Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • January 22, 2022 7:55 AM

@ Currious,

It was pointed out that the serial numbers were typically four and seven byte ID numbers, which was deemed equally trivial to clone.

I suspect the journalist got a “lost in translation” moment.

You can get RFIDs with various numbers of bits, with the smallest, years ago if memory serves correctly being 24bits from Dallas Semiconductor all wrapped up in a tiny glass pill. They went through 32bits to 64bits fairly quickly and some will be more than that but to what point?

RFID’s are less secure than metal plate “serial numbers”. They are not now nor ever will be even remotely close to being “authentication tokens”, that is what Smart Cards and later were designed to do (and fail miserably even today).

What the industry spokesman was doing is what the banking industry does,

Externalise the risk onto the party least capable of defending themselves.

That is they fully well know their system is not in anyway secure but they figure you can never get the money together to go to court and win so why should they go to the expense of cutting their profits.

At some point there will be an “ID clash” when the legitimate user and the fraudster both plug into the charging network together… So how do you think the network will keep it quiet without swallowing losses?

The system designers should have known better at “design time” but why should they care, they have “profits to consider”. Plus they know that should anything push the charging network to upgrade, they will get a nice “fat fee” job supplying the upgrades…

I can go through virtually every step of the process showing how all involved are complicit in the very weak security. Yet for “profit” reasons none of them will do anything better than the barest minimum required (and frequently not even close to that).

It’s why we need legislation and regulation of the right sort.

What is the “right sort” I’ll leave as a subject for another day, but lets just say few systems are even remotely close.

Clive Robinson • January 23, 2022 1:14 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

One aspect is “Soldiers lie to others about being a soldier”.

We mostly don’t tell as we only want to remember the good not the bad.

Each year we raise a glass to those who will remain forever young in our eyes.

They say combat changes you, it does, it also teaches you to be different.

Remember what it is you have to do… From the earliest we can remember we are taught that violence, and killing especially are wrong. Yet a soldier sights their gun on the enemy and knowingly pulls the trigger to kill. Mostly you miss but you know in the back of your head that some shots count.

There are three basic types of shooting,

1, Shoot to scare.
2, Shoot to wound.
3, Shoot to kill.

Mostly a soldier does the first, it’s known as “covering fire” if you put enough lead in the air the sensible place for the enemy to be is where they can not shoot back.

With the second type of shooting the question is where to aim? Often you are encoraged with the “aim low” mantra. In the west our targets are generally drawn on “center body mass” others such as some Russian ones are drawn on the groin. The reason is under stress we mostly tend to “shoot high”.

But why wound rather than kill? Well there are several reasons one of which is the psychological one of pretending to yourself you have not killed. But there is another reason which is part of the cold logic of war. If someone is wounded they need care, which means a medic is required, then two others to carry the stretcher, yet others to get them to trauma centers the faster you do it the better chance they will survive. In the UK we’ve got so good at it, that people come back and they realy wish they had not in the months and years that follow…

But that cold logic is simple, a wounded soldier holds down maybe ten other soldiers and significant resources in the moment of battle. The dead need no assistance[1] they are nolonger a part of the battle they do not slow down the pace, the battle continues without them. It was the First World War, the first “industrial war” where the horror of wound not kill became clear to all, the use of gas to blind and choke to win a battle without having to engage the enemy…

Then there is the job of the specialist in killing, the sniper, who aims for “one shot on kill” their job is to bring death to order and instill fear in the enemy.

One sniper and their spotter can have a hugely disproportionate effect. They can cause not just fear but “long gun fever” where peoples every actions change so much they become not just mentally but physically ill. You realy can die of fear if the stress hormones stay elevated long enough.

The view painted of a sniper is that the take out important people thus destroy the enemy chai of command. Whilst this may happen it’s not the job that most do.

Even though it is obvious guns have ranges few rarely think how it effects warfare on the ground. Hand guns are of not much use beyond a hundred feet, rifles whilst good to 1500-2000 feet are more accurate than the soldier pulling the trigger who is good to maybe 1000 feet quite offten not even 500. A light machine gun is good to 3000 feet, so they can kill beyond the range they can be killed at by a squad of infantrymen. A sniper can kill reliably at 3000 feet and out to beyond 6000 feet. So the job of the infantry sniper is to kill those who operate machine guns. They are quite good at this in unconventional warfare, because the enemy is often not trained. A machine gun makes you feel powerfull if not invincable as people can not get close to you. So unless trained otherwise they do stupid things like stand in the open with the machine gun up on a post or tripod mount in the back of a vehicle or just on an oil drum. Yes they get a wide field of fire, but they are all the more vulnerable because of it, so they get popped for their stupidity. A wiser commander picks his fields of fire with more care as their life expectancy is related to the life expectancy of the men behind the machine gun…

For some in the UK it is fourty years early this year of the battle of the South Atlantic, and Falklands. A stupid war started by politicians hoping to hide their failings behind patriotism, drum banging and flag waving.

However the real reason behind it is only now becoming more apparant to the world at large, and it is the fight for mineral rights, mainly for energy such as oil and the very temporary wealth[2] they bring a nation both directly and indirectly.

