... I really do wonder about the wisdom of some of the convenience mechanisms that have become commonplace in cars over the last decade or so. Centralised electrical locking: fine provided it supplements a mechanical mechanism, not so good if it becomes a single point of failure that can deny you access to your vehicle if it goes wrong. Remote locking and unlocking: nice, but what about side-effects?
And that's before you even start thinking about failure modes of the more recent 'intelligent' engine-management systems. There was a news report a couple of months ago in Switzerland - sorry, cannot find a URL for it now - of a number of incidents near Zurich where engines in several examples of a newly-introduced model had temporarily cut out for no apparent reason, fortunately without causing damage or injury despite being on busy motorways (and in one case in a tunnel). Suspicion was on interference with vehicle electronics, possibly related to radar emmissions from the nearby air traffic control.
<luddite>Makes me glad I'm still running an '88 VW with very little electronics. Perhaps I'll do best to replace it with a comparably simple second-hand car when the time comes to retire it.</luddite>
Did you like the taste? If you're like myself and most of my acquaintances from Uni time, probably not. A nasty, bitter taste - not just because for most of us our first experience was with the instant variety which was pretty vile in those days. After a while I got to tolerate it, now I like it, but I'm pretty sure it's a learned response from the caffeine jolt. (Ditto tea, BTW - I'm a Brit but couldn't stand that brew either till I reached Uni.)
Now we'll probably get a bill making it illegal to 'knowingly or recklessly cause or attempt to cause death of passers-by through the defenestration of a Texan or Texans'.
That $1 million-plus bill for Amalthea imaging is based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintaining Galileo's 12-member science team and data distribution system for another year (during much of which they would be idle).
But this, strictly speaking, is not required.....
The article goes on to summarise the possibilities for doing a "last fling" flyby that could cover more than just the small moon, for a cost of perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars. It would be a gamble on avoiding another radiation-triggered shutdown, but if the article is accurate, that's a possibility for the planned data collection anyway on this orbit.
Seems a pity not to rereview squeezing as much as possible out of what may well be this impressive craft's last pass through the inner reaches of the Jovian system. On the other hand, just a rereview would probably eat up another $1M:(
Who would possibly want to run an obsolete version of Windows(tm) that doesn't automatically phone home to check for this week's security patches?
-- Security patch, n. See EULA
FWIW: Not so "Groundbreaking".
on
Space Music
·
· Score: 1
The PR piece linked from the story talks of this as a "groundbreaking new work", but it's certainly not the first time that sounds derived from extraterrestrial signals have been mixed with chamber music - I heard an example in the early '70s in London (the work and the ensemble that played it were pretty instantly forgettable, and they also managed a cringingly underwhelming rendition of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, but that's another matter.)
What kind of fscking imbecile allows critical infrastructure control systems to be
connected to the Internet?
Individuals whose career prospects can be heavily affected by pressure from elected politicians and other PHBs to cut costs, perhaps?
The WP story claims that some intrusion tests into important infrastructure controls have been carried out and that the intruders were typically able to gain access. And there's this interesting comment on page 4 of the piece:
... But many of the
[SCADA remotely-operable control] systems rely on instantaneous responses and cannot tolerate authentication delays. And the devices deployed now lack the memory and bandwidth to use techniques such as "integrity checks" that are standard elsewhere.
One could reasonably hope that such systems would be on redundant dedicated control connections, for pity's sake. Or - if you're going to use the Internet for such critical control information (and for all I know it may well make sense, at least as a backup) then have them connected via a robust black box that does have the resources to operate a continuous dedicated secure Internet connection, and which then controls the SCADA systems through a local direct link.
<Oliver Hardy>Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten us into, Stanley</Oliver Hardy>
The GPL issue is irrelevant here, I think: this smells like the standard Windows{tm) business model: leverage dominance on the desktop to grow a profitable new market in which non-MS solutions will be at a competitive disadvantage, whether they involve the GPL or not. (There are of course laws on the books intended to restrain this sort of corporate behaviour, but unfortunately they seem to have been declared inoperative of late by the DoJ.)
Just because 'GPL BAD!' has been high on the company's (im-)propaganda hymn-sheet for the last few months doesn't mean that everything announced during that time has been constructed specifically to advance that agenda.
And whether or not this scheme will fly is another matter entirely: the resistance from other large businesses to Passport's original intent of giving MS the lion's share of authenticated e-commerce gives grounds for hope.
