High explosives are believed to have been moulded to his body and sewn in to his underpants. ...
A preliminary FBI analysis has found that the device allegedly found on Mr Abdulmutallab contained the high explosive PETN, also known as pentaerythritol.
It sounds pretty full on to me. I think we dodged a bullet.
Sounds more like a misfire to me. One article said he basically had a bomb built to the shape of his lower body. My supposition is that he had to manually install a trigger while he was in the toilet and he stuffed it up.
Seriously. Make every passenger from Nigeria go out through security in Amsterdam, then back in. And while you are at it if some guy in Nigeria goes to the US embassy and says look out for my son here is his name then bloody look out for that name in visa requests and think twice before granting it.
Oh and another thing. US security seems to focus on detaining the bad guys after they have landed in the US. We have heard of this happening to plenty of people. How about recognising that they can get up to bad stuff while still in the air over Detroit, and trying to keep the bad guys from even getting on the plane.
Do you recall the type of serial interface cards it used? Or was the modem connected to the console? The PDP 11/84s and 11/83s I used used variants of the DZ11 MUX card which gave eight channels. If still have the octal interrupt vector and bus address sequence imprinted on my brain:
Yeah here Telecom Australia charged $10000 AU dollars per year for a DDS connection (thats 9600 bits per second, serial on a 25 pin D connector, point to point). Its a good service, but 10 grand?. The early limitations on modems not provided by Telstra were basically there to protect that business.
I have a couple of modems I could junk and I am sure a lot of people around here do to. Maybe put up a journal page and point your sig to it. You will have to pay postage. I could send you a few but its going to be from Australia, which could be expensive.
Here in Melbourne, Australia computer swap meets (markets for grey marketing, mostly) usually have bins of old modems, mostly with their power supplies for two dollars each. If you buy two or three you can get a working unit. Are there similar markets where you live?
Yeah I think the fact that ADSL, cable and 3G are always on is more important than the throughput. It makes it possible to plan to check something online from a single source, rather than grabbing information in advance and creating multiple copies.
I have mod points to burn but I have to post in here.
The traffic system I worked on had 300 baud modems attached to cheap leased lines (soldered in, mostly). Two modems per card. 8 cards on a bytecraft backplane. Up to 128 modems on a 19 inch rack. Each modem had three LEDs (carrier, TX, RX) and at the speed the system operated you could see the poll/response from the regional controller to the sites and back. In the dark it was a thing of beauty. Computers of old.
If something was wrong in the logic (say a checksum mismatch) then you could see it in the LEDs because one channel (slot) would not follow the nice pulse sequence. Several times I mucked up the checksums of a rack and took out a lot of sites. Maybe I shouldn't post about that...
Going back in time my 6502 system had a modem for the cassette interface. I knew you could overclock the UART and FSK modem driver and I had dreams of using my uncles reel to reel hifi system for storage. Never happened. Though I did find that you could use the cassette player as a sound card of sorts by locking on REC and PLAY.
I think its fascinating. Its a mix of the itinerant fruit pickers here in southern Australia and the RV borne populations popular in cyberpunk books by Bruce Stirling and Neal Stephenson.
How about a padlock on the box, and a BIOS password?
Unfortunately they sound like the type of people who would cut the lock, and reset the BIOS. I think the poster should find a new colo and tell us who the current colo is so we can avoid them.
Really, if some impoverished people want to come to your country, is it such a bad thing for you, as a "rich" person?
Put that way its not really a bad thing but spare a thought for the great number of people from poor countries who do the right thing by applying through channels, filling out the forms and working hard to qualify. Letting asylum seekers through does two bad things IMHO:
It creates a black market for often lethal people smuggling.
It reduces the number of places for migrants who use the system from end to end.
I 1997 I visited friends in the US. They had an apartment in Manhattan and during the day I made use of the laundry in their building. The demographics in the laundry and the attached playground were totally different from elsewhere generally in the building. The clothes were being washed and the children were being cared for by middle aged women from central America. It was actually a lot like Malaysia (my wife's native country), where many families have Indonesian servants.
