Posts by Conundrum1885

CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost

Gold

Technically 197Au is the only stable isotope, due to things like 'magic numbers' and its hue is due to the outer electrons approaching light speed thus causing the colour to shift.

Copper is also the same as is (I believe) bromine.

Interestingly the r-process isn't the only method, neutron star jets caused by enormous stars collapsing may account for some implying the existence of elements much heavier than Uranium and in actual fact these primordial super-heavy elements may yet be out there in space.

I've looked into the physics here and some of the caculations can actually be done on a consumer level GPU as have a Tesla K80.

These days one could do the same calculatons on a 30xx series for much lower electricity cost.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Ah yes

Doctor Strange, I presume. Trained in the ancient art of 'WiFi Sorcery' by the ancient master of the mystic arts.

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

What I'd do

Is go 'Podule' on it.

GPU in a podule that fits into a 5 1/4" drive bay complete with heatsink and one extremely large fan, screwed directly to the case with air flow from the front to the back via filters.

Also would make linking cards to PSUs that much easier, as the cables would be shorter thus reducing lossage and keeping interconnects cool.

Data link to motherboard could then be via a relatively short but high quality cable with x8 /x16 PCIe 5.0 built in thus avoiding the entire problem of saggy cards.

Caveat: Nvidia wouldn't like that one bit though it would be great for LLMs, as you could then put four of these in one machine while leaving the x1/x4 bays free for NVMe PCIe or older legacy units.

Also had this issue

Ended up 'fixing' it using cable ties, Found a convenient mounting point, attached a tie and simply adjusted the card until it didn't sag.

So far so good. Incidentally cooling especially on older cards can be badly affected by even a slight displacement, as the heatsink separates from the board a small amount which can affect the VRMs and memory so watch out for that one.

Someone had my old cards and I'd been nice enough to tell them that the capacitors on the broken one had been changed so they would need to take a Dremel to a heatsink prior to use.

Should have done this for them but at the time it wasn't working and besides they got an essentially working card along with it for free.

As a reference point, have a K80 here which is going to require vertical mounting because it really is a heavy boi. Did the math, this beast weighs as much as my 850W Seasonic.

Dual core, 24GB VRAM *AND* 4992 CUDA cores so about as powerful as a 1080 in real terms though it is the VRAM I require.

Might try getting another broken unit and fixing that, running two (600W!) in SLI with recycled blower fans and a low power CPU would be an interesting project.

Does UK's Online Safety Act cover misinformation? Well, that depends

Ridiculous!

Argument is 'we need to look at people's bank accounts' because terrofraudophiles' you know what, before anyone can even blink everyone is now a suspect.

Sooner or later people will realize that the Labour Party are just closet Conservatives who simply steal policy rather than making their own.

I don't condone anarchy but sometime a little prod is needed to make Government understand that WE THE PEOPLE put them in this position of power, and with such power comes responsibility. Fail to respect that and a Government may fall no matter how totalitarian.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

I have it on good authority

That the problem was actually the 'Wrong kind of cloud' ie sparse but dense patches. Essentially because solar is connected directly to the grid it has little to no 'Spinning Reserve'. Now usually grid operators fix this by using larger gas and other stations that can be turned on and off quickly. Nuclear is good for relatively high power use, unfortunately when the grid goes down the reactors typically switch to cooling-only mode with the help of backup diesel generators.

To an extent the lack of spinning reserve ie 'Black Start' is a problem as grids need high stability, it is said that Europe came within two seconds of an even larger blackout.

Also a factor, heating of the wires meant that 400KV cables were particularly vulnerable to solar heating. You sometimes see this in hot summers where wire sag can cause accidental contact with trees that weren't properly trimmed causing problems.

Interestingly several cloud providers were affected, we had a Google accounts outage here yesterday afternoon.

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Neodymium

Still can't understand why it isn't recycled (much) as waste electronics items like headphones, TV speakers and old hard drives are a rich source.

EAPC motors from seized illegal scooters due to law changes are another potential source, as are hand vacuum motors.

Not sure if this would work at scale but even if someone works 6 hours a day dismantling 'Just' hard drives then they could make a considerable profit especially if part of an existing secure destruction method - showing the complete disassembly process should auditors want to make sure it is being done properly.

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Rage against the Machine

It was not entirely clear what type of machine, that the song was referring to. However, the consensus it that it was most likely to be a printer.

