You can always get a USB charging cable that doesn't even *have* any data lines, though finding one intentionally may be a challenge. And it'd mean your phone should draw only the standard 0.5A specified by the USB standard, since it can't negotiate for higher current.
I may be wrong here - someone with more USB protocol experience feel free to step in, but:
I agree that your proposal would be good, but I think it would require a potentially major revision to the USB standard to implement - the USB standard is designed as a data connection of peripherals to a centrally controlling host - dumb power was never an intended purpose for it, and even today remains a fall-back option to allow for cheap chargers. It doesn't even consider the possibility of untrusted connections, especially from the device end (your phone). You plug something in to your PC, it's pretty much presumed to be a peripheral that now belongs to the PC. The device can't even initiate any communications - it can only respond to communication initiated by the host.
What you could potentially do today is have a prompt pop come up on your phone saying "Enable data?" whenever it's plugged in, and just pretend to be a power-hungry USB hub unless and until you activate data to "plug in" the virtual phone. Or even a switch that electrically disables the data lines. But I don't think they could be auto-connected to your normal PC, because the the USB protocol doesn't involve the PC identifying itself.
> If it wasn't deliberate they would have blocked the access by fixing the USB bug. Is that not exactly what they're doing? They don't know exactly what the bug is, so they're making the USB port useless unless the phone is already unlocked.
Of course that's sort of the nuclear option, as it removes the easiest routes to repairing a phone with "broken" software, as well as probably interfering with the functionality of a number of clock-radios and other often-idle accessories. But it does the job.
How would that protect against a hardware compromise that allows the attacker to write to memory that *should* be protected? What would prevent the attacker from then just changing the required signature to their own?
Well, it'd almost certainly be impossible for *you* to do so - how would you talk to the phone? Normally you'd plug it into your PC and initiate a reset, but now plugging it into the PC doesn't actually do anything unless the phone is unlocked, so...
The only chance would be if the phone is still wirelessly connecting to Apple, and Apple has the capability to remotely trigger a reset.
There's an awful thin line between "bricked" and "bricked unless you can eventually find the password that you've forgotten". How many times have you managed to recall a password after forgetting it?
Of course, if they're still regularly calling home to Apple for updates and the like, Apple might be able to at least do a remote wipe and restore to factory default state, so the phone itself wouldn't be lost, just all the data on it. That'd be nice.
Nope - entirely different sort of nutjob is going to space - one with dreams of humanity among the stars, or of escaping the stifling societies on Earth. Underground vaults offer none of that - they're purely a survival ark in case something goes wrong.
Why move people underground? What's the long-term goal? Survival vaults are incredibly expensive to build and maintain for their own sake, and you're not going to get many forward-thinking people to volunteer.
It may take a while before we develop a self-sustaining colony elsewhere, but it'll *never* happen unless we try. And there's no particular reason to assume it'll be incredibly difficult, especially if we start someplace like Mars that has immense easily accessible reserves of the two most important building blocks of an ecosystem: CO2 and water. No doubt lots of people will die in the attempt, but that's pretty much always been true of settlers - as long as they go in with their eyes open I don't see a problem.
Unfortunately "survival colonies" scattered around earth are poor protection against many of the most likely ends of civilization: super plague (GMO or otherwise, affecting humans or staple crops), nuclear warfare, or even sufficiently severe ecosystem collapse. Sure, they *could* be sealed ecosystems deep underground with no contact with the outside world - but what sort of sorry nutjob is going to lock themselves away from the world on the off-chance that it all comes tumbling down so fast that locking the doors after the fact might be too late?
Besides which preserving the human race is one of those extreme-long-term secondary visions anyway. So long as we live on only one planet, sooner or later something *will* kill us. Our exploding sun if nothing else. The real goal is to expand into new challenges and frontiers. Have elbow room to live the way people were meant to live - whatever that happens to mean to you. Frontiers have been good to our species, but we've pretty much filled them all up on Earth. Space offers the promise of an unfillable frontier - an endless expanse in which dreamers and malcontents can try to find their land of milk and honey. It offers both a pressure relief valve for society, and fertile ground for our adventurers - a kind of individual that has historically enriched our species in many, not always expected, ways.
I thought you were joking, what with the Simpson's reference, but double checked and it's true!
