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THE UNRESTING TECHNOLOGIST

This is my blog about programming, technology, politics and other random stuff
of interest, where information might be hard to find or be otherwise scattered
across the vast internet.

Menu
 * Imprint
 * GDPR
 * GDPR (German)
 * Book reviews
 * Reading List




AMAZON, LANGUAGE-DEPENDENT PRODUCT DATA STATE AND OTHER QUIRKS

It seems as if Amazon has problems with functional dependency of its product
data.

Depending on with language is chosen on the Amazon.de webpage, for example
German, there are books where the website language used remains English. In
addition to that, this results in totally different editions of the books being
displayed or different sellers being listed for the same book.

Also, when selecting “Foreign books” on an author’s Amazon page, nothing is
selected, although one might expect to be shown the author’s original,
untranslated works.

Sometimes, multilingual editions of books (which are mostly used for teaching
foreign language at schools) show up instead of a particular edition in a
desired language.


SHOPPING CART AND WISH LIST

There have been instances where I was unable to move items between different
wish lists with a failure message from Amazon claiming it could not move the
item, while said item was definitely not on the destined wish list.

This also fails when trying to add the item to a particular wish list directly
form the product page. It makes not difference whether the item in question is
already in the shopping cart or not during the time of trying to move it to the
faulty wish list.

Shopping cart bottlenecks

When moving items from the Amazon shopping basket to the “Save for later”
section, it is only possible to do this for one item at a time, and also only
after each individual item has been moved is it possible to even click on the
next item. This creates an opportunity for the underlying code to be
restructured in support of faster operations.


LINK ROT

From the book “Superfreakonomics”, a link claims to lead to a webpage for the
entire series of books, including “When to rob a bank”, “Think like a freak” and
“Freakonomics”. However, when clicking the product link for the latter
(https://www.amazon.de/dp/B074CB84JK?binding=mass_market&ref=dbs_dp_sirpi),
Amazon claims it is unable to find the page:


BOOK EDITIONS VARYING IN THE NUMBER OF VOLUMES

When books gain additional volumes with newer revisions, one example being
Rosenberg’s Molecular and Genetic Basis of Neurological and Psychiatric Disease,
which fit in a single volume for its fifth edition, but grew to include a second
volume in its sixth edition, product pages can list any part of the multi-volume
editions along with books from the single volume editions.

Another example would be Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which
initially was comprised of two volumes, but was later released as a single
volume edition.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on January 29, 2024February 1, 2024Categories
Uncategorized


COMBINED CIVIL APPLICATIONS AND WARTIME DEFENSE

War is the single most unproductive economic activity known to date, en par with
environmental pollution. But while we still have not figured out how to prevent
the emergence of warring activities, could there be a way to transform war
preparation efforts into something that is also useful during times of peace?
After all, the physical principles that enable the massive destruction of
livelihood also have the potential to protect from many naturally occurring
hazards.

Build missile and rocket storage facilities in a way they can double as delivery
systems for projectiles that can immediately be fired at incoming asteroids when
there is no enemy threat that requires fitting the weapons to delivery systems
like aircraft. Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory simulated
nuclear explosions directed at asteroids to deflect the object trajectory
(https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad0838/pdf).

Fitted with landing gear and braking parachutes, decommissioned cruise missiles
could find use in time-critical courier delivery. Development already done on
the JDAM guidance kit that makes unguided bombs “smart” could serve as a
starting point. The SSM-N-8 Regulus I and SSM-N-9 Regulus II cruise missiles of
the Cold War era were fitted with landing gear during testing to enable them to
return, landing like planes on a runway.

Civil shelters (also in private homes / public or commercial buildings) can
serve a dual purpose as shelters for wartime and natural threats like storms
(homesteads in the Tornado Alley of the US Mid-West sometimes have them, while
cyclone-prone areas in tropical regions could certainly benefit) or, a less
likely event, asteroids. A prime example of dual use is Peking, where during the
summer of 2023, with its unprecedented heat waves, they opened shelters for
people looking to escape the extremely high temperatures outside.

Old design documents are still available from the US government:
https://dahp.wa.gov/sites/default/files/FamilyShelterDesigns.pdf



In Peking, where each building is required to have underground shelters even
today, and an estimated 1 million people live in dwellings built into former
shelters dating from the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the threat of nuclear war
between communist China and the Soviet Republic seemed imminent (Sino-Soviet
border conflict along the Ussuri river in 1969). Construction of the 85 square
kilometer wide complex dubbed “Nuclear City” was completed in 1979.

