Posts by Rattus

AI more likely to kill animals if it saves fuel or money

Re: Value of life

"AI can't commit murder. Part of the proof of murder is that the murderer knowingly does the deed. AI's don't actually know anything."

And still, if the AI doesn't know anything we humans have already entrusted it to: make financial decisions, replace HR in the hiring phase, write code (I can't bring myself to call its output software). By definition these are ALL job roles in the (so called) "knowledge based economy"

I suggest that either:

. (A) we are claiming that AI's know things, and can reason - thus CAN and WILL commit murder or

. (B) AI's don't actually know anything and thus should never be permitted to replace a human in any

Reality is / will be more analogue, but you get the idea

Ministers rejected NATS reimbursement plan before 2,000 UK flights were cancelled

I agree with both points

(1) Validate, Verify, and reject at entry into the system should prevent the system from fall down with bad data.

Having a process to flag and handle bad data outside of the normal system isn't that hard to envisage

(2) Long delays

Whilst I agree this undesirable (and unforgivable if the result of an forseeable scenario given the impact of such an occurance) I do understand how even a small (i.e. 1 hr) downtime can have a huge impact lasting a day or more

If I divert a plane to another airport, does the new airport, and the original airport have additional capacity for it to be moved back into position before the aircraft is next scheduled to depart from the original airport?

o Almost certainly not if this was nothing more than an unload / load return flight

o If not When can that occur?

What about the flight crew?

o That additional (repositioning) flight may tip them over their permitted hours...

You could just cancel the next flight (pair of flights if this was a return trip) and position the aircraft at the start of its loop or half way point... but what happens to the passengers (especially if flights are close to fully booked)

Now apply this to a busy airport such as Heathrow with around 50 take-offs or landings per hour, now include all the other airports in the UK and you are probably looking at around 200 - 250 take-offs or landings per hour (lets ignore transit flights that would also have to be diverted if the UK airspace is effectively closed)

It is really easy to see how a relativity short duration indecent can take days to recover from.

3 times in 3 years...

Why do I get the heart stopping fear that this failure was not a breakdown of hardware, or application software (NAT was designed with redundancy and failover from the start), but instead some miscreants (foreign governmental actors?) got into the system and caused havoc?

Will we ever find out the cause?

This sort of system needs continuous (24hr), proactive security, regular maintenance and pre-emptive service with a minimum N+2 redundancy. And any contracts need real teeth to enforce such requirements.

/Rattus

Digital sovereignty sounds great until you try ditching your suppliers

Re: Devil in the Detail

I have a hunch that "technology dependency" might be far more prevalent than many CIO's would care to admit.

I could not agree with you more

A few years ago I worked for a company that made communication aids. It got brought out, and after a year they decided to outsource IT.

A serval was conducted by the new outsourcing company, and contracts were signed. NOBODY even visited our site - the survey / audit was carried out remotely

I am an electronics engineer, I looked after the production line systems (Linux) alongside a couple of excellent IT admins (Windows, but knew enough to maintain the Linux platforms).

Fast forward 6 months and our production server responsible for deploying software to the company's core product throws a disk. It support company claims that the server doesn't exist.

I ask them about the entire production line equipment - Nope doesn't exist, not on the contract, can't be seen on the network (well it wouldn't because the production line, and all the test stations are firewalled away from the 'office' network)

I managed to get management to allow me re-sync the array with the hot spare, order a new spare disk. But I failed to get them to include the production line systems in the IT support contract.

3 months later the IT contractors turned up on site for the first time and insisted that all the production line IT was disconnected from 'their' network (they insisted that it was removed from the structured cabling, and no equipment was located inside either the riser cupboard or 'machine room'. Management let them do this; I left the company in a hurry to pastures new .. The server clogged with dust and overheated within 4 weeks in its new location at the back of the loading bay. No I would NOT come back in and 'fix it' for them.

US watchdog opens probe into Tesla's Cybercab self-certification

Re: Two Tesla KyberCrap coveyances in East Wing Ballroom faux Gold livery…

Hay, don't diss 'da pink rolls!

UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say

Re: as the meme says "hello fellow young people"

I was born in the 1970s.