On such things the fate of a few people rest. Right now there is a war of words going on in the UN over the Falklands and the right of the people there for self determination. It is not just sad that this is happening, it is sickening. The UN C24 committee is for “Decolonisation” and the Falklands is on their list. Each year the Falkland islanders have to send representatives to fend of false Argentina’s claims that the Falklands are theirs, that is to plead for the right of self determination,

https://www.falklands.gov.fk/assembly/component/jdownloads/?task=download.send&id=3141&catid=494&m=0&Itemid=101

But dispite repeated requests by the Falklanders that the UN send a fact finding mission there to see what the people want, for “political reasons” they won’t send one. Why because the Falklanders are 99.8% happy to stay the way they are as an “Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom” and that is the opposite of what the C24 ideology is about.

So each year Argentinian politicians get to beat up a frenzy of patriotism at home in their press to scream for blood and vengence against people that have done them no harm, in fact the opposite. But worse those politicians trample on the memories of friends and loved ones who helped fight the Argentinian dictatorship that killed and disapeared so many Argentinians that nobody knows how many it was… Is that dictatorship gone, yes with the help of the Battle of the South Atlantic. But is what caused the dictatorship to arise gone, no very apparently not, and this rightly concerns people. This is what the UN C24 wants to inflict on the Falklanders out of “ideology” and the Falklanders very clearly do not want anything to do with it, they do not want to be traded like a commodity of political ideology into the hands of political despots driven by greed, desperation and inadequacy.

But as soldiers we are required to bide, to watch on, and hope we are the last who have to remember those for whos life journy was so short.

[1] A dead soldier can wait, they are not going anywhere, they need no comfort or aid, eventually a couple of soldiers after the battle is over will spend maybe twenty minutes with a couple of shovels putting the body in a shallow grave and mark it on a map… Or these days even less putting the pieces in a body bag and stacking it on a truck like so much cordwood. We take the fallen to the rear, they go from our minds untill we do something normal like eat, or take a smoke and they are not there. But as the fallen retreat they become others responsability to get them home one last time. The quiet repatriation ceremonies where the names do not matter, they are one of us and they are leaving, going home, to journies end, they feel no pain as those that remain feal their loss, we hope in our hearts that there is a reason why it was them not us. We leave the nonsense of glorious deaths, heroic actions to other fools, what we remember is the little things like the laugh the joke the silly stunt, what they drank, how they liked their hot brew or banjo even what hand they used to hold a mug or smoke. We also remember those photos from home how they made them feel proud and us as well. In short soldiers remember the life of their comrades not their deaths and we take them with us always.

[2] History shows that such wealth is usually squandered by stupidity and status. Why bother creating when you can just buy it… Such wealth makes a people not just poor but bankrupt. Because that real wealth that carries a nation forward is knowledge and it’s application through industry, to make trade goods, and it is through trade you stop wars starting. But politicians do not care for this as it does not keep them in power…

Clive Robinson • January 24, 2022 3:40 AM

@ NotMe,

From memory @SpaceLifeForm was being sarcastic to make a point.

As for “Climate Change” the last two paragraphs quoted from the draft report are the important ones,

“We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviours at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions, and governments.”

“We must redefine our way of life and consumption.”

Part of moving into an “information economy” should be the realisation that communications displaces transportation.

Two of the things the pandemic has shown is,

1, Teleworking works as well as office working.

2, Software is not upto anywhere even close to the minimum security standards needed for Teleworking.

Thus the software industry needs to improve a very great deal if we are to stand even a small chance on,

“Redefining our way of life and consumption”.

Oh and a third thing the pandemic should have made clear to all is “Bio-Sec” is of vital importance. So,

“International transportation of people and goods is not a safe thing for the longevity of mankind.”

Clive Robinson • January 24, 2022 6:41 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

WW2 Soldiers All. And going back through the entire history of the USA

Both my parents and uncles and aunts were in uniform during WWII, my grandparents were likewise in “The Great War” though not all in uniform[1]. There has always been a member of the family in the Royal Corp Signals in each generation since before it became “The Corps” in 1920.

What many do not know is that the Royal Sigs are “First in and last out” and often “the awkward squad” would go in well before the likes of the SAS to set up communications, and accompany them during their operations as operators. They would also “go in solo” to support diplomatic missions and some units were trained not to come back. That is they would become “stay behind” forces alowing the enemy to pass them by and provide intelligence back from behind enemy lines, whilst others were trained to “drop in” behind enemy lines.

I’m not sure just how far back the family tree can be traced, but for those we know back as far as Cromwell many did military service in some way.

The exception is my son, I’ve pointed out that what was “good” has been stolen by politicians and the covenent irrevocably broken by them.

I’ve tried to be honest with him about how the military in the UK has changed in the last fourty years for very much the worse and how in reality there is no real benifit in it for an individual any more.

Needless to say because of politicians behaviours the number of those becoming recruits has declined so much that at one point it was less than one a day…

UK politicians became so desperate to fill vacancies in the existing ranks and find experts to fill new roles rather than train up existing personnel, at one point they took off the age restrictions on pepole “re-joining” especially in Signals-Intelligence. But honestly, think about it, how many 50year olds do you know that could run 500m in full NBC kit in the desert carrying a combat load out plus technical equipment?

