Posts by Luiz Abdala

Virginia industrial park wants to power DCs with mini nuclear reactors, clean hydrogen

Nuclear option

I wholeheartedly support BIG PWR nuclear power plants, producing 1000+ MW each. Except these guys don't like to slowdown or speedup and love working at 100% all the time, just changing fuel rods every 18 months. Sell the rest of the energy to the grid or make hydrogen.

Don´t forget the Lawrence Livermore research to break down the HLW (high level waste) into something less risky for the environment, and that research should be included in the package.

This hydrogen part needs a lot of research however.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Task failed successfully.

So if humans fail the task 50% of the time, you should present 2 or more tests, expect humans to fail, and bots to complete all of them successfully.

After 10 tests, there is only 1 in 1024 chance of humans doing all of them correctly, while bots will get them every time.

See icon.

Boffins say they can turn typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy

TEMPEST

This has been the subject of TEMPEST for over 20 years.

Straight from that wiki: "TEMPEST is a U.S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations".

Yeah, a leaky VGA cable or the sound of a keyboard, all the same. Altough reading the electromagnetic emanations of a VGA signal is a much more esoteric way of snooping around, IMHO.

Keyboard icon for reasons.

Japanese boffins slice semiconductors from diamonds – with lasers!

Diamond chips, with golden coolers. New shiny, indeed.

Oh boy, the RGB crowd is gonna go nuts with this. Bling-bling through and through.

Imagine that, 30-billion-transistor-9000-carat-chips, with gold-plated coolers, the Kim Kardashian of PCs is gonna be born within 10 years!

"Oh I spent 30000 quid on this new shiny Intel 20th generation diamond Core i11!"

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

In Brazil, of all places, I got 100 mpbs up and down already.

To top that, my plan is outdated, no longer sold, all the ISPs sell only 300 mpbs minimum, and with no "cable" TV attached on the plan, just raw broadband, for cheaper than what I am currently paying.

I plan to change soon and ditch the TV plan that only shows low quality programs, that I don't watch anyway, any longer. All the good stuff have their streaming equivalent straight from the web, so the "cable" is no longer justified.

And I just bought a FireTV from Amazon that hosts an impressive amount of streaming channels, that even takes voice commands from Alexa, which is neat.

By the way, I am paying the equivalent of 64 USD / month here in the... remote South America. The next plan is going for 21 USD. (64 still feels like I am being ripped off.)

How come the US of A is so far behind ? This is beyond my understanding.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Crosstalk? Not anymore.

I had an acquaitance that complained his POTS had a crosstalk with another line, and he was being charged through the roof for calls he didn't make. He called the phone sparkies, which found nothing.

That process was repeated for a month.

He then got hold of a coil - the kind used to ignite spark plugs -capable of 5 or 6 digit (volts or amps, whatever, this is irrelevant). As soon as he heard the line being used, he turned it on, immediately frying his line, the junction box down the street, and the line of the perp that was stealing his phone, just outside the box, on a carefully dug hole on the sidewalk by a tree root.

He then called the phone company for "Line not functioning" and everything was magically solved.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

No GUI?

I used KDE once, 20 years ago, trying dual boot in a Pentium II machine, breathe some life back into it. Maybe a Gnome Ubuntu boot disk in recent epoch to unbork some system when Windows hit the fan (not that often lately, it turns out).

But I never used Slackware... maybe if I had came fresh out of DOS in those days, I would have tried another OS without a GUI.

Microsoft 'fesses to code blunder in Azure Container Apps

Re: Well, Well

More like throwing the ball upwards every 10 seconds and grabbing it again.

Asus blames 'thermal stress' for fried SD card readers in Ally handhelds

GTA also has a 90-ish GB footprint these days, last time I checked some years ago... The original game had 60-ish GB, the difference has to be all the business, vehicles, and Cayo Perico, the single landmass added to the game.

Anyway, google could answer this one reasonably, on the other hand:

Steam Games With The Biggest File Size And How Many GB They Take

1 Ark: Survival Evolved - 400 GB.

2 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare - 235 GB. ...

3 Borderlands 3: Director's Cut - 135 GB. ...

4 Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War - 175 GB. ...

5 Red Dead Redemption 2 - 120 GB. ...

6 Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition - 110 GB. ...

I don't know about you, but I don't think I even have room to install Ark if I had it. And that list mention just Steam. Yes, Call of Duty has a bunch of modules that can be installed separately, this must be the whole thing.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

Re: Oh no!

You made me google that Cheetah. Rambo Lambo's prototype.

Well before overpowered SUVs or Humvees were considered cool.

