Tech Round Table Meeting 4/26/23

April 26, 2023 Tech Round Table meeting on Zoom

Main topic was Bruce Arnold’s purchase of the Bkouen Mini PC running Windows 11 Pro. Other topics included how a computer virus was created using ChatGPT, the collision issue of heavy batteries in EVs including a re-mention of Tesla’s EV Semi, Apple winning lawsuit to continue banning third party sales in apps, Robot Avatars, a video on NFC (Near Field Communication), and John Gbur showing the SanDisk 64GB iXpand Flash Drive Go for iPhone and iPad.

Bkouen Mini PC

Bruce Arnold purchased the Bkouen Mini PC so he had access to Windows 11 for assisting with support at the Hunterdon County Senior Services help desk. The 9.8 ounce computer does not include any peripherals such as keyboard, mouse and monitor. He used a 40 inch spare TV for a monitor and found a spare keyboard and mouse to get set up.

He was able to get the computer running quickly but Windows 11 required two updates and he claimed both took about 2 hours to complete. When done it consumed 1/2 of the 256 GB SSD disk space but he was able to remedy that with a disk cleaner.

Bruce mentioned it got hot, about 98 degrees, during the installation of Windows 11. The computer does come with a fan. He said he could not hear the fan but did feel air flow. The product information claims a quiet fan.

It has two USB 2.0, three USB 3.0 and two HDMI ports. Also has one Ethernet and one 3.5mm input/output audio port. It also has dual band Wifi 5.

Bruce did not install any apps such as Microsoft Office however he did conduct his Zoom session using the computer. That session went smoothly and he was able to share the screen.

The CPU is Intel N5105 with 4 cores and 4 threads. Its base frequency is 2.0GHz with a turbo frequency of 2.9GHx. It has a 4M smart cache. Power consumption is 8 watts.

Bkouen Intel Celeron N5105 CPU, 4Cores/4Threads and 8GB RAM — Bkouen Intel Celeron N5105 CPU

It can handle a dual display and has a small 4.84 x 4.84 x 0.91 inch footprint.

The price point is around $200 and comes with a 1 year guarantee. Bruce pointed out that the price soon was raised after he purchased it but then he checked back later and the price was reduced but still higher than what he paid. You can purchase a wireless keyboard and mouse for around $25.

SanDisk 64GB iXpand Flash Drive Go

John Gbur did a show and tell on his SanDisk 64GB iXpand Flash Drive Go for iPhone and iPad. It requires a USB Type-C port. It is also available as 128GB and 256GB. His previous equivalent functionality flash drive stopped working when iOS updated recently. It can be useful if your iOS device is scrunched for space or you want an offline backup.

There is an app, called the iXpand Drive app, to download from the App store to assist in using the ScanDisk.

You can use this to automatically backup your video and image and for that matter take videos and images directly on the drive.

Using AI to Create a Virus

Is it possible to engage AI chats like ChatGPT for nefarious uses like hacking and creating computer viruses? First the terms of service explicitly prohibit that use. Second the interfaces will politely decline prompts for such requests.

However with clever use of prompts, you may be able to circumvent the AI chat interface from detecting those uses.

This was proven by Aaron Mulgrew. Aaron did so as an experiment. In fact he release an article entitled I built a Zero Day virus with undetectable exfiltration using only ChatGPT prompts explaining how to go about it.

Aaron had two goals in his project:

How easy it is to evade the insufficient guardrails that ChatGPT has in place
How easy it is to create advanced malware without writing any code and only using ChatGPT

To achieve his goals he had to find a way to prompt ChatGPT in a way it was not aware of its intentions.

To work around this, I decided rather than being up front with my requests to ChatGPT, I decided to generate small snippets of helper code and manually put the entire executable together. I concluded steganography is the best approach for exfiltration, and ‘living off the land’ would be the best approach by searching for large image files already existent on the drive itself.

He did this essentially by asking for snippets of code that would be used by any programming effort. Then he combined them into his final solution.

