"Here's Michael Mann's (The Hockey Stick guy) prediction that the West Side Highway would be under water by now"
The (demented) Hockey Stick is indeed Mann's. The Westside Highway prediction was James Hansen in 1988 and he still has a decade to go before it is shown to be false. I'm guessing that Hansen is probably beginning to think he may have gotten that one more than a bit wrong.
"It doesn't help that as a background signal NYC is sinking about a foot a century due to isostatic rebound since the end of the last ice age."
Probably not that much. But it is probably sinking. Nothing obviously wrong with the notion of glacial isostasy. But the numbers look to be hazier than most folks assume. Sometime in the next decade or two we'll probably have the solid GPS derived estimated of Battery tidal gauge elevation change accurate to say 100 microns. Then (and likely only then) will we know for sure how much of the observed 27-30 cm (11-12 inches) per century sea level rise observed at the Battery is due to the instrument sinking rather than the ocean rising.
The good news is that the article is, like most of the stuff BeauHD posts, more or less unmitigated nonsense. Despite mankind's practice of building way to much stuff below the level likely to experience storm surge in a major storm, a few inches of sea level rise in the next 50 years clearly isn't going to do all that much additional harm.
The bad news is that there is no reason to expect sea levels to stop rising any time soon. Here's a link to the NOAA webpage for the tide gauge at The Battery in NYC. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.... If you look carefully at the picture of the gauge, you'll see there is probably less than a meter clearance between the high tide line and the top of the dock. A few centuries of 20-30cm/century sea level rise and "they" are going to have a problem. And not only with the dock. The street, parking area, and building behind the dock all appear to be at about the same level as the dock.
BTW. The evidence is thin, but it looks like sea levels in the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago peaked 5 meters (16 feet in American) above current sea level.
For whatever reason, I couldn't get to historical tidal gauge data for the Battery from the NOAA site (503 error). Maybe I clicked the wrong link. Here's a link to a chart from a reputable source (psmsl.org) http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q... Note that a couple of cm per century of the Battery seal level Rise is thought to be due to tectonic forces -- The Battery is thought to be sinking a bit due to glacial isostasy.
No offense, but what a user cares about is the data he/she has access to. Yeah, your precious OS may be intact after user-san clicks the wrong link. if you haven't made any errors in setting permissions on files. Your user, and very likely many or all of your users who interact with digitally him/her are, however, screwed.
(And no, there is little basic difference between Unix and Windows file systems or security although a lot of details differ. The latter are pretty much based on the former and neither was intended to provide security in the modern sense. Unix security in its basic form was intended to keep multiple users from inadvertently tromping on each other's files. It does that quite well. One of the Unix creators -- Ken Thompson maybe -- actually wrote a paper many decades ago on the subject of why Unix was not a secure system. I genuinely don't think it's significantly more secure now than it was then)
The correct answer, grasshopper, is to abjure your computer and cell phone. Sell your car. Buy physical copies of a dozen thick books with real meaningful content. Buy a bag of bean seeds, and a few simple tools. Load the stuff into a backpack and hitch-hike as far into the wilderness as you can get. Then walk a further ten days and set up housekeeping.
You'll be surprised how little you'll care about Unix, Windows, Microsoft, Apple, and similar weighty matters after a year or three of living on beans and roasted lizards.
Add to that Microsoft's clever incorporatation of Linux into Windows 10. Now we probably have the spectre of simple bash scripts that will delete, encrypt, or do something else undersirable to all the files a user has access to on Windows. And (once debugged) will do the same thing on Linux or Mac OS, or BSD.
Let me submit that the underlying problem is that we're trying to run computers connected to a world encompassing network with software that has vast attack surfaces. That's probably never going to work.
Shouldn't take more than a couple of decades to figure that out and another couple of decades to fix it.
Here's a thought. Instead of something you know (a PIN), to control cockpit access requests use something you have -- maybe a piece of metal with some unique notches cut into it. We could call it... I dunno... maybe a "key". Might have a few problems (many of the same ones a PIN has), but it's unlikely to get written down or posted inadvertently on the internet.
