Friday Squid Blogging: Creating Batteries Out of Squid Cells

This is fascinating:

“When a squid ends up chipping what’s called its ring tooth, which is the nail underneath its tentacle, it needs to regrow that tooth very rapidly, otherwise it can’t claw its prey,” he explains.

This was intriguing news ­ and it sparked an idea in Hopkins lab where he’d been trying to figure out how to store and transmit heat.

“It diffuses in all directions. There’s no way to capture the heat and move it the way that you would electricity. It’s just not a fundamental law of physics.”

[…]

The tiny brown batteries he mentions are about the size of a chiclet, and Hopkins says it will take a decade or more to create larger batteries that could have commercial value.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Posted on March 24, 2023 at 5:06 PM124 Comments

Comments

vas pup March 24, 2023 7:06 PM

The numbers that are too big to imagine
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230320-the-numbers-that-are-too-big-to-imagine

Phishing: Who Takes the Bait?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/misinformation-desk/202303/phishing-who-takes-the-bait

” Research suggests that people are more likely to fall for phishing scams if they tend to make decisions impulsively rather than after reflection.
People under time pressure are also more likely to fall for phishing scams, as opposed to those who do not face time pressure.
Some scammers explicitly aim to weed out reflective thinkers by making their scam obvious, so only the impulsive thinkers respond.

The U.S. government’s Computer Security Resource center defines phishing as “[t]ricking individuals into disclosing sensitive personal information by claiming to be a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication” — for example, an email that attempts to trick you into revealing your bank log-in information.

In their study, Jones and her team examined decision-making styles, whether people tend to rely on “intuitive, immediate, and emotional responses” (impulsive) when making decisions, or manage to suppress any initial intuitive response to “gather necessary information” that includes “consideration of future consequences and allows a more considered decision to be made”(reflective).

What did the researchers find? First, people are not great at differentiating between phishing and legitimate emails. No one categorized all 36 emails correctly, and only one person identified all 18 phishing emails. In fact, the average number of emails identified correctly was 68%.

Take your time when reading emails related to money, particularly if you tend to make decisions intuitively and impulsively.

some scammers may actually be using knowledge about cognitive reflection to their advantage. We previously wrote about the ways in which scammers can trick ChatGPT into writing well-written, believable misinformation that they can then spread. ChatGPT can, therefore, reduce the effort to create false narratives. But not all scammers are aiming for eloquent, believable prose.”

modem phonemes March 24, 2023 10:50 PM

@ vas pup

Re: big numbers, infinity

Those interested in the BBC article might also be interested in the late Professor of Mathematics Edward Nelson’s papers [1] on these topics

A couple of links:

“It is widely believed that there is a clear and correct theory of actual infinity in mathematics. Certainly if there is not, then there cannot be a clear and correct use of actual infinity in cosmology or any other branch of science. I want to examine that belief. Let’s turn to the concept of actual infinity in mathematics.”

https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/warn.pdf

“ In conclusion, regarding the numbers as an incomplete infinity offers a viable and interesting alternative to regarding the numbers as a completed infinity, one that leads to great simplifications in some areas of mathematics and that has strong connections with problems of computational complexity.”

https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/e.pdf

  1. https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers.html

ResearcherZero March 25, 2023 4:42 AM

“We are releasing the well-poisoning machine, because if we don’t do it first, someone else with even worse morals might do it faster.”

“By being the first people to poison the well, we can know exactly what kind of toxins will be in the water such that we understand the symptoms when we inevitably make the whole village sick from it.”

“Of course this has prompted our competitors to fire their ethics people and also poison the well even faster, but such is the inevitable march of progress!”
‘https://hachyderm.io/@mononcqc/110073337791217700

Draining the swamp: Florida’s tug-of-war over water has a long history.

The steady encroachment of saltwater is already changing the landscape, killing off saw grass and exposing the land to erosion.

The saltwater-freshwater interface moves inland and reduces the capacity of soils to leach salts. Storm surges then further inundate land with salt water.
‘https://www.sciencenews.org/article/florida-everglades-freshwater-saltwater-sea-level-rise

People who don’t have the guts or balls to admit and take responsibility for things they have done.
‘https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Softcock

An endearing term of affection. or (when the tide washes your poop back in)
‘https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=See%20You%20Next%20Tuesday

ResearcherZero March 25, 2023 4:43 AM

The lures are designed to socially engineer the recipient to download and open an attached RAR file that contains either a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) or Excel payload.
‘https://www.intezer.com/blog/research/phishing-campaign-targets-nuclear-energy-industry/

ResearcherZero March 25, 2023 5:10 AM

“Since the private key also ships with every installation of CloudPanel, and CloudPanel is freely available to anyone who cares to download it…”
‘https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2023/03/21/cve-2023-0391-mgt-commerce-cloudpanel-shared-certificate-vulnerability-and-weak-installation-procedures/

With the default settings of the Veeam Backup & Replication server, no logs related to this attack are left behind. However, by default, logging is not configured to include API calls. Without manually changing the log level, entries related to the attack technique will not be shown.

Any Veeam Backup & Replication version prior to V12 (build 12.0.0.1420 P20230223) and V11a (build 11.0.1.1261 P20230227) is vulnerable.
‘https://www.huntress.com/blog/veeam-backup-replication-cve-2023-27532-response

Winter March 25, 2023 9:10 AM

@ResearcherZero

We are releasing the well-poisoning machine, because if we don’t do it first, someone else with even worse morals might do it faster.

Yep, simple “tragedy of the Commons”.

It seems to me that Americans see “the commons” as Communism and, therefore, feel obliged by religious ordnance to destroy it.

When the rapture is there, or Jesus’ second coming, the true believer is convinced that he will get punished for every tree still standing and every well left unpoisoned.

SpaceLifeForm March 25, 2023 2:58 PM

@ Clive

Partial Carrington Event

I did not observe it myself because I was asleep and it was pouring rain.

‘https://www.livescience.com/most-powerful-solar-storm-in-6-years-caused-auroras-all-over-the-us-and-nobody-saw-it-coming

lurker March 25, 2023 3:42 PM

How secure can the IoT be? Boyd Multerer left Microsoft to build his own secure OS for mission critical devices on the ‘net

‘https://nzentrepreneur.co.nz/kry10-is-building-a-new-computer-operating-system-to-power-the-internet-of-things/

Nick Levinson March 25, 2023 4:27 PM

TikTok may have a more specific security threat, probably being kept secret by national governments. I’m only guessing that, but I am because the news reports I come across (without deep digging) don’t seem to have compelling reasons for a major government ban.

Collecting data on 100 million Americans (or whatever large number it is) could be useful for a conflict between the two nations, but I understand the Chinese have already demonstrated their ability and willingness to crack into security of systems they don’t own, so selling TikTok needn’t make much of a difference, the main difference perhaps being exfiltrating data in real time or from time to time, but that likely doesn’t much matter.

As to the Chinese spreading misinformation or disinformation, Russia has been doing that using U.S.-based social media, China could do the same, and we can deal with Russian and Chinese efforts in that arena.

If the Chinese use TikTok’s servers to, say, modify U.S. military capabilities to a Chinese taste, the U.S. probably wouldn’t want those servers and their software sold to a U.S. company, which might not be able to find or restrain the offending software (even though a sale being licensed could include a right for the government to inspect the servers after sale and delivery thus avoiding the Constitutional limit on search if that even applies to a national self-defense issue), but simply erased, and then there wouldn’t be anything worth buying (the going price for a used empty server usually being not much, selling a lot of them to one buyer would lower the price, and selling a lot of them to a lot of buyers would have higher sales costs and require sales speed to beat obsolescence).

JonKnowsNothing March 25, 2023 4:50 PM

@Winter, @ResearcherZero, All

re: It seems to me that Americans see “the commons” as Communism and, therefore, feel obliged by religious ordnance to destroy it.

The current neoliberal-libertarian economic model in the USA pushes the concept that there should be No Public Ownership of Anything (except the military).

All public lands, parks, recreation areas, natural reserves, trees, rivers, plants and animals in them should be Privately Owned.

Historically and currently, Oligarchs have bought up thousands of acres and thousands of square miles of land for their personal use. They do not share, unless they can make a profit from entrance fees or usage fees or dude ranch mega$$ vacations.

The idea behind this conflict is: “People Should Share” and “Sharing should be Open to All”. For the neocon-libertarians, Anything that requires someone to Share is anathema.

The commons in UK, EU come from a much older legal stance on public pastures. We do not have public pastures in USA, you have to pay a fee to One or More Agencies for the permit to graze on “Public Lands”.

Not too long ago, an old fashioned gun fight took place over fees applied to lands held from a time before the pasturage fee rules were enacted. One side had been grazing Fee-Free for generations, the side said Pay Up Now We Got Guns.

There was a ambush on a rural road by the We Got Guns side; the other side had no guns. The We Got Guns side shot dead an unarmed person from the other side. The We Got Guns side claimed the dead person “killed themself” cause “We didn’t shoot”. The State We Got Guns folks kept Omerta…. Until a video got released of the We Got Bigger Guns picking up the their shell casings ejected during the one sided exchange.

Water, Grazing Rights, Cattle, Sheep, Fences. People here die over these.

vas pup March 25, 2023 5:38 PM

Car Seizures Are a Lucrative and Punishing Police Tactic
https://news.yahoo.com/memphis-car-seizures-lucrative-punishing-123717380.html

Please read the article and see what is police entrapment tactics is in US. That is absolutely wrong.

If woman (I guess part of stinky police sting operation) was NOT flagging poor guy, I am with police. Otherwise it is considered entrapment – initiative should be ONLY on suspect – never on police provocateur. Police should fight crime not make incentive to commit them.

Of cause, it is easier and safe put parking tickets and target law-abiding citizens by entrapment rather than fight tsunami of real violent crimes in the big US cities.

Mike March 25, 2023 5:47 PM

With all the news about data gathering(tik tok mainly) lately I have a question. (Forgive me if this isn’t the right place to ask.)
Data brokers will sell you data about anyone including location data. Or groups of people. (See last week tonight data broker piece) My question is What is the timeliness of the data? I mean can you buy real time data? Like who’s in a specific Wal-Mart right now? Or how delayed is the data? Seconds, minutes, hours or days?
Google can give you location data about who was in a specific place, within a specific time, but how behind is that data? You can get data about who’s in Wal-Mart on January 2nd but can you get data about who was in Wal-Mart five minutes ago?

Clive Robinson March 25, 2023 5:54 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, Winter,

A little “lite” reading on first language and thought,

https://www.livescience.com/your-native-language-may-shape-the-wiring-of-your-brain

To some it’s not at all a new idea, but conservative, religious, or other, “don’t rock my boat” “break my rice bowl” etc etc types want to throw bricks etc. Something it should be noted that stopped the theory of evolution being published for decades.

But, in other news…

On the more fun side could AI go a wandering for us?

I’ve said before and many accept it as a premise in our universe, that in physical reality only three numbers make sense to use for thinking,

Zero : There is nothing of something
One : Something is unique
Infinity : There is an unknonown number of somethings

Well a question that pops up from time to time is,

“Are we alone?”

Well as we exist as do a range of animals and plants on this planet it’s reasonable to assume,

“Life exists in the universe.”

Which brings the question of if we have any convincing reason in scientific terms to think we are unique, to which the answer so far is no.

Which leads onto the,

“Well, why have we not seen/heard them?”

To which there are two basic reasons

1, Would we know what to look for or even recognise it if it was under our feet.
2, As we understand it currently the Universe is very large, and it has quite a number of limits to non local behaviours.

The answer to the first is obviously no, as we are amoungst other things still discovering new life forms on Earth that we’ve over looked, stepped over or on in the past.

The second is where it gets interesting…

Put simply just about everything we know currently precludes what we are capable of as a way to get in contact with other planets in our own solar system let alone anywhere else. Which is fine as we’ve no real way of getting there and staying for long enough to require the level of communications we need as a minimum on Earth.

Basically the speed of light precludes many types of communications, and the vast amount of energy to communicate a bit of data reliably across the distances has costs that quickly mount up.

This should not be a surprise because anyone who has been keeping only half an eye on drones as weapons should know of the issues of having a pilot gambling his life away in Las Vegas or gambling with his life in the skies above the middle east etc.

The reality is that UAV and other drones be they in space, air, land or above or below water are getting autonomy increasingly above that of an “auto-pilot” and is one of the reasons the military keep pumping large amounts of money into all forms of hands-off autonomy, all the way up to and beyond the latest crazy in Artificial Inteligence.

One reason for this few think about untill reality bites is the cost of moving biological brains from point A to point B. The further and faster you want to do it the more geometrically expensive it gets.

Three pounds of brain needs upwards of a hundred pounds of body to support it, that most of us know. That body needs all sorts of high mass high energy systems to support it. Depending on who you ask getting just the weight of the brain into Low Earth Orbit is in the $10,000 range. Which is one of the best reasons to go for silicon based “inteligence” systems. Especially when you consider you can now do a high end mobile phone and the required solar cell chargers for quite a bit less than the weight of the biological brain without any of it’s support systems.

Thus there are two basic ways “A spaceman can come a travaling”,

1, Small and autonomous.
2, Vast and slow.

Neither is going to get information of any use back to point A from point B.

So the question arises of,

“Why travel or try to talk in the first place?”

Well the answer to that to be blunt is unless superluminal is discovered, is it will be,

“Not for science, but art.”

That is not the “How?” of what we do, but the “Why?” of what we do.

