Friday Squid Blogging: Light-Emitting Squid

It’s a Taningia danae:

Their arms are lined with two rows of sharp retractable hooks. And, like most deep-sea squid, they are adorned with light organs called photophores. They have some on the underside of their mantle. There are more facing upward, near one of their eyes. But it’s the photophores at the tip of two stubby arms that are truly unique. The size and shape of lemons­—each nestled within a retractable lid like an eyeball in a socket­—they are by far the largest photophores known to science.

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.

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Posted on June 9, 2023 at 5:05 PM • 69 Comments

Comments

cephalopodcaster • June 9, 2023 5:24 PM

But does it make them magnetic?

httpx://www.sciencenews.org/article/rna-editing-octopus-dna-cold-protein

vas pup • June 9, 2023 6:19 PM

EU, US prepare common code of conduct on artificial intelligence
https://www.timesofisrael.com/eu-us-ready-common-code-of-conduct-on-artificial-intelligence/

“STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) — The European Union and the United States said Wednesday that they would soon release a voluntary code of conduct on artificial intelligence, hoping to develop common standards among democracies as China makes rapid gains.

Both political and technology industry leaders have been warning of the growing risks as AI takes off, with potentially wide-ranging effects on privacy and other civil liberties.

After talks with EU officials in Sweden, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that Western partners felt the “fierce urgency” to act and would ask “like-minded countries” to join the voluntary code of conduct.

==>“There’s almost always a gap when new technologies emerge,” Blinken said, with “the time it takes for governments and institutions to figure out how to legislate or regulate.”

In a joint statement released by the White House and the European Commission, the two sides called AI a “transformative technology with great promise for our people, offering opportunities to increase prosperity and equity.”

=>“But in order to seize the opportunities it presents, we must mitigate its risks,” it said.

Technology leaders, including Altman, warned in a joint statement Tuesday that AI could put the world at risk without regulation.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” they wrote.

ChatGPT burst into the spotlight late last year as it demonstrated an ability to generate essays, poems and conversations through minimal input.”

Clive Robinson • June 9, 2023 8:08 PM

@ vas pup, ALL,

Re : AI code of conduct.

First point to note,

“they would soon release a voluntary code of conduct on artificial intelligence”

That’s “lawyer speak” for a discriminatory system, designed to “pull up the draw bridge” and protect various “rice bowls”.

Second point to note,

“warning of the growing risks as AI takes off, with potentially wide-ranging effects on privacy and other civil liberties.”

Tells you those rice bowls are held by those practicing,

1, Surveillance Capitalism.
2, Gov agencies who get access for free.

I could go on but as I’ve noted this AI noise is about to things,

1, Creating a faux-market highly profitable bubble to replace crypto-coin and the stalled Web3.0.
2, Further destroying individual privacy and personal security on a path that makes the Chinese surveillance modle look almost tame in comparison.

Oh as for the “existential risk” for that to happen the AI needs direct or indirect agency… And it can only get that through human action, either directly, or more likely at “arms length” via the likes of “Robo-debt” and similar politically inspired lunacy through psychopathic corporates.

Just remember,

“Don’t say you’ve not been told.”

WTFUT • June 9, 2023 9:43 PM

“STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) — The European Union and the United States said Wednesday that they would soon release a voluntary code of conduct on artificial intelligence

OK so Sweden might be the kind of country that means what they say, but who is to guarantee that these countries do not internally use AI for “what ever”.

Winter • June 10, 2023 8:37 AM

@ResearcherZero

72th Brigade not happy.

I heard that people do not give much for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s future. If you are close to Putin, you do not have to beg for ammunition. He generates too much noise and there are less known alternatives available. I do not expect him to die of old age.

That parts of the Russian army fight each other is quite common.
‘https://thedebrief.org/russian-buryat-soldiers-get-in-a-shootout-with-each-other/

Petre Peter • June 10, 2023 1:00 PM

Philips recommends use of genuine Sonicare brush heads for optimal performance.

Raqs Beledi ("sharky" isn't me, I swear!) • June 10, 2023 5:37 PM

<

blockquote>
About safety, in general: please contribute infos to increase security. thanks

1)

singles need to study security advice for families and couples
families and couples need to study security advice for singles
youths need to study security advice for adults
adults need to study security advice for youths
veterans need to study public domain security advice for civilians
civilians need to study public domain security advice for veterans

last yet not least, throw polite traditions out the window when such cordial traditions jeopardize modern security; traditional courtesies are lately vectors for some of the most vicious personal attacks; for example, traditional smalltalk exactly matches the attack strategies of civic hackers or social hackers, identity thieves, industrial espionage interlopers etcetera.

it’s better to be rude and insulting while specifically methodically saving lives, than to be routinely polite and accidentally cause mass murder and worse via vectors of vulnerability or whatnot.

2)

i remember some leadership of Mexico partially admitting publicly and internationally Mexican state-sponsored hacking of the United States of America. the confession was recommunicated on prime time television news and also within news periodicals. it seemed to be believable.

if Mexican hackers did hack the United States of America, perhaps that’s also who hacked the Democratic National Committee file servers (in addition to others we’ve already talked about here in the deeper past) rather than and instead of Russians or Ukrainians.

whether or not the alleged hacking was malicious or not benevolent or neutral is an adjacent item of issue yet still relevant even to lingering claims that it was Russian.

3)

USA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA, intelligence project) already stated their ambitions many years ago. Such ambitious intelligence gathering goals match the contemporary media hyped reputation of “Tik Tok China”. ByteDance seems like they are only being interview and interrogated and browsed as a decoy, perhaps as a preparation “dry run” for litigation against the “YouTube=Alphabet=Google=Gmail=Chrome=Chromium=ChromeOS=Edge” megalith.

i have a quiet theory that the case against “Tik Tok China” is a test strategy against the “YouTube=Alphabet=Google=Gmail=Chrome=Chromium=ChromeOS=Edge” megalith which already has it’s own exact duplicate alternative to the ByteDance item(s).

4)

I.C.E. used to be (also) tasked with recovering missing or stolen weapons of mass destruction and similar contraband. The irrational demands to abolish or defund I.C.E. might still actually be a cultural proxy war against counterterrorism; the attempt to interfere with I.C.E. might “simply” be contemporary living history attempts to acquire (and maybe use) weapons of mass destruction.

modem phonemes • June 10, 2023 10:15 PM

@ Mr. Peed Off

Re: Marc Andreessen

Yes, but will it bring about the paperless office ? 😉

Nick Levinson • June 10, 2023 11:48 PM

@Clive Robinson & @vas pup:

The AI code from the US and the EU that’s been promised would be voluntary, but that in itself doesn’t mean anything more than that it would not be binding, that it would not be law.

To make it binding, it would have to be a treaty or other international law below the norms of international law. No one not a party would be bound by that law. Would P.R. China, if it doesn’t sign on and, if it’s too tight, it probably won’t, restrain itself because other nations have to, and maybe even if it does sign on? I think the consensus is that it would not and I agree.

The big institutions developing AI and having deep pockets are likely discovering legal problems around AI, so they’re slowing their own AI development, but the people doing the developing are finding shallow-pocketed pro-experimentation startups wanting products. One or more of the startups will come up with products Microsoft, Google, et al. would love. The biggies will buy the startups that already have product they want, or buy their products. Maybe by then, the legal issues will have cleared up, and the biggies will develop further. And, in all likelihood, given history, legal issues will clear up in favor of new technology and new ways of doing things. Whose interests are protected will be secondary.

I’m not sure that AI will be very constrained by law, but that view or a contrary view is too subjective to mean much. I think AI is going to be advanced on what is already out, and we will have to live with most of it. Regulatory success will be measured by the public by whether we’re still alive and have, in some ways, better lives.

Clive Robinson • June 11, 2023 1:47 AM

@ Mr. Peed Off,

Re : AI does destroy jobs and society.

“Marc Andreessen has wrote an interesting and thoughtful piece on dangers and regulation of AI.”

Mr Andreessen is wrong on several points. So some provable counter points,

Firstly technology does destroy jobs.

It’s easy to see from history that not just jobs but skilled jobs get killed by technology. I know this because I have an interest in “industrial archaeology”. For instance how many expert “flint knappers” are there now?, Likewise how many expert clog makers? And so on. How about expert motor mechanics? And likewise how many expert electronics repair men?

The important point to note it is always the “High skill, High Pay” jobs that get killed off by technology. Sixty years ago in the UK high skill high payed jobs were coal miners and steel workers and makers of thermionic valves for consumer electronics, and the repair men of such electronics.

Those jobs are gone from the UK, some have been outsourced and offshored to other countries, others so niche that they are now very very rare skills, with most now gone entirely and just exist as records in historical documents, or as “arts and crafts, and living museum exhibits.