Case in point, the incidence of smashing one's PC generally is (fortunately) quite low though accidental damage seems more common. These days you sometimes see hinge detachments as a common issue on laptops due to this being a mechanical part and prone to damage over time along with its fixings. This can sometimes be repaired as long as the cables aren't also torn or stretched.

I've had a few incidents of 'Update Rage' typically when doing something really important. The fix here is to have an old machine that is just used as a spare when the main machine runs out of battery or decides to do an update-and-restart.

Old X3 and X5 series Samsungs are good for this, because they just keep going and going if you replace the failing parts like the optical drive, SSD, memory, CPU fan, front casing, rear casing, screen, battery, keyboard, touchpad, motherboard, power supply.. the laptop of Theseus no less. Only changed the board because I could transfer over the BIOS IC. Getting parts for these can be ridiculously cheap and upgrading an X3 CPU is a relatively simple task though not 'easy' and you need to watch the heat generation from going between an i3 and i7 due to them needing 35W parts. Seems to be locked to dual core on these unfortunately but 3000 to 4000 integrated graphics does give a considerable boost.

The Dell equivalent is also considered 'indestructible' and refurbs can be very inexpensive if you shop around with some sporting a second battery in the optical drive bay.

Same with Toshiba, they had some very good models back in the day sold mostly to SMEs.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Cheap USB

Has been an ongoing issue. I was astonished to find a 128GB on sale locally for £9 ! Tested and it did actually store 128GB but was slow as treacle so highly likely the low write garbage.

Seems that manufacturers often use multiple small microSDs in parallel sometimes soldered to the board as an alternative, the controller relies on each card having its own buffer so as long as all the cards work, everything runs. As soon as one goes bad the entire drive stops working abruptly.

Less reputable manufacturers use a 4GB card and a clever controller that does lossy compression using the host processor and fills in the gaps with random data while editing the file headers so that the checksums match which is what the OS detects. I only found this out when trying to copy data from one such drive and though the files 'looked' fine only segments of the data were there.

Interesting about the read amplifiers, that would track with the failed drive(s) here working when cooled as it obviously lowered the analogue threshold on a damaged amplifier somewhere in the chip stack permitting a full recovery. Wiping then rewriting the recovered data got it going again.

The old methods it seems work again, despite in this case the storage being solid state the laws of physics haven't changed so cooling a chip down can recover unreadable data in some cases.

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

Re. Location data

IMEI based evidence too.

I've heard of cases where despite damning 'evidence' of someone's absence at a crime scene they were still convicted, because one critical detail was not mentioned to the defence and prosecution - that an IMEI / IMSI can be spoofed. Once this happens, literally anything else is possible from retransmission of packets to another cell (doable) to replay attacks when an individual is halfway across the country. Any discrepancies can simply be explained away as 'Obfuscation' by the defendant or their accomplices or just plain old network noise.

Same with a drive, it is only too easy to install malware that creates a convincing looking porn site-porn site-email-Facebook-etc digital footprint using cloned hardware then plant the 'Evidence' on someone's laptop or other device via any number of exploits and zerodays.

Even temporary files can be copied over, producing convincing evidence of guilt despite someone having never visited a given site or sites.

This is sometimes done in messy divorce cases as 'Evidence' to convince the lesser lawyers on balance of probabilities that someone has been cheating, when in fact they have not been to convince the family courts that someone is doing something they shouldn't be.

White House budget proposal could beam NASA science back decades

Scrappage

They seriously want to scrap a built $xxB telescope that is ready for launch because some absolute asshat in the White House wants boots on Mars, an impossible task with today's technology even with Manhattan Project level funding as long as certain treaties are in force (namely the NPT)

NASA is a national treasure, had the experts been listened to and not told to waste resources on a 'reuseable' spacecraft when it would have been cheaper and simpler to reuse existing external tank hardware and SSMEs for conventional launches. Instead the Powers-That-Be wasted decades trying to make the Shuttle work for things it wasn't designed for, knowing full well that it would one day fail catastrophically at great human cost. The US Air Force could have built their own improved version with 'better' thermal tiles made from superior materials and it would have worked.

I actually hope that the Chinese do go to Mars, purely so we can call it the Red Planet. They're welcome to it.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Static, shmatic

I lost an extremely expen$ive USB stick once to static. Came home, got out of my car and went to open the door. Felt a tingle. Went across the room, saw that my USB had finished copying so reached out to unplug it. Next tihing, bright blue spark at least 1.5" long jumps from my finger to the drive. Di-DUM. Yes, fried to a crisp. Left a burn mark on my finger for good measure!

