Ever read a research paper? Stereotypical conclusion is something similar to "if I only had more grant money, the logical next step would be to..." There are exceptions, but like most stereotypes this is based on a lot of evidence.
In hard sciences you could do worse than just go to arxiv in your field and cut and paste those "if I only had more money" lines from about 50 articles onto about two pages of paper and gin up a speech about where the frontier of your field is currently located. It would be a pretty good value added journalism job. There's a lot of "popular science" level magazines and podcasts, but at the high level there's kind of a big hole. Of course a lot of grad students burn a lot of time doing this job for their prof, I'd be accused of creating something of a higher academic "cliffs notes".
People like to believe we have a good handle on everything. It makes them feel safe.
There's a simpler non-psychological / non-political / non-philosophical explanation, that your average J6P knows we really do pretty much have an excellent handle on most anything we can mass produce, which for J6P is pretty much everything, or everything J6P knows, anyway. Therefore we must have a good handle on everything.
On the other hand, there's a heck of a lot of things we can imagine that we can't mass produce, and history shows we're pretty good at inventing and later mass producing some unimaginable stuff, so we'll probably keep on doing just that in the future. And thats that complicated science-y stuff.
They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
Oh I don't know if its that bad. To the best of my knowledge I'm the only person I've ever met who always asked any post-secondary educator about their PHd dissertation. Two observations:
1) On topic, virtually all of them spent the last 10% of their discussion talking about very recent work in that field. Apparently my favorite calc teacher tells people he takes credit for inventing how pretty much every kid learned algebraic equation multiplication in the 80s based on an enormous number of teaching experiments and lots of early computer based statistical analysis, but that was superseded by a more recent fad / trend / research around 1990 blah blah blah. I never fact checked these people, but even in something irrelevant to them now, they pretty much all keep up with old times.
2) Off topic, at least a small percentage of phd's are achieved on a non-dissertation track. Maybe 5% of my phd level instructors talked about submitting a large quantity of research papers with their name on it. Maybe luck, donno, but this seemed more prevalent outside the hard sciences. My pre-civil war history prof got his PHD based on lots and lots of published research papers some fairly interesting sounding historical economic analysis of England or something very similar to this story, but he claimed to never write "a" dissertation just turned in stacks of research papers and did his written and oral exams.
TLDR if you think your prof is clueless about modern research, motivate your prof by asking about their PHD dissertation and you'll probably get a pretty interesting speech about modern developments in the field both during and since the prof's dissertation.
I don't think this is all that surprising... J random luser walks up to me and asks whats new in the modern world of computing and I probably tell them to F off I'm busy, but if they have a good conversation starter about something from my past, maybe we'll have an interesting discussion instead.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
Thanks for bringing that up. Would you agree with me that if you insist on twisting up what quantum physics is, a better way of twisting it up than saying its the biggest possible change which is ridiculously wrong, would be to say quantum physics is a way to deal with what amounts to negative probabilities and also deal with stuff that has some underlying rules that are more complicated and less random than you'd expect at the (non-quantum) level (I guess I'm aiming more at, for example, the shapes of electron orbitals not being mostly random, than tiresome schrodinger's cat analogies?).
If the guy had some physics cross fertilization with his discipline, maybe by vague simile / metaphor he could get some inspiration for one of his problems:
This was largely my experience up through high school. Science was taught as a body of facts, and less so taught as a process.
I'd agree with you but give it a different spin, in that all education begins with little kids being taught the virtues of authoritarianism and a class-based society (the classes being educational achievement which equals authoritarianism of course). Eventually branching out.
It doesn't help that an education major probably doesn't know much about science, anyway. Odd how you can separate our educational system along the lines of "this group has teachers with education majors" and they're almost universally failing, and "this group has teachers with a major in the field they're teaching" and they're almost universally the shining jewel of the entire world's educational system. I don't know anything about the the french language; I'm sure I could study educational techniques and eventually do an awful job of teaching to the test; but my students would probably end up with some pretty bizarre ideas about the french language by the time I'm done with them./. has a subculture of science-types but the mainstream/.er is a comp sci-type. So who out there started on their comp sci path with a learned debate about the virtues of functional vs object vs procedural programming, or the virtues of ye olde waterfall vs agile strategies, or the beauty of the codd-normal forms of database design, vs the vast majority who probably started their comp sci educational adventure with "don't copy that floppy" and "I shall teach you the one true language, because its the only one I know"
I'll go out on a limb where I don't really know anything (as you can see by my writing), and make the wild bet that english majors started their educational path with hyper-authoritarian vocabulary lists, weekly spelling lists, and those PITA grammer flow charts (what is the technical term for where you break a single line of prose into a very strictly formatted flowchart / graph thing? I hated drawing those Fing things so I'm blanking it out). Then after 15 to 20 years of indoctrination / training to get a job / or even god forbid education to teach them how to think, the students are allowed to debate the relative ranking of metaphors in beowulf or whatever it is english lit majors do all day?