Lamborghini may not have the best engineering or execution, but they were definitely visionnaires.

Oh no!

I only find it a crime that Lamborghini sold their tractor division. (Lamborghini Trattori)

The last chance you had to drive a Lambo with 4-wheel drive, 40 inch tires, and 300 HP at a blistering 20mph through a crop field is gone, whlle making fun of John Deere owners locked away from their Right to Repair.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Lightning always finds a way... of least resistance.

At least the guy that made the server rooms didn't weld the wrist straps ground to the lightning rod's ground... like someone I know...

The friend of mine that noticed this averted a Benjamin Franklin experience en masse, and got in charge of the grounding of the building for his troubles.

HSBC banks on quantum to lock down comms network

Quantum computing is...

... the ability to make a variable assume two values at the same time, which happens to help when you want to bruteforce password guessing, making it infinitely faster (in a rough definition).

But a quantum password that assumes two values at the same time should accept an attempt to guess it by inputting either one of the values, thus making it less secure.

(See icon.)

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Re: Clean keyboards

Extra sugary tea had no chance against the handyman working with me at a Language Course center back in the day. He washed all of it: removed all the keycaps, gave them a scrub, and applied a hair dryer, at a safe, tolerable to the touch temperature.

As for the parts where he didn't dare to use the dryer, he literally hang them to dry, then kept all the caps in a plastic shopping bag tied to the cord, giving me the honor to put it back together 24 hours later.

Flawless operation ensued.

Obvious icon.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

BOFH jargon bingo

Oh, the needle of the buzzword-o-meter on the wall just turned into a fan while reading this article. Good lord, I never heard anybody my age (late 70's early 80's) talking like that.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: Loudspeaker fridge.

You sir, nailed it on the head.

It is a small frigobar, so it has small capacitors on any snubber, if any at all. I will ask around here any sparky if they can do something about it.

Loudspeaker fridge.

Over here, the relay in an old fridge sends a massive spike back through the mains and the unfiltered 2.1 subwoofer sends it straight to the 4" speaker. It sounds like a 9mm bullet that was hit by lightning, the best approximation.

The kicker is, it goes through USB earphones as well. A loud, sharp CRACK ringing through, every time. The affected machine has an UPS, but since the 2.1 spike comes through the sound port, it does not block the signal.

It took a while to figure it was a fridge, now I miss a way to filter it away.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

There is an anectode around the web about a student that gets late to his Class. The teacher has a set of problems on the board. Because he is late, he thinks he is supposed to solve them. He took a while to solve, but he managed. It turned out to be a famous set of problems, like the Fermat Theorem or thereabouts, and this student solved it.

Found the source: the student was George Dantzig and the Class was about statistical theory, and he solved it, thinking it was an assignment.

So those tests with impossible questions, well... some day somebody might solve them out of the blue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Don't mention Soundblaster.

I spent more time fine tuning dos boot sequences to free the 600 kilobytes of base memory to make those DOS games run properly, than actually playing them.

Then their original media got destroyed before I could setup a dosbox for them, eons later. Never bothered with them again, chasing a bootleg copy, whatever.

Now they are so cumbersome to play, they belong in the past, behind several layers of rosy, laser-etched colored glasses.

A drink to those memories.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Re: Those are rookie numbers

There was a cruise missile design based on that principle. It used nuclear fuel rods to power its flight and would cause nuclear fallout as it moved around. It was as horrible as you could ever imagine.

But the plane itself never ejected chunks of the core. In fact, it never powered itself with the reactor, they never connected the whole thing to the conventional jets on the plane, just tested powering it up.

Search Project Pluto, wikipedia. and the plane as NB-36H, nuclear powered aircraft.

Re: Those are rookie numbers

If that B-29 with a nuclear power plant had worked... But you know... steam turbines are kinda heavy and hate being shaken around. They fit on Submarines and Carriers, though... and cooling isn's exactly a problem in vessels surrounded by water.

OVH punts hybrid water and immersion cooling for high performance systems

EK Water Blocks

I bet the gaming community absorbed that knowledge from whoever worked with these guys. 20 years in the business means the information will inevitably get around.

Thanks to them my PC cpu never overheats with a simple off the shelf AIO watercooler.

And I'll drink to that.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Re: So they removed the impossible?

One of the creators of Python was turned down for a position on the language he created.

I am having a hard time to find a reputable source for it, though. Or which one of them, either. The anecdote is rather old.

Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes

Re: Laws of Robotics?

That's the AT FIRST part of the sentence. Too subtle, I guess.

