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B@1k@N GARBAGE in Ideho Gubmint • April 17, 2026 6:33 PM

The b@1k@n GARBAGE THAT WORKS IN THE GUBMINT IN ideho GETS TO SPY, STALK, AND HACK ME AND MY FAMILY BECAUSE THEY ARE ABUSING RAPING THE POWER THEY WERE GIVEN BY MY GUBMINT.

In america if you’re an immigrant and you uncover corruption in your gubmint,
YOU WILL BE DESTROYED.

WHAT ST00P1D 1D10T IN IDAHO HIRED ALL THESE CORRUPT B@1K@N01D$ TO WORK 4 THE GUBMINT????

rUNNING IP THEFT SITE AS A GUBMINT EMPLOYEE IS A huge liability for idaho, someone will sue you bigly.

Go back to buhznyuh THUGZ!

tRUTH CANNOT BE detained or imprisoned • April 17, 2026 6:54 PM

They came here to the USA from the commie
$h1th013 that they destroyed back in the 90s. THey have slashed each other’s throats just because there was a difference in which God or Book they believed, then they came here to the USA by tens if not by hundreds of thousands to SPREAD THEIR INFESTATION EVEN AS GUBMINT EMPLOYEES – DESTROYING RECKLESSLY EVERYTHING IN THEIR PATH, even the decent humans who’d dare touch their TWO SH1TTY LITTLE WEBSITES THAT SPREAD THE IP WAREZ. they don’t care if those who created the content get paid or not – AS LONG AS THEY GET THEIR GUBMINT CHECKS.

The have MADE IDAHO THE $H1TH013 THAT IT IS TODAY – BY DESTROYING MY INNOCENT AND DECENT LIL FAMILY WITH THEIR LIES AND COVER UPS.

LIES

LIES

LIES

LIES.

eITHER YOU work for the gubmint or YOU ARE A CRIM,INAL – OH WAINT, THESE ARE B@1K@N01D$ – THEY MUST HAVE BOTH, BECAUSE THAT’S WHO IT IS BACK HOME.

SEND THEM BACK HOME WHERE THEY BELONG!

Weather • April 17, 2026 11:29 PM

@please dont, can you explain what is happening, I’m from NZ and don’t read your newspaper.

lurker • April 18, 2026 2:14 AM

In the mid-late 1940’s the race was on: large rooms full of equipment, connected by miles of cables, tended by armies of technicians, consumed enough electricity for a small town, as people tried to build a useful computer.

In the mid-late 2020’s the race is on again: large rooms full of equipment, connected by miles of cables, tended by armies of technicians, consuming enough electricity for a small town, as people try to build a useful physics experiment.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20q4nv89yzo

bye bye AI • April 18, 2026 9:50 AM

https://deepmind.google/research/publications/231971/

Google’s Deep Mind has a new paper out arguing that Large Language Models can never achieve human consciousness.

The article is word salad. As I have articulated before the fandom around AI has many of the characteristics of a religious cult. I also agree with Clive that the actual use cases for LLMs are limited. At the same time, there is nothing about the profession of computer programmer that gives them a special insight into human consciousness and it is arrogance to write the way they do. Philosophers from Dennet, to Rorty, to Davidson to Pascal have been arguing theory of mind for many decades. One can even find a theory of mind in St. Augustine more than a millennium ago.

This is not an abstract point. While fans of AI may be obsessive there is a real and substantial danger that critics of AI look like they are tilting at windmills and romanticizing a worldview that supports entrenched interests over healthy growth. I’ll be blunt. Computer science should leave the humanities to the the humanities. Sometimes interdisciplinary efforts lead to much needed cross pollenization but sometimes, like in this paper, it leads to the over claiming characteristic of the Dunning Kruger effect.

r • April 18, 2026 12:09 PM

first the internet, then AGI.

we are facing a general knowledge/expertise extinction event.

knowledge is power, there is an intent to subjugate ourselves to a repository and an algorithm.

