The banks have no clue what the collateral is. They send an appraiser who does a joke of an appraisal and that's it. The residential mortgage underwriting system in the U.S. is fundamentally broken.
Their names and approximate location are given in the article. You can easily locate their home using county auditor's website. Surely some measurements could be made from the public right of way...
Yep. The head positioning is essentially a servo with torque output to the head arm, input being the signals from servo tracks on the platters themselves. The servo track is written at the factory and if you lose it, it cannot be rewritten in the field -- the drive's data is toast at that point. In a clean room you can open a hard drive, put your finger (as a damper) on the head arm close to the pivot point, and it will happily keep working without any errors. Access times go to hell, but otherwise it's OK.
I think most posts here miss the big picture: the magnetized structural steel is only, if anything, affecting old-style CRTs, nothing else. It's way cheaper to spend 2k on one or two nice flat panel TVs to replace the CRTs they are currently using than doing degaussing unless there's good access. Problem solved, and the homeowner will be quite happy too.
The homeowner's other claims are bogus extrapolations, coming from lack of understanding. They may be telling the truth, but only as to what's observed, not as to what's the cause. Their other problems are coincidences. Lack of education makes people believe in whatever their minds make up. Reality ain't so.
The charges in conductors move slowly, and a static magnetic field isn't going to change that. If you have any references where they clearly show synchrotron radiation in "nonexotic" conditions, please let me know. I'm looking for, specifically: metallic conductor, reasonable current densities for copper on a PCB, large static fields (1T+).
Synchrotron radiation is had when you have speeds that can be achieved by charges in vacuum. If you tried to push electron gas through a conductor that fast, you'd vaporize the metal. Again: give references/arguments if I'm somehow wrong. Otherwise you completely misunderstand what synchrotron radiation is about.
It was legally obtained in the sense of copyright law. The "smuggling" was perhaps a misused figure of speech. It ceased to apply in mid-89:) I do have a bunch of machines that were truly smuggled in spite of COCOM embargo etc, though:)
Hard drives are not shielded against static magnetic fields. Low-frequency shields are usually made from Mu-metal (or similar materials) and are fragile as hell -- they lose their shielding properties if you handle them incorrectly. You'll find them on cathode-ray oscilloscope tubes, and perhaps magnetometer-type instrumentation. You can easily check for that: get a non-stainelss steel screwdriver and move it around on the surface of hard drive's enclosure (don't touch electronics!). You'll feel it attracted to the voice coil magnets. Any shielding would work bidirectionally: it would short circuit the magnetic circuit and prevent the internal magnets from affecting outside of the drive, just as it'd prevent the converse: external field affecting the inside. Hard drives are enclosed in aluminum. Useless against static and low-frequency fields.
True to that. Have you ever played with the voice coil magnets from a hard drive? They are strong as hell, and in spite of being in a magnetic circuit there's plenty of leakage from them that's strong enough to let you feel stickiness of various hard drives to steel, no disassembly required. Try it -- you need to have different drives at hand as with some the effect is stronger than others. Even laptop drives, such as Hitachi's used by Apple, show this effect. Obviously, hard drives survive all that just fine. Two very strong magnets literally millimeters away from the platters.
Degaussing structural steel can be done entirely with stuff you can buy at Harbor Freight for crying out loud. Who the heck needs to replace anything? It doesn't even cost anything. When you're done, return the welder to the store.
I truly don't buy this story. It can't be just structural steel. I really need to dig into the court documents for this case, I'm in Ohio after all:)
Electronics typically don't give shits nor giggles about static fields, unless magnetic forces due to said fields mechanically damage the devices in question. About the only things that care about static fields are signal isolator chips that use magnetic technology. Those can get saturated with static fields -- I have an ILxxx series isolator (from NVE) and it'd stop working when placed on a PC board right next to the coil of a small safety relay. It was the static field that would cause it to stop working. Solution was to turn the relay 180 degrees around on the board, as the coil was then moved to the end far from the isolator chip. That relay had a fairly decent coil, I don't think you could ever magnetize structural steel in a typical U.S. 2-story home to produce such a field at any sane distance from said steel (1 foot or more).
The people who claim they are affected are just mixing things that, to their uneducated minds, are the same thing. Static magneticity, radio waves, same difference, right?