To say the politicians plan smacked of desperation was an understatment. Unfortunately since UK commitments have dropped, and being cannon fodder became less likely, the number of “young, desperate, and not fit” joining up has increased. I suspect it will only be a matter of months before the politicians throw them into some new combat zone, under trained and ill prepared for what they will face. There is no honour in politicians these days and they care not a jot as long as those doing the dirty work are not their sons or daughters.

[1] Little known fact, for various reasons there were a number of people of Scottish ancestry living in Normandy and Brittany at that time. Come the “Great War” whilst they did not join the fight as soldiers, some became what you would call auxiliary medics, stretcher bearers and the like with their wives and other family members becoming “bandage boilers and makers”. What some did was beyond heroic and they saved many lives, few ever got any recognition which is a shame, in part because it was considered incorrectly they were “Conscientious objectors”. Something the millitary hierarchy did nothing to change, as the view carried forward from the Boar-War was that all men including wounded should fight not be encoraged into malingering or do “womens work” (remember the same commanders such as Lord Gort had over three thousand people sentanced to death of which over three hundred and fifty were carried out, all who had shell shock and similar. This was apparently justifed as being to stiffen “Moral Fibre” in other soldiers…).

Clive Robinson • January 25, 2022 6:09 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Regards “Russia cutting cables”

As you know it’s something I bang on about from time to time, more in respect of the “landing zone” “choke points” and ease of surveillance to out the likes of Tor and other MixNets. But few others apparently have ever been interested…

However Marcie Wheeler of “EmptyWheel” lives in Ireland these days (for her own safety). But her audience is still mainly US based, so I guess she is rather more sensitive to it than others.

But she is getting things a little wrong and missing a very significant point.

Mostly she is using logical diagrams that show the cables conveniently on a drawing, but not the actual geo-position of the cables. So it gives a false impression of where the problem actually is…

However look at the topological map she givez where the area the Russian Excercise is due to take place is marked.

You will see the Bristol channel that comes between Wales at it’s north and Cornwall at it’s south. This channel goes well out to the west under the sea. You will see on the map the edge of the continental shelf and mostly it’s a very step drop, thus not suitable for laying cables over.

Now project from the Bristol Channel between West and West-Sou-West you will see a darker patch immediately north and partially inside the Russian Excercise Area.

Well this is a much more gentle drop into the deep Atlantic, and it is there that many of the cables have been laid. In fact it’s known that some are actually ontop of each other in this area.

Thus the northern part of the Russian Excercise Area, is well within two man mini-sub range of all the cables in that sub-sea valley.

If you want to know more about the cables locations, you might want to look at the UK Admiralty “notice to mariners” information marked up on the relevant charts for those areas. They show areas where ancoring is prohibited, because “dragging anchors” badly damage sub-sea cables.

Oh by the way the “dragging anchor” excuse has been used to cut four cables around Africa a few years back… What is known is that they all happened within a very short time of each other, therefore under the,

Once is hapanstance,
Twice is coincidence,
Thrice is enemy action.

Rule you can guess what was going on.

Thus any “accidents” that happen almost certainly will not be “accidents”.

But the real question is “what of the future? It raises an important point.

Russia is known to have developed some quite sophisticated mines that can be controled remotely. It would take only a minor change in the way they work to be put within “damage range” of the cables without actually touching them…

So accidents can be arranged well in advance…

Now imagine having to go down and look in a 300ft wide swathe down the length of every cable looking for “concealed mines” or similar devices… The resources required would be immense.

So importantly look on it as yet another form of “Asymetric Warfare”…

But I also expect there to be more than a couple of “Signals Intelligence” submarines and similary surface vessels and aircraft “just passing by”…

Clive Robinson • January 25, 2022 7:04 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

What is this group recruiting that you speak of your honour?

It’s a nasty “tort” notion that has been around for a long time.

It’s to do with the quaint US notion that the skills of employees belong to their employers… It’s an extention of the idea about patents and similar.

Historically it goes back to serfdom and the “thiething of freemen” by land owners, and Guild employment of freemen as what we might call apprentices and endentured servitude.

The modern argument is something like this,

Person X has skills that employer A facilitated in some way. These skills give person X “value added” where the increased “value” is “claimed” to be due to their employment.

Therefore employer A claims that it has invested in person X and increased their market value, and thus are entitled to enjoy a return on that investment (think endentured / apprentice labour where the emoloyee is “tied” for a period of time).

Now in the past employers rather than pay to train their own emoloyees have “poached” those with the skills they need from other emoloyers who have trained those who work for them. Not so long ago the big Silicon Valley Corps got smacked over the wrist for operating a cartel with a “no employ” from others in the cartel policy to quite deliberatly keep skilled labour wages down on the pretense of a “no poach” policy.

So now individuals are free to seek the best wages/conditions they can, but employers are still not alowed to poach.

It’s hard to argue legally that an individual has been “poached” but there was a case of this over “self driving vehicles” not so long ago as part of a bigger case (technology theft).