China stores ICBMs in 5000 km of underground tunnels.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/underground-great-wall.htm One
must wonder if the massive numbers of unfinished, uninhabited buildings
constructed in recent years are just a disguise.

Appropriate shielding requires use of high-density concrete containing baryte or
magnetite to shield against gamma radiation, or boron in the form of borate
minerals or to be effective against neutron radiation. Elevator shafts are made
from high-density concrete to reduce noise emissions. Crane counterweights are
also made from this type of concrete. While 80 % of global baryte production is
currently used for drilling fluids in fossil fuel exploration, civil shelters
are a better use of the material.

Existing Swiss shelter building codes need a closer look: do they require use of
radiation-shielding high-density concrete? If not, their strategy has major
flaws.

https://www.babs.admin.ch/de/publikservice/downloads/schutzbauten.html

Neutron bombs have been described as humane weapons which only affect humans
(or, by extension, biological lifeforms) while leaving infrastructure such as
buildings and equipment intact.

What remains unstated are the effects of neutron activation, where elements in
the vicinity of the explosion absorb the neutrons and become radioactive
themselves, emitting gamma radiation.

A comprehensive table of neutron activation energies for many elements can be
found at:

http://cds.cern.ch/record/111089/files/IAEA-TR-273.pdf

Further,
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-12/volume19.pdf

Also, look into ISO 14152 for neutron absorption.

https://www-nds.iaea.org/tm-fzk/docs_slides/Forrest_EASY_IFMIF.ppt

Ventilation in Swiss-style shelters relies on a hand-cranked system if the power
goes out. This means that in order for people to be able to sleep during the
length of the required sheltering period, which could be 4-5 weeks, there must
be several people occupying the shelter. In order to alleviate this restriction,
build hydroponic systems into the shelters, where the plants / algae provide
oxygen, and fish provide food. During peacetime, those systems can be part of a
local food chain.

https://www.antoniofaccilongo.com/atomic-rooms

Building resilient underground structures that incorporate large-scale
facilities would make civil shelters feasible at scale and double as structure
for peacetime housing.

Soviet-era closed cities still exist in Russia today and serve as proof that
such concepts do work.

Manufacturers of tunnel boring machines like Herrenknecht or Aker Solutions
could find additional business in the construction of fallout shelters in
built-up areas.

Underground facilities for large-scale particle physics experiments such as the
Large Hadron Collider at CERN already contain high-density concrete in critical
sections of the design. When old accelerators at CERN are dismantled, the
remaining tunnels could be turned into a shelter superstructure. However, this
is an unlikely scenario, as the LHC will continue to serve as an accelerator
stage for future, even larger particle accelerators.

Ultrasonic drilling could also find applications.

Since the height of the Cold War, fallout shelters have been reduced in numbers.
The current situation with Russia threatening Ukraine shows that this may have
been a mistake.

So what could be a more sustainable approach to building fallout shelters?

Looking to Scandinavia and Switzerland, where large shelters are built into
underground parking and recreational facilities for use during peace time.

Manufacturers of fuel storage tanks could use available production capacity to
build shelters from the same geometrical designs which can then be buried
underground on private property to provide basic shelter. In times when there is
concern for public safety, e.g. when unexploded ordnance is found nearby,
residents could shelter in place instead of having to be moved to a special safe
location.

http://www.schutzbauten-stuttgart.de/de-de/kalterkrieg/h%C3%A4uslicherluftschutzkalterkrieg/r%C3%B6hrenbunker/naur%C3%B6hrenbunker.aspx

During the Cold War, German motorways were built to function as airstrips with
the middle lane separators removed, and rest areas along highways doubling as
aircraft parking. Those road sections featured reinforced surfaces in order to
handle the higher weights of aircraft compared to cars and trucks.

Ventilation equipment of large bunker structures could serve as direct air
capture inlets during peaceful times, diverting the air intake away from wartime
sand filter units to carbon dioxide scrubbers, this way aiding in the climate
change recovery effort.


LIGHT-GAS PROJECTILES

Attach a thin-walled cartridge containing pressurized hydrogen gas to the bottom
of a projectile to achieve propulsion velocities exceeding the Earth’s escape
velocity.

Re-manufacture surplus shaped charges and kinetic energy penetrators to be used
with Voitenko compressors for aerospace applications.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on January 11, 2024January 11, 2024Categories
Uncategorized


MAFALDA AND THE INNER WORKINGS OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE

A while ago, when browsing the collective works of Mafalda by the Argentinian
cartoonist Quino, I tried having parts of the sentence translated from Spanish
to English by Google Translate.

