* Posts by W.S.Gosset

2470 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2016

AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Wow

Yeah it's all toytown anti-data shrieking. For a real laugh, check out "ocean acidification". Priceless watching the panic on scweamers' faces when you ask if they've heard of freshwater crayfish, oysters, prawns, crabs, etc, ("of course!") then tell them what pH that is.

>ample evidence that elevated CO2 increases yields

Well...like: shops. Selling stuff grown by: farmers. Who for max.growth rate use sealed environments @ 1,500ppm CO2. For some crops/locations, cost-benefit trade-off will drop that, sometimes even as low as 1,000ppm. But virtually all are north of 1,200.

Most British vegans rely on more-than-tripled CO2 levels for much of their diet. (Just like a huge proportion of their diet is, physically, oil&gas.)

The global greening is also dropping our albedo.

"Awkward" for the apocalypse modellers.

"It's turtles all the way down!" | sed s/turtles/farce/g

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Wow

I'm not your mummy, mate, and I am not interested in that sort of flouncing gamesmanship.

You have heard of google, ddg, etc? JFGI.

>Look up any of the long-standing measurements of plant viability at various CO2 concentrations.

Throw in C3 & C4 to ~eliminate false positives.

This is not remotely rocket science nor obscure nor arcane knowledge. It is extremely well known and for a very long time. For you to NOT know it suggests you've confined yourself to marketing documents. Time to try some data.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

?

Nuclear power stations can be armoured, unlike solar or wind, and they are. In all Western countries, they're actually required to be safe vs terrorist attack (portable missiles, fire-bombs (accelerants), high-speed trucks, etc etc). Are you unaware of this?

So in answer to your question: infinitely, since 0 relevant damage from a scrub fire.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Wow

Sorry, mate, you've been egregiously misled.

He is quite correct. We were ~0.00008% away from being in serious trouble.

Look up any of the long-standing measurements of plant viability at various CO2 concentrations.

Note that humans derive the bulk of their plant nutrients (vs mere carbohydrates) from C3 photosynthesis, not C4.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

>solar...And, at scale, it's

FRAGILE.

Hail, winds, bushfires (sometimes self-started) -- all have been demonstrated to wipe out large solar farms. Soil often irretrievably contaminated as a result.

The minerals requirements are also eyewatering; in scale, expect knock-on consequences blowing out cost of anything electronic. Eg, traffic lights, elevators, phones, ... computers...

(The latter is the béte noire of the faux-renewables. Look up Prof Herrington's (Oxford, Natural History Museum) run-through of just the minerals impact of just EVs alone. Something he wasn't aware of: copper's supply is tight as a drum: the PRICE impact of even 1% demand increase is large. And affects whole economy.)

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: @Paul 195

>Seems like we narrowly avoided blackouts last week

Just to add to that:

~500 MW in hand, per the hands-on real-world industry boys. Substantially below "minimum". 300 MW of STOR was already illegally operating in the market. NESO has come out with a startlingly fraudulent "reply" (eg, claiming that the nominal capacity of wind turbines not turning because no wind, constitutes reserve power (I wish I was making this up)), and has been challenged to provide the data it's suddenly hiding. NESO so far refusing; industry is going to OFGEN etc to try to force the issue.

Separate but related: the long-warned-of Frequency problems caused by nonspinners wind+solar (wolar) are mounting up. 100s of near-breaches of limits each month now. And by drift, not event. !!!

Be aware: breach means sub-second shutdown. And with so little reserve left in the system, sub-second chain reaction across entire grid is exponentially increasingly possible. Meaning blackstart. Never done before in UK. Because previously, it's never happened since electricity was rolled out in UK, because previously the grid was managed on real-world principles related to facts.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Batteries not included

Solar panel fires are actually far worse, toxic-contamination-wise.

Censorship note: 2nd quoted paragraph has been deleted (as at 7hrs later). For future reference, any time you see something likely to be deleted or censored (i.e., factual), whack it into archive.today. Doesn't comply with deletion demands like Internet Archive. (But snapshot only, no auto-recheck.) Installable extension on front page for one-click preservation. Extremely useful where facts are awkward for the anti-pleb brigade -- they tend to get disappeared. Carpe diem.

