Posts by fg_swe

European companies form space jam to secure comms sovereignty with satellites

VVS Will Rejoice

All they need to do is to fly their Mig31+ASAT to the North Pole and pick the Sats off one by one.

General Staff Airborne Command Post - GESAC

+ Airbus A380

+HF radios

+VHF, UHF, Microwave radios

+Common European Cipher CEC

+manned by the top generals from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Poland, Netherlands, Sweden and support officers from said nations

+operating as required, but only in takeoff-ready standby/training as long as no external threats existent

Survivable High Bandwidth Communications Relay

The Grob EGRETT can fly at 16000 meters and provide e.g. a high speed microwave link from Berlin to Paris, London to Paris. Two EGRETTs would be needed for Madrid to Paris or from Rome to Berlin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grob_G_520

As I wrote before, if only the muppets knew what they already have.

Narrowband Communications Style

Of course leaders on all levels must accept and learn how to communicate with other leaders using text-chat-style interaction. HF radios cannot support video or even voice communication on a large scale, but this is not really necessary. C2 for huge operations was executed with shortwave, Morse telegrams in the past.

In terms of communications security, the less bits you need to transmit, the better.

Re: Better Approach: Shortwave Spread Spectrum Radios

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_(communications_system)

https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/defence-and-security/radio-communications/land-communications/tactical-radios/hf-3000

Better Approach: Shortwave Spread Spectrum Radios

Why:

+ a network of shortwave radio stations cannot be taken out easily, unlike satellites which are easy to spot and attacked by ASAT weapons like the SM3

+ low cost

+ spread spectrum is hard to locate and hard to jam

+ much smaller cybernetic attack surface

Rohde+Schwarz and Thales have spread spectrum shortwave radios readily available. If only the leaders knew what was at their disposal, instead of being fooled by commercial interests who want to live off the teat of state.

Also, given the Russian threat, there must be Common European Action. A centrally controlled air defence wargame, including all west European air forces acting as single power. No more Divide Et Impera by the Kremlin !

Telcos need another $3B in Uncle Sam's cash to remove Chinese network kit, says FCC

Defence is always more or less collectivist in nature. The world is a bit more complex than Austrian Economics can explain.

As Opposed To

"being held like cattle without food an water, during an imagined 'virus' crisis" ?

Control of Development Engineers

Whoever controls the development engineers controls the number and quality of backdoors. Backdoors can be "explained" as programming errors. He also controls which security holes will be fixed, which not. He further controls whether a crashed system can be restarted or not.

The Americans are right, it is a serious threat and it just shows how childishly naive the Germans as a whole are. They can be so naive, because they know they can always call in Uncle Sam.

War Even More Expensive

China has global ambitions and they are willing to use force to get what they desire. Don't be a fool.

Well

German politicians are dumb enough to let defence deteriorate to the point they must cry for Uncle Sam whenever Moscow or Ankara utters a threat. A case of childish pacifism, often nurtured by communist leanings.

They will first lecture and then panic. Less rationality than Kindergarten kids.

We

...from Piter, eh ?

Modular finds its Mojo, a Python superset with C-level speed

Re: Generic Programming Using Standard Tools

I got this idea when working for d'Assault on CATIA. They use cfront macros for generic programming. It works rather well for CATIA and its 2000 odd modules. m4 is superior to cfront.

Generic Programming Using Standard Tools

Use a proper Macro Processor such as m4 to define generic code and then generate instances for different types. Here is an example of a generic Sappeur quicksort algorithm:

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/quickSort.ad.m4.txt

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/quickSort.ai.m4.txt

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/SortUnterstuetzer.ad.txt

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/SortUnterstuetzer.ai.txt

The C++ template system is mostly an unnecessarily complex/hard to debug macro system. The purpose seems to be to scare off newcomers with a load of hard-to-decipher error messages upon a single mistake.

So, get rid of templates, get rid of dynamic typing and employ a proper macro processor for generic code. Write the instantiated code on harddisk, so that the programmer can look at it.

Static Typing: Safety, Security and Performance

Dynamic typing has been a Dangerous Thing since its beginning. It can be safely used for toy projects without real-world relevance. E.g. adding up the results of the local tennis club or the like. As soon as cybernetic attackers are a concern, do not use it !

Also, if you need performance, dynamic typing requires fancy optimizers, which are themselves security problems.

Essentially, dynamic typing is Fast Food Programming. Quick results at long term cost.