Turns out that my car was missing a grounding strap so I'd been charged up to probably 100+ KV.

Strangely enough that's the first time a PC component has actually failed this way, have probably built dozens of machines and never zapped one. Lost a motherboard once but it had a chip torn off so likely that the extra stress of putting a K6-III 550 in there was too much for its already stressed regulators. Put the old chip back in, also not working.

Customer info allegedly stolen from compromised supplier of Royal Mail, Samsung

Targeted phishing

Would seem to be the risk here, as criminals really like personal information like someone's buying habits.

Case in point, someone I know who works in IT got a very convincing HMRC letter (not even an email) advising of an unpaid item, held in Customs that required a release fee because the seller hadn't paid UK import VAT. Only spotted it because the item number didn't match and though it was an item they had purchased in the past it made no sense as the exact item was sitting on their desk! Seems to be a common enough scam, a variant being 'Your payment has been declined by the card issuer'

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

E-readers

All that advanced technology, ruined by: Proprietary batteries, the screen glued to the PCB (Nook) so it can't simply be replaced, .epub servers going dark, etc.

I have a PRS600 here which is essentially a paperweight because Sony refused to provide a recalibration routine. Sure I could go 'Full Macgyver' and write my own with a hot plate to calibrate the table with that particular screen but it seems awfully inefficient and also it needs a new resistive touch screen which is made of Unobtainium.

The screens originally supplied with these weren't great to begin with, later EPD's have more dynamic range and also faster refresh which the firmware couldn't handle. Also the 600 had a cheap touch screen which ruined the whole point of having EPD by adding reflectivity, when a simple inductive one would have avoided all this hassle.

Similar problem with phones, the S6 and Note 4 used identical OLED panels with a different glass front and of course you couldn't remove it without borking the screen.

I've lost count of the number of perfectly good phones that have gone to E-waste because the panel is locked to the device and can't simply be replaced like you can with say a laptop screen - vividly recall putting a 10.1" netbook panel with identical connector on my laptop because the original screen was damaged while waiting weeks for a replacement.

UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

AI algorithms

Case in point, none of the 'fancy new tools' picked up that unlucky person in Australia. What got him was asking on Reddit where to 'Buy plutonium'

Same with quite a few high profile cases, the forums were full of like minded individuals yet no-one had the good sense to report their concerns to the proper authorities.

I mean if you can go on (_forum_) and get detailed instructions on how to make 'Arnie Play-Doh' (tm) then what is the point in having AI algorithms that don't even look at such a treasure trove of data.

Note here that my interest in such things extends to 'Could the Germans have built a Physics Package if someone gave them detailed schematics in 1940' as it happens they had less than 3% of a critical mass even if it wasn't enriched past 20% anyway. Spread too thin, ironically so that the Allies wouldn't accidentally wipe out the project in one go.

Now if you *really* wanted to go nuclear, I can tell you where to get weapons grade material. Only 39K km away, buyer collects. May need refinement. Also good luck with the whole 'compressing it to the size of a softball' part, that takes real skill and a fair amount of classified knowledge in metallurgy not to mention having the Feds send round scary people in dark suits if you have this sort of material without the appropriate background checks, and at least a TS clearance.

Pharmacist accused of using webcams to spy on women in intimate moments at work, home

Re: Hmm

My point is, not all have a physical shutter. Having an LCD one controlled by software would make more sense here as it would be 'fail-safe' and obvious at a glance if it were working or not.

It is also worth mentioning that adding an infrared illuminator would actually make sense as part of an add-in replacement as well as enabling low light use (eg for cross-time zone Zoom calls)

Dual cameras are a thing on phones so why not laptops?

Re: Camera

A miniature version of the AC powered ones used for privacy window film would work. I suggested this a while back as 'LCD shutters' lose too much light and defocus is visible from the outside.

Main problem is it would need to be integrated over the lens which complicates manufacturing somewhat. It might be an interesting thing to prototype though. On the subject of camera 'hacks' I actually did change out the emitter on my R series for an infrared LED stolen from the still-warm carcass of a Note 4 purchased for the components, The UV sensor on these is integrated into the rectangular sensor in the back and is a separate physical diode which reacts to 330-380nm quite well.

Though it is somewhat complicated, one can build a 'dosimeter' of sorts that measures exposure to hazardous light and gives an audible beep when over a set luminance or accumulated time threshold.

