Posts by vtcodger 2337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
Presumably the fuckwits ...
After some thought, I think it's possible that the IT community reaction may be a bit off-focus here.
Look, we're dealing with a 2600km pipeline and storage complex here. How else would you propose to control it other than over "phone" lines? Alternatives like a private, separate, wired or wireless communication system would likely be costly, failure prone and require the same constant maintenance that the phone system does. And it might not help in cases like this.
I think that in this case, the system level problem possibly doesn't come from remote control per se. It sounds like it comes from failure to isolate the physical delivery/storage system from the company's administrative, management, etc systems. The latter fails -- and it is very likely that it will from time to time. ... And it takes the product storage/delivery system with it. ... Ooops
I have never worked with pipeline systems, but my guess would be that their is some need to extract billing and operating data from the product delivery system and probably some need to input some commands at times. So a completely separate system might be difficult/impractical/impossible. I did work at one time with some folks who were trying to extract an unclassified data subset from a classified system in real time. The difficulties were legion.
So I don't think partitioning the product system from the other systems would be anywhere near as easy as it sounds. But I think it might be possible. A quick internet search leads me to believe that partitioning is not a very common practice. Maybe it should be.
Partitioning/Isolation looks to be an entirely different problem than the well known potential problem of SCADA vulnerabilities. I suspect that fixing one will do little to solve the other.
In 1964, the control was probably provided by some dude driving out in a war surplus jeep to manually open or close one or more valves. ... After getting a phone call or teletype message. Probably more secure, but hardly bulletproof. And probably kind of expensive and not all that reliable.
Just a guess.
" Let the miscreants try to take over OS/360 "
Good point. Internet hackers are clever, but I doubt they are clever enough ever to master JCL. On the downside, identifying malicious JCL would be harder than identifying malicious Javascript. Pretty much impossible I should think.
I still remember a chance lunchtime encounter in the 1960s with an early OS/360 user. He described JCL as the world's first syntax free language. What more can you say about a scripting language that frequently requires a null operator and calls its null operator "IEFBR14"?
"Have a +1 for realizing that NAT is an obstacle that needs to die and not some fake security shield that people mistake it for."
Have a downvote for not understanding that many of us don't want "blackbox" devices on our network that anyone can trivially access from anywhere. NAT pretty much prevents that. Inelegant? Perhaps. But setting up and properly maintaining a firewall is a complex task that I and many others would prefer to avoid.
How about you run your network your way (assuming that you have the ability to do so) and let us run ours our way?
"Targeted advertising is a fraudulent concept."
Not entirely. If, for example, I'm searching the Internet for lawnmower parts, it's probably reasonable to assume that I likely have a lawn and might be more interested in lawn products than someone picked at random. I don't much mind advertising related to my current activities as long as it isn't too intrusive, doesn't use too much bandwidth, and doesn't use scripting. Fair exchange for providing me with a decent search engine I think.
But the user profiling practiced on the modern internet is bizarre to the point of being ludicrous. I don't care if it's profitable. It's still inexcusable.
Past time to shut it down. My suggestion is to tax retained data on users beyond that necessary to support account activities. --- and make the tax substantial -- and tax it at the same rate in every country where the company does business.
"The one with the best bandwidth is chosen as the lead server ..."
Upvoted. Not because I strongly agree. But because your downvoters appear to be the usual inarticulate clods who won't/can't lay out their probably nonsensical/self-serving objections for the rest of us to evaluate.
Upvoted because I came here to say much the same thing. As far as I can tell, the claim for Autopilot safety is -- like the claim that the November 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump -- based on nothing other than repeated assertion. But if T.F.M.Reader and I are wrong, please provide us with some CREDIBLE references to material that demonstrates the exceptional safety of Autopilot.
Seems to me that it's past time to acknowledge that automated vehicle control is a tremendously complex problem that is going to be solved slowly and piecemeal. I think level 2 autonomy needs to be fully validated first at low speeds where a human driver has some chance of figuring out what the car's digital brain has in mind before it does something dumb. And we probably should not allow anything higher than level 2 autonomy on public highways until level 2 can pass rigorous independent tests. No matter how devastating that is to some folk's business plans.
