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Terror Plot, NASA, DHS Patch Alert
It was a tough decision to part with my laptop, PDA and mobile but I decided to take my chances. It only really then dawned on me the extent to which I depend on these items when I was waiting for hours to clear security ... While I could have found a public pay phone, all my phone numbers are stored in my mobile & PDA and I actually remember very few of them. I could speak to people, after somehow getting their numbers, but they could not call me back. All the usual channels that are normally available to me to get information about a delay were unavailable to me - no web access or even SMS messages to friends with access. You just have to stand in a queue like a sheep.
[...]
As has been reported, items allowed were limited to wallets/travel documents and baby/health-specific products. However, many of us brought books and papers with us also. Interestingly, Duty Free shops were open airside - although I didn't see if any electronics shops were. The focus this morning was really on what can be brought from landside to airside and they didn't seem to have thought about what you buy airside so much (although I would speculate that electronic items bought airside do not pose such a threat in that terrorists would use pre-modified devices to detonate explosives). The search at security was a remove shoes, belts etc. job - rather like being in the US :)
"First, congratulations to the Security Services for foiling this plot," writes reader ettlz, before raising a few relevant questions:
Did they need to detain someone for 90 days without trial to prevent this disaster? Would ID cards have helped?
And how long before I can travel with my notebook onto an aeroplane again, as we all know a cargo hold is no place for a lithium ion battery?
Null537 asks
Is anyone else more angry about the hassle this causes, than anything else? Terrorists spread terror, so they've hit their mark. By being foiled the plot does an amazing amount of damage on its own, spreading FUD.
I don't feel any safer by having my liquids/toenail clippers/pocket vibe/ipod/laptop taken away from me, when there are plenty of other ways to kill/be killed that airlines have no control over. I am more angry at terrorists for making American privacy close(er) to extinction than anything else. With a "war" on "terror" there are going to be casualties, my water consumption/music listening/laptop using/game playing/phone usage habits shouldn't be at the top of the list.
Why does the scapegoat have to be the common citizen?
Reader v1 left one of hundreds of comments on the missing original recordings of the first moon walk, which NASA would like to recover and safely archive before their inevitable deterioration past the point of rescue.
It would not surprise me if these tapes have been in some very rich person's "personal museum" for the last several years, the result of a quiet and large payoff to someone that had access to the archives. Things like this don't just "disappear," they "grow legs."
Ninwa questions the significance of the claim made in the linked article that "The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.":
Is the article honestly trying to suggest that NASA couldn't reverse engineer a format and design a player for it if the original player was lost? I personally find that a little hard to believe. It just sounds like a convenience excuse to create a "give-up searching" date. In my opinion these tapes are very important to our country's history. It's almost shameful to me to think they could have lost them so easily.
According to reader Detritus, "The format isn't a big mystery, it's IRIG 106 if anyone cares" -- but that's not the problem, he says:
The problem is that as part of the continuing budget crunch at NASA, made worse by the need to scrounge money from the existing budget for new tasks like a Shuttle replacement and going to Mars, many activities and facilities are being cut or eliminated. The lab that can handle these old tapes, the Data Evaluation Lab at Goddard, has lost its funding. That means that it will be closed at the end of this fiscal year. The equipment goes into storage or is surplused. The people have to find other jobs or be laid off or retire.
Building a recorder from scratch would be insanely expensive. These recorders cost anywhere from $50-100K when they were new and being manufactured in quantity.
It's easy to say that "they" should keep and maintain the hardware, catalog and store the tapes in climate controlled warehouses, and do all the other things needed to preserve the data for future generations. That doesn't pay the bills. Just storing a tape can cost a dollar or more a year. That doesn't sound too bad until you realize that a single spacecraft can easily generate tens of thousands of tapes. Another problem is that at $100-200 for a new reel of tape, there has always been a large incentive to recycle and reuse tapes for current missions.
Reader Aufero has no trouble believing that if NASA did have to reverse engineer the format, it would run into more than a bit of bureaucratic barbed wire:
If NASA did it, it would require five years, fifteen administrators, and fifty million dollars. The quarterly funding reviews alone (much less the reviews of the reviews) would take up more time than the project, and the funding would be proxmired halfway through to pay for a bridge to an island owned by a friend of some congressman. If they ever find the tapes they should hand them over to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which would probably have them transferred to more durable media in six months at a cost of $30,000.
The problem of preservation sure isn't one confined to NASA, though: reader drDugan writes with an insightful comment on long-term storage of historically important but voluminous data:
I was recently at a meeting in Bethesda at the NIH and heard Don Lindberg, the director of the national library of medicine talk about long term information storage.
After going through all the normal stuff about media degrading and backups, etc -- he made a really interesting point: The only way to really ensure REALLY LONG storage - like tens of thousands of years is to keep having people accessing information. The point he made is that all the storage technology will continue to evolve, and it's only the information we stop accessing that will fall into danger of getting lost.
