Right you are good sir, though for most of us plebs, we're happy with our 128kbps MP3's and our crappy dot pitch, we don't want none of your valve amp is better than transistor stuff around here, now get on my lawn so I can tell you to get off.
In my backyard (Australia) I have, well, me and 20 million others, have rock paintings that date back 40,000 years. Hand prints sprayed on to stone walls and caves that often look as fresh today as when they were first created, from babies through to adults, pictures, stories, it's utterly amazing stuff to see - it pre-dates 'the good book' by tens of thousands of years. So I think why would I give a damn about religion? Really? Why? From birth to death our beliefs grow as we grow, we soak up what those around us tell us is 'correct', and these things generally die along with us after we pass the same on to our children. I don't really give a crap if there is more to it (life) or not, but whatever, others think and believe they 'know' otherwise, so I wish them good luck.
You have 50 or 60 Christian texts, written by humans, for humans, on topics I profess to know absolutely nothing at all about. The person you responded to might as well be speaking in another language, it is all meaningless to me, but he (or she) is also talking about words written by humans for humans. It strikes me though, that there could also be a hell of a lot less to it than you say too. Just a guy with a quill.
Apologies, I meant 112, but there are others as well - 999, 119, 118, 000, 110 - try them to see what works in your area:-) Most cell phones will dial these numbers whether you have a SIM or not.
The 911 GPS thing is filled with a lot of assumptions and misinformation. How 911 gets the lat and long is entirely up to the carrier. Some do it using tower triangulation, some get it from the phone itself, but the GPS chip (if the phone even has one, and not all of them do) is only activated when 911 (or 117) is dialled. GPS chips still draw too much power to have them turned on all the time. My N95 lasts about 2 to 3 hours with GPS on, about 24 hours with it off.
The problem largely is that the difference between airspeed and ground speed can mean the difference between supersonic airflow over the airframe, or not enough to maintain flight. At cruising altitude (FL300 and above) you don't have a very large speed differential between these two danger areas, so windshear is something you want to avoid. (i.e. Thunderstorms)
Your question about wind speed is a little difficult to answer, it would depend on the aircraft type, but then it also depends upon what you are doing in the aircraft too, straight and level, in a turn, high g, and so on, so there are a whole host of factors to consider.
With your logic Einstein would never have worked his way up and out of the patent office. What the hell was HE doing discussing anything other than patents?
At least listen to the message before judging the messenger.
It took me about 7 years before I even remotely began to feel comfortable in Asia - as in having both a good understanding of the culture, and losing my "direct" response mode to normal life circumstances. There are a staggeringly large number of local customs you need to relearn, lest you become the stereotypical friendless bar circling ex-pat, angry at the entire world, believing that 'back home' is the only place on earth were people do things the right way.
And speaking of friendless, unless you bring your family with you, you really will need to be able to function alone for a long time (and by this I mean probably for a few years) While there might be a lot of people to interact with on a daily basis, smiling, happy, and so on, this sea of faces will remain a mystery until you get the common use language as second nature. You don't really know people like you know your old military buddies or whatever - it's the cultural thing, history, understanding the sense of humour, body language, thousands of things really.
Hard work, I don't know that I'd ever want to do it again.
Places like China, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on, these countries have tremendous amounts of personal freedom, much more so than in any 'western' country I've been to. If it's political freedom one is looking for, then Asia is probably the wrong place to be.
There are 5 of these agencies, they all share information. Expect other countries to follow along with the same types of press release. In practical terms, these agencies are already viewed as the leading authorities on this topic anyway. They each have many hundreds of domestic customers, and their public websites are indicative of them providing information of this nature when requested. These particular press releases are likely naught more than political maneuvering anyway. Probably just to 'remind' a particular foreign government or two that they are on top of the game.
I'm living in the Philippines, I can answer the crappy code part. While many might like to think of us as being a 'third world' kind of country, we are more of a follower of first world trends in disguise, we do it by building cheap look-a-likes and selling at a price our market can accommodate. We don't really fit the glove of this whole "X World" thing.
