Posts by vtcodger

Cyber sleuths reveal how they infiltrate the biggest ransomware gangs

Re: "Proving themselves"

An interesting idea. Really. But can you imagine the chaos if that honeypot is somehow used to gain access the real corporation's IT infrastructure?

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: Doesn't this invert democracy

"where we tell our elected leaders what THEY can spend OUR money on ?"

Posting here at The Register will likely work as well as anything. (which is to say,not at all)

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Re: Oops!

What, you think the US doesn't have this technology?

Why yes, I think exactly that. Why would the Chinese bother to ban export of the technology otherwise?

BTW, if you read the Wikipedia article on the Mountain Pass mine, you'll find that the rare earth oxide concentration there is around 7% which is actually quite a bit higher than the typical commercial ore concentrations of minerals like Copper, Silver, or Gold. I suspect, but don't know for sure that the technology in question might have to do not with extraction, but with separating the various rare earth elements from each other. My hazy recollection is that the chemistry o the 17 elements is virtually identical -- which makes separating them from each other and purifying them quite difficult. I should think that someone else around here would know a lot more about this than I do.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

A bargain?

One dollar seems a bit pricey to me. Surely a bit more work can get the price down to one cent. Or maybe persuade the dealer to pay a bit to get the car off his lot.

Watson

Quite likely the best model we have for the capability and limitations of AI is IBM's Watson. Watson, it will be remembered, was an AI agent built by IBM a little over a decade ago to play a game -- Jeopardy. And it did that very,very well. IBM then spent many millions of dollars trying to adopt Watson to more serious (and more profitable) uses. None of those efforts succeeded. The full story can be read at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-ibm-watson.html

This seems to me a clear warning that the road ahead for AI is likely to be -- as Waylon Jennings would have it -- rocky, dusty and hard. A truly intelligent race would probably approach AI with extreme caution. Humanity however .... Best fasten your seatbelts folks. it's probably going to be a bumpy ride.

Mozilla decides Trusted Types is a worthy security feature

Re: An even worthier security feature

"Scripting has its place"

Ehrrr ... no, in the very long run I think it probably does not -- at least not in the way you mean.

I think a much restricted form of scripting directed solely at controlling content layout might be OK. But scripting today is synonymous with Javascript. And Javascript as it stands now looks to be far too capable to be compatible with computing security. If you let third party material that loads Javascript code into your computing ecosystem, I doubt any amount of protective superstructure can reliably keep the bad guys out of your machinery. And they only need to get in once to leave you with an incredible mess that will be very time consuming and very costly to fix. If it can be fixed at all.

I fear that in the very long run, I think we have have two choices -- secure computer intercommunication with the outside world or scripting. Pick one.

I'd like to be wrong about that because an awful lot of stuff including useful stuff and many serious businesses is built on scripting capability. But I don't think I am.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Vasa Syndrome

"Meanwhile NT has evolved into a monster that looks as if it wants to spend 30 years displaying the message "Preparing to Configure Windows. Don't turn off your computer"."

Somewhat reminds me of this:

Vasa or Wasa[a] (Swedish pronunciation: [²vɑːsa] ⓘ) is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. ... Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world. However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and foundered only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

Seems to me that many of the problems with modern computing are due not to lack of innovation, but to marketing folk insisting on the appearance of innovation. Potemkin innovation as it were.

Re: Word 6

Come to that, why Word at all? In the late 1980s, we were running offices with no huge problems using text based Word Perfect and Lotus123. For most people most of the time, they worked perfectly well. They may well have been not only as good at actually getting work done -- which is, I think, most likely the point of PCs -- as their modern GUI equivalents. Maybe better.

Re: Computer did get faster, software did get bloated.

"I for one will welcome our new AI overlords!"

Ahem ... How do you plan to do that? Looks to me like one very likely result of the overenthusiastic embrace of AI will be that effective communication. with or via computers will become next to impossible.

For example your "Hail Overlords" message will likely be massaged and come out on the overlord end as "What is the hail threat today in Overland Park, Kansas?" Or maybe as a challenge to take them on in a cage fight.

