You are describing signal jamming tech (single-channel, sine-wave) that is decades old.
Modern EW platforms are capable of covering entire RF bands, adapting and following hopping schemes, and efficiently spreading their energy over seemingly pseudo-random code-schemes.
In the end, there's only so much you can do with modulation techniques - it comes down to signal strength - and the inverse-square-law pretty much says that who-ever gets closer wins.
The control signal from the US base comes likely via LEO sat-link or over-the-horizon AWACS-type platform - both of which are going to be hundreds of kilometers away. You're not going to need "absurdly more powerful" anything to interfere with that. I have a wide-band I/Q generator able to modulate any mathematically describable code-sheme - which I could then hook up to our MIL-STD-461 susceptibility testing-chamber-amp - and knowing something about the signal band I could easily get the right high-gain antenna to track the bastard off the sky... and all this is with off-the-shelf COTS equipment!
We will probably never know how the plane came down - unless some new Manning leaks the info to us: US gov won't admit anything - and all Iranian 'proof' is subject to doubt...
Assuming the worst: the control channel was hacked and the drone was guided down - would involve immense sophistication even with assuming they've cracked all security features in the system - you'd still need to reverse-engineer the protocols, plan and test the attack mode, and execute it in the right signal-environment - not to mention build a working replica of the guidance platform and human interface control and train someone to pilot the thing down.
Something like this would need superior surveillance over a long period - outside help would probably help a lot: Russian signal intelligence satellites, combined with Chinese cyber experts most likely - already the intel community is speculating that the Russian and the Chinese are the real end-customer here for this 'delivery'.
Someone here mentioned a previous intercept of a video feed from a US drone over Irak: that was intercepted between a relay and unencrypted satellite link - not the drone and ground-station. Any modern military tech can't possibly use an unencrypted control channel in the battle field these days!?!
Someone else mentioned that the control signal comes from above: satellite or AWACS aircraft - and shouldn't be able to be intercepted from a ground station. Well, that's all relative if its simply a matter of signal strength. And who sais the intercept came from down below - both R and C have satellites above...
The only fact we know about the drone guidance system is what the US military told us: in the event of lost communication the drone should return automatically back to base.
Now we can speculate how that guidance logic would work: if it is like the one on current smaller Israeli drones for example - it is simply a GPS-autopilot back to home co-ordinates - which is subject to false/spoofed GPS signal that the Iranians could've subjected the drone to - GPS signal is notoriously weak, even with upward pointing antennas it might be overridden from ground - and then you'd only have to drown out the control signal to make the drone go into autopilot mode, and land the thing in the false co-ordinates provided by the ground signal. The Iranians surely know where the home base was so it would be simple matter of shifting the reference coordinates to their own airfield or landing area in the desert...
Here we go again, every couple of years an article relating to avionics interference shows up in slashdot and I have to come out of my cave to save the world...
Just because you are 'an engineer' who 'works with RF' doesn't mean you know tiddly about avionics. I actually work at an avionics lab and repair and test these devices and have actually measured RF interference of avionics systems, both on the ground and in the air. Its my job.
As a fellow engineer I could give you a 5 minute brief on how the ILS system works, another 15 to go through explaining all the board level receiver circuits, data busses and another 20 to go throught the navigation computer and autopilot at block diagram level - and afterwards you'd be rolling on the floor laughing to the very idea of a passenger ipod being able to interfere with 'the ILS system'... unfortunately my superiors are hunting me down to lock me back to my cave now.
Perhaps you could've slightly improved your piece of 'code' before slashing it here, but then anything get plastered around here these days...
Google maps DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is based on SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data over most of the globe. You can download the original processed data from NASA and apply it to any GIS software of your choice.
Then with a single click of the elevation tool you can raise or lower the global sea level by x meters of your choice. Was playing around with this 7 years ago when the data came out. Now bored of it.
Like some have pointed out already, the flood fill algorithm is a bit pointless since tsunamis don't behave like flood filled algorithms. A more informative map would simply color areas more than a certain height green showing areas that are definitely out of reach of a tsunami of certain height. Then people could at least see where its relatively safe by inputting the maximum wave height.
