Who was it that said when all you have is a hammer, it's tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail?
That's the mentality I see running the show inside the Beltway these days. When we need smarter security, we get dumb ideas like this -- and this one is worse than useless, because it makes people feel safer without actually providing any protection.
That's the upside of it. The downside is that now anyone worried that someone is going to find evidence of their scam, or screwup, in our Federal Depository Libraries can get that evidence destroyed under the watchful eyes of U.S. Marshals and not only can we not stop it, most of us won't even know when it happens.
Oh well.. at least I haven't been pulled over for not showing a flag..
It is actually quite normal for planes to crash every now and then, therefore it is most likely to be an accident.
Before 9/11, a plane crash used to be a more or less guaranteed headline. The PA crash on 9/11 was the first major airline crash I know of since CNN went on the air that *didn't* get at least a full day of "breaking news" coverage. I remember that as the thing that really gave me a sense of scale to the NYC/Pentagon attacks -- a crash like that was a minor byline to the day's events, and only really got airtime because it was related to the attacks. One measure of how 9/11 changed our perception is that so many [more] people now automatically think 'terrorism' when an airliner crashes.
Maybe it's just an accident. I agree with other folks here -- they do happen, all the FAA's and NTSB's best efforts to the contrary..
Here's a lesson too often left unlearned in "free" countires (sadly, including too much of the USA): Freedom is hard. That's why it's so rare in hisotry. Freedom means putting up with people with whom you disagree, people who set your teeth on edge, people who violate your most cherished beliefs. Freedom means offering to others all the rights you expect for yourself, and more. Freedom means allowing the possibility, no matter how remote, that you are wrong on something. Further, it means accepting that even if you are right and someone else is wrong, that person has the right to live his/her life as he/she sees fit.
I have to agree with that, having gone through most of the alternatives to it during my 38 years on this planet. There are times when it is very hard to do that, but it is the only logical way to respond to someone like a neo-Nazi, or white supremacist, or any one of a half dozen other social pathologies. People who live by hate tend to feed on it, and responding to them by trying to shut them down or censor them only makes them martyrs. Their right to speak goes hand in hand with my right to ignore them -- if nobody's trying to shut them up, they can't claim the are trying to silence them. Believe it or not, this system works -- not well, admittedly, but better than anything that depends on the personal gnosis of an Übermensch to sort out who's right and who's wrong..
My question -- has anyone asked the American Library Association what they think of this, or has the ALA been keeping a low profile ever since the DMCA was passed? This would seem to step right dead center on their largest and most painful toes.. I know of a university library that has a collection of 20K+ CD's available for checkout, is why I ask..
Rather than wasting time on email, does anyone know of any politicians that are using web enabled opinion polls to help them understand the thoughts of their constituants?
Vote for me, and I'll do it..;-).. if you live in Texas, that is..
Seriously, how out of reach is it to get a techie into office? If the people in office don't know how to use the most effective tools, put people in office who do.
How come I always hear about auroral activity a couple of days after it peaks?;-) I mean, some guy in *Tyler* saw this one.. may not have gotten as far south as Austin, but it would have been nice to check one more item off my life's to-do list..
That's exactly what I'd have done in his position - made the world think that I was out of touch, with a primitive communications infrastructure at best.
low tech != primitive..
especially against a high-tech adversary with intel that focuses on high-tech targets..
Cracking the Enigma, and more importantly the Fish codes later on was made possible by some completely original thinking by Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, who together created Colossus, the first ever electronic computer. ENIAC eat thy dust.
But the previous poster is right.. Polish intelligence was using a device called the "Bombe" to automate (to some extent) cracking a 3-wheel Enigma. Turing actually expanded on that design as a first step to cracking the 4-wheel machine, which was an order of magnitude more complicated, and later developed the Colossus as a more sophisticated approach to the same problem, but both were highly specialized machines and not as general-purpose as ENIAC.. although it *can* be argued that ENIAC wasn't exactly "general purpose"..
Now, if you want to talk about mechanical computers, what I *really* would like to see, if it's even possible, is a working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine.;-) Probably not possible, since very few of his drawings survived, but it would still be fascinating to see that machine run.. bit offtopic, I'll agree, but thought I'd indulge..