Drinking under age - check; I worked at a pub from the age of 14

Access to P0rn - check; 'rip mags' were always available, either discarded in the local park, or if you had the (ahem) spunk for it you could buy them from w h smiths, most the Saturday staff couldn't care less about your age

Knowing the rules (and how to subvert them) - I got given a little red book school book by my mother... and was in the scouts (taught me not to break the rules but how to bend them so far as to be meaningless)

NO - I am not going to complain, kids today are just like we were. Only for some reason we look at what they are doing with outrage and look at our childhood through rose tinted glasses

Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access

Although I am impressed with the countermeasures in place to "disable" unauthorised users of the Memex terminals

'Not a theoretical risk,' feds warn as attackers use AI-made code to hack critical infrastructure controllers

Re: take them offline FFS!

Leased line or VPN, its all the same.... once connected back to the head office LAN

VPN is still an attack vector. But given how secure most Telco networks are so is a leased line :-(

nope needs to be bidirectional.... these are command and control networks as well as monitoring nodes

You need to be able to open and control 'valves', turn on and off pumps etc.

Re: take them offline FFS!

How else do you remotely manage a fleet of unmanned locations?

I would hope that these satellite sites are behind a firewall with only VPN traffic back to the appropriate management 'hub', permitted (no open internet access)

Of cause as soon as the company LAN is compromised then all devices at your satellite sites are wide open too.

IT departments may update devices they manage (routers, servers, desktop PCs etc) but lots of other devices get put on company networks which are out of the IT departments control.

PLCs are but one...

We all have had to add security to everything with network access - this wasn't something even considered a few years ago, and it has come to applications on servers, and desktop devices, switches and routers, and has arrived on modern embedded systems. However such embedded infrastructure devices are long lived, and may not yet, been replaced with something even vaguely security capable.

IT & security managers only have so much budget, this sort of infrastructure is was often considered a lower risk of attack... but once the big ticket items became more secure the attackers move to more low hanging fruit. Yes I agree that this *should* have been considered from the very start as critical - but then that is true for everything else connected to the internet, mail severs, databases, cloud storage etc. and look how often they are compromised.

More than half of Americans now view AI negatively

if you insist on using more water than can be replenished within your local water basin then yes - you are screwed...

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

Re: Fake it before you make it

Agreed - but it is hard to get a grant to make things that work in the real world.

I completely agree

However, it is not just small companies and startups that do this - company #1, that I talked about in previous post, had over 140,000 employees at the time I worked for them. OK this was a spin out / subdivision with fewer people, but never the less it was a well known international company. They failed to install any oversight or project management

Basis Rules if you want it to work & project to be delivered (possibly even delivered on time)

- Design For Manufacture

- Know what it is you are building

- Verify the costs after the initial proof of concept

Stick to the plan or abandon the project and start again NEVER make changes on the fly

Changes and new features can be made, however this MUST be a SEPORATE project AFTER successful delivery of this first project (and a suitable bedding in period)

(of cause if project is being developed for you then the contractor will happily switch to Time and Materials as well as offering you lots of tempting new options and features)

there was supposed to be an earth shattering ka-boom!

Fake it before you make it

The last two companies I have worked for were bringing a 'product' out from proof of concept and into production, not thinking ahead (perhaps willful negligence) would apear par for the corse

Neither company had any idea what compliance would be required *before* they had sold "production units"

Each company believed that turning something that (mostly) "works" in a tightly defined test setup would be fine for production.

* Repeatable production was never considered

* Assembly time and cost had not been considered

* Production scale up and logistics were so far over the horizaan as to be laughable.

* Production volume was assumed to reduce cost but didn't take into acount changes that would be needed to realise these savings for volume manufacture

* EMC was never considered

* Laser Safety (one product used Class III Lasers)

* Intended final performance (at this point neither company had hardware capable of performing at the speeds they were stating would be achieved in the product - 1 was limited by memory bandwidth and the other by working voltage on stepper motor drive FETs BOTH thought this was a software problem)

* Neither company had a working remote update for firmware (or even host OS and application software)

* Both companies were courting international sales but were struggling to support a 'test/trial' customer site a few miles away

Both companies needed a new round of prototype hardware before they could consider a sale

Neither company had budget for this nor the time scale

Both companies were pushing new features before they even had hardware or software capable of delivering a minimum viable product.

Budgets were wishful thinking and weren't even considered. Items that were estimated at one price turned out to be magnitudes more expensive...

Passport out-of-control at French airport

Re: Most PARAFEortunate

cue the obligatory XKCD strip...

https://xkcd.com/327/

Code fixers have fired up the AI warp drive. Strange new worlds await

Re: Brownian goalposts

You got there before I did. Great phrase, added to my collection (with citation)

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

Britain's railway fuzz says images of anyone who does not match the authorized watchlist are deleted immediately and permanently."