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

Re: Autopilot may undermine the effectiveness of the driver's supervision

"Yet, in interviews, Elon will show just that by removing his hands from the steering wheel ..."

Not any more apparently. The OTA update will reportedly require hands on the wheel at all times.

BTW, how does one toggle turn signals with both hands on the wheel? Toes? Tounge? Brain implant? (Can that last be installed OTA)?

Re: There's a movie in there.

Am I the only one who thinks that just maybe a company whose driver assist software can't identify a bunch of brightly flashing lights as probably something that should not be driven through at speed, should NOT be doing over the air software updates? At least not without regulatory approval of the results of a well monitored test program.

Seems to me that there's a big difference between gratuitously breaking millions of printers (again) and messing with control of vehicles with a mass of two tonnes or more travelling at highway speeds. In the first case, people will eventually tire of having their workflows randomly broken, and they will find another vendor. In the second, the customer likely won't be around to complain. And neither will some of the folks who those lights were intended to protect.

Elon and other auto makers may not like the idea of being tighly regulated. But speaking as potential collateral damage, I think regulating these folks tightly is a just dandy idea.

Competing Section 702 surveillance bills on collision path for US House floor

The merits of the case

This is hardly an every day issue. One problem one might expect that probably 97% of the members of the House have no idea what any of this is about. More important, the US House of Representatives is currently in a state of extreme dysfunction. A week ago,the majority party had a majority of 4 in a body with 455 members. But one of their members -- facing 23 federal felony charges -- was expelled. And the majority's deposed former leader just resigned effective at month end. (We won't have Kevin McCarthy to kick around any more). One might expect that a legislative body so evenly split would be a model of moderation. Au contraire, both parties are firmly controlled by idealogical extremists. The future? Pretty much anything might happen. Nothing whatsoever is a strong possibility

One doubts that this issue will be resolved on its merits. Indeed, it may not be resolved at all unless and until some debacle or other somehow forces action.

Musk takes SEC 'Twitter sitter' consent decree appeal to US Supreme Court

What's the problem?

In the unlikely event the Supremes elect to hear the case, and if they find a prior restraint, what's the problem. Musk then gets to tweet whatever he wishes. And the SEC presumably is then free to whack him with appropriate fines if they judge his tweets to be attempts to manipulate the financial markets.

Sounds to me like Elon is fighting tooth and nail for the opportunity to screw himself. Have I got this wrong somehow?

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Re: Hating printers

We have a little used inkjet printer because despite its many flaws, the print quality is pretty good. And installing a color laser printer in linux seems invariably to be a nightmare. The inkjet seems, incredible as it may seem, the least bad choice if we wanted to print a few pages in color every now and then. What I've been doing for several years is printing a CUPS printer test page which includes a small multicolor circle every two weeks. That really does seem to keep the print heads from clogging.

Re: H What?

Back in the 1990s, we used to rub shiny rollers vigorously with a gauze pad soaked in isopropyl alcohol. That often worked. For a few months anyway.

Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec

Chromebooks

If you can buy a "proper laptop" for the same money, by all means do so. But I doubt you can. Chromebooks -- especially used ones or older models --are really, really cheap. The internet tells me that Walmart has one new for under $50 US.

Are they good for anything? Out of the box, they seem to be OK for email, web surfing, and probably for most schoolwork. I assume that many of the apps in the Chrome Web Store actually work although I've never tried one.

BTW, Linux will run after a fashion on top of ChromeOS via Crouton or Crostini. There are purportedly some Linux distributions that can replace ChromeOS. Don't know how well they work.

The drawbacks -- the OS is nowhere near as easy to customize as Linux or even Windows. And Google is presumably spying on every action you take -- which may well be worse than Microsoft spying on your Windows PC.

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

2024 will be a good year ... for some.

For those unfamiliar with diabetes, the symptoms of of severe hypoglycemia are confusion and anxiety followed by coma and possibly death. The treatment -- Glucose. 15 or 20 grams. Perhaps followed up by more Glucose or some starchy food. The starch breaks down after a while into more Glucose.

From Honolulu to Vienna and all points in between lawyers are sharpening their pencils. And their knives. They are smiling. 2024 may be a very good year for lawyers.