I hadn't realized that. Sounds like Beryllium-9 is a better candidate than aluminum, and that typically you'll mix powders of your target light isotope and alpha emitter rather than just wrapping it in foil, and that even then you're looking at a 1000-to-1 chance of an alpha particle triggering a fusion reaction and then neutron emitting decay...but criminy. It seems like every elementary discussion of nuclear radiation mentions that alpha radiation can be blocked with aluminum foil. You'd think someone would bother to mention that doing so creates a neutron radiation source.
Watch your units. Watt-hours (energy), are not watts. One watt-hour is the total amount of energy delivered by 1 watt operating for 1 hour. Or in this case, something closer to 1uW operating for 1,000,000 hours (over 100 years).
No, read more carefully: it doesn't deliver 3.3Watts per gram, it delivers 3.3Watt-hours per gram. That's energy, not power. Energy that is delivered spread across it's multi-century lifespan. The article even specifies the power - initially 10uW/cm^3. And assuming its density is about the average of its nickel and diamond layers(9 and 3.5 g/cm^3, respectively), one cubic centimeter masses about 6 grams.
It's also a nuclear battery, not chemical - the rules are completely different. Its power delivery follows the fixed exponential decay curve of its radioactive fuel, and is delivered regardless of whether there's a load actually using that power or not. You can't slow it down by not using the power, and you can't draw one mW more than it's generating open circuit. You'd have to somehow increase the spontaneous decay rate of it's fuel to do that.
I know. Very disappointing. I'd love to have a 1kg battery that delivers a nice steady (or even exponentially decaying) 3.3kW of power for decades, it'd change everything. But that's not even remotely what this does. According to their numbers a 1kg battery would initially deliver only somewhere around 1.6mW.
I don't see it. Yes, it's easy for a mu to accidentally disappear or be changed the a normal character. But that's my point: the article involved a proper mu character in the energy content output - what are the odds that it would be accidentally *inserted*?
25lb ~= 11,000g ~= 37,000Wh total capacity Probably about half of that is delivered in the first century, which works out to an average of ~190Wh per year, or 0.5Wh/day
The key point though is that while it has a relatively high energy density, it delivers almost no power. It takes about a century to half-drain that 3300mWh nuclear battery, which means you're averaging less than 0.05mWh per day (per cm^3 of battery). In comparison you can completely drain a lithium battery within hours.
How does the inevitable high levels of environmental radiation play out in your imaginary world? Because cars, cargo boat and plane crashes all occur on a regular basis, and in a fission powered world those crashes would often mean nasty highly radioactive waste products getting spread around.
The problem is not the fear of radioactive contamination - the danger is real. The problem is that we don't have any technology safe enough to reduce that danger to something tolerable outside a well-regulated power plant (and fear well may have contributed to that). You can't even trust people to dispose of batteries and household chemicals properly when doing so is free and easy, and big companies like BP routinely get away with a slap on the wrist when causing massive damage via negligence and then intentionally worsening the problem in order to make it less visible - messes which rarely ever get adequately cleaned up. Hell, whole cities like Flint have had toxic water supplies for years that the residents can't even decline to pay for if they want to keep their kids. And do you really want to live in a world where any car bomb gets the radioactive dirty bomb part for free?
Fusion may eventually change that - generally speaking there's no direct waste products, and neutron activation problems can be mitigated with lithium shielding. And then by all means let's play. Even something like a compact Lockheed Martin fusion reactor wouldn't be something I'd want in a car though - break the reactor and reaction-based radioactivity ends almost immediately. Those inner coils though will inevitably be neutron activated though, and I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for cleaning up the mess. No fast and cheap tow-truck services to clear an intersection after a bad mash-up.
If it gets in to sensitive areas, sure. The point though is that you can work alongside a beta emitter all day long, it mostly can't even penetrate your skin. Sure, it'll ionize the outer layer of your skin if it's not encased in... pretty much anything really, but so will rubbing against wool. Just don't eat it - living tissue is a lot less resilient to ionization than dead skin cells.
An alpha emitter you'd want encased in a foil shell. Easy to add to any implant or other device. You don't want to cut open the battery, but as long as the foil wrapper in place, you're not getting any exposure.
Gamma and neutron emitters though can't be stopped by any such inobtrusive shielding. So they're what you worry about. And of course neutron radiation is "contagious" via neutron activation, unlike alpha and beta radiation which just break chemical bonds on impact and ionize the location until an electron migrates to neutralize it.
Unfortunately the half that needs replacing is uniformly distributed within the half that doesn't, which makes the project slightly more challenging.