I thought it was a good point.
Why on earth do we not have access to the original data from the Moon landings? If we did, lots of people would have a copy around. Silly secretive state.
On the announcement that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had issued a strongly worded recommendation that Windows users update their computers with the latest security patches from Microsoft, tholomyes writes that the suggestion is a good one:
This update is as important as it gets. There are vulnerabilities in every major MS program which allow remote code execution, which means that as soon as the exploit is discovered, it can take advantage of holes all over your system.
Affected programs and services:
- MS Server Services (TCP 139 and 445)
- DNS servers
- Internet Explorer
- Outlook Express
- Microsoft Management Console
- HTML Help
- Visual Basic
- Microsoft Office
- Windows kernel
I'm not too surprised that they're trying to push awareness of this patch. It was the lack of patching several weeks beforehand that allowed Code Red to do as much damage as it did.
Many comments suggested that the Department of Homeland Security's motives for issuing its urgent suggestion to patch systems were less than admirable, if not not downright conspiratorial; in response to by ExE122's suggestion that "monitoring 10 million computers to find out what porn sites people like to visit isn't [a government priority]," Shaper_pmp offered a level-headed reason not to discount such suspicions:
How about monitoring 10 million phone calls?
And with a handy backdoor installed monitoring computers would be even easier to automate.
I'm not saying they have, merely that your pooh-poohing of the whole idea is a bit baseless when they've already been caught doing essentially the same thing in a different medium.
[...] The only way this makes sense to me is if you're saying conspiracy theories shouldn't attract tinfoil hat accusations any more... because everyone knows they're watching you, lying to you and breaking the law all the damn time?
Reader twofidyKidd outlines the tension that makes it hard to decide between tempting conspiracies and comforting trust:
The real problem is that our cynicism makes viewing realistic possibilities hard to imagine, and our tools [of] logical deduction sort of seem to fail. Occam's razor can't be used in a situation like this because time has proved over and again that the interests of people at the government level aren't always in the interest of people at the constituency level. This is one of those times that we (the Slashdot conflux) would like to imagine that someone (like Lawrence Lessig or Brad Templeton) has finally said something to an official that he finally understood and as a result has taken this action, but since we often have a hard time getting our own management to listen to the good ideas we put forth, we're hesitant to believe such a thing has happened. In fact, given the recent history of our government, we're much more inclined to consider a sinister purpose. The DHS press release has many of the "hidden agenda" trappings, like specifically indicating which patch to apply, as well as the call of immediacy. ...
Just to put things in perspective; right now, Britons are unloading all liquids and gels into trash cans prior to boarding U.S.-bound planes, while we're wondering if the U.S. government is acting in our best interest by adamantly suggesting we patch our Windows computers.
Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose comments went into each of these conversations.
Null357 asked "With a "war" on "terror" there are going to be casualties, my water consumption/music listening/laptop using/game playing/phone usage habits shouldn't be at the top of the list."
Sorry, but your not at the top of the list. Your a casualty of the other side's attempt to make you a real casualty.
What would you have the government do? The media has already handcuffed them with the help of paticular interest groups from doing what is truly effective, profiling. So whats left? Simple, inconvienence EVERYONE. After all its "only fair". Hence my mother gets harrased trying to board flights with her dog. One day some of ya'll are going to grow up and realize that "the man" isn't out to get you. He is out to get the bad guy and the real problem is that the most effective ways are denied to him because of political correctness.
The truth is that there is a group of people out there who only want to kill. You are no more an individual target of their aspirations as you are no more the direct target of restrictions of what you are allowed to take on a plane with you. These people don't care. The fact that they are willing to die to kill others means that we going to suffer some extraordinary restrictions just to make sure they don't get the chance. You want to blame someone, blame them. I know, its far easier to blame our government and Bush (in fact its popular among some segments) but the truth is that they didn't create this enemy. Its been around a long time. Time and technology have given them a means to hit people other than in their home areas.
This will continue until this group is either rendered harmless or their attempts so futile they go back to doing what they did before.
honestly, what would you expect of your government with regards to this situation? There is no reasonable defense that will work against an unreasonable enemy. The sooner that is acknowleged the sooner many will realize just what a major problem it truly is.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why does the scapegoat have to be the
When the terrorists first attacked, we were told to keep living our lives and not let the attacks change our lives. The attacks didn't - our Government has.
As far as I'm concerned, the terrorists have occomplished one of their goals: we are all living in fear. The terrorists just threaten us and we end up having to have more of our civil liberties taken away.
Congratualations, Bin Laden! You are a fucking genius! You've won. The US is now a cowering giant.