If you want to retain your identity, migration has to be slow. I am sure that India or Sri Lanka could dump enough people on NZ in one year to create a new majority. I doubt that even the past immigrants from those countries want that to happen. And it is a sad fact I think that population pressure has to be used to reduce population growth. Its sad because starvation is implied in that equation.
If you are so concerned about criminal activity "crossing the border", why not do what that lovely man in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City suggested for florida, build a moat!
Yeah as an Aussie it has long been my belief that you shouldn't be able to be a country unless you have water all the way around. Of course the Panama Canal is sort of a moat, and it is part of the USA.
Back when I inhabited sci.space.* on usenet it was customary to detect school projects and to tell the poster to GTFO. Somehow I doubt wolfram will do that so I wonder how many school projects it will solve in their entirety.
My son types whatever he wants into google. He doesn't know how to type URLs. My wife and her sister are the same. If home didn't go to a search engine they would be lost. If home didn't go to google they would search for google first.
I downloaded ba-038-air-traffic-control-tape.wmv from wikileaks and distributed it to a few co-workers and friends. I don't have the resources to run a full mirror but I would be happy to mirror that file. If wikileaks had the ability to point to mirrors for specific files and verify the MD5s of the files on an ongoing basis then some load could be taken off their servers.
I suppose a sneaky mirror host could serve different files to different IP addresses though but I can't immediately see a reason for that.
Actually this article has got me thinking that I would be better off with a tablet in the form factor of the screen of my eeepc 701, and an external keyboard. Same unit all over but more useful for quickly looking things up.
Slashdot Mirror
So how did this guy get through?
1) All airline passengers must travel nude and will be required to be nude to traverse any security checkpoints.
And not a year too soon I say. I have been waiting for this day since I first read The Puppet Masters in about 1970.
I stuffed up. I was thinking PDP 10 where you wrote DECsystem10.
Has anybody provided any evidence that the guy had anything remotely like a bomb?
From this article:
High explosives are believed to have been moulded to his body and sewn in to his underpants.
...
A preliminary FBI analysis has found that the device allegedly found on Mr Abdulmutallab contained the high explosive PETN, also known as pentaerythritol.
It sounds pretty full on to me. I think we dodged a bullet.
Sounds more like a misfire to me. One article said he basically had a bomb built to the shape of his lower body. My supposition is that he had to manually install a trigger while he was in the toilet and he stuffed it up.
Especially because the terrorist in question remained in his seat the whole time.
No he spent 20 minutes in the toilet possibly preparing for the explosion. Then he covered himself with a blanket and tried to set it off.
Seriously. Make every passenger from Nigeria go out through security in Amsterdam, then back in. And while you are at it if some guy in Nigeria goes to the US embassy and says look out for my son here is his name then bloody look out for that name in visa requests and think twice before granting it.
Oh and another thing. US security seems to focus on detaining the bad guys after they have landed in the US. We have heard of this happening to plenty of people. How about recognising that they can get up to bad stuff while still in the air over Detroit, and trying to keep the bad guys from even getting on the plane.
The computer was a DECsystem10
Do you recall the type of serial interface cards it used? Or was the modem connected to the console? The PDP 11/84s and 11/83s I used used variants of the DZ11 MUX card which gave eight channels. If still have the octal interrupt vector and bus address sequence imprinted on my brain:
Yeah here Telecom Australia charged $10000 AU dollars per year for a DDS connection (thats 9600 bits per second, serial on a 25 pin D connector, point to point). Its a good service, but 10 grand?. The early limitations on modems not provided by Telstra were basically there to protect that business.
I have a couple of modems I could junk and I am sure a lot of people around here do to. Maybe put up a journal page and point your sig to it. You will have to pay postage. I could send you a few but its going to be from Australia, which could be expensive.
Here in Melbourne, Australia computer swap meets (markets for grey marketing, mostly) usually have bins of old modems, mostly with their power supplies for two dollars each. If you buy two or three you can get a working unit. Are there similar markets where you live?
Its a mix of the itinerant fruit pickers here in southern Australia
Ah, you mean the backpackers.
