Posts by fg_swe 1478 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Nov 2021
It is memory safe and has a Java-like garbage collector. Or rather, Java is the New Algol.
There exist mainframe OSes written in ALGOL. One of them you can still buy from Unisys.
But if you believe the bozos, C and Unix are so much better, because they dominate the market like McDonalds does.
Who needs quiches, if you can get the same $hit burger all over the world ?
Remember Richard, former SIS man, who wrote a book called "big breach" (find it with google for free).
SIS and BBC would spread disinformation about their little dissident Richard, labeling him a "terrorist". Which could have killed him e.g in France, when police broke down his hotel room door.
I think Richard was not the smartest cookie(not seeing the cues, rebelling against superior power etc), but labeling him this way was clear and dangerous misinformation.
I got the same stuff from yt.
To me, most of the voice sounded genuine, but the Images presented were cr4ptastic. He-111s flying next to F-35s in a piece about the F4 and the like.
When you spot disinformation, report to yt. This should alert the algorithm. In theory, at least.
Report and downvote obvious trash.
Why is nobody turning the screws on China, who produce 30% of World CO2 ? Expanding coal use by 1000MWe WEEKLY.
My suspicion is that some powerful financemen have very nice business with both China-production and at the same time doing the CO2 scam in Britain and Germany.
Russia produces 4% of CO2 and have no intention to scale down whatsoever.
Britain about 1.5%, Germany 1.7% or so.
This awfully looks like a hugely successful COMINTERN information operation.
So the Redtops here want to convince us that Covid vaccine were essentially something great and good. All the products pushed by oligarchs, banks and corporations are essentially something good.. They can do nothing wrong, these commercialists cannot have malicious effect on the mass media.
I claim:
1.) Covid vaccines were dangerous quick+dirty substances pushed by the king of improvisation, William H. Gates. A man without proper, completed education. Not even beancounting.
2.) CDC VAERS WONDER had a very strong Adverse Effects Signal. Factor of 10000 more reports of near-death adverse effects than e.g. Measels vaccines.
3.) Out of my probably 300 acquaintances+friends, at least 2 had very serious adverse effects from Covid vaccine. One near death heart inflammation. Several others reported severe, though not live threatening adverse effects.
I am by no means a communist, quite the opposite. But neither do I think the oligarchs are super intelligent and super above board.
Thank god there are forces who do not worship Mammon.
Frank Gerlach
Brackenheim
Germany
Any proper control unit software engineer operates under the assumption that variables do not simply flip, as this nullifies any assumptions made about the code. Ideally the RAM, the Flash and the CPU itself performs ECC both in storage and in processing paths. The other option is to run a second unit in lockstep and compare the outputs, as identical bitflips in two ECUs is very unlikely.
There is no way a control algorithm can accept a bitflip of control variables or of program code; the outcomes can all be catastrophic.
Imagine the bitflip occuring inside your imagined dampening filter. Filter value jumps from 0x0005 to 0x8005. The output of your control unit goes from "minimal" to "maximum" in 20ms or so. In a matter of seconds the a/c attitude goes into a dangerous pitch that will rip the a/c apart. In the meantime your dampening filter went from 0x8005 to 0x8001 - not a relevant difference to save the a/c.
In reality it is probably much more complex PID controllers and filters working together to do the ELAC work. But any bitflip in the PID and the filters will hairraise the control software engineers. They want NOTHING of the like happening in their control codes. They want either immediate reset of the ELAC(in something less than 300ms) or a switchover to the Other Elac.
"until you leave the flight envelope"
This happens in a few seconds with maximum elevation of the horizontal stabilizer at full speed. A major aspect of this control unit is to keep the a/c pitch inside proper limits. A control algorithm only works as long as there are no unchecked bitflips... See the problem ?
Boeing also seems to have exquisite capabilities and a network of even more exquisite partners to do radiation testing
https://www.boeing.com/specialty/radiation-effects-laboratory#accordion-7aa0d0df7d-item-bfd8ce86b9
As I wrote above, some radiation sources need national labs capabilities.
Quick search with AI yields companies like this:
https://radiationtestsolutions.com/services/radiation-effects-testing/
https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/space/launch-vehicles/launch-vehicles-and-propulsion/testing-for-success
It seems the capabilities already exist, ready-to-use, but some MBA beancounter decided it was not necessary to contract them.
Airbus and EASA are stonewalling on the exact details of this failure mode. I guess they consider control unit engineering to be their secret sauce and fear they could advance the competition by telling too much.
My best guess is that L104 removed a redundant RAM storage+computation path, which would detect and mitigate the bitflip.
Or maybe L104 simply turned off ECC by accident. This would align with their decision to perform a hardware replacement of older control units. They probably have no ECC at all.
