Posts by cyberdemon

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

> if you assume light dissipates its energy as it travels, then you get a red-shift.

Er, then how do you explain blue-shift?

"Galaxies in the mirror are closer than they appear" ?

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Giving nvidia the finger

Giving nvidia the finger has obviously worked well as a strategy! They have just relented on their stubborn closed-source BLOB antics. That probably wouldn't have happened without Linus' ranting and raving.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-open-kernel&num=1

(although, they haven't released it yet. I'm sure when they do, Mr Torvalds will find something inside to rant about)

OpenAI's DALL·E 2 generates AI images that are sometimes biased or NSFW

Re: With Folded Hands..

It would probably come up with some article about how a bunch of statistics that were generated from actual reality, appear to reflect actual reality, and, shockingly, not the non-reality that exists inside the frothing bowl of soup that Guardian columnists call a brain, wherein women prefer to do dirty, manual labour intensive jobs, and men prefer to do social, empathy-intensive jobs.

Communication around Heroku security incident dubbed 'train wreck'

Salesforce also own Slack btw

Salesforce acquired Slack last year..

A communications "Train Wreck"? I could only imagine how much worse this could have been if Slack were compromised instead of (or as well as) Heroku.

THAT would have been a communications train wreck, not just for salesforce, but for their entire customer base who rely on Slack for their internal communications.

Airbnb will let staff work from anywhere without a pay cut

Where's Lex Luthor when we need him?

It's time to sink California into the Pacific.

Pop!_OS 22.04: New kid on the Ubuntu block starting to show real muscle

toxic

There are very good reasons to dislike snap and flatpack, and it's not just a case of "the user can turn it off", because the more popular these nasties become, the more software distributors will use them as the only supported means of install..

The way that they package up applications into their own sandboxes a bit like Android, means that the user has much less control and scrutiny over what the app is actually doing.. Apps have extremely limited interaction with the OS and eachother, meaning that the extensibility and flexibility aspect of using Linux is lost.. They pollute the OS's mountpoint list as each snap application makes its own loopback device.

Basically, it's great for proprietary software vendors, but terrible for users and even worse for third-party software developers who want to make extensions or forks to what is supposed to be open-source software.

We should be educating people on how to build software from source, not forcing them to install some containerised crapware and not ask questions about it.

Your ignorant dismissal of [people with strong opinions about software]? being all too common in the Linux world, is sadly all too common in the Windows world...

AWS's Log4j patches blew holes in its own security

Java

Write Once, Exploit Everywhere

Google tracked record 58 exploited-in-the-wild zero-day security holes in 2021

Re: The industry is a sewer

> My least-favorite tool to fix problems is the government. But I don't see any other way to address this.

Agreed.

One thing that "the government" could do for example, is to restrict JavaScript in the same way that they restrict Cookies.

Browsers should be forced to block all JavaScript that did not come from the original publisher of a webpage, except by explicit individual consent of the user.

The reason that this would need support from "the government" of course, is because it would seriously impinge on Google, Amazon, Facebook et al's ability to collect data from their data cows users.

No longer would you have a bunch of javascripts from googletagmanager.com, googlesyndication.com etc that you don't want with your webpage and which are doing nothing useful except collecting data about you on behalf of google, or worse, scripts from some hacked or outright malicious third-party that are exploiting one or more of Google's numerous zero-day vulnerabilities to steal your passwords, draw over your screen etc. on the behalf of the FSB, Mossad, the CCP or your local friendly scamware gang.

Finnish govt websites knocked down as Ukraine President addresses MPs

> THIS IS THE REAL PROBLEM, Putin is just a ... embodiment of what Russians believe in.

Hmm, maybe. But I remain skeptical. How many of those russians are succumbing to "groupthink" / "doublethink" i.e. they are lying about what they say they believe, because they are fearful of fascist thugs who are on the lookout for any russian sympathising with the enemy.

Google issues third emergency fix for Chrome this year

> practice "safe surfing".

Another good reason to block all JavaScript by default.

Use NoScript on Firefox and ScriptSafe on Chrome.

Yes, it means that some websites are broken-by-default until you whitelist one of the umpteen-zillion javascript domains, but that's a price worth paying IMO.

It has the added side-effect that I don't need a blacklist-based adblocker or privacy guard, because all ads and tracking cookies are pulled in via Javascript. e.g. on the Reg, I am allowing scripts from "forums.theregister.com", but those that it tries to load from "securepubads.g.doubleclick.net", "googletagmanager.com" and "google-analytics.com" are thoroughly BLOCKED.

