There's unfortunately a common attitude in the physics world that anything that the math allows - anything that you can't rule out - is real. Beyond this, I think the discovery of things like general relativity and quantum physics got us so used to the concept that the universe is wierd that there's few possibilities that come across as "too weird to be real".
On the other hand, it's sort of like saying, "we know little of the fish that live in the deep oceans, and we've seen fish that come in all sorts of forms.... since I can't rule out that there's a fish down there that looks exactly like Justin Bieber, then there must be one". The ability to deduce the existence of something based on what you can't rule out requires that you can be certain that your model is perfectly describing everything about the dataset that it's supposed to be modeling. But we know that they're not describing everything about the universe. We know that there's things that they specifically don't model.
In some universe in the multiverse, there's an alternative Smolin and Woit who are vehemently arguing for the unreality of time and the existence of a multiverse against a mainstream that tends to assume that the universe is only as it appears to be.
Bats are common rabies carriers, although contracting rabies is indeed rare. Rabies vaccines work, but they have to be used before symptoms set in. If you don't realize that you've been put at risk, you're not going to get the vaccine.
One of those rare people to die of rabies was an acquaintance of my younger sister, who lives in the Houston area (this was something like 10 years ago). A bat got into his room while he was sleeping and they shooed it out when it was discovered; he never knew he had been exposed. They tried to save him after the symptoms set in - it has succeeded in the past, although only very rarely. It was too little, too late.
What percenage of British MPs does, say, Manchester elect?
The UK is not 100% of the EU. Therefore it should not get 100% of the representation in matters that affect the whole of Europe. Which is the whole point of the EU - matters that affect the whole of Europe, like travel and trade.
The European Commission is the equivalent of a cabinet. A cabinet serves at the pleasure of the executive. The executive, in the case of the EU, is the council, aka, the heads of state of Europe (aka, the people you elected).
Yes, the EC is a strong-executive system. That's because the individual member countries wanted that way, they didn't want to give up power from their national governments to this new body (the European Parliament). The UK in particular has been holding the EU back from closer integration / greater power to the European Parliament. So it's funny to see that used as an excuse in support of Brexit.
Also, there are checks in parliament over the council. They have to approve the council president, and thus the president is proposed based on the results of the last parliamentary election. While the president doesn't have power to block new commissioners (which, as mentioned, are chosen by member states), he does control what areas they have authority over, and thus can assign then to more or less powerful positions. Also, parliament gets to then approve or reject the commission as a whole. So the council generally has to compromise with parliament in order to get an acceptable arrangement. Parliament can also cause a vote of no confidence in the council. So the council has reason to respect parliament's requests for legislation, and generally does. The president can also request the resignation of commissioners, and the ECJ can kick out commissioners for violation of their duties.
In short, there's a lot of checks and balances in the system. Probably more than in most national governments in Europe. But the strength that anti-EU states had put into the hands of their directly-appointed commission rather than the independently-elected parliament is IMHO a weakness. The goal should be to get turnout in EU parliamentary elections to increase by giving parliament more power, and timing parliamentary elections as much as possible with national elections.
Let's start with your mention of Iceland. I live in Iceland. So let's just say that I know a little something about countries whose currencies have crashed. Yeah, it's good for the bottom lines of businesses that don't have to import anything. It's terrible for regular people and for businesses that have to buy things form overseas. Because the price of all imported goods skyrockets when your currency crashes. Which directly hits your pocketbook every time you go to the store or buy gas at the pump. It also means your savings crash. And the government funds such as retirement funds crash as well.
But hey, some fish magnate can sell their fish cheaper, so that makes everything just wonderful, right?:P
If it *were* a bad thing, then you'd be complaining about how from 2 two years ago up to the brexit, the pound lost 20% of its value
Seriously? Do you really need this explained to you? Is this how you think that investors think?
"Hey, the country is considering doing something a couple years from now that could have profoundly reduce the value of my British investments. I think I'll do absolutely nothing and just hope that it doesn't pass!"
Of course it doesn't work that way. Markets take into account the risk of adverse events happening in the future - which is why as Brexit support rose in polls, the markets fell, and as it declined the markets rose. When it passed, the sudden drop became the difference between the "possibility of brexit" and "the actuality of brexit".
This is really, really basic stuff here. People don't wait until some prospective bad event happens to price it in; they price it in relative to the risk of it actually happening.
One way that Greece could have eased their troubles was by floating their currency. They *asked* the EU for permission to do this, and were denied.
The EU made it quite clear that Greece was more than free to leave. They chose to remain. Even their populist, anti-EU government couldn't stomach the potential aftereffects of leaving.
Furthermore, the UK always has been able to float its currency. Are you not aware that the UK is on the pound, not the euro?