It reads like a bunch of BS. Do they still have CRTs in their TVs? In typical 2-story U.S. homes, there's structural steel in a few isolated places -- a beam or two in the basement, perhaps another beam and a column in the garage. That would, at best, cause some changes in color. It'd need to be substantial to cause geometric distortion of the image itself. You can have typical home speakers a few feet away from a color CRT and there's no effect. That structural steel would need to be magnetized quite well to see the effects they claim.
Hard drives won't be affected by any remnant magnetization of structural steel that's a byproduct of production, shipping and storage in varied conditions. Same goes for wireless devices -- static fields do nothing much to them. I'll read their case and perhaps pay them a visit, I need to see it to believe it.
Sometime in 1989 or very early 1990, I called Samna for help with their Ami Pro product. I believe it was bundled with a runtime of Windows 2.something. I was calling from Poland, no less, and, perhaps surprisingly, I had a legally obtained boxed product (smuggled from abroad). Not only did they agree with my bug report, but in about two weeks I've received a set of floppies with an updated version that had the bug fixed!! I will never forget that experience. I wish they weren't acquired and could independently develop their product. As I recall it was a rather easy to use editor.
Their website, frankly said, visually sucks. Those YellowHawk people are doing themselves a disservice.
They don't seem to have a design document done for consistent use of their logo, nor for consistency among visual elements on the pages. There are tons of annoyances, they didn't even do the most trivial things like color correction on the B/W pictures (say on the history page). I don't claim to be any sort of a highfalutin' designer, but there's a point where things just get too annoying to look at, and all the minor problems add up...
The fact that it's VMS is irrelevant I'd think. The fact that MUMPS is involved -- well, everything depends on whether they are taking some sort of a database snapshot, or a dump. If it's a dump, it'll be human readable. If it's a snapshot, I'd still expect it to use some sort of records with strings stored without further ado. Most uncompressed databases I've seen are readable once passed through strings, though data from each row is not necessarily contiguous. All in all, I don't doubt that anyone who cares enough to run the tape through the drive will be able to pull enough data to wreak potential havoc. Especially if they decide that obtaining credit in bulk would be a cool trick to pull off... It's not that complicated to quickly get a few millions worth of credit based on those records. Not with the retarded way credit is handed out in the U.S., anyway. All you need to get a credit card is often just to know someone's address, employer, and SSN, and perhaps an ID if you do it in a brick-and-mortar location.
Retrieving the data on the tapes would require knowledge of and access to specific hardware and software and knowledge of the system and data structure
-Who wants to bet that all you need to pull the data out is something like: dd if=/dev/tape | strings, perhaps with conv=ascii given to dd... and maybe gunzip or bunzip2. Sigh. Specific hardware: tape drive and a scsi card. Software: any recent unix would do. Knowledge of data structure: they obviously Huffman-coded all their SQL dumps, right? Haha.
I was talking generally. Admittedly it doesn't apply in the circumstances, as you've stated. It works pretty well in the opposite direction, though: you could kill someone's wireless network from the other side of the street by pointing a transmitter pumping out a few milliwats, via a good antenna, straight at the access point's antenna -- because then the path equation is skewed all in your favor over other devices. Of course you could probably, umm, skirt EIRP limits that way, too.
Submarine patents are an entirely different concept, and it turns out it's a made-up concept anyway (the Wikipedia page is semi-wrong and turns a non-issue into something it isn't).
The patent has to be actively protected. So if it was filed in the 90s and not enforced until today, from my understanding they essentially forfeit the right to later lay claims to the patent
In the U.S.? No. Trademarks have to be actively protected. Patents -- not so.
I dunno, if I had a big-ass directional antenna pointed straight at the ham's perhaps omnidirectional receiving antenna, I could easily overpower whatever he/she received from farther away, if said was transmitted omnidirectionally even at 10W vs. mine directionally at 250mW. It'd take a fairly reasonable antenna gain to do: a factor of 80-100 or so. It's EIRP that counts, after all, not absolute power.
Holy crap, that greenpeace press release reads like something scribbled on a napkin by someone half-drunk (of half-asleep). I guess it must be really bad there if even their PR {person|department} can't polish the turd...
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The banks have no clue what the collateral is. They send an appraiser who does a joke of an appraisal and that's it. The residential mortgage underwriting system in the U.S. is fundamentally broken.