Chip supply relief coming in 2024 when wafer plants open

Er, I don't think we'll be running out of sand any time soon.. (seems as if you forgot the joke icon)

But it's the stuff a bit higher up the technological house of cards thats in trouble. Like machines that make the silicon crystals and cut them into wafers. That's some pretty precision engineering that takes a while to scale up, even in normal economic and political times..

How long does it take to grow a silicon crystal?

As title: How long does it take after the plant has opened, before you actually have a crystal big enough to turn into wafers?

I should imagine it's a process that cannot be rushed, and does not like to have any perturbations in temperature in the meantime, which may be caused by, er, power outages etc.

Microsoft dogs Strontium domains to stop attacks on Ukraine

Re: For a tech site...

Yes I seem to remember a man named Michael Roe, who had a software company with a domain called mikeroesoft.com and he got similar treatment, for Microsoft are the self-appointed police of the internet and apparently nobody challenges that?

AlmaLinux comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Serves a roll

Dual-booting is not "the best way to run Linux"

The best way is to dispense with proprietary operating systems entirely, of course!

Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants

Re: "Unproven"

If you've ever tried the electrolysis experiment at home, you'll find that whatever you use as the negative electrode disintegrates pretty damn quick, unless you make it out of Platinum..

Battery systems are useful for short-term fault tolerance (frequency balancing) but not for bulk energy storage of the kind that we would need to make wind power reliable.

The only viable solution to get us out of the energy crisis IMO is nuclear SMRs (yes, for once I agree with Boris), but unfortunately there are too many powerful lobby groups including the likes of Drax, Octopus and the Oil/Gas industry, who stand to make less money, and they are easily able to spread the FUD around with the hippy green groups who don't know anything about science or engineering.

Re: "Unproven"

Nuclear is unproven?? Tell that to the French! :(

Indeed, a battery that could power the UK for a day, nevermind a week of calm weather, would cost more than a few nuke plants, and I wonder which would cause more pollution (mining a million tonnes of lithium vs one ton of uranium) and which would be most likely to cause a fatal accident or poison a large swath of land (lithium batteries produce HF when they burn - not a nice chemical).

Traditional fuel cells need 5 tonnes of platinum per GW (not cheap) And solid-oxide fuel-cells are terribly inefficient (they must be kept at a temperature of 500 degrees C) and suffer catastrophic meltdowns which can be caused by vibration shock or old-age failure (a wafer thin piece of ceramic separates hydrogen and oxygen, at 500C. What could possibly go wrong with that idea?).

Re: unlike your typical UK green energy project

Yes indeed, the problem could be mitigated by changing everyone's main incoming fuse to 40A instead of 100A so that they cannot charge their EV and run their heating or have a shower at the same time. Or if they wanted to run the heating and the shower they'd have to discharge the EV. Not great for the morning before the commute.

However, there is still a problem, because the underground cables are sized on a 'diversity' argument, i.e. they cannot cope with every house on a street drawing its maximum load at once, because that would require a massive cable that is never going to be needed. And before EVs and widespread electric heating that was true. But soon, many more people will want to draw more than 40A for long periods of time, and that is going to make the distribution system inefficient (losses = I^2 R remember) and much more likely to fail.

There's another problem: Inverter-driven heat pumps and EV chargers are constant-power devices. Like with a switched-mode power supply for a laptop, if you lower the input voltage, it will automatically draw more current from the AC to supply the same power to the DC load. That means if excessive current due to excessive load on the circuit causes the voltage to drop, then EVs, heat pumps, (as well as computers, laptops, TVs etc) will respond by drawing more current. I^2 R means that the losses in the cables go up with the square of that current, and that's when you get an exploding underground cable.

Re: unlike your typical UK green energy project

Yeah, I vaguely remember that idea popping up as well, and I really wish it hadn't, because as I said earlier, it is patently stupid and has polluted the discourse on SMRs.

The only reason to colocate power generation with housing, is combined heat and power. This does make energy use more efficient, but efficiency is pretty pointless when the energy supply itself is basically limitless and the only cost is in managing the infrastructure to get it out. CHP with nuclear would be an utter nightmare for any safety regulator. (You're sending coolant water WHERE? Yes I know there are five heat exchangers in the way..)

CHP makes much more sense with gas power, of course. 60% of our electricity comes from gas, and gas power generation is 60% efficient at best, but a further 10% is lost in distribution, and those losses go up with the square of demand, ultimately leading to overheating cables.

Therefore, electric heating without heat pumps (and even in some cases even WITH heat pumps) is less efficient than a condensing gas boiler.