2024 may not be such a good year for diabetics and for Insulet shareholders.

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Microsoft will respond to the Register

Microsoft will respond to the Register just as soon as they can print out a copy of the draft response and run the response by Management and Legal. But there seems to be some sort of problem printing the draft on their HP printer.

Korean peninsula space race sees South and North launch tit for tat spy sats

Re: This is clearly not about "spy satellite".

Google maps used to fuzz out critical locations. I discovered that a few years ago when I tried to check whether Jimmy Carter's home in Plains, GA had solar panels installed. (I'll be surprised if it doesn't). Couldn't tell. Looks like they've stopped doing that although the image of the White House on Google Maps (1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW in Washington DC) looks perhaps slightly fuzzy to me. Try it yourself.

For comparison, here's a link to an (eventually) declassified intelligence satellite photo posted on Twitter in 2019 courtesy of one Donald J Trump. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-image-from-a-spy-satellite-declassified-document-shows

I should think that the current NK satellite is just a proof of concept. Not really a serious intelligence collection vehicle. Those will presumably come later.

California commission says Cruise withheld data about parking atop of a pedestrian

Re: In fairness

I'm inclined to agree. A human would presumably have felt a bump and stopped. But maybe not that much sooner than the Cruise vehicle did. The article says 20 feet (about 6m). That's really not all that far.

And the internet tells me that a Chevy Bolt has a ground clearance of 5.6in (14cm). I don't think there's any way to get a car that low off the unfortunate pedestrian other than jacking the vehicle up and then dragging them out. I think that doing that probably is best left to professional emergency service folk. So maybe parking on the pedestrian is the best of a selection of bad choices.

Not that I think that Cruise or any other automated vehicle is currently smart enough to know that. BTW, How did the Cruise vehicle know to stop? It's probably not like it has a "human under the car" sensor.

Re: In fairness

"In fairness, if a human driver dragged a human body under their car the human driver would be prosecuted."

As I understand it, the Cruise vehicle didn't run down the pedestrian in the fashion you are probably visualizing. The pedestrian was struck by a car in an adjacent lane and thrown in front of the Cruise vehicle. Why do you think either the Cruise vehicle or a human driver would have enough information to understand the situation? I doubt that a human driver would be prosecuted in most cases like that unless they were obviously grossly negligent.

BTW, front proximity sensors might prevent/minimize some accidents like that. But most cars don't have them. And I get the impression that some cars that have them only activate them in "Parking Mode"

In fairness

In fairness, I'm not sure that most human drivers would notice that they were dragging a human body under their car. And if they thought something seemed wrong without knowing exactly what, would they not stop (well, OK, not in NYC. But most places) -- likely on top of said human?

That said, if Cruise was not transparent about what happened, substantial fines and maybe other penalties would seem quite appropriate.

Creating a single AI-generated image needs as much power as charging your smartphone

Re: Do charge a thousand phones instead

"Human artists are so much more creative and efficient than the giant energy sucking sound made by gen-AI ... why even bother![?]"

Because humans are not the NEXT BIG THING. We humans may be energy efficient, but we are yesterday's news. This is not an issue of efficiency, it seems to be an issue of venture capitalists and other parasitic lifeforms seeking big bucks without having to work too hard at acquiring them.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: Well, HP lost me as a customer.

FWIW, most of the internals in those fondly remembered hyper-reliable HPII and HPIII printers that seemingly ran forever were made by Canon, not HP.

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Re: We need the technological progress...

"WE are doing exactly that. ... Distill it. Presto: Fuel from the atmosphere that virtually any petrol/gasoline engine can be run on."

Sorry, I guess I should have addressed that in my post. But it would have made a rather long post. The major problem with your somewhat utopian scenario is distillation. Making fermented corn mash into 190 proof whiskey -- which is what corn ethanol pretty much is -- takes a lot of energy. In the US, that's mostly done with natural gas which is abundant and pretty cheap. Cheap in North America. Not necessarily elsewhere. There have been a number of studies that conclude that the energy budget for corn ethanol is slightly positive in the best growing areas and actually negative in less favored areas. Bottom line -- after one takes into account fertilization, mechanized field work, harvesting, and conversion to fuel, corn ethanol is a relatively inexpensive way to convert natural gas to a liquid fuel. That's not a bad thing. But a replacement for fossil fuel it is not. (BTW petroleum from Alberta Oil shales is pretty much the same story. How to the get the hydrocarbons out of the shale? Steam heated by Natural gas.)

