Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
That's probably more computing power than the entire processing power of all the GNC systems of all LV's to date. The processors on Apollo were pocket calculator power IE 32KIPS, Shuttle GPC's started at 0.4MIPS and upgraded to 1MIPS each. The ISS runs (IIRC) 40MHz 386s. The bigger Mars rovers run Power PC's at around 200MIPS (and $100K a board, hence the interest in OTS processing).
As for radiation RAM started using on chip ECC because of radioisotopes in the packaging material decades ago. They don't report statics because a)It would tie up valuable pins and b)Who cares as long as the state read out is the same as the state read in.
Servers should have ECC for ram as standard, and logging processes as standard for SNMP (obviously the packet delay will be a bit of an issue).
Likewise "spinning rust" is AFAIK a lot more rad hard but it induces motion in the structure, unless you have pairs of contra-rotating disks to cancel those forces out. Sounds crazy but despite its size the ISS is not actually attached to anything
Obviously HPE are hoping a good result ouf of this will make them the goto supplier for HPC systems but getting hardware NASA certified and you can bet it will have to be NASA certified if any kind of software is running that's mission critical and the mission is NASA funded.
IOW upgrading to new processors is usually a massive PITA, which is why space runs with hardware generations behind the SoA in processing power. SX accepts the systems will reset and is OK with that, but getting that accepted by NASA for ISS docking must have been a nightmare.
You're a bit behind the times. Infusion pumps (they do other stuff apart from insulin) had serial ports in the late 90's.
I'm pretty sure at least one model has a BlueTooth interface or some other species of exploitable connectivity.
IRL what has happened is every such pump has fail safed on the same day.
There's a delightful YT from a doctor who studies how (and why) large complex systems fail.
Not at all.
I think this thing (it's a front door lock) is obscenely over priced for what it does, simply for the novelty of how it does it.
Crap can always be over priced for what it does (Google JML products for a company that sells nothing but such items).
For that kind of money I'm pretty sure you can get a very heavy door, with piano hinges and a high security multi bolt lock to go with it.
You're now in the software development (and support) business.
Either accept this (and set up processes accordingly) or get flushed down the pan of history.
A lock used to allow 3rd party access to living accommodation whose entry code can be re-written remotely you say?
How weak is the crypto? I fancy a holiday.
Because no one uses botched, stitched together software in their production environments, right?
I'd guess they used it because it because a)They wrote it b)It's actually in common use around the country (or even the world) c)They have a copy in their DNA lab.
TL;DR. RTF report.
True, and they stated as much in the report.
However they also stated they done a source code analysis that showed the program did use the same sort of unsafe coding practices.
Rather than release a sequence that could crash an unmod'd copy of the program they created a deliberately compromised version that could be crashed by their sequence.
Which demonstrates this can really happen but not exactly how to do it.
I guess that's "responsible disclosure" in this field
I wondered if they are related to "Mutician" Elliott Organick ?
The program processes DNA sequences so the notion is to craft a DNA sequence (presumably in some bacteria or virus) that when detected, analyzed and fed through the software triggers a BO fail.
DNA synthesis machines (and DNAaaS companies exist) have been around for decades, although reinserting the product into an organism is tricky.
You'd probably want it to have it marked "do not read" by the host organism as what that sequence coded for inside an organism could be anything. Also genes are not read quit the way most people think they are. They are usually in multiple segments and often sub sets of the full set can generate specific proteins as well
So the attack vector is DNA --> Analyser--> V. big file --> file compressor -->Pwd PC running file compressor.
Worst case scenario. The malware writer inadvertently creates something that is a viable structure in the host organism and it's highly dangerous.
I guess it's what you'd do if you were the NSA and you suspected a nation state was running a covert BW programme you wanted to get a window into.
This is real Greg Bear territory ("Vitals" comes to mind), although I think William Gibson did a short story ("New Rose Hotel"? ) that loosely hinges around this idea.
Beer as it's Friday and y'know, yeast.
*My second thought was someone had used genetic algorithm techniques to "breed" more efficient BO code, which would be clever but not be that interesting (I'm not familiar with the subject but I'd be astonished if that hadn't been done several times by now).
The novelty would be it would a secure?
Sounds like one of those "If someone has the resources to gain physical access...." which is true of any attack.
If you can get into someone's place and swap their "whatever" for a copy with rogue hardware inside it's pretty much game over.
Reading the sunlight frequency shift depending on wheather the planet is "going away" or "coming toward" you.
Sadly all the paper has is that none of them is > 4 x M(earth) which is still pretty tough.
But the level it has to be improved to clearly sets a plan for future work.
Not so.
The biggest versions of all the main US launchers firing in salvo (over slightly more than a week) could put 62 tonnes into LEO right now. SpaceX FH will put about 20 tonnes on that number.
Without a dime spent on development.
How you use that capacity to implement a mission is a tougher question.
Software so good their company would rather fire them than they talk about it.
Coat, because they said if I posted this I'd have to go.
