IIRC one technology the military has been thinking about is using "nuclear batteries" - radioisotope thermal generators, and I also had an even vaguer recollection that they were experimenting with the emitted charged particles to produce an electric current. Now, obviously these have some issues (notably what happens when the radioactive material gets up close and personal with an exploding hand grenade) but it just might meet the power requirements.
More prosaically, fuel cells seem like a practical option here.
In theory, it should be easy to get a cleartext of a password sent in through telnet or FTP.
Just because passwords are being sent in the clear, doesn't mean you can necessarily intercept them. You need to be able to intercept the packets containing the username/password combination from the remote user. You could do this at one of three locations: the remote machine, the server, or in transit. If you own the remote machine, you could just trojan *any* client used, so telnet isn't any worse off than a more secure protocol. If you control the server, the point is already moot.
So let's look at the "intercept the packets in transit" approach. You could try to sniff the packets by compromising one of the routers, or listening in on a wireless LAN if that's what the client was using, or installing a physical wiretap. None of these would work against a secure protocol.
Anyway, let's assume the attacker has intercepted a username/password combination for a particular machine. He could then do anything that user could. However, that doesn't get the attacker full control over the system. For that, the attacker could then use a local root exploit.
Additionally, many of the daemons that provide services like FTP or telnet have had many remote root holes in them.
So, whilst telnet and non-anonymous FTP have their security issues, and you probably shouldn't be running them and certainly shouldn't be exposing them to the world, exploiting their weaknesses isn't quite as easy as you might think.
"Our fries are really hot and crispy today. Would you like some?"
There are two problems with this statement. One: it's too long, and it'll reduce the number of customers the kid can serve. The second is it's not credible - everybody knows that the fries are pretty much the same today as they are every day, so the server will sound sillier than they do already.
NightHawk doesn't have the takeover game which, to my mind, was the coolest part of Paradroid.
I'm surprised nobody's ever tried a FPS based around the same idea as Paradroid - your character as a "wraith" that takes over other entities within the game, with a puzzle game to determine whether the takeover is successful or not.
Rainbow Six research flawed (NOTE:SPOILERS)
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 1
Rainbow Six had other issues, particularly poor research.
Sydney does not have 100 Farenheit days in September, when the Olympics were. 30 seconds of googling can tell you that Sydney's record September temperature, over 140-odd years of record-keeping, was about 94 Farenheit (still reasonably warm, but *extremely* rare), and the mean daily maximum in September is a very pleasant 67 Farenheit. There was no need for the kind of fogging equipment that formed the key point of the terrorists' plan in the book. If you were going to use a fogging system at an Australian sporting event to spread Shiva, the only one of global interest that's held in really hot conditions is the Australian Open. Equally jarring, the dialogue involving Australians just didn't ring true. I doubt Tom Clancy has ever spoken to an Australian, let alone an Australian soldier, in his life.
Now, if he can't be bothered getting easy stuff like that right, how the heck are we supposed to find the rest of the book convincing?
Tom Clancy is something you read when you want to take your brain out of gear, rather than engage it. Great for reading on a plane, perhaps not so great for when you're on holidays and looking to prevent intellectual atrophy.
He's most famous for 2001, but his short fiction is probably better (perhaps partly because his admittedly awful characterisations don't matter so much in the form). There's a reasonably new collection out which has virtually all the short fiction he ever published. You could do a lot worse.
Oh, and seeing we've had the Ayn Rand enthusiasts, you could try some other flavours of political philosophy. Machiavelli's The Prince, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Marx's Communist Manifesto are all reasonably accessible and are certainly worth a read.
Tom Clancy later stuff is shite...
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 4, Informative
His first few books are decent thrillers, particularly Hunt For Red October and The Sum of All Fears (and perhaps Rainbow Six), but his later Jack Ryan books become ever-lengthier hymns to conservatism in general and Ronald Reagan in particular. If his editor had some spine he or she would send his drafts back with lots of red lines through the more egregious sermonizing.
Remember how much users liked those? Was there *anybody*, even a raw newbie, who found their suggestions vaguely useful? The technology to make such an interface useful doesn't seem to exist, unfortunately.
Risk management still applies
on
IT at the CIA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If the CIA makes a bad call because their IT systems made it impossible or too hard to retrieve important information people can die just as easily as a security breach.