The marketing people -- including Elon Musk -- should not be allowed anywhere near the concept of vehicle autonomy until its safety is solidly established. Those folks are crazy and irresponsible. We all know that. If they want to lie about how well their detergent works or how much money they can save you on insurance, I suppose that's OK. But really, it's a dumb idea to let them roll out and sell control systems for massive objects traveling at high speed through shared public spaces.
"A collision in space between two reasonably hefty objects would result in thousands of bullet and football sized chunks travelling a speed in random directions. ..."
A bit more nuanced than that. Depending on the closing speed, closing angle, rotational speed of the objects (if any), object masses, the construction of the objects and whether one or both have explosive payloads that actually explode, the result could be anything from thousands of fragments to only a few fragments plus (possibly) some amount of harmless vapor. Barring other factors intervening, two things will be true of each and every one of the objects leaving the collision. They will be traveling in an orbit -- probably an ellipse with the center of the Earth at the nearer focus. And, assuming they don't hit the Earth or leave the Earth's gravitational field entirely, they will all pass thru the collision point (in an Earth-centered inertial coordinate system) when they finish their first revolution. I think that most will probably "hit the Earth". But that's not certain. It's just the expected result over a large number of random collisions. Fortunately (probably) they won't all arrive at the collision point at the same time because most every orbit will have a slightly different period.
Anyway, that's what I think will happen.
Why 15min? And what's the screwdriver for? On my ancient Nokia 2126, changing out the battery takes 30 seconds and doesn't require any tools. It'd probably be faster with practice. But I don't need to replace the battery all that often.
Could Apple, Motorola, Samsung et.al. do that if they wished? I'll bet that somewhere in dark, forgotten corners of the ... ehrrr ... campuses, they each have an engineer two who vaguely remembers how to design things like that.
Of course, before we can have replaceable batteries we probably need to replace all the MBAs in management and the lunatics in marketing. A bag of cabbages from the local market would probably have about the same intelligence and would have a far lower burden rate.
You're getting security related emails from Google that you can understand? How? I get emails from them every now and then offering to help me enhance my security. But their missives quickly deteriorate into a jumble of incomprehensible phraseology that makes no sense whatsoever.
I ignore them.
I'd probably ignore them even if I understood them.
Will MS delete _all_ the data they have collected WRT to me??
Of course not. At least not intentionally. But they probably have you confused with a distant cousin who lives in Albania. When they try to pull data on either of you they will come up with a garbled and mostly harmless composite.
Actually, Texas probably needs BOTH a big battery and more natural gas generation. Elon Musk has been remarkably unforthcoming about the need for and economics of the big battery in South Australia. But it seems actually to be necessary because wind and solar can often be kind of bursty -- think a nice Summer day with soothing, intermittent breezes and clouds scuttering across the sky. Unlikely as it may sound, the low points between gusts and due to clouds are conventionally handled by stealing rotational energy from every motor generator on the grid. That works fine. If you aren't overly dependent on bursty electrical suppliers.
But the climate warriors envision a world driven almost entirely by wind and solar. Try that, and you are looking at a world with far fewer motor generators attached to your grid. You'll need another buffer. A big battery can do it. How big? I don't think anyone actually knows. But pretty big.
Why more gas generators as well? Because -- as became evident during this year's once in a decade freeze -- short term, Texas has inadequate worst case electrical generation capability. Natural gas is probably the cheapest/best way to provide it.
"Fiat money doesn't take anything to produce."
Not exactly. At its root conventional money is IOUs and a large part of its "value" is based on the perceived ability of the issuer to redeem them. One trouble with cryptocurrency is that there is no issuer. AFAICS, it's "value" depends mostly on the belief that there will always be a greater fool who will take it off your hands -- preferably at a profit.
Recommended reading -- Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went by John Kenneth Galbraith. It may not change your views but it might get you thinking.
"Personally, I cannot think of a single thing fake gold adds to society."
