"A process network is the network the SCADA/DCS system and it's physical controllers sit on, usually segregated from corporate LAN"
You do seem to have implimented a solution, which begs the question as to why the rest of the power industry haven't also done it. See here where their still using the Internet to relay SCADA data. They obviously don't use your methodology. Just who do you work for again?
"the vendor usually checks out stuff like windows updates, and assesses the impact in the system"
How do you checkput a service pack without installing it on a live system, when a service pack breaks something, the usual solution is ti reinstall, reinstall, reinstall. Again you do seem to have thought of a solution that would be of use to the rest of the IT industry.
"Updates are usually installed to fix/improve system operation"
My understanding is that service packs are provided by the software vendor in response to general issues, and not specifically to correct problems in a specific installation. In nix land, if there's a bug then you can directly contact the programmers and get specific solutions to your problem. I guess it's a different mind set.
"The site that you visited was built for an earlier, beta version of Silverlight - not the current one. Please contact the site owner to let them know"
Only works on Silverlight and the license has this to say..
'INDEMNIFICATION. You agree to indemnify, hold harmless, and defend Microsoft from and against any claims, allegations, lawsuits, losses and costs (including attorney fees), that arise or result the use or deployment of your "Silverlight applications"'
"This is why you keep the IT nerds away from the process network"
What's a 'process network' and who exactly do you get to fix your 'process network' ?
"I've had a whole plant lose view of it's system because some well meaning retard in IT decided to push updates onto a SCADA system without qualifying the updates....... never had it KILL the control side of things though....well done whoever you were, you've done well"
Assuming the above anecdote was even true, such an incident would never occur on a live system, and I'll tell you for why. You never update a life system - got that - never. At least in any competently run IT department.
What I suspect happened in the Georgia nuclear power plant was that some automatic patch process broke the 'computer', the rest of the story is just so much smoke screen.
re: 'qualifying the updates': Just how exactly do you qualify an update. Is an update the same as a patch or a bug fix. What motivates you to apply such qualifying updates. I mean if the computer ain't broke, then don't fix it.
If it's security updates then why bother, I mean if the 'process network' is secure you wouldn't need to. I would have thought they used end to end gateways running on embedded hardware, providing a VPN connection to the SCADA units.
But then again I only ever provided IT services to the double glazing sector, and what do I know..:)
"Good enough evidence for me! Microsoft caused a nuclear meltdown! Quickly, to the Blogo-Sphere!"
That's only funny if it wasn't even partly true. But here's something really funny:
"The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's
Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety
monitoring system for nearly five hours"
"TRANSCRIPTS of telephone conversations between utility operators.. include explicit mention of some unknown 'computer problems' at FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility thought to have triggered the regional power failures, in those preceding hours"
"Part of the challenge is we have all of this infrastructure in the control systems that was put in place in the 1980s and '90s that was not designed with security in mind, and all of sudden these systems are being connected to [Internet-facing] business networks" said Brian Ahern, president and chief executive of Industrial Defender Inc., a Foxborough, Mass.-based SCADA security company
No, the problem is putting 'computers' on the Internet that were most certainly designed with security in mind, something the 'computers' most certainly fail at. To put in bluntly, running your SCADA units on Windows over the Internet is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. And that they are still running such designs five years after the great blackout of 2003, demonstrates incompetence and neglience boarding on the criminal
A crying shame that slashdot is reduced to regurgitating this nonsense. This one has to be up there with, OLPC stealing food from the third world hungry..
"I didnt have to. I checked the device manager and found no bluetooth in that. Either Acer left the driver out (highly unlikely) or it's just not in there"
You went in looking for Bluetooth and when you didn't find it you never even asked the staff!
"Later on, a friend from the uni bought that very acer I looked at. He couldnt use his phone with the laptop because it didnt have the bluetooth module in it"
What model, did they advertise it a BlueTooth enabled? Why did he buy the same model as you, didn't you tell him it didn't have BlueTooth.