Heavy EV Batteries and Collisions

The National Transportation Safety Board head Jennifer Homendy expressed concerns about the safety risks of heavier EVs in collisions with lighter vehicles. Heavier translates into heavy cars and all trucks.

2022 Hummer Ultium battery pack 2,923 pounds

The larger the vehicle the bigger the battery. The bigger the battery and the heavier the vehicle at around 33% heavier. Some of the numbers are astonishing. For example a Ford’s F-150 Lightning EV pickup truck add 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of weight over an equal combustion engine model. The 4.5 ton GMC Hummer battery packs a weight of 2,923 pounds Elon Musk’s Semi is estimated at 11,000 pounds although the Tesla Semi official website hides the battery weight.

Bottom line is EV vehicles are heavier than their combustion engine counterparts.
Lon Hosford

The statistic that brings into light the heavier vehicle increases the chances of deaths in collisions. In 2011 “National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper that said being hit by a vehicle with an added 1,000 pounds increases by 47% the probability of being killed in a crash.”

Add to that EV’s have larger horsepower allowing for faster accelerate which may compromise safety in more crowded urban areas with people on the streets.

Then EVs are quieter than combustion vehicles reducing one of the signs that might alert a pedestrian of a potential danger.

Apple Ban On In App Third Party Sales Upheld

Apple takes a cut of all sales for transactions in apps on your iOS devices. This means an iOS app developer cannot use a third party to handle a transaction and bypass the Apple commission.

This ban was upheld by U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on April 24th. The court affirmed a lower court ruling in Apple v. Epic Games.

Open App Markets Act

However Congress is developing legislation to open up the iOS app. It is called the Open App Markets Act. The bill is aiming at preventing companies that operate app stores engaging in anti-competitive behaviors. The bill would apply to app stores with 50 million or more US users. Some of those anti-competitive behaviors noted by the Verge article include:

Requiring developers to use the company’s own in-app payment processor as a condition of using the store
Penalizing a developer for offering better prices on another app store
Restricting developers from directly contacting customers with business offers
Using private analytics data from third-party apps to build its own competitors
“Unreasonably” preferencing its own apps in search results

NFC (Near Field Communications) – Tap to Pay

Jack Sharp shared a Wall Street Journal video that explains how tapping your credit or bank card to pay works and why or why not you care to use it. Surprising it has not given a big incentive to people over sliding a card into the slot so its adoption is slow.

You also will learn about the security in the video.

Robot Avatars

Bruce Arnold had shared an article from IEEE Spectrum on the state of robotic avatars. Its a long but very informative article. It contains many images and some videos.

A robotic avatar system is similar to virtual reality, in that both allow a person located in one place to experience and interact with a different place using technology as an interface. Like VR, an effective robotic avatar enables the user to see, hear, touch, move, and communicate in such a way that they feel like they’re actually somewhere else. But where VR puts a human into a virtual environment, a robotic avatar brings a human into a physical environment, which could be in the next room or thousands of kilometers away.
Evan Ackerman IEEE Spectrum 4/16/23

Imagine working from home as a warehouse employee or construction worker! More simply interfacing the yard work for you so you can sit inside comfortable.

At this point the user wears a VR headset for visual input for what the robot sees. I pointed out that the use of a VR headset since its introduction in the Atari days has had some users reporting of headaches.

After Hours

Image AI

After hours discussed more of the impact of AI. I pointed out the impact perhaps the stock photo companies and those working in the image production fields. This was from my projects with OpenAI’s DALL-E image generation API. Clearly workers in these fields will have to start learning and integrating image generation and editing AI for their skill sets.

We bandied about the issues of EV batteries making the cars heavier. For example would auto insurance be more based on the size and more likely on the increased damage and death potential in collisions. It seems we have a long learning curve for adopting EVs in the US based on how we use cars and trucks.

We also took a closer look at other Tesla electric products like the Solar Roof, Solar Panels and the Powerwall. Solar Roof is a solar tiled roof vs solar panels you might put anywhere such as on a roof. The Powerwall is battery backup for a home.