Whilst a biometric signature of the target face is saved along with other useful metadata such as time, date, location, direction of travel. Once a face (or any other image has been identified) there is no need to keep a copy of the originating image. All the useful information may be kept as a much smaller database record, with the handy side effect that it is easy to search, and provides a record of an individuals travels.

Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows

When an 'AI' encounters a problem

Eddie the Computer: Guys, I am just pleased as punch to inform you that there are two thermo-nuclear missiles headed this way... if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and take evasive action

...not a lot happens...

..missiles gaining...

Arthur Dent: COMPUTER DO SOMETHING!

Eddie the Computer: Sure thing fella! Switching over to manual control... good luck!

Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G

/me shudders at the thought

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Re: Yeah

If it is a national security issue, then a national agency should provide the security.

If this is nationally significant infrastructure then perhaps the infrastructure should be nationalised...

Either a water company operates for the profit of its shareholders, or it is operated for the benefit of the nation, which one is it?

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

So ROM based.

Is there a specific type of mask-ROM that is orders of magnitude faster than FLASH to access? I don't see a particular reason why a similar FLASH fabric would impede performance.

I suspect that the reason for mask ROM has been selected is because the same data storage on FLASH would require a a considerably larger die.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

"Who's the supposedly smartest person who has asked you a dumb support question?"

I worked for a telecoms company in my first real job after university.

We had one exceptionally bright gentleman who worked in R&D. He would regularly get confused and ask who we were and where was he. Not really dumb questions, he really did forget who were were, and couldn't find his way around the office.

He was a remarkably pleasant person to work with (if he noticed you were there at all), very kind and gentle, and if you got him on his own (not coping with crowds of people, something I can struggle with too; in his case 4 was about the limit) he would take the time to explain some of his ideas at a level some of our best engineers could just about keep up with...

When he joined the company he already had a PA, who would do the usual PA tasks, However, really her job was to collect him from home in the morning and deliver him back from the office at night, make sure he was dressed in something appropriate for the office (not a dressing gown) and ensure that he would make it into the office alive (he didn't drive, and could be lost in taught and walk into the road - he really wouldn't cope with a bus or train).

Sadly, he died before I really got to know him, 4 years later when I left the company, we were still catching up with his roadmap, implementing his designs.

Voyager 2 cheats the power budget for another year

Thats at the other end...

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Live heat sinks

You bet that is by design

It is very common to have a heat sink at a high potential.

typically if a part is dissipating enough heat to require a heat sink the component in question will have all or part of its casing in metal.

Adding an insulator impedes heat transfer (even if there is one fitted over time they degrade) so always assume a heat sink is live

OpenAI-Hugging Face attack doesn't mean agents are evil – unless you tell them to be

AI imitating the real world..

"Read the framing with the same scepticism you'd apply to any ‘our product is dangerously powerful’ claim, and treat it as marketing bullsh*t until it is independently corroborated.”

FIFY

We are complaining that the AI Lies - it does. how is this any different from anything coming out of the mouths of sales and marketing (of which politics is a sub set)?

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: And removable.

"Current inspection/maintenance machinery doesn't take into account these panels"

so yes maintenance trains already exist.as I said

so the additional cost would be to add waggons to the aforementioned maintenance train that would deal with the solar PV thus re-enabling the previous maintenance function.

Its not as if you need to re-invent (or buy entirely new) maintenance trains, you just need to add the new functionality of lift and replacing the PV.

and again as I previously stated - additional manpower and the cost of the PV maintenance 'waggons/cars' to be added to the train should be more offset buying the power from the grid (and be part of the overall cost of the system)

TIME on the other hand could be an issue- to all jobs we need to:

- Add in the time required to perform the INITIAL section of PV lift (must happen before other 'physical maintenance of the way' can happen)

- Add in the time required to perform the LAST section of PV re-lay (must happen after the last section of 'physical maintenance of the way' has finished and before the way can be re-instated into service)

All other lift and lay of PV sections can happen in front and behind the section of way being maintained at no additional delay to maintenance (providing that neither lift of lay functions take longer than the physical maintenance step)

Re: And removable.

maintenance is relatively easy:

o As already pointed out, maintenance trains exist.

o Panels are always in the same position relative to a maintenance vehicle (at least when considering 'precision' for any civil engineering project).