But what about when an employer sees two or more employees leave at the same time to a competitor?

Is this just “free market” opportunities or is the new employer practicing “industrial-warfare” against the old?

Or is the old actually practicing not just “industrial-warfare” but also trying to illegaly operate a cartel or monopoly over labour to suppress wages and opportunities?

It’s a matter of circumstances and which way the wind blows on a given day.

However there is sofar clear evidence that the old employer was very deliberately holding down wages and forcing worse working conditions on the employees. As they are the ones bringing the case, to try and enforce Medieval userous tutelage Rights that are iniquitous in modern society, through a legal backdoor that should have been slamed shut a century or more ago, I’ll let you guess what I think.

There is actually a real danger in this court case, because if the court finds for the old employer it gives rise to “case law” that sets workers rights back a few centuries.

So I would be very tempted as the defendent in the case to ask for the plaintiff to under go full financial disclosure and search, because certain political and other corporate interests outside of this actual dispute may be financing it for their own ends.

Clive Robinson • January 25, 2022 7:01 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, Anders,

Re Hardware Trojans.

Quite a few years ago @NickP and @RobertT discussed this in quite some depth.

@RobertT suggested that the test framework the Fab added to the chips might be a place ro start as this is propriatory to the Fab. He also suggested routing out via a blind via trick a bit such as carry from an ALU output register.

The conclusion was that there was no way to “scan the chip” for a blind via.

@Nick P also pointed out that there had been a request for techniques to find what we now call supply chain poisoning and that some of the groups that submitted ideas “went dark” suggesting they might have been taken into the fold.

I surmised via my “castle-v-prison” research that there was actually no reliable way to test a chip for a trojan. For instance it could need a 256bit number to get written to a register to enable it and there is no way that would come out in testing except by blind luck.

So I assumed three different CPU units from different manufacturers. Any attempt to turn on malicious behaviour could not be done in parallel only serialy. Thus via a voting circuit if any CPU went rouge it would trigger the voting mechanism that would flip the state machine based hardware hypervisor to freeze the “prison” and the hardware hypervisor would trigger the next layer of hypervisor up that would inspect the prison memory, registers etc looking for differences.

So yeah this blog has been several years ahead in this area…

It’s a shame neither @Nick P or @RobertT are still dropping by they contributed quite a lot, as well as making good sounding boards for quirky ideas. Likewise we appear to have lost @Wael and @Dirk Praet, @Thoth and a few others.

The last I saw of @NickP was over on Lobste.rs but he appears to have fadded there as well. @Wael was occasionally poping up but as was @Thoth but both appear to have faded.

Hopefully they are all well.

Clive Robinson • January 26, 2022 6:11 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

Survivors (1) need a probate certificate to handle the financial and real estate of the deceased person, without it you cannot pay bills, close bank accounts, sell property or dispose of valuable items.

Actually you can with a bit of fore thought.

The old way was to put everything in a trust and have appropriate conditions specified.

The UK Government stamped down on this because of people using it to avoid all kinds of taxes.

The second more recent way was to use a “limited liability company” with A and B shares (voting and dividend). I won’t go into the details because people started to use companies to avoid paying ruinus “Stamp Duty” on more expensive property sales.

So the UK Government brought in legislation for that.

But this still leaves the use of foreign companies and “Limited Liability Partnerships” and “back to back loans” via tax havens.

The UK Government left this alone untill the embarasment of the “Panama Papers” and what quite a number of UK politicians of the current encumbrants had their dirty laundry aired.

The thing is there is still gaping holes in the system that dictators, tyrants, crooked politicians, crooked financiers, crooked banks like HSBC, and many others “launder the proceeds” of their various questionable activities and those of their clients through.

Many see death duties as an iniquitous tax on what a person has already payed tax on multiple times already. Thus robbing their descendants of a start in life.

Oh for those looking for an easy way to avoid death duties in the UK, buy a working farm and live on it. It’s one of the reasons farm land is currently so eye wateringly expensive. However a legal friend pointed out that the definition of a working farm is a bit broad so other properties can become farms (fought realy hard by local authorities). Also the definition of “crop” is also very wide…

Clive Robinson • January 26, 2022 12:58 PM

@ AL,

How ’bout that?

No surprise at all.

Look at the –illegal under EU legislation– Nordstream II pipeline and similar. Due to various policies under Mummy Merkles leadership, Germany has developed an energy need for the likes of Gas that has made it dependant on Russian Energy Exports with more than 1/2 Germans Energy Needs at low low prices currebtly comming from Russia.

And I suspect many Germans are now scared Putin will turn the tap off and they will either freeze ib their homes or pay the huge price hikes other parts of Europe are having to edure due to China…

After all it’s not as though Putin has not used energy dependency as a political tool in the past… Oh and US President Biden went soft on Russia…

As they say in training for team sports,

“Come on keep up and stay on pace”

So have a read of,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/23/nord-stream-2-how-putins-pipeline-paralysed-the-west

It ourlines some of the issues. Put simoly Putin is “the pusher” of a couple of “drugs” Germans are addicted to thanks to now departed Mummy Merkle.

