meant to type 15+ years and counting and also meant to type 2006?
+1 anyway because Win98 really does belong in a VM only. At least there it has some kind of memory segmentation..
+1
Been using Debian GNU/Linux (+ KDE) as my main desktop since 2002, so almost 20 years.
KDE 3.5: Brilliant. KDE 4: Too much 'alpha' for most people - too unstable for basic users and too many features missing from 3.5 for the power users - and it did KDE a lot of damage - I held out with KDE 3.5 for ages, even tried trinity for a while.
These days KDE 5 is where 3.5 used to be: It's stable, configurable, and awesome. Windows-beating in every way IMO, and it isn't sending buckets of 'telemetry' to microsoft.
Trust me. Microsoft would go that low (and lower) if they thought they could get away with it without an outright revolt.
Google can get away with this because many people still have this image of a nice cuddly company that lets people sit on beanbags and used to say "don't be evil".. Google could NEVER do evil things.
So why did they drop "Don't be Evil" from their corporate charter?
> " Maemo wouldn't have saved it"
I totally and utterly disagree. Maemo would have made a real alternative to that most evil of duopolies that you cite. I think it absolutely WAS a competitor to Windows Mobile, because Wince/WM was both shit AND evil, whereas iOS/Android were just evil. Even if maemo was "shit" in your opinion, it certainly wasn't evil. They actively encouraged open source app development, and there were Maemo ports of desktop communications software like Mumble, along with a desktop-style browser that actually supported Text Reflow, something that the evil duo have banned on mobile for some unfathomable reason. And it ran X11! I could SSH from my phone to my university's Linux cluster and bring up full-fat Matlab, with plots, on my phone. It was an incredibly powerful mobile OS, one that was focused on serving the user, not the corporations who want to 'own' the user. So therefore IMO Microsoft WAS trying to kill off the competition, and so IS relevant to the Epic/Google situation.
> " It's far more harder today to use a phone that doesn't run iOS or Android."
Yes, because Microsoft assassinated Symbian and Maemo, while trying to foist their own shitty OS that nobody on the planet wanted. That duopoly is Microsoft's fault, imo.
> "You may find it strange, but employer use many ways to analyze the productivity of their employees and rightly so. Which may be not how many characters you type but the quality of your document. Think I have to file appraisals of my team members every year.... their bonuses depends on that."
Rightly so? Says who? My performance should be measured by a manager who actually does his job, not by some pointy-haired boss (you?) who just reads and obeys the output of some creepy machine tracking my every keystroke/email/search term.. If you want to analyse the quality of a document that I wrote, how about READING it??
I noticed recently that I CANNOT turn off the new "connected experiences" in Microsoft Office, such as uploading and automatically tagging every image I insert into word, and logging my searches in Outlook, and analysing my 'productivity' into a nice little report - (even if I disable it in 'privacy center' it seems to be overridden by Group Policy - so again, they work for the corporations, not the users).
My workaround: Use LibreOffice. Fuck them. If my employer asks why is MS Office is telling them I am being unproductive by not producing enough data for them to mine, then I will tell them why. If they want to force me onto Teams-for-Desktop and MS Office, then I will find a new employer.
Worse than that. Before the buyout, they installed a stooge CEO (Stephen Elop - ex VP Microsoft, and a major MSFT shareholder) at Nokia to kill off both Symbian OS and Nokia's new Debian GNU/Linux-based mobile OS Maemo, which was used on N770,N800,N900 (best phone ever), and the then-upcoming N950 which Elop cancelled. Elop declared that from now on, all Nokia phones would run Windows Mobile.
The Nokia developers had a revolt, many walked out, the share price crashed, and then having made themselves a cheap deal, Microsoft moved in for a buyout.
It was horrific, I have no idea how the hell they got away with it.
See: https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/15/elop_and_the_fall_of_nokia_revisited/
And no, I disagree. Satan is pretty cozy with apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook these days, but Microsoft is still his number one. Everyone seems to be jumping on the Evilcorp bandwagon these days, but MS were evil before it was cool.
Just consider: Microsoft owns both LinkedIn and GitHub. Its cloud analytics and data platforms are used by everyone who is not Google, Amazon or Facebook, and 90% of computer users run its increasingly spyware-laden OS. Microsoft have a vast share of the Surveillance Capital.
Almost every 'white-collar worker' on the planet are forced by their employer to use Microsoft Teams, Office 365, etc which analyzes their productivity for their employer, and for Microsoft.
"a senior Google executive proposed that Google 'consider approaching Tencent,' a company that owns a minority stake in Epic, 'to either (a) buy Epic shares from Tencent to get more control over Epic,' or '(b) join up with Tencent to buy 100 per cent of Epic.'"
^ If that's true, it is monopolistic practice right there.. (although M$ somehow managed to get away with it when they pulled this trick and worse against Nokia, but then again they are sponsored by satan himself ever since win95, so they can get away with anything)
and the Road to Hell is paved good intentions.
Even if Apple's intentions are good (Ha!) this has a MASSIVE potential for future misuse by dictatorships, Copyright/IP trolls, etc. It is the epitome of the "thin end of the wedge".
