Maybe one cannot hold someone confined indefinitely because some person of alleged authority conferred a label of "mentally troubled" onto someone else.
Given the sad state of affairs where everyone is in a database somewhere, that person of alleged authority has now condemned his evaluatee into a life of unemployment and that person will be condemned to be a beggar or thief the rest of his life. If he wasn't mentally troubled before the evaluation, he definitely will be after the evaluation... and probably madder than hell.
The saddest thing yet is the taxpayer, under the government leadership of elected representatives, funds stuff like this.
Yes, I do have a passion for security, no less than I have a passion for anything else that once one places his resources into constructing it - it should perform what it was designed to do until it is decommissioned.
I am just very frustrated at the current state of affairs in system security, like I would be disappointed to buy a screwdriver and have the handle break loose from the shaft. We have been making screwdrivers long enough that this should not happen. Maybe I am naive - I guess the lesson I had was from my old Commodore64, ROM. What it did was well defined by its creator. I only remember one company, Electronic Arts, earned my undying ire by coding routines that hammered the drive head on the 1541 relentlessly against the stop, and got me very interested in hacking - not to avoid payment - but to simply remove code that was physically hammering my machine away while the author of it - smug in his "hold harmless" legal crap was probably investing in replacement drive assemblies.
I post these rants because I am frustrated. You are quite right that I am quite low on the totem pole of cracking skills - and I end up being very frustrated paying for stuff that just causes me misery, while the alternative is being to be forced to steal it to get a workable copy. If I had good reversing skills, I could remove all this horseshit out of a legally purchased copy and get what I wanted in the first place. I would much rather just buy a clean copy from its creator. The problem is not in paying for my meal; my problem is the chef seems determined to pour gravel in my meal and force me to eat stuff I do not want to eat. Kinda like if mama kept putting asparagus in the dessert.
Actually, I was thinking more about that new XMOS chip. 8 core. 32bit. Looks like a super parallax propeller. A fellow Slashdotter turned me onto them. I now have one of their StartKit promos and am anxious to wrap up a current project so I can start exploring what I can do with this thingie. I wonder how it stacks up against a NetBurner. I do not know that much about it yet; I was hoping I would find a book like Labrosse wrote for the uC/OS II.
Things are so half-cooked right now its hard to find anything I feel good about holding onto for good. I liked the stability and simplicity of DOS, and have been sorely frustrated that every implementation of a GUI based multitasker I have seen has rapidly bloated into a unwieldy monster. I simply can see no reason things have to be so complex. 16GB for an OS? That's the base install of WIN7 on my Walmart laptop. Somehow it seems to me that even 1MB of code to manage the core functionality would be severe overkill.
Say there was some way the OS got one core and ROM space. Once flashed, all changes locked out until a hardware jumper is installed.
Maybe OS gets several cores - managing the VGA alone is a heck of a lot of busywork. The OS does most of the heavy lifting anyway.
Would not surprise me to have multiple XMOS chips so that each app gets its own core to play in, with the OS chip running the show.
But whatever we do, never, never, never let the OS take instructions from the net. An app can, but not the OS. The OS has to motherhen the apps and cannot be persuaded by clever code the way the way Microsoft or the US Congress gets persuaded by special interests. I do not have my hammer phoning home for permission to drive a nail. I do not need my OS doing it either. If some author wants to code his app to be a pain in the ass, let them. It can be gotten rid of as fast as an annoying fly. I just need this hardware configured so the fly cannot leave its maggots all over the other apps; he can only mess up his own jar.
Obviously what we need to be really secure is a Open Source browser
I think you typed in jest, but I think you are still spot-on.
The biggest problem I see is all these scripting thingies where webmasters can insist you run arbitrary code in order to view their page. The magic of our legal system allows them to do all this ""hold harmless" stuff regarding anything you ingest at their site. See if this "hold harmless" talk also applies to restaurants. It won't. You eat some restaurant's food and get sick, the restaurant owner has a lot of explaining to do. If common law held anyone who insisted arbitrary code be run in order to view content - hold them liable for malcontent - this would soon stop.
Business went to our Congress over the DMCA and had really stiff penalties legally levied on anyone who violated their business model. Any chance our Congress take our computer infrastructure integrity as seriously as they take the illegal downloading of a song?
If some business made it mandatory you eat one of their candies in order to enter the business, should they be held liable if the candies they insisted on caused a diabetic to go into a coma? Or should their relationship with the U.S. Congress insulate them from liability?
The difference I see is that business will organize and put their concerns before Congress and hound them until they pass whatever legislation they want, whereas voters seem to vote for whoever has the best sound bites, and do not hold their congressmen to their campaign promises. So we end up with software we can't trust.
I rant and rave all the time here bagging on Microsoft for caving in to special interests for things like backdoors and DRM, both of which are hijackable and used to annoy the hell out of those who lack the hacking skills to pirate the damm stuff in the first place. But then, very little of this is Microsoft's doing... its just that they provide the means for others to do this.
I posted a few days ago about Micrium's stuff. ( uC/OS II). I guess the only OS I consider truly secure. Rom-able. Why this is not the standard for standalone industrial controllers is beyond me.
I get so fed up with the way we do things in these Von-Neuman ( Princeton ) architecture machines where we mix code and data. I do not think anyone can really code a secure OS where there is no hardware line of demarcation over what is OS and what is user code. Personally, I would love to see someone come up with something like the Android - running ROM - on a Harvard machine, requiring a physical jumper to re-flash its ROM. Something completely open-source so nobody is trying to hide anything about the inner workings of the OS. The OS would be like a toolbox - handling all the devices on the system. And that's all it would do. Manage the TCP/IP stack, display, keyboard, USB port, HDD files, RAM, and sound. Virus? It will have to infect an app, which now will no longer have a proper signature when its files are verified by the OS's file hasher. Bad app? Delete it. Phoning home app? It HAS to go through the OS to get to the TCP/IP stack, and the OS will rat it out.
Running arbitrary code? Go ahead with Java. In RAM. In the data space. Interpreted. It can't really do anything the OS won't let it do... and its completely helpless to overwrite the OS so it can get its way, as it cannot install the necessary jumper plug that enables the write current.
We take something so simple, and make a helluva mess out of it, just so some special interests can manipulate it at everyone else's expense. Tragedy of the Commons.
