Posts by fg_swe

NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages

Empirical Results Of Memory Safety

To all the detractors, I would like to point out this:

A) Decades-old Unix tools have been run with valgrind and exposed memory errors. So they still had memory errors after 1000 incremental bug fixes.

B) Even in safety critical automotive embedded code, programmed by highly experienced (20 years or more of software engineering time) software engineers, we find index errors using tools such as PC Lint or PolySpace.

C) Working with memory safe languages results in less pain, less bad surprises in my work as a software engineer. I am developing software since 1993 and I have a degree in CS.

D) Tony HOARE points out that real-world, production(!) FORTRAN programs typically contain index errors. Turning on index checking "offended" the FORTRAN users, because it "broke" their "proven" programs.

Conclusion: Human software engineers are the best we have (artificial neural networks can't do it yet and prolly won't do for another 100 years) and they are NOT perfect. Claiming such perfection is equivalent to lying.

Greetings

I salute my computer science colleagues in Military Intelligence for supporting the trend towards Memory Safety.

Having invented a memory safe language

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/

myself, I am very pleased to be validated by this esteemed* computer science organization.

Memory Safety is the natural progression from firewalls to mandatory access control (SE Linux, AppArmor, sandboxing) to fine-grained Software Fault Isolation.

Applied computer science does have a big problem, which is a lack of practical security. Entire corporations have seen their computer networks destroyed by exploits which are based on a lack of C or C++ memory safety.

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/Sappeur_Cyber_Security.pdf

70% of CVE exploits are based on the lack of memory safety of real-world C and C++ programs. Let's plug this hole.

Let's rediscover the Algol Mainframes, Spark ADA, Modula-2, Oberon, MSFT's Singularity OS. Memory Safety is not a new idea, but it had been forgotten.

* see the Perl Language as an example of NSA inventions

Thank You

...for this reasonable and kind comment.

JavaScript: Weak Typing

JavaScript is in some ways memory-safe, but certainly not in the spirit of Rust or Sappeur. For example, JS records don't have a type. Each instance of record can contain other members. Or same named members with different types.

Rust, Sappeur, Spark Ada - they are Strongly Typed

Re: The more things change

I take it you use a horse carriage instead of these newfangled explosion-engine carriages ? Too dangerous !

Mixing Up Things

You confuse Memory Leaks with Memory Safety. Please educate yourself. It is about stopping memory corruption and Virus Injection.

So

..Unix was the wrong turn, we should have gone the Algol Mainframe way instead !

Chipmakers cripple products to dodge US China ban

Re: Restrict Export, Save Peace

Even in 39-45, information superiority was key. Germany was bled to economic death by that. Japan was literally destroyed by information superiority. Everybody can now make a warhead and a missile, but only a few can deliver them anywhere, under any condition.

So, if information superiority is key, we must deny information and information technology to our potential enemies.

Kinetics has been secondary to information since at least 1939, maybe 1917.

Re: Restrict Export, Save Peace

Both countries must be denied high end electronics, tool machines, chemicals and so on. That would be used to build advanced weapons.

Just look at HIMARS - what makes it extremely dangerous is the reliable GNSS receiver and flight guidance mechanism. One HIMARS is worth easily 100 "dumb" rocket launchers.

Other advanced weapons need even more electronics+informatics, which I will not elaborate here, as we already have enough fires.

Diesel we can make out of coal, if push comes to shove. Look up LEUNA.

Re: 99,7% of populace is now naturally immune

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/antibodies

Ok, so just 95%.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/office-for-national-statistics-scotland-england-wales-government-b2031918.html

Or 98%, according to this source.

Re: 99,7% of populace is now naturally immune

You didn't get the memo, did you ? American Oligarchy has moved on.

Chinesium

As the saying goes "Chinesium is the weakest metal on earth".

Of course they will try to do what you say. Until now their success is rather limited. Their key skill is treating their own people like ants(see the Covid lockdown terror and other draconian things). There is no such Chinese man like a von Ardenne, a Diesel, a Hoare, a Copernicus.

Their nation is based on brutal repression by communism. Great minds are destroyed by that.

Also, there is no honesty in Chinese Quality Control. How can anyone complain about bad quality, when the cause of it is a communist plant manager ? They still worship the Covid thing, even though 99,7% of populace is now naturally immune.

Restrict Export, Save Peace

High end weaponry needs high end semiconductors for all sorts of applications. As both the Ukraine and Taiwan fires are very real, we (NATO+SK+JP+ANZAC) need to restrict the supply of petrol to China and Russia.

