Posts by Ubuntu Is a Better Slide Rule 126 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jan 2011
A) Buy a cheap cellphone
B) buy a cheap, registered and prepaid SIM card
C) use for a day
D) swap with somebody else
E) reload SIM card account
Note: Phones can be tracked,too.
Leave your number on a protected weblog for all your friends as soon as your Phone Number has changed.
b/c you lack ten ICBMs to defend your Island and all the routers against, well, "freedom fighters". Maybe you get in touch with EADS or Vlad the Gazman.
Here's a sales brochure I got from Vlad:
http://en15.rian.ru/img/119234529_free.html
He offered it to me in a bundle with 100grams of Polonium.
Why do you bother with FM and AM ??
Read up how DSL modems do it. Hack your own SSE3-based Software Defined Radio with Discrete Multitone Modulation. Cryptographically strong coding; Adaptive Forward Error Correction; Custom Ciphers. That will be the GNU Wireless Revolution !
In the evening distill your own Schnaps, Vodka or Raki and show the gobbermint inspectors the middle one. You can also try GNU beer. As in "free beer". Ok, I'll stop here :-)
A) Soupcan WLAN Mesh networks
http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/cantennahowto.html
B) Microwave long-distance links
http://www.microwave.gr/
http://www.icomamerica.com/en/products/amateur/mobile/id1/specifications.aspx
C) "rogue" broadband, directed HF links. Directly wire a Pentium Processor to a DAC/ADC and use SSE3 to create a software radio. Send at 19 to 21 MHz across any ocean with 5 kW of power. It should easily yield a multi-megabit/s link.
D) Blast VHF at the moon to perfom broadcasting of critical information. Also a software radio using SSE3 to thwart simple jamming.
Remember, Shannon proved that total jamming is not possible.
أثبت شانون تذكر ، أن مجموع التشويش غير ممكن.
Please ask yourself the following Questions:
A) How many dirt-cheap Engineers did it take to invent MySQL ?
B) How many dirt-cheap Engineers did it take to invent the Qt Toolkit ?
C) Who were the slave labourers who created the ARM processor ?
D) Is Dyson making their excellent hand-dryers in China or India ? And where did they develop them ?
E) What was the name of the name of that dirt-cheap labourer inventing HTTP/HTML ?
F) Why does Accuracy International only use unskilled labour ?
You can't find the answer ?
I think you will figure there is a big difference between simple, routine work and inventing something innovative. A big difference between screwing something together and making high-performance Diesel engines.
Maybe it is simply time to lose Faith In Money. Education, Training, Skills, creative, free thinking and being proud of your profession. Expecting a decent life instead of Money, Lordship, Barbados holidays and all that crap. A Seat is often much more useful than a Porsche. It's only in your mind. The problem is *your* greed. Not the world as such.
By the way, worldwide wealth indeed grows as more people manufacture useful things. Because useful things make wealth, not funny paper pieces, peerage and all that claptrap.
Your man Ricardo knew long ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo
..all you have to worry about is the Banksters. They have destroyed serious parts of British economy, not the cheap labourers in Asia.
The German economy is doing extremely well, because
A) Banksters are somewhat under control (they always bitch about a "lack of freedom" of course)
B) Everybody gets three or more years of academic or Apprenticeship. And the latter is not a comical theater as it is in other countries, as the state controls education plans and exams.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_model#Vocational_training
Now dear Anglo Banksters, I am sure you can tell me about the Nazi angle of all that. At least tell us what Ayn Rand has to say.
Maybe by doing a few "highly illegal" broadcasts using amateur radio ? Maybe somebody donates the credentials for her SATCOM internet access system to a friend in Arabia ? Improvised Directed WLAN with a Soupcan ? Israeli amateur radio people setting up "higly illegal" microwave links ? (while forgetting their hatred for a couple of days ??)
I am sure a single high-speed SATCOM uplink coupled to a WLAN mesh could reconnect Cairo again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network
Title is "http://translate.google.com/#auto|ar|Demokratie%20f%C3%BCr%20Arabien%20!"
