Another clear advantage to open source is that it is easy to obtain the source code from multiple different routes and run comparison checks, thus assuring that the source code you have is in fact the code everyone is using. If you are buying copies of closed source code on the black market, you have no assurance that the code is correct in all respects, and no way to assure that the seller is not an agent of the CIA, Mossad, MI5, or the French Foreign Legion.
Maybe you can get hold of a few different copies of the source code. And maybe some are in agreement with each other, but some are different. You still do not know which one, if any of them, is correct.
More than likely, Iran has a number of copies of Windows source code and is spending a fair bit of their tech resources on trying to figure out which ones are bogus.
I am a big fan of FOSS. But I have got to say that this line of reasoning has surprised me with being a valid argument for the continued existence of Windows. It can do great things for western counter intelligence operations that would be impossible in an all FOSS world.
Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. And these cyberwarfare attacks have all the earmarks of the NNPT nations putting some teeth into that treaty.
Think of the old Big Four who dominated world politics for 25 years after World War II: USA, Russia, Britain, and France. Together they have the capability of mounting this kind of cyberwarfare, it is in all their interests to do so, and they have the experience in clandestine operations to pull this off.
Israel could not do this on its own, and would never be invited to join the party.
Since we are talking about acts of war, both in Iran's stated objectives wrt USA and other nations, and the USA led response of imposing war time embargos on trade with Iran, the cost needs to be measured in the context of war.
Number of dead from these attacks (including attackers, defenders, and collateral deaths): minimal.
Amount of war material drawn from stockpiles or inventory needed to support this attack: minimal.
Cost of disruption of civilian economic activities of these attacks: For the attackers, minimal. For Iran, significant wrt computer techs and other assets needed to cleanse and defend infrastructure systems, but this is not the kind of expense that the typical Iranian civilian would see in an increase in cost of living, etc.
So, the short answer is that the cost of this program, if it is properly managed to keep it on target, is minimal to everything, except Iran's program to become a nuclear bully nation.
Well, stuxnet and Flame becoming public are really the first evidence that someone is putting teeth into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which is now something like 40 years old, with over 150 countries signing on to it).
If one or two more incidents like these happen over the next year or so, I think pragmatists in Iran's government and any other nation that is considering developing their own nuclear weapons program will make sure their governments do not waste any resources on an impossible objective. It would be one thing to spend a chunk of your GNP on gaining bragging rights as a nuclear power; it is something else again to throw that wealth into a black hole from which nothing of use will come forth.
If you want to look for the governments that put together the stuxnet-Flame cooperative, start by looking at the strongest proponents of the NNPT. The USA, Russia, the UK, France, etc.
If the blackhats can wipe all active instances of Flame in such a way that no one can tell it was ever there, AND they can do so before Flame is fully analyzed, then they only need to wait until some critical computers have to be restored from backups, where some backups are assuredly dirty with Flame. This way Flame has a better chance of coming back as undead malware.
I rather suspect that whoever constructed Flame is also capable of arranging things so that certain computers will need to be restored from back ups.
Cleansing backups is going to be costly. There will be fewer resources available to the teams that are developing the missile guidance systems and the nuclear detonation simulators.
There are also images of Flame components on a lot of the backups of every significant system that was infected. An unrelated malware that simply crashed computers in a way that forced reloads from backups would not be difficult to construct, and could possibly assure that Flame components would again be in active residence on the networks.
Flame may very well be capable of becoming undead. To assure that this could not happen, it may be necessary to destroy all backups since the days before Flame.
A related question: how often have networks been re-infected by backups or accessing archived files? IIRC, this used to be an issue with some Word macro viruses, back in the days of the woodburning computers.
Thank you! I ran checks on my arithmetic, but I failed to check a conversion factor somewhere. Probably in going from cubic meters to gallons.
Here are the corrected numbers:
Weight of the increased water, approximately: 9*10^16 lb, or 4*10^13 tons, a little less than 10 times more than what I had first estimated.
That is just an awful lot of weight to take off of Antarctica and Greenland. If isostatic rebound exists, which the geologists seem pretty sure about, then these two land masses are going to bounce upward, which is definitely going to affect the strain on all tectonic plate edges. How much and in exactly what way is a question for geologists. But since petrochemical companies would not see any value in this research, not many geologists are going to find funding for studying this.
It would seem the 140,000 tons per sq km increase in weight on the ocean floors would also have an effect on those parts of the ocean floor that are already under strain. I am not sure that one can dismiss this effect as minor by saying that in the big picture the weight of 10 cm of water is so little compared to the water that is already there. We know that around active rifts and at subduction zones there are strips of ocean floor that are much more brittle than geologically stable areas further away from these zones. Saying that the increase cannot cause any significant problems is rather like saying that since we know the ice at the edge of the river is many times thick enough to bear our weight, we can walk all the way across without fear of falling through where the water flows faster, because it all averages out as being safe. By that logic, there is no need for hurricane building codes in Florida, since the average annual wind speed never exceeds 10 mph.