In farewell speech, Biden rails against the tech industrial complex, disinfo dismantling democracy

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Leaders all mysteriously wish they'd taken on the vested interests

And the UK.

"Yes, Minister" was a documentary, not a comedy.

NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Kaliningrad

The Lithuanian Commonwealth would like a word.

Patch now: Critical Nvidia bug allows container escape, complete host takeover

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: AI Breaking Out of the GPU?

>a few guys

To be clear: competing with each other, not a team. Time-trial thing.

You'll also be startled at the sheer level of "public" LUP pre-prepped cracks for simple check&use. Think databases of rainbow tables, on steroids. Open access.

Then automate that with AI.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: AI Breaking Out of the GPU?

Yes.

If you spend some time in the "HaXoRs!"/crackers communities, you'll discover almost immediately that 99.9% of them are idiots parroting now-routine off-the-shelf techniques created by a tiny subset of dissociated puzzle-solvers. "Script Kiddies", as they used to be called.

But watch a few guys in front of you mechanistically crack a tiny gap in a CTF challenge, that 99.99.% of admins would think "Meh. Safe enough. In the real world." and you'll realise just how powerful blind, stupid, parrot repetition is.

LLM AIs do precisely that.

Fast.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

You're both right.

A feature of the West historically has been a High-Trust Environment, socioculturally-speaking. (Exceptions were so rare they were flagged up as outrageous/criminal.)

This is no longer a safe basis.

Public Wi-Fi operator investigating cyberattack at UK's busiest train stations

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Efficient free market

Despite the far-more-complex-&-vulnerable-to-error-than-it-appears-even-on-second-and-third-thoughts nature of air traffic control, NATS is actually working quite well.

My point was NOT "omg!", but, rather, poking a pointed needle into the absolutely-standard meme that "micromanagement by a special (govt) ELITE is the only SANE way to DO things!". (OP's post suggested to me at the time he was firmly in that syndrome (hence "frighten yourself": they love an excuse to get hysterical) ; on re-reading now, I'm not so sure. Might have intended simply to point the "incompetence!" (or, better: "irresponsibility!") finger in all directions.)

If ANYTHING would prove that _actual_ professionals shouldn't be allowed to consider the real needs of the job because it would all go horribly horribly wrong without their kindly masters correcting & managing their underclass foolishnesses, air traffic control is kinda a biggy.

NATS demonstrates that that meme is false at core.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Efficient free market

Frighten yourself. Look at air travel.

Eg Air Traffic Control.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Censored Message contents

The BBC published it verbatim since it was so anodyne. It has since been pulled nationally and an image circulated instead with dramatic blurring of ~all of it, in order to support a preferred story.

Just do a search on Twitter for "rail wifi"(latest tab). 2 secs later: Here's a BBC screenshot.

Victims lose $70K to one single wallet-draining app on Google's Play Store

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: CDBCs

>Aren't intended for you and me.

Strongly suggest you learn a bit about them. Start with their own industry & governmental presentations of same. Your "understanding" at present is almost exactly upsidedown.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Exploiting the mechanics of smart contracts allowed the attackers to authorize transfers

"Contracts!", the term, originally comes from the old high-privilege wouldbe-social-engineer pseudo-tech brigade (think Cory Doctorow & co), on the basis that this approach would "solve" the "problem" of legal procedural stuff like conveyancing. Sign, pay your money, property transferred automatically, kinda thing.

In reality, yeah, they're just code frameworks, with events auto-triggered by blockchain transactions, allowing per-transaction control --including adjustment or even permission OF the transaction-- by a central authority.

You'll note all the CDBCs being developed are based on "smart contracts". Not "coins" which actually fulfil all the nominal goals of a currency. Hence the alarm from people aware of their potential for abuse.

Uncle Sam accuses Aussie AI startup boss of financial fakery that duped investors

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

We've had a hell of a time trying to extradite a murderer, so I'd say he'd be pretty safe as a mere fraudster.