Unless he's reverse engineering the thing and still hasn't mapped out the wheel connections?;-)
It may be old technology, but I certainly would enjoy having a copy of an Enigma on the coffee table for guests to play with.. there are more ethical (not to mention legal) ways to get this information, but maybe he was trying to get a really good look at what was inside.. who knows?
As for the soft porn, the original show wasn't exactly lacking that either. What straight male over thirty hasn't had fond thoughts of the green chick in The Menagerie? That was racy stuff back then. The difference is that Menagerie and the rest of the original series had some class. They didn't just say "OK, how are we gonna get them naked? How about a disinfectant scene where they 'have' to rub each other down?"
Well, true. William Ware Theiss' costumes certainly did something for TOS (personal favorite is the one from "Gamesters of Triskelion" -- awful episode, truly awful, but that costume and the actress in it were worth putting up with the rest of it..) Anyone *not* familiar with his theory of costume design?;-)
But then again, Seven of Nine's lines didn't help the situation any on Voyager, with unmistakable implications of polyamory writ large.. still looking for a clock whose alarm is the words "You will awaken. Resistance is futile"..
Another issue conveniently ignored is the storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen, in its current form, is not particularly dense, requiring large tanks to store the equivalent energy stored in fossil fuels.
They also leak. A *lot*. Hydrogen is really hard to contain, since its nucleus is a proton, and can drop its electron off at the surface, bounce through the tiniest crevices, pick up an electron from the other side, combine with another hydrogen atom from the same crevice more than likely, and float away in the air as a free H2 molecule.
One of the genius tricks of the Viking GC/MS experiment was the palladium tube separator. Pd is porous enough to leak a little bit of hydrogen at ambient temperature -- heat it up to 200 C or so and it won't hold hydrogen at all, even though it will completely contain everything larger.
Connect a submicron vacuum pump to one end of a piece of Pd tube, connect a hydrogen cylinder to the other end, heat the tube to a few hundred degrees C, and you can crank the regulator wide open and not budge the gauge on the vacuum pump -- the hydrogen is all going out the sides of the tube, combining with oxygen at the surface (because Pd is also an excellent catalyst!;-) and disappearing as water vapor.
The same thing is happening on a much smaller scale with ordinary steel plumbing -- most metals are far too porous to contain hydrogen well enough to travel any distance with losing or contaminating it (and did I mention hydrogen is explosive in just about any mixture with air?) and you don't even want to *think* about what it takes to make a pipe connection hydrogen tight. I used to mess with capillary column GC's, which use hydrogen in their flame ionization detectors -- trust me, hydrogen can get out of anything. I can get rid of helium leaks with no problem, but I never could get rid of hydrogen leaks, even with painstaking tubing end preparation and microscope inspection of the fittings and ferrules, so your average $30-an-hour plumber is *definitely* not going to be up to the job..
That's the condensed verson of the letter I sent to my representative a while back, and would send to my Senators except for the unfortunate fact that I'm in Texas..
Where they find encrypted data they can't characterise it any further; so they hit a brick wall. But its not common right now, so they can make a file. However, if everyone on the internet routinely uses uncrackable encryption they can't build a file on everyone.
A *very* good reason to be using encryption for all the email you can, not just the messages you'd rather not have read by every MTA enroute. I keep telling people this until I'm blue in the face and haven't seem to made any headway. Maybe you can. If you can convince people that encryption only has any practical use if they encrypt a significant fraction of your messages, including enough innocent ones to lower the signal/noise ratio on what they encrypt, you're doing better than I am.
On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.
And if anyone *really* gets smart, they'll use the legal encryption as a wrapper for the illegal encryption, which means there's no way to profile it without going into key escrow or firing up the big cracker.
But the strongest method of all is to encrypt everthing and let the spooks sort it out. Encrypt everything -- shopping lists, random chat with friends, discussion on where the party is going to be tonight and who's picking up the keg, and so on -- and make them crack open the key escrow to read all of it. The smaller the percentage of your messages that are of any real interest to anyone else, the more effective this tactic is -- it's just not worth doing if you have to do it for every message because it's just too fscking expensive.
Of course this 'monitor all the traffic on the internet idea' falls down in several other ways. As an example, suppose somebody creates a Quake III server that has some sort of low bandwidth messaging in it perhaps the player steps left at careful timed moments or something, the characterisation by the NSA would be, oh its just another Quake player, when really its sending an encrypted message as well. [I just made that Quake idea up- its called 'steganography' in general, hiding encrypted messages in something else.]