Their names and approximate location are given in the article. You can easily locate their home using county auditor's website. Surely some measurements could be made from the public right of way...
Yep. The head positioning is essentially a servo with torque output to the head arm, input being the signals from servo tracks on the platters themselves. The servo track is written at the factory and if you lose it, it cannot be rewritten in the field -- the drive's data is toast at that point. In a clean room you can open a hard drive, put your finger (as a damper) on the head arm close to the pivot point, and it will happily keep working without any errors. Access times go to hell, but otherwise it's OK.
That's only environmental containment. It shields against dust, not magnetic fields.
I think most posts here miss the big picture: the magnetized structural steel is only, if anything, affecting old-style CRTs, nothing else. It's way cheaper to spend 2k on one or two nice flat panel TVs to replace the CRTs they are currently using than doing degaussing unless there's good access. Problem solved, and the homeowner will be quite happy too.
The homeowner's other claims are bogus extrapolations, coming from lack of understanding. They may be telling the truth, but only as to what's observed, not as to what's the cause. Their other problems are coincidences. Lack of education makes people believe in whatever their minds make up. Reality ain't so.
Those things are made from material so thin that they are very poor at being magnets, even if you purposefully magnetize them as much as you can...
The charges in conductors move slowly, and a static magnetic field isn't going to change that. If you have any references where they clearly show synchrotron radiation in "nonexotic" conditions, please let me know. I'm looking for, specifically: metallic conductor, reasonable current densities for copper on a PCB, large static fields (1T+).
Synchrotron radiation is had when you have speeds that can be achieved by charges in vacuum. If you tried to push electron gas through a conductor that fast, you'd vaporize the metal. Again: give references/arguments if I'm somehow wrong. Otherwise you completely misunderstand what synchrotron radiation is about.
It was legally obtained in the sense of copyright law. The "smuggling" was perhaps a misused figure of speech. It ceased to apply in mid-89 :) I do have a bunch of machines that were truly smuggled in spite of COCOM embargo etc, though :)
Hard drives are not shielded against static magnetic fields. Low-frequency shields are usually made from Mu-metal (or similar materials) and are fragile as hell -- they lose their shielding properties if you handle them incorrectly. You'll find them on cathode-ray oscilloscope tubes, and perhaps magnetometer-type instrumentation. You can easily check for that: get a non-stainelss steel screwdriver and move it around on the surface of hard drive's enclosure (don't touch electronics!). You'll feel it attracted to the voice coil magnets. Any shielding would work bidirectionally: it would short circuit the magnetic circuit and prevent the internal magnets from affecting outside of the drive, just as it'd prevent the converse: external field affecting the inside. Hard drives are enclosed in aluminum. Useless against static and low-frequency fields.
Your other points are valid, of course.
True to that. Have you ever played with the voice coil magnets from a hard drive? They are strong as hell, and in spite of being in a magnetic circuit there's plenty of leakage from them that's strong enough to let you feel stickiness of various hard drives to steel, no disassembly required. Try it -- you need to have different drives at hand as with some the effect is stronger than others. Even laptop drives, such as Hitachi's used by Apple, show this effect. Obviously, hard drives survive all that just fine. Two very strong magnets literally millimeters away from the platters.
Degaussing structural steel can be done entirely with stuff you can buy at Harbor Freight for crying out loud. Who the heck needs to replace anything? It doesn't even cost anything. When you're done, return the welder to the store.
I truly don't buy this story. It can't be just structural steel. I really need to dig into the court documents for this case, I'm in Ohio after all :)
Electronics typically don't give shits nor giggles about static fields, unless magnetic forces due to said fields mechanically damage the devices in question. About the only things that care about static fields are signal isolator chips that use magnetic technology. Those can get saturated with static fields -- I have an ILxxx series isolator (from NVE) and it'd stop working when placed on a PC board right next to the coil of a small safety relay. It was the static field that would cause it to stop working. Solution was to turn the relay 180 degrees around on the board, as the coil was then moved to the end far from the isolator chip. That relay had a fairly decent coil, I don't think you could ever magnetize structural steel in a typical U.S. 2-story home to produce such a field at any sane distance from said steel (1 foot or more).
The people who claim they are affected are just mixing things that, to their uneducated minds, are the same thing. Static magneticity, radio waves, same difference, right?
