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Air Traffic Control "Telephone Glitch" Delays Hundreds of UK Flights
First time accepted submitter biodata writes "The BBC is reporting that hundreds of UK commercial air flights have been delayed for most of Saturday due to an internal telephone systems problem in the National Air Traffic Control Service, and delays are likely to continue into the evening. A spokesperson said that it was a different software bug from the one which grounded flights in the summer."
"difficult software bug from the one which grounded flights"
well, spellchecker did not complain, so we're all set...
Rich
I believe you meant to say "different software bug," not "difficult software bug."
@Clive Robinson
A lot of people are wondering why dragosr was the only one to run across this malware. In fact, he wasn't. The people who were before him were mocked and most threads closed and either deleted or shuffled to areas of message boards where Joe Q public couldn't see it and question this for themselves. [some] Major Anti-Virus companies included.
Users didn't want to know, companies didn't want to know. Unless you were "known" in the field, like dragosr, and even then, you are handled like you may be retarded or just need a vacation.
Here is one of dozens of reports:
LCD Monitor Broadcasts Noise To Radio! Why? (FRS)
http://forums.radioreference.com/computer/255488-lcd-monitor-broadcasts-noise-radio-why.html
Final post in that thread:
"BOTTOM LINE: No matter WHAT you do, all devices that use electricity will emit some sort of interference in the air and there's nothing you can do about it without unplugging/turning it off. "
including:
"Have you noticed any nondescript white vans or black helicopters in your neighborhood?
What do you do or have you done to make "them" take such an interest in you that "they" have to bug you?
You need a bigger tinfoil hat, perhaps a full body suit."
Another thread:
Gpu based paravirtualization rootkit, all os vulne
http://forum.sysinternals.com/gpu-based-paravirtualization-rootkit-all-os-vulne_topic26706.html
This:
U.N. report reveals secret law enforcement techniques
"Point 201: Mentions a new covert communications technique using software defined high frequency radio receivers routed through the computer creating no logs, using no central server and extremely difficult for law enforcement to intercept."
http://www.unodc.org/documents/frontpage/Use_of_Internet_for_Terrorist_Purposes.pdf
http://www.hacker10.com/other-computing/u-n-report-reveals-secret-law-enforcement-techniques/
I think this is something which has been brewing for years, but "forces" beyond our sight have managed to stifle any serious investigation into the technology. Some have announced they are retreating to ancient technology of the 70's and 80's, others are looking towards open source hardware and software combinations.
Is it time Wireshark included audio monitoring as well? Off to play with a recording device and Audacity.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/friday_squid_bl_402.html#c2751193
Mind Games
New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, January 14, 2007
IF HARLAN GIRARD IS CRAZY, HE DOESN'T ACT THE PART. He is standing just where he said he would be, below the Philadelphia train station's World War II memorial -- a soaring statue of a winged angel embracing a fallen combatant, as if lifting him to heaven. Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. He looks like a local businessman dressed for a casual Friday -- a local businessman with a wickedly dark sense of humor, which had become apparent when he said to look for him beneath "the angel sodomizing a dead soldier." At 70, he appears robust and healthy -- not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking. He is also carrying a bag.
Girard's description of himself is matter-of-fact, until he explains what's in the bag: documents he believes prove that the government is attempting to control his mind. He carries that black, weathered bag everywhere he goes. "Every time I go out, I'm prepared to come home and find everything is stolen," he says.
The bag aside, Girard appears intelligent and coherent. At a table in front of Dunkin' Donuts inside the train station, Girard opens the bag and pulls out a thick stack of documents, carefully labeled and sorted with yellow sticky notes bearing neat block print. The documents are an authentic-looking mix of news stories, articles culled from military journals and even some declassified national security documents that do seem to show that the U.S. government has attempted to develop weapons that send voices into people's heads.
"It's undeniable that the technology exists," Girard says, "but if you go to the police and say, 'I'm hearing voices,' they're going to lock you up for psychiatric evaluation."
The thing that's missing from his bag -- the lack of which makes it hard to prove he isn't crazy -- is even a single document that would buttress the implausible notion that the government is currently targeting a large group of American citizens with mind-control technology. The only direct evidence for that, Girard admits, lies with alleged victims such as himself.
And of those, there are many.
IT'S 9:01 P.M. WHEN THE FIRST PERSON SPEAKS during the Saturday conference call.
Unsure whether anyone else is on the line yet, the female caller throws out the first question: "You got gang stalking or V2K?" she asks no one in particular.
There's a short, uncomfortable pause.
"V2K, really bad. 24-7," a man replies.
"Gang stalking," another woman says.
"Oh, yeah, join the club," yet another man replies.
The members of this confessional "club" are not your usual victims. This isn't a group for alcoholics, drug addicts or survivors of childhood abuse; the people connecting on the call are self-described victims of mind control -- people who believe they have been targeted by a secret government program that tracks them around the clock, using technology to probe and control their minds.
The callers frequently refer to themselves as TIs, which is short for Targeted Individuals, and talk about V2K -- the official military abbreviation stands for "voice to skull" and denotes weapons that beam voices or sounds into the head. In their esoteric lexicon, "gang stalking" refers to the belief that they are being followe
Scientist-developed malware prototype covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound
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Malware communicates at a distance of 65 feet using built-in mics and speakers.
by Dan Goodin - Dec 2, 2013 7:29 pm UTC
http://arstechnica.com/author/dan-goodin
https://twitter.com/dangoodin001
"Dan is the IT Security Editor at Ars Technica, which he joined in 2012 after working for The Register, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and other publications."
