NIMBY is alive and well and it will probably take localized, quiet fuel cell generators to fix this problem.
And run them on what? NPR's coverage of the issue this morning mentioned that the gas required to make a megawatt-hour of juice was now up to $300, whereas the CPUC has dictated that the most you can charge for a megawatt-hour is $250. If you have a gas shortage your fuel cell doesn't do you much good.
You can probably do a lot better using co-generation (use the waste heat from the fuel cell to heat your domestic hot water and your house, and get any remaining heat requirements using a heat pump driven by the fuel cell), but we're still several years away from seeing this kind of package offered to the general public. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Is there a solution to maintenance bullying? Or will we need to forbid the physical line providers from providing service simply to insure that they don't abuse their maintenance monopoly to get customers away from everyone else?
Yes, we will. If we can get a big enough political stink going over these documented abuses, maybe we can force the companies which own the wires (CWOTW) to divest the companies which deliver the content (CWDTC). But we have to start NOW.
This is very similar to the way the phone company used to work. AT&T used to own everything, from the local loop to the long lines to the very phone on your wall. They had no real incentive to hold down costs, because they were guaranteed a slice of everything and a certain rate of return on investment. This led to enormous overcharging for long-distance service and nowhere near enough work on making the local loop cheap (because it was subsidized, and making it cheaper reduced the investment on which AT&T got its return). Separating the various functions led to enormous increases in choice for both long-distance and phone instruments, answering machines, voice mail and you-name-it.
Cable companies don't have the guaranteed return which AT&T once had, but most of them do have local monopolies stemming from the fact that most cities only allowed one cable company per area. As I have noted before, it is just plain wrong to allow this accident of history to dictate what services can be obtained by subscribers in a particular area. The cable is there to deliver packets, and the cable company should be able to charge money for it. The cable companies ought not to be allowed to have any financial relationship to the companies which generate the packets, nor discriminate between them, any more than SWB should be allowed to discriminate between long-distance providers. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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The keyboard sends key codes, and these say *exactly* what keys were pressed.
So you change the way the keyboard works. When the system boots, the CPU and the keyboard do a Diffie-Hellman key swap, and carry on the rest of their data exchanges in cyphertext. This requires a new BIOS, but it's not impossible. The real problem is probably getting a suitable random-number source into something as low-powered as a keyboard.
even that won't work, if the put the tap between the smart part and the keys.
On most keyboards, the key switches are a physical part of the PC board which also contains the encoder chip. There's no connector to lift. The black hat could try connecting to the lines for the keyboard matrix, but that could be made very difficult too (chip-on-board technology, for example). Have the keyboard authenticate itself to the computer upon boot using some shared secret, and replacing the guts undetected becomes difficult as well.
It's never going to be impossible to intercept communications like this, but it appears that the right detection systems and countermeasures (which are not just for hiding criminal activity, they'd be entirely legitimate for use against industrial espionage) could make them extremely difficult to carry off. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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You are obviously a person who has never suffered from keyboard-related repetitive stress injuries. As soon as you plug in an external keyboard to deal with that, you're back to the problem of the bug in the keyboard.
Second issue: that only buys a little time. At the rate things are shrinking, bugs that fit into laptops can't be far off. Swapping the entire laptop for a bugged one is another possibility; all the FBI would have to do is swap the old hard drive into the new box. How often do you check your serial numbers? You only have to use a compromised machine once, and your PGP key is an open book. Maybe there are people who are meticulous enough to catch this, but I am not one of them, I don't know any, and if I did know any of them I would probably think that they were too weird to keep as friends. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Meanwhile, protecting yourself from the keyboard monitor is trivial. Never type anything critical on a computer electrically connected to anything else. Need to communicate? Use sneakernet to carry a disk with the encrypted message to a computer that is connected.
I don't think you read the articles. The FBI put a keystroke monitor (which can potentially record 32M keystrokes) onto the subject's computer. The data were being tapped directly at his keyboard; avoiding any transmission outside the computer would have done nothing to prevent its interception.
