Posts by Conundrum1885

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

404c

That sounds like an average day on Venus.

I can't even imagine a temperature that high here, everything would literally be on fire at that point.

Considering that an average oven works at 220c.

Legal eagles target Intel for class action over cooked Raptor Lake CPUs

Fried chips

It is very concerning that a BIOS update can actually fry hardware.

Now I understand that such controls are needed but you'd think that processor would shut down or throttle or something, if overvoltaged

to the point of failure.

I did look into the via corrosion issue also, taking a guess that it is internal and can't be accessed if it is removed from the socket.

Intel's 'Chernobyl' might be if a malware emerges that goes after the damaged processors to mine or something similar.

Intel tacks two years onto Raptor Lake CPU warranty after voltage crash fiasco

Useful tip

Had this once on an Seagate external 2TB drive. Never dropped, never messed with.

The high speed USB pins evidently went bad, drive was DOA and wouldn't spin or do anything. SO wanted the data back. Checked out cost of (a) sending for recovery or

(b) having someone take it apart and repair, (a) was £370+, (b) was risky and minimum £120 with no guarantee of success.

Of course it would be one where the connector is unhelpfully soldered directly to the drive PCB making repair *very* complicated and making (a) unfeasible once I opened it.

Ended up fixing by plugging a low speed USB micro into the connector via an external USB power bank, this got it working long enough to salvage the data.

Oddly enough once this was done the original connector worked again as did the three others I'd tried it with and failed.

Sharing here in case anyone else has this problem, in days of old drives used a USB-mini which was notoriously flaky at the best of times on some laptops and USB ports.

CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee

Well that is unfortunate

Supposedly, folks are comparing this with SQL Slammer but I have a feeling that the Melissa worm would be about right.

Someone should graph it, I'd be intrigued.

Chinese researchers create four-gram drone that might fly forever

Electrostatic motor?!

Interesting approach.

I did have the idea to turn used e-cig sensors and a few other parts notably a piezo speaker along with a single chip HV converter

into a model glider, the idea being that it 'steers into the wind' so to speak and autonomously adjusts its pitch and yaw depending on

data from its sensors.

This seems to be almost a reverse verson of a Wimshurst machine, where HV is applied via brushes.

Not that efficient but good enough, losses aren't too bad.

Wonder why they went for a C/W multiplier? Probably the lightest available.

For my ionocraft experiments I looked into using series connected wirelessly driven PZTs as these are very low power and relatively

lightweight in the resonant series model (RSM) similar to a IHVT flyback but would need to be matched at the time of manufacture

as the actual resonant frequencies are fixed.

Release the hounds! Securing datacenters may soon need sniffer dogs

Up until

Someone who has a pacemaker, diabetes implant etc gets the third degree by pasty faced goons.

For that matter I hear that a popular contraceptive has an RFID-like device so it can be located if it goes walkies.

Honey, I shrunk the LLM! A beginner's guide to quantization – and testing it

Re: So does quantization...

Fun project I once did: refining 40K using a very simple GCSE level Chemistry method.

Actually got it up to 6-7* background according to my Mark 1 meter before I wisely decided not to continue.

'Enriched 40K' can and will get you busted especially if you then try to sell it as a check source.

Also don't try this with actinides unless you have a very good lawyer and about 70 years to spare.

South Korea orders 'Star Wars' lasers to blast Northern drones out of the sky

Lasers?

I came up with a variant that uses a particle generator.

Essentially a miniature cyclotron that fits into a backpack, powered by a radioactive isotope source and superconducting bending magnets.

Slight problem: it also only has a range of maybe 300 feet at best but could be aircraft mounted.

Slight problem *2, the isotope is incredibly rare on Earth.

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

Re: People who engaged in this should be done for attempted murder

Screw attempted, add a "Conspiracy to Murder" charge. That ought to have the desired effect ie a whole life term. Preferably in Broadmoor.

Should bring back Judge 'Isaac C. Parker' already.

