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Hate to spoil a touch of nuclear scaremongering, but the old nuclear test sites have been open to tourists for decades.

http://www.atomictourist.com/nts.htm
http://www.bikiniatoll.com/

That all sounds fair enough except for one thing... what did we actually "win"?

A nonnuclear Iraq and an end to the notorious Hussein government who has historically been extremely aggressive militarily and shown a willingness to use WMD. My take is that if the world did nothing, the sanctions on Iraq would have been lifted years ago, and Saddam Hussein would now be restarting his nuclear weapons program. And the Middle East would be much closer to a nuclear war than it is.

I originally thought that the process of developing nuclear weapons would be difficult. That was before I stood in Experimental Breeder Reactor 1. It was basically a small breeder reactor capable of producing modest amounts of plutonium from depleted uranium. The scale of the project is relatively small for the US. The building has effectively three stories, one undergrounnd and maybe fills around an acre of real estate. IIRC, the staff for the place was somewhere around 50-100 (ignoring guards). The technology of the time was very simple and I figure recreating this project, while taking liberal shortcuts with safety, would probably only cost a few tens of millions.

People ignore nuclear proliferation at our collective peril that even back then, considerable work in the development of nuclear weapons just didn't take that much infrastructure. Now, there are a number of countries with the economic capability of the US in the Second World War. This number will only grow as the world economy grows. Further technology has advanced enormously since the time of the Second World War.

In the early 90's th U.S. declassified the bunker under the Greenbrier resort in WV - http://www.atomictourist.com/green.htm - and while not as big as the U.K. city, it's open for tours...

Speaking of Atomic stuff...go visit some early atomic history up in Idaho.

Atmoic City I believe is still being used for research. But the real gem along the way is EBR-1, which stands for Experimental Breeder Reactor 1.

To quote some sources:
The Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 was the first facility to produce electricity generated by nuclear energy.

The Experimental Breeder Reactor - 1 (EBR-1) is located at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho. On December 20, 1951, the EBR-1 produced the first usable electricity generated by atomic energy . From the next day until it was decommissioned in 1963, the EBR-1 supplied all of the power for its own building. Three years after it was decommissioned, President Johnson dedicated the facility as a registered National Historic Landmark.

The nearby city of Arco, Idaho became the first city in the world to be lit by nuclear power.

You can take a tour of the facility and walk into the reactor core, stand on top of it, see the original lightbulbs that lit. Plus outside are some wicked looking experimental engines that they wanted to use for atomic powered bombers. Never used in real-life, they make for some interesting display.

For photos, more details and driving instructions, check out this site.

- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.

- AC

Try to visit the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona. It's near Tucson. It's a missile silo, with missile, converted to a museum.

Bah. If you're looking for a real example of applied technology around Vegas, make a reservation with the Department of Energy and see the Nevada Test Site. Land of a thousand nuclear craters. And it's only one hour north of Vegas. :-)

Also, since you can only get there by DoE's bus tour, it's great for backpackers, so long as they make your reservation well in advance, especially if you're not a US Citizen.

If you're into atomic tourism then the Sedan Crater is much more impressive than Trinity test site. The Titan Museum is also said to be very interesting.

Another spooky monument to technology (not atomic) is the Airplane Graveyard near Tucson.

Well, there was that trivial little thing known as an atomic bomb....

Running diverse software on the roots is probably a Good Thing, but security through obscurity isn't

Man this is such a false meme, where did it get started? Obscurity by itself is questionable security, but as a component of a multi-layered security strategy it's perfectly reasonable.

• Security by obscurity is your world-readable /etc/passwd file, with the password data either hashed (obscured) or moved to the shadow file (also obscured). (And if your shadow password file isn't world readable, that's just more obscurity.)

• Security by obscurity is the fact that most people don't have the names & addresses of the personnel running the US military's nuclear weapons systems so that these people can't be blackmailed. Maybe these people can be trusted not to betray their country under torture and such, but keeping their identities non-public -- an obscurity measure -- is important too.

• Security by obscurity is Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" (*cough* Greenbrier Resort, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia)

• Security by obscurity is restricting access to your company's co-location facility, so that untrusted people can't get physical access to your equipment.

In short, in a broad sense, "security by obscurity" is a lot of good ideas, when you think about it. Any of these ideas can be an Achilles heel, but the solution there is not to cut off the heel altogether, but to wear sensible shoes when going out in the wilderness :)

To get back to the original topic, obscurity is a perfectly good tactic for the people running these DNS servers as part of their overall strategy for protecting the system. It's perfectly reasonable for certain aspects of their systems, processes, etc to be kept on a need to know basis. Sure, there is a benefit to keeping software source open as a security measure, though the benefit of doing that is debatable (and no, I'm not going to be the one to debate it -- I agree that it's generally a good idea but can understand some of the objections). But in this case, where the software is a black box to the outside world, and it's explicitly *not* meant for general DNS use (it's meant for authoritative servers only!) I don't see any particular harm in keeping their doors locked down pretty well.

Not that they're doing that in the first place. As another reply noted, you yourself write that both the betas & release will be available under a BSD style license :-)

But moreover, your objections are I think misplaced -- as are most of the people that blindly parrot the "obscurity is bad" meme. Think about what you're saying -- it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Cool! (Sorry, I'm a sucker for Cold War History - might I also recommend The Bureau of Atomic Tourism"> as a vacation planning site?)

For the Bay Area, I recommend the nearby SF-88 Nike Missile Base. During the 60s, this was the last line of defence against incoming bombers - the entire system was dismantled after the signing of the ABM treaty, except for one site that was kept (mostly) intact for historical purposes.

Located just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and open a couple of days a week, you'll get to stand on the launch platform and descend into the bay where the missiles were stored. When you're not standing on the platform, they can also raise the missiles into firing position.

The tour guides are informed and geeky - when they detect a fellow geek, most will be happy to show off the gear they've restored. Lots of analog computers, vaccuum tubes, and frighteningly-high voltages. Be sure to ask how the computers worked. You'll be amazed at the engineering.

> The tour includes the actual control room where launch codes were recieved, and the infamous red button & code book are kept. You can even push it..Doing so before 1983 would have meant a couple million people would die.. :)

Likewise, the control vans at the Nike Missile Base feature a Button. Pushing said button before 1973, would have taken out a squadron of incoming Soviet bombers 100+ miles away with either a conventionally-tipped or nuclear-tipped warhead, saving several million people :)

Less than two minutes down the road the launcher at SF-88L, is a second Nike launch site - SF-87L. Better known as the Marine Mammal Center, it now defends cute little seals and sea otters, and is also open to visitors daily.

The hike up to the radar platforms at SF-87C is a bit long, but affords a wonderful view of the Marin headlands. (In addition to some of the best views in the Bay Area, the whole area is full of historical artifacts, including abandoned artillery emplacements from the Spanish-American War, through World War I and II.)

Well, actually even though it never did go into service, it WAS nasty as hell when it experienced a partial core meltdown on November 29, 1955.

For some reason, most of the sites like this that show it lighting four light bulbs or mention Arco, Idaho as "the first city to be lit by atomic power" don't seem to mention this...

If you are ever in Idaho, you should visit EBR-1, the world's first breeder reactor. It is decommissioned, cold, and open for tourists during the summer season. Outside, they have some prototype nuclear jet engines - devices that took in air, heated it with a fission reactor, and expelled it for thrust. Neat stuff - would have been nasty as hell had it ever gone into service, but neat none the less.

EBR-1 is about 4 hours drive from the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park, and about 45 minute from Craters of the Moon National Park, so there's plenty of other stuff to do in the area.