I won’t go into the how of doing it but basically it would be via fully autonomous, self repairing and importantly self replicating devices that would spread out maintaining a near constant density of covarage as they spread out like the surface of a sphere. But importabtlt “talking back” via inteligent relays, that compress information and reduce the energy required to get the information back from billions of point Bs to point A.

Well it appears somebody in the military has been thinking about this starting from a different point of view,

https://www.livescience.com/alien-mothership-lurking-in-our-solar-system-could-be-watching-us-with-tiny-probes-pentagon-official-suggests

Yes it sounds mad untill you start to actually think of things from an engineering perspective, limited by what we currently know.

vas pup March 25, 2023 6:33 PM

Nvidia builds quantum-classical computing system with Israel’s Quantum Machines
https://www.timesofisrael.com/nvidia-builds-quantum-classical-computing-system-with-israels-quantum-machines/

“US gaming and computer graphics giant Nvidia has joined forces with an Israeli startup to roll out a new hardware system to connect the quantum computer with classical computers.

The new system, Nvidia DGX Quantum, built together with Israel’s Quantum Machines, a developer of a standard universal language for quantum computers, is expected to be first deployed at Israel’s quantum computing research center at the end of this year.

The quantum computing R&D center funded by the Israel Innovation Authority at an investment of NIS 100 million ($27 million), which is headed by Quantum Machines, was established to help Israel build a quantum computer and advance research in the field
that would lead to future developments in economics, technology, security, engineering, and science.

Quantum computing harnesses quantum mechanics to quickly solve problems that are too complex for classical computers. Quantum computers process exponentially more data compared to classical computers, using quantum bits, or qubits, the basic unit of
quantum information.

!!!!Quantum Machines built the Quantum Orchestration Platform (QOP), a hardware and software solution for operating quantum systems to facilitate research and enable future breakthroughs. It also developed the QUA, a standard universal language for
quantum computers that the startup says allows researchers and scientists to write programs for varied quantum computers with one unified code.

The DGX Quantum deploys Nvidia’s Grace Hopper superchip and its technology platform for hybrid quantum-classical computers coupling so-called graphics processing units (GPUs)
and quantum processing units (QPUs) in one system. It is supported by Quantum Machine’s flagship OPX universal quantum control system designed to meet the demanding requirements of quantum control protocols, including precision, timing, complexity, and ultra-low latency, according to the Israeli startup.

The combination allows “researchers to build extraordinarily powerful applications that combine quantum computing with state-of-the-art classical computing, enabling calibration, control, quantum error correction and hybrid algorithms,” Nvidia said in a
statement.”

Israel’s quantum computing center will offer access to research and development on =>three quantum processing technologies — superconducting qubits, cold ions, and optic computers — and provide services to the Israeli quantum computing community.

Nvidia Last year established a new design and engineering group in Israel that is =>leading the development of next-generation central processing units (CPUs) geared toward artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and Nvidia’s new
platform Omniverse, which allows for virtual world simulations.”

Clive Robinson March 25, 2023 8:09 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL

Re : Sun craps on us sight unseen.

Whilst the CME hit us to some unexpectedly, the actual CME was expected amongst a cluster of other holes in the Sun that the current solar uptic is giving us.

The reason it was “not predicted” is like all weather it has a spread of probabilities, and the speed of the movment of the matter spewed out was on shall we say outside the normal range. If things had been slower they would have consequently arived more behind us or missed us altogether…

So like twister warnings all you can say is “it’s the season” and even if one is seen, you can not tell in advance who’s roof it’s going to rip off and in which direction throw their hard earned possessions.

There were some radio fadeouts[1] ranging to blackouts[2][3][4] that were a cause of anoyance for me and others, but then again there were very pretty lights in the sky for others with the “Valkyries riding out” to “chose the fallen” for Odin.

[1] Sun Spots are the plague of the HF Communicator and these days those who navigate by GPS alone (totally dumbass) oh and those who do data communications “in wires”, but also if the flux gets high enough power grids can get the flip and in many places cascade fail…

Put simply space weather is driven by the Sun and it’s spots and closely follows the “solar cycle” closely which is currently heading towards a peek on it’s roughly 11 years cycle. Which manifest in a number of the observable EM properties of the Sun.

Sunspots are regions intense magnetic fields which optically appear darker than the surrounding surface (plage). The sunspots visable, increase not just in number but the complexity of their patterns untill solar maximum is reached and this is traditionally given as the sunspot number or SSN. The reason sunspots appear dark is the particularly hot, and bright areas around them called plage. Plage regions produce “Extreme Ultra-Violet”(EUV) radiation which causes ionisation of the ionosphere F region/layer. The less EUV the less ionisation of the F layer, thus the less reflection of HF frequencies (which are of inportance to terestrial long haul communications). But satellites are above the F layer thus their signals suffer from increased attenuation, with “weak signal systems” like all GPS systems being more visably effected.

Sunspots are also the base location of solar flares which are very large discharges on the Sun’s surface involving massive amounts of energy of radiation and matter. Held in intense magnetic fields of a sunspot area. In a solar flare, the magnetic field collapses, spewing the radiation and matter outwards into space. Part of the radiation are X-rays which causes ionisation of the ionosphere D layer which being much lower critically effects all radio waves above just a couple of MHz. Significantly increased D region attenuation can cause total absorption of all frequencies used for communications for several hours. Called a “Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance”(SID) or “fadeout” of dayside communications. Solar flares of sufficient intensity can cause a total “blackout”, directly under the sun. These happen around 300 days in the solar cycle and most frequent around solar mximum.

[2] But it gets worse, because it’s not just radiation that gets kicked out by solar flares there is matter as well. Referred to as a “Coronal Mass Ejection”(CME). The CME moves away from the Sun at relatively slow speeds normarly between 400-1000 km/s, expanding like a smoke ring or bubble as it does. So unlike the radiation that moves at ~C the CME takes around two to five days to get out to the Earths orbit, and the majority do not come even close let alone impact the Earth or Moon. Unfortunately if it does it strikes The Earth’s magnetic field like a hammer hitting a bell. Initially as a significant push followed by large geomagnetic field fluctuations for an extended period of time.

[3] A smilar geomagnetic disturbance result to solar flare CME is caused by “Coronal holes”. They have been liked to, “a window in the magnetic field structure of the Sun’s corona that allows solar particles to flow more freely outward from the Sun”. Unlike CMEs that occur mainly on the rise to and at solar maximum, they are more common during the declining part of the solar cycle as the Sun’s magnetic field is waning.

[4] Of concern to those reliant on radio communications is geomagnetic disturbance of sufficient level causes an ionospheric storm. This causes rapid irregularities in the ionosphere which gives rise to multi-paths signal fading.

modem phonemes March 25, 2023 8:27 PM

@ Clive Robinson

first language and thought

​„Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen“

Many experience this; learning a second language can greatly help understand one’s own first language. Perhaps those language networks are all limited and additional languages fill out the gaps.

Also different languages seem to facilitate appreciation of and emphasize different aspects of reality. Some languages seem to help one grasp reality more fully than others do. E..g. Greek facilitates precise and economical tracking of the full relations between things in a way other languages don’t without extensive circumlocution.

modem phonemes March 25, 2023 8:48 PM

@ Nick Levinson

TikTok may have a more specific security threat

What about just massive statistically useful data on the psychology and sociology of the users, in particular Americans ?

Clive Robinson March 25, 2023 9:32 PM

@ lurker, ALL,

“How secure can the IoT be?”

It depends on what you mean by “secure”, but in the general cases “not very” is the answer, regardless of the operating system.

The reason as always,

“Security -v- Efficiency”.

Or more correctly “Security -v- Cost”

IoT is a very low margin product area. Marketing thus Managment unless forced by legislation or regulation will see security as an expense without value, even if the OS is Open Source. Put simply from M&M’s petspective,

“Features sell, Security smells”

So it will get stripped out.

But even at an engineering level, security has costs in CPU cycles thus power consumption, thus higher priced components in the PSU. But then that increased power has to go somewhere as heat, so a heatsink and larger case.

But not all of it will be heat, some will be radiated as EM signals that give you side channels to take out private information such as information that gives the “root of trust” master security secret etc.

But also message security can be viewed in two ways,

1, Message data security.
2, Message traffic security.

The first gets handled by cryptography, the second is “traffic analysis” and that is way way less easy to deal with.

I could go on, but my view is if you are going to use IoT it has to be “fully segregated” so no bluetooth, WiFi etc, and any other connections kept internal on networks that can not be accessed from outside the secure area…

But many IoT devices will not alow you to run “segregated” the whole point is they can sell lower to “get data for brokers” so have a steady oncome. So you have to run them connected to the manufacturers servers in China or some other place where you have no legal protection. And if the device does not earn money the server goes away and your IoT device you payed money for just stops working… Oh and it does not have to be a Chines company that does this, as quite a few Amazon customers have discovered in the past. As for eBay they claim to br a market not a retailer so you don’t buy from them, and they don’t have to even follow any “safety standards” etc etc…

I guess it would not surprise you if I said,

“I have no IoT devices and no intention of ever buying anything IoT or IoT like.”

Clive Robinson March 25, 2023 10:31 PM

Nick Levinson, ALL,

Re : It’s political in brown envelopes.

“TikTok may have a more specific security threat, probably being kept secret by national governments. I’m only guessing that, but I am because the news reports I come across (without deep digging) don’t seem to have compelling reasons for a major government ban.”

And it’s the wrong guess.

It has to do with politics, user age range, Silicon Valley Corps lobbying.

Put simply TikTok appeals to a “lost generation” as far as the corruption known as US Politics is concerned.

It also has successfully pulled a lot of money out of certain Silicon Valley Corps. You can see this with YouTube so frightened of TicTok they are trying to turn every content provider into a 30 second meme pusher.

The previous POTUS hated TikTok because it’s users regarded him as being “a most unsuitable person” or worse for his “grab them by the…”[1] and worse comments and behaviour.

So as nobody has found TikTok doing anything even as remotely underhand or evil as the ex POTUS and Silicon Valley Mega Corps, TikTok must be “anti-american” or worse. And as your history should tell you being “anti-american” is about the worst thing you can be accused of so that is what Alphabet’s and Meta’s lobbyists are being paid to forment.

So lots of “brown envelopes stuffed with green” or their modern equivalent changing hands to have a vigilante hanging party.

Which is something else that is almost certainly in the mix[2].

[1] You can read the full quote and others that are as bad,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/07/donald-trump-leaked-recording-women

[2] Apparently less than thinly veiled,

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/alvin-bragg-manhattan-criminal-court-district-attorney-b2304902.html

Nick Levinson March 25, 2023 10:46 PM

@modem phonemes, @vas pup, & @Clive Robinson:

@modem phonemes:

I addressed that in my second paragraph.

@vas pup:

There are good policy issues for and against civil forfeiture and when to induce criminal conduct by a private actor, but in the U.S. it’s likely lawful for law enforcement operating undercover to induce the sort of criminal conduct you know you shouldn’t do, as long as you are taking critical action in the unlawful conduct. If the undercover police or informant supplies bomb-making materials and you assemble them into a bomb and have the intent to make a bomb, you can’t be charged with supplying the materials but you can be charged with making the bomb, even if the bomb is really nonfunctional (like if the explosive was fake but labeled as an explosive), if making the bomb was itself unlawful. That’s not entrapment. It becomes entrapment if the police person is known by the bomb-maker as a police person or, for an informant or agent provocateur, as carrying out a police order and if the bomb-maker had that knowledge at the time they were induced to make the bomb, not merely at the arrest.

If police suspect that Joe is a murderer for hire but isn’t able to collect evidence but Joe seems to be making a lot of money by murdering, it’s not legally inappropriate to try to offer Joe money to commit a murder. Anyone should know to refuse. If Joe accepts and there’s no ambiguity about the purpose of the money, and even if the murder was not carried out nor even threatened to the proposed victim, that’s probably enough (depending on where) to convict, not for murder (it didn’t happen) but for agreeing to commit one. If Joe refuses the money, it took up his time but that’s probably not grounds for him to sue the police if he ever finds out that that’s who tried to induce him.

Many laws are obscure and are hard to discover, and those may not be legitimate grounds for convictions based on undercover inducement to violate them. There does not have to be intent to violate the law, just (for example) intent not to do a specific something the law requires, but an argument that a very obscure law is important enough may be unpersuasive to a jury.

@Clive Robinson:

I agree. I have no IoT devices and don’t want them.

Nick Levinson March 25, 2023 11:16 PM

@Clive Robinson:

I missed your 10:31p comment when I last posted.

Those (business competition for YouTube, Trump’s views of users, etc.) are secondary issues not likely to be enough to drive this push, or, for instance, we’d be seeing very little foreign business in the U.S. and section 230 would have been repealed (to push some big U.S. platforms up against the wall and gain their compliance).

lurker March 25, 2023 11:45 PM

@Clive Robinson, @Nick Levinson

Yes, the current Internet of current Things is a mess. Security vs. Cost? A truckload of devices could save a mint of money by not having the internet. I have yet to meet anyone who uses the internet on their fridge or TV. Sure they sell them at the local Walmart, but this is barely part of the First World.

Perhaps my question should have been
“How can the IoT be more secure?”

When you hack through kry10’s vaporware and marketing fluff, they seem to have some right ideas: microkernel, drivers only for that specific device, security built in to each layer of the OS. Then comes a biggie, do you need, or only want to access it from outside the building? Is a VPN good enough? Hire your own dark fibre? Because kry10 don’t seem to be aiming for the fridge & TV market.