Companies relocating to the EU are European companies... yes? And those European companies employ mostly non-UK workers, yes? And pay taxes to their parent country, yes?
By and large, no, no, and no. 1) The biggest groups looking to relocate are British banks. 2) Most companies in the UK, whether British or not, employ British workers. 3) Non-British workers living and working in the UK pay taxes to the UK, not their home countries, and local corporate offices in the UK pay taxes to the UK.
And note that the EU growth rate [ash.tips] has been going down, overall, in the last few years (and not because of the recession either).
Yes, both were in the common market, so one expects their GDP growth to have historically tracked each other. However, the Euro has been going up majorly with respect to the pound. Currency exchange rates react to adverse news immediately. Figures like GDP growth and unemployment lag behind.
Are you saying that remaining a part of a declining or stagnant union is a *good* thing for the UK?
The EU is not stagnant. And most of its troubles of late that aren't part of global slowdowns has been due to stupid, completely avoidable nonsense like the Brexit and Grexit crises.
The problem with the UK wanting to get their way is that most of what the EU covers is multilateral issues. So they can shout "sovereignty" until they turn blue, but no party is ever sovereign in multiparty issues except at the barrel of a gun. The more the UK distances themselves from the EU, the less incentive they have to be accommodating. The concept that by leaving the EU they can suddenly get the EU to give up on its core principles for access to the common market (such as freedom of movement) is an absurd daydream.
The currency has already crashed, the stock market lost 140 billion pounds, and many major companies are now preparing for partial or complete relocations in order to stay within the EU. The main thing holding companies back is the possibility that the UK might agree to remain bound by the EU's rules and thus stay within the EU common market, thus rendering relocation unnecessary - expect a further crash if the UK doesn't remain in the common market. S&P has already slashed their growth forecast for the UK, and the UK has lost its AAA credit status.
The team isn't very explicit on what they're doing. But if they're doing it in a reasonable manner, it's probably not that naive, as to only look for "sequentially read, encrypt, write, delete" patterns. I think it's more fundamental. No matter what pattern it uses, a piece of ransomware has to fundamentally do the following.
1) Read the data. So, for each block that there's actual reads of, flag it. 2) Write data, somewhere, somehow. Can be to a disk, card, even over the net. Writes to disk might be to new files, archives, overwrites, etc. Even if compression is used, the writes have to be a relevant fraction of the size of the data read in. 3) Somehow invalidate the original block. There are different approaches one can use to invalidate data, and all of them need to be covered.
The key factors are #1 and #3. A process that just reads blocks isn't a problem. A process that just invalidates original blocks isn't a problem (that can't be ransomware, only deletion... and you can't get a ransom for files that are outright gone). But a process that reads and then later writes over blocks may or may not be a problem. We can divide this down into different scenarios.
1) Processes that only slowly, randomly, modify things that they've read, only on a limited number of files. These are most likely not a problem. 2) Processes that do read and write over a large amount of files, but always - in some recoverable form or another - keep an understandable copy of the file around (for example, writing the same file out elsewhere). These are not a problem. 3) Processes that modify vast numbers of things, without keeping a recoverable copy on hand. Particularly processes that do it quickly. Particularly processes that do it to files that aren't modified frequently. These are most likely a problem.
There is some level of nuance and heuristics involved here, of course. And another nuance is that this clearly has to be done at the system level, something dug into the operating system everywhere reads and writes are done. It probably needs to modify a number of pieces of system functionality as well to make sure that they don't do anything weird that might unintentionally trigger the heuristics. It might also be wise to break down the file system into monitored and unmonitored segments, where the unmonitored sections are where OS files, temp files, etc tend to be stored, while the monitored sections tend to be user files.
But the key issue is that - if they're doing this right - they're looking at the fundamental things that ransomware has to do - in particular, reading data blocks, then trying to leave then unrecoverable at some point afterward. The protection software should not interfere when a program reads, but when it tries to invalidate things that it's read - in a manner that triggers the "this is excessive, strange, suspicious behavior" heuristics - then it suspends the application. Because, say, the overwrite behavior of a person using MS Word or Photoshop doesn't look at all like when ransomware does it - no matter what "pattern" they use for their encoding. They could mimic the overwrite behavior of programs like that to avoid the heuristic.... but then it'll take them weeks, months, or even years to get through all of the files on a person's computer, and they'll get caught long before that.
I can say this: in the process of sourcing products from China, you run into a *lot* of places there (producers, middlemen) selling hoverboard-like things for dirt cheap. QA is surely almost nonexistent. Western companies can buy them and resell them for a big profit. And the results are ever-so predictable.
You never import from China without doing rigorous product inspection and testing - because they'll only manufacture to the minimum standard needed in order to get you to pay them. They can, and will, manufacture to good standards, but only if that's their only way to get your money. The buyer is basically the QA team, not the producer. That goes double for things that involve 1) precision, 2) moving parts, and 3) electronics.