With large tsunamis we do not even have scientific data on how far inland they could actually travel. Some geologists for example speculate that a super tsunami might have swept across the whole of the Australian continent.
Who reads slashdot TFA:s anyway these days? All they do is linkfuck you into some blogfarm multipage sprawl with regurgitated 'content' from the actual source. Most of the time you have to google the original source: corporate press-release, university research group submission etc. because they can't be bothered to put in an actual hyper-link to their hyper-fucking-document!
it does not impact "shiny media" such as CDs or DVDs that contain Autorun files. We are aware that someone could write malware to take advantage of that, but we haven't seen it in the wild. (We also think malware on shiny media would be less likely to have widespread impact, because people burn CDs less often than they insert USB drives.)
So how much would it cost to run even a low level log of all traffic (http requests? email headers? attachement file names?). I wouldn't even know how to begin to estimate.
However I do know what storage costs and despite all the hoopla about cheap consumer USB-harddrives, real storage is still expensive.
Recently I looked around for the cheapest possible reliable enterprise storage for a medium size company and their daughter companies.
A Proliant DL380 with an expansion bay and second raid controller for 8 more disks could conceivably cheaply hold 16x500G disks, 4x4 RAID5 = 6TB of usable space, with a cost of...
So anybody at all can be an engineer if they just decide so?
Yes! exactly. Engineering is about a state of mind. You can sit in a school all you like but you'll never become an engineer.
An engineer is someone who makes things, makes things better, as is passionate about it. The questions is: when did I become an engineer?
When I took apart my first machine and put it back together?
When I designed my first circuit, programmed my first code?
When I sold my first design, setup and registered my own business?
You can cry into your pillow all you like about formal qualifications - the most successful and inspiring engineers I know never benefited from or cared much for the education they went through - they were already engineers.
As an engineer I work on things everyday that have direct and immediate consequences in the physical world. Hence my errors of judgment or bias have a direct feedback to me. The physical world is a hard unforgiving taskmaster.
A politician is buffered from any consequences or feedbacks to his actions by distance; the bureaucracy surrounding him as well as the physical disconnect.
As an engineer I must compromise between contradictory and opposite qualities and find practical combinations that satisfy a multitude of specifications and demands. I must accommodate as well as critically evaluate the demands of users, marketing and design and architecture people, and come up with a mutual understanding of what they actually want within the means of what is possible.
A politician is defined only by what that supports him in power - those who fund and elect him for the next term.
The limits with my work are the laws of physics - both direct resources: money, time, people - as well as all kinds of non-intuitive ones: scaling, flow rate, logistic function, probability distribution. Hence my sense for the 'truth' is not based on passion but experimentation, and I appear unsure and as having no confidence in my 'opinions' - which I don't really have at all, as most people understand them. An opinion for me is always something I can explain - at least to myself - and most of the time to others. It is this process that both helps me understand my own reasoning better (keeps me honest to myself), as well as provides a further insight into my cognition as well as to some extent of those of others.
A politician swims in the superficial memes of popular sentiment. He maybe an ideologue but a successful one is also a pragmatist: he shapes truth into what is most convenient for the occasion and in doing so may actually benefit from self-delusion, even intentional and conscious.
It maybe be argued that in this way a politician is more 'human' than an engineer and thus is more suited to lead us. And that my friends is the conclusion that cost me my mod points.
The funny thing is, the moment I pressed submit on that one, I realized I had been brainwashed by too much Colbert, and ashamed for having no original thought of my own.
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
Windows Server 2008 R2. Not that IPv6 implementation itself is wrong - its just everything else surrounding it: from dcpromo to the evil Network and Sharing Center and bloody stupid restricted control of firewall profiles.
Most MS technet comments just end up recommending disabling ipv6 as 'the solution'.
Result: hell'va load of windows servers on the web with just ipv4 soon...
Use tools to fit the job:
1. on the desktop work on Windows or OSX with linux on VMware or VirtualBox or SSH to a separate hardware.
2. leave linuxes for what they were meant for: server and embedded with remote CLI interface.
There will be less pain and boring/. articles in the world...
Interesting stance from linux-heads... I'm a troll for pointing out the obvious. I mean really, does anybody genuinely believe that linux will ever be able to catch up enough with the industry and consumers on the desktop to be noticed? I think its a lost cause.