Do we morn the loss of these jobs? Mainly no they were once needed greatly which is why they became valuable skills, but now are not thus are consigned to history.

However nobody in society in general ever realy asks,

“What did we loose with those now forgoton skills?”

Well the answer is quite a lot, and it can be painful rediscovering it when we need to. Something that few realise we do need to do. Take flint knapping, it was a skill that was required to take certain types of material with awkward properties and make those materials usefull. Well guess what we have new materials with similar awkward properties, and although nolonger done by hand knapping is now a “hidden from view” high technology skill done by machines.

The problem is “Machines do not learn”. The Scientific process as called, is observe, analyse, hypothesize, test, “rinse and repeate”. Machines can not do that and I think they won’t in any of our life times. The problem is humans are becoming disconnected from the observe and analyse processes thus hypothesis is hampered, and with it innovation.

For all the “run faster” the journey is actually no quicker, in fact in some ways it’s slowing down and becoming more limiting.

As it slows society actually slows and makes up for it with highly inefficient “make-work” which requires no more than a warm body to “fill a chair”. The human mind however needs to “do things” and that is dangerous… We joke about Internet Stars, but we joke less now about conspiracy nuts, since Dec 37 and similar. They are a result of minds “making work” and “communications” linking them up to let them self reinforce… We say “echo chambers” and “fake news” but what we are actually seeing is human minds going out of whack because they can nolonger connect meaningfully with the needs of human existance that kept us busy. Technology has enforced laziness on us before we’ve evolved to deal with it. The result is reality is nolonger acting as a brake on sanity and thus society… We are in a sensory perspective out evolving ourselves with technology and our minds mostly can not respond.

AI is in most ways actually not very much at all, the real issue is we don’t see how it works, yet we can not take the lid off the bpx and look in… To say AI is currently over hyped is an understatment, however one thing not being muched tallked about is that it is in no way efficient…

AI is replacong cryptocoin mining as a way to chew up CPU cycles and burn vast amounts of energy into heat polution…

So yes AI is dangerous, all technologies are in one way or another. But…

“Do we appreciate the real risks of human behaviour?”

Well history tells us almost always we do not at the time, nor unfortunately do we learn from history.

“Is this behaviour going to have an unhappy ending?”

At some point yes, it’s inevitable unless something else wipes the human race out as it very nearly did once before (remember a natural disasyer once knocked us back to maybe 6,000 humans, and before that the dinosaurs were not as lucky).

Will AI destroy the human race?

No probably not, but it will probably hasten the human demise just as all technical inovation can be seen to do.

What will kill humans, is two things,

1, Force multipliers.
2, The human mind freewheeling.

The second alows us to make the first worse… And that’s our real existential threat,

“Human minds have physical agency, beyond our physical limits”.

And… That also answers the two AI issues.

AI, can only become an existential threat if we give it the physical agency to become so… The thing is, what most do not realise is we’ve already given AI physical agency without realy realising it. That is, we’ve given it via it’s polution creating ability, the ability to choke us with it, if we let it.

Secondly AI is also going to make the human condition worse as all technology does. It will remove us even further from the constraints of physical reality of existance and thus our minds will continue to freewheel looking for things to become skilled at…

Nick Levinson • June 11, 2023 4:29 AM

@Clive Robinson:

No, tech does not generally make life worse. Yes, it removes us from the constraints of physical reality, but mainly in the sense that it intermediates; however, we choose to have that intermediation because generally it, in the judgment of most of us worldwide, makes life better. The uncertain among us can try their hands at living by sleeping on high tree branches (if we’re shorter and lighter more branches would support us) and gathering and hunting on the basis that food cannot be owned so as to exclude most people from having it but is available by existing in nature and therefore can be gathered and hunted whenever needed. Some people succeed by living by that economic system, but, percentage-wise, not many any more. My rough guesstimate is that Earth can support 200,000,000 people that way, but we already number 8,000,000,000, so that, if we all switched over to gathering-hunting and stuck with it, within about a month and a half out of every 40 people 39 would have to die. Controlled fire was the new tech one day (with which our ancestors could sleep on the ground and be safe from hungry jungle cats more afraid of fire than hungry) and later horticulture was and later agriculture was and later rail freight was and later AI was.

Freewheeling is fine. People invent and discover without knowing whether their invention or discovery is useful. If they can get the resources for inventing or discovering without that knowledge, we can get that knowledge after the invention or discovery is complete: it’s useful or it’s not.

The legal key to managing AI is managing the people who have their hands on it. There will be violations; but while there also are murderers law against murder turns out to have utility, and law limiting AI will have utility, even though some people will violate it.

vas pup • June 11, 2023 4:16 PM

@Clive and @Nick Levinson.

What I appreciate on this blog is possibility to provide different point of views in civil way without attacking person.

That should be continue and be good example for social medias.

On the subject: AI is bad or good? Depending on application and WHO is using it. That is very powerful tool. Like with Law: the stronger punishment the stronger procedural guarantees should be.

As I recall in former USSR bureaucracy liked to ban anything new – new always brings possibility of failure and risk for their asses. But banning bring for them no risk at all. New always has potential of negative results. E.g., Musk’s Neuralink tested its technology on monkeys first, then get approval from FDA for testing on humans.

The idea is be reasonably cautious but not avoid any potential error. The danger of real extinction of human civilization should be the only stop sign.

On jobs: the potential failure is rooted in education. Concentration should be STEM as highest priority and skills of obtaining knowledge and their utilization in real projects. Merits only make US be competitive with China no other way.

I lost confidence in international agreements/laws due to double standard and their selective application. I see movement to right of force rather than law.

vas pup • June 11, 2023 4:32 PM

Wireless olfactory feedback system to let users smell in the VR world
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230606111647.htm

“A research team co-led by researchers from City University of Hong Kong (CityU)
recently invented a novel, wireless, skin-interfaced olfactory feedback system that can release various odours with miniaturised odour generators (OGs). The new technology integrates odours into virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) to provide a more immersive experience, with broad applications ranging from 4D movie watching and
medical treatment to online teaching.

Dr Yu and his collaborators from Beihang University developed a new-generation,
wearable, olfaction feedback system with wireless, programmable capabilities based on arrays of flexible and miniaturised odour generators.

They created two designs to release odours on demand through the new olfaction feedback devices, which are made of soft, miniaturised, lightweight substrates. The first one is a small, skin-integrated, patch-like device comprising two OGs, which can be directly mounted on the human upper lip. With an extremely short distance between the OGs and the user’s nose, it can provide an ultra-fast olfaction response. Another design is a
flexible facemask design with nine OGs of different odour types, which can provide
hundreds of odour combinations.

The magic of odour generators is based on a subtle heating platform and a mechanical
thermal actuator. By heating and melting odorous paraffin wax on OGs to cause phase
change, different odours of adjustable concentration are released. To stop the odour, the odour generators can cool down the temperature of the wax by controlling the motion of the thermal actuator. By using different paraffin waxes, the research team was able to make about 30
different scents in total, from herbal rosemary and fruity pineapple to sweet baked pancakes.
=>Even less-than-pleasant scents, like stinky durian, can be created. The 11
volunteers were able to recognize the scents generated by the OGs with an average success rate of 93 percent.”

Question: where are Apple, Meta on this?

Nick Levinson • June 11, 2023 6:42 PM

@vas pup:

Education has serious problems, probably in many nations, including developed nations. But, yes, it is key to replacing jobs that are obsolete for the new, that are mindlessly routine for the thoughtful and creative.

Human extinction is not the only reason to stop, but people don’t all agree on where else to stop.

In every era we know anything about, force being successful resulted in law being created or enforced. The loser learned red lines, at least temporarily, and the victor had no reason to cross the red lines they drew, until it moved them. Thus, part of the time, law maintained peace, if not pleasantry. Peace is more conducive to economic stability and success for more of a given population, people who want war learn that war is expensive and needs a relatively robust economy to pay for it, and leaders know all this and try to further peace some of the time.

SpaceLifeForm • June 11, 2023 6:44 PM

A question I posited on Mastodon:

Is the source code that ChatGPT generates released under the MIT License?

Apparently, no one wants to touch this can of worms. The only response I got is that people acknowledge that the question exists.

Clearly, it can not be GPL because that requires copyright, and copyright requires humans. Machine models can not generate copyright because they are not human.

Right?

Clive Robinson • June 11, 2023 7:34 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re : Copyright on LLM output.

“Apparently, no one wants to touch this can of worms. The only response I got is that people acknowledge that the question exists.”

Well I suspect there is a little more to the,

“Garbage in, Garbage out”

Model involved than people want to think about.

In essence thete are two types of copyright,

1, Original creation.
2, Derived works.

Now ignoring for the moment the “only humans” asspect, I think most people after considerrd thought would see AI ML output as “not original creation” thus at best “derived work”.

