Posts by hammarbtyp 1522 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
my daughter works for KFC (between career choices) and to be honest dealing with some customers which tempt even Mother Theresa to say "F@#k you"
Some of the things she has had to deal with
1. A complaint that therre was a hair on te burger, even though the hair was black and all the staff were blonde
2. Russain truck driver making sexually explicit comments
3. Threats of physical violence because the customer felt they did not get enough chips
To be honest with you after a 8 hour shift and dealing vast hordes of the unwashed with unrealistic demands (No the chicken is not hallal because the Bird throat slitter was off today) while churning out products that can only vaguely be classed as food, while deaIing with obsolete IT systems pressed on them by cheapskint franchise operators while basically getting minimum wage I'm impressed any that raise a response other than "kill me now"
So the ATM use hard drives? Really?
And the code is not signed, and are the hard drives not encrypted? Do thy not have aTPM to initiate trusted boot?
For an embedded security device they seem awfully generic and open...
Or are are just talking about the land of the free (money) here. You know where chip and pin is still treated with suspicion and signing checks still common
A drone has some advantages compared to a manned helicoptor
Firstly they can be smaller but carry the same payload.I once spent 6 week watching seakings take on and off a RFA oiler and it was amazing to see how close the blades got the hanger deck. In theory a drone would have a greater margin
Second is perceived risk. A human capable chopper may not get launched due to risk of fail to recover and loss of a human crew. In worst scenarios a drone can be ditched (although the bill would be considerable)
On the downside, however good your AI is, I would back a experienced human pilot to adapt to conditions, especially ones that have not been encountered before.
Fine...but any firm supplying equipment should have a clause that any mis-identification will automatically result in £1000 from the firm going to the victim each time.
If it so perfect, surely that should not be an issue
That's me with the Andrew Mountbatten comedy mask...
10 years ago our company gutted its graduate recruitment program, suspending hiring and making the graduate co-hort redundant.
Now we have had to re-create the graduate program from scratch, because the company realised that a whole tranch of engineers will be retiring in a few years taking with them a vast trove of tacit knowledge with no one to replace them.
Here's the problem with gutting the lower level positions with AI. Yes, AI may be able to to some of the lower level tasks. However those junior engineers will eventually become senior engineers and without that stepping stone you are basically hollowing out the tree. For a while it will look fine and strong until it suddenly topples over
This is another classic example of short term thinking which a lot of western companies fall for. Yes in the short term it will boost the share price, and make all those executive stock options look great, but longer term it will cause massive issues. By then the present CEO will be sipping martina's and some executive resort no doubt
As part of our device security conformance we needed to provide a way to decommision our devices which have the firmware installed on a CFAST card.
we did a lot of research on how CFAST cards can be erased so that the data cannot be recovered, but it was never clear how permamnt any method would be. Certainly the old spinning rust methods of wipe, random data, wipe, repeat were not recommended since flash memory moves data around and you cannot be sure that it does not still exist.
So in te end we documented at end of life the user should take a drill to the disk, and provided photos on the procedure.
Similarly here. If you want a disk you can destroy, then get a cheap plastic one, and snap it in half when needed, then gind the component under your heel. Physical destruction will always trump electronic wipe as long as you don't intend to re use the disk in the future
1. Get a scale model of the shuttle
2. Add a crew of cockroaches (No one says the crew needs to be human)
3. Launch model on weather baloon above the Karman line
4. Send recovered model and desicated cockroaches via UPS (no one said the crew had to survive)
5, Bill Texas for $85 million
Alternatively, the recovered parts from the ill-fated Shuttle Columbia are currently taking up storage space in Cape Canerval
Since it is already convieniently dis-assembled. Crate it it up and send it signed delivery to Mt T.Cruz, Texas
a) You are not crippling anything
b) what level of risk are you willing to accept that your PC is running a valid and unadulterated OS?
If you are joe blogs, and using it for a few games or writing documents, that mya not matter to you much. if you are a bank and you are accessing sensitive information, then you you may care a lot more
Bsaically it as about root of trust
The machine comes with BIOS installed at manufacturer. That verifies the boot loader can be trusted, that verifies the OS can be trusted. The OS then verifies the drivers and libraries. If the OS cannot be trusted, then In theory the libraries and drivers could be hacked, so your PC is pw0ned.