That said, Why: It's simple. We are what we are because our ethos is "Near enough really is absolutely good enough, anything better is a waste of money, effort, and time". An analogy: You want a straight and level sidewalk? Damn, that's going to cost you extra. And you want it free of obstructions like telegraph poles, open drains, plus all the little lines that we refuse to step on? You want wheelchair access too? And you want it to actually be 'finished'? Well, for that kind of crazy desire, your price has now reached exactly the same as what you would pay in first world USA or anywhere else in the world for the same quality stretch of sidewalk.
Americans want stuff done on the cheap. Guess what - you actually do get what you pay for! (I know, who'd have though!)
What if she decided to become a doctor? An airline pilot? An escort? Or she wins the lottery. Are you saying this woman is incapable of setting change in motion such that her life might take a financial turn for the better?
Two hundred thousand or two million, doesn't much matter like you say, both of these figures are outrageous for 24 songs. What I see you are doing is naught more than placing a glass ceiling over the potential of someone you do not know.
'Never' is often a very transient state. Maybe you need to find some new words to use.
I hope you've got a lot of jammers and people willing to set them up, because that same UAV that just noticed it can't talk to HQ any longer has just slaved a human pilot in to the zone. He or she is ready to unleash a few HARM's on target to clear up any noisy patches.
I work for an NGO in the Philippines as well. Similar situation as you - we're a Linux shop almost entirely now, spanning about a hundred machines or so and growing. People complained for the first few weeks, then got over it. Financially we drag in 8 or 9 digits a year (in Peso), though given our customers are in a situation where they need food, right the hell now, we tend not to have a whole lot left over for the IT budget. I'm ok with this. However! And you should take note. Whenever we use commercial software (to appease our accountants and graphic artists) we still PAY for it like everyone else. If a desirable piece of (free) software says 'for home use only' then we suck it up and pay for the commercial version, or we don't use it.
I presume you are a registered NGO with an SEC number and such. This means you are also incorporated, have a board of directors, by-laws, etc., viewed legally as a corporation. Someone spent a lot of money to get those credentials, so shake the tree a bit.
Read the fine print sir, free versions of Avast and AVG should not be installed on corporate machines. Even in the Philippines. Why would you be doing this? Tell your boss to skip a lunch or two at the Peninsula and eat at Starbucks instead so you can get some extra cash for your basic tool set. You may need to phrase this with your boss a little more creatively though:-)
I'm not sure if this is a BOFH thing or just a plain old bastardly thing in general, but it is always worth a bit of a chuckle modifying the HR prudes search engine to display unfiltered content.
Your link to wiki says that magnetic reversal appears to have happened (once all the geology is averaged out) every 250,000 years. I'm not seeing anything indicative of this having only ever happened once. The last time this event may have occurred was 750k years ago, so why is it none of us would be around to find out about the next one?
It was a human who flew into the middle of a giant thundercloud, not a computer.
This is pure speculation. There was no radar coverage for that part of the flight profile, nobody knows if the aircraft flew through the storm or not. Period. If the CVR's and FDR's are found, hopefully this can be figured out, but right now the sensible approach is not to manufacture statements of fact.
Hopefully there would be no need to mess with the GSM/CDMA over the air part, but you are right, lots of papers on the encryption schemes and they could be brute forced if time is not much of a factor. You are right about the luck part in some ways, but perhaps not as much as you might think. Unless the guy has his office on the 35th floor and has a thousand in view, then probably we only need to seek out 3 or 4 towers at most and work with those.
I concur, not all of these are microwaved, but in built up city areas, ~many~ of them actually are. (And if 10k was important enough, you'd hit the comms box and wire yourself in directly) Some are non-standard, but by their nature they will be either entirely packet switched, or multiplexed. It's just a binary data stream, so worst case whatever it is, it's going to raster at some width and give itself away. SS7 is in the majority of cases a 64kbps packet switched channel, the vocoders are normally taking up 16kbps and get padded out a little. Law of averages would hopefully be on my side here.
I've never seen a BTS-BSC link that has been 'encrypted', though I don't doubt you on this point, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Having tuned up a lot of these things I've never actually seen one using encryption.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding the methodology of this email system though, if it uses a simple SMS to send it's secret key, then it is entirely trivial. We already know what we are looking for - the origin, destination, and payload. Though if we have to pick out a particular audio stream from the pile, we would require the services of a few extra sets of ears, but then we are moving in to the realms of the illegal. If that were the case, and I didn't care about breaking the law, I'd modify my estimate to about a week. If it works on some kind of voice print authorization then it'd make things a little bit more complicated again, we'd have to get a sample from the man, but still not impossible.
