Tag: technology

CROWDSTRIKE GLOBAL OUTAGE: No accident

A technical breakdown of the root cause of the world’s biggest IT fuck up is out. If it’s correct, we believe no one should consider this an accident.

Here’s a short, non technical explanation.

Windows contains fundamental programs called drivers that are required for the operating system to work. They are pretty low level software that load in the boot sequence and whenever needed. Users don’t directly interact with them and they don’t appear in Task Manager’s easy view. The user is kept away from them. Drivers have powerful system privileges and access. If essential drivers don’t load, work or are corrupt, Windows can completely crash. That can look like the blue screen of death BSOD.

CrowdStrike make a security software product, Falcon, that is a Windows driver that loads during boot up. The update mechanism for Falcon is within Windows. Users don’t get a direct say. CrowdStrike released an update to the globe that contained a direct, guaranteed fatal coding error.

The coding error in C++ language is fatal because it makes the program try to access a non existent part of the machine’s memory. No machine anywhere will have this memory address. When this access attempt happens, a fatal error results that causes the program to crash. When that program crashes, Windows crashes.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon was intrinsic to Windows boot up, so once a crash happened the machine could never be booted up again until Falcon was literally deleted from the machine’s boot sequence. This requires manual access to the machine in many, many cases. Remote fixing isn’t possible, so “the fix” is very high labour and access. That’s an insanely expensive fix. Literally dudes going to each machine and manually doing the fix over and over.

The above is absolutely fucking insane.

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AI Mass Surveillance at Paris Olympics Will Continue Even After Games End

The 2024 Paris Olympics is drawing the eyes of the world as thousands of athletes and support personnel and hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe converge in France.

It’s not just the eyes of the world that will be watching. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems will be watching, too.

Government and private companies will be using advanced AI tools and other surveillance tech to conduct pervasive and persistent surveillance before, during and after the Games.

The Olympic world stage and international crowds pose increased security risks so significant that in recent years authorities and critics have described the Olympics as the “world’s largest security operations outside of war.”

The French government, hand in hand with the private tech sector, has harnessed that legitimate need for increased security as grounds to deploy technologically advanced surveillance and data-gathering tools.

Its surveillance plans to meet those risks, including the controversial use of experimental AI video surveillance, are so extensive that the country had to change its laws to make the planned surveillance legal.

The plan goes beyond new AI video surveillance systems. According to news reports, the prime minister’s office has negotiated a provisional decree that is classified to permit the government to significantly ramp up traditional, surreptitious surveillance and information-gathering tools for the duration of the Games.

These include wiretapping; collecting geolocation, communications and computer data; and capturing greater amounts of visual and audio data.

I am a law professor and attorney, and I research, teach and write about privacy, artificial intelligence and surveillance. I also provide legal and policy guidance on these subjects to legislators and others.

Increased security risks can and do require increased surveillance. This year, France has faced concerns about its Olympic security capabilities and credible threats around public sporting events.

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NASA SCIENTIST SAYS PATENTED ‘EXODUS EFFECT’ PROPELLANTLESS PROPULSION DRIVE THAT DEFIES PHYSICS IS READY TO GO TO SPACE

A patented experimental propellantless propulsion drive is finally ready to go to space, according to its inventor, a veteran NASA scientist with decades of expertise in electrostatics.

Dr. Charles Buhler, the technology’s creator, says the propulsion system may represent a working version of Quantized Inertia, a theory first proposed by University of Plymouth professor Mike McCulloch. The proposition has been subjected to criticism from mainstream scientists in the past because it seemingly violates Newton’s third law of motion.

The controversial technology, which The Debrief covered in April, is privately owned by Exodus Propulsion Technologies and is not affiliated with NASA.

After almost a decade of research, design, and testing, Buhler says he and his team are confident they have verified the force, one his team calls the Exodus Effect(TM), in “nearly every way conceivable on Earth.” The final step required to officially demonstrate the validity of their discovery is to send the propulsion drive unit into space.

