Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • April 1, 2023 4:25 AM

@ lurker, ALL

Re : It all comes down to power politics.

With regards,

“The Alignment Problem: how do we ensure machine learning systems represent the best human values rather than magnify the worst?”

You can not…

Firstly look at just about any religion, their fundamental doctrine is “domination” via, when you stand back and look, ‘cult form memory techniques’. Carried out on the very young, who mentally are defencless to defend themselves from the attacks. So before they even get to school age they have been cognatively biased[1].

Secondly, for some reason we almost always end up with hierarchical structures, which push power to the top of the hierarchy.

Thirdly as part of these hieratchical structures is generally a “self selection” process that encorages a “them and us” style thinking. Such inward thinking gives rise to “secrecy” through which control structures are organised.

I could point out many other points but the issue is not if they are inherantly “good or bad” but how you as an observer see how they are used.

I’ve found through repeated observation that irrespective of how they start unless kept very open, such power and control structures quickly spiral into behaviours that are bad.

That is because what “society” considers bad is attracted to hierarchical structures for the power and control they give.

So we enslave ourselves by our own failings. We willingly build systems that will be used to harm us because in the general case we do not as individuals want to actually take responsability for our future, we just want to “go with the flow”. Thus those who are the exception who desire or crave status, money, power and control get gifted an almost ideal structure to put their desires in action. All they have to do is follow a basic set of actions that are in effect,

1, Build a guilded cage, with a “one way” door.
2, For the majority to “sleep walk into”.
3, Build in an unopposable control structure.
4, Build in a defence / deniability system for self protection.

The first two are accomplished through the “hope” illusion of “their will be jam tommorow” or similar. The third is the “them and us” of heresy through unquestioning “faith”. The fourth is the arms length of “humble servant” acting as “a messenger of the deity” where they are the “Godhead” and get to use the power from the control the hierarchy gives them without them being held responsable via the “he told me to do it” principle. But these last two can be seen as part of the “might is right” justification of “charity”.

Charity is when you look at it exactly the process a drug dealer uses to get people on the dependency hook and keep them there. It’s a form of behavioral control via “food treats” and similar. All you need to do to abuse the process is get and maintain control of the resources people need to survive. Ultimately access to clean air, energy, water, materials, and the ground to stand/grow upon.

So understanding that, which can be quite a cognative shock for most to get to grips with (because of what they have been taught from birth). You need to consider what AI realy is and what it is going to bring certain people with respect to the four actions above.

In essence AI Deep learning is a “mirroring system” in that “it learns from it’s input” thus “will become as it’s input”… Control the input, and you control what results.

Importantly though is the mystique of apparent “wisdom” or “magic” where the majority fool themselves into thinking the resulting “AI tool” is actually some kind of “AI master”. Thus AI systems will become the “techno deities” through which those who put faith in them will be controled by those who control the inputs… Thus they get the “computer says” excuse on steroids to pass the blaim for their actions…

All I can say is that if you or anyone else can not see this coming this way, then you are “sleep walking into a guilded trap” blinded by “faith and hope” into becoming subservient to the “charity” of the resource controlers, who’s only intent is to aquire status, power and thus control through the resources.

After all “sheep have to be led” so “they can be shorn” so they are easily controled[2]. So the become used to being led, thus eventually are “easy to lead to the slaughter”.

Any tool that aids that process is going to be seen as not just valuable to the few, but for control only by the few.

Pull back the curtain and the illusion thus mystique is destroyed, and with it the magic by which people are controled.

But by pulling back the curtain, remember you have to accept the responsability of what follows… Which is others having to take responsability for their lives.

Which is why we build societies to help spread that load to buffer the apparently random shocks of nature[3]. We make ourselves into flocks by choice as it gives us considerable power of concerted effort. But the method of control of the flock is our responsability to see that the conserted effort is used wisely. If we shirk taking on that responsability, then we get first shorn then slaughtered as a consequence by those who’s desire is to do so… They will use any “force multiplier” they can get their hands on, especially if by denying knowledge they can imbue that tool with false wisdom etc they can hide behind.