A clever idea, that.. and you can certainly fake enough of the protocol to hide a lot of data in the margins.. who was it that found encrypted data hidden in GIF's or JPEG's?
Anyway, that's really what's going on. The security agencies are using the WTC disaster as a chance to get their legislation through whilst the going is good. Of course anyone with any sense can evade it, but not every terrorist has sense.
That's what I worry about the most. The people that really lose if encryption/privacy measures are outlawed are you and me.. the terrorists used it while it was strategically viable and have gone on to much more low-tech and far more secure communication, and we get stuck holding the bag when the Feds need a handy excuse to shut down something they have wanted to get rid of for a long time. I don't trust Ashcroft not to use these tools long after OBL and al Qaeda are yesterday's news, because I'm just the sort of person whose email he would love to read for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with his own religious beliefs. Personally, I would like to be using PGP for everything I send out, not because I have anything to hide, but because I don't believe that having nothing to hide means having nothing to fear, to paraphrase a billboard from one of my creepiest nightmares. The fact is that once we lose these freedoms, it's very unlikely that we will get them back, and a lot of people really want to take them away right now and see the current crisis as their chance of a lifetime, so all I can say is, let's start using it, *before* we lose it..
(PGP RSA and DH/DSS public keys available on request..)
Maybe it's time to rename the thing to the "Galactic Positioning System."
I think that's a little optimistic.;-)
Seriously, this thing seems to have the potential to make space probe control and navigation much easier and more accurate. It should be very interesting to see what applications come of this.
I think it changes all the rules. Any platform that can figure out for itself where it is in orbit and go where it wants to go without a team of engineers on the ground driving it 24/7 is going to be a major step up in technology. The AO-40 experiment shows SGPS is good for position data out to and possibly beyond GEO (it was launched into GTO from Kourou and didn't get much delta-V before the propulsion systems failed, so its apogee is still about GEO altitude), so you can count on future sats having at least SGPS receive capability on board now that the technology's been demonstrated.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some SGPS capability and perhaps onboard orbital management added to ISS and/or STS in the near future as well.. it's just too nice to have that independent capability on-orbit without having to do ground tracking. With enough hardware on the station and spacecraft, you could even do point-and-click rendezvous, sharing live data over TDRSS and computing plane changes and transfer orbits automatically, and of course you could continuously update your own Keplerian elements.. basically, you don't need nearly as much help from NASA or NORAD.
It should be very interesting to see what applications come of this.
Basically anything that requires live updating of on-orbit position data, which is a *lot*.. navigating in space just got a whole lot easier, for manned and unmanned travel alike.
Bear in mind, too, that even if you're going someplace where you *can't* get valid SGPS data, you still have to travel through a large region of space where you still *can* get valid data, which means your picture of your lunar transit or Hohmann transfer orbit is going to be that much more accurate. I'm still salivating over what this means for commercial lunar-earth orbit transits, now that getting into an accurate lunar transit doesn't take radar tracking and heavy CPU on the ground at JSC.
Now all we have to do is put a lunar orbit equivalent in place -- maybe with some telecom capability added in, call it something like Lunar Positioning and Communication System (LPCS) -- and you've got most of what it would take to get to the moon and back on a regular basis.. OK, yeah, yeah, except for fuel, but that's a logistics problem..;-)
And then there's email and the World Wide Web. Imagine a technically unhip Senator or Member of Congress who has read about Osama bin Laden allegedly using encrypted email and secret messages hidden in online porn to communicate with his followers an allies.
Can't tell for sure, but from the description it seems like they're talking about image steganography -- hiding encrypted data in the nooks and crannies of, say, a GIF image. Technically quite possible -- anyone seen any evidence of this, or is this just USAtoday pulling stuff out of their hat?
Put the words "Osama bin Laden" in the same sentence as "pornography" and "the Internet," and you had better get out of the way of the avalanche of anti-online privacy laws coming your way -- or get crushed by them,
Not arguing with that.
even if people like bin Laden can switch to other means of communication at the drop of a hat.
From the sound of it, he already has -- probably years ago. It's hard to get SIGINT from a group that doesn't use radios or cellphones.
So now we're going to be asked to give up our email privacy for no benefit at all, just to make the panicked uneducated masses feel better? Sounds to me this industry of technophobia is turning into an expensive luxury.