Real lesson: if you want your data protected, don't put it in a computer.
Putting a flash-based keystroke recorder into any detached keyboard would be a relatively simple matter; you get power and data directly from the cable and stash the data on the card. You could send the data to an external device using something like Bluetooth. If it was done to your keyboard, how would you detect it? Do you have seals on the case and examine them every day? I sure don't.
I think the lesson here is actually one of guarded optimism: breaking PGP is still beyond the FBI, so they have to use physical intrusion to get access to the keys. This burden makes it utterly impossible to perform fishing expeditions on encrypted e-mail or computers in general (Van Eck/Tempest monitoring notwithstanding). I feel a whole lot better about this than I do about things such as Carnivore. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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(Of course, no democracy has ever lasted very long anyway, and we are about at the end of the projected lifespan.. so we shall see, eh?)
The democratic republic of the United States is aging, but what would you say about the thriving new democracies of Taiwan and Poland, to name just a couple? The phenomenon is still growing world-wide. While society and economy may contract, it appears doubtful that a shift to dictatorship in the USA is very likely. If we did have problems we might have election observers coming here from France, Australia and Japan (a mere 55 years old as a democracy) to help straighten things out. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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You can model a crystal as a bunch of balls (nuclei) held apart by springs (bonds). Heat travels through the crystal as sound waves (phonons), which cause the balls to wiggle around against the springs. If all the balls and springs are the same, the interaction with each plane in turn is identical and the phonon keeps going in the same direction. A phonon which travels to the end of the crystal escapes. If some of the balls are heavier than others, they resonate differently and tend to scatter the phonon instead of allowing it to go in one direction. A phonon which keeps getting scattered is a lot less likely to get to the end of the crystal than one which does not, so heavier balls (different isotopes) decrease the thermal conductivity. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Of course it scales; it's a bulk process.
on
Isotropic Silicon?
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· Score: 2
I am concerned about the origins of the technology and the ability of any process to generate it "scaling up" to the kinds of quantities required for a chip fab.
The isotopic purification is done on the silicon before it's made into crystals, long before it ever goes to the chip fab. I don't know what kind of tricks are being used (gaseous diffusion or gas centrifuges would work about ten times as well on silane as on UF6), but if you look at the techniques used by the chemists to extract deuterium from water you'll realize that they've probably found some shortcut. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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What we need is to either nationalize these mammoth corporations, or at the very least require one government representative to be put on every board of directors -- by law -- with veto power over any decision.
Ah, a wonderful idea! Nationalization would be guaranteed to bring the French disease (labor inflexibility and lousy productivity, leading to economic contraction, unemployment and sky-high taxes, huge deficits or both) to the USA. Placing government reps on corporate boards (every corporation? even 5-person outfits? who's paying for this?) would be a wonderful way to politicize the economy in the worst way.
The resulting collapse and manipulation of the economy for political ends would discredit socialist measures on this continent for the next century, and probably lead to Constitutional prohibitions against any such meddling ever again. We could call it (between ourselves) the New Deal Socialist Repeal Act, because that's what it would produce. And about time; we've already had sixty-odd years of wretched government excess, and it'll take some shock treatment to get the sheeple to realize what it's done to them. It would be like smoking a pack of cigarettes as your introduction to tobacco; you'd never want to touch it again.
This dyed-in-the-wool libertarian capitalist says, let's do it! " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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It would be trivial to double-encrypt the mail. The first encryption is with the recipient's public key, and includes only the message body. The second encryption is with the anonymous remailer's public key, so that the data in transit contains nothing in plaintext except the headers for the hop to the remailer. This avoids the generation of keys by anyone other than the possessor of the private part of the key.
Would you trust a key that someone you didn't know had generated for you? If you would, you're not paranoid enough. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Wait... I thought you said that the linux distro's would earn their keep selling boxed sets with manuals? But if they cost $0, where's their money?