I was surprised upon finding out banks actually would use something with the hacking history of Microsoft in a critical application. Microsoft has done a good job being everything for everybody - however one faction often buys benefit at the expense of another faction.
Often its the customer that takes the hit for things some special interest wants put into the OS, like "secure" backdoors for remote product monitoring and control. Problem is these backdoors, put in for one special interest, are often used in other nefarious ways. Note the Micrium code is wide open. It is not open source code - they still want me to license each copy. I have absolutely no problem with that. Companies like NetBurner will even pre-install the Micrium code and handle the licensing of the code as part of the price of the hardware package. Makes for a beautiful user experience as the modules perform predictably - for me like a very powerful Arduino. ( Yes, I love Arduinos too - but they are like comparing a toy scooter to a Mack truck when it comes to anything heavy - however they both share many common control protocols... and I do love C++ ).
Maybe I am just being a snit, but there are a few things that I can get real snitty on. I guess its because I usually assume responsibility *personally* for the stuff I design, and I take it quite hard to to think of using substandard components on a critical design. I would have thought banks would be using some very specialized software they wrote themselves or had some highly responsible organization ( Tandem? ) to code it. In my own opinion, Micrium and Wind River OS products are the tool to use for something like an ATM. Its what I would use for industrial controllers if I still had a go at it.
This whole affair of what platforms to use puzzles me greatly. I am of the opinion that the selection process has everything to do with politics and little to do with substance.
I feel a lot of it has to do with a corporate mentality of holding everything blameless with contracts which have to be signed off on before the business will do anything. "Hold Harmless" seems the byword of the day.
Business will pay for people to play down everything the "leadership" type does not understand, and personal experience tells me that if I do not recommend Microsoft, I will not get the job. Regardless of my belief and experiences to the contrary. Its been my observation that once one gets high enough in corporate hierarchy, one is forced to play CYA, and the only way to play is find someone else to pin the blame on if things go sour - better yet be able to blame someone big - so the guy who hired them does not take the fall for it.
There seems to be a trivial amount of effort expended to mitigate the probability of a breach in the first place.
I am not trying to shill for Micrium - I just like their product and their philosophies of supporting an OS. It is all quite well documented ( link to the book I use all the time ).
NetBurners run this code. This had been the most robust system I have ever studied, yet I find few people who are willing to let me implement it - and for now it runs on a machine I have for my own edification.
My own feeling if anyone wants to hack a bank ATM, go for it. No one's responsible, its just another ledger entry to the bank. If the thing gets too out of hand, the government will make it up to them.
I like your post. I, too, have heated disagreements with "God's Elect" over these issues and have come to the conclusion the Bible was quite correct over False Prophets and wolves in sheep's clothing.
The main evidence I have against evolution, in favor of some sort of creation, is speciation. I observe that within a species, there is a continuous spectra of traits within that species - I am sure I can find every gradient of dog somewhere between a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua if I had to. However I do not find any gradient part dog, part cat. Same within the plant species. I hold that if evolution were true, I would expect to find gradients across the entire living ecosystem, yet that's not what I see.
Science itself has been the greatest witness to me that I am the product of some fertile imagination somewhere, not "slime plus time"... but every religion I have had the (dis)pleasure of encountering seemed to ignore the wonder of it all in favor of trying to control it all and vector itself tithes. The selfishness of the whole affair makes it stink.
The best explanation I have so far is right out of the Bible book of Revelation which states that I was created for God's pleasure. So, I am one of God's pets. I cannot prove it one way or the other, but so far that's the best I have seen as to why I exist.
I am an engineer. I have as good of training as any for recognizing good and bad design... and the designs I have seen are simply amazing in my view - but the religions I have seen look like the crap dreamed up in business schools on how to manipulate people. Same thing Al Capone would do. Finding ways of pinning people down so you can "give them an offer they can't refuse."
Thanks, Cusco.. those are exactly my concerns. I figured my "troll" has never considered what an investment of labor it has been to provide the comforts of modern living.
I guess he's right considering that male engineers do not give birth to biological children ( although if we are lucky, we may make a contribution - but apparently not many of us do ), what I build is my legacy and I could well claim to be "speaking as a mother". I hate to spend my life trying to leave a legacy of something useful just to have someone else blow it up just for the fun of it. Or see another engineer's work destroyed like that. I have a very deep respect for the people who put this infrastructure in place.
This topic forced me into consideration of what my role should be in an event such as this.
First, I am an engineer. I know damn well how important our electrical power infrastructure is to my community - and I also know damn well how irreplaceable those power transformers are should several be taken out at once - exceeding the spares available.
For me, the question boiled down to: "If I had the means, and already knowing this is an attack vector planned by entities hostile to my community, should I use those means, or bleat like a goat?"
I admit my feelings toward Washington are not all that good, and if they attempted this stunt against political adversaries, I would not be so adamant in my response, if I had any at all.
Taking out the power transformer that supplies myself and my neighbors with the comforts of a civilized life - well that's hitting pretty close to home if you ask me. One might as well be coming to our neighborhood drinking water reservoir with a truckload of dead animals and expect me to peaceably watch them dump the dead animals in, knowing all the time that our drinking water will now be unusable.
I have heard it said that all it takes for evil to take over is for the good to lay back and do nothing.
This is one of the reasons I like to run things up the flagpole here at Slashdot to see if anyone else salutes. I get a lot of other opinions from others to act as a "reality check" on myself. and I thank you for taking the time to post.
Ahhh yes... old bicycle tubes. And their valves. Schraeder valves. Ya know if you cut the rubber part off of 'em, you are left with the brass part which can be soldered into 1/4 inch copper fittings with minimal fuss. Just disassemble it so you do not melt the rubber seal on the other part which screws in... Once you have your valves in place, you can play with an old compressor from a junk refrigerator and some barbeque gas ( propane ) and toy around with refrigeration.
My childhood was rife with stuff from the trash bin, those were my prized toys. I would spend countless days simply playing with the stuff, old TV's, radios, hi-fi's, washing machines. Had a helluva lot of fun just taking it all apart to try to find out what made them work, then reassembling them into other things to see if I could make something else. Ooooh! Shop class in High School. Tools! And a teacher who could get all sorts of neat stuff for us. And dear old Dad, who had a garage full of tools. My childhood is full of memories of playing with it, I would pay visits to the city dump now and then and get some real treasures, but I kinda had to be sneaky about it because I was not supposed to be there. But I had far more fun taking something apart than I ever had using it as it was intended to be used. A broken TV would give me several weeks of fun simply disassembling the thing and trying to see what I could build out of the components I recovered.