Now in the past I’ve written programs that would take my source code in (ie an original work). Then apply various algorithms much like that of the C Pre-Processor to “change the code” into another form that was basically stripped, mixed up, and obfuscated via let’s call it a “key”. The purpose being to stop or limit,

1, Theft of the source code.
2, Reduce reverse engineering.
3, Put the quivalent ofva water mark via the key.

Now… The resulting source code out was markedly different to the source code in to the obfuscator. The customer got this code, not the original source code.

Now… Was this obfuscated code an “original creation” or a “derived work”?

I would argue either way depending on what you were trying to achieve legally.

But as far ad I’m concerned even if it was seen as a “derived work” it was “derived by code I wrote, from code I wrote” so it was still an original creation by me, thus I retained all the legal and moral rights, even if I was being paid…

The same logic applies to the AI ML it’s not providing an “orignal creation” but at best a “derived work by algorithmic action”…

So the copyright still belongs to the “original creator” who ever that might be…

P.S. It would probably be wise at this point for both of us to “duck and cover”, as I sense fire balls from Hades as “in coming” 😉

JonKnowsNothing • June 11, 2023 8:16 PM

@Clive, @ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

re:
1, Original creation.
2, Derived works.

It’s also a matter of legal interpretation.

The artist Andy Warhol used photographs and images that he did not create or own as part of his artistic works. He used them even though he did not have the rights to the underlying images.

The Marilyn Diptych (1962) is a silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol depicting Marilyn Monroe.
…
[image] taken from the single publicity photograph from the film Niagara (1953).
…
[the image] was owned and distributed by her movie studio.
…
Warhol is regarded as an artist known for the appropriation of images and he often made use of publicity photographs and publicly available photographs and motifs not owned by him, which often brought him into conflict with the owners of the source material.
…
Warhol’s Marilyn series including the Marilyn Diptych, resulted in a settlement with the owner of the Marilyn Monroe publicity photograph.

So from one view, his works are original, another view they are derivative and yet another view point they are appropriated without enough transformation to be “fair use”.

It’s going to be hard to determine whether HAIL-P1 and HAIL-P2 and HAIL-P3 are original, derivative or appropriated work.

===

ht tps://en.wikipedia.o r g/wiki/Marilyn_Diptych

(url fractured)

SpaceLifeForm • June 11, 2023 8:20 PM

@ Clive

Stay cool.

I am seeing a lot of folk not happy with the temps on your side of pond in your early AM.

They are so hot they can not sleep.

ResearcherZero • June 11, 2023 9:47 PM

The attorney told prosecutors that Trump made a “plucking” motion, as if to suggest he remove any damaging documents.

‘https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-allegedly-classified-documents-nuclear-programs/story?id=99968546

Nick Levinson • June 11, 2023 10:12 PM

@SpaceLifeForm, @Clive Robinson, & @JonKnowsNothing:

On U.S. copyright:

Copyright exists even without a copyright notice, unless facts show otherwise, such as being Federal work product or being too old to still have copyright protection. The burden is on the prospective user to find those facts before use as not under copyright. Permission to use a work under copyright requires some kind of copyright license. If you can’t find a license that clearly applies to the work you want to know about, you don’t have the license. You can negotiate to get one if the copyright holder is willing, but you still have to get one or you don’t have one.

Nothing inherently prevents a machine from creating original content. It might take some effort for a programmer to cause originality, but the test is a legal test, not a Turing test. A creation of prose may use only words that have been in a dictionary, but the prose or any significant portion of it might still be different enough from anything else known to be legally considered original. The questions presented here about algorithms and preprocessing likely already have been at least partly answered in binding precedents by courts, and those precedents likely are cited in a treatise or journal article on copyright law. When the original and the derivative are made by the same person, the difference between original and derivative is generally less critical than when different persons make them, and may be moot. For an unclear case that would not be moot, a machine would generate content, its owner or user might claim the copyright, and, if someone else claims infringement, the two parties might head to court for a decision by legal standards.

A machine does not own a copyright, just as, if today’s copyright law applied to Rembrandt, the paint brush did not own a copyright on a work with his name. Machines do not have legal rights, though their owners or users might. The person (natural, corporate, or some such) responsible for creation would have the copyright.

Suppose someone writes a children’s book of stories based on the ancient texts of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Qur’an, both long in the public domain. The stories about Jesus or Muhammad might share some elements with what is in the public domain but still be different enough to be protected by modern copyright.

Suppose a machine, pursuant to a user’s instruction, generates work in the style of Mark Twain. His works are now in the public domain. A court might inquire into the originality of what the machine generated. If it’s original enough, the user would own the new copyright.

I’ve heard of appropriation in a political context, not in a legal context. Legally, the relevant concern is on infringement, and that may apply to Warhol.

Clive Robinson • June 12, 2023 2:57 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, JonKnowsNothing, Winter, ALL,

Re : Stay Cool,

“I am seeing a lot of folk not happy with the temps on your side of pond in your early AM.”

Well this comming Sunday is not just Father’s day, but the Summer Solstice…

So it’s not just AM temps “being hotter than Hades” we now have “Hose Pipe Bans” on “Home gardeners” as “commercial growers” pump millions of “imperial gallons”(4.5lt not US 3.5lt) into deity alone knows what crops inefficiently. Yet a walk down my road shows atleast six leaking water supply pipes to houses bubbling through the tarmac[1]…

Few realise the work both in energy and physical lift required to make water “potable” as we don’t see the 1.5kW/SqM for three-eight hours a day to lift water vapour to make rain, nor the almost glacial slowness it trickls through limestone and the like to fill aquifers.

To “educate your children” –but more their parents 😉 — take a large unglazed earthwear unglazed flower pot. Block the hole in the bottom with a rubber bung or bolt and rubber washers. Then set it up over a bowl or bucket and put in a full 2lt of water and see how long it takes to seep through… That is the equivalent of filtering water to make it potable “drinkable” it’s effectively what a “Birky water filter” does. With a little practice you can get five to ten gallons of potable water a day that way[2]… In southern Europe they do this but not as an experiment, they do it with a cloth under the flower pot that the water drains into. The cloth in turn hangs down in front of a fan to make a “poor mans air con”… (just the breeze from a window works if you know how to channel it). The same process can make a “cool box” to store food in.

[1] Many get quite supprised when you tell them a tiny trickle of just a “teaspoon a second” in a day of 86400secs soon mounts up. With teaspoons holding UK=3.5516328125ml, US=4.92892ml, Metric/Medicine=5.0ml and 1 cubic Meter or ~ton=1,000,000ml. At a rate of 432lt/day or a little over 3tons in a week it is enough potable drinking water for 1500days for an individual or about 4years “per week of leak”… Just don’t ask about power showers or swiming pools, or people brushing their teeth, the maths on those is just mind boggling… For emergancies in the US FEMA/CDC reasom 3.8lt/person/day or 26lt/week is sufficient for drinking, cooking, washing your body[3]. The US army in the field work on 80lt/week/person as the minimum (~three USgal/day).

[2] I’ve been told but never investigated –and don’t want to– that you can “filter pee to potable” in this way… Apparently you use a pre “earth and charcoal filter” first. But… As an experiment we did try making a “solar still” that ran on pee using “contractor” black rubbish bags… What came out was clear and only had a faint urine smell and it tested OK as drinkable but there was no way we were going to be “Astronauts”…

[3] It takes supprisingly little water to wash a body[4] with per person per week to stay healthy (especially back in the days of the tin bath in front of the fire where water got heated a couple of pints a time). You can wash your hair and have a “Navy Shower” combined with as little as 2lt of water, once a week. With a “flannel down” twice a day for less than 0.25lt so a total of say 5lt/week tops. Which won’t flush the toilet at 7-9lt hence the catchy little phrase “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down”… Remember in some parts of the world a family of six survives on the amount of water an eight year old girl can carry on her head walking upto 3miles each time…

[4] Cleaning cloths is a rather vexed question according to historians… Half a century or more ago we used to wear cotton underware and wool shirts etc as the next layer… Well a “dirty little secret” is “hanging to air”. Apparently if you have sufficient underware to rotate over a week, you can if you don’t work up a sweat, rotate your undetware for upto four-six months before you need to “boil wash” them. Wool shirts six months in cool climates and jackets and trousers a year… A boil wash in a “copper” kettle used to hold about 20lt of cold water that you would bring slowely to the near boil (~90C/195F)… Light ware cotton could be washed at hand hot (about 38C/100F). Thus you would start by soaking the day before. Then light ware white cottons would go in first at hand hot and work through to heavy ware and coloureds at boil. The design of “wash house coppers” and “tubs” was actually very similar to what was used for “beer making”… Make of that what you will, but “dual or more use” was very common two hundred years or more ago. For instance bread was cooked very early in the day, and the still very hot ovens used to “slow roast” meat and make stews in glazed earthenware pots for evening meals. Usually with flour and water pastry used to seal the tops in various ways (and you thought dumplings were just for fun, likewise pies 😉

Winter • June 12, 2023 2:58 AM

Of all the dangers of AI, would you have predicted this one?