Ah, punched cards. What I miss most about them is having something reasonably sized and reasonably robust to use for recording the odds'n'ends of useful information that I need from time to time, but which isn't available in a convenient summary form in other documentation. Back in the late 70's some of us had whole sets of such cards held together with loose rings along with the official manufacturers' reference cards; occasionally you'd see that someone had platic-laminated a particularly vital card for additional longevity.
No worries about losing data if batteries ran out, either!
For me the thing that jumped out from your plea was this:
This is all taking place in a Windows environment, with an NT 4.0 file server, and I am far from an experienced Sysadmin.
Fair enough. Provided your job description doesn't require you to be a sysadmin wizard, then ask your management for the budget to
hire one as a consultant to help you put together a reliable backup solution (selection of products to use, file placement rules, drawing up procedures for backup and restoration, documenting it and providing user education, etc.). The solution should be one which doesn't require the users to do anything more than follow a few simple and well-documented guidelines, and preferably it should make their life massively easier if they do follow these guidelines rather than do their own thing. You should be able to sell this to your management by pointing out that the cost of a professional solution will be small compared with the lossage if the current situation continues (from what you say, they've already learnt this the hard way). Sell it to the users as a desirable upgrade that will make their lives easier and safer.
Do insist that you get to work with the hired consultant as the solution is specified - that way the consultant gets warned of any 'gotchas' that may be special to your local setup, and you get to learn properly how the solution works so you can modify it to meet new requirements that will come along in the future. Choose a consultant who has the right attitude and you'll also get a valuable lesson in how to build such solutions. And last, but by no means least, if there's a massive screwup and the solution breaks, you may be able to transfer at least some of the blame;-)
This is, unfortunately, not particularly surprising. The UK government Home Office ( = department of the interior, and responsible for police, courts, customs, etc) has a long and dishonourable track record of using every opportunity and excuse to extend the powers of the organisations it is supposed to supervise, and with as little independent oversight as it can persuade Parliament to swallow. The initial form of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill introduced into Parliament a couple of years ago in effect merely formalised the authority of government agencies to tap electronic communications as they wished without any provision for independent judicial oversight. (A new meaning of the word "Regulation", but abuse of the English language seems to be standard practice where controversial legislation is concerned.)
An extraordinary degree of opposition from all parts of the political spectrum succeeded in getting the worst aspects of that accursed Bill amended, though the resulting Act that passed into law is still highly objectionable. Crucially, some aspects of the way the RIP Act would actually work in detail were left unspecified in the legislation, to be clarified as regulations to be drawn up later by - yep, you've guessed it - the Home Office. This is fairly standard practice in the UK, but in this particular case one has to conclude that the parliamentarians who were trying to pull the teeth of the monster ended up by giving it a big yet kiss.
Well, now we have the detailed clarification from the Home Office of who should be allowed to snoop on our communications. A grab-bag of everyone from government departments with responsibility for sensitive areas like nuclear power to hundreds of thousands of minor civil servants and elected officials up and down the country, presented to Parliament in a form that doesn't even need further legislation to come into force - it's more in the nature of an administrative order. I will nevertheless admit that I'm a little surprised at how over the top this list of authorised organisations is. The Post Office is authorised to snoop on electronic communications? Any local authority (ie local town or district council)? Does the Home Office perhaps believe that snooping on electronic communications is going to help deliver letters on time, or keep the sidewalks free from dog-poop? More likely you'll end up with Councilor Bigbucks-the-Builder, head of the local building & planning department, trawling for information about the pesky folks who are orchestrating a campaign against selling off the school playing-field for a multi-story office development.
FWIW, my guess is that the more extreme entries in the wish-list are sacrificial and that the Home Office will give them up if pushed - though it will do this with the same bloody-mindedness and grudging bad grace that it displayed throughout the discussion on the original RIP Act which this 'clarifies' - so that some other entries which would otherwise be contentions, for example the government Department of the Environment - will slip through unopposed. Cynical, but unfortunately standard practice. I'd guess that other aims of such an extensive set of authorised organisations are to make the task of oversight as difficult as possible, and to maximise the uncertainty about whether a particular request for traffic information to an ISP can legitimately be resisted.
Brits: write to your MPs - politely but firmly. Look at the list of bodies that the Home Office wants to authorise to snoop - the wish-list is up on the government's web site here. Ask your MP to consider what range of offenses and security concerns it is reasonable to use traffic analysis and access information to investigate, and what organisations are going to be directly involved in such investigations.