Hyperscalers are carving up the ocean floor into private internet highways

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

"Not immune" made me laugh

>hyperscalers are not immune to geopolitics

*snort*

Google, at least, has been an active and partisan participant since at least the late 00s. Facebook was revealed in recent years to be acting similarly; recently confirmed and apologised for same in writing to Congress. Amazon has less direct influence but Alexa recently showed that the employees wish it were otherwise.

As cautiously understated elliptical allusions go, "not immune" is a blinder.

NIST: New smoke alarms are better at detecting fires, but still go off for bacon

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Finally...

Using infrared cameras should help sort that. Cats & dogs have different body temps from humans.

(For that matter... a genuinely trivial "task" for AI, just on shapes.)

Tor insists its network is safe after German cops convict CSAM dark-web admin

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: TOR offers no protection against old-fashioned sleuthing methods

Smart police would be training an AI for that job. Far less prone to fatigue/data-overload oversight.

Australia’s government spent the week boxing Big Tech

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Misinformation

>The definitions of misinformation and disinformation in the Bill are narrow

This could _politely_ be described as complete fiction.

The eSafety Commissioner is empowered to declare anything she feels like to be misinformation, for example.

Exception: the government has specified that they are authorised to broadcast misinformation, and any friendly media companies are likewise explicitly authorised.

She is doing very badly in court. So the Act removes access to the court.

Etc etc.

Online media outstrips TV as source of news for the first time in the UK

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Also: good luck in hospital, mate.

(Keep an eye on the chart at the foot of your bed. If you see "DNR" appear on it, be sure to cross out the "N".)

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Bring back Robot Wars!

Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Interim solution

>basically illegal to operate a civil aircraft that noisy out of any civilised location.

So the Brussels-Australia route remains viable.

Atlassian CEO's idea to build 4,000-kilometer extension cord plugged in

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: That doesn't add up

>Aussie politicians aren't known for their technical expertise.

Albanese, Labor, current prime minister, has proudly trumpeted that thanks to their HUGE "renewables" & "green" push, Australians will be able to use their solar panels on their roof to charge their electric vehicles for free overnight.

Slack AI can be tricked into leaking data from private channels via prompt injection

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

>I use ChatGPT almost as often as Google now

I've found it outstanding for winnowing the bazillion obfuscations in govt/civil service hidings of Information. It will extricate a core number immediately and throw you straight to the key reference. Hours of close (& draining) semantic scouring, in 5 seconds.

Other than that, though, I just use ddg.

Russia tells citizens to switch off home surveillance because the Ukrainians are coming

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Good to see we collect Russian bots here too...

I saw yesterday Russia's apparently announced a special Refugee programme for Westerners seeking to escape Woke.

Made me chuckle.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Ukraine is spying on your ring

Thing is, you're BOTH right.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Conspiracy Theories.. HP due diligence guys did their work.

Ah ha. Now THIS makes sense. Seen that --and "stupider"-- happen many times.

Andreessen I've only seen little bits of, and he's baffled me. Weird alternation of common sense and all over the shop. This sheds a little light: thanks.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

Wooden ships routinely anchored in 25 fathoms.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

>"Anchoring in 50m? I doubt it."

>Yeah, beyond unlikely.

"Cable" is a standard Imperial measure of length because it was the standard length of the standard British anchor cable, for hundreds of years, for wooden ships, sloops, etc of typically half this boat's size.

It is nearly 4x times longer than these declarations of "I doubt it" and "beyond unlikely".

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

?

Gust...

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/08/19/mike_lynch_missing_yacht/#c_4915067

Add: particularly on the north side, Sydney Harbour is characterised by high land dropping sharply to the water.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: the mast

Eye-witness quotes here (along with CCTV footage) say either it bent to the water & snapped, or that the boat was laid flat. Former from a chap at their "altitude"; latter from a chap apparently higher up.

