Look there's no significant evidence of any 'absurdly complex product' features here. These suckers didn't change the password from the factory default. That's all. Or they spouted off to anyone on the phone about what they were.
From what I know of Nortel, I'd bet that the company ran courses that laid out exactly what you should do to secure the equipment. Its no use these companies going crying to their mommies because they didn't use the flipping equipment properly. Kevin RTFM and they didn't. So it's in the manual too.
The use of default passwords wasn't out of line with the time. Nowadays you'd have to explicitly switch it on to get it to work. Back then, probably not. Heck, over the weekend I was reading about the Alcatel ADSL modem. Apparently the tftp server on it doesn't even HAVE a password- that modem looks wide open to me. And that wasn't designed 15 years ago, more like 2 or 3. Who's more culpable?
The customer. They bought the equipment, they specified the equipment, they didn't set the passwords on the equipment, they didn't read the manual that comes with the equipment. They didn't make a big fuss to Nortel about how insecure the equipment was. It certainly wasn't the customers fault that they were hacked, but they did everything except hold the door open for him.
The problem with this is that your speed when fueling from the tanker will be slow enough that you'll get questionable gains from this system. The tanker will, at best, be travelling around 1 km/sec (and that's in the Mach 2-3 range).
It's not so much the speed, it's the altitude and the fact that your takeoff weight is reduced. If the tanker and craft separate at 100 km, it's much easier for a small craft to make orbit.
Your shuttle needs to get to 8 km/sec. Burn time is directly proportional to delta-V, so you save very little even with a very fast tanker.
The small craft needs less undercarriage because it doesn't take off with any weight, and has less structure because you only have to worry about fuel in it when you are flying- the lift of the wings holds the fuel from snapping the wings.
I also question how much of a problem the atmosphere is. For small craft, it's a very big deal, but for craft large enough that their cross-sectional weight is much, much greater than that of the air column they plow through, atmospheric drag isn't a concern.
Yes.
This is especially true given that most of the boosting happens at great altitude (less atmosphere to worry about).
The idea is that the dry mass ends up less, also, because you can fly around you can take off nearer the equator, and there significant range control issues that go away.
The big advantage to an air-breathing rocket is a huge specific impulse boost (as your rocket fuel needs no oxidizer).
Only whilst its in the atmosphere. But staying in the atmosphere costs fuel and it quickly becomes uneconomic, except at low speeds. Rockets deliberately leave the atmosphere as quickly as possible for a reason.
However, getting rockets to work at extremely-hypersonic speeds is an unsolved problem, and if your jets can only be used at (relatively) low speeds, you again don't get much benefit (and have to drag the extra weight of the jet engines along).
In actual fact rocket engines are 'heat engines' and more efficient than jet engines and routinely achieve 80% efficiency.
I think not.
Yes, I haven't noticed you doing any thinking either.
A rocket engine is not a heat engine.
You seem to have put the word 'not' in that sentence. Take it out and you form a true statement. It turns heat energy into fast movement of the exhaust. And it does so with extremely high efficiency.
And the maximum efficiency of a heat engine is 27% [bgsu.edu].
True. 'a' heat engine does have 25% percent efficiency. Heat engine's efficiencies depend on the temperatures involved. All rocket engines I am familiar with don't run at 100C however, they run at ~3000C, and if you do the maths (you can do maths can you?) you should notice a quite startling increase in efficiency. Yes it does go up to around 80%. Have a nice day.
First you say: They're unnecessarily big, wasteful, and difficult to maintain.
But then: That's not to say that I have a replacement or that I'm smug enough to believe I know better than the rocket scientists though...
So who are you to say what's unnecessary exactly?
Perhaps it's time for us to revisit Chuck Yeager's opinion that we should not use deadlift rockets but should instead fly into space.
Maybe, but I've seen no evidence that flying in space is a good idea, and a rocket needs 93% of its velocity going sideways very fast if it is to make orbit. Going fast within the atmosphere- well mach-3 would be doing well, about mach 25 is orbital velocity; that's a massive difference.
I've heard that the shuttle uses up more fuel to go the first 100 feet than a packed 747 uses for its entire flight.
