As of the release of Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, Microsoft says they're using Network Time Protocol. And it did seem to work with our NTP servers. It just didn't work all that nicely.
It may well be that they're still using SNTP, but if that's the case they need to state this up front.
Actually, having set up the NTP servers in our network, I have to say that the Windows version of NTP draws very substantial vacuum. It's not nearly as easy to configure. It can't be queried about what it thinks of the configured time standards, and I'm not exactly sure how they expect you to manage keys.
As long as you don't give a damn about sub-second accuracy (in our SCADA system, we like to stay in sync within 7 milliseconds or less) and as long as you don't care about traceability, then I guess it's better than nothing. However, the NT version of Mills' NTP is free, it is very stable on all versions I've tested it on from NT through 2003 server, and the configuration is exactly the same as most POSIX systems.
Having been there and tried it, I have to say that Microsoft did a piss poor job with their version of NTP. Get the GNU version. It Just Works Better.
I have always felt that I learned more from watching things break, than by watching things work smoothly. Thus, while grammar rules and instructions are important; I feel they can be taught better by showing what happens when these rules are violated. Otherwise, one only has a bunch of rules and very little background as to why they're useful for conveying information.
It is also quite instructional to show how something is grammatically correct, yet still ambiguous or confusing. From an engineer's perspective, the goal is communication. Liberal Arts students like to experiment with language, playing with the medium to see where it takes them. Engineers want language to "just work" for them ---just as liberal arts majors want their computers to "just work" for them. Don't teach fancy stuff. Don't teach too many writing devices. Just teach the basics. That's what they want. That's what they need. The rest will come in time if it is needed.
Uhh, radios DO work in the "underground." The Metro in Washington DC does this, as do many other subway systems. The technology has been around since at least the late 1970s. It's really quite simple: A leaky coaxial cable (Andrew Corporation makes one called Radiax) can be used for both receiving and transmission. If what you say is accurate, the folks managing the London Underground could really use an education.
Now as for mines, such systems are useful for tunnels which don't change much, such as underground railway tunnels. Engineering these systems on an ad-hoc basis isn't simple, nor cheap. Mines need to use something better. A robust digital modulation scheme which can survive multiple repeating nodes with less than ideal signal to noise ratios is something which needs development. Ideally this system would use something robust like turbo-codes, where a damaged packet could be recovered with some delay.
This could result in some messages taking many seconds to get to and from the surface, but at least they'd get there...
In other words, computer science specialists might be going the way of 'scribes' -- people who were essentially professional readers and writers in societies were most people were illiterate. The US educational system isn't graduating many scribes today, but I don't think anyone views this as a major problem.
Umm --I think they're called liberal arts majors. They become Journalists, Novelists, Copy writers, Speech writers, graphic artists, and so forth.
I think part of what is happening is the very suceess of human engineering. It used to be that programming computers requried a knowledge of assembly langugage and machine coding. I'll bet many CS majors graduate today without ever having used a machine code monitor. (Not that it's a bad thing)
Today we have object oriented programming, GUIs are expected, and command line interpreters are seen as programming tools to be used by the technical priesthood.
In one sense you're right because the study of CS has morphed. In another sense, we have lost something: Few think about how to program efficiently or how to build a minimalist system. With the cheap cost of hardware and the sheer speed and storage that the processors have to offer, there is little incentive to do things well. It only has to look pretty.
And that is why, despite demand, there aren't any more CS majors than there are engineering majors. Most have realized that the easiest and best paying work really isn't called CS or engineering. They're called managers, analysts, architects, and so forth.
...it makes me nervous when the government and its actors role play about technology and how it should be meted out.
Isn't that what government is for?
Their original responsibility (at least the FCC's) is to fairly and equitably maintain the distribution of the commodity that is radio spectra.
They don't call it the "Federal Communications Commission" for nothing. The FCC has always regulated telephony, telegraphy, cable TV standards, protocol use, and so forth. These venues have very little to do with radio.
It's troubling when someone with no apparent business background and understanding of technology to the depth necessary to grasp what DRM has done and will do gets a bully pulpit this high and this visible.
I don't know how well Ms. Tate understands what she advocates or not. I doubt any of us can say that with authority. However, if her advocacy causes a discussion resulting in clear standards for how DRM is supposed to work, why is that a bad thing? Since there is such a force for this technology in the first place, perhaps someone ought to propose standards on how it should be used.
