Is it possible to make a setup that would boot Windows off of a prom or CD/DVD (something with no possibility of writing to from the kernel even if it is exploited), and mount a read/write, no execute permission volume for the 'My Documents' folder? ( or equivalent?)
This would be trivial in a modern *nix, but for some reason most of the UAS companies prefer to use windows. Some even use Windows CE on the actual bird. I can't fathom why personally, but they do.
On my G1, with either the stock firmware or cyanogen mod, I have to turn on mobile storage before the sd card and such are mountable through the USB. So, at least in my case, the pattern lock is effective for blocking USB access also (at least as effective as is it at locking anything else). Is this different for other firmware/models?
On the other hand, If I had the physical access, I could just yank the battery and plug the SD card into my laptop. So for that reason, I wouldn't rely on the pattern lock to secure anything sensitive anyways, regardless of how strong/weak it is. It's really only good for keeping somewhat honest people from digging through your text message history and such.
You're pretty much right on the dot with the problem with UAVs these days. It doesn't take all that much technical expertise (nor much sophisticated technology) to be a UAV operator. It does, however take a lot of trust and responsibility.
Honestly, outside the military, I could see how this makes sense to you. But in practicality, there are other, more pertinent missions that this UAV would be more suited for. For example, I work on UAVs for the Marine Corps. We're are far more interested in the smaller, more field expedient UAVs that we can operate in theater and provide direct intel to our riflemen brethren. If we need a large, hard target taken out we call other support (cobras, arty, our jets, air force jets etc...). But on the level I work at, we already have motivated Marine grunts nearby and don't need the heavy shit. We just have to keep eyes on the situation to aid them in tracking the enemy, they to the work. So while there is a place for UAVs to make the kill (and honestly i'm surprised that Osama wasn't taken out by an Air Force Reaper), most situations still require boots on the ground, and the smaller more local UAVs are more suited to that goal.
I'm still holding out on Toshiba's still unnamed offering. That thing is going to be the IPad killer if anything will be. But what's up with the thing still not having a brand name?
I am current active duty military with a clearance, and i was told the same thing. That being said, as long as i am active duty i will obey and not visit the site. Not for any fear of reprimand (honestly how would they know?), but because of my duties and responsibilities that were the reason for me being granted a clearance in the first place.
I remember something called the "M&M" principle from a book i read as a kid. I don't remember the book, though, so any reply as to the source would be appreciated.
The basic principle is this: if you take a jar of red, green and blue indestructible M&M's and shake it for a million years, at any point in those million years there will be huge clumps of red, green and blue M&M's, interspersed with regions of near perfect dispersion. Never (or at least extremely rarely) will the entire jar be entirely evenly dispersed, or as evenly grouped as it was when you started. The explanation for this was that, of all possible arrangements that those M&M's can be in, almost all will show clumps and evenly mixed regions, only a few will be nearly all evenly dispersed or all grouped.
Funny you should quote John Wayne, since he normally portrays values of
fairness.
It's not about dying for your country, it's about fighting fairly while still doing everything to win.
All I'm saying is those who don't fight fair should not also expect to be *respected* for their efforts.
They might own the ground in the war zone, but we own the air.
The problem with this philosophy is, simply put, we own the ground also. Decisively. Yet they are still there.
Their goal is not traditional military superiority, their goal is to win the political game. As proof of how effective their campaign may eventually be, consider this. The U.S. won every battle in Vietnam. Every single one. Most by an embarrassingly huge margin. But, who has control of the Vietnam peninsula today? How did they achieve this?
I forget the actual details, as i've been out of the medical equipment repair business for years, but depending on the class of equipment, med. equipment manufacturers are required to support equipment for a decent amount of time. Defibrillators and phys. monitors, for example, both require ten years of support from the manufacturer. This is due to F.D.A. regulation.
That kinda reminds me of what I heard Tom Clancy say in an interview once, and I am paraphrasing.
When asked how one could bring a nuclear bomb into the states he said:
"Just wrap it in cocaine and bring it through the Port if Miami."