If anybody tells you that you're shallow, obnoxious and a nitwit, I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.
Try thinking a bit, for a change. You might even find that actually using the brain that you may have been given produces interesting results.
Did I say that socialism works well? Nope. Didn't say that. Don't think that. The record says it can do a pretty good job with healthcare, weapons systems, and heavy industry. Sucks pretty much everywhere and always at agriculture and producing/distributing consumer goods
But capitalism has -- whether you like it or not -- a few problems as well.
It is claimed they say in Russia. "Everything Marx told us about communism was wrong. Unfortunately, everything he told us about capitalism was right." Try thinking about it. You might learn something.
Uber -- which seems to be pretty much the poster child for everything that can be wrong with capitalism -- isn't likely to go quietly. They'll probably kill and maim no small number of innocents on their way to the dustbin of history.
But this is probably good news. Lyft is, if nothing else, adroit at avoiding bad publicity and may actually be a fairly decent company.
And Google -- no matter what you may think of their activities and ethics in other fields -- seems to be developing autonomous vehicle technology in a sane, methodical, responsible manner. Might be a great combo.
It sounds like maybe they didn't actually send an electromagnetic wave. They just set up a device that could send such a wave then didn't turn it on and used quantum magic to determine what would have happened if they had turned it on.
Or maybe they did something else entirely.
In case it's not obvious, I'm not a physicist either.
If you don't want a backdoor in your processor, you'll need to use an ancient processor.
But fortuitiously, for the 95% of us who aren't ardent gamers, aren't bitcoin miners, and aren't wrangling huge data bases, ancient processors should be more than adequate. A 386SX16 might be a bit lightweight for playing cat videos. But a 15 year old VIA C5 will do a surprising amount of the things people actually want to do about as well as more modern CPUs.
1) There is a big chance they are not going to unlock your data, anyway.
"They" aren't going to unlock your data. You are. But with their pricing, they will almost certainly tell you how. If they don't, their revenue stream will become nonexistent once the word gets out that paying doesn't get the data back.
"What is surprising is that something like this has not happened before now.... and when, oh when, are people going to stop using MS Windows for mission critical systems?"
Not any time soon. Think for a while about the actual costs of moving a business, school, or government department off Windows. Acquiring new software, Developing new procedures. Training people. Rewriting the CFO's Excel spreadsheets and macros to work on something other than MS Office, etc.etc.etc.
Yes, Windows has evolved into a fairly crummy OS -- especially as a server. And Microsoft is no longer the reasonably user friendly company we knew in the 1980s and 1990s. And yes there are perfectly OK non-Microsoft alternatives for many (probably not all) things a company might need. Nonetheless, the costs of ditching Windows are REALLY staggering for most operations.
The kill switch is in the malware, not in the underlying Windows code. It's probably not exploitable for intelligence activity. Why would the NSA/CIA/FBI/whatever care about it as long as it doesn't infect their computers? (Which they probably back up regularly and, one suspects, probably don't run on Windows)
Microsoft tried rewriting Windows in 2001 and the years following. It was a near total disaster. I think their enthusiasm for doing THAT again is nonexistent.
Exactly! I don't see any problem with using XP, Windows 95, or MSDOS as an embedded controller OS provided they will do the job. But why would you not plug any RJ-45 sockets with chewing gum?
Why, other than rampant masochism would you connect ANYTHING that doesn't absolutely need to be networked to a network -- local or remote?
If the url existed, you'd find out about it when you rolled out your malware and it didn't work.... or if you tested your product before deploying it, but who does that nowadays?
Not exactly a "bank account". An account managed by a cell phone company with convenience stores and such acting as tellers. Google M-PESA. The M-PESA system is said to work pretty well in Kenya and Afghanistan. Here's a link http://www.economist.com/blogs...
You'd so often see a $1000 PC hooked up to a $350,000 medical scanner. That PC would be running a 5 year old OS because it ran a specific $30,000 piece of software that the scanner required to interpret the raw data. Its not that they didn't want to upgrade the OS or hardware, shit, that's the cheap part...