Please understand, I'm no fan of DRM in general. And given recent court rulings against the FCC on the Broadcast Flag issue, I think it would behoove us all to clarify DRM practices. At her level, Ms. Tate only has to get the ball rolling. After that I suspect her participation will be minimal.
Oh, and by the way, have you ever filed comments on regulatory proceedings with the FCC? No? Then stop wondering why getting good government is so hard. I have done my part in quite a few regulatory proposals in the past. At least I can hold my head high and say "I told you so." I'll probably be right there making comments at the next NPRM on this subject.
Second, aircraft use many pieces of equipment on many different bands from Longwave through microwave. FM radios, for example, have local oscillators which can interfere with VOR reception.
Third, keep in mind that most phones have GPS receivers built in to them nowadays. These phones could radiate enough of their LO to interfere with aircraft GPS gear.
Fourth, yes, it's true, pilots like me are supposed to be able to detect navigational problems and deal with them. And, in normal cruising airspaces, that's not much of an issue. However, it becomes a very big deal if you're following an instrument approach and suddenly a piece of equipment fails. The workload and procedural difficulties in that situation are not small while the risk for a major accident goes up very substantially.
Speaking as an instrument rated pilot and as an electrical engineer and a ham radio enthusiast of more than 30 years, yes, I'd like to think that what you posted is realistic most of the time. The problem is that it's not like that ALL of the time.
There are some ways to work around this mess. It wouldn't be that hard to set up a micro cell for the phones in the aircraft which would present a reasonable signal to all the phones and take over all of the traffic. This would accomplish several goals: (1) it would cause all the phones to reduce power because the cell is right there. (2) It would manage all the phone traffic so that special airline rates could apply (and thus fund the investment in equipment). (3) It would also shut the phones down to some minimal level during instrument approaches so that it would not have the chance to screw around with the aircraft navigation instruments.
Yes, I've used my phone while flying in my airplane (at low altitude). No, I don't see any problems using some electronic gear that I know about while cruising, even while flying on instruments. What I object to are the idiots who insist on using their favorite electronic gadget of the week while I'm trying to make the approach to an airport in Instrument Meteorlogical Conditions (IMC).
Arrogance and ignorance of that kind will probably not cause problems 99.99% of the time. But every now and then, it does. Would you like to take a 1 in 1000 chance of dying so that some nitwit can play with his (second) favorite toy?
Glass cockpit displays are wonderful and all that, but no pilot I know will use them exclusively. At the very least, there will be two of these displays in the cockpit and they will be powered by two completely independent electrical systems. It also normal to have a basic altimeter, airspeed indicator, and artificial horizon with some other indpendent power source (such as a vacuum line).
Mod Parent UP! The article confuses education with memory.
Also note later in the study that this was the result of only 312 patients in NYC. I have to wonder how many significant digits the 0.3% per year degradation number has. For me, this is hardly conclusive.
Sadly, Maryland has been rocked by allegations of vote fraud in the past. Some of this would be easy to deal with given a paper tally from a voting machine. However, many things about Maryland have nothing to do with voting machines and everything to do with the process that certifies a citizen and his/her right to vote. I've heard rumors that as many 6000 Baltimoreans voted even though they were listed as deceased.
The real problem here is political machines playing dirty tricks on each other. The Republican party in Maryland is starving for office and will do nearly anything after three decades of predominantly Democratic rule. The Democratic party is so used to being in power that they're taking their constiuency for granted. Both sides are gearing to slime the other in any way possible. Maryland is losing as a result.
I vote Republican in Maryland mainly because they're marginally less looney than the Democratic Party here. That's not a ringing endorsement. Nor will they get one from me until I see a more balanced and fair view of the issues at hand.
Most hackers would have a hard time doing that where I work. It is TRULY isolated. Granted, in many utilities, the IT department has taken over things like DCS systems and SCADA systems. This is a very BAD thing. IT may be really good with computers, but they often don't know anything about how industrial control systems work. It is not "just another data source" or "just another network". Screw up on projects like these, and there may not be anything left to reboot. It is wise to cultivate a few engineers and attempt some cross training between the two groups.
Sadly, most IT departments are in it for the flashy reports and cool looking web page designs. Most engineers I have spoken to on this subject just shake their heads in disgust.
When it comes to utilities, yes, we're very concerned about what the employees know and what they can do. The percentage figure is misleading because there are actually very few documented cases of such attacks.