The fault of course lies in the manufacturing culture in China, but it also lies on the importers who either didn't know or didn't care and just bought from some random producer (who has no reputation to protect and will gladly just change the name on the sign if things turn south) without testing their products to death, just because the fit & finish looked good enough.
I think "Okay, I guess some probe has to do it at some point." sums up well how I feel about Juno. It's sort of like a chemistry research team going through thousands of variants of aramids to find the ones that yield the strongest tensile strength. Great that they're doing it, important, but not exactly the most interesting thing to follow.
Venus presents some of the biggest questions we could possibly answer in space, including "Is this the fate of Earth?" "If so how can we avoid it?" "If not how did we dodge the bullet?" Etc. It presents a hellish surface where yet somehow liquids (yet clearly not lavas... at least normal ones) formed some of the longest "rivers" in the solar system (including deltas). A planet with volcanoes the area of Olympus Mons... not one, but hundreds. A planet whose surface is speculated to experience common flows of kimberlites, carbonatites, and is known to be loaded with "incompatible elements" (often valuable)... rocks that are then baked under acidic gases, creating erosion products that can vaporize. A planetwhere a wide range of industrial chemicals and even iron can be condensed out of the clouds at an altitude with Earthlike pressures, temperatures, sunlight, gravity, and under a mass of radiation shielding equivalent to half a dozen meters of water, where the predominant cloud-forming mist decomposes largely into H2O and O2 under heat, and where normal Earth air is a lifting gas.
It's a fascinating world. Our neighbor. Our twin. And yet it keeps getting passed by. We'd know almost nothing about it if the Soviets hadn't run their Venera program.
Titan is the other world that really has a fascinating atmosphere... though at least it has its excuse of distance and rare launch windows. It's not so much interesting from the perspective of "atmosphere as a giant industrial refinery"... it's more along the line of "atmosphere as a churning primordial soup". I can't stop thinking about the disappearing acetylene and ethylene. The data from the northern lakes showing that they're almost pure methane makes the question even bigger. Where is it going? We know it's being made. And then just... vanishing at the surface. Into it? Something breaking it down? How? And the lakes are just so tempting targets for exploration... "disappearing islands", deep sediments of organic matter at the lake beds.... how can a person not want to find out what's going on there, chemically?
IMHO Pluto was exciting because we'd never seen it or any Kuiper belt object before... and even more exciting once we started getting the data and you could see that the solid surface had massive convection cells like a giant roiling kettle with floating mountains and a massive range of crazy weirdness.
Honestly, most of what you described about Jupiter isn't exactly uncharted territory. It's going to have no impact on our understanding of asteroid dangers because Jupiter's mass and orbit are already extremely well known.
Lots of planets have poorly understood storms, Jupiter is hardly unique in this regard. And Juno's ability to clarify it is only a "maybe", it's not like we're dropping in a balloon probe (that would actually be rather interesting).
Jupiter's magnetic field almost certainly does contain antimatter... because even Earth's does;) It's not a quantity interesting for harvesting on its own, though. We know how magnetic fields work, there's nothing new to learn in that regard. We should learn more about Jupiter's dynamo (and core in general) through Juno, but that doesn't personally interest me that much... to each their own.
But... we'll definitely get the prettiest pictures yet, for what that's worth. And as mentioned it'd be nice to better quantify (flux/energies of different particles over a wide spatial range) Jupiter's radiation belts.
In response to a person whose post was "Just because YOU don't understand the science mission... Again, just because YOU don't understand why this science is important, then well, maybe you should just STFU...."?
Please stop trolling. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this mission
Thought police much? Since when is not being excited about something "trolling"? Am I not allowed to not be excited about something that you happen to be excited about?
There's a lot of interesting stuff in this mission, especially for a meteorologist. It's actually very interesting to study the atmospheres of other planets
And of all of the planets one could study the atmosphere of, I couldn't think of one less interesting than Jupiter's overwhelmingly hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, so heavily focused on light-gas reactions. We have massive gaps in our knowledge of two of the three "interesting", very complex atmospheres in our solar system (Titan and Venus... the third, well understood one being Earth). Even Pluto's nitrogen/methane photochemistry is IMHO more interesting than Jupiter's atmospheric chemistry. The last two atmospheres I'd want to spend money on a probe to go study would be Jupiter's and Saturn's - the ice giants are at least somewhat more interesting.
I once wrote a paper for a climate modeling class about how to simulate the climate on a terraformed Mars. It's a very interesting planet, and one that poses some unique challenges versus Earth. We only have one substance of any significance to climate that changes state at normal Earth temperatures, which is water. That's different on Mars, where you get carbon dioxide clouds. That has to be accounted for in weather and climate modeling.