Watch out world, the trouble with cowering giants, they can turn into the worst bullies! I heard a woman on talk radio this morning who thinks that terrorists should be put into old military bases - in effect, she was suggesting we creat concentration camps for Muslims.
There's another Holocost coming! But this time its:
Multi state
Against the Muslims
and no one will stop it!
I didn't comment yesterday on this, and thought about it last night.
Every time there's an environmental regulation (clean air, clean water) or some social program which impacts business, there's an instant outcry from the right side of the aisle that there needs to be an economic impact study to determine if these new regulations are really financially viable. So, where is the cry now? We're looking at billions upon billions of lost productivity, likely slowing of the economy, more people losing jobs and healthcare (and other) benefits beacuse of the increased "downtime" due to these draconian flight regulations.
There were what, 10 aircraft in all, tops? I want to see the cost of the aircraft and the insurance value of the couple thousand people balanced against the lost productivity. Yes, call me cynical.
Oh, and I'd just like to point out that they caught these folks without the ban in place, and only catching the extra one or two planes that might slip by just makes my economic argument that much more salient.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm just a regular guy, and I thought of it, so if it's viable, some bad dude has thought of it too. The best protection from this sort of attack is to not make someone hate you enough to want to attack you. We can cry "ooh they hate our freedoms", but their problems are more tangible than that. meh. flame on.
I would rather have to have to buy new toothpaste because the airline won't get my bags to me for another day than risk having a loved one killed crossing the pond.
The only way to ensure someone has no risk of being killed doing something is to kill them beforehand.
I would rather your perception on risk in no way affects how the rest of us conduct our travel.
Are you serious? If you don't want to risk getting killed crossing the pond, I suggest you just don't fly. You can't prevent terrorism thru the so-called security you go thru at the airport. It's not security, its a huge, costly waste of time masquerading as effective security procedures. How hard do you think it will be for terrorists just to put some "toothpaste" in a non-metal container and just sail thru security anyways? So, while they are doing that, the rest of us get to stand around like friggin bare-footed, thirsty sheep going thru the turnstile. Are you okay with full body pat-downs next?
Put me on the airline that doesn't screw with this. I'm more worried about getting killed on the drive to the airport.
Sorry for the rant. Your sig. is really funny.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
That is massive. How many bags do you think are handled a day by these airlines? How many passengers per year?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This is always the case for challenging parties, regardless of who is in power.
For whoever is in power to lose the next election, they have to screw up (or be perceived to have screwed up).
A modified watch could give out enough juice to do the deed.
You mean like a Casio digital watch? That is a very suspicious thing to wear these days, and can easily earn you a one way ticket to Guantanamo bay.
Terror is your election enemy. Say goodbye to '06 and '08.
You know when election season is finally upon us, because they start changing the DHS color and issuing alerts.
I'm going on a trip to the UK soon and I'm not going to be able to take any carry-on luggage on the plane now! Six hours of thumbing through Skymall. For the past few years I've usually tried to avoid scheduling flights before elections, but a wedding forced my hand this time. Still, I figured, it's only primary season- the general campaigning isn't until after my return flight. Now I'm facing a long flight from the UK without my usual accoutrements!
Screw you, Lieberman! How can an incumbent lose a primary!
It's not as if terrorism is the big deal we make it out to be anyway. More Americans died in 2001 from asthma.
There are a lot more people, far more densely packed, in a typical airport secrity check area.
Why not just blow up one of those? The building and the equipment there is probably more valuable
than an aircraft, and a terrorist would not even have to do all that careful planning. You might not
be able to get through the checkpoint with so much as a plastic fork or a bottle of hair conditioner,
but you can certainly walk right up *to* the crowded checkpoint with anything you can carry.
Frankly I'm surprised it hasn't happened.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Several terrorist plots were foiled under Clinton's watch (such as the attempted bombing of the Holland Tunnel) but of course he didn't dislocate his shoulder trying to pat himself on the back or hold any press conferences or anything as this administration no doubt would.
Yes, cheer as our country is scared into totalitarianism. That's just great. You're the type of idiot that would have followed the sheep into fascism in Nazi Germany after the staged bombing of the Reichstag. Grow a brain.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Here, the cure is the same as the malady it is supposed to be curing. Yeah, yeah, I know, sometimes you have to do things you don't like, but that's really not the issue. The issue is not whether X, Y or Z is necessary, the issue is whether X, Y or Z is substantially different from what they are remedies for.
If you wage a war to prevent a war, you still have a war. The war you attempted to prevent may now not take place, but since it has been substituted for something that is essentially identical, that isn't much of an achievement.
The biggest problem is when you don't, in fact, prevent whatever it is - or even causes it when it would probably never have occured on its own. Then everyone gets to suffer twice, quite needlessly. See World Wars I and II for details.