And those hours spent on programming the latest desktop graphics drivers could be spent on something useful - for example more work for Asterisk (PBX) and Racoon (KAME) for example. Beta testing and debugging these has been well worth the effort at least in my projects - there is nothing comparable that could do secure IP telephony other than a linux-server - but if I need to work on graphics or browse the web I have a macbook for that...
IF some hardware or software vendor releases or updates a product or a feature which lacks Linux support in someway
DEFINE 'd as anything short of releasing fully supported and documented binary drivers with source
THEN GOTO submit horror outrage on/.
Why do you need to be on the hardware running linux browsing the web?
Use tools to fit the job:
1. on the desktop work on Windows or OSX with linux on VMware or VirtualBox or SSH to a separate hardware.
2. leave linuxes for what they were meant for: server and embedded with remote CLI interface.
There will be less pain and boring/. articles in the world...
I predict they will cruise around the world taking photos of every harbour, ship and shoreline.
I also predict they will get into trouble for doing that.
All of the world's marine traffic in real-time is already on Google... (ok, its basically just overlayed AIS data, but still its effing cool ! just try to find an application that is cooler! or is it wetter?)
I don't know where in the wikipedia article you picked up the 900 figure but that's a frequency for short range UHF: basically line-of-sight propagation. Indeed the cheap mass-produced consumer devices you mention are the greatest sources of radio interference in todays environment. But so would any kind of broadband transmitter on unbalanced unmatched unshielded transmission lines...
The reason why some (successful) smart metering systems have adopted the mobile phone network for sending the data back the utilities is the very reason of RF interference of other methods. Power companies would of course like to use PLC to send the data up the electrical cables from the customer premises to the utilities hub but there are a lot of technical problems with that.
This is the crux of the problem in Smart metering. The last mile problem. The industry does not have standardized protocols or well tested technologies yet for power line communications.
Of the arguments voiced by the good hipp.. citizens of Marin County, the radio interference problem is a legitimate one, that even the power companies themselves struggle with. Its not that it messed up your wibe man but that the data throughput is unpredictable and there is no 'one-fit-for-all' technology that works in all environments, from city center to rural dwelling.
In simple terms, its all about bandwith and transmission theory. You can't expect to push a great amount of data realiably through wires made for electrical mains transmission, certainly not with any kind of high frequencies we are used to with our modern gadgets. The power companies have long used remote control modems at crawling speeds which use the overhead powerlines as transmission medium but those are pretty uniform in characteristics, and you only need to go from one grid node to the next with them. The last-mile end, the consumer end of the utilities are often a huge mess, with old and new wiring, switching and filtering all over the place. A bit like the POTS network was before telcos started tearing out their whole almost-last-mile infra and replacing it with fibers with DSLAMs at the end. The last mile can be anything from a mile to dozens of miles depending on where you are located on the city network. And although it doesn't take many bits of data to send this info down to the power company, you need to multiply that by the number of customers on a simple branch of the network which could be tens of thousands. even more. And every broadcast needs to be isolated from others. Think of collision zones on ethernet except you only have sub MHz bandwidth to work with and a crazy chaotic switching and transmission line characteristics.
Then there is also the very real problem of radio interference. Mains wires weren't designed or installed for carrying any kind of radio frequencies. Consequently it is all too easy to make them into nice ideal broadband antennas that radiate your signal into outer space. Many commercial PLC trials have stumbled upon this problem with local FCC's shutting them down for interfering with electrical appliances, control circuits other commercial radio systems. Furthermore, consumer appliances themselves increasingly interfere with anykind of PLC. Computers and TV's are pretty good sources of nasty radio noise flowing back to the utilities mains, but the worst culprit are all kinds of new compact fluorescent and LED lighting systems that use cheap crappy switching. Some of them are like plugging an electromagnetic countermeasures pod to your mains to make sure no data can get through!
The TFA mentions Hams (Amateur Radio Operators) as one of the opposing gangs and I can tell you that we don't take kindly to being bundled with bloody hippies! We tend to actually know WTF we are talking about! often alerting and advising the FCC and industry on how to best use the limited spectrum we all need to share. Hell, pretty much all the hams I know work for the industrial-complex: IT, telcos, utilities, defence...