I hate to put cold water on this parade, but cyber attacks aren't nearly as effective as good old infrastructure attacks. Most of the control systems used for distribution networks are designed with an awful lot of fail-safe behavior. You can damage things, but doing it in a way that will bring the system to its knees is difficult. Why get upset over esoteric computer security issues when a couple of idiots and a cutting torch can bring down high tension lines. Why build elaborate security systems when for the cost of a suit, a hardhat, a phony badge, and a clipboard, you can enter most of these places unmolested?
Yeah, we ought to be concerned, but there are bigger vulnerabilities that need addressing first...
Just so you know, most targets for this sort of thing are called SCADA systems and they tend to be located on isolated networks. The isolation is actually a realistic thing...
1. You may indeed need some hardware assistance here, perhaps in the form of selectable analog notch filtering. In the longer run, as everyone converges on the same standard, the problem takes care of itself, I think. You THINK, but you don't know. First of all, most spread spectrum signals will suffer badly from problems with group delay of such notch filtering. Second, what are you trying to notch here? Why do you assume that the source of your interference is going to be coherent enough for a notch filter to work?
2....a broadband jammer radiating a kW over 1GHz of bandwidth is only radiating 1mW/kHz... Yeah, that's real funny until you realize that the nearby signal is utterly swamping the front end receiver stages of your SDR. Now your front end could be rectifying the incoming signal, changing its own bias point and basically shutting down. Most narrowband receivers deal with this problem by filtering the front end very carefully --but you can't do that with a spread spectrum signal. See my first point.
3. Nodes will need to do stochastic meshing and automatic power regulation. NBD, I think. Again, you think, but you don't know. What if one node is broadcasting to a group covering many square miles away while you're trying to connect to one across the street? Where's your stochastic behavior now? Why do you assume everyone's playing the same modulation schemes, protocols, priorities, and playing nice with one another all the time? Where is the opportunity to upgrade to better schemes?
4. In the short term, you put analog notches in those bands and modulate around them if you care about the tiny loss. In the long term, you convert those services to spread-spectrum also. Who pays for the cost to convert them over? Think a fleet of mobile equipment is cheap? How about avionics? And once again, have you ever heard of that wonderful concept called Group Delay in Filters? Oh, and if you're going to argue frequency hopping, think again. The best source of process gain from spread spectrum is UWB pulse modulation. You can't filter that out of a few notched bands.
5. There will be far fewer of them. Good spread spectrum coding is remarkably resilient. The ones that remain could be resolved by civil suit, or by binding arbitration on a case-by-case basis. You presume that such interference can be detected and dealt with on a case by case basis. The problem is that everything wrong with a spread spectrum connection is manifested in the same way: Noise floor. Front end overload? Noise. Nearby signal? Noise. Timing problem? Noise. Interference? Noise. How do you know that you've been interfered with in the first place, and then how do you deal with it in a timely fashion?
How the standards got to where they are is largely irrelevant, but I know enough of the history to know that it was a combination of really vile politics, really primitive hardware capabilities, and ignorance of Shannon's Theorem that persists widely to this day. Rather than condescending, why don't you help to try to solve the problems, as I am doing? Oh, believe me, Shannon's limit is a very major part of policy in today's spectrum management. There is much that we can do to improve spectrum management but you're going too far, too fast, and you THINK that everything will be ok. Sorry, I disagree with you. You are not fixing anything. The old rules may not have been the most efficient methods, but they were manageable. You want to push radio users headlong toward an uncertain future because you THINK that it will be more efficient. That only works if we have some way to self regulate. Good luck figuring out how that's going to work. It's not as easy a problem as you think. Believe me, many great minds have tried and failed at this attempt.
Spread Spectrum has it's place as a multiplexing technology, as a non-critical communications technology and as a military signal hiding technology. However, we'd have to create some m
First, how are you going to get the dynamic range you need for RF intense areas if the radio front end has to remain wide open for octaves?
Second, energy costs for radiating Kilowatts are relatively cheap.
Third, what about the near-far problems with spread spectrum?
Fourth, how do you regulate narrowband emergency frequencies in a spread spectrum world?
Fifth, if you're going to push everyone to unlicensed spread spectrum, how do we resolve interference disputes?
I could go on, but I think you can figure out where I'm coming from. The problem is that if we didn't have radio and we were starting from scratch, you might be able to make a case for this technology. But since you clearly don't know how the standards got to where they are today you have no technical basis for trashing them.
Most IT behavior I've seen is mainly the result of how the whole company is managed. If the IT division is a mess, chances are that the rest of the company isn't much better.