If a silo of hard science geeks only hang out with other hard science geeks and try to reverse engineer the 1800s era educational system they grew up in thru observation and analysis, they're going to come up with whoppers like this such as thinking only evolutionary biologists are taught this way, and surely the english lit majors are taught some other way.
In honor of it being a slashdot car story, instead of providing the official slashdot car analogy, I'll provide the slashdot computer analogy to the story.
"Its like 3-d printing a computer case, and then having the media report the entire computer was printed, circuit boards and all".
Its just the exterior of the car that was printed, not the motor or the wheels or whatever. This is not to belittle the accomplishment... for 3-d printing that's a very large component to print, and also the stereotype of 3-d printed stuff being weak seems to be finally going away....
They did not seem to understand how, exactly, the inventions work
Columbus. Great hair cut. Liked to sail. In 1492, he sailed, somewhere, not sure where. But look, we have an educational poster of him over here...
I'm thinking there must be an engineering college with work-study EEs and MEs who could talk about our modern polyphase AC power system pretty much exactly as Tesla designed it, and his boundary flow turbine mostly used at fish hatcheries AFAIK, and his very famous "coil" which is basically a air core RF transformer with big lumped constant resonant exterior coil and a resonant quarter wave high Q antenna on the inside.
His coil is an interesting way to give EEs a headache, prior to recent large scale computer modeling (ansys and the other computational electrodynamics solvers, etc) I don't think there was a way to completely accurately model the behavior of a tesla coil under all conditions.
Then again I've seen enough wanna be electricians screw up a simple 3-phase install that maybe that's a little over optimistic.
Think about a more recently deceased EE, like Bob Pease. An EE can easily appreciate the cool stuff he did, (well, an analog/RF EE anyway) but your average volunteer tour guide would be totally WTF when trying to explain the stuff he designed and invented.
millions of lives ruined as their credit goes to pot
Yeah, how does that work? I've seen this quite a few times in the comments already, and I'm not arguing they're doing the right thing, I'm not arguing no one will be hurt or its not annoying, but I have no idea how your credit gets ruined because someone steals your docs.
I'm old enough to have gotten a couple car loans and mortgages and I've seen my reports, you can request a copy online although its a modestly annoying task.
They are unexpectedly interested in how long the account has been opened (I was surprised to learn that, my guess is its a legal proxy for knowing your age). They're extremely excited about your monthly payment record over the past couple years. They seem interested in default/fraud/NSF-bounce issues in the past couple years. They really like to tabulate your current balance and all kinds of ratios based on those balances as a fairly pointless snapshot. I'm just not seeing a section of the report "number of times account info released by anonymous", perhaps with a graph or something like that.
My wife got her CC stolen probably online, no big deal, bank was nice about it all, no cost to us, doesn't show up on any report that we've seen since. My mom got her info stolen and a truck purchased in her name and driven across the.mx border, again no problem.
So humor me with what an organic chemist would call a reaction mechanism. A droplet containing your bank account number is dropped into the fetid test tube that is the internet and the reaction begins with... I'm looking for a model of how this supposed "destruction" happens? I'm hearing this is financial ebola, but only experienced and heard of a sniffle in similar cases. I'm interested in how this destruction happens.
How do you know it is going to ruin lives when you havent even gone through it?
That is an excellent question. I'll have to download the data and grep for my info. Anyone connected to my paper checks, as recipient or store clerk or garbage man, already knows my name, address, bank name, and bank account number, and at least one recently written check number. Allegedly this is why Knuth stopped sending out personal checks in return for finding errors in his books. Given the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people with access to this data who've done nothing to me and the only person I've ever heard even mention it is Knuth, I donno if its a serious concern.
Being a "Linux Professional" in most fields of IT is like being a "Knife Professional" working in a kitchen.
hmm ok
But it's not how you should define your career, or even your desired job. (That you're thinking of it that way might be why you keep seeing sysadmin in a Linux environment as the only obvious role.)
Disagree. If you really love knives and making exotic knife cuts and carvings in food, don't define your dream job as being a pastry chef where you don't get to chop stuff up very much.
Maybe I can give the standard/. car analogy that even if you really like using a screwdriver, it would pay to try and learn a bit about a wrench or maybe even a hammer.
I superficially glanced at this but couldn't figure out if the museum audience is supposed to be: 1) 10 years old 2) -or- electrical engineers and fellow travelers 3) -or- homeopathic crystal therapy conspiracy theory vampire worshipers
Its pretty hard to appeal equally to all 3, so I'm curious which audience the museum is aimed at.
The project looks extremely interesting and useful, but I don't get why they wish to base it on "the cloud". Does their algorithm really require a centralized server to compute a result? Seems to me that would prohibit the application's use in areas where an internet link is not available.
Its all about the liability and malpractice. Dr. VLM misdiagnosed my kid? Cool, lets bankrupt him. "The cloud" misdiagnosed my kid?.... crickets... Sounds like the designers are in.au and the buyers are in Africa so plus or minus extradition treaties etc they're pretty safe.