I did gloss over the details a little bit - lots of cell sites act as relays for others, and many that are wired up can actually have air gaps in places, so there are still vulnerabilities. There might well be a lot of data to sift through, but really, we know the phone number of the calling system, so it still wouldn't take very long to narrow things down to the right trunk. It's all in the SS7 links so we have a waiting game, but we wouldn't be passive, we'd be working pretty hard to activate the guys phone as often as we could.
I guess the bigger picture is whether 10 thousand is enough to reveal the methodology - everyone has a price I guess. Others have pointed out the legalities better than I know them.
I'm Australian, a former secret 3 letter agency drone (Defence Signals Directorate, and others), probably disgruntled, and a few years back I moved to Asia. I'd love to say I now dabble in a little light industrial espionage, but really, there isn't much of a call for former spies. People don't believe you anyway. These days I'm just some guy with a keen interest in radio communications. And this problem is naught more than a bit of a jigsaw puzzle of equipment and a hex editor. Pretty much anyone working with any kind of satellite communication system will be familiar with the technology.
What is hard? For me, anything that is largely not radio communications, like women, and carburettors:-)
Damn, I wish I lived in the US. This is easy money.
For 10 grand in prize money - wow, they didn't think about this very well. The kit you need is all available on ebay for less than a grand. I already have the modems, EDT data capture cards, a couple of Sun ultra's (old, but they do the job dependably), a spectrum analyser, antennas, level converters, up/down converter, transceivers and a bunch of cables to connect it all together.
It would take a half a day at most. Camp outside his office or home, figure out which cell tower he is on (line of site) and poke an antenna in the path of the microwave link the tower uses to talk to the exchange. (This traffic is all unencrypted, bog standard T1/E1 stuff) - do whatever you need to do to trigger the text alert, suck down the CCITT-7 channel, then pick through the SMS payload until you find the code. Log in and take the cash.
Legal? I'd say absolutely, you haven't actually monitored a 'cell phone' at all, nor have you tuned your receive gear to any part of the spectrum used by a cell phone. All you've done is read the out of band signalling system on an entirely separate trunk over a link, that is not breaking the 'do not monitor phone calls' rule. (No such rules exist where I live, mostly because radio is still thought of as magic by the Government)
I don't know of many countries that outright let you 'make up' a last name though, apologies, that was really what I meant. Last names are usually always pretty static, obtained from either the mother or the father, but in our case nowhere along the chain did they check in to this. Your birth certificate is usually the starting point for all your official forms of documentation, including passports. I guess my point is that it wouldn't be hard to have many identities here.
The Australian government wanted to see everything when I registered her citizenship.:-) It's not a smooth (or cheap) process by any means.
Thinking about this more seriously, I can't actually imagine why not. You can turn up to the births and deaths registry and simply say that you've never obtained a birth certificate. They have a window booth just for people in that situation. You provide whatever information you can, they charge you a little extra money (a late fee), and you get your birth certificate 30 minutes or so later. After this they do send the details to the national statistics office for entry in to their database, presumably this is used as part of the immigration process, but it's already too late by this stage.
I have an Australian passport so I'm not in any desire to actually do this, though one point of interest: My daughter was born here, nobody, not a single person, ever asked for our identities. The hospital asked us for a name, then went off and typed up exactly what we wrote down. We took their form and used it to get a birth certificate. I suspect they just assume the hospital would verify our identities first.
Lots of businesses do this already - sometimes it's just more convenient to use a drop in solution rather than roll out your own, you weigh up the risks first obviously.
Netsuite is just one of several that cost anywhere between 5 and 6 figures to set up, and they don't exactly lack clients.
Did I miss a memo or something? What is it with websites and the need to show a whole bunch of links in different font sizes? Are they trying to be like wordpress?
Slashdot Mirror
Right you are good sir, though for most of us plebs, we're happy with our 128kbps MP3's and our crappy dot pitch, we don't want none of your valve amp is better than transistor stuff around here, now get on my lawn so I can tell you to get off.
