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

the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.

This guy might get a bill through that bans Chinese AI stuff, though I think that enforcement is gonna be a pain, but as per the text, this is banning all Chinese intellectual property, AI or not. That’s a non-starter; it’s not going to go anywhere in Congress. Like, you couldn’t even identify all instances of Chinese intellectual property if you wanted to do so.

EDIT: Okay, they define the phrase elsewhere to specifically be “technology or intellectual property that could be used to contribute to artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence capabilities”, which is somewhat-narrower but still not going anywhere, because pretty much any form of intellectual property meets that bar; you can train an AI on whatever to improve its capabilities.

While 50 is a small sample size, the issue might be widespread since they bought their drives at a dozen different retailers, some of which are on Seagate’s official “where-to-buy” list. Some of the impacted retailers are quite large, such as Amazon and Mindfactory.

I mean, Amazon lets anyone sell through the site. Unless an order is specifically from Amazon itself, you could get it from any seller out there. It’s not like they’re going to conduct some kind of technical evalution of the product.

Drives do have serial numbers, though, so I suspect that it’s not going to be very hard to trace back up the chain, see who they were originally sold to, find who they sold them to, and figure out who has been fiddling with the firmware to make old drives look new.

I recently went looking to see if there was a practical way to expose a USB powerstation to Linux as a battery under /sys/class/power_supply, the way internal laptop batteries are. Unfortunately, that didn’t appear to be the case. There are UPSes that NUT can monitor, but not a route to treat them the way Linux does laptop batteries. Kind of annoying, since for a luggable computer, it’d be really neat to have an external, expandable battery that looks to the computer like the one in a laptop.

Well, he’d like Google+, I guess. I’m pretty happy with pseudonymity, though.

Either way, garmin’s user manual(link) says it is not needed. See page 36, saying “Data Storage Life: Indefinite; no memory battery required”

I don’t think that they’re saying that the button cell is some sort of undying thing, but rather that your GPS traces and such are being written to nonvolatile memory.

I assume that you already went looking for a replacement cell and couldn’t find one, else you’d have replaced it rather than resoldered the existing one.

Assuming that the button cell is actually the problem and that it’s rechargeable, it occurs to me that you might try pulling the cell off again and checking the recharging voltage across the connectors to try to get an idea of what type of cell it is, try getting a new cell with similar characteristics. Might kill the unit doing so if you get the replacement cell voltage wrong, but if it’s not usable now and you’re confident that the cell is the issue…shrugs

To be honest, if I had the unit, I would probably pitch it rather than invest time in fixing it. It looks like this is a fifteen-year-old unit, and my smartphone is probably a more-capable GPS unit running free software. The value of the time I’d spend on fixing it probably exceeds the value of the unit. There’s a reason that consumer electronics repair isn’t much of a business. If you’re viewing the repair as a hobby or something, though, fair enough.

I finally dropped Lenovo last month, got a laptop from Tuxedo. No three physical button trackpad, but it does have a 100 Wh battery.

I don’t care about the Trackpoint, but I do like the three Thinkpad physical buttons on that Synaptic trackpad, which are also a signature feature going way back on the Thinkpad. Hard to find feature on laptops.

If you’re willing to use an external keyboard, the same factory that made the IBM Model M was bought by the employees when IBM sold the line to Lenovo, and is still making buckling spring keyboards off in Kentucky. Some of theirs still have a Trackpoint option.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=UB40PGA

A lot of this sounds pretty abstract to me.

It argues that drones transmit data about use to Chinese drone manufacturers, which could leverage that data to provide an edge globally.

Okay, fine. I’ll believe that farms have models of when to spray and such, and that these models have value. And this effectively gives drone manufacturers a fair bit of that data.

But…how secret is that data now? Like, is this actually data not generally available? There are a lot of corn farms out there. Did each corn farm go carefully work up their own model on their own in a way that China can’t obtain that data? Or can I go read information publicly about recommended spraying intervals?

More radically, agricultural data could be used to unleash biological warfare against crops, annihilating an adversary’s food supply. Such scenarios pose a significant threat to national security, offering China multiple avenues to undermine critical infrastructures by devastating food availability, threatening trade and economic resilience, and destabilizing agricultural systems.

That seems like an awful stretch.

Biowarfare with infectious disease is hard to control. Countries historically have been more interested militarily in stuff like anthrax, which works more like a chemical weapon. I am dubious that China has a raging interest in biowarfare against American crops.

Even if we assume that China does have the intent and ability to develop something like a crop disease, I have a very hard time seeing as how somewhat finer-grained information about agriculture is going to make such an attack much more effective. Let’s say that China identifies a crop that is principally grown in the US and develops an infectious diease targeting it. Does it really need to know the fine points of that crop, or can it just release it at various points and let it spread?

As for food security, the US is not really a country at any sort of food security risk.

• It exports a lot of staple food. It’s the source, not the consumer.

• It has large margins due to producing luxuries that could be reduced in a wartime emergency – I recall once reading a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could provide for all of Europe’s food needs purely from the increased output without bringing any more land into production.