I had a childhood I do not ever see I could recreate for any offspring I may have without being accused of child abuse. Letting my kid play with things that could kill him. I did. I lived. I even shot guns. My Dad taught me all about Gun Control and it was all about whether or not you hit what you was a shootin' at. If you fired your gun and you did not hit what you was a shootin' at, you were not controlling your gun!
I agree with every poster commenting that we have become so paranoid as a group that we seem to want to live our lives neatly stacked in little cubicles like laying hens in a egg farm.
I do not. I am going to go out there and build my stuff, and if it kills me, at least I can say I went out doing what I loved to do, and I did not die of rot.
I had a neighbor's kid come over about computers. I gave him an old AT I had laying around, with a copy of GWBasic, text editor, Borland Eureka ( algebraic solver ), Borland C++ for DOS, Mathcad for DOS... but by far the most important thing,,, a copy of the manuals to show him how to use it as well as me personally demonstrating how to use it. I know he will encounter nothing in any math classes he will take that those tools will not solve. He will be able to check out any mathematical algorithm he can dream up without having to do all the drudge work. He can even do all the thermodynamic equations I have dealt with. For him, I guess it would like me using grandpa's 100 year old woodworking tools.... but when you know what it is and how to use it - they work pretty damm good.
I wonder what all those displays in the old TV series "Time Tunnel" were. I recognized the lissajous displays on their consoles... I was making the same kind of display when I was in high school trying to make a decent oscilloscope out of a TV.
I ended up making a Science Fair EKG project with it.
Incidentally, those lissajous patterns is damn near all I ever was able to get from that TV - it made a lousy - and I mean lousy - 'scope. It barely had the bandwidth to display an EKG, and even then you had to use your imagination as the screen phosphor persistence for that application was way too short.
Reading those pages sure brought back a lot of fond memories of the day I got that big box from California ( I was living in Pascagoula, Mississippi at the time working at Chevron's big oil refinery there ).
I spent many an evening assembling and programming that thing - I had built my own keyboard and was using a couple of security type monochrome CRT monitors. I had two video cards in mine, each taking up 1K of RAM area, 30K of 2716, and the rest of its 64K address space was filled with 2102 static ram.
Me and the assembler had become great friends. So much so I had the assembler resident in a couple of the 2716, along with that famous little "Tiny Basic" 2K-byte wonder that showed up in "Dr. Dobb's computer journal".
The rest of the EEPROM space was mostly libraries I made that were callable from that little tiny basic, and they would do all the nitpicky bit banging.
I was especially proud of a hacked cassette tape recorder which I had modified to store data in a manchester format. I designed the hardware and file structures for it. Got my first experiences with phase-locked loops. CD4046. Basically it locked onto the carrier and looked for transitions between clock bits. I was feeding current directly into the write heads to do this, and adjusting the frequencies to use the inductance of the write head to limit the write current and leave me clean readable patterns on the tape. I learned a helluva lot about magnetics doing that. Filter design ( pulse shaping ) too.
I felt I could do nearly anything with that box.
I often wondered if I was the only individual in the entire State of Mississippi who had his very own computer.
It was my belief that I could run the entire refinery from that thing if Chevron would let me.
I feel very fortunate to have "come of age" when everything wasn't already done and I could enjoy building from scratch. Today, it seems everything is already there and off the shelf and all the enjoyment of rolling one's own is gone... now everyone "rides the bus" and goes where the bus takes them. I got to "walk the woods" off the beaten path, making my own trail. Sure, its oblivion now... but it was fun.
I wonder if IMSAI 8080 paid for placement in WarGames?
They were not a big name by all means. I still have the IMSAI I put together from a kit sold out of San Leandro, California. I thought it was such a cool little machine.
Car tints were exactly what popped in my mind when I saw this article.
We are beginning to design stuff into cars which continuously draws power, much like the numerous things in our homes that never turn completely off.
Solar cells built into car windshields can be used to mitigate the effects of a car not having its engine running. An owner of a solar-cell windshield equipped car will be able to return to his car, parked at an airport after it has sat unused for possibly several weeks, and have the battery fully charged upon his return. I have traveled and it has always been a concern to me whether the car will start after I have ignored it for a week.
Just a few hundred milliamperes going into the battery would have mitigated this concern.
I do agree with the posters who have already pointed out that using this for office building windows is a lot of wasted expensive effort for a negligible ( and likely negative sans tax credits ) return on investment, considering the cost of line power. A car in a parking lot usually has no line power available.
California will still make lots of money even if they don't tax Tesla one thin dime.
What California needs right now - more than anything else - are companies who are funneling money into paychecks and will provide the State with a database of who is getting paid, and how much.
Do not kill the goose which is trying to lay a golden egg. Sure, you can kill the goose with tax law, but in doing so, you forfeit all those eggs it was going to lay.
The streets of California are already littered with the carcasses of killed geese.
Many done in by the pen of the FTB. The parts that used to run the goose now are on welfare.
From what I can see, all this economic malaise we have had is a result of both poorly applied taxation and mismanagement of resources. We tax productivity and reward sheer gluttony/greed. So far, the FED has kept the economy "growing" by dropping interest rates over the last 30 years or so. For 30 years, the FED has been able to keep dropping the interest rates to keep liquidity in the economy so merchants could brag around 10% year-over-year growth in sales receipts, making their stock look good, as well as real-estate people carrying on over increases in home price. By lowering interest rates, bankers have been able to support increasing home price - but look at the charts.... how much leeway do the bankers have to keep this charade going?
Look what happened the last time Bernake bumped the rate up a bit. Google found lots of charts. They all say the same thing. Our economic engine is now running on fumes.
Look at the charts. This cannot go on much longer. We are now at the end of travel. The wolf is nearing the door, and we have outsourced way too much of the vital resources which kept our USA strong. The global elite will fare well, unless riots take them out. The rest of us are kinda caught in the mess.
It is my belief that if the Government issued the currency, not the FED, the Government would not need to tax anyone.