In my backyard (Australia) I have, well, me and 20 million others, have rock paintings that date back 40,000 years. Hand prints sprayed on to stone walls and caves that often look as fresh today as when they were first created, from babies through to adults, pictures, stories, it's utterly amazing stuff to see - it pre-dates 'the good book' by tens of thousands of years. So I think why would I give a damn about religion? Really? Why? From birth to death our beliefs grow as we grow, we soak up what those around us tell us is 'correct', and these things generally die along with us after we pass the same on to our children. I don't really give a crap if there is more to it (life) or not, but whatever, others think and believe they 'know' otherwise, so I wish them good luck.
You have 50 or 60 Christian texts, written by humans, for humans, on topics I profess to know absolutely nothing at all about. The person you responded to might as well be speaking in another language, it is all meaningless to me, but he (or she) is also talking about words written by humans for humans. It strikes me though, that there could also be a hell of a lot less to it than you say too. Just a guy with a quill.
Apologies, I meant 112, but there are others as well - 999, 119, 118, 000, 110 - try them to see what works in your area :-) Most cell phones will dial these numbers whether you have a SIM or not.
The 911 GPS thing is filled with a lot of assumptions and misinformation. How 911 gets the lat and long is entirely up to the carrier. Some do it using tower triangulation, some get it from the phone itself, but the GPS chip (if the phone even has one, and not all of them do) is only activated when 911 (or 117) is dialled. GPS chips still draw too much power to have them turned on all the time. My N95 lasts about 2 to 3 hours with GPS on, about 24 hours with it off.
The problem largely is that the difference between airspeed and ground speed can mean the difference between supersonic airflow over the airframe, or not enough to maintain flight. At cruising altitude (FL300 and above) you don't have a very large speed differential between these two danger areas, so windshear is something you want to avoid. (i.e. Thunderstorms)
Your question about wind speed is a little difficult to answer, it would depend on the aircraft type, but then it also depends upon what you are doing in the aircraft too, straight and level, in a turn, high g, and so on, so there are a whole host of factors to consider.
Don't be an idiot.
With your logic Einstein would never have worked his way up and out of the patent office. What the hell was HE doing discussing anything other than patents?
At least listen to the message before judging the messenger.
It took me about 7 years before I even remotely began to feel comfortable in Asia - as in having both a good understanding of the culture, and losing my "direct" response mode to normal life circumstances. There are a staggeringly large number of local customs you need to relearn, lest you become the stereotypical friendless bar circling ex-pat, angry at the entire world, believing that 'back home' is the only place on earth were people do things the right way.
And speaking of friendless, unless you bring your family with you, you really will need to be able to function alone for a long time (and by this I mean probably for a few years) While there might be a lot of people to interact with on a daily basis, smiling, happy, and so on, this sea of faces will remain a mystery until you get the common use language as second nature. You don't really know people like you know your old military buddies or whatever - it's the cultural thing, history, understanding the sense of humour, body language, thousands of things really.
Hard work, I don't know that I'd ever want to do it again.
Places like China, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on, these countries have tremendous amounts of personal freedom, much more so than in any 'western' country I've been to. If it's political freedom one is looking for, then Asia is probably the wrong place to be.
There are 5 of these agencies, they all share information. Expect other countries to follow along with the same types of press release. In practical terms, these agencies are already viewed as the leading authorities on this topic anyway. They each have many hundreds of domestic customers, and their public websites are indicative of them providing information of this nature when requested. These particular press releases are likely naught more than political maneuvering anyway. Probably just to 'remind' a particular foreign government or two that they are on top of the game.
CSE (Canada)
DSD (Australia)
GCHQ (UK)
GCSB (New Zealand)
NSA (USA)
I'm living in the Philippines, I can answer the crappy code part. While many might like to think of us as being a 'third world' kind of country, we are more of a follower of first world trends in disguise, we do it by building cheap look-a-likes and selling at a price our market can accommodate. We don't really fit the glove of this whole "X World" thing.