OK, here's the deal: When the Federal marshals show up at my door to demand I uninstall PGP, I'll think seriously about it. Until then:
(This is an older RSA key, but it should still work -- email me your public key and I'll send you my current DH/DSS public key. Or you can grab it from pgp.mit.edu while the server is still up..)
Build in some means of fire suppression that can control a fire involving at least one or two entire floors of the building, and make that system able to survive a major aircraft impact.
The basic structure probably would have survived more or less intact, thanks to the core's penetrable structure, if it hadn't been for the fire that involved at least one entire floor below each impact point, presumably from pooled fuel. The heat from the fire was what caused the collapse of the upper sections of the building, and when the framework failed and the upper sections fell 20-30 feet, that overloaded the remaining parts of each tower and caused the rest of the tower to collapse.
Go back and look at the footage -- you can see this yourself. The collapse was essentially straight down, with scattered outfall of debris -- vertical enough to shear off the fascia panels, which you can see standing about 40 stories high for several seconds after the north tower collapses. If the crash had caused the structural failure, the collapse would have been asymmetrical and the building would have toppled sideways. Thus, this was essentially fire damage and thermal weakening of the steel.
How to make this system survive an impact? Best suggestion I can make is an armored standpipe system, possibly near the corners so at least some of the standpipes survive, with heat activated discharge nozzles that flood the floor if it gets hot enough to threaten the structure itself. May not put out the fire, but could at least cool the framework to where it remains intact.. I'll let the engineers take it from here..
Fisher amplifier and tuner, bought at estate sale for $20.
Denon DCD-660, bought years ago for about $200.
Four element tuned port speakers with one cubic foot cavities, homebuilt from Radio Shack car stereo triaxials and piezo tweeters and some mahogany I had lying around, about $60 total, and I tuned the cavities myself.
Close your eyes and listen to it, and you'll swear it's one of those $10K plus systems.
The trick isn't in how much money you spend, it's in getting the sound right. Most people have never heard midrange before, let alone a system that's truly flat from 30Hz-20kHz, and if you can get the whole system that flat, and get the phasing and staging right, and get decent efficiency out of the speakers, you can get a $10K sound out of garage sale gear for a couple of hundred bucks.;-)
And mine doesn't have surround speakers because it doesn't need them..
The most disturbing point of all of this is that a U.S. owned and operated site is being forced by a court in another country to remove content it cannot stand.
I know pretty much everyone here realizes what a dangerous precedent that sets, but how do we convince the judges of that? There are a lot of countries out there a whole lot more hostile to U.S. hosted content than France, and if we open the door to this, what's to stop folks like the Taliban from using this to remove.. well, pretty much everything from U.S. servers? Hmm?
If I make and sell a smart TV set that blocks my competitors' commercials and replaces them on the fly with my own (yes, it's a non-trivial task, chill!) those competitors will probably take about a nanosecond to file suit for unfair competition, because, quite frankly, it is.
So, how is this any different? Yes, I know, I don't have to use WinXX -- I don't, as a matter of fact, since I have an all-Apple household and have never *needed* any Microsoft products -- but we're still talking about subverting third-party site content at the browser level, making changes to a site that the developer never intended, and generally polluting the user's experience. Given Microsoft's penchant for no-prisoners strategic marketing, how can this be a good thing?
.. the list of 'approved' titles is going to be *short*. It sure will be if the RIAA gets to decide what can and cannot be listed.. if you're bypassing the RIAA by (gasp) distributing your tunes directly to the public, RIAA just cut off your distribution system. Sorry.
Yes, in that scenario, it would be restraint of trade, because it would give RIAA monopoly control of recorded music distribution and freeze out all their competitors. Can't let you publish that, sorry, y'know, union rules and all that. If the *copyright holders* can opt in, then this scheme has a fighting chance of being fair, but don't hold your breath..
Slashdot Mirror
..before someone plugs in their wireless base station with NAT/DHCP turned on and WEP turned off?
.. it's inevitable .. ;-)
You know it will happen
Who was it that said when all you have is a hammer, it's tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail?
.. at least I haven't been pulled over for not showing a flag ..
That's the mentality I see running the show inside the Beltway these days. When we need smarter security, we get dumb ideas like this -- and this one is worse than useless, because it makes people feel safer without actually providing any protection.