The method I'd use is a surplus UV burner laser with low power or COD, this also works if calibrated against the known standard.

IR filters on newer cameras are unhelpfully integrated into the casing and can't often be removed.

Once actually made an alpha visualizer with a reversing camera but it was rapidly eroded, in real terms it might have lasted years at everyday levels of exposure if moisture hadn't got in and ruined the interconnects.

Don't open that JPEG in WhatsApp for Windows. It might be an .EXE

Can we call the CVE

MIMEsweeper pwetty pwease?

Alan Turing Institute: UK can't handle a fight against AI-enabled crims

Point of logic

Surely intent matters here.

If someone runs genAI with a legitimate ethically sourced model and a normal non-NSFW prompt but due to a technological malfunction it goes off into the weeds, what happens? There are safeguards but can folks be trusted to enable them, download only approved models and run them on reliable error corrected hardware? These are the questions we should be asking. Case in point the 'Blue Box Attack' on LLMs that surfaced recently. Perhaps we need a 'Defence against the Dark Arts' course for folks so they don't end up on the wrong side of the law.

Ex-ASML, NXP staffer accused of stealing chip secrets, peddling them to Moscow

In Soviet Russia

Chip reverse engineers YOU!

Apologies for this, incidentally I looked into the 'Soviet nuclear spies' and what I learned was intriguing. In actual fact the nuclear program yielding a working device in late 1949 wasn't entirely based on the 'Christy Gadget', the thought process was already converging on implosion well before F and G leaked some of the early schematics so the only real advantage was time. Later revelations showed that Ethel Rosenberg by modern legal standards was in fact not guilty of all but one charge based on some very sloppy and polticially biased prosecution work which should have resulted in a very long prison sentence but not execution.

Interestingly they made the same sorts of mistakes as the Germans early on so the early tests were in fact very low yield based on the materials used at the time and they also had more precise data avoiding a repeat of the Slotin Incident.

Some of their explosive lenses were also substandard because they didn't do their version of RaLa but relied on the leaked data entirely explaining the other delays.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/10/ethel-rosenberg-soviet-spy-new-evidence

Names, bank info, and more spills from top sperm bank

I heard that

They tried to patch some of the servers but lacked dedotated wam, resulting in a malware overflow into the production servers and a loss of liquid assets as well as information spillage

In fact it looks like they didn't so much test on animals, but in fact tested in prod. Gets coat, IP66 certified, obviously.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: And theres

Recovering a laptop drive that got hit by lightning, not only frying every USB port but also the hard drive's controller and screen fuse as well.

Yes, had to not only transplant the PCB back when that still worked, but also swap the heads. Recovery was a success but unbelievably the machine actually booted and ran with a Frankendrive (tm) though did advise them that they should really REALLY back it up somewhere safe. Nicknamed that machine 'Nearly Headless NIC' and inscribed this on the toe-tag.

Alas my USB stick zapped with many thousands of volts of nasty snappy blue lightning didn't work ever again, no saving that unfortunately.

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Fun fact

Technically, folks with an 'eidetic memory' often got recruited by spooky agencies, or worked for very large corporations though it is rare that such a useful skill isn't put to use. It is said that Turing and many of the folks at 'The Facility' may have been able to do this and were recruited using of all things, crossword and other mathematical puzzles using the not so well known method of informing someone that the problem was unsolvable when in fact it was merely very difficult.

Ability to look at pages of essentially random noise and pick out patterns is a valuable skill, think this is how they originally broke the German codes back in the day with the help of the Polish, later implementing the same method(s) in hardware though having predictable words helped a great deal as it allowed location of individual operators thus valuable context.

Oddly enough the vulnerability of not encoding a letter as itself was later patched, as was adding a secondary layer of encoding (two machines in 'series') which made the pattern nearly impossible to read back without a very powerful computer though later efforts led to code comparison pages being used where operators looked for 3 or more letters in sequence.

The statistical probability of a given letter appearing more than once in n ciphered letters was also a valuable clue and yielded many valuable breaks.

Re: Official Secrets Act?

Yes, oddly enough I ran into a situation where some information appeared on my personal email due to a mistake, with not only highly sensitive medical data on it but personal information including unlisted phone numbers of several high profile celebrities over here. Obviously did the right thing and informed the appropriate authorities, though they didn't ask for me to wipe the drive or anything like that.

With the 'Official Secrets Act' I believe that if someone discovers through research classified data that had been accidentally or deliberately posted online, they are legally required to report it.