Thus AI of the likes of GPT and Co give them such a tool…

[1] When you analyze religions most have “pillars” which generally contain “faith”, “Hope”, and “Charity”. Which are always spun up in a way that establishes an “unquestioning hierarchy”(faith) that has a “self deluding reward structure”(hope) and encorages a form of “discrimination in the mind” (charity) that is often worse than casual racism by those who’s behaviours are based on “what they csn do with their fists”.

[2] Pre-lambing shearing is practiced as a wayvto get sheep to behave in a desired way, that is to come down off of the hills etc to fond shelter. Look at it this way, if I steal your warm coat in late autumn as winter sets in, you have little choice but to find shelter. If I control that shelter as the farm does the lambing sheds, then I control your freedom of action.

[3] Any regular event that occurs at long periods, will look random over shorter periods. Those occasional eclipses of the Sun and Moon are entirely predictable when you know how to predict them. But scary when you don’t. If you find out how to predict them but keep the method secret, then you can with care gain significant power over others with the knowledge they do not have… Which might account for why religions used to be ardent star watchers.

Clive Robinson • April 1, 2023 8:52 AM

@ Nimmo, ALL,

Re : Havana Syndrome

“noone on earth believes ‘Havana Syndrome’ is real.”

I guess you were not paying attention at school when they explained the basics of the laws of nature with regards the transportation of energy and matter by forces.

What the sufferers appear to be suffering from is the same issue that effects sports with violent head contact…

The NFL certainly know what the legal costs are of ignoring those laws of nature (1 billion and rising). Look up “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy”(CTE) and what it does to NFL players and why currently we have to wait for an autopsy to show the actual injury[1].

The fantastic cost of not just compensation but increased protection that is likely going to have to be paid, is “proof enough” according to some as to why the US agencies have been “dragging their heels” over Havana Syndrome.

My view is that those who talk about the heating effect of the use of microwave systems generally do not know sufficient to understand the issues.

Because they run into the inverse square law issue, which means that if it were just the heating issue the operators of the system would have their brains boild way way faster than someone a hundred or more meters away which those who have suffered from Havana Syndrome have been.

Thus you have to look at the problem differently with the use of multiple beams.

I’ve explained this before on these pages so you can go “look it up” but the physics behind it has been in use since WWII, so you can start by looking up “The battle of the beams” or read Prof R.V.Jones 1973 book “Most Secret War”.

@ Nimmo,

If you truely don’t believe Havana Syndrom exists, you can not possibly have any objection to your head and brain being used for experiments. After all what does not exist can not harm you can it?

Just leave your details and I’ll send some equipment and personnel around, so you don’t have to be inconvenienced by travel etc. You can just sit there sipping a beer and monday morning quarterbacking whilst we run the tests.

Clive Robinson • April 1, 2023 9:57 AM

@ MarkH, ALL,

Re : No obvious brain injury.

You might find this if interest,

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-research-points-to-causes-for-brain-disorders-with-no-obvious-injury/

“Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy”(CTE) like “Functional Neurological Disorder”(FND) has in the past been put down as “all in the mind”.

Especially by those who believe to much in the electronic tools they use, without understanding the tools limitations (something that gets rather dull having to explain over and over to representatives of the medical proffession).

In my case nearly a quater of a century after having had a head injury that realy should have killed me, I still get the pass from piller to post issue of the medical practicioners saying we can not see anything on this grainy image we are holding so “it’s all in his mind” and those who deal with the brains actuall functioning say “No it’s real and it’s physiological not psychological”. To say it’s annoying is a bit of an understatment, especially when the side effects of the injury you’ve had flare up and get on top of you and all you want is for it to stop.

However imaging and image enhancing technology is improving fairly rapidly, so hopefully I won’t have to wait untill my autopsy to prove my case…

Clive Robinson • April 2, 2023 5:47 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re : “Mother of Landsat”

I would call getting to 96, an achievement in of it’s self, especially as she retained her curiosity through out[1].

A little over a decade ago NASA did a highlights biography of Virginia Norwood based on an interview carried out by Virginia’s daughter Naomi,

https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/virginia-t-norwood-the-mother-of-landsat/

[1] Which is possibly going to be seen as more evidence of “the forever young” / “it’s the brain that keeps the body alive” hypothesis that keeps comming up in one way or another.