Hundreds of Protestants attended a sermon in Nuremberg given by ChatGPT, which told them not to fear death
‘https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-sermon-protestant-congregation-nuremberg-germany-not-to-fear-death-2023-6

ResearcherZero • June 12, 2023 4:20 AM

“Researchers in other fields have already shown how this has a negative impact on local government, in terms of transparency and accountability of elected officials. We’re finding the same is true for businesses and public companies. These changes—that is, the decrease in local newsroom employment—have had a detrimental effect on the information environment of local firms.”
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-local-newspaper-coverage-companies.html

The age of organised political contrivance is upon us. How and why has this happened?
https://theconversation.com/the-hidden-media-powers-that-undermine-democracy-3028

“There is ideological falsehood when the public official […] fails their duty to tell the truth with legal effects, a duty inherent to public officials given their authority to certify the truth […].” — Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia

Rights come with responsibilities.

Obligations of public officials (and other public persons as candidates for public office) to tell the truth, and/or take measures to avoid errors in the information they disseminate in the exercise of their office. The quality of the information received cannot be left to the recipient.

“When a candidate or political leader lies to the citizens […] they deny the central premise of democracy: the sovereignty of the citizenry. Politicians who lie […] act as if citizens are merely instruments for their own use.”

“Consequently, there is a public interest that the information conforms to reality. Therefore, unlike what occurs in the exclusively personal experience, it is not a question of a broad right to the truth, but a very limited right to obtain certain information in any of those areas in which the obtaining of information is of general interest in support of the accusation.”

“[w]hen citizens realize that politicians are lying, many are outraged. After a while, they adopt an indifferent position. They may even stop listening. In any case, leaders who lie undermine the democratic process making it very difficult or impossible for citizens to know who to trust. They discredit the idea of self-government. Everything becomes doubtful.”
‘https://www.palermo.edu/Archivos_content/2021/cele/papers/Disinformation-and-public-officials.pdf

–

“In official news outlets like the Global Times, the party maintains the Chinese government is the sole legitimate arbiter for all reincarnations of Buddhist lamas, regardless of where they are born or their traditional regions of influence. Despite decades of persistent claims the Communist Party exercises sole authority in these matters, it is merely an official fabrication.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-12/tibetan-succession-stake-in-battle-over-dalai-lama-reincarnation/102462036

Chinese security forces took away a 6-year-old Tibetan child, Gendun Choeki Nyima, and his parents from a remote town in Tibet. They have not been heard from since.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/15/25-years-after-disappearing-tibetan-panchen-lama-china-no-nearer-its-goal

https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2023/05/22/ccp-smear-campaign-targets-the-dalai-lama/

ResearcherZero • June 12, 2023 4:21 AM

The Law Council of Australia has asked the government to deal with invasive personal data collection practices as part of a potential Cyber Security Act.

The Law Council of Australia recommends “a review of government legislation that requires the retention of records by both government and businesses, with a view to whether that retention is warranted, and the duration of that retention”

Governments should be required to obey Australian Privacy Principle 11.2, which requires entities to “destroy or de-identify all personal information which they no longer need for any purpose”.
‘https://www.lawcouncil.asn.au/publicassets/e0210489-1504-ee11-9482-005056be13b5/2023%2005%2005%20-%20S%20-%20Cybersecurity%20Discussion%20Paper%20-%20final.pdf

Mr. Peed Off • June 12, 2023 10:35 AM

@ vas pup
Wireless olfactory feedback system to let users smell in the VR world

I have concerns about the safety of this for asthma and allergy sufferers.

Clive Robinson • June 12, 2023 10:52 AM

@ Mr. Peed Off, vas pup, ALL,

Re : Smell by wireless.

“I have concerns about the safety of this for asthma and allergy sufferers.”

I would not start worrying just yet.

Smell and allergy are two markedly different processess in the human body with few commonalities.

Smell works like a “Spectrum analyser” looking at the frequency energy curve of a molecule, it does not change the molecule or have a chemical reaction with it as such.

Allergic reactions are very much chemical reaction based and how those effect the human that is cursed with the allergy.

vas pup • June 12, 2023 6:21 PM

@Clive on smell clarification: BRAVO! You’re my hero.

@all – sorry for long post by it is important – please see below

Why millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65669537

“The irony is that shredding devices is relatively risky today. The latest drives have 500,000 tracks of data per square inch. A sophisticated data recovery person could take a piece as small as 3mm and read the data off it, Mr Hands says.

!!!Last year, the IEEE Standards Association approved its Standard for Sanitizing Storage. It describes three methods for removing data from devices, a process known as sanitization.

The least secure method is “clear”. All the data is deleted, but it could be recovered using specialist tools. It’s good enough if you want to reuse the drive within your company.

==>The most extreme method is to destroy the drives through melting or incineration. Data can never be recovered, and nor can the drive or its materials.
[I’ll suggest this one for all politicians 🙂 -vp]

Between the two sits a secure option for re-use: purging. When the drive is purged,
data recovery is unfeasible using state-of-the-art tools and techniques.

There are several ways a drive can be purged. Hard drives can be overwritten with new patterns of data, for example, which can then be checked to make sure the original data has gone. With today’s storage capacities, it can take a day or two.

=>By comparison a cryptographic erase takes just a couple of seconds. Many modern drives have built-in encryption, so that the data on them can only be read if you have the encryption key. If that key is deleted, all the data is scrambled. It’s still there, but it’s impossible to read. The drive is safe to resell.

Refurbished drives are tested, recertified and sold with a five or seven-year warranty.

“We are seeing small data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations pick them up,” she says. “Our successes have been on a smaller scale, and I think that’s probably true for others engaged in this work too.”

For drives that can’t be reused, Seagate looks first at parts extraction and then
materials recycling. In the Taiwan pilot program, 57% of the material was recycled,
made up of magnets and aluminium. Innovation is needed across the industry to help recover more of the 61 chemical elements used in the drives, Ms Zuckerman says.

The principle of sanitizing and reusing hardware also applies to other devices,
=>including routers. “Just because a company has a policy of replacing something over three years, it doesn’t mean it’s defunct for the entire world,” says Tony Anscombe, the chief security evangelist at IT security company ESET.

“A large internet service provider (ISP) may well be decommissioning some enterprise grade routers that a smaller ISP would dream of having.”

!!!It’s important to have a decommissioning process that secures the devices, though. ESET bought some second-hand core routers, the type used in corporate networks. Only five out of 18 routers had been wiped properly. The rest contained information about the network, applications or customers that could be valuable to hackers. !!! All had enough data to identify the original owners.

Mr Anscombe recommends companies test the process of sanitizing devices while they’re !!! still under support. If anything is unclear, help is available from the manufacturer then. He also suggests saving all documentation needed for the process in case the manufacturer removes it from their website.

!!!Before sanitization, Mr Anscombe says companies should make and store a back-up of the device. If any data does leak, it’s easier to understand then what has been lost.

Finally, companies should make it easy for people to report security leaks. Mr Anscombe says it was hard to notify companies of what they had found on their old routers.

!!! How can companies be sure the data has gone from a device? “Give it to a security
researcher and ask them what they can find,” says Mr Anscombe. “A lot of cyber-security teams will have someone who understands how to take the lid off and see if the device was fully sanitized.”

This ‘someone’ should be working before in forensic unit of top LEAs/ICs. That will get some assurance.

Blaziken • June 12, 2023 7:48 PM

@Clive Robinson

“Well this comming Sunday is not just Father’s day, but the Summer Solstice…”

Not to be picky, but the solstice is on Wed 21 June at 14:57 GMT.

Clive Robinson • June 12, 2023 8:53 PM

@ Bruce, Moderator,

I’ve tried twice to post a very valid warning of a security risk with regards the re-cycling of Hard drives and other semi-mutable memory in response to @vas pup and for others.

But for reasons unknown auto-mod has blocked it for “moderation” which as others have noted in the past means it gets dumped…

Such flakyness is not just coincidental to the fact that less and less people post valuable security related information, which harms reputations.

Phillip • June 12, 2023 10:07 PM

All,

On the general topic of bioluminescence in sea-dwellers, among these~are~those which free-swim in open water and often have bioluminescence on the under-side, owing to from-below-profiling aided by sunlight.

Of particular (for me) is the barrel-eye fish, whose highly discriminant light-sensing eyes change elevation angle during ascension to capture/make-a-meal-out-of prey. This link may not explain everything I am focused on:

https://www.mbari.org/news/researchers-solve-mystery-of-deep-sea-fish-with-tubular-eyes-and-transparent-head/

Having interest in both evolutionary biology and remote sensing, the barrel-eye fish is a kind of an interesting way of seeing a way to executing something.