“We’ve done everything we could have in vacuum chambers here on Earth. We’ve tested it every which way you can, but the real validation is to have this thing move in space,” Buhler told The Debrief in a lengthy interview. “That’s the bottom line.”

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Google Plans New Content-Scanning Censorship Tech

Earlier in the year, Google filed an application to patent new methods, systems, and media for what the giant calls “identifying videos containing objectionable content” that are uploaded to a social site or video service.

For example, YouTube – though the filing doesn’t explicitly name this platform.

The patent application, which has just been published this month, is somewhat different from other automated “methods and systems” Google and other giants, notably Microsoft, already have to power their censorship apparatus; with this one, the focus is more on how AI can be added to the mix.

More and more often, various countries are introducing censorship laws where the speed at which content is removed or accounts blocked is a major requirement made of social media companies. Google could have this in mind when the patent’s purpose is said to be to improve on detecting objectionable content quickly, “for potential removal.”

No surprise here, but what should be the key question – namely, what is considered as “objectionable content” – is less of a definition and more a list that can be further expanded, variously interpreted, etc., and the list includes such items as violence, pornography, objectionable language, animal abuse, and then the cherry on top – “and/or any other type of objectionable content.”

The filing details how Google’s new system works, and we equally unsurprisingly learn that AI here means machine learning (ML) and neural networks. This technology is supposed to mimic the human brain but comes down to a series of equations, differentiated from ordinary algorithms by “learning” about what an image (or a video in this case) is, pixel by pixel.

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JUST IN: Trump Would-Be Assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks Had Two Cell Phones and 3 Encrypted Accounts Overseas

Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had two cell phones and used three encrypted accounts overseas to communicate.

The FBI found Crooks’ second cell phone at his home with only 27 contacts, The Daily Mail reported.

Congressman Mike Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters that according to an FBI briefing, Crooks had multiple encrypted accounts and said more will come out Monday.

Rep. Waltz said the Trump shooter had the overseas accounts at the same time we heard about the Iranian assassination plot against Trump.

Jesse Watters asked if the two are connected (they aren’t).

The Intel agencies leaked an Iranian assassination plot story to CNN to throw chaos in the camp and distract from Saturday’s Secret Service failures.

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Danger: Artificial Intelligence Data Centers Are Overwhelming The Global Electrical Grid

The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged.

The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.

The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant that has been dormant since the infamous disaster in 1979.

Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide.Data storage has becoming an increasingly concerning problem for electrical grids over the years. With the fast rise of artificial intelligence and its demands, experts warn many grids are already near capacity.

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PHOTON ENERGY SYSTEM THAT GENERATES 60 TIMES MORE POWER THAN SOLAR PANELS COULD POWER AN ELECTRIC CAR WITHOUT A BATTERY

New York-based tech company Wavja says the third generation of its proprietary Photon Energy System (PES), which employs tiny spheres to collect photonic energy, generates over 60 times the output of similarly sized traditional solar panels. According to a new video released by the company, the next generation of the PES could soon be powerful enough to run an electric car without a battery.

The company says its system can also capture light energy from artificial sources, including LED lighting, and convert it to usable electricity, offering both indoor and outdoor applications.

“Our system generates remarkable luminosity by utilizing multiple layers of cutting-edge materials and specialized spheres,” explains Shereen Chen, co-founder and executive director of Wavja USA, in the recently posted video. “This luminosity is then seamlessly converted to electricity using our proprietary technology.”

“It revolutionizes how we harvest sunlight,” Chen adds.

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BIZARRE TACHYONS THAT MAY BE ABLE TO SEND DATA BACK IN TIME COULD BE RECONCILED WITH SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Tachyons, a mysterious variety of hypothetical particles capable of exceeding light speed, could play a more significant role in our understanding of the universe and its causal structure than scientists previously realized.

Not only have tachyons been revealed to be potentially compatible with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, but now, according to an international collaboration of physicists from the University of Warsaw and the University of Oxford, these curious particles could also help shed light on remaining questions regarding our understanding of the quantum world.