Thanks. I was sure that what you describe was not uncommon, but since I never worked with medical stuff, only happened to have it applied to me from time to time, I didn't bring the subject up.
Question: If the PC is only there to act as an embedded controller, and it does its job, why should you care what OS or version it uses? If it were a black plastic box with a couple of sockets and a power plug would you care what sort of CPU it had or whether it were running MSDOS, QNX, OS9 or ran by the power of prayer? And why, if you value your sanity, would you ever, even for a second, consider plugging a network cable into it?
That machine gets infected, and so it spreads at an exponential rate. Short version, this is WW III starting level shit!! We'll know soon enough in the next 48 hours around the world
Ya know, you have a point there. I'd sort of expected that the first net propagated worldwide IT catastrophe would be in the financial sector. But healthcare is pretty important also. Especially if you are the patient.
Best of all, it works with human controlled vehicles too. There's going to be a lot of them on the road for decades even if we have AI cars available to the public tomorrow.
We have them in the US. While great in theory, American's -- excepting a small number of nutcases -- mostly loathe them. If traffic is light, they are an unnecessary nuisance and if traffic is heavy, judging the proper speed and timing to enter traffic flow is difficult and requires skills approximating those of a professional race driver. They also tend to baffle GPS which is a real problem when encountering one of these monstrosities in a strange town.
They might, and I emphasize MIGHT, work well with fully automated traffic control.
Slashdot Mirror
"Here's Michael Mann's (The Hockey Stick guy) prediction that the West Side Highway would be under water by now"
The (demented) Hockey Stick is indeed Mann's. The Westside Highway prediction was James Hansen in 1988 and he still has a decade to go before it is shown to be false. I'm guessing that Hansen is probably beginning to think he may have gotten that one more than a bit wrong.
"It doesn't help that as a background signal NYC is sinking about a foot a century due to isostatic rebound since the end of the last ice age."
Probably not that much. But it is probably sinking. Nothing obviously wrong with the notion of glacial isostasy. But the numbers look to be hazier than most folks assume. Sometime in the next decade or two we'll probably have the solid GPS derived estimated of Battery tidal gauge elevation change accurate to say 100 microns. Then (and likely only then) will we know for sure how much of the observed 27-30 cm (11-12 inches) per century sea level rise observed at the Battery is due to the instrument sinking rather than the ocean rising.
Sea Levels really are rising. But not very fast.
The good news is that the article is, like most of the stuff BeauHD posts, more or less unmitigated nonsense. Despite mankind's practice of building way to much stuff below the level likely to experience storm surge in a major storm, a few inches of sea level rise in the next 50 years clearly isn't going to do all that much additional harm.
The bad news is that there is no reason to expect sea levels to stop rising any time soon. Here's a link to the NOAA webpage for the tide gauge at The Battery in NYC. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.... If you look carefully at the picture of the gauge, you'll see there is probably less than a meter clearance between the high tide line and the top of the dock. A few centuries of 20-30cm/century sea level rise and "they" are going to have a problem. And not only with the dock. The street, parking area, and building behind the dock all appear to be at about the same level as the dock.
BTW. The evidence is thin, but it looks like sea levels in the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago peaked 5 meters (16 feet in American) above current sea level.
For whatever reason, I couldn't get to historical tidal gauge data for the Battery from the NOAA site (503 error). Maybe I clicked the wrong link. Here's a link to a chart from a reputable source (psmsl.org)
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q...
Note that a couple of cm per century of the Battery seal level Rise is thought to be due to tectonic forces -- The Battery is thought to be sinking a bit due to glacial isostasy.
No offense, but what a user cares about is the data he/she has access to. Yeah, your precious OS may be intact after user-san clicks the wrong link. if you haven't made any errors in setting permissions on files. Your user, and very likely many or all of your users who interact with digitally him/her are, however, screwed.