Phillip

ResearcherZero • June 12, 2023 11:11 PM

United States law enforcement authorities are seeking to gather new evidence about Julian Assange in an apparent effort to bolster their case against the WikiLeaks founder.

‘https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/fbi-restarts-julian-assange-probe-despite-hopes-of-release-20230531-p5dcoe.html

–

‘https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/31/coalition-staffers-took-classified-documents-after-election-loss-labor-claims-in-senate-estimates

–

Morrison government caught – yet again – handing out dodgy grants

When ministers establish grants programs they should define the selection criteria but should not be involved in choosing grant recipients.

‘https://www.anao.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-06/Auditor-General_Report_2022-23_31.pdf

C|T Group’s business model is unique in the world of politics and lobbying.

“Fullbrook remained on C|T’s UK books as one of its top political operators until May 2022 when he left to set up his own outfit, Fullbrook Strategies.”

“Fullbrook Strategies’ advisory board includes Lynton Crosby AO. (The other is Johan Christofferson, a hedge fund manager who was a major donor to Boris Johnson in 2019.) Another prominent Australian, the hedge fund manager Michael Hintze, has also been a member of the Fullbrook board.”

“The Fullbrook manoeuvre — swivelling from a decade with C|T to take the role of chief of staff of the UK prime minister’s office — precisely mirrored the appointment of former Australian C|T head Yaron Finkelstein to the role of principal private secretary in Scott Morrison’s office.”
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/crosby-textor-s-influence-on-prime-ministers-helped-it-dominate-the-anglosphere/ar-AA1c0QZp

Operation Hookless

Former prime minister Scott Morrison has denied knowing of links between conservative lobbyists the Crosby Textor group (C|T Group) and the giant US company General Dynamics, which builds nuclear-powered submarines.

He has also denied knowing that General Dynamics was the lead constructor for the US Navy’s fleet of nuclear-powered submarines as he pondered cancelling Australia’s contract for conventional submarines in favour of nuclear-powered submarines. And he denied speaking about the nuclear-powered submarine option with his principal private secretary Yaron Finkelstein, who left C|T’s Australian operations to join Morrison’s staff in 2018.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/australia/scott-morrison-issues-blanket-denial-on-nuclear-submarine-questions/ar-AA1bUVx1

So why has Scott Morrison hesitated to exit the political stage?

Morrison may be ready to go but he must stitch together a post-political career that will allow him to earn a decent salary – and will not receive his parliamentary pension until he turns 60.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-question-isn-t-when-scott-morrison-will-quit-politics-it-s-why-he-hasn-t-already-20230503-p5d59f.html

ResearcherZero • June 12, 2023 11:36 PM

Electron spin measured for the first time
‘https://phys.org/news/2023-06-quantum-materials-electron.html

‘https://phys.org/news/2023-06-mechanical-qubits.html

–

‘https://www.horizon3.ai/moveit-transfer-cve-2023-34362-deep-dive-and-indicators-of-compromise/

–

‘https://vulcan.io/blog/ai-hallucinations-package-risk

–

Swiss gov ransom and possible data breach
‘https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-95605.html

Sydney Australia • June 13, 2023 3:00 AM

Clive Robinson

The public broadcaster in Australia known as ABC is really quite an unreliable, divisive, partisan, biased and fickle outlet when it comes to current affairs.A bit like the way the Guardian being apparatchik, and funded by billionaires yet claims to be both independent and also requiring readers donations to stay alive.

Nonetheless you may like the following news piece about a solution for space junk.

A couple of squids ago you were discussing sattelites. You referred to the plausibility of space junk rendering that environment inoperable. But you did not give the odds. How likely do you believe such an event is?
Is it something that is already likely any day now? Or is it more likely in the distant future only if nothing changes
(Some might consider advantages for the human race, would such an event to occur..)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-13/high-tech-cube-helping-solve-space-junk-problem/102469160

NB it’s funny to me that ‘Guardian reader’ is an insult in England! Unfortunately Australian humour is not as sophisticated

ResearcherZero • June 13, 2023 3:30 AM

@Sydney Australia

Australian humor is sophisticated out in the bush, but it may offend some people, and often does because they just don’t get the joke. The unsophisticated jokes are even better. People are partisan soft c***, and the market is catering for the demand, hence all the adds for Viagra.

–

Even ministers do not fall on their sword these days for what was once considered the serious sin of misleading parliament…

“Fiona Brown, alleged Mr Morrison had given a misleading account to parliament in which he claimed to have spoken to her about the issue.”
‘https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/2023/06/13/scott-morrison-brittany-higgins-gallagher/

Morrison told parliament he spoke to Brown over the weekend and had reviewed the events of the parliamentary sitting week that began on February 15, 2021

On February 12, 2021, Mr Dutton asked his chief of staff to engage with the Prime Minister’s office about what he knew.

He has declined to detail exactly what he told the Prime Minister’s office with his spokeswoman offering a “no comment” on the question on Monday.

Morrison said his recollection differed from that of Brown but while he believed “my response to be accurate at the time, I cannot obviously fully discount that her recollection of those events now were the more accurate”.

“However, I reject absolutely any suggestion of deliberate intent in any such possible inaccuracy in my response and am pleased to have taken the first opportunity available to clarify these matters to the house,” Morrison said.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-gallagher-deny-misleading-parliament-over-higgins-rape-allegation-20230613-p5dg5p.html

Scott Morrison had an inquiry by Phil Gaetjens, his former chief of staff, who was then head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, about who knew what in his office. That report has never been released.
‘https://www.news.com.au/national/peter-duttons-office-was-tipped-off-about-brittany-higgins-allegations-in-october-2019/news-story/cd6505cfb4b70b43dfc498d07bc95b31

ResearcherZero • June 13, 2023 4:00 AM

Morrison has plenty of form…

‘https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/simply-untrue-scott-morrisons-claim-completely-rejected-by-news-corp-boss/news-story/ec5b68833163d0c567c25721964bea97

Did a deal with members of the Labor Party…

“Michael Towke won that ballot, there were moves afoot to overturn that vote. And in the end, the New South Wales Liberal Party invalidated Michael Towke’s victory. And then a number of things flowed from that that led to Scott Morrison being effectively installed.”

“Michael Towke actually won preselection for the seat of Cook in 2007 by quite a big margin, 82 votes to Scott Morrison’s eight. Yet Scott Morrison ended up as the candidate.”

Archival Tape — Sam Dastyari:
“Scott Morrison’s lieutenants, and I’m sure it’s Scott Morrison’s knowledge turned to the Labor Party and asked them to prepare the dirt file on his political opponent. To be able to get rid of the guy and actually having disendorse this Liberal Party candidate.”

Archival Tape — Sam Dastyari:
“I know this because I was the one who put the file together.”
https://www.themonthly.com.au/podcast/true-story-how-scott-morrison-got-parliament#toggled

(paywalled)

“Mr Morrison won the seat of Cook in 2007, after the retirement of Mr Baird, amid the most bitter political factional war ever seen in the shire.”

“The Liberal Party preselection for the safe seat attracted a big field of candidates, but was won easily by Michael Towke, a young Lebanese Catholic, who had been working quietly for months building up numbers in the branches. Mr Morrison was eliminated in the first ballot, gaining only eight votes, and Mr Towke went on to win with 82 votes.”

“However, the state executive of the party refused to endorse Mr Towke’s preselection after a media campaign suggesting Mr Towke had fudged his CV and rumours spread about his family and early ALP involvement. News Limited later paid Mr Towke $50,000, plus costs, and removed offending articles from the internet after he sued for defamation.”

“Mr Towke claimed party officials did not want him as a candidate after the 2005 Cronulla riots because of his Lebanese background. A second preselection resulted in Mr Morrison being endorsed. Mr Morrison has previously rejected any knowledge of muckraking or playing the race.”
‘https://www.theleader.com.au/story/5607166/scott-morrisons-journey-through-the-shire-to-the-lodge/

And for there on it just gets worse if you look further back (or forward).

modem phonemes • June 13, 2023 10:50 AM

Re: Only Connect

“ To many people’s surprise, a standard video camera recording a power LED provides a means of data collection that is much more efficient for measuring information leaking through a side channel. When a CPU performs different cryptographic operations, a targeted device consumes varying amounts of power. The variations cause changes in brightness and sometimes colors of the power LEDs of the device or of peripherals connected to the device.”

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/hackers-can-steal-cryptographic-keys-by-video-recording-connected-power-leds-60-feet-away/

Clive Robinson • June 13, 2023 10:54 AM

@ Sydney Australia,

“Nonetheless you may like the following news piece about a solution for space junk.”

