Posts by trindflo 432 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2011
Is there no way to aim this stuff? It doesn't have to be a perfect shot, but it seems like it should be possible to make an reentry vehicle to guide debris into an approximate place in the ocean. Preferably something better than what they did with skylab (which was to just put it over the southern hemisphere because that's mostly ocean).
I don't recall anything ever being close to a 6250 tape drive that wasn't properly sealed (half-assed put together because it was being used for test). The air whistling past made a very loud, very high frequency shriek and I was apparently the only person in the building young enough to hear it. I wondered if it was affecting anyone else even though they couldn't hear it because I wasn't too far from running mindlessly out of the building it was that painful. It seemed like they tested me a couple of times to verify I wasn't faking it then checked me out some hearing protection.
There are current attempts to fix prison slave labor: US pending legislation to remove prison slave labor exemption
Awesome. Thank you.
I recall a few cultures that would regularly go on raids to steal wives, and the figures for the 1800s were only for the advertised slave trade from Africa to the Americas. The numbers are clearly arguable.
Modern slavery could mean a lot of things too (such as parents owning their infant children), but I satisfied myself that in the second link the criteria for selecting who is a modern slave sounded reasonable: forced labor or marriage with no real chance of escape. I didn't dig into their methods, but am making a good faith estimate they are more interested in being a good source of information than in generating click-bait.
I can't argue that as a percentage of world population, the slave population has gone down. I still think the numbers are crazy in the modern world regardless of how we agree to filter the numbers, and some of what you are saying might make the modern numbers larger.
Slightly dated information from 2018: https://theexodusroad.com/does-slavery-exist-in-america-today/
Estimates 403,000 actual slaves in the US defined as either forced labor or forced marriage
Worldwide, the slave trade from has grown from 12.5 million slaves captured and shipped, largely to the Americas, From 1526–1867 to something more like 50 million slaves at any one time circa 2021:
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/#mode=map
Just going by 50 / 12.5, that says the trade has grown 4 to 1 or 400%
A major reason for this growth is how inexpensive it is to own a slave now. In 1886 you would have spent $40,000 for a slave (adjusted for inflation). Today you can get a slave for more like $90.
That's mind boggling. Control over another human's dreams and aspirations for less than the cost of a meal for two in Los Angeles.
Please fact check me. I'm more than a little aghast at what I found.
Maybe the best use for such technology is to block "manufactured nonsense" before the judge needs to get involved. The defense team wants to make ridiculous claims to delay? Let the AI run an analysis of likelihood of success. If the odds are < 50% defense pays all fees for the nonsense hearings. If the odds of success are < 5% then no - just no - no hearing, don't bother the judge with this one, and only the next level of appellate court can pull it back out of the trash bin.
In my neck of the woods the local cable company would take an unnegotiated shortcut.
Twice a year the satellite you are getting your shows from passes in front of the sun and your antenna sees nothing but sun.
Nowadays most satellite companys put up a 2nd antenna and point you where the sun is not.
Back in the day, cable companys were supposed to record at a different time of day and play back from the good source.
When the company couldn't be arsed you would see the show fuzz out and disappear. If you called the cable company, they would call it sun spots. Close I guess? The antenna was spotting the sun.
Icon because that is what the antenna sees.
Next go after sim swapping. Get them to do something meaningful before it happens like buzz the phone as well as ring it, flash the screen, make the swapper take a day or two and give them a temporary sim until the delay is over. The carriers can do it; they just need to be strongarmed into making it a priority.
I don't think insurance companies use BS generators. What works best for them is to stall things as long as they can with the least effort. CEO pay is part of administrative costs, and medical insurance has to have a minimum 'health care' / 'admin cost' ratio. If they can delay their payout by automatically rejecting a claim for missing the dot on an I, they continue to earn on that that money. If they do wacky things, it starts to involve people, that leads to higher administrative costs and reducing the CEO's paycheck.
Insurance companies will try new services that promise to reduce costs (reject more claims), but when a hospital gets too many complaints, making the admin costs go up, the new service gets scrapped, the insurance companies show the palms of their hands swearing they had nothing to do with it, and the payment gets delayed. The insurance company can get sued if they willfully make up BS. As long as there are sacrificial contractors, all is good.
The doctors / service providers usually resubmit those claims and eat the costs of the payment delays. As the patients, we get to live (or not) with the consequences of delayed treatments if we are found to be ineligible.
To your first comment about diagnoses: I would not want an AI triage kiosk deciding I need an extra finger somewhere.
One of the annoying things that happens with elevated command prompts in Windows is that it sort-of disconnects all your mapped drives within the elevated sessions. I believe RunAs does the same thing. There is a registry setting to defeat it, but it is still annoying anyway you flavor it.
When we give our smartphones access to our banking and install every fun sounding app, aren't we part of the problem? Would the spyware industry exist if only flip phones and hardened operating systems were being used? Does single signon make things more secure?
I agree with most of what you say (have a vote). Artificial Intelligence is not Human Intelligence. Where I disagree is that there should be no expectation of analogous behavior.