Here is my shot at strong typing and memory safety: http://sappeur.ddnss.de/

FALSE

See here why C and C++ have systemic problems when used by real-world, fallible folks: http://sappeur.ddnss.de/SappeurCompared.html

ChatGPT is coming for your jobs – the terrible ones, at least

Been There, Done That

1% of population are farmers who feed 100%. If you add essential supplies for the farmers, it might be 3% of population who ensure the other 97% can do funny stuff such as arts, car production, traveling, music, administration, policing, firefighting, producing phones, being warriors, building weapons for wars that hopefully never happen and so on.

The Money System seems highly effective in motivating the 97% to work hard on their "superfluous" activities.

That description might be a bit crude, but you get the idea.

The REAL risk is that semi criminal entrepreneurs from the 97% will build+produce biologically dangerous things to get over their idleness. Cocaine, Heroine, unproven medical contraptions.

Well

Customers expect 100% correct advice from the help system. ChatGPT will be 99% right and will emit false information 1% of time. So what is the value of an AI customer help system ? Maybe it can help your helpdeskers to find a clue and then confirm it by checking the documentation manually ?

Countermeasure

Install TOR and set the Exit Router to US:

https://www.optimizationcore.com/security/set-tor-exit-node-tor-browser-country-code-specific-node/

Costs nothing except a bit of config file meddling. It will prolly connect to ChatGPT even without a change of the config file.

Euro-Trottel

This is how Italy ensures it continues to become poorer and poorer. Ban the new toys from America and keep your people in a state of backwardness. I guess this assures a supply of low skilled servants for the Italian elite, who will use a VPN to learn about ChatGPT.

Yes, ChatGPT will collect lots of data. So does Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and so on. Never feed it with anything sensitive. Don't think it is your electronic counselor; find friends over a Cappucino !

Italians have the choice to use qwant, DeltaChat, GMX, hetzner, an RPI file+http server instead. GNUpg, courtesy of the German government to encrypt messages to be sent via the cr4ppy email servers.

Xi, Putin declare intent to rule the world of AI, infosec

"AI"

It's the latest hype for attracting-scaring investors, so that they will invest into a publicly traded company.

Actually, it has been around for decades in certain applications and its limitations are also quite clear. Lots of stories of "AI" breaking down in spectacular fashion in "corner cases".

The scarier something, the more investment money you can receive.

Like mRNA for innoculation.

See the purpose of AI ?

"Leopard's Shorts" ?

If he does not change his shorts, are they smelly by now ?

Google's claims of super-human AI chip layout back under the microscope

Male Cow Ex.

I call Bullshit on this claim. The "AI" of Google is in the order of complexity of a worm. Thousands of Neurons.

Mankind overcame the Tiger, with 5 billion of neurons, with much better muscles, powerful teeth.

The Human brain has 100 billion neurons, with each connecting 10000 other neurons.

Our brain learned to make very pointy spears and it learned to lob it into the tiger, before he can jump on us. While we gang up on him, using complex language.

https://dinoanimals.com/animals/number-of-neurons-in-the-brain-of-animals/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20neurons%20in%20the%20brain%20of,the%20human%20brain%20has%20an%20estimated%2086%2C000%2C000%2C000%20neurons.

China debuts bonkers hybrid electric trolley-truck

Compare Iraq War For Oil

1 Million people killed.

Hundreds of oil wells set ablaze, million tons of soot emitted.

Cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Even more for Iraq herself, if you can quantify their "cost" (read: death an misery in the millions of cases).

Poisonous ammunition spent all over the place.

It all started with a dispute about "horizontal oil drilling theft" and a finance dispute related to low oil prices.

Compared to that, Fukushima is child's play.

Nuclear power can make a nation self-sufficient in energy production, which makes her much less likely to start a war. Also see Pearl Harbour and what led to that event.

Trains

They are extremely inefficient, because the assembly and disassembly of a train takes lots of time. 3x to 10x more time than direct lorry transport. Time is money, as they say.

Imagine the ElectroSmog Folks

..they should jump up and down when they measure the alternating field from coils inside the road.

Seriously, ripping up all roads and inserting coils sounds very much excessively expensive. Much cheaper/easier to install the overheard wires.

See also: "why Transrapid was excessively expensive".

What they did in Sweden(?) is to have coils in the Bus Stops asphalt.

Re: Small Battery

Errata: one pole on each arm of the T. Two poles.

All True, But

We have "small" computers* and cheap cameras in cars and lorries these days. And we have GPS and the cloud. Just lower the pantograph before you switch the lane or enter a junction. Run on a SMALL battery for a minute or so. If the battery approaches death, turn on the combustion engine before the "critical section" occurs. Can all be nicely automated without half-baked neural network AI stuff. Conventional software and reliable KISS image processing algorithms suffice.