Plus the fact that you'd need something the size of a small moon to deliver the power a Tesla needs. To deliver 320kW to the motors at 10uW/cm^3 you'd need 32,000 cubic meters of battery
The problem for consumer applications of course is that the full 129mWh/g in a lithium ion battery can easily be delivered in an hour or two, while it takes a literal eternity to extract the 3300mWh/g from their nuclear battery (though you'll get about half of it in the first century). That translates to less than 3.3mWh/g in a year, and less than 4uW/g in a day.
So, totally useless as a phone battery, where a lithium battery's daily power delivery is 32,000x greater.
>Does a battery that produces energy like this through radioactive decay work like a chemical battery? Nope, you're right on. The power is extracted from radioactive decay, which follows the exact same exponential decay curve regardless of whether the power is used or not.
There's a reason nuclear batteries are used primarily for deep space missions and remote lighthouses, etc. Their advantage is not in power density, but in their long, maintenance-free lifespan.
I'm not so sure. Last bullet point in the Science Direct highlight list: - The battery power density of 10W/cm3 and specific energy of 3300mWh/g were achieved due to cell thickness decreasing.
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u. And with nickel at about 9g/cm^3, and diamond at 3.5g/cm^3 that's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 6g/cm^3, or 2uW/g. What's the lifetime output of an 100y half-life expontential decay that starts at 2uW? 100 years at 2uW would be what, 1,750mWh? And given the shape of an exponential decay curve, it's going to spend most of that century a lot closer to 1uW than 2. so (very roughly) let's call it 1000mWh for the first century, 500 for the second, 250 for the third... that'd be ~2000mWh/g for eternity - well within the margins of error for a rough pre-breakfast calculation.
One option to at least help - use a different web browser for Facebook and other social surveillance sites. At least then they can't easily connect your browsing habits with your account. And a bit of a tangent, but I refuse to install any such surveillance apps on my phone. Bad enough they do their best to track me online - no way I'm letting them harvest my contacts and physically track me throughout the day.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always get a USB charging cable that doesn't even *have* any data lines, though finding one intentionally may be a challenge. And it'd mean your phone should draw only the standard 0.5A specified by the USB standard, since it can't negotiate for higher current.
I may be wrong here - someone with more USB protocol experience feel free to step in, but:
I agree that your proposal would be good, but I think it would require a potentially major revision to the USB standard to implement - the USB standard is designed as a data connection of peripherals to a centrally controlling host - dumb power was never an intended purpose for it, and even today remains a fall-back option to allow for cheap chargers. It doesn't even consider the possibility of untrusted connections, especially from the device end (your phone). You plug something in to your PC, it's pretty much presumed to be a peripheral that now belongs to the PC. The device can't even initiate any communications - it can only respond to communication initiated by the host.
What you could potentially do today is have a prompt pop come up on your phone saying "Enable data?" whenever it's plugged in, and just pretend to be a power-hungry USB hub unless and until you activate data to "plug in" the virtual phone. Or even a switch that electrically disables the data lines. But I don't think they could be auto-connected to your normal PC, because the the USB protocol doesn't involve the PC identifying itself.
> If it wasn't deliberate they would have blocked the access by fixing the USB bug.
Is that not exactly what they're doing? They don't know exactly what the bug is, so they're making the USB port useless unless the phone is already unlocked.
Of course that's sort of the nuclear option, as it removes the easiest routes to repairing a phone with "broken" software, as well as probably interfering with the functionality of a number of clock-radios and other often-idle accessories. But it does the job.
How would that protect against a hardware compromise that allows the attacker to write to memory that *should* be protected? What would prevent the attacker from then just changing the required signature to their own?
Well, it'd almost certainly be impossible for *you* to do so - how would you talk to the phone? Normally you'd plug it into your PC and initiate a reset, but now plugging it into the PC doesn't actually do anything unless the phone is unlocked, so...
The only chance would be if the phone is still wirelessly connecting to Apple, and Apple has the capability to remotely trigger a reset.
>So, they're about on par with pretty much every software company out there?
I like your universe. How do I get there from here, where most software companies could care less about security issues beyond copy protection?
There's an awful thin line between "bricked" and "bricked unless you can eventually find the password that you've forgotten". How many times have you managed to recall a password after forgetting it?
Of course, if they're still regularly calling home to Apple for updates and the like, Apple might be able to at least do a remote wipe and restore to factory default state, so the phone itself wouldn't be lost, just all the data on it. That'd be nice.