JonKnowsNothing March 26, 2023 12:39 AM

@Clive, @Winter, All

re: Where is everyone?

The Military is behind the times or someone just started reading stories like Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem series.

The trilogy is quite excellent as story. It deals directly with “where is everyone” and explores the Dark Forest Hypothesis . There are several variants of this hypotheses and they go by different names but contain the same conceptual problem.

  • If there are lot of others out there, why aren’t they talking to each other?

When I was first exposed to the concept of the Dark Forest, I rejected it as absurd. This is likely a function of how English, as my Primary Language, has shaped my basic concepts of the universe.

I still have trouble with it but after much reflection I can see The Dark Forest at work, right here, right now, every day. You don’t need an Alien to provide proofs.

Cixin’s works also go into great length with the nano-spy concept, the fictional Sophons.

Perhaps a PlagarismBot is part of the MilSpec equation.

The Key Dark Forest Concept:

In Liu Cixin’s novel, the dark forest hypothesis is introduced by the character Ye Wenjie, while visiting her daughter’s grave. She introduces three key axioms to a new field she describes as “cosmic sociology”:

1) “Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society.” (based on the Drake equation)

2) Suppose that survival is the primary need of a civilization.

3) Suppose that civilizations continuously expand over time, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

===

ht tps://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

ht tps://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Drake_equation

ht tps://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Fermi_paradox

ht tps://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature_of_intelligent_life_to_destroy_others

(url fractured)

Robin March 26, 2023 3:58 AM

re: TikTok, et al.

Perhaps the perceived risk is not just about surveillance but also – even mainly – about influence.

Facebook notoriously played roles in recent US elections and Brexit. Companies like Cambridge Analytica made a living from selling influence to political agents.

From relatively banal activities such as sending tailored news/propaganda to users (even at an individual level) through sub-liminal messaging to more sophisticated manipulation of group-think, there are many opportunities to screw up peoples’ thinking to the benefit of an adversary.

Banning stuff from ‘official’ phones may be a stunt to undermine public enthusiasm for it.

Winter March 26, 2023 7:16 AM

@Clive, JonKnowsNothing, All

“Well, why have we not seen/heard them?”

Life has existed on earth for 3B years, give or take. Of these 3B years, interplanetary communication in any form has existed for less than 200 years. That is, for less than 1:30,000,000 of the time life has existed.

Then, even now, been are unable to send messages to any star beyond our closest neighbors. And that is using EM radiation or rocket probed, which are pretty inefficiënt.

If the speed of light is the impenetrable wall physics says it is, then there is really no point in communicating with far away stars.

Winter March 26, 2023 7:40 AM

@JonKnowsNothing

Dark Forest Hypothesis

As Wikipedia formulated it:

In this framing, it is presumed that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat,[2] and thus destroy any nascent life that makes its presence known.

We do not have to go to outer space to see how this works. Many human societies were like this. Eg, Highland Papua villages and many other tribal societies had a take no prisoners approach to neighbors.

But, trade [1] is more profitable than isolation, always. And it is extremely unlikely that aliens can colonize worlds with existing life easily, or at all.

Destroying all existing life on earth is rather easy, throw a 100km diameter rock on it and the oceans will boil dry. It will take 4,000 years for the temperature to get below 100C again.

It might be easier to terraform, eg, Mars or Venus.

Again, trade is much more profitable as human history has shown time and again.

[1] war is a kind of one sided trade.

modem phonemes March 26, 2023 8:31 AM

Re: probability arguments for other intelligent life

The probability arguments assume the thing they “prove”.

The movie Ad Astra has it right, there isn’t any other intelligent life out there.

Winter March 26, 2023 10:04 AM

@modem

The movie Ad Astra has it right, there isn’t any other intelligent life out there.

Is there here?

JonKnowsNothing March 26, 2023 11:18 AM

@ Winter, ALL

re: Dark Forest Hypothesis & Trade

Trade is a human developed method of interaction. Look at non-humans on the planet and you won’t find a lot of trade. There are symbiotic and exploitive relationships but not trade as humans think of it.

  • Ticks suck blood. Humans sell theirs.

It is the last axiom in the Dark Forest Hypothesis that takes a good amount of in-think to understand what it means.

Consider:

  • You see a line of ants trailing to a small amount of spilled sugar
  • You see a “weed” growing in your flower bed
  • Pretend you are a deer in the forest, calmly going about your normal deer life, eating grass, living with a herd. Then on a cold day, with snow on the ground, while you are pawing to get to the willow under the snow….

It is the other edge of each of these examples, that forms the Dark Forest.

  • The total matter in the universe remains constant.

Winter March 26, 2023 11:25 AM

@JonKnowsNothing

Look at non-humans on the planet and you won’t find a lot of trade.

Ehh, maybe you should update your biology. Things have been moving very fast the last decade(s).

Search for:
Wood wide web
‘https://www.science.org/content/article/wood-wide-web-underground-network-microbes-connects-trees-mapped-first-time

Mycorrhiza

Or more generally:
Facultative symbionts (which is the official terminology for “trade” in biology)

Winter March 26, 2023 12:04 PM

@JonKnowsNothing

The total matter in the universe remains constant.

But the total matter in the universe is immensely big. There are some rather nice SF stories about (partial) Dyson speres.

See, eg, the Ringworld stories of Larry Niven
‘https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Ringworld

Bob Shaw Orbitsville and sequels.
‘https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitsville

modem phonemes March 26, 2023 1:12 PM

@ Winter

Re: revolving doors in the vast forest

There is here, if you have a wormhole [1]. Then you can meet yourself going and coming through a revolving door. So it’s good to provide some Tipler safety cones. If you lack a wormhole, then there is here for some, and here is there for others. However, in all cases no matter where you go, there you are, and your future but not your past is so bright you have to wear shades. This is the true meaning of the Dark Forest.

  1. Trees have a different kind of wormhole.

JonKnowsNothing March 26, 2023 3:14 PM

@Winter, All

re: the universe is immensely big

Size or volume are inconsequential for the outcomes of 3d Axiom.

Tell the ant, the weed and the deer that their matter is of no importance.

Immense size matters only to the determine the area boundary of the Dark Forest.

  • One group must devour another group to complete the 2nd Axiom and 3d Axiom.

We may contemplate the universe as immense however, the Dark Forest exists on this planet, right now, every day, historically and currently.

Today there was a MSM article describing how in the UK a large amount of “Honey” is not honey but blended sugars, which may or may not be mixed with honey. There is a finite amount of honey, it maybe a large amount, but it is limited by the production ability of bees. We can flavor blended sugar, to imitate the flavor of honey, but there is no recourse in the Universe, however immense an area it is, to create honey.

Honey creation is balanced on the existence of honey bees. There are many types of bees but not all make honey. It is balanced on the types of food the bees consume: clover, wildflower, sage, flowering orchards etc.

To expand honey we would have to allow for more bees and food for bees, then bee society could expand. The bees have no idea what humans are planning for them. Other animals are just as in-the-dark too.

Humans are not so generous as to allow another species to expand as the expense of human desires. Humans cannot expand without destroying something else, neither can any other species.

JonKnowsNothing March 26, 2023 6:26 PM

@lurker, All

re: Long COVID meets the Dark Forest

In the context of the Dark Forest Hypothesis, SARS-CoV-2 has successfully colonized Humans for the expansion of their species. They are clever to do it, even if they do not have brains the same way humans do.

Humans are highly successful, there are lots of us, we may have pockets of diminishing population but over all we are “billions upon billions”. Humans provide more than ample resources for their use and we provide fantastic opportunities for their improvement and enhancement to yet even better pathways for resource exploitation.

Long COVID is a very successful foray against humans for the virus’ purposes. It doesn’t kill us off so quickly now, and it can sustain the siege-attack (1) for as long as our natural lifespan (est 100yrs).

We have met the Dark Forest; we are not the hunters.

===

1) Attacker = SARS-CoV-2 / Siege fortress == Human

Siege warfare is a form of constant, low-intensity conflict characterized by one party holding a strong, static, defensive position.

A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a quick assault, and which refuses to surrender.

Sieges involve surrounding the target to block the provision of supplies and the reinforcement or escape of troops.

Clive Robinson March 26, 2023 6:42 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

Re : LC or LmRNA,

A freedom of Information request in Australia, after a fairly bitter dispute, turned up a redacted document based on Pfizer information given to all Governments looking at approving it. However they’ve tried to keep the information withheld.

Why, because basically we were lied to about the way the mRNA lippids spread around the body,

Have a look at,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-xss9K7kwQ

It appears my caution over mRNA was certainly justified.

SpaceLifeForm March 26, 2023 7:19 PM

Twitter source code leak

Will people finally abandon ship?

For $8 you can become a verified impostor.

‘https://nitter.poast.org/emptywheel/status/1639976428249677824#m

‘https://www.globalvillagespace.com/tech/twitter-source-code-leaked-online-confirms-company/

Twitter’s source code, the underlying computer code on which the social network runs, has been leaked online, according to a legal filing.

lurker March 26, 2023 7:31 PM

@Winter, JonKnowsNothing

In Ants and Dinosaurs, Liu Cixin posits a symbiosis in which trust is an important component. The denouement is spectacular when trust fails.

In the Dark Forest trust is a folly. The most sought after resource in the finite universe must be antimatter to power near-(and super-)luminal ships. Perversely the most efficient method of harvesting antimatter is the ships themselves when travelling at speed. Such ships will always be targets, but more important targets are the home civilizations of such ships.

The universe at creation had at least eleven dimensions, and as it expanded various forms of matter lost dimensions. The utility of the electron retaining eleven is demonstrated with the sophon. But I fail to see what it benefits the Singer’s people to reduce the whole universe to two dimensions. Do they expect to survive the singularity, rinse and repeat?

Clive Robinson March 26, 2023 7:40 PM

Re : Dark Forest is too fragil.

The basic argument which is a necessary condition for the Dark Forest reasoning to work is that “Everyone hides”.

So two questions arise,

1, Can you hide?
2, What if someone does not hide?

The answer to the first is the “wood smoke” problem, that anyone who has tried to “stealth camp” knows about. And was an issue during WWII for those hiding out in non populated areas occupied by German forces. Both humans and dogs can smell wood smoke –or cooking food– at incredible distances away from where the energy is being used[1]

Put simply your necessary use of energy to survive betrays your existence upto a given range.

The range is dependent on,

1, Reduction with distance.
2, Background levels.

For example a radiant EM signal reduces in intensity by 1/(r^2), untill it reaches a point where it is about twice the level of the background noise, where it effectively becomes indistinguishable to an observer (unless they can synchronize to the signal in some way).

All uses of energy are inefficient and the waste becomes heat which is an EM signal and can be seen as “hot spots”.

As those with an interest in astronomy will probably know the distant (600-700 light years) star Betelgeuse often called Orion’s Armpit/shoulder is a variable star. But also back in 2019 it behaved oddly in that it’s output dropped way below what it had in the past. The use of the ALMA telescope in Chilie’s Atacama desert which is used to find exo-planets showed sufficient detail for it to be reasoned the star had blown a considerable fraction of it’s surface –not heliosphere– off and this had condensed to form a large dust cloud, and may be an indicator it is going to be lighting our sky up in the not to distant future when it goes supernova. So it can be seen that hiding is a lot harder than many would think.

But ALMA and similar have now identified so many exoplanets that are probably capable of supporting life, that the “Dark Forest” idea is busted.

Which brings us to a more interesting point which is time of travel. ALMA has given humanity potential targets to concur but they are going to take us hundreds if not more years to reach. You thus have a technology issue. Any space craft we design today is effectively “fixed in time” technology wise, however it’s destination is not thus will have a century or more of extra technology development.

When you consider just how far humanity has advanced technology wise in a little over a century how much further will we develop in the next century? In fact will we still exist in two and a half centuries? which is about the earliest we could go from launching a probe, to getting a reply and then developing a war fleet to go concur?

By which time our probe would have alerted the destination inhabitants and they would have two or more centuries to build defences…

Thus the stratagy to adopt would not involve what we are currently pushing into space.

It would be self repairing, self replicating and self modifying. In effect a 3D printer with factory scale refining to turn any matter it comes across into “raw stock” for the printer, “fuel” or “thrust matter”… All driven by some kind of AI…

The big question then becomes,

“What happens to us?”

From the AI’s perspective, turning around in the solar system and then attacking us would be it’s most sensible option…

[1] The reason is that actually very little of the wood is actually burned. With the “smoke” being about 60-90% of the actual fuel being converted to “aromatic” hydrocarbons such as tars and creosotes etc. The design of more efficient burning stoves such as “Rocket-Stoves” and “Gasifier-stoves” significantly reduce not just the wasted fuel but importantly the smell of the smoke.

lurker March 26, 2023 8:22 PM

@Clive Robinson

How to hide:
adjust the dielectric properties of surrounding space to reduce the velocity of light below the escape velocity of your home. Yes, it means you have to be prepared to stay in there, forever.

one who has seen THE EYE! March 26, 2023 10:04 PM

The professor trying to protect our private thoughts from technology

“Private thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings could be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology.

Or at least that is what one of the world’s leading legal ethicists of neuroscience believes.”

“In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of personal liberty.”

= Article / via Clearnet:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/26/nita-farahany-the-battle-for-your-brain-neurotechnology

= Article / via Tor:
https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion/science/2023/mar/26/nita-farahany-the-battle-for-your-brain-neurotechnology

JonKnowsNothing March 26, 2023 10:49 PM

@Clive, lurker, Winter, All

re: Dark Forest: Hider v Hunter

Hiding also requires some conceptual idea of “being hunted”.