Now that our great "leaders" in Europe and the US stick with the tyrant Mubarak, we should help Arabians subvert the tyranny with technology. Or maybe go to the street and let our support know.
I'll chip in with a short GNU Privacy Guard tutorial in Arabic:
إخفاء الرسائل الخاصة بك من الحكومة
gpg --symmetric message.txt
فك تشفير ملف
gpg -d message.txt.gpg
جب أن تكون كلمة السر لا يقل عن 30 حرفا. يجب أن كلمة السر لا تنبع من الكتاب.
أدخل كلمة المرور لصديقك في مقهى. لا تستخدم الهاتف
I hope democracy and freedom of expression will grow in Arabia, as it grew in Europe after the french revolution. It took a long time and a lot of mistakes. Please make Ghandi your role model, not Robespierre.
وآمل أن الديمقراطية وحرية التعبير سوف تنمو في السعودية ، كما نمت في أوروبا بعد الثورة الفرنسية. لقد استغرق الأمر وقتا طويلا والكثير من الأخطاء. الرجاء جعل غاندي قدوتكم، وليس روبسبير.
Please do not turn to violence. Time will blow away the tyrant.
الرجاء عدم اللجوء إلى العنف. الوقت سوف يطير الطاغية.
Here is a little list of programming languages free of the Java Patent Cruft:
+ FreePascal / Lazarus
+ GNU Ada (GNAT)
+ Cyclone
+ Modula-3
We now know that Richard Stallmann was sport-on in suggesting that Java is a death-trap and the hunter in charge of the trap is named Larry Ellison.
Tux knew.
I know because I have seen the people working on it. They still have engineers left who can do this. Maybe not in five years though, because at that point everything will be done by one of these contractors from that certain Asian country.
They have engineers on their payroll who care about the Linux kernel and calls like epoll().
A) Mark Shuttleworth & Ubuntu
B) Redhat
C) Mozilla
D) Richard Stallman & GNU
In the datacenter the battles are already over. Big finance is now Linux. Ubuntu aims for the desktop now...
All MoneySoft has left is Office and Exchange. LibreOffice, AbiWord, GNUmeric growning stronger by the day. TeX already strong with engineers. Gmail eating into Exchange/Outlook.
Nobody really needs MoneySoft anymore.
The Feistel Function F() can be any function. Many functions would be stupid, though:
F(x) = x
F(x)= 7
IDEA does not use s-boxes whatsover, yet it is considered quite strong. But the class of functions F(x) using s-boxes is actually a small subset of all functions. Important, but not all. Keeping the s-boxes secret and make them part of the key is the idea of the GOST algorithm.
DES/3DES have been weakened on purpose.
..that I do not intend to release this thing, as it could help people I do not like. But if the governments really want to break the truce with the software community, they can certainly get what they want. Not three ciphers to break (DES, AES and RC4), but say, three billion ciphers.
Keep the status quo and the software people will also keep it.
"In Greek mythology Sisyphus (pronounced /ˈsɪsəfəs/; Greek: Σίσυφος Sísyphos) was a king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity. He is also found in Roman mythology."
If you ban RIM, you should consider banning all other half-brained cellphone like the Nokia 6300. I have technology in my bedroom that will drive the folks at NSA nuts and all it needs is a 6300 or something equivalent.
Not yet intimidated ?
Think of Feistel Ciphers with function F() being *user-defined*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feistel_cipher
Each cryptogram would have a different, user-chosen function F(). Not just a different key, not just secret s-boxes. Maybe s-boxes, but maybe
F(x)= x*732478634+167123+(x>>>7)+(x<<<19)
or
F(x)= x*(732478634>>(x%7)+167123+(x>>>7)+(x<<<19)
or
F(x)= x*732478634+167123+(x>>>7)+(x<<<19)+sbox[(x>>23)%255]
So you better ban any cellphone which can perform GPRS. Nokia 6300s are much cheaper than BBs, but they can perform the above for any text message of 1000 bytes in a second.