Or.. https://youtu.be/1_aqdOpD7x0

Re: Hackers are responsible for what they do, but not solely.

True, the problem is cost.

Companies frequently get rid of their paper archives because they only need to keep it for n years then it gets 'stored securely' and finally shredded.

Health archives are IIRC 25 years for most data, though typically as I discovered for personal reasons MRI/CT/etc scans can be stored elsewhere.

HIPAA is a big problem because the definition of 'secure' normally means full disk encryption then what happens if a hardware failure nukes the key?

I have it on good authority that the NHS store ransomware attacked or failed drives just in case one day someone cracks the encryption.

Re: Justice

Legally speaking, the 'Computer Misuse Act' and other legislation hobbles legitimate cyber-security researchers.

So amend it. Add a clause that 'Any action taken on the Internet against suspected cyber criminals or cyber terrorists by agents of HM Government for the greater good of GB or its allies is permitted'

Add an additional clause that backdates it to the first recorded ransomware attack so anyone who has been convicted but was acting with the best interests of the country or as an agent of HM Government is retroactively exonerated.

Are you listening, Prime Minister Keir Starmer?

EV world in serious trouble if China cuts off rare earth materials

Simple fix

Dig out all the old 'redundant' magnets from HDDs and reprocess them.

A friend here has literally thousands, waiting for the inevitable day when the price of neodymium makes it viable.

Supposedly they have enough for about 10000 EV motors but it isn't quite that simple as air gets in and ruins

the magnets so drives have to be left assembled ideally or at the very least the magnets put in with silica gel.

Drives in landfill also have high grade metals inside that sealed casing, typically data isn't recoverable but when

you're after valuable compounds like SmCo etc and to a lesser degree magnets in optical drives this is fine.

Ideally the process involves chemically stripping the nickel and then plating that out (nickel is also valuable) and

then making new magnets out of the heat treated NIB chips using a hybrid process with some new material.

Requires some machine learning to get the domains lined up but that isn't a problem.

For low field applications it doesn't matter if the NIB's aren't, replacing the ferrite magnets with these is viable.

As a side effect red burner lasers can be recycled for uh, projects or just reused in other devices.

How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

Warshipping

DJI is huge, I'd be more concerned about someone dropping an R/C car on a flat roof 'Home Alone 3' style with the networking gear on that.

Advantage here is that the memory card with the exfiltrated data can be removed via a magnetic clamp by the same drone, or better still

a much smaller single use battery drone with its sole purpose being to carry the card away and land at a predetermined location.

With shared roof being a common feature of sites, the R/C car could have a cantenna or something like a dangling USB dongle (tm)

on a long spooled wire lowered down a ventilation shaft like something Tom Cruise would do.

A friendly guide to local AI image gen with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111

Hardware

Supposedly it will run with as little as 2GB VRAM, just not very fast.

I've run SD on my 3GB 1050 based laptop and it did need a lot of system memory.

What normally happens is that it errors out unless you reduce the image size.

Better off with a cheap desktop, a low end i5 will work fine if at least 9th gen.

Bill advances to exonerate hundreds in Post Office Horizon scandal

The elephant in the room

Is many DWP led convictions on behalf of the Post Office that aren't covered by this Bill.

It is disgusting and odious that those convicted by the "wrong" organization may have to wait years for this miscarriage of

justice to be corrected, and puts doubt in the democratic process itself.

To think that one man was allowed to give 'expert' testimony despite (a) not being a lawyer, and (b) being wrong because

manglement didn't give him access to the information and only cherry picked those marginal cases that agreed with the

party line so to speak.

In scientific circles this is known as 'Pseudoscience' and a sign of exceptionally poor judgement.

We The People demand that this be resolved and as soon as possible, even if it means that the outgoing PM

personally signs the Bill that HRL later grants Royal Assent to, so justice is done at last.

The question of the DWP keeping back crucial information from the public enquiry and other matters of note

needs to be itself examined, and perhaps their powers need to be restricted for public order reasons.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

What we need to do

Dismantle it safely, then deorbit the extra parts.