Risk management is still the right way to do this - it's just that the risks on both sides of the ledger can sometimes be much higher.
I would have thought it was perfectly obvious why liberals hate Bush. To their (well, our, because if I was American I would be classified as a liberal and would vote Democrat) way of thinking:
He should never have won the election in the first place - even ignoring what went down in Florida, if Nader hadn't been so stupid Gore would certainly have won.
Bush, and the Bush team, get a free pass from the mainstream press on their personal conduct and integrity on considerably more serious issues than what Clinton was given the third degree over.
Bush and the GOP regularly question the patriotism of liberals. Liberals tend to find this rather insulting. Some of the stuff going on gives liberals flashbacks to McCarthyism.
Government by prayer meeting is scary. Atheists, particularly, just don't understand the thought processes of Christian conservatives.
Bush and the Bush team knowingly and blatantly lied to attempt to get support for the war on Iraq (whatever it was about, it certainly wasn't the threat of Iraq's WMD), and hasn't been called by the mainstream media on it.
Bush makes the US look like an arrogant bully to the rest of the world, and just doesn't care (unlike the liberals who take editorials in The Guardian to heart).
Worst of all, there's absolutely nothing that can be done about it until 2004, and more than likely 2008.
There's plenty of other factors (Karl Rove, for instance), but the above should give you a good idea.
The EU is a very large economy which will only grow bigger as it takes in "New Europe" over the next decade or two. It can easily afford to do this, if it chooses.
The assumption that the rest of the world have the arse falling out of their pants and America is the only going doing OK economically is not only false, it's insulting.
One thing I've discovered is that it's impossible to do research for an hour at a time. To get anything done, you need to devote at least half a day (and preferably the whole day) to working on it. A student interrupting you for "just a couple of minutes" every hour or so is likely to lead to you achieving 3/5ths of bugger-all.
That's why I'll hide if I want to get any research done.
My first-year C programming project was to read a file and print out a table based on the contents of the file. Everything worked fine, except for some reason it appended a 'p' in a seemingly nondeterministic manner.
Nobody had bothered to teach us about debuggers at that stage, so we tried our best inserting diagnostic printf's everywhere, but despite days of searching we could never find what was causing it. In the end, we inserted some code to count to where the end of the string should have been and replace the "p" with a null character.
We got marked down anyway. I still have the source code somewhere, but I haven't dared to look at it for fear of provoking the code gods...:/
Hey, I learned how to write buffer overflow exploits in my final-year security class.
If you're playing defence, you need to understand how the offence does it's thing. No great shock there.
Pump and dump is a share-price scam...
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
It's a classical stock market fraud that I believe well predates the Internet.
First, you buy a significant parcel of shares in FsckedCorp, a small company on its last legs. Then you convince enough suckers that this stock is going to go up and so they should buy in. One way to reach suckers is of course spam. To further convince the suckers that this stock is on the way up, you trade FsckedCorp with your friends back and forth so that the quoted price indeed goes up. Then, you sell all the stock over the market to the suckers and you laugh all the way to the bank as the stock then drops like a rock.
Whilst it might be harder to track this spam back to the source, it can be done, and it's also clearly a crime under existing laws.
Seeing Barney the Dinosaur is being used for psychological torture of Iraqis, does this mean that we can start an international campaign to ban Barney?
But seriously, does that extend to allied forces, cos we (British) always seem to take a lot of hits from people allegedly on the same side as us.:o(
I don't know about this specific system, but the Australian government reckons that one of the reasons it's going to have to spend a crapload more money on defence is so that our systems can remain compatible with the US's systems.
I'm booked in for a colonoscopy next week.
Let me just detail how the procedure works, and why swallowing a video camera capsule would be the greatest thing since sliced bread by comparison. The squeamish are invited to go read the next post (or indeed the next story...).
First, you can't have anything to eat after breakfast the day before. In the afternoon, you have to swallow about 100 millilitres (a few ounces) of very unpleasant-tasting and very potent laxative. This is a big improvement from my first colonoscopy I had to drink THREE LITRES (nearly three quarts) of even more unpleasant-tasting and equally potent laxative of which about a third got vomited back up again. The results ensure you spend the next three hours on the toilet. That evening, you repeat the entire process, by which time not only is your arse sore, you're kinda hungry and you're nervous about the procedure coming up the next day.