Chat bots are based on neural networks, which are opaque feedback loops that somehow store information and allow the information to be retrieved for problem solving goals. Computer neural networks were originally created to test the theory that this is how the mammalian brain stores information.
Chat bots are designed to generate human-like responses. They are more than just clever code, which seems to imply a complex decision tree. We cannot demand a proof from a neural net the way we can from an inference engine like Prolog. The way the neural net comes up with an answer is opaque.
To the degree we are using chat bots to simulate human responses, we should expect problems analogous to human foibles and that they may be susceptible to being tricked by the hacker equivalents of hypnotists, mentalists, and magicians. It won’t be the same, but it may be strikingly similar and may offer opportunities to learn about ourselves.
For instance, while chatbots hallucinate, humans are susceptible to recovered memories, misremembering, and false memories.
It shouldn't be surprising considering how easily humans are misdirected. Give a competent psychologist or hypnotist a little while with a human and see how thoroughly scrambled the human's thinking becomes. Make the AI as paranoid as a decent IT person and it starts cursing at users.
With connectivity to bridge the non-production test systems to the production systems because segmenting networks is so hard.
And where they somehow got hold of a private key? That means the people with that key can publish software as Microsoft and nobody will be the wiser!
Except for illegal reasons. Women are a protected class and can demand some sorts of BS stops. Termination because a woman doesn't seem nearly as charming after being hired could be considered retaliation. A big customer that took a personal dislike can be another. Nobody in management is going to talk about it. Management can lock shoulders and keep the quiet part quiet, especially if they all agree among themselves they are being reasonable. And there is much less scrutiny during the probationary period. Many large companies only convert contractors and never hire a permanent position until they are very certain, effectively extending the probationary period indefinitely.
Only if the child can perfectly reproduce what it has read without understanding it at all. It is the exception for two talented programmers to produce the same exact code, although I have seen it happen. Humans need to strain or plagiarize to produce that level of conformity. The AI seem to require extra work to avoid it.
Violence was being threatened in extortion emails for a *very* short while (maybe two days). Similar to the "I turned on your webcam and caught you doing something nasty" threats, these were very simply "we know where you live, and ...". I assumed they stopped because that crossed a line. I also was hoping the feds would be interested and forwarded them to official channels. I can't imagine swatting being any less interesting to authorities.
We had a horrible spam filtering company for a while and I ended up needing to scan a lot of emails by hand, so I saw most flavors of the garbage. Some of it was funny in a very sad way, assuming some people were responding to it.
why did you have social security numbers available online and unencrypted?
I'm really curious why a shipper *needs* to have something as sensitive as social security numbers. I doubt there is a good reason to have them available in a form that can easily be exfiltrated, and I'm making an assumption they were unencrypted and not air-gapped.
I'll say again, good on you for not feeding the monster.
The majority of that problem is that there is a free and potentially anonymous internet. The majority of western countries want it that way. Totalitarian regimes do not want anyone to be anonymous on the internet, but are forced to put up with it because of commerce.
The worst tasting and hardest (most loaded with minerals) water is pumped from wells. In many places a water softener is required to keep from ruining the pipes.
Some places that 'consume' water are dumping it more or less into the ocean. Once data center water is mixed in with bog water and industrial waste the cost to clean it goes up dramatically. The water should be reclaimed at the data center before the cost to clean it skyrockets.
We already recycle water to a degree; this new legislation is saying they don't need to clean the water as much before handing it back to people to drink. It seems to me that if the data centers are so thirsty they should be using the waste water rather than putting it into our taps.
I got that it was tricky to detect. No mention of any sort of test or antivirus I could run. There was a suggestion of "strong passwords", but those don't really do much against injection / keystroke logging. Information is good, but I'd like some more details. Several AV suites detect Danabot, which is mentioned in the article. It's not obvious anyone detects DBot v3.
Really. You'd think with all his money he could afford something better to put in his pipe.
A fully electric vehicle in salt water. Can't think of anything that might go wrong there: Sinking of the Conception
Interesting that the initial cause of that disaster was attributed to lithium batteries, but by the time the bureaucrats completed their reports it was all human error and the batteries officially had nothing to do with it. Yes, the crew was negligent...which is why they didn't notice that the batteries had caught fire.
I bet you all know where this is going based on the subject!
I wonder how difficult it would be, strictly for educational purposes of course, to feed facial images of the company management into such a system. If politicians were fed into it, it might provide insight into what it takes to get images removed and just how quickly it can be done. This would be important information to have if suing the operators of the system for negligent libel.
"listen in on your house even when the phone is hung up"
Check. Did you think your window shades are giving you privacy?
"wherever Russia leads"
What I came to say. Is Putin on-board? Of course he is. Could that possibly bode well?
"One world govt"
Don't see how that is going to happen. The EU isn't united. The US isn't united. I only recall one dictator willing to abrogate their power.
If I read the article correctly, this looks like a way to detect the compromise:
REG query HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\VSS
REG query HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\mXoRpcSsx
The keys do not necessarily mean you are compromised, but the absence of the keys might mean the machine you ran the query on is not compromised by this particular attack.
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