But to anyone with an ounce of Insight into how the real world works*, Apple is using this as an impossible-to-argue-against (for you must be a paedoterrorist!) excuse to make their product more acceptable in places like China: Look: We can let you crack down on whatever you like.
And to appease copyright trolls. "Here is a list of people with non-DRM copies of the album you just bought the rights to. Would you like their names and addresses so you can sue them all?"
* aka Cynicism. Something which Positive Thinkers mistake for paranoia.
This.
And what most people seem to be missing, is that this system could 'unexpectedly' throw up hundreds of millions of "violators/infringers" among the billions of IDevice lusers. Especially children/teenagers, who may have taken pictures of themselves in the mirror and not sent them to *anyone*.
And especially anyone who has insulted The Powers That Be in their local jurisdiction, be it the FBI/CIA/RIAA/MPAA in 'murica and the west, or the CCP, or Mossad, the Belarusian regime or the Revolutionary Guard.
There could be very few people who are not personally or by family/friend extension, affected by this.
Obviously Apple could not possibly take action against every single one of these people - it would hurt their bottom line.
So who decides who gets priority consignment to the Gulag? Apple?
What's the price to put someone on the suspect list?
Easy to arrange for an app to dump dodgy material on the local storage too. Even if they don't have many apps, just send them a whatsapp message with something nasty embedded in an unviewable portion of an innocuous cat video, perhaps.
But what if someone approached you about one of the codes that you had open sourced years ago after fixing your problem X, and said angrily, "I found a bug when applying your code to problem Y. You must fix this bug in your code immediately, for it is preventing me from making millions out of it!"
You would expect them to either 1) fix it themselves (and hopefully contribute back their fix) or 2) pay you a small portion of those $millions to fix it for them.
Unfortunately many companies do neither - they get very angry and upset about bugs in open source code that they are making millions (or billions) off the back of, but contribute no resources towards fixing them.
(never mind actively maintaining the code they used, or contributing back their custom extensions)
Some companies (or rather, some managers) have the mentality that open source = nobody to blame when it goes wrong, so they avoid it altogether and go for a proprietary black-box solution which is LESS secure/stable, but they can point the finger of blame at someone else when it goes wrong.
True, there is plenty enough energy in the sun to last forever. But there is a much more finite amount of rare-earth metals (hence the name) here on earth that are unfortunately needed to build each MW of installed capacity. And when it goes on fire like this, Entropy does indeed kick in.
There's a lot of energy needed to turn that pile of blackened scrap back into a functioning battery. Most likely, it will simply be consigned to the toxic waste dump.
Source?
For that is unbelievably stupid. :(
(yes, current-generation hybrids are crap, but I have hopes that future technologies e.g. gas turbine series-hybrids could be made to work)
And if we completely limit ourselves to one specific tech, we really are shooting ourselves in the foot economically.
Have a beer, sir. Sounds like you need it!
As someone with a very good job but nevertheless unable to buy a house within 20 miles of the (Oxford) office, I couldn't agree more.
However, for those who already own a 600k terraced house in Oxford, a few solar panels are a Great investment. Greenwashing it for some virtue signalling millionaire mugs could help turn it into a 700k terraced house in Oxford.
And it is these who the tory government are working for.
@Aldair
https://technode.com/2021/06/24/china-to-ban-large-energy-storage-plants-from-using-retired-ev-batteries/
I don't think China would make a move as drastic as this against the use of recycled batteries without good reason. They are EXTREMELY dangerous if you don't know exactly what you are dealing with.
Trying to use old batteries is extremely hazardous, and disassembling and remanufacturing them is even worse. (trust me, i'm an engineer)
Your best hope might be to crush and incinerate the batteries in some controlled way, and then mine the ashes for raw materials. But that would be extremely polluting, and especially hazardous to staff dealing with all of the toxic waste from combustion products of electrolytes.
The sad fact is, Green tech is some of the most polluting tech on the planet: Lithium batteries (Li, Co mining, electrolyte production, fires), solar PV (large scale silicon wafer manufacture is HORRIBLY polluting), EVs and Wind power (neodymium & copper mining), and don't get me started on Biomass..
TBH, the world would be in a much better place if we hadn't killed off Nuclear!
Yes, just like the legislative focus is on removing gas boilers from homes and businesses.
I mean seriously? Using electricity for bulk heating? It couldn't get any more stupid than that.
The national grid is already at breaking point as just one of three main energy distribution networks - the others being the gas grid, and petroleum distribution. The amount of gigawatts needed to replace these two shouldn't be underestimated.
Legislative focus seems to be geared towards "let's pile everything on top of the electricity grid" (the one that's most overloaded and most prone to sudden and complete failure, and is most difficult to restart if it does fail completely)
In fact I'd say that legislative focus is steering the RMS TitGreat Britain so hard towards the iceberg of future economic collapse that I wouldn't be surprised if it is being lobbied mostly by powers who wish to sabotage the economic future of the UK and Europe.
Not sure why all the downvotes for this.