EXCEEDING THE UNIVERSAL SPEED LIMIT

Tachyons, which derive their name from the Greek word tachýs, meaning fast or quick, are theorized to exist under conditions where their minimum speed would be the speed of light. This effectively means that they should only be capable of traveling at velocities that exceed this universally recognized speed limit.

Ordinary particles, by comparison, move at subluminal or slower than light speeds. As Einstein’s theory of relativity dictates, the universal laws of physics prevent anything from being capable of accelerating to the speed of light from a slower speed. The same isn’t necessarily true for tachyons, though, since they are theorized to be born at speeds that already exceed light. Hence, the opposite would seem to be the case for these unusual particles, which hypothetically should be incapable of slowing down to light speed or slower speeds.

The idea of such superluminal particles has its origins in theoretical studies conducted back in the 1960s by physicist Gerald Feinberg. Although no experimental evidence has ever confirmed their existence, a theoretical framework for how these proposed particles might come to be has been developed over the decades, occasionally resulting in some rather strange paradoxes.

Among these is a curiosity that arises from their superluminal travel speeds, which indicates that tachyons may effectively be capable of sending information backward in time, giving rise to bizarre conditions under which cause and effect could theoretically become reversed.

However, new research is revealing that despite the implications of their existence, these bizarre hypothetical particles may be compatible with the special theory of relativity and could also help offer physicists significant new insights into quantum theory.

The new findings could potentially also upend long-held notions about the unlikelihood of superluminal particles, suggesting that tachyons might even play a crucial role in the formation of matter.

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Soft Robot Can Amputate and Reattach Its Own Legs

Among the many things that humans cannot do (without some fairly substantial modification) is shifting our body morphology around on demand. It sounds a little extreme to be talking about things like self-amputation, and it is a little extreme, but it’s also not at all uncommon for other animals to do—lizards can disconnect their tails to escape a predator, for example. And it works in the other direction, too, with animals like ants adding to their morphology by connecting to each other to traverse gaps that a single ant couldn’t cross alone.

In a new paper, roboticists from The Faboratory at Yale University have given a soft robot the ability to detach and reattach pieces of itself, editing its body morphology when necessary. It’s a little freaky to watch, but it kind of makes me wish I could do the same thing.

These are fairly standard soft-bodied silicon robots that use asymmetrically stiff air chambers that inflate and deflate (using a tethered pump and valves) to generate a walking or crawling motion. What’s new here are the joints, which rely on a new material called a bicontinuous thermoplastic foam (BTF) to form a supportive structure for a sticky polymer that’s solid at room temperature but can be easily melted.

The BTF acts like a sponge to prevent the polymer from running out all over the place when it melts, and means that you can pull two BTF surfaces apart by melting the joint, and stick them together again by reversing the procedure. The process takes about 10 minutes and the resulting joint is quite strong. It’s also good for a couple hundred dettach/reattach cycles before degrading. It even stands up to dirt and water reasonably well.

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‘Amazing’ new technology set to transform the search for alien life

It has produced one of the most consistent sets of negative results in the history of science. For more than 60 years, researchers have tried to find a single convincing piece of evidence to support the idea that we share the universe with other intelligent beings. Despite these decades of effort, they have failed to make contact of any kind.

But the hunt for alien civilisations may be entering a new era, researchers believe. Scientists with Breakthrough Listen, the world’s largest scientific research programme dedicated to finding alien civilisations, say a host of technological developments are about to transform the search for intelligent life in the cosmos.

These innovations will be outlined at the group’s annual conference, which is to be held in the UK for the first time, in Oxford, this week. Several hundred scientists, from astronomers to zoologists, are expected to attend.

Astronomer Steve Croft, a project scientist with Breakthrough Listen, said: “There are amazing technologies that are under development, such as the construction of huge new telescopes in Chile, Africa and Australia, as well as developments in AI. They are going to transform how we look for alien civilisations.”

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