This is what I tried as inputs:

el pomo de témpera
el pomo de tempera
el pomo
de tempera

and this is what I got as the results eventually:

the tempering pommel
the seasoning pommel
he snitch
tempered

Why Google Translate even failed to properly identify articles and proper nouns,
instead translating them into pronouns and verbs, is beyond me.

However, what Mafalda really refers to is a jar of paint, specifically the
“tempera” kind of paint, which has pigments combined with delicate emulsifiers.

Also tried a translation to German, which for “pomo de témpera” gave me a word I
had never heard of: “Würzknauf”. Which would translate to “seasoning knob” if
used in an English context.

Shockingly, trying the Google web search on it, the results were very limited:

Why would Google return exclusively Arabic texts (which, judging by the results
Google Translate gives me, seem to be very sexually explicit) for a made-up
German word that their own system had in all likelihood created itself? Was this
a foreshadowing of the hallucinating artificial intelligence systems like
ChatGPT?

Maybe the following paper could shed some light on the inner workings of the
neural networks that drive the Google search engine technology?

https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~sm2283/papers/FSE18.pdf (dead link, now found at
https://people.cs.umass.edu/~shiqingma/papers/FSE18.pdf)


GOOGLE CHROME WEBSITE TRANSLATION

Google Chrome website translation from Singhalese to German in Chrome 78 was not
supported for some unknown reason, and when German was selected as the target
language, translation failed, while a translation to English worked fine.

In the current Google Chrome version 120, a Russian Wikipedia article translated
to German does not preserve the context of numbers, i.e. it switches bases and
exponents of numbers written in scientific notation.

The example here is
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80,
the Russian Wikipedia article on the vircator type of microwave generator.

Repeating the process of translating from Russian to German with Google
Translate instead, the same problems dealing with scientific notation are
exhibited, additionally failing to identify a HTML tag and including it in the
translation instead.

All this leads me to believe that proper machine translation of digital
documents still has a long way to go.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on December 17, 2023December 17,
2023Categories Information Retrieval


REPURPOSED FOSSIL-FUEL ERA EQUIPMENT 4/4

All the above examples can serve as a hint that forced dependence on any
technological path or the abandonment of one, like it happened in 2011 with the
German exit from nuclear power and like the planned exit from fossil
fuel-powered vehicles by 2035 in the EU, are not totally beneficial when looking
at the whole picture. It is the network effects that count.

In September 2014, the US senate passed legislation claiming that resources on
asteroids belong to the entity that discovers / mines them.

https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW-114publ90.pdf

Using microorganisms such as Sulfobacillus harzensis that can recover the
majority of cobalt metal in an mine tailings:
https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/ijsem/10.1099/ijsem.0.004871

Alternative process: phytomining, where plants that are so-called
hyperaccumulators take up the metal and incorporate them, creating high
concentrations of metals in their biomass.

“Pressure to Power” describes technology that recovers energy at distribution
stations of gas pipelines where the pressure is reduced before distribution to
local users. (expansion turbine)

For crude oil pipelines, this has already been realized in 2018 with the Trans
Alpine pipeline from Italy to Austria using the potential energy from the
pipeline traversing the Alps to recover some of the energy required for pumping
the crude oil.

Pigging devices currently used to inspect and clean pipeline networks could be
modified to a form of hydraulic transport using the existing fossil fuel and gas
pipelines, although it would require the constrution of a greater number of
receiver stations than those that currently exist. Such “pigs” are already used
today when multiple products differing in composition are sent into the pipeline
at the same time, with the devices limiting mixture of the different products.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on November 15, 2023November 15,
2023Categories Uncategorized


REPURPOSED FOSSIL-FUEL ERA EQUIPMENT 3/4

The first offshore windfarm in US water was built in 2015:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/first-us-offshore-wind-farm



Jack-up rigs can be converted for construction of offshore wind power: If they
want to stay in business, companies like Seadrill must upgrade their ships to
support offshore wind  / tidal / solar power installation:
http://newatlas.com/meygen-tidal-energy-scotland/45396/?li_source=LI&li_medium=default-widget

In a long shot, those ships could serve as launch platforms for space
exploration because moving platforms closer to the equator reduces the amount of
rocket fuel needed to reach orbit.