Clive Robinson • January 26, 2022 5:08 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

While I normally (or previously) have no food allergies, I do now.

It’s a form of failing autoimmune response.

You’ve in effect had the allergies for some time but the body has been able to deal with it via hormones etc (think histamine and insulin responses).

As you get older and or you overload the system, the response becomes less and less and thats when the symptoms become prevelant and you call it an allergy. Often one of the first signs you are heading into trouble is in effect cravings that make you want more of what makes you ill…

Due to poor “medical advice” I started eating rather more bread than I should have done. The reason I was told it had to be X% of diet, but they had not realised because I was burning upwards of 4000 cals a day due to cycling and the like I was eating too much wheat based grains… The result was first I became addicted to it with two or three slices or rolls with every meal. Calorificaly not an issue but wheat is not something you should eat a lot of, especially the full wheatgerm stuff…

I started developing what looked like coeliacs but was not… However after years of being told I was imagining it or similar a chat with a research professor in animal nutrition who is a relative of a friend, suggested the way to go was “evidenced based” rather than “medical based” so various forms of “elimination diet” pointed out a strong causal relationship…

Further testing shows that one reason I got addicted to bread is that to my blood glucose levels it’s like nitros in motors… It sent it rocketing followed shortly there after by the crash… Part of this was I ended up with diabetes. To which the medical profession just loads you up with insuline and you put on lots and lots of weight which you can not shift as dieting and diabetes control are apparently alien with respect to each other as far as the medical profession is concerned.

The solution eliminate foods that made my BG soar or jump then crash, and have only one meal a day or every other day. 20kg of shifted weight and no food cravings and mostly no IBS and similar was great.

Then last summer things went horribly wrong… I had been put on a relatively new drug called riveroxiban a couple of years previously as they wanted me off of “rat poison” (not that I had issues with rat poison it was the idiots who ran the INR clinics political infighting and general incompetence that was the problem). The prob with riveroxiban to be honest was I had no idea it was failing to work. Thus I ended up at the begining of august in hospital with serious heart failure and nearly in ITU due to blood clots through out my lungs and other places, one of which was a clot the size of the end of your thumb in the right atrium of the heart… Not good for longevity. Any way I’m back on the rat poison, which suits me… But the “General Practicioners”(GPs) and INR clinics are still “politically in fighting” which makes me want to pick some of them up by their ankles and bounce them on their heads untill they start seeing sense or swing them around like the proverbial cat in a small room.

Anyway asume your food alergies are probably an indicator of underlying harm, and act accordingly. Even if they are not acting that way is going to be a lot less harmful to you than doing the opposit. Oh one piece of advice, I don’t know what medical nutricionists actualy are, they are not scientists or doctors and they follow a Government supplied set of mantras like it was a religion… Best avoided in the UK especially when they cannot answer basic guestions like “I need minerals found in brasicas for my heart failure, unfortunatly the have a significant adverse effect on my INR thus I get DVTs, PEs and CEs/TIAs, what other foods will give me the minerals but not VitK?”… A basic simple question that lookup tables or even a braindead computer program could do with ease… But not hospital nutritionists…

Clive Robinson • January 26, 2022 9:24 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re : CVE-2021-4034

Interesting to note why OpenBSD is NOT effected…

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2022 3:47 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

CVE-2022-0330 is not surprising.

May I draw peoples attention to,

“Flawed assumption was that flushing the TLB at the start of every userspace GPU execution is sufficient, “

Hmm not flushing memory… I seem to remember thst free() / malloc() had this “data retained” issue so they came up with the wrong solution security wise and called it calloc().

So from a security perspective,

clearing the memory became the job of the wrong person.

So there was a vulnerability you could drive a full prison bus through for a sunday picnic…

If memory serves correctly one of the first incidents back in the mists of time was where people were alerted to this major issue was with an archive system on SunOS where the last block written to tape contained parts of one of the system security files…

The real reason for these issues with memory containing sensitive information is marketing specmanship “go faster stripes”.

Clearing memory takes CPU cycles and time for what ordinarily would not be an issue. So not clearing memory is an easy performance gain. But in some cases it’s also an easy “covert channel” to communicate sensitive information through…

In the words of the song,

“When will we ever learn,
When will we ever learn.”

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2022 4:27 AM

@ Wael,

I’m well, and I believe so is @Dirk Praet.

That is nice to hear. If you are still in contact with Dirk, tell him I wish him well.

Speaking of which, do you still have contact with @Nick P?

He kind of faded off of lobste.rs as the stuff he was posting was to advanced in time by far for the majority of posters there “short term cognition” issues…

As for,

I trust you remain healthy and wise.

Not sure on either ={

I was at the hospital yesterday morning because the Heart Failure had suddenly gone nasty. Tests showed that for some reason the meds were not working… The practitioner was quite shocked when I told her that despite changing Drs they were still not issuing perscriptions correctly after what is six months… Oh and blaiming “the crown cough” as the reason…

As for the wise, let’s just say whilst I can remember minutia from years ago, these days some mornings “I can’t remember my name”… If you remember the Harsh Mistress, she still has her wicked way with me. Two hours a day most days then a whole day or two when finally it catches up is not good…

But as they’ve said for over three quaters of a century “nil carborundum” or equivalent…

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2022 8:10 AM

@ ALL,

Because it’s getting towards the anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death, and I’m currently laid up sick, at the moment I’m reading his book “Thud” written back in 2004.

