I recently did installation work at one of the largest gas processing plants in Norway. The control system HMI runs on OpenVMS, the controllers are on a redundant token ring network. (good old coax).
All the control room clients are winxp sp2 with almost no patches. This is required to have the HMI applications work. They also need to be set to 256 colors to get blinking effects (critical in such a system..).
Will the system be replaced with something newer? Not in a few years. Stopping the plant costs 23 million USD per day just in lost sale/production...
Now... have there been problems with these vulnerable machines? Nope. Not ever. Control room personell know not to fuck with the clients and behave... They are running a multimillion dollar plant and fucking up is not something you want to do.... You dont mess with the system.. EVER.
The story describes what I consider an HR issue, not a technical one...
One simple example would be storing an encryption key in the eFuses. If the software experiences X number of failed login attempts the rest of the fuses are all blown rendering the key gone.
Nooo idea if this is the reason but in my eyes it looks like a way to do it.
One could also have a secure cipher processor in the device where the eFuses are located and have the chip only accepting decoding requests if the eFuses are in the correct configuration. This means that software can blow fuses to disable the chip without having to actually communicate directly with the chip lessening the attack surface of it.
The xbox360 has eFuses that are used to verify a correct version of the bootloader. If you look at the various modding forums regarding it you will see that on certain dashboard patches it is stated that an eFuse is blown to prevent downgrading to a vulnerable version. This eFuse implementation has -no- reset functionality. I wouldnt feel bad about guessing that they have not provided a reset functionality in this case either as the point of the eFuse is gone if such a thing exists and is accessable from software.
The common target of blame is badly written corporate software. This is the same reason IE6 is still "popular" in business.
We have a 386 machine running at a site... They still have spare parts so it wont be replaced. The reason? Replacing the machine requires shutting down three oil rigs. Doing so costs anywhere from 20 to 80 million dollars.
The machine is scheduled for replacement in 2 years during a major maintenance halt of the rigs, but until then it is not touched. (Yes, it is a single point of failure... and oh have we eeever told the customer.... every year... every audit... sigh)
Sometimes you have a customer calling the shots, and nothing at all in this world dictates that they have to be well informed or willing to listen;)
When you log into battle.net you are presented with an agreement where you accept that blizzard will read even your whispers/tells. So there is no privacy whatsoever on WoW. I dont really care that much but I do feel people should be fully aware of it!
I have much the same back-story and much the same disappointment.
For me it was random crashes or freezes in the 10.x versions. It was driving me nuts. I finally went to firefox and took the time to change the mouse-gesture plugin to match opera's patterns. I doubt I will go back to Opera as I'm now used to firefox. Hopefully they will manage to get some sort of "killer feature" I want, but for now I'll stay with firefox...
I wonder if I still have my opera serial key somewhere... might be a nice thing for my museum of dead stuff:p
While a polyalphabetic substitution cipher can be broken I would not call breaking this particular one "simple". Compared to many other such ciphers it is quite good in that there is a shifting alphabet which has a very large range of values.
Considering it was made in 1918 I suspect it would be a pain in the ass to actually break it. You cant do much with frequency analysis as the alphabet and thus the substitutions change on every letter.
Much like with Enigma I suspect that this cipher's biggest weakness is in the application. In other words following a set pattern which makes it possible to find "cribs".
I was the only kid in the entire school who would blow the 50 bucks for the link cable required to move ASM apps to the calcs... You could move them from calc to calc easily enough...
Heh, while my math textbook here in Norway had such guides for the calculator this was in an appendix. It was pretty much cut-paste from the TI83 calc manual translated to Norwegian..
If the teachers fall back on this as a teaching aid this is hardly a problem with the technology. The problem is shitty teachers.
My father teaches math and science classes in a middleschool and the kind of arsehat teaching you describe pisses him off to no end;)
"You may bring any calculator you like to calculator-allowed tests, provided it does not dim the lights when powered on."
Nice policy in my eyes.
A calculator and to a greater degree now a laptop is just a tool. I'd rather use a spade than a teaspoon for a tool when digging a hole... And most of what you use a laptop for in class from my experience (last year of high school all those years ago I had an early pentium battleship of a laptop) is a big funky calculator.