Its not that they're evil, its just economics. Lets say 99% is a realistic goal, so 1% of the time you'll be sued for $10M. That means you need to charge everyone $100K just to break even on insurance. Unless you can put all the brains on the internet and the developers on another continent... then you can reduce the $100K per procedure cost of insurance to zero, and get the price down to a more unskilled labor range like $1 per person or whatever.
To some extent I'm not sure what the point is. If the cost of effective treatment dramatically exceeds the cost of diagnosis, and the cost of diagnosis is out of reach, then whats the point of lowering the cost of diagnosis. I guess from a system perspective its a net win to quickly and cheaply triage patients.
Why develop it for a phone that nobody uses (or wants)?
The medical market understands high cost of sales more than it understands high cost of devices.
The team expects its stethoscope to cost around $15 to $20, significantly cheaper than current digital stethoscopes in the market which tend to cost hundreds of dollars.
I recently read MS spends $500 on advertising for each phone sold.
Why waste dev time on a SDR TX when you can buy a used transponder off ebay for cheap or just steal one?
Just sayin its not all that practical.
Specifically, there are two other sources of data they can use
Third is data gathering from multiple sites. You cannot generate enough power / altitude from the ground to knock out a substantial range. Talk to some microwave RF guys. So use the ring of airports/radars around the transmitter.... Of course this sucks AT o'hare if the jammer is in the o'hare parking lot...
For ground purposes why can the ADS RX be on a narrow beam antenna? HMm a network of them just triangulated on you.
maintaining a network of primary surveillance radar.
They HAVE To maintain it. Otherwise my learjet full of coke gets the "cloaked ship" star trek effect if I flip the transponder circuit breaker off. They're never, ever, going to give up on skin painting. Maybe some phb who's never ATC'd or piloted a plane made up some story, but...
Therefore, you could potentially cause an aircraft to maneuver to avoid an intruder which isn't actually there.
Talk to a pilot. The first thing you do is visual the incoming. So that limits it to IFR only conditions right off the top.
A successful attach is going to be pretty ineffective and very dangerous to attempt. I just don't see it as an issue.
If these attacks become popular, planes will just pop the tcas circuit breakers on order of ATC (probably in the ATIS/AWOS message?) and fly "pre-tcas" which works just fine.
transmitting live spoofed data into the real ATC system
If you want to tx live unspoofed data talk to a avionics tech / aircraft mechanic or a guy who develops this stuff for a living. Its not that much of an accomplishment. Like saying you "hacked FM broadcasting" because you built a kit FM transmitter.
If you want to generate spoofed data because you're good or bad a cheap aviation transponder and an imaginary NMEA stream will do quite well. No need to "build" stuff just go appliance operator...
Withdraw enough cash to feed yourself for a week, then leave. Go camping. Get out into nature. If technology is your concern, get away from the technology.
If you've an avid sailor, and I've been sailing since I was a teen, a cruising sailboat is way better. Helps if you're near a coast or at least a great lake. I believe you're pretty much screwed as a sailor if you're in Utah, then again you don't have to be fleeing the MIB to be screwed if you're stuck in Utah.
The mesh of ADS ground stations extends around the jammer. The jammer can only screw up stuff within say a couple miles (microwave line of sight) So you pull data from the neighboring RX which are unjammed.
Its about as much of an operational problem as voice channel jamming, VOR jamming, NDB jamming, and ILS jamming, which are all conceptually the same. Theoretically it could be done, but it probably wouldn't have much effect other than getting a 1 way ticket to gitmo, so....
They may be planning to start to drop the gates whenever it snows, but that would be a first.
Speaking as a local with decades of experience they rely on inadequate surface street plowing to keep people off the interstate during blizards. If I can get to the interstate they plow continuously and its an easy drive... HOWEVER good luck getting there if they won't plow in front of your house until the storm ends, or they won't plow main roads more than every couple hours. The last thing you'd want to do is close the interstate because the fire trucks and ambulances need to use it. I'm just not seeing it.
explaining that ADS-B signals are unauthenticated and unencrypted, and 'spoofing' (video) or inserting a fake aircraft into the ADS-B system is easy.
He doesn't know much about the system. OK. go ahead... try to break it.... what'll happen? Nothing.
Spraying junk into the system is irrelevant. Being unauth and unencrypted its simpler and cheaper just to build a raw RF jammer than to feed in formatted junk reports. That works really well until the.mil shows up to train their jamming countermeasures equipment against your jammer. Whoops. DF work isn't all that complicated and the higher the frequency the easier it is. Radar jamming has been an option for what, 70 years now, and nothing really ever comes of it? ATC/pilots already have procedures to survive radar outages. Happens all the time. Send a nice thunderstorm thru, send in the backhoes (lots of remote radar units connected by fiber). So jamming/spamming/forcing it out of service is useless. Nothing an attacker can send will break anything.
I know about the ADS-B data structure. This stuff is small and simple. We're not talking about radar and jetliner sending sandboxed java applets to each other, its incredibly simpler than that. Its like declaring you can hack buffer overflows over a morse code telegraph. There's not enough "stuff" in the protocol to be turing complete.