After a restless night and no breakfast (so you're getting *really* hungry) you cart yourself off to the medical centre. They then pump you full of sedatives and whatnot so that although you can respond to prompting, you'll happily lie there whilst the doctors shove their magic tube up your arse and take pictures, and afterwards you won't remember it occurring. Afterwards, you sit there whilst the most dramatic effects of the drugs fade (you're concious and semi-withit after about half an hour, but you're not allowed to drive the rest of the day), and then you need to get a friend or family member to pick you up, take you home, and make sure you don't start bleeding profusely out the arse (it's called a perforated bowel and there's a small but finite risk of it occurring in the process). You're supposed to be watched for the rest of the day.
I'll have to have a screening like this every couple of years (and probably annually as I get older) for the rest of my life. Believe me, the chance to replace that rigmarole (or even just the actual procedure) with swallowing a pill and sitting there whilst the doctor plays remote-control submarine would be absolutely wonderful.
If open source suddenly became unviable for business users, Microsoft will have *everyone* else in the IT industry, including IBM, by the testicles (well, even more than they do now). IBM does not want to have Microsoft dictating terms to them into the never-never.
Therefore, in this case, it seems to me to be in their clear interest to act in the interests of squashing this lawsuit completely.
43 years on, the US is still using the same basic spyplane that Gary Powers flew - the U-2. Sure, they've been improved over that time quite a bit, but they're still basically the same craft. Missiles have improved too...
I presume that the Global Hawk will replace it at some stage. Similar sort of plane, really - take pictures from very high altitudes, except no pilot. If it gets shot down, it's not nearly as big a deal - and it can do duty cycles way longer than any human pilot could.
Slashdot Mirror
More prosaically, fuel cells seem like a practical option here.
Just because passwords are being sent in the clear, doesn't mean you can necessarily intercept them. You need to be able to intercept the packets containing the username/password combination from the remote user. You could do this at one of three locations: the remote machine, the server, or in transit. If you own the remote machine, you could just trojan *any* client used, so telnet isn't any worse off than a more secure protocol. If you control the server, the point is already moot.
So let's look at the "intercept the packets in transit" approach. You could try to sniff the packets by compromising one of the routers, or listening in on a wireless LAN if that's what the client was using, or installing a physical wiretap. None of these would work against a secure protocol.
Anyway, let's assume the attacker has intercepted a username/password combination for a particular machine. He could then do anything that user could. However, that doesn't get the attacker full control over the system. For that, the attacker could then use a local root exploit.
Additionally, many of the daemons that provide services like FTP or telnet have had many remote root holes in them.
So, whilst telnet and non-anonymous FTP have their security issues, and you probably shouldn't be running them and certainly shouldn't be exposing them to the world, exploiting their weaknesses isn't quite as easy as you might think.
There are two problems with this statement. One: it's too long, and it'll reduce the number of customers the kid can serve. The second is it's not credible - everybody knows that the fries are pretty much the same today as they are every day, so the server will sound sillier than they do already.
The place is a complete and utter basket case.
I have to agree that ales and whatnot are better chilled, but not ice-cold, but there is something to be said for a cold lager on a hot day...
Your better half lets you get away with keeping ecosystems going in the fridge???
I'm surprised nobody's ever tried a FPS based around the same idea as Paradroid - your character as a "wraith" that takes over other entities within the game, with a puzzle game to determine whether the takeover is successful or not.
Sydney does not have 100 Farenheit days in September, when the Olympics were. 30 seconds of googling can tell you that Sydney's record September temperature, over 140-odd years of record-keeping, was about 94 Farenheit (still reasonably warm, but *extremely* rare), and the mean daily maximum in September is a very pleasant 67 Farenheit. There was no need for the kind of fogging equipment that formed the key point of the terrorists' plan in the book. If you were going to use a fogging system at an Australian sporting event to spread Shiva, the only one of global interest that's held in really hot conditions is the Australian Open. Equally jarring, the dialogue involving Australians just didn't ring true. I doubt Tom Clancy has ever spoken to an Australian, let alone an Australian soldier, in his life.
Now, if he can't be bothered getting easy stuff like that right, how the heck are we supposed to find the rest of the book convincing?