UAV's also have weight issues. The shadow, the one mentioned in the article, doesn't have any kind of radar, heck it doesn't even have brakes. This is due to the very reliable but fairly weak engine it uses. It's internal computer basically only handles the inertial nav system, the communications, and maintains straight and level flight. The ground control station makes all the actual decisions. If the AV loses contact with the GCS, it's preprogrammed either to return to a predesignated coordinate and fly a loiter pattern (hopefully getting signal back again on the way), or to deploy it's parachute.
In other words, nevermind avoiding another aircraft, this thing will fly into a mountain if allowed to fly itself. I believe that the reason that this aircraft is the one being selected for FAA approval is because of it's reliability at doing it's job even with it's limitations, not because of it's feature set. My unit, and many others, have never crashed one of these UAV's. Other UAV's, even more sophisticated ones, fall out of the sky all the time. While the shadow is not perfect, it is definately going to be the benchmark in the future for how rugged and simple versus how feature rich a UAV needs to be.
I joined the Marine Corps just over a year ago, and one thing they taught us in recruit training is that anytime the name Marine occurs in a news story, there will be a huge blowup over the issue, and the fact that the marines are involved. For example, if an army soldier gets in trouble, they say Private Whomever. If a marine gets in trouble, the headline goes something like, "MARINE GETS DUI" or "MARINE BEATS HIS WIFE". This story definately highlights that point. They have banned social networking sites on their own intranet. They have not banned me from viewing such sites via other means. Many of my fellow marines who have deployed tell me about how they can to to a USO or MCCS tent and do pretty much what they want on the internet while deployed (depending on availability, of course). Hell if i remember correctly, when i used to work for G.E., they did similar things on their intranet, and that was 10 years ago. No one made too much noise about it then, probably because it wasn't the marine corps.
Re:Unfortunately FCS is based on Linux
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 1
Hi, I am an active duty US Marine who works with UAVs.
The Shadow and the Predator are both controlled by Solaris workstations, running CDE as their desktop environment. The operators have no difficulty learning the system and never have to open a CLI. In fact, me as a tech, really never have to either.
As right as you may be on all points reguarding THIS incident, there are many many more documented cases of birds destroying engines, windshields, air speed sensors (which you just CAN'T fly without in modern aircraft), etc... so bashing airbus' engineering principles is going to do nothing to help this problem.
The article is misleading. With UAV's, tailhooks are often used as a means to land the AV on land. The RQ-7B Shadow, for example, uses a tailhook for 2 main reasons:
1: To shorten the runway length needed to land (it uses a launcher so runway length during takeoff isn't a consideration).
2: It kinda doesn't have any brakes.
All the UAV systems i have seen so far that land on ships tend to do a controlled crash into a net. So while it may be possible that GA is intending to land on carriers, I think it more likely that the author was pulling stuff out his ass.
Man i wish i had mod points right now.
As moot a point as it is for me to say so, i'd spend all 5 on you and the GP. You''dve gotten 3 positive, and the GP would've gotten 2 flaimbait, and id've felt my mod duties would have been achieved.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Konqueror has something like that. When it renders a page that it believes has errors in it, in the HTML, CSS, etc... it adds a little icon in the status bar. Clicking that icon opens a page describing the error(s) that Konqueror found. It still tries to render the page, however.
I remember watching UC Berkeley's webcast of their intro to computing class, CS61A. (i think it was fall of '02). Anyways, one of the assignments they did was an english to pig latin translator in scheme.
He typed:
'(cs61a is a great class)
and got (something like):
(acs61ay isay aay eatgray assclay)
the class was laughing their ass off for a few minutes befure the prof. looked at his laptop and realized what exactly happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it possible to make a setup that would boot Windows off of a prom or CD/DVD (something with no possibility of writing to from the kernel even if it is exploited), and mount a read/write, no execute permission volume for the 'My Documents' folder? ( or equivalent?)