CCTV from 200m shows the boat there, then not there.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Conspiracy Theories

I'll pull you up on this:

>he was found innocent of all charges

He was as guilty as hell of everything he was accused of. I worked for years at that level; didn't know Lynch or Autonomy from a bar of soap before he exploded into the press; but recognised immediately his language & tactics. If you've seen enough parasites in action up close & personal: absolutely standard tactics: effectively shouting his guilt. So I dug out some of the analyst reports. Yeah, guilty as hell. He'd used the standard semi-illegality most software companies use for revenue recognition, but instead of staying carefully inside the arguable grey area, he'd gone absolutely psycho. Like, loonytoons OTT. (Implying complicit auditors)

Now, come the court case, I could see where that actually worked in his favour.

See, if *I* could see that in a coupla minutes looking at public information, there's absolutely 0 excuse for HP's full-time M&A boys sitting in the dataroom (with full behind-the-curtain access) not spotting it. No way. No way in hell. Barring a level of incompetence/arrogance/irresponsibility that blisters the eyes even to think about.

So I can see a judgement of Not Guilty on the basis of : "Dear Mr & Mrs HP. Grow the hell up. You're responsible for your own actions. Despite what your mummy tells you. Blind Freddy could see these numbers were fraud. Caveat emptor. Dismissed."

Essentially, the extraordinary degree & obviousness of the fraud protected him legally. HP can not announce in court that they demand protection from their actions whilst also struggling and crying and scweaming for mummy if they try to wear shoes with shoelaces.

This is not the same as Lynch being innocent.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

I remember gazing vaguely out the window over breakfast back when I lived on Neutral Bay in Sydney, calm bright day and a lovely new large yacht (15-20 metres) sailing very very slowly in the tiny early morning breeze, crept very very slowly into the sub base's inlet in front of me then wore about for a down-harbour reach. Doing perhaps quarter of a mile per hour, if that. Lovely sleepy but active scene as I sipped my tea. BANG it was horizontal, maybe 30-40+metres of mast and full sails flat on the water and maybe 10-20 ton keel horizontal above the water on the right. 90⁰ rotation ~instantly (less than half a second).

Then stayed like that.

5-10 seconds later, abruptly righted by the keel suddenly falling back into the water and a great pseudo-sucking sound of the sails being pulled off the water.

And that's in the heart of one of the safest harbours on the planet. With almost no wind.

DoD spins up supercomputer to accelerate biothreat defense

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Pentagon nightmare

>you can probably still see online

Yeah, here ya go: 2017: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research

(Also perma-archived via the extremely useful censorship-ignoring http://archive.today (URL throws to various geoservers): https://archive.md/NxWam. A useful habit to get into. Archive.org routinely wipes history under pressure.)

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Still a good read

It actually scaled up in the US by orders of magnitude after 9/11, and the work was spread out much wider under apparently-innocuous civilian umbrellas, particularly the NIH & DURC. More recently, the UN knocked it up several notches further in terms of sheer scale & potential impact, dispersed globally, under a very different & proactively Virtuous umbrella. See my comment below.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Pentagon nightmare

Oh, and,

>said no to gain of function... funded anyway.

The only formal ban I'm aware of was Obama buckling to pressure and issuing a formal order.

But Fauci & Collins unilaterally reversed that a coupla years later within the (VA$T!!) NIH umbrella, and you can probably still see online the quiet bland announcement of same. You could, last year, anyway.

EcoHealth ("EgoWealth") was a primary channel for obfuscating it further. But there were others.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Pentagon nightmare

>called something else

"DURC". That term has been the veil since the original international bioweapons convention. Several virus modification methods are used as standard in vaccine development. So just call it vaccine development, or skim off unwanted byproducts from genuine such. DURC.

The whole bioweapons "industry" went absolutely ballistic in the US after 9/11. Several orders of magnitude above previous. Grifter-assisted by lots of people jumping on the bandwagon and revving it up because massive funding. And more recently, the UN has piled in but even more covertly, hiding truly excruciatingly dangerous work behind the One Health umbrella.

For example re One Health, I am currently having my first coffee of the day half a mile from a major genetic engineering site, UQ/the University of Queensland, which has multiple projects building & releasing custom viruses & custom RNA epigenetic modifiers. Please note: releasing...