Also, other machinery, chemicals, instruments, consulting services, specialist information must not be delivered to them. This is the best way to preserve the current international order and the moderate peace we have. "Free Trade" means "putting petrol next to the fires". Or rephrasing Uljanow "do not deliver rope to the commies, which they want to use to hang their opponents".

"FPGA Control"

1.) Design from USA (Xilinx, Altera, AMD,...) or France

2.) Made in Taiwan using NATO+SK+JP technology

This looks like full control of NATO+SK+JP+ANZAC.

FPGAs are a key component of high end electronic warfare applications and their export must be tightly controlled.

Indeed

Given the latest signals from Chinese Leader For Lifetime, NATO+SK+Jp+ANZAC strategy works as designed. The Russian Leader for Lifetime is hopefully getting the message, too. They now have to resort to low tech Iranian drones.

FALSE

Even the rather small German Luftwaffe recently deployed five JÄGER90+Tankers to the Australia-Japan region. The German Navy sent a frigate. They operate in concert with RAAF, USN, RN, USAF and JASDF.

https://www.bmvg.de/de/themen/dossiers/engagement-im-indopazifik

We are in fact very close to a very hot war over the Taiwan issue.

Let's keep the petrol( high tech) away from the fire.

Sure

Cheating USG is a good way to land a free vacation in Club Fed.

Euro clouds lodge another complaint against Microsoft over anti-competitive licenses

Sodium Reactors of the Dnepr Vikings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4gd8bwnFow

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-01/gifiv_webinar_pakhomov_19_dec_2018_final.pdf

Apparently, liquid sodium is much less of a problem than one would think.

Old Tale About the King in the Mine

As the old tale says - the king is not dead, he is only resting somewhere in a mine !

https://www.volksliederarchiv.de/der-alte-barbarossa/

European Weakness and Romanticism

For some reason European voters are for Greenies and other Marxists. People who want to deprive us of competitive energy sources such as Uranium and Coal. Greenies are programmed by America-WEF to damage European economies and their roots are in Maoism. Of course Mao wants China to be strong and everybody else to be weak.

Voters need to grow a pair and get rid of these traitors.

Then we can again have competitive energy prices and run data centers here.

Secondly, we need an Airbus-like cooperation of European nations to create alternative IT systems. Think of a nicely integrated solution of European hardware, Linux, a sleek QT GUI, LibreOffice, NextCloud, OnlyOffice, Jitsi and so on. Using Modula-2, Oberon, SPARK Ada, seL4 where it makes sense. Italian mechanical hardware design, French CompCert compiler, British CPU, German HA OS and so on.

We need to assemble the existing pieces into something competitive. Something which is not infested with key loggers and other extraction mechanism (Ala Google Docs). Police wiretapping must be transparent and defined by law, which is not hard if you think about it. Require people to post their keymat to the local police station. Much better than the covert subversion we currently have.

Swiss Re wants government bail out as cybercrime insurance costs spike

Algol Mainframes

At the same time as Unix and C were created, the Algol Mainframes were developed by ICL, Burroughs and Moscow(now MCST).

These computers already had quite a few memory safety mechanisms.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1463321/was-algol-ever-used-for-mainstream-programming

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

Re: OR

No, the "agent" of the insurance companies would be IT security companies acting on behalf of the insurer.

Well

If the insured companies actually used best practices, then insurance against unknown issues is reasonable.

But who decides what is "best practices" ?

Who mandates use of memory safe languages ?

Who mandates seL4 in certain areas ?

I guess the financial industry and central banks should come up with regulation, as the damage of 900 billions clearly threatens the entire economic system. They can always get help from other government agencies and specialist organizations such as HENSOLDT and INRIA.

OR

The insurance companies could demand security best practices and also check whether the customer implemented them.

They could reduce premiums by 70% if your customer-facing code is done in Rust or Sappeur. They (or an agent of them) could perform code reviews, etc.

Re: Why it Insurance?

Indeed, Google is one of the leaders

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/10/announcing-kataos-and-sparrow.html

seL4+Rust !

Plus: AT&T Bell Labs

These folks "presented" the world with the C language and the Unix OS written in C.

C and C++ based exploits are causing 70% of CVE exploits.

New projects should be realized in memory safe languages

http://sappeur.ddnss.de/Sappeur_Cyber_Security.pdf

+MODULA-2

+SPARK ADA

+OBERON

+RUST

+SAPPEUR

+SWIFT

+JAVA

+C#

Proven correct compilers and Operating Systems should be used

+seL4

+INRIA CompCert

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/

Feel Luckey, punk? Oculus designer builds VR murder headset

IT Nutters Inc ?