It’s a subject I have slightly “more knowledge than the average bear”[1] does. As I’ve mentioned before I have been involved not just with CubeSat payloads but ion thrusters and Surrey Satellites as was[2] did research into de-orbiting space junk. But actually even amoungst experts knowledge is slim, so asking,

“You referred to the plausibility of space junk rendering that environment inoperable. But you did not give the odds. How likely do you believe such an event is?”

Will get you almost as many different answers as the number of people you ask.

Firstly more than one satellite has been significantly adversely effected by space junk so the threat is not at all theoretical.

Secondly we actually have very little information on just what is up there in the various orbital shells we use. You sometimes here “above ten centimeters” as the objects we know about. Well I’ve designed satellites that small and smaller.

Thirdly a speck of paint smaller than your little fingernail has one heck of a lot of potential energy as a kinetic object it can punch through sheets of metal thicker than the skin on the space craft used for the moon missions and earlier. Think of it as a bullet moving at more than 15,000ft/sec… You know it’s going to hurt something it hits with even a glancing blow.

Fourthly, natural de-orbit burn up, is not necessarily going to happen, and even if it does “when is an open question”.

The reasons for this are a bit complicated and start with Sir Issacs observation of “Equall and opppsit reaction”. The basic formular that is used is “MV=MV” (which is also the idea behind the ion engine). So a big but slow object can result in a small but fast object, where the velocity causes the small object to exceed not just the current orbit maintaining velocity, but earth’s escape velocity… Thus bits may disappear from view and come back to haunt us in a few hundred years or so…

As for ion engines the idea for them has more fathers than you can imagine, but early serious research was carried out in the UK. The idea is conceptually very simple, and works in the same way an “electron gun” at the back of a TV “Cathode Ray Tube”(CRT) does. The electron gun is a very very small equivalent of a particle accelerator you will find in any number of higher energy physics labs right up to the lokrs of CERN that is big enough to be in several countries…

In short take a lump of matter and give it an electrical charge, then put it in a field created by a suitable force to accelerate it as close to the speed of light as you can get. This time Einstein’s well known little equation can tell you just how much energy and relative velocity can be obtained given sufficient time.

Practocally in space you need very little. A source of mass obviously, a way of making and ionizing very small quantities of it, and a force to accelerate it, which can be as simple as a very high voltage.

So take a lump of metal connect it to one terminal ov a very high voltage supply. The other side of the supply to a ring of metal or grid of wires. Then using a laser or similar cause a very small amount of the metal to be turned into a plasma, that then gets accelerated towards and through the metal ring or grid of wires. Yes it’s an increadibly small amount of matter but the velocity is very high. So whilst the overall thrust is quite low, it is continuous so the velocity of the object will increase with time to quite high velocities as well (depends on how much matter gets in the way).

Again as a result of Brexit the research has effectively left the UK and won’t be comming back, so not just the jobs but the expertise has gone…

[1] Back when I was young “Yogi Bear” was popular in the UK with children. It was only later I found out that despite being “denied” the name was a joke on “Lawrance Berra” who due to the way he sat on the ground was nicknamed “yogi”.

https://slate.com/culture/2015/09/yogi-berra-and-yogi-bear-the-relationship-explained.html

Howrver times move on and language with it… I ended up with several nicknames one of which was a long time ago “Bruin” which @Winter can probably confirm is Dutch for Brown and also means “bear”. I got it when playing a sport, and it stuck whilst I was wearing the green, because of the way I could move up on even quite alert people quietly and either loom over them or take them down without a weapon hence likewise the sporting “plough tackle” hence “big dipper” or “Ursa Major”. By the mid 1980’s I’d effectively retired from that sport due to injuries from playing and being called variations on bear had more or less stopped. Which was just as well, because you have to be carefull who you call a bear these days as it has other meanings in other communities since the late 1980’s…

[2] Surrey Satelite has a checkered history that I’ve had some involvment with back in the Surrey University days. Unfortunately it’s future got sacrificed on the short lived political ambitions of a quiffed buffoon known as “Trumpetta’s Pet” or BlowJo etc[3], ex UK Prime Minister and Covid disaster creater who not only turned the UK into “The Dirty Man of Europe” but used Brexit to gain personal power by effectively destroying the country as far as science, technology, manufacturing industry, and much else as well.

[3] One of my personal regrets, is that the Buffoon caused me personal harm many years ago, and I had the opportunity to give him what he right royaly deserved… However my basic nature is such I do not pick on the weak, feeble, or others even though they have attacked and harmed me. I sometimes wake up at night wondering how history might have changed if I had given him what he right royaly deserved…

lurker • June 13, 2023 2:15 PM

@Blaziken

Possibly @Clive is a Druid. Our local Druids hold a drumming ceremony at the summer and winter solstice. For modern convenience it is held on the nearest Sunday …

Clive Robinson • June 13, 2023 6:22 PM

@ lurker, Blaziken,

Re : Green wreaths, sharp knives and white Robes at dawn…

“Possibly @Clive is a Druid.”

Whilst I have been jokingly called a “hedge wizard” because of my knowledge of wild plants and their alleged medicinal properties that I mainly use for cooking and preserving. I’ve not been called a Druid… Though I have looked into their ceremonies years ago when looking at early faith systems.

The “solstice’s like twilight and dawn have various definitions.

Look up “civil twilight” and “naval twilight” to see this explained.

The most obvious civil solstice’s are often not even close to the celestial sostice’s and are those used to switch from winter time to summer time and even double summer time.

As you note,

“For modern convenience it is held on the nearest Sunday…”

But also the solstices are actually effected by leap years that move by approximately a quater of a day a year so it does not take long to work out that the solstices likewise move in fractions of a day as well.

Which has the fun side that how you define it also indicates where the “day” is…

It all gets even less fun when you have to translate your local monotonic time (say atomic, or just the XTAL in your computer) to “civil time” and “wall clock” time.

I’ve proved links in the past but some people got silly and pretended they had legal rights they could extract money with so the links are nolonger valid. As I’ve a rather hammer blunt attitude to certain legal types, it’s best I don’t incite them. Then have to hammer the point home on their thick skulls, that I care not a jot for them or their nonsense and am quite happy to demonstrate that as far as I’m concerned it’s my bat and my ball, and they realy need to be mindfull of that 😉

ResearcherZero • June 13, 2023 11:46 PM

Prosecutors are scrutinizing a series of campaign contributions made by right-wing operatives who were part of a political spying operation based in Wyoming.

‘https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/us/politics/fbi-spy-ring-political-contributions.html

Every dirty trick that was possible before the internet is possible today. The biggest difference is that they are cheaper, faster and easier to hide.

‘https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2019/07/11/a-short-history-of-campaign-dirty-tricks-before-twitter-and-facebook/

“You would do evil to produce good?”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/

Box 13—the tin ballot box that was stuffed with votes for Johnson—remains at large, although it’s widely believed to be in the hands of an unidentified local.

‘https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/go-ask-alice/

“It is striking that such a simple manipulation can be so effective and believable to some.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/23/faked-pelosi-videos-slowed-make-her-appear-drunk-spread-across-social-media/

Unless we are vigilant, the new world of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to be an even more dangerous weapon in the years ahead.

‘https://www.brookings.edu/research/malevolent-soft-power-ai-and-the-threat-to-democracy/

Be careful what you place into your bag of ‘dirty tricks’…

“It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements — extremist, racist and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S..” — Alexander Dugin
https://bigthink.com/the-past/the-dangerous-philosopher-behind-putins-strategy-to-grow-russian-power-at-americas-expense/

ResearcherZero • June 13, 2023 11:59 PM

@Clive Robinson

The rate we are launching s*** up there is a problem. The risk that a mistake will lead to a collision increases with each addition. Faster response times require more accurate clocks for automated systems, and the margin for error grows smaller in turn.

At the same time we are heading into ‘solar maximum’ with higher risks from space weather over the rest of the decade.

–

https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0013.html

“CVE-2023-20867 allowed the attacker to execute privileged Guest Operations on guest VMs from a compromised ESXi host without the need to authenticate with the guest VM by targeting the authentication check mechanism.

The vpxuser account is a privileged service account created on an ESXi host automatically when it is first connected to a vCenter server. The password for this user is encrypted and stored in the vPostgreSQL database on a vCenter server and by default rotates automatically every 30 days.

Once the vpxuser credentials were acquired, the attacker used an additional script to map out the ESXi hosts and their respective guest VMs.

With the available ESXi hosts and guest VMs identified, another attacker python script was used to update the allowed list of IP addresses for any service across all ESXi hosts connected to the vCenter server this script was run against.

“The threat actors’ retroactive cleanup performed within days of past public disclosures on their activity indicates how vigilant they are.”

VMCI sockets

Since this traffic is localized to the bare metal machine, there are no security mechanisms restricting any guest VM or ESXi host from initiating a connection with the other… Additionally, no traffic can be monitored outside of the guest VM’s and ESXi hosts present in the virtualized environment. … it is invisible to commonly used networking tools such as tcpdump, netstat, nmap, and Wireshark without custom configurations as it belongs to a different socket address family.”