Meh. On Venus there's likely dozens, and we don't even know them all. Mars' atmospheric chemistry is trivial compared to Venus's and Titan's. And there's really big mysteries on both. Titan, examples: where's the acetylene and ethylene going? Is there really a downward flux of hydrogen, and if so, where is it going? Where's the methane coming from? Venus, examples: where's all of the mercury that should have baked out of its rocks and be setting in its atmosphere? What's the mystery UV absorber in the clouds? Are the surface fogs real, and what are they? What's the lower cloud made of - phosphoric acid? What are the "metal snows", and are there more than one type? And on and on, for both of them.
Venus rotates a lot slower, so you'd only get one per hemisphere.
Except that Venus doesn't behave like that. Venus is a superrotator (for crying out loud, you wrote a climate paper modeling a planet and you don't even know that Venus's atmosphere superrotates?). It has a hadley cell which stretches around the whole planet up to about 60 degrees, followed by cold collars, followed by very unusual polar vortices (sometimes described as double vortices, but the shapes are irregular and vary with time). That's just at the cloud level - our understanding of the deep atmosphere is highly limited. Venus also has somewhat Earthlike jet streams, gravity waves visible at the cloud deck (despite the great distances to the surface), and interesting, Earth-reminiscent tropospheric convection in the middle cloud layer (with possible rains and snows), plus lightning, although its location and details are unknown (and the data on it is often just weird... including the possibility of a layer in the lower atmosphere that "zaps" conductive objects as they move through it)
We have a sister planet sitting right next to us with crazy-complex atmospheric chemistry who we know pathetically little about and which is easy to get to with frequent launch windows and short transit times. Instead, we're studying the simple light gases of a much further body that likes to fry spacecraft orbiting it. No, Juno doesn't really capture my interest. But apparently that makes me a "troll".
Too many projects, too little time:( But I'll get to it eventually. I've worked with GEANT4 before on some spallation work, I just need to pick it up again.
(Then again, come to think of it, I'm not sure how well it'd deal with bulk plasma interactions... I may need to look into other tools. Or... hmm..)
Not "understand". "Excited about". I'm more than aware of what the science objectives are and what hardware is on the craft. I just don't find them particularly interesting. Just because you personally find knowing studying Jupiter's upper atmospheric composition and dynamics exciting doesn't mean that I somehow must. I would far rather get a better understanding of Venus's atmosphere than Jupiter's, for example.
Is this how you generally behave, that anyone who doesn't share your interests must somehow be an idiot who just doesn't understand what your interests really are? Yeah, I much prefer solid bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium to gas giants - so freaking sue me.
That depends on what you mean. Are you talking about the magnetic field strength or the flux and energy distribution of ionized particles? The field strength at the surface ranges from 25-65nT, and becomes increasingly more position-dependent with altitude. Jupiter's magnetic field is only something like 15x more intense than Earth's, but it's vastly larger and with a much higher flux. There's some extra amplification effects in the vicinity of Io as well, due to the "io flux tube".
I think you've confused "the science mission for Juno" with "science in general" - or more appropriately for this topic, "space exploration in general". There's a great deal of research related to space that I have a keen interest in.
If anyone who's not trolling has any thoughts on the concept I'd be glad to hear them. The general idea being the creation of a toroidal mini-magnetosphere (mini-magnetospheres being an active area of research, for spacecraft shielding - 10s to 100s of kilometers in diameter, without requiring absurdly massive hardware) to create a dense plasma focus at the center, which is then further compressed (quite a few possibilities). Since you're dealing with a Maxwellian plasma, the plasma temperature is doing to define how much of the plasma will be have in the desired spectrum, and that in turn is a function of how much plasma you're concentrating into how small of a cross section; and the amount of plasma being concentrated is in turn a combination of the flux at Jupiter and the size of the inflated artificial magnetosphere)
That's the general idea, anyway - I haven't done too much with it yet. I was thinking of playing around with the concept in GEANT4.... I've always just been too busy with other projects when I started thinking about it.
... excited about Juno? I mean, it'll be sending some pretty pictures and all... but I just can't get myself that excited about the science mission.
I guess it'll be nice having better information on high energy particles in Jupiter's magnetosphere. I've often been tempted to simulate a concept I had for using Jupiter as a massive particle pre-accelerator for bulk antimatter production, to see what sort of flux in the dozens to hundreds of GeV could be achieved across a reasonable-sized target.
Just wondering, how many "numerous orders of magnitude" can one have in 8 bit per RGB channel data? A bit more than 2?
That's exactly the problem - you can't represent the real world properly with 8 bit RGB. Light intensities are properly represented in floating point.
You seem to be under the impression that the camera somehow didn't see the truck.