Clive Robinson • April 2, 2023 7:03 AM

@ Winter,

Re : A rose by anyother name.

“The crucial word here is loop. Current LLM and other AI are strictly feed-forward without loops (recurrence).”

I don’t think that @Nick Levinson is tallking about the sort of feedback system you are.

However all these LLM’s are effectively “generators” followed by “adaptive matched filters”. Where the generator is assumed to be “stochastic” and the “matched filter” the probablistic model of the “parrot”.

In reality the “parrot” matched filter has to be “adaptive” from a cohort of continuous “training data” that will include it’s own output at some point.

But also the “generator” realy is not “stochastic” as it is based on the user requirments.

Which brings us to Searl’s Chinese Room issues.

Searl’s argument was “the rules were fixed” however implicitly by the fact that “actor” was human it was also an intelligent agent. Searl however did not preclude the “actor” from “learning the system” and thus being able to apply it’s own rules to modulate the fixed rules to the “actors” advantage…

So… A “parrot” does repeat “spoken phrases” other birds –in corvid family– can “mimic” all sorts of noises including those of mobile phones fake camera shutter noises.

For some reason “we assume” the parrot is “not intelligent”… However “it mimics” and it does not do it randomly. Even the mimicary of the “shutter noises” is not random.

I won’t go through a long list of “from A to B” reasoning, just note that,

1, The parrot learns from it’s environment.
2, The parrots vocalizations are also input into the environment.
3, Which changes the environment.
4, Which changes how the environment responds to the parrot.

You have a closed feed back loop… Which importantly is modulated by the parrot as well as the environment. We call it “training by food treats” or similar where the actions of the parrot involve both risk and reward as the reward can be “good” (food) or “bad” (harm) which is determined by the “environment”.

The same “good/bad” response from the “environment” is one of the dirty little secrets of GPT and friends. That is “behind the curtain” are humans continuously looking at what is being put into the “environment” by GPT etc and applying feed back to limit “travel” in any undesirable direction.

The reason this is necessary is two fold,

1, GPT etc are inherently unstable due to the consequence of feed forward in the design.
2, GPT etc have no inherant limiting and have no ability to “read the environment” to detect “good/bad”.

People in general appear to have not learned the lessons of Microsoft’s Tay.

Nor for that matter the likes of “Social Media” and “echo chambers” that got ignored in the quest of “engagment”.

The reason I would like a spoke to be shoved in GPT and similars wheel is not the “parrot” but the “environment”. That is the “environment” needs to be “regulated” as that is where the harm will originate that the unstable “parrot” will “magnify by design”.

Clive Robinson • April 2, 2023 11:48 AM

@

Re : Animal inteligence.

“many pet owners are sure that their animals are intelligent and many other people think those believers are fooling themselves.”

My view is that if any “system” can modify it’s behaviour by “choice” then it has “agency”. If it can use the results of past choices to make future choices then it can “learn”. If it can use any learning to it’s advantage then it effectively has “self determination”.

The hard thing to determin by observation is if the system is making choices or not. Call it the “sugar in your coffee test”…

As an observer I see you every morning make a cup of coffee. If there is sugar available then you add two spoons worth.

Thus it can be viewed by the observer as determanistic behaviour by you, rather than action by your choice (due to a sweet tooth).

So the observer waits untill one morning there is no sugar what do you do, not make a coffee? or drink the coffee without sugar? Actually it does not matter as either action could be determanistic or by choice…

And that’s the problem “action by choice” or “agency” can not be determined by an observer.

If I can not determin if there is “action by choice” how can I determine if there is learning let alone “inteligence”?

All I know is,

“I think I have choice”

Therefore I further think it’s reasonable to assume other people have choice. And if they do, then animals almost certainly have choice as well. As for other systems biological or otherwise, showing “determinism” is just as hard…

Clive Robinson • April 3, 2023 7:01 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, Nick Levinson, Winter, All,

Re : Animals Choices

“Within the spectrum of living creatures the amount of choice varies.”