Clive Robinson • April 18, 2026 6:20 PM

@ ProblemBetween…, ALL,

With regards,

“Got me thinking…”

A “little thinking is a dangerous thing”, and as Einstein noted as a rider, “so is a lot”.

So beware on where you cast your thoughts 😉

But getting onto the serious point of,

“… the efforts to enable cell phones to communicate through satellites…”

Is only the “physical layer” of the networking stack and as such it can have any other set of protocols “overlaid” right upto the “layer 13” of “Government Policy / legislation and regulation”…

In between however we have the real issue of “Data Brokers” that make so many “apps” effectively “spies in your pockets”. Allied with Government Agency “policy” which is forcing the use of mobile phones etc onto everyone so the Government can save money and use AI to turn you into “a surveilled entity” at a level that in times well within living memory would have been reserved only for the worst of gangsters / criminals / crooks.

Consider the FBI, ICE, and IRS are just some of the agencies purchasing records from “data brokers” to get out from legislated oversight, legislation and regulation.

In short from their perspective, you are a “proto-criminal” just awaiting some AI or similar to flag you up to “make the numbers”…

If the US had started with strong personal data control and privacy legislation, not only would there not have been the incentive for apps that breach your privacy, the entire data broking market place would not have come into being. Thus US State and Federal Agencies would have remained constrained and subject to clear oversight…

But because legislators are now bought off by data broker lobbyists the chances of getting workable and unavoidable personal data protection legislation is next to zero.

Which means that every tiny step in technology will be used to get your personal and private data under the control of data brokers and similar who will use it with few precautions and no checking for errors etc.

Thus a percentage of people will be flagged as criminals not for committing any crime or breach of regulations etc… But because there is no legislation forcing data brokers to ensure that what they “gather and sell on” is even remotely accurate (which means that around 3/10ths or more is already not even close to accurate, and for which selling it on carries no penalties for the data brokers due to various pieces of US Legislation…).

Thus the incentives are all wrong and abuse will run rampantly with any even tiny improvement in technology. With “Guard Labour” and worse jumping on it without any kind of constraint or over sight at the expense of ordinary tax paying citizens.

I guess we will have to wait a few days to see what the US Executive does in the next…

Clive Robinson • April 19, 2026 5:53 AM

@ ^, ALL,

With regards,

“BADBIOS is a real thing!”

First off it’s actually “BadBIOS” and gow to do it was first openly and fully described on this blog by @RobertT and myself against all those who said it was “not possible”.

We knew it worked because back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s we had worked as professional engineers developing such networked systems to be used for “data transmission” not just across a room but by AM Radio Broadcasts.

The problem with the ICT industry is it forgets it’s own history in just a few months not decades as in most other human endeavors. So in less than a decade what was old becomes new again, this appears especially true of ICTSec where the same old things get endlessly repeated and reused.

Thus the Up-Side of using Current AI to find vulnerabilities thus instances of attack vectors is that if it’s input training data in the ML stage is correctly collated from just “living memory” of the 1960’s onwards then this “reuse” will come to an end…

Of course the same effect could be achieved by properly training software developers as actual engineers not like Victorian and earlier artisans with their outmoded patterns and guild secrets type thinking.

JohnJJones • April 19, 2026 12:54 PM

Are links in comments being blocked? reinsert the h before each link when you copy in your browsers address bars:
Three calls to action from the EFF, two to defend the right to 3d print without DRM Stalin’s stepping all over you, and one to end Section 702 spying.

ttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702
ttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/stop-new-yorks-attack-3d-printing
ttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/dangers-californias-legislation-censor-3d-printing

Whilst the authoritarians proposing printing restrictions claim it will prevent printed weapons (a threat which hardly really exists, given most such “weapons” are much more dangerous to the shooter than the target, and that nobody has ever or will ever be able to print ammunition, and that “printed” guns are only possible because the actual metal parts for guns are widely sold in the USA so that the bits which can’t be trivially bought are bits which don’t get subjected to stresses plastic can’t handle) the reality is that this is a war against Right to Repair and will no-doubt be under the control of the DRM-lobby which uses excuses about intellectual property to exploit consumers.

