I have a feeling Neal Asher is doing this now. He worships at the altar of Elon Musk and thinks the Messiah is going to take us to Mars, so presumably he's using Grok. His novels are getting less memorable with each release.
The article references a quote about the "benefits of moderate alcohol consumption" as well, which I thought was an idea that had been debunked? I can't read the actual editorial though, it's paywalled.
Thank you for pointing that out! I would add that intelligence agencies and law enforcement are almost completely exempt from all those fancy GDPR requirements.
Furthermore, in the EU, there is no such a strong equivalent to the 4th Amendment. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can access your cloud data without needing a warrant—unless the data is stored in the US in which case a US judge would have to approve it. This is one of the reasons they are so eager to keep it "home".
The craziest thing is what happened with Encrochat and SkyECC. These two services made the critical mistake of trusting OVH to host their servers, and then OVH literally placed law enforcement and intelligence agency backdoors on them. Eventually, they even used these backdoors to send malware to users' devices, not caring whether they were located in the EU or not.
While all this was happening, the founder of OVH appeared on a popular YouTube tech channel and proudly explained that, unlike Amazon and Google, they weren’t sniffing their customers’ data. What a liar!
> Furthermore, in the EU there is not something such as the 4th amendment, Law Enforcement and Intelligence agencies can grab your cloud data without requiring a warrant. Unless the data is stored in the US, which is one of the reasons they are so eager to keep it "home
You're commenting under an article that explicitly says how US intelligence agencies and police get around the need for warrants. Many rights in the US are more theoretical than practical if someone in power decides so.
Also, there are strong expectations of privacy in the EU, as well as due process, warrants, etc. There are of course abuses, and especially "terrorism" can enable some shortcuts (to be fair, often for very good reason multiple EU countries have had tens to hundreds of dead from terrorist attacks that could and should have been prevented), but I don't have the impression it's in any way even close to as bad as the US. Do you have any information/sources to the contrary?
"Because the SR Server was located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment would not have required a warrant to search the server, whether for its IP address or otherwise."
To me this statement only makes sense if it explains why an American law enforcement agency can hack a foreign server without an American warrant. And it just demonstrates the limits of American privacy protection.
If you think this was about European legal system, you are mistaken. If Americans were hacking European servers without due process involving European authorities, this was probably highly illegal here.
Their servers were found or their encryption were broken under mysterious circumstances involving classified "techniques".
In 3 out 4 cases malware was sent from the services to their users once taken over.
All were hosted in the EU, even stranger, all of them had servers hosted by OVH. Although SR was not directly hosted by OVH Ross Ulbricht had a vnc server (virtual desktop) there which he apparently used to administrate the SR main server and on another OVH server he had a deadmanswitch and his will.
In a sense this is the counterpart to the survival bias. But in this case we only know where the taken down services were hosted, we don't know where the survivors are being hosted.
All this has serious Crypto AG vibes. Back then it was: trust us, we are from Switzerland, we are neutral....
It doesn’t make sense to build a conspiracy theory on randomly selected facts, when there’s an obvious explanation that in all those cases the law was broken and law enforcement acted as they were supposed to act. Other ISPs and hosting providers are cooperating with lawful requests too.
I do not see any lies or omission of important details in this document. Looks like OVH complied with some legal request and just handed over everything they had, including encrypted copies of hard drives. Americans then just cracked the root password.
Your comment needs some serious fact checking. For example, Encrochat backdoor was authorized by judge, so there was a due process. And it was not an ordinary customer.
How? They busted huge criminal network and linked the app itself to a criminal gang. This is how the law enforcement should work. Every human right, including privacy, has limits and the purpose of the law and the due process to establish where those limits should be. It would be strange to expect that privacy of a human trafficker or drug dealer is protected more than the rights of the people they harm.
They intercepted and read the messages of most users, yet the number of arrests is significantly lower than the total number of SkyECC and EncroChat users.
Not only that, but they also have charged and are attempting to jail the creators of these phones/end-to-end messaging apps.
With what is happening it is becoming pretty much impossible to provide backdoor free communication tools within the EU.
I have built something similar for my personal use.
The problem is that some filings especially the 10-K onces, can be very long (too long for chatGPT or Claude). Only Gemini can handle them properly. It can be quite expensive if a user chats a lot with a long filing.