If used in fuel cells instead of engines or turbines, crude oil, natural gas and
methane hydrate will remain viable sources of energy in the the future.

https://worldoceanreview.com/wp-content/downloads/wor3/WOR3_de_Kapitel_1.pdf

https://worldoceanreview.com/wp-content/downloads/wor3/WOR3_de_Kapitel_2.pdf

https://worldoceanreview.com/wp-content/downloads/wor3/WOR3_de_Kapitel_3.pdf

https://worldoceanreview.com/wp-content/downloads/wor3/WOR3_de_Kapitel_4.pdf

With the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a scramble
among European countries to secure enough new LNG supplies to counteract the
dwindling Russian deliveries of natural gas through pipelines such as NordStream
1.

As LNG requires the prior existence of LNG-capable terminals onshore, the lack
thereof creates major hurdles when it comes to severing the ties with Russia in
the energy domain. Luckily, there are special ships called FSRU (Floating
Storage Regasification Unit) which are capable of turning the liquid natural gas
back into gaseous form which can then be injected into the existing European
pipeline network.

LNG carrier ships should be designed to also allow the transport of ammonia to
facilitate a hydrogen economy. Built as FPSO ( Floating Production Storage and
Offloading Unit), they could make use of surplus wind energy and produce
ammonia. The first of those ships is named P2XFloater.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on November 15, 2023November 15,
2023Categories Uncategorized


REPURPOSED FOSSIL-FUEL ERA EQUIPMENT 2/4

Using deep geothermal drilling to produce supercritical water to be fed into the
steam generators of existing coal power plants can help provide clean energy
using former fossil fuel power plants. Deep geothermal wells can be drilled
almost anywhere in the world, not just where there is volcanic activity. An
improvement over conventional drills are gyrotrons that use microwave energy.
While the gyrotron can stay at the surface, a waveguide can deposit the energy
where it is needed. Existing wells can be used as a starting point to reach
initial depths of 500 meters or more, from where the microwaves can extend the
wells to the necessary depths of 5 to 20 kilometers.

Exhausted oil formations can be used to harness geothermal energy while
providing energy storage much like a battery. The process uses water injected
into a deep well, while using a second well to extract highly pressurized,
heated water when needed. This can be done for many hours after injection has
completed, thus effectively storing energy.

Water passing through iron-rich underground rock formations results in the
production of hydrogen, a resource that can be tapped by drilling and then
feeding hydrogen motors in a similar manner to current gas wells (so-called
“orange hydrogen”).

It is also possible to directly source naturally occuring hydrogen (so-called
“white hydrogen”).

Drill rigs can be re-purposed for geothermal energy production (thanks to to a
larger temperature gradient of the underwater heat source) and to create CCS
(Carbon Capture and Storage) reservoirs.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/05/17/submarine-drones-drive-demand-for-subsea-power-plants/

“Submarine Geothermics;Hydrothermal Vents and Electricity Generation” suggests
concepts to harness such deep-sea thermal energy sources:
http://www.geothermal-energy.org/pdf/IGAstandard/WGC/2010/3704.pdf

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Strom-aus-dem-Vulkan-3660940.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seadrill, Transoceon, Diamond Offshore

 Nautilus Minerals to mine hydrothermal vents

Fervus Energy uses fracking technology for geothermal energy:
https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/5704/

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on November 15, 2023November 15,
2023Categories Uncategorized


REPURPOSED FOSSIL-FUEL ERA EQUIPMENT 1/4

This series of four articles in a style similar to a stream-of-consciousness
format wants to shed some light onto the challenge we face in times of enormous
climate challenges:

The proposed taxation of estimated fossil fuel reserves realizes a concept of
fictionalized gain that forces companies to exploit all available resources,
which is detrimental to global climate when done with current technology, i.e.
without carbon capture. (It remains to be seen how the similar concept of
advanced flat capital gains tax will affect private ETF investors)

In-situ mining of oil sands and leaching of ore deposits promise new ways to
extract resources from otherwise unviable deposits.

Novel bioreactors for oil sand tailings could help clean up the toxic remains
left behind after processing the extracted crude:
https://www.googlesciencefair.com/projects/en/2014/ac15475dbf66c3811244a629ba10e4139111ea2389204ed13bcca114bff38f70

In-situ coal gasification would allow to exploit coal seams without having to
dig them up, while simplifying the process of carbon capture. Products of this
advanced process are syngas and synfuel. This technology also enables
exploitation of undersea coal reserves that would otherwise be inaccessible.
(https://petrowiki.spe.org/PEH:In-Situ_Combustion)

In addition, fossil fuel deposits contain non-negligible amounts of radioactive
material, which, when they are released into the environment during the
conventional firing process, are more harmful than if these elements (such as
thorium) were to be extracted from the fly ash and used as fuel in nuclear power
plants. With the fly ash stripped of radioactive elements, it can used in
concrete for building construction or roadway surfaces more safely.

http://www.ieaghg.org/docs/general_publications/8.pdf

Drilling fluids account for about 80 % of global baryte usage. Finding
alternatives to free up baryte for use in high-density concrete applications of
fallout shelters needs to be of higher priority.