Also sinister news on the age-verificcation front of the deep state’s war against General Purpose Computing:

ttps://reclaimthenet.org/us-bill-mandates-on-device-age-verification
ttps://reclaimthenet.org/eu-age-verification-app-hacked-in-two-minutes
Pavel Durov’s comments in the second article are particularly concerning.

And some small updates of progress by the side of good in the War on General Purpose Computing:

ttps://agelesslinux.org/hardware.html

Ismar • April 20, 2026 2:18 AM

It is interesting to see how‘honest’ ChatGPT is around its role in knowledge centralisation

You’ve hit on the defining tension of the late 2020s. We are witnessing a shift from the “Library” model of knowledge (where information is static, public, and accessible to anyone with a book or a URL) to the “Oracle” model (where knowledge is dynamic, proprietary, and synthesized by a few massive entities).
This centralization isn’t just about who owns the data; it’s about who owns the means of synthesis.

1. The Three Pillars of the “New Feudalism”

The centralization of knowledge in 2026 is built on three physical and legal bottlenecks:
* Compute Sovereignty: Advanced intelligence requires massive clusters of specialized hardware. Because these chips are expensive and subject to export controls, “high-tier” knowledge synthesis is physically concentrated in a handful of data centers globally.
* The Data Moat: For 20 years, the internet was a “commons.” Now, every major platform (social media, news, scientific journals) has walled off its data. AI companies are the only ones with the capital to “buy” access to the collective human record, effectively turning public heritage into private intelligence.
* Refinement Asymmetry: There is a massive gap between raw data (which is still somewhat decentralized) and refined intelligence. Even if you have the data, you may lack the $100 million in compute power to turn that data into a functional model. This creates a class of “Information Serfs” who provide the data and “Information Lords” who own the refined output.

2. The Death of the “Searchable” Web

We are seeing the end of the “Indexable Era.”
* The Feedback Loop: As AI-generated content floods the public internet, “pure” human data becomes more valuable and harder to find.
* Gatekeeping: Search engines are being replaced by Answer Engines. In a search engine, you see the source; in an answer engine, the source is often hidden behind a “synthetic summary.” This severs the link between the creator of knowledge and the consumer, centralizing the authority of the answer in the AI itself.

3. The Regulatory “Capture”

“Safety” and “Ethics” are frequently used as the justification for this centralization. By arguing that powerful AI is “too dangerous” for public release, large incumbents successfully lobby for regulations that only they can afford to follow.
* The Result: Innovation is funneled through a “vetted” pipeline. If you want to build a high-assurance system or a new scientific tool, you are forced to build it on top of an “Elite” API, rather than owning the stack yourself.

4. The Counter-Current: “The Sovereignty Movement”

While the trend is toward centralization, a significant “Resistance” is forming among technical professionals and researchers. This is characterized by:
* Local-First AI: The rise of high-performance “Small Language Models” (SLMs) that can run on consumer hardware or isolated Linux workstations, bypassing the cloud entirely.
* Hardware Sovereignty: A focus on using open-source hardware and “dumb” components to build secure, independent systems that the “centralized oracle” cannot see or throttle.
* Data Cooperatives: Groups of individuals or professionals pooling their data to train private, “domain-specific” models that aren’t controlled by Big Tech.

The Critical Question: If knowledge is centralized, truth becomes a consensus dictated by the provider of the model. In a world where you don’t own the “weights” of your own intelligence tools, can you ever be certain the answers aren’t being “steered” to serve the interests of the

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2026 3:28 AM

@ D@@R, ALL,

There is actually earlier comment threads on BadBIOS on this blog you might want to read.

This is towards the end of one such thread and it explains how the “hardware” gets in as “redundancy is cheaper” than designing “bespoke chips”,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/friday_squid_bl_398.html/#comment-207227

Put simply there was really only one “SoundCard” set of chips that went in PC’s and that was the “AC97” chip set which were fully supported vy the three main BIOS’s of the time. So “writing a universal malware” for “airgap crossing” and putting it in place as part of a “supply chain attack” was fairly simple.