A combination of mindless brutality combined with dysfunctional physics.

This guy should join Hans Reiser at Club Fed.

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

Also Fire the P.R. Man

So he openly admits that the subsystems were not tested before for low temperature ?

That does really NOT sound like seasoned engineering. If you want a complex system to operate correctly, you better simulate the environment (hot, cold, vibrations,electromagnetics, software input vectors, A/D sensor voltages, ...) and operation of ALL subsystems before. Rocket motor, avionics, vernier rockets, GPS receiver, telemetry etc. HIL Testing of all avionics and telemetry. ArianceSpace thought they could cheat on HIL and it cost them only 500 million Dollars (Ariane V first flight).

That is costly, but probably cheaper than launching the entire system and trying to decipher what went wrong based on telemetry from the real flight. Also the reason the Russians lost the race to the moon, they were overly aggressive instead of systematic and complete ground testing.

Having said that, the V2/A4 had plenty of launch failures, before it was moderately reliable. Mr Musk had plenty of failures until his rockets became reliable. So, keep trying, rinse repeat. Before that, test all subsystems in a simulated environment on the ground.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Re: Energy Engineering Measures

"Jet engines on airliners are optimized for thrust, not rotational energy."

Modern turbofans have a bypass ratio of 1:10 or even more. That (approx) means 90% of thrust comes from the fan. Most of the engine power is the torque and revolutions of the fan axle. As I wrote, remove the fan. Then add a gearbox to adapt to the speed of the generator. The hot exhaust from the turbine can then be used for hot water heating. ZF or the A400M folks can provide the gearbox.

Afaik, this approach is used in many warships, as yourself point out :-)

Kerosene is much easier to trade, transport and store as compared to LNG.

"liquefication of coal and gasification of coal and oil, that makes no sense"

With all due respect, you seem to be slow and not recognize there is a war ongoing.

"Town gas, but it was dirty"

What do you prefer - ice in the living room or a bit of fumes in the air. Again, this is a wartime measure.

"Germany only did it in WWII because they could not get oil"

We need a strategic insurance against energy blackmail. The two types of oil tyrants have teamed up, recently.

"But it would probably take decades to re-create the UK coal industry."

Drilling holes and doing UCG can be done quickly and with moderate manpower. Yes, Carbon Monoxide is not the nicest fuel, but much better than having nothing, freezing and closing factories forever.

So

The "aspiring CEO of English Electric" would ask RR to simply "bring the proven submarine nuclear engine to land" and begin trials by 1st of December 2022.

But alas, there is no English Electric anymore.

In France, the grandson of de Gaulle is an advocate, the president an equally useless Rothschild banker.

Germany, infested by Maoists who preach windmills with fervor.

In Russia, they have an SMR operational on a barge. Thank god their inefficiency and corruption is legendary.

Re: Hot gas

Welcome to war. You can thank Mrs NULAND "Fuck the EU" and the WEF Young Leader trash fior it.

PUTIN, BAERBOCK, MERKEL, MACRON, TRUDEAU - WEF young leaders.

The WEF Trash also wants to inject an experimental gene therapy into the entire population, so that one of their chief oligarchs makes a "killing" 100 billion dollar business.

We need a Nuremberg 2.0 trial.

Why ?

Why should we cater for people who are unwilling to think rigorously ?

The nations of Europe are great because we are sometimes able to overcome superstition. In the last few decades we have receded into feel good irrationality; if we want to survive it is time to use our intelligence.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh

Re: Hot gas

Oil oven in each methane household, powered by oil. Makeshift chimney. Fixed.

Re: Power cuts!!!!

That's what you get when beancounters and social scientists are running government.

Engineers would rig jet engines to generators. See other post.

Other engineers would create a cloud based Electricity Rationing APP.

Still a few weeks until peek demand, so we can do both.

Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactor ?

What came out of this great idea ?

Mr Rees-Mogg should by now developing a plan how to build 3 of these reactors per month, securing the expedited design validation and financing.

He once wanted to be the CEO of English General Electric. I guess he is now just one of these helpless RedShield Bankers like Mr Macron.

Measure E

Like A, just replace the oil with Carbon Monoxide from C or from incomplete Lignite burn. Then costs will come down to 10 cent/kWh or even less. Let DGA, FGAN, QINETIQ work on this problem. They will be 10x faster than RR, MTU and SNECMA by themselves. Of course, pull out all the paper shifting BS ("V Modell", "Genehmigungsverfahren", "Consultation" etc etc).