Can ethanol be distilled more cheaply? Maybe. Solar distillation MIGHT work. But I suspect only in lower latitudes. Almost certainly not here in Vermont where corn is grown, but making a crop is problematic some years because of the short growing season. By the time you got your mash fermented, you'd be trying to use solar heat with an eight hour day, a maximum sun angle of about 25 degrees and solar collectors likely covered with ice or snow. The only study I've seen says solar distillation of ethanol is not economic even in the tropics, but I'm not sure that's the final word.

How about ethanol from sugar cane? Maybe. I've never seen an energy budget for that. Maybe it'll work. But Sugar cane is a tropical crop and it won't grow well even in some parts of the tropics. It needs a LOT of water.

How about biofuel crops that don't require distillation? Maybe. I tried once to figure out if it was possible to grow enough oil palms to support modern air travel. My conclusion. Maybe, probably not. Too many unknowns to be sure. BTW, environmentalists loathe palm oil. I'm not sure I disagree. Endless rows of oil palm trees are not my idea of living in harmony with nature.

My point remains. We do not currently have the technologies to feed 7 or 8 o 10 million people and fuel a modern civilization. It might be a good idea to have those technologies in hand before we run out of fossil fuels.

Re: We need the technological progress...

"We could make unnatural petrol with the CO2 from the atmosphere."

WE can do no such thing. At least not at any scale beyond that required to run a demo. Our great, great, ever so great grandkids might be able to do it. BUT ONLY IF "we" plug away at developing the technology and have it on the shelf when we start to run short of fossil fuels. My guess is that we will start to run short of fossil fuels sooner than anyone expects. Yes, the supply of stored hydrocarbons is vast. No one really knows how vast. But don't underestimate the vastness of the demand as billions of goat herders and subsistence farmers/workers in the developing world get richer and demand stuff like heat in winter, refrigeration, tractors, game consoles, vacations in distant lands, and other essentials of modern life.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: Delusional narcissist

"Even if they aren't currently buying ads, both companies still have Twitter / X accounts. Why do you suppose that is?"

1) In the case of IBM, they are likely cruising for an opportunity to sue X some reason. Sooner or later they'll find a patent violation. It's only a matter of patience and time.

2) Disney? Who knows? Maybe The Mouse has an untreated Twitter addiction.

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

Re: I won't be buying one

"For me, any touchscreen is too much touchscreen."

I'm inclined to agree. However, I bought a Garmin SatNav device many years ago, that I still use from time to time. I usually mount it in the upper left corner of the windshield. It needs a tap to switch between displaying time_to_go and arrival time. My experience has been that it is far less annoying to view/use its touch controls while driving than touch controls on the center entertainment console. Maybe "heads-up" is really works better than down and right.

Re: It’s not just the “mark ups”

Correctio: 400C, not 450C.

Re: It’s not just the “mark ups”

"Once EVs get old enough we will likely see more of this."

Possibly. Or not. Gasoline fires are relatively easy to start. Albeit nowhere near as much so as Hollywood would have you believe. They are also relatively easy to extinguish. Cut off access to oxygen and they will go out.

OTOH, Lion battery fires require heating at least one cell beyond 450C. Not so easy to do. Once started, they are likely to keep on burning. Cutting off Oxygen has little affect since the "fire" is fueled not by oxygen but by spontaneous discharge of the cell(s). The only(?) ways to put them out are to either break up the battery, isolate the burning cells and let them burn out. Or to somehow cool the whole mass of the battery below 450C.

My GUESS is that EV battery fires are/will be caused mostly by battery manufacturing defects or physical damage from collisions. And that they will decrease over time as battery designs improve.

In the meantime, I possibly wouldn't park an EV next to anything I valued. And I'd expect to pay a LOT for collision insurance because repair shops will likely refuse to repair any damage that might have damaged the battery. And to charge a lot for any work they do. Because THEIR insurance costs will likely go through the roof if they choose to work on EVs.