Right now, the banker-boys net the profit from issuing currency that the Government should have been getting.
Where does this increase in money supply come from? For you and me, we have to earn it, but if I go to the bank for a loan, where do they get it? Thanks to something called the "Fractional banking system", they can just enter my debt to them in a ledger and start charging me interest for the loan of something they never had in the first place. The usury will now require yet another loan somewhere to pay that back.
This whole banking scheme is a huge moneymaker, yet the government would rather tax the working stiff on his wage rather than covering the costs of running a government by the increase of the money supply.
In my house I use the right bulb for the right purpose. Bathrooms and closets get incandescents
For me, it has to be incandescent for the bathroom. Condensation is a problem. I need the heat of the incandescent to insure the water does not accumulate in the fixture and make both an electrocution and fire hazard.
Note to "Relion Group"... I have seen numerous advertisements of yours advising anyone taking some drug that had an unintentional side effect to call you and your attorneys will sue the hell out of the manufacturer. Can you please start running ads to the effect that if you have had a house fire or electrocution due to condensation in an electrical fixture designed for incandescent but retrofitted with a bulb it was not designed for to personally sue those Congressmen that voted this requirement into law?
So far I have had three CCFL retrofits fail from failure, what appeared to be a voltage spike damaging either one of the input diodes or one of the two inverter transistors, or the noise spike may have buggered the timing of the inverter to the point the ballast inductor saturated with the resultant current spike doing the damage. In all cases, the device failed shorted, and the resultant current surge caused a brief flash of fire to escape the enclosure, evidenced by the carbonized area around the blown devices. I will not have those halogen rod lights in the house for the same reason. You can place a flammable near one and ignite it.
Many of the LED offerings available have poor heat sink design, which becomes apparent once you install the thing.
The saving grace of the old incandescent is when it quit working, it simply quit. And there wasn't much way for the fire to get out of the bulb unless you physically broke the bulb.
Not to say I am against LED or CCFL altogether. I have retrofitted a lot of fixtures to use 100 watt ( yes, 100 watt ) LED chips, albeit I only run them around 20 watts or so, and get lots of light. If your LED is running too hot to hold, its running too hot. I ended up making quite a few of my fixtures using old aluminum cooking utensils - they were thick, had good thermal heat sinking properties, and were cheap at garage sales and thrift stores.. thick aluminum ashtrays/bowls work nice. LED's give you a lot of artistic freedom to work with various colors and extremely simple dimmer circuits, as well as being quite safe due to their much lower operating voltages. The commercial offerings are pricey right now, but if you care to get the guts and roll your own, you can be quite free to express your artistic side and make something unusual.
Build it right, don't overdrive it, and the LED should last longer than you will.
So far, I have had extremely positive results from my efforts in building LED's into my stuff. I highly recommend both the 100-watt chips I linked to ( but running them substantially less than that ). Ten watt chips using similar mounting methods are also available, and run very well from current-limited 12 volt sources. ( I run my 10 watt ones at about 9 volts/200 mA or so... about 2 watts or so each ). I have already seen lumen degradation and chip failure of devices run full power, so I don't do that. Those things are rated for excellent heat sink design, which I have yet to achieve.
I have been in this business as a design engineer for 40 years. One thing I have seen for sure within the last decade is a strong disdain from the management types toward the creative types.
My conjecture is that the industry as a whole is saturating, and people fortunate enough to have landed the higher echelons in companies are doing the animal-planet alpha-male thing and running anyone possibly more technically competent than themselves out of the company while they still have the power to do so.
I am handling it by developing independent products and working with small companies, as my hope for ever working for a big company again is dashed. I can not imagine a company that has the financial resources to hire expensive lawyers and managers has any place for artistic types. I consider myself to be one of the dime-a-dozen gardeners in their eyes. A "computer janitor" as one of my fellow slashdotters noted so eloquently.
We have got tax and business law so convoluted with special interests that actually doing anything makes little business sense, when there is far more money to be made by throttling competition and selling rights to do anything. I see this going on and on and on as long as the world relies on the US as their bank, as it is well known that bankers eventually end up owning everything due to their capability of not only creating currency out of thin air, but also expecting usury on it that can only be met by their printing yet more currency to pay the amount owed.
History shows only one way has worked to reset the system, and it ain't pretty. Civilizations have worked just like a relaxation oscillator ( avalanche mode ) for as long as we have recorded history. No reason it stops now. It is not human nature at all for it to stop.
Sadly most "save the environment" types failed Chemistry class in high school, and as a result they don't understand that it's not the raw molecules which are usually a problem, but rather how they're hooked together. They tend to believe that any time you have a nasty substance made of A and B, that by extension both A and B are also just as nasty... if not worse. Reality is usually about as far from that as can be
Yes. I have seen a lot of that. I am highly "save the environment", but that does not mean not to use it to its best purposes. I used to work for Chevron. In the research lab as well as the refinery. Great folks. I learned a heck of a lot there. Including how to put hydrogen and carbon together many different ways as well as how to take them back apart. Its all simple little building blocks, but when they are assembled as a toxin, well, that's what they are. Reverting it back to something useful is just a matter of disassembling it then reassembling something useful out of it.
That is why I mentioned getting the oil companies in on it. They are really good at taking things apart then making something useful out of the pieces.
AC, you already posted the first thing that came to my mind. Burn it.
There is nothing hazardous about the elements in any of this stuff. Its how they are assembled that makes it so hazardous. Destructive decomposition by fire is a great way of disassembling unwanted molecules back to far simpler predecessors..
Oil refineries have done this for years. Its known as "flaring". There are lots of oil refineries in the Mid-East. They already have all the equipment in place to disassemble nasty complex molecules.
Not everything in crude oil is nice and pristine. A lot of nasty stuff comes up mixed with the oil.
I think it is high time the government work with the oil companies to borrow the use of their flaring and cracking technologies to disassemble this mess of unwanted molecules and re-form them into something useful, or at least render it harmless.
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Maybe one cannot hold someone confined indefinitely because some person of alleged authority conferred a label of "mentally troubled" onto someone else.
Given the sad state of affairs where everyone is in a database somewhere, that person of alleged authority has now condemned his evaluatee into a life of unemployment and that person will be condemned to be a beggar or thief the rest of his life. If he wasn't mentally troubled before the evaluation, he definitely will be after the evaluation... and probably madder than hell.