*Ranging from 32bit PowerPC+1Mbyte RAM/100MHz to 64bit ARM+1GByte RAM/1GHz . Your ABS brake already depends on such small computers.

Re: Small Battery

The pantograph whip would be T-shaped, with two poles on each arm of the T.

NATO Reactors

Also, the NATO(+SK+JP) approach of encasing the reactor with a concrete containment building has proven to contain a melted-down core, as happened in Harrisburg and Fukushima. Disregard the "corium will melt into the middle of the earth" scaremongering. The corium was stopped in the concrete floor of the containment building. Noone killed in Harrisburg and less than 10 people killed in Fukushima.

The Russians never had the money to produce the concrete and steel for the containment building, which made Chernobyl dirtier. They did have plenty of lazytime to twist the minds of their useful idiots inside NATO, though.

Greece

...is free to leave the €-zone, make a nice default and start over with New Drachme.

But I guess they are l4zy people who want to live off the hard work of other people and simply use the German Credit Card.

All of Europe is full of entitled lazies who all want to live off the work of others instead of getting their own hands dirty.

Car Pantograph

1.) Looks like a telescope whip, with a T-shaped end

2.) Controlled/moved by a camera-based ECU, which tracks the wires and also reacts on the driver input (lane change) by lowering, raising and steering the pantograph.

3.) Can be telescoped and folded into the car when not needed.

That would be my idea.

Small Battery

1.) The Pantograph would be automatically steered and look more like a long whip for cars.

2.) A small battery would "bridge" energy consumption for lane changes and other hiccups.

3.) A combustion engine is used for the last 10kms from Autobahn to final destination.

Bingo

Germany was once a leader in nuclear reactors. We had all types of reactors, including two types of breeders.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

https://www.enbw.com/unternehmen/konzern/energieerzeugung/kernenergie/standorte/standort-neckarwestheim.html

Almost all shut down by people who are great at communist Propaganda, but are otherwise useless(useful for Moscow) idiots.

FALSE

The Soviet-Ukrainians worked hard to ignore the operating manual written by the design engineers in Moscow. That is how they managed to blow it up.

But even if you add the 1000 or so people killed in Ukraine from the Chernobyl accident, nuclear power is still safer and cleaner than anything else.

Total Economic Cost

Imagine how much it would cost (in terms of energy, work, raw materials) to build 40 million large batteries for a country like Germany, Britain or France. Then compare that to the cost (in terms of energy, copper, steel, work) to electrify all major roads of said countries.

I cannot prove it by numbers at the moment, but my strong feeling is that it would be much cheaper/easier to do the second option, as no exotic materials are required. It is more a problem of Thinking. We cannot imagine a car with a pantograph (which could look very different than the one for trucks or trains).

We have 20000km of electrified rail in Germany already. The autobahn network is 13000km(multiple lanes, two wires per lane, yes...). Definitely looks like it can be done.

City vs Autobahn

The idea would be to electrify all Autobahns and other highways. Drive at 150km/h or more.

Trolley busses only operate inside cities.

"Ground"

The conductance of concrete and asphalt is not as good as required. You would have to bury a metal rail into the road, flush with the road surface. That is prolly more expensive than a second overhead line and it creates a safety problem, as the metal does not provide as much grip as the asphalt does.

Regarding Fission Power

Nuclear power using established light water reactors has proven to be sufficiently safe. If you add up all the damage from Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Windscale and Fukushima, it is the safest form of electricity generation in terms of People_Killed/TWh. Just think of how many people have been killed from Methane explosions and burning oil platforms. Think of how many cancer cases from coal plants.

There is no need for supa-dupa new reactor types or fusion. Just build more proven light water reactors(like the french ones) or the CANDU, which is a proven heavy water reactor.

Right Approach

Batteries are expensive and very dirty to produce (in terms of CO2 and other emissions and environmental damage). The Way Forward is

1.) Electrify all major Autobahns and other highways with two overhead power lines per lane.

2.) New cars and trucks are electric-combustion hybrids. They have an automatically steered pantograph(using a camera to correctly touch to the power lines). A small battery is included to "bridge" lane changes and so on.

3.) Use the combustion engine for the last couple of kilometers from the Autobahn to the destination.

4.) Nuclear fission power for electrcity generation.

