Posts by Timothy Creswick

Roaming always seemed like a bigger risk

I've always been more concerned about the risks of roaming; when your phone roams to another network, your provider must send your 'shared secret' (key) to the roaming provider in order that their network can authenticate your handset.

This means that a level of trust is established between providers in their roaming agreement, but of course what's to say that a foreign government can't now gain access to your SIM encryption key, which can then be used to decrypt your comms globally.

It wouldn't be terribly surprising if the UK and US governments are using this method to collect SIM keys of foreign nationals - it's certainly a lot easier than sending messages which are likely logged and traceable and require not-insignificant computational time to crack.

It makes more sense for email

I think in general the usefulness of being able to use http://coke/ or "enjoy.coke" is limited, however it sounds like most of these organisations will benefit from lovely concise email addresses: ceo@coke, for example.

Some Context

Men's 50m freestyle WR stands at 20.91s, an average speed of 2.39m/s.

If the pool had been 2 inches shorter (0.0508m), the record would be 20.89s.

The world record has frequently been broken by 2/100ths of a second, so I guess it's easy to understand why it's a big deal.

Having said that, I'm sure I read somewhere that designers of competition sports venues deliberately try and 'tweak' the design within the rules in order to maximise the possibility of records being broken at that venue, as this attracts more media attention and revenue.

Really?

So 250 people didn't notice an average of $7940 in surplus phone charges every year?

That's about £400 per month...

Inertial navigation

I would have thought a highly accurate inertial navigation system (based on accelerometers and gyroscopes), perhaps coupled with some wearable "boot sensors" to more accurately track distance and a digital compass would provide much more accurate, dependable position fixes in 3 axes essentially via dead reckoning.

Certainly distance could be very easily tracked - unlike submarines, ships and aircraft using dead reckoning, the medium (water, air etc) isn't moving due to currents, so there's less drift to account for.

Perhaps a camera sensor that works like a giant optical mouse could track distance travelled like an electronic trundle wheel...

Missing the point

I think the point here is being missed. The reason that the US was able to "snoop" on SWIFT data since 2001 was due to the Patriot Act.

The point is that SWIFT has been mirroring all their data between it's site in Belgium and in the US. Once those data are on US soil, they are subject to the Patriot act, regardless of the nature of the underlying financial transaction they represent.

Same applies to Gmail, Google Apps, Salesforce etc etc. Once your data is on US soil, it's privacy is questionable since the Patriot Act [probably] supercedes even the Safe Harbor (sic) protocols.

Sensible Measures

It's surprising that there's been almost no report on the topology of the affected network, and how that ultimately contributed to the large-scale effects of this incident.

As with most universities, Exeter University widely uses public IP addresses in it's 144.173.0.0/16 primary network allocation for connected devices (this huge subnet means there's no technical requirement for any address translation since they're a long way from subnet exhaustion).

However, the University regularly uses /21 (255.255.248.0) subnets internally, with insufficient segregation [with VLANs] of logical segments. In addition, many network segments are wired in long spurs, which means that isolating one network segment may necessarily require isolation of cascaded segments which needn't have been architechted in that way.

Finally, and arguably most importantly, the university uses no internally firewalling of it's subnets in their central routing platform (think: zoned firewalls). There is firewalled access for traffic originating outside their primary /16 network, but that still leaves 65k+ addresses all of which can directly connect to each other. To my knowledge there is little or no IDP or traffic monitoring across segments, although this only helps if you actually segregate your networks at the Layer 2 & Layer 3 level.

Certainly, there's no excuse for an attack which (ostensibly) only affects Windows workstations and servers to mean that VoIP networks should be affected, and indeed it should be possible on any corporate network to leave VoIP up and running, even if there's shared infrastructure.

Finally, you have to wonder how the majority of network connected Windows machines went un-patched.

Just my $0.02, but didn't seem that anyone else was saying it.

Phase-change coolers

Phase-change cooling is nothing new; the latent heat of vaporisation and condensation make for an especially effective method of heat transfer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cooling#Phase-change_cooling).

It's always nicer when you can do it without a compressor, but as far as I can tell the only major innovation here is the "wick" technology. The only time I've ever read about vaporisation coolers on production (as opposed to experimental and demonstration) systems is on supercomputers, where individual CPUs have a closed module attached inside which the vaporisation and condensation occurs. This only really works when you know what the orientation of the module is likely to be (since the gases tend to bubble 'up' through the more-dense liquids), which I gather is the main reason why you don't see this on PC CPU and GPU coolers, since they may be mounted in a variety of orientations.

It looks as though the Vapor-X retains all of the liquid within the wick, which means that it would work [almost?] as effectively upside-down, so thumbs up for the engineering!

Tiki Hut

Large photo of the VMWorld Tiki Hut here:

http://www.foedus.com/img/VMworld%20Tiki%20Booth%202007%20155.jpg

More photos here:

http://www.foedus.com/pressroom/tradeshowsandConferences.php