This would be trivial in a modern *nix, but for some reason most of the UAS companies prefer to use windows. Some even use Windows CE on the actual bird. I can't fathom why personally, but they do.
On my G1, with either the stock firmware or cyanogen mod, I have to turn on mobile storage before the sd card and such are mountable through the USB. So, at least in my case, the pattern lock is effective for blocking USB access also (at least as effective as is it at locking anything else). Is this different for other firmware/models?
On the other hand, If I had the physical access, I could just yank the battery and plug the SD card into my laptop. So for that reason, I wouldn't rely on the pattern lock to secure anything sensitive anyways, regardless of how strong/weak it is. It's really only good for keeping somewhat honest people from digging through your text message history and such.
You're pretty much right on the dot with the problem with UAVs these days. It doesn't take all that much technical expertise (nor much sophisticated technology) to be a UAV operator. It does, however take a lot of trust and responsibility.
Honestly, outside the military, I could see how this makes sense to you. But in practicality, there are other, more pertinent missions that this UAV would be more suited for. For example, I work on UAVs for the Marine Corps. We're are far more interested in the smaller, more field expedient UAVs that we can operate in theater and provide direct intel to our riflemen brethren. If we need a large, hard target taken out we call other support (cobras, arty, our jets, air force jets etc...). But on the level I work at, we already have motivated Marine grunts nearby and don't need the heavy shit. We just have to keep eyes on the situation to aid them in tracking the enemy, they to the work. So while there is a place for UAVs to make the kill (and honestly i'm surprised that Osama wasn't taken out by an Air Force Reaper), most situations still require boots on the ground, and the smaller more local UAVs are more suited to that goal.
Trust me, either they're dropping ordinance within the hour, or not at all.
I'm still holding out on Toshiba's still unnamed offering. That thing is going to be the IPad killer if anything will be. But what's up with the thing still not having a brand name?
linky: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/21/toshiba-launches-flashy-tablet-teaser-site-still-doesnt-have-a/
Surfs up space ponies! I'm making gravy without the lumps!
I am current active duty military with a clearance, and i was told the same thing. That being said, as long as i am active duty i will obey and not visit the site. Not for any fear of reprimand (honestly how would they know?), but because of my duties and responsibilities that were the reason for me being granted a clearance in the first place.
It is if you're really, really lucky.
I remember something called the "M&M" principle from a book i read as a kid. I don't remember the book, though, so any reply as to the source would be appreciated.
The basic principle is this: if you take a jar of red, green and blue indestructible M&M's and shake it for a million years, at any point in those million years there will be huge clumps of red, green and blue M&M's, interspersed with regions of near perfect dispersion. Never (or at least extremely rarely) will the entire jar be entirely evenly dispersed, or as evenly grouped as it was when you started. The explanation for this was that, of all possible arrangements that those M&M's can be in, almost all will show clumps and evenly mixed regions, only a few will be nearly all evenly dispersed or all grouped.
I tend to stick to Cowboy Neal.
This encourages a mental image that i would rather not have.
Funny you should quote John Wayne, since he normally portrays values of fairness. It's not about dying for your country, it's about fighting fairly while still doing everything to win.
All I'm saying is those who don't fight fair should not also expect to be *respected* for their efforts.
Is this a boxing match or a war?
In WWII the US did intentionally slaughter a couple hundred thousand civilians in Dresden and Japan
And Berlin, Monte Cassino, Okinawa, Tokyo, etc...
I'm not going to justify these actions, they were horrendous. Nonetheless, they were all done for the purpose of ending the war.
Not the intended goal of the insurgents whom we are fighting, who are actively seeking out such conflict.
They might own the ground in the war zone, but we own the air.
The problem with this philosophy is, simply put, we own the ground also. Decisively. Yet they are still there.