(NOTE: Not alll EVs are a LIon fire hazard. Older Prius hybrids used NiMH batteries that don't spontaneously "burn")

I can't imagine why you were downvoted. In point of fact, US cars in 1980 were basically the same cars as the US cars of the 1950s without the tailfins, portholes and with automatic transmissions that were less prone to spontaneously shift into low gear at 60mph. They were notorious for poor reliability, awful gas mileage, and, in some cases, a tendency to shed a few parts as soon as they were driven a few miles from the dealer's lot.

When an American carmaker -- Ford -- finally put together a competitive vehicle with decent build quality at a not outrageous price -- the 1984 Taurus/Sable -- it quickly became the best selling car in the US. We inherited one of those in the 1990s. Probably not a car I would have bought. A bit ponderous for my taste. But a perfectly reasonable vehicle and we'd probably have driven it for many more years had a pickup truck not decided to make a left turn through the space it occupied. Vastly better in pretty much all respects than the early 1980s Ford station wagon bought at the insistence of my wife to meet the needs of our family.

AI offers some novel crystal materials that could form future chips, batteries, more

Maybe not always that easy

What immediately popped into my mind was that creating materials to order possibly isn't always as easy as it might seem. Example: Dolomite -- Calcium Magnesium Carbonate (CaMg(CO3)2). Simple enough molecule. One part Calcium, one part Magnesium, two parts Carbonate. Mix (cautiously) and (if necessary) cook. There is a LOT of dolomite on Earth. It is created in nature by replacement of one Calcium atom in the Calcium Carbonate in calcareous sediments by a Magnesium atom. Happens a lot. There are whole mountains made of the stuff.

Turns out to be very difficult to make in a lab.

Here's a reference https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.1c04624

Doesn't mean that this AI effort or its trial and error old-fashioned equivalents are useless. Just means that things are likely to be (as is very often the case) more difficult than they seem.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Re: Profit on rockets

Actually, there will be one cryptic message from the X to Mars expedition. "Elton John was right. This place is cold as hel..."

Re: Debug Windows

There will be such a feature. But the dump will be binary, in a weird undocumented format and encrypted using a key that Microsoft will not share (Got to think about security y'know). The resulting multigigabyte file will be useful only to Microsoft who will assign an intern to analyzing dumps in his/her spare time while not emptying wastebaskets and cleaning keyboards. It will also be useful to a group of seven hackers in Bulgaria who will somehow use it to obtain admin privilege on internet connected machines that have such a file present.

Google goes geothermal to power some bitbarns

Re: Earth's crust or Earth's core?

So far as I know, the heat is thought to be generated by the decay of a variety of radioactive isotopes diffused throughout the planet. I don't think we currently know for sure what isotopes, nor in what quantities, nor or how they are distributed throughout the mass of the planet. Ask again every few decades. Someday you'll get an answer.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Fireproof

A Fireproof container might help, but I have some doubts it is really adequate. Computer media do not like heat, and building fires are nothing if not hot. I recall seeing pictures of a bag of silver dollars melted together by a California brush fire. The melting point of Silver is 916C. The ignition point of paper -- which is probably what a fireproof box is intended to protect is -- 233C. The maximum storage temperature for computer media seems mostly to be around 70C or less -- a number that I personally wouldn't have all that much faith in.

If your data is important to you, I'd suggest a backup someplace offsite as well as backups on site. Even the trunk of a car might be better than anything on site. And a backup in the cloud as well won't do any harm if doesn't cost too much and if one's internet connection is fast enough.

Sadly, storage media are not completely reliable. Neither are web service providers. Encryption (if you need to use it) can be slow, And there's a real risk that you may not be able to decrypt the files for any of dozens of reasons. Saving all your data can be difficult without a fast data link -- which is not an option for many people. and attempting to update only altered files gets complicated if you encrypt.

Truth is that many of us probably need multiple backups done regularly ... and a bit of luck.

X's legal eagles swoop on Media Matters over antisemitic content row

Re: Reputation management via lawsuit

It's not like things seem to be going all that well in the Grand Duchy of Twit. Maybe this is just a "What the hell, how can things possibly get worse?" action.