It's all about communication and cooperation. Many IT departments do not take the time to understand the other parts of the company they serve. The bosses' merit pay or bonuses don't use those metrics. So, neither do they.
If it's all about cutting costs, but not about investing, then the infrastructure will get slashed for no apparent reason and nobody will be able to make a decent business case for anything.
If it's all about strict heirarchichal bureacracy and justification of the need for resources, then there will be mounds of paper required even for the most ridiculously cheap devices.
If it's all about security or the lack thereof, then you'll see extreme behavior in both realms.
These problems are usually symptoms, not the disease itself. Fighting it is actually much more difficult than it looks because you're fighting corporate culture. If Managers want to know why their company can't have a good IT department, maybe they ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves what's wrong with the way they're doing their own jobs...
To a large extent, it depends on who you are, who most of the computer users are, and what objectives the IT security staff has. Our company has had its share of lockdown mania. We're about to go through another one very soon. The problem is technical ignorance. Those in charge do not understand what the fundamental issues are.
In fact, although it's possible to secure a gaggle of Windows based systems, most people don't know enough to do it right. And in addition, once you learn that much, you begin to see the wisdom of the designs in so many other "complicated" OSs. It's not that Windows is more or less complex. It's just that they have successfully marketed themselves as the "easy to use and secure" OS even though the underlying concepts are anything but.
Real security comes from understanding. That understanding is not commonly found among the many people who call themselves Windows network administrators. That's why this problem exists.
In other words, Marketing is one of the biggest reasons why Windows really sucks. The security features are there. It's just that learning to use them is far more difficult than most customers have bargained for and the folks who market this stuff do not want that commonly known. They'd rather sell security "improvements" and update services...
You know, if this was some obscure buffer overflow, I'd have to admit that you have a point. But it wasn't.
It was an issue with the WMF file processing. The fix in this case should have been painfully obvious to anyone with source code. Given the simplicity and severity of this situation, it shouldn't have taken long (a couple days perhaps) to do adequate testing to assure that there wouldn't be any other unanticipated side effects.
No, my concern is that Microsoft's management misread this situation and failed to recognize how serious this flaw was. As this is not open source, we have no alternative but to trust their judgement on this. Lately, they've been getting several such judgement calls wrong. At some point we have to ask ourselves whether these people are up to the task we expect from them.
If that's trolling, then so be it. But the question remains. Ignore it at your peril.
I think Microsoft deserves a great deal of criticism for their response to this exploit. Let's face it, exploits will always be a fact of life. How we deal with them is what separates the kids from the adults.
In this context I find it quite amusing that Guilfanov was able to make a quick and effective fix without the benefit of the source code for gdi32.dll. In contrast the folks at Microsoft thrashed around for more than a week before realizing the significance and the simplicity of the fix.
I wonder how many more times this sort of thing will have to happen before people realize what a poor job Microsoft is doing managing their security flaws. What are people paying them for, anyway?
If you want a big salary, in today's market driven world, you need to think big. You're not an engineer, you're a technical plan implementor --or some other such balderdash. That's the problem with job titles where I work. If you want better pay, you have to stop calling yourself an Engineer, even if that's what you do. So they have engineering managers, control system specialists, Antenna site managers, and so forth. These are all jobs which require an engineering background.
So, when someone goes to our company to count the number of Engineering positions, we don't have many. But we do have lots of people with engineering educations and engineering backgrounds. Now the managers want to know how many engineers they have. They have already recast most of us in to different titles. So the count the few who still work under the old titles, and GASP! they don't know where all the engineers have gone.
This is why they write idiots guides to management, but not idiots guides to electrical engineering.
Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate the used cyclotron, which is roughly six feet tall by eight feet wide, to Swank's business, Langdon Engineering and Management.
Clearly Cyclotrons are built that small. In fact, I recall seeing one of the first cyclotrons ever built in the Smithsonian Institution. It was all of about 6" in diameter.
I presume this guy has a reasonable "back yard." The article didn't say how large his property was. Assuming that Swank has room for a reasonable building in his back yard to house this endeavor, I don't see why this is any different than a garden shed or a garage.
With all those household chemicals, pesticides, sprayers, fertilizers and the like, one could easily mix them wrong and gas the neighborhood to death. The gasoline from the lawn mower might leak and cause an explosion from the fumes. The pesticides might get in to someone's well and poison them. The mulch pile might catch fire and smoulder...
The list is long. The point is these are every day hazards that people are comfortable with. This is all about feelings and very little about the actual hazard. It's not even about ignorance. People are woefully ignorant about the products they use in their houses every day.
