Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • January 7, 2022 6:22 PM

@ null clam,

but “SQUID” is falling

May it fall and fall untill its fetid corpus is rent asunder and eviserated by those that feast upon such deities to greed.

Or something like that 😉

Clive Robinson • January 8, 2022 4:18 AM

@ Anders, SpaceLifeForm,

patchwork-apt-caught-in-its-own-web

Not so much shot themselves in the foot but been given enough rope to not yet hang themselves, but certainly enough to entrap themselves.

One of the first rules of writing such tools is to test then on an entirely issolated network, just to prevent crawlback and having your machines identified as patient zeros…

Oh what a tangled web some weave due to their choices, but where do they get the yarn to make their cats cradle… Did you know that the symbol in the middle of the Indian flag is a spinning wheel? The same sort that used to appear in all the best fairytales… Put there by Ghandi to represent the way Indian women spun their way out of poverty…

In sometimes what appears odd ways, India is very much an equal opportunities employer of women and men in technology, that is self made tallent goes a long way. Maybe some one should have done “The Dutch thing” and turned the computer camera on.

Clive Robinson • January 9, 2022 2:41 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Better would be a large room full of walls of whiteboards.

Been there, done that, sung the song[1] as the tee-shirt says 😉

It’s also as I’ve mentioned before how I know Richard Branson did the project managment on his dare devil adventures.

[1] The song is of course “Bright Eyes”,(Art Garfunkel) but unlike most I also have the pie recipe 0:)

https://thequietus.com/articles/25442-watership-down-film-anniversary-review

Clive Robinson • January 10, 2022 2:53 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, SpaceLifeForm, Winter, ALL,

Spain is reporting on their 6th wave-period of the pandemic. The population vaccination rate is 79-80% fully vaccinated.

What does this say for “Herd Immunity Policy”(HIP)…

Logically,

HIP is not going to happen due to immunity escape.

There are two probably reasons for this,

1, The high rate of mutation.
2, Rapid loss of immunity.

As has been noted vy various people getting a “booster jab” three to five times a year is not sustainable.

Which is why,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1043680/technical-briefing-33.pdf

Caused more than a bit of a fuss, because under “Vacine Effectiveness”(VE), it indicates a 25% drop in ten weeks can be expected for some…

Especially as vacine effectiveness with repeated shots unsuprisingly is apparently getting lower (law of diminishing returns).

But there is increasing indications that things have been very much worse than has been officially reported,

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237475-covid-19-news-indias-death-toll-may-be-six-times-higher-than-thought/

Clive Robinson • January 10, 2022 4:43 AM

@ Winter, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

With respect to all the vitamin/ventilation advice. Yes, it helps…

But it should not make any difference… yet it does.

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself

“Why does it make a difference?”

Most have not, and when you realise, you start to realise just how mucked up humanity is.

Put simply because we are “malnourished” and “incarcerated” by modern lifestyles and we have become sick and feeble because of it.

Processed foods, in fact most foods we eat are lowest common denominatior garbage. Look at the levels of omega three in raw products like milk, meat and farmed fish. It has been diminishing year on year since the mid 1940’s. For example it’s fallen so much in chickens it’s had a palative difference that even jaded taste buds can pick up. Yes we apparantly have sufficient food to have an obesity epedemic, yet we are actually so malnourished because “Big Agro” makes nutritionaly deficient food. It does not matter if it’s got an “organic” label on it or not, the food is deficient.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333682-800-have-we-got-the-science-of-obesity-back-to-front/

But how about the way we live? Our bodies are designed to be physically active twelve to eighteen hours a day depending on the time of year and how old we are. Yet due to industrialisation we now spend our lives encarcerated in our workplaces, transport, and homes. Building up “stress hormones” that will and do kill us at an early age. Yet we ignore what even medical proffession says is the truth, our bodies get rid of stress hormones by excercise no other way is as effective, as increasing numbers of long term studies show,

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2303567-strength-balance-and-mobility-are-the-best-predictors-of-a-long-life/

In short the food we eat and the way we work is killing us, yet we kbow and have known for a couple of life times we do not need to live this way. In fact we only do so because we are lied to for the benifit of a self appointed few (see history of the various work ethics, that science repratedly finds are wrong, wrong, wrong).

Clive Robinson • January 10, 2022 2:48 PM

@ ALL,

Re : Cooking,

Appart from when I was a wee un not old enough to go to school I’ve cooked all my life. Oh and even when a we un, I used to help clean the cake and buiscuit mix bowls 😉

As soon as I learnt to hold a crayon, I was taught how to use a washing up brush and butter my own bread (not both at the same time B-)

Holding and using a potato peeler cam next, and shortly after that using what some might call a pearing knife.

By the time I was seven my jobs were washing up, preping vegtables making tea/coffee for mum/dad and making my own breakfast and tea. Which within half a year was eggs every morning and sometimes bacon… Oh and by the time I was eight I also got the sunday morning full fry up to do.

By the time I was ten I could cook a two course meal for the whole family.