Or taking notes... writing on paper is all good and well in classes that require a lot of drawing like a physics class, but when you're taking notes from an overhead projector for 4-5 hours a week in class due to an asshat teacher saying "the only way to learn is to write it" you really really want a text editor of some kind;)
An over-active empathy for this kind of thing can be horribly destructive to yourself though.
It is ok to laugh at the star wars kid, but being an asstard to him like some were is not.
Re:Back to the original subject...
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
My win7 gaming pc starts from a cold boot to being logged in and ready to go with my usual apps (firefox, steam, zMud, etc) started in less than a minute... This machine has an SSD as a system drive though.
That is what I do. But this time I was burned by a motherboard that had been around for a while, but the CPU was fairly new. The combo was not nice and few had seen the issue.
I have an ASUS motherboard I love in my old computer.... Same with the one before that...
The latest ASUS board was insanely picky on which CPU to use... I ended up having to buy a cheap low end CPU must to flash in a bios rev that would actually detect the CPU listed as compatible in the documentation.... *sigh*
I finally cut my losses in terms of time and bought a board from MSI.. amusingly it just worked. No fiddling at all.
Hopefully I was just unlucky, I'd hate to have to avoid ASUS boards:(
Even better if you have a "safeprint" system. You print from your laptop anywhere in the building and go to the nearest machine, swipe your card and print.
Slashdot Mirror
And it is so bloody convenient it is costing me a fortune....
When it has become faster and easier to buy it than pirate it... I'm sold!
Damnit steam and your abilty to entice me to pay for things I would have pirated 2-3 years ago :p
Win98 was vulnerable, and I loved it. I could loot anything I wanted :p
Then winxp came out and wasnt... *pout* ;)
I recently did installation work at one of the largest gas processing plants in Norway.
The control system HMI runs on OpenVMS, the controllers are on a redundant token ring network. (good old coax).
All the control room clients are winxp sp2 with almost no patches. This is required to have the HMI applications work. They also need to be set to 256 colors to get blinking effects (critical in such a system..).
Will the system be replaced with something newer? Not in a few years. Stopping the plant costs 23 million USD per day just in lost sale/production...
Now... have there been problems with these vulnerable machines? Nope. Not ever. Control room personell know not to fuck with the clients and behave... They are running a multimillion dollar plant and fucking up is not something you want to do.... You dont mess with the system.. EVER.
The story describes what I consider an HR issue, not a technical one...
One simple example would be storing an encryption key in the eFuses. If the software experiences X number of failed login attempts the rest of the fuses are all blown rendering the key gone.
Nooo idea if this is the reason but in my eyes it looks like a way to do it.
One could also have a secure cipher processor in the device where the eFuses are located and have the chip only accepting decoding requests if the eFuses are in the correct configuration. This means that software can blow fuses to disable the chip without having to actually communicate directly with the chip lessening the attack surface of it.
The xbox360 has eFuses that are used to verify a correct version of the bootloader.
If you look at the various modding forums regarding it you will see that on certain dashboard patches it is stated that an eFuse is blown to prevent downgrading to a vulnerable version.
This eFuse implementation has -no- reset functionality. I wouldnt feel bad about guessing that they have not provided a reset functionality in this case either as the point of the eFuse is gone if such a thing exists and is accessable from software.
The common target of blame is badly written corporate software. This is the same reason IE6 is still "popular" in business.
We have a 386 machine running at a site... They still have spare parts so it wont be replaced. The reason?
Replacing the machine requires shutting down three oil rigs. Doing so costs anywhere from 20 to 80 million dollars.
The machine is scheduled for replacement in 2 years during a major maintenance halt of the rigs, but until then it is not touched. (Yes, it is a single point of failure... and oh have we eeever told the customer.... every year... every audit... sigh)
Sometimes you have a customer calling the shots, and nothing at all in this world dictates that they have to be well informed or willing to listen ;)
Indeed!
When you log into battle.net you are presented with an agreement where you accept that blizzard will read even your whispers/tells.
So there is no privacy whatsoever on WoW. I dont really care that much but I do feel people should be fully aware of it!
I have much the same back-story and much the same disappointment.
