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Make Your Own DHS Threat Level Display At Home
An anonymous reader writes "This guy put together what most law-abiding Slashdotters have always wanted for Christmas: a stylish, wall-mounted homeland security threat level display. A perfect accent for the living room."
You can save money by leaving out the three colors which aren't actually used.
Outside the bathroom door. The rest of the family will appriciate it.
The "low" (green) and "guarded" (blue) levels have never actually been used, and probably won't ever be, so they're only really there in theory.
Perhaps a more realistic version would've had the cutout for those two levels, but not bothered to install the color backing, because the switch would be rigged so selecting them is impossible.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Just put an "ELEVATED" sticker on the wall and you're set for life.
The last admin would have given this to ever home had they thought about it.
When you set it to green it explodes.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Michal Zalewski isn't just some guy. He's a well known security researcher.
see http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/142252/Homeland-Security-Drops-Color-Coded-Terror-Alerts
CAPTCHA: inhuman
I've gone low-tech. I just have the following video playing on the telly:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xg5m2n_janet-napolitano-and-wal-mart_news ...and have a more 'current' theme of Security Scare Theatre over the now decommissioned threat level display.
DHS has recommended dropping the colour-coded terror alert system.
Would prefer one.
I made my own CNC milling machine for less than $1000 plans http://www.drzib.com/projects.php (Google drzib projects)
where does the arduino go?
he who controls the spice controls the universe
But it's no use if it's not automatic! What if you forget to switch it to the appropriate level?
Smivs on the intertubes!
Wasn't the colour-coded threat level discontinued? I thought I remember reading about it on Schneier's
You could just stick to the good old Muppet threat level by embedding http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/terror.jpg into your site.
looks well built. and the photos are very nice too- talented chap
For extra fun, sew it into a Yankees jersey and wear it to Boston. They love blinking lights in Boston.
Of course making the plaid epoxy color filter would have been a little bit more complicated.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Sure, I'll just pull out my $21,000.00 mill... oh...
Even Oceania had DIY fans. Thinkpol was really happy to see that.
No news here.
The new kdawson.
The modern-fad "doomsday clock" would perhaps be inspired after the nuclear-war doomday clock, counting how close to implosion Wall St gets. In any case, it's neared midnight a number of times now. People like apocalypse clocks. doomsday clock, US Debt clock, ipv6 countdown clock. Impossible to tell how many fear and how many hope for a "Wall St Doomsday" -- but a clock just counts time.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Homeland Security should provide the threat level via WWVB, the time hack sent out of Colorado. This threat level device or something like it could update nationally in real time automatically like a clock.
E Proelio Veritas.
Surely this needs some way of communicating at the DHS. For example, I might spot my neighbour with a pair of binoculars, a book and a pen. We should report such suspicious activity to the authorities!!
But I like Dial A Yield better.
All 3 of them?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You too can give the gift of Big Brother to your loved ones.
That would be true if we were to use this display for the uncreative purpose of displaying whatever threat-level the DHS is currently at.
I would pay for a display like this. Back in 2004 I had to resort to using the various colors of the dry-erase-marker rainbow to create a threat-level display on the whiteboard in my office. Back then my team's product had a memory leak somewhere in it, and nobody believed me. The servers would be up for a handful of days, and then just when everybody was lulled into a false sense of security we would get a flurry of random OutOfMemoryExceptions as the whole thing would sieze up and become unresponsive - pulling system administrators out of their scheduled meetings to conduct emergency rolls in a panic. And then, back to business as usual.
At first I was alone in suspecting a leak. Back then we didn't have any memory monitoring in place so it was all thruthiness from my gut. But worse than being alone in my suspicions was the sinking feeling that the leak was proportional to user load, which was on a steady incline with no sine of abating. So over the course of a few months - while everybody went about their business of making sure to only work on things that could be billed to client project numbers - the frequency of emergency rolls steadily increased, and I kept elevating my threat level in response.
"What's that on your whiteboard," some would ask. I would explain that a shitstorm was on the horizon and that we had better take some time to find and fix the memory leak even if it meant taking a hit to billable hours. "Leak? What leak?"
By doing this I got a partner onboard who put some hand-rolled memory monitoring in place using JFreeChart to plot the decline. "See...a memory leak!," we would insist. "No, no," said the best and brightest of our software engineers. "It'll pick up," he continued, suggesting that maybe I didn't really understand how the garbage collector worked and that maybe it merely needed to fall below some threshold before it kicked in.
And with that, I once again elevated the threat level, and kept elevating it until it hit the top. Eventually we got to the point where one out of four nodes in our cluster was always in the process of being rolled, with users spilling over to the remaining 3, and one of them would crumble just as the 4th node was coming back up.
We eventually discovered a dubious use of ThreadLocal in the old version of Xalan (the pre-xsltc version), and fixed the problem by upgrading the library. But without the threat-level indicator in my office, I might never have gotten attention to the problem before it was too late.
I'll pay $200 for one of these boards. And I want all of the colors, damn it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Once the real DHS finds out he stole how they actually do it LOL.
Not to mention the maximum level of alert: The cover of Rush's seminal album "Moving Pictures".
This story should be removed.
I just stapled a piece of orange construction paper to my wall. It never moves off orange.
Such services are available now. There are "Christian ISPs", with heavy filtering at the server. They have very few customers.
Frankly, I don't care. Seriously, who even pays attention to these 'threat levels'?
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
What a complete waste of time, and on a project supportive of the awfulness that is security theater! Yet the results, the fine crafstman mill work, the sheer awesomeness of that beautiful, reflective, colored-letter DIY plate leaves me humbled. Well done sir, well done.
Sorry, law-abiding citizens don't use CNC machines and soldering irons. They help our economy by being good consumers this holiday season. Why don't you try a nice stylish wallclock, only $19.95?
As pretty as thas is, this is Slashdot and I'd have expected one or more of the following features:
(1) Internet connection
(2) Out of circuit, redundant internet connection
(3) A link to some DHS Threat Level status source with automated update of the status on the device
(4) some stupid social networking linkage (since it's so bloody ubiquitous...)
But, nice box.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
This would have been clever and amusing like 5 years ago. They're doing away with the color-coded threat level thing. It's like how that rotten-toothed unfunny "comic" russel brand gets on stage and insults Bush a year after he's been out of office.
That would be kick-ass.
It can get the security alert level via RSS or by polling a page on the DHS site and display the level in black on a background of the appropriate color.
I could white the C program to do all kinds of klaxon sounds if it ever changes. (Fat fucking chance.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"Make Your Own DHS Threat Level Display At Home"
In what world does using a fucking CNC MILLING MACHINE qualify as "at home". 99.999% of people do not have machining tools worth more than a car sitting around their house.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I thought all those jokes about American culture being based on fear were a just that. Now bring fear of a imagined threat into you home. Until attacks with in USA become a common feature in the news do you really need to be freaking you children out for nothing?
So this is a kind of home "theatre" system, then?
Just hang a picture of the Sun, since it is ALWAYS at ORANGE.