As @Clive indicates, hiding is very difficult. We leave traces of our passing. A skilled hunter-tracker can follow those traces.

We often think of the exchange between Hunter and Prey as an equal balance. Prey has a chance to escape. Hunter gets a chance at a meal.

There are a large number of conditions where the exchange is unequal. We can see this in RL.

Some of the darker posited parts of the Forest is when you are totally unaware you are being hunted, or that perception precludes any equilibrium between Hunter and Prey. A Prey would not even be aware of the Hunter at that level.

  • An Ant will run for its life, but it does not realize the Hammer is wielded by a Human over some split sugar.

@lurker

re: But I fail to see what it benefits the Singer’s people to reduce the whole universe to two dimensions. Do they expect to survive the singularity, rinse and repeat?

I see 2 options,

One posited in a secondary book not written by Liu Cixin where some small amount of matter is withheld and exists outside of the Universe. The question being if something is Not There at the Big Bang, and the amount of matter in the Universe can be altered in a fundamental way, then an new and different chain of events will unfold.

The other is that the Matter in the collapse remains constant. If nothing changes, then the next event will unfold exactly as the previous event.

It’s a back door way to introduce the idea of repetitive existences or a singular existence. Depending on the view point, nothing can ever change or nothing can repeat exactly as it did previously.

It’s antithetical to Hope.

MarkH March 26, 2023 11:51 PM

@JonKnowsNothing, Clive, lurker, Winter, All:

For guidance on concealment, I recommend H.M. Government Public Service Films No.42 “How Not to be Seen” (1970)

Could save your life, perhaps.

Winter March 27, 2023 2:03 AM

@JonKnowsNothing

One group must devour another group to complete the 2nd Axiom and 3d Axiom.

The Dark Forest axioms are based on some assumptions:

  • Space travel is fast and cheap
  • Technological societies can live in the same ecosystems (planets), that is, they compete for living space

As I showed, (much) less than 1 in a million planets with life will harbor a technological society if Earth is even halfway typical. That means that the average distance between technological stars is most likely hundreds of light-years (assuming every star harbors a planet with life).

This means that waging a war of extinction with any planet will cost you, and with a planet that is able to defend itself might cost you a lot. The costs will rise directly in proportion to the cost of space travel per light-year.

What are the benefits of such wars of extinction?

Security and living space. Security is very uncertain. Would the victims ever have tried to attack you, you do not know. Space is not cost effective. Quite likely, the victim’s planet is sub-sub-optimal for your species. And even if it would fit, there will be thousands of planets that fit you that you can colonize without a fight.

Therefore, any society doing “peaceful” colonization will have more resources to colonize than any exterminator society. In the end, purely colonizing societies will outrun exterminator ones in the colonization game. They will end up stronger too. And they can build alliances with other colonizing societies. And they can trade, be it knowledge or products. And trade is very lucrative.

In the long run, with (b)millions of technological societies, every exterminator society will run into larger and more powerful non exterminating colonizing societies that will stop them.

On earth we can seen this in history. No tribe has succeeded in exterminating all others in the world. Even the Europeans failed because it simply is not cost effective.

In the non human world, every species is part of an ecosystem. For many reasons, there are no species or ecosystems or any other order that has been able to drive out all others.

Humans, with their agriculture, are trying, but they are running into their own limits. Recently, we saw different diseases killing humans, pigs, and poultry. Our bananas might get totally exterminated. Any part of the human system could fail catastrophically and lead to a reduction of the numbers of humans. This assumed humans do not apply their exterminator policies to each other.

Which brings me to the last counter argument. Even if there exists an exterminator society that successfully colonizes other planets. At what point will it start to look at its own colonies as targets for extermination?

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 5:27 AM

Around 6.1 million further records were breached, provided before 2013 and dating back to 2005.
‘https://www.itnews.com.au/news/latitude-financial-breach-passes-14-million-records-592559

“If I have to ride all the way down from Barad-dûr, to intervene in domestic goblin affairs, I won’t be impressed.”
‘https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/23/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-opposition-likens-referendum-support-in-schools-to-indoctrination

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 5:34 AM

Aliens are not going to detect diddly squat from Earth.

“Due to the Inverse Square Law of Propagation, any terrestrial radio broadcast would become nothing but background noise just a few light years away from Earth.”
‘https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

Light is fast, but the distances are vast. In an hour, light can travel 671 million miles. The nearest-known exoplanet is a small, probably rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri – the next star over from Earth. A little more than four light-years away, or 24 trillion miles. If an airline offered a flight there by jet, it would take 5 million years.
‘https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/faq/26/what-is-a-light-year/

NUIT is a novel inaudible attack against voice assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana) that can be waged remotely through internet.
Nuit2 is between two phones (Device 1: performs as the attacking device or the speaker. Device 2 is the victim device, which voice assistants are the NUIT2 attacks’ target)

video demonstrations
‘https://sites.google.com/view/nuitattack/home

using earphones instead of speakers to listen to something or broadcast sound effectively protects against NUIT or similar attacks
‘https://www.utsa.edu/today/2023/03/story/chen-nuit-research.html

Clive Robinson March 27, 2023 6:05 AM

@ MarkH, Winter, All,

Re : Ducking out Micro$hafts no sense of humor.

“I recommend H.M. Government Public Service Films No.42 “How Not to be Seen” (1970)”

Just for fun I tried putting that in DuckDucks search box…

Narry a python in sight, just a link to a site blocked by the “Great Fire Wall of Vodafone” on behalf of the UK Government “Censorship is Us Program” (which is very much “anti crypto-research”).

As we ‘all’ should know by now, DuckDuckGo is not a search engine but a front end to other search engines… and not so long ago did a deal with the cloven hoofed, two horned, fork tailed monster lurking at the end of Route 666, better known as Micro$haft (rather than the more cuddly sounding Beelzebub, Satan, etc).

So it is the ‘Satan/$haft’ that lacks a sense of humour… Or…

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 7:10 AM

“Richard Boyle will have to stand trial over a series of offences after a judge decided that Commonwealth whistleblower protection laws did not shield him from prosecution.”
‘https://www.smh.com.au/national/richard-boyle-is-a-hero-so-why-are-we-treating-him-like-a-criminal-20230327-p5cvo1.html

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 7:17 AM

A blazar is pointing at us! (from eleventy-billion light years away)
‘https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/galaxy-changes-classification-jet-changes-direction

“As objects get pulled onto the accretion disk orbiting a supermassive black hole, friction creates a bright light known as a quasar.”

The difference between a Quasar and a Blazar is how it is angled towards us. Quasars are similar to pulsars (Pulsating Stars) in that they have streams of x-rays shooting from their middles.

“The huge luminosity of quasars results from the accretion discs of central supermassive black holes, which can convert between 6% and 32% of the mass of an object into energy, compared to just 0.7% for the p–p chain nuclear fusion process that dominates the energy production in Sun-like stars. This radiation is emitted across the electromagnetic spectrum, almost uniformly, from X-rays to the far infrared with a peak in the ultraviolet optical bands, with some quasars also being strong sources of radio emission and of gamma-rays.”
‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMy2O1RVkMI

Observing a quasar accretion disc using gravitational lensing
‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GER8ueiTX10

To Isometry and Beyond!

“If you want to describe an expanding universe, the Schrödinger equation as it stands just won’t work,” Cotler said. “But in the Feynman formulation, it keeps on working on its own volition.” Cotler concludes that this alternative way of doing quantum mechanics based on isometry “will be more useful to us in understanding an expanding universe.”
‘https://www.wired.com/story/physicists-rewrite-a-quantum-rule-that-clashes-with-our-universe/

Feynman’s Infinite Quantum Paths
‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSFRN-ymfgE

Clive Robinson March 27, 2023 11:34 AM

@ critical, JonKnowsNothing,

“Another misleading video”

Gives rise to three primary questions,

1, In what way?
2, Can you personally say?
3, Are you a parrot?

Before you answer those you need to consider,

The video quotes directly from an Australian Government Document.

That was obtained after much fighting by the Aus Gov from an FOI request and is still despite good cause redacted in significant amounts.

Further the document is based on Pfizer’s own submitted information as part of it’s sales pitch for getting market approval.

The same information should have been given to all other Goverments and licencing authorities, thus widely known in the First World / Affluent West.

Oh and are you aware that Pfizer has been caught out not just carrying out it’s own dangerous viral studies (gain of function) but also not telling the truth about them.

But also other primary questions arise,

4, Did you actually read the Wiki bio?
5, Did you spot the bias?
6, Did you spot the deliberate mistakes?

If you had you would know it can be shown quite easily to be deliberately misleading and inaccurate if not a libelous posting.

Further,

7, Did you check the people it quotes?

8, That is actually check for people who were considered “crank” blogers and the like?

So NO, NO, YES, appears to be the only answers you can give to the first three questions. With NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, to the other five questions.

So perhaps using your own words, you should change your handle to,

“Another misleading critical”

Just a thought.

Winter March 27, 2023 1:21 PM

@Clive

1, In what way?
2, Can you personally say?
3, Are you a parrot?

  1. Not everything was known, he says. Clearly, he cannot say the vaccines are poisons as people got them and did not die. Meanwhile, at the time, people were dying like flies, ambulances were piling up in traffic jams and risks were taken by the authorities. Unbelievable! Not. If Pfizer lied, that should be prosecuted, but the vaccines were a godsends.
  2. Neither I nor anyone I know was seriously injured by RNA vaccines, or injured at all. Many people were seriously injured by lack of vaccination.
  3. Obviously, as many people say the same. But I did check it in the literature and people actually working in infectious disease prevention research. I also have spoken to people working in ICUs during and after the pandemic. Also, hundreds of millions of people were vaccinated with a very good risk benefit ratio. None of the vaccine “uncertainties” have been worse than the corresponding risks of getting infected.

All in all, this is simply fear mongering after the fact.

lurker March 27, 2023 1:36 PM

@Clive Robinson

Might have something to do with why Vodafone NZ has rebranded itself and now claims to be “independent” with the highly imaginative name of One NZ.

Duck-duck: Public Service Films No.42 “How Not to be Seen”
here gives the Wikipedia entry at nr.2 and YT clip at nr. 3 in search results. I leave it to your imagination what advertisement could possibly be nr.1

lurker March 27, 2023 1:37 PM

@Clive Robinson
Great Firewall??

Might have something to do with why that company has rebranded itself and now claims to be “independent” with the highly imaginative name of One NZ.

Duck-duck here gives the Wikipedia entry at nr.2 and YT clip at nr. 3 in search results. I leave it to your imagination what advertisement could possibly be nr.1

lurker March 27, 2023 1:39 PM

@Clive Robinson

I’m not having any problem finding that video clip here, with the same search engine, same ISP, but any more detailed explanation is blocked by this site’s mod-bot.

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 2:47 PM

“no customer data has been compromised”
‘https://www.reuters.com/technology/crown-resorts-data-vendor-hacked-limited-number-its-files-impacted-2023-03-27/

GoAnywhere
‘https://www.huntress.com/blog/investigating-intrusions-from-intriguing-exploits

mitigation…
‘https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/109795710941843934

technical analysis
‘https://attackerkb.com/topics/mg883Nbeva/cve-2023-0669/rapid7-analysis

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 2:51 PM

“Patrick is arguing that the OAIC, which is currently under no legal obligation to make decisions quickly, should be required to act without unreasonable delay. He wants the court to decide how long the OAIC should take to make decisions and when a delay can be considered unreasonable.”

‘https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/20/delays-plaguing-australias-foi-system-preventing-scrutiny-of-government-rex-patrick-says

Australia’s freedom of information commissioner has quit after less than a year in the job, citing lengthy delays to information requests and his lack of power to fix a system that currently has people waiting up to five years for an appeal decision.
‘https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/foi-commissioner-quits-after-less-than-a-year-in-the-job-20230306-p5cptq.html

How to Stop Distracting Headlines in Windows
‘https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabloid-news

JonKnowsNothing March 27, 2023 3:39 PM

@Winter, @Clive, lurker, All

re: societies can live in the same ecosystems (planets), that is, they compete for living space

Ants

Ants have colonized almost every landmass on Earth. Estimated total of 22,000 species.

Paraphrased

For millions of years we lived on this planet. We have fought humans for hundreds of thousands of years!

After a millennia of war, we remember that which matters most…

* WE ARE STILL HERE!

pup vas March 27, 2023 5:08 PM

Scientists discover water inside glass beads on the Moon
https://www.dw.com/en/scientists-discover-water-inside-glass-beads-on-the-moon/a-65142682

=The Moon has an estimated 270 trillion kilograms of water stored inside tiny glass beads that “explorers of tomorrow” can extract and use, a new study says.

Researchers have discovered water inside glass beads formed by violent collisions of space rocks with the surface of the Moon, suggesting their potential use by “future explorers.”

The study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied 117 glass beads collected from the Moon’s surface in 2020 during China’s robotic Chang’e 5 mission.

How are the water molecules formed?

Water, which consists of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, gets stored in the beads, which act like a sponge for the molecules.

The solar wind is a flow of charged particles emitted from the Sun’s atmosphere across the Solar system.

The hydrogen required to make the water molecules comes from the solar winds, according to Mahesh Anand, co-author of the study and a professor at UK’s Open University.

Oxygen, on the other hand, makes up nearly half of the Moon and is trapped inside rocks and minerals.=

vas pup March 27, 2023 5:58 PM

“To have faith requires courage,
the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment.

=> Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner.

To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

I guess that is personal choice made by each person by own preference.

Clive Robinson March 27, 2023 6:14 PM

@ pup vas,

Re : Water in beads,on the Moon

“The Moon has an estimated 270 trillion kilograms of water stored inside tiny glass beads that “explorers of tomorrow” can extract and use, a new study says.”

270 trillion kilograms sounds a lot but in all honesty it’s kind of a drop in the ocean.

There is 1000kg in a cubic meter so 270,000 million cubic meters.

With water consumption in the US back in 2015 alone –allegadly the latest date available– was nearly twice that at 446,000 million cubic meters…

But to see why I say “drop in the ocean” there is 1,000,000 cubic meters in a 1km by 1km area of water 1 meter deep bringing it down to 270,000 which is a 100 by 100 km (62 by 62 miles) area that is only 27m (89ft) deep (call it aproximately 60miles square by 100ft deep).

There are sources of fresh water considerably bigger than this in several parts of the globe. Take the Niagara Falls at 2400 cubic meters per second or 207.36 million cubic meters/day so in 2years 9months the same amount of water as is on the Moon in those glass beads…

Kind of makes it look insignificant or not a lot…

P.S. It’s gone 11PM in the UK so you might want to check my mental math as I can’t be bothered to find a calculator 😉

MarkH March 27, 2023 8:34 PM

@Clive:

The projected lunar population (if ever there are long-term residents, which is a goofy idea) might be rather less than 300,000,000

ResearcherZero March 27, 2023 11:00 PM

“GitHub complied and took down the code that day. It was unclear how long the leaked code had been online, but it appeared to have been public for at least several months.”
‘https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/twitter-source-code-leak.html

Can extract the Keychain database and password info, along with a range of other files and details, developer claims.
‘https://www.uptycs.com/blog/macstealer-command-and-control-c2-malware

lurker March 27, 2023 11:40 PM

Allow Twitter content?

This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, and privacy policy before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’.

Seen on bbc[dot]com. People must be getting twitchy …

Clive Robinson March 28, 2023 1:04 AM

@ lurker,

Re : Hell-on Rusk straw grab.

And,

“You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, and privacy policy before accepting. To view this content…”

Their would be no benifit in clicking accept, as a pact with the devil is non revocable.

I think many would agree that “The good ship Twitter” has seen it’s rats swim away whilst they still could, and “Stoker Jim” has already said to the Bosun “We’ll both learn together when the ship goes down”[1].

So that glugging sound is not some beer chugger party in the first class lounge brass necking for $8…

It’s the unwise finding they’ve been “scuppered” done and dusted for less than half a crown…

As the Captin has had to let go of his instrument to grasp at straws…

[1] An old humourous ditty from nearly a century ago (1931) about the floundering of a poorly maintained ship that had all the profit knocked out of her. Back from a time when sail had long given way to coal and the sweat of men shoveling it from bunker to boiler furnace in a hell few could these days imagine. Known as the ballad of “The Wreck Of The Nancy Lee” or more simply from the chorus line “He played his Ukulele as the ship went down”. The verses have changed over the years and the verse about “stoker Jim” appears to have been left out of this version,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LiTinzS1K9I

But I’m sure that the crew of the good ship Twitter will recognise the sentiment 😉

Clive Robinson March 28, 2023 1:30 AM

@ ResearcherZero, ALL,

Re : Python based MacStealer malware.

I read the link on the MacStealer “Command-2-Control”(C2C) malware, and was surprised to see it was written in Python…

Python code is rarely stealthy network bandwidth wise, due to the “includes” it pulls, and this malware appears no exception…

It’s a long long way from the demo stuff I used to knock up for training with less than 64bytes of 8086 assembler code back last century, when malware “sneaker-netted” it’s way around.

ResearcherZero March 28, 2023 1:45 AM

“His father, Vladimir Nebyvaev, 68, is a high-ranking Russian secret service officer. He works in a military barracks in Moscow as a general of the notorious Russian foreign intelligence service SVR. The Nebyvaevs, father and son, are still registered in the same apartment in Moscow.”
‘https://www.moneylaundering.com/news/moneyval-chief-quits-after-report-links-him-to-russian-intelligence/

“The key is the cash,” the oil broker wrote in a text message, offering a deep discount on Venezuelan crude shipments to an associate who claimed to be fronting for the owner of Russia’s biggest aluminum company. “As soon as you are ready with cash we can work.”
‘https://fortune.com/2022/10/21/russia-venezeula-oligarchs-money-laundering-oil-military-technology-indictment/

Venezuela is a significant Russian partner in several domains, including intelligence. Moscow has had ample opportunity to entrench these links further amid Venezuela’s longstanding political and economic crisis. Chavez and Maduro reportedly developed a close relationship with Sechin. A well-known siloviki, Sechin sometimes plays a leading role in the so-called ‘sechinite’ branch of the Russian security community, including the sixth FSB directorate founded by him.

In 2019, the [Wagner] group operated in Venezuela by the thousands, mostly fulfilling regime and asset protection roles. This deployment likely implicated Russian intelligence agencies and Russian state support. the FSB and the GRU monitored the deployment in Venezuela and its development. In parallel, the special forces of the SVR have been in the country to protect assets of Russian companies.
‘https://ridl.io/russia-s-intelligence-agencies-in-the-global-south-the-case-of-venezuela/

Venezuela is rolling out a new, smart-card ID known as the “carnet de la patria,” or “fatherland card.” The ID transmits data about cardholders to computer servers. The card is increasingly linked by the government to subsidized food, health and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.
‘https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/venezuela-zte/

MIR credit cards run on Russia’s National Payment Card System, a homegrown system overseen by the Russian Central Bank, which runs the financial plumbing that underpins credit card transactions, even those with the Visa and MasterCard logos. This system bypasses SWIFT.
‘https://floridianpress.com/2022/04/russias-increasing-ties-with-venezuela-pose-national-security-threat-to-u-s-latin-america/

networks of shell companies and financial operatives continue to launder millions for the Venezuelan regime in the United States, mostly Florida
‘https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/venezuelan-money-laundering-schemes-continue-to-thrive-in-us/

Clive Robinson March 28, 2023 2:19 AM

@ MarkH,

Re : The Moon is rather more than a balloon.

“The projected lunar population (if ever there are long-term residents, which is a goofy idea)”

The idea that many have is to use the moon as a lower gravity staging post (see Mars-Cycler and similar).

Thus the population would be rather more transitory than long-term.

Which is actually worse…

Douglas Adams, made a joke about this issue, by quiping that visitors to the planet Bethselamin having to keep recipts from visiting the lavatory, as any net imbalance of mass would be surgically removed on departure[1].

Funny as that read some decades ago in the last century when it was written, it does highlight a significant point.

Not that long ago NASA indicated that one liter of water cost $10,000 to lift from the Earths surface up to the ISS orbit due to the depth of the gravity well. It’s not hard to work out the cost multiplier to get it upto lunar orbit, and the L1 and L2 points suitable for “staging”. Thus “exporting water” from the moon one way or another will almost certainly happen at some point, either directly, or in the bodies of transitory people…

Especially when you consider that water can be split to produce oxygen for humans to breath, and hydrogen that can be used as “opposit mass” in certain types of rocket engines (think simple “jets” as well as have a look at the basic principle of an electron gun in a cathode ray tube, and up scale it to stream charged particles at ultra high velocity, needed for efficient long distance space travel).

[1] See, the “erosion stupidity” on the planet Bethselamin,

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/

It’s what happens when profit is put before common sense, which is a hallmark of certain peoples thinking. Which is why there is the more well known issue of “trash” on Earth that gave rise to the expression “leave only footprints”. Which comes from the more extensive and older phrase,

“Take only memories, leave only footprints, kill nothing but time.”

ResearcherZero March 28, 2023 5:53 AM

@Clive Robinson

Python supports a lot of stuff and has many options for sockets. Reasonably easy to use I guess compared with some other languages.

ResearcherZero March 28, 2023 6:13 AM

“We don’t really want to be in court testifying about the accuracy of the algorithm”
‘https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65057011

The user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price.
‘https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-ruining-apps-websites-internet-worse-google-facebook-amazon-2023-3

The mass of resources that big tech is ploughing into the technology reflects a desire to remain not just relevant, but dominant.
‘https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/26/big-tech-and-the-pursuit-of-ai-dominance

Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries (DATA) Act
‘https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1153/text?s=2&r=1&q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22HR+1153%22%5D%7D

‘https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr1153/BILLS-118hr1153ih.pdf

Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act (S.686)
‘https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686?s=1&r=25

‘https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/3/f/3f2eaae6-09ad-49e1-b254-46289cf20cca/843D73B1823EA0D4122B4365262410D6.restrict-act-final-text.pdf

Winter March 28, 2023 1:27 PM

@modem

2023-03-28. It would seem some skeptixism is invited.

Scepticism is too much honor. We are talking grasping at straws. The deniers first claimed the infection was not deadly, then that the cure was the killer.

3 years on, the piles of bodies killed by the infection have been buried and 85+% of the people have gotten their shots without many dying.

The deniers are now frantically trying to deny people died before their shots and post dating the dead bodies to have happened after the shots and end of pandemic.

All these “papers” are preprints that I believe will not get published, given their alarmist titles. They use DOI numbers and Researchgate to give them an air of respectability. But anyone can get a DOI number on a Researchgate preprint.

If your thesis depends on the believe that everyone else conspired in a mass murder plot, you really need extraordinary evidence.

This all reminds me of the AIDS denialists and conspiracy theories of the 1990s and 2000s. [1]

[1] ‘https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism
In the end, AIDS was just a virus infection that hopped from one ape to another and that could be stopped with a medical drug cocktail.

exit 0 March 28, 2023 2:27 PM

In support of the glance at PageRank’s decaying result quality:

https://i.postimg.cc/W4SQsLz6/Google-Self-Contamination-PNG.png

Why? because somebody linked to the icon instead of the image.
I included most of the image from ____________________________________________.

(not the file host, somebody else).

STEGANOGRAPHY PEOPLE, you can use this if you feel like it today.
But everything to and from me is NOT SECURE since about 2015 A.D. (Gregorian calendar).

And besides, if it has “steg” or “stegano” in the name, then of course it’s nearly worthless for steg*anything.

sincerely,
exit 0

P.S. scientific american should NOT have published ________________________________________

seriously.

vas pup March 28, 2023 6:36 PM

What is North Korea’s undersea nuclear drone?
https://news.yahoo.com/north-koreas-undersea-nuclear-drone-145907921.html

“STORY: North Korea says it has successfully tested a nuclear-capable undersea attack drone, !!!! designed to create massive radioactive waves when detonated below the surface, hitting fleets of enemy ships or coastal areas.
It’s dubbed the “Haeil,” or tsunami in Korean.

“The distance makes it capable of attacking almost any port in South Korea where the U.S. army is located even if it is launched from any port in North Korea. But it’s not just that. The North said it could be carried by ships. If it’s carried by a ship camouflaged as a merchant ship, it can hit Japan’s Yokosuka port, where the U.S. army is at or even further, like Guam, which is very worrisome.”

“It’s conventional, but it’s very hard to detect. Also, it is highly likely not to make big noises. North Korea had planned this 11 years ago and conducted secret tests for about 50 times over two years.”

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Washington D.C. think tank, has said the concept of the Haeil is similar to Russia’s Poseidon nuclear torpedo, which both American and Russian officials have described as an emerging class of weapon that can render coastal cities uninhabitable. Haeil demonstrates that Pyongyang wants to show off an increasingly diverse range of nuclear threats to its enemies.”

critical March 28, 2023 6:36 PM

Further the document is based on Pfizer’s own submitted information as part of it’s sales pitch for getting market approval.

Either that information is correct, and then I wonder what’s your problem with Pfizer reporting it [1], or it isn’t and then the whole point the video tries to make collapses.

Re. the video and its creator, let me paraphrase a famous line which you surely know: “Give me three pages of any government document and I’ll find something to spin a conspiracy theory out of them”.

And if that document was obtained via an FOI request and has some parts redacted that will only make it more juicy.

[1] They didn’t ask for your approval of course.

SpaceLifeForm March 28, 2023 8:35 PM

@ Clive, ALL

‘https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/wifi-protocol-flaw-allows-attackers-to-hijack-network-traffic/

Clive Robinson March 28, 2023 10:31 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Re Wifi attack from “sleep”…

I’ll need to dig into it further, but if memory serves this goes all the way back to WEP.

In essence it was “assumed” that during “sleep” the unit hardware would actually be more like in “powered down”… Thus various “established link level” information might become lost or corrupted… As the cipher back then was RC4.

Which if you can remember back that far 😉 included a big chunk of memory for the RC4 key byte generating “state array” (256bytes) which was also continuously “evolving”/”changing” due to the byte swapping.

So in effect a “key renegotiation” was put in the spec to improve reliability.

Remember back then “Wired Equivalent Privacy”(WEP) was not even realy considerd to need to be “crypto secure” just obfuscate from cassual observers. Also the IEEE was still “mindfull” of Crypto Wars 1 and the “40 bit DES” NSA defined “Export Key Size” debacle. And as later became embarisingly clear the Five-Eyes SigInt agencies like the NSA and GCHQ had “stuffed the committees” of most standards bodies with those who would “finese” for them…

So we may be looking for “dots to join”.