The current instability in Russia, and quite possibly the two Chechen wars as well, are likely a byproduct of Western countries depriving Gorbechev of the aid he needed to stabilize things after Glastnost. Ronald Reagan and George Bush I denied that aid on political grounds. True, we'll never know what would have happened if a concerted effort had been made at that time to bring Russia to a healthier economic condition. Things might have ended up worse. However, by waging a political war to prevent that "might be", conditions deteriorated to the point where actual wars were fought and actual people died.
If we look at the current instabilities, it is in populations that have been neglected, where poverty is high, life expectency is low, purpose and meaning are seldom to be found. It would seem obvious to me that smashing property and killing wildly is not going to improve things in such a climate, but this has been the typical response. As responses go, it is flat-out guaranteed to be counter-productive.
There's an interesting article in The Guardian (sorry, Teh Grauniad) newspaper where an anti-terror expert claims that 95% of terrorists are acting on secular or political grievances. (Notice the word "grievance". It's important.) The implication of the Palestinian situation, the Russian situation and the Middle East situation is obvious - if we created a tolerable society where we can, and avoided creating an intolerable one otherwise, 95% of the problem would go away on its own, leaving a paltry 5% for the super-paranoid police and intelligence organizations to fret over.
(I'm not sure I would trust them with much more than 1/20th of their current workload, anyway.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, I agree. I was actually thinking in broader terms, not just about planes.
In that case it is a good news is that a Muslim cannot turn himself into a claymore by swallowing a pack and walking into a Yankee stadium; he'd have to strap a shitload of gear and can be picked off from afar.
Also, there is a difference between 100 people on a plane going down and 3000 in two towers going down; so as bad as it sounds, shooting down hijacked planes might be a good idea after all.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Seriously though, it's impossible to negotiate with someone who's opening position is a deal breaker, as in:
Western Civilization: "What can we do to make you stop hating us and trying to blow up our planes?"
Islamic Horde: "All you of you must die"
Western Civilization: "yeah, that doesn't work for us. How about... we send your goverment tons of money?"
Islamic Horde: "Um, we'll take the money, sure, but then, all of you must die."
Western Civilization: "Let's try this another way. What if we just leave all of you alone?"
Islamic Horde: "Well, to the extent it enables us to kill all of you, that works for us, but again, our basic position, and this is a deal-breaker, is that you must all die."
etc.etc.
The solution is not to look inward and say "what can we do to make them stop hating us?" It's to ask instead, "what can we do to make them understand that trying to kill us doesn't work as a strategy."
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
You miss the point. The objective of these terrorists was not to bring down the plane, or even to burn people. The objective was to terrorize; to cause mass panic; to force us to all take off our shoes before we get on the plane; to force us all to check our carry-on bags, and throw out our water and toothpaste before the flight. Looking at the results, this was the most spectacularly successful terrorist attack in a while.
Reality has a liberal bias
I agree to some extent, but I think that the percentage of people who would attack us just for being there vs people who attack us for what they perceive to be concrete geopolitical reasons is quite a bit smaller than you think it is. The craziest of the crazy may be the ones in charge and driving policy, but I would guess that the people on the ground would, by and large, not be easily convinced that the issue was worth dying for unless there was some serious geopolitical cause involved. I have to wonder how easy it would be to recruit terrorists to die in an attack on Norway or China, each of which most likely has a culture that violates a number of funamental Islamic principals.
The reason I'm worried about the "they'll attack us no matter what" attitude is that I think that it creates a policy that's fundamentally destructive. If we can position ourselves in such a way that the average citizen of a devoutly Muslim country doesn't think we should all be killed, it makes it much easier to weed out the ones who do want us dead and are willing ot act on it. As it stands, we don't have a lot of policing support in the nations that harbor terrorists largely because the average non-terrorist citizen isn't too fond of us and doesn't particularly think it's a bad thing for us to get poked in the eye. If we can just be introspective enough to change the general opinion to "well, they're not Muslims, but we shouldn't be killing them," it's a lot harder for terrorists to operate and recruit within those countries.
The problem we have fundamentally is the fact that politicians are scared to be introspective about how our foreign policy affects our popularity because they're afraid to be labeled as "nutty blame-America-first America-haters!" The simple assumption seems to be, "We're Americans and we've always been the good guys, therefore everything we do is good and anybody who thinks it's not is bad." Admitting that our foreign policy may be stepping on some toes and encouraging terrorism against us is not the same as beliving that such terrorism is justified. Likewise, admitting that we may be stirring up hornets' nests unnecessarily is not necessarily the same as capitulating to terrorist demands. All we get by admitting no fault (or assuming that nothing we can do aside from killing the bad guys will ever make things better) does is leave us on the bad side of populations we should be relying upon to police themselves.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
"Free people do not relinquish their security. This is contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example." --Bin Laden's speech