I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."

"You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email. Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't you call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now." Right. This is the chairman of statistics.

"Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius." //

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system." //

It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes
You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles

• 558.84719
  / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

I just saw a Western Digital external hard drive special: a 12TB desktop drive for $187. How do drive vendors do it?

vas pup • January 20, 2020 5:07 PM

From the article - looks like the weakest link:
"Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested."

Photos from government databases are uploaded to private servers with untested security. Just speechless.

The New York Times has a long story about Clearview AI, a small company that scrapes identified photos of people from pretty much everywhere, and then uses unstated magical AI technology to identify people in other photos.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system -- whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites -- goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.

[...]

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

And it's not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

What would happen if GPS - the Global Positioning System - stopped working?

For a start, we would all have to engage our brains and pay attention to the world around us when getting from A to B. Perhaps this would be no bad thing: we'd be less likely to drive into rivers or over cliffs through misplaced trust in our navigation devices.
With no GPS, emergency services would start struggling: operators wouldn't be able to locate callers from their phone signal, or identify the nearest ambulance or police car.

There would be snarl-ups at ports: container cranes need GPS to unload ships.

Gaps could appear on supermarket shelves as "just-in-time" logistics systems judder to a halt. Factories could stand idle because their inputs didn't arrive just in time either.

Farming, construction, fishing, surveying - these are other industries mentioned by a UK government report that pegs the cost of GPS going down at about $1bn (£820m) a day for the first five days.

If it lasted much longer, we might start worrying about the resilience of a whole load of other systems that might not have occurred to you if you think of GPS as a location service.

Consider phone networks: your calls share space with others through a technique called multiplexing - data gets time stamped, scrambled up, and unscrambled at the other end.

A glitch of just a 100,000th of a second can cause problems. Bank payments, stock markets, power grids, digital television, cloud computing - all depend on different locations agreeing on the time.

If GPS were to fail, how well, and how widely, and for how long would backup systems keep these various shows on the road? The not very reassuring answer is that nobody really seems to know.

No wonder GPS is sometimes called the "invisible utility".
Trying to put a dollar value on it has become almost impossible. As the author Greg Milner puts it in Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Our World, you may as well ask: "How much is oxygen worth to the human respiratory system?" It's a remarkable story for an invention that first won support in the US military because it could help with bombing people - and even it was far from sure it needed it. One typical response was: "I know where I am, why do I need a damn satellite to tell me where I am?"

it wasn't until the first Gulf War, in 1990, that the sceptics came around.

As Operation Desert Storm ran into a literal desert storm, with swirling sand reducing visibility to 5m (16ft), GPS let soldiers mark the location of mines, find their way back to water sources, and avoid getting in each other's way.

It was so obviously lifesaving, and the military had so few receivers to go around, soldiers asked their families in America to spend their own money shipping over $1,000 (£820) commercially available devices.

The American taxpayer puts up the billion-odd dollars a year it takes to keep GPS going, and that's very kind of them. But is it wise for the rest of the world to rely on their continued largesse?

In fact, GPS isn't the only global navigational satellite system.
There's a Russian one, too, called Glonass - although it isn't as good. China and the European Union have their own well advanced projects, called Beidou and Galileo respectively. Japan and India are working on systems too. These alternative satellites might help us ride out problems specific to GPS - but they might also make tempting military targets in any future conflict, and you can imagine a space war knocking everyone offline. A big enough solar storm could also do the job.

Five years ago, a CBS 60 Minutes report publicized a bit of technology trivia many in the defense community were aware of: the fact that eight-inch floppy disks were still used to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, control, and communications network. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s.

Those floppy disks have now been retired. Despite the contention by the Air Force at the time of the 60 Minutes report that the archaic hardware offered a cybersecurity advantage, the service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a “highly secure solid state digital storage solution.” The floppy drives were fully retired in June.

But the IBM Series/1 computers remain, in part because of their reliability and security. //

While SACCS is reliable, it is obviously expensive and difficult to maintain when it fails. There are no replacement parts available, so all components must be repaired—a task that may require hours manipulating parts under a microscope. Civilian Air Force employees with years of experience in electronics repairs handle the majority of the work. But the code that runs the system is still written by enlisted Air Force programmers.

OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. — In 2014, “60 Minutes” made famous the 8-inch floppy disks used by one antiquated Air Force computer system that, in a crisis, could receive an order from the president to launch nuclear missiles from silos across the United States.

But no more. At long last, that system, the Strategic Automated Command and Control System or SACCS, has dumped the floppy disk, moving to a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution” this past June, said Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron.

"I joke with people and say it's the Air Force's oldest IT system. But it's the age that provides that security,” Rossi said in an October interview. "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address. It's a very unique system — it is old and it is very good."

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office wrote that SACCS runs on an IBM Series/1 computer dating from the 1970s and that the Defense Department planned “to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017,” but it’s unclear whether those upgrades have occurred.