Re Flywheel: Sorry for not making clear that the flywheel would rotate at 100.000 rpms, weigh ca 50kgs and drive an electric generator/motor. A gearbox would certainly be totally infeasible, for many reasons. You would load energy into the flywheel by sucking power from the overhead lines and spinning it up with (say) 1000kW, depending on the current state of the network. The loading computer would of course communicate with the grid via UMTS or the like to prevent overloading the overhead power lines and the grid in general.
Material would probably be some sort of composite material (e.g. CFC+Metal), as used in modern Tanks. Steel probably cannot take 100000rpms - it would simply disintegrate.
The car would be electrically propelled and draw (say) up to 70kW from the flywheel. Hotrod cars could even draw 1000kW in an instant and leave behind any Ferrari.
Re Vycon: Too slow (just 36000rpms. At 10000rpms, the energy capacity is about nine times higher). Probably because they use steel rotators. I like the concept of magnetic bearings, though.
Re Stirling: There are evangelists around who praise it. In reality, the weak point of the Stirling is the Stirling Principle: A cylinder must be heated externally to heat an internal gas ! Contrary to that, the Diesel heats an internal gas by injecting the fuel with extreme violence.
According to wikipedia, Diesels are indeed more efficient than ANY OTHER combustion engine, including the Stirling. An MAN Diesel can achieve 54% efficiency in the optimal case (always same rpm, same temperature, seldom restarts etc).
The 1500hp Diesel engine from MTU propelling the EuroLeopard can burn lots of liquids that contain hydrocarbons, not just Diesel, Biodiesel and Rapeseed. Currently duking it out with the red army and all you have is a dump of Motor oil intended to grease Petrol engines ? Just pump it into your leos and continue to be mobile.
That's certainly not the cheapest solution, but it might be the rational decision to make in this situation. Wasting expensive motor oil is on the long run cheaper than detonating a nuke.....
What you can infer from that is that Diesels can burn any hydrocarbon liquid, including alcohol, if they have been designed and tested with that. Modern electronics, sensors and electronics can perform little wonders, nowadays. The engineers at Bosch, MAN and MTU would have quite a few wet dreams while downsizing the EuroLeopard engine into the VW Golf or Opel Astra. It must be boring to perfect the current state of Diesel engines running only on "proper" fuel.
Did I mention BMW has a Diesel burning hydrogen ?
Rudolf's a hero !
Certainly it is easier to burn Petrol and Diesel IF these are cheaply available. But I am quite confident a serious R&D effort could make this technology viable for emergency purposes or as a "last 5 kilometers" technology (electrified Autobahn to home).
The current state of "Wood-Gas" technology is absolutely primitive. Not much R&D done, no sophisticated sensors, no electronic control systems, wood of uncertain quality.
To make this happen, serious R&D efforts must be done, which would
A) develop a gasifier with sophisticated sensor/control system
B) a standard for wood chips (size, wood type, water percentage etc)
C) a system for automatically feeding the gasifier with wood chips from a storage trunk.
Apparently nothing has been done to improve Car-scale gasifier development, so it is a small wonder the technology is currently primitive. When the next "oil crisis" strikes, R&D must be completed to use gasification/electrification as a response to the crisis.
I am sure Exxon, BP, $hell and Lockheed Martin have a different concept in mind. Involving assassinations, smart weapons (not smart soldiers, though) and stealth bombers. So much more Money in Killing Tech R&D than in Gasification R&D !!
Petroleum roasting Iraqis.
According to Wikipedia, there are several countries with much longer systems of electrified railways than Germany has Autobahns. This in turn means that Autobahns could be electrified without pushing copper and/or aluminum prices too high.
The concept would be as follows: Cars either have a Storage System or a Reserve propulsion system. Normally they would be powered electrically from the overhead wires and a pantograph. An electro-optical system would align the pantograph (which would look more like a long stick) with the wire.
Grounding would be provided by a ground rail integrated into the road. Only were no overhead wires are existent, the Storage System or the Reserve Propulsion System would be used. Most often this would be the five kilometers from the Autobahn to a family's home.