Yeah this is true. But the context windows for most of the frontier models have been increasing over time so this will most likely be solved soon. It's good enough to still get a decent amount of value.
I am very interested in knowing how they are able to get such precise measurements with an ESP32.
In their chart there is a time of arrival difference that has nano second accuracy. The ESP32 runs at 240MHZ max, and usually it takes several cycles to read certain values, so I really wonder how they were able to pull it off.
Every WiFi chip needs to be able to synchronize to the received signal down to a few I/Q samples (the remaining synchronization error is accounted for by the cyclic prefix of OFDM). For example, with 40MHz of bandwidth, there is an I/Q sample every 25 nanoseconds (the wave travels 7.5m during that time), so the level of synchronization will be on that order. The ESP32 reports the time of arrival, the code for extracting a nanosecond-precision timestamp is here: https://github.com/ESPARGOS/pyespargos/blob/main/espargos/po...
Additionally, you can use the phase information in the estimated channel coefficients (CSI) to determine the more precise time of arrival. Very briefly, a time delay in time domain will be visible as a frequency(=subcarrier)-dependent phase shift in frequency(=subcarrier)-domain. Now synchronization is only limited by impairments like thermal noise and phase noise. In practice in nice lab conditions, the time of arrival accuracy is on the level of <<1m.
On top of phase differences between subcarriers (--> timing information), we also measure phase differences between antennas, which provides angle of arrival and, with multiple arrays, phase of arrival information.
You can go even further by measuring phase differences between subsequent packets, which provides frequency offset and Doppler (--> velocity) information. I have some nice results on that, but that's a topic for the future ;)
Thank you for your reply, I have been reading the code and there are some things that I am not sure to understand.
- The Espargos code uses rxstart_time_cyc & rxstart_time_cyc_dec for the ns timestamp calculation
- Both values are not documented in the Espressif code and just marked as /*< reserved */
- The timestamp parameter is documented but it is in "microseconds"
Is there anywhere I can find more documentation on the "rxstart_time_cyc" and "rxstart_time_cyc_dec" fields? Are these cycle counters from the wifi chip?
You can often get some sample timing resolution from a sampled signal by interpolating the result of a complex correlation. You start by searching the correlation output for the loudest hypotenuse lag, then take he worked tangent of the quadrature information of that lag to estimate the sub-sample event time
Just a gas but maybe it's because they're using multiple esp32's in an array? But also I seem to recall something similar in the Snowden papers?
But I get your point, given that the esp32 and all its design files are available from SPRESIF maybe they built a board that's running out of much faster clock rate?
PS: sorry about the typos and miss takes but sadly I have to use Voice typing due to a recent traumatic injury.
To a point sure. Commercial viability doesn’t mean they need to match NVIDIA, they just need yields (and power consumption) that are just good enough. They are going to go for scale, so even power consumption is going to dictate how many nuclear plants they need to build.
Electricity prices being cheaper than in the US doesn’t necessarily mean electricity is actually cheaper. They subsidize a lot of it since utilities are state run and rates are set by politicians just as much as they are set based on costs. Farmers still freeze in the winter when they are forced to switch from in-home coal to electric heating (natural gas isn’t viable in rural China, and propane tanks are often banned for purposes other than cooking), electricity is cheap but not cheap enough compared to what they earn.
Your critique contains multiple factual inaccuracies:
1. Price Formation: China's electricity pricing isn't politically manipulated. Since 2021, 60.8% of electricity has been traded in competitive markets (NDRC 2022), with industrial users paying 20-40% more than residents.
2. Rural Heating: 12 million rural households received $3.5B in 2023 heating subsidies (MOF), reducing coal-based PM2.5 by 54% since 2015 (MEE). Freeze incidents decreased 78% post-2020 grid upgrades (State Grid Corporation).
3. Energy Access: Over 98% villages now have LPG access via 53,000 licensed stations (MEM), with 300m CNG cylinders in rural circulation - 4x more than in 2017.
4. Affordability: Rural electricity costs average 5.9% of income vs 8.7% in US farm households (OECD 2023). China's residential rates remain 30% below commercial tariffs to protect vulnerable groups.
While transitional challenges existed during 2017-19 coal-to-clean shift, WHO-certified data shows rural respiratory hospitalizations dropped 22% since 2020. The "cheap energy=state control" narrative oversimplifies complex market structures evolving since 2015 reforms.