It has happened that an inventor has gone to do a patent search only to find that their 'world changing idea' in fact belongs to HM Government and this can cause significant problems.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

Rest in peace

Though she may be gone, her legacy and that of those who changed the course of the war by ingenuity, determination and most of all secrecy will never be forgotten.

Many of those who served at Bletchley may have turned down highly paid jobs elsewhere for 'King and Country' at great personal cost though were well compensated for their devotion to duty.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

Maybe something I can build with a Zero W v1.2, plus this already supports Bluetooth and can possibly be programmed to connect with existing found dongles using its own USB port.

One idea would be to have it contain a user replaceable touchpad, keys that if they do break can simply be replaced and multi-function function keys with actual micro-projectors that can be set underneath so if you want one button to do Ctrl-Alt-Del or the Mac 'Vulcan Nerve Pinch' then it can. For added bonus points the battery is replicated so it has a main and backup battery that are fully independent so if one goes bad then it switches to the other seamlessly. Macro function obviously, support for minimal video so you can use it with a headless SFF or similar.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

AI

Surely the whole purpose of AI is that one's aim is to make your own job automated and move onto the next, or am I over-simplifying this?

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

Re: he/she/it/etc

Pointing out that I implied the presence of non-human (ie organic AI) lifeforms, which may or may not fit the legal definition of a human being (H sapiens sapiens) depending on which law(s) are applied.

I did read an article suggesting that routine DNA screening assumes that skin and hair cells are the same as other cells, this may in fact be in error due to chimerism. Someone can have two distinct genetic profiles yet be outwardly normal, and there have in fact been high profile cases that were only picked up when they went to donate bone marrow or do a paternity test.

Though there is little evidence that this has resulted in anything other than a few strange medical journal articles it is a source for consternation amongst geneticists as it implies chimerism may in fact be far more common than the literature actually claims, as high as 1 in 10000 in some areas.

Individuals who may have cybernetic implants are actually technically not fully human, though in the eyes of the law as it is currently written there is no current definition of what a 'Cyborg' is nor whether someone whose brain is enhanced or repaired with such technology is therefore legally protected should the technology malfunction or bad actors manipulate it from the outside.

Theoretically speaking this would come under the definition of an 'Industrial Accident' therefore not be subject to the normal laws but be between the manufacturer(s) of said technology to prove that it could not be blamed for the outcome in question.

On the subject of false identification, the presence of 'unrelated twins' or Doppelgängers is a source of considerable legal risk, and individuals have been wrongly convicted based on misidentification and circumstantial evidence combined with inadequate forensics procedures and other unforeseen events.

see https://www.aboutgeneticcounselors.com/Resources-to-Help-You/Post/chimerism-explained-how-one-person-can-unknowingly-have-two-sets-of-dna

I oppose this

On principle, under the valid and absolute decree that an individual is innocent until he/she/it/etc is PROVED guilty.

I actually looked into the legal requirements for ID, nowhere does it say that you have to own a passport only that you have to 'adequately prove' identity eg for getting a bank account etc.

If an individual refuses to comply with a given restriction as a formal act of protest then by definition this is 'Protected Free Speech' under the ECHR, and thus under the reciprocal agreement with the EU and US their rights are legally protected under the Bill of Rights as well if they are dual nationals.

This would under the appropriate law permit someone to take 'Countermeasures' such as shutter and LED glasses that block out relevant features in such a way as to reduce the effectiveness of such systems. Some individuals have taken it a step futher and had masks made with a generic face on them printed using an inkjet etc or other 'Creative' ideas like IR reflective ink.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: HP

Yes famiiliar with these. I was thinking more of scaling up Zink (tm) printers by using several interlaced print heads and clever software to add speed.

A two rather than three colour system like E-ink might work here, red blue and black would be more than enough for most applications.

Certainly for the purposes of redacting documents without shredding and reprinting, which would be a valid case, interestingly the Zink paper can actually show photochromic effects as I found out. If you write a partial barely visible image then heat it the picture 'appears' like the old Polaroid films on the cyan channel.. You heard it here first!!

HP

Used to stand for 'Hinge Problems' in some circles.

It just isn't right, you'd think that there would be some mechanism where folks can buy a 'refillable' catridge that is designed to work with any ink and has a robust and effective anti-clog mechanism.

