We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The last of the Lockheed-Martin Titan rockets, after months of slow preparation, is finally up and away from Vandenberg. The blacksat on board was considered quite important and Lockheed used their clout as the launch contractor to kick fledgling rocket company SpaceX out of Vandenberg and away from the pad in which owner Elon Musk had invested millions of his own dollars.
Now that LockMart’s big launch is away they will not have the power to continue their underhanded operations against potentially cheaper competition. A number of folk have told me that Elon’s burn rate has been such that he is no longer quite a billionaire. As the adage goes, the way to make a small fortune in aerospace is to start out with a large one. Nonetheless, Elon is not letting the bastards (at Lockmart) get him down. I believe he has his next test coming up in November on Kwajalein, and the USAF is reportedly quite positive about working with him.
Except when LockMart throws a hissy fit…
 Elon Musk speaking at the National Space Society’s 2005 International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC. Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
It seems a Japanese company has invented a human steering device. It is external, harmless and affects the sense of balance.
The article suggests uses in gaming where tweaking the balance system helps make immersive gaming more realistic. One must wonder: how much time will pass before the porn industry picks up on this?
There are darker uses I am sure you can easily imagine. A company is already studying the use of the ideas for crowd control by affecting their sense of balance. One can imagine implants to control gulag prisoners of future Stalin’s.
My dark crystal gets darker still from there.
If there is a heaven, then I died and went to Las Cruces this weekend. Or perhaps I stumbled into a jackrabbit hole after one of the long sessions in the hotel bar and found myself inside a space art painting I saw some years back. Whatever the case… I was there.
It was obvious from a great distance the event was bigger than I had imagined possible.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.When I noticed the Canadian rebuild of a V-2 missile I decided some Canadians have two. Big ones. Really big ones. Made of solid stainless steel.
And yes, those round things really are view ports for the ‘pilot’.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.I got up close and personal with Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.John Carmack pats his Armadillo after it tipped over on landing from a tethered 20 foot controlled flight.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.Your fellow Samizdata readers at XCOR Aerospace brought their EZ-Rocket engine testbed out of retirement just for the event. Astronaut Searfoss jumped at the chance to display this lovely hot-arsed bird twice within the afternoon.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.Even the bicycles had rocket motors on them.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.The British engine gave a rather spectacular pyrotechnic sound and light show as it blew up at t=0. To be fair, the Starchaser group apparently had several succesful firings of this quite large engine over the weekend. I simply had the good or bad fortune to be there for the one that did not.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.I also have video of such things as two low level passes by an F117; the full first flight of EZ-Rocket and much else, but I am afraid I would bring our server to its little knees if I were to try to upload so much to it.
With yet another long international flight stretching ahead of me, I finally have time and boredom enough to write a good deal more on network security issues than I have in the past. I have been at least peripherally involved in the area (self defense of my own and customers business networks) for quite some time.
There has been a sea change in the threat model over the last few years. The underworld of the Gibson novel has come to pass although things are perhaps not so dramatic as in the stories. Reality does not fit neatly between two covers.
I recently wrote about a possible case of industrial scale industrial espionage. There is much evidence in security literature that this is occuring and KGB/FSB bugged Russian hotels are not the only place one need worry. Everyone is getting into the game. For those who might be interested in such things I recommend a Dartmouth paper “CyberWarfare: An Analysis Of The Means And Motivations Of Selected Nation States”, Bilko And Chang, December 2004.
While reading Bilko and Chang a number of other strands of thought came together. It puts a whole new light on the recent move of major internet equipment suppliers into Chinese production facilities. Among these, two are of particular note.
IBM Thinkpads: the laptop of choice of many network professionals.
Cisco Routers: These are ubiquitous in the infrastructure of the Internet from major backbone to small office.
Then there is the Lynn debacle. Michael Lynn gave a presentation at DEFCON this last summer in which he showed beyond a shadow of a doubt Trojans can be inserted into Cisco backbone routers… and by extension most other brands as well. His slide presentation was not of a specific exploit but of a generic method.
Cisco and ISS, the company from which he had just resigned, went totally over the top. They sent a crew to the DEFCON to remove pages from the programs. Afterwards they threatened to sue Michael Lynn unless he agreed to allow their forensics people to cryptographically wipe anything to do with the the research from his disk drives. They sent nasty letters to all and sundry who posted his slide set. They tracked down and took possession of every bit of video of the session they could get their hands on. Despite their best efforts to pull a “1984”, they failed.
It was not just failure, it was total, abyssmal, embarrasing, hang-your-head you idiot failure. Instead of a few interested hackers and security analysts with copies stored in dusty corners of the internet they made it a slashdot affair. Absolutely everyone has the document now. I will not post a link here because if you really are interested you already have a copy and if you do not you can find it easily enough.