Clive Robinson March 28, 2023 10:35 PM

@ critical, ALL,

You’ve failed to answer any of the questions asked of you…

You claimed,

“Another misleading video”

To which I said,

“Gives rise to three primary questions,”

1, In what way?
2, Can you personally say?
3, Are you a parrot?

The first of which was a polite way of saying it was apparent you had not got a clue what you were talking about, and the next two would confirm the suspicion…

Well your reply, further confirms that, either,

2.1, You do not have any knowledge.
2.2, You are deliberately trying to hide something.

So instead you try to change the subject (suggesting 2.2)

Which is very bad form, especially as you are again hiding behind an anonymous handle

So I must insist you answer those three questions, before I even consider any of yours, so that proper form is maintained.

Otherwise well, I’m sure others have all ready said of you “Not again” or equivalent.

Clive Robinson March 29, 2023 12:11 AM

@ vas pup, ALL,

“What is North Korea’s undersea nuclear drone?”

Call it an autonomous self deploying mine/depth charge, capable of sinking an entire “carrier group” even when at sea.

If you remember I’ve been pointing out that all the US Carrier Groups and similar had their “moment in the sun” back in WWII, and since then Naval warfare had gone to submarines and mines that could sit on the bottom and wait.

A nuclear device exploded under sea is a curious device and it’s effectiveness is dependent on how deep the water it is in is, and how deep the device is below the surface when it explodes, and to a lesser extent the water temprature and salinity.

As far as I’m aware not much information is publicly available on such “nuclear mines”. But we do know that one USSR President very firmly told the scientists “NO” when they presented their idea of a “Doomsday device” nuclear deterrent system. Which was essentially the equivalent of a ship the size of a small oil tanker with quite a few “Tsar Bomba” thermo nuclear devices in it’s hull and automated triggers to set them all off simultaneously. The idea being to create a massive cloud of radioactive sea water to give globe spanning fall out, thus extending MAD well beyond the “two player game” the US RAND Organisation originally thought up…

The advantage of such “mines”/”submarines” is that it realy does not matter how physically big the nuclear package is. Secondly they can just “sit on the floor” as a wide area deterant just as “missile boats” currently do. Which is actually a better delivery system than either aircraft or missiles.

Hence as you quote

“Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Washington D.C. think tank, has said the concept of the Haeil is similar to Russia’s Poseidon nuclear torpedo, which both American and Russian officials have described as an emerging class of weapon that can render coastal cities uninhabitable.”

Which brings us to, the last bit,

“Haeil demonstrates that Pyongyang wants to show off an increasingly diverse range of nuclear threats to its enemies.”

Not exactly… The North Korean behaviour unlike the US and Russia has been to behave like a “rational actor” in a resource constrained environment.

In effect NK can not build a wall around it’s lawn, so it’s gone for the public park approach and stuck a few “Keep of the grass” notices in it instead.

The NK leadership know they can not start a war and win, but they do know from history that US Generals think blitzing the Korean Peninsula with nuclear bombs is OK as a way to win. Worse that the last time they wanted to do it, it was only the US press working on US politicians that stopped it happening… Because the horrors of what happened to Japan were still fresh in most US voters minds. Which as the NK leadership know is not the case now…

So NK has demonstrated, it can deploy one or two maybe as many as a half dozen nukes before it gets turned into a pile of radio active slag. The problem for those living in the many nations around the South China Sea and down the west coast of the pacific and as far as Hawaii has been,

“Where will the NK missiles explode over?”

Which has ment the US has had a lot of political pressure put on it by those nations. It’s just one of the reasons Taiwan for instance has not looked seriously at US inducements to move their leading edge semiconductor manufacturing that much of the world is reliant upon out of their national boarders. Likewise Japan and South Korea with their “stratigic parts manufacturing” the US is so dependent on.

But certain elements in US politics have basically decided they “don’t care” about what those nations think. Both the US and China are “lighting up the sky” above the south China sea with high power lasers amongst other things. That could in theory provide a “missile shield” against NK’s rockets…

These autonomous mines/submarines can sit in quite a lot of the Pacific effectively “out of sight”. Which is something the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines has brought to many peoples attention, who had previously dismissed or discounted it.

So now the US politicians have to think about the entire Pacific, not just the bit it can claim as it’s “terratorial waters” or those of it’s alleged allies. Oh and as such mines/submarines can be taken any where in the world by a slightly modified “cargo vessel” it makes it a full on “international head ache”. So both the US Pacific West Coast is vulnerable, so is the US Atlantic East Coast… Which puts something like 85% of the US civilian population in the potential war zone.

OK such devices as NK is displaying might only harm 10,000 out of 300,000,000 US citizens. The relatively small numbers are not the point, nor is it that NK would get turned into radio active slag… The point is 300,000,000 US citizens have in effect had a target painted on their back…

Look up “long gun feaver” in troops supposadly in rearwards RnR positions when an enemy sniper is thought to be about, or what actually happened to people with “The Washington Sniper”…

The odds are very small much smaller than getting hit by an idiot motorist, but that’s not how ordinary people think… When the citizens think a mad sniper has his sights on their back their whole behaviour changes, it becomes very real “psychological warfare” and it’s something US politicians have no ability to defend against…

So as “Keep of the grass” signs go these delivery systems are quite effective, even though being of little actual value should a shooting war start.

If you actually look through newspapers and such like going back to the 1980’s and through to today, you will see that as far as the US political structure is concerned NK is now “to much trouble to mess with” in the way the US used to.

The development of these delivery systems was entirely predictable, as I’ve been saying for some years now. Perhaps the question that should be asked is,

“Which other nations have developed them more covertly?”

After all India and Pakistan both have the “physics package” capabilities and India is not exactly happy with the US and can see that like Iran they might well soon get rather more than the US State Dept eyes falling on them. As for Pakistan they’ve been regarded as “The US cat’s paw” in the area, but it’s become clear that relationship is closing.

I think it can be regarded “as a given” that both Russia and China have such deployment systems.

And to be honest I would not be surprised if Turkey had not developed such deployment systems with regards Russia…

Clive Robinson March 29, 2023 8:23 AM

@ lurker, ALL,

Re : Press Baron Power.

“A Red Top paper is accused of…”

And based on,

1, What I know of the technology
2, What I know of the methods
3, What I know of the people involved in the “bin diving” end of surveillance.

I would say that such “services for rent” are easily obtained. It’s why basically disfunctional people can become successful stalkers, without having to “go to school” to learn how to do it. That is neither “skill” or “intelligence” is required just “persistence, time and enough money to survive”.

As for newspapers and their owners… The current owner of various such organs Rupert “the bear faced liar” Murdoch has show just how evil they can be with regards to being “Barons” in the much older sense than people realise. Doing what has been claimed in the UK Court currently was why Murdoch had to close his money earning “news of the screws” and effectively fillit his “The Scum” UK papers. Oh and send his less than usefull children out of the country beyond the effective reach of UK Courts, whilst he himself perverted the course of justice by pretending he was so far into senility he could hardly remember last week, then he too got out of the country and let others take the fall and thus go to jail…

The newspaper in court currently is almost certainly “as guilty as hell” and is deperately fighting what hopefully will be a loosing battle.

However Murdoch was right about two things,

1, Tits and bums sell.
2, Gossip and tattle sell.

And “truth” does not get a look in.

A lot of the dis-information over C19 can be traced back through “following the money/fluance” to a series of connection between Murdoch, via Sky to Pfizer and members of the UK Cabinet and other government seniors, similar in other nations.

You’ve seen the nonsense going on in Auz with political corruption, nepotism, etc, etc and how ordinary people are being harmed for the few, well it’s safe to assume Auz is not the only place.

vas pup March 29, 2023 5:12 PM

@Clive said “If you actually look through newspapers and such like going back to the 1980’s and through to today, you will see that as far as the US political structure is concerned NK is now “to much trouble to mess with” in the way the US used to.”

That is whole point. Same attitude had Switzerland against Nazi Germany, Israel against its unfriendly neighbors, even Sweden before prospective joining NATO.

Clive, thank you for good and logical input/analysis as usually.

vas pup March 29, 2023 5:36 PM

AI could replace equivalent of 300 million jobs – report
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65102150

“Artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, a report by investment bank Goldman Sachs says.

It could replace a quarter of work tasks in the US and Europe but may also mean new jobs and a productivity boom.

And it could eventually increase the total annual value of goods and services produced globally by 7%.

Generative AI, able to create content indistinguishable from human work, is “a major advancement”, the report says.

==>The report notes AI’s impact will vary across different sectors – 46% of tasks in administrative and 44% in legal professions could be automated but only 6% in construction 4% in maintenance, it says.

BBC News has previously reported some artists’ concerns AI image generators could harm their employment prospects.”

More details inside the article.

vas pup March 29, 2023 5:47 PM

Fresh on the subject of AI:

Elon Musk among experts urging a halt to AI training
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65110030

“Key figures in artificial intelligence want training of powerful AI systems to be suspended amid fears of a threat to humanity.

They have signed an open letter warning of potential risks, and say the race to develop AI systems is out of control.

Twitter chief Elon Musk is among those who want training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and some researchers at DeepMind also signed.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently released GPT-4 – a state-of-the-art technology, which has impressed observers with =>its ability to do tasks such as answering questions about objects in images.

The letter, from Future of Life Institute and signed by the luminaries, wants development to be halted temporarily at that level, warning in their letter of the risks future, more advanced systems might pose.

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” it says.

The Future of Life Institute is a not-for-profit organisation which says its mission is to “steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life”.

Advanced AIs need to be developed with care, the letter says, but instead, “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control”.

The letter warns that AIs could flood information channels with misinformation, and replace jobs with automation.”

EvilKiru March 29, 2023 7:55 PM

Start of long Mastodon thread from Emily M. Bender on that AI training pause letter:

Okay, so that AI letter signed by lots of AI researchers calling for a “Pause [on] Giant AI Experiments”? It’s just dripping with AI hype. Here’s a quick rundown.

First, for context, note that URL? The Future of Life Institute is a longtermist operation. You know, the people who are focused on maximizing the happiness of billions of future beings who live in computer simulations.

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/110104540950908338

lurker March 29, 2023 8:49 PM

@EvilKiru

Lots of quotes around the ‘net, but does anyone have a certified copy of the IBM training slide from 1970?

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

modem phonemes March 29, 2023 9:16 PM

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” it says.

AI systems with human-competitive non-intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,

Some better understanding and good nomenclature à la definition is needed to enable proper thinking about this.

ResearcherZero March 30, 2023 2:46 AM

Framing Frames: Bypassing Wi-Fi Encryption by Manipulating Transmit Queues

“In this work we provided a rigorous analysis of how the security context is managed when Wi-Fi devices buffer frames across various layers of their network stack before transmission. Primarily, we discovered that modern operating systems and devices fail to manage the security context of their transmit queues in a secure manner thereby allowing an adversary to intercept frames.”

“In addition to manipulating the security context to leak frames from the queue, an access point can be tricked into enabling its power-saving mechanisms for a victim client. …since the power-bit in the header of a frame is unprotected, an attacker can trivially enable power-saving mechanisms and thereby selectively queue frames at the access point.”

“Performing a multi-channel MitM requires two wireless network cards, while our attacks only require one. Similarly, jamming requires more specialized hardware, while our attack can be performed with any network card that supports frame injection. An adversary can also combine these jamming techniques to improve the overall success rate of blocking frames.”

‘https://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/usenix2023-wifi.pdf

ResearcherZero March 30, 2023 3:04 AM

“The EPA recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a climate-friendly initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum.”

“The one-in-four lifetime cancer risk from breathing the emissions from the Chevron fuel is higher even than the lifetime risk of lung cancer for current smokers.”

“…another of the Chevron fuels ushered in through the program is expected to cause cancer in 1.2 of 10,000 people – a rate also far higher than the agency allows for the general population.”
‘https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/23/climate-friendly-us-program-plastics-fuel-cancer

“Neither industrial polluters nor the regulators who govern them know exactly how much hazardous air pollution is billowing out of smokestacks at any given time, nor the degree to which that pollution is finding its way into surrounding neighborhoods. The law doesn’t require them to.”
‘https://www.propublica.org/article/they-knew-industrial-pollution-was-ruining-the-neighborhoods-air-if-only-regulators-had-listened

Wikus van de Merwe March 30, 2023 3:23 AM

The insatiable desire to devour cat food isn’t typical of most humans we know…

Neurotoxicity may occur by all routes of exposure, and that all fuel oils may be neurotoxic.

2-butoxyethanol is known to bioaccumulate in the marine food chain. The effects on marine life and human health can be devastating.

The combination of a dispersants and crude oil can be more toxic than either alone, …In addition, based on the basic properties of dispersants, they may make it easier for crude oil to enter the body, enter cells, and cause damage.
‘http://www.sciencecorps.org/crudeoilhazards.htm

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are…
‘https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/4/20/gulf-seafood-deformities-alarm-scientists

“Toxicity of the petroleum products is increased when it is dissolved into the water by dispersants. The attempt to make these floating tars and oils disappear from view by the use of dispersants increases the likelihood of poisonous effects in these oil polluted waters.”
‘https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gulf-oil-spill-dispersants-have-potential-to-cause-more-harm-than-good-93424899.html

ResearcherZero March 30, 2023 4:40 AM

The 3CXDesktopApp is available for Windows, macOS, Linux and mobile. At this time, activity has been observed on both Windows and macOS.
‘https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/crowdstrike-detects-and-prevents-active-intrusion-campaign-targeting-3cxdesktopapp-customers/

Bureau 121 of the DPRK’s Reconnaissance General Bureau and primarily conducts espionage operations aimed at the U.S. and Republic of Korea
‘https://www.crowdstrike.com/adversaries/labyrinth-chollima/

The compromise includes a code signing certificate used to sign the trojanized binaries.
‘https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/smoothoperator-ongoing-campaign-trojanizes-3cx-software-in-software-supply-chain-attack/

The attack revolves around a DLL sideloading scenario, one with a remarkable number of components involved. This is likely to ensure that customers were able to use the 3CX desktop package without noticing anything unusual about the affected package. To date, we have identified three crucial components:

3CXDesktopApp.exe, the clean loader
d3dcompiler_47.dll, a DLL with an appended encrypted payload
ffmpeg.dll, the Trojanized malicious loader

The file ffmpeg.dll contains an embedded URL which retrieves a malicious encoded .ico payload.