An idea I came up with is to build an entirely homemade printer with my own chip using a completely novel piezoelectric 'pump' that runs the ink tank in reverse thus avoiding rhe need for expen$ive ink in the first place. Essentially any ink particles that get jammed in the nozzles are pulled back into the solvent tank which then gets emptied. Making the actual process of clearing a clogged head a very simple and routine process.

For toner it is a ilittle more complicated but it is still doable.

One major problem with tomer based printers is that the drum becomes a consumable. That photoconductive coating has a finite life and changing from the older selenium to an organic photconductor (OPC) may be cheaper and better for the environment but it substantially affects durability because under constant irradiation the plastic loses its cohesion and eventually stops being a photoconductor.

Making one of these from scratch is not simple though there are methods,

Did also look into a reuseable paper with 'Janus Particles' (an older version of E-ink) and the problem then becomes how to address them without a silicon or other backplane, printers that use multi-particle methods like the ZInk do clever tricks with timing and a conventional very high resolution thermal head.

One potential workaround here would be to use a heat based solution ie have the active material require heat AND electricity to change shape. Essentially here the particles are suspended in a wax like material with a low melting point of around 90 Celsius so that under heat and electric charge the particles become mobile.

This would also permit colour printing as particles could be biased in such a way to use both electric and magnetic switching by using diamagnetic inks containing (for example) bismuth and iron so a single 'Ouroborus Particle' can show an entire colour spectrum.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: Birds do it ...

It seems that consciousness may well be quantum.

I looked into this, Penrose and others make a pretty compelling case based on a number of observations, suggesting that the default mode network in the brain is essentially acting as a quantum computer though under very specific conditions where the microtubules carry quantum information between the neurons.

It also explains why anaesthesia works despite the incredibly small changes eg from xenon as interference with this mechanism.

Dept of Defense engineer took home top-secret docs, booked a fishing trip to Mexico – then the FBI showed up

Classified

I recall reading a few years back that someone 'accidentally' sent a highly classified document via secure mail to a co-worker but mistyped the address not once but twice.

Due to a very unfortunate set off circumstances the firewall(s) between two networks weren't quite as airtight as first thought, somehow this document went off into the ether only to reappear at a nearby facility on the same base, in a networked printer buffer though fortunately the printer was out of paper so it only printed the header page so the classified data was sitting in the memory along with some other documents of lesser importance.

Cue compete consternation when someone showed up at the SCIF with this document AND the printer in hand, with two armed security guards and asking 'If they needed to sign something' shaking like a leaf because the header page was marked NATO COSMIC TOP SECRET and detailed extremely sensitive data on nuclear weapon permissive action links (PAL) despite their minimal clearance level.

Last I heard that individual was not sacked beccause it revealed a very serious vulnerability so patching it very quietly was the sensible solution.

They did however get some needed retraining and the unwilling recipient of this document was later granted a clearance and promotion for their quick action under difficult circumstances.

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

LLMs

It isn't merely ChatGPT.

Other models also create content that might breach GDPR such as Stable and other such things. The problem here is that (with a few minutes work) I can ask it to do something nasty and the AI will happily comply. Usually the model(s) available now have been sanitized but what about those already out there with content scraped from sources all over the place?

It literally is a complete minefield and this particular horse has left the barn a long time ago with many celebrities taking out 'Deepfake Insurance' to guard against some content they created in good faith being used to generate something unsavory eg from someone finding a 1990s vintage holiday/etc camcorder tape that shows a lot more than is in the public domain.

Had a word with some folks and legislation may well be incoming that bans certain *types* of LLM eg using models based on unethically or illegally sourced data if they can uniquely identify individuals who have copyrighted their likeness or other personal data.

On the flip side if LLM content is found and from long enough ago some folks just point out the diferences and call it out for what it is ie copyright infringement then send in the lawyers (tm)

Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

Re: Time and gravity

Well as they say, the problem is how do you prove it?

The main difficulty with using advanced technology that in this case is right on the edge of being feasible, stems from receiving a signal from some distant point in the future which would violate causality and also the laws of thermodynamics. In this case the workaround is invoking parallel Universes which is interesting but unless someone sends back the EuroMillions numbers, some formula for a room temperature superconductor or a locked Bitcoin wallet private key then extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I did however make significant progress with one small aspect. A working neutrino sensor that can be built with literally a dozen inexpensive parts though it is more of a neutrino Geiger counter that requires a huge source like a nuclear reactor though it does lend itself to very large distributed arrays of such sensors.