I'm inclined to agree. The merit of an "asset" backed solely by happy thoughts seems a bit dubious. What happens when, as will happen sooner or later, people stop thinking happy thoughts?
The one virtue I can see to bitcoin et al is their ability to fuel dubious activities without requiring the somewhat risky exchange of physical tokens -- traditionally Gold or small unmarked bills. (Although I believe that in practice. large transactions may not be as untraceable as the participants might hope). And that's really only a virtue to kidnappers, ransomware distributors and perhaps those in the drug trade.
"Soon after, younger co-workers within [the manager's] department who became aware of [the manager's] critique of Mr Tsur began calling Mr. Tsur derogatory names, such as 'old man,' and 'old fart,' as well as demeaning Mr Tsur’s Israeli origin in Mr. Tsur’s presence,"
Assuming this to be true, why would Mr Tsur (or anybody else) want to work there?
"So? Do you have a better plan for how to hold large companies to account?"
Sure. Grab the CEO and throw him/her into a dungeon until the company comes up with a few billion dollars. Euros, Pounds or whatever ransom in small, unmarked bills. It's traditional. Has been used since time immemorial. And worked pretty well. I'm not sure why it has fallen out of favor.
I think maybe automated driving on known expressways just might be doable. Get in the right hand lane. Stay there. Maintain a safe distance from whatever is in front of you. Don't exceed the speed limit. And, above all, DON'T HIT ANYTHING. All of that can probably be done with today's technology. Albeit barely.
What is tricky is detecting people, wild animals, livestock, "stuff", snow, sand, vegetation, construction, accidents, water, other liquids, other liquids--burning, etc, etc, etc in the right of way and handling them appropriately and non-lethally. Maybe that's somehow doable, but it is hard to see quite how. Whatever is done, it has to be reliable and shouldn't result in 50km long traffic jams when your vehicle encounters its first tumbleweeds, insect swarms, or escaped kangaroos.
I don't know how to do that. I don't think anyone does.
Indeed. Rear view cameras and GPS are genuinely useful. But they can be retrofitted inexpensively. I've been doing that to our cars for a couple of decades. ABS is probably a good idea if you don't drive much on unpaved roads and don't have to deal with ice and snow four or five months of the year. The rest of the junk (ESC et al) mostly seems to fall into the "Now You Have Two Problems" category.
I don't expect that automated driving technology will be fully sorted out for decades. I'd prefer that someone else does the sorting.
38000 jobs? Most likely in the collision damage repair, emergency medical services, and mortuary sectors?
A system that beeps at the driver when he/she drifts out of lane or gets too close to the vehicle in front might be a good idea. Worth trying I think. (But with an off/on switch please, if you don't mind.) The notion that computer technology in its current state can safely steer a vehicle in any but the most carefully controlled situations is nuts.
Maybe preventing bad guys running stuff on your network might be a better target for remediation
If you can figure out how to do that, a fortune awaits you. So far as I can see, not connecting your computer(s) to a network -- ever -- is the only known method of preventing all malware attacks. And even THAT may not be sufficient if you insist on inputting "data" to your computer(s).
Roads were labeled by route numbers - exclusively. No destinations, sometimes not even a direction ...
On top of which, even in following decades, there are places on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River opposite NYC where so many numbered routes merge into a single stretch of expressway that there isn't room on the signs for all the route numbers. Thus you end up with the GPS telling you to take route N in 200 feet and you have no information whatsoever as to whether N is the right fork or the left fork. This is not especially fun.
Clearly, you've never driven in Boston. Not only do they not have signs that tell you where roads go, they have street signs that somehow never reveal the name of any street that you'd be likely to use. My understanding is that they feel that if you don't know where you are and where you are going, you don't belong there.
Given China's long standing and utter disdain for intellectual property rights, why should anyone here give two hoots about patents held out there too?
It's we in the West who put our faith in "Intellectual Property". The Chinese are surely well aware that the wheels started to come off the patent system in the late 19th century and that it is now a vast swamp of (intentionally) incomprehensible documentation presided over by hordes of vicious and insatiable lawyers.