Leuna: Petrol From Coal

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leunawerke#Zweiter_Weltkrieg

Energy Engineering Measures

A) Quick Fix Electricity: Lease Planes, remove engines. From the engine, remove the fan. Connect engine to generator. Add electronic control unit to synchronize with net and control power. Cost will be in the order of 40cen/kWh operational and 1Dollar/W Capital Cost. Still cheaper than blackouts, production stops and stopped trains. Can be done in the dozens of GW scale in a matter of weeks.

B) Lignite Coal Briquettes: Can be ramped up in a matter of weeks. Unbeatable national sovereignty.

C) Underground Coal Gasification: under the North Sea, there are vast coal reserves, that can be turned into hot CO and then on the surface to CO2, generating huge amounts of heat (100GW easily). The heat can be used for electricity or heating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBpj42CF2yI

D) Coal2Methane, Coal2Diesel, Coal2Petrol. Been there done that, worked nicely until those bombers destroyed it. Can be done again !

All of this can and will be done, if the situation worsens and some foreign tyrants think they can stick it to us.

Same Here

We also have to drastically reduce methane consumption, because 40% came from Russia. In practice this means that some industries will have to shut down or maybe die completely.

In addition, we might experience a shortage for private methane consumption.

All of which can be handled, if you know more options than handing out money. Engineers can find solutions, lawyers(chancellor) and children's tale authors(economy minister) can only scare the people.

What we will do is to put a small oil-powered stove in methane-heated households. Ersatz Chimney through the wall, using a bit of sheet metal piping. That will create a bit of fumes, but I am sure nobody will want to trade that for ice in the living room.

https://www.hornbach.de/shop/Oelofen-Haas-Sohn-Elba-II-406-55-Braun-Beige/5795556/artikel.html

And that is just Engineering Measure Nr 1. Many more to follow, if needed.

Any Source Of Energy Creates Dead People And Waste

Just think hard. Do you think solar cells come free of environmental damage ? Certainly not. Installers fall from the roof then and now. Windmills are full of hazardous materials, which are currently impossible to recycle, at least economically. After 20 years, they must be demolished for safety reasons.

Same argument can be made about any source of energy. Think of the people killed in Wars For Oil.

Think of the political damage of Lack Of Methane. People killed from methane explosions.

People getting cancer from coal exhaust, much of which is radioactive(was naturally buried, is now airborne).

Realistic Nuclear Power Development

1.) Fast Neutron Breeders, which can burn U238, Thorium and Plutonium. The Russians have it operational in Beloyarsk.

2.) Maybe the SMR reactors, which can be mass produced and shipped by heavy road vehicles.

3.) Simply more large pressurized water reactors. They have a very good safety record in terms of People_Killed/TWh. That includes the 1000 or so people killed in Tshernobyl, Windscale and Fukushima. All other energy sources kill more people per unit of energy generated.

4.) U238 we have sufficient in storage and U235 can even be mined in many places in Europe, providing great jobs for European families. All controlled by competent and honest medical professionals.

Fusion is a nice concept, but still very much research and no commercial development. The fission reactors we know can provide reliable energy production at reasonable cost (unlike wind+solar) and they can provide tens of thousands of well paid jobs for educated people. As opposed to make-work programs in "renewable" and pipe dreams.

What we need is Industrial Policy as opposed to MaoistGreenScare and FreeMarketByTyrantCarboSource. Energy is a strategic matter like building tanks and fighter jets; it must be secured by government policy and long term finance. Just like the reactor building programs of the past.

The open internet repels its most insidious attackers. They’ll return

Yeah, Centrally Controlled Dystopia

1.) Running you own WWW server is by no means as hard as climbing an 8000m mountain. More like "get your fat arse up the local 50m hill"

2.) Posting something on Facebook means that your ideas can be killed any time, especially if you post something inconvenient to some oligarch. They can either do this in a hard or a stealthy way. On FB, you are not a free man, but a slave-product of an oligarch and the Giga-financiers who own his stock.

3.) As I wrote, there are now lots of small WWW sites, internet radio stations, non YT video sites. There is absolutely no need to further the dystopian control of a few oligarchs. Rather, we should consciously use the little guy alternatives. The oligarchs displayed their rotten attitude when they pushed GATES' Covid agenda and business, all while censoring dissenters to nowhere.

3.2) Klaus Schwabs "you will own nothing" should be a warning to all free men, of the coming merger of Big Business and Marxism.

Cult leader meets the Pope: Apple CEO chats to Francis

Extremely Funny British Cynicism

Can I have it with some Brian ?