Digital Literacy — Opening Doors to the Future

Gain valuable skills that prepare you for problem-solving in a digital world.Do you need a way to demonstrate basic computer and digital literacy skills to employers? Completing the Northstar Digital Literacy Assessments can help you identify areas in which you need further education. Once you have mastered the needed skills, you can obtain a Northstar Digital Literacy Certificate by successfully completing the assessments at an approved testing location in a proctored environment. You can also claim a digital badge to put in your Digital Backpack. Once you pass Northstar, which certifies basic skills, you may choose to pursue more advanced training and certifications.

Spread-spectrum RF chirps are low-bandwidth—but they go farther than you'd think. //

Sure-Fi isn't intended to replace Wi-Fi at all. When Ars spoke to Sure-Fi president Mark Hall, he clarified that the company's gear is high tech RF for industrial controls, and it's not intended for a consumer audience. It uses 900MHz spectrum RF chirp communications to establish a low-bandwidth, high-reliability connection between industrial equipment (such as HVAC systems or electronic security gates) and their controllers. //

It's very nerdy-cool to see these things communicate underground, through trees and buildings, and up to a mile away. But unless you happen to be an HVAC or security system vendor, these particular RF chirp devices probably aren't going to be of any direct use to you. The underlying, nearly unjammable long-range technology could, however, lend itself to a lot of consumer-focused applications in the future—and the tech would do it without screwing up your Wi-Fi along the way. After a few makeshift at-home tests, we certainly hope to also see this kind of tech in drone controllers, security system sensors, and similar low-bandwidth applications in the near future

Moscow, 4 August, 1945. The European chapter of World War Two was over, and the US and the USSR were pondering their future relationship.

At the American embassy, a group of boys from the Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union made a charming gesture of friendship between the two superpowers.

They presented a large, hand-carved ceremonial seal of the United States of America to Averell Harriman, the US ambassador. It was later to become known simply as The Thing.

Naturally, Harriman's office would have checked the heavy wooden ornament for electronic bugs, but with neither wires nor batteries in evidence, what harm could it do?

Harriman gave The Thing pride of place, hanging on the wall of his study - from where it betrayed his private conversations for the next seven years.

He could not have realised that the device had been built by one of the true originals of the 20th Century.

Leon Theremin was famous even then for his revolutionary eponymous electrical musical instrument, which was played without being touched.

He had been living in the US with his wife, Lavinia Williams, before returning to the Soviet Union in 1938. His wife later said he had been kidnapped. In any case, he was promptly put to work in a prison camp, where he was forced to design, among other listening devices, The Thing.

Eventually, American radio operators stumbled upon the US ambassador's conversations being broadcast over the airwaves. These broadcasts were unpredictable: scan the embassy for radio emissions, and no bug was in evidence. It took yet more time to discover the secret.

The listening device was inside The Thing - and it was ingeniously simple, little more than an antenna attached to a cavity with a silver diaphragm over it, serving as a microphone. There were no batteries or any other source of power. The Thing did not need them.
It was activated by radio waves beamed at the US embassy by the Soviets. It used the energy of the incoming signal to broadcast back. When that signal was switched off, The Thing would go silent.

Much like Theremin's unearthly musical instrument, The Thing might seem a technological curiosity. But the idea of a device that is powered by incoming radio waves, and which sends back information in response, is much more than that.

The RFID tag - short for Radio-Frequency Identification - is ubiquitous in the modern economy.

My passport has one. So does my credit card, enabling me to pay for small items simply by waving it near an RFID reader.

Rowland Hill was a former schoolmaster, whose only experience of the Post Office in the 1830s was as a disgruntled user.

Nobody had asked him to come up with detailed proposals for completely revamping it. He did the research in his spare time, wrote up his analysis, and sent it off privately to the chancellor of the exchequer, naively confident that "a right understanding of my plan must secure its adoption". //

What were the problems Hill identified? Back then, you did not pay to send a letter. You paid to receive one. The pricing formula was complicated and usually prohibitively expensive.

Hill's solution was a bold two-step reform.

Senders, not recipients, would be asked to pay for postage; and it would be cheap - one penny, regardless of distance, for letters of up to half an ounce, 14g.

Hill thought it would be worth running the post at a loss, to stimulate what he called "the productive power of the country".

But he made the case that profits would actually go up, because if letters were cheaper to send, people would send more of them.

A few years ago the Indian-born economist CK Prahalad argued that there was a fortune to be made by catering to what he called "the bottom of the pyramid", the poor and lower-middle class of the developing world.

They did not have a lot of money as individuals, but they had a lot of money when you put them all together.

Hill was more than 150 years ahead of him.

In 1840, the first year of Penny Post, the number of letters sent more than doubled. Within 10 years, it had doubled again.

It took only three years for postage stamps to be introduced in Switzerland and Brazil, a little longer in America, and by 1860, they were in 90 countries. Hill had shown that the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid was there to be mined.

Half a century on from Hill's Penny Post, deliveries in London were as frequent as hourly, and replies were expected by "return of post".

But did the Penny Post also diffuse useful knowledge, and stimulate productive power?

A group of economists recently came up with an ingenious test of this idea in the United States. They gathered data on the spread of post offices in the 19th Century, and the number of applications for patents from different parts of the country.