The saddest thing yet is the taxpayer, under the government leadership of elected representatives, funds stuff like this.
Thanks!
Just knowing what to ask for solves 90% of the problem.
I have heard of doing this. How do you get one-time CC numbers without going through these high-fee things I see at the local supermarket?
Yes, I do have a passion for security, no less than I have a passion for anything else that once one places his resources into constructing it - it should perform what it was designed to do until it is decommissioned.
I am just very frustrated at the current state of affairs in system security, like I would be disappointed to buy a screwdriver and have the handle break loose from the shaft. We have been making screwdrivers long enough that this should not happen. Maybe I am naive - I guess the lesson I had was from my old Commodore64, ROM. What it did was well defined by its creator. I only remember one company, Electronic Arts, earned my undying ire by coding routines that hammered the drive head on the 1541 relentlessly against the stop, and got me very interested in hacking - not to avoid payment - but to simply remove code that was physically hammering my machine away while the author of it - smug in his "hold harmless" legal crap was probably investing in replacement drive assemblies.
I post these rants because I am frustrated. You are quite right that I am quite low on the totem pole of cracking skills - and I end up being very frustrated paying for stuff that just causes me misery, while the alternative is being to be forced to steal it to get a workable copy. If I had good reversing skills, I could remove all this horseshit out of a legally purchased copy and get what I wanted in the first place. I would much rather just buy a clean copy from its creator. The problem is not in paying for my meal; my problem is the chef seems determined to pour gravel in my meal and force me to eat stuff I do not want to eat. Kinda like if mama kept putting asparagus in the dessert.
Actually, I was thinking more about that new XMOS chip. 8 core. 32bit. Looks like a super parallax propeller. A fellow Slashdotter turned me onto them. I now have one of their StartKit promos and am anxious to wrap up a current project so I can start exploring what I can do with this thingie. I wonder how it stacks up against a NetBurner. I do not know that much about it yet; I was hoping I would find a book like Labrosse wrote for the uC/OS II.
Things are so half-cooked right now its hard to find anything I feel good about holding onto for good. I liked the stability and simplicity of DOS, and have been sorely frustrated that every implementation of a GUI based multitasker I have seen has rapidly bloated into a unwieldy monster. I simply can see no reason things have to be so complex. 16GB for an OS? That's the base install of WIN7 on my Walmart laptop. Somehow it seems to me that even 1MB of code to manage the core functionality would be severe overkill.
Say there was some way the OS got one core and ROM space. Once flashed, all changes locked out until a hardware jumper is installed.
Maybe OS gets several cores - managing the VGA alone is a heck of a lot of busywork. The OS does most of the heavy lifting anyway.
Would not surprise me to have multiple XMOS chips so that each app gets its own core to play in, with the OS chip running the show.
But whatever we do, never, never, never let the OS take instructions from the net. An app can, but not the OS. The OS has to motherhen the apps and cannot be persuaded by clever code the way the way Microsoft or the US Congress gets persuaded by special interests. I do not have my hammer phoning home for permission to drive a nail. I do not need my OS doing it either. If some author wants to code his app to be a pain in the ass, let them. It can be gotten rid of as fast as an annoying fly. I just need this hardware configured so the fly cannot leave its maggots all over the other apps; he can only mess up his own jar.
I think you typed in jest, but I think you are still spot-on.
The biggest problem I see is all these scripting thingies where webmasters can insist you run arbitrary code in order to view their page. The magic of our legal system allows them to do all this ""hold harmless" stuff regarding anything you ingest at their site. See if this "hold harmless" talk also applies to restaurants. It won't. You eat some restaurant's food and get sick, the restaurant owner has a lot of explaining to do. If common law held anyone who insisted arbitrary code be run in order to view content - hold them liable for malcontent - this would soon stop.
Business went to our Congress over the DMCA and had really stiff penalties legally levied on anyone who violated their business model. Any chance our Congress take our computer infrastructure integrity as seriously as they take the illegal downloading of a song?
If some business made it mandatory you eat one of their candies in order to enter the business, should they be held liable if the candies they insisted on caused a diabetic to go into a coma? Or should their relationship with the U.S. Congress insulate them from liability?
The difference I see is that business will organize and put their concerns before Congress and hound them until they pass whatever legislation they want, whereas voters seem to vote for whoever has the best sound bites, and do not hold their congressmen to their campaign promises. So we end up with software we can't trust.
I rant and rave all the time here bagging on Microsoft for caving in to special interests for things like backdoors and DRM, both of which are hijackable and used to annoy the hell out of those who lack the hacking skills to pirate the damm stuff in the first place. But then, very little of this is Microsoft's doing... its just that they provide the means for others to do this.
I posted a few days ago about Micrium's stuff. ( uC/OS II). I guess the only OS I consider truly secure. Rom-able. Why this is not the standard for standalone industrial controllers is beyond me.
I get so fed up with the way we do things in these Von-Neuman ( Princeton ) architecture machines where we mix code and data. I do not think anyone can really code a secure OS where there is no hardware line of demarcation over what is OS and what is user code. Personally, I would love to see someone come up with something like the Android - running ROM - on a Harvard machine, requiring a physical jumper to re-flash its ROM. Something completely open-source so nobody is trying to hide anything about the inner workings of the OS. The OS would be like a toolbox - handling all the devices on the system. And that's all it would do. Manage the TCP/IP stack, display, keyboard, USB port, HDD files, RAM, and sound. Virus? It will have to infect an app, which now will no longer have a proper signature when its files are verified by the OS's file hasher. Bad app? Delete it. Phoning home app? It HAS to go through the OS to get to the TCP/IP stack, and the OS will rat it out.
Running arbitrary code? Go ahead with Java. In RAM. In the data space. Interpreted. It can't really do anything the OS won't let it do... and its completely helpless to overwrite the OS so it can get its way, as it cannot install the necessary jumper plug that enables the write current.
We take something so simple, and make a helluva mess out of it, just so some special interests can manipulate it at everyone else's expense. Tragedy of the Commons.
I was surprised upon finding out banks actually would use something with the hacking history of Microsoft in a critical application. Microsoft has done a good job being everything for everybody - however one faction often buys benefit at the expense of another faction.