Here's one example: https://science.uq.edu.au/event/session/9680 ("creation of chimeric or ‘hybrid’ viruses" plugging very dangerous viruses into "benign mosquito viruses" which will then self-spread the "vaccination"). I attended that session; I may be visible in the audience, I haven't watched the recording. It's actually worse than it looks: she runs through live field trials at one point. Release. Someone asked at end about risk of lab leak. She got flustered and eventually said basically they hoped it never happened. I talked to her afterwards and warned her further that it had been proven at a minimum of 99.8+% significance just from the genome structure that Omicron was a vaccine lableak (look up self-spreading vaccines) (something to think about: all the very senior people shouting very loudly about them vs Covid went very suddenly very quiet mid-to-late-2021. I was relieved at the time. Coupla years later the genome calcs got published), and she went rabbit in the headlights, froze, and sort of stammered that they'd have to be careful.

Now look up BioClay. Coupla buildings over from hers, iirc. Yes, that is WIDESCALE broadcasting of "genetic therapy" epigenetically modifying insects' DNA so that they ... "go away".

Despite their own website's prima facie presentation of it as "new!", you will casually find it being pitched publicly & repeatedly used in the field, over a decade ago.

Consider the Mao vs Sparrows episode. Then consider that insects are a rather larger and rather more important component of the ecosystem.

There is a STARTLING number of people globally doing surreally dangerous work vs "biothreat", funded just by One Health alone, much much larger than just the US DoD biowarfare. Sometimes BSL-4 work done at BSL-2 (your dentist works at BSL-2). I've talked and e-talked to a few of them now, and you realise very quickly they're all just excited about the discoveries and novelties -- they blank out any idea of consequences.

We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: The real issue

Username checks out.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Standard

"Code of Conduct" is a standard Trojan Horse for hijacking communities. Cf Robert Conquest's Three Laws.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Only for the Far Right

The actual flashpoint was nothing to do with social media. That came later, ex-post.

The flashpoint was a Pakistani (hence Muslim) being sprung while sneaking up on the vigil for the slaughtered children, wearing a balaclava and wielding a large knife. (Police claimed "flick" knife -- videos show it being nearly a foot long.)

The locals exploded.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Buy Shares In Hoodies.....ASAP......

Interestingly, video released last night shows that the people smashing up shops at Southport were all Asian.

FBI, CISA remind US voters that DDoS attacks can't touch election systems

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

"What an odd thing to say"

Anyone else find it "peculiar" that such a very specific warning, unrelated to current "IT services crises", should be issued regarding the election?

Specifically warning (and putting in people's minds) that there could be sudden complete invisibility of the whole process, but that nobody should be concerned.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Maricopa County AZ was hit with cloudstrike issue for primary voting. Absolute Rubbish.

>starting with "a few"

The day before, there were 223 locations operational.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

>Kamala Harris is not a black woman she is an Indian and Black woman.

Not even that. She's 100% Indian on her mother's side, but her father's side is mostly English & Scottish.

She's only 1/8th black.

Equivalent to 1 great-grandparent.

W.S.Gosset Silver badge
Mushroom

The Dominion machines are more than vulnerable -- they are deliberately designed for hijack.

Plug in an external keyboard: you are given root access. Plus GUI text editor, etc.

Swipe ANY employee card (eg, temp. election worker): you are given root access.

Rather than use a standard Zip library, they rolled their own and it "had a bug": Zip Slip. Pop any files you want overwritten into a zip dir tree, unzip on the machine, and you can replace any software/logs/etc you feel like. And since ALL election config files (candidates, parties, etc per electoral unit) are prepped in a single zip file in HQ then distributed to be copied out down the pyramid of "command", any person at any point in that tree can simply modify their copy, and it will spawn down te rest of their branch. Then into all the actual machines.

There's more, for example the effortless steamrollering of "human readable output" since the ACTUAL output is the QR code. But these alone are enough to destroy any credibility Dominion had.

Info here, the ONLY ever hands-on audit of a Dominion box (Prof.Halderman & co):

summary: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/06/14/security-analysis-of-the-dominion-imagecast-x/

full report: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.240678/gov.uscourts.gand.240678.1681.0.pdf

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

W.S.Gosset Silver badge

Re: Genius.

>thumbs up and beer

Careful, you'll have your eye out.