I suppose having a barrel of nuclear waste under your back garden would at least make a ground-source heat pump a bit more efficient!

Back on topic though, what about running a sewer-source heat pump? A lot of waste heat goes down the drain, and it might be a bit more efficient extracting heat from waste water than air. On the other hand, frozen sewers would not be a good thing.

Re: unlike your typical UK green energy project

Actually, 400kV transmission lines are much more efficient than you seem to imply. Because it is such high voltage, very little current is needed for a LOT of power, and the resistive losses which go as I^2 R are very low.

The high-voltage part of the transmission system is on average about 99% efficient i.e. 1% is lost in transit between the power station (say, Drax up north) and the load (say, Birmingham). To send the power all the way from Drax down to London would cost you no more than another 0.5%. But the lower the voltage, the more that tends to be lost in transmission, even over a short distance.

What worries me the most about the Green Energy transition though, is low-voltage local distribution. I.e. what happens when each house on a street needs 40 Amps for their EV charger, 40 Amps for their Heat Pump, and 40 Amps for an electric shower? The answer is that the underground electric cable, often rated at 400A, overheats. And even when they are not on fire or exploding, these low voltage underground cables are often very warm, which is a lot of lost energy, often 5-10%. If the gas grid lost as much energy in transit, you'd smell it everywhere and there would be major fires and explosions.

But these losses are off-meter (though they are part of the reason that electricity costs 4-5 times more than gas per kWh) so you can spend a fortune on your heat pump and electric SUV and kid yourself that you are saving the planet.

Drifting somewhat offtopic, but What really grinds my gears is when people like BBC radio presenters start to imply that there is some sort of problem with nationwide electricity transmission, when actually it's the one part of the system that works really well. This morning they were spouting some bollocks about Nuclear Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), saying that the idea behind them is that they can be placed near to towns and cities for efficiency, but wouldn't this be terrible for safety! This is absolute hogswash. FUD at best, and deliberate anti-nuclear propaganda at worst. SMRs would of course be located in the usual nuclear sites for safety, defensibility etc., but instead of having 2x 500MW reactors, you would have 20x 50MW reactors. This makes them much cheaper and faster to build and maintain. That is all.

On Call

I foresee a future episode of On Call, where our IT hero has to debug the cause of some degraded web app performance, only to find that the whole rack is overheating due to a large brown lump stuck in the inlet hose.

Crooks use fake emergency data requests to get personal info out of Big Tech – report

Re: What are these EDRs used for?

Surely not! Our police are beacons of responsibility and professionalism. They would never, ever, abuse their warrant cards to, er, stalk, rape and murder someone.

Emma Sleep Company admits checkout cyber attack

Sounds like some people will be losing sleep over this..

And I doubt an expensive mattress is going to help

UK spy boss warns China hopes Russia will help it take over tech standards

Re: The war in Ukraine is a devastating blow to the image of a mighty Russia

> It should have been a win

No, it should have never happened.

If Putin hadn't been so isolated, mistrusting his own advisers and believing his own bullshit, then he might have known that he could never win in Ukraine.

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

Re: Google is in bed with the NSA

Yeah I don't think they are doing it because of the NSA. They are doing because they can make billions by tracking, modelling and manipulating every person on the planet that they can get their tentacles into. Just like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, TikTok etc.

Even if you have an Apple phone or even /e/os, you will still have Google Firebase Analytics inside most of your apps etc. And apps don't come under the same cookie legislation that websites do.

But the NSA won't get much out of your phone company if you use WhatsApp for all your calls and text messages. But they might get something out of Facebook or Google, especially if you were silly enough to accept WhatsApp's default behaviour of saving all your messages unencrypted on your Google account.

My point wasn't that Google is snooping on everyone because the government told them to. It was more that The Governments (of the world) are snooping on everyone all the time now, because the tech companies like Google make it so easy for them to just tap into their handy APIs and portals.

> There are numbers stations which any competent person will use

Er, yes.. Funny definition of "any competent person" you have there. I wonder who you are working for... :P

Re: Google is in bed with the NSA

But Google (along with other companies e.g. Microsoft for Teams, Amazon for Alexa) do store voice recordings, and use it for various purposes such as improving their language models. (This could include phone calls, if you happened to have call recording and google drive backup turned on on your android phone)

Would a (bent or otherwise) cop, or the NSA, need a specific wiretap warrant obtained from a judge, to download those from the Google law enforcement portal?

Also, I wouldn't say that the metadata that you mentioned is 'totally irrelevant with no privacy implications whatsoever'..!