Often its the customer that takes the hit for things some special interest wants put into the OS, like "secure" backdoors for remote product monitoring and control. Problem is these backdoors, put in for one special interest, are often used in other nefarious ways. Note the Micrium code is wide open. It is not open source code - they still want me to license each copy. I have absolutely no problem with that. Companies like NetBurner will even pre-install the Micrium code and handle the licensing of the code as part of the price of the hardware package. Makes for a beautiful user experience as the modules perform predictably - for me like a very powerful Arduino. ( Yes, I love Arduinos too - but they are like comparing a toy scooter to a Mack truck when it comes to anything heavy - however they both share many common control protocols... and I do love C++ ).
Maybe I am just being a snit, but there are a few things that I can get real snitty on. I guess its because I usually assume responsibility *personally* for the stuff I design, and I take it quite hard to to think of using substandard components on a critical design. I would have thought banks would be using some very specialized software they wrote themselves or had some highly responsible organization ( Tandem? ) to code it. In my own opinion, Micrium and Wind River OS products are the tool to use for something like an ATM. Its what I would use for industrial controllers if I still had a go at it.
This whole affair of what platforms to use puzzles me greatly. I am of the opinion that the selection process has everything to do with politics and little to do with substance.
I feel a lot of it has to do with a corporate mentality of holding everything blameless with contracts which have to be signed off on before the business will do anything. "Hold Harmless" seems the byword of the day.
I have tried to use Micrium's uC/OS products, based mostly on their certifications for mission critical affairs such as aircraft and life support . For me, this thing is like a "Super Arduino" for embedded applications.
Business will pay for people to play down everything the "leadership" type does not understand, and personal experience tells me that if I do not recommend Microsoft, I will not get the job. Regardless of my belief and experiences to the contrary. Its been my observation that once one gets high enough in corporate hierarchy, one is forced to play CYA, and the only way to play is find someone else to pin the blame on if things go sour - better yet be able to blame someone big - so the guy who hired them does not take the fall for it.
There seems to be a trivial amount of effort expended to mitigate the probability of a breach in the first place.
I am not trying to shill for Micrium - I just like their product and their philosophies of supporting an OS. It is all quite well documented ( link to the book I use all the time ).
NetBurners run this code. This had been the most robust system I have ever studied, yet I find few people who are willing to let me implement it - and for now it runs on a machine I have for my own edification.
My own feeling if anyone wants to hack a bank ATM, go for it. No one's responsible, its just another ledger entry to the bank. If the thing gets too out of hand, the government will make it up to them.
Thanks, AC.
As far as I am concerned, you posted the most informative comment on this whole topic, and I had no modpoints.
I like your post. I, too, have heated disagreements with "God's Elect" over these issues and have come to the conclusion the Bible was quite correct over False Prophets and wolves in sheep's clothing.
The main evidence I have against evolution, in favor of some sort of creation, is speciation. I observe that within a species, there is a continuous spectra of traits within that species - I am sure I can find every gradient of dog somewhere between a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua if I had to. However I do not find any gradient part dog, part cat. Same within the plant species. I hold that if evolution were true, I would expect to find gradients across the entire living ecosystem, yet that's not what I see.
Science itself has been the greatest witness to me that I am the product of some fertile imagination somewhere, not "slime plus time"... but every religion I have had the (dis)pleasure of encountering seemed to ignore the wonder of it all in favor of trying to control it all and vector itself tithes. The selfishness of the whole affair makes it stink.
The best explanation I have so far is right out of the Bible book of Revelation which states that I was created for God's pleasure. So, I am one of God's pets. I cannot prove it one way or the other, but so far that's the best I have seen as to why I exist.
I am an engineer. I have as good of training as any for recognizing good and bad design... and the designs I have seen are simply amazing in my view - but the religions I have seen look like the crap dreamed up in business schools on how to manipulate people. Same thing Al Capone would do. Finding ways of pinning people down so you can "give them an offer they can't refuse."
Thanks, Cusco.. those are exactly my concerns. I figured my "troll" has never considered what an investment of labor it has been to provide the comforts of modern living.
I guess he's right considering that male engineers do not give birth to biological children ( although if we are lucky, we may make a contribution - but apparently not many of us do ), what I build is my legacy and I could well claim to be "speaking as a mother". I hate to spend my life trying to leave a legacy of something useful just to have someone else blow it up just for the fun of it. Or see another engineer's work destroyed like that. I have a very deep respect for the people who put this infrastructure in place.
This topic forced me into consideration of what my role should be in an event such as this.
First, I am an engineer. I know damn well how important our electrical power infrastructure is to my community - and I also know damn well how irreplaceable those power transformers are should several be taken out at once - exceeding the spares available.
For me, the question boiled down to: "If I had the means, and already knowing this is an attack vector planned by entities hostile to my community, should I use those means, or bleat like a goat?"
I admit my feelings toward Washington are not all that good, and if they attempted this stunt against political adversaries, I would not be so adamant in my response, if I had any at all.
Taking out the power transformer that supplies myself and my neighbors with the comforts of a civilized life - well that's hitting pretty close to home if you ask me. One might as well be coming to our neighborhood drinking water reservoir with a truckload of dead animals and expect me to peaceably watch them dump the dead animals in, knowing all the time that our drinking water will now be unusable.
I have heard it said that all it takes for evil to take over is for the good to lay back and do nothing.
This is one of the reasons I like to run things up the flagpole here at Slashdot to see if anyone else salutes. I get a lot of other opinions from others to act as a "reality check" on myself. and I thank you for taking the time to post.
I just RTFA'd. Scared the hell out of me when I considered the ramifications of a co-ordinated attack,
Made me wonder if I would be justified in taking out anyone I saw trying to attempt such a thing.
( Of course, I guess even thinking that makes me one of the types who our government seems to believe should not have access to the means to do so. )
Its not like spares for those big transformers are laying around all over... those things were manufactured to order.
Ahhh yes... old bicycle tubes. And their valves. Schraeder valves. Ya know if you cut the rubber part off of 'em, you are left with the brass part which can be soldered into 1/4 inch copper fittings with minimal fuss. Just disassemble it so you do not melt the rubber seal on the other part which screws in... Once you have your valves in place, you can play with an old compressor from a junk refrigerator and some barbeque gas ( propane ) and toy around with refrigeration.