Yes, it does, but for an observer “showing choice” as opposed to “showing determinism” is always going to be a problem of significant dificulty, if not impossibility[1] even with very simple organisms.

Simple “correlation” between stimulus and response is at best unreliable due to unobservable “meta-stability” issues in a normally functioning organism.

Such problems do come up in science though they tend to not get published.

One scientist went on the record as saying that she had run a series of experiments to disprove an asspect of “alternative medicine”. Having run her tests off and on over a period of time her results showed no better than “noise” (as expected). Then over one period her results showed the opposit… She went through testing the equipment etc and found no fault. As she noted “Sometimes probability does come up all sixes”.

But in testing of many things, and organisms in particular there is a disturbing trend actually happening that is causing puzzlement if not consternation. There are many well known and well relied upon papers in psychology and similar. Where experiments that have been not just published, but subject to scrutiny and apparently repeatedly verified nolonger hold…

It’s called “Replication failures in psychology” and a quick Google will show it kicked off back in 2010[2]

If this was to happen to just a very few papers nobody would realy care. But the number it is happening to is apparently rising with time. The problem is nobody has what appears to be a sensible idea as to why this might be, or even how to come up with a test that might give further insight to the issue.

One argument of that form that got raised when discussing it, is that observationally,

It appears that the test subjects with time get to hear about the experimental test from those who have knowledge of it in some way, and with this propagates out like a pathogen spreading from host to host.

Obviously nobody belives it to be the actual case but it does loosely describe the observations (so much for Conan Doyle’s character Holmes reasoning[3]).

As many engineers can confirm,

“There is a zone twix signal and noise where chaos can be seen.”

Sometimes it’s real and sometimes it’s not[4]. So knowing what to test for and importantly how is essential in many fields of endevor.

[1] Consider it the “biological halting problem” even if you know all the states an “organism” can be in, you “can not know” the current “functioning” state or know when a state “transition” has happend. At best just one of several indicators may eventually become apparent via the organims behaviour. But if a further transition or chain/cascade of them has happened then you’ve likely lost correlation between state transitions and behavioural indicators.

[2] Replication failures in psychology is fun to follow as it’s a,kind of a “Tester tests the testers” activity a quick overview can be read at,

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/replication-crisis

[3] In his short story “The Sign of Four” Conan Doyle has Holmes explain,

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Did not alow for what we now know that somethings are simply beyond reasoning by logic.

[4] I’ve mentioned this a few times before but sometimes “random” is anything but. The example I use is two squarewave oscillators driving the clock CLK and data D inputs and observing the Q output. When the Q output is looked at on an oscilloscope or similar “close in” it looks quite random. However dial the timebase out so the individual transitions can not be easily seen and you notice they “group” into regular periodic bunches. Stick the Q output through an appropriate “leaky integrator” and you get a near perfect sinewave at the difference frequency between the oscillators.

Clive Robinson • April 3, 2023 7:44 PM

@ vas pup, ALL,

Re : Where is Intuition.

Missing from the Psychology Today article you link to is an important fact.

Intuition as described happens in different parts of the nervous system.

Whilst efficiency might play a part, more important is speed of response.

As you know there is the “monkey” or “reptile” brain at the top of the spinal column. It gives the “muscle memory” effect that gives the efficiency of repetative actions like riding a push bike. But more importantly it gives speed from subconcious pattern recognition to implement “flight” when a hunting creature is recognised. It’s how you can “find yourself up a tree before you know it” or because the concious limiters are bypassed enable you to do incredible physical things such as tear a car door open as part of “fight”.

You might end up in significant pain either way, but importantly you are alive not dinner. So have the chance to heal and go on to have children etc.

Thus fight / flight intuition is not reasoned, as there is no time for it.

However when that intuition has got you over the starting inertia the higher levels of the brain have to reason such that you can use unique features in the environment / suroundings when there is not a tree to scoot up.

It is not untill the end of the article that the author indirectly mentions this eith “experts”. The thing is what he describes is yet another speed up system similar to that which the lizard brain does only with more abstract than physical patterns.

But yes finally at “the top of the stack” you have no speed up mechanism because the pattern is new.

Most can remember the issues of coordination when learning to drive a manual rather than automatic car.