The attack vector is incredibly narrow. I know a lot more about piloting and radar RF and microcontrollers, and frankly pretty much everything in the system compared to this guy and I can't figure out how to actually bust it.
Look at the guy's presentation. notes as I scan thru the slides. 1) He's cooler than you, crendentialism means he's correct (LOL) 2) he drinks vodka, very impressive proof 3) he admits he knows nothing about ATC and radar 4) He doesn't know much about RF or comms (pulse per second modulated, wtf is this star trek technobabble) 5) Other people are looking and no one has come up with anything 6) his threats are not serious and/or not realistic and/or already exist 7) I love this quote "some threats are total unknowns" yeah I think thats an excellent summary of the ADS-B "security hole". 8) the pretend made up scandal about the FAA not releasing "sensitive security information" is about skin painting radar coverage for smuggler detection, thats why they claim it has no impact on passenger aircraft... its not all space alien coverup unless your passenger craft is 50 feet off the ocean and full of coke I think you're OK. 9) "Not trying to spew FUD" LOL ok dude I hope the audience laughed at that. 10 ) Dude calls a homemade SDR RX an "exploit" LOL 11) he hopes they don't unplug primary radar... well duh how would they catch smugglers if all they had to do was flick a circuit breaker to disappear...
Look I know the guys not an idiot in general. But this is the kind of thing that happens when someone who doesn't know anything about any individual components of a big system, or anything about the big system itself, gets all FUDdy and self promotional. If you don't know anything about the terrain you're fighting in or the tools you have, you'll lose, no matter how smart you are.
TLDR is don't worry its not an issue. FUD FUD FUD self promotion thats all.
are both possible, but I think option #1 will be more popular with FPS players and option #2 more popular with the "lets play dress up dollies" players?
DayZ is responsible for more sales of Arma2 than Arma2.
You could say Arma2 is a pre-release beta of DayZ.
This is a point in the argument that is being missed. What if, say, super mario galaxy had a great engine but all the levels sucked.... then nintendo released mod tools and one of the hottest games out there was "super mario zombie galaxy" or something.... So they saved all their money on "art devel" all their money on "testing" and all their money on "PR" (I don't see ads... is Arma2 primarily advertising itself as a bootloader/engine for DayZ?)
I don't understand the people who claim its not possible to make money off modding tools. How do the original engine developers and original modeling tool developers make money? The business model is take a good engine, some good devel tools, some crappy starter art just to show off what might be possible, and resell.
What possible reason would there be to have a shared private key among all devices? Even if there is some (weird, and probably not a good idea) requirement that it be identical across an entire user site, that should be part of a programming/keyfill process. If uniqueness is good, it should just generate a key on first boot...
My guess from dealing with embedded stuff as a user and programmer, and from dealing with lots of idiots, but no experience with this particular hardware, is the intersection is probably something like a "secure boot and config" infrastructure where only official firmware upgrades and configurations can be uploaded.
Anyone out there who's ever cut and pasted a cisco config knows what I'm talking about. Now imagine having to sign anything you cut and paste into the config with a annual license key, which eventually via the magic of SSL traces back to the one true mfgr key.
So you have to pay an annual license fee or you're unable to reconfigure, or perhaps even reboot, the hardware.
A pretty good licensing scheme, until it gets you owned.
The other vector is probably the traditional "your idea sucks so here's an awful implementation to make you go away". OK we'll do your dumb encryption thing so the terrorists can't steal your proprietary trade secret stoplight camera revenue maximizing sequence times now with 5 millisecond yellow lights only when the redlight camera is installed and operating, but we'll give you the dumbest possible crypto because its an idiotic idea and sales might like your commission check but I hate you. Oh, you say another totally different customer two years later is now relying on our "idiot grade" crypto to run a nuclear reactors cooling pumps... um, whoops sorry my bad.
Lately they've been on a building frenzy adding those gates that drop to prevent people from entering the interstate, like the ones they use in flyover sand states so they can evac from the monthly hurricane using both sides of the interstate... You know, for the coastal defense of Wisconsin during hurricane season. Seriously we're about 1200 miles away from a coast, I have no idea why we have brand new interstate gates. Probably black helicopter and tinfoil hat time. When Obama declares martial law and drops those gates there's going to be a lot of cheese heads unable to drive up to green bay for the packers game... and Thats when the revolution will begin... not until pro sports are impacted.
Also Milwaukee is chock full of rivers and remotely operated river bridges seemingly every other street.
I don't think you could directly kill anyone or destroy anything, but you could fairly well paralyze all ground traffic if you owned the WiDOT.
Slashdot Mirror
about what you don't know?
Ever read a research paper? Stereotypical conclusion is something similar to "if I only had more grant money, the logical next step would be to ..." There are exceptions, but like most stereotypes this is based on a lot of evidence.
In hard sciences you could do worse than just go to arxiv in your field and cut and paste those "if I only had more money" lines from about 50 articles onto about two pages of paper and gin up a speech about where the frontier of your field is currently located. It would be a pretty good value added journalism job. There's a lot of "popular science" level magazines and podcasts, but at the high level there's kind of a big hole. Of course a lot of grad students burn a lot of time doing this job for their prof, I'd be accused of creating something of a higher academic "cliffs notes".