(And no, there is little basic difference between Unix and Windows file systems or security although a lot of details differ. The latter are pretty much based on the former and neither was intended to provide security in the modern sense. Unix security in its basic form was intended to keep multiple users from inadvertently tromping on each other's files. It does that quite well. One of the Unix creators -- Ken Thompson maybe -- actually wrote a paper many decades ago on the subject of why Unix was not a secure system. I genuinely don't think it's significantly more secure now than it was then)
The correct answer, grasshopper, is to abjure your computer and cell phone. Sell your car. Buy physical copies of a dozen thick books with real meaningful content. Buy a bag of bean seeds, and a few simple tools. Load the stuff into a backpack and hitch-hike as far into the wilderness as you can get. Then walk a further ten days and set up housekeeping.
You'll be surprised how little you'll care about Unix, Windows, Microsoft, Apple, and similar weighty matters after a year or three of living on beans and roasted lizards.
Add to that Microsoft's clever incorporatation of Linux into Windows 10. Now we probably have the spectre of simple bash scripts that will delete, encrypt, or do something else undersirable to all the files a user has access to on Windows. And (once debugged) will do the same thing on Linux or Mac OS, or BSD.
Let me submit that the underlying problem is that we're trying to run computers connected to a world encompassing network with software that has vast attack surfaces. That's probably never going to work.
Shouldn't take more than a couple of decades to figure that out and another couple of decades to fix it.
Here's a thought. Instead of something you know (a PIN), to control cockpit access requests use something you have -- maybe a piece of metal with some unique notches cut into it. We could call it ... I dunno ... maybe a "key". Might have a few problems (many of the same ones a PIN has), but it's unlikely to get written down or posted inadvertently on the internet.
If anybody tells you that you're shallow, obnoxious and a nitwit, I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.
Try thinking a bit, for a change. You might even find that actually using the brain that you may have been given produces interesting results.
Did I say that socialism works well? Nope. Didn't say that. Don't think that. The record says it can do a pretty good job with healthcare, weapons systems, and heavy industry. Sucks pretty much everywhere and always at agriculture and producing/distributing consumer goods
But capitalism has -- whether you like it or not -- a few problems as well.
It is claimed they say in Russia. "Everything Marx told us about communism was wrong. Unfortunately, everything he told us about capitalism was right." Try thinking about it. You might learn something.
Uber -- which seems to be pretty much the poster child for everything that can be wrong with capitalism -- isn't likely to go quietly. They'll probably kill and maim no small number of innocents on their way to the dustbin of history.
But this is probably good news. Lyft is, if nothing else, adroit at avoiding bad publicity and may actually be a fairly decent company.
And Google -- no matter what you may think of their activities and ethics in other fields -- seems to be developing autonomous vehicle technology in a sane, methodical, responsible manner. Might be a great combo.
Sounds like radio. What am I missing?
It sounds like maybe they didn't actually send an electromagnetic wave. They just set up a device that could send such a wave then didn't turn it on and used quantum magic to determine what would have happened if they had turned it on.
Or maybe they did something else entirely.
In case it's not obvious, I'm not a physicist either.
Time to fire up my Raspberry Pi.
Not a bad idea. I'd use mine, except I seem to have mislaid it. It's not very big you know. Maybe I'll epoxy the next one to a rock or something.
If you don't want a backdoor in your processor, you'll need to use an ancient processor.
But fortuitiously, for the 95% of us who aren't ardent gamers, aren't bitcoin miners, and aren't wrangling huge data bases, ancient processors should be more than adequate. A 386SX16 might be a bit lightweight for playing cat videos. But a 15 year old VIA C5 will do a surprising amount of the things people actually want to do about as well as more modern CPUs.
1) There is a big chance they are not going to unlock your data, anyway.
"They" aren't going to unlock your data. You are. But with their pricing, they will almost certainly tell you how. If they don't, their revenue stream will become nonexistent once the word gets out that paying doesn't get the data back.
"What is surprising is that something like this has not happened before now.... and when, oh when, are people going to stop using MS Windows for mission critical systems?"