I say hire a PR firm through the local hospital, buy the neighbors some doughnuts, and listen to the chatter. Clearly there are a few arrogant idiots who need to be identified and pushed back in to their caves^H^H^H^H^Hhomes.
Slashdot Mirror
As of the release of Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, Microsoft says they're using Network Time Protocol. And it did seem to work with our NTP servers. It just didn't work all that nicely.
It may well be that they're still using SNTP, but if that's the case they need to state this up front.
Actually, having set up the NTP servers in our network, I have to say that the Windows version of NTP draws very substantial vacuum. It's not nearly as easy to configure. It can't be queried about what it thinks of the configured time standards, and I'm not exactly sure how they expect you to manage keys.
As long as you don't give a damn about sub-second accuracy (in our SCADA system, we like to stay in sync within 7 milliseconds or less) and as long as you don't care about traceability, then I guess it's better than nothing. However, the NT version of Mills' NTP is free, it is very stable on all versions I've tested it on from NT through 2003 server, and the configuration is exactly the same as most POSIX systems.
Having been there and tried it, I have to say that Microsoft did a piss poor job with their version of NTP. Get the GNU version. It Just Works Better.
I have always felt that I learned more from watching things break, than by watching things work smoothly. Thus, while grammar rules and instructions are important; I feel they can be taught better by showing what happens when these rules are violated. Otherwise, one only has a bunch of rules and very little background as to why they're useful for conveying information.
It is also quite instructional to show how something is grammatically correct, yet still ambiguous or confusing. From an engineer's perspective, the goal is communication. Liberal Arts students like to experiment with language, playing with the medium to see where it takes them. Engineers want language to "just work" for them ---just as liberal arts majors want their computers to "just work" for them. Don't teach fancy stuff. Don't teach too many writing devices. Just teach the basics. That's what they want. That's what they need. The rest will come in time if it is needed.
Uhh, radios DO work in the "underground." The Metro in Washington DC does this, as do many other subway systems. The technology has been around since at least the late 1970s. It's really quite simple: A leaky coaxial cable (Andrew Corporation makes one called Radiax) can be used for both receiving and transmission. If what you say is accurate, the folks managing the London Underground could really use an education.
Now as for mines, such systems are useful for tunnels which don't change much, such as underground railway tunnels. Engineering these systems on an ad-hoc basis isn't simple, nor cheap. Mines need to use something better. A robust digital modulation scheme which can survive multiple repeating nodes with less than ideal signal to noise ratios is something which needs development. Ideally this system would use something robust like turbo-codes, where a damaged packet could be recovered with some delay.
This could result in some messages taking many seconds to get to and from the surface, but at least they'd get there...
I think part of what is happening is the very suceess of human engineering. It used to be that programming computers requried a knowledge of assembly langugage and machine coding. I'll bet many CS majors graduate today without ever having used a machine code monitor. (Not that it's a bad thing)
Today we have object oriented programming, GUIs are expected, and command line interpreters are seen as programming tools to be used by the technical priesthood.
In one sense you're right because the study of CS has morphed. In another sense, we have lost something: Few think about how to program efficiently or how to build a minimalist system. With the cheap cost of hardware and the sheer speed and storage that the processors have to offer, there is little incentive to do things well. It only has to look pretty.
And that is why, despite demand, there aren't any more CS majors than there are engineering majors. Most have realized that the easiest and best paying work really isn't called CS or engineering. They're called managers, analysts, architects, and so forth.
Isn't that what government is for?
They don't call it the "Federal Communications Commission" for nothing. The FCC has always regulated telephony, telegraphy, cable TV standards, protocol use, and so forth. These venues have very little to do with radio.
I don't know how well Ms. Tate understands what she advocates or not. I doubt any of us can say that with authority. However, if her advocacy causes a discussion resulting in clear standards for how DRM is supposed to work, why is that a bad thing? Since there is such a force for this technology in the first place, perhaps someone ought to propose standards on how it should be used.
Please understand, I'm no fan of DRM in general. And given recent court rulings against the FCC on the Broadcast Flag issue, I think it would behoove us all to clarify DRM practices. At her level, Ms. Tate only has to get the ball rolling. After that I suspect her participation will be minimal.
Oh, and by the way, have you ever filed comments on regulatory proceedings with the FCC? No? Then stop wondering why getting good government is so hard. I have done my part in quite a few regulatory proposals in the past. At least I can hold my head high and say "I told you so." I'll probably be right there making comments at the next NPRM on this subject.