Fossil fuel infrastructure can be given a second, more environmentally
beneficial, life, in an effort to enable future developments that are
independent of a certain technology path:

This includes the modification of processes ion existing refinieries to shift
production from combustible fuel to LOHC (liquid organic hydrogen carrier).
Using toluol and benzyl chloride to create dibenzyl chloride in a Friedel-Crafts
alkylation yields a diesel-like LOHC that allows hydrogen to be transported in a
liquid without cryocooling requirements. One liter of this LOHC can bind 650
litres of hydrogen, facilitating a mobility concept that does not need
high-pressure vessels.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on November 14, 2023November 14,
2023Categories Uncategorized


MICROGRIDS ARE THE FUTURE OF ELECTRICAL DISTRIBUTION


MASSIVE POWER BLACKOUT IN INDIA (2012)

On July 30, 2012, India was hit by the worst power blackout in its history until
then, affecting 19 of the 36 states and leaving roughly half of the 1.2-billion
strong population without electricity. This is certainly an over-estimate, as
back then, just under 40 percent of people only ever may have had access to the
grid.

According to Reuters, peak-hour demand at the time exceeded power capacity by
about 10 percent, impairing economic growth.
A weak monsoon that resulted in a fall of hydroelectricity generation worsened
the situation as people tried to cool down in scorching heat.

The Indian government was slow to respond to some of the pressing challenges
facing its population.
This power cut could have offered the opportunity to make a change and transform
India’s energy-hungry economy into one that is greener, and more resilient to
outages, which are even more likely to happen in the future is nothing is done
about it.

Growth in demand exceeds new capacity being added by far, even more than a
decade after the event.
The fact that there are only five electricity grids makes the system prone to
cascading failure.

People need to re-think the way power is generated, by opting for locally
generated power using renewable sources like photovoltaics, solar-thermal
power and wind. Microgrids connected to power storage solutions such as
batteries would at least partly eliminate the need for expensive,
environmentally-unfriendly diesel generators and kerosene, which are causing
respiratory problems in the millions of people using them for lighting and
cooking.


PAKISTAN POWER BLACKOUT 2015 AND 2023

After terrorists destroyed a transmission tower in Baluchistan, Pakistan, nearly
80% of Pakistan’s population – or more than  140 million people – were left
without power for hours. (see Bloomberg article)

Just like India in 2012, Pakistan would hugely benefit from a distributed,
highly resilient grid.

But they seem to have learned nothing from it:

During the early hours of January 23, 2023, interventions by the grid operator
intended to reduce energy consumption resulted in a total collapse of the grid
across the nation, taking all day for power to be restored.

Apparently, providing electricity to your people is harder than building nuclear
weapons.

South Africa

South Africa has had rolling blackouts (“load shedding”) since 2006, forcing
people to take them into consideration when they want to do laundry, charge
their phone or when students can do their homework.

Western Australia

The state of Western Australia can be thought of as an example, as they are
currently in the process of abandoning their 93,000 km long electricity grid in
favor of solar-powered microgrids for the sprawling farms dispersed throughout
the bush, with diesel generators for backup.

Germany

Germany has separate networks for providing electricity to the railway network
and the rest. The railway network mainly uses 16.7 Hz, while the rest of the
country uses 50 Hz. Could the railway network help with the transformation
towards renewable energy?

Latest developments as of 2022 / 2023

Germany loosens restrictions on plug-in solar power systems, allowing
electricity meters to run in reverse for up to four months. However, without
compensation, this further enriches the established power and grid companies.

https://www.golem.de/news/gesetzentwurf-zu-balkonkraftwerken-zaehler-duerfen-mehrere-monate-lang-zurueckdrehen-2306-175297.html

https://www.golem.de/news/privilegierte-baumassnahme-gesetzentwurf-zu-balkonkraftwerken-vorgelegt-2305-174426.html

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/klima-nachhaltigkeit/neuer-gesetzentwurf-weniger-huerden-fuer-solaranlagen-18991327.html

Development in regions with sparse networks

For less developed regions such as Africa, considering various scenarios for
simulation can save considerable cost before actual implementation. Numerous
tools have been developed to help with such efforts, a selection of which are
listed below:

https://un-modelling.github.io/electrification-paths-presentation/

https://github.com/un-modelling

http://www.onsset.org/

https://github.com/global-electrification-platform/gep-onsset

https://electrifynow.energydata.info/

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on October 30, 2023Categories Energy


THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF BITCOIN AND OTHER CRYPTO CURRENCIES

Lex Fridman with Elon Musk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxREm3s1scA

In this podcast, Musk mentions Nick Szabo as the creator of Bitcoin.