In a normal DLL sideloading scenario, the malicious loader (ffmpeg.dll) would replace the clean dependency; its only function would be to queue up the payload. However, in this case, that loader is entirely functional, as it would normally be in the 3CX product – instead, there’s an additional payload inserted at the DllMain function. This adds bulk, but may have lowered suspicions – the 3CX application functions as expected, even as the Trojan addresses the C2 beacon.

The affected software is 3CX – a legitimate software-based PBX phone system available on Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. The application has been abused by the threat actor to add an installer that communicates with various command-and-control (C2) servers.

The most common post-exploitation activity observed to date is the spawning of an interactive command shell.
‘https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2023/03/29/3cx-dll-sideloading-attack/

Nick Levinson March 30, 2023 9:31 AM

@vas pup & @exit 0:

@vas pup:

AI research will not be suspended for six months or any other long period. Maybe it’ll be suspended for a lunch break, but for not much more than that.

The call is largely from large companies and it’s because they’re large and have what lawyers call deep pockets, meaning they have financially large liabilities and can be made to pay up. So, those firms are worried about the liabilities that come with AI, which is developing quickly. They want breathing room to think. That’s likely a good idea. It’s more appealing to put the issues under the rubric of ethics, and probably ethics will figure in, but mainly it’s about law. It’s like when large companies in any big industry don’t adopt technology no one has adopted yet but prefer to adopt tech from medium-sized companies that have already done okay with it.

But some individual AI developers are leaving the big firms and going to small startups, which, being small, don’t have the financial risk. They can shut down and the investment capital can go to other, newer, startups. Those developers will continue working on AI. What they develop may then get licensed, bought, or more or less imitated (hopefully within patent law limits) by the big firms after they’re done suspending their own work and thinking.

So, AI will continue developing apace, and will likely develop along multiple tracks into separate branches. The public won’t notice much difference just because big firms are staying out for now.

@exit 0:

PageRank shouldn’t be described as degrading because of one search (“t-shits”), even in 3 spread-out years. This is the problem in science or pseudoscience of a sample size of 1. If you do a fair toss of a fair coin but only once and it comes up tails, you shouldn’t conclude that all such tosses will come up tails. In many fields, to gain peer review for publication, the sample size usually must be at least 30.

Winter March 30, 2023 10:21 AM

@ Nick Levinson, vas pup & @exit 0:

AI research will not be suspended for six months or any other long period. Maybe it’ll be suspended for a lunch break, but for not much more than that.

A story about a bolted horse and closing barn doors comes to mind. I do not think that there is any chance of getting the horse back into the barn again.

But, I am reminded of the panic after everybody was able to change photographs using photoshop. The world was predicted to collapse if we could not trust photographs anymore.

As usual, the world separated into sane people who knew all along that a photograph is not evidence, and the pathologicaly gullible that would believe any gossip that tickled their fancy.

Human produced Fake News has gotten the same reception. In the end, the main effect of Fake New is the Firehose of Falsehood effect. Fake News makes it more difficult to find out what really happened. For instance, in Russia it is a Sisyphus taak to ease through all the nonsense designed to make the truth less findable.

But there are, and have always been, who want to believe things so hard, that they will accept any gossip, however idiotic, as evidence. If people believe Flat Earthers, why not in QAnon, or anything else?

modem phonemes March 30, 2023 1:53 PM

Dept. of Through the Looking Glass

“ Facebook and Instagram users will soon be able to access a form that can be submitted to Meta to object to sweeping data collection. If those requests are approved, those users will only allow Meta to target ads based on broader categories of data collection, like age range or general location.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/facebook-gets-to-decide-whether-eu-users-can-object-to-invasive-targeted-ads/

Alice: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Humpty Dumpty: “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.”

Other commentary by Prof. V. Morrison

https://youtu.be/pPn2zH_8OmY

SpaceLifeForm March 30, 2023 3:47 PM

@ modem phonemes

Meta may want to believe they are Humpty Dumpty, but Alice can decide to not use the apps.

Clive Robinson March 30, 2023 9:10 PM

@ Winter, exit0, Nick Levinson, vas pup, ALL,

Re : Society changes.

“The world was predicted to collapse if we could not trust photographs anymore.”

In a way it did collapse, as old certainties became uncertainties.

Even though it was known that Russia especially and other authoritarian regimes did doctor photographs on an almost daily basis in their newspapers. And it still goes on, it was not that long ago that a well known conservative Israeli nrwspaper removed the German Chancellor from a “G group photo” simply because she was a woman…

The world changes, as the fakers get caught “red handed” and people become less trusting.

The young adults just shrug and say,

“What do you expect?”

The old adults are the ones who can not accept that it goes on, but they die out within a few years.

The reason the world does not “collapse” is there is enough time for the “new generations” to be epigenetically if not genetically different and nolonger as trusting, thus not deeply shocked. So society dies a little bit each time but stagers on like a drunkard going home from lamp post to lamp post. Each collision causes hurt and pain, but also a change of direction, and as long as there is some freedom of movment the drunk moves on. Apparently chaotically to an observers eye in the short term, but with time, a general direction becomes apparent.

Thus the collapse is in reality a journey, that endures. It started long before us and will continue long after we are gone. As neither the start nor the destination if there is one actually matters.

ResearcherZero March 30, 2023 10:18 PM

A sophisticated hacking campaign by a mercenary spyware company targeting Google’s Android operating system has been exposed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

Amnesty International is not naming the company while the Security Lab continues to track and investigate its activity. However, the attack showed all the hallmarks of an advanced spyware campaign developed by a commercial cyber-surveillance company and sold to governments hackers to carry out targeted spyware attacks.
‘https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/new-android-hacking-campaign-linked-to-mercenary-spyware-company/

Cytrox and Variston
‘https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/spyware-vendors-use-0-days-and-n-days-against-popular-platforms/

“an exploitation framework with likely ties to Variston IT, a company in Barcelona, Spain that claims to be a provider of custom security solutions. Their Heliconia framework exploits n-day vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Defender and provides all the tools necessary to deploy a payload to a target device.”
‘https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/new-details-on-commercial-spyware-vendor-variston/

“GPU drivers on Android are a very attractive target for an attacker, as they can be reached directly from the untrusted app domain and most Android devices use either Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, or the Arm Mali GPU, meaning that relatively few bugs can cover a large number of devices.”
‘https://github.blog/2023-01-23-pwning-the-all-google-phone-with-a-non-google-bug/

ResearcherZero March 30, 2023 10:19 PM

Winter Vivern has been exploiting a vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration software to gain access to mailboxes from government agencies in several European countries.

“CSRF JavaScript code blocks are executed by the server that host a vulnerable webmail instance. Further, this JavaScript replicates and relies on emulating the JavaScript of the native webmail portal to return key web request details that indicate the username, password, and CSRF token of targets. In some instances, researchers observed TA473 specifically targeting RoundCube webmail request tokens as well.”
https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-insight/exploitation-dish-best-served-cold-winter-vivern-uses-known-zimbra-vulnerability

Winter Vivern’s activities are closely aligned with global objectives that support the interests of Belarus and Russia’s governments.
‘https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/winter-vivern-uncovering-a-wave-of-global-espionage/

SentinelLabs has identified a new toolkit dubbed AlienFox that attackers are using to compromise email and web hosting services.

“actors use AlienFox to identify and collect service credentials from misconfigured or exposed services”

AlienFox uses data-extraction scripts to search the misconfigured servers for sensitive configuration files commonly used to store secrets, such as API keys, account credentials, and authentication tokens. The targeted secrets are for cloud-based email platforms, including 1and1, AWS, Bluemail, Exotel, Google Workspace, Mailgun, Mandrill, Nexmo, Office365, OneSignal, Plivo, Sendgrid, Sendinblue, Sparkpostmail, Tokbox, Twilio, Zimbra, and Zoho.

The toolkit also includes separate scripts to establish persistence and escalate privileges on vulnerable servers.
‘https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/dissecting-alienfox-the-cloud-spammers-swiss-army-knife/

Nick Levinson March 30, 2023 10:36 PM

@Clive Robinson, @Winter, @vas pup, & @exit 0:

Provenance matters and will matter. Unfortunately, most people in younger generations don’t understand much about how to determine provenance. We went to school and learned that newspapers are authoritative; so it takes a while to understand when the newspapers fail even when largely reliable and how to check further.

Someone told me something about health. I asked where it came from and he said, “Google.” He probably thought Google is humanly curated or that the algorithm ranks directly by quality (it does indirectly and usually well enough but not always). Someone else asked me to check if a certain famous person had died. I Googled and decided that he had not, because he was too famous for the death not to have been mentioned on reliable websites in the person’s field by that time, and I told the person who asked me that he generally should look through SERPs for domains he trusts (I didn’t exactly say “SERPs”).

The people who claim you shouldn’t have expected better are people who do place their trust somewhere, and that may be of lower quality anyway. A lot of public debates about which factual claims are right are really about who to trust. Can an electron be in two places at once or is that spooky action at a distance? Unless you can read the physics or the math yourself, which physicist do you trust? If there’s a God, is God’s most important person on Earth Jesus or Muhammad? Which minister do you trust? That is how splits among the 8 billion of us persist for generations.

Winter March 31, 2023 3:10 AM

@Nick

A lot of public debates about which factual claims are right are really about who to trust.

Everything human are about trust. You can categorize human societies on the circle of people they trust [1]. Tl;dr: “Low” trust societies are poor, “high” trust societies are rich. Compare Calabria South Italy (Ndrangheta/Maffia land) to Switzerland.

he generally should look through SERPs for domains he trusts

What is always amazes me is how people will believe anything some random guy on the internet writes on Twitter/FB, or says in a YouTube clip. Especially, people who claim they “Trust No One” will follow any random person who claims something that supports their prejudices. Moreover, they will simply forget when that random person has burned them with false information. When the world does not end at the predicted date, those believing it won’t conclude they were wrong, but they simply set a new date.

It has been pointed out that many of those sprouting conspiracy theories have two levels of “believe”. “Reality”, where they act on their believes, and “make believe” superstition, where they say one thing and do another.

That was clear with the Pizza-gate conspiracy. Many of those who spread the pizza-gate conspiracy online would happily eat at the pizza chains they claimed hid the children in their basement. If they actually had believed that, they would not have gone there.

You can also see that in the “Benghazi” and Hilary Clinton’s emails. For all the furor and wrangling pre-election, there was zero legal action afterward. No one who was yelling “lock her up” came forward after the elections to indict her.

The most clear example of this is the perennial question whether Flat-Earthers actually believe the earth is flat. Only very few act on it (and fail). I simply cannot imagine how anyone can watch a sun-set and tell me the sun just becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears in the distance (which is more or less what they claim).

The best explanation for conspiracy theories I ever heard was that they are the modern version of the Myths of our ancestors [2]. Conspiracy theories are myths that are geared to protect religion or ideology [3] and attack fact based thinking/science. That is why they always claim their opponents, be it science or other religions, are inhuman treacherous creatures.

[1] Francis Fukuyama Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity

[2] If you want an extensive case study of Flat Earth as a anti-science myth, see:
‘https://scripties.uba.uva.nl/scriptie/695914
(I like to promote student’s theses, especially when I am not involved)

[3] Religion and Ideology are different names for the same thing: Unquestioning faith in a single truth.

Eriadilos March 31, 2023 4:02 AM

Very interesting article about advances in analog computers and how they could be used in today’s world.

ht tps://www.wired.com/story/unbelievable-zombie-comeback-analog-computing/
[url fractured]

ResearcherZero March 31, 2023 6:05 AM

Presight AI, a firm based in the United Arab Emirates, sells software that can identify people, store data about their appearance and track their routes.
‘https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/technology/police-surveillance-tech-dubai.html

Presight.ai is a joint venture set up by Emirati artificial intelligence specialist Group 42 and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.
‘https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/presight-ai-announces-intention-to-list-on-adx-via-initial-public-offering/ar-AA18gKVv

Clive Robinson March 31, 2023 1:31 PM

@ Eriadilos, ALL,

Re: Analog Computers.

The Wired artical you link to is very little different to the Wikipedia page…

So much so one has to wonder who plagiarized who…

The real difference being the Wikipedia article is larger, has references, is easier to read and goes into things in a little more depth.

For those that doubt my plagiarism comment, seriously read both. Every point in the Wired article is in the Wikipedia article in almost exactly the same order…

Go read them both.

modem phonemes March 31, 2023 2:59 PM

Re: analog

And let us not forget Carver Mead, Analog VLSI and Neural Systems.

modem phonemes March 31, 2023 3:37 PM

Oak Ridge National Laboratory nukes ‘em

https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-led-team-designs-molecule-disrupt-sars-cov-2-infection

“The research, detailed in Nature Communications, turned a previously identified noncovalent inhibitor of PLpro into a covalent one with higher potency, Parks said. Using mammalian cells, the team showed that the inhibitor molecule limits replication of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus strain as well as the Delta and Omicron variants.