The red giant phase is the explosion, albeit a very slow one.
Perhaps at first - but you're building towards a future in which humanity goes to the stars - not just hiding in a hole.
Nope - entirely different sort of nutjob is going to space - one with dreams of humanity among the stars, or of escaping the stifling societies on Earth. Underground vaults offer none of that - they're purely a survival ark in case something goes wrong.
Why move people underground? What's the long-term goal? Survival vaults are incredibly expensive to build and maintain for their own sake, and you're not going to get many forward-thinking people to volunteer.
It may take a while before we develop a self-sustaining colony elsewhere, but it'll *never* happen unless we try. And there's no particular reason to assume it'll be incredibly difficult, especially if we start someplace like Mars that has immense easily accessible reserves of the two most important building blocks of an ecosystem: CO2 and water. No doubt lots of people will die in the attempt, but that's pretty much always been true of settlers - as long as they go in with their eyes open I don't see a problem.
Unfortunately "survival colonies" scattered around earth are poor protection against many of the most likely ends of civilization: super plague (GMO or otherwise, affecting humans or staple crops), nuclear warfare, or even sufficiently severe ecosystem collapse. Sure, they *could* be sealed ecosystems deep underground with no contact with the outside world - but what sort of sorry nutjob is going to lock themselves away from the world on the off-chance that it all comes tumbling down so fast that locking the doors after the fact might be too late?
Besides which preserving the human race is one of those extreme-long-term secondary visions anyway. So long as we live on only one planet, sooner or later something *will* kill us. Our exploding sun if nothing else. The real goal is to expand into new challenges and frontiers. Have elbow room to live the way people were meant to live - whatever that happens to mean to you. Frontiers have been good to our species, but we've pretty much filled them all up on Earth. Space offers the promise of an unfillable frontier - an endless expanse in which dreamers and malcontents can try to find their land of milk and honey. It offers both a pressure relief valve for society, and fertile ground for our adventurers - a kind of individual that has historically enriched our species in many, not always expected, ways.
I thought you were joking, what with the Simpson's reference, but double checked and it's true!
I hadn't realized that. Sounds like Beryllium-9 is a better candidate than aluminum, and that typically you'll mix powders of your target light isotope and alpha emitter rather than just wrapping it in foil, and that even then you're looking at a 1000-to-1 chance of an alpha particle triggering a fusion reaction and then neutron emitting decay...but criminy. It seems like every elementary discussion of nuclear radiation mentions that alpha radiation can be blocked with aluminum foil. You'd think someone would bother to mention that doing so creates a neutron radiation source.
Watch your units. Watt-hours (energy), are not watts. One watt-hour is the total amount of energy delivered by 1 watt operating for 1 hour. Or in this case, something closer to 1uW operating for 1,000,000 hours (over 100 years).
No, read more carefully: it doesn't deliver 3.3Watts per gram, it delivers 3.3Watt-hours per gram. That's energy, not power. Energy that is delivered spread across it's multi-century lifespan. The article even specifies the power - initially 10uW/cm^3. And assuming its density is about the average of its nickel and diamond layers(9 and 3.5 g/cm^3, respectively), one cubic centimeter masses about 6 grams.
It's also a nuclear battery, not chemical - the rules are completely different. Its power delivery follows the fixed exponential decay curve of its radioactive fuel, and is delivered regardless of whether there's a load actually using that power or not. You can't slow it down by not using the power, and you can't draw one mW more than it's generating open circuit. You'd have to somehow increase the spontaneous decay rate of it's fuel to do that.
I know. Very disappointing. I'd love to have a 1kg battery that delivers a nice steady (or even exponentially decaying) 3.3kW of power for decades, it'd change everything. But that's not even remotely what this does. According to their numbers a 1kg battery would initially deliver only somewhere around 1.6mW.
Yep, and it only takes a century to recharge it... That's going to be a heck of a nap.
I don't see it. Yes, it's easy for a mu to accidentally disappear or be changed the a normal character. But that's my point: the article involved a proper mu character in the energy content output - what are the odds that it would be accidentally *inserted*?
Really? You only use half a Watt-hour per day?
25lb ~= 11,000g ~= 37,000Wh total capacity
Probably about half of that is delivered in the first century, which works out to an average of ~190Wh per year, or 0.5Wh/day
The key point though is that while it has a relatively high energy density, it delivers almost no power. It takes about a century to half-drain that 3300mWh nuclear battery, which means you're averaging less than 0.05mWh per day (per cm^3 of battery). In comparison you can completely drain a lithium battery within hours.