‘https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/vmware-esxi-zero-day-bypass

“In the full attack vector, threat actors can completely take over an organization’s ESXi’s deployed in a hybrid infrastructure and virtual machines hosted and managed by the hypervisor from just endpoint access to a host with a vCenter client.”
https://pentera.io/blog/information-disclosure-in-vmware-vcenter/

Winter • June 14, 2023 2:53 AM

In Entertainment News:

Florida man insists he didn’t violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs
‘https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/14/florida_man_data/

The celebrated entertainer, who had a walk-on part in Home Alone 2 and spent four years in the role of US president, pleaded not guilty, and offered no justification for storing so many boxes of classified paperwork at his Mar-a-Lago manse. His aide Walt Nauta did not enter a plea for lack of a local attorney. He’s scheduled to be arraigned June 27.

…

Federal investigators have recovered more than 300 classified documents from the former steak salesman’s property since the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began trying to obtain the files in May 2021. Under the Presidential Records Act, former presidents are obligated to turn over official documents to NARA.

…

In a civil case earlier this year, the one-time owner of several beauty pageants was found liable for battery and defamation of writer E. Jean Carrol earlier this year when a jury concluded he sexually abused Carrol. He also faces 34 felony counts in New York for alleged falsification of business records related to hush-money payments intended to conceal an alleged affair that everyone knows about with adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Clive Robinson • June 14, 2023 7:55 AM

@ ResearcherZero,

Re : Space,is something we don’t have.

“The rate we are launching s*** up there is a problem. The risk that a mistake will lead to a collision increases with each addition.”

True and true, but my main concern is what’s already up there combined with the fact we know next to nothing about it other than there is one heck of a lot of it.

As a rough rule of thumb the probability we know an object exists goes up with the objects size.

Likewise our ability to predict where the object is going and for how far into the future goes up with the objects size.

Likewise the bigger any object is the less it is to cause damage as it’s “all in one place”.

Small objects are usually from larger objects. In many cases they are “the garbage thrown overboard” and records were not kept that would be of real use today.

There is a story that Fred Haise made a joke about not being able to “pull over and open a window” in response to a question about what boild down to a “body waste” issue. The fact is though, whilst the Apollo craft did not “pull over” they did do the equivalent of “roll down the window and throw it out”. Hence there is another truth in your,

“The rate we are launching s*** up there is a problem.”

People tend to forget that above a certain relative velocity it does not matter if it’s a steel bolt, or a frozen poop, the initial impact energy is the same for them both if they have equivalent mass velocity. What happens as a secondary effect in both casee is,

“An unknown number of new micro objects are created. That have effectively random elements in their trajectories.”

That is a “cone of crap happens” we can make fairly good estimates about the cone, but not what is in it and where. With time that cone becomes an orbiting field that “spreads out” with individual orbits defined by those initial “unknowns”.

Thus as with mariners of old reputedly writing “Here be dragons” on their charts for “unknown hazards” we have to in effect do the same in three dimensions in volumes moving around our globe.

Things have reached a point where each time we want to launch a rocket etc, we now have to first find “windows” between these “here be dragons” fields.

Because for some strange reason, people appear to be not in favour of $100million plus launches turning into firework displays in just a few minutes.

Yes Elon Musk is attracting a lot of attention, for various reasons, but to be honest he’s just a very small part of a much larger existing problem that exists but is tucked out of sight by “politics” of one form or another.

Hence part of my comment about as many different answers as the number of people you ask…

Petre Peter • June 14, 2023 1:05 PM

“ When you have paired, your shaver and smart phone, Bluetooth on your shaver is switch on automatically, even when the shaver is switched off. This allows your shaver data to be sent later so that you don’t need to take your smart phone with you when you shave. “

From Philips s9000 manual
The software uses Google to harvest data.

ResearcherZero • June 14, 2023 3:29 PM

‘Doppelgänger’

According to agency Viginum’s report, the campaign consisted of spreading pro-Russian content; impersonating media such as Le Monde, Le Figaro and Le Parisien, as well as government websites including France’s ministry of European and foreign affairs; creating websites on francophone news with polarizing angles; and coordinating fake accounts to spread the content created.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-accuses-russia-of-wide-ranging-disinformation-campaign/

Visually, the page resembles that of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. The graphic design, logo, and links to the ministry’s official social media accounts all look like an official French diplomatic press release, like the ones the ministry publishes every day. Except that the information it shares – the introduction a 1.5% tax on “every monetary transaction” to finance military support for Ukraine – is false.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2023/06/13/doppelganger-the-russian-disinformation-campaign-denounced-by-france_6031227_13.html

Many media outlets do not manage to contact the websites in question because faked websites basically never have a site notice.
https://www.dw.com/en/russian-propaganda-spread-on-fake-news-sites/a-63011188

ResearcherZero • June 14, 2023 6:25 PM

The decision by PwC’s senior partners to invest their own money into Top Education Group came after the private college was thrust into a political storm, when it was exposed as a personal benefactor to controversial former Labor senator Sam Dastyari.

Mr Dastyari was forced to quit the Senate after he was revealed to have accepted more than $1,600 from Top Education Group to cover a “travel budget overspend” in late 2015.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-15/pwc-acquired-stake-in-college-while-consulting-to-teqsa/102480774

One quarter of the public service off the books

‘https://theconversation.com/blacklisting-pwc-wont-stop-outsourcing-here-are-3-reasons-it-has-become-embedded-in-the-australian-public-service-206772

“Outsourcing inherently creates conflict of interest risks and this example demonstrates just how damaging that can be.”
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/why-is-the-government-spending-billions-for-others-to-do-its-job-20230126-p5cfot.html

The Big Four consulting firms’ work rose from $282m to $1.4bn

54,000 full-time staff were employed as consultants or service providers for the federal government during the 2021-2022 financial year – the equivalent of 37% of the 144,300-employee public service.

In 2021-22, the feds paid $21 billion for “external labour” – consultants, but also contractors and labour-hire companies.

‘https://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-05/Audit%20of%20Employment%20-%20Report_1.pdf

Government outsourcing costs two to three times the cost.

DoD service contracting budget and spending data found that contractor employees cost 2.94 times more than an average DoD civilian employee performing the same job.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2012/11/dod-contractors-cost-nearly-3-times-more-than-dod-civilians

the government pays service contractors more than 1.8 times the amount it pays federal employees with the same education, doing the same job and performing similar tasks

‘http://pogoarchives.org/m/co/igf/bad-business-report-only-2011.pdf

“local communities suffer the consequences of lower quality services and middle class jobs being replaced with poverty-level wages” while “far-away corporate executives benefit from lucrative government contracts.”
https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/06/03/High-Cost-Low-Wage-Public-Service-Outsourcing

As the total U.S. population has grown, the number of federal civilian workers as a share of the population has declined. However, since work still needs to be done, the government has turned to contractors to perform public work, creating an expensive and expanding “shadow government.”
https://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/11865

ResearcherZero • June 14, 2023 6:28 PM

Living Space

“mortgage and rental stress has never been higher”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-15/cost-of-living-report-households-mortgage-stress-rental-stress/102417204

‘https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/builders-delay-thousands-of-homes-over-high-costs-lacklustre-property-prices-20230517-p5d90b.html

“short-term rental entrepreneurs have switched focus from big cities to tourist-friendly towns and resort destinations”

It’s a brutal combination. More tourists equals more money and more job opportunities in Sedona’s hospitality and entertainment industries. But with housing in short supply, everyone ends up competing for the same tiny pool of rental properties. And in Sedona, more and more of these rentals are now Airbnbs.

And with the flood of outsiders coming in, local residents like Kaitlin are being forced out.
It was June 2022 and her landlord had decided to raise the rent on her three-bedroom house by $800 to $3,000, an increase of 36 percent.
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-rentals-sedona-arizona/

“The rented accommodation in the private sector is all getting converted to Airbnb now.”

‘https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/10/i-wanted-my-children-to-grow-up-here-how-airbnb-is-ruining-local-communities-in-north-wales

50% of working-age households do not have earnings that meet the minimum cost of living in New York City
‘https://www.fcny.org/nyc-true-cost/

“What keeps me up at night is knowing that with every single passing month we’re going to find more people falling off the cliff into homelessness by no fault of their own.”
https://eu.azcentral.com/story/money/real-estate/catherine-reagor/2023/05/28/what-keeps-arizona-housing-advocates-up-at-night-work-that-is-helping/70253528007/

ResearcherZero • June 14, 2023 7:27 PM

‘https://www.smh.com.au/national/russia-now-knows-who-hacked-medibank-but-it-s-doing-nothing-about-it-20230517-p5d8xf.html

“the government is looking at avenues, legal (and) appropriate avenues, to ensure the Russian Federation doesn’t get to exercise this right to build a new embassy”
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2023/06/01/russia-wins-court-battle-act-embassy/

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the government will today introduce legislation to end Russia’s lease for “a proposed diplomatic presence next to parliament house”.