It reads like a bunch of BS. Do they still have CRTs in their TVs? In typical 2-story U.S. homes, there's structural steel in a few isolated places -- a beam or two in the basement, perhaps another beam and a column in the garage. That would, at best, cause some changes in color. It'd need to be substantial to cause geometric distortion of the image itself. You can have typical home speakers a few feet away from a color CRT and there's no effect. That structural steel would need to be magnetized quite well to see the effects they claim.
Hard drives won't be affected by any remnant magnetization of structural steel that's a byproduct of production, shipping and storage in varied conditions. Same goes for wireless devices -- static fields do nothing much to them. I'll read their case and perhaps pay them a visit, I need to see it to believe it.
If only this wasn't true...
Sometime in 1989 or very early 1990, I called Samna for help with their Ami Pro product. I believe it was bundled with a runtime of Windows 2.something. I was calling from Poland, no less, and, perhaps surprisingly, I had a legally obtained boxed product (smuggled from abroad). Not only did they agree with my bug report, but in about two weeks I've received a set of floppies with an updated version that had the bug fixed!! I will never forget that experience. I wish they weren't acquired and could independently develop their product. As I recall it was a rather easy to use editor.
I probably still have those floppies somewhere...
Their website, frankly said, visually sucks. Those YellowHawk people are doing themselves a disservice.
They don't seem to have a design document done for consistent use of their logo, nor for consistency among visual elements on the pages. There are tons of annoyances, they didn't even do the most trivial things like color correction on the B/W pictures (say on the history page). I don't claim to be any sort of a highfalutin' designer, but there's a point where things just get too annoying to look at, and all the minor problems add up...
The fact that it's VMS is irrelevant I'd think. The fact that MUMPS is involved -- well, everything depends on whether they are taking some sort of a database snapshot, or a dump. If it's a dump, it'll be human readable. If it's a snapshot, I'd still expect it to use some sort of records with strings stored without further ado. Most uncompressed databases I've seen are readable once passed through strings, though data from each row is not necessarily contiguous. All in all, I don't doubt that anyone who cares enough to run the tape through the drive will be able to pull enough data to wreak potential havoc. Especially if they decide that obtaining credit in bulk would be a cool trick to pull off... It's not that complicated to quickly get a few millions worth of credit based on those records. Not with the retarded way credit is handed out in the U.S., anyway. All you need to get a credit card is often just to know someone's address, employer, and SSN, and perhaps an ID if you do it in a brick-and-mortar location.
Retrieving the data on the tapes would require knowledge of and access to specific hardware and software and knowledge of the system and data structure
-Who wants to bet that all you need to pull the data out is something like: dd if=/dev/tape | strings, perhaps with conv=ascii given to dd... and maybe gunzip or bunzip2. Sigh. Specific hardware: tape drive and a scsi card. Software: any recent unix would do. Knowledge of data structure: they obviously Huffman-coded all their SQL dumps, right? Haha.
I was talking generally. Admittedly it doesn't apply in the circumstances, as you've stated. It works pretty well in the opposite direction, though: you could kill someone's wireless network from the other side of the street by pointing a transmitter pumping out a few milliwats, via a good antenna, straight at the access point's antenna -- because then the path equation is skewed all in your favor over other devices. Of course you could probably, umm, skirt EIRP limits that way, too.
Theoretically it does apply. In practice, umm, remember unisys and their GIF compression patent? I don't think they were quick to act on that one.
Submarine patents are an entirely different concept, and it turns out it's a made-up concept anyway (the Wikipedia page is semi-wrong and turns a non-issue into something it isn't).
The patent has to be actively protected. So if it was filed in the 90s and not enforced until today, from my understanding they essentially forfeit the right to later lay claims to the patent
In the U.S.? No. Trademarks have to be actively protected. Patents -- not so.
I don't think I'd want some of the lawyers to become doctors...
I dunno, if I had a big-ass directional antenna pointed straight at the ham's perhaps omnidirectional receiving antenna, I could easily overpower whatever he/she received from farther away, if said was transmitted omnidirectionally even at 10W vs. mine directionally at 250mW. It'd take a fairly reasonable antenna gain to do: a factor of 80-100 or so. It's EIRP that counts, after all, not absolute power.
Holy crap, that greenpeace press release reads like something scribbled on a napkin by someone half-drunk (of half-asleep). I guess it must be really bad there if even their PR {person|department} can't polish the turd...