However as the patterns become recognised they get controlled from “further down the stack” increasing both speed and efficiency, thus freeing up the concious mind to take more distant patterns into account.

As I’ve pointed out in the past,

“There are no accidents, only insufficient knowledge or time to process it.”

The human nervous system is rather elegant in how it uses pattern recognition and automated response at multiple levels.

Yes relying on the lower levels will be dangerous in new situations, especially in modern environments, where the harms are less than a century or so old. But in over 10,000 years preceading thay, just standong still and taking the time to think will have caused you to be dinner, to some large preditor.

As the line from the film has it,

“That’s Evolution baby.”

It’s a situation that is not going to get better any time soon as our pace of environment change through industrialization is still “speeding up”. If we could go back several thousand years, mankind would be physically and in many ways mentally our equalls, only way better tuned to their environment. Look at the kids of today glued to their mobile phone screen oblivious to all as they walk in an environment that is actually way more dangerous, especially with virtually silent high power electrical vehicals on “auto-pilot”. You can, if you stop somewhere safe to do so, think about it rationally and realise technology has shoved a very large spoke in the path of human evolution…

Clive Robinson • April 4, 2023 4:02 AM

@ ALL,

Auz technical commentator “Dave” of EEVblog has had a little play with AI creating images.

It’s actually quite fun to watch as well as hitting some serious points at the end.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3YgVmL0anAU

Clive Robinson • April 4, 2023 9:19 PM

@ lurker,

Re : Plagiarism and honour codes.

“Turnitin is software currently used in the education sector to detect plagiarism and similar cheating.”

But what do you do when the real “industry best practice” is to commit plagiarism for profit, and a University lecturer decides to have an industry behaviour realistic course assesment worth more than 60% of the course marks?

Which do you go with,

1, Industry best practice plagiarism
2, University honour code

It’s something my son has raised a formal objection to on his university course.

He like some others went with the honour code, and they got 25% or less, others who went with “cut-n-paste” plagiarism got over 75%. Two clear and distinct groups in the marking results…

Put simply it was a “software” module to write non trivial C code for a microcontroler, wire up the microcontroler board into IO and write documentation in the code all in an hour and a half.

The computers they used were connected to the University network where the students own earlier work and “home drives” plus access to “example code” was available. Also to the Internet.

Apparently the lecturer had verbally told some of the students in a tutorial that they should “pre-write” code specifically for the assesment…

So,

“Assessment methods should be changed, eg. to a method where AI cannot help”

Is already an issue and it’s not just AI that is the problem, “industry best practice plagiarism” is as well.

Clive Robinson • April 4, 2023 10:33 PM

@ Bruce, and the usual suspects,

An informative paper by Samuel R. Bowman of New York Uni, titled,

“Eight things to know about Large Language Models”

https://cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/eightthings.pdf

Makes interesting reading about LLM’s.

Clive Robinson • April 5, 2023 5:14 AM

@ MarkH, ALL,

Re : Regulating Crypto coins

The article author notes,

“If the United States cracks down, it is possible that cryptocurrency may migrate elsewhere.”

Would that be a bad thing? I suspect not. Because although the author immediately notes,

“However, because the global cryptocurrency industry relies heavily on funding from U.S. venture capital firms, it remains an open question whether the industry could survive without that funding.”

She has faild to raise an important point of,

“Why are US Venture Capitalists so avidly funding the Cryptocurrency industry?”

When she has previously correctly noted,

“The result is that fraudsters have rushed into cryptocurrency, exploiting the complexity and hype to dupe the unwary.”

And,

“Despite the industry’s claims, most of those who invested in cryptocurrency have lost money.”

The reality is but for the lucky few all those using cryptocurrency have lost money “as designed”. That is when you seperate out the parts you can see how the short cons and long cons move the money to the exchanges, mills, and miners, away from the “investors” or more correctly “speculators”, who are being “fleeced”.

So if it’s “so obvious” to many the question of,

“Why are US Venture Capitalists so avidly funding the Cryptocurrency industry?”

Would appear puzzling.

The answer is actually a little more subtle, and actually shows they are in on the con game.

