Apr. 25th, 2025

thewayne: (Default)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed an open-source toolkit that, when installed in a very inexpensive portable hot spot, the device will report whether it sees any cell-site simulators (CSS) in your area.

CSS devices, also known as Stingrays, allow law enforcement to capture all identifying information in an area with great precision. It is blanket surveillance. The problem is that while they may have a warrant to surveil Suspect X, they don't have warrants to surveil and capture information on me, you, and everyone around us. Stingrays capture everyone's location information in their effective operating range and logs it. Also, we know very little about how these devices operate: this info is kept under very tight lockdown by the manufacturers and by the law enforcement agencies. There has been very little success in law suits filed to pry this information into direct sunlight.

Some CSS units can go beyond locating the suspect's phones and actually intercept communications. Whether they can intercept everyone's comms who it has sucked into connecting to it isn't known.

The concern is whether CSS is being used to surveil protests and religious gatherings, things that are protected by the First Amendment. There is some evidence that points to this, it is not known how widespread such surveillance may be.

This new toolkit by the EFF is called Rayhunter, i.e. hunting for stingrays. It requires the purchase of an Orbic WiFi hotspot, links in the article to Amazon and eBay show them available for $10-20. The software to turn the Orbic into a Rayhunter is available on the EFF site, but you must be running Linux or Mac OS to install it - no package for Windows at this time. I suppose you could probably run a Linux VM on Windows to install it that way. Once installed and running, in the presence of CSS a red line will appear on the top of the display and the event will be logged, otherwise a green line will show. Connecting to the device's browser will let you review the log file.

The device is not a counter-surveillance tool, it does nothing to interfere with CSS which would be against many FCC rules and probably against local and Federal law. The EFF believes that the Rayhunter is legal under U.S. law, but if you're not in the USA then you should talk to an attorney in your area to see what kind of risk that you might be taking.

Myself, I'd look into rehousing it into something else, like, say, a Gameboy box that also works as a Gameboy, as eventually The Powers That Be will be looking for people carrying this particular model of Orbic devices and plausible deniability might begin running thin. For the paranoids amongst us, perhaps having a tamper switch on the Gameboy that would fry the memory if it's opened incorrectly.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying
thewayne: (Default)
Microsoft has cancelled or revised data center plans to the tune of $13,000,000,000 recently, projects that were mainly for AI centers. The reason? AI/LLM is not panning out as projected. As newer models are coming out, hallucination rates are rising rather than falling. This bodes ill.

In some cases lease options are being kept and the sites will continue being used as farmland until if/when MS decides to actually build the data centers.

Meta has recently likewise started cancelling data center plans.

Article may be paywalled:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-26/microsoft-abandons-more-data-center-projects-td-cowen-says

The Slashdot summary:
"Microsoft has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence. From a report:
The analysts, who rattled investors with a February note highlighting leases Microsoft had abandoned in the US, said the latest move also reflected the company's choice to forgo some new business from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which it has backed with some $13 billion. Microsoft and the startup earlier this year said they had altered their multiyear agreement, letting OpenAI use cloud-computing services from other companies, provided Microsoft didn't want the business itself.

Microsoft's retrenchment in the last six months included lease cancellations and deferrals, the TD Cowen analysts said in their latest research note, dated Wednesday. Alphabet's Google had stepped in to grab some leases Microsoft abandoned in Europe, the analysts wrote, while Meta Platforms had scooped up some of the freed capacity in Europe."


https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/26/1832216/microsoft-abandons-data-center-projects-td-cowen-says


Meanwhile in China, two years ago a huge data center construction boom took place in an attempt to catch up in the AI/LLM race. And then the Chinese had a breakthrough and found a way around the GPU chip embargo and discovered that there wasn't nearly as much need for huge numbers of data centers and GPU farms.

And 80% of these data centers are sitting around unused!

From the article: “The growing pain China’s AI industry is going through is largely a result of inexperienced players—corporations and local governments—jumping on the hype train, building facilities that aren’t optimal for today’s need,” says Jimmy Goodrich, senior advisor for technology to the RAND Corporation.