In the early pages you will find,

“And then, just when you thought it was as bad as it could be, up popped Grag Hamcrusher and his chums.”

And

“He preached the superiority of Dwarf over Troll, and that the duty of every Dwarf was to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and remove trollkind from the face of the world. It was written in some holy book, apparently, so that made it okay, and probably compulsory.

Young Dwarfs listened to him, because he talked about history and destiny and all the other words that always got trotted out to put a gloss on slaughter. It was heady stuff, except that brains weren’t involved. Malign idiots like him were the reason you saw Dwarfs walking around now with not just the ‘cultural’ battle-axe but heavy mail, chains, morningstars, broadswords… all the dumb, in-your-face swagering that was known as ‘clang’.”

And the thought occured that if you change,

1, Garag to opportunistic politition
2, Hamcrusher to Putin
3, chums to crooks
4, Dwarf to Rus
5, Troll to West Ukranian / Anglo-Saxon
6, Make the weapons more contempory

Then it would accurately describe the political position we find ourselves in currently.

Written nearly a decade ago the words look now quite prophetic.

But sadly, the reality is where we find ourselves currently, history teaches us, was all to probably going to happen anyway. As the wheel keeps turning down a well rutted path to macho stupidity and slaughter, that happens almost every few years somewhere on the face of this planet.

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2022 11:03 AM

@ Dirk Praet, Wael,

Nice to hear you are still pushing the world around, last I heard you were giving the south of the EU a try for a different type of local beer 😉

Yes I’m still knocking about much to many others expectations, and yes I’m still bumping into too many Drs and Nurses, for some reason they keep getting younger to my eye ={

With regards,

Anyone has any news on the whereabouts of @Mike the goat, by the way ?

I popped a message up on his WordPress site, about four years ago as did @figureitout, but he did not reply.

Nor did he make any further posts after that 1st Sept 2016 post with the title,

“I’m Not Dead; Just Vacationing”

https://mikethegoat.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/im-not-dead-just-vacationing/#comments

So I’m guessing things changed.

But his pen name of “Mike the Crypto Goat” kind of got stolen by the faux crypto-coin called “goat coin”… So my occasional OSInt methods have way to much noise and either next to no, or no signal.

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2022 5:50 PM

@ Ted, JonKnowsNothing, name.wihheld…, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

The chip-maker Intel plans to invest $20 billion to develop new chip factories in Columbus, Ohio. Construction is set to start this year, with chip production scheduled for 2025.

It’s not just Intel, the US is preasuring Taiwanese companies

“To get the heck out of dodge”

Or put another way the simplest way for China to cripple US Millitary Forces is invade Taiwan, Japan or both and grab the Fab plants.

Over twenty years ago I warned about “out sourcing” and the dangers it could represent. I pointed out why in Europe we stopped making TV tubes as did the US and we ceaded our manufacturing capabilities to,

1, Japan
2, Taiwan
3, South Korea

Then,

4, China.

With,

5, India
6, Brazil

Coming in to other areas.

As far as “high tech” and “consumer electronics” Europe, the UK and US have lost their ability to manufacture as the jobs got out-sourced in the 1990’s and earlier and with it went the skills base.

Need I say were this stupidity arose?

The effectcs of ultra short term grab profit and run thinking, ultra long high fragility supply lines and worse much worse the deskilling of two or three generations.

The thing is that to manufacture technology the processes change so fast that you can be two or more technology generations behind within three years. What was valuable IP becomes not just stale but worthless and the workforce not just disapated but effectively out of date, untrained, and unskilled.

It’s actually going to be harder for Europe, the UK and US to “re-skill” than for most “second world nations” due in part to the high costs involved, but also because those that might have gone into engineering did not and the Western First World has passed a tipping point.

I suspect the US State Dept has finaly woken up to the fact that the probability is high that China is going to invade one or more of the South China Sea and West Pacific nations within half a decade and the reality is the US can not stop China or even North Korea if they do decide to invade.

So the only sensible thing to do is “bring the hens back home” so all those eggs do not end up in the same hostile basket…

If the politicians wake up to this or not is an interesting question, because there may not be enough time. And lets be honest when have either of the US houses actually acted in the US Citizens interests in the last 40 years or so?

The same can be said of Europe and the UK…

Behind this of course is a small group of people that apparently can buy the legislation they wont…

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2022 4:38 AM

@ null clam,

Your mission, should you decide to accept it…

The last time I even came close to doing that was decades ago, back in the early 1980’s when trying to write a program to automate ship stability calculations.

What ever you try, you end up with what we would now call a “chaotic component” kind of equivalent to balancing an object on a point that is on it’s center line of it’s center of gravity, and whilst you can make it small it just won’t go away. For example consider the corner of a cube you can come up with a formular you can encode on a computer that indicates there is a position it will “balance”… But it’s wrong[1].