Storage System: This would be either a battery system, a gimbaled flywheel at 100000 rpms or a high-pressure air tank/compressor/engine (surrounded by water tank to cool/heat the air). The Storage system would provide energy on road sections without overhead electric lines. Autobahns would not need to be fully electrified, but only have sections which are electrified (e.g. electrifying only 1/5 of the Autobahn length).
Reserve Propulsion System: Either Diesel, Stirling (or another ICE or ECE) burning basically anything which can burn; Hydrogen to wood chips.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel
http://www.holzgas.ch/573.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_%28rail%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_des_elektrischen_Antriebs_von_Schienenfahrzeugen#Gr.C3.B6.C3.9Fte_L.C3.A4nder_der_Welt
..because by mechanical or electronic means the wrong plug/battery will simply refuse to do anything. Batteries will contain at least as much CPU/memory/sensors power as any modern smartphone, just to assure proper loading/unloading/temperature stress. Safety functions will come as an added bonus for virtually no cost.
One could upgrade petrol stations the same way, but that would cut into profits....
Indeed, the C language is something very dangerous. Application programmers should not use it. It was sendmail running the worm, not Unix, though.
My point is that a small system, which can be thoroughly analysed, will protect these stinking heaps of application software used to render HTML, PDF, OpenOffice, MS Word.
It is much easier to assure correctness of AppArmor than to assure the correctness of all these applications. Including custom-written applications.
AppArmor could even be mathematically proven to be correct. The effort would be significant, but the benefit could be experienced in many, many Linux installations.
Many commercial computer users still feel they cannot live without MS Office. Wine can integrate Linux and MS Office and ease the transition.
Wine&Linux are the safest way of executing the bug-ridden Microsoft and Adobe applications, as these applications can be locked into a sandbox using Linux Security Modules.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/137560
For example, a company/organization with secrets to protect (say an aircraft engine manufacturer dealing with a certain powerful nation in asia), could create custom AppArmor profiles to allow their executives safely view word documents coming in from the Big, Bad Internez.
And no, this is not hypothetical, Booz-Allen Hamilton (big in the NSA/CIA/DHS business), RR (engines), the German government and Chinese dissidents have been attacked with hostile PDFs or Word docs in the past.
A picture of a Vigilant Penguin.
If you don't want to depend on torturer's aircraft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N379P
you can have an aircraft partially made in Britain:
http://www.airbusmilitary.com/Multimedia/Gallery.aspx
And which is based on the highly successful A320/A319 family of aircraft.
Now that the Royal Air Force operates A330MRTT tankers, which are the most capable tankers in existence, I am sure Airbus can also deliver an A330 or A340 ASW aircraft.
With some creativity, the A330/A340 airframe could become a multi-role AEW/ASW/ELINT/Ground-SAR aircraft. Just plaster it with the latest antennas (on the full hull, preferably, to get maximum aperture). Process the data using dirt-cheap 3D Video cards.
I am sure our friends at Thales have some excellent and cheap antennas available. They recently gave Germany a marvelous antenna system for change:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAR-Lupe
(German Radar sat constellation)
I do think your general approach is quite good. Nevertheless, automatically replacing words with synonyms or just inserting commas, dots etc might change the semantics of the message significantly.
Just think of replacing "lady" by "woman" or vice versa. "I did not have sex with that woman" is different from "I did not have sex with that lady", because the first one is derogatory towards that female human being in question. It suggests this lady/woman/female is untrustworthy...
In diplomatic messages this would twist the meaning, so I do not think it would be a good idea.
Maybe different users of a secret database could be served with different fabricated gossip messages. "Putin loves threesome", "XXX has three balls" etc. The source of the gossip is the leaker...
Still, their major fault was to not compartmentalize their "cables". Why did Manning need cables from Berlin to perfom his job ?? That's called "need to know" or "secret compartmentalized information" ("sci"). It is the standard operating procedure of any secret-handling bureaucracy, military research organization or higher government office.