Then again when it gets to orbit it needs essentially no fuel at all, for weeks. Try doing that in a 747. The point is really that a rocket burns its fuel all at once early on, so it looks impressive; if a 747 burnt all its fuel at takeoff you'd be moaning about how inefficient they are. In actual fact rocket engines are 'heat engines' and more efficient than jet engines and routinely achieve 80% efficiency. Consider this: water vapour in some rocket exhausts has been known to condense out, because the rocket nozzle has extracted so much heat. Now that's impressive.
Now, if we could use a graceful system like horizontal launch to first break the inertia, then a rocket boost up in the 10K-30K feet range (3KM-10KM roughly) would be much more efficient and allow heavier cargo and more people in the same space as our current shuttles.
Huge IF. The problem is you need a lot of fuel to reach orbit. Jet engines for example can barely lift their own weight in most cases, although some can lift a light aeroplane, straight up, for a shortwhile. A rocket engine can lift 70-130 times its own weight, and even then reaching orbit isn't all that easy in fact, some rockets barely make it off the launchpad due to the fuel load necessary to make orbit.
Undercarriage costs weight too. The typical problem found is you end up carrying so much equipment and spend so long messing about in the drag of the atmosphere that you use more fuel, not less.
Actually the web site was very carefully constructed. The MP gets your actual home address and can contact you to ask questions, and verify your identity in any number of ways.
To be fair to Nortel, these particular systems were hacked 7 years ago, at a time where encryption on the internet was a rarity, and orginally designed well over a decade ago. Security features weren't much of an issue with customers at that time, clearly security is becoming much more of an issue now.
However, very few systems are proof against social engineering, encryption or not.
Atleast one person (me) found out about the issue right here on slashdot as well as the Fax webpage. I was one of the hundreds that used this mechanism. I received a very nice letter from my MP thanking me for my interest and noting that the legislation had been voted down (actually he was quite happy about it, as he's in opposition).
Wow- real democracy! And in the semi-police state of the UK. Who'd have thought?
Actually, probably there's differences in the number of 0's or 1's in the blocks anyway. Therefore if you were to take all of the blocks of data on one CD, sort them by intensity, you could arrange for the data blocks to be positioned to approximate to the image you wanted to write, on the data portion of another CD.
Of course doing this would completely scramble the disk data up, so the poor CDROM laser would be jumping around like a lunatic; and CDROMs are peculiarly slow at jumping... So accessing the data would work, but really, really sllllllllllooooowwlllllly.
Well, they could add more layers and gradually vary the proportions of the different metals with each layer. That way you don't get any sharp discontinuity and the thermal shear stress is massively reduced. Wouldn't help with immiscible metals of course.
"A technician deals with all of these imperfections one image at a time using a computer and digitized versions of the images. Once the still images are perfect, the morphing software interpolates between them. Then the background images are laid into the green area. A technician has to build a complete 3-D computer model of the computer-generated scene and then key the rotation through this scene to the position of the camera in each frame of the film."
As I said, the cameras are too bulky... they needed to be able to inbetween them to get the effect that the director wanted.
Its just a few hundred cameras that are synched and can be switched from in a linear method giving the illusion of 1 single camera.
Actually no. There would have had to have too many cameras to get a smooth camera movement- and the cameras would have got in each others way.
The Matrix effects really did have to do inbetweening between the different cameras digitally in fact.
I am uncertain as to how much of this was done by software and how much was hand hacked in practice, frame by frame; but it wasn't as simplistic as you said above.
Yup, the emergency procedure in the UK involves disabling wired phones as well. Supposedly several phones are supposed to be registered and they are supposed to be preserved. However sometimes the various services forget to register some of the phones and then it gets a bit farsical.
It's been used a few times (not terribly appropriately IRC), most of which included comical images of the bomb squad desperately trying to remember their semaphore signals.
However, they do leave the public telephones running, so that's something.
"After several days of impasse I finally caved-in and changed the design document to match the reviewer's ideas. However, the finally code was based on my original design. No one knew. My boss was happy, the reviewer was happy and I was happy."