I venture to claim that this approach has the lowest total environmental footprint. Batteries are hugely dirty and energy-intensive to produce. It is much better to electrify with overhead power lines from copper or aluminium.

See also:

https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.oberleitungen-fuer-saubere-lastwagen-schwarzwald-erhaelt-lkw-teststrecke.d23b88d2-e850-420f-9eef-720b5b566e83.html?reduced=true

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/frankfurt/teststrecke-bei-frankfurt-elektro-highway-im-vollbetrieb-16824051.html

Hold off on that 2046 Valentine's date, asteroid might hit Earth

Probing

A small warhead could first probe the material composition of the rock before the main warhead is "dialed" and applied.

Depends

Depending on the weight and trajectory of the incoming "rock"(could be non-stone materials like water ice, Wolfram), the warhead yield must be customized. In most cases, much less than 1MT will suffice.

The idea is to evaporate enough material from the "rock" to give it the needed impulse for the needed trajectory change. The idea is not necessarily to break the thing in lots of small pieces, which will still enter the atmosphere.

Of course the exact location and timing of the explosion is important to achieve the desired impulse vector, but the Japanese have shown this can be done.

Here is How The Fix Looks Like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-2PM2_Topol-M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)

As always, powerful tools can be used for good and bad.

The good side is that we do not have to suffer the fate of the big dinosaurs.

US cybersecurity chief: Software makers shouldn't lawyer their way out of security responsibilities

Great Systems Security

+ seL4 microkernel

+ CompCert proven correct compiler

+ Rust and other efficient memory safe languages

+ AppArmor, SE Linux, LSM sandboxing

+ MIG-V CPU https://hensoldt-cyber.com/mig-v/

+ Spark Ada

+ PC Lint, PolySpace static analysis

+ Wirth-developed Systems (Modula-2, Oberon): elegant, robust, KISS

Proper Regulation

The question is, can there be useful regulation, which will make systems more secure ?

Innovation, efficiency, security must be balanced. It does not help to set up a soviet-style bureaucracy because of security issues.

One idea would be that government mandates Payment-For-Exploits for all systems in wide use. For example, SAP would have to pay whitehat hackers for finding bugs in SAP/R3. Microsoft would have to pay for bugs found in Windows. Then the question arises, how large is the finance pool to be paid out to security researchers ? Maybe 3% of sales revenue ?

Of course, companies must also be forced to make these systems available to qualified researchers. So IBM would have to make their mainframes available to skilled software engineers. Same with SAP/R3, Oracle ERP, Windows Server and so on. Inevitably, some sort of state bureaucracy must administer this. It must be staffed by skilled and motivated civil servants. Could NSA, BSI or CESG do this ? Possibly, if we want to make the fox the master of the henhouse ;-)

Widely used FOSS software would have a state-paid exploit payout pool for the same effect. So USG would cough up 30 million p.a. for Apache Exploit Research ? How would Japan, SK, Britain, France contribute ?

Maybe the software tycoons have a constructive idea on the matter ? (Seriously)

Compare Other Regulation

I.T. Systems are becoming more and more critical to the life and well-being of a nation. This will probably mean that some software projects will come under Government Scrutiny. For example, it will no longer be the sole authority of Microsoft to develop Windows and government security engineers will be part of the development organization. Same for Android, iOS, Oracle, SAP, Apache, Python and so on.

In embedded systems (rail, aerospace, medical, automotive) this is already an (imperfect) reality. See V-Model, ISO26262, DO178, IEC 61508, DIN EN 50128, FDA Medical Safety Regulations.

CESG already monitors Huawei source code, this model could be extended to other widely used software. Firefox, Linux Kernel, Apache, libc, gcc, iOS, MacOS, WNT, MS Office, libreoffice, ...

Yeah, Ageism

I am below 50 and have been able to look back at the ALGOL mainframes, because they had great security features (memory safety of some sorts). I also created a memory safe and efficient language, marrying the best of C++ and Java. I see the problems of C and Unix. I have also seen horribly buggy mainframe hardware in the 2000s. The pressure of the market competition and the pressure from the financiers...

See my posting history.

MacStadium brings macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes to AWS

No

My M1 Macbook is a very fast platform for software development. It is also super efficient in terms of power consumption, as it runs for two working days on one battery charge. A nice and useful office package included. A real Unix machine as soon as the command line is launched. And yes, all looks great, too.

Not sure how nicely a fleet of M1/M2 mac minis would serve as datacenter/cloud machines. Maxing out at 32GB RAM is certainly not enough for some application types. But if you want power-efficient servers, the M2 definitely is interesting.