The Chinese want to sell to us stuff. A lot of stuff. Patents are one of the things they will need. So they have patents (in our system BTW). Lots of patents apparently. quelle surprise
6G will be wonderful! The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together. And all the cops will have wooden legs. And the bulldogs all will have rubber teeth. And the hens will lay soft-boiled eggs. And the farmers' trees will be full of fruit
And yes, there will be hookers. And blackjack.
Apparently it is a campus/airport shuttle (or delivery) vehicle with virtually no road clearance, capable of traveling up to 19kph (12mph). It looks and specs like what I think a reasonable person would hope an early autonomous vehicle might look like. Most conscious vertebrates should be able to elude it if turns rogue. Pictures at https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/29933371.html
Franz Kafka lived a century too early. From the IMDb review of The Castle.
"A land surveyor is summoned to a village to work, yet finds that nobody knows who sent for him. As he tries to understand what is happening, he is blocked at every turn by bureaucratic Kafkaesque obstacles and officials."
Perhaps it is time for a new term -- "Googlesk"
There is no such thing as a global operating system.
And in any case every multiuser OS I've ever seen has, of necessity, at least one admin account that can do pretty much whatever it damn well pleases. One account to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. How much more authoritarian can you get?
And, as far as digital currencies are concerned, ... The only reason for these are for government surveillance.
Seems to me that there is a use case for an anonymous digital currency for small transactions. You wave your "wallet" (whatever it's physical form) at a parking meter or chewing gum dispenser and a small amount of value moves from your possession to someone else's in return for a few minutes of parking or a pack of gum. Doesn't require one to have tokens (coins) of the proper dimensions and mass or to physically transfer a token. Can it be done? I haven't the slightest.
But if it can be/is done, I doubt it will require blockchain.
And I imagine that it'll be anonymous because tracking who spent how much for what for small transactions will almost certainly be more trouble than it is worth.
Sure is a good thing that the Emotet folks didn't leave a doomsday device behind that will brick the affected devices a few after their DLL is removed. They wouldn't do a thing like that ... right? That'd be uncivil.
Perhaps they will just be content to use the bogus admin account they installed last year when they had control of the machine.
My point in case it isn't clear. This security thing is a contest. And the black-hatted guys aren't stupid. It might be a good idea to be cautious about taking possibly premature victory laps.
Ultimately you can't protect people from themselves.
True. But the underlying issue would seem to be that of protecting innocent bystanders from the excesses of inept/unlucky/overwhelmed system designers, demented marketeers, partying Texans late on Saturday night, and similar menaces.
What I read suggests that ALL automatic driving and current collision avoidance systems (except perhaps Waymo's) are not yet ready for prime time. Too many edge cases. Too much stuff that isn't quite right yet. And that's when used as intended. Much less when bypassed. Yet those systems are being advertised, sold, and, inevitably, abused.
May I suggest that it's past time to impose adult supervision on vehicle automatic control systems? Heavy vehicles traveling at high speed on public highways are an inappropriate venue for "move fast, break things", "Worked once - ship it. We'll fix the bugs in production" and similar craziness.
==== A quote that seems appropriate ==
"... the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have the SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them, too." M Crichton, Airframe,1996
Not commercially viable? The same could be said of the ISS dontcha think? BTW, a significant part of the ISS is owned and operated by Russia. How much? It's surprisingly hard to find a number. The best I could find is Wikipedia $12B from Russia from a total cost that might (or might not) be around $150B. (2015 numbers?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Cost
"Not permanently manned" Very likely means like Skylab in the 1970s. When you have enough worthy experiments collected to justify the trip, you send a crew up for a few weeks or months to occupy it, run the experiments, and shut it down again. That actually might be cheaper than paying the ongoing costs of a permanent presence in space on the ISS.
Radiation? I dunno. I suspect the problem comes from the Russian's probably entirely reasonable desire to be able to observe the northern portions of their country from space. The ISS 51 degree inclination orbit wouldn't allow that. Their own space station probably would. I don't fully understand the mechanics of how the Earth's magnetic field protects against radiation but my very crude mental image suggests that radiation protection might be a problem at high geomagnetic latitudes -- which would presumably be where they would like to visit?