You need to write down what the system HAS to do to be saleable/useable. You can write down what you'd like it to do on top ("run as fast as possible").
You need to do that, and write it down between you. Then you need to get your manager to sign it off. Then when your manager says- "you need to make it faster" then you can point to the requirements and say- I've achieved 1 ms, like it says here.
Otherwise, you will never be finished and never deploy your system. It's nearly always possible to modify the code to improve performance.
I agree with the other posters too, if you have to throw away some part or all of the tables to do a user request, do that, and recalculate them afterwards.
"So something triggered it" - it says nowhere that it had been deactivated.
"and something made it leave the building." - nothing necessarily MADE it leave the building, it probably just randomly blundered its way out. However, some robots are photophilic (move towards to light), but I don't know whether this one exhibited that behaviour; some behaviours it might have might make it more likely to find itself outside, and that's one example.
Not malfunction, there's no evidence of that. The robot almost certainly didn't know what it was doing anymore than a bunch of insects escaping from a tank knew they were in a tank; the current state of the art in robotics is about insect level at best, and probably not even that high.
then all they're doing is not TELLING you they are tracking email headers, dialled phone numbers and http connections. (In cryptographic circles it's called Traffic Analysis.)
Blunkett went all uncharacteristically contrite on us, but according to the Register this just means that they're not actually formalising what they are doing anyway.
They probably really are handing around traffic analysis data like smarties. "Oh looook what he's accessing!" Probably there's people out there being blackmailed right now; there's bound to be some bad apples with access to this data.
Re:DNS isn't the only game in town
on
Ruling the Root
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· Score: 2
Um. Yes. I know. But Google != Googol.
Re:DNS isn't the only game in town
on
Ruling the Root
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· Score: 2
google is a fun way to refer to the number 1 with 100 zeros following it.
It might be fun, but it's wrong (or perhaps its fun because it's wrong?): googol is 10^100
DNS isn't the only game in town
on
Ruling the Root
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· Score: 2
Ok, firt, remember that DNS is just one way to find web sites- at best its just a handy mnemonic for the IP address, would you prefer:
www.google.com
or: 216.239.39.101???
Both work fine; so we don't absolutely need a dns on the internet at all- in fact I think it is becoming less and less important already.
And we're supposed to be upset that choosing global mnemonic is politicised? That businesses pay for mnemonics that happen to match their businesses name? That they try to protect their name? I'm sorry but that doesn't bother me. Creating novel names is easy. I mean what did 'google' mean? It didn't mean anything.
Personally, I'm much more concerned about search engines- I don't really see the point of DNS lookups so much anymore. If search engines in general and google in particular really starts to sell out, the internet could be in trouble. Google is a much more flexible, practical, and less politicised, less bought system; but I expect that to slowly change.
Still, there are other things on the internet that peform equivalent functions. Peer-peer systems usually don't use DNS much; we could switch over to use them at a pinch- there would need to be some work done, but p2p is harder to buy, it can be open sourced, and the search engine is totally distributed unlike google.
(Yes, I know that p2p search is slow and inefficient right now, but there's better p2p search algorithms that can be applied that are fast, scalable, distributed and robust, and give similar results to a google if we care to do that. The only reason we're not using them right is because nobody has been forced to implement and deploy them- but they can be if google starts to mess up.)
Summary: even if DNS is going to hell in a bucket. Who cares?
And plucking the signals out of the air currently is more difficult because...
It's not. That doesn't make it ok.
It doesn't make it not OK either.
End to end encryption ensures protection of the packets, as well as authentication. This is no more a problem than it is on the internet. Been to an https server lately? I was using encryption on a wireless packet link ALL day. Anybody could grab the packets. Good luck cracking 3DES.
Robust channel coding, interleaving and ARQ introduces more delay.
Not necessarily. The encoding can be end-end rather than per link. Per link routing delays can be as low as a single bit in fact. If you think about it that means errors can be found within 8 bits or so and a retry begun really quickly afterwards.
I wouldn't pay any monthly fees if I were you when there are no guarantees that any calls would get through.
So when I text, there's no guarantee that would get through. So I should stop paying my bill? Huh? And when I use my cell phone what guarantees a channel right now? Nothing. You can't be serious.