Personally, the technology I am waiting for is the gas-turbine series-hybrid. Basically an EV with an extremely compact high-speed generator.
Gas turbines can be much more power dense than ICEs because of their speed. Previously, power electronics was not fast enough to make a synchronous motor work at gas turbine speeds, but now they are becoming feasible thanks to GaN semiconductors etc.
The big problem with EVs is as TFA says: Charging them. And this is not just a lack of chargers, but a lack of generation and distribution capacity to power the chargers themselves.
If the UK had 230,000 EV chargers, the grid would fall over in an instant if even 1/5 of them were in use at any one time.
Therefore for EVs to be really practical we need decentralised power generation. Either from a compact gas turbine on the car itself (which could burn hydrogen or biofuel, at high temperature with very low emissions except CO2), or a lot of domestic wind and solar, or both.
Don't forget that if you are charging your EV when there isn't a surplus of renewable energy on the grid, then most of that energy is coming from gas turbines (and sometimes diesel generators) anyway. With a good 50% generation-and-distribution overhead before it even gets to your 97% efficient DC charger, 90% efficient battery, and 90% efficient inverter/motor. That puts it on a par with a 40% efficient ICE in terms of carbon emissions.
I'd guess that most of the learning is done in simulation - only once the 'statistical analysis machine' has analysed enough data from the simulation to be able to control a simulated robot, will it ever be allowed near real hardware.
For a good demo of how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTDkYFZFWug
Google have realised that all they need to make terrifying robots is LOTS OF COMPUTE, LOTS OF DATA, and they have both of those.
Yes, it does. But a collision of robots resulting in a fire?
That kind of thing is entirely preventable with simple things like fuses and current/temperature monitoring of motors & batteries.
Activation of the sprinkler system is an unfortunate last-resort measure to take. Presumably a large number of droids & groceries are now damaged and need disposing of.
Very sad that this happened (again) to Ocado.. Another win for Bezos' Bozos..
No, Cs-137 is reckoned to be lethal, but the levels really are not so lethal.
The stupidity lies in " Indeed, surveys of the local boar population found they are contaminated by up to 300 times the safe human dosage of the lethal isotope caesium-137 [PDF]. "
The "safe limit" according to the PDF is set at 4 millirem/year. The pigs were exposed to 300 times that, which is 1200 millirem / year.
1200 millirem is pitifully non-lethal. It is equivalent to 12 millisieverts, where 4-5 Sieverts is actually the LD50/30 value for acute radiation exposure in humans.
And we're talking per year, so we'd probably assume the LD50 to be even higher for a dose spread over a whole year.
So while Cs-137 itself certainly is lethal, the "safe limit" is set so low, that even "300 times the safe limit" while sounding really scary, it is still 400 times lower than the dose that might kill you.
The disconnect between these "safe limits" and what is actually an "unsafe level" is IMO one of the main things that has killed the nuclear industry. Radiation is so easily "detectable" but impossible to see and therefore impossible for the public to quantify what the detector reading means.
So we set the limits based on a model that basically says "there is no safe limit", so we will set it at background. And because Cs-137 is a short-lived isotope, background for that isotope is basically zero.
WTF?
They obfuscated this in a powershell script with a base64 string.. why?
So that they could pull the wool over the eyes of the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure and appear that “They showed a genuine commitment to do the right thing,” by providing a magical detection tool?
Or because they are so cynical that they expect their recently-pwned customers to double click on an obfuscated powershell script and run it, rather than just telling them to look for a file called agent.crt?
More like, what the frak is a print spooler doing accepting "drivers" from network clients?
Or, what the frak is a printer doing requiring a 'driver' running with system priveleges?
i.e. Why the ducking fuck are printer drivers not standardised, or at least run in unpriveleged userspace?
Nah, they'll just hide the errors under layer upon inscrutable layer of neural network, and a few arithmetic glitches will probably benefit the model as a whole.
So instead of being a function of its input and training data, and coming to a conclusion like "black person == criminal" it will say something like "bork bork bork, today's unperson of the day is.. Richard Buttleoyce"
Obviously that's hyperbole and not quite true. But there is certainly some survivor bias going on. :)
Any politician who cannot / does not lie, will not last very long in politics. (which sadly is a world where being honest about anything, especially your own mistakes, is the biggest mistake you can make)
The most successful politicians are born liars (so said Nico Machiavelli)
This.
"nothing to hide (from us) = nothing to fear (from us)" obviously makes a massive assumption about the benevolence of authority..
George Orwell literally wrote the book on this. It said that if an authoritarian system is allowed to exist in the first place, then it can guarantee its own stability in perpetuity by making up fake enemies and eradicating the idea of privacy, so that anyone could become the next enemy of the state, simply by disagreeing with whatever the party line is at the time.
Maybe we trust our government (hah!) But in cryptography land, taking account of the most obvious human factors like leaks of master backdoor keys, what is visible to the authorities is just as visible to the criminal neighbours anyway. So authoritarian government or not, banning strong encryption is obviously plain stupid, and that should have been the end of the argument, filed alongside the banning of opaque walls.
What's more, since when have real criminals respected a ban on anything?? :|