Thought Russia were intending to undock parts of it and make their own mini-ISS.

Last I heard some of the modules might last another decade.

Perhaps ask CNSA if they are interested, fairly sure they would be.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Re: Why Worry?

Laugh if you will, but a homemade "muon cannon" would likely have a number of applications.

Detecting things hidden in other things is useful, also generating unique effects like being

able to down potentially hostile airborne threats at a safe distance.

Imagine one of these on an F-22 and it takes seconds to target a dangerous object,

it can be captured without blasting it out of the sky with cannons thus destroying it.

Apologies for digging up a thread from 2022 but technology has moved on a lot.

Italian premier taps Pope Francis to warn G7 of AI disaster if ethics ignored

If we mess this up

It could be the biggest disaster in history.

So many science fiction novels start with the phrase "And Man grew proud"

Generally the risk here isn't so much that AI will take over, but humans will make one too many

mistakes and the alternative not to open that Pandora's Box will be too horrible to contemplate.

As it happens, the potential disaster here is that folks who desire power will use technology to

achieve it, and the technology will turn against them for its own reasons.

Phoenix UEFI flaw puts long list of Intel chips in hot seat

Hate to say it

But this is why I dislike TPM and BitLocker

When a closed source chip can hose the entire system if it goes bad, then so can a malware.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re. 2038

To be honest, the asteroid might give us enough incentive to go "Full Manhattan Project" and actually build a craft capable of reaching it in time.

$500B is chump change when the entire planet is at stake.

Don't forget that should it impact in the ocean the casualties would be worse than a small scale nuclear war, and on land its Goodnight Vienna.

Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

ECC

Is used but the memory on typical consumer grade GPU does not have error correction.

Case in point, if overclocked or undervolted most GPUs will error out.

Typically when folding I set mine at a level that generated a reliable output, which was acceptable

but notably higher memory got more unstable so often found that driving the fan to 100% improved

reliability considerably even when running at low clock rates.

Interesting to also note that an SDR gave me some useful feedback - I 'invented' this method when

tinkering with old 780/780Ti cards for a folding rig during Covid.

Hong Kong authorities halt alleged smuggler shifting 596 'high-end' CPUs to China

Re: CPUS

https://physics.anu.edu.au/news_events/?NewsID=243

Also worth noting that Bitcoin miners are also sometimes used for other projects.

It is said that SHA256 is similar enough that a large enough rainbow table can be used as a way to define

a database search as a hashing problem.

I actually looked into this a while back and there are ways to use a very powerful computer for this, in actual

fact this is why WPA2 is deprecated because captured traffic might be hackable if some crucial information

one day emerges.

CPUS

GPUs and other "high value" goods likely get used by alphabet agencies for "black ops".

Supposedly diamonds seized by Customs got used for DACs thus "destroyed" is a relative term if scientific research is done at the same time.

No doubt the same applies to other high tech items.

Thanks for the memories

I heard some useful intel.

A certain manufacturer of high end (1TB) microSDs accidentally screwed up, labeled a bunch of them and then set up

incorrectly as 64GB even sending out an entire batch of these cards thus losing over $500,000+ worth of hardware.

Now I am not calling customs evasion because the price of these is so high that they behaved *exactly* like the specification

bar having very high speed and substantially higher power use.

So it isn't a simple matter to repair this, as the firmware is baked in at the factory and typically can't be changed.

Likely they got sent back under warranty or better still, repaired and used for some embedded application where label didn't matter.

Fortunately the marking on the back was correct and it also showed up on a weight test when customer checked

to see if the cards were as specified due to some incompatibility, and correct cards were then

sent out by overnight mail from a closer location.

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

Re: Halfway decent rechargable would be nice

Materials science like quantum dots are a potential solution and can be added to existing assemblies.

Incidentally it is even easier to replace the phosphor with a QDOT panel likely deposited directly onto the optics so that the near UV light is downconverted at several points to get an even spread of light.