There's pretty good article on the state of the investigation as of Tuesday at Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/elon-musk-denies-autopilot-was-active-before-deadly-crash-in-texas/ Their take away It's a confusing situation where all possible explanations seem rather unlikely.
BTW, the police seem (or at least seemed two days ago) quite certain that the driver's seat was empty and both passengers were belted in. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/cops-almost-99-9-sure-tesla-had-no-one-at-the-wheel-before-deadly-crash/
The most plausible explanation based on the "facts" at hand would seem to be that there was a third entity driving the vehicle who was teleported to safety just before impact.
I doubt we'll have to wait for an official report. That may take months or years. But we certainly would seem to need more complete/more accurate data.
Given the dismal state of internet security and the fact that has become clear in recent months that it's wall to wall crackpots out there, it's not too hard to imagine a digital threat from some malicious agent(s) that needs to be dealt with **NOW** not six weeks from next Thursday. So, yes, the government probably needs to be able to step in and fix things sometimes. Can/will they abuse/botch that intervention sometimes? Probably.
I don't think we've been told why the FBI felt they had to act immediately. They probably had reasons. Maybe good reasons. Or not. At least they got a court order. So they probably had at least a plausible justification.
What to do about all this. I haven't the slightest. Neither, I suspect does anyone else. It's a serious issue I think. But it's not even in the top ten problems I think I see looming in this shiny new digital universe.
It's going to be a bumpy night.
Probably no reason to give up on IPv6. But it should be pretty obvious by now that there is a LOT of resistance to implementing it. Could be there are reasons for that. Might be time to consider plan B which likely involves seamless dual stacks and "one-click" disabling of anything remotely resembling the obviously unsecurable Internet of Things.
The setting: A rural elementary school. The library
Six year old pushes cdrom button. Tray slides out. Six year old digs chocolate chip cookie out of lunch bag. Places it in tray. Pushes button again. Computer eats cookie while making odd noises. Six year old entertained. Librarian outraged.
I thought the incident showed a certain amount of commendable initiative. Don't recall if I was able to salvage the cdrom drive. Probably not. Quite a few non-standardized fragile plastic parts in those things. The school went through a fair number of them every year even when used properly.
its going to have to be more fabs since the current ones are all full...
Can Intel or anyone else build a new fab in 6 to 9 months? That's 185-275 days from deciding to build to draw up plans, acquire permits, plumb water supplies, order and install equipment, order supplies (raw silicon? chemicals, etc) hire and train staff, etc,etc,etc.
I remember visiting a fab once to fix someone's modem. There was a line of squirrel-cage blowers each the size or a suburban garage in the parking lot presumably awaiting installation. I'm pretty sure that huge air blowers are NOT something one orders on Amazon and gets delivered overnight. Acquiring stuff like that probably requires months of lead time and for all I know they are built up on site from parts as I suspect that delivery by road or rail is also a problem.
So Intel is leading the hogs to feed at the federal trough. Fair enough.
One question though. I don't know a lot about semiconductor fabs, but I'm pretty sure that they are complex factories with a lot of special tooling and process unique support procedures and equipment. Does anyone who is more familiar with fabs and their workings think that 6 to 9 months is or is not enough time to repurpose one or more existing fab facility(ies) to making automobile chips?
And are these new chips going to be identical to the old ones? Functional equivalents? Pretty much the same with only a few firmware tweaks needed? Something else?
And what about whatever said fab used to make? Is that stuff then going to be in short supply?
I was going to say much the same thing. As I understand it, PayPal is already treated like a bank in Europe. Now China as well?
Not being willing to hand over my financial details to an unregulated bank (and especially one with a long standing reputation for high-handed conduct) I don't use PayPal. That's kind of a problem as most North American vendors seem to believe that nothing could possibly go wrong as long as PayPal is available and not too expensive.
I realize that China bashing is the motif dejure, but perhaps we Americans could lease a few Chinese regulators for a while. Maybe we could pretend they are Japanese or slightly odd looking Italian consultants.
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