And a lot of itinerant country people who won't identify as backpackers. I met a few of them travelling around years ago.
Yeah I think the fact that ADSL, cable and 3G are always on is more important than the throughput. It makes it possible to plan to check something online from a single source, rather than grabbing information in advance and creating multiple copies.
Sadly, your comment contains more actual information, and is better written, than the 'article.'
You read the articles?
I have mod points to burn but I have to post in here.
The traffic system I worked on had 300 baud modems attached to cheap leased lines (soldered in, mostly). Two modems per card. 8 cards on a bytecraft backplane. Up to 128 modems on a 19 inch rack. Each modem had three LEDs (carrier, TX, RX) and at the speed the system operated you could see the poll/response from the regional controller to the sites and back. In the dark it was a thing of beauty. Computers of old.
If something was wrong in the logic (say a checksum mismatch) then you could see it in the LEDs because one channel (slot) would not follow the nice pulse sequence. Several times I mucked up the checksums of a rack and took out a lot of sites. Maybe I shouldn't post about that...
Going back in time my 6502 system had a modem for the cassette interface. I knew you could overclock the UART and FSK modem driver and I had dreams of using my uncles reel to reel hifi system for storage. Never happened. Though I did find that you could use the cassette player as a sound card of sorts by locking on REC and PLAY.
I think its fascinating. Its a mix of the itinerant fruit pickers here in southern Australia and the RV borne populations popular in cyberpunk books by Bruce Stirling and Neal Stephenson.
How about a padlock on the box, and a BIOS password?
Unfortunately they sound like the type of people who would cut the lock, and reset the BIOS. I think the poster should find a new colo and tell us who the current colo is so we can avoid them.
Really, if some impoverished people want to come to your country, is it such a bad thing for you, as a "rich" person?
Put that way its not really a bad thing but spare a thought for the great number of people from poor countries who do the right thing by applying through channels, filling out the forms and working hard to qualify. Letting asylum seekers through does two bad things IMHO:
I 1997 I visited friends in the US. They had an apartment in Manhattan and during the day I made use of the laundry in their building. The demographics in the laundry and the attached playground were totally different from elsewhere generally in the building. The clothes were being washed and the children were being cared for by middle aged women from central America. It was actually a lot like Malaysia (my wife's native country), where many families have Indonesian servants.
If you want to retain your identity, migration has to be slow. I am sure that India or Sri Lanka could dump enough people on NZ in one year to create a new majority. I doubt that even the past immigrants from those countries want that to happen. And it is a sad fact I think that population pressure has to be used to reduce population growth. Its sad because starvation is implied in that equation.
Hmmm good point. I suppose a couple of seconds of random delay would introduce enough noise into the position to make the camera hard to spot.
If you are so concerned about criminal activity "crossing the border", why not do what that lovely man in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City suggested for florida, build a moat!
Yeah as an Aussie it has long been my belief that you shouldn't be able to be a country unless you have water all the way around. Of course the Panama Canal is sort of a moat, and it is part of the USA.
Back when I inhabited sci.space.* on usenet it was customary to detect school projects and to tell the poster to GTFO. Somehow I doubt wolfram will do that so I wonder how many school projects it will solve in their entirety.
My son types whatever he wants into google. He doesn't know how to type URLs. My wife and her sister are the same. If home didn't go to a search engine they would be lost. If home didn't go to google they would search for google first.
I'm sorry, but Afghanistan was broken before the U.S. military arrived...before 9/11 happened.
Yeah there's a whole movie about it now.
I downloaded ba-038-air-traffic-control-tape.wmv from wikileaks and distributed it to a few co-workers and friends. I don't have the resources to run a full mirror but I would be happy to mirror that file. If wikileaks had the ability to point to mirrors for specific files and verify the MD5s of the files on an ongoing basis then some load could be taken off their servers.
I suppose a sneaky mirror host could serve different files to different IP addresses though but I can't immediately see a reason for that.
Actually this article has got me thinking that I would be better off with a tablet in the form factor of the screen of my eeepc 701, and an external keyboard. Same unit all over but more useful for quickly looking things up.