"a ready-made surveillance system to controlling 3rd world governments"
We've had that here for ages, why did it take them so long to catch up? If not then why have I had six separate visits from the 'anti-terrorist' police and why did the "BBC", come in and photograph all the staff.
You seem knowledgeable, did you ask before you left the store, if it had Bluetooth device installed? What models did they have, did they advertise it as Bluetooth enabled? According to this from Jan 2006, the Aspire 9500 comes equipped with integrated Bluetooth and Firewire port.
At the very least the President should be able to read an Atlas, or as First Lady Bunny refers to it as, that little picture book, so as he can find all those countries he needs to Nuke..:)
"One interesting thing I've found talking to average Joe (who doesn't have any personal agenda to fulfil as to whether they use IE or Firefox) is that they find all this Firefox publicity as vain"
I've never come across an average Joe that has even heard of a 'release candidate', never mind knowing what one is. I don't believe they are aimed at the average Joe, unless you know different. People would be off directing them to the current stable release. I mean without 'release candidates', Mozilla would they get less user feedback and retard the development of Firefox..
"Release candidates are development packages released to check if any critical problems have slipped into the code during the previous development period"
Slashdot Mirror
Build giant frickin' laser beams to threaten the rest of the planet with .. :)
"A process network is the network the SCADA/DCS system and it's physical controllers sit on, usually segregated from corporate LAN"
You do seem to have implimented a solution, which begs the question as to why the rest of the power industry haven't also done it. See here where their still using the Internet to relay SCADA data. They obviously don't use your methodology. Just who do you work for again?
"the vendor usually checks out stuff like windows updates, and assesses the impact in the system"
How do you checkput a service pack without installing it on a live system, when a service pack breaks something, the usual solution is ti reinstall, reinstall, reinstall. Again you do seem to have thought of a solution that would be of use to the rest of the IT industry.
"Updates are usually installed to fix/improve system operation"
My understanding is that service packs are provided by the software vendor in response to general issues, and not specifically to correct problems in a specific installation. In nix land, if there's a bug then you can directly contact the programmers and get specific solutions to your problem. I guess it's a different mind set.
And Google is really evil, really .. :)
I can't see, what I get is this msg:
"The site that you visited was built for an earlier, beta version of Silverlight - not the current one. Please contact the site owner to let them know"
It works here on Firefox 2.0.0.14 ..
This sure looks like Deep Zoom and it works without Silverlight ..
Only works on Silverlight and the license has this to say ..
'INDEMNIFICATION. You agree to indemnify, hold harmless, and defend Microsoft from and against any claims, allegations, lawsuits, losses and costs (including attorney fees), that arise or result the use or deployment of your "Silverlight applications"'
"This is why you keep the IT nerds away from the process network"
.. :)
What's a 'process network' and who exactly do you get to fix your 'process network' ?
"I've had a whole plant lose view of it's system because some well meaning retard in IT decided to push updates onto a SCADA system without qualifying the updates....... never had it KILL the control side of things though....well done whoever you were, you've done well"
Assuming the above anecdote was even true, such an incident would never occur on a live system, and I'll tell you for why. You never update a life system - got that - never. At least in any competently run IT department.
What I suspect happened in the Georgia nuclear power plant was that some automatic patch process broke the 'computer', the rest of the story is just so much smoke screen.
re: 'qualifying the updates': Just how exactly do you qualify an update. Is an update the same as a patch or a bug fix. What motivates you to apply such qualifying updates. I mean if the computer ain't broke, then don't fix it.
If it's security updates then why bother, I mean if the 'process network' is secure you wouldn't need to. I would have thought they used end to end gateways running on embedded hardware, providing a VPN connection to the SCADA units.
But then again I only ever provided IT services to the double glazing sector, and what do I know
"Good enough evidence for me! Microsoft caused a nuclear meltdown! Quickly, to the Blogo-Sphere!"