Put up or shut up.
First, here's the actual regulation.
Second, aircraft use many pieces of equipment on many different bands from Longwave through microwave. FM radios, for example, have local oscillators which can interfere with VOR reception.
Third, keep in mind that most phones have GPS receivers built in to them nowadays. These phones could radiate enough of their LO to interfere with aircraft GPS gear.
Fourth, yes, it's true, pilots like me are supposed to be able to detect navigational problems and deal with them. And, in normal cruising airspaces, that's not much of an issue. However, it becomes a very big deal if you're following an instrument approach and suddenly a piece of equipment fails. The workload and procedural difficulties in that situation are not small while the risk for a major accident goes up very substantially.
Speaking as an instrument rated pilot and as an electrical engineer and a ham radio enthusiast of more than 30 years, yes, I'd like to think that what you posted is realistic most of the time. The problem is that it's not like that ALL of the time.
There are some ways to work around this mess. It wouldn't be that hard to set up a micro cell for the phones in the aircraft which would present a reasonable signal to all the phones and take over all of the traffic. This would accomplish several goals: (1) it would cause all the phones to reduce power because the cell is right there. (2) It would manage all the phone traffic so that special airline rates could apply (and thus fund the investment in equipment). (3) It would also shut the phones down to some minimal level during instrument approaches so that it would not have the chance to screw around with the aircraft navigation instruments.
Yes, I've used my phone while flying in my airplane (at low altitude). No, I don't see any problems using some electronic gear that I know about while cruising, even while flying on instruments. What I object to are the idiots who insist on using their favorite electronic gadget of the week while I'm trying to make the approach to an airport in Instrument Meteorlogical Conditions (IMC).
Arrogance and ignorance of that kind will probably not cause problems 99.99% of the time. But every now and then, it does. Would you like to take a 1 in 1000 chance of dying so that some nitwit can play with his (second) favorite toy?
I wouldn't.
No.
Glass cockpit displays are wonderful and all that, but no pilot I know will use them exclusively. At the very least, there will be two of these displays in the cockpit and they will be powered by two completely independent electrical systems. It also normal to have a basic altimeter, airspeed indicator, and artificial horizon with some other indpendent power source (such as a vacuum line).
Mod Parent UP! The article confuses education with memory.
Also note later in the study that this was the result of only 312 patients in NYC. I have to wonder how many significant digits the 0.3% per year degradation number has. For me, this is hardly conclusive.
Sadly, Maryland has been rocked by allegations of vote fraud in the past. Some of this would be easy to deal with given a paper tally from a voting machine. However, many things about Maryland have nothing to do with voting machines and everything to do with the process that certifies a citizen and his/her right to vote. I've heard rumors that as many 6000 Baltimoreans voted even though they were listed as deceased.
The real problem here is political machines playing dirty tricks on each other. The Republican party in Maryland is starving for office and will do nearly anything after three decades of predominantly Democratic rule. The Democratic party is so used to being in power that they're taking their constiuency for granted. Both sides are gearing to slime the other in any way possible. Maryland is losing as a result.
I vote Republican in Maryland mainly because they're marginally less looney than the Democratic Party here. That's not a ringing endorsement. Nor will they get one from me until I see a more balanced and fair view of the issues at hand.
You've heard of "social engineering", I presume?
Most hackers would have a hard time doing that where I work. It is TRULY isolated. Granted, in many utilities, the IT department has taken over things like DCS systems and SCADA systems. This is a very BAD thing. IT may be really good with computers, but they often don't know anything about how industrial control systems work. It is not "just another data source" or "just another network". Screw up on projects like these, and there may not be anything left to reboot. It is wise to cultivate a few engineers and attempt some cross training between the two groups.
Sadly, most IT departments are in it for the flashy reports and cool looking web page designs. Most engineers I have spoken to on this subject just shake their heads in disgust.
When it comes to utilities, yes, we're very concerned about what the employees know and what they can do. The percentage figure is misleading because there are actually very few documented cases of such attacks.
I hate to put cold water on this parade, but cyber attacks aren't nearly as effective as good old infrastructure attacks. Most of the control systems used for distribution networks are designed with an awful lot of fail-safe behavior. You can damage things, but doing it in a way that will bring the system to its knees is difficult. Why get upset over esoteric computer security issues when a couple of idiots and a cutting torch can bring down high tension lines. Why build elaborate security systems when for the cost of a suit, a hardhat, a phony badge, and a clipboard, you can enter most of these places unmolested?