“We anticipate this legislation will pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate this morning,” he says.

“The Government has received clear national security advice that this would be a threat to our national security and that is why the government is acting decisively today to bring this longstanding matter to a close.”
‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-15/live-news-blog-the-loop-europe-ai-us-interest-rate-hel-666/102481632

Lavrov said that “diplomatic etiquette does not provide for one-sided leaks of [such] recordings.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-accuses-france-of-breaching-diplomatic-etiquette-over-release-of-macron-putin-call/

Gömböc – one point of equilibrium

‘https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6mb%C3%B6c

Winter • June 15, 2023 3:54 AM

Ross Anderson live-blogs about:

Security and Human Behaviour 2023
‘https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/06/14/security-and-human-behaviour-2023/

The Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour is happening right now in Carnegie-Mellon University and I’ll be liveblogging it in followups to this post. The participants’ papers are here, while the liveblogs and papers from previous workshops are here.

Phillip • June 15, 2023 9:16 PM

@lurker

Thank you. I did have occasion to witness green bioluminescence in waves reaching Ventura, CA (I grew up in a beach city, and could time it.) Still, sky blue waves would also be a neat bit of illumination. Sometimes we believe there is only manifestation, you see? Sky blue is way cool. Please have some tasty waves, unless you prefer some other nice surround-with.

Phillip • June 15, 2023 9:29 PM

@modem phonemes

About your link to the ArsTechnica article: weird. There must be an electronic equivalent of the mantrap you know about, when visiting a jewelry store? Maybe a solution is to make some kind of standard longest-time LED shutoff, while the waveform of whatever is crunched, or something?

modem phonemes • June 15, 2023 11:18 PM

@ Phillip

the ArsTechnica article

I seemed an instance of “failure to energy gap”, of which @ Clive Robinson has often reminded this blog. Reality is out to get everyone 😉 .

ResearcherZero • June 16, 2023 12:16 AM

@Winter

Thank you. Looks very interesting. I’m already reading through it.

This story that is relevant to some of the subjects discussed…

Sim porting is …the third-most common scam this year.

“Individually we’re responsible for the information we put out online. Organisations are responsible for the information they collect and governments at all tiers are responsible.”
‘https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-16/sos-warning-first-sign-of-identity-theft-mobile-phone-porting/102316168

ResearcherZero • June 16, 2023 12:18 AM

@Winter

“Machiavellian Brain hypothesis” – the idea that we became smarter than other monkeys not so we could make better tools, but so we could use other monkeys as tools. As group sizes increased, so did the complexity of the “social chess” that we play. Later versions of this theory can be summarised as: monekeys who were better at deception, or detecting deception in others, left more descendants.

ResearcherZero • June 16, 2023 12:20 AM

“Because user-mode code is free to do things like modify the properties of objects and reallocate arrays, upon returning from a user-mode callback, Win32k must ensure that referenced objects are still in an untrusted state. Operating on such objects without performing the proper checks or object locking can and does create security vulnerabilities.”

‘https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/win32k-analysis-part-1/

ResearcherZero • June 16, 2023 2:04 AM

New CVE and PoC

‘https://community.progress.com/s/article/MOVEit-Transfer-Critical-Vulnerability-15June2023

–

UNC4841, targeting a subset of Barracuda ESG appliances to utilize as a vector for espionage, spanning a multitude of regions and sectors.

‘https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/barracuda-esg-exploited-globally

–

DNS-over-HTTPS provides encrypted communication between an infected device and the command and control server, making malicious queries indistinguishable from regular HTTPS traffic.

‘https://stairwell.com/news/chamelgang-and-chameldoh-a-dns-over-https-implant/

–

“Cadet Blizzard is active seven days a week and has conducted its operations during its primary targets’ off-business hours when its activity is less likely to be detected.”

“In addition to Ukraine, it also focuses on NATO member states involved in providing military aid to Ukraine.”

‘https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/06/14/cadet-blizzard-emerges-as-a-novel-and-distinct-russian-threat-actor/

Shuckworm/Gamaredon/Armageddon

Shuckworm is known to use phishing emails as an initial infection vector, in order to gain access to victim machines and distribute malware

Shuckworm has also been observed using a new PowerShell script in order to spread its custom backdoor malware, Pterodo, via USB.

‘https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/shuckworm-russia-ukraine-military

Clive Robinson • June 16, 2023 4:54 AM

@ ResearcherZero,

With regards the Met Police…

Look at the previous incumbent… She was ay best incompetent as a leader, and she got the job through two basic techniques,

1, She knifed her more competent boss and sold with help from the existing baf apples pushed him under the bus.

2, She knew how to make the Home Office Minister and later fairly usless Prime Minister Mrs May “look good”.

I’ve mentioned this from time to time on this blog since she was thr highly incompetent “Gold Commander” on the ritualistic slaughter of Jean Charles de Menezes,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

Who was guilty only of looking foreign and having an iPod in his pocket with ear phones in.

Oh and it’s been frequently muttered by those that should know, that she only got her Gold Commander position by a biased selection process designed for publicity reasons to try and address other press criticisms about discrimination…

Clive Robinson • June 16, 2023 5:02 AM

@ ResearcherZero,

With regards the Palo Alto Networks comment of,

“Operating on such objects without performing the proper checks or object locking can and does create security vulnerabilities.”

Shame they did not say it can be proved under the assumptions of the way Win32 handles these objects,

“It is not possible to assure they do not become security vulnerabilities.”

But hey we all kind of guessed that right 😉

Sydney • June 16, 2023 5:19 AM

2FA for online services is hard to avoid.And sometimes those online services are a necessary evil.

I’ve looked at authenticator apps and it appears Authy is the best free option.
Although I’m not keen on their privacy policy. At a bare minimum it states all data is transferred to the US. They claim not to sell data but state they provide all to ‘third party providers in order to access their services’.
Actually thats ended my consideration of their service.

What authentication apps do you rely on to avoid being low hanging fruit?

lurker • June 16, 2023 2:18 PM

@Sydney

Why would you rely on an authenticator “app” to do a task that should be shared between you and your communicant, in mutual trust?

JonKnowsNothing • June 16, 2023 7:45 PM

@Sydney, @lurker, All

re: Why would you rely on an authenticator “app”

Because some games require you to use one. Sometimes they require you to use a designated one.

Similar to how some banks, insist on sending a code they generate to your smartphone that you have to key back in. It’s rather an oxymoron activity but you don’t really have a choice except to Not Do That Activity.

  • Game Authenticators aren’t any better than older methods like dongles or key fobs.

Games are optional, banking not so much.

Some Game Authenticators will work with multiple accounts and some are one account only. The latter is a bit constraining since a lot of gamers have multiple accounts. Depending on the game design, and subscription setup, hard core gamers can have hundreds of accounts each requiring authentication to log in. If your game rig is big enough, you may never need to log them out, except after a Game Restart Day.

Game Restart Day can be a weekly restart where everyone is kicked from the server for “maintenance” and a prayer that the memory leak that causes the game to Crash to the Desktop won’t happen in the middle of the best PVP fight of the week. Murphy was an optimist.

  • Watching 24 players all running in place and each wink out of existence with Link Lost messages until it is your turn to go Link Dead

===

  • my internet has been down for 3 days / no eta on repair date

Clive Robinson • June 16, 2023 10:12 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, lurker, Sydney, All,

Re: What you get from an authenticator “application”.

“Because some games require you to use one. Sometimes they require you to use a designated one.”

It’s time people realised three things about these service supplier autheticator and similar apps,

1, They increase your liability.
2, They decrease the service suppliers liability.
3, They provide either the service provider or other 3rd party with access to your privacy by which they profit.

And it’s not just “Banks” and “Games Companies” it’s all online / cloud service operators.

So includes, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, and several more “Mega-Corporates” not just those hanging out in “techlands” such as Silicon Valley.

But those who make most you are probably unaware of which is the “Data aggregators and brokers” only some of whom are the “credit agencies” who so often loose a few million customers Personal and Private Information with apparently no liability or shame…

Ted • June 18, 2023 1:25 AM

@SpaceLifeForm

Good questions about copyright.

I heard Japan won’t be enforcing copyrights on data used in AI training. I don’t know how this would apply to outputs though.

In testimony to Congress, MIT’s Aleksander Mądry wrote that over 900 companies worldwide were already using OpenAI base models in their business processes.

On an aside, Japan ranked highly on an AI and democratic values index for 2022. CAIDP assessed 75 countries. Is it too early for a AI and copyrights index?

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