Posts by His Geekishness 6 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jan 2009
Oh please, the use of adaptive optics in communications is exactly as old as adaptive optics.
Also, @ac above, no it wont make cheap com links anytime soon; usefull adaptive optics involve a lot of fragile and high precision parts, professional maintainance and calibration. I actually can see how they might be manufactured cheaply, but not how they could be run cheaply and/or reasonably reliably in a mass- market.
I bet this was the result of a misunderstanding/miscommunication. No way in hell all three (or four?) companies involved employ total amateurs too dumb to have a backup or five. In my experience , when too many companies with different storage policies have access to one dataset, its usual conflicting policies badly communicated that lead to several people overwriting their version of the same data, each thinking that the other is keeping not a backup, but "a version we should be able to merge the rest with later", or something to that effect; have this go some rounds of " uh-no,-do-that -backwards-and-then-the-other-way-round", and suddenly all versions are useless.
The sad thing is that, as far-fetched as it sound, it's happend more than once where i work.
(not one of the companies named in the article, fortunately.)
Hiding patterns in the retransmitting is quite an obvious technique, once someone else mentioned it already :)
I would have expected the timing or time-differentials of sequential re-transmits to be even less conspicuous than changing the chunc on the second sending, but then, what do I know? Not enough to come up with this one, it seems.
However, the ones who use this had better limit the differences between original and re-sent packages to what can be ascribed to one-bit errors, or they are painting on themselfes a nice flashy target for our beloved man-in-the-middle-phormers :)
That prof has long term perspectives, which is good, but doesn't consider medium term, which isn't and makes the longterm questionable.
I'm sure we'll have some kind of fusion power source in 50 years, and in 200 it might even be worth the effort. By then, we will either be using a lot of it to synthesize long hydrocarbon chains for the chemical and medical industries because we're out of oil, or we will be using a lot of it to synthesize long hydrocarbon chains for the chemical and medical industries because we're conserving oil for the far future.
Nonsense, risk of injury. I happen to work in a pc shop, and have whacked a lot of old drives with hammers. No injury jet- as pointed out above, you dont take them apart and hit the platters individually. It is a reliable method of data destruction, but the main reason i prefer it is that it's fast - running a 35-pass guttman over all the old drives would also be reliable enough, but take days.
Considering M$'s "oh-we're-just-updating-the-updating" backdoor, Mr. Gates actually manages to get paid to take control of some expensive military gear. You have to admit, that is no small feat, even if WiFoWaShi probably only can be disabled remotely.
Seriously, this HAS to be some sort of giant hacker-recruiting ploy. It's hard to imagine a more enticing soft target.
I simply refuse to believe that IT workers at the MoD are dumb enough to actually let this become a reality.
Mine's the one with 'I Do Not Want To Believe This' on the back.
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