Old tech, new battles: Inside F-Secure’s formidable Faraday cage A Faraday cage, originally commissioned and assembled 10 years ago as a means to allow Finnish security firm F-Secure to test Bluetooth-based mobile malware, is still finding productive work even though the type of malware that spawned its creation is long dead. The copper-lined, 4-by-3 metre enclosure is still used for mobile …
I used to respect F-Secure, paid for their software often and recommended it as the best anti-virus. Then their software got hit by a presumably targeted attack, flashing nonsense-texts pop-ups, and they mistook my paid-for version with a free-version. No customer support and poor front-end programming sabotaged what their Faraday caged boffins had come up with.
Look behind you Mikko Hypponen, that's your former paying customers wishing you'd spent a bit more time ensuring your products worked in the real world and a bit less time preening in the mirror before your TEDtalk.
Ah, Finland. I remember when it was all Nokia and cutting edge techies, now it's all just forests and fields.
Green and red cables are a risk factor - especially as they are defining two extremes of network safety.
It is not uncommon to find males who cannot distinguish the two colours. We had a colleague who was afflicted in that way. We used to sit him down with our test GUIs to see if there was anything that he saw as ambiguous. When driving he had to interpret traffic lights by their known configuration.
With three choices to make it would be better to use blue, yellow, and red. Blindness to the first two is much rarer - while red is known as a standard danger signal by people who don't have that colour blindness. People who are red blind would know which cable was red by elimination of the colours they could see.
My first application for an apprenticeship was at Ferranti. I walked the interviews and tests, being a smart arse, but they failed me because I couldn't tell the difference between orange and purple on their colour tests - all just grey to me. I still don't fully understand that, I know purple, I know orange, I could spot them in a police line-up. Yet my poor male chromosomes left me sexually disadvantaged.
At a company which mistook metric for imperial measurements - hence the initial Tornado nose being filled with concrete ballast rather than the Ferranti radar they had to stick behind the navigator seat.
PS Are you Anon Cow because you are female and just made a true remark about male inferiority? I hope this place isn't just all guys, rather than the free dating site I've been hoping it is.
I was failed from Ferranti solely for my Colorblind James experience. I was failed from the Civil Service after getting 97% on their EO exam simply for being a smart arse in the subsequent inteview - but look at how that place has declined since then! I'm enough of a smart arse to tell the difference, thanking you anyway.
Failed from BA after passing all their tests, including the psych, simply for being plebbier than the other three candidates. Got a lot of good jobs though in tech by people who had a similar sense of humour.
A cheeky attitude is essential to a good workplace, in my arrogant opinion. If you ever get promoted then you won't want to be surrounded by Yes Men, will you?
I merely joked because I am seriously worried that my society, and in particular STEM, is more sexist than it was in my youth. I couldn't see any other reason for the posters Anon Cow status from their comment.
El Reg can be a particularly sausage-fest of a place due to all our sarcasm. That shouldn't be putting off any females from posting here openly imo, else our industry is doomed and we will all remain childless.
" I couldn't see any other reason for the posters Anon Cow status from their comment."
All my comments are anonymous. That means that anything I say has to stand on its own merits - rather then inheriting any like/dislike engendered by my previous comments.
Having found that all the comments made under my El Reg user name are too easily trawled on Google - then everything will stay anonymous in the future.
Paranoid? Moi?
"that particular colour blindness is male chromosome linked" -- AC
Doesn't mean it doesn't affect females, just that the proportion of affected females in the population is the (smaller) square of the proportion of the affected males: e.g. if 10% of males are X-linked R/G colourblind, 1% of females are (because 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01).
@MyffyW
At least it's not Rumblr...
My lovely dyslexic ten year old nephew was beating my nasty Scrabble-obsessed mum on their first game, and not only did I catch her cheating him while losing, she stuck a needle into his orange.
Women, can't be alive without them, can't live for long with them.
Green and red cables are a risk factor - especially as they are defining two extremes of network safety.
It is not uncommon to find males who cannot distinguish the two colours. We had a colleague who was afflicted in that way. We used to sit him down with our test GUIs to see if there was anything that he saw as ambiguous. When driving he had to interpret traffic lights by their known configuration.
Maybe he was having you on somewhat; it's for precisely this reason that the "green" traffic light colour actually has masses of blue in it. There may not be as obvious a difference between red and "green" as there is to a non-colour blind person, but it isn't necessary to rely just on position.
"it's for precisely this reason that the "green" traffic light colour actually has masses of blue in it"
Coming from a town in a region with a historic 28% rate of male red/green colourblindness and significant rates of others considered odd (yellow/blue and a few monochromats), the blue is extremely noticeable there - as is the word "STOP" masked onto every single red light.
The fact that the town's population has been shrinking and over the last 50 years has gone from 40 sets of traffic lights to 10 is another matter.
There are a few types of colour blindness, red-green is X-linked (that is, you are male and got the wrong copy from your mum), in about 5% of the population.