o Cleaning & inspection could be a simple matter of running a cleaning train (or a specific cleaning 'car' appended to a relatively slow moving service)

o Track inspection is already done on high speed engineering trains in the UK (see "flying banana" )

o Adding (semi-)Automated panel lift and lower to ballast trains shouldn't add time to existing re-ballast operations

o It would require additional resources (crew and specialist rail-cars)

As long as the cap-ex / op-ex comes in less than the cost of power generated everyone is a winner

And yes you would expect vandalism, but you would factor that in (and add some defence for it) - but this is no different from a solar farm or adding solar to existing railway infrastructure

And yes you need to factor in possible theft of cables for the copper - again see above, this is no different from a solar farm or existing railway infrastructure (indeed on a busy line possibly less likely given that you don't get much time to nick things before being splatted by an oncoming train that wouldn't notice a squishy meet-bag getting in the way until its next cleaning cycle....

Oh and finally - the railways already exist, so these linear solar farms wouldn't need to replace fields in an actual farm :-)

Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

Re: "taking away teens' phone makes them act like humans again"

I agree, removing social media access from the Orange Git would not render him any more human than a deranged homicidal clown.

However doing so would lower the rage and blood pressure of a significant number of people...

Just block the idiot, so you don't see his rants

This works for all politicians, influencers etc. regardless of left right, up, down, forward or backwards leaning [do we have charm and strange on the on the political compass yet?]

Better yet we could all practice what is being preached - lead by example and removing social media from our life as well as the kids - no bans required.

Parenting is NOT too hard

"I'm sick of this generation of parents claiming that Parenting is too hard,"

In my experience it is not parents that are claiming this, it is the politicians and press telling us we need to demand this shyte.

Seriously, I haven't asked for this, I don't know anyone who has...

(And yes I write to my MP 2 or 3 times a year so that puts me in the very active politically sub-set of voters)

/Rattus

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

Re: Meek & submissive, never forward & assertive.

Whilst SEP may well be (and often is the case) don't underestimate that sheer number of people who just not paying attention to their surroundings

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

"Anyone know a good source of candle-tallow"

Render down the board room fat cats?

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: Wealth is a meaningless word

the problem with "like brexit then" was I've already been screwed by dot com, 2008 financial crash, brexit...

I am investing heavily on KY and other loube technologies at the moment because I know I am going to be shafted again and may as well try to make it less painful

Ukraine puts its Russian war trophies online for allies to pick apart

iFix it

yes!

you can fix anything with duct tape.

Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped.

Duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can't improve on duct tape.

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

Re: Par for the course

No No - It *IS* a toy to hand to the kids boss to keep them quiet

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

Re: Is This A Prediction?

Its called hedging your bets....

Offering 40% of future stock at a fixed price insulates against a sudden drop in price, but the other 60% of stock you can sell at a further increased margin if demand is still there.

/Rattus

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Thank you for riding Johnny Cab....

I won't be back...

India blocks Telegram ahead of scandal-hit medical school entrance exam

Re: Here's an idea

You are assuming that they are physical attendance exams - for 2 million candidates? I suspect that this will be 'on-line'

However it is possible to have many exam centres, but now you run into the problem of staggered exam times (either because of the size of the country, and / or to allow multiple sittings at the same address)

Note: I am only inferring from the article and have no Idea if the entrance exam is IRL or online, but given the sheer numbers I would be very surprised if this isn't online- if only to allow speedy automatic & hopefully corruption free grading

/Rattus

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Zombie Starmer's Victorian internet: An Internet without Things.

When my daughter was 6 we needed to define 'p0rn'...

Its simple she said to us:

If it is surrounded by cherubs, or an urn, its art.

If it's surrounded by a gilt frame it's art.

If costs more than £10000, then its art

If it's a statue and the arms were never part of the sculpture, cut off just below the shoulders, then its art

If it's in a museum it's art.

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

as previous articles have pointed out not turning off in bases is a bad thing too.

It is quite easy to map a base, where are barracks, mess halls, command and control, stores etc, based upon routes, timings etc when you corralate multiple users and timings.

This is WWII sig-int, meta data is enough.

Utah mega datacenter could dump 23 atomic bombs worth of energy per day

Re: New unit?

I have a suggested location for storing your prototype unit (even if only for a few ms)

how about 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

1 in 8 employees totally cool with selling work credentials

Sell - Most of the sheeple I work with have already given their credentails to AI

Seriously!