That said, Why: It's simple. We are what we are because our ethos is "Near enough really is absolutely good enough, anything better is a waste of money, effort, and time". An analogy: You want a straight and level sidewalk? Damn, that's going to cost you extra. And you want it free of obstructions like telegraph poles, open drains, plus all the little lines that we refuse to step on? You want wheelchair access too? And you want it to actually be 'finished'? Well, for that kind of crazy desire, your price has now reached exactly the same as what you would pay in first world USA or anywhere else in the world for the same quality stretch of sidewalk.
Americans want stuff done on the cheap. Guess what - you actually do get what you pay for! (I know, who'd have though!)
What if she decided to become a doctor? An airline pilot? An escort? Or she wins the lottery. Are you saying this woman is incapable of setting change in motion such that her life might take a financial turn for the better?
Two hundred thousand or two million, doesn't much matter like you say, both of these figures are outrageous for 24 songs. What I see you are doing is naught more than placing a glass ceiling over the potential of someone you do not know.
'Never' is often a very transient state. Maybe you need to find some new words to use.
And then when I go and skim a single insignificant cent off each 'entire bank account' they want to throw me in jail :-( Pricks.
:-( My bank already takes more than 1 cent in every dollar for normal monthly fees and ATM charges.
I hope you've got a lot of jammers and people willing to set them up, because that same UAV that just noticed it can't talk to HQ any longer has just slaved a human pilot in to the zone. He or she is ready to unleash a few HARM's on target to clear up any noisy patches.
I work for an NGO in the Philippines as well. Similar situation as you - we're a Linux shop almost entirely now, spanning about a hundred machines or so and growing. People complained for the first few weeks, then got over it. Financially we drag in 8 or 9 digits a year (in Peso), though given our customers are in a situation where they need food, right the hell now, we tend not to have a whole lot left over for the IT budget. I'm ok with this. However! And you should take note. Whenever we use commercial software (to appease our accountants and graphic artists) we still PAY for it like everyone else. If a desirable piece of (free) software says 'for home use only' then we suck it up and pay for the commercial version, or we don't use it.
I presume you are a registered NGO with an SEC number and such. This means you are also incorporated, have a board of directors, by-laws, etc., viewed legally as a corporation. Someone spent a lot of money to get those credentials, so shake the tree a bit.
Read the fine print sir, free versions of Avast and AVG should not be installed on corporate machines. Even in the Philippines. Why would you be doing this? Tell your boss to skip a lunch or two at the Peninsula and eat at Starbucks instead so you can get some extra cash for your basic tool set. You may need to phrase this with your boss a little more creatively though :-)
I'm not sure if this is a BOFH thing or just a plain old bastardly thing in general, but it is always worth a bit of a chuckle modifying the HR prudes search engine to display unfiltered content.
Your link to wiki says that magnetic reversal appears to have happened (once all the geology is averaged out) every 250,000 years. I'm not seeing anything indicative of this having only ever happened once. The last time this event may have occurred was 750k years ago, so why is it none of us would be around to find out about the next one?
Am I missing something here?
It was a human who flew into the middle of a giant thundercloud, not a computer.
This is pure speculation. There was no radar coverage for that part of the flight profile, nobody knows if the aircraft flew through the storm or not. Period. If the CVR's and FDR's are found, hopefully this can be figured out, but right now the sensible approach is not to manufacture statements of fact.
Hopefully there would be no need to mess with the GSM/CDMA over the air part, but you are right, lots of papers on the encryption schemes and they could be brute forced if time is not much of a factor. You are right about the luck part in some ways, but perhaps not as much as you might think. Unless the guy has his office on the 35th floor and has a thousand in view, then probably we only need to seek out 3 or 4 towers at most and work with those.
I concur, not all of these are microwaved, but in built up city areas, ~many~ of them actually are. (And if 10k was important enough, you'd hit the comms box and wire yourself in directly) Some are non-standard, but by their nature they will be either entirely packet switched, or multiplexed. It's just a binary data stream, so worst case whatever it is, it's going to raster at some width and give itself away. SS7 is in the majority of cases a 64kbps packet switched channel, the vocoders are normally taking up 16kbps and get padded out a little. Law of averages would hopefully be on my side here.