I knew about “danger foods” like cutting away the green in potatoes not eating the green on potato, tomato, rhubarb etc plants and beans should be soake for 24hours in winter and atleast 8hours in summer befor a vigourous boil for ten minutes for “coloured beans” (butter beans don’t need it which is why you can use them in slow cook foods).

During the early 1970’s with power cuts, the three day week and other distuption I learned “war time” and earlier cooking methods including “Hay box” cooking which I still do but without the hay as it makes the important parts of meat in the conective tissue break down and go into the cook liquid to thicken and nutritionaly enrich it way beyond what most would realise.

I knew the how and why of brining and soaking pork and beef, also how to boil down pigs feet and skin to make gelatin for making savoury like pigs head brawn and sweet in the summer time like jellies (jello) and trifles. Not sure when I learned to bake biscuits and cakes, probably when I was still knee high to “grasshopper”… But I do remember making my first pie with steak, kidneys and anchovy (the recipe called for oysters but they were no longer “poor person” food by then). And later “hot water pastry” for “raised pork pies”.

Pigs head brawn whilst tasty is not something for the squimish to make, but hey if you are under 12 you are curious. Plucking –defeathering by hand– drawing –eviserating– and later killing chickens was just something you did, even though the chickens had names…

In later life when strong enough I learnt how to turn 200 pounds of happy pig into a whole winters supply of meat and black (blood) pudings. Trust me the bit you have to be strongest for is shoving your arm up the you know where and cleaning it out with a hose pipe. Also butchering and brining is heavy work when dealling with a whole bellt. I eventually got into charcuterie, and trust me when I say why I know fat in meat is important.

None of this is dificult to do, though some people make it so by having measuring devices for every conceivable stage. Let me tell you the most important thing to know is “eggs” were the “Kitchen standard” for every other measure for weight and volume both dry and wet, for considerably more than a thousand years.

You don’t need “four eggs and 120g of fat, 120g of flour and 120g of sugar” to make a basic cake mixture… What you need is the weight of the four eggs you are using in fat, flour and sugar. If you look at “English recipes” you will find the standard weight measure is “two ounces” which was the weight of an average egg back then (now it would be “large” as eggs are a bit smaller these days due to the way we mass produce eggs). The point is the egg no matter how big or small is the prime measure you judge every thing else against.

I realy do not weigh things in the kitchen I just use what looks right or I know like “heaped table spoon”. Speaking of which who on this blog knows the difference between a heaped tabke spoon and a heaped dessert spoon when measuring flour for making say “pancake batter”?

I also know how to make jams(jelly) conserves, and fruit leathers and cheeses from just the raw ingredients of apples, honey and fruit. Speaking of cheeses the word does not mean what most think it does… But yes I hwve made what most would think of as cheese from cottage cheese –yuck– through to various hard cheeses that can take three to four years to mature.

None of this I consider difficult to do, and at one time every one knew how to cook and preserve and make soap from fat and ashes or if they could get it lye. The reason women did the cooking and washing in the home is that it educated the children in the home and helped keep them disease free during winter as the kitchen and boiler was where the warmth is and generally safe. Whilst the boys and men did the brute work of agriculture including moving of crops, mucking out, managing the beasts, horses, oxen, and similar needing rather more than a shove from time to time. Cooking in inns and taverns was usually done by the men as it was heavy and hot work and actually quite dangerous.

It scares me just how much we “are encouraged to forget” for the sake of profit by a self select few. Oh and as we forget, we get further exploited becsuse we do not have the choice knowledge brings us.

Clive Robinson • January 10, 2022 7:36 PM

@ lurker,

food like that needs to keep until next growing season.

That’s where some forms of rotting can be your friend….

Think what goes on with fermentation and I don’t mean good beer or cider, think Kim Chee. Which I happen to like a lot and thankfully I live close to the largest commnity of Korean’s in the UK. Which is next to the Japanese –don’t ask– and a little bit to the north west Thai and Vietnamese communities. So I have quite a selection of real raw food stuffs within what might be xonsidered a healthy couple of hours walk there and back (not that I can do healthy walks any longer thanks in part to a misspent youth but more recently to the prescribing of the wrong statin which caused atleast a 50% loss of muscle mass).

@ John

Edible clays, while they have been used for thousands of years are almost ignored now.

Yes that biblical “little peck of dirt” which you unavoidably get on home grown vegetables.

As for being “ignored” well it’s because like many things, the self selected few do not want you to know, so they can make vast profits from selling you something they can patent etc.

Oh look into a certain French “blue veined” –looks green-blue– cheese that is matured in caves. The Roquefort cheese gets it’s vein characteristics from “penicillium roqueforti” a relative of the penicillin mould. Although it does not produce penicillin, it has both antibiotic and anti inflammatory properties, French sheep farmers in the region knew of the befits of using it in poltices to help wounds heal long prior to WWI.

Also Roquefort cheese has a high content of free glutamate. Some believe that the glutamate therefor the cheese is a natural “smart drug”.