Sure, you can do that. All it takes is a more sophisticated (and expensive) tranceiver.
Current tranceivers are really, really cheap. A more expensive tranceiver doesn't sound like a show stopper; unless its massively so.
Look, we're basically talking about VOIP. Packet forwarding doesn't exactly need massive computing power.
We're really not. Not trying to be a bitch here, but please look up some references on GSM (since the previous poster nailed it down to that).
We're not talking about GSM here really.
There's a lot going on in a GSM phone! While you're right that you don't have to do any processing on the voice signal, to describe it as simple packet forwarding is a little bit simple, or every so often.
It's a little bit, but only a little; look, 99.9% of the time you'd keep the same route you used on the last packet you sent. Just occasionally, or if the reception varies do you even have to think about recreating routing tables.
Look at some literature on cell phone issues. It is much more common to assume 1/r^4, but it varies according to exactly where you are (ie: How dense things are). 1/r^2 really only applies in free space; nobody really uses it.;)
Actually I know; I was being conservative. It actually makes my point more not less if you assume 1/r^4- that means lots of short hops are much, much, much lower power.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I know of Nortel, I'd bet that the company ran courses that laid out exactly what you should do to secure the equipment. Its no use these companies going crying to their mommies because they didn't use the flipping equipment properly. Kevin RTFM and they didn't. So it's in the manual too.
The use of default passwords wasn't out of line with the time. Nowadays you'd have to explicitly switch it on to get it to work. Back then, probably not. Heck, over the weekend I was reading about the Alcatel ADSL modem. Apparently the tftp server on it doesn't even HAVE a password- that modem looks wide open to me. And that wasn't designed 15 years ago, more like 2 or 3. Who's more culpable?
The customer. They bought the equipment, they specified the equipment, they didn't set the passwords on the equipment, they didn't read the manual that comes with the equipment. They didn't make a big fuss to Nortel about how insecure the equipment was. It certainly wasn't the customers fault that they were hacked, but they did everything except hold the door open for him.
It's not so much the speed, it's the altitude and the fact that your takeoff weight is reduced. If the tanker and craft separate at 100 km, it's much easier for a small craft to make orbit.
Your shuttle needs to get to 8 km/sec. Burn time is directly proportional to delta-V, so you save very little even with a very fast tanker.
The small craft needs less undercarriage because it doesn't take off with any weight, and has less structure because you only have to worry about fuel in it when you are flying- the lift of the wings holds the fuel from snapping the wings.
I also question how much of a problem the atmosphere is. For small craft, it's a very big deal, but for craft large enough that their cross-sectional weight is much, much greater than that of the air column they plow through, atmospheric drag isn't a concern.
Yes.
This is especially true given that most of the boosting happens at great altitude (less atmosphere to worry about).
The idea is that the dry mass ends up less, also, because you can fly around you can take off nearer the equator, and there significant range control issues that go away.
The big advantage to an air-breathing rocket is a huge specific impulse boost (as your rocket fuel needs no oxidizer).
Only whilst its in the atmosphere. But staying in the atmosphere costs fuel and it quickly becomes uneconomic, except at low speeds. Rockets deliberately leave the atmosphere as quickly as possible for a reason.
However, getting rockets to work at extremely-hypersonic speeds is an unsolved problem, and if your jets can only be used at (relatively) low speeds, you again don't get much benefit (and have to drag the extra weight of the jet engines along).
The shuttle already has an undercarriage, as is evidenced by this picture [nasa.gov] on this site [nasa.gov]
Really? Gasp! And where's the picture with it using it to take off? Hint: there isn't one, because it can't take the weight.
I think not.
Yes, I haven't noticed you doing any thinking either.
A rocket engine is not a heat engine.
You seem to have put the word 'not' in that sentence. Take it out and you form a true statement. It turns heat energy into fast movement of the exhaust. And it does so with extremely high efficiency.
And the maximum efficiency of a heat engine is 27% [bgsu.edu].