"You shall not be a dick and prevent humans from evolving" is known to everybody that read his work or watched "I Robot". I was expecting true connoisseurs to respond.

Thank you.

Laws of Robotics?

Isn't it time we explicitly include Isaac Asimov's rules into these things?

It seems like a good idea at first.

Journalist hurt by exploding USB bomb drive

CBRN* checks on the USB payload

Yeah, a vacuum-sealed container filled with boron sand lined with lead and kevlar and with an USB extension cord is a good idea.

Altough a usb stick can carry its own battery and detect the leads being connected to trigger a detonation, even without a USB 5v power, or detection current.

I would suggest some form of rail guide and a relay to push the drive into said USB extension cord port, then powering it up.

*Chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

Re: Maybe, just maybe

If HP pulled that trick of selling at cost on their ink cartridges... "the world gets to see how much a $[#] inkjet cartridge really cost and the obscene profits made simply by the name on the ink tank".

(just to roll it back into IT)

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

John Deere and Apple.

Finally that icon is relevant again, because both annoying companies intercepted when Louis Rossmann picked up the Right to Repair crowd about Apple (the fact that he repairs iphones despite Apple blocking him at every chance), and a handful (more than that) of disgruntled John Deere customers showed up on the same RTR meeting.

Just a reminder.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

I was expecting he'd compiled his own OS.

Well, if the man created C, I was kinda hoping he'd have his own WIP pet project OS.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Don't forget the ID10T error!

Nobody mentioned the ID10T error, but I didn't reach the end of the comments yet, so there it is.

NASA fixes solar observation spacecraft by turning it off and turning it on again

I think Mr. Bradley said: "I may have invented [the three-finger salute], but Bill made it popular".

Call an ambulance for that burn.

Re: shutdown -r now

"shutdown -r -f -t 0" is my favorite. It also murders anything hanging on windows and preventing a reboot. Not including -t 0, the system will add 10 seconds or such on its own.

IBM satellites.

I wouldn't mind having 3 distinct bolted-on panels with buttons labeled CTRL, ALT and DEL behind them on the external surface of any spacecraft. Preferably one within reach of opposable thumbs and 2 gloved fingers.

Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?

HP 48GX

I miss my HP 48GX with the game Columns played sideways, fully customizable universal Remote Control that used the IR transceiver, and an Italian version of Poker, plus a full blown text editor.

Taking a break from thermodynamics lessons and reading "Doppia Coppia": priceless.

All of it from 3x AAA batteries that lasted months, the best keyboard ever devised for a portable device, and a monochrome LCD.

My college didn't demand the Texas Instruments equivalent, it was agnostic, but people chose the HP48GX due familiarity from the brand and easy to find on the grey market.

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

No good deed goes unpunished...

...But you can charge through the nose for them.

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

DOS boot chip?

Is there a way to load an OS from a rom chip these days? Something you can only physically change?

If it gets corrupted by malware, just yank the chip out and replace with a clean one. Then, with all storage devices cutoff, flip a physical DIP switch on the motherboard to read-only and then tell it to wipe all storage boot sectors it finds or load cleaning tools.

Something that can't be tampered eletronically, and then flips the switch back to accept a clean modern OS install bypass, then it can be locked again to read-only for that single OS checksum signature.

I don't know, having a read-only onboard OS with a DIP switch seems like a good idea. You could even load a second BIOS with the solid read-only OS onboard.

I think some vintage machines had DOS onboard once upon a time, but if it worked like this somebody would have made it at this point.

Boffins concoct interference-busting radios

Noise cancelling headphones

I thought for a second his RF tuner was screaming back the frequencies that were causing interference in the opposite wave, like a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

(phew, glad it isn't)

Because that would work fine with regulatory agencies... (no it wouldn't, and jamming is illegal outside a war and very specific siuations, I assume)

Please carry on.

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

BOFH tampering..

... you know, instead of going to a dealership, it locks the user inside and proceeds to move at high speeds on the wrong way of an Interstate... while disabling the forward collision sensors...

Unless things change, first zettaflop systems will need nuclear power, AMD's Su says

Nvidia...

If you have seen the latest Nvidia GPUs (and AMDs too, for that matter), they already need nuclear power to run, have an issue with melting cables, have coolers several times larger than the board themselves... and don't fit in any case.

People joke that the boards should have 110V sockets straight on them. And they have the room to fit TWO sockets, in any orientation.

Things have already gone stupid, at least since last year.

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

Reddit.

There is an entire subreddit dedicated to malicious compliance.

r/MaliciousCompliance needs a beer served cold in a pint to accompany the reading. And lots of hours to waste.