But then there is the Airbus philosophy of triplicate and higher control unit redundancy. Why did that not catch the bitflip ?
Of course machine code review will only be done for highly safety-critical parts of e.g. a flight control system("FlugLageRegler") and probably not on less critical things such as the radar, the radio and the like. Focus efforts on the most important parts and relax it on the lesser ones. Basic rationality goes a long way.
In aerospace software development you do not blindly trust the compiler, rather you will review every single line of Ada code and resulting machine instructions.
And you will test the effectiveness of your measures by a realistic particle/ radiation beam, which simulates hundreds of years of a/c operations in a matter of days.
If you read carefully, the bit flip could occur in a high valued bit of an important variable. This would trigger maximum elevation of horizontal control surfaces. A/c would perform extreme pitch, resulting in high aerodynamic forces, resulting in structure breakup.
Electronic control means the control unit must work almost perfectly. Bitflips must be propely dealt with. Sensor faults must be dealt with.
The same argument can be made about hydraulic and mechanical controls, though.
Engineers need to be on top of any failure mode.
1.) Measure real-world radiation
2.) Talk to a particle physicist how to simulate 1000x the radiation in a lab
3.) Strap control unit with the real software in a HIL setup in front of artificial radiation source (linear accelerator or the like)
4.) See what the HIL reports.
5.) Change software and or hardware.
6.) GOTO 3.
It is almost as if we spend lots of money on CERN and almost if Airbus could cooperate with CERN on this matter. As both entities are funded mostly by EU states.
In theory, this kind of things can be avoided by running the control unit in realistic HIL tests. As mandated by the V-Model.
Sensor failure is part of proper HIL Testing.
Redundant Sensors detect Sensor failure.
HIL Testing can be done in front of a particle beam, which simulates the sun and other radiation sources.
One should think that well-educated and enlightened engineering managers could think of this and make the necessary time, money and machinery available.
This issue seems to expose a deficiency of current aircraft/spacecraft control unit development(HW+SW) processes.
Why did they not find it in a HIL test strapped in front of an appropriate particle beam(simulating a solar storm's radiation over several years) ?
I've added this subject to my document on these matters:
https://di-fg.de/RobusteSoftware.html
Note 2: software of this type is developed with the V-Model approach, which is vastly different from the quick-and-dirty approach used for most beancounting and general IT software.
See
https://di-fg.de/RobusteSoftware.html
Airbus does have a good history of faithfully executing the V-Model and this appears to be an unfortunate exception. Nevertheless, they should now subject ALL of their safety-critical control units to artificial particle beam while executing inside a HIL test rig.
It transpires:
1.) The problem was a bitflip, caused by solar storm radiation. For some hard to explain reason, the affected variable in main memory was not protected by CRC, ECC or the like.
1.2) Protection is ideally done by hardware, but can also be done in software: Store multiple copies of the variables and compare them upon each use. Handle deviation in a proper way.
2.) The affected software controls the horizontal control surface. This means the aircraft can potentially pitch up or down wildly, up to a breakup of the a/c structure.
3.) The software rollback again protects against solar storm particles.
Questions:
A) Shouldn't Airbus have found this problem in a HIL Test rig under simulated solar radiation ? Particle beam accelerators do exist and are not expensive for a fleet of thousands of aircraft. Needs to be done once for each release and all a/c
Note: Control systems of this kind are typically programmed in Ada, C, C++ and execute on a RTOS like Integrity-178, VxWorks, QNX or the like. Unixes or Windows do not fit the bill, as they are not hard realtime capable. CPU could be an embedded version of PowerPC, ARM or 680x0.
According to ChatGPT:
Darwin Core OS kernel (macOS is built on it; includes XNU kernel, BSD utilities, etc.)
XNU Kernel Hybrid kernel used in Darwin (part Mach, part BSD)
bash / zsh Default shells in Terminal (zsh is default as of Catalina)
OpenSSH Secure remote login (SSH access, used in Terminal)
rsync File synchronization and backups
curl / wget Command-line tools for data transfer via HTTP, FTP etc.
git Version control system, often pre-installed
Apache HTTP Server Web server, included but not enabled by default
Python / Perl / Ruby Pre-installed scripting languages (varies by version)
LLVM / Clang Compilers and toolchains used for macOS and iOS development
libc (BSD / FreeBSD libc) Core C library used by system programs
cups Printing system for Unix (used in macOS printing stack)
tmux / screen (user-installed) Terminal multiplexer, useful for developers
Simply do not give away the latest patches of your FOSS software for free. Also, have two tiers of download servers: a slow one, "free" and a fast one for paying customers. Stand up this service by means of Paypal or Bitcoin.