True. 'a' heat engine does have 25% percent efficiency. Heat engine's efficiencies depend on the temperatures involved. All rocket engines I am familiar with don't run at 100C however, they run at ~3000C, and if you do the maths (you can do maths can you?) you should notice a quite startling increase in efficiency. Yes it does go up to around 80%. Have a nice day.
But then: That's not to say that I have a replacement or that I'm smug enough to believe I know better than the rocket scientists though...
So who are you to say what's unnecessary exactly?
Perhaps it's time for us to revisit Chuck Yeager's opinion that we should not use deadlift rockets but should instead fly into space.
Maybe, but I've seen no evidence that flying in space is a good idea, and a rocket needs 93% of its velocity going sideways very fast if it is to make orbit. Going fast within the atmosphere- well mach-3 would be doing well, about mach 25 is orbital velocity; that's a massive difference.
I've heard that the shuttle uses up more fuel to go the first 100 feet than a packed 747 uses for its entire flight.
Then again when it gets to orbit it needs essentially no fuel at all, for weeks. Try doing that in a 747. The point is really that a rocket burns its fuel all at once early on, so it looks impressive; if a 747 burnt all its fuel at takeoff you'd be moaning about how inefficient they are. In actual fact rocket engines are 'heat engines' and more efficient than jet engines and routinely achieve 80% efficiency. Consider this: water vapour in some rocket exhausts has been known to condense out, because the rocket nozzle has extracted so much heat. Now that's impressive.
Now, if we could use a graceful system like horizontal launch to first break the inertia, then a rocket boost up in the 10K-30K feet range (3KM-10KM roughly) would be much more efficient and allow heavier cargo and more people in the same space as our current shuttles.
Huge IF . The problem is you need a lot of fuel to reach orbit. Jet engines for example can barely lift their own weight in most cases, although some can lift a light aeroplane, straight up, for a shortwhile. A rocket engine can lift 70-130 times its own weight, and even then reaching orbit isn't all that easy in fact, some rockets barely make it off the launchpad due to the fuel load necessary to make orbit.
Undercarriage costs weight too. The typical problem found is you end up carrying so much equipment and spend so long messing about in the drag of the atmosphere that you use more fuel, not less.
Actually the web site was very carefully constructed. The MP gets your actual home address and can contact you to ask questions, and verify your identity in any number of ways.
However, very few systems are proof against social engineering, encryption or not.
Wow- real democracy! And in the semi-police state of the UK. Who'd have thought?
Of course doing this would completely scramble the disk data up, so the poor CDROM laser would be jumping around like a lunatic; and CDROMs are peculiarly slow at jumping... So accessing the data would work, but really, really sllllllllllooooowwlllllly.
Still, it would be very cool ;-)
Well, they could add more layers and gradually vary the proportions of the different metals with each layer. That way you don't get any sharp discontinuity and the thermal shear stress is massively reduced. Wouldn't help with immiscible metals of course.
"A technician deals with all of these imperfections one image at a time using a computer and digitized versions of the images. Once the still images are perfect, the morphing software interpolates between them. Then the background images are laid into the green area. A technician has to build a complete 3-D computer model of the computer-generated scene and then key the rotation through this scene to the position of the camera in each frame of the film."
As I said, the cameras are too bulky... they needed to be able to inbetween them to get the effect that the director wanted.
Actually they take out the landlines from the exchange end.
Actually no. There would have had to have too many cameras to get a smooth camera movement- and the cameras would have got in each others way. The Matrix effects really did have to do inbetweening between the different cameras digitally in fact.
I am uncertain as to how much of this was done by software and how much was hand hacked in practice, frame by frame; but it wasn't as simplistic as you said above.
It's been used a few times (not terribly appropriately IRC), most of which included comical images of the bomb squad desperately trying to remember their semaphore signals.
However, they do leave the public telephones running, so that's something.
That's evil. I like it ;-)
Kudos.
You need to do that, and write it down between you. Then you need to get your manager to sign it off. Then when your manager says- "you need to make it faster" then you can point to the requirements and say- I've achieved 1 ms, like it says here.
Otherwise, you will never be finished and never deploy your system. It's nearly always possible to modify the code to improve performance.