(Sigh) It took the BSE and foot'n'mouth debacles before the UK government finally reluctantly accepted that the old Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries & Food had become nothing more than an in-house lobbey for the agribusiness, and could no longer be trusted with supervising food safety. I shudder to think how long it will be before it is accepted that justice and supervision of law enforcement are now too important to be left to the Home Office.
The 'satellite telemetry' link on the St Andrew's University Sea Mammal Research Group site gives more information about the technical aspects of the seal tracking: messages limited to just 32 bytes so much of the time only summary information is sent (out-of-water times, dive times) with option to get more details of selected dives.
Consumers could save digital broadcasts on DVDs, and transfer broadcasts for playback on different devices in the same house, they said. But they probably(my emphasis) would not be able to e-mail an episode of "The Simpsons" to a friend, or make it available on a file-sharing network like KaZaA.
So there's going to have to be some mechanism built into all the electronic information transport mechanisms commonly available to consumers that will look for and honour the "It's MINE, I tell you, all MINE!!!!" flag? Even when the content has been transformed into a format suitable for transport?
I wish them luck. Perhaps the broadcasters have finally found a form of sufficiently advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic (nods to the shade of Arthur C Clarke); would they now mind turning their attention to producing something that's worth watching even once?
Somehow, I have a feeling that for this plan to fly they're going to have to get some more laws passed by their tame sock-puppets in the legislatures. If only because otherwise they'd have to fund the requisite extensive changes to the communications infrastructure themselves, which would doubtless bring about the end of civilisation as they know it....
There's a lot of this sort of legislation about at the moment, and like many other people I have a strong suspicion that the law enforcement and intelligence communities are using 9/11 and the prospect of even worse to obtain a blank cheque for everything they've wanted for years, but have been unable to get because of the checks and balances in the political systems that they serve. And it is doubtless in their own interest to play up the dangers.
However, the uncomfortable fact remains that a group of martyr-minded people came up with a new terrorist method and succeeded in using it, with devastating consequences. Whether or not increased surveillance of the general population (in combination with a less SNAFU-d domestic intelligence organisation) would have prevented their success in this instance isn't clear. But - and this is a point that I wish the Franklin-quoting libertarian tendence showed more signs of appreciating - it might be able to reduce the likelihood of a similarly-creative group succeeding in some future endevour. The hard questions are to estimate (and maximise) any extra margin of safety that giving up some personal privacy will buy, and how to minimise the risk of misuse of additional data that is collected. Who watches the watchmen, indeed?
A few things that would make me a lot less unhappy about these sorts of abusable powers:
A requirement that they lapse automatically unless explicitly renewed by the elected legislature on a regular basis.
Clear limits on what collected data can be used for. If the FBI (for example) correlates someone's finances and travel patterns and decides that the person warrants closer scrutiny, one may regard this as "reasonable" in the context of identifying potential terrorists. But passing any resulting interesting snippets on to the IRS (for example) should be proscribed.
Strong sanctions on any misuse of the new extensive powers: if extraordinary circumstances require that public servants be granted extraordinary powers, then they must be held to correspondingly high standards, and be subject to correspondingly stong punishment if they fall below them. China's occasional flurries of executions of Party officials convicted of corruption come to mind, although these are undoubtedly more cosmetic than effectual.
(Hits 'Submit' and leans back. Thinks "I wonder how many -1 Troll marks this will collect?")
Looking at the PDF presented to the Senate Judiciary commitee, I noticed that this "Copy Protection Technical Working Group" is represented on the first page as including representatives of consumer groups, but on page 7 these aren't mentioned. The CPTWG site itself isn't exactly overwhelmingly informative about its membership, either.
WTF does the government have to do with creating domain names???
Back in the 19th century, Michael Faraday was asked by a member of the audience at one of his popular Royal Society lectures on the new science of electricity, of what possible practical use this new thing could be.
The questioner was Gladstone, later to be Prime Minister, at the time the finance minister.
Faraday's caustic answer: "One day, Sir, you shall tax it."
Slashdot Mirror
And that's before you even start thinking about failure modes of the more recent 'intelligent' engine-management systems. There was a news report a couple of months ago in Switzerland - sorry, cannot find a URL for it now - of a number of incidents near Zurich where engines in several examples of a newly-introduced model had temporarily cut out for no apparent reason, fortunately without causing damage or injury despite being on busy motorways (and in one case in a tunnel). Suspicion was on interference with vehicle electronics, possibly related to radar emmissions from the nearby air traffic control.