People like to believe we have a good handle on everything. It makes them feel safe.
There's a simpler non-psychological / non-political / non-philosophical explanation, that your average J6P knows we really do pretty much have an excellent handle on most anything we can mass produce, which for J6P is pretty much everything, or everything J6P knows, anyway. Therefore we must have a good handle on everything.
On the other hand, there's a heck of a lot of things we can imagine that we can't mass produce, and history shows we're pretty good at inventing and later mass producing some unimaginable stuff, so we'll probably keep on doing just that in the future. And thats that complicated science-y stuff.
They had more up-to-date knowledge about the issues of the faculty's politics and the mechanical problems of the coffee machine than their (former) field.
Oh I don't know if its that bad. To the best of my knowledge I'm the only person I've ever met who always asked any post-secondary educator about their PHd dissertation. Two observations:
1) On topic, virtually all of them spent the last 10% of their discussion talking about very recent work in that field. Apparently my favorite calc teacher tells people he takes credit for inventing how pretty much every kid learned algebraic equation multiplication in the 80s based on an enormous number of teaching experiments and lots of early computer based statistical analysis, but that was superseded by a more recent fad / trend / research around 1990 blah blah blah. I never fact checked these people, but even in something irrelevant to them now, they pretty much all keep up with old times.
2) Off topic, at least a small percentage of phd's are achieved on a non-dissertation track. Maybe 5% of my phd level instructors talked about submitting a large quantity of research papers with their name on it. Maybe luck, donno, but this seemed more prevalent outside the hard sciences. My pre-civil war history prof got his PHD based on lots and lots of published research papers some fairly interesting sounding historical economic analysis of England or something very similar to this story, but he claimed to never write "a" dissertation just turned in stacks of research papers and did his written and oral exams.
TLDR if you think your prof is clueless about modern research, motivate your prof by asking about their PHD dissertation and you'll probably get a pretty interesting speech about modern developments in the field both during and since the prof's dissertation.
I don't think this is all that surprising... J random luser walks up to me and asks whats new in the modern world of computing and I probably tell them to F off I'm busy, but if they have a good conversation starter about something from my past, maybe we'll have an interesting discussion instead.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
Thanks for bringing that up. Would you agree with me that if you insist on twisting up what quantum physics is, a better way of twisting it up than saying its the biggest possible change which is ridiculously wrong, would be to say quantum physics is a way to deal with what amounts to negative probabilities and also deal with stuff that has some underlying rules that are more complicated and less random than you'd expect at the (non-quantum) level (I guess I'm aiming more at, for example, the shapes of electron orbitals not being mostly random, than tiresome schrodinger's cat analogies?).
If the guy had some physics cross fertilization with his discipline, maybe by vague simile / metaphor he could get some inspiration for one of his problems:
What is the purpose of all that 'junk DNA"?
This was largely my experience up through high school. Science was taught as a body of facts, and less so taught as a process.
I'd agree with you but give it a different spin, in that all education begins with little kids being taught the virtues of authoritarianism and a class-based society (the classes being educational achievement which equals authoritarianism of course). Eventually branching out.
It doesn't help that an education major probably doesn't know much about science, anyway. Odd how you can separate our educational system along the lines of "this group has teachers with education majors" and they're almost universally failing, and "this group has teachers with a major in the field they're teaching" and they're almost universally the shining jewel of the entire world's educational system. I don't know anything about the the french language; I'm sure I could study educational techniques and eventually do an awful job of teaching to the test; but my students would probably end up with some pretty bizarre ideas about the french language by the time I'm done with them. /. has a subculture of science-types but the mainstream /.er is a comp sci-type. So who out there started on their comp sci path with a learned debate about the virtues of functional vs object vs procedural programming, or the virtues of ye olde waterfall vs agile strategies, or the beauty of the codd-normal forms of database design, vs the vast majority who probably started their comp sci educational adventure with "don't copy that floppy" and "I shall teach you the one true language, because its the only one I know"
I'll go out on a limb where I don't really know anything (as you can see by my writing), and make the wild bet that english majors started their educational path with hyper-authoritarian vocabulary lists, weekly spelling lists, and those PITA grammer flow charts (what is the technical term for where you break a single line of prose into a very strictly formatted flowchart / graph thing? I hated drawing those Fing things so I'm blanking it out). Then after 15 to 20 years of indoctrination / training to get a job / or even god forbid education to teach them how to think, the students are allowed to debate the relative ranking of metaphors in beowulf or whatever it is english lit majors do all day?
If a silo of hard science geeks only hang out with other hard science geeks and try to reverse engineer the 1800s era educational system they grew up in thru observation and analysis, they're going to come up with whoppers like this such as thinking only evolutionary biologists are taught this way, and surely the english lit majors are taught some other way.
In honor of it being a slashdot car story, instead of providing the official slashdot car analogy, I'll provide the slashdot computer analogy to the story.