There are corporations who massively depend on FOSS, e.g. Apple. Negotiate a special support contract with them. They make more than $100 BILLION in PROFIT PER YEAR. Surely they can spend a few millions on FOSS here and there. A Macintosh essentially is 90% FOSS SW and 10% Apple-developed SW.
https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/aapl/apple/financial-statements#google_vignette
Many countries, including Britiain, did not build new power stations for decades. When they restartet, enormous Learning Cost popped up. Which is reasonable if you think about re-training thousands of highly skilled workers.
The proper approach would have been a steady pace of nuclear-rebuild, one reactor unit at a time(start a new one each 3 years or so). But I guess all the attention and money went to the Canary Wharf set and their crazy contraptions.
Has Margret Thatcher written this, out of her father's veggie shop ?
AIRBUS is world-leading in almost all ways from design to manufacturing and market share. It has been jump-started from public funds, but it operates like a corporation. It can hire at market rate and fire lazies and incompetents.
The same can work for IT, if actually competent decisionmakers would be financing and founding it.
http://afd-zg.de/IT_Airbus.html
Meanwhile, Hetzner cloud works very nicely, no need for foreign behemoth, thanks a lot. So do OVH, Strato and quite a few more. Then there are Linux, ARM, RPI, MaxDB, LibreOffice, GNUpg. All of it rock-solid technology in comparison to the cloudy security of the behemoths:
https://www.heise.de/news/Klatsche-fuer-Microsoft-US-Behoerde-wirft-MS-Sicherheitsversagen-vor-9674431.html
https://nhimg.org/microsoft-azure-key-breach
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/microsoft_entra_id_bug/
Commercial IT systems are indeed still very weak. They are often developed using sub-standard methods such as informal+weak scanners, parsers and validators. This opens the castle to SQL and command shell injection attacks. Serialization has proven to be cheap+dangerous. Too many self-trained developers don’t know these basic computer science concepts, neither can they devise a proper syntax+grammar to the IT problem at hand.
https://di-fg.de/RobusteSoftware.html
Too often memory safety is not used due to inertia; it causes 70% of CVE exploits.
Microsoft had a memory-safe kernel in their R+D labs, but never made it a commercial product. It would have undermined the “secure Windows kernel” messaging…
The government needs to step up regulation to defend major industrial players. Red-teaming will also help to identify and plug dangerous weaknesses in industrial networks.
Government also needs to help out JLR, the same way they help out the bankers. What’s good for the financier is also good for the auto worker !
Alternatively, bow down to the Factory Of The World and lose the next conflict.
I guess it depends on the number of Cojones in a certain Berlin office.
When it came to the US fleecing Volkswagen and Bayer, there were none left.
It's also a matter of defence policy - if you want American soldiers to defend yourself in each critical situation - then you are beholden to U.S. demands.
Many Europeans operate exactly under this motto - America should do the fighting and all the dirty, bloody business. Like mowing the Iranian-Yemenite lawn or keeping a certain Euro tyrant in check.
Then the Europeans will be lecturing the Americans how bad they were, when they did the lawnmowing.
There already exist quite a few companies, products and systems to be used. They are not AWS-scale, but that might in many cases be an advantage. I am a Hetzner mini customer and they always respond to my questions+requests in time and with competence.
So if you are an IT decisionmaker, just give Hetzner a try. First for small projects, then midsize and eventually large-scale. Hetzner does have an API to spin up and down servers by shell script. Find out whether you like their technology and their customer support.
Then there are OVH, Ionos, Stackit/Schwarz IT, Deutsche Telekom and the British have their own companies. Give them a try, too.
Regarding IT Systems, there are plenty of non-monopolist alternatives to be used:
https://di-fg.de/IT_Airbus.html
Regarding SAP - they are a behemoth, but always anxious to never compete with Google, Amazon and MSFT base services. It can be seen in their rhetoric here. They were anxious not to create an alternative to Google Search and this smells of very much being beholden to foreign interests.
Because CISCO, Palo Alto, Microsoft and the like employ peabrains and rookies to implement their management(or other public-facing services like RDP) interfaces. All of this stuff should be locked behind a small, mathematically proven correct cipher system.
If you cannot trust your key routers and firewalls, how can you be sure there is no covert subversion on-going ? How are you going to detect the enemy operating inside your network, if he can commandeer your firewall ?
https://di-fg.de/MinimalesChiffrierSystem.html
In future routers and switches, the entire management interface must be secured by minimalist cipher end to end. From network management system to network element.
Do NOT use SSL for this. 400kloc and impossible to prove correct.
OpenSSH is much better, but still 80 times too big.
Never expose complex and faulty SNMP, PHP webapps and the like. Lock it behind the minimalist, secure Cipher.
As long as we do not have this, prepare for at least three days of telecom network outage. It has already happened to a certain country, can happen to yours.
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