Article URL: https://bowshock.nl/irc/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287395

Points: 337

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Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data

If the device you are reading this on has an IPv4 address, it is very likely not a publicly routeable one. This is because the wide scale dep

Let me tell you a story about World War 2. In 1940, before the entry of the U.S. and the USSR into the war, Britain was fighting alone against Germany and Italy. Despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned, the British managed to pull off a spectacular naval victory, using innovative new technology. They sent the HMS Illustrious, an aircraft carrier, to attack the Italian fleet in its harbor at Taranto. The British aircraft disabled three Italian battleships and several other ships, without the Italian navy even seeing their opponents’ ships, much less having a chance to fight back.

But that’s just the prelude to my story, which is not about a British victory, but a British defeat. Just a little over a year after the Battle of Taranto, Winston Churchill sent the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to deter Japan from attacking Singapore. Despite their own crushing victory at Taranto, the British military leadership was skeptical that battleships moving under their own power at sea could be taken down by air attack alone. They placed their faith in the power of zigzag movement and anti-aircraft guns to deter attacking planes.

This was foolish. Japanese torpedo bombers found and sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse quite easily. Here is an aerial photo of the British warships, taken from the cockpit of a Japanese plane, desperately trying to evade their doom:

The great battleships — the invincible masters of the sea in previous wars — were suddenly helpless against the swarm of tiny aircraft. Churchill reacted with shock and horror, and the British fleet withdrew, essentially leaving Southeast Asia to the Japanese.

The world had changed, almost overnight. Air power had brought about a revolution in military affairs. Ironclad battleships went from the single most valuable piece of military hardware to being almost obsolete overnight. Yet people who had invested their countries’ treasure in battleship fleets, like Churchill, were painfully slow to realize the shift — even when it was their own technological innovations that rendered their old weapons useless.1

OK, so there’s your old WW2 parable, with a clear moral to the story: Don’t ignore technological revolutions. Now fast-forward to 2025. We may just have witnessed something akin to a modern Battle of Taranto. For years, Russia has used its strategic bombers — which can also carry nuclear weapons — to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine from a huge distance. The Ukrainians had attacked these bombers on the ground with drones, but the Russians simply moved them farther away, well out of reach of anything the Ukrainians could launch from their own territory.

So the Ukrainians got sneaky. They packed a bunch of drones — little plastic battery-powered quadcopters, not too different from a toy you would fly at the park — into trucks and (somehow) sent the trucks all the way across Russia. When the trucks got close to the air force bases where the Russians had parked their bombers, the Ukrainian drones popped out of the trucks and started blowing up the bombers — and other planes — on the ground. You can see the footage of the attack here:

And you can see some pictures of the drones used in the attack here:

It’s not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia’s bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out battery-powered toys.

Again, the world has changed, almost overnight.

The American military is much better than the Russian military, but it’s ultimately not that different — it’s built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy “platforms” like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks. Each F-22 stealth fighter, still widely considered the best plane in the sky, cost about $350 million to build. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion each. An M1A1 Abrams tank costs more than $4 million, and so on.

That’s the amount of value that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed. Except the true value lost will be much higher, since — like Japan in World War 2, or Russia now — the U.S. now has extremely limited defense manufacturing capacity, and thus won’t be able to easily replace what it loses.

As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.

That’s obviously a terrifying thought. How can the U.S. defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield.

The other question we need to be asking is: Why can’t the U.S. just do the same thing to China, in the event of a war? We have drones, right? Weren’t we the inventors of drone technology? Don’t we have innovative startups like Anduril, and Skydio, and lots of others racing to arm our military with the world’s best drones?

Well, OK. The U.S. did invent drone technology. But most of what we currently use are lumbering, expensive systems like the MQ-9 Reaper:

Each one of these giant drone planes costs $33 million. During the recent U.S. conflict with the Houthis — a conflict in which the U.S. was essentially defeated — the ragtag Yemeni militia shot down at least 7 of these Reaper drones, and possibly as many as 20. America in total has only a few hundred.

The kind of drones used in the Ukrainian raid, on the other hand, are “FPV” drones — that stands for “first person view”. These are small battery-powered plastic copters equipped with explosives. There are many types, but here’s one example:

These drones cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, depending on the type. Ukraine is currently producing thousands of these drones per day, and says it expects to be able to produce over 10,000, although either the base drone (before weapons and other military hardware are added) or the parts used to make the drone typically come from China.

Why so many? FPV drones aren’t just useful for the kind of long-range surprise attack that Ukraine just carried out. In fact, they’re steadily replacing every other type of weapon on the battlefield. FPV drones can take out tanks, including America’s best tanks. They are now estimated to cause 70% of the casualties on the battlefield — more than artillery, the traditional “god of war”. Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg explainer:

Tens of thousands of the relatively cheap and expendable machines are now buzzing back and forth over the front lines, pinpointing Russian positions, gathering intelligence to anticipate impending assaults, colliding with enemy targets or dropping bombs on them.