I've never seen a BTS-BSC link that has been 'encrypted', though I don't doubt you on this point, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Having tuned up a lot of these things I've never actually seen one using encryption.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding the methodology of this email system though, if it uses a simple SMS to send it's secret key, then it is entirely trivial. We already know what we are looking for - the origin, destination, and payload. Though if we have to pick out a particular audio stream from the pile, we would require the services of a few extra sets of ears, but then we are moving in to the realms of the illegal. If that were the case, and I didn't care about breaking the law, I'd modify my estimate to about a week. If it works on some kind of voice print authorization then it'd make things a little bit more complicated again, we'd have to get a sample from the man, but still not impossible.
I did gloss over the details a little bit - lots of cell sites act as relays for others, and many that are wired up can actually have air gaps in places, so there are still vulnerabilities. There might well be a lot of data to sift through, but really, we know the phone number of the calling system, so it still wouldn't take very long to narrow things down to the right trunk. It's all in the SS7 links so we have a waiting game, but we wouldn't be passive, we'd be working pretty hard to activate the guys phone as often as we could.
I guess the bigger picture is whether 10 thousand is enough to reveal the methodology - everyone has a price I guess. Others have pointed out the legalities better than I know them.
I'm Australian, a former secret 3 letter agency drone (Defence Signals Directorate, and others), probably disgruntled, and a few years back I moved to Asia. I'd love to say I now dabble in a little light industrial espionage, but really, there isn't much of a call for former spies. People don't believe you anyway. These days I'm just some guy with a keen interest in radio communications. And this problem is naught more than a bit of a jigsaw puzzle of equipment and a hex editor. Pretty much anyone working with any kind of satellite communication system will be familiar with the technology.
What is hard? For me, anything that is largely not radio communications, like women, and carburettors :-)
Damn, I wish I lived in the US. This is easy money.
For 10 grand in prize money - wow, they didn't think about this very well. The kit you need is all available on ebay for less than a grand. I already have the modems, EDT data capture cards, a couple of Sun ultra's (old, but they do the job dependably), a spectrum analyser, antennas, level converters, up/down converter, transceivers and a bunch of cables to connect it all together.
It would take a half a day at most. Camp outside his office or home, figure out which cell tower he is on (line of site) and poke an antenna in the path of the microwave link the tower uses to talk to the exchange. (This traffic is all unencrypted, bog standard T1/E1 stuff) - do whatever you need to do to trigger the text alert, suck down the CCITT-7 channel, then pick through the SMS payload until you find the code. Log in and take the cash.
Legal? I'd say absolutely, you haven't actually monitored a 'cell phone' at all, nor have you tuned your receive gear to any part of the spectrum used by a cell phone. All you've done is read the out of band signalling system on an entirely separate trunk over a link, that is not breaking the 'do not monitor phone calls' rule. (No such rules exist where I live, mostly because radio is still thought of as magic by the Government)
I don't know of many countries that outright let you 'make up' a last name though, apologies, that was really what I meant. Last names are usually always pretty static, obtained from either the mother or the father, but in our case nowhere along the chain did they check in to this. Your birth certificate is usually the starting point for all your official forms of documentation, including passports. I guess my point is that it wouldn't be hard to have many identities here.
The Australian government wanted to see everything when I registered her citizenship. :-) It's not a smooth (or cheap) process by any means.
Thinking about this more seriously, I can't actually imagine why not. You can turn up to the births and deaths registry and simply say that you've never obtained a birth certificate. They have a window booth just for people in that situation. You provide whatever information you can, they charge you a little extra money (a late fee), and you get your birth certificate 30 minutes or so later. After this they do send the details to the national statistics office for entry in to their database, presumably this is used as part of the immigration process, but it's already too late by this stage.
I have an Australian passport so I'm not in any desire to actually do this, though one point of interest: My daughter was born here, nobody, not a single person, ever asked for our identities. The hospital asked us for a name, then went off and typed up exactly what we wrote down. We took their form and used it to get a birth certificate. I suspect they just assume the hospital would verify our identities first.
An interesting country.
Lots of businesses do this already - sometimes it's just more convenient to use a drop in solution rather than roll out your own, you weigh up the risks first obviously.
Netsuite is just one of several that cost anywhere between 5 and 6 figures to set up, and they don't exactly lack clients.
Fry will slap nike all over it long before then anyway.
Did I miss a memo or something? What is it with websites and the need to show a whole bunch of links in different font sizes? Are they trying to be like wordpress?