Is it just me or does the malware seem to be better structured and more tightly coded than the software it's attacking?
Which raises another interesting question.
If now the signature of actual black hole collisions does the rate at which they have been found match the rate we would expect to find them?
IOW why did it take so long to find one?
Just a thought.
That's sort of the point. I'd never heard of "STARP" till you mentioned it.
There is work to deduce what kind of word a word is by its place in a sentence and assuming the sentence is grammatical.
Which, if you're looking at a system that learns to speak a human language the way a human does may be more appropriate.
Despite the fact that ultimately the human brain is a huge multi layer neural net I don't think, and all human thought maps to that architecture, I think the brain uses intermediate abstractions and massive training sets won't help identify what they are.
No doubt this time round it will involve machine learning because.....
Snarky comments aside there are 3 big problems with asking questions in a natural language.
1) It's vocabulary is never complete. Humans make new nouns and verbs at the drop of a hat. So IRL the classic step 1 of an NL algorithm (look up all words in the sentence) is actually BS.
2) There is probably no complete grammar for any real natural language anywhere. Some do exist but they are f**king huge, compared to those for even big languages like Ada, C++ (claimed to be impossible without parsing the whole source 3 times) and COBOL.
3) Questions like "How many really expensive houses are for sale in London right now" have huge implicit context associated with them, not to mention they are only appropriate in the context of a data base of UK (or global?) house prices. If you're DB does not have that information the question is basically meaningless.
What I could see is a system that has to have items explicitly explained to it (what does "very expensive" mean in this context?) and retains that data for reuse, so that over time its answers become more intelligent sounding (like a real PFY learning on the job, hopefully not turning into a BOFH)
What has changes is a lot more on line resources of things like parts of speech dictionaries to help with the brute force task, and of course processor speeds rising by a 1000 and memory sizes by a 1000 also (which sounds like any increase in processor speed has been cancelled by increase in the search space ;-( )
I don't give a s**t about your color, your gender, your gender preference, your religious beliefs your "challenges" (physical or mental) or your age.
Can you get the job done?
Can you get the job done in the social environment of the company?
You don't hire a social group. You hire a person. Once you start excluding people on their membership, or non membership of a group you just cut yourself off from a significant chunk of the potential workforce. I could say it's bigoted, narrow minded and prejudiced.
But actually it's simply inefficient.
Basically the theory that as rich, upper class White men are at the top of the heap they are naturally superior, and should go on being at the top of the heap.
This was the idea that lead to laws in the US allowing doctors to enforce mandatory sterilization of people for everything from having below average IQs to having a child outside marriage.
The idea of glass ceilings, pulled up drawbridges, hereditary wealth and writing laws to benefit a specific class were simply not in their mental landscape.
I imaging Ada, the Countess Lovelace and Grace Hopper would also have had something to say on the suitability and capability of women in tech jobs.
Then perhaps they should have made sure their hardware was not s**t before they rolled it out?
"it appears from network throughput graphs that the chipset is running a routine task every couple of seconds that stalls packet processing, inserting bursts of lag into connections."
WTF's that about? What is so f**king vital that everything else has to stop while this gets done?
Interesting comment that this affects chipsets built around both ARM and Atom processors.
Intel could not have been so stupid as to do another "Management engine" drop of untested processor hardware running un reviewed code, could they?
A charity that cannot be taken over and has to distribute its surplus to its members (or reinvest them in improving the service) sounds like a pretty good idea to me for areas with low population densities.
I'm sure BT have lots of reasons why they should be quietly strangled.
I think that's the story here.
I don't think anyone has a problem the use of this tool on that basis. *
Makes a nice change following the antics of the NSA's "must have all data, all the time, forever."
*Although in the UK expect the Daily Heil to call for a ban on the use of TOR.
So yes shutting it down, or pulsing the Europe wide grid with it at "interesting" frequencies would be quite noticeable.
It sounds like this guy has single handedly given a wake up call to the whole industry, and the relevant regulators.
You can bet none of the actors involved in this will thank him for making them do their jobs properly.
Now I wonder what sort of security the hardware that runs all those big wind turbines is like....
However in Europe there are companies who install PV arrays on the roofs of businesses on a shared profits basis, usually with some soft of govt deal to pick up part of the install costs.
You can bet all of those are remote monitored through the cheapest available data channel.
Guess what that is.
I guess you've never heard the term "recoiless rifle " ?
The earliest implementation of which was the Davis system in 1918 on a cloth and wood aircraft.
The downside is the higher propellant load and the limited availability of RR shells over conventional artillery, hence my preference for essentially a one shot gun barrel.
It's not that much more sophisticated options exist, it's they are also much more expensive and need a lot more development.
These guys will even sell you one.
300eV is of course what you need for that "Extreme UV" that people have been touting as the future of narrow line width chip making.
Current systems need a 20Kw laser to generate c10W of "EUV" light to expose a 300mm dia wafer.
I'm guessing but it can also be used for diagnostics on one of those laser fusion systems as well.
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