So again, is that desirable or not?
Great article thanks, but some questions
So basically Linux provides a workaround to allow existing distributions to run on x86 platforms. How then does linux ensure that the OS installed can be trusted, if once the Shim is installed, basically it will run anything?
Similarly how does the Arm platform verify the installed OS.
With things like the Cyber Resiliancy Act coming in, it puts a lot more emphaisis on things like secure boot being available. How will Linux meet that challenge?
They don't.
You can add your own UEFI keys and sign your own OS if you want. However PC's out of the box come with MS keys pre-installed, because basically 99% of use cases are running windows variants, and the effort of updating the BIOS values is beyond the technical capability of a majority of users. They just want something to work out of the box
It would also be possible for Rd Hat, SUSE etc to request motherboard manufacturers toi add their own keys, or all Linux distributions to come together and create a common key, but Linux does not work like that, so it has never been done, so they came up with the Shim idea, leveraging on the MS key
Also there is no reason why Linix distributors don't provide their own UEFI implementation, signed by MS key purely to add there own keys into an existion BIOS. Again no one has felt te need
Basically the reason MS has done it is their long standing deep relationships with motherboad manufacturers and they know who signs the checks.
The biggest risk to humanity is the ability to allow politicians to fight proxy wars with little risk to themselves.
This started soon after the 2nd world war, where there aws a general feeling in the US that destroying a country with Nuclear weapons was perfectly acceptable, if t meant no US soldiers would get hurt. Later it was realised the nuclear weapons were not a no-risk option, but nthen they invented drones which meant you could take out the "bad" guys with minimal risk to yourself and all the administartions from Bush onwards have taken that option.
Now the nex step is the remove man out the loop altogether. Drop a load of automonous drones over a battlefield and then wash your hands of it.
War should be the last resort, but unfortuantely all this is making wars affordable. What is forgotton however is what yoy give, you will recieve and it won't take long before the next Bin Laden wannabe will release that the same technology could be used to attack the west with no or little consequence to them.
One of my hobbies is following the way information is dissected and regurgitated in ways that suit the audience (The daily torygraph is a fantastic case study)
The shift in the climate debate is a fascinating example. It has shifted in the MAGA crowd (with a few exceptions..see above) from the science is wrong and climate scientists are faking it to, yes, it maybe real, but its OK, we will fix it with, bigger sea walls better air conditioning, carbon capture etc. Basically the point is, some elements of society want to believe in Fathe Christmas and they can keep doing what they have always done, with no consequences. So I want to keep driving a gas guzzling truck, but climate change will stop me. Answer, pretend that climate change will not effect me.
Similarly we want AI, so pretend it will not have any real world consequences.
They can get away with this because the effects of climate change are gradual enough that peoples memories care too short to track the effects.
Here is the problem however. If the models are correct (and they have been remarkable accurate up to know, despite what the deniers say), we may reach a point of no return. We think of the climate as a stable sytem. Generally in each area, we expect a certain amount of seasonal rain, heat etc. However the climate is in in fact a chaotic system. Now like any chaotic system, it can become a stable state, however with enough push, it can become a chaotic system again. After that it may achieve stability again, but it will be a different state.
