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I imagine its more likely someone who is part of the underground body modification scene as most of the companies who are doing this kind of thing are doing so in more control;ed environments and even when its more out in the wild its with their own systems rather than interacting with 3rd party systems as there is obviously a liability to have in those situations. For example I know of one company who makes commercial smart locks, the kind many of us will have experienced where we have to walk around with a lanyard all day with a key card on them to get through doors. They have been testing with volunteers both internally and with some companies they supply to have to have the RFID chips that are in the cards embedded.

Some of the things the underground scene its doing though as they don't have the same red tape doing stuff to themselves that companies have is crazy. If I remember right Jack Whitehall visited one group in that spin off his his travels with my father show that was out last year if anyone wants to just see some of the the kind of things they are doing.

 

TBH it's not really any more scary than alot of the things we currently have. Your phone is tracking your location not just via things like GPS but its also connecting to the phones of people around you using a low powered Bluetooth mode that can't be turned off which is then being sent back to Google or Apple for use with things like Find My Phone so if its stolen and they turn wifi, gps and bluetooth off it can still report where it is.

And I'm sitting here right now with a Xiaomi Mi Band on which is recording my heart rate, my blood oxygen level, my breathing, my stress levels, my steps and my sleep. And some of the more expensive fitness bands/watches like the Apple Watch are recording even more data.

Most of us no doubt have smart speakers and other smart tech. They are recording a load of info about us, the smart speakers are having to listen to us and process that to know what we are asking. I have mmWave presence sensors in my rooms that not only know when someone enters it knows exactly where in the room I am even if I sit still, to a point where it knows when I'm sitting in certain places in the house at certain times to dim the lights, turn on the TV and load up the last show I was watching on the AppleTV in that room. And with the data it can tell if I fall asleep when it turn the TV off, turn the lights off and then set my alarm so thats an immense amount of data that is being tracked about me. And most of the smart speakers include either a motion sense in them so they know when you enter rooms or in the case of most Alexa's released in the last couple have mmWave presence sensors in them so they know all your movement in the room.


Then at work if you have a badge or keycard the RFID chip in that allows you to be tracked throughout the building and will even be seen by other companies. If you go for a coffee on the way to work you card will be picked up by its ID number, they might not know its you as they don't have access to your companies database linking the RFID number with a name but it's not a big leap to there being some central DB.

Our cars are also full of tech now all feeding data back and forth.Its recording where we go, its recording how we drive and in some cases is recording video outside and even at times inside the car

And there is a million other things we use all the time which is 'tracking' us which is is racking us just as much as an embedded chip could.


So really all having chips emended in us does is make it so you can't forget your phone, payment card or access key as its inside of you. And it can even increase security as if you lose your card or even your phone someone else can get it and use it but it's harder to use and we have built in 2 Factor Auth. For example your chip can be linked to a finger print or a retina scan so if someone cuts your chip out they don't have these to unlock it. It can also have secondary 'pins' which if placed in the right place you can use your fingers to enter as it could read finger movements. if your pin is 1534 moving your thumb, then 5th finger then 3rd finger then 4th finger could be recognised and used used to verify. And down the line they could probably lock it to your DNA so only you can use your chip

 

To add to this there are a few different ways we can try and resolve the issue (which is both of our CPU's are hitting 100% utilisation, a CPU will do do this at times in short less than a second spikes and thats fine but when it extends beyond a second or two all new processes have to queue up and if new processes get started quicker than each one is dealt with the queue just gets longer and longer. And when thats happening and you hit refresh your initial request is still in the queue but you add a new one on top. And not only do the processes of you requesting a page get queued other server related processes also get queued, they will have a higher priority so will execute sooner but it still needs the cpu to finish with what its working on to start on these so the whole server then just grinds to a halt especially if what can't run instantly is system critical).

We have gone first with the cheapest and easiest to implement solution first and that's upgrading the CPU's to a more premium Server CPU's plus it also comes with an upgrade from standard SSD drives to NVME SSD's (AMD's EPYC CPUS's). In theory these give around a 58% uplift so it should process all the request quicker but these figures are based on benchmarks of specific tasks so its no guarantee the uplift for our use case will be anywhere near that. Hopefully it's enough to keep usage in the 80-90% range when we get usage peaks which will be fine but if not we will have to look at one of the other options which range from being easy to implement but a decent amount more expensive (adding 2 more CPU's for example) to only a little more expensive but alot more complex to implement (Things like having multiple lower servers with a load balancer so that not all users are accessing the same server, one users connects and it will look at the two or more servers and will send you to the least utilised one, the next person might then get sent to a different server but with the data is all synced so you see content, a post is made on one server it will show up on all the servers. Or where we split the services over multiple servers, for example we have one for the web server and php and another for the database. In both cases we can scale each server down as it has to do less work so rather than costs doubling it will only increase a fraction but it will still costs more as it will see a increase in combined amount of resources, just not double the amount)

 

I'm still not 100% the upgrade we have done will be the fix we need but each morning between 4am and 5am the automated backup runs and that is pretty intensive and I would get the automated resource usage warning email. Since the upgrade I haven't received a single one of these warnings. So hopefully the uplift the more premium CPU's give which seems to be helping with the backups will also help when it comes to normal access to the site

 

It was a slightly different issue to the one we have been having. While it's been the CPU previously that was the issue this time we ran out of RAM. The database was using an excessive amount but I'm not sure at the moment if it was the db that caused it or that was a symptom. I should know better later when I can check the logs (I don't want to open the logs right now as that just means more resource usage)