Why the Dept. Of State can't apply what basically all their peers around the world and the military services/research institutes do is beyond me.
..I am much more concerned about that "Commander In Chief" who apparently wields the authority to initiate Armageddon or maybe just starting a conventional war by autocratic decisionmaking:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar?currentPage=all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
Why Americans think that their President is by definition sane and rational is completely above me. Apparently they let him drink the water of sanity or something. And it apparently has no effect. Which makes the whole "Commander In Chief" concept something very, very dangerous. As expected by any rational person. But we are talking about Americans.....
Mr Assange can only "do damage" with a pile of bits. I have yet to see anybody killed by information, which does not contain any operational relevance anymore.
This so-called overhead is more a systems management overhead than a real hardware investment. Facebook, which is the largest internet service now by many measures, would need to spend less than 5 million $ on this technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_accelerator
Compared to hundreds of million revenue that's simply negligible. But their friends in government can't perform easy datamining and snooping, that's much more of an issue.
99% of people in the EU are not doing criminal business on the internet or the telephone system. They use it to send email to business partners, lovers, politicians, activists.
If Intelligence Agencies want to influence an election, they will identify key people and key networks from these big heaps of data and then let quite a few funny things happen. The surveillance industry (dozens of billions of worldwide revenue) will certainly feed everybody with arguments why each bit must be inspected, recorded and analyzed. Surely their Artificial Intelligence can identify the bad guys before they become bad guys, irrespective of the definition of "bad guy", certainly.
I personally had the pleasure to have an American-speaking reception committee in a restaurant in Germany, after making an appointment to meet a friend there. One of the black-glass guys was at one point standing in a threatening pose in front of me. I decided not to hit him but to just leave that Pizzeria and its underling owner who didn't throw that merkin out of his premises.
No, this is just a quest for government money and for power of intel agencies to control those 99% who are law-abiding. The 1% criminals will either use TOR or be in prison. When they come out, they will know what TOR is.
All parties except the FDP (liberals) want to control people, including the lefties and the greenies. When it is about anything important, the greenies will regurgitate the Langley agenda, anyway.
..in case you have been a former Tshekist who is now bitching ? Tshekists "know the rules about traitors" so it is surely ok to treat them with Polonium or Mercury ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko_poisoning
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/russische-dissidenten-in-berlin-ehemalige-kgb-agenten-mit-quecksilber-vergiftet-1.1040513
"Opfer des möglichen Giftanschlags sind die Journalisten Viktor und Marina Kalaschnikow. Bei diesen hatten Ärzte der Berliner Charité laut dem Magazin Focus Quecksilberwerte im Blut entdeckt, die den zulässigen Grenzwert um das 25-fache übersteigen."
Your argument's logic boils down to saying "the US military is known to use torture, if you join them, you accept being potentially tortured". I am now accepting this is the truth, but then the US military is a band of thugs, nothing more. And it is sad you defend them.
I fell sorry for you if you believe this "business world moving faster than you can learn" B.S.
Quicksort, Hash tables, balanced trees, vectors etc have not changed in any meaningful way for the last 40 years.
Being able to transform a business or science problem into an algorithmic solution first and foremost requires proper data structures and reasoning about algorithms. The clusterf*cks of "industry standard languages" do not help to develop this skill.
The first objective in a proper CS education in secondary or tertiary education must be to enable pupils/students to think in data structures and then devise or apply an algorithm. Pascal is as clean as it can get to help students achieve that objective. Quick hacks with funnily typed languages and regexp might be ok to to a quick-and-dirty job for a $hitty businessman, but anything non-trivial requires the skills one learns by doing Algorithms & Data Structures with something like Pascal or Ada.
MySQL: migrate to PostgreSQL, Firebird or OpenIngres
OpenOffice: migrate to GNUmeric, AbiWord, gnu bc or even better: LaTeX
Java: migrate to Python, PHP, GNU Ada or FreePascal/Lazarus
Virtualbox: migrate to Xen or KVM
There is no need to support this bully any longer.
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