But don’t use intuition unless you reason it out…

We intuatively assume that a tossed coin can not land and balance on it’s rim. Well it can, and I’ve seen it happen twice in my life, maybe one day I’ll see it again “for the charm”.

But if you think about it, all a coin is, is a thin slice of a rod. Now our intuition tells us rods don’t balance on their ends, which conflicts with coins where the faces they mostly land on are the ends of a very very short rod.

After some tgought you realise that the change in probability comes about somewhere close to when the rod diameter and length are the same.

Which brings us back to the cube and it’s six corners… A slice of rod has edges but no corners… We find that the near cubical slice of rod won’t balance on it’s edges unless… We spin it along the diagonal from one edge to the opposite edge on what would be the other face of the coin.

In other words the coin is also when spining in effect a thin slice from a sphere…

We know that spheres have no corners or edges to balance upon… Yet a spinning cube is a good aproximation of a sphere and will balance…

Which begs the question of “What happens when you spin a sphere?”

Well don’t bother trying to model it on a digital computer… Look at the sphere as not having “no corners” but as having “an infinate number of corners” to realise why.

You will realise from the cube approximates a sphere when spining that a corner has a “maximum diameter” property which defines the spining sphere diameter. Thus anything aproximating a sphere with a maxima on the rotational axis through the center of gravity has a “corner” on which it can spin. So remember those Victorian “spining top” toys?

But… Now consider balancing a rod on the end of your finger, like a pencil. You can do it but only briefly.

Counter intuatively it gets easier the longer the rod is. From this a little experiment with sticking it in “the teachers apple” then balancing it, you will find it’s not the length as such but the mass moving the center of gravity away from the balance point.

It’s why you can with very little practice balance a broom with the end of the handle in the palm of your hand and the brush end up in the air.

If you go back to looking at the Victorian toy “spinning top”, you will realise that it is infact shaped like an upside down rain drop.

So the real answer to Columbus’ balancing an egg on it’s little end puzzle[2], is not to damage it by flattening the end. That’s the “search by Digital Computer for a solution” answer, the real world answer is to spin it, and several mechanical “adult” toys have been made for after dinner entertainment[3].

But think back to the “cube aproximates a sphere when spining” argument above what is it about the faces of the cube that give it the stability a sphere or egg does not have?

Well the story of how Columbus did it gives you the answer. You need an area of zero curvature “normal” to the axis of the center of gravity as a starting point. It’s easy to do with a sphere you just “grind a flat” but mathematically you are doing something else, your balance point is now at what you might call the shortest or least diameter.

You can if you follow further reasoning come up with a near egg shaped object that will stand on it’s end. It’s called the supper egg[4].

Whilst this might appear as impractical musings, I was once asked a “trick question” in a job interview related to this. I was “the weakest candidate” based on qualifications and previous work experience, but a friend that worked there thought I would enjoy working there. So I just stuck the C.V. In more to get interview experience more than anything else. To my surprise I did get called to interview, where the question was asked. Whilst they were looking for the “zero curvature” answer, the fact I could explain my own reasoning of how you get there got me the job offer.

Sometimes it’s not “Who you know” or even “What you know” that is important but showing you “know how to look beyond” what others assume is obvious.

[1] When you get down to it you find it is an artifact of the fact digital computers only work with a limited subset of natural numbers(N). So whilst they can fake working with integers (Z) issues arise like having two zeros or imbalance. Digital computers can even be made to work with a limited subset of rational numbers, but with more issues arising. Effectively that’s it for digital computers, everything else has to be “faked up”, with the unfortunate result there are all sorts of issues hiding in there for the unwary. Which is what drove me to very carefully read some of Donald Knuth’s publications.

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus_(mechanical_puzzle)

[4] When you look at a “superegg” you will see an elongated cube morphing into a sphere 😉

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superegg

Oh the maths behind it also has relevance to orbital calculations. The basic math behind elipses can be easily reasoned from Pythagoras and by slowley rotating a hoop and seeing it normal to the rotational axis and from along the rotational axis.

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2022 8:24 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Wire Wrap

Ahh “Oh happy days”[1] back when I used to pull junk appart. Yes my first direct contact with computer programing was memorable[2] and at school. Even though I’d been programing my calculator for a while before that. But to me the smell of a warm soldering iron as I desoldered components such as transistors from the earliest of computer scrap, still has a fond place in my heart.