The BBC Newsnight program on the issue (from last February) explains the issue pretty well. Watch it.
The funny/disturbing thing is why did it take 10 months! for some official at the UK banking industry association to have a revelation/panic and issue such a stupid letter. The professor's response to them is pretty effing on!
I think he should've said quite blunty: " listen, our students figured this weakness in your system during their free time, using our shoe string budget". Do you really think high tech criminals and criminal organizations with millions or even more at their disposal won't reproduce this? All you need to do is read the bloody manual! "
If I was a banker/bank/building society I would seriously consider funding research into this instead of whining about it. I mean those students don't have what the criminals can easily get with just money. At least buy them the latest oscilloscope/logic analyser for god sake! - its a miniscule fraction of the profits the banks make - or even what they stand to loose from such weaknesses...
It isn't just hardware that is the problem. Have a look at support forums for Windows Server 2008 R2 for example. The amount of problems there are at getting IPv6 working 'seamlessly' at every level and service in mixed network environment is a nightmare. The dual IPv4/IPv6 implementations for network interfaces and services are full of riddles and holes. No wonder even Microsoft's own engineers propose 'solutions' like "turn off IPv6". Well that is actually what every admin I know who has struggled with 2K8R2 has done. As long as you don't 'need' IPv6 for anything yet, why bother. There is enough other shit to shovel meanwhile - we'll deal with it when it comes.
Slashdot Mirror
You are describing signal jamming tech (single-channel, sine-wave) that is decades old.
Modern EW platforms are capable of covering entire RF bands, adapting and following hopping schemes, and efficiently spreading their energy over seemingly pseudo-random code-schemes.
In the end, there's only so much you can do with modulation techniques - it comes down to signal strength - and the inverse-square-law pretty much says that who-ever gets closer wins.
The control signal from the US base comes likely via LEO sat-link or over-the-horizon AWACS-type platform - both of which are going to be hundreds of kilometers away. You're not going to need "absurdly more powerful" anything to interfere with that. I have a wide-band I/Q generator able to modulate any mathematically describable code-sheme - which I could then hook up to our MIL-STD-461 susceptibility testing-chamber-amp - and knowing something about the signal band I could easily get the right high-gain antenna to track the bastard off the sky... and all this is with off-the-shelf COTS equipment!
We will probably never know how the plane came down - unless some new Manning leaks the info to us: US gov won't admit anything - and all Iranian 'proof' is subject to doubt...
Assuming the worst: the control channel was hacked and the drone was guided down - would involve immense sophistication even with assuming they've cracked all security features in the system - you'd still need to reverse-engineer the protocols, plan and test the attack mode, and execute it in the right signal-environment - not to mention build a working replica of the guidance platform and human interface control and train someone to pilot the thing down.
Something like this would need superior surveillance over a long period - outside help would probably help a lot: Russian signal intelligence satellites, combined with Chinese cyber experts most likely - already the intel community is speculating that the Russian and the Chinese are the real end-customer here for this 'delivery'.
Someone here mentioned a previous intercept of a video feed from a US drone over Irak: that was intercepted between a relay and unencrypted satellite link - not the drone and ground-station. Any modern military tech can't possibly use an unencrypted control channel in the battle field these days!?!
Someone else mentioned that the control signal comes from above: satellite or AWACS aircraft - and shouldn't be able to be intercepted from a ground station. Well, that's all relative if its simply a matter of signal strength. And who sais the intercept came from down below - both R and C have satellites above...
The only fact we know about the drone guidance system is what the US military told us: in the event of lost communication the drone should return automatically back to base.
Now we can speculate how that guidance logic would work: if it is like the one on current smaller Israeli drones for example - it is simply a GPS-autopilot back to home co-ordinates - which is subject to false/spoofed GPS signal that the Iranians could've subjected the drone to - GPS signal is notoriously weak, even with upward pointing antennas it might be overridden from ground - and then you'd only have to drown out the control signal to make the drone go into autopilot mode, and land the thing in the false co-ordinates provided by the ground signal. The Iranians surely know where the home base was so it would be simple matter of shifting the reference coordinates to their own airfield or landing area in the desert...