Perhaps if I call "Wolf" loud enough, some geologist who can talk sensibly about these concerns will speak up.
Ah! Parent post is a perfect example of reasoning that is so totally within the center of the box that, while it doesn't contribute anything that is at all insightful, it at first glance appears to be entirely reasonable. When in fact contemplating it is just a great waste of time.
We need a label for persons who are at the opposite extreme of "mental illness". Those that have such an excess of "mental normalcy" that all they contribute to any discussion is the incredible mental inertia found at the peak of the bell curve.
"Responsible nuclear [power]"... Now, there's an oxymoron for you. Especially in the context of the full processing cycle, from mining to waste management.
Ok, I had been too lazy to do the math. But I now feel shamed into it.
The Earth's ocean surface area: 335,258,000 sq km (from worldatlas.com)
A conservative estimate of the amount of sea level rise from AGW over the next 75 years, give or take, seems to be around 10 cm.
Volume needed to raise the ocean surface area by 10 cm: 3.35*10^13 cu m
Weight of 1 cubic meter of water: 282.5 lb (Pardon the change from metric to english, but I am more comfortable with the measures I learned as a kid. Especially as I want to talk about weight and not mass.)
Weight of the increased water: 9.5*10^15 lb, or 4.7*10^12 tons.
That seems like an awful lot of weight to take off of Antarctica and Greenland. If the continents are actually floating on the mantle, then these two would become more bouyant as all that ice melts away.
So the question for geologists is to what extent would the rise of Antarctica and Greenland affect the plate tectonics? Bearing in mind that this weight has been transferred to the ocean floors at roughly 14,000 tons per sq km?
(It would not hurt my feelings if someone would check my math.)
A vaguely related question that nags at me whenever the talk goes geological, is this:
I was taught that the eastern Canada and New England were probably slowly rising in a rebound effect after the weight of the last Ice Age glaciers was removed. And that the southern part of the eastern seaboard was slowly sinking due to a concomitant seesaw effect.
Whether that is true or not, it does have me wondering what the increase in sea level may be doing to plate tectonics. Is the weight of this increase enough to depress the ocean bottoms, somewhat mitigating the rise in sea levels, but probably increasing tectonic activity? As Greenland and Antarctica shed the weight of their ice caps, they should start rising, and what effect might that have on tectonic activity throughout the world?
In brief, is AGW going to cause more earthquakes? Is anyone looking at the relationship between climate changes and geology? Or do we regard these as totally separate sciences, each affecting only its own little model of the planet?
Large scale: the solar system passed through the debris field of an old super nova and Earth picked up a lot of meteors high in C14.
Mid scale: Earth was struck by the remnants of a comet that had taken the full force of a solar flare while at its perihelion. The flare was not aimed at Earth, but Earth picked up a lot of meteors high in C14.
Small scale: The young punk delivery guy who brought the pizza to the Collaborated Alien Archeology Group that was studying Stonehenge kicked his runabout into hyperdrive before leaving the Earth's atmosphere. He would have been ticketed for that, but the mess he left behind would have cost more than the Galactic Overlord had in his budget for cleaning up a pre-industrial world.
No evidence, no. Leaking evidence would be both unnecessary and foolhardy.
The story does fit the pattern though. Stuxnet causes damage, the Iranians begin to develop an effective defense against it, and then all kinds of stories emerge about how big, bad, and really subtle stuxnet is. Forcing the Iranians to counter a larger possible threat than what stuxnet probably first seemed to be. Flamer causes damage, directly to the Iranian Oil Ministry, and the Iranians begin to develop an effective defense against it, then stories begin to emerge about how massive, multi-pronged, and difficult to eradicate Flamer might be. Now, just as Iran announces that it has an adequate defense against Flamer, we get this NYT that suggests all kinds of other nasties might already be in Iranian computer systems. Messing around with this and that, maybe screwing up the inventories of spare parts for war machines... Who knows what.
There must now be some Iranian hardliners who are thinking that maybe the country needs to put its resources into developing its very own super-hardened operating system and getting rid of all these foreign OSs with all their attendant risks. From a USA and Israeli POV, that would not be a bad thing. It has cost $$billions to develop the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems, and Linux has grown with gifts that would also be worth $$billions, if its ecosystem was based on a market economy rather than a gift exchange model. If Iran was to pour $$billions into making its own little software ecosystem, it would be much less of a threat to the rest of the world.