Yes. Physical media, books, telephone support agreements... these are all things with per-copy value. It's also separate from the software (and the right to use the software) itself. M / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Redhat, and any other Linux distro companies only hope for survival is keeping their distributions needlessly complex?
Afterall, that'll be the only revenue they can count on, correct?
Make the distribution needlessly complex, and nobody will bother with it; they'll install something that's simpler and works better (I've been hearing great things about Debian). The revenue will come from people willing to fork out for a boxed set with a book, because of the backing it has; if something goes wrong, paying for the set gives them someone to call (and makes them feel good about supporting the effort). All of the un-paid "technical support" done by people testing configurations, writing drivers, and doing other things either on their own time or for the benefit of their companies (which they re-release under the GPL so nobody else has to re-invent that wheel)... that comes with Linux at a list price of $0.00. M / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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The lesson I take from this is that free software kills the software-sales and software-license business models. Service and technical support are still valuable in a free-software environment.
The other lesson I take from this is that Linux and its free-software adjuncts are getting into the quality/capability region where they can take on Microsoft for possession of the desktop. If Microsoft Office starts losing that battle, it's all over for the Wintel monopoly. M / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Better have some kind of server which is either bolted down too tightly to steal, or is off-site and connected through a fat enough pipe to get the pics to before the thieves pull the cables out.
If your purpose is to catch pictures of the miscreants as they come through the door, it sure wouldn't help very much if those pictures were carried away along with the Linux boxen on which they got stored. --
All this means is that a network will spring up inside Poland to download and swap CD's of Linux, Star Office, and all the rest. People will stop importing physical CDs, eliminating the excuse of the tax official to levy outrageous taxes. And every copy of every Microsoft program will still have the tax added onto its ridiculous price...
Thanks, Poland, for helping to sell Open Source and promoting your own indigenous culture of sharing. I know that's not what your apparatchiks meant to do, but I still have to give credit where credit is due even if it comes by way of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Hee hee hee hee hee! --
Trapped air wouldn't have affected the insulating value (there is at least as much trapped air in nylon used dirtside). Instead the problem appears to have been some kind of puncture or porosity. Here is the press release on the report issued on the tether-break analysis. The most important paragraph:
The board found sufficient evidence to identify two possible causes of the breach in the insulation -- foreign
object damage, or a defect in the tether itself. Debris and contamination found in the deployer mechanisms and in the tether itself could have been pushed into the insulation layer while the tether was still wound on its reel. The investigation found evidence of damage to copper wire in the tether, and also established that normal forces on the tether while on the reel could push a single copper strand or foreign
debris through the insulation.
NASA's not that hard to search, you should go consult it more often. --
I can think of several problems with Freenet, and how malicious people will gum up the works. I'd like to see these points addressed somehow.
The issue of goodwill: Freenet can be subverted. Because anyone can run a Freenet node, it would be trivial for a black-hat to claim to have any information which is to be censored, and either return something else or look to see who is submitting the requests.
The issue of spoofing. Merely faking the metadata on documents could really mess up the system.
The issue of request propagation. A document which is widely distributed will be returned quickly, but a document which is present in only one place potentially requires the request to visit every Freenet node. Suppose that someone generates a bunch of bogus requests for documents which do not exist? Each request goes to every Freenet node, flooding the system.
I know next to nothing about these issues, but I was still able to formulate the questions. Why don't we have answers? If Freenet is supposed to be able to function even in a very hostile environment, shouldn't it be proof or at least resistant to these attacks? And we know it will be attacked, by bored script kiddies if no one else. --
I think it would be very appropriate if the prosecutor, detective and judge were caned after this case is reversed on appeal. Nothing would be more appropriate for such a gross violation of the Constitution. --
The cold war is over, but Iraq/N. Korea are still in the business. The whole ISS effort is designed to keep the Russian rocket scientists working on civilian projects instead of turning mercenary for the bad guys.
What's sadder yet is that the strategy appears to be a pretty bad failure. --
To be specific, leaving low Earth orbit requires about 3 km/sec of velocity change. Dropping the orbit by 100 miles (causing an immediate re-entry) requires about 50 m/sec. You get one guess as to which is feasible in the current technological and financial climate. --
Not very funny if your satellite is one of the ones in the path of the junk spewed from the collision.