How does the inevitable high levels of environmental radiation play out in your imaginary world? Because cars, cargo boat and plane crashes all occur on a regular basis, and in a fission powered world those crashes would often mean nasty highly radioactive waste products getting spread around.
The problem is not the fear of radioactive contamination - the danger is real. The problem is that we don't have any technology safe enough to reduce that danger to something tolerable outside a well-regulated power plant (and fear well may have contributed to that). You can't even trust people to dispose of batteries and household chemicals properly when doing so is free and easy, and big companies like BP routinely get away with a slap on the wrist when causing massive damage via negligence and then intentionally worsening the problem in order to make it less visible - messes which rarely ever get adequately cleaned up. Hell, whole cities like Flint have had toxic water supplies for years that the residents can't even decline to pay for if they want to keep their kids. And do you really want to live in a world where any car bomb gets the radioactive dirty bomb part for free?
Fusion may eventually change that - generally speaking there's no direct waste products, and neutron activation problems can be mitigated with lithium shielding. And then by all means let's play. Even something like a compact Lockheed Martin fusion reactor wouldn't be something I'd want in a car though - break the reactor and reaction-based radioactivity ends almost immediately. Those inner coils though will inevitably be neutron activated though, and I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for cleaning up the mess. No fast and cheap tow-truck services to clear an intersection after a bad mash-up.
If it gets in to sensitive areas, sure. The point though is that you can work alongside a beta emitter all day long, it mostly can't even penetrate your skin. Sure, it'll ionize the outer layer of your skin if it's not encased in... pretty much anything really, but so will rubbing against wool. Just don't eat it - living tissue is a lot less resilient to ionization than dead skin cells.
An alpha emitter you'd want encased in a foil shell. Easy to add to any implant or other device. You don't want to cut open the battery, but as long as the foil wrapper in place, you're not getting any exposure.
Gamma and neutron emitters though can't be stopped by any such inobtrusive shielding. So they're what you worry about. And of course neutron radiation is "contagious" via neutron activation, unlike alpha and beta radiation which just break chemical bonds on impact and ionize the location until an electron migrates to neutralize it.
Unfortunately the half that needs replacing is uniformly distributed within the half that doesn't, which makes the project slightly more challenging.
Plus the fact that you'd need something the size of a small moon to deliver the power a Tesla needs. To deliver 320kW to the motors at 10uW/cm^3 you'd need 32,000 cubic meters of battery
correction - 10uW/cm^3. Forgot that Slashdot doesn't support unicode.
The problem for consumer applications of course is that the full 129mWh/g in a lithium ion battery can easily be delivered in an hour or two, while it takes a literal eternity to extract the 3300mWh/g from their nuclear battery (though you'll get about half of it in the first century). That translates to less than 3.3mWh/g in a year, and less than 4uW/g in a day.
So, totally useless as a phone battery, where a lithium battery's daily power delivery is 32,000x greater.
>Does a battery that produces energy like this through radioactive decay work like a chemical battery?
Nope, you're right on. The power is extracted from radioactive decay, which follows the exact same exponential decay curve regardless of whether the power is used or not.
There's a reason nuclear batteries are used primarily for deep space missions and remote lighthouses, etc. Their advantage is not in power density, but in their long, maintenance-free lifespan.
I'm not so sure. Last bullet point in the Science Direct highlight list:
- The battery power density of 10W/cm3 and specific energy of 3300mWh/g were achieved due to cell thickness decreasing.
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u. And with nickel at about 9g/cm^3, and diamond at 3.5g/cm^3 that's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 6g/cm^3, or 2uW/g. What's the lifetime output of an 100y half-life expontential decay that starts at 2uW? 100 years at 2uW would be what, 1,750mWh? And given the shape of an exponential decay curve, it's going to spend most of that century a lot closer to 1uW than 2. so (very roughly) let's call it 1000mWh for the first century, 500 for the second, 250 for the third... that'd be ~2000mWh/g for eternity - well within the margins of error for a rough pre-breakfast calculation.
One option to at least help - use a different web browser for Facebook and other social surveillance sites. At least then they can't easily connect your browsing habits with your account. And a bit of a tangent, but I refuse to install any such surveillance apps on my phone. Bad enough they do their best to track me online - no way I'm letting them harvest my contacts and physically track me throughout the day.