Yes, I substituted an overly simple, short phrase for what I thought would be obvious.
You are right, it is the technicians who are drawn away from their normal duties to tend to the demands of stuxnet or any other backyard brush fires. That of
course leaves the researchers and developers without as much of their usual tech support. Which means each of the dozen of little everyday technical glitches that normally have no more effect than changing the time a Heavy Thinker takes his lunch break now idles that Heavy Thinker and the group that depends on him as they all have to wait for one of the remaining techs to figure out why the network printer isn't working and why Workstation X is no longer able to interact with Server Y, etc.
Not that the guys with the Computer Science degrees could not figure out the irksome daily problems and take care of them on their own. They could certainly do so, given time to learn the tech's procedures, diagnostic tools, standard workarounds, and so on. Any engineer can operate a screwdriver. But knowing which screw to tighten, now that is often esoteric knowledge that only the lowly technicians know by heart.
There can be no question that one of stuxnet's effects has been to slow Iran's progress with weapons software development. I am not in a position to assess how serious those delays would be, but I know that the intelligence agencies of several countries have been doing those assessments, closely monitoring Iran's response to stuxnet, and in at least a couple of cases doing whatever they could to maximize Iran's difficulties. Such as the timely release of dysinformation, or even true tidbits, about some "newly discovered" aspect of stuxnet behavior.
And of course even as Iran succeeds in killing stuxnet, whoever created the beast would certainly be doing everything possible to make its death throes as destructive as they could be.
There comes a point with even the most successful cyberattack vector-- think stuxnet-- of diminishing returns. Sooner or later the nation under attack is going to wise up and put in place some sort of protection.
However the attacker can change the game and go public just before that point, and do so in a way that can create enough confusion and fud to further damage his opponent. The way the news about stuxnet was dribbled out, with lots of caveats and plausible conspiracy theories, Iran has had to spend a lot more than they had budgeted for on system reviews. And all those Iranian tech people who have been tied up in assuring that military and critical civilian systems are clean-- well, they are no longer available for other pursuits, like refining nuclear detonation models or missile control systems. This is significant: if you can tie up the intellectual resources of a country with a few thousand lines of code, you can bring the development of their war machine to a grinding halt. And do it without anyone having to dodge real bullets.
It is plausible that we are now learning about Flame because its controllers have decided that it is time to go public. Kaspersky might be simply an unwitting player in moving the game to the next level. Or perhaps they are very much in the loop. From the perspective of a third party, it doesn't matter. What matters is that Flame makes it more likely that any clandestine business arrangements with repressive Middle East countries will become public. That shifts the risk - benefit analysis of companies that are thinking about doing business with those governments, and those governments will find some purchases will be harder to make and more expensive.
Of course this post adds to the fud; it suggests a complex conspiracy theory operating on several levels. I can say that I am not a party to such a conspiracy, but most readers would not be able to verify that. I can also say that as I do not much like the current regimes in Iran and Syria, I think it would be a good thing if they had to spend more of their resources on assuring that all their computers were clean of nasty little surprises. It seems to me that talking up the possibility of some kind of international conspiracy of many, many levels would be a good thing, whether it is true or not. Could the intelligence agencies of the USA, UK, Israel, Russia, Denmark (why not Denmark?) and so on have formed their own little Anonymous group? Can you not picture Ninja Hackers in Guy Fawkes masks?
No. I feel like I should have stopped several posts ago.
I recognize that in these circumstances there is very little likelihood that the person I am addressing will benefit from my efforts. But as this is a public forum, there is the possibility of a silent audience that might find something of value in the continued discussion, so sometimes it is worth the effort to throw a comment or two against what is clearly a stone wall. However this thread has gone well beyond the point where any third party with any sense is likely to follow, so for the last few volleys it has probably been just you and me. I should have dropped out a while ago. But I do not always use good judgment.
So goodbye now; you win; I concede; the game is yours; please award yourself however many points you think you deserve; give your ego an extra stroke from me, gratis. It has not been enjoyable nor enlightening for me, but it has shown me I need to exercise better judgment about terminating this kind of thread. So thank you for that.
I should add that the scientific method, when fully applied with demonstrably repeatable experimental results, is a very effective tool for getting around the problem of reflected bias. With regard to the experimental results, only. Unfortunately the reflected bias problem comes into play again as soon as one begins to think about the implications of the results. And it is in full sway in discussions about how science should be done.
