Posts by W.S.Gosset

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Is this parody?

Actually, you're using the lead boy's work right now. Every time you look at the web. (Or use SSH etc)

See that little padlock/green icon in your URL bar? The one that says you have a secure connection?

He did that. Found a massive hole in the "experts'" implementation. Fixed it. Now you use it. Continuously.

...

I have to say, the LEVEL of deranged fantasies/schizophrenia on this site, and the LEVEL of deranged Projection, has got surreally out of control. Absolutely surreal. It's not just you -- it's now pretty much standard/compulsory. It's why you see almost no comments here now which aren't casually binned by inspecting facts.

Re: CISA's statement on the "cancellation"

"CISA’s Red Team is among the best in the world ... laser focused"

...but failed to mention that mission critical election kit which they "tested" and "proved" to be un!crackable!,

gives anyone root access if they plug in a keyboard.

Plus has actually _worse_ security holes, if you can believe that. Not joking.

"best!in!the!world!"

Never mind sacking them, there's grounds for them repaying every dollar they took in salary.

Is this parody?

>election security

Several hundreds of federal employee "experts": "prove" that eg the election machines are perfect: ultra-secure, uncrackable.

Independent expert: you get root access if you plug in a keyboard. Worse, deliberate creation of a "bug" lets anyone in head office hijack the whole state in 5 seconds, invisibly.

They should all have been sacked a very long time ago. They are beyond incompetent. They are apparently deep into malfeasance territory.

Google wins 1-1: Judge rules ad giant broke some antitrust law

But not the ad market itself ?

This I do find odd:

>Justice Department failed to prove its case with regard to Google's "open-web display advertiser ad networks."

I can only assume it's some sort of wrinkle arising from their apparently rather elliptical definition in their 2nd allegation of the 3.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: (earthquake, volcano, typhoon, sea monsters...).

Speak of the devil... Update from Kathryn from her digging so far:

Even the biomass "backup" was mostly mgt fantasy.

The primary backup was to switch in supply from 2 other substations. But, again, not a real backup: they structurally take hours to switch over.

The only other backup she's found (FOR ALL HEATHROW!) is some diesel generators for the runway lights.

This...is astonishing. This is worse than even the biomass farce. That coy "landing" backup that Heathrow kept bleating...just the bloody lights.

The otherwise inexplicable decision to close the whole airport even for landings despite having a "landing backup" suddenly makes perfect sense.

We are seriously into aggravated misfeasance or even malfeasance territory here.

Re: (earthquake, volcano, typhoon, sea monsters...).

That's her: Kathryn is quietly rock-solid and balances deep detail knowledge & hands-on competence with awareness of the larger systemic context AND the overarching PURPOSE of the residents' and industries' needs (again: down to details).

She is PROPAH uber-geek.

(I mean, that blog post's got a link to a gloriously ineptly filmed example of "Galloping Conductors". Wut? I'd never even heard the term before. A plate of 1" bolts sheered off...)

She posts more-detailed info & analyses on her TwitterX a/c. Recommended. Eg, where anyone can pick up the govt or OFGEM renewables "costing" analyses and 5mins later hold only the smoking ashes of frantic deceit in their hands, she'll be adding that this particular site's 2nd & 3rd plants need doubling and that particular circuit is at particular early-failure risk and so on.

Re: (earthquake, volcano, typhoon, sea monsters...).

>the UK grid has been rather too reliable

A major energy analyst I had some professional overlap with some years ago and rate very highly, recently got hold of the full dataset for grid frequency.

It's worse than you think.

Frequency excursions are rising sharply & nonlinearly. Currently at IIRC over 100 a month. That's 3 per day.

Key point is: they're drift, not event. The grid simply no longer under stable control.

!!

If any one of them escapes emergency remediation, with expected cascade that's a subsecond national shutdown.

Now, the Brit engineers still do absolutely brilliant Blackstart prep on a continuing basis. (REALLY quite impressive -- benchmark gold standard) (No idea how they've managed to escape the beancounters.) But it's REALLY something you don't want to need to do. Because so much can still go wrong.