By early 2025, drones were accounting for 60% to 70% of the damage and destruction caused to Russian equipment in the war, according to UK-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute…

Military commanders around the world are taking note. Taiwan is investing in mass-produced drones in anticipation of a possible conflict with China. Israel has recalibrated the Iron Dome air defense system in the war in Gaza to account for maneuverable drones — one of its biggest blind spots. European governments embarking on their largest rearmament since the Cold War have identified drones and counter-drone systems as an investment priority. The US Pentagon, which pioneered sophisticated and expensive drones sourced from big arms contractors, is looking to buy cheaper ones designed by startups and deployed en masse…

Small, light drones with multiple rotors have become the defining innovation of the war. Known as first-person view drones, they are typically controlled in real time via a video feed by an operator who can “see” through an onboard camera using electronic goggles so they can fly beyond the line of sight. Social media is full of videos showing the machines closing in on troops, armored personnel carriers, missile batteries and command posts until the moment of impact, when the picture turns to static…Other rotor drones are used to drop grenade-sized explosives on targets and can be reused if they make it back safely.

Bloomberg says that the parts used to make Ukraine’s drone fleet are bought “online”, but that is a euphemism. They are made in China.

An FPV drone is basically:

• some injection-molded plastic parts

• some trailing edge computer chips (microcontrollers, sensors, etc.)

• an electric motor made of rare earth permanent magnets

• a lithium-ion battery

The U.S. can still make plenty of trailing-edge computer chips, but the rest of these items are all China, China, China.

China does a large fraction of the injection molding in the world — about 82%, according to one 2024 estimate.2 Currently, I know of no government plan to restore America’s lost capacity in injection molding. In fact, Trump’s tariffs — if they ever go into effect — are expected to severely damage the U.S. injection molding industry, by cutting American injection molding companies off from imports of the specialized equipment they need.

China also makes most of the electric motors in the world. This is because China makes most of the magnets, and an electric motor is basically just made out of magnets. The rest of the world is scrambling to add magnet production capacity, but for the rest of this decade, China will dominate:

But this will be hard to accomplish. The magnets for electric motors are made out of materials called “rare earths”, which are almost entirely mined and processed in China.

In fact, China recently slapped export controls on its sales of rare earths to the U.S., causing chaos in a number of U.S. industries, and probably contributing to Trump’s decision to pause his tariffs. So far, U.S. efforts to mine and refine rare earths have fallen short (which itself is a topic for another full post).

Finally, and most importantly, we have batteries. A battery is the essential component of an FPV drone — it holds the energy that makes the thing go. Larger drones can use combustion engines, but to get something as small and cheap as an FPV drone, you need a battery.3

China makes most of the batteries in the world. In 2022 it had 77% of global manufacturing capacity. Here’s a projection out to 2030:

Even this projection, which shows America catching up just a little bit, is probably way too rosy. It was made at a time when Joe Biden’s industrial policy — specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act — was dishing out huge subsidies for American battery factories. Here’s what that looked like:

This wouldn’t have put American battery-making capacity on par with China, but it would have given us a fighting chance.

Now, though, Donald Trump and the Republicans are canceling the policies that were promoting American battery manufacturing:

A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans…would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks.

Electric vehicles are crucial for battery manufacturing capacity, because in peacetime, they’re the main source of demand for batteries. Pump up the EV industry, and you pump up the battery industry too — just as the chart above shows Biden doing. Kill the EV industry and you kill the battery industry too, just as Republicans now want to do. Harming the solar industry will also harm the battery industry, because some types of batteries are used to store solar energy for when the sun isn’t shining.

GOP policies are already mauling the American battery industry:

[M]ore [battery] projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona…“It’s hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits and regulations,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven’t been formally canceled yet.

In fact, the whole boom in American factory construction that happened under Biden appears to be halting and going into reverse under Trump, thanks to a combination of tariffs and the expected cancellation of industrial policies:

The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.

Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.

In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.

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Een paniekerig moment voor de 21-jarige Julia op de Hogeschool van Amsterdam vanochtend: ze schrok zich tijdens de les een hoedje toen de noodmelding van NL-alert tegelijk viel met het nationale luchtalarm om 12:00 uur. Aan haar vriendin en studiegenoot Aicha liet ze weten dat ze het allemaal maar grimmie de bimmie vond.

“Kweenie, met alles wat nu in de wereld speelt weet je wel, oorlog, erge dingen, het voelt allemaal heel grimmie de bimmie, zo’n alarm in combinatie met die trillende noodmelding op je telefoon.” zegt ze tegen Aicha. Die beaamt dit. “Ik krijg er zegmaar gewoon echt geen chille vibe van, weet je wel.” “Precies”, zegt Julia. “Echt zo niet chillie de billie.”

Hun volgende les begint, waardoor ze het beklemmende gevoel snel van zich af moeten schudden. “Niet te veel aan denken mop”, zegt Aicha. “Inderdaad”, zegt Julia. “Treurie kan gebeurie”.