Another reason these actions were foolish on the part of Cisco brings me back to the central point of this article. The Cisco heap smash attack described by Michael Lynn was only an improvement on already published literature… and it may have already been implimented… by Chinese hackers.
→ Continue reading: Privacy? What privacy?
I do not usually bring my professional activities to the pages of Samizdata, but I have a very interesting little story to tell.
There are things going on out in Cyberspace of which most are little aware. Some will have heard reports saying Cyberwar backed by nation states will soon be able to bring down economies. Other reports equally vehemently say the idea is an over-hyped load of bollocks.
I can tell you from personal experience ‘on the front lines’ there are indeed goings on which I find difficult to explain without recourse to State backed Cyberwar activities as fact. I cannot give specific details: that would be violating customer trust. What I can tell is the broad brush tale of a rather interesting discovery I stumbled upon late one night.
I was trying to assist a ‘Road Warrior’ CEO in getting at his email. This was not my reason for being at the ISP working – I was there on a consulting job – but I was the only one available at that hour. Their customer was in Moscow on a business trip and was becoming more and more strident over his inability to read his office mail.
I began tracing the ISP’s systems and trying to pull needles out of haystacks of system and mail logs. At first I thought he was appearing through a different address than he claimed to be using in his hotel. Proving this was made more difficult by the Moscow hotel not having its systems properly set up.
Someone was reading his mail and it was not him. Further more, that someone was in Beijing. Most disturbingly, it was from a Beijing network through which several years ago I had a near penetration of a firewall of mine. A friend who was a reformed ‘black-hat’ could not even explain what had happened. They were that good. So seeing someone on the same network repeatedly picking up this CEO’s email was a nasty surprise. My investigation suddenly shifted from ‘help the idjit customer’ mode to defense and forensics.
I will not bore you with details. After conferring with some other network and security people I had a story that fit the facts. I cannot absolutely swear the following is what was going on, but I can make a fair case for it.
It seems old hardline KGB have a presence in China and they use Beijing as a cutout for some of their activities. Since the password had to get there somehow, I infer either in the Moscow hotel or somewhere in a nearby Russian backbone node there is a data mining operation going on.
Imagine you are a businessman arriving in Russia for a trade show or other event. You check into the hotel and immediately use the internet connection to pick up your home office email. As you are not a network security expert, you do not realize your normal ‘pop3’ mail pickup is sending a clear-text user name and password when your laptop connects to your office (or gmail) server.
Your poor, unprotected little password gets scarfed up before it reaches the border. Along with other captives it gets passed on to the cutout operation in Beijing. Someone then connects and reads your mail. Presumably all the mail then gets dumped into a huge database where it can be cross-indexed and mined for proprietary data, internal data security info, blackmail possibilities and other attack vectors into yours or other corporate networks.
I could be wrong. There are other scenarios… but not many. One must explain how a password journeyed to Beijing within no more than a day or two of the CEO’s Moscow arrival. This does not happen accidentally.
I find this all quite disturbing.
Rita is starting to look like she is right up there amongst the mothers of all storms. According to the National Weather Service:
000
WTNT63 KNHC 212351
TCUAT3
HURRICANE RITA TROPICAL CYCLONE UPDATE
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
650 PM CDT WED SEP 21 2005
…RITA BECOMES THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE ON RECORD…
DROPSONDE DATA FROM AN AIR FORCE RESERVE UNIT RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT AT 623 PM CDT…2323Z… INDICATED THE CENTRAL PRESSURE HAS FALLEN TO BELOW 899 MB…OR 26.55 INCHES. THE DROPSONDE INSTRUMENT MEASURED 32 KT/35 MPH WINDS AT THE SURFACE…WHICH MEANS IT LIKELY DID NOT RECORD THE LOWEST PRESSURE IN THE EYE OF RITA. THE CENTRAL PRESSURE IS PROBABLY AT LEAST AS LOW AS 898 MB…AND PERHAPS EVEN LOWER. FOR OFFICIAL PURPOSES… A PRESSURE OF 898 MB IS ASSUMED… WHICH NOW MAKES RITA THE THIRD MOST INTENSE HURRICANE IN TERMS OF PRESSURE IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN. SOME ADDITIONAL DEEPENING AND INTENSIFICATION IS POSSIBLE FOR THE NEXT 12 HOURS OR SO.
RITA CURRENTLY RANKS BEHIND HURRICANE GILBERT IN 1988 WITH 888 MB AND THE 1935 LABOR DAY HURRICANE WITH 892 MB.