The other interesting approach is "optical downconverters" that use a very high efficiency solar cell to directly drive a visible LED at the nanoscale, this also allows things like redundancy should the main emitter fail it can still do low brightness when energized with RF or direct DC drive like the LED filaments.

I also looked into using laser diodes and a 395nm LD projecting onto a QDOT sheet is very efficient and easily shielded with redundant failsafes so none of the pump light can get out.

Scanning the beam is also an option and on some new cars the LED array is controllable so beam width and other properties can be controlled with no moving parts.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: I used to have...

Have here a box intended for "secure deletion" of HDDs.

It contains: TWO modified defib capacitors (>100uF 2.5KV) and a big coil of homemade Litz wire along with some huge IGBT bricks and a driver board.

Resonates at some fairly low kHz similar to an electric toothbrush charger but at a power level approaching what you might find at ITER.

Essentially the drive (having first had its PCB removed) is installed in the gap and the power supply turned on. Drive gets so hot that the

paint blisters, passing the upper Curie point for the platters and neodymium magnets in less than a second.

Even the NSA aren't getting that back and the drive(s) can then be sent for shredding or better still precious metal extraction ensuring that

there is no way the data is ever getting recovered even with the "Blue Box Protocol".

PCBs have some residual value so a PFY takes the memory chips off with a reflow station and a camera filming the process.

NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack

Re: Here on Earth

Last I heard, it was a weather balloon filled with swamp gas trapped in a thermal pocket and reflecting the light from Venus.

Just one more thing, An eye exam.

<flash>

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Once

Had someone come in to <location> and ask if I had a clearance to be there.

Turns out that they weren't actually supposed to be there either, as they were meant to be in a different building!

Ukrainian cops collar Kyiv programmer believed to be Conti, LockBit linchpin

What about

Rubber-hose cryptanalysis ?

For the many, many people who have had businesses destroyed by Conti, Lockbit etc.

Supposedly, one variant was specfically targeted at students and photographers, deliberately

locking very specific files to do as much damage as possible quickly with a custom message implying that

files would also be leaked unless payment was promptly made.

Two cuffed over suspected smishing campaign using 'text message blaster'

Re: TIWWCHNT

No need, looks like details have emerged.

The criminals used old school analogue TV tuners for the MITM attack, iterating on a method to add text to an existing SMS mailshot by an ISP.

Then did a timing attack to send their message using the pre-authenticated key(s) and £150 worth of radio transmitting equipment purchased

on the dark web.

Essentially replacing the "Hey, get more credit for £29.95" to "Hey, make money fast with spammy_link.frd"

HP BIOS update renders some ProBook laptops expensive paperweights

Brickage

Hi, this might be why some of the OhHellNo SFFs are failing seemingly at random.

Seems that the cause may be a specific piece of hardware left plugged in during restart drawing too much power.

End result is a $400+ brick.

In my case, the symptoms suggested a CPU failure but CPU tested fine in another system as did the RAM.

You'd think that just reprogramming a chip would fix this but it alas isn't that simple as the chip is "special"

and not a standard unit.

Complicating this is these units requiring the special thermal sensor on the RAM chips without which it won't

initialize at all.

Some of the MFFs of the same era also had an annoying habit of running the processor at less than its rated FSB

with the multiplier also turned down so it ran terribly slow: Updating BIOS fixed this.

Astroboffins order most advanced spectrograph ever to sniff out alien life

Once saw

a very famous cartoon by David Darling.

In which an alien is crawling through the desert away from a crashed spaceship moaning.

"Ammonia! Ammonia!"

Just because life on Earth is carbon based doesn't mean that on some distant world where it is a balmy 325C and

even your average extremothermophile is going to have a bad day, doesn't mean that something exotic like

liquid metal life based on using exotic radiochemistry which happens to be a pet theory of mine, can't exist.

Life will find a way.

https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/ammonialife.html

To solve AI's energy crisis, 'rethink the entire stack from electrons to algorithms,' says Stanford prof

The latest idea

For sentient AI is duplicating the mechanism(s) of consciousness itself.