Re: Venue Change

Is this filed in the same district that patent trolls love to use?

I'm not (and would not want to be) an expert on legal matters. But i believe the Troolheim is(was?) the Federal District Court in East Texas. This sounds like a suit filed in a Texas state court.

Boffins claim invention of rechargable, biodegradable, supercapacitor drug pump

Re: Implant where??

that is requiring around 4cm incision at least to implant under the skin and rather larger surgery to implant anywhere else.

large? ... invasive? Especially if you are a rat -- maybe 20cm long and weighing maybe 400g. I think that before moving on to humans, someone should interview the rats and see if maybe they would have preferred a different treatment. Or maybe just living with the yeast infection.

How do you interview a rat? AI of course. AI can do anything.

Ex-IBM sales veteran sues for access to health benefits

Re: The answer is very simple

All capitalist companies care about is money...

Nonsense. They care about all sorts of important stuff like the design of the corporate logo, and executive perks and who who gets the parking spaces next to the door.

Re: Oh look

..like breathing?

Exactly. If you insist on continuing such practices, you really can't expect your healthcare provider to pay for the consequences of your actions.

(I'm not sure whether our US healthcare system more closely resembles something by Orwell or something by Kafka. I'm sure that both would find it vastly entertaining. If you live in America, it is an excellent idea not to get sick.)

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

A bit shallow I think

If you think that China alone will be able to duplicate, let alone surpass, what the whole of North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are able to achieve in chip manufacture, then I have a bridge to sell.

You might want to think about that a bit more deeply. There are a great many Chinese. About 1.3B. That's about the same -- maybe a bit more -- than all the developed countries put together. The Chinese work very hard. They are literate., Probably as much so as the developed countries (They claim a bit higher. Maybe that's true). They have a great respect for education. Certainly more than the US which largely thinks that a college is a football/basketball team attached to a few buildings full of very odd people. One expects they can do just about anything they set out to do although there is probably a limit to how many goals they can work toward simultaneously.

I expect the Chinese interest in chipmaking is primarily in producing chips for consumer products for themselves and that they can peddle to the rest of humanity. That wouldn't seem to require the latest and greatest technology -- just something good enough. Military? I used to know a little about that. Maybe things have changed, but my experience was that military hardware has long development cycles, and a number of features, supply chain requirements, training requirements, wide operating temperature range, modest radiation hardness, ruggedness -- that mitigate somewhat against the very latest technology. In general, military gear isn't pretty, and not all that nifty. But most of it will likely work about as well as ever after being pitched out of a truck in the Arctic in Winter or a desert in Summer and driven over by the next truck in line. And whoever picks it up and dusts it off may well be able to operate it and might even be able to fix it when it eventually breaks.

My guess is that chip bans may have some affect on some research efforts and maybe on the Chinese intelligence services. But the impact likely won't be that great. At least that's been the story with prior technology bans intended to hinder China's space program.

The only example I'm aware of where technology export bans do seem to have been effective is jet engine technology. Probably there are others. But not many? Mostly they don't seem to work very well.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society

"He was partially right though : some people will end up losing their jobs because of AI. As he has now proved."

So, the world's first AI refugee?

White House hopes to power up American battery factories with $3.5B fund

Not oppossed, but ...

Compared to paying for development/procurement/deployment of dubious weapons systems (B-1 bomber, F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, etc), funding rural broadband that never happens, and proping up a variety of unsavory governments because ... well I'm not sure why we do that ... this is cheap. And Lord knows, ANY improvement in battery technology is probably a good thing. But I would point out that the US already spends a lot of money on this very thing. The Internet tells me that $92B (!!!!) has been spent on the "battery supply chain" since Biden took office 3 years ago. And I'm by no means sure that's all the government spending in place for batteries.

Use AI to accelerate adoption of central bank digital currencies, says IMF head

Benefits to you

POSSIBLE advantages to you.

CAVEAT: AFAICS, a CBDC looks to be more or less like a government guaranteed prepaid credit card. Assuming that's true and assuming that the potentially huge problems of security and counterfitting can be controlled, the advantages to us as individuals might be.