My childhood was rife with stuff from the trash bin, those were my prized toys. I would spend countless days simply playing with the stuff, old TV's, radios, hi-fi's, washing machines. Had a helluva lot of fun just taking it all apart to try to find out what made them work, then reassembling them into other things to see if I could make something else. Ooooh! Shop class in High School. Tools! And a teacher who could get all sorts of neat stuff for us. And dear old Dad, who had a garage full of tools. My childhood is full of memories of playing with it, I would pay visits to the city dump now and then and get some real treasures, but I kinda had to be sneaky about it because I was not supposed to be there. But I had far more fun taking something apart than I ever had using it as it was intended to be used. A broken TV would give me several weeks of fun simply disassembling the thing and trying to see what I could build out of the components I recovered.
I had a childhood I do not ever see I could recreate for any offspring I may have without being accused of child abuse. Letting my kid play with things that could kill him. I did. I lived. I even shot guns. My Dad taught me all about Gun Control and it was all about whether or not you hit what you was a shootin' at. If you fired your gun and you did not hit what you was a shootin' at, you were not controlling your gun!
I agree with every poster commenting that we have become so paranoid as a group that we seem to want to live our lives neatly stacked in little cubicles like laying hens in a egg farm.
I do not. I am going to go out there and build my stuff, and if it kills me, at least I can say I went out doing what I loved to do, and I did not die of rot.
I had a neighbor's kid come over about computers. I gave him an old AT I had laying around, with a copy of GWBasic, text editor, Borland Eureka ( algebraic solver ), Borland C++ for DOS, Mathcad for DOS... but by far the most important thing,,, a copy of the manuals to show him how to use it as well as me personally demonstrating how to use it. I know he will encounter nothing in any math classes he will take that those tools will not solve. He will be able to check out any mathematical algorithm he can dream up without having to do all the drudge work. He can even do all the thermodynamic equations I have dealt with. For him, I guess it would like me using grandpa's 100 year old woodworking tools.... but when you know what it is and how to use it - they work pretty damm good.
In addition to this, there is a nasty little thermodynamic effect where compressed gases heat up when you compress them..
If your tank isn't well insulated, you are just going to spend a lot of energy compressing hot air which cools off and loses a lot of its pressure.
I wonder what all those displays in the old TV series "Time Tunnel" were. I recognized the lissajous displays on their consoles... I was making the same kind of display when I was in high school trying to make a decent oscilloscope out of a TV.
I ended up making a Science Fair EKG project with it.
Incidentally, those lissajous patterns is damn near all I ever was able to get from that TV - it made a lousy - and I mean lousy - 'scope. It barely had the bandwidth to display an EKG, and even then you had to use your imagination as the screen phosphor persistence for that application was way too short.
Thanks for the link, Cohiba!
Reading those pages sure brought back a lot of fond memories of the day I got that big box from California ( I was living in Pascagoula, Mississippi at the time working at Chevron's big oil refinery there ).
I spent many an evening assembling and programming that thing - I had built my own keyboard and was using a couple of security type monochrome CRT monitors. I had two video cards in mine, each taking up 1K of RAM area, 30K of 2716, and the rest of its 64K address space was filled with 2102 static ram.
Me and the assembler had become great friends. So much so I had the assembler resident in a couple of the 2716, along with that famous little "Tiny Basic" 2K-byte wonder that showed up in "Dr. Dobb's computer journal".
The rest of the EEPROM space was mostly libraries I made that were callable from that little tiny basic, and they would do all the nitpicky bit banging.
I was especially proud of a hacked cassette tape recorder which I had modified to store data in a manchester format. I designed the hardware and file structures for it. Got my first experiences with phase-locked loops. CD4046. Basically it locked onto the carrier and looked for transitions between clock bits. I was feeding current directly into the write heads to do this, and adjusting the frequencies to use the inductance of the write head to limit the write current and leave me clean readable patterns on the tape. I learned a helluva lot about magnetics doing that. Filter design ( pulse shaping ) too.
I felt I could do nearly anything with that box.
I often wondered if I was the only individual in the entire State of Mississippi who had his very own computer.
It was my belief that I could run the entire refinery from that thing if Chevron would let me.
I feel very fortunate to have "come of age" when everything wasn't already done and I could enjoy building from scratch. Today, it seems everything is already there and off the shelf and all the enjoyment of rolling one's own is gone... now everyone "rides the bus" and goes where the bus takes them. I got to "walk the woods" off the beaten path, making my own trail. Sure, its oblivion now... but it was fun.
I wonder if IMSAI 8080 paid for placement in WarGames?
They were not a big name by all means. I still have the IMSAI I put together from a kit sold out of San Leandro, California. I thought it was such a cool little machine.
Car tints were exactly what popped in my mind when I saw this article.
We are beginning to design stuff into cars which continuously draws power, much like the numerous things in our homes that never turn completely off.
Solar cells built into car windshields can be used to mitigate the effects of a car not having its engine running. An owner of a solar-cell windshield equipped car will be able to return to his car, parked at an airport after it has sat unused for possibly several weeks, and have the battery fully charged upon his return. I have traveled and it has always been a concern to me whether the car will start after I have ignored it for a week.
Just a few hundred milliamperes going into the battery would have mitigated this concern.
I do agree with the posters who have already pointed out that using this for office building windows is a lot of wasted expensive effort for a negligible ( and likely negative sans tax credits ) return on investment, considering the cost of line power. A car in a parking lot usually has no line power available.
California will still make lots of money even if they don't tax Tesla one thin dime.
What California needs right now - more than anything else - are companies who are funneling money into paychecks and will provide the State with a database of who is getting paid, and how much.
Do not kill the goose which is trying to lay a golden egg. Sure, you can kill the goose with tax law, but in doing so, you forfeit all those eggs it was going to lay.
The streets of California are already littered with the carcasses of killed geese.
Many done in by the pen of the FTB. The parts that used to run the goose now are on welfare.
From what I can see, all this economic malaise we have had is a result of both poorly applied taxation and mismanagement of resources. We tax productivity and reward sheer gluttony/greed. So far, the FED has kept the economy "growing" by dropping interest rates over the last 30 years or so. For 30 years, the FED has been able to keep dropping the interest rates to keep liquidity in the economy so merchants could brag around 10% year-over-year growth in sales receipts, making their stock look good, as well as real-estate people carrying on over increases in home price. By lowering interest rates, bankers have been able to support increasing home price - but look at the charts.... how much leeway do the bankers have to keep this charade going?