[1] To mis-quote the Gospel hymn,

“Oh happy days, (oh happy days) Oh god He taught me (he taught me) how To Watch Fight and pray (Watch Fight and pray). Oh god he taught me (he taught me) How to wipe their attacks away (wipe their attacks away)”

[2] I was seen as “bright and curious” at school, which is as I know, a very dangerous combination. So they had to do something to keep me out of trouble some of the teachers could barely comprehend. Looking after the rats in the biology lab did not keep me out of trouble, just made the trouble way way more interesting curiosity being what it is, I found I could train the rats to do things and slipping them the odd walnut usually caused random loud noises in the middle of classes 😉 So they decided “computing” might be the way afyer all what harm could I do… So one day the physics teacher (Paul Muggleton) who I was already doing “satellite tracking” with suggested I might try “BASIC programing”. He briefly explained the control structures but suggested I printed out factorials… What got lost somewhere was the fact that the computer had a factorial function you could use. He explained in depth how you generate factorials manually so you could check the program output. I misunderstood and thought he wanted me to write the program that way… Which back then was a whole lot harder than you might think as the control structure in BASIC back then were not what they are now (thanks to algol68). Anyway I diligently put my program on to punched paper tape, but when uploaded it produced error messages I did not understand, so I asked for help… One glance later I was told “This is not what I told you to do, don’t you listen to what people tell you?” and he was very clearly annoyed… What can you say… Lets just say things went down hill a long way for quite some time, and it almost caused me to give up on studying physics and electronics… Luckly my dad pulled me back as did friends in the Pirate Radio world, but it was a close thing.

I guess however the teachers got the “what harm can he do with computers” factor rather wrong… Well not that long after I apparently did enough harm to have then UK Prime Minister “Mad Margaret” Thatcher want me setup to be a judged a criminal and incarcerated or similar… By luck my sixth sense stopped that happening to me but not Robert Schifreen and Steven Gold, even though I warned them… In the 1980’s they got set up by “Micronet 800” and the Met Police for “fraud” by impersonation and tried, convicted, cleared on appeal and finally the House of Lords ruled against Mad Maggies personal machinations and said that the legislators (House of Commoners) to make appropriate legislation which they finaly did in 1990.

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2022 8:47 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

We cashier Captains that take initiative to save their sailors lives when not in combat.

That still disgusts me to my very core every time I think about it.

It’s not realy any different in the UK, just less publicly blatant.

There used to be a form of covernent between the Government, and Armed Forces, at the very least a form of respect…

But now, because that has costs, some who are self entitled view it as rightfully theirs thus being in their very warped view “stolen out of their pocket”. The fact these self entitled buy politicians and their views, not just individually but by a whole political party or two they get their way…

So people that have decided to do the honourable thing for their country are being not just disrespected but having their lives thrown away…

What should that tell the average voting citizen about not just about the priorities of politicians, but the views of those who own them, especially how the self entitled might view the voting citizen and the sickening plans they have for them…

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2022 8:01 PM

@ null clam,

Re : Gömböcs figure

I admit I’ve never heard of them, so I looked them up,

https://plus.maths.org/content/story-goumlmboumlc

But one thing is apparent, if you look at the image of one given there, it is what I was describing in parts…

Consider the base of it as “rod like” that changes into a “cube with one coner upper most” and the edges alined with the rod maxima and minima. Then take the pair of opposit edges of the cube that are aligned with the rod maxima and form them into a near circle you would get that would just hold the cube and with an “egg like” curve for the pair alined with the rod minima.

The problem is that the “rod like” part can not have flat ends, as this would create two points on which the shape could just like with the face of a cube balance at rest. That is they must have curviture that is not zero unlike the base of the rod like part.

Now whilst I can see all this in just a single glance, that does not mean I could have come up with it in a blink of an eye, or even at all.

So could I have found it on my own?

It’s an interesting question, I certainly already knew the information that was required. But I never realy had reason to think specifically for something with those required properties (I was dealing with self righting on a fluid not solid surface).

That said though, could you change the four edges of the cube for a different number?

Gut reaction / intuition says the answer is very probably yes if there are an even number of edges, with the base a little more like a squashed sphere than an aproximation to a rod…

But how about an odd number say the minimum of three edges?

Now that is going to take some real thinking :-S

Clive Robinson • January 29, 2022 6:59 AM

@ name.withheld…, null clam, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Of note, as Open Systems reached market entropy, Microsoft subsumed the project.

Yes, it was not the only thing to be subsumed. Depending on who you talk to “Active Director” was a re-hash of the “Lightweight Directory Architectur Protocol”(LDAP) and “Kerberos” ticketing system, that was given the “Embrace, Extend, Add Propriatory to Own and Capture Market”(EEAPOCM) preditory behaviour.

The classic being FAT systems. FAT12 was a clear outgrowth of other Didk Allocation systems, and FAT16 an upgrade to that, as is FAT32, however Microsoft added the extended name system and thunk down mechanism to 8.3 naming, which the claim is proprietary to them. So the FAT part of FAT32 should be non proprietary and constraint free. However what MS calls FAT32 is effectivrly a registered name of their standard that uses the filename extension/thunking, so MS claim you cannot call it FAT32 or even compatable without including their proprietory features which requires a licence fee etc, so MS used to get a big chunk of change out of the embedded and RTOS market.

It’s a game few honest engineers can abide as it goes against the primary engineering ethos which is much like that of doctors,

“Improve the lot of man but first do no harm”.

Sadly the “harm” factor is so broad these days that arguably making anything harms something, like the environment indirectly or directly. Even software now falls under that thanks to BitCoin and Co showing up just how much energy use of software contributes to Global Warming, and the ruination of states that have an “inexpensive energy” policy to encorage useful economic growth.