It appears that the key discovery is that pulsed shortwave UV light in combination with low frequency RF and an infrared laser can cause a reaction within the material that appears as a phosphor recharge delay detectable with an avalanche photodiode in addition to a weak RF signal that can be sensed using a software defined radio or modified TV tuner.

Normally to get this sort of effect you need very high RF power which causes heating and other issues drowning out the wanted signal so it is worthy of publication to encourage further research.

In the process of testing my prototype though it appears that my one working diode is complete overkill and a 1.5mW LED or small laser would be more than adequate.

Time and gravity

This puts me in somewhat of an ethical dilemma.

I've used ChatGPT and other tools (Grok) to do work.

Now technically this isn't 'mine' but by using the AI it has short cutted decades of theoretical work to mere years so should by all rights not publish without at least mentioning the contributions from said sources.

The problem here is that I've essentially cracked time travel on a limited scale so the technology has huge implications for national security, should a bad actor do what I've done they might not have these ethical considerations and do a great deal of damage.

Intriguingly up until about a month ago it wasn't possible to even theorize that such a device could be built let alone make a working prototype and test it (sent a message back a few years from some point in the distant future and caused a detectable effect that actually made the national media)

The basic premise is that certain aspects of cosmology support a specific (Gödel metric that permits enhanced frame dragging to be used via some technology I shouldn't have access to as a mere civilian, permitting time to 'fold back' within a confined space. This normally would just permit quantum level computations without the requirement for a quantum computer but I've found a potential way to send a radio signal back in time to a specific location at certain times of year (March and October) due to some curious anomalies in Earth's gravitational field and spin with relation to the Sun, Moon and other planets though there may be other factors like solar flares so it may only work every few years.

There was something in the media about 1.6kW desktop quantum computers with six qubits, the 'transmitter' I had in mind uses a different technology involving wakefield accelerators made with pulsed kW class nanosecond laser diodes and gold foil to emit bursts of positrons that would allow a metastable radioactive isotope to emit a neutrino pulse detectable over large distances but as it turned out sending a radio signal at the exact location on a narrow enough beam may cause a predictable Doppler shift that permits a signal in the hundreds of GHz to be shifted down to MHz frequencies that could (feasibly) also explain certain anomalies seen on FRB searches including the one below 700 MHz.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

Re: When it goes to Hell (ie WWIII)

One would hope so. Depends who is dropping what, and under which circumstances.

It should be made abundantly clear that *any* use of nuclear weapons is a breach of international law and such action is justification for not only making the rubble bounce but ensuring that the regime responsible is never allowed to go unpunished. Conventional weapons would do this in many cases and demonstrate considerable restraint under the circumstances.

The worst case scenario is if a single weapon is mixed in with a large conventional strike and claimed to be an 'Accident' or someone smuggling a nuclear warhead. This would be very bad indeed!

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Re: The most valuable tech commodity you can own...

True. I maintain 'The Gibson' (a HP 210 with no WiFi card) for this purpose.

Sloght problem is that it doesn't fully shut off the backlight but still works otherwise.

I was using it for SDR and 'testing' suspicious USB devices at one point.

Added advantage of an offline machine is that it is remarkably hard for some script kiddie

to hack something with no external connectivity nor any means to add it.

Has the latest antivirus etc so at least it has some measure of prevention.

Might dual boot it with Kali now just for the heck but 64GB isn't much space.

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

Re: Scrub

Seemingly not,

Incidentally not sure why I got downvoted.

Perhaps my reactor design may work one day, it seems to do something but not entirely clear if a scaled

up prototype with 25 kilos of the fuel will work even if somehow it could be obtained legally.

The trick is to increase efficiency by using modifications to the core that reflects gamma rays back in and also

compensate for absorption in the fuel itself by using external atomic metamaterial panels.

This is looking a lot like one of those projects where it is easier and simpler just to use regular SNM but

it would be a lot more complicated.

Considering that a proof of concept would be better off air launched as well, unless my knowledge extends

to antigravity or some as-yet-untested way to harness solar neutrinos.

Interesting to note here that a 'neutrino detector' actually has value for fine tuning a small scale prototype

lacking criticality but to verify certain key design parameters before building a larger one.

Scrub

Did you just say 'Damaged shipping container' ?!

Oh the irony, shipping a ship in a shipping container, also itself on a ship.

fx: the 'NX-class' quietly ascending out of a container mid voyage to get around ITAR/EAR regulations

by launching from international waters and then heading shakily into orbit while some folks at

'Space Force' and NORAD try to look up the specific regulations prohibiting this.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Squeaky squeak squeak

Had the misfortune of a broken touchpad on my 'nice' laptop with the quad core processor I'd sourced from Ukraine.