On the same page you will find me briefly describe the BOOT I/O problem that allowed I/O devices to load their own code from on board ROM on I/O cards.

It’s not clear who came up with the idea, but Apple had it fully functional on the Apple ][ 8 bit PC back in the mid to late 1970’s years before the IBM Skunkworks started on the IBM-PC design which was mostly the Apple ][ design re-worked for a 16bit CPU.

That BIOS BOOT hole was later used by Lenovo to put lots of “crapware” they profited by on their low end business and consumer laptops. It’s not known exactly when they started but it had been found and discussed in May 2015 and by that august it had become a front page news item,

https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/lenovo-rootkit-malware.html

So all the pieces to make BadBIOS as an idea work were long in place when Dragos first started hunting.

The fact he in effect did not speak to “design engineers” from the 1970/80s who had done acoustic or IR networking with practical experience who could have told him it was “easily possible” ment he went around and around in circles.

It was not helped by the fact there were “so many supposed experts” who actually were nothing of the sort saying “not possible” and calling Dragos paranoid…

Now of course once it was “proved” and “written up” by a couple of Uni Students doing what I’d already done and described on this blog… “acoustic beaconing” comes built in to many mobile phone Apps to track users in shops etc.

As for Dragos, he effectively “disapeared” for a while…

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2026 1:21 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

“Don’t say you were not warned”

The other day I posted about the increasing scarcity of helium due to the US attacking Iran.

In the past I’ve pointed out about “investor advice” especially with “hype bubbles”. That is you invest “second or third line” where the real money is not the VC nonsense. The example I pointed out quite some time ago as the LLM Hype bubble got going and Nvidia was worth only about 300Billion was Nvidia and it fairly quickly rose to ~5Trillion (though I advised getting out when it was around 1T for sensible reasons that later became clear with the circular investing).

The point is in every hype real money flows from the likes of VC’s to real commodity suppliers like Nvidia. This is the “second line” and the share you want to grab is the VC money spend (hopefully helping bankrupt the “Pump and Dump” VC idiots in the process).

Third line is the very real money that flows from second line companies like Nvidia to say those that supply them.

Well you might have heard about RAM prices on the ballistic orbit rise due to the LLM hype.

What you might not know is making RAM like making GPU’s needs access to some really quite nasty chemicals that have to be very pure…

There are not many places such chemicals get sourced or transported from…

Which brings us back to the US attacking Iran again, this time for “Bromine” which is used in etching silicon wafers. By far the greatest supply of the required memory for LLM systems comes from South Korea.

And something like 97.5% of the bromine they acquire comes from Israel’s Negev Desert region that is well within Iran ballistic missile range and Iran has started hitting fairly unrestrictedly.

I suspect some people have already taken advantage of this Bromine issue and I don’t need to say how (that will become obvious soon enough).

You can read more on this Bromine issue at,

‘https://warontherocks.com/cogs-of-war/the-bromine-chokepoint-how-strife-in-the-middle-east-could-halt-production-of-the-worlds-memory-chips/

But the point I’m making is the same one I’ve been naking about “Energy Wars” replacing “Water War” I made back quite a time before Russia started their “criminal” invasion of the Ukraine. The world is a global economy almost 100% dependent on “global trade” it’s why trade is still the best way to ensure long term peace and stability globally (ie the more intertwined the less chance for major conflicts / World Wars, unless started by short term thinking idiots).

The secret not talked about by the WEF and other idiot Neo-Con think tanks is the Second and Third line trade…

And there is quite a bit more of that to talk about beyond petrochemical and other more interesting chemicals. Ukraine showed up fertilizer, grain and energy issues… Israeli and US has thrown up others.