That's the upside of it. The downside is that now anyone worried that someone is going to find evidence of their scam, or screwup, in our Federal Depository Libraries can get that evidence destroyed under the watchful eyes of U.S. Marshals and not only can we not stop it, most of us won't even know when it happens.
Oh well
It is actually quite normal for planes to crash every now and then, therefore it is most likely to be an accident.
..
Before 9/11, a plane crash used to be a more or less guaranteed headline. The PA crash on 9/11 was the first major airline crash I know of since CNN went on the air that *didn't* get at least a full day of "breaking news" coverage. I remember that as the thing that really gave me a sense of scale to the NYC/Pentagon attacks -- a crash like that was a minor byline to the day's events, and only really got airtime because it was related to the attacks. One measure of how 9/11 changed our perception is that so many [more] people now automatically think 'terrorism' when an airliner crashes.
Maybe it's just an accident. I agree with other folks here -- they do happen, all the FAA's and NTSB's best efforts to the contrary
Here's a lesson too often left unlearned in "free" countires (sadly, including too much of the USA): Freedom is hard. That's why it's so rare in hisotry. Freedom means putting up with people with whom you disagree, people who set your teeth on edge, people who violate your most cherished beliefs. Freedom means offering to others all the rights you expect for yourself, and more. Freedom means allowing the possibility, no matter how remote, that you are wrong on something. Further, it means accepting that even if you are right and someone else is wrong, that person has the right to live his/her life as he/she sees fit.
..
I have to agree with that, having gone through most of the alternatives to it during my 38 years on this planet. There are times when it is very hard to do that, but it is the only logical way to respond to someone like a neo-Nazi, or white supremacist, or any one of a half dozen other social pathologies. People who live by hate tend to feed on it, and responding to them by trying to shut them down or censor them only makes them martyrs. Their right to speak goes hand in hand with my right to ignore them -- if nobody's trying to shut them up, they can't claim the are trying to silence them. Believe it or not, this system works -- not well, admittedly, but better than anything that depends on the personal gnosis of an Übermensch to sort out who's right and who's wrong
Or is that just a buzzword nowadays?
.. I know of a university library that has a collection of 20K+ CD's available for checkout, is why I ask ..
My question -- has anyone asked the American Library Association what they think of this, or has the ALA been keeping a low profile ever since the DMCA was passed? This would seem to step right dead center on their largest and most painful toes
Rather than wasting time on email, does anyone know of any politicians that are using web enabled opinion polls to help them understand the thoughts of their constituants?
.. ;-) .. if you live in Texas, that is ..
Vote for me, and I'll do it
Seriously, how out of reach is it to get a techie into office? If the people in office don't know how to use the most effective tools, put people in office who do.
How come I always hear about auroral activity a couple of days after it peaks? ;-) I mean, some guy in *Tyler* saw this one .. may not have gotten as far south as Austin, but it would have been nice to check one more item off my life's to-do list ..
That's exactly what I'd have done in his position - made the world think that I was out of touch, with a primitive communications infrastructure at best.
..
..
low tech != primitive
especially against a high-tech adversary with intel that focuses on high-tech targets
Cracking the Enigma, and more importantly the Fish codes later on was made possible by some completely original thinking by Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, who together created Colossus, the first ever electronic computer. ENIAC eat thy dust.
.. Polish intelligence was using a device called the "Bombe" to automate (to some extent) cracking a 3-wheel Enigma. Turing actually expanded on that design as a first step to cracking the 4-wheel machine, which was an order of magnitude more complicated, and later developed the Colossus as a more sophisticated approach to the same problem, but both were highly specialized machines and not as general-purpose as ENIAC .. although it *can* be argued that ENIAC wasn't exactly "general purpose" ..
;-) Probably not possible, since very few of his drawings survived, but it would still be fascinating to see that machine run .. bit offtopic, I'll agree, but thought I'd indulge ..
But the previous poster is right
Now, if you want to talk about mechanical computers, what I *really* would like to see, if it's even possible, is a working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Unless he's reverse engineering the thing and still hasn't mapped out the wheel connections? ;-)
.. there are more ethical (not to mention legal) ways to get this information, but maybe he was trying to get a really good look at what was inside .. who knows?