1. No more wallet full of plastic? (Fat chance of that -- as an elderly US citizen I have no less than 5 cards of various sorts that need to be perused just to get medical services, plus a library card, a couple of different, park "passports", three credit cards because you never know for sure which will be accepted by the merchant and occasionally any one may be arbitrarily declined by the electronic gods, etc, etc, etc).

2. No need to input name, rank,credit card number, date(s) and mysterious codes into idiosyncratic, cranky, often horribly designed software when purchasing stuff on-line.

3. No need to have anywhere near as much personal data stored by various online agents in an electronic communication system that is currently so sloppily constructed that occasional data theft from one or more of the way too many agents holding your data is virtually guaranteed.

4. Anonymity for small transactions. (Well, that's what the Chinese -- who seem to be furtherest along with CBDC are promising. They might mean it).

5. (Near) universal acceptance. (I'm not sure your corner drug dealer will take CBDC but most merchants likely will).

6. Lower transaction costs (Well, that's the claim. And, of course, the government will never take it into its head to tax CBDC transactions ... absolutely not ... never ... well except maybe for the duration of the current emergency).

7. There may also be be some advantages at the level of people who buy and sell commodities in 100,000 metric tonne quantities. Beyond my pay grade. Wouldn't know. (Actually, I think that's quite possible and its not impossible that some of the benefits might filter down to the end user.)

Re: We've left port and are now on the high seas

One wonders where we find these people, and why we, having found them, persist in putting them in charge of things.

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

Certainly cute and maybe useful

It's cute and maybe useful

1. For other Americans, 100g is about 3.5 ounces. Assuming it works (and I do assume that), it seems quite impressive

2. I doubt it'd work with spin stabilized satellites. (Spin stabilization was used in some early satellites to keep them in a known orientation) But I don't think there are very many of those nowadays. And it wouldn't be needed anyway? Their orientation is stable. Although collecting a spinning satellite for deorbiting might not be so easy.

3. Many (most?) satellites need to be slowly rotated once per orbit in order to keep the bottom of the vehicle (where the sensors most likely are) pointed "down". There are various ways of accomplishing that. Presumably this gizmo doesn't generate enough torque to interfere with active three-axis control if it's present during the platform's active lifetime.

4. Rather to my surprise, there already seem to be some somewhat similar devices in use. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_attitude_control#Types_of_stabilization -- the section headed passive attitude control.

5. I agree that mounting one of these things mechanically on a dead satellite while in orbit using screw/bolts/rivets looks to be quite impractical. Assuming one could catch up with an expired orbiting platform and work on it, I guess you could attach this damper to a prepositioned plate of magnetic material. Or velcro. Or maybe glue if there are satisfactory adhesives that can set in a vacuum. I doubt any of that would be practical

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

Regulators

"Regulators have let us down ...

Claims that there are regulators who somehow control the behavior of the fine christian, capitalist IT pioneers who have brought us the modern internet are known to be specious. Yes, there have been reports of internet regulator sightings ever since DARPA net days. But upon investigation these invariably turn out to be honest mistakes (e.g. malfunctioning pop-over ads) when they are not out and out scams. It is long past time to move regulators from the endangered list to the extinct list.

Musk thinks X marks the spot for Grok AI engine based on social network

TakeCare

He drinks tourists visiting Cornwall?

For God's sake man, do NOT put new ideas into the Elon's head. The world already has more than sufficient problems.

(Are there really tourists in Cornwall? Are they soluble? In what? Is the resultant mixture tasty? Is there a profit to be made by peddling it on the Internet? What's the, obligatory this season, AI angle?)

As NASA struggles to open OSIRIS-REx's asteroid sample can, probe heads off to next rock

If a bigger hammer won't work ...

There's always that old standby -- a Dremel with a carbide cutting disk. That'll cut/abrade most anything other than diamonds. But most likely it'd contaminate the environment more than just a little.

BTW, has anyone seen a picture of the balky connector(s)? I'm curious what they might look like. I've searched for an image, but haven't found one. How DO you seal a container in zero gravity without introducing contaminants into the container? Apparently NASA found an answer that almost works.