It would be funnier if the final descent of Mir was abruptly terminated by a test of the US ABM missile. It would also make some real pretty bolides, I bet. --
He wasn't talking about the power emitted by the satellites, but rather, by the Iridium phones themselves.
If that's the case, then there would almost certainly be no detectable effect, because the number of Iridium users will always be small. The only way the scenario works is if people on the ground are endangered by the radiation of the satellites themselves, and that is ridiculous (thus I have ridiculed it).
The Iridium satellite antennas are considerably more directional than cell-tower arrays (the DSPs required to manage the phased arrays are a huge power drain) and I doubt that the power of an Iridium phone is any higher than a run-of-the-mill 144 MHz ham handheld. Hell, I know it; this page specifies 0.64 watts for an Iridium phone, and several other pages found by Google repeat the 0.64[5] watt figure. Ham handhelds are often 5 watts or more, and people use them up against their heads just the same.
In other words, the doctor is this || far from being a quack. --
Slashdot Mirror
You can probably do a lot better using co-generation (use the waste heat from the fuel cell to heat your domestic hot water and your house, and get any remaining heat requirements using a heat pump driven by the fuel cell), but we're still several years away from seeing this kind of package offered to the general public.
"
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This is very similar to the way the phone company used to work. AT&T used to own everything, from the local loop to the long lines to the very phone on your wall. They had no real incentive to hold down costs, because they were guaranteed a slice of everything and a certain rate of return on investment. This led to enormous overcharging for long-distance service and nowhere near enough work on making the local loop cheap (because it was subsidized, and making it cheaper reduced the investment on which AT&T got its return). Separating the various functions led to enormous increases in choice for both long-distance and phone instruments, answering machines, voice mail and you-name-it.
Cable companies don't have the guaranteed return which AT&T once had, but most of them do have local monopolies stemming from the fact that most cities only allowed one cable company per area. As I have noted before, it is just plain wrong to allow this accident of history to dictate what services can be obtained by subscribers in a particular area. The cable is there to deliver packets, and the cable company should be able to charge money for it. The cable companies ought not to be allowed to have any financial relationship to the companies which generate the packets, nor discriminate between them, any more than SWB should be allowed to discriminate between long-distance providers.
"
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It's never going to be impossible to intercept communications like this, but it appears that the right detection systems and countermeasures (which are not just for hiding criminal activity, they'd be entirely legitimate for use against industrial espionage) could make them extremely difficult to carry off.
"
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Second issue: that only buys a little time. At the rate things are shrinking, bugs that fit into laptops can't be far off. Swapping the entire laptop for a bugged one is another possibility; all the FBI would have to do is swap the old hard drive into the new box. How often do you check your serial numbers? You only have to use a compromised machine once, and your PGP key is an open book. Maybe there are people who are meticulous enough to catch this, but I am not one of them, I don't know any, and if I did know any of them I would probably think that they were too weird to keep as friends.
"
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Real lesson: if you want your data protected, don't put it in a computer.
Putting a flash-based keystroke recorder into any detached keyboard would be a relatively simple matter; you get power and data directly from the cable and stash the data on the card. You could send the data to an external device using something like Bluetooth. If it was done to your keyboard, how would you detect it? Do you have seals on the case and examine them every day? I sure don't.
I think the lesson here is actually one of guarded optimism: breaking PGP is still beyond the FBI, so they have to use physical intrusion to get access to the keys. This burden makes it utterly impossible to perform fishing expeditions on encrypted e-mail or computers in general (Van Eck/Tempest monitoring notwithstanding). I feel a whole lot better about this than I do about things such as Carnivore.