In fact, typically young scientists are in a worse position than liberal arts or business majors with regard to dealing with their own biases. Science majors tend to be so focused on the techniques of developing and testing abstract thought models that they do not get much exposure to multicultural conflict mediation (present in the liberal arts schools) or managing conflicts of interest between stakeholders (present in business schools). Liberal arts and business majors almost always bump into some issue or other that will force them to examine their innate biases; it is built into the courses. But not so with science majors. It is much easier to graduate a class of science majors who are highly trained but have little education than it would be to do so with a liberal arts or business program.
If the readers are failing to understand whatever it is that the writer wants to communicate, the problem lies in the writer's scope of action, not with the readers.
Perhaps you intended to communicate something that was different from the meaning of the words that you used. That does happen. The solution is to learn to write better. Become better with your choice of words, more clear in your argument, and so forth. You will not learn this in science classes, but it is taught in higher level writing and language classes. Go ask an English teacher.
Or, horror of horrors, perhaps the words you use in your head when you think about the subject are too fuzzy or too tied up in some personal meaning to let you describe reality to yourself in an approximately correct way. That happens, too. You bring your own little packet of biases and misconceptions with you wherever you go, and you project them onto the world around you; you should never trust what you see because you can never be sure how much you are seeing is objective reality and how much are reflections of your personal biases. Dealing with this problem is also outside the realm of science classes. There are methods of getting this under control that can be learned, but you need about a decade of experience as an adult as prerequisite before beginning to learn how to think critically. Learning how to use your mind to critically evaluate the way you use your mind is very difficult and requires levels of emotional maturity and self confidence that are simply not present before the onset of early middle age.
There is one important clue about self-deception from reflected biases: as the biases arise from within the mind rather than from external stimuli, they typically present themselves more clearly than what is really going on. So when something is clearly obvious to you, that should be taken as an indication that it is probably your own bias reflected back upon you rather than the reality Out There. Do not trust yourself when you are sure of yourself, because you are probably oh so wrong.
Yeah, yeah, heard this before. And said it better: more succinctly yet covering the broad spectrum of scientific purity in a few easy to understand drawings.
So other than the snob value of "physics is better", what does this have to contribute to the current discussion? Nothing that I can see. If all there was was physics, our fastest mode of travel would be wind powered sails and the fastest way to transmit messages would be line of sight bonfires and semaphore towers.
Both studies and science are affected by bias inducing forces, such as 'publish or perish' policies of institutions and grant availibilty from stakeholders with an economic interest in the results. Elsevier, et al, raise similar problems with their control of the distribution of knowledge pipelines.
About a hundred years ago traffic problems became so bad that government had to step in and legislate which side of the road drivers had to use, and who had right of way at intersections. It might be that similar legislation is needed to curb the biasing influences on research today.
It is a mistake to think that this is about the science itself. This is about controlling the environment in which the science is done so that we benefit from good science rather than science steered by whoever has the deep pockets to pay for it. The laboratory needs to be isolated from outside economic and political influences, and those influences have found too many ways to get around the barriers that used to work, sort of, in a kind of "it is insulated enough that sometimes good work can be done" way.
Sorry but Microsoft does the best at offering security fixes at no cost. I can't think of another company that does it better than Microsoft.
Three off the top of my head: Mozilla, Canonical, Apache.
Oh, you probably mean to limit the discussion to companies whose primary goal is profit. WRT providing users with a secure computing experience, that certainly raises a lot of conflict of interest issues.
dcraw is great at doing what it does. Which is converting dozens of proprietary.raw formats to one of several common formats. Parent post seems to be suggesting archiving the.raw images then using dcraw to convert them to a common format at the time of viewing. I think this would be risky.
For example, there is currently a lot of activity in converting.raw images from today's Nikon cameras using dcraw. As Nikon improves its end of the technology, we can expect some changes in its.raw formats. The community behind dcraw will keep up with new offerings while trying to preserve the code that is being used today. But ten years from now that community may determine that dcraw.nikon.2012 is so close to dcraw.nikon.2014 that there is no need to keep both pieces of legacy code. Especially as the few dozen remaining Nikon users (everyone else having gone to the Nukodak lightfield cameras) are all using dcraw.nikon.2019 format, or newer. If the dcraw guys miss something in their assessment (based on the limited trials they can do with a limited amount of 8 and 10 year old cameras), you might find that dcraw.nikon.2014 makes garbage of all your archived backlit sunset.raw images. Including all those photos of your kid's grandparent's last Anniversary Luau And Surfing Party that your Mom so wanted you to pass on to her grandkids.
Use dcraw to convert the images to.tiff,.png, or maybe.xcf. and archive those. Make your Mom happy.
Slashdot Mirror
That is indeed the obvious advantage.