> - that is to say we have become complacent in expecting a 100% service.

Very much so.

And it will "suddenly" start to go very wrong very quickly when the last reserve protection is exhausted.

"How did you go bankrupt?"

"Very slowly, then very quickly."

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

>much like front door locks on houses are reliant on politeness of people not to just want to pick them.

Or kick them.

Re: Really...?

Thanks for struggling to deflect by raising something completely separate from the backup arrangements but pretending it's the same thing because "looklook one of words same".

>Richard Tice

Had to google that one.

(Torygraph->paywall->no idea)

YOU may have a personal obsession with local politics but that does not mean that everyone else subsumes reality to ingroup-dominance games, nor does your private world alter reality.

Re: Really...?

Oh dear lord

Re: Really...?

That's one of the more asinine things I've read for a while. "Let's make up a story! Completely dissociated from the world!"

By the bye, the backup system kicked in immediately and was originally designed to provide full power immediately. You know, as "backup".

But the climate cultists demolished the original generator in ~2012 and installed a "green" "apocalypse-averting" Bio!Mass! planet saviour. Biomass generators take hours to spin up, they're slower than coal, they are not insta-backup capable.

Heathrow got lucky for a long time and didn't need it.

As soon as the real-world intervened, the meme-compliant nonbackup plan failed catastrophically.

Simple engineering reality. Grownup-town.

Re: Really...?

They *DID* have, but then they demolished it and replaced it with a Climate!Change! version to prevent the model apocalypse.

i.e., demolished the existing diesel turbine, installed a BioMass turbine.

Problem: diesel cuts in immediately; biomass boilers take hours to come up to speed. So diesel works for insta-backup and biomass does *NOT* work for insta-backup.

Analogous to acknowledging a need for PeakingPower, then tearing out your gas plant and replacing it with coal. Only more so: coal spins up faster.

They got lucky and had absolutely no problems until they tried to actually use it.

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

Re: Gosh!

>The cynic in me wants to know who shorted Accenture, Capita, McKinsey etc. stock in mid January.

After the first DOGE results reveals, and knowing they'll be looking at ALL of govt, and knowing full well what the REAL "business" model of Accenture etc is from their insider perspective,

I would assume approx.100% of the staff were up to their eyeballs on max-margined Shorts the next day.

Re: The GSA's guidance would determinate contracts

So far, every Court ruling has either:

* breached the Constitution, or

* refused to say what the legal basis of the ruling is.

My "favourite" was the judge who got furious at a lawyer pointing out the case failed instantly and unambiguously on Constitutional grounds, and declared that "the Constitution does not apply in my Court!".

Closest thing to an honest judge we've seen in this farce yet.

Twin Google flaws allowed researcher to get from YouTube ID to Gmail address in a few easy steps

Re: doge.com - saving you from X many evils

Yeah, that suggests they've got the same bug/design f*kup as the Cisco/Meraki rubbish.

When a site is censored by the administrators, the user is typically first told that the site has a problem, that the site has a security error ("risky!site!"): incorrect security certificate. If you choose to proceed Unsafe, it will then buckle, resort to showing you the actual error: that site is censored by internal policy as being Too Dangerous For Plebs To See.

Re: doge.com - saving you from X many evils

Just geo-block on non-USA IPs, with no custom-coding/-config of the default Cloudflare message.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

Re: I can see it...

>when 2 or more actors are directed to leave

E.g., by the bear.

AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

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

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.

?

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.

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.

>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.)

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.

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

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

Re: Kaliningrad

The Lithuanian Commonwealth would like a word.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Re: Efficient free market

Frighten yourself. Look at air travel.

Eg Air Traffic Control.

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

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.

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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".)

Bring back Robot Wars!

Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier

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

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

>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

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.

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

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.

Re: Lifestyles of the rich and famous...

Wooden ships routinely anchored in 25 fathoms.

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".

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.