"Its like 3-d printing a computer case, and then having the media report the entire computer was printed, circuit boards and all".
Its just the exterior of the car that was printed, not the motor or the wheels or whatever. This is not to belittle the accomplishment... for 3-d printing that's a very large component to print, and also the stereotype of 3-d printed stuff being weak seems to be finally going away....
They did not seem to understand how, exactly, the inventions work
Columbus. Great hair cut. Liked to sail. In 1492, he sailed, somewhere, not sure where. But look, we have an educational poster of him over here...
I'm thinking there must be an engineering college with work-study EEs and MEs who could talk about our modern polyphase AC power system pretty much exactly as Tesla designed it, and his boundary flow turbine mostly used at fish hatcheries AFAIK, and his very famous "coil" which is basically a air core RF transformer with big lumped constant resonant exterior coil and a resonant quarter wave high Q antenna on the inside.
His coil is an interesting way to give EEs a headache, prior to recent large scale computer modeling (ansys and the other computational electrodynamics solvers, etc) I don't think there was a way to completely accurately model the behavior of a tesla coil under all conditions.
Then again I've seen enough wanna be electricians screw up a simple 3-phase install that maybe that's a little over optimistic.
Think about a more recently deceased EE, like Bob Pease. An EE can easily appreciate the cool stuff he did, (well, an analog/RF EE anyway) but your average volunteer tour guide would be totally WTF when trying to explain the stuff he designed and invented.
millions of lives ruined as their credit goes to pot
Yeah, how does that work? I've seen this quite a few times in the comments already, and I'm not arguing they're doing the right thing, I'm not arguing no one will be hurt or its not annoying, but I have no idea how your credit gets ruined because someone steals your docs.
I'm old enough to have gotten a couple car loans and mortgages and I've seen my reports, you can request a copy online although its a modestly annoying task.
They are unexpectedly interested in how long the account has been opened (I was surprised to learn that, my guess is its a legal proxy for knowing your age). They're extremely excited about your monthly payment record over the past couple years. They seem interested in default/fraud/NSF-bounce issues in the past couple years. They really like to tabulate your current balance and all kinds of ratios based on those balances as a fairly pointless snapshot. I'm just not seeing a section of the report "number of times account info released by anonymous", perhaps with a graph or something like that.
My wife got her CC stolen probably online, no big deal, bank was nice about it all, no cost to us, doesn't show up on any report that we've seen since. My mom got her info stolen and a truck purchased in her name and driven across the .mx border, again no problem.
So humor me with what an organic chemist would call a reaction mechanism. A droplet containing your bank account number is dropped into the fetid test tube that is the internet and the reaction begins with... I'm looking for a model of how this supposed "destruction" happens? I'm hearing this is financial ebola, but only experienced and heard of a sniffle in similar cases. I'm interested in how this destruction happens.
How do you know it is going to ruin lives when you havent even gone through it?
That is an excellent question. I'll have to download the data and grep for my info. Anyone connected to my paper checks, as recipient or store clerk or garbage man, already knows my name, address, bank name, and bank account number, and at least one recently written check number. Allegedly this is why Knuth stopped sending out personal checks in return for finding errors in his books. Given the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people with access to this data who've done nothing to me and the only person I've ever heard even mention it is Knuth, I donno if its a serious concern.
Being a "Linux Professional" in most fields of IT is like being a "Knife Professional" working in a kitchen.
hmm ok
But it's not how you should define your career, or even your desired job. (That you're thinking of it that way might be why you keep seeing sysadmin in a Linux environment as the only obvious role.)
Disagree. If you really love knives and making exotic knife cuts and carvings in food, don't define your dream job as being a pastry chef where you don't get to chop stuff up very much.
Maybe I can give the standard /. car analogy that even if you really like using a screwdriver, it would pay to try and learn a bit about a wrench or maybe even a hammer.
I superficially glanced at this but couldn't figure out if the museum audience is supposed to be:
1) 10 years old
2) -or- electrical engineers and fellow travelers
3) -or- homeopathic crystal therapy conspiracy theory vampire worshipers
Its pretty hard to appeal equally to all 3, so I'm curious which audience the museum is aimed at.
The project looks extremely interesting and useful, but I don't get why they wish to base it on "the cloud". Does their algorithm really require a centralized server to compute a result? Seems to me that would prohibit the application's use in areas where an internet link is not available.
Its all about the liability and malpractice. Dr. VLM misdiagnosed my kid? Cool, lets bankrupt him. "The cloud" misdiagnosed my kid? .... crickets ... Sounds like the designers are in .au and the buyers are in Africa so plus or minus extradition treaties etc they're pretty safe.
Its not that they're evil, its just economics. Lets say 99% is a realistic goal, so 1% of the time you'll be sued for $10M. That means you need to charge everyone $100K just to break even on insurance. Unless you can put all the brains on the internet and the developers on another continent... then you can reduce the $100K per procedure cost of insurance to zero, and get the price down to a more unskilled labor range like $1 per person or whatever.