FORECASTER STEWART
If you are in Rita’s path, please get out.
UPDATE: Here is the current (updated hourly) satellite image of Rita.
UPDATE: Current Category 4 warning. Note that Lake Ponchartrain and New Orleans are within the danger zone.
We will just have to get used to bigger storms as we head deeper into the upside of the decades long Atlantic storm cycle. Over the next decade nature will be reclaiming land which became saleable during the downside of the cycle. Unfortunately there are some pretty useful things in threatened areas. One of which is the marvellous Lone Star Flight Museum.
I hope they are getting their airframes out of Dodge and their exhibits to safety. I would hate to see a repeat of what happened to Kermit Week’s collection in Florida about ten years ago.
Tonight I watched the excellent second episode of a BBC series on the US/USSR space race of the 1950’s and 1960’s. I found it highly entertaining and well worth the watching.
As some of you are aware, I have some slight knowledge in this area. It was for the most part well researched and an accurate portrayal both of historical facts and the atmosphere of the time. I found the use of bits of old black and white TV from the period fascinating. I must also admit to recognizing the Life Magazine covers as those and Werner’s Disney appearances had at least something to do with my own passion for space.
This would not be a proper review if I did not also point out what was wrong. The history they presented was what anyone would find by researching the times and accepting the received wisdom about ‘what happened’. There was more to the events of the era than most are aware of even though a great deal of it is no longer classified.
There was more at stake than whether ex-German Werner Von Braun launched the first satellite or not. There was an intelligence sting in progress; perhaps one of the most successful in US intelligence history.
The story began some years earlier with a top secret report on the use of space for military purposes, and in particular for spy satellites. The problem was whether flying an object repeatedly and undeniably over an enemy nation would be taken as an aggressive act. Would satellites be treated the same as Francis Gary Powers and his U2 were treated many years later? That was the sticky point, and the way around it was to make sure the Russians were suckered into doing it first. Once they had established the ‘open skies’ precedent, the US was free to roll out the spy satellites. It was no accident that the technology was ready to go and that many of the early Explorer’s were less than scientific in purpose.
The public response, or ‘blowback’ caught Eisenhower by surprise. He’d accomplished precisely what he had wanted to accomplish but was now publicly on the hook for a missile gap which did not actually exist. Even at the time of the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Russians did not have a significant number of ICBM’s reliable enough to generate a serious strategic threat to America. LBJ, as a member of a key Senate committee was well aware of the real facts and almost certainly used the fact of their secrecy to his and Kennedy’s political advantage.
Meanwhile, Nixon had to hold his tongue on the issue. Some pundits have suggested this may have caused him to strike back in inappropriate ways a decade later, leading to the Watergate fiasco. Personally I cannot forget that he was a key player in the McCarthy hearings of the early fifties, hearings which ruined many lives and did not uncover any of the real Stalinist moles in the heart of the US government.
I will not hold this against the BBC however. Few are aware of this bit of history and there are many who consider it controversial.
I give the BBC an 8.5 for history and a solid 10 for presentation and entertainment.
Respect for property rights in America seems to be at a new low these last few years. Just a few months ago we heard the Supreme Court announce that any government can apply Eminent Domain to steal pretty much anything it wants.
Now we have the Federal Government using a technology for ‘secret’ purposes and making sure the inventors cannot sue for fair recompense.
I do not know about you, but I do not find it surprising enough to warrant high secrecy that the US government is using submarines to tap undersea cables. They have been doing this for decades, albiet with copper. They even had a special submarine for it, the USS Halibut.
I can understand sensitivity to which cables and what data… but to pretend that we do not already know what they are doing is much like the 3 year old with a cake smeared face confronted with the empty cake plate proclaiming: “I didn’t do it!”
 Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved
It seems many important building in Moscow may still be mined from WWII.
Indeed, the recollections of another NKVD officer only corroborate Krotov’s story. “On October 20, 1941, there was an order to place explosives beneath the most prominent objects in the capital,” Pavel Sudoplatov, once the head of the Central Staff of the Fighter Battalion of the NKVD, wrote in a memoir. According to Sudoplatov, the Bolshoi Theater and other buildings were on the list. They could be blown up only on very special orders, however, and only if occupied by Germany’s top leadership.
The German’s would have found Moscow nights to be rather more high energy affairs than expected… as they watched the last waltz at the Bolshoi.
I ran across this via one of the professional lists I read. It is a fascinating peek behind the scenes of a datacentre that kept going right through Katrina and well into the worst of the aftermath.
The many people like this were (and are) the real heroes of New Orleans.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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