"
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You can model a crystal as a bunch of balls (nuclei) held apart by springs (bonds). Heat travels through the crystal as sound waves (phonons), which cause the balls to wiggle around against the springs. If all the balls and springs are the same, the interaction with each plane in turn is identical and the phonon keeps going in the same direction. A phonon which travels to the end of the crystal escapes. If some of the balls are heavier than others, they resonate differently and tend to scatter the phonon instead of allowing it to go in one direction. A phonon which keeps getting scattered is a lot less likely to get to the end of the crystal than one which does not, so heavier balls (different isotopes) decrease the thermal conductivity.
"
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The resulting collapse and manipulation of the economy for political ends would discredit socialist measures on this continent for the next century, and probably lead to Constitutional prohibitions against any such meddling ever again. We could call it (between ourselves) the New Deal Socialist Repeal Act, because that's what it would produce. And about time; we've already had sixty-odd years of wretched government excess, and it'll take some shock treatment to get the sheeple to realize what it's done to them. It would be like smoking a pack of cigarettes as your introduction to tobacco; you'd never want to touch it again.
This dyed-in-the-wool libertarian capitalist says, let's do it!
"
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Would you trust a key that someone you didn't know had generated for you? If you would, you're not paranoid enough.
"
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The lesson I take from this is that free software kills the software-sales and software-license business models. Service and technical support are still valuable in a free-software environment.
The other lesson I take from this is that Linux and its free-software adjuncts are getting into the quality/capability region where they can take on Microsoft for possession of the desktop. If Microsoft Office starts losing that battle, it's all over for the Wintel monopoly.
M
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And the ATAN (?) bug in the '387 should be in there somewhere.
--
If your purpose is to catch pictures of the miscreants as they come through the door, it sure wouldn't help very much if those pictures were carried away along with the Linux boxen on which they got stored.
--
Thanks, Poland, for helping to sell Open Source and promoting your own indigenous culture of sharing. I know that's not what your apparatchiks meant to do, but I still have to give credit where credit is due even if it comes by way of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Hee hee hee hee hee!
--
--
- The issue of goodwill: Freenet can be subverted. Because anyone can run a Freenet node, it would be trivial for a black-hat to claim to have any information which is to be censored, and either return something else or look to see who is submitting the requests.
- The issue of spoofing. Merely faking the metadata on documents could really mess up the system.
- The issue of request propagation. A document which is widely distributed will be returned quickly, but a document which is present in only one place potentially requires the request to visit every Freenet node. Suppose that someone generates a bunch of bogus requests for documents which do not exist? Each request goes to every Freenet node, flooding the system.
I know next to nothing about these issues, but I was still able to formulate the questions. Why don't we have answers? If Freenet is supposed to be able to function even in a very hostile environment, shouldn't it be proof or at least resistant to these attacks? And we know it will be attacked, by bored script kiddies if no one else.--
I think it would be very appropriate if the prosecutor, detective and judge were caned after this case is reversed on appeal. Nothing would be more appropriate for such a gross violation of the Constitution.
--
Try reading up on space tethers and skyhooks. You might be very surprised.
--
What's sadder yet is that the strategy appears to be a pretty bad failure.
--
To be specific, leaving low Earth orbit requires about 3 km/sec of velocity change. Dropping the orbit by 100 miles (causing an immediate re-entry) requires about 50 m/sec. You get one guess as to which is feasible in the current technological and financial climate.
--
Not very funny if your satellite is one of the ones in the path of the junk spewed from the collision. It would be funnier if the final descent of Mir was abruptly terminated by a test of the US ABM missile. It would also make some real pretty bolides, I bet.
--
No, about the same. Max hand-held phone power is about 0.7 watts, for analog at least.
--
The Iridium satellite antennas are considerably more directional than cell-tower arrays (the DSPs required to manage the phased arrays are a huge power drain) and I doubt that the power of an Iridium phone is any higher than a run-of-the-mill 144 MHz ham handheld. Hell, I know it; this page specifies 0.64 watts for an Iridium phone, and several other pages found by Google repeat the 0.64[5] watt figure. Ham handhelds are often 5 watts or more, and people use them up against their heads just the same.
In other words, the doctor is this || far from being a quack.
--