The important thing to note, is they are not “investing in cryptocurrency” they do not touch it thus avoid any of the existing legislatory liability. What they are doing is making companies/corps around the “cryptocurrency industry”, which they build up on the hype and then self off, which although it is a con of another form is currently perfectly legal thus does not carry liability.

In a way it is just another way to “repackage bad debt as a safe investment” which is what caused the so harmfull Finacial Crisis the author mentioned,

“Blockchain-based finance is complex, automated, highly interconnected, and offers vast opportunities for creating leverage, because there is a virtually unlimited supply of assets to borrow against. These are the kind of fragilities that led to the last financial crisis, in 2008.“

Anyone who buys shares in these “companies/corps” the “US Venture Capitalists” are creating will loose their money unless they “hot potato” them, because nearly all those “companies/corps” are actually acting illegally and will cease to have value when the authorities take action.

A piece of old “investor advice” is

“Don’t invest in the primaries, but the secondaries.”

So when chip manufacture was bubling up, investing in the fab companies was “investing in the primaries” and did not bring the same growth as investing in the chemical companies that supplied the “chip encapsulation” companies with the plastics that turned the chips into “packaged integrated circuits”.

It’s probably to late now, but if you want to “ride on cryptocurrency” as an investment, investing in the manufacturers of the “mining rig” silicon would have been the more sensible way to go.

In essence this is what the “US Venture Capitalists” are trying to appear to be doing to avoid being sanctioned. Because they are actually creating faux/fake secondaries and “Pump and Dumping” them.

The thing is every where I take a serious look at what the author calls the “US Cryptocurrency markets” I find illegal, unlawfull, or highly questionable behaviour, that has just one intent, to take money away from “cryptocurrency investors” as quickly as possible.

What the author does not, but perhaps should have said of those investor / speculators she described as,

“most of those who invested in cryptocurrency have lost money”

Is, perhaps the oldest reason financial markets especially the faux/fake ones like cryptocurrency exist in the first place,

“A fool and their money are soon parted…”

Clive Robinson • April 5, 2023 2:40 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, MarkH, Winter, All

Re: Clearance of mines, ordinance, booby traps etc.

“Finding them and deactivating them are 2 different problems.”

And finding is different for each and every type.

“Unexploded Ordinance”(UXO) is often in a heavy metal case with explosives inside such as artillery shells and air drop bombs.

The casing makes these relatively easy to find, if they did not “slow-up” in soft ground and go more than two or three feet down. However some new “Fuel Air Explosives”(FAE, FAX) don’t have heavy metal casing or any metal casing at all. That is they are a container of a fuel with two explosive charges. The first being to disperse the fuel into the air, the second a very short time later to ignite the fuel/air mixture.

The problem is a small percentage of shells and UXO will go six or more feet down as designed, but then not detonate. Which in a war could be hundreds if not thousands of shells or bombs that either just stay there rotting away poisoning the soil or slowly move to the surface over many decades or untill discovered under buildings that get built over them[1]. Which can happen in cities and “urban build up”. Some also appear as rivers “move” by washing banks away, or turn up on beaches, both where children play.

Mines on the other hand are mostly “shallow buried” but, designed not to be detected even though international treaty says they should have a mine detecting clip added. Most mines are designed to be used for “area denial” not destruction of property like shells and bombs. So they are out in fields and other open spaces and designed to be shallow buried, hard to find and difficult to remove safely thus are often “detonated in place” with a small amount of plastic explosive. However the more modern way is to use a little “dragon” fire or similar[2] even very high preasure water jets that can easily cut metal.

Another way to clear mines was the out development of one of the “funnies” during WWII. Sometimes called a “mine-flail” or “thresher”, in essence it is a heavily armoured vehicle that has a pair of arms at the front with a rotating drum with heavy chains or cables attached to it[3]. It effectively “beats a path” through an area thus detonating or destroying any mines near the surface. They are inefficient for clearing “farm land” but can clear “safe paths” fairly quickly.

Other types of “anti-personnel” device sometimes called “shinies” or “booby traps” that are surface or just above mounted devices set of mechanically by a wire or similar not all are explosive, and some contain no metal parts, being made from “local organics” like living plants etc. So can not be detected by most types of technology devices only the very experienced “Mk 1 eye ball” or now some trained creatures.