Another clear advantage to open source is that it is easy to obtain the source code from multiple different routes and run comparison checks, thus assuring that the source code you have is in fact the code everyone is using. If you are buying copies of closed source code on the black market, you have no assurance that the code is correct in all respects, and no way to assure that the seller is not an agent of the CIA, Mossad, MI5, or the French Foreign Legion.
Maybe you can get hold of a few different copies of the source code. And maybe some are in agreement with each other, but some are different. You still do not know which one, if any of them, is correct.
More than likely, Iran has a number of copies of Windows source code and is spending a fair bit of their tech resources on trying to figure out which ones are bogus.
I am a big fan of FOSS. But I have got to say that this line of reasoning has surprised me with being a valid argument for the continued existence of Windows. It can do great things for western counter intelligence operations that would be impossible in an all FOSS world.
Bullshit.
Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. And these cyberwarfare attacks have all the earmarks of the NNPT nations putting some teeth into that treaty.
Think of the old Big Four who dominated world politics for 25 years after World War II: USA, Russia, Britain, and France. Together they have the capability of mounting this kind of cyberwarfare, it is in all their interests to do so, and they have the experience in clandestine operations to pull this off.
Israel could not do this on its own, and would never be invited to join the party.
At what cost?
Since we are talking about acts of war, both in Iran's stated objectives wrt USA and other nations, and the USA led response of imposing war time embargos on trade with Iran, the cost needs to be measured in the context of war.
Number of dead from these attacks (including attackers, defenders, and collateral deaths): minimal.
Amount of war material drawn from stockpiles or inventory needed to support this attack: minimal.
Cost of disruption of civilian economic activities of these attacks: For the attackers, minimal. For Iran, significant wrt computer techs and other assets needed to cleanse and defend infrastructure systems, but this is not the kind of expense that the typical Iranian civilian would see in an increase in cost of living, etc.
So, the short answer is that the cost of this program, if it is properly managed to keep it on target, is minimal to everything, except Iran's program to become a nuclear bully nation.
Well, stuxnet and Flame becoming public are really the first evidence that someone is putting teeth into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which is now something like 40 years old, with over 150 countries signing on to it).
If one or two more incidents like these happen over the next year or so, I think pragmatists in Iran's government and any other nation that is considering developing their own nuclear weapons program will make sure their governments do not waste any resources on an impossible objective. It would be one thing to spend a chunk of your GNP on gaining bragging rights as a nuclear power; it is something else again to throw that wealth into a black hole from which nothing of use will come forth.
If you want to look for the governments that put together the stuxnet-Flame cooperative, start by looking at the strongest proponents of the NNPT. The USA, Russia, the UK, France, etc.
If the blackhats can wipe all active instances of Flame in such a way that no one can tell it was ever there, AND they can do so before Flame is fully analyzed, then they only need to wait until some critical computers have to be restored from backups, where some backups are assuredly dirty with Flame. This way Flame has a better chance of coming back as undead malware.
I rather suspect that whoever constructed Flame is also capable of arranging things so that certain computers will need to be restored from back ups.
Cleansing backups is going to be costly. There will be fewer resources available to the teams that are developing the missile guidance systems and the nuclear detonation simulators.
There are also images of Flame components on a lot of the backups of every significant system that was infected. An unrelated malware that simply crashed computers in a way that forced reloads from backups would not be difficult to construct, and could possibly assure that Flame components would again be in active residence on the networks.
Flame may very well be capable of becoming undead. To assure that this could not happen, it may be necessary to destroy all backups since the days before Flame.
A related question: how often have networks been re-infected by backups or accessing archived files? IIRC, this used to be an issue with some Word macro viruses, back in the days of the woodburning computers.
Thank you! I ran checks on my arithmetic, but I failed to check a conversion factor somewhere. Probably in going from cubic meters to gallons.
Here are the corrected numbers:
Weight of the increased water, approximately: 9*10^16 lb, or 4*10^13 tons, a little less than 10 times more than what I had first estimated.
That is just an awful lot of weight to take off of Antarctica and Greenland. If isostatic rebound exists, which the geologists seem pretty sure about, then these two land masses are going to bounce upward, which is definitely going to affect the strain on all tectonic plate edges. How much and in exactly what way is a question for geologists. But since petrochemical companies would not see any value in this research, not many geologists are going to find funding for studying this.
It would seem the 140,000 tons per sq km increase in weight on the ocean floors would also have an effect on those parts of the ocean floor that are already under strain. I am not sure that one can dismiss this effect as minor by saying that in the big picture the weight of 10 cm of water is so little compared to the water that is already there. We know that around active rifts and at subduction zones there are strips of ocean floor that are much more brittle than geologically stable areas further away from these zones. Saying that the increase cannot cause any significant problems is rather like saying that since we know the ice at the edge of the river is many times thick enough to bear our weight, we can walk all the way across without fear of falling through where the water flows faster, because it all averages out as being safe. By that logic, there is no need for hurricane building codes in Florida, since the average annual wind speed never exceeds 10 mph.