.. include explicit mention of some unknown 'computer problems' at FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility thought to have triggered the regional power failures, in those preceding hours"
That's only funny if it wasn't even partly true. But here's something really funny:
"The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours"
"TRANSCRIPTS of telephone conversations between utility operators
"Part of the challenge is we have all of this infrastructure in the control systems that was put in place in the 1980s and '90s that was not designed with security in mind, and all of sudden these systems are being connected to [Internet-facing] business networks" said Brian Ahern, president and chief executive of Industrial Defender Inc., a Foxborough, Mass.-based SCADA security company
No, the problem is putting 'computers' on the Internet that were most certainly designed with security in mind, something the 'computers' most certainly fail at. To put in bluntly, running your SCADA units on Windows over the Internet is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. And that they are still running such designs five years after the great blackout of 2003, demonstrates incompetence and neglience boarding on the criminal
"The virus encrypts all user files with the extensions listed below"
Does it require administrator rights to function?
Does it run on Vista with User Account Control active?
Doesn't even run on OS X or Linux .. :)
A crying shame that slashdot is reduced to regurgitating this nonsense. This one has to be up there with, OLPC stealing food from the third world hungry ..
"I didnt have to. I checked the device manager and found no bluetooth in that. Either Acer left the driver out (highly unlikely) or it's just not in there"
You went in looking for Bluetooth and when you didn't find it you never even asked the staff!
"Later on, a friend from the uni bought that very acer I looked at. He couldnt use his phone with the laptop because it didnt have the bluetooth module in it"
What model, did they advertise it a BlueTooth enabled? Why did he buy the same model as you, didn't you tell him it didn't have BlueTooth.
"The bluetooth switch. It was on all the models"
Which models, did they not have the Aspire 9500?
"a ready-made surveillance system to controlling 3rd world governments"
.. :)
We've had that here for ages, why did it take them so long to catch up? If not then why have I had six separate visits from the 'anti-terrorist' police and why did the "BBC", come in and photograph all the staff.
Welcome to the desert of the real
Battery Life: Up to 4.5 hours run time
You seem knowledgeable, did you ask before you left the store, if it had Bluetooth device installed? What models did they have, did they advertise it as Bluetooth enabled? According to this from Jan 2006, the Aspire 9500 comes equipped with integrated Bluetooth and Firewire port.
"there is nothing like Photoshop, and no killer video capture and editing software, and for some, games are important too"
..
Photoshop under Linux
CINELERRA, the first Linux based real-time editing
For games, buy a PlayStation or Nintendo
At the very least the President should be able to read an Atlas, or as First Lady Bunny refers to it as, that little picture book, so as he can find all those countries he needs to Nuke .. :)
"One interesting thing I've found talking to average Joe (who doesn't have any personal agenda to fulfil as to whether they use IE or Firefox) is that they find all this Firefox publicity as vain"
..
I've never come across an average Joe that has even heard of a 'release candidate', never mind knowing what one is. I don't believe they are aimed at the average Joe, unless you know different. People would be off directing them to the current stable release. I mean without 'release candidates', Mozilla would they get less user feedback and retard the development of Firefox
"Release candidates are development packages released to check if any critical problems have slipped into the code during the previous development period"
Makes you wonder why they didn't fix the MMU issues while they went about evoluting .. :)
"Whichever way you try to spin it, GPL restricts some freedoms"
No, the GPL acts to prevent you from restricting the freedoms of others.
No, the GPL acts to prevent you from restricting the freedoms of downstream developers, in that sense the BSD license is restrictive.
"can I close-source my entire application (except the ADODB directory"
.. :)
What did the ADODB people tell you when you asked them?
ADOdb is dual licensed using BSD-Style and LGPL
"The GPL wording needs some serious work IMHO"
Which bits, specifically
"My main problem with the GPL and the 'slashdot zealots'"
.. :)
My main problem is with people who use the word zealots in the first sentence