Sony have lost the plot. Ten years ago, I used to recommend Sony, but now they don't give a rat's.... about consumers. Ever since the founder, Masaru Ibuka, died they've become another money hungry corporation who don't don't care about their customers but more about their shareholders.
I know these posts are not serous, but the term metallic glass does not refer to transparent metals, but rather metals with an amorphus structure. Metallic glass lacks the fracture points associated with the crystal lattice of metals. This means that metallic glass does not fagigue over time as normal metals would. I believe that metallic glasses were first discovered by rapidally cooling laminants of titanium (I think I read somewhere that a WW2 nazi scientist fisrt discovered them). While a metallic glass wouldn't fatigue because it doesn't have the fracture points, there is another property of glass that people seem to forget. IT SHATTERS. That would be fantastic. Planes that instead of bits falling off, they shatter into a million pieces . Think of the military applications...Planes that, instead of only having a few holes in them when someone shoots at them, they completely disappear into a rain of small pieces, when hit by a bullet. We could save on all those ejector seats.
Pilot thinking.. "Where's my plane going. Ohh! I must have been hit. Well at least I don't have to think about ejecting."....Pilot just pulls ripcord.
One of the things we need to add is SMTP over SSL. It won't prevent all snooping, but at least between 2 people that trust each other, no snooping happens on the path between.
And how would that actually help the average joe. It's not like they have an SMTP server set up on their home network. They have to trust that the ISPs that serves emails won't be in on the legally required snooping. Then there is also the fact that not all mail goes directly between your mailbox and my mailbox, there may be several intermediate mailboxes inbetween for aggregation, forwarding, snooping, etc...
End to End encryption is the only safeguard.
Secondly the software update did not respect the data in the nuclear control system and synchronized it to new initial data in the update on the other system! Not a good idea. In critical safety systems, you always practice an update before actually doing one.
I have no problem with a computer on the process control subnet reporting information to a computer on the business subnet.
I have a BIG problem with a computer on the business subnet being able to modify and corrupt data in a computer on the process control subnet.
"I can't dump data to the business side" is a reason to make a log entry and maybe sound a minor alarm. It's not a reason to shut down the reactor (unless the data is needed for regulatory compliance and the process control side isn't able to buffer it until the business side is working correctly.)
But if a business subnet computer can tamper with something as critical as a process control machine's idea of the level of coolant in a reservoir, it rings my "design flaw" alarms.
Is it ONLY able to reset it to "empty" as poorly-designed part of a communication restart sequence? Or could it also make the process control machine think the level was nominal when it WAS empty?
IMHO this should be examined more closely. It may have exposed a dangerous flaw in the software design.
Security flaws don't care if they're exercised by mischance or malice. If nothing else, this is a way to Dos a nuclear plant through a breakin on the business side of the net. I agree with the previous post. In railway signalling (at least outside of the USA) formal safety processes must be followed with software design and configuration. Part of that is a formal hazard analysis. There are various Safety Integrity Levels(SIL) for systems that are applied to different control and monitoring components (SIL-0 being lowest to SIL-4 for stuff that can kill people if it goes wrong). There is no condition under which it is even a acceptable for a business system to feed vital sensor data for the control system. This should always be a hazard analysis performed when making any changes to a control system, at which point this sort of thing should have been detected.
You obviously don't travel OS much. I find if I want my tools to be at my destination before I'm scheduled to return home, then I've got to carry them with me.
I travel around SE Asia, usually working in remote places. So you're going to guarantee that one of the following will happen:
1) no-one will sign for your stuff in a hotel
2) customs agents will hold up the shipment.
3) it will go missing if it's valuable.
I'd rather pay the excess baggage and duties (cough...) than waste time searching for my stuff, especially if I don't speak the language.
A thing that floats and catches the wind. They have a name for that. It's called a "sailboat".
I this case they'd have a tried and tested method for holding it in place called... an "anchor".
But, given it's not designed to move by windpower and probably doesn't have a method of steering it might not fit the definition of a sailboat, so we'll go with wind generator and they can run the transmission cable up the anchor cable.
"Asher's query produced [hijacker Mohamed] Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers." What he didn't say was what would have happened to the other, non-criminal names on the list. I suspect that they would have been stigmatised, harrassed or sacrificed to ensure the safety of those in power.