Because that's precisely what we've been told - that the vehicle did not see the difference between the white of the truck and the sky. Which is a common artifact in camera images converted to a linearized RGB space, as any quick search of outdoor scenes on Google Images will show you.
No, what is needed is better algorithms to process the camera data.
A better algorithm will never pick out a vehicle out of a giant, continuous block of RGB=255,255,255.
Slashdot Mirror
There's unfortunately a common attitude in the physics world that anything that the math allows - anything that you can't rule out - is real. Beyond this, I think the discovery of things like general relativity and quantum physics got us so used to the concept that the universe is wierd that there's few possibilities that come across as "too weird to be real".
On the other hand, it's sort of like saying, "we know little of the fish that live in the deep oceans, and we've seen fish that come in all sorts of forms.... since I can't rule out that there's a fish down there that looks exactly like Justin Bieber, then there must be one". The ability to deduce the existence of something based on what you can't rule out requires that you can be certain that your model is perfectly describing everything about the dataset that it's supposed to be modeling. But we know that they're not describing everything about the universe. We know that there's things that they specifically don't model.
The macroscopic world has ample unsolved things as well, such as inflation and dark energy.
In some universe in the multiverse, there's an alternative Smolin and Woit who are vehemently arguing for the unreality of time and the existence of a multiverse against a mainstream that tends to assume that the universe is only as it appears to be.
Bats are common rabies carriers, although contracting rabies is indeed rare. Rabies vaccines work, but they have to be used before symptoms set in. If you don't realize that you've been put at risk, you're not going to get the vaccine.
One of those rare people to die of rabies was an acquaintance of my younger sister, who lives in the Houston area (this was something like 10 years ago). A bat got into his room while he was sleeping and they shooed it out when it was discovered; he never knew he had been exposed. They tried to save him after the symptoms set in - it has succeeded in the past, although only very rarely. It was too little, too late.
But again... humans dying of rabies is very rare.
What percenage of British MPs does, say, Manchester elect?
The UK is not 100% of the EU. Therefore it should not get 100% of the representation in matters that affect the whole of Europe. Which is the whole point of the EU - matters that affect the whole of Europe, like travel and trade.
The European Commission is the equivalent of a cabinet. A cabinet serves at the pleasure of the executive. The executive, in the case of the EU, is the council, aka, the heads of state of Europe (aka, the people you elected).
Yes, the EC is a strong-executive system. That's because the individual member countries wanted that way, they didn't want to give up power from their national governments to this new body (the European Parliament). The UK in particular has been holding the EU back from closer integration / greater power to the European Parliament. So it's funny to see that used as an excuse in support of Brexit.
Also, there are checks in parliament over the council. They have to approve the council president, and thus the president is proposed based on the results of the last parliamentary election. While the president doesn't have power to block new commissioners (which, as mentioned, are chosen by member states), he does control what areas they have authority over, and thus can assign then to more or less powerful positions. Also, parliament gets to then approve or reject the commission as a whole. So the council generally has to compromise with parliament in order to get an acceptable arrangement. Parliament can also cause a vote of no confidence in the council. So the council has reason to respect parliament's requests for legislation, and generally does. The president can also request the resignation of commissioners, and the ECJ can kick out commissioners for violation of their duties.
In short, there's a lot of checks and balances in the system. Probably more than in most national governments in Europe. But the strength that anti-EU states had put into the hands of their directly-appointed commission rather than the independently-elected parliament is IMHO a weakness. The goal should be to get turnout in EU parliamentary elections to increase by giving parliament more power, and timing parliamentary elections as much as possible with national elections.
Let's start with your mention of Iceland. I live in Iceland. So let's just say that I know a little something about countries whose currencies have crashed. Yeah, it's good for the bottom lines of businesses that don't have to import anything. It's terrible for regular people and for businesses that have to buy things form overseas. Because the price of all imported goods skyrockets when your currency crashes. Which directly hits your pocketbook every time you go to the store or buy gas at the pump. It also means your savings crash. And the government funds such as retirement funds crash as well.
But hey, some fish magnate can sell their fish cheaper, so that makes everything just wonderful, right? :P
Seriously? Do you really need this explained to you? Is this how you think that investors think?
"Hey, the country is considering doing something a couple years from now that could have profoundly reduce the value of my British investments. I think I'll do absolutely nothing and just hope that it doesn't pass!"
Of course it doesn't work that way. Markets take into account the risk of adverse events happening in the future - which is why as Brexit support rose in polls, the markets fell, and as it declined the markets rose. When it passed, the sudden drop became the difference between the "possibility of brexit" and "the actuality of brexit".
This is really, really basic stuff here. People don't wait until some prospective bad event happens to price it in; they price it in relative to the risk of it actually happening.
The EU made it quite clear that Greece was more than free to leave. They chose to remain. Even their populist, anti-EU government couldn't stomach the potential aftereffects of leaving.