I agree with the other posters too, if you have to throw away some part or all of the tables to do a user request, do that, and recalculate them afterwards.
"and something made it leave the building." - nothing necessarily MADE it leave the building, it probably just randomly blundered its way out. However, some robots are photophilic (move towards to light), but I don't know whether this one exhibited that behaviour; some behaviours it might have might make it more likely to find itself outside, and that's one example.
Not malfunction, there's no evidence of that. The robot almost certainly didn't know what it was doing anymore than a bunch of insects escaping from a tank knew they were in a tank; the current state of the art in robotics is about insect level at best, and probably not even that high.
Blunkett went all uncharacteristically contrite on us, but according to the Register this just means that they're not actually formalising what they are doing anyway.
They probably really are handing around traffic analysis data like smarties. "Oh looook what he's accessing!" Probably there's people out there being blackmailed right now; there's bound to be some bad apples with access to this data.
Um. Yes. I know. But Google != Googol.
It might be fun, but it's wrong (or perhaps its fun because it's wrong?): googol is 10^100
www.google.com
or: 216.239.39.101???
Both work fine; so we don't absolutely need a dns on the internet at all- in fact I think it is becoming less and less important already.
And we're supposed to be upset that choosing global mnemonic is politicised? That businesses pay for mnemonics that happen to match their businesses name? That they try to protect their name? I'm sorry but that doesn't bother me. Creating novel names is easy. I mean what did 'google' mean? It didn't mean anything.
Personally, I'm much more concerned about search engines- I don't really see the point of DNS lookups so much anymore. If search engines in general and google in particular really starts to sell out, the internet could be in trouble. Google is a much more flexible, practical, and less politicised, less bought system; but I expect that to slowly change.
Still, there are other things on the internet that peform equivalent functions. Peer-peer systems usually don't use DNS much; we could switch over to use them at a pinch- there would need to be some work done, but p2p is harder to buy, it can be open sourced, and the search engine is totally distributed unlike google.
(Yes, I know that p2p search is slow and inefficient right now, but there's better p2p search algorithms that can be applied that are fast, scalable, distributed and robust, and give similar results to a google if we care to do that. The only reason we're not using them right is because nobody has been forced to implement and deploy them- but they can be if google starts to mess up.)
Summary: even if DNS is going to hell in a bucket. Who cares?
It's not. That doesn't make it ok.
It doesn't make it not OK either.
End to end encryption ensures protection of the packets, as well as authentication. This is no more a problem than it is on the internet. Been to an https server lately? I was using encryption on a wireless packet link ALL day. Anybody could grab the packets. Good luck cracking 3DES.
Robust channel coding, interleaving and ARQ introduces more delay.
Not necessarily. The encoding can be end-end rather than per link. Per link routing delays can be as low as a single bit in fact. If you think about it that means errors can be found within 8 bits or so and a retry begun really quickly afterwards.
I wouldn't pay any monthly fees if I were you when there are no guarantees that any calls would get through.
So when I text, there's no guarantee that would get through. So I should stop paying my bill? Huh? And when I use my cell phone what guarantees a channel right now? Nothing. You can't be serious.
Sure, you can do that. All it takes is a more sophisticated (and expensive) tranceiver.
Current tranceivers are really, really cheap. A more expensive tranceiver doesn't sound like a show stopper; unless its massively so.
We're really not. Not trying to be a bitch here, but please look up some references on GSM (since the previous poster nailed it down to that).
We're not talking about GSM here really.
There's a lot going on in a GSM phone! While you're right that you don't have to do any processing on the voice signal, to describe it as simple packet forwarding is a little bit simple, or every so often.
It's a little bit, but only a little; look, 99.9% of the time you'd keep the same route you used on the last packet you sent. Just occasionally, or if the reception varies do you even have to think about recreating routing tables.
Look at some literature on cell phone issues. It is much more common to assume 1/r^4, but it varies according to exactly where you are (ie: How dense things are). 1/r^2 really only applies in free space; nobody really uses it. ;)
Actually I know; I was being conservative. It actually makes my point more not less if you assume 1/r^4- that means lots of short hops are much, much, much lower power.