The peace time statistics of death to mines and “Unexploded Ordinance”(UXO) is around 22/day world wide say one an hour. Injury that is life impairing is around 70/day and in both cases it’s over a quater of casualties are children “playing”. This has a significantly disproportionate effect on rural communities where children are the investment in the future not just locally but for food production to feed entire nations.

It’s clear from the little that is already known that Russian troops are puting in near undetectable mines to “salt the fields” of the Ukraine, for exactly this purpose of long term “vengeance”.

[1] I was effected by this “annoyance” back in 2019,

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/kingston-ww2-bomb-thousands-of-residents-told-not-to-return-home-after-unexploded-bomb-found-on-nearby-building-site-a4150181.html

Which could have been there for eighty years (they did not say the actual year it was dropped). The problem is these days they tend to over multiply the “effect radius” thus hundreds if not thousands of people get effected. Which if you are a Uni student studying for exams that are only a week or two away.

[2] The old way of dealing with mines and small UXO was to put a small amount of high explosives on them and “disrupt the firing chain”. However you risk “sympathetic detonation” if the main charge in the devices has become “unstable”.

Thus a more modern aproach is to use a “low entropy hump” solution of an intense flame that burns through the device or causes the case to split. This is generally a lot lot safer,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4388261.stm

Importantly though, not only are the Dragons easy to make with locally resourced materials, they are not a solution that can be “repurposed” back into weapons. That is it is not unknown for the stores of explosives ment for mine clearence to be attacked/robbed by what we now call terrorists etc.

[3] This has a picture and marketing description of a small mine-flail,

https://www.army-technology.com/projects/minewolf/

Clive Robinson • April 6, 2023 4:42 PM

@ lurker,

Re : Phoning home IoT etc.

The question all owners should ask themselves is,

“What am I actually paying for, and what am I paying in rent and how that payment is made…”

Which brings you back to my usual first question,

“Why is this device connected to external communications and what is the business case for it to be so connected?”

It’s one of the reasons I joke that,

“Anyone using Amazon products will end up having their head looked at very quickly”.

But from another aspect many of these systems do not work in the way you want should the external connections fail…

So you buy a box cheap and install it and it’s great, then a few months down the road the supplyer goes out of business or decideds there’s not enough money being made in the “back end” they are running. So they simply turn it off or demand large sums of support/rent… Either way you do not get what you thought you were paying for.

The trouble is most home-consumer / lowend-commercial security systems are all like this these days. Including many “home electronics” including those in your kitchen and bathroom (and in some cases the bed room).

Worse even if the companies are honest about what they do with your data (Amazon comes into question here with Ring)… It goes through “the cloud” where SigInt agencies and Others play with their hoover systems…

The fact that the article is on a Chinese firm when US firms are doing the same or worse, should tell you where the money / influance in that journalistic organisation comes from… I won’t say it’s more “5G politics” but you can see why I might think so, let’s just say,

“For the moment several horses are running in the same direction. But they won’t always do so.”

In fact the more “Police State” supposed Western democracies get, the worse these issues will get. Remember those “smart meters” connected to “smart grids” are just another form of “communications network” through which influance/control will be exerted on “the citizens” by both Government and Rent Seekers.

Clive Robinson • April 6, 2023 8:06 PM

@ lurker, Winter, ALL,

Re : To be shorn or munched.

“Which unfortunately doesn’t solve the problem of ordinary users being treated like cannon fodder by their own governments.”

Something that @Winter commented on just a few days ago, implying that it was in the job specification of “Political”.

In essence citizens are the flock of sheep to be driven, fleeced and slaughtered, by the self appointed.

That is however you look at it democracy never realy exists, it always becomes a hierarchy with the four evils of,

“Status, money, power and control”

Migrating rapidly to the top.

Which thus attracts the mental defectives who find those four “evils” deeply attractive. Hence the “dark quadrad” of mental defects of,

1, Narcissism
2, Sadisim
3, Psychopathy
4, Machiavellism

Being found strongly exhibited at the top of any hierarchy.