Furthermore, the UK always has been able to float its currency. Are you not aware that the UK is on the pound, not the euro?
By and large, no, no, and no. 1) The biggest groups looking to relocate are British banks. 2) Most companies in the UK, whether British or not, employ British workers. 3) Non-British workers living and working in the UK pay taxes to the UK, not their home countries, and local corporate offices in the UK pay taxes to the UK.
Yes, both were in the common market, so one expects their GDP growth to have historically tracked each other. However, the Euro has been going up majorly with respect to the pound. Currency exchange rates react to adverse news immediately. Figures like GDP growth and unemployment lag behind.
The EU is not stagnant. And most of its troubles of late that aren't part of global slowdowns has been due to stupid, completely avoidable nonsense like the Brexit and Grexit crises.
The problem with the UK wanting to get their way is that most of what the EU covers is multilateral issues. So they can shout "sovereignty" until they turn blue, but no party is ever sovereign in multiparty issues except at the barrel of a gun. The more the UK distances themselves from the EU, the less incentive they have to be accommodating. The concept that by leaving the EU they can suddenly get the EU to give up on its core principles for access to the common market (such as freedom of movement) is an absurd daydream.
The currency has already crashed, the stock market lost 140 billion pounds, and many major companies are now preparing for partial or complete relocations in order to stay within the EU. The main thing holding companies back is the possibility that the UK might agree to remain bound by the EU's rules and thus stay within the EU common market, thus rendering relocation unnecessary - expect a further crash if the UK doesn't remain in the common market. S&P has already slashed their growth forecast for the UK, and the UK has lost its AAA credit status.
UK voters: We want to give a boat a silly name!
UK government: No.
UK voters: We want to break up the European Union and crash our economy on a single, simple-majority vote!
UK government: Okay.
The team isn't very explicit on what they're doing. But if they're doing it in a reasonable manner, it's probably not that naive, as to only look for "sequentially read, encrypt, write, delete" patterns. I think it's more fundamental. No matter what pattern it uses, a piece of ransomware has to fundamentally do the following.
1) Read the data. So, for each block that there's actual reads of, flag it.
2) Write data, somewhere, somehow. Can be to a disk, card, even over the net. Writes to disk might be to new files, archives, overwrites, etc. Even if compression is used, the writes have to be a relevant fraction of the size of the data read in.
3) Somehow invalidate the original block. There are different approaches one can use to invalidate data, and all of them need to be covered.
The key factors are #1 and #3. A process that just reads blocks isn't a problem. A process that just invalidates original blocks isn't a problem (that can't be ransomware, only deletion... and you can't get a ransom for files that are outright gone). But a process that reads and then later writes over blocks may or may not be a problem. We can divide this down into different scenarios.
1) Processes that only slowly, randomly, modify things that they've read, only on a limited number of files. These are most likely not a problem.
2) Processes that do read and write over a large amount of files, but always - in some recoverable form or another - keep an understandable copy of the file around (for example, writing the same file out elsewhere). These are not a problem.
3) Processes that modify vast numbers of things, without keeping a recoverable copy on hand. Particularly processes that do it quickly. Particularly processes that do it to files that aren't modified frequently. These are most likely a problem.
There is some level of nuance and heuristics involved here, of course. And another nuance is that this clearly has to be done at the system level, something dug into the operating system everywhere reads and writes are done. It probably needs to modify a number of pieces of system functionality as well to make sure that they don't do anything weird that might unintentionally trigger the heuristics. It might also be wise to break down the file system into monitored and unmonitored segments, where the unmonitored sections are where OS files, temp files, etc tend to be stored, while the monitored sections tend to be user files.
But the key issue is that - if they're doing this right - they're looking at the fundamental things that ransomware has to do - in particular, reading data blocks, then trying to leave then unrecoverable at some point afterward. The protection software should not interfere when a program reads, but when it tries to invalidate things that it's read - in a manner that triggers the "this is excessive, strange, suspicious behavior" heuristics - then it suspends the application. Because, say, the overwrite behavior of a person using MS Word or Photoshop doesn't look at all like when ransomware does it - no matter what "pattern" they use for their encoding. They could mimic the overwrite behavior of programs like that to avoid the heuristic.... but then it'll take them weeks, months, or even years to get through all of the files on a person's computer, and they'll get caught long before that.
I can say this: in the process of sourcing products from China, you run into a *lot* of places there (producers, middlemen) selling hoverboard-like things for dirt cheap. QA is surely almost nonexistent. Western companies can buy them and resell them for a big profit. And the results are ever-so predictable.