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/smart.contracts.html

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html



https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/hermeneutics.html#law



http://time.com/money/5002378/bitcoin-creator-nakamoto-billionaire/

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bit_Gold_proposal

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/secure-property-titles/#selection-77.5-88.0

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/04/16/linguistic-researchers-name-nick-szabo-as-author-of-bitcoin-whitepaper/



https://web.archive.org/web/20160709091851/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/



Faster Bitcoin mining

Approximate Bitcoin mining:

http://rakeshk.crhc.illinois.edu/dac_16_cam.pdf

The Unreasonable Fundamental Incertitudes behind Bitcoin Mining:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.7935



https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2020/02/new-computing-technique-could-help-make-bitcoin-mining-faster-and-greener.html
(using SAT to accelerate the calculations in the mining process)



Re-purposing Bitcoin ASICS for useful SHA-256 computations

> Reverse Engineering A Bitcoin Miner

https://web.archive.org/web/20180917223621/http://mightydevices.com/?p=615

Datasheet:
https://file12.bitmain.com/shop-product/firmware/BM1380_Datasheet_v1.0.pdf



Use the mining rigs to work with the Hashcash protocol to defend spam.

http://www.hashcash.org/

Use
https://docs.braiins.com/os/open-source-en/Development/2_build.html#getting-started
as the base of the modified firmware

https://github.com/orgs/braiins/repositories

Use the consensus mechanism of the cryptocurrency protocols to build distributed
voting tools for the people based on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, depending
on the decision at stake.

Caveat

It is entirely possible to change smart contracts:
https://www.heise.de/news/Kryptowaehrungen-Gericht-laesst-Smart-Contract-umprogrammieren-7533982.html?seite=all

https://www.blockworksresearch.com/research/we-do-a-little-counter-exploit

https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2023/340

The blockchain itself can also be manipulated by forcing the adoption of changes
in the client software:
https://www.heise.de/news/Bitcoin-Programmierer-muessen-vielleicht-die-Blockchain-manipulieren-7489900.html?seite=all
(article in German)
This could open up the possibility of removing malicious content injecting into
the blockchain, therefore making sure it remains an efficient mechanism and does
not remain tainted when such illicit events occur.

InterPlanetary File System is already using the Bitcoin block chain as a way to
provide distributed content-adressable storage.

Nonces are meant to be used once. If they are recycled, this can result in the
leakage of the private key used to sign a transaction:
https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2023/03/06/polynonce-a-tale-of-a-novel-ecdsa-attack-and-bitcoin-tears/


BITCOIN COMPUTING DAEMON

If inputs on the network are treated as Gödel numbers for the encoding of
programmable state machines, together with the majority voting mechanism the
nodes on the Bitcoin network could form a powerful distributed computer.
Individual nodes must agree, as per their common protocol version, on how to
treat given nonces, i.e. how to interpret them to execute a particular
instruction on the global distributed computing system they form.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on December 30, 2021January 11,
2024Categories Tech ReuseTags Bitcoin


FINDING YOUR WAY WITH CUSTOM MAPS ON A GARMIN GPS

While exploring Vancouver Island in 2018, I was using OpenStreetMap-derived map
data converted to the format used in Garmin automotive navigation systems like
my trusted Garmin LMT-51.

However, when using the device on some remote backroads of Vancouver Island, I
noticed a strange behaviour: it wouldn’t compute a route along those roads.
Instead, if it was able to find a route at all, it resulted in a massive detour
on the major roads along the not-so-remote parts of the islands. When testing
the parameters with OpenStreetMap’s online route finding service, a route was
returned using the rural backroads I had originally intended to use.

Have you experienced similar results with OpenStreetMap data and Garmin devices?
If so, please let me know in the comments.

When time allows, I will try to debug the device’s software in order to learn
what might cause this kind of ‘bug’.

Author unrestingtechnologistPosted on March 14, 2020August 30, 2021Categories
Hardware, Travel


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