It may be old technology, but I certainly would enjoy having a copy of an Enigma on the coffee table for guests to play with
As for the soft porn, the original show wasn't exactly lacking that either. What straight male over thirty hasn't had fond thoughts of the green chick in The Menagerie? That was racy stuff back then. The difference is that Menagerie and the rest of the original series had some class. They didn't just say "OK, how are we gonna get them naked? How about a disinfectant scene where they 'have' to rub each other down?"
;-)
.. still looking for a clock whose alarm is the words "You will awaken. Resistance is futile" ..
Well, true. William Ware Theiss' costumes certainly did something for TOS (personal favorite is the one from "Gamesters of Triskelion" -- awful episode, truly awful, but that costume and the actress in it were worth putting up with the rest of it..) Anyone *not* familiar with his theory of costume design?
But then again, Seven of Nine's lines didn't help the situation any on Voyager, with unmistakable implications of polyamory writ large
Another issue conveniently ignored is the storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen, in its current form, is not particularly dense, requiring large tanks to store the equivalent energy stored in fossil fuels.
;-) and disappearing as water vapor.
..
They also leak. A *lot*. Hydrogen is really hard to contain, since its nucleus is a proton, and can drop its electron off at the surface, bounce through the tiniest crevices, pick up an electron from the other side, combine with another hydrogen atom from the same crevice more than likely, and float away in the air as a free H2 molecule.
One of the genius tricks of the Viking GC/MS experiment was the palladium tube separator. Pd is porous enough to leak a little bit of hydrogen at ambient temperature -- heat it up to 200 C or so and it won't hold hydrogen at all, even though it will completely contain everything larger.
Connect a submicron vacuum pump to one end of a piece of Pd tube, connect a hydrogen cylinder to the other end, heat the tube to a few hundred degrees C, and you can crank the regulator wide open and not budge the gauge on the vacuum pump -- the hydrogen is all going out the sides of the tube, combining with oxygen at the surface (because Pd is also an excellent catalyst!
The same thing is happening on a much smaller scale with ordinary steel plumbing -- most metals are far too porous to contain hydrogen well enough to travel any distance with losing or contaminating it (and did I mention hydrogen is explosive in just about any mixture with air?) and you don't even want to *think* about what it takes to make a pipe connection hydrogen tight. I used to mess with capillary column GC's, which use hydrogen in their flame ionization detectors -- trust me, hydrogen can get out of anything. I can get rid of helium leaks with no problem, but I never could get rid of hydrogen leaks, even with painstaking tubing end preparation and microscope inspection of the fittings and ferrules, so your average $30-an-hour plumber is *definitely* not going to be up to the job
email without encryption == postcard
..
email with encryption == letter in envelope
banning encryption == banning envelopes
That's the condensed verson of the letter I sent to my representative a while back, and would send to my Senators except for the unfortunate fact that I'm in Texas
Where they find encrypted data they can't characterise it any further; so they hit a brick wall. But its not common right now, so they can make a file. However, if everyone on the internet routinely uses uncrackable encryption they can't build a file on everyone.
.. and you can certainly fake enough of the protocol to hide a lot of data in the margins .. who was it that found encrypted data hidden in GIF's or JPEG's?
.. the terrorists used it while it was strategically viable and have gone on to much more low-tech and far more secure communication, and we get stuck holding the bag when the Feds need a handy excuse to shut down something they have wanted to get rid of for a long time. I don't trust Ashcroft not to use these tools long after OBL and al Qaeda are yesterday's news, because I'm just the sort of person whose email he would love to read for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with his own religious beliefs. Personally, I would like to be using PGP for everything I send out, not because I have anything to hide, but because I don't believe that having nothing to hide means having nothing to fear, to paraphrase a billboard from one of my creepiest nightmares. The fact is that once we lose these freedoms, it's very unlikely that we will get them back, and a lot of people really want to take them away right now and see the current crisis as their chance of a lifetime, so all I can say is, let's start using it, *before* we lose it ..
A *very* good reason to be using encryption for all the email you can, not just the messages you'd rather not have read by every MTA enroute. I keep telling people this until I'm blue in the face and haven't seem to made any headway. Maybe you can. If you can convince people that encryption only has any practical use if they encrypt a significant fraction of your messages, including enough innocent ones to lower the signal/noise ratio on what they encrypt, you're doing better than I am.
On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.