<luddite>Makes me glad I'm still running an '88 VW with very little electronics. Perhaps I'll do best to replace it with a comparably simple second-hand car when the time comes to retire it.</luddite>
Did you like the taste? If you're like myself and most of my acquaintances from Uni time, probably not. A nasty, bitter taste - not just because for most of us our first experience was with the instant variety which was pretty vile in those days. After a while I got to tolerate it, now I like it, but I'm pretty sure it's a learned response from the caffeine jolt. (Ditto tea, BTW - I'm a Brit but couldn't stand that brew either till I reached Uni.)
Coffee without caffeine seems somehow pointless.
Now we'll probably get a bill making it illegal to 'knowingly or recklessly cause or attempt to cause death of passers-by through the defenestration of a Texan or Texans'.
Points:
If the Volkwagen automobile group diversified into musical instruments, would their robot bass player be an Audi Quattro?
Spare us, please. If you can afford to run a mistress on the side, you can afford a taxi.
</cynic>
Seems a pity not to rereview squeezing as much as possible out of what may well be this impressive craft's last pass through the inner reaches of the Jovian system. On the other hand, just a rereview would probably eat up another $1M :(
See also plebiscite, something that ICANN would never countenance.
--
Security patch, n. See EULA
The PR piece linked from the story talks of this as a "groundbreaking new work", but it's certainly not the first time that sounds derived from extraterrestrial signals have been mixed with chamber music - I heard an example in the early '70s in London (the work and the ensemble that played it were pretty instantly forgettable, and they also managed a cringingly underwhelming rendition of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, but that's another matter.)
No. Ramjets don't have compressors.
The difference is that a jet engine uses oxygen from the atmosphere as one of its fuels. Rockets carry all their fuel(s) with them.
The WP story claims that some intrusion tests into important infrastructure controls have been carried out and that the intruders were typically able to gain access. And there's this interesting comment on page 4 of the piece:
One could reasonably hope that such systems would be on redundant dedicated control connections, for pity's sake. Or - if you're going to use the Internet for such critical control information (and for all I know it may well make sense, at least as a backup) then have them connected via a robust black box that does have the resources to operate a continuous dedicated secure Internet connection, and which then controls the SCADA systems through a local direct link.<Oliver Hardy>Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten us into, Stanley</Oliver Hardy>
Just because 'GPL BAD!' has been high on the company's (im-)propaganda hymn-sheet for the last few months doesn't mean that everything announced during that time has been constructed specifically to advance that agenda.
And whether or not this scheme will fly is another matter entirely: the resistance from other large businesses to Passport's original intent of giving MS the lion's share of authenticated e-commerce gives grounds for hope.
Ah, punched cards. What I miss most about them is having something reasonably sized and reasonably robust to use for recording the odds'n'ends of useful information that I need from time to time, but which isn't available in a convenient summary form in other documentation. Back in the late 70's some of us had whole sets of such cards held together with loose rings along with the official manufacturers' reference cards; occasionally you'd see that someone had platic-laminated a particularly vital card for additional longevity.
No worries about losing data if batteries ran out, either!
Fair enough. Provided your job description doesn't require you to be a sysadmin wizard, then ask your management for the budget to hire one as a consultant to help you put together a reliable backup solution (selection of products to use, file placement rules, drawing up procedures for backup and restoration, documenting it and providing user education, etc.). The solution should be one which doesn't require the users to do anything more than follow a few simple and well-documented guidelines, and preferably it should make their life massively easier if they do follow these guidelines rather than do their own thing. You should be able to sell this to your management by pointing out that the cost of a professional solution will be small compared with the lossage if the current situation continues (from what you say, they've already learnt this the hard way). Sell it to the users as a desirable upgrade that will make their lives easier and safer.
Do insist that you get to work with the hired consultant as the solution is specified - that way the consultant gets warned of any 'gotchas' that may be special to your local setup, and you get to learn properly how the solution works so you can modify it to meet new requirements that will come along in the future. Choose a consultant who has the right attitude and you'll also get a valuable lesson in how to build such solutions. And last, but by no means least, if there's a massive screwup and the solution breaks, you may be able to transfer at least some of the blame ;-)
Good luck.
An extraordinary degree of opposition from all parts of the political spectrum succeeded in getting the worst aspects of that accursed Bill amended, though the resulting Act that passed into law is still highly objectionable. Crucially, some aspects of the way the RIP Act would actually work in detail were left unspecified in the legislation, to be clarified as regulations to be drawn up later by - yep, you've guessed it - the Home Office. This is fairly standard practice in the UK, but in this particular case one has to conclude that the parliamentarians who were trying to pull the teeth of the monster ended up by giving it a big yet kiss.