You never import from China without doing rigorous product inspection and testing - because they'll only manufacture to the minimum standard needed in order to get you to pay them. They can, and will, manufacture to good standards, but only if that's their only way to get your money. The buyer is basically the QA team, not the producer. That goes double for things that involve 1) precision, 2) moving parts, and 3) electronics.
The fault of course lies in the manufacturing culture in China, but it also lies on the importers who either didn't know or didn't care and just bought from some random producer (who has no reputation to protect and will gladly just change the name on the sign if things turn south) without testing their products to death, just because the fit & finish looked good enough.
I think "Okay, I guess some probe has to do it at some point." sums up well how I feel about Juno. It's sort of like a chemistry research team going through thousands of variants of aramids to find the ones that yield the strongest tensile strength. Great that they're doing it, important, but not exactly the most interesting thing to follow.
Venus presents some of the biggest questions we could possibly answer in space, including "Is this the fate of Earth?" "If so how can we avoid it?" "If not how did we dodge the bullet?" Etc. It presents a hellish surface where yet somehow liquids (yet clearly not lavas... at least normal ones) formed some of the longest "rivers" in the solar system (including deltas). A planet with volcanoes the area of Olympus Mons... not one, but hundreds. A planet whose surface is speculated to experience common flows of kimberlites, carbonatites, and is known to be loaded with "incompatible elements" (often valuable)... rocks that are then baked under acidic gases, creating erosion products that can vaporize. A planetwhere a wide range of industrial chemicals and even iron can be condensed out of the clouds at an altitude with Earthlike pressures, temperatures, sunlight, gravity, and under a mass of radiation shielding equivalent to half a dozen meters of water, where the predominant cloud-forming mist decomposes largely into H2O and O2 under heat, and where normal Earth air is a lifting gas.
It's a fascinating world. Our neighbor. Our twin. And yet it keeps getting passed by. We'd know almost nothing about it if the Soviets hadn't run their Venera program.
Titan is the other world that really has a fascinating atmosphere ... though at least it has its excuse of distance and rare launch windows. It's not so much interesting from the perspective of "atmosphere as a giant industrial refinery"... it's more along the line of "atmosphere as a churning primordial soup". I can't stop thinking about the disappearing acetylene and ethylene. The data from the northern lakes showing that they're almost pure methane makes the question even bigger. Where is it going? We know it's being made. And then just... vanishing at the surface. Into it? Something breaking it down? How? And the lakes are just so tempting targets for exploration... "disappearing islands", deep sediments of organic matter at the lake beds.... how can a person not want to find out what's going on there, chemically?
IMHO Pluto was exciting because we'd never seen it or any Kuiper belt object before... and even more exciting once we started getting the data and you could see that the solid surface had massive convection cells like a giant roiling kettle with floating mountains and a massive range of crazy weirdness.
Honestly, most of what you described about Jupiter isn't exactly uncharted territory. It's going to have no impact on our understanding of asteroid dangers because Jupiter's mass and orbit are already extremely well known.
Lots of planets have poorly understood storms, Jupiter is hardly unique in this regard. And Juno's ability to clarify it is only a "maybe", it's not like we're dropping in a balloon probe (that would actually be rather interesting).
Jupiter's magnetic field almost certainly does contain antimatter... because even Earth's does ;) It's not a quantity interesting for harvesting on its own, though. We know how magnetic fields work, there's nothing new to learn in that regard. We should learn more about Jupiter's dynamo (and core in general) through Juno, but that doesn't personally interest me that much... to each their own.
But... we'll definitely get the prettiest pictures yet, for what that's worth. And as mentioned it'd be nice to better quantify (flux/energies of different particles over a wide spatial range) Jupiter's radiation belts.
In response to a person whose post was "Just because YOU don't understand the science mission ... Again, just because YOU don't understand why this science is important, then well, maybe you should just STFU...."?
I'll go with the former.
Thought police much? Since when is not being excited about something "trolling"? Am I not allowed to not be excited about something that you happen to be excited about?
And of all of the planets one could study the atmosphere of, I couldn't think of one less interesting than Jupiter's overwhelmingly hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, so heavily focused on light-gas reactions. We have massive gaps in our knowledge of two of the three "interesting", very complex atmospheres in our solar system (Titan and Venus... the third, well understood one being Earth). Even Pluto's nitrogen/methane photochemistry is IMHO more interesting than Jupiter's atmospheric chemistry. The last two atmospheres I'd want to spend money on a probe to go study would be Jupiter's and Saturn's - the ice giants are at least somewhat more interesting.
Meh. On Venus there's likely dozens, and we don't even know them all. Mars' atmospheric chemistry is trivial compared to Venus's and Titan's. And there's really big mysteries on both. Titan, examples: where's the acetylene and ethylene going? Is there really a downward flux of hydrogen, and if so, where is it going? Where's the methane coming from? Venus, examples: where's all of the mercury that should have baked out of its rocks and be setting in its atmosphere? What's the mystery UV absorber in the clouds? Are the surface fogs real, and what are they? What's the lower cloud made of - phosphoric acid? What are the "metal snows", and are there more than one type? And on and on, for both of them.