As a random piece of knowledge I picked up as a youngster, the UK plug wiring used to have 3 plain wires but since 1977 (Wikipedia) they added a stripe to the earth wires to stop confusion, since live/neutral are powered.
P.
The old domestic plug colour coding was green = earth, red = live, black = neutral. These were 'sensible' in terms of their representation but the problem was that people with red-green colour blindness could easily make a lethal mistake in wiring them up.
The modern colours are yellow/green striped = earth, brown = live, blue = neutral.
Neutral is the same as earth potential under ideal conditions and serves as a current return line.
"Bah, 230 volts only tickles anyway.."
As the old saying goes "volts jolts, mills kills".
It's the current flow that does the damage in two possible ways. Moderate current makes the heart go into fatal fibrillation - which can only be stopped by quick use of a defibrillator. A more severe current stops the heart - and there is then a good chance of restarting it. Which is why the defibrillator machine gives someone the requisite shock to stop the heart ready for a tidy restart.
Even the 50 volt "safe" limit can still kill if the skin is sufficiently wet. IIRC high humidity US jungle areas had 32 volts - and people were killed by it.
"Red = Dead!!"
And brown is a burnt red. My father can't tell the difference between the old red and the new brown, or the old red and the old green.
He _can_ see the stripe, but rather sensibly he doesn't even think about trying to wire up plugs (or anything else using colour codes)
Here in Australia we have both systems...
I wired up some new power outlets yesterday (anon because this is illegal here) and I can confirm that for behind-the-wall cabling we still use green = earth, red = live, black = neutral. But for the wires in extension leads and other in-front-of-the-wall stuff we most commonly have green&yellow = earth, brown = live, blue = neutral.
1970s TV spent a lot of time explaining how to wire plugs, if I recall. With the cover of the plug off to show the terminals, BRown -> bottom right, BLue -> bottom left, Green -> 'go straight ahead'. I wonder if the demographic pyramid shows a dent in the 40-50 age bracket caused by 1970s kids experimenting with things they shouldn't!
It's not that it can't run. It's rather malware authors make a design choice to exclude some potential targets for the reward of making analysis of their behaviour harder. Those clever enough to setup a vm are also far less likely to leave their systems unpatched or to just allow anything through the firewall.
My father was a cosmic ray physicist and chair of a major university department of physics. He had a lab called Meson Manor. Because his equipment was so sensitive to random radio and other signals, he needed to build the lab inside a Faraday cage. Unfortunately, a cage lined with solid copper sheeting would have been too expensive for his budget. His solution (thinking outside-of-the-box was a specialty of his) he determined that copper screening had holes that were under the wavelengths of the radiation he wanted to stop, so he lined the "Manor" with copper screening at a fraction of the cost solid copper would have been, and yet performed just as well!
"he determined that copper screening had holes that were under the wavelengths of the radiation he wanted to stop"
He and everyone else who has ever known anything about electromagnetic radiation and happened to ever see a microwave oven. The front "window" of each and every one of those is not actually a bunch of small holes by accident you know...
Quite. One of the places I used to work had a mesh-based EMC test area that was put together in the days before the explosion in GSM/wifi/etc transmissions - it was still a useful resource to have when it came to doing precompliance emissions testing in the lower frequency bands (where most of our emissions were concentrated - the fastest clocks we had on any of our embedded kit were in the 30-80MHz region), but with each year that passed you'd see stronger spikes in the GHz+ region on the spectrum analyser.
“It’s rated as impenetrable to anything up to the grade of military radar,” said Sullivan.
What rating would that be then?
Any particular radar RF band ?
How does it know the radar is "military"
Yeh, quite so.
(Comment: I can understand BBC, newspapers, etc retailing nonsense like this - but El Reg?)
They may be rare in the anti-virus industry, but they are common elsewhere. You'll find these cages (a.k.a. "anechoic chambers") at any EMC test site. Most sites have several. I was in one (a 10-meter one) a couple weeks ago, and I can assure you, your mobile phone will not get a signal when the door is closed.
In a previous job I had cause to sometimes work in a datacentre Faraday cage. The reason for the protection was that it was sited on the edge of an airfield which on occasion was used for testing new radar developments. AC for obvious reasons.
One thing that you did notice was that the battery on your phone did not last for very long if you forgot to switch it off.
The trouble with mesh Faraday cages is the holes are sized to stop a particular frequency, yet people assume they stop every frequency. Even the solid ones like my tin-foil hat only stop a certain level of power, but my thick lead hat is too heavy for my neck.
I worked in a place that tested microwave transmitters and one of the young lads noticed all the bubbles always ran up the side of his daily bottle of Irn-Bru that was facing a transmitter. He was genuinely worried by that, until I pointed out his daily bottle of Irn-Bru would kill him long before the microwaves did, and he'd never have children anyway because his was pocked-marked pugly due to his daily bottle of Irn-Bru.
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