Re: Fingerprinting....NO.....Destruction.....Maybe.....
You think MACs are unique? That would require that companies actual adhere to the standard, you know...
Posts by Claptrap314
2988 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015
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RAM-ramming Rowhammer is back – to uniquely fingerprint devices
Microsoft puts out Outlook fire, says everything's fine with Teams malware flaw
China chip material export controls just the tip of the iceberg, warns official
Wednesday 5th July 2023 21:29 GMT 
How much news here?
Not criticizing running the article, but China has been on & off with mineral export restricting multiple times in the last decade or so. At this point, it would be a complete dereliction of duty not to wargame against this response to ANY irritation of Pooh & friends.
The difficulty, of course, is that the free market means at any preparation to respond looks a LOT like corruption, in that it more-or-less means tipping off people that the supplies of these materials is going to become restricted.
Which means...we need to slap enough of a tariff on any & all critical Chinese-sourced goods that it become competitive to source them elsewhere. The justification is their lax regulation creates an unfair market. But even doing that is likely to be a risky move. So...start with some public speeches to the effect that the US government foresees the future supply of these materials as unstable.
Uggh. This would have been SO much easier if we had taken the Chinese at their word in 1992...
Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan
Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight
Report reveals US Space Force unprepared to counter orbital threats
Monday 3rd July 2023 16:22 GMT
Re: Think Tanks found to leak; use New Never-Before-Seen Sealant for Instant Repair!
President Reagan's strategy can be boiled down into two parts: 1) gain morale superiority, 2) exploit economic superiority.
So, for 1), he dubbed the USSR the "Evil Empire". He proclaimed that they would be "consigned to the ash-heap of history". He also confronted the useful idiots internally, which, as you can see, are still smarting from our victory. 2) More-or-less boiled down to stepping up the tempo of the arms race. SDI was actually a twofer, in that the mere idea had a significant effect on the morale of both sides, as well as forced the USSR to spend its way into oblivion.
Monday 3rd July 2023 16:15 GMT
Re: Think Tanks found to leak; use New Never-Before-Seen Sealant for Instant Repair!
Very much this. No way to get seriously into space without a separate branch to handle the matter.
Having said that, it seems to me to have been premature by most measures. Two strong possible justifications come to mind, however. 1) It may have been an attempt to shake up the perfumed palace enough to get something useful going. 2) It was part of the (long overdue) efforts to deal with the realities of an aggressive and abusive China.
Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers
Monday 3rd July 2023 15:54 GMT
The other way...
to do this with arcade games was to "git gud". I only managed to join the elite with one game (Centurion???). In 1985 or 1986. Those who knew how would run the number of games up to 9, then pass it off to the pleebs until it got down to two. We would be rather forceful in reclaiming the game so we could build the credits back up...
Comms watchdog to probe errors that left Brits unable to make emergency calls
Wednesday 28th June 2023 21:28 GMT
Re: Ensure uninterrupted access?
Certainly, "forcing regulation" is a bunch of political BS. But this isn't Microsoft, so serious reliability engineering can, assuming this was a software problem, keep the chance of something like this vanishingly low. It is NOT easy, however, and without a serious look under the hood, I could not venture to guess as to what exactly they did wrong.
We had a global distributed key store at Google when I was there (2015-6) that only went down when the SREs took it down--one minute a quarter, so that people would not build apps that depended on it always being up.
I consider six 9's to be theoretical as an SLA unless you are in something like a single-site manufacturing facility, but if you engineer for it, five 9's is quite doable by a competent team.
Wednesday 28th June 2023 21:21 GMT
"I can speak to you about the issue, or I can fix the issue... I can't do both"
That's a reasonable attitude if your tech team consists of you and your manager. But this is BT, and we are talking about EMS.
For even slightly mature incident management, external communications is generally the first responsibility that gets spun off by the incident commander--usually to the nearest manager, it keeps them out of your hair & lets them be the reassuring face to the clients while the workers are trying to figure out exactly what phase the moon is right now.
For something like EMS, weekend staffing also shouldn't matter much. Given the scope of the problem, the pagers should have been hitting everyone within half an hour--including the first line manager, whom, as mentioned above, is going to be responsible for communication. That includes understanding what the regulatory requirements are for communication, and calling up whomever as necessary.
You may have heard about AI defeating voice authentication. This research kinda proves it
Wednesday 28th June 2023 16:03 GMT
"Who you are"
has NEVER been a viable auth strategy. Any bio measure has got to be lossy, so unless you are sampling a LOT of data, neither uniqueness nor security is likely to be very good. And that--only until the data is somehow leaked, at which the main problem arises: bio data is effectively unchangeable.
I guess if your business model is to sell systems to people who don't really understand the limits of the technology, this can be a thing. I don't understand how any of these systems ever survives a serious technical review.
Ex-FBI employee jailed for taking classified material home
US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI
MIT discovery suggests a new class of superconductors
Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI
38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report
Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson
Lawyers who cited fake cases hallucinated by ChatGPT must pay
Thursday 22nd June 2023 23:38 GMT
I really don't like the term "hallucinate" for this behavior. The reality is that these GOLEMs are executing weighted random walks. That their output fails to match a series of phonemes that constitute a "true" sentence is not a malfunction in any way. It does not result from any error in the GOLEM's input, nor in the processing of said input. In fact, because the temperature is selectable, this undesired behavior is tunable.
What these GOLEMs are doing is best classified as guessing. The goal of these projects is to convince enough people that these guesses are useful. Mis-attributing what is happening in the first place is useful to their marketing, but should be banned or heartily mocked in the press.
Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary
Thursday 22nd June 2023 18:49 GMT
Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...