Their goal is not traditional military superiority, their goal is to win the political game. As proof of how effective their campaign may eventually be, consider this. The U.S. won every battle in Vietnam. Every single one. Most by an embarrassingly huge margin. But, who has control of the Vietnam peninsula today? How did they achieve this?
nothing better than 90 days
I forget the actual details, as i've been out of the medical equipment repair business for years, but depending on the class of equipment, med. equipment manufacturers are required to support equipment for a decent amount of time. Defibrillators and phys. monitors, for example, both require ten years of support from the manufacturer. This is due to F.D.A. regulation.
That kinda reminds me of what I heard Tom Clancy say in an interview once, and I am paraphrasing. When asked how one could bring a nuclear bomb into the states he said: "Just wrap it in cocaine and bring it through the Port if Miami."
Ditto for android.
UAV's also have weight issues. The shadow, the one mentioned in the article, doesn't have any kind of radar, heck it doesn't even have brakes. This is due to the very reliable but fairly weak engine it uses. It's internal computer basically only handles the inertial nav system, the communications, and maintains straight and level flight. The ground control station makes all the actual decisions. If the AV loses contact with the GCS, it's preprogrammed either to return to a predesignated coordinate and fly a loiter pattern (hopefully getting signal back again on the way), or to deploy it's parachute.
In other words, nevermind avoiding another aircraft, this thing will fly into a mountain if allowed to fly itself. I believe that the reason that this aircraft is the one being selected for FAA approval is because of it's reliability at doing it's job even with it's limitations, not because of it's feature set. My unit, and many others, have never crashed one of these UAV's. Other UAV's, even more sophisticated ones, fall out of the sky all the time. While the shadow is not perfect, it is definately going to be the benchmark in the future for how rugged and simple versus how feature rich a UAV needs to be.
I joined the Marine Corps just over a year ago, and one thing they taught us in recruit training is that anytime the name Marine occurs in a news story, there will be a huge blowup over the issue, and the fact that the marines are involved. For example, if an army soldier gets in trouble, they say Private Whomever. If a marine gets in trouble, the headline goes something like, "MARINE GETS DUI" or "MARINE BEATS HIS WIFE". This story definately highlights that point. They have banned social networking sites on their own intranet. They have not banned me from viewing such sites via other means. Many of my fellow marines who have deployed tell me about how they can to to a USO or MCCS tent and do pretty much what they want on the internet while deployed (depending on availability, of course). Hell if i remember correctly, when i used to work for G.E., they did similar things on their intranet, and that was 10 years ago. No one made too much noise about it then, probably because it wasn't the marine corps.
Hi, I am an active duty US Marine who works with UAVs. The Shadow and the Predator are both controlled by Solaris workstations, running CDE as their desktop environment. The operators have no difficulty learning the system and never have to open a CLI. In fact, me as a tech, really never have to either.
As right as you may be on all points reguarding THIS incident, there are many many more documented cases of birds destroying engines, windshields, air speed sensors (which you just CAN'T fly without in modern aircraft), etc... so bashing airbus' engineering principles is going to do nothing to help this problem.
The article is misleading. With UAV's, tailhooks are often used as a means to land the AV on land. The RQ-7B Shadow, for example, uses a tailhook for 2 main reasons:
1: To shorten the runway length needed to land (it uses a launcher so runway length during takeoff isn't a consideration).
2: It kinda doesn't have any brakes.
All the UAV systems i have seen so far that land on ships tend to do a controlled crash into a net. So while it may be possible that GA is intending to land on carriers, I think it more likely that the author was pulling stuff out his ass.
Man i wish i had mod points right now. As moot a point as it is for me to say so, i'd spend all 5 on you and the GP. You''dve gotten 3 positive, and the GP would've gotten 2 flaimbait, and id've felt my mod duties would have been achieved.
I remember watching UC Berkeley's webcast of their intro to computing class, CS61A. (i think it was fall of '02). Anyways, one of the assignments they did was an english to pig latin translator in scheme.
He typed:
'(cs61a is a great class)
and got (something like):
(acs61ay isay aay eatgray assclay)
the class was laughing their ass off for a few minutes befure the prof. looked at his laptop and realized what exactly happened.