Perhaps if I call "Wolf" loud enough, some geologist who can talk sensibly about these concerns will speak up.
Thanks, again!
Anyone with mod points: please mod parent up as "informative".
Thanks for a sensible answer, complete with citation that allows further follow-up.
Anyone with mod points: please mod parent up as "informative".
Ah! Parent post is a perfect example of reasoning that is so totally within the center of the box that, while it doesn't contribute anything that is at all insightful, it at first glance appears to be entirely reasonable. When in fact contemplating it is just a great waste of time.
We need a label for persons who are at the opposite extreme of "mental illness". Those that have such an excess of "mental normalcy" that all they contribute to any discussion is the incredible mental inertia found at the peak of the bell curve.
"Responsible nuclear [power]"... Now, there's an oxymoron for you. Especially in the context of the full processing cycle, from mining to waste management.
Ok, I had been too lazy to do the math. But I now feel shamed into it.
The Earth's ocean surface area: 335,258,000 sq km (from worldatlas.com)
A conservative estimate of the amount of sea level rise from AGW over the next 75 years, give or take, seems to be around 10 cm.
Volume needed to raise the ocean surface area by 10 cm: 3.35*10^13 cu m
Weight of 1 cubic meter of water: 282.5 lb (Pardon the change from metric to english, but I am more comfortable with the measures I learned as a kid. Especially as I want to talk about weight and not mass.)
Weight of the increased water: 9.5*10^15 lb, or 4.7*10^12 tons.
That seems like an awful lot of weight to take off of Antarctica and Greenland. If the continents are actually floating on the mantle, then these two would become more bouyant as all that ice melts away.
So the question for geologists is to what extent would the rise of Antarctica and Greenland affect the plate tectonics? Bearing in mind that this weight has been transferred to the ocean floors at roughly 14,000 tons per sq km?
(It would not hurt my feelings if someone would check my math.)
A vaguely related question that nags at me whenever the talk goes geological, is this:
I was taught that the eastern Canada and New England were probably slowly rising in a rebound effect after the weight of the last Ice Age glaciers was removed. And that the southern part of the eastern seaboard was slowly sinking due to a concomitant seesaw effect.
Whether that is true or not, it does have me wondering what the increase in sea level may be doing to plate tectonics. Is the weight of this increase enough to depress the ocean bottoms, somewhat mitigating the rise in sea levels, but probably increasing tectonic activity? As Greenland and Antarctica shed the weight of their ice caps, they should start rising, and what effect might that have on tectonic activity throughout the world?
In brief, is AGW going to cause more earthquakes? Is anyone looking at the relationship between climate changes and geology? Or do we regard these as totally separate sciences, each affecting only its own little model of the planet?
Large scale: the solar system passed through the debris field of an old super nova and Earth picked up a lot of meteors high in C14.
Mid scale: Earth was struck by the remnants of a comet that had taken the full force of a solar flare while at its perihelion. The flare was not aimed at Earth, but Earth picked up a lot of meteors high in C14.
Small scale: The young punk delivery guy who brought the pizza to the Collaborated Alien Archeology Group that was studying Stonehenge kicked his runabout into hyperdrive before leaving the Earth's atmosphere. He would have been ticketed for that, but the mess he left behind would have cost more than the Galactic Overlord had in his budget for cleaning up a pre-industrial world.
No evidence, no. Leaking evidence would be both unnecessary and foolhardy.
The story does fit the pattern though. Stuxnet causes damage, the Iranians begin to develop an effective defense against it, and then all kinds of stories emerge about how big, bad, and really subtle stuxnet is. Forcing the Iranians to counter a larger possible threat than what stuxnet probably first seemed to be. Flamer causes damage, directly to the Iranian Oil Ministry, and the Iranians begin to develop an effective defense against it, then stories begin to emerge about how massive, multi-pronged, and difficult to eradicate Flamer might be. Now, just as Iran announces that it has an adequate defense against Flamer, we get this NYT that suggests all kinds of other nasties might already be in Iranian computer systems. Messing around with this and that, maybe screwing up the inventories of spare parts for war machines... Who knows what.
There must now be some Iranian hardliners who are thinking that maybe the country needs to put its resources into developing its very own super-hardened operating system and getting rid of all these foreign OSs with all their attendant risks. From a USA and Israeli POV, that would not be a bad thing. It has cost $$billions to develop the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems, and Linux has grown with gifts that would also be worth $$billions, if its ecosystem was based on a market economy rather than a gift exchange model. If Iran was to pour $$billions into making its own little software ecosystem, it would be much less of a threat to the rest of the world.