Certainly, in the absolute sense, the hypothesis rules out any coinage of terms at all--therefore it must be taken in a sense which is not absolute. And in a less absolute sense, the work required to engage a concept where one lacks a term certainly is negative cognitive feedback. That feedback can be avoided by coining a new term, or by avoiding the concept. If the concept itself is subject also to external negative feedback, it is a mockery to claim that these two feedbacks don't accumulate.
One terrific example of how this can play out is with the term "retarded", or whatever term in the long chain you prefer. Mental impairment is a real thing, with deep implications at almost any level. Attempts to keep whatever term is current from turning into an insult have been continuously futile precisely because of those deep implications.
Thursday 22nd June 2023 18:30 GMT
Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...
Except no. The term master/slave is generally used for contexts wherein the "slave" has no choice under the architecture but to accept the commands of the master. There can be a lot of variations on the implementation, but this is the core principle. For contrast, consider a distributed database with a multi-master architecture. Often, there will be a leader/follower relationship between the masters in the cluster, and the language describing them avoids master/slave, because there is no "slave revolt" when one of the masters challenges for leadership.
The one place that the master/slave term is uses where it should not be is when it relates to copying. If you object to "master" branches in git, however, you are the git. But at the same time, it is equally obnoxious to understanding to refer to a leader/follower database setup when the "follower" has no agency. Master/copy makes a lot more sense.
North Korea's Lazarus Group linked to Atomic Wallet heist
AI weapons need a safe back door for human control
Friday 9th June 2023 19:23 GMT
It's much worse than that. The problem is emergent complexity. Remember the 3-body problem? In Newtonian physics, if you have two bodies interacting by gravity, you can work out their future paths. 3? Only in some VERY special cases. But it gets a lot worse. If you have 5 bodies, they can be arraigned to distance themselves without bound in finite time. (Basically you take three bodies, one with a satellite, plus a "runner". The runner transfers orbital energy of the satellite into kinetic energy for the three main bodies.)
But this isn't just true for physics. There is a version of the same phenomenon for state machines. Check out the Busy Beaver. We know BB(n) for 2,3, and 4. That's it. It gets better (worse?) There is a 748-state machine that halts if and only if ZFC (the usual set theory) is inconsistent.
How big of a state machine is required to control a weapons system?
Formal verification works great for proving out cache architectures. You can even prove that divide works (I know a guy who did that for AMD). But much beyond that? Forgedabodit.
Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week
Friday 9th June 2023 18:13 GMT
What a change
one of my biggest challenges when I worked for Google (2015-16, ~55,000 employees) was setting up a meeting. Getting a spot on everyone's calendar was Hard. Getting a meeting room? impossible. The switch to online meetings alone would have notably boosted productivity, once people adjusted.
Google's culture is *special*. It's really difficult to communicate if you've not experienced it. They built some sort of Neverland Ranch that is designed to keep work on your mind constantly. It's really targeted to make green grads think that they are in the best place *ever*. For folks that are married with kids? Not so much.
Google measures everything. They have a sizable team (People Analytics) dedicated to statistics regarding their workforce. They A/B hiring strategies. They run deep regressions on their population. If it were any other company, I would simply assume that this push is the usual middle-manglement opposition. While I don't doubt that this is a significant factor, I think that there is also a good chance they they're actually seeing a retention issue for their senior-level employees compared to prepandemic, and that they have some sort of data that wfh is part of it.
The problem, of course, is that this policy is likely to create a much more serious retention issue with those over thirty.
Microsoft injects ChatGPT into 'secure' US government Azure cloud
Malwarebytes may not be allowed to label rival's app as 'potentially unwanted'
Singapore to double its submarine cable landing sites by 2033
Coinbase, don't feel left out. SEC has a lawsuit for you, too
SEC drops 42 cases after staff bungle data protection
Identity thieves can hunt us for 'rest of our lives,' claims suit after university data leak
Uncle Sam wants DEF CON hackers to pwn this Moonlighter satellite in space
This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage
Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file
Air Force colonel 'misspoke' when he said an AI-drone 'killed' its human operator
Deployed publicly accessible MOVEit Transfer? Oh no. Mass exploitation underway
US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'
Friday 2nd June 2023 20:03 GMT
Re: What's new here
Sorry, but I would love to work on such a project, for two (non-Ron Swanson) reasons:
1) A weapon is a weapon, and a tool is a tool. The fact that idiots misuse weapons and evil people misuse tools doesn't mean that the tool or weapon should not exist. In fact, the cruise missiles we sent to Baghdad in 1991 made final target selection autonomously. In this case, getting this tool usage right is hard. And I love to work on hard problems.
2) We know that for the last decade or so, China has been pouring money into AI research. It's pretty easy to foresee a scenario where only an AI is going to be able to act fast enough to counter an AI. Laugh about mine shaft gaps all you want, technological advantage has been thing every general in history worthy of the title has sought out. If we don't prepare to contain a hostile AI, we can expect to be rolled over by one. And I'm a defender. Even if the work were not in and of itself technically interesting, this is very worthy work.
Friday 2nd June 2023 07:11 GMT 
What's new here
is the BLATANT lack of imagination/understanding by the people running the simulation.
We have a NAME for this: Paperclip scenario.
The FIRST book I read to contemplate this EXACT sort of thing was published in 1981.
Not that Shelby had not considered this problem generally two hundred years ago, or that Walt Disney had not VERY pointedly warned about the dangers of automatons eighty three years ago?
Seriously, just what kind of rock were these people hiding under? What color is the sky in their world?
Oh, wait. The old saw about "military intelligence." Carry on then. Good thing they aren't responsible for anything important.
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Okay, so NOW I believe that AI is an existential threat--because it's going to be ordered about by this crew.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