See also my follow up reply with a link to an actual published academic study on avionics interference. Have fun.
Here we go again, every couple of years an article relating to avionics interference shows up in slashdot and I have to come out of my cave to save the world...
Here is something I wrote back in 2006 about this same issue.
Just because you are 'an engineer' who 'works with RF' doesn't mean you know tiddly about avionics. I actually work at an avionics lab and repair and test these devices and have actually measured RF interference of avionics systems, both on the ground and in the air. Its my job.
As a fellow engineer I could give you a 5 minute brief on how the ILS system works, another 15 to go through explaining all the board level receiver circuits, data busses and another 20 to go throught the navigation computer and autopilot at block diagram level - and afterwards you'd be rolling on the floor laughing to the very idea of a passenger ipod being able to interfere with 'the ILS system'... unfortunately my superiors are hunting me down to lock me back to my cave now.
For others see what I wrote about Ultracrepidarianism
Perhaps you could've slightly improved your piece of 'code' before slashing it here, but then anything get plastered around here these days...
Google maps DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is based on SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data over most of the globe. You can download the original processed data from NASA and apply it to any GIS software of your choice.
Then with a single click of the elevation tool you can raise or lower the global sea level by x meters of your choice. Was playing around with this 7 years ago when the data came out. Now bored of it.
Like some have pointed out already, the flood fill algorithm is a bit pointless since tsunamis don't behave like flood filled algorithms. A more informative map would simply color areas more than a certain height green showing areas that are definitely out of reach of a tsunami of certain height. Then people could at least see where its relatively safe by inputting the maximum wave height. With large tsunamis we do not even have scientific data on how far inland they could actually travel. Some geologists for example speculate that a super tsunami might have swept across the whole of the Australian continent.
How about also linking to the original source.
Who reads slashdot TFA:s anyway these days? All they do is linkfuck you into some blogfarm multipage sprawl with regurgitated 'content' from the actual source. Most of the time you have to google the original source: corporate press-release, university research group submission etc. because they can't be bothered to put in an actual hyper-link to their hyper-fucking-document!
Sincerely TimBL
They are just messing with windows registry settings for autorun. Any admin concerned with security has already done this manually since conflicker.
The only sure way to kill this vector for infection is :
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"
So how much would it cost to run even a low level log of all traffic (http requests? email headers? attachement file names?). I wouldn't even know how to begin to estimate.
However I do know what storage costs and despite all the hoopla about cheap consumer USB-harddrives, real storage is still expensive.
Recently I looked around for the cheapest possible reliable enterprise storage for a medium size company and their daughter companies.
A Proliant DL380 with an expansion bay and second raid controller for 8 more disks could conceivably cheaply hold 16x500G disks, 4x4 RAID5 = 6TB of usable space, with a cost of ...
So anybody at all can be an engineer if they just decide so?
Yes! exactly. Engineering is about a state of mind. You can sit in a school all you like but you'll never become an engineer.
An engineer is someone who makes things, makes things better, as is passionate about it. The questions is: when did I become an engineer?
When I took apart my first machine and put it back together?
When I designed my first circuit, programmed my first code?
When I sold my first design, setup and registered my own business?
You can cry into your pillow all you like about formal qualifications - the most successful and inspiring engineers I know never benefited from or cared much for the education they went through - they were already engineers.
I love messing with people's heads. They are so deliciously predictable most of the time. Gives you a kind of high...
As an engineer I work on things everyday that have direct and immediate consequences in the physical world. Hence my errors of judgment or bias have a direct feedback to me. The physical world is a hard unforgiving taskmaster.
A politician is buffered from any consequences or feedbacks to his actions by distance; the bureaucracy surrounding him as well as the physical disconnect.
As an engineer I must compromise between contradictory and opposite qualities and find practical combinations that satisfy a multitude of specifications and demands. I must accommodate as well as critically evaluate the demands of users, marketing and design and architecture people, and come up with a mutual understanding of what they actually want within the means of what is possible.
A politician is defined only by what that supports him in power - those who fund and elect him for the next term.