Not any time soon. Think for a while about the actual costs of moving a business, school, or government department off Windows. Acquiring new software, Developing new procedures. Training people. Rewriting the CFO's Excel spreadsheets and macros to work on something other than MS Office, etc.etc.etc.
Yes, Windows has evolved into a fairly crummy OS -- especially as a server. And Microsoft is no longer the reasonably user friendly company we knew in the 1980s and 1990s. And yes there are perfectly OK non-Microsoft alternatives for many (probably not all) things a company might need. Nonetheless, the costs of ditching Windows are REALLY staggering for most operations.
It appears these guys (Is that sexist?) have mispriced their product. They have several options:
1. Increase their rates in hopes of generating more revenue from the same number of clients
2. Decrease their rates in hopes of generating more revenue from many more clients
3. Increase the number of computers they infect (i.e. broaden their customer base)
4. Improve their targeting in order to do a better job of reaching clients who will pay up.
They clearly need help from Ivy League MBAs
Except that real users don't follow those rules anyway. If they did, they'd have to break
* rule number 5 -- keep your passwords in your head, not written down where they can be stolen.
The kill switch is in the malware, not in the underlying Windows code. It's probably not exploitable for intelligence activity. Why would the NSA/CIA/FBI/whatever care about it as long as it doesn't infect their computers? (Which they probably back up regularly and, one suspects, probably don't run on Windows)
Microsoft tried rewriting Windows in 2001 and the years following. It was a near total disaster. I think their enthusiasm for doing THAT again is nonexistent.
Then why is it on the network?
Exactly! I don't see any problem with using XP, Windows 95, or MSDOS as an embedded controller OS provided they will do the job. But why would you not plug any RJ-45 sockets with chewing gum?
Why, other than rampant masochism would you connect ANYTHING that doesn't absolutely need to be networked to a network -- local or remote?
If the url existed, you'd find out about it when you rolled out your malware and it didn't work. ... or if you tested your product before deploying it, but who does that nowadays?
Not exactly a "bank account". An account managed by a cell phone company with convenience stores and such acting as tellers. Google M-PESA. The M-PESA system is said to work pretty well in Kenya and Afghanistan. Here's a link http://www.economist.com/blogs...
You'd so often see a $1000 PC hooked up to a $350,000 medical scanner. That PC would be running a 5 year old OS because it ran a specific $30,000 piece of software that the scanner required to interpret the raw data. Its not that they didn't want to upgrade the OS or hardware, shit, that's the cheap part ...
Thanks. I was sure that what you describe was not uncommon, but since I never worked with medical stuff, only happened to have it applied to me from time to time, I didn't bring the subject up.
Question: If the PC is only there to act as an embedded controller, and it does its job, why should you care what OS or version it uses? If it were a black plastic box with a couple of sockets and a power plug would you care what sort of CPU it had or whether it were running MSDOS, QNX, OS9 or ran by the power of prayer? And why, if you value your sanity, would you ever, even for a second, consider plugging a network cable into it?
That machine gets infected, and so it spreads at an exponential rate. Short version, this is WW III starting level shit!! We'll know soon enough in the next 48 hours around the world
Ya know, you have a point there. I'd sort of expected that the first net propagated worldwide IT catastrophe would be in the financial sector. But healthcare is pretty important also. Especially if you are the patient.
It smells more to major incompetence.
So General VLAN (first post) has been promoted to a staff position and Major Incompetence has been given his old command?
Best of all, it works with human controlled vehicles too. There's going to be a lot of them on the road for decades even if we have AI cars available to the public tomorrow.
We have them in the US. While great in theory, American's -- excepting a small number of nutcases -- mostly loathe them. If traffic is light, they are an unnecessary nuisance and if traffic is heavy, judging the proper speed and timing to enter traffic flow is difficult and requires skills approximating those of a professional race driver. They also tend to baffle GPS which is a real problem when encountering one of these monstrosities in a strange town.
They might, and I emphasize MIGHT, work well with fully automated traffic control.