Yeah, we ought to be concerned, but there are bigger vulnerabilities that need addressing first...
Just so you know, most targets for this sort of thing are called SCADA systems and they tend to be located on isolated networks. The isolation is actually a realistic thing...
1. You may indeed need some hardware assistance here, perhaps in the form of selectable analog notch filtering. In the longer run, as everyone converges on the same standard, the problem takes care of itself, I think. You THINK, but you don't know. First of all, most spread spectrum signals will suffer badly from problems with group delay of such notch filtering. Second, what are you trying to notch here? Why do you assume that the source of your interference is going to be coherent enough for a notch filter to work?
...a broadband jammer radiating a kW over 1GHz of bandwidth is only radiating 1mW/kHz... Yeah, that's real funny until you realize that the nearby signal is utterly swamping the front end receiver stages of your SDR. Now your front end could be rectifying the incoming signal, changing its own bias point and basically shutting down. Most narrowband receivers deal with this problem by filtering the front end very carefully --but you can't do that with a spread spectrum signal. See my first point.
2.
3. Nodes will need to do stochastic meshing and automatic power regulation. NBD, I think. Again, you think, but you don't know. What if one node is broadcasting to a group covering many square miles away while you're trying to connect to one across the street? Where's your stochastic behavior now? Why do you assume everyone's playing the same modulation schemes, protocols, priorities, and playing nice with one another all the time? Where is the opportunity to upgrade to better schemes?
4. In the short term, you put analog notches in those bands and modulate around them if you care about the tiny loss. In the long term, you convert those services to spread-spectrum also. Who pays for the cost to convert them over? Think a fleet of mobile equipment is cheap? How about avionics? And once again, have you ever heard of that wonderful concept called Group Delay in Filters? Oh, and if you're going to argue frequency hopping, think again. The best source of process gain from spread spectrum is UWB pulse modulation. You can't filter that out of a few notched bands.
5. There will be far fewer of them. Good spread spectrum coding is remarkably resilient. The ones that remain could be resolved by civil suit, or by binding arbitration on a case-by-case basis. You presume that such interference can be detected and dealt with on a case by case basis. The problem is that everything wrong with a spread spectrum connection is manifested in the same way: Noise floor. Front end overload? Noise. Nearby signal? Noise. Timing problem? Noise. Interference? Noise. How do you know that you've been interfered with in the first place, and then how do you deal with it in a timely fashion?
How the standards got to where they are is largely irrelevant, but I know enough of the history to know that it was a combination of really vile politics, really primitive hardware capabilities, and ignorance of Shannon's Theorem that persists widely to this day. Rather than condescending, why don't you help to try to solve the problems, as I am doing? Oh, believe me, Shannon's limit is a very major part of policy in today's spectrum management. There is much that we can do to improve spectrum management but you're going too far, too fast, and you THINK that everything will be ok. Sorry, I disagree with you. You are not fixing anything. The old rules may not have been the most efficient methods, but they were manageable. You want to push radio users headlong toward an uncertain future because you THINK that it will be more efficient. That only works if we have some way to self regulate. Good luck figuring out how that's going to work. It's not as easy a problem as you think. Believe me, many great minds have tried and failed at this attempt.
Spread Spectrum has it's place as a multiplexing technology, as a non-critical communications technology and as a military signal hiding technology. However, we'd have to create some m
First, how are you going to get the dynamic range you need for RF intense areas if the radio front end has to remain wide open for octaves?
Second, energy costs for radiating Kilowatts are relatively cheap.
Third, what about the near-far problems with spread spectrum?
Fourth, how do you regulate narrowband emergency frequencies in a spread spectrum world?
Fifth, if you're going to push everyone to unlicensed spread spectrum, how do we resolve interference disputes?
I could go on, but I think you can figure out where I'm coming from. The problem is that if we didn't have radio and we were starting from scratch, you might be able to make a case for this technology. But since you clearly don't know how the standards got to where they are today you have no technical basis for trashing them.
Keep dreaming until you get a clue...
Most IT behavior I've seen is mainly the result of how the whole company is managed. If the IT division is a mess, chances are that the rest of the company isn't much better.
It's all about communication and cooperation. Many IT departments do not take the time to understand the other parts of the company they serve. The bosses' merit pay or bonuses don't use those metrics. So, neither do they.
If it's all about cutting costs, but not about investing, then the infrastructure will get slashed for no apparent reason and nobody will be able to make a decent business case for anything.