The real scary ones being those who portray them selves as “humble servants” of the “leaders”. They are the Machiavellian “control freaks” often with other psycopathic tendencies, effectively hiding behind narcissits and sadists, that are the public faces or frontmen. Knowing full well that “come the reveloution” the frontmen end up swinging from street lights whilst they slip away into the night, wait a while and then come back and insinuate themselves behind new frontmen so remain hiden but very much in control…

Clive Robinson • April 7, 2023 5:45 AM

@ Winter, ALL,

Re : Flat pack drone kits.

“Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond”

Whilst not the “cardboard” I was thinking of other light weight materials or composits and 3D printing, I’ve been predicting this sort of drone for quite some time now on this blog. As I’ve noted several years back developing a flight system with a Mobile Phone or gumstick SBC would be an under graduate first or second year project.

My view / take on it when discusing it with those wanting to develop low cost drones was a “Vulcan bomber” style Delta wing design made from hot wire cut expanded polystyrene with push through strengthaning rods and a “pusher motor” style propultion system mounted in the tail. As a prototype it was known to work and some people have been “product developing them” prior to C19 put a gimp in things.

But the lightest material I’ve made a “glider” out of is balsawood spars covered with an ultra thin chemical film made by spraying chemicals onto a water bath (kind of like making plate glass on a hot tin float).

The early manned aircraft were little different they used very thin cotton cloth stretched across wooden spars that was then “tightened” with “dope” which could be as little as very dilute flour and water paste, or shelack or similar disolved in some kind of spirit just brushed on and left to dry. Odd shapes were made with early plastics like “casin” that essentially was boiled up milk and vinegar.

So replacing the cloth with paper and the spars with corrugated card or that “artist board” made of two sheets of paper seperated by a layer of closed cell expanded foam is not exactly a stretch of the imagination. I happen to know that a UK University north of london gives the making of a small glider with exactly those materials in the second term of the first year to their areospace students to show they have understood the basic maths of flight in an “applied” way. And they’ve been doing it for several years now.

Clive Robinson • April 17, 2023 8:11 AM

@ ResearcherZero, ALL,

Re : Wireless energy harvesting.

“For some perspective the output of mobile phone towers is very low. You can test the output of various wireless devices with a rectenna and multi-meter.”

You could have provided a link 😉

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/rectenna-harvests-electromagnetic-energy-from-5g-signals

However “wireless power transmission” though used as major plot items in Spy, SiFi and Detective films are not realy “much cop” currently.

The first problem is radiation of the signal spreads out like an enlargening balloon so it’s surface area expands quickly (r^2) but not as fast as the volume (r^3). So either the rectena has to be close to the radiative source or extensive beam forming at the transmiter has to be used.

Which is the second problem. A simple analogy model is to “turn it around”. That is from a point draw the rectenna which realy needs to be atleast 16 wavelengths from the point. Then continue the line from the rectenna out the distance you want to use it from the source which needs to be more than two wavelength and preferably atleast sixteen to get a usable plane wave. Then draw two more lines from the point via the largest outer dimensions of the rectenna and keep going such that you get a triangle at the distance the source has to be away from the rectenna. That gives you a simplified first approximation for the effective appature diameter of the source transmit antenna assuming spherical antennas. Anything less will cause significant losses (which is why “lensing” has to be used, but even that’s not going to help much at geo-stationary distances).

The third problem is that basic descriptions of rectennas talk about “a diode” which in theory is easy to understand… In practice all diodes have problems, not least is the turn on voltage drop. There is a very real world issue you can look up to see this, it’s the use of MF and loe end HF “Series Resonant Power Supplies”(SRPS). They frequently do not use diodes because the losses means quite a bit of inefficiency which means heat thus various types of limitations to avoid failure.

Fourth is what frequency to use… As a very rough rule of thumb the higher the frequency the more issues there are to do with unwanted absorption. One issue is that of “antenna spill over” where stray radiation goes outside the confines of the antennas. Thus ask the question of “Do you want high power microwaves coming down on your head etc and broiling it?”.

So “beaming power from space” is not going to be that easy and require quite a bit of the Earth’s surface.