My rant of WTF was met with "meh" by most of the office when I found that they had given their credentials to several AI systems so that it could trawl their (work) systems on their behalf (and of cause feed all that juicy data, and IP back to its HQ as well)

/Rattus

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

Re: If Meta wants to be fined on their UK revenues

Meta Zuck would have to choose between a massive* one-off fine or the loss of all the ongoing UK revenue. This would be an 'encouraging others' event for lots of countries with similar legislation.

you think that the fines will change corporate behaviour? I don't, and neither does meta. This won't be a 1 off payment because they won't change. as a result they are simply looking to reduce the cost of fines low enough to be considered a 'tax' something to be reduced again and again as part of business as usual

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: Obvious from the start

"It was definitely the correct choice as it was specifically designed for that purpose."

No it wasn't. Marketing dweebs got togeather and claimed it could by inventing a 'standard'.

It doesn't work.

Latency, latency, latency.

Disclosure: I too had the misfortune to work on ESN Infrastructure development for a while

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

I am a parent.

I limited my daughters internet access using the tools available 20 years ago.

I never felt the need to remove these limits.

Around the time she was 12 she could be trusted with root on her own machine, still on a locked down network. After a while she found her way out of the sand box and out onto the big wide internet warts and all. If she is cleaver enough to circumvent any restrictions I put on a system (she is) then there is little I can do to stop her.

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: Grifters gonna grift

uprated for your small print

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Hyundai is clearly a fan of P'Terry and Gaiman

My car likewise appears to try and show album art for, my surprisingly old school habit, of using USB media. This is fine, but any album with the title (or sub-title) of greatest hist always shows the artwork for Queen's Greatest Hits.

"Essential S Club 7, the greatest hits" with vocals by F. Mercury anyone?

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Isnt this what people want?

"I've always reckoned an effective strategy would be cut advertising and marketing costs and deploy the saving into good products and customer service and just gain market share from the others' customer churn."

You are nearly right with that...

When a company does just what you say, they gain market share, they pay their staff well and make a profit, hell they might even make their customers happy :-) <<=== I want more companies like this - I used to work for one of them...

Unfortunately companies like that are few and far between because eventually someone makes an offer to buy the company that the board can not refuse. The company is then stripped of assets (transferred to the parent or holding company, so they can be rented back), it is saddled with the debt incurred in buying the company (and we see charges of management fees for providing an executive from the new parent company). Next R&D is shown the door, Support is reduced and or offshored, because profits can be higher. The new execs get to take a big bonus, and the company can trade on for another few years as a zombie - it is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

The exec go back to the parent company, mission accomplished and more the richer, leaving the a corpse of another company in its wake (or better yet sold to another meat grinder to pick over the remains), along with a staff looking for new work.....

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

it is my experience that most firmware and driver devs, turn on and configure hardware devices (and pin swapping matrix) at start and then forget about it. Often with single hard coded magic register vales instead of individual bit toggling.

There is no attempt to clean up and save configuration state, or even turn off hardware during suspend (or shutdown) and this can be a real problem when resuming, the hardware block needs to be re-powerd and restored into a state that wasn't previously saved; requiring state machines to be restarted, effectively screwing up anything higher up the stack. Although it would help if software further up the stack could cope with stateless device communication (or at least handle closing and re-opening pipes)

Why does this happen?

I lay the blame mostly on the HW vendors not providing any open access documentation for the hardware devices that would enable FLOSS developers to work well in this area (even the better players in this area usually only provide redacted information under an NDA limiting useful development in the open to a few named individuals)

And why is that?

Often because the HW is a combination of IP / devices from a combination of vendors that are poorly documented themselves. Likewise the HW team usually end up hacking a few registers to get the device to start before handing over to the SW team, who never envisaged the need for their device to handle suspend or hibernate events (at a HW level this usually means power off) the reference design and demonstration code normally leaves such things as an exercise for the integrator :-) Such hacky code often ends up underpinning much of our low level hardware control...

This isn't just a FLOSS issue. This is true for almost every 'embedded system' I have ever worked on.

----

What about 3rd party peripherals (after market devices)?

Just how many of the vendors provide FLOSS support as source code as opposed to a binary that assumes a particular kernal version, or distribution? (true also for Windows)

Now support the cheaper end of the market

A lot of OEM hardware uses 'generic' drivers - however often these drivers don't support all the device features' or the device doesn't quite work with the drivers...

/Rattus