How difficult would it be (for the NSA and Google) to take those MD5 hashes of text messages and crack them using a natural language model? If they crack one message, there are only a fairly small number of likely responses, (and the three most likely ones are often presented to you as 'quick reply options'!). If they crack a few in a row, then they can build their markov chain.

Google knows how you construct your sentences. And they know what you will (probably) say next.

And they could even improve their model incrementally, by predicting what the next MD5 hash will be.

Re: That rogue programmer again

Was that the same "rogue" programmer who did the engine control for VW? I heard that he thought he'd fake the emissions tests just for funsies, and he didn't even tell the management, they knew absolutely nothing about it!

Re: Google is in bed with the NSA

Google is also a cheaper and more efficient way for the NSA, the FBI, the (corrupt and psychopathic) Met Police, or the Council Tax Office to inspect call and text message logs, rather than asking the phone companies.

It's one company, one point-of-contact and they have all the data about everyone.

Google has a special "law enforcement portal" where anyone with a government ID (hopefully with some clearance and relevance checks, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are none) can log in and get the God Mode access on anything they like.

I also doubt if there's a need for any old-fashioned wiretap warrants if you're not actually tapping any wires (you're just asking for a copy of a recording that has already been made)

Heaps of tweaks and improvements incoming with GNOME 42

Bin it

KDE is really, really good these days.

KDE 4 / Qt4 had issues, but they are long gone now in KDE5 / Qt5. It's back to the power and stability that KDE 3.5 had, but with modern graphics and features.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Then you run into one who happens to be a gamer,

Actually I think one of the safest things to do right now is to uninstall Steam and other games distribution software from any non-disposable Windows box. It's a massive attack vector, any russian games developer could be coerced into pushing a poisoned update, and there is a handy API for the game developer to say "please run this update as admin" (which is not available under Linux afaik)

And proton is great, actually. Even does VR games well.

It really is not worth getting a ransomware or outright disk-wiper worm just because you or your kid wants to play some game and it won't work in a VM. Kids are playing CoD for real right now and it's not very fun because it hurts and you only get one life. :(

Brit techie shows us life in Ukraine amid Russian invasion

Re: REDCROSS

Thank you! I've been looking for a small charity who can give immediate help, and for whom a bit of money makes a difference, instead of these big corporate ones that spend so much on executive salaries and marketing.

Beer, because that seems to be what Ukranians are missing most right now :'(

Re: "sadly none of his party have had the balls to kick him out yet"

> This leaves no victory conditions for Russia. Putin can't admit that, because to do so is to admit that he's failed totally and be deposed. This leaves him busily shoving his army into a meatgrinder where the best possible outcome is a Phyrric* victory

All wars these days are proxy wars, and this one is no different. Putin is being used, (AFAICT), by a regime much more powerful, and even more dangerous than his own.

Where now is all the public (and private!) sector money going? Who funds all our national debts? (and What happens when they call it in?) Who could we not possibly ever apply sanctions to?

The tories, with their financial self-interest, were similarly easy to use as a tool to weaken western alliances and start a war in Europe.

* I think you mean Pyrrhic victory. Ph***ic is a different word which you may have confused it with.

Re: "sadly none of his party have had the balls to kick him out yet"

I would go further, and say that many of the unpopular tories who knew they were unpopular and liked it that way, e.g. Theresa May, declared themselves to be against Brexit.

Some people had valid reasons to vote leave, I'll give you two: 1. They were heavily invested in Crypto Assets, Commodity Derivatives, ForEx Spread-betting etc. and so were betting against the traditional economy and helped to cause its collapse, making themselves obscenely rich and the rest of us poor. 2. They were involved in companies that take bungs^H^H^H^H^Hcontracts from the public sector and wanted the anti-corruption rules lifted.. And then you have psychopath policemen (the kind that inhabit police stations in Minsk and Charing Cross) who would love to have all that Human Rights bollocks wiped from the statute book.. Oops sorry that's 3 "valid" reasons, depending on your definition of valid.

Who was behind the whole thing? I'm sure Dom knows. He's the sort that would've pressed the "end the world now" nuclear button, given half a chance.

New Chinese exascale supercomputer runs 'brain-scale AI'

Re: So, American Trade wars work?

The question is, was DJT (and other populist leaders and campaigns, who couldn't possibly have won on rational debate and without the guerilla marketing provided by social media) part of the plan?

96000 nodes... That must result in an impressive electricity bill.

Who cares, when you have cheap Russian gas?

Bargain price!