Tom Clancy is something you read when you want to take your brain out of gear, rather than engage it. Great for reading on a plane, perhaps not so great for when you're on holidays and looking to prevent intellectual atrophy.
Oh, and seeing we've had the Ayn Rand enthusiasts, you could try some other flavours of political philosophy. Machiavelli's The Prince, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Marx's Communist Manifesto are all reasonably accessible and are certainly worth a read.
His first few books are decent thrillers, particularly Hunt For Red October and The Sum of All Fears (and perhaps Rainbow Six), but his later Jack Ryan books become ever-lengthier hymns to conservatism in general and Ronald Reagan in particular. If his editor had some spine he or she would send his drafts back with lots of red lines through the more egregious sermonizing.
Remember how much users liked those? Was there *anybody*, even a raw newbie, who found their suggestions vaguely useful? The technology to make such an interface useful doesn't seem to exist, unfortunately.
Risk management is still the right way to do this - it's just that the risks on both sides of the ledger can sometimes be much higher.
There's plenty of other factors (Karl Rove, for instance), but the above should give you a good idea.
The assumption that the rest of the world have the arse falling out of their pants and America is the only going doing OK economically is not only false, it's insulting.
That's why I'll hide if I want to get any research done.
Nobody had bothered to teach us about debuggers at that stage, so we tried our best inserting diagnostic printf's everywhere, but despite days of searching we could never find what was causing it. In the end, we inserted some code to count to where the end of the string should have been and replace the "p" with a null character.
We got marked down anyway. I still have the source code somewhere, but I haven't dared to look at it for fear of provoking the code gods ... :/
If you're playing defence, you need to understand how the offence does it's thing. No great shock there.
First, you buy a significant parcel of shares in FsckedCorp, a small company on its last legs. Then you convince enough suckers that this stock is going to go up and so they should buy in. One way to reach suckers is of course spam. To further convince the suckers that this stock is on the way up, you trade FsckedCorp with your friends back and forth so that the quoted price indeed goes up. Then, you sell all the stock over the market to the suckers and you laugh all the way to the bank as the stock then drops like a rock.
Whilst it might be harder to track this spam back to the source, it can be done, and it's also clearly a crime under existing laws.
The more out-there states of the US have rules on self-defence that are a lot more unrestrictive than just about anywhere else in the Western world.
Seeing Barney the Dinosaur is being used for psychological torture of Iraqis, does this mean that we can start an international campaign to ban Barney?
First, you can't have anything to eat after breakfast the day before. In the afternoon, you have to swallow about 100 millilitres (a few ounces) of very unpleasant-tasting and very potent laxative. This is a big improvement from my first colonoscopy I had to drink THREE LITRES (nearly three quarts) of even more unpleasant-tasting and equally potent laxative of which about a third got vomited back up again. The results ensure you spend the next three hours on the toilet. That evening, you repeat the entire process, by which time not only is your arse sore, you're kinda hungry and you're nervous about the procedure coming up the next day.
After a restless night and no breakfast (so you're getting *really* hungry) you cart yourself off to the medical centre. They then pump you full of sedatives and whatnot so that although you can respond to prompting, you'll happily lie there whilst the doctors shove their magic tube up your arse and take pictures, and afterwards you won't remember it occurring. Afterwards, you sit there whilst the most dramatic effects of the drugs fade (you're concious and semi-withit after about half an hour, but you're not allowed to drive the rest of the day), and then you need to get a friend or family member to pick you up, take you home, and make sure you don't start bleeding profusely out the arse (it's called a perforated bowel and there's a small but finite risk of it occurring in the process). You're supposed to be watched for the rest of the day.
I'll have to have a screening like this every couple of years (and probably annually as I get older) for the rest of my life. Believe me, the chance to replace that rigmarole (or even just the actual procedure) with swallowing a pill and sitting there whilst the doctor plays remote-control submarine would be absolutely wonderful.
Therefore, in this case, it seems to me to be in their clear interest to act in the interests of squashing this lawsuit completely.
I presume that the Global Hawk will replace it at some stage. Similar sort of plane, really - take pictures from very high altitudes, except no pilot. If it gets shot down, it's not nearly as big a deal - and it can do duty cycles way longer than any human pilot could.