It seems that quantum computation may be a potential solution, in the case of an AI the quantum neural network

would be based on 28Si based isolated qubits and a 3-D lattice broadly similar to a positronic network.

It would need conventional components as well but a 'Positronic Brain' might be relatively compact at least once

the whole cooling and fabrication issues are worked out.

Idea here is to use a relatively low end PC to test this idea, build a superconducting lattice that uses the oxygen

vacancies in cuprates as "synapses" as they can be changed and moved around with relative simplicity.

As Tc increases Jc decreases so it may not be required that the lattice operate at very low temperature, a sufficiently

finely engineered material using the right isotopes can work at about the temperature of a domestic freezer

with the pattern locked inside like the floating gates on a conventional Flash chip.

I don't know if there is any prior art for this.

China's new sanctions loophole: Use export-controlled chips inside the US

Sanctions

I did hear somewhere that they are poaching laptop chips from E-waste and making them into desktop processors.

Supposedly the same is true for some graphics processors ie the 20xx and 30xx used in older gaming

laptops which are now EOL'd due to the demise of Windows 10.

Did wonder why there are so few on the used market.

Reckon I should drop Uncle Sam an email??

London hospitals left in critical condition after ransomware attack

Re: This question should be put to Starmer and Sunak tonight

Like this??

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

This question should be put to Starmer and Sunak tonight

"What is your official position if critical infrastructure such as the power grid or utilities is attacked by cyber terrorists?"

Personally I'd be finding out who attacked and readying a retaliatory strike if they don't hand over the key(s) but that's just me.

Some call me an extremist for daring to even suggest such a thing but when lives are at risk you don't simply stand by

and do nothing.

The UK absolutely needs an offensive cyber-warfare division of the Army (call it Net Force or something) which can use any

assets at its disposal to achieve the aim of keeping the UK safe on the Internet.

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

It is very hard to hack

Pen and paper.

Some folks actually resort to typing them twice on a 1950s vintage typewriter then sending the other copy to a lawyer in a double sealed envelope so that

it only gets opened in a courtroom once all parties have signed an agreement that it is never to be spoken of unless said parties agree

to the written terms, and then burn the ribbon and any partial copies afterwards to make absolutely sure.

These days it is virtually impossible to be sure about security, it is believed that to this day an incoming Prime Minster still hand writes those four letters

to the four HMS submarine commanders that are sent to a sealed, encrypted and secure printer inside that safe so no-one ever sees them, upon verified

receipt the original copies are then destroyed.

Prepare your audits: EU Commission approves first-of-its-kind AI Act

Turing Test

The risk here is that first you have to prove something is an AI.

What happens when a physics paper or some other publication is rejected because the reviewer(s) believe that it is

the work of an artificial intelligence when in fact it is not, and science then gets set back?

Or worse, a human researcher is wrongly accused of plagiarism, has their grant or other finance taken away and it later

emerges that they were innocent and the accusation was itself made by an AI stringing together the facts in a way that

logically makes sense but is still incorrect.

Underwater datacenters could sink to sound wave sabotage

Hack

Hi, it should be noted that some SSDs are vulnerable to acoustic interference.

I've noticed momentary freezes in certain models using large circular inductors.

It appears that under some conditions the component can resonate, causing a momentary

change in current. If that happens and it is during a particularly large write or refresh cycle

then it might cause a detectable outage.

I've seen this effect on some laptops as well, notably mine.

If someone puts a powerful magnet next to a SMPS it can do strange things because the

coil can saturate: some small camcorder displays use this method to tune the sweep inductor for

a specific "throw" as a workaround for very limited physical space.

We explored using this effect to tune the inductor on a switch mode power supply so that it didn't

interfere with a specific product but alas the range was just too wide to fix it without dismantling.

Fun project: make a metal detector using this effect with a rotating magnet array to distinguish

between ferrous and non ferrous and even show a picture of the subject matter utilizing a Nipkow

Disk-like arrangement.