• It is wealthy enough to have access to the global food market. If the US is starving, a lot of the world is going to be starving first. In some cases, one can cut off physical transport access to the global market via blockade even where a country could normally buy from those markets – as Germany tried to do to the UK in World War II or the US did to Japan in World War II, but that would be extraordinarily difficult to do to the US given the present balance of power. The US is by far the largest naval power in the world. This assessment is that in a defensive naval and air war, which is what such a blockade would involve, it could alone prevail against the combined militaries of the entire rest of the world. And on top of that, a substantial portion of the other major naval powers are allied to the US. China is very unlikely to be in a position where it could blockade the US, and if we imagine the kind of changes necessary to create some scenario where it was, I’d suggest that this scenario would also very probably bring with it other issues that would be of greater concern to the US than food security.

I’m willing to believe that it might be possible to target “university IT systems” for commercially-useful data, but it’s not clear to me that that’s something specific to drones or to China. There are shit-tons of devices on all kinds of networks that come out of China. I’d be more worried about the firmware on one’s Lenovo Thinkpad as being a practical attack vector than agricultural drones.

Now, okay. The article is referencing both American national security concerns and potential risks to other places, fine. It’s talking about Brazil, Spain, etc. Some of my response is specific to the US. But I’m going to need some rather less hand-wavy and concrete issues to get that excited about this. You cannot hedge against every risk. Yes, there are risks that I can imagine agricultural drones represent, though I think that just being remotely-bricked around harvest time would be a more-realistic concern. But there are also counters. Sure, China no doubt has vectors via which it could hit the US. But the same is also true going the other way, and if China starts pulling levers, well, the US can pull some in response. That’s a pretty significant deterrent. Unless an attack can put the US in a position where it cannot respond, like enabling a Chinese nuclear first strike or something, those deterrents are probably going to be reasonably substantial. If we reach a point where China is conducting biowarfare against American crops to starve out the US, then we’ve got a shooting war on, and there are other things that are going to be higher on the priority list.

5G infrastructure is, I agree, critical. TikTok might be from an information warfare perspective. You can mitigate some of the worst risks. But you cannot just run down the list of every product that China sells and block every way in which one might be leveraged. Do that and you’re looking at heading towards autarky and that also hurts a country – look at North Korea. Sanctions might not do much to it, but it’s also unable to do much.

To quote Sun Tzu:

For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.

You have a finite amount of resources. You can use them to mitigate some threats. You cannot effectively counter all potential threats. You have to prioritize. If we want to counter agricultural drones as an attack vector, then we accept greater vulnerability elsewhere to do so. The question is not simply “does a potential vulnerability exist”, but “is this the optimal place to expend resources”?

I think that it’s kind of globally-applicable.

And I’ve wondered in the past whether the long-run for the Internet was always going to be people generally winding up with VPNs for similar reasons. I’m far from the first:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

– John Gilmore

Or does it make it more taboo and thus more appealing?

Honestly, it might be a good thing long-run to have a higher percentage of users on VPNs. They aren’t a magic cure-all, but they do help make it safer to use untrusted networks and discourage some things on the service side, like geolocating and data-mining users based on IP.

“This might address some security problems” is somewhat abstract to appeal to most users, I think. “VPN or no tits” is something that I think is more generally-relatable.

I think that driverless busses are probably much less of a dramatic change than driverless cars.

If you have one person in a car driving to work and the car is fully-self-driving, then you free up one person’s time. You potentially change where parking is practical. You may permit people who cannot drive a car to use one, like young or elderly.

With a bus, the passengers are already free to do what they want. You’re saving labor costs on a bus driver, maybe getting a safer vehicle. But I’d call that an evolutionary change.

https://proxy.parisjc.edu:8293/statistics/300887/number-of-buses-in-use-by-region-uk/

In 2020/21, the number of buses amounted to 37800 in Great Britain.

Those probably get heavier use than cars. But you want scale, since driverless vehicle costs are mostly fixed, and driver labor costs variable. You’re talking about not having maybe 38k people driving. You need to cover all of your costs out of that. That’s not nothing, but…okay, how many tractor-trailers are out there?

https://www.statista.com/topics/5280/heavy-goods-vehicles-in-the-uk/

Heavy goods vehicle registrations bounced back above their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, reaching 504,600 vehicles in circulation.

If you have driverless trucks, that’s an order-of-magnitude difference in vehicle count from busses in the UK.

I’m not saying that there aren’t wins possible with self-driving busses. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the vehicle type with the greatest potential improvement from being self-driving.

I haven’t been that excited about the Framework laptops, because despite liking expandability and modularity, the actual modules offered for expansion didn’t really provide functionality that I’d actually wanted to swap in. A larger battery, a trackpad with physical buttons, those are things that I would want to upgrade. I just didn’t need an LED matrix on the side of my keyboard, and the external ports on most laptops were at least reasonable.

But being able to add more M.2 slots is legitimately something that I could use.

So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated on bug trackers by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.

However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.

Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.

“We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.

As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.

The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:

• It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.

• But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. Nor does having written something on the paper. I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.

This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unusual about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the right to compel searching a landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.

I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives, however.

I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]