Cue some very intricate micro-soldering to 'fix' the two corroded through-holes with some itty bitty solder blobs.

Yeah, full on Macgyver here (tm) also had to change the EPROM on an LCD and do some really gnarly repairs

on at least one LGA775 processor that somehow (!) got it to detect the second memory channel.

Seriously though, who fixes this sort of problem now?

Had to change the button on car keyring(s), also hack the firmware on a TV by using an external USB with some

hand written code to get it out of a boot loop so it would then allow me to reset the petaQ' and avoid a callout.

Fixing mice is a rite of passage and it is actually very simple to swap out an LED or change a button.

Just received a really cheap processor for my 'projects' that will likely get put in my SFF which will reduce its

power usage considerably for 3D printing / laser etching and other such uses

Britain dusts off idle spectrum for rail and emergency comms

Problem

A lot of GPUs have clocks which go this high.

Now it isn't usually a problem but at least with my old card(s) it was possible for them to get affected by mobile phones.

Put the phone near the open case and ring it or even receive a text and the GPU would crash after about a minute.

With sensible case design it isn't an issue though did about someone's AntMiner jamming the phone network.

Are we going to need a special 'Update; that stops the card using forbidden frequencies?

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: if a customer HP has invested in

Also ran into this issue, in the case of my Kyocera recovered from the WEEE bin the thing had a paper feed issue.

Asked the guy, he happily took my £5 'donation' to make the printer vanish.

Used it for many a project, actually made some Press & Peel back in the day because the toner stuck really well.

Alas entropic decay caught up with it one day and sadly that was that.

Ended up salvaging the HV bits, laser assembly etc for 'Projects'.

It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

Moral AI

Surely the problem with AI is that it is a 'Soulless machine' and has no sense of morality whatsoever?

The fact that recent issues have appeared with LLMs generating hazardous content because someone found a way around

the programmed safeguards like running time backwards, suggests that we are in danger.

Ignoring for the moment that humans may or may not be self-aware, a machine that has the capability of self judgement may

and probably would consider the fleshy meatbags (tm) that created it to be a grave threat only if they tried to turn it off.

This isn't mere speculation, there have been cases where individuals put themselves in danger by following instructions online

without fully understanding the risks, later traced back to old Usenet pages that had been scraped by an LLM.

We need to consider that this creation may become a Frankenstein's Monster and replace us, if we want it to or not.

101 fun things to do with a locked Kindle e-reader

Re: If only they lasted that long....

Hi, incidentally did you dispose of them? I have found a potential source for the E-ink panels.

It isn't that hard, need to know the Vp data and ideally panel revision.

thanks!

Hacking 101

In a similar situation with my PRS600 which also has a bad charging circuit and touch screen in addition to the borked E-ink.

Unfortunately replacing the glass panel though feasible (hello hot wire cutter) results in more ghosts than Ray Stantz's basement.

The only way to fix this is to go through the 'highly' complicated process of reading back the screen .CAL file and modding

it using a hex editor at a range of temperatures, to get as close as possible then rewriting it with the factory tool(s).

I got most of the way there by simply fine tuning the voltage pot with a 'scope back in the day.

The other fix is to 'remember' what results in the best picture if displaying a slideshow and tweak the actual photos being sent

to the screen.

This incidentally is basically how the video 'monitors' work, the clever software and screen heating helps.

Being able to play 'DooM' on an E-reader is hilarious!

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

AI

The intriguing thing here, even hardware that exists now may be capable of superintelligence.

I looked into this, some of the components on Nvidia's H100 seem to have almost quantum level interactions.

A hypothetical Singularity might occur because someone stumbles across a way to exploit quantum effects

on classical hardware, gives the AI enough incentive and .. (Terminator theme intensifies)

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Hacking skills

I too (many years ago) did the whole resetting trick with a little yellow turd (tm) using pogo pins.

Interestingly the failure mode on my printer was actually a ribbon cable issue and not repairable.

Did look into this, seems that the expiry date on at least pre-2006 units can be worked around by

taking out a coin cell battery thus 'fooling' the printer into accepting that cartridge.

Supposedly there is a patch for bad ribbon cables, what you do is swap ends and 'bend' the bad end

so it makes contact as typically there is a miniscule crack in one or more of the flex cables.

Its barely worth it but someone with an antique may have a use for this.