If it's all about strict heirarchichal bureacracy and justification of the need for resources, then there will be mounds of paper required even for the most ridiculously cheap devices.
If it's all about security or the lack thereof, then you'll see extreme behavior in both realms.
These problems are usually symptoms, not the disease itself. Fighting it is actually much more difficult than it looks because you're fighting corporate culture. If Managers want to know why their company can't have a good IT department, maybe they ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves what's wrong with the way they're doing their own jobs...
To a large extent, it depends on who you are, who most of the computer users are, and what objectives the IT security staff has. Our company has had its share of lockdown mania. We're about to go through another one very soon. The problem is technical ignorance. Those in charge do not understand what the fundamental issues are.
In fact, although it's possible to secure a gaggle of Windows based systems, most people don't know enough to do it right. And in addition, once you learn that much, you begin to see the wisdom of the designs in so many other "complicated" OSs. It's not that Windows is more or less complex. It's just that they have successfully marketed themselves as the "easy to use and secure" OS even though the underlying concepts are anything but.
Real security comes from understanding. That understanding is not commonly found among the many people who call themselves Windows network administrators. That's why this problem exists.
In other words, Marketing is one of the biggest reasons why Windows really sucks. The security features are there. It's just that learning to use them is far more difficult than most customers have bargained for and the folks who market this stuff do not want that commonly known. They'd rather sell security "improvements" and update services...
You know, if this was some obscure buffer overflow, I'd have to admit that you have a point. But it wasn't.
It was an issue with the WMF file processing. The fix in this case should have been painfully obvious to anyone with source code. Given the simplicity and severity of this situation, it shouldn't have taken long (a couple days perhaps) to do adequate testing to assure that there wouldn't be any other unanticipated side effects.
No, my concern is that Microsoft's management misread this situation and failed to recognize how serious this flaw was. As this is not open source, we have no alternative but to trust their judgement on this. Lately, they've been getting several such judgement calls wrong. At some point we have to ask ourselves whether these people are up to the task we expect from them.
If that's trolling, then so be it. But the question remains. Ignore it at your peril.
I think Microsoft deserves a great deal of criticism for their response to this exploit. Let's face it, exploits will always be a fact of life. How we deal with them is what separates the kids from the adults.
In this context I find it quite amusing that Guilfanov was able to make a quick and effective fix without the benefit of the source code for gdi32.dll. In contrast the folks at Microsoft thrashed around for more than a week before realizing the significance and the simplicity of the fix.
I wonder how many more times this sort of thing will have to happen before people realize what a poor job Microsoft is doing managing their security flaws. What are people paying them for, anyway?
Umm, Moderators, this is actually meant as a joke. See the third definition in the Wikipedia link...
If you want a big salary, in today's market driven world, you need to think big. You're not an engineer, you're a technical plan implementor --or some other such balderdash. That's the problem with job titles where I work. If you want better pay, you have to stop calling yourself an Engineer, even if that's what you do. So they have engineering managers, control system specialists, Antenna site managers, and so forth. These are all jobs which require an engineering background.
So, when someone goes to our company to count the number of Engineering positions, we don't have many. But we do have lots of people with engineering educations and engineering backgrounds. Now the managers want to know how many engineers they have. They have already recast most of us in to different titles. So the count the few who still work under the old titles, and GASP! they don't know where all the engineers have gone.
This is why they write idiots guides to management, but not idiots guides to electrical engineering.
Clearly Cyclotrons are built that small. In fact, I recall seeing one of the first cyclotrons ever built in the Smithsonian Institution. It was all of about 6" in diameter.
I presume this guy has a reasonable "back yard." The article didn't say how large his property was. Assuming that Swank has room for a reasonable building in his back yard to house this endeavor, I don't see why this is any different than a garden shed or a garage.
With all those household chemicals, pesticides, sprayers, fertilizers and the like, one could easily mix them wrong and gas the neighborhood to death. The gasoline from the lawn mower might leak and cause an explosion from the fumes. The pesticides might get in to someone's well and poison them. The mulch pile might catch fire and smoulder...
The list is long. The point is these are every day hazards that people are comfortable with. This is all about feelings and very little about the actual hazard. It's not even about ignorance. People are woefully ignorant about the products they use in their houses every day.
I say hire a PR firm through the local hospital, buy the neighbors some doughnuts, and listen to the chatter. Clearly there are a few arrogant idiots who need to be identified and pushed back in to their caves^H^H^H^H^Hhomes.
It can, if they're not watching their money. There are no easy solutions.