UK, EU regulators probe Google and Meta's 'Jedi Blue' ad deal

"Google actively deteriorates Google/2 but promotes Google+Google"?

I think you should stick to flower arranging, mate. I have no idea wtf you just said.

Lapsus$ extortionists dump Samsung data online, chaebol confirms security breach

Re: Bootloader

Came to say the same thing!

Alibaba smart electric vehicles now in mass production

GM, VW, BMW, Daimler et al can forget about Chinese Chips, then..

Leaked stolen Nvidia key can sign Windows malware

It's only good to control independent developers

Yes, I believe that's its intended purpose

It seems to me, the only point of TPM is to force smaller developers out of the market and to let Microsoft, Google, Amazon et al take over everything. And it will be used for unbreakable DRM for the likes of Disney, netflix, etc.

It was never about security - that was always just an excuse.

US chip stocks undeterred by export ban to Russia

Re: Considering all the supply chain issues ...

Yes quite - I am sure that they are quite relieved to be selling to actual customers and not price-gougers

What is it with cloud status pages not reflecting reality?

Re: Was MUCH larger than even reported here

A cyber attack may be likely, but what makes you think the aggressor was the USA, rather than say, Russia?

Fancy some new features? Try general-purpose Linux alternative Liquorix

Re: I'm guessing that Devuan might [not] be able to use the Debian kernel?

Eh? Why should the kernel care about which process it spawns first?

Ukraine invasion may hit chip supply chain – analysts

It's not just manglement of one company though - any company will always choose the cheapest supplier, because in capitalism, profit trumps everything. So when they all choose the same cheap supplier, there is barely anybody to say Oi, you lot are all using the same supplier, therefore collectively, you are a risky investnemt. (maybe a very dilligent investor might say that) and there is certainly nobody to say "Oi, diversify your suppliers, or else." That would be considered highly communist.

This stinks a bit..

It is starting to seem as if WWIII is really about China's dominance of tech.

According to an earlier story apparently three companies in Ukraine - iceblick, Ingas and Cryoin, manufacture 70% of the world's neon gas supply (I guess it leaks out of rocks there? or do they condense it out of the air with cryopumps?) and 90% of the world's semiconductor-grade neon that is needed for making the DUV and XUV excimer lasers that are used to make semiconductors.

Then last year there was a mysterious fire at ASML, and apparently a Chinese company ran off with the designs for their XUV lithography machines.

What next? Will we see European and US Cryopump manufacturers hit with "mysterious fires" and the odd "stray" missile?

'Hundreds of computers' in Ukraine hit with wiper malware as conflict continues

Re: And this is why you should turn off all updates now

> Yeah, because lots of unfixed security vulnerabilities are just what's needed.

I'd rather have unfixed security vulnerabilities on my firewalled system than be constantly pulling inscrutable updates from sources whom I do not know and therefore cannot trust. And even if I did trust, could be compromised.

This "update immediately" mentality is the problem tbh. It makes developers too lazy to test for, and fix security vulnerabilities BEFORE they release software, and it makes users too complacent so as to simply trust whatever updates are put on their plate.

Re: And this is why you should turn off all updates now

Please let us know, how to completely disable updates in Win10 or 11 without disconnecting entirely from the internet?

I think Windows users are basically forced to have them on at all times. Although I think it's possible to suspend them for a while. But I'm not sure if that applies to updates that describe themselves as "critical"

We should definitely stop using Steam for a while, too.

Any developer (especially a russian one) could be 'persuaded' to issue a dodgy update..

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

Even if they don't have any working warheads or ICBMs, (which is extremely unlikely, IMO) Who says China haven't/won't sell them any? I'm sure China are just itching to test out their latest & greatest hypersonic nuke tech.

Google kills download-shrinking Lite Mode browser tech

AMP

> Although Lite mode is going away, we remain committed to ensuring Chrome can deliver a fast webpage loading experience and subsequent data slurping returned to us in a timely manner on mobile

Yeah exactly, they're not going to kill off AMP any time soon, even though its use case for saving mobile data and improving page load speeds was just as dubious.

Big banks will blaze the enterprise GPT-3 AI trail

Financial Services

Yes, I am sure this would be extremely useful for people who wish to automate fraud and 419 scams without any human call centre operators involved, who might speak in a foreign accent or (worse) might turn out to have a moral compass. They could even apply the perfect "conversion optimisation" to their automated calls, and soon we will have AI that learns how to blackmail people.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Re: re. more blankets

You'd have thought that if they had degrees in PPE, they could've at least manage to buy the proper stuff at a decent price..

I'll get my PPE..