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Comment Vote with your wallet (Score 1) 154

Just don't buy these crappy licenses. Retro-gaming is booming for a very good reason.

And, if you're looking for another reason not to buy -- the way hardware prices are going, retro emulators are probably all we'll be able to play soon because nobody will be able to afford the GPUs and RAM needed to play the next wave of new release games anyway.

Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 3, Insightful) 67

Delivering "late" is not delivering at all.

For example -- "The Roadster 2 is going into manufacture *this year*" he said, several years ago.

For example -- "We will have humans on Mars by 2024" he said. Even if he eventually does deliver humans to Mars, he still broke that promise.

Saying you're going to do something by a certain date and then not doing so constitutes a broken promise -- even if you do it a decade later.

Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 5, Funny) 67

Of course Musk is a genius... those who say otherwise are idiots.

After all, how else would I be enjoying my FSD Roadster 2 that charges from my solar roof-tiles before the drive through a Boring Company tunnel to the Hyperloop terminal where I'm whisked off to the SpaceX launch-pad in anticipation of a Starship flight to join some of the others who set up that initial Mars base back in 2024.

Those who say that Musk is a snake-oil merchant who doesn't deliver on his promises are just deniers who simply choose not to see the reality of the world as it is today.

Or I could be wrong :-)

Submission + - A mini-data center in your back yard?

NewtonsLaw writes: According to this story, US homebuilder PulteGroup has plans to equip new homes with a mini-data center so as to relieve the need to build and power much larger tradtional centers.

The article states the company "it can install 8,000 XFRA units about six times faster and at five times lower cost than the construction of a typical centralized 100 megawatt data center of the same size"

Could this be the solution to at least some of the problems hindering the roll-out of greater data-center capacity for AI systems?

Comment Mine still works too. (Score 1) 180

and towards the end I got one of the low-profile USB-powered drives.

Got of those, too (the early USB 1 ones, with the exposed ATAPI connector. I ended up buying Iomega's Firewire expansion that attaches on the back of the slim USB and latches on that ATAPI connector, as Firewire 400 had much better bandwidth than USB 1, provided enough power and thus required only a single cable, and I had a cheap Firewire 400 adapter laying around from some video project (funily: the Firewire 400 card was a free bundle bundled with some crappy movie software that was selling poorly and was on heavy sale at the shop I bought it from. Threw the useless CD, kept the Firewire card).

Actually I still have all three of them in storage now I think, and since one is USB I might be able to theoretically recover any data I have on disks still.

Mine still works too. The most difficult was trying to find the barrel power plug (since back in the days I was mostly using the Firewire attachment and because Firewire provides enough power, I wasn't using the barrel jack much. Nowadays most of my machine are USB only.

Zip drives were great when I first got into it

Yup. The slim USB were also a good solution to carry data around.
Bring the slim USB and the cables at the university, download shit with the fast bandwidth, then bring the drive back home, plug into the Firewire attachment and load it onto the computer.
Later the university aquired computers (from Dell) that came with ZIP IDE drive built in, so I only carried the Zip250 disks and kept the drive permanently plugged into the Firewire attachement. And almost lost the power barrel adapter as mentioned above.

Comment Bank note detection. (Score 1) 139

Photocopiers implemented bank note detection to prevent users copying them, as did scanner software and apps like Photoshop.

Yes, that ass-backward approach came in my mind.
Your bank notes are too easy to copy now that color photocopiers and color laser printers are a thing?
- Rest of the world: make better banknotes (see swiss money, euros, etc.)
- USA: make bank note detection software mandatory on each piece of tech (HP and other US manufacturers have a boner at the thoughts of the sudden illegalness of cheaper competitors from countries without that function) and also mandate yellow dot tracking (now in addition the police-state is having a boner, too) (*).
- Rest of the world: why the hell is my color cartridge constantly empty on yellow and why is this preventing my to print even black and white?