So how does affect the climate. Well we are pumping in (or more accuratly retaining more energy) . There may come a point in which the world climate changes. the problem is like any chaotic system it then becomes unpredicatble. However the entire world agricultural system relies on stability and pretty well has since we moved from hunter gathering to mass agriculture. So if the praries of the US abd russia, get less/more rain, or the seasaonal asian monsoons move, or the gulf stream shifts south so Northen europe has longer winters and shorter seasons, basically you are destroying you are destroying a fair % of the food production
I don't know about you, but I cannot eat AI, and no amount of technology will fix this in the future once it occurs
The panic threshold was the 1st thing we had to nix when porting NTP to an embedded controller, since we had no idea what the time would be set to when the controller was added to the network (also it was on a ship, which had its own issues with movable time zones)
Never really understood why it was there, and if so why it could not be disabled
Another issue was an alarm server going into meltdown when the NTP caused the clock to go back one hour
The advantage Apple has is that it controls the entire stack from processor to OS (and a lot of the applications). This means as a company theu could driver the changes, rather than relying on others. So they could implement the abstraction layer that allowed legacy code to be run on a new processor architecture with minimal performance loss. Also most MAC products were remarkable homegeneous in terms of hardware
microsoft coulkd do something similar. they couldlicence, build and control their own ARM architecture. The problem is for them, for many years windows has been licenced to myriad hardware manufacturers, meaning it has to have all sort of fixes to support the different variants. there is no straightforward wintel architecture. This makes porting to another platform more difficult since you can only support a small subset of the existing variants totally, and others vonly partially
In many ways Window is a victim of its own success, which was basically sell it to anyone. Even small hardware dependencies such as the windows 11 TPM support creates huge ripples in the support cases. MAC on the other hand deliberately went the other way, of keeping everything under control. This meant in terms of market share they lost out, but in the longer term they have far fewer issues porting existing machines and applications
Thats a little bit mis-leading. Unlike Apple, google makes the majority of money by pushing users to its services. The pixel line is more a technology demonstrator, encouraging other manufacturers to follow its lead and build on the service.
Google really does not care about market share as long as Android and the bundled services (Currently 72% of the market) is dominent and any AI services use the google cloud
Well the problem is not that the data is kept, but who can access it. So for example if insurance firms can access your medical records to evaluate your risk, is this something you are happy with? What a future government decides to use AI to find parameters that migh show your liklihood of committing a crime, based on mental health records. is that OK?
The problem is not the data itself, but who own asd controls it. If you have to give permission for someone to access it like your doctor, fine, but unfortunately people have given these things away for free or for the price a like on facebook, only to find later that the others are using that data to enrich themselves at your cost
And yes, you should have the right to request such data is deleted, even if the cost maybe to you
We all know what will happen..
Companies will be forced to put in controls that at best pay lip service to the legislation, at the same time workarounds will be found and quickly disseminted. The only people who will really be affected will be legitimate users who will be forced to continually prove who they are, while at the same time companies will harvest more and more informatioin which will become a goldmone to fradsters and hackers
At the same time, the real problem. The creators and disseminators of dubious material will be hardly affected
eventually the law will just become some background noise because the challenges of operation and enforcement will prove just too great, until the next great crusade begins
Reform are nothing more than a protest party.
They follow the usual far right patterm of promising easy solutions to complex issues, sucking in the desperate, easily led, and those who have feel aggreived against society in general. Then they hope the effects are not realised before their term of office expires or else blame others (Woke, immigrants, EHCR) for their failings
I cannot wait for the party of Farage to explain to me the downsides of Brexit
The suggestion is that AI will replace starter positions largely. These will affect non-qualified/graduate starter jobs. This is already happening with the new graduate job market probably as bad as it has been for a while.
So the question is what then?
We will have a huge number of dis-affected youths many with huge debts built up at uni, who are basically locked out of the job market. Without that the challenge of getting on the property ladder, setting aside pensions etc (which are already difficult ) become insurmountable. Therefore starting families, leaving home etc are delayed yet again. Instead of the well paid jobs that they were promised, they have to fall back to that modern indentured servitude of the gig economy
The question no one ever answers with AI is who benefits and who pays. The pitch is always about increased productivity and efficiencies, which is great if society as a whole benefits. However increasingly any profits are syphoned off to industrial elites who spend their largesse's to buy news and media channels in order to lobby to make sure that they are protected. At the same time their is an increasing disaffected population who turn to far right parties offering easy solutions, while at the same time those same parties are pandering to the very people causing the issues in the 1st place.
The question with AI should never be what can we do with it, but whether we should. But if it does happen, who should benefit and pay for the societal disruption caused
In the 70s we were promised the robot revolution would result in a world of leisure where our plastic pals would do the work for us. That never happened , but at least we could transfer the workforce to creative industries. It is hard to see where we will go now, and we know that rather a society of leisure we will instead have a two tier society with those at the top who control and directly benefit from AI and the large majority marginalized at societies edge.
History has shown, that never ends well
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