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* Posts by Aus_Eng

2 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2010

Physicist unmasks 99-year-old mistake in English dictionaries

Aus_Eng

OED is right

It's not due to gravity, a siphon works INSPITE of gravity, if the gravity is to high a siphon will not work, but as long as there is air pressure (atmospheric on earth), a siphon will work. Gravity or not.

If fact, a siphon will work perfectly well in zero gravity, the h or maximum height of the 'hump' would be infinate.

Air pressure pushes on the surface of the liquid, that pressure if great enough will push the liquiq uphill, against gravity.

On earth the air pressure is created by gravity, but the air pressure does not have to be supplied by gravity, it just is on earth.

On the space station, where there is air pressure but zero gravity, a siphon will work just fine, again the h value would be infinate, if the available air volume, and liquid volume were also infinate.

A the fluid moves out of the container the air pressure on the surface of the fluid will lower, on earth you would not see this effect because of the large amount of air available, and the flow from source to destination and destination to source for the air.

But a siphon would work in zero gravity, if the air pressure was supplied by cylinders or compressed gas for example, or just the normal atmospheric pressure within the space station.

The human circulation system relies on a mixture of pumping and siphoning effects to circulate blood through the body, but when astronaughts to go space, they dont die. The siphon effect works in zero gravity, and blood keeps circulating.

Cooling system no the space station would most certainly rely upon siphons to move coolant.

There is no 'vacuum', a vacuum is an absence of stuff, not a 'thing' in itself, if there is air in the siphon pipe it will not work because gas is compressible, and liquid for most part is not. thats why you have to fill the tube of a siphon will fluid before it will work.

So this 'so called physist' is completely wrong and OED is right, it's odd that someone that calls themselves a physist would not simply revert to math, and look at the equation for a siphon,

Bernoulli's Equation, and look at the terms that it uses to calculate a siphon, gravity is not a factor, density is, P is pressure, h is height

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'Severe' OpenSSL vuln busts public key crypto

Aus_Eng
Black Helicopters

Yes, it is important, and a SSL fault

I thought the strength of FOSS was the "many eyes" looking at these issues, therefore when one of those "many eyes" finds something, what does the FOSS community do ?

They complain and argue against it, and attack the messenger. I thought the "model" of FOSS was supposed to promote and support testing and experimenting with the code?

Assume you have a large group of people working on breaking into a system, mabey something like the chinese government. With huge resources, people "on the inside" and massive support and technical resources.

Now also consider, the further development of this type of exploit, (bug).

You know programmically control you're CPU and RAM voltages, you can also remotely control the CPU load, and progababy even the internal cooling system including CPU fan.

So it's quite possible for future development and work on this bug would make it exploit REMOTELY exploitable.

Also with "inside" workers, (say a chinese IT worker working in google chine, on a night watch).

Would be able to access the machine, and with the availability of super computers get the key's he wants. Mabey without detection.

a Cluster of 81 P4's, what would a couple of fully configured quit CPU, quad Core i7's and 4 TESLA cards do it in. Probably not that long. with a desktop supercomputer or two.

So this exploit/bug is critical, and it's not that big a step to refine it as a remote exploit, it might be as easy as watching the CPU load, and taking advantage of the expected known CPU temp.

Or varying the CPU and RAM voltages (as overclockers do all the time), making it a remote exploit. (not to mention the 'insider job' possibility).

It's is a fault (bug) in OpenSSL, there should be NO WAY for fragments of the Key to be released in clear text due to hardware operational issues.

It's about time FOSS start to take security more seriously, and cease beign so cavalear with the assumption that 'all it just dandy in FOSS'. It's not........

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