Same here:
USA: has a problem of violence, bonkers level of gun proliferation, on tops of tons of ways to make life shitty for everyone (lack of proper health care, social welfare, etc.)
also the USA: lets add "gun detectors" to 3D printers so nobody prints a gun without a serial number. Surely that's the best solution to address all of the above, right?

I would imagine that 3D printer manufacturers will comply by adding some largely ineffective code to their apps that blocks known gun designs.

Trouble is that this time, most 3D manufacturers ARE NOT in the USA.
Most of them are in China, and the US is only a fraction of their exports, and the required function requires magnitude more compute power to implement than the tiny micro-controller that is usually found in those printers and implementing would require massively driving up the cost of the printer.
Chance are high that the manufacturer will just say f-u, and merely just stop selling complete pre-assembled kit to the USA, only stuff that can circumvent the restrictions (e.g., kits with only motor and drivers that require adding a sold-separately microcontroller).

---

(*): fun fact: on some printers (E.g. with very low memory) those "functionnalities" were implemented in the drivers instead.
My ancient HP color lasterjet works this way. There are no yellow dot when I print from CUPS.

It's entirely possible that the "gun detection" is going to be the same: crappy buggy detection +additional privacy invading tracking implemented into the management software shipped next to the 3D printer as the MCU cannot handle that. Circumventable by downloading Octoprint from some european server and running that on a Pi to manage the printers.

Comment And complexity (Score 3, Informative) 87

the selection of a 40 year old 6502 application is interesting,

Not even the application, just a 120 byte-long binary patch.

It may however help if someone identifies a small digestable chunk as security relevant and set it about the task of dealing withi t.

And that chunk doesn't have any weirdness that requires a seasoned and actually human reverse-engineer.
(Think segmented memory model on anything pre "_64" of the x86 family - the kind of madness that can kill Ghidra).

Also, if it's not from the 8bit era or the very early 16bit era, chances are high that this bit of machine code didn't start as hand-written assembler but some higher-level compiled language (C most likely). It might be better to run Ghidra on it and have some future ChatBot trained on making sense of that decompiled code.

In short there so many thousands of blockers that have been carefully avoided by going to that 40 year old 120-byte long patch of 6502 binary.

Comment Good example of why it's wrong (Score 4, Insightful) 87

But what if you had a similarly loose platform but it's running a kiosk and that kiosk software is purportedly designed to keep the user on acceptable rails.

There is a lot of leverage done by the "similarly".

Apple's computers run on 6502.
This was an insanely popular architecture. It's been used in metric shit tons of other hardware from roughly that era. There are insane amounts of resource about this architecture. It was usually programmed in assembly. There has been a lot of patching of binaries back then. These CPUs have also been used in courses and training for a very long time, most of which are easy to come by. So there's an insane amount of material about 6502 instructions , their binary encoding, and general debugging of software on that platform that could be gobbled by the training of the model. The architecture is also extremely simple and straightforward with very little weirdness. It could be possible for something that boils down to a "next word predictor" to not fumble too much.

Anything developed in the modern online era, where you would be interested in finding vulnerabilities is going to be multiple order of magnitude more complex (think more multiple megabytes of firmware not a 120 bytes patch), rely on very weird architecture (a kiosk running on some x86 derivative? one of the later embed architecture that uses multiple weird addressing mode?) and very poorly documented.

Also combine this with the fact that we're very far into the "dimishing returns" part of the AI development, where each minute improvement requires even vastly more resources (insanely large datacenter, power requirement of entire cities) and more training material than available (so "habsburg AI" ?), it's not going to get better easily.

The fact that a chat bot can find a fix a couple of grammar mistake in a short paragraph of English doesn't mean it could generate an entire epic poem in a some dead language like Etruscan (not Indo-European, not that many examples have survived, even less Etruscan-Latin or -Greek bilingual texts have survived to assist understanding).
The fact that a chat bot successfully reverse engineered and debugged a 120-byte snipped of one of the most well studied architecture doesn't mean it will easilly debug multi-mega bytes firmware of some obscure proprietary microcontroller.

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