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: I'm gonna borrow a friend's story here. I wish this wasn't true.

My old man referred to these as "chicken feet".

When one rod may not work, you add another three. And those were sufficient for a ground home installation if large enough..

Re: I'm gonna borrow a friend's story here. I wish this wasn't true.

Saying "May the wrath of God strike me down if I am lying" is a bad idea at your Church at this moment, right?

I'm gonna borrow a friend's story here. I wish this wasn't true.

So, back in the 80's. Company that integrated PCs. Expanding.

He was an Eletrical Engineer, helping with the expansion. Raised floors. Assembly lines for 50+ people. Wrist-straps all around. Everything being installed. He notices something very, very very crucial: the ground lines for the wrist straps were the same for the LIGHTNING RODS.

Take a moment. Read that again. Wipe your desk, you just spilled on.

He asks the responsible for that part of the project, which promptly dismiss it (!?!?). "What? Ground is ground!". He takes it to the higher-up in the Sparky Department. Cue the largest chewing he's ever heard in his life, AND him being put in charge of every. single. object. that. man. ever. authorized. The fact that man and everybody that worked in previous projects with him were still breathing was a major cause of rejoice and soiled pants.

He had to go through everything in order to avoid the recreation of Benjamin Franklin's experiment in mass scale, plus every other building that man ever worked on. The unnamed walking manslaughter sparky was promptly fired and was never heard of again.

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

Daemons?

Oh, you could run daemons on Twitter? Neat.

The quake warning bot thing looked interesting.

Perhaps somebody should put one up when the Metacritic score from gamers for a new game is above 9.0 and it has no microtransactions.

Castrol immerses itself deeper into liquid cooling with researcher

Re: Not huge news as just announcing a link with a research group

AIOs have been known to run for 2,3, even 5 years without any maintenance more complicated than dusting the radiator fans.

Very few brands showed further signs of deterioration, because their fluids and metals were incompatible and caused clogging due to galvanic corrosion. All outside of user's responsibility of maintenance.

JayZTwoCents youtube channel showed some disgusting green-gooed copper plates of such failed products...

Lab coat... because yuck.

Re: Not huge news as just announcing a link with a research group

Watercooling is already a thing for PC home users, but either in custom closed loops or and All-in-ones. The newer performance chips are nearly impossible to cool with just air. You just can't evict 200W out of a postage stamp without some sort of fluid radiator anymore. Noctua holds the keys to the last air cooler of its kind for PC enthusiasts, and the thing is ginormous and more expensive than an AIO that uses a radiator and 2 fans of 120mm that you can attach to any free surface of a desktop case. Ask any PC gamer. You can buy off-the-shelf gaming pcs with all-in-one watercooling, no questions asked. They might doubt your sanity if you ask for a plain fan to cool the new generation from both Intel and AMD.

Enthusiasts already tried submerged cooling, and the fluids were... less than optimal. As in, too viscous and making a mess if you ever decided to remove the gear from the fish tank where you submerged them.

HOWEVER, I understand they are developing new fluids with low viscosity, and no electrical conductivity, making them more serviceable, and I think that yes, they will find a market in high density applications...

...but nobody will want to service large aquariums with their datacenters floating inside them if it can be helped. In fact, I find the opposite more plausible, large companies seeking chips with great performance per watt, and simply turn the costs of their servers down because the cooling system already installed will barely turn on.

Former Facebooker alleges Meta drained users' batteries to test apps

Beta tester? Hello?

They should have run this in double-blind tests with volunteers, or beta testers.

Steam has beta tester flags for this reason.

As wafer demand dries up, foundry revenues head for a cliff, we all celebrate

NVIDIA has the market cornered.

The latest and best GPUs are overpriced, and will continue to do so until NVIDIA reaches some semblance of ROI.

Good thing for NV with the prices drop, they will get soaring sky-high profit margins per unit.

If and only if AMD offers some bang-for-buck cards they will drop prices, otherwise no.

And to top it off, they have almost complete monopoly of the market, which makes it ever harder for AMD to make waves.

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

VPN for DNS

Looking from outside, in a hot take, and before my morning coffee, it looks like a VPN tunnelling made for DNS requests: obfuscate the contents of the DNS request so it can't be tracked / spoofed / tampered.

PS. we need a coffee cup or tea symbol.

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Explosive demonstration

I heard of one steam turbine in South Africa where the blades decided to leave the building and get encrusted 3m deep into concrete columns.

Considering they were something in the 2 - 5m width range and were spinning at exactly 3000 rpm, their mass was just a multiplier.