The upshot is that projects are failing, energy is being wasted, and data centers have become “distressed assets” whose investors are keen to unload them at below-market rates. The situation may eventually prompt government intervention, he says: “The Chinese government is likely to step in, take over, and hand them off to more capable operators.”


Something on the order of over 500 were announced in 2023/2024, which means only 100 or so are in use?! The problem was that nobody knew what they were doing with AI, but by damn, we've got to get on that bandwagon!

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/26/1113802/china-ai-data-centers-unused/
thewayne: (Default)
Apparently testing was pretty good and MS has decided to launch Recall for Windows 11. They have made it opt-in, thus you must specifically enable it before it starts snapshotting your system. This is good.

But there's something better: it doesn't run on most machines out there!

Recall requires a system with an NPU, a Neural Processing Unit. These are additional chips installed on the motherboard that have only been in the sales channel for about a year. I'm also pretty sure that these computers came with a keyboard that had a Copilot key on the bottom row to the right of the space bar, though there may be keyboards with that key sold with computers without the NPU. So if your PC is from 2023 or older, it doesn't have an NPU and won't run Recall.

And yes, there are laptops with NPUs.

Recall is part of a feature package called CoPilot+. From the article: "The only consumer processors that currently support Copilot+ are Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, Intel's Core Ultra 200V-series laptop chips (codenamed Lunar Lake), and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series. Copilot+ features have generally been coming to the Arm-based Qualcomm PCs first and to x86-based Intel and AMD PCs later; Recall and the improved Search are available for both Arm and x86 PCs, while some Click to Do features are currently only available for Arm systems."

Of course there is the problem that when you go to replace your current system in a few years, it's likely that your new box will contain an NPU and you'll get nagged to activate Recall.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/microsoft-rolls-windows-recall-out-to-the-public-nearly-a-year-after-announcing-it/


In an interesting sidenote, Intel's AI chipsets are not selling well, people are really wanting the previous generation known as Raptor Lake. The AI chips are known as Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, I think one name designates laptop chips.

Intel is having all sorts of corporate problems and it's being felt up and down the product line. They're looking at selling off divisions to hunker down and get their act together.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-ai-pc-chips-arent-selling-instead-last-gen-raptor-lake-booms-and-creates-a-shortage
thewayne: (Default)
There's a new hack that has become widespread. It's actually been around for a while, it was previously kind of tightly targeted. But now you can compromise a web site and install this crap and you have a good chance of infecting all sorts of people who stop by!

It starts looking like a form of CAPTCHA: prove that you're a human. It wants you to do three things:
1. Press the Windows button plus R
2. Press Control-V
3. Press Enter.

What you've just done is open a command prompt and pasted some code that the compromised web page has placed inside your computer's paste buffer. That code installs a remote-access toolkit (RAT), key capture program(s), things to further compromise your PC's security, etc. You no longer own your computer.

Things like this is why we can't have nice things. You'll most commonly see these on lookalike web sites impersonating known sites through typosquatting, etc.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/03/clickfix-how-to-infect-your-pc-in-three-easy-steps/

(yes, I'm cleaning out browser windows)
thewayne: (Default)
Aix-Marseille Université accepted applications from NASA, Yale, and Stanford scientists to move to France and continue their research under, shall we say, less politically-fraught conditions. The president of the université said, "We expect to be able to raise up to 15 million euros for a 3-year program, and will be working with local institutions to host around 15 researchers."

I expect other smart countries to do this. I know there are companies that already have facilities in Canada that are moving all operations up there. Apparently no one running the country realizes what the long-term ramifications of academic brain drain will have on the country.

https://www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/actualites/safe-place-science-aix-marseille-universite-ready-welcome-american-scientists

Article paywalled:
https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] croptoptux is coming over from Tumblr and seems to have quite the knowledge of Classic Chinese and Japanese, and unless I'm missing my guess, is an anime fan and also involved in AO3?

I look forward to future blog posts, even if I don't understand them. :-)

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