Well, now we have the detailed clarification from the Home Office of who should be allowed to snoop on our communications. A grab-bag of everyone from government departments with responsibility for sensitive areas like nuclear power to hundreds of thousands of minor civil servants and elected officials up and down the country, presented to Parliament in a form that doesn't even need further legislation to come into force - it's more in the nature of an administrative order. I will nevertheless admit that I'm a little surprised at how over the top this list of authorised organisations is. The Post Office is authorised to snoop on electronic communications? Any local authority (ie local town or district council)? Does the Home Office perhaps believe that snooping on electronic communications is going to help deliver letters on time, or keep the sidewalks free from dog-poop? More likely you'll end up with Councilor Bigbucks-the-Builder, head of the local building & planning department, trawling for information about the pesky folks who are orchestrating a campaign against selling off the school playing-field for a multi-story office development.
FWIW, my guess is that the more extreme entries in the wish-list are sacrificial and that the Home Office will give them up if pushed - though it will do this with the same bloody-mindedness and grudging bad grace that it displayed throughout the discussion on the original RIP Act which this 'clarifies' - so that some other entries which would otherwise be contentions, for example the government Department of the Environment - will slip through unopposed. Cynical, but unfortunately standard practice. I'd guess that other aims of such an extensive set of authorised organisations are to make the task of oversight as difficult as possible, and to maximise the uncertainty about whether a particular request for traffic information to an ISP can legitimately be resisted.
Brits: write to your MPs - politely but firmly. Look at the list of bodies that the Home Office wants to authorise to snoop - the wish-list is up on the government's web site here. Ask your MP to consider what range of offenses and security concerns it is reasonable to use traffic analysis and access information to investigate, and what organisations are going to be directly involved in such investigations.
(Sigh) It took the BSE and foot'n'mouth debacles before the UK government finally reluctantly accepted that the old Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries & Food had become nothing more than an in-house lobbey for the agribusiness, and could no longer be trusted with supervising food safety. I shudder to think how long it will be before it is accepted that justice and supervision of law enforcement are now too important to be left to the Home Office.
(And we find 56kB/sec slow....)
But isn't the waiting and liquoring the main point of the exercise?
So there's going to have to be some mechanism built into all the electronic information transport mechanisms commonly available to consumers that will look for and honour the "It's MINE, I tell you, all MINE!!!!" flag? Even when the content has been transformed into a format suitable for transport?
I wish them luck. Perhaps the broadcasters have finally found a form of sufficiently advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic (nods to the shade of Arthur C Clarke); would they now mind turning their attention to producing something that's worth watching even once?
Somehow, I have a feeling that for this plan to fly they're going to have to get some more laws passed by their tame sock-puppets in the legislatures. If only because otherwise they'd have to fund the requisite extensive changes to the communications infrastructure themselves, which would doubtless bring about the end of civilisation as they know it....
Don't the CC companies have rules and guidelines on this that they require their partner businesses to follow?
However, the uncomfortable fact remains that a group of martyr-minded people came up with a new terrorist method and succeeded in using it, with devastating consequences. Whether or not increased surveillance of the general population (in combination with a less SNAFU-d domestic intelligence organisation) would have prevented their success in this instance isn't clear. But - and this is a point that I wish the Franklin-quoting libertarian tendence showed more signs of appreciating - it might be able to reduce the likelihood of a similarly-creative group succeeding in some future endevour. The hard questions are to estimate (and maximise) any extra margin of safety that giving up some personal privacy will buy, and how to minimise the risk of misuse of additional data that is collected. Who watches the watchmen, indeed?
A few things that would make me a lot less unhappy about these sorts of abusable powers:
(Hits 'Submit' and leans back. Thinks "I wonder how many -1 Troll marks this will collect?")
If you're a budding kernel hacker, or a wannabe approximation to one, look it over as an example of another way of doing things.
Looking at the PDF presented to the Senate Judiciary commitee, I noticed that this "Copy Protection Technical Working Group" is represented on the first page as including representatives of consumer groups, but on page 7 these aren't mentioned. The CPTWG site itself isn't exactly overwhelmingly informative about its membership, either.
The questioner was Gladstone, later to be Prime Minister, at the time the finance minister.
Faraday's caustic answer: "One day, Sir, you shall tax it."