Look what happened the last time Bernake bumped the rate up a bit. Google found lots of charts. They all say the same thing. Our economic engine is now running on fumes.
Look at the charts. This cannot go on much longer. We are now at the end of travel. The wolf is nearing the door, and we have outsourced way too much of the vital resources which kept our USA strong. The global elite will fare well, unless riots take them out. The rest of us are kinda caught in the mess.
It is my belief that if the Government issued the currency, not the FED, the Government would not need to tax anyone.
Right now, the banker-boys net the profit from issuing currency that the Government should have been getting.
Where does this increase in money supply come from? For you and me, we have to earn it, but if I go to the bank for a loan, where do they get it? Thanks to something called the "Fractional banking system", they can just enter my debt to them in a ledger and start charging me interest for the loan of something they never had in the first place. The usury will now require yet another loan somewhere to pay that back.
This whole banking scheme is a huge moneymaker, yet the government would rather tax the working stiff on his wage rather than covering the costs of running a government by the increase of the money supply.
For me, it has to be incandescent for the bathroom. Condensation is a problem. I need the heat of the incandescent to insure the water does not accumulate in the fixture and make both an electrocution and fire hazard.
Note to "Relion Group"... I have seen numerous advertisements of yours advising anyone taking some drug that had an unintentional side effect to call you and your attorneys will sue the hell out of the manufacturer. Can you please start running ads to the effect that if you have had a house fire or electrocution due to condensation in an electrical fixture designed for incandescent but retrofitted with a bulb it was not designed for to personally sue those Congressmen that voted this requirement into law?
So far I have had three CCFL retrofits fail from failure, what appeared to be a voltage spike damaging either one of the input diodes or one of the two inverter transistors, or the noise spike may have buggered the timing of the inverter to the point the ballast inductor saturated with the resultant current spike doing the damage. In all cases, the device failed shorted, and the resultant current surge caused a brief flash of fire to escape the enclosure, evidenced by the carbonized area around the blown devices. I will not have those halogen rod lights in the house for the same reason. You can place a flammable near one and ignite it.
Many of the LED offerings available have poor heat sink design, which becomes apparent once you install the thing.
The saving grace of the old incandescent is when it quit working, it simply quit. And there wasn't much way for the fire to get out of the bulb unless you physically broke the bulb.
Not to say I am against LED or CCFL altogether. I have retrofitted a lot of fixtures to use 100 watt ( yes, 100 watt ) LED chips, albeit I only run them around 20 watts or so, and get lots of light. If your LED is running too hot to hold, its running too hot. I ended up making quite a few of my fixtures using old aluminum cooking utensils - they were thick, had good thermal heat sinking properties, and were cheap at garage sales and thrift stores.. thick aluminum ashtrays/bowls work nice. LED's give you a lot of artistic freedom to work with various colors and extremely simple dimmer circuits, as well as being quite safe due to their much lower operating voltages. The commercial offerings are pricey right now, but if you care to get the guts and roll your own, you can be quite free to express your artistic side and make something unusual.
Build it right, don't overdrive it, and the LED should last longer than you will.
So far, I have had extremely positive results from my efforts in building LED's into my stuff. I highly recommend both the 100-watt chips I linked to ( but running them substantially less than that ). Ten watt chips using similar mounting methods are also available, and run very well from current-limited 12 volt sources. ( I run my 10 watt ones at about 9 volts/200 mA or so... about 2 watts or so each ). I have already seen lumen degradation and chip failure of devices run full power, so I don't do that. Those things are rated for excellent heat sink design, which I have yet to achieve.
I have been in this business as a design engineer for 40 years. One thing I have seen for sure within the last decade is a strong disdain from the management types toward the creative types.
My conjecture is that the industry as a whole is saturating, and people fortunate enough to have landed the higher echelons in companies are doing the animal-planet alpha-male thing and running anyone possibly more technically competent than themselves out of the company while they still have the power to do so.
I am handling it by developing independent products and working with small companies, as my hope for ever working for a big company again is dashed. I can not imagine a company that has the financial resources to hire expensive lawyers and managers has any place for artistic types. I consider myself to be one of the dime-a-dozen gardeners in their eyes. A "computer janitor" as one of my fellow slashdotters noted so eloquently.
We have got tax and business law so convoluted with special interests that actually doing anything makes little business sense, when there is far more money to be made by throttling competition and selling rights to do anything. I see this going on and on and on as long as the world relies on the US as their bank, as it is well known that bankers eventually end up owning everything due to their capability of not only creating currency out of thin air, but also expecting usury on it that can only be met by their printing yet more currency to pay the amount owed.
History shows only one way has worked to reset the system, and it ain't pretty. Civilizations have worked just like a relaxation oscillator ( avalanche mode ) for as long as we have recorded history. No reason it stops now. It is not human nature at all for it to stop.
Yes. I have seen a lot of that. I am highly "save the environment", but that does not mean not to use it to its best purposes. I used to work for Chevron. In the research lab as well as the refinery. Great folks. I learned a heck of a lot there. Including how to put hydrogen and carbon together many different ways as well as how to take them back apart. Its all simple little building blocks, but when they are assembled as a toxin, well, that's what they are. Reverting it back to something useful is just a matter of disassembling it then reassembling something useful out of it.
That is why I mentioned getting the oil companies in on it. They are really good at taking things apart then making something useful out of the pieces.
AC, you already posted the first thing that came to my mind. Burn it.
There is nothing hazardous about the elements in any of this stuff. Its how they are assembled that makes it so hazardous. Destructive decomposition by fire is a great way of disassembling unwanted molecules back to far simpler predecessors..
Oil refineries have done this for years. Its known as "flaring". There are lots of oil refineries in the Mid-East. They already have all the equipment in place to disassemble nasty complex molecules.
Not everything in crude oil is nice and pristine. A lot of nasty stuff comes up mixed with the oil.
I think it is high time the government work with the oil companies to borrow the use of their flaring and cracking technologies to disassemble this mess of unwanted molecules and re-form them into something useful, or at least render it harmless.