Yes, I substituted an overly simple, short phrase for what I thought would be obvious.
You are right, it is the technicians who are drawn away from their normal duties to tend to the demands of stuxnet or any other backyard brush fires. That of course leaves the researchers and developers without as much of their usual tech support. Which means each of the dozen of little everyday technical glitches that normally have no more effect than changing the time a Heavy Thinker takes his lunch break now idles that Heavy Thinker and the group that depends on him as they all have to wait for one of the remaining techs to figure out why the network printer isn't working and why Workstation X is no longer able to interact with Server Y, etc.
Not that the guys with the Computer Science degrees could not figure out the irksome daily problems and take care of them on their own. They could certainly do so, given time to learn the tech's procedures, diagnostic tools, standard workarounds, and so on. Any engineer can operate a screwdriver. But knowing which screw to tighten, now that is often esoteric knowledge that only the lowly technicians know by heart.
There can be no question that one of stuxnet's effects has been to slow Iran's progress with weapons software development. I am not in a position to assess how serious those delays would be, but I know that the intelligence agencies of several countries have been doing those assessments, closely monitoring Iran's response to stuxnet, and in at least a couple of cases doing whatever they could to maximize Iran's difficulties. Such as the timely release of dysinformation, or even true tidbits, about some "newly discovered" aspect of stuxnet behavior.
And of course even as Iran succeeds in killing stuxnet, whoever created the beast would certainly be doing everything possible to make its death throes as destructive as they could be.
There comes a point with even the most successful cyberattack vector-- think stuxnet-- of diminishing returns. Sooner or later the nation under attack is going to wise up and put in place some sort of protection.
However the attacker can change the game and go public just before that point, and do so in a way that can create enough confusion and fud to further damage his opponent. The way the news about stuxnet was dribbled out, with lots of caveats and plausible conspiracy theories, Iran has had to spend a lot more than they had budgeted for on system reviews. And all those Iranian tech people who have been tied up in assuring that military and critical civilian systems are clean-- well, they are no longer available for other pursuits, like refining nuclear detonation models or missile control systems. This is significant: if you can tie up the intellectual resources of a country with a few thousand lines of code, you can bring the development of their war machine to a grinding halt. And do it without anyone having to dodge real bullets.
It is plausible that we are now learning about Flame because its controllers have decided that it is time to go public. Kaspersky might be simply an unwitting player in moving the game to the next level. Or perhaps they are very much in the loop. From the perspective of a third party, it doesn't matter. What matters is that Flame makes it more likely that any clandestine business arrangements with repressive Middle East countries will become public. That shifts the risk - benefit analysis of companies that are thinking about doing business with those governments, and those governments will find some purchases will be harder to make and more expensive.
Of course this post adds to the fud; it suggests a complex conspiracy theory operating on several levels. I can say that I am not a party to such a conspiracy, but most readers would not be able to verify that. I can also say that as I do not much like the current regimes in Iran and Syria, I think it would be a good thing if they had to spend more of their resources on assuring that all their computers were clean of nasty little surprises. It seems to me that talking up the possibility of some kind of international conspiracy of many, many levels would be a good thing, whether it is true or not. Could the intelligence agencies of the USA, UK, Israel, Russia, Denmark (why not Denmark?) and so on have formed their own little Anonymous group? Can you not picture Ninja Hackers in Guy Fawkes masks?
No. I feel like I should have stopped several posts ago.
I recognize that in these circumstances there is very little likelihood that the person I am addressing will benefit from my efforts. But as this is a public forum, there is the possibility of a silent audience that might find something of value in the continued discussion, so sometimes it is worth the effort to throw a comment or two against what is clearly a stone wall. However this thread has gone well beyond the point where any third party with any sense is likely to follow, so for the last few volleys it has probably been just you and me. I should have dropped out a while ago. But I do not always use good judgment.
So goodbye now; you win; I concede; the game is yours; please award yourself however many points you think you deserve; give your ego an extra stroke from me, gratis. It has not been enjoyable nor enlightening for me, but it has shown me I need to exercise better judgment about terminating this kind of thread. So thank you for that.
Have a good day.
Verbosity is not the issue. Succinct is good. Laconic-- not so much.
Develop a larger vocabulary, learn to use it properly, and learn how to think critically and correct your own biases.
I should add that the scientific method, when fully applied with demonstrably repeatable experimental results, is a very effective tool for getting around the problem of reflected bias. With regard to the experimental results, only. Unfortunately the reflected bias problem comes into play again as soon as one begins to think about the implications of the results. And it is in full sway in discussions about how science should be done.