The limits with my work are the laws of physics - both direct resources: money, time, people - as well as all kinds of non-intuitive ones: scaling, flow rate, logistic function, probability distribution. Hence my sense for the 'truth' is not based on passion but experimentation, and I appear unsure and as having no confidence in my 'opinions' - which I don't really have at all, as most people understand them. An opinion for me is always something I can explain - at least to myself - and most of the time to others. It is this process that both helps me understand my own reasoning better (keeps me honest to myself), as well as provides a further insight into my cognition as well as to some extent of those of others.
A politician swims in the superficial memes of popular sentiment. He maybe an ideologue but a successful one is also a pragmatist: he shapes truth into what is most convenient for the occasion and in doing so may actually benefit from self-delusion, even intentional and conscious.
It maybe be argued that in this way a politician is more 'human' than an engineer and thus is more suited to lead us. And that my friends is the conclusion that cost me my mod points.
Burn baby burn!
The funny thing is, the moment I pressed submit on that one, I realized I had been brainwashed by too much Colbert, and ashamed for having no original thought of my own.
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
Is that you Colbert?
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
Windows Server 2008 R2. Not that IPv6 implementation itself is wrong - its just everything else surrounding it: from dcpromo to the evil Network and Sharing Center and bloody stupid restricted control of firewall profiles.
Most MS technet comments just end up recommending disabling ipv6 as 'the solution'.
Result: hell'va load of windows servers on the web with just ipv4 soon...
Use tools to fit the job: 1. on the desktop work on Windows or OSX with linux on VMware or VirtualBox or SSH to a separate hardware. 2. leave linuxes for what they were meant for: server and embedded with remote CLI interface.
There will be less pain and boring /. articles in the world...
Interesting stance from linux-heads ... I'm a troll for pointing out the obvious. I mean really, does anybody genuinely believe that linux will ever be able to catch up enough with the industry and consumers on the desktop to be noticed? I think its a lost cause.
And those hours spent on programming the latest desktop graphics drivers could be spent on something useful - for example more work for Asterisk (PBX) and Racoon (KAME) for example. Beta testing and debugging these has been well worth the effort at least in my projects - there is nothing comparable that could do secure IP telephony other than a linux-server - but if I need to work on graphics or browse the web I have a macbook for that...
IF some hardware or software vendor releases or updates a product or a feature which lacks Linux support in someway /.
DEFINE 'd as anything short of releasing fully supported and documented binary drivers with source
THEN GOTO submit horror outrage on
Why do you need to be on the hardware running linux browsing the web?
Use tools to fit the job:
1. on the desktop work on Windows or OSX with linux on VMware or VirtualBox or SSH to a separate hardware.
2. leave linuxes for what they were meant for: server and embedded with remote CLI interface.
There will be less pain and boring /. articles in the world...
Good riddance!
The most reliable storage media is still magnetic tape.
Incidentally my 10.5in reel mp3 player needs a new backpack...
nah, just use cat and read really fast
RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY...
This is an obscene abuse of a perfectly innocent program meant to concatenate files.
I'll have you know I've called the Unix Police and they will be picking you up shortly.
And you don't have to read fast. All you need is a 45.5 baud teletype machine and filename > /dev/tty
Personally I prefer to read the punchtape directly though ... with a torch.
I predict they will cruise around the world taking photos of every harbour, ship and shoreline.
I also predict they will get into trouble for doing that.
All of the world's marine traffic in real-time is already on Google... (ok, its basically just overlayed AIS data, but still its effing cool ! just try to find an application that is cooler! or is it wetter?)
I don't know where in the wikipedia article you picked up the 900 figure but that's a frequency for short range UHF: basically line-of-sight propagation. Indeed the cheap mass-produced consumer devices you mention are the greatest sources of radio interference in todays environment. But so would any kind of broadband transmitter on unbalanced unmatched unshielded transmission lines...
The reason why some (successful) smart metering systems have adopted the mobile phone network for sending the data back the utilities is the very reason of RF interference of other methods. Power companies would of course like to use PLC to send the data up the electrical cables from the customer premises to the utilities hub but there are a lot of technical problems with that.
See my post above for more discussion. - OH3GPJ
This is the crux of the problem in Smart metering. The last mile problem. The industry does not have standardized protocols or well tested technologies yet for power line communications.