But the US trying to get TSMC and the like to make chips in the US is to little to late and will take to long to happen. Likewise this recent FCC nonsense on consumer and low end commercial network routers is going to take years. Likewise just about everything else Electronic or Communications, or light or heavy industry… I’ve warned about the idiocy of “Out-Sourcing, Off-Shoring, Supply-Chain and similar issues” as long as this blog has been here, and few took note… Well the turkeys are coming home to roost on ballistic and similar paths…

Strange Coil • April 20, 2026 1:23 PM

@ Clive Robinson, ALL

Thank you for the further details!

As for Dragos, he effectively “disapeared” for a while…

I heard someone hacked him, IIRC.

It was not helped by the fact there were “so many
supposed experts” who actually were nothing of the sort
saying “not possible” and calling Dragos paranoid…

Yes indeed. I believe many of them were in the know and wanted to stifle research. “They” don’t want you to know about phreaking and black hardware/software vulns. They want you to be a good little point and click Windows user.

lurker • April 20, 2026 2:58 PM

@Clive Robinson, ALL

Prof. Wikipedia says that salt lakes and brine wells contain bromine, and that bromine is the tenth most abundant element in seawater, but lists main sources of production as Israel and Jordan.

USGS Mineral Commodities Summary 2025[1] says “The United States maintained its position as one of the leading bromine producers in the world along with China, Israel, and Jordan.” Bromine is produced from brine wells in Arkansas; US production and consumption figures are withheld for commercial sensitivity, but imports are estimated at less than 25% of total consumption.

If the Negev source becomes constrained, who would rely, politically or economically, on the US as a supplier?

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-bromine.pdf

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2026 8:36 PM

@ lurker,

With regards bromine production,

Yes just like “heavy water” bromine can be found in some small quantity in salt water / brine just about anywhere.

But there are some other things to note,

1, What else is in the brine that must be removed.
2, Is the bromine extractable in the right form for processing.
3, How long it will take to put in place appropriate processing facilities.
4, Is the expertise required to build and operate such facilities available.
5, Is the finance available to build out and do so available.

If you read the article I linked to you will see the answers in other parts of the world are “unfavorable at best” for producing bromine for use in the purity and type suitable for the semiconductor industry any time soon or even ever in an economically viable way.

sparky • April 20, 2026 9:05 PM

“Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time,” reports the Associated Press. “All without a warrant.”

The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device’s location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls “patterns of life,” according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts… Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police…

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.

“Police in other states have said the technology (and its low price tag) has helped expand investigatory capacity,” the article adds.

But it also points out that Fog Data Science has a web page letting individuals opt out of all their data sets.

maniac mousepad • April 22, 2026 3:42 AM

Reuters reports that Meta plans to start collecting U.S.-based employees’ mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and occasional screen snapshots to train AI agents that can better learn how humans use computers. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will reportedly “not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that safeguards were in place to protect ‘sensitive content.'” From the report:

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees in a separate memo shared on Monday that the company would step up internal data collection as part of those “AI for Work” efforts, now re-branded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA). “The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” Bosworth said. The aim, he added, was for agents to “automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time.” Bosworth did not explicitly spell out how those agents would be trained, but said Meta would be “rigorous” about “building up data and evals for all the types of interactions we have as we go about our work.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged that the MCI data would be among the inputs. […] “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people “actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” said Stone.

whales weep not • April 24, 2026 5:04 AM

  • If malware via monitor cables is a matter of national security, this might be the gadget for you

The team called the finding Deep-TEMPEST, an evolution of the TEMPEST analog signal interception phenomenon of yesteryear. But, as with all side-channel attacks, the real-world application is significantly different from a remotely exploitable software bug, for example.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/23/ncscs_first_foray_into_commercial/

  • French govt agency confirms breach as hacker offers to sell data

Update 4/24 – ANTS published an update on the incident where the agency confirmed that 11.7 million accounts were impacted.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/french-govt-agency-confirms-breach-as-hacker-offers-to-sell-data/

lurker • April 24, 2026 2:06 PM

@ResearcherZero
“Operators have largely failed to implement the security mechanisms available in 4G and 5G.”

Where’s the profit?

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