In fact, typically young scientists are in a worse position than liberal arts or business majors with regard to dealing with their own biases. Science majors tend to be so focused on the techniques of developing and testing abstract thought models that they do not get much exposure to multicultural conflict mediation (present in the liberal arts schools) or managing conflicts of interest between stakeholders (present in business schools). Liberal arts and business majors almost always bump into some issue or other that will force them to examine their innate biases; it is built into the courses. But not so with science majors. It is much easier to graduate a class of science majors who are highly trained but have little education than it would be to do so with a liberal arts or business program.
If the readers are failing to understand whatever it is that the writer wants to communicate, the problem lies in the writer's scope of action, not with the readers.
Perhaps you intended to communicate something that was different from the meaning of the words that you used. That does happen. The solution is to learn to write better. Become better with your choice of words, more clear in your argument, and so forth. You will not learn this in science classes, but it is taught in higher level writing and language classes. Go ask an English teacher.
Or, horror of horrors, perhaps the words you use in your head when you think about the subject are too fuzzy or too tied up in some personal meaning to let you describe reality to yourself in an approximately correct way. That happens, too. You bring your own little packet of biases and misconceptions with you wherever you go, and you project them onto the world around you; you should never trust what you see because you can never be sure how much you are seeing is objective reality and how much are reflections of your personal biases. Dealing with this problem is also outside the realm of science classes. There are methods of getting this under control that can be learned, but you need about a decade of experience as an adult as prerequisite before beginning to learn how to think critically. Learning how to use your mind to critically evaluate the way you use your mind is very difficult and requires levels of emotional maturity and self confidence that are simply not present before the onset of early middle age.
There is one important clue about self-deception from reflected biases: as the biases arise from within the mind rather than from external stimuli, they typically present themselves more clearly than what is really going on. So when something is clearly obvious to you, that should be taken as an indication that it is probably your own bias reflected back upon you rather than the reality Out There. Do not trust yourself when you are sure of yourself, because you are probably oh so wrong.
Yeah, yeah, heard this before. And said it better: more succinctly yet covering the broad spectrum of scientific purity in a few easy to understand drawings.
So other than the snob value of "physics is better", what does this have to contribute to the current discussion? Nothing that I can see. If all there was was physics, our fastest mode of travel would be wind powered sails and the fastest way to transmit messages would be line of sight bonfires and semaphore towers.
Both studies and science are affected by bias inducing forces, such as 'publish or perish' policies of institutions and grant availibilty from stakeholders with an economic interest in the results. Elsevier, et al, raise similar problems with their control of the distribution of knowledge pipelines.
About a hundred years ago traffic problems became so bad that government had to step in and legislate which side of the road drivers had to use, and who had right of way at intersections. It might be that similar legislation is needed to curb the biasing influences on research today.
It is a mistake to think that this is about the science itself. This is about controlling the environment in which the science is done so that we benefit from good science rather than science steered by whoever has the deep pockets to pay for it. The laboratory needs to be isolated from outside economic and political influences, and those influences have found too many ways to get around the barriers that used to work, sort of, in a kind of "it is insulated enough that sometimes good work can be done" way.
Sorry but Microsoft does the best at offering security fixes at no cost. I can't think of another company that does it better than Microsoft.
Three off the top of my head: Mozilla, Canonical, Apache.
Oh, you probably mean to limit the discussion to companies whose primary goal is profit. WRT providing users with a secure computing experience, that certainly raises a lot of conflict of interest issues.
dcraw is great at doing what it does. Which is converting dozens of proprietary .raw formats to one of several common formats. Parent post seems to be suggesting archiving the .raw images then using dcraw to convert them to a common format at the time of viewing. I think this would be risky.
For example, there is currently a lot of activity in converting .raw images from today's Nikon cameras using dcraw. As Nikon improves its end of the technology, we can expect some changes in its .raw formats. The community behind dcraw will keep up with new offerings while trying to preserve the code that is being used today. But ten years from now that community may determine that dcraw.nikon.2012 is so close to dcraw.nikon.2014 that there is no need to keep both pieces of legacy code. Especially as the few dozen remaining Nikon users (everyone else having gone to the Nukodak lightfield cameras) are all using dcraw.nikon.2019 format, or newer. If the dcraw guys miss something in their assessment (based on the limited trials they can do with a limited amount of 8 and 10 year old cameras), you might find that dcraw.nikon.2014 makes garbage of all your archived backlit sunset .raw images. Including all those photos of your kid's grandparent's last Anniversary Luau And Surfing Party that your Mom so wanted you to pass on to her grandkids.
Use dcraw to convert the images to .tiff, .png, or maybe .xcf. and archive those. Make your Mom happy.