New post offices did indeed predict more inventiveness, just as Hill would have expected.

"Clickable" endnotes for Schneier's book... lots of security info to learn here.

NASA had a famous quality control process: National Research Council (1996), “Case study: NASA space shuttle flight control software,” in Statistical Software Engineering, National Academies Press

Snarki, child of Loki • July 11, 2019 12:02 PM

"The Smart trend is turning stupid."

Smart is the new Stupid.

Patrick • July 11, 2019 12:28 PM

"Do you know what version of the firmware you're running ?"

Pretty sure you can just telnet into it and it tells you right there on the login screen.

drdec • July 11, 2019 12:29 PM

If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb...

Something has gone horribly wrong in your life.

Chelloveck • July 11, 2019 12:57 PM

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

CallMeLateForSupper • July 11, 2019 1:11 PM

Last century, when I was a kid, jokes about "Honest John the used car salesman" were common. Honest too often meant not honest. Today, "smart" usually indicates not-smart.

older servers had a peak to idle ratio of only 1.8 (average) compared to 4.8 average for the new servers.  This is not a surprise given the proliferation of power management schemes to reduce energy use.  Then I looked at the PSU power rating (all at 1N redundancy) and found that the new servers had a PSU rating that was on average 3.5 times that of the maximum server power consumption.  This was slightly higher than the average for the older servers which was 2.9.  One would expect that these ratios would be closer to 1.5 if server vendors were sizing PSUs to the maximum server load and maximum PSU efficiency. 

AI-powered video technology is becoming ubiquitous, tracking our faces and bodies through stores, offices, and public spaces. In some countries the technology constitutes a powerful new layer of policing and government surveillance.

Fortunately, as some researchers from the Belgian university KU Leuven have just shown, you can often hide from an AI video system with the aid of a simple color printout.

Fool’s errand: The deception demonstrated by the Belgian team exploits what’s known as adversarial machine learning. Most computer vision relies on training a (convolutional) neural network to recognize different things by feeding it examples and tweaking its parameters until it classifies objects correctly. By feeding examples into a trained deep neural net and monitoring the output, it is possible to infer what types of images confuse or fool the system.

Eyes everywhere: The work is significant because AI is increasingly found in everyday surveillance cameras and software. It’s even being used to obviate the need for a checkout line in some experimental stores, including ones operated by Amazon. And in China the technology is emerging as a powerful new means of catching criminals as well as, more troublingly, tracking certain ethnic groups.

The mid-1990s inception of the private sector Internet – has led to the greatest economic and lifestyle leap forward in the history of humanity.

More than $1 trillion in private investment has taken us from 14K dial-up – to 1GB+ of speed. And hurtling ever upward.

The free speech-free market Xanadu that is the Internet – is entirely the creation of the free market. NOT of government.

Government has in fact been an ongoing, rolling impediment to this mind-boggling progress – not a contributor.

While all of this amazing private sector Internet success has been going on – Leftists have bizarrely insisted these local governments actually try to get into the Internet provider business.

The Case For Municipal Broadband

This paper should be MUCH shorter than it is. Seven words: “There isn’t a case for municipal broadband.”

We Need a Public Option for Broadband

Because the Obamacare public option was so outstanding.

We Need Affordable and Reliable Publicly-Accountable Broadband

Government – affordable and reliable? That’s like saying “We need short and slow NBA basketball players.” Reality is an impediment to the asserted demand.

Government can’t even get it going – because of my Wallet Rule:

If you go out on a Friday night with your wallet, and you go out the following Friday night with my wallet – on which Friday night are you going to have more fun?

Obviously, you’re going to have a whole lot more fun with my wallet – because you don’t care what my wallet looks like at the end of the evening.

Well, government is always on other peoples’ wallets – ours. In gambling parlance – they’re playing with house money.

Government will never spend money as wisely or well as the people who earned it – from whom government takes it.

“The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it’s the 1980s is the city assessor’s office. Its property tax system dates back to the dawn of the floppy disk.

“City employees appraising the market work with software that runs on a dead programming language and can’t be used with a mouse. Assessors are prone to make mistakes when using the vintage software because it can’t display all the basic information for a given property on one screen.

“The staffers have to open and exit several menus to input stuff as simple as addresses. To put it mildly, the setup ‘doesn’t reflect business needs now,’ says the city’s assessor, Carmen Chu.”

This is San Fran-freaking-cisco. The Tech Capital of Planet Earth. The government is awash in hundreds of millions of Silicon Valley tax dollars.

And they are running software, government-wide – from when Ronald Reagan was president. Back when there was still a Soviet Union.

If The Tech Capital of Planet Earth is three-plus decades behind – how do you think the federal government is doing?

Here’s a hint: Frigging terribly. In fact – even worse.

US Government Is Spending Billions on Old Tech that Barely Works, Says Watchdog:

“Three-quarters of the government’s IT budget goes to supporting legacy systems, some of which date back to the 1970s.”
Oh good – four-plus decades behind. Ahh…1970s tech. When Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were President.