I'm always a bit dubious of the effect of being a false positive in this sort of system.
I'm sure that the stereotype is familiar enough to/.ers. Most of us know those people who have been playing roleplaying games for so long that their personality becomes the character that they play. There are the Vampire players who really believe that they are walking undead. There are the D&D players who eventually get into Wicca and other "majik" kind of stuff to the point where they believe that they can cast spells and talk to spirits. I think it's basic psychology that anybody who spends any significant amount of time pretending to be someone else will eventually manifest behavorial changes. I don't project myself into an avatar. I create one I want to look at. I would think that most/. geeks would create hot elven chick avatars. I know that's what I do.
I work for a large engineering company (50k+ employees) and it seems to work reasonably well. There is no way that the IT dept can enforce a standard operating environment, since we are client driven. Our clients demand, and we supply, solutions to problems. This requires the principal developers and systems engineer need support a raft of different platforms, OSs, software and skills on their own. The IT department manages the corporate infrastructure (e.g. LAN,WAN,VPN, file servers, access control, backups, email, etc...) but they're not responsible for determining development and test tools.
We develop and integrate complex Control Systems for our clients. So the engineering/project departments are responsible for selection of software, server, workstations, embedded controllers, switches, network sniffers, protocol analysers and anything else that is required to support that function.
The system works, as the IT support and engineering sections work together to iron out problems. It's not anarchy, because key "experts" in each domain are tasked with making the system work. Communications is the key point.
The frequency of a tsunami is also low, but they can still cause a significant amount of damage. It's more to do with how much energy can be stored and released on a failure, which in this case would be catastrophic.
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Sony have lost the plot. Ten years ago, I used to recommend Sony, but now they don't give a rat's .... about consumers. Ever since the founder, Masaru Ibuka, died they've become another money hungry corporation who don't don't care about their customers but more about their shareholders.
One of the things we need to add is SMTP over SSL. It won't prevent all snooping, but at least between 2 people that trust each other, no snooping happens on the path between.
And how would that actually help the average joe. It's not like they have an SMTP server set up on their home network. They have to trust that the ISPs that serves emails won't be in on the legally required snooping. Then there is also the fact that not all mail goes directly between your mailbox and my mailbox, there may be several intermediate mailboxes inbetween for aggregation, forwarding, snooping, etc... End to End encryption is the only safeguard.You obviously don't travel OS much. I find if I want my tools to be at my destination before I'm scheduled to return home, then I've got to carry them with me. I travel around SE Asia, usually working in remote places. So you're going to guarantee that one of the following will happen: 1) no-one will sign for your stuff in a hotel 2) customs agents will hold up the shipment. 3) it will go missing if it's valuable. I'd rather pay the excess baggage and duties (cough...) than waste time searching for my stuff, especially if I don't speak the language.
A thing that floats and catches the wind. They have a name for that. It's called a "sailboat". I this case they'd have a tried and tested method for holding it in place called... an "anchor". But, given it's not designed to move by windpower and probably doesn't have a method of steering it might not fit the definition of a sailboat, so we'll go with wind generator and they can run the transmission cable up the anchor cable.
"Asher's query produced [hijacker Mohamed] Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers." What he didn't say was what would have happened to the other, non-criminal names on the list. I suspect that they would have been stigmatised, harrassed or sacrificed to ensure the safety of those in power. I'm always a bit dubious of the effect of being a false positive in this sort of system.
I work for a large engineering company (50k+ employees) and it seems to work reasonably well. There is no way that the IT dept can enforce a standard operating environment, since we are client driven. Our clients demand, and we supply, solutions to problems. This requires the principal developers and systems engineer need support a raft of different platforms, OSs, software and skills on their own. The IT department manages the corporate infrastructure (e.g. LAN,WAN,VPN, file servers, access control, backups, email, etc...) but they're not responsible for determining development and test tools. We develop and integrate complex Control Systems for our clients. So the engineering/project departments are responsible for selection of software, server, workstations, embedded controllers, switches, network sniffers, protocol analysers and anything else that is required to support that function. The system works, as the IT support and engineering sections work together to iron out problems. It's not anarchy, because key "experts" in each domain are tasked with making the system work. Communications is the key point.
The frequency of a tsunami is also low, but they can still cause a significant amount of damage. It's more to do with how much energy can be stored and released on a failure, which in this case would be catastrophic.