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/scientist-developed-malware-covertly-jumps-air-gaps-using-inaudible-sound/
---
Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet:
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/acoustical-mesh-network.jpg
http://www.jocm.us/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=124&id=600
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"Computer scientists have proposed a malware prototype that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection.
The proof-of-concept software-or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods-could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an "air gap" between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that repeat the audio signals.
The researchers, from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics[1], recently disclosed their findings in a paper published in the Journal of Communications[2]. It came a few weeks after a security researcher said his computers were infected with a mysterious piece of malware that used high-frequency transmissions to jump air gaps[3]. The new research neither confirms nor disproves Dragos Ruiu's claims of the so-called badBIOS infections, but it does show that high-frequency networking is easily within the grasp of today's malware."
[1] http://www.fkie.fraunhofer.de/en.html
[2] http://www.jocm.us/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=124&id=600
[3] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/
""In our article, we describe how the complete concept of air gaps can be considered obsolete as commonly available laptops can communicate over their internal speakers and microphones and even form a covert acoustical mesh network," one of the authors, Michael Hanspach, wrote in an e-mail. "Over this covert network, information can travel over multiple hops of infected nodes, connecting completely isolated computing systems and networks (e.g. the internet) to each other. We also propose some countermeasures against participation in a covert network."
The researchers developed several ways to use inaudible sounds to transmit data between two Lenovo T400 laptops using only their built-in microphones and speakers. The most effective technique relied
Samzenpus chose to combine different cult using an ultra-liberal poetic license. Bugs are not an option with this telephone system... they come bundled with it.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
And this is the reason for this bug :-(
This wouldn't -- no counldn't have happenned in the days before computers.
Eventually, I think centralised computer control is going to go the way of semaphore. It's too easy for a centralised computer system to glitch, break, be shutdown, and then screw up the lives and functions of millions.
What we should see is decentralised systems run using independent computer systems.
May the Maths Be with you!
but a day/night switchover.
which means they have back-assward management in the first place, for not operating a life-safety system as a 24/7 operation.
carbon-based computation should not be part of the core logic on which the air control system rests.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
`One of the key changes involves improving the warning messages that flash on the air traffic controllers' screens when an aircraft moves out of their area of control and responsibility. The aim is for a warning to flash on the display to remind the controllers to ensure that they have completed all their co-ordination checks before an aircraft leaves their screen and becomes the responsibility of others.
"There is a quirk over whether it flashes or not," says Chisholm. "We want it to work in 100% of cases".
It is important to fix this problem because the Swanwick system, unlike the current manual process, supports the automated transfer of aircraft from one air space sector to another.
Currently at the London Air Traffic Control Centre, when controllers relinquish responsibility for an aircraft, they confirm this by phoning the appropriate new controller. This will not happen under the new automated procedures at Swanwick'. link
It's just an unfortunate incident.
British Telecom has had an issue (which has happened a number of times) which led to a minor timing glitch in one of their systems. When this happens, the data reliability on the FARICE line to Iceland drops and you start getting corrupted flight messages. Shanwick was alerted to the problem and both sides consulted and decided that the best solution in the interrim would be something that had been done previously, disconnecting FARICE and thus forcing all connections through the backup line, DANICE, which appeared to be operating normally.
Unfortunately, the problem was even worse on DANICE. What appeared to be normal operation was only normal up to the data logger. Once it actually got to the flight tracking software, the messages were being refused, and corrupted messages being sent in the other direction. So while BT was working on getting their system fixed, flight control managers were being forced to basically manually dig up ATC messages and copy-paste them off to the air traffic controllers (as much was handled through voice as possible as well).
But it got even worse. A totally unrelated communications network, Datalink, decided to misbehave during all of this, which may or may not have been due to the Shanwick problems. On the Iceland side, the general solution is to force a switchover to the backup system. Which was done... except a critical component on the backup system immediately crashed. Repeated attempts to switch and ultimately switch back caused even more problems for the air traffic controllers.
Eventually the fixed FARICE line was brought back up, Datalink back online (with the switchover-crash problem postponed to be investigated during a low-traffic timeperiod)
It's terrible that there were so many delays, but these are extremely complicated systems with a challenging task, built up over decades with tons of computer components, protocols, lines, routers, radar systems, transmitters, and on and on, scattered all over the world. On a weekend. Everyone was scrambling and doing their damndest to fix it as soon as possible. It should also be noted that it was never a safety issue - even in the absolute worst case, air traffic control could go all the way back to the old paper-and-pencil method. What the systems give is, primarily, speed, and thus when there's big problems, there's delays.
And that was my weekend, how was yours? ;)
Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word 'clean'.
I was traveling from Heathrow to Beijing via Helsinki (5.5 hour lay-over) that was supposed to leave LHR at 7:30 but was delayed until 9:00...the estimated departure moved again backwards and forwards once (after we got on the plane), but it seemed to be a minor delay from my point of view.
The most annoying thing was that the online systems weren't showing the disruption. I was looking at the departure board at LHR and it was showing the delay (though it took a while), but the online web page and the 'Heathrow App' for my android phone both showed no delay even though it was ~8am already. I was due to meet someone for lunch (during my 5.5 hour lay-over) and I had smsed them about the delay, but they had called the airport authority and were told there was no delay, and so they experienced some inconvenience while they waited.
The good thing was that the flight from Helsinki to Beijing was very sparse, and I was able to use a whole 4-seat row to sleep on - I guess many flights missed the connection. Sucks to be them, but good for me, I suppose :)
Max.