Venus rotates a lot slower, so you'd only get one per hemisphere.
Except that Venus doesn't behave like that. Venus is a superrotator (for crying out loud, you wrote a climate paper modeling a planet and you don't even know that Venus's atmosphere superrotates?). It has a hadley cell which stretches around the whole planet up to about 60 degrees, followed by cold collars, followed by very unusual polar vortices (sometimes described as double vortices, but the shapes are irregular and vary with time). That's just at the cloud level - our understanding of the deep atmosphere is highly limited. Venus also has somewhat Earthlike jet streams, gravity waves visible at the cloud deck (despite the great distances to the surface), and interesting, Earth-reminiscent tropospheric convection in the middle cloud layer (with possible rains and snows), plus lightning, although its location and details are unknown (and the data on it is often just weird... including the possibility of a layer in the lower atmosphere that "zaps" conductive objects as they move through it)
We have a sister planet sitting right next to us with crazy-complex atmospheric chemistry who we know pathetically little about and which is easy to get to with frequent launch windows and short transit times. Instead, we're studying the simple light gases of a much further body that likes to fry spacecraft orbiting it. No, Juno doesn't really capture my interest. But apparently that makes me a "troll".
Too many projects, too little time :( But I'll get to it eventually. I've worked with GEANT4 before on some spallation work, I just need to pick it up again.
(Then again, come to think of it, I'm not sure how well it'd deal with bulk plasma interactions... I may need to look into other tools. Or... hmm..)
Not "understand". "Excited about". I'm more than aware of what the science objectives are and what hardware is on the craft. I just don't find them particularly interesting. Just because you personally find knowing studying Jupiter's upper atmospheric composition and dynamics exciting doesn't mean that I somehow must. I would far rather get a better understanding of Venus's atmosphere than Jupiter's, for example.
Is this how you generally behave, that anyone who doesn't share your interests must somehow be an idiot who just doesn't understand what your interests really are? Yeah, I much prefer solid bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium to gas giants - so freaking sue me.
That depends on what you mean. Are you talking about the magnetic field strength or the flux and energy distribution of ionized particles? The field strength at the surface ranges from 25-65nT, and becomes increasingly more position-dependent with altitude. Jupiter's magnetic field is only something like 15x more intense than Earth's, but it's vastly larger and with a much higher flux. There's some extra amplification effects in the vicinity of Io as well, due to the "io flux tube".
Again: to anyone who is not trolling: general thoughts?
The solar wind is nowhere near as concentrated as the flux around Jupiter.
And there is nothing preposterous about the concept of mini-magnetosphere generation, it's a very mainstream research topic in spacecraft shielding.
I think you've confused "the science mission for Juno" with "science in general" - or more appropriately for this topic, "space exploration in general". There's a great deal of research related to space that I have a keen interest in.
Just not most of what Juno is going to be doing.
Okay......... meanwhile...
If anyone who's not trolling has any thoughts on the concept I'd be glad to hear them. The general idea being the creation of a toroidal mini-magnetosphere (mini-magnetospheres being an active area of research, for spacecraft shielding - 10s to 100s of kilometers in diameter, without requiring absurdly massive hardware) to create a dense plasma focus at the center, which is then further compressed (quite a few possibilities). Since you're dealing with a Maxwellian plasma, the plasma temperature is doing to define how much of the plasma will be have in the desired spectrum, and that in turn is a function of how much plasma you're concentrating into how small of a cross section; and the amount of plasma being concentrated is in turn a combination of the flux at Jupiter and the size of the inflated artificial magnetosphere)
That's the general idea, anyway - I haven't done too much with it yet. I was thinking of playing around with the concept in GEANT4.... I've always just been too busy with other projects when I started thinking about it.
... excited about Juno? I mean, it'll be sending some pretty pictures and all... but I just can't get myself that excited about the science mission.
I guess it'll be nice having better information on high energy particles in Jupiter's magnetosphere. I've often been tempted to simulate a concept I had for using Jupiter as a massive particle pre-accelerator for bulk antimatter production, to see what sort of flux in the dozens to hundreds of GeV could be achieved across a reasonable-sized target.
That's exactly the problem - you can't represent the real world properly with 8 bit RGB. Light intensities are properly represented in floating point.
Because that's precisely what we've been told - that the vehicle did not see the difference between the white of the truck and the sky. Which is a common artifact in camera images converted to a linearized RGB space, as any quick search of outdoor scenes on Google Images will show you.
A better algorithm will never pick out a vehicle out of a giant, continuous block of RGB=255,255,255.