To some extent I'm not sure what the point is. If the cost of effective treatment dramatically exceeds the cost of diagnosis, and the cost of diagnosis is out of reach, then whats the point of lowering the cost of diagnosis. I guess from a system perspective its a net win to quickly and cheaply triage patients.
Why develop it for a phone that nobody uses (or wants)?
The medical market understands high cost of sales more than it understands high cost of devices.
The team expects its stethoscope to cost around $15 to $20, significantly cheaper than current digital stethoscopes in the market which tend to cost hundreds of dollars.
I recently read MS spends $500 on advertising for each phone sold.
Why waste dev time on a SDR TX when you can buy a used transponder off ebay for cheap or just steal one?
Just sayin its not all that practical.
Specifically, there are two other sources of data they can use
Third is data gathering from multiple sites. You cannot generate enough power / altitude from the ground to knock out a substantial range. Talk to some microwave RF guys. So use the ring of airports/radars around the transmitter.... Of course this sucks AT o'hare if the jammer is in the o'hare parking lot...
For ground purposes why can the ADS RX be on a narrow beam antenna? HMm a network of them just triangulated on you.
maintaining a network of primary surveillance radar.
They HAVE To maintain it. Otherwise my learjet full of coke gets the "cloaked ship" star trek effect if I flip the transponder circuit breaker off. They're never, ever, going to give up on skin painting. Maybe some phb who's never ATC'd or piloted a plane made up some story, but...
Therefore, you could potentially cause an aircraft to maneuver to avoid an intruder which isn't actually there.
Talk to a pilot. The first thing you do is visual the incoming. So that limits it to IFR only conditions right off the top.
A successful attach is going to be pretty ineffective and very dangerous to attempt. I just don't see it as an issue.
If these attacks become popular, planes will just pop the tcas circuit breakers on order of ATC (probably in the ATIS/AWOS message?) and fly "pre-tcas" which works just fine.
nd IFR flights would probably have to revert to VFR if in VMC. But what of a bunch of IFR flights in actual IMC?
If tcas is going off you're doin it wrong. Old fashioned separation rules. By altitude.
Some non pilots think aviation is handled like a video game where you dodge dodge dodge like a WWI biplane dogfight. Not so.
You rarely navigate by radar because its extremely embarassing to tell ATC you're lost and need a vector... you nav using GPS and VORs and NBDs
transmitting live spoofed data into the real ATC system
If you want to tx live unspoofed data talk to a avionics tech / aircraft mechanic or a guy who develops this stuff for a living. Its not that much of an accomplishment. Like saying you "hacked FM broadcasting" because you built a kit FM transmitter.
If you want to generate spoofed data because you're good or bad a cheap aviation transponder and an imaginary NMEA stream will do quite well. No need to "build" stuff just go appliance operator...
Withdraw enough cash to feed yourself for a week, then leave. Go camping. Get out into nature. If technology is your concern, get away from the technology.
If you've an avid sailor, and I've been sailing since I was a teen, a cruising sailboat is way better. Helps if you're near a coast or at least a great lake. I believe you're pretty much screwed as a sailor if you're in Utah, then again you don't have to be fleeing the MIB to be screwed if you're stuck in Utah.
Then I'd do whatever jon katz did. I mean, nobody has heard of him lately.
Thats a remarkably tasteful answer. I was expecting a worse comparison, like Roland...
The mesh of ADS ground stations extends around the jammer. The jammer can only screw up stuff within say a couple miles (microwave line of sight) So you pull data from the neighboring RX which are unjammed.
Its about as much of an operational problem as voice channel jamming, VOR jamming, NDB jamming, and ILS jamming, which are all conceptually the same. Theoretically it could be done, but it probably wouldn't have much effect other than getting a 1 way ticket to gitmo, so....
They may be planning to start to drop the gates whenever it snows, but that would be a first.
Speaking as a local with decades of experience they rely on inadequate surface street plowing to keep people off the interstate during blizards. If I can get to the interstate they plow continuously and its an easy drive... HOWEVER good luck getting there if they won't plow in front of your house until the storm ends, or they won't plow main roads more than every couple hours. The last thing you'd want to do is close the interstate because the fire trucks and ambulances need to use it. I'm just not seeing it.
explaining that ADS-B signals are unauthenticated and unencrypted, and 'spoofing' (video) or inserting a fake aircraft into the ADS-B system is easy.
He doesn't know much about the system. OK. go ahead... try to break it.... what'll happen? Nothing.
Spraying junk into the system is irrelevant. Being unauth and unencrypted its simpler and cheaper just to build a raw RF jammer than to feed in formatted junk reports. That works really well until the .mil shows up to train their jamming countermeasures equipment against your jammer. Whoops. DF work isn't all that complicated and the higher the frequency the easier it is. Radar jamming has been an option for what, 70 years now, and nothing really ever comes of it? ATC/pilots already have procedures to survive radar outages. Happens all the time. Send a nice thunderstorm thru, send in the backhoes (lots of remote radar units connected by fiber). So jamming/spamming/forcing it out of service is useless. Nothing an attacker can send will break anything.