Of the arguments voiced by the good hipp.. citizens of Marin County, the radio interference problem is a legitimate one, that even the power companies themselves struggle with. Its not that it messed up your wibe man but that the data throughput is unpredictable and there is no 'one-fit-for-all' technology that works in all environments, from city center to rural dwelling.
In simple terms, its all about bandwith and transmission theory. You can't expect to push a great amount of data realiably through wires made for electrical mains transmission, certainly not with any kind of high frequencies we are used to with our modern gadgets. The power companies have long used remote control modems at crawling speeds which use the overhead powerlines as transmission medium but those are pretty uniform in characteristics, and you only need to go from one grid node to the next with them. The last-mile end, the consumer end of the utilities are often a huge mess, with old and new wiring, switching and filtering all over the place. A bit like the POTS network was before telcos started tearing out their whole almost-last-mile infra and replacing it with fibers with DSLAMs at the end. The last mile can be anything from a mile to dozens of miles depending on where you are located on the city network. And although it doesn't take many bits of data to send this info down to the power company, you need to multiply that by the number of customers on a simple branch of the network which could be tens of thousands. even more. And every broadcast needs to be isolated from others. Think of collision zones on ethernet except you only have sub MHz bandwidth to work with and a crazy chaotic switching and transmission line characteristics.
Then there is also the very real problem of radio interference. Mains wires weren't designed or installed for carrying any kind of radio frequencies. Consequently it is all too easy to make them into nice ideal broadband antennas that radiate your signal into outer space. Many commercial PLC trials have stumbled upon this problem with local FCC's shutting them down for interfering with electrical appliances, control circuits other commercial radio systems. Furthermore, consumer appliances themselves increasingly interfere with anykind of PLC. Computers and TV's are pretty good sources of nasty radio noise flowing back to the utilities mains, but the worst culprit are all kinds of new compact fluorescent and LED lighting systems that use cheap crappy switching. Some of them are like plugging an electromagnetic countermeasures pod to your mains to make sure no data can get through!
The TFA mentions Hams (Amateur Radio Operators) as one of the opposing gangs and I can tell you that we don't take kindly to being bundled with bloody hippies! We tend to actually know WTF we are talking about! often alerting and advising the FCC and industry on how to best use the limited spectrum we all need to share. Hell, pretty much all the hams I know work for the industrial-complex: IT, telcos, utilities, defence...
73 OH3GPJ
In fact work at a lab, and I say this was a major missed opportunity...
What they should've said is:
" Listen, your whole system is flawed and full of holes like a tennis racket made of swiss cheese.
For a start immediately buy our university department the following:
- One of each on their catalog...
- And their...
- And their...
...that should cost you only 50-100 million (you might get a discount). Budget it as a long term investment into transaction systems."
At least such a scenario is a recurring dream of mine. Oh well, back to the grind ... calibrating old Tektronix oscilloscopes...
The BBC Newsnight program on the issue (from last February) explains the issue pretty well. Watch it.
The funny/disturbing thing is why did it take 10 months! for some official at the UK banking industry association to have a revelation/panic and issue such a stupid letter. The professor's response to them is pretty effing on!
I think he should've said quite blunty: " listen, our students figured this weakness in your system during their free time, using our shoe string budget". Do you really think high tech criminals and criminal organizations with millions or even more at their disposal won't reproduce this? All you need to do is read the bloody manual! "
If I was a banker/bank/building society I would seriously consider funding research into this instead of whining about it. I mean those students don't have what the criminals can easily get with just money. At least buy them the latest oscilloscope/logic analyser for god sake! - its a miniscule fraction of the profits the banks make - or even what they stand to loose from such weaknesses...
It isn't just hardware that is the problem. Have a look at support forums for Windows Server 2008 R2 for example. The amount of problems there are at getting IPv6 working 'seamlessly' at every level and service in mixed network environment is a nightmare. The dual IPv4/IPv6 implementations for network interfaces and services are full of riddles and holes. No wonder even Microsoft's own engineers propose 'solutions' like "turn off IPv6". Well that is actually what every admin I know who has struggled with 2K8R2 has done. As long as you don't 'need' IPv6 for anything yet, why bother. There is enough other shit to shovel meanwhile - we'll deal with it when it comes.