And if anyone *really* gets smart, they'll use the legal encryption as a wrapper for the illegal encryption, which means there's no way to profile it without going into key escrow or firing up the big cracker.
But the strongest method of all is to encrypt everthing and let the spooks sort it out. Encrypt everything -- shopping lists, random chat with friends, discussion on where the party is going to be tonight and who's picking up the keg, and so on -- and make them crack open the key escrow to read all of it. The smaller the percentage of your messages that are of any real interest to anyone else, the more effective this tactic is -- it's just not worth doing if you have to do it for every message because it's just too fscking expensive.
Of course this 'monitor all the traffic on the internet idea' falls down in several other ways. As an example, suppose somebody creates a Quake III server that has some sort of low bandwidth messaging in it perhaps the player steps left at careful timed moments or something, the characterisation by the NSA would be, oh its just another Quake player, when really its sending an encrypted message as well. [I just made that Quake idea up- its called 'steganography' in general, hiding encrypted messages in something else.]
A clever idea, that
Anyway, that's really what's going on. The security agencies are using the WTC disaster as a chance to get their legislation through whilst the going is good. Of course anyone with any sense can evade it, but not every terrorist has sense.
That's what I worry about the most. The people that really lose if encryption/privacy measures are outlawed are you and me
(PGP RSA and DH/DSS public keys available on request..)
Maybe it's time to rename the thing to the "Galactic Positioning System."
;-)
.. it's just too nice to have that independent capability on-orbit without having to do ground tracking. With enough hardware on the station and spacecraft, you could even do point-and-click rendezvous, sharing live data over TDRSS and computing plane changes and transfer orbits automatically, and of course you could continuously update your own Keplerian elements .. basically, you don't need nearly as much help from NASA or NORAD.
.. way cool. Way cool indeed.
I think that's a little optimistic.
Seriously, this thing seems to have the potential to make space probe control and navigation much easier and more accurate. It should be very interesting to see what applications come of this.
I think it changes all the rules. Any platform that can figure out for itself where it is in orbit and go where it wants to go without a team of engineers on the ground driving it 24/7 is going to be a major step up in technology. The AO-40 experiment shows SGPS is good for position data out to and possibly beyond GEO (it was launched into GTO from Kourou and didn't get much delta-V before the propulsion systems failed, so its apogee is still about GEO altitude), so you can count on future sats having at least SGPS receive capability on board now that the technology's been demonstrated.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some SGPS capability and perhaps onboard orbital management added to ISS and/or STS in the near future as well
In short
It should be very interesting to see what applications come of this.
.. navigating in space just got a whole lot easier, for manned and unmanned travel alike.
.. OK, yeah, yeah, except for fuel, but that's a logistics problem .. ;-)
Basically anything that requires live updating of on-orbit position data, which is a *lot*
Bear in mind, too, that even if you're going someplace where you *can't* get valid SGPS data, you still have to travel through a large region of space where you still *can* get valid data, which means your picture of your lunar transit or Hohmann transfer orbit is going to be that much more accurate. I'm still salivating over what this means for commercial lunar-earth orbit transits, now that getting into an accurate lunar transit doesn't take radar tracking and heavy CPU on the ground at JSC.
Now all we have to do is put a lunar orbit equivalent in place -- maybe with some telecom capability added in, call it something like Lunar Positioning and Communication System (LPCS) -- and you've got most of what it would take to get to the moon and back on a regular basis
Can't tell for sure, but from the description it seems like they're talking about image steganography -- hiding encrypted data in the nooks and crannies of, say, a GIF image. Technically quite possible -- anyone seen any evidence of this, or is this just USAtoday pulling stuff out of their hat?
Not arguing with that.
From the sound of it, he already has -- probably years ago. It's hard to get SIGINT from a group that doesn't use radios or cellphones.
So now we're going to be asked to give up our email privacy for no benefit at all, just to make the panicked uneducated masses feel better? Sounds to me this industry of technophobia is turning into an expensive luxury.
