Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Ghost in the Wires

A friend of mine recently lent me Kevin Mitnick‘s book Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. It’s an entertaining story that highlights how the willingness of people to trust and help others who they assume to be co-workers is often the greatest weakness in security systems.

It also highlights some of the characteristics of obsessive behaviour. I had no idea how many separate times Mitnick was caught. It reminded me of Marc Lewis’ Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, in terms of how repeated contact with agents of authority was insufficient to interrupt a longstanding pattern of behaviour.

The book is also a reminder of what seems like a more innocent era of global interconnectivity – when phone phreaks with blue boxes were a cutting-edge threat, and when the FBI would have real trouble tracking you down if you assumed the identity of someone who died in childhood. Now, attacks against computer systems seem associated more with governments themselves than with curious amateurs, and it’s difficult to imagine someone like Mitnick evading the surveillance state for long.

Graveyard of blogs

Either because people are moving away from blogging in general or because I haven’t been seeking out new blogs, many of the sites in my blogroll haven’t been updated for long spans of time.

I feel the time to pull them from the list has come – at least in the case of blogs not updated in the past six months.

For reference, here they are:

I hope all the authors have moved on to stimulating new projects.

First impressions of Gaiman

Trapped in a science fiction book store by a short spring downpour, I bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. After hearing him much recommended, this is the first thing of his I’ve read. I’m enjoying the language and style of storytelling, and the similarities the premise bears to Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently books is interesting – antiquated gods existing unnoticed, having been deprived of followers by history.

There are rarely long passages that seem especially quotable, but there are lots of little fragments I like:

  • Of the security cameras in the counting room of a casino: “under the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny cameras they cannot see”
  • “There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
  • “I heard a new CIA joke. Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assasination? … He’s dead, isn’t he?”
  • “And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports. “Are you sure it’s not something like ‘The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment?'””

‘Caracoled’ is also an interesting verb.

Sea-based nuclear power stations

Sea-based nuclear power stations would offer some advantages over the terrestrial sort:

For one thing, they could take advantage of two mature and well-understood technologies: light-water nuclear reactors and the construction of offshore platforms… The structures would be built in shipyards using tried-and-tested techniques and then towed several miles out to sea and moored to the sea floor…

Offshore reactors would help overcome the increasing difficulty of finding sites for new nuclear power stations. They need lots of water, so ideally should be sited beside an ocean, lake or river. Unfortunately, those are just the places where people want to live, so any such plans are likely to be fiercely opposed by locals.

Another benefit of being offshore is that the reactor could use the sea as an “infinite heat sink”… The core of the reactor, lying below the surface, could be cooled passively without relying on pumps driven by electricity, which could fail…

At the end of its service life, a floating nuclear power station could be towed to a specially equipped yard where it could be more easily dismantled and decommissioned. This is what happens to nuclear-powered ships.

The article mentions the Akademik Lomonosov, a Russian ship-based nuclear power system with an output of 70 megawatts. It uses the same kind of reactors that power the Taymyr-class icebreakers. Unfortunately, several such stations are intended to provide power for offshore oil and gas development.

The earliest floating nuclear power station went critical in 1967, inside the hull of a Liberty ship. It provided 10 megawatts to the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1975.

Open thread: thorium-fueled nuclear reactors

Whenever the many problems with nuclear power are raised, there are people who suggest that everything could be fixed with a substantial technical change: moving to generation IV reactors, for instance, or the ever-elusive fusion possibility.

Another common suggestion is that using thorium for reactor fuel could limit concerns about proliferation, as well as (modest) concerns about uranium availability.

I have read a lot of contradictory things on the subject of thorium, so it seems useful to have a thread tracking information on the issue.

The heartbleed bug is bad news for internet security

Many websites rely on SSL / TLS to encrypt communication: everything from passwords to credit card numbers to emails. OpenSSL is a very widely used implementation of these encryption protocols.

Right now, the internet is abuzz with the news of the ‘hearbleed’ bug. Because of a flaw in OpenSSL, attackers can extract 64 kilobytes of information from a webserver for each ‘heartbeat’. This information can include secret encryption keys, usernames and passwords, and other kinds of sensitive data.

In response, the Canada Revenue Agency has stopped accepting online filing of tax returns. There is a lot of other discussion online: Schneier, XKCD. A tool for testing webservers for the vulnerability is also online.

One take-away from this is that once various web servers are fixed, we will all need to change our passwords.

Yes, Minister on regulatory capture

But that’s how the civil service works, in practice. Each department is controlled by the people who it’s supposed to be controlling… Why, for instance, do we have comprehensive education? Who wanted it? The pupils, the parents? The National Union of Teachers wanted it. They’re the chief client of the Department of Education, so the DES went comprehensive. You see, every department acts for the powerful sectional interest with whom they have a permanent relationship. The Department of Employment lobbies for the TUC, whereas the Department of Industry lobbies for the employers. It’s rather a nice balance. Energy lobbies for the oil companies, defence lobbies for the armed forces, the Home Office lobbies for the police, and so on.

— Yes, Minister. Series three, episode five. “The Bed of Nails”