For me it was random crashes or freezes in the 10.x versions. It was driving me nuts.
I finally went to firefox and took the time to change the mouse-gesture plugin to match opera's patterns. I doubt I will go back to Opera as I'm now used to firefox. Hopefully they will manage to get some sort of "killer feature" I want, but for now I'll stay with firefox...
I wonder if I still have my opera serial key somewhere... might be a nice thing for my museum of dead stuff :p
+5 for effort :p
While a polyalphabetic substitution cipher can be broken I would not call breaking this particular one "simple".
Compared to many other such ciphers it is quite good in that there is a shifting alphabet which has a very large range of values.
Considering it was made in 1918 I suspect it would be a pain in the ass to actually break it.
You cant do much with frequency analysis as the alphabet and thus the substitutions change on every letter.
Much like with Enigma I suspect that this cipher's biggest weakness is in the application. In other words following a set pattern which makes it possible to find "cribs".
Yes you do.
This is why being presumed innocent until proven guilty is a somewhat important concept...
This way of educating will probably create the kind of engineer you get from India.
The kind that can follow orders and regulations but has no creativity whatsoever. No ability to improvise when things dont go as you expect...
So... they do the grunt-work and they send the tricky stuff over to us up in the north ;)
Some of our systems still use token ring coax networks and OpenVMS servers.
The problem is that the fuckers just work... and keep on chugging along happily in the basement of the plant...
Win2k is still used widely all over the world in production environments.
The problem with systems that work is that you're usually not to touch them until they stop working :(
Ah the joy of the TI83 I had in high school....
I was the only kid in the entire school who would blow the 50 bucks for the link cable required to move ASM apps to the calcs... You could move them from calc to calc easily enough...
Which meant I was the school app-store :-p
Heh, while my math textbook here in Norway had such guides for the calculator this was in an appendix. It was pretty much cut-paste from the TI83 calc manual translated to Norwegian..
If the teachers fall back on this as a teaching aid this is hardly a problem with the technology. The problem is shitty teachers.
My father teaches math and science classes in a middleschool and the kind of arsehat teaching you describe pisses him off to no end ;)
"You may bring any calculator you like to calculator-allowed tests, provided it does not dim the lights when powered on."
Nice policy in my eyes.
A calculator and to a greater degree now a laptop is just a tool. I'd rather use a spade than a teaspoon for a tool when digging a hole... And most of what you use a laptop for in class from my experience (last year of high school all those years ago I had an early pentium battleship of a laptop) is a big funky calculator.
Or taking notes... writing on paper is all good and well in classes that require a lot of drawing like a physics class, but when you're taking notes from an overhead projector for 4-5 hours a week in class due to an asshat teacher saying "the only way to learn is to write it" you really really want a text editor of some kind ;)
I'm so glad that kind of business practice of keeping a phone locked after the contract ends is illegal in Norway...
You're not alone in that....
An over-active empathy for this kind of thing can be horribly destructive to yourself though.
It is ok to laugh at the star wars kid, but being an asstard to him like some were is not.
My win7 gaming pc starts from a cold boot to being logged in and ready to go with my usual apps (firefox, steam, zMud, etc) started in less than a minute... This machine has an SSD as a system drive though.
That is what I do. But this time I was burned by a motherboard that had been around for a while, but the CPU was fairly new. The combo was not nice and few had seen the issue.
I have an ASUS motherboard I love in my old computer.... Same with the one before that...
The latest ASUS board was insanely picky on which CPU to use... I ended up having to buy a cheap low end CPU must to flash in a bios rev that would actually detect the CPU listed as compatible in the documentation.... *sigh*
I finally cut my losses in terms of time and bought a board from MSI.. amusingly it just worked. No fiddling at all.
Hopefully I was just unlucky, I'd hate to have to avoid ASUS boards :(
Even better if you have a "safeprint" system.
You print from your laptop anywhere in the building and go to the nearest machine, swipe your card and print.
And it just works.
What they are doing that they know work is drilling a relief well.
The rest they are doing I fully agree is a pile of "we're fucked, lets try anything remotely possible".
The unfortunate thing about the relief well is that it takes so bloody long to drill.