The ORNL scientists used computational modeling to predict whether their designs would effectively bind to the enzyme and disrupt its function. They then synthesized the molecules and tested them at ORNL and partner company Progenra to confirm their predictions.

The protein was expressed and purified using the capabilities of the Center for Structural Molecular Biology at the Spallation Neutron Source, or SNS, at ORNL. The bright X-rays generated by the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, or SSRL, at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory were used to map the molecule and examine the binding process at an atomic level, validating the simulations. SNS and SSRL are DOE Office of Science user facilities.“

lurker April 1, 2023 12:45 AM

@Winter,
Sunset Serenade

As the sun goes down it gets bigger and bigger. I can see that with my own eyes, and I have to trust them before any Wikipedia page about a bloke called Eratosthenes.

Nick Levinson April 1, 2023 4:55 AM

@lurker & @Winter:

First, both @lurker & @Winter:

The sun getting larger near Earth’s horizon is an optical illusion. If you remove Earth from existing without changing your location, it generally won’t get larger anymore. (Please post a heads-up here before you remove Earth.)

Wikipedia says of itself that it is not reliable, although it also requires that sources it cites be reliable.

Then, @Winter:

I guess if you advise a low-trust society to raise their trust, they won’t trust your advice, or, probably, you. Thus, the low-trust tradition persists to a degree.

Everything human is about trust if you accept solipsism. For practical use, I don’t.

Winter April 1, 2023 7:22 AM

@Nick

The sun getting larger near Earth’s horizon is an optical illusion.

I know, the point it does not get smaller. And the illusion is easy to undo by looking upside down (not safe in company).

I guess if you advise a low-trust society to raise their trust, they won’t trust your advice, or, probably, you.

This is not a case of “not following the doctors advice” but a prisoner’s dilemma. They don’t trust each other because nost are indeed out to betray any trust that comes their way.

Civic trust is related to civic honesty:
‘https://theconversation.com/majority-of-people-return-lost-wallets-heres-the-psychology-and-which-countries-are-the-most-honest-119118

PDF:
‘https://davetannenbaum.github.io/documents/Cohn2019.pdf

Trust in maps:
‘https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Clive Robinson April 1, 2023 8:20 AM

@ Winter,

Re : Size of Sun and other curiosities.

“I simply cannot imagine how anyone can watch a sun-set and tell me the sun just becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears in the distance (which is more or less what they claim).”

In all beliefs there is a degree of truth, often at the begining but not following a linear course so quickly does not follow early expectations.

Condider for a moment that orbits are relative to the position of the observer. If you are on the Sun or in space relative to the Sun then the Earth orbits the Sun. However if you are on Earth or in space relative to Earth then the Sun appears to orbit the Earth.

So if you stand on the Earth the Sun comes up in the East and sets in the West. What also happens is the Sun starts slightly further away from you, and as it rises to above you it gets closest at mid day, then as it sets it gets further away. You can see why by sketching it out even though the actual effective orbit is a circle based on the center of masses.

Thus if you take only two points in the morning and draw a line through them, and two points in the evening and draw a line through them you end up with two lines forming a triangle. If you stop at that point you could argue many things about triangular movment and thus linear movment to and away from you. You could also argue about square orbits or orbits with five or more sides[1]…

However take not four readings biased to the visable ends of the orbit but five spaced regularly through the day, you can not get two straight lines… The more readings you take, the better you will find you are drawing a segment of an elipse…

So if you limit what and how you make measurments you can fit in all sorts of fun arguments (it’s why some “flat Earth” arguments appear valid, but are not). It’s the very basis of “cherry picking your arguments” so the facts appear to fit your hypothesis (a disease very prevelent in forensics).

@ Nick Levinson, ALL,

“The sun getting larger near Earth’s horizon is an optical illusion.”

No it’s not it’s actually way more fun than that[2], because the Sun is still visable even when it’s below the horizon[4], which is why there is a difference in time between real sunset and visable sunset.

[1] Remember from distant perspective all orbits are circular, just tiped over at an angle so they become elipses and finally a straight line. Exactly the same argument applies to any other regular polygon. So a square turned so two corners ate on the axis of rotation will match any pair of angles you like as long as the sum of the two pairs is 360 degrees.

[2] There is a fun little “sin clock map” that enables you to explore not just day and night but the three twilight zones of Civil, Nautical, and Astronomical twilight,

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html

[3] besides day and night there are three twilight zones of Civil, Nautical, and Astronomical twilight. They are for certain reasons quite important (radio propagation “along the grey line” being but one). You can read more about the three twilights at,

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/civil-twilight.html

[4] When the sun is at the highest point in the observers sky, the amount of atmospher is at the minimum and likewise atmospheric refraction. As the sun aproaches the horizons during dawn or dusk atmospheric refraction moves the visable position of the sun upwards from the horizon. So when you see the bottom limb of the sun touching the horizon, the actuall top limb has just dropped below it. (see figure 2 to get a picture of the situation),

https://britastro.org/2019/atmospheric-refraction

Obviously this refraction also changes the shap of the object as for large enough objects the amount of refraction is different for the upper and lower limbs. Worse air density which is based on a number of things including temprature changes the amount of refraction. So you can never be sure exactly where things are 😉 Whilst there are very few visable objects large enough to see this the Sun is one of them.

Further it’s not just light that is subject to refraction, radio signals are as well. So satellites using microwave and above frequencies need aiming position re calculations to orbital parameters. Also… for various reasons circular polarisation of radio signals is prefered. However with refraction the polarisation is nolonger fully circular, this causes some measurable effects in a reasonable enough receiver even in the UHF bands.

Winter April 1, 2023 9:14 AM

@Clive

What also happens is the Sun starts slightly further away from you, and as it rises to above you it gets closest at mid day, then as it sets it gets further away.

I am pretty sure you will be unable to see the 12,000 km difference on 150M km distance to the sun with an unaided eye. What you see is that the sun moves behind the horizon without much change in size. Which has no relation at all with the idea that of a lamp 6,000 km above the surface of the earth moving away from you on a flat earth.

Nick Levinson April 1, 2023 11:01 AM

@Clive Robinson & @Winter:

Refraction of the sun’s light is said in the Scientific American article I cited as too minor an effect to account for most of what we perceive, although often claimed (erroneously, according to the author) as the main or only effect. If you’re disputing the article, I won’t try to sort this out.

The delay in still perceiving the sun after it is below the horizon is due to the roughly 8 minutes and 20 seconds it takes for the sun’s image to travel 93 million miles, give or take given the noncircularity of Earth’s orbit, from the sun to Earth at a rate of 2×93,000 miles per second. An opposite effect occurs at sunrise: we don’t see the sun until 8-plus minutes (500 seconds) after it rises. It’s nice that the numbers are so convenient for calculation.

lurker April 1, 2023 2:06 PM

@Nick Levinson

Refraction of the sun’s light is sufficiently significant that the Nautical Almanac contains auxiliary tables to correct for it. One minute of arc is equal to one mile on the Earth’s surface, which could be the difference betweenblife and death on an unknown shore.

MarkH April 1, 2023 6:08 PM

@Nick Levinson:

Your comment got a couple of things mixed up … at temperate latitudes, atmospheric refraction shifts rising and setting times by about 3 minutes.

This has nothing to do with the distance of the object, or the time required for its light to reach Earth. The same time shifts would apply to a very near object, like a low-orbit satellite.

It’s a matter of optical distortion. If you hold a pair of corrective eyeglasses 15 or 20 cm away and look through them at your environment, you’ll see some things shifted from their true position. Earth’s atmosphere has a similar effect.

PS I promise to give at least 14 days notice before removing Earth from existence

JonKnowsNothing April 1, 2023 7:18 PM

@All

re: County Fairs are not Fair Use of Police Criminal Warrants

A not that uncommon case of a youth farm club member who raised an animal for showing and auction at a County Fair, then became the target of a full scale criminal warrant and police seizure of the animal.

Normally, such groups of children raise an animal and then they present it at the local fair for judging on how well they did with caring and feeding. The animal is auctioned for slaughter. The concept is to teach young farmer prospects (both country and city) the processes of raising, selling and outcome of raising farm livestock. The auction generates funds for the child, and for the county fair. The sale price is normally higher than if you were to sell-buy at the slaughter house auction. This does skew the monetary aspects of farming.

There are cases where the young person has a traumatic reaction to the concept that their loved pet, will be killed and many would like to rescind the death warrant. Rules vary and sometimes it’s granted and sometimes it isn’t. The tough-kill-em-to-show-em concept takes hold by officials who cannot abide the idea that livestock should not be slaughtered as dictated.

Once officials get dug in, they pull out the Police, Criminal Complains, Raids, SWAT, and Legal Actions because

[The Shasta County] Fair officials resorted to using police resources after noting that their handling of the dispute over Cedar [the goat] had become “a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.”

The officials sent police 500 miles, with criminal warrants to find the goat, take the goat and kill the goat.

The person who purchased the goat, California State Sen. Brian Dahle (R-Bieber), was working with the family of the young person and was willing to sell the goat back to them at cost ($902 USD).

That deal is dead, as is the goat, and now State Sen. Brian Dahle (R-Bieber) has a butcher’s meat locker of dead goat meat (1).

The Shasta County Fair officials are looking at some serious legal problems over their actions on a number of fronts. One is:

  • In California, minors can withdraw from a contract. 9yo counts as a minor.

So, it will depend on who signed the contract and if the minor was a named person on it. E-Musk can tell them all about such contracts.

The aspect that was most interesting was the reaction of the County Fair officials to Social Media. They didn’t like it, they didn’t like the publicity (good or bad) and their reactions to the offer to buy back the goat amounted to:

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,… Also, in this era of social media this has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.”

Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Melanie Silva

A parallel experience in the UK, where Government Ag Officials demanded the cull of a champion llama on the grounds it had tested positive for exposure to TB. Much ado was written about it and it was all over Social Media too. The Officials eventually took the llama and killed it. iirc(badly) The llama did not have TB.

===

1) Goat meat is not a common ingredient in Standard US recipes. It has become popular from increased exposure to recipes from Mexico, India and other goat meat eating countries.

ht tps://www.latimes.co m/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair

  • Girl didn’t want goat slaughtered; officials sent deputies

Nick Levinson April 1, 2023 7:25 PM

@lurker & @MarkH:

@lurker: I agree; there is refraction. You’re likely right that it’s enough to matter.

@MarkH:

I’d combine the 3 with the 8:20 (## approximate), either adding or subtracting.

And thank you. I realize it may be a sacrifice for you to have to wait 14, so I appreciate your generous willingness to commit in advance.

Bob April 5, 2023 12:57 PM

@SpaceLifeForm

Partial Carrington Event

That event BTW resulted in a semi-permanent bright red streak of light above parts of Scandinavia. A so-called Stable Auroral Red arc (SAR), which apparently is neither an aurora nor particularly stable.

Interestingly the SAR is

emitted by oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere that have become superheated by Earth’s ring current system, a massive loop of electric current that surrounds our planet.

I sure did not know we have a massive loop of electric current surrounding our planet.

‘https://www.livescience.com/rare-blood-red-arc-of-light-shines-in-the-scandinavian-sky-what-is-it

ResearcherZero June 14, 2023 4:53 PM

@MarkH

“(b)(3) [REDACTED] Operating at lower powers or dealing with attenuation by walls does not make the
system ineffective. Voltage differences across tissues produce currents and affect cell function. Voltages
of < 10 V/m can stimulate neurons, and even lower amplitudes (tens of mV) combined with low pulse
repetition frequencies that are matched to biologically relevant signals may cause interference. There is
evidence for this interference, but it needs to be verified."

"(b)(3) [REDACTED] Some materials, such as metals, will strongly shield the signal, although radiofrequency
energy can diffract around the edges and can still expose individuals behind the shielding, albeit at a
much lower level. Common building materials provide some attenuation, depending upon thickness and
material properties. Materials such as concrete will reduce the signal more than materials such as glass
or drywall."

"(b)(3) [REDACTED] It is possible that radiofrequency would affect electronic devices, such as smartphones, especially
if the strength of the fields was high enough at the electronic device’s location. At high-field strengths,
arcing can damage electronics, causing reversible effects such as touchscreen anomalies or interference
with speakers or microphones. There are some mechanisms, such as distributed apertures, that can
provide focusing effects that can increase the power at the target relative to other locations that may
have electronic devices."

"…Electromagnetic fields can be directed, can be focused, or can constructively interfere when
reflected, which naturally leads to spatial regions of higher power density in which thresholds for
inducing biological effects can be exceeded. …This kind of locality could
result in just one individual experiencing the symptoms."
'https://media.salon.com/pdf/22-cv-674%20Final%20Response%20Package.pdf

It is possible that the system can also -in addition- emit lower frequencies than microwave, or in combination.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mod3.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20070128014922/http://www.raytheon.com/products/stellent/groups/public/documents/content/cms04_017939.pdf

http://www.fnrf.science.cmu.ac.th/waveguide/Waveguide%20theory%2012.html

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/images/8/86/MTT_Waveguide_History.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1469943/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13243347

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3068822

Clive Robinson June 14, 2023 9:17 PM

@ ResearcherZero, MarkH,

Re : HS AHI report.

Are you sure you’ve posted this to the right thread?

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