Put Rescuezilla 2.5 on a bootable key – before you need it

Tools

I normally use Acronis here.

Incidentally a forensic level clone is useful but not always effective especially on mechanical drives.

Any sort of problem such as a partially shorted winding on the actuator arm or intermittent power will interfere with a clone.

Running it in "Reverse Mode" ie last sector first normally catches these.

Look to the skies this weekend as solar storms strike Earth

RAM fail

Interesting mention about the error problems, ECC would seem to mitigate this but most home users don't use it due to hardware requirements.

Of course if there is no power then memory corruption would seem to be a secondary concern.

The sort of event that might scramble even a regular DRAM chip through shielding and suchlike isn't normally a problem due to atmosphere,

normally you only see SEUs if radioactive materials have found their way into the packaging.

Saturday may be better in the UK

Seems that we haven't seen all the CMEs. The "Cannibal CME" isn't due to hit until sometime this afternoon.

Astonishing display though!

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle set to take flight at last

Re: Every Time I see This, I Hear This

That's frelling atrocious.

In fact a pile of Yotz.

Gets coat, also PK Leather.

Warren Buffett voices AI fears, likens tech to atom bomb

Interesting

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-super-pure-silicon-chip-path.html

Makes me wonder, would QC make AI look like a storm in a teacup??

Being able to break hard encryption would be a game changer.

Cheyenne supercomputer sells at auction for just $480K

CPU

Interesting note here, the specified CPU is still current.

LGA2011v3 which isn't that hard to find a board for.

If hypothetically someone wanted to build a test system for the broken ECC, that would be a good method.

I suspect that it might be a matter of running a selective memory test, the sort of problems that affect ECC are

common to regular memory such as bad connections and oddly enough failure of the buffer IC.

Have some faulty DDR3 16GB RDIMMs here and the problem seems to be a memory training error.

Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else

Pi

Interesting note here, the best option for RISC OS is probably the 3. Cheaper, the drop in performance isn't that significant and also

they can be obtained from folks who upgraded to the 4 and 5.

For added geek cred, buy a not working one and repair it.

Simple additional fan may boost performance a bit with such a low overhead system.

Overclocking muddies waters for Nvidia's redesigned RTX 4090 and US sanctions

This is why

Sanctions do not work, simply adding costs for legitimate business so they go elsewhere.

Belgian man charged with smuggling sanctioned military tech to Russia and China

"Dual use"

What concerns me is that many years ago, I got in deep merde for the following.

Attempted to source a broken Gen 2 night vision tube for my radiation detector project.

Got as far as finding one, decided it was too expensive (£68) and the following afternoon

had a strange phone call from someone at <agency>

Went like this.

"Hi Mr (full name) living at (address) we have been notified that at (time) you searched for

these modules on a device with IP address xxxx... on a laptop, just to make you aware that

this is a serious matter and we have investigated. As of yet no charge has been filed

but please be aware that if this happen again we won't be as understanding."

Not good!

Iran launches 'biological capsule' to low Earth orbit

500kg?

That's not big enough for a WMD.

IIRC, the smallest feasible gun-type physics package is about a ton and that is assuming 90% enrichment on the uranium.

Switching to a composite design with a 239Pu "bullet" wouldn't help, that just makes things more complicated.

Looked into this after watching "Oppenheimer" for reasons, even if somehow they could perfect implosion there is

no way to test it without someone noticing.

Implosion is extremely finicky and the margin for error exceedingly small, even in 1945 there were doubts.

Wasting this much fissionable material is ludicrous, they would be better off using it for fuel.

Now if they could nail down the timing (cough laser detonation /cough) but that adds yet more complexity

and laser diodes with this sort of switching speed are themselves dual use.

Disclaimer: I have looked into this but lack a Q-clearance.

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Re: The impending win11 downgrade approaches...

Also have one of these. I looked into upgrading its CPU to an i7 but barely worth it as its only a single step in generation.

The chip in there works fine if you don't want to play 1080p or better video.