OK, here's the deal: When the Federal marshals show up at my door to demand I uninstall PGP, I'll think seriously about it. Until then:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.6.2
mQCPAzacFJsAAAEEAOEuJGZBdIOlQowWPelEx66CfEpoqaS
j53ksItvRIqYPzr4NWjYzp0b36Q4Dy8e63ACZ971kjDbVPX
6wkE6N4Iuwy4DA3LsdzZ5Eg5n1iQ5nYMabiapAYLuWM4lbf
AAG0KUJydWNlIEJvc3R3aWNrIDxsaWhhbkBjY3dmLmNjLnV
=pwWB
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
(This is an older RSA key, but it should still work -- email me your public key and I'll send you my current DH/DSS public key. Or you can grab it from pgp.mit.edu while the server is still up
Build in some means of fire suppression that can control a fire involving at least one or two entire floors of the building, and make that system able to survive a major aircraft impact.
.. I'll let the engineers take it from here ..
The basic structure probably would have survived more or less intact, thanks to the core's penetrable structure, if it hadn't been for the fire that involved at least one entire floor below each impact point, presumably from pooled fuel. The heat from the fire was what caused the collapse of the upper sections of the building, and when the framework failed and the upper sections fell 20-30 feet, that overloaded the remaining parts of each tower and caused the rest of the tower to collapse.
Go back and look at the footage -- you can see this yourself. The collapse was essentially straight down, with scattered outfall of debris -- vertical enough to shear off the fascia panels, which you can see standing about 40 stories high for several seconds after the north tower collapses. If the crash had caused the structural failure, the collapse would have been asymmetrical and the building would have toppled sideways. Thus, this was essentially fire damage and thermal weakening of the steel.
How to make this system survive an impact? Best suggestion I can make is an armored standpipe system, possibly near the corners so at least some of the standpipes survive, with heat activated discharge nozzles that flood the floor if it gets hot enough to threaten the structure itself. May not put out the fire, but could at least cool the framework to where it remains intact
"September 11, 2001 .. a date which will live in infamy .."
if you can find either a generator that can withstand 100krpm, or a gear reduction that can take the torque .. hmm .. ;-)
Fisher amplifier and tuner, bought at estate sale for $20.
;-)
..
Denon DCD-660, bought years ago for about $200.
Four element tuned port speakers with one cubic foot cavities, homebuilt from Radio Shack car stereo triaxials and piezo tweeters and some mahogany I had lying around, about $60 total, and I tuned the cavities myself.
Close your eyes and listen to it, and you'll swear it's one of those $10K plus systems.
The trick isn't in how much money you spend, it's in getting the sound right. Most people have never heard midrange before, let alone a system that's truly flat from 30Hz-20kHz, and if you can get the whole system that flat, and get the phasing and staging right, and get decent efficiency out of the speakers, you can get a $10K sound out of garage sale gear for a couple of hundred bucks.
And mine doesn't have surround speakers because it doesn't need them
The most disturbing point of all of this is that a U.S. owned and operated site is being forced by a court in another country to remove content it cannot stand.
.. well, pretty much everything from U.S. servers? Hmm?
I know pretty much everyone here realizes what a dangerous precedent that sets, but how do we convince the judges of that? There are a lot of countries out there a whole lot more hostile to U.S. hosted content than France, and if we open the door to this, what's to stop folks like the Taliban from using this to remove
If I make and sell a smart TV set that blocks my competitors' commercials and replaces them on the fly with my own (yes, it's a non-trivial task, chill!) those competitors will probably take about a nanosecond to file suit for unfair competition, because, quite frankly, it is.
So, how is this any different? Yes, I know, I don't have to use WinXX -- I don't, as a matter of fact, since I have an all-Apple household and have never *needed* any Microsoft products -- but we're still talking about subverting third-party site content at the browser level, making changes to a site that the developer never intended, and generally polluting the user's experience. Given Microsoft's penchant for no-prisoners strategic marketing, how can this be a good thing?
If the market is pushing towards optional filtering, what would make for a better solution?
/.?
;-)
Make the filtering less of an on/off choice and more of a fuzzy choice, preferably with a user-selectable threshold.
And is it any coincidence that that is starting to sound more and more like
.. the list of 'approved' titles is going to be *short*. It sure will be if the RIAA gets to decide what can and cannot be listed .. if you're bypassing the RIAA by (gasp) distributing your tunes directly to the public, RIAA just cut off your distribution system. Sorry.
..
Yes, in that scenario, it would be restraint of trade, because it would give RIAA monopoly control of recorded music distribution and freeze out all their competitors. Can't let you publish that, sorry, y'know, union rules and all that. If the *copyright holders* can opt in, then this scheme has a fighting chance of being fair, but don't hold your breath