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What if you want to find out more about the PS/2 Model 280? You head out to Google, type it in as a query, and realise the little “AI” summary that’s above the fold is clearly wrong. Then you run the same query again, multiple times, and notice that each time, the “AI” overview gives a different wrong answer, with made-up details it’s pulling out of its metaphorical ass. Eventually, after endless tries, Google does stumble upon the right answer: there never was a PS/2 Model 280, and every time the “AI” pretended that there was, it made up the whole thing.

Google’s “AI” is making up a different type of computer out of thin air every time you ask it about the PS/2 Model 280, including entirely bonkers claims that it had a 286 with memory expandable up to 128MB of RAM (the 286 can’t have more than 16). Only about 1 in 10 times does the query yield the correct answer that there is no Model 280 at all.

An expert will immediately notice discrepancies in the hallucinated answers, and will follow for example the List of IBM PS/2 Models article on Wikipedia. Which will very quickly establish that there is no Model 280.

The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it.

How much would you value a research assistant who gives you a different answer every time you ask, and although sometimes the answer may be correct, the incorrect answers look, if anything, more “real” than the correct ones?

↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum

This is only about a non-existent model of PS/2, which doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. However, what if someone is trying to find information about how to use a dangerous power tool? What if someone asks the Google “AI” about how to perform a certain home improvement procedure involving electricity? What if you try to repair your car following the instructions provided by “AI”? What if your mother follows the instructions listed in the leaflet that came with her new medication, which was “translated” using “AI”, and contains dangerous errors?

My father is currently undertaking a long diagnostic process to figure out what kind of age-related condition he has, which happens to involve a ton of tests and interviews by specialists. Since my parents are Dutch and moved to Sweden a few years ago, language is an issue, and as such, they rely on interpreters and my Swedish wife’s presence to overcome that barrier. A few months ago, though, they received the Swedish readout of an interview with a specialist, and pasted it into Google Translate to translate it to Dutch, since my wife and I were not available to translate it properly.

Reading through the translation, it all seemed perfectly fine; exactly the kind of fact-based, point-by-point readout doctors and medical specialists make to be shared with the patient, other involved specialists, and for future reference. However, somewhere halfway through, the translation suddenly said, completely out of nowhere: “The patient was combative and non-cooperative” (translated into English).

My parents, who can’t read Swedish and couldn’t double-check this, were obviously taken aback and very upset, since this weird interjection had absolutely no basis in reality. This readout covered a basic question-and-answer interview about symptoms, and at no point during the conversation with the friendly and kind doctor was there any strife or modicum of disagreement. Still, being into their ’70s and going through a complex and stressful diagnostic process in a foreign healthcare system, it’s not unsurprising my parents got upset.

When they shared this with the rest of our family, I immediately thought there must’ve been some sort of translation error introduced by Google Translate, because not only does the sentence in question not match my parents and the doctor in question at all, it would also be incredibly unprofessional. Even if the sentence were an accurate description of the patient-doctor interaction, it would never be shared with the patient in such a manner.

So, trying to calm everyone down by suggesting it was most likely a Google Translate error, I asked my parents to send me the source text so my wife and I could pour over it to discover where Google Translate went wrong, and if, perhaps, there was a spelling error in the source, or maybe some Swedish turn of phrase that could easily be misinterpreted even by a human translator. After pouring over the documents for a while, we came to a startling conclusion that was so, so much worse.

Google Translate made up the sentence out of thin air.

This wasn’t Google Translate taking a sentence and mangling it into something that didn’t make any sense. This wasn’t a spelling error that tripped up the numbskull “AI”. This wasn’t a case of a weird Swedish expression that requires a human translator to properly interpret and localise into Dutch. None of the usual Google Translate limitations were at play here. It just made up a very confrontational sentence out of thin air, and dumped it in between two other sentence that were properly present in the source text.

Now, I can only guess at what happened here, but my guess is that the preceding sentence in the source readout was very similar to a ton of other sentences in medical texts ingested by Google’s “AI”, and in some of the training material, that sentence was followed by some variation of “patient was combative and non-cooperative”. Since “AI” here is really just glorified autocomplete, it did exactly what autocomplete does: it made shit up that wasn’t there, thereby almost causing a major disagreement between a licensed medical professional and a patient.

Luckily for the medical professional and the patient in question, we caught it in time, and my family had a good laugh about it, but the next person this happens to might not be so lucky. Someone visiting a foreign country and getting medicine prescribed there after an incident might run instructions through Google Translate, only for Google to add a bunch of nonsense to the translation that causes the patient to misuse the medication – with potentially lethal consequences.

And you don’t even need to add “AI” translation into the mix, as the IBM PS/2 Model 280 queries show – Google’s “AI” is entirely capable of making shit up even without having to overcome a language barrier. People are going to trust what Google’s “AI” tells them above the fold, and it’s unquestionably going to lead to injury and most likely death.

And who will be held responsible?