I know about the ADS-B data structure. This stuff is small and simple. We're not talking about radar and jetliner sending sandboxed java applets to each other, its incredibly simpler than that. Its like declaring you can hack buffer overflows over a morse code telegraph. There's not enough "stuff" in the protocol to be turing complete.
The attack vector is incredibly narrow. I know a lot more about piloting and radar RF and microcontrollers, and frankly pretty much everything in the system compared to this guy and I can't figure out how to actually bust it.
Look at the guy's presentation. notes as I scan thru the slides. 1) He's cooler than you, crendentialism means he's correct (LOL) 2) he drinks vodka, very impressive proof 3) he admits he knows nothing about ATC and radar 4) He doesn't know much about RF or comms (pulse per second modulated, wtf is this star trek technobabble) 5) Other people are looking and no one has come up with anything 6) his threats are not serious and/or not realistic and/or already exist 7) I love this quote "some threats are total unknowns" yeah I think thats an excellent summary of the ADS-B "security hole". 8) the pretend made up scandal about the FAA not releasing "sensitive security information" is about skin painting radar coverage for smuggler detection, thats why they claim it has no impact on passenger aircraft... its not all space alien coverup unless your passenger craft is 50 feet off the ocean and full of coke I think you're OK. 9) "Not trying to spew FUD" LOL ok dude I hope the audience laughed at that. 10 ) Dude calls a homemade SDR RX an "exploit" LOL 11) he hopes they don't unplug primary radar... well duh how would they catch smugglers if all they had to do was flick a circuit breaker to disappear...
Look I know the guys not an idiot in general. But this is the kind of thing that happens when someone who doesn't know anything about any individual components of a big system, or anything about the big system itself, gets all FUDdy and self promotional. If you don't know anything about the terrain you're fighting in or the tools you have, you'll lose, no matter how smart you are.
TLDR is don't worry its not an issue. FUD FUD FUD self promotion thats all.
So, AC... pick one:
1) DLC items with free mod maps
and
2) DLC maps with free mod items
are both possible, but I think option #1 will be more popular with FPS players and option #2 more popular with the "lets play dress up dollies" players?
DayZ is responsible for more sales of Arma2 than Arma2.
You could say Arma2 is a pre-release beta of DayZ.
This is a point in the argument that is being missed. What if, say, super mario galaxy had a great engine but all the levels sucked.... then nintendo released mod tools and one of the hottest games out there was "super mario zombie galaxy" or something.... So they saved all their money on "art devel" all their money on "testing" and all their money on "PR" (I don't see ads... is Arma2 primarily advertising itself as a bootloader/engine for DayZ?)
I don't understand the people who claim its not possible to make money off modding tools. How do the original engine developers and original modeling tool developers make money? The business model is take a good engine, some good devel tools, some crappy starter art just to show off what might be possible, and resell.
What possible reason would there be to have a shared private key among all devices? Even if there is some (weird, and probably not a good idea) requirement that it be identical across an entire user site, that should be part of a programming/keyfill process. If uniqueness is good, it should just generate a key on first boot...
My guess from dealing with embedded stuff as a user and programmer, and from dealing with lots of idiots, but no experience with this particular hardware, is the intersection is probably something like a "secure boot and config" infrastructure where only official firmware upgrades and configurations can be uploaded.
Anyone out there who's ever cut and pasted a cisco config knows what I'm talking about. Now imagine having to sign anything you cut and paste into the config with a annual license key, which eventually via the magic of SSL traces back to the one true mfgr key.
So you have to pay an annual license fee or you're unable to reconfigure, or perhaps even reboot, the hardware.
A pretty good licensing scheme, until it gets you owned.
The other vector is probably the traditional "your idea sucks so here's an awful implementation to make you go away". OK we'll do your dumb encryption thing so the terrorists can't steal your proprietary trade secret stoplight camera revenue maximizing sequence times now with 5 millisecond yellow lights only when the redlight camera is installed and operating, but we'll give you the dumbest possible crypto because its an idiotic idea and sales might like your commission check but I hate you. Oh, you say another totally different customer two years later is now relying on our "idiot grade" crypto to run a nuclear reactors cooling pumps... um, whoops sorry my bad.
Traffic light overrides?
Lately they've been on a building frenzy adding those gates that drop to prevent people from entering the interstate, like the ones they use in flyover sand states so they can evac from the monthly hurricane using both sides of the interstate... You know, for the coastal defense of Wisconsin during hurricane season. Seriously we're about 1200 miles away from a coast, I have no idea why we have brand new interstate gates. Probably black helicopter and tinfoil hat time. When Obama declares martial law and drops those gates there's going to be a lot of cheese heads unable to drive up to green bay for the packers game... and Thats when the revolution will begin... not until pro sports are impacted.
Also Milwaukee is chock full of rivers and remotely operated river bridges seemingly every other street.
I don't think you could directly kill anyone or destroy anything, but you could fairly well paralyze all ground traffic if you owned the WiDOT.