Oh and what ever you do, DO NOT keep the cheese near grains and grain products like bread. The mould can grow on grains fairly easily, however when it does it produces a fairly toxic mycotoxin called PR-toxin, that critically effects the livers ability to function. Whilst the LD50 in humans is unknown currently, in some animal tests it’s been shown to be 2mg/kg. But that’s not the Roquefort moulds only fun trick… It also produces a neurological active chemical Roquefortine C (think poor mans never agent ;-). Although quite active, the levels produced in cheese are considerd “safe” unless you are a gram positive bacteria…

But decidedly unsafe to humans if it grows on grains… This highlights one of the issues of “natural medicines” as a by product of living pathogens, they do not come for free, and what comes with them is dependent on the environment and sometimes you realy do not want it.

So storing Roquefort in a sack/bag with bread causing almost ideal growing conditions could be decidedly deliterious to health, though putting Roquefort in a sandwich is bot going to hurt you.

If you are lucky you can get the genuine Roquefort cheese with it’s full range of anti-biotic effects. Sadly most “Roquefort” outside of Europe and especially in the US is not genuine Roquefort…

But having seen the potential dowbsides of “uncontroled” growth of potebtial pathogebic organisms, how about the “upside under controled” conditions… Have a look into such unpleasent sounding things like fecal transplants and phage therapy.

Oh but it’s not all microorganisms, surgeons have returned to the use of leaches and even maggots to improve outcomes.

Clive Robinson • January 11, 2022 5:12 AM

@ null clam, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re “Google’s man” and “Green bubbles”…

It’s nonsence by Google, they are drumning it up to push a position that will favour them and network service providers. Call it what it is,

Commercial Propaganda

Oh and don’t forget behind the scenes Google is spending a lot of money to become a network service provider to the world via sub sea cables whilst others such as Starlink are going up up and away into space, where the inherent delay will limit certain interactive services.

But… on the face of it,

“Google for the last several years has been pushing a new communications protocol called Rich Communication Services, or RCS, which is designed to replace the current SMS standard.”

Would appear reasonable as Google did not design RCS and it’s a “standard”. But there is more behind it than that hence all the “interoperability” nonsence from Google.

I’m not going to go into all the details but RCS is a security disaster waiting to happen. Some of the people who designed it know darn well it will be a security disaster that is adventageous to both Corporate and Government “collect it all” policies.

But there is also the network providers, as some know in some places even basic SMS is “metered” or even charged for. What some call “Picture SMS” is very lucrative with some providers charging well over the equivalent of $1 for a low quality picture as it’s a “data service” not a “SMS service”.

Which brings us back to the “green bubble” nonsense.

When Apple designed the system the different coloured bubbles served as a “warning” with regards not just “cost” but “security”.

I guess they got the idea in part from web browsers and the coloured locks / bars / borders warrning you not just if it was HTTPS over HTTP but what type of HTTPS Certificate is in play.

This “Green bubble bullying” Google is “drumming up” is in part because Google can not mine iMessages, and iMessages are “free” not “metered”.

But if Apple start supporting RCS, Google can force RCS to let them mine messages, just as they can totally insecure SMS messages currently. In so doing they alow not just themselves and the network service providers to “mine” RCS messages, they also allow those shady inbetween organisations you’ve never heard of that currently provide the SMS interoperating to take over RCS and not just “mine” but “meter” as well[1].

RCS is a “too little, to late” and actually a very insecure protocol. When you dig into it, you will find it’s been designed by the telco industry for not just the telco industry to make money, but because the telco industry has embedded SigInt personnel in it’s “Standards Committees”, so the SigInt agencies agendas are very high in it’s requirments as well…

But getting back to the “green bubble” bullying, call it what it realy is drumed up “tribalism”.

History shows that there are people who will latch onto any, even almost impossibly minute, difference to beat up on other people. If Apple took out the Green Bubble the bullying would still continue the bullies and “status divas” would just find something else to use to bully.

If “Google’s man” is realy “too dumb to know” this, maybe he should go find a job more in keeping with his tallents, say as a junior “Mall Cop”.

[1] Remember all the nonsense about opening Signal out… It was about making Signal pick up the bill for all the backend servers etc, so others could “free load” off of them.

Clive Robinson • January 11, 2022 6:40 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, MarkH, JonKnowsNothing, Winter, All,

With regards to,

Vaxing is now futile.

And,

WHERE do you get your information?????

Sadly the truth of it is,

1, 25% loss of effectivness 10 weeks after booster jab.
2, Upto 3 weeks from jab to lifted effectivness.

So 7 weeks of effective immune system lift in a winter respiritory disease season that lasts 12-20 weeks depending on where you are and what the prevailing weather is like, with “mild” 4-6C daily average tempratures in a maritime climate being the worst.

There was a report from the UK Government published on the day before christmas –I assume to avoid the press– that gave the bad news about booster shot effectiveness decline. I gave a link to it above on this blog page just over 24hours ago,

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/friday-squid-blogging-squid-prices-are-rising.html/#comment-398284

Clive Robinson • January 11, 2022 8:54 AM

@ Curious

Koala bears! Not Panda bears.

So now you are blaiming the Aussies;-)

Both are by the way extreamly dull whitted creatures due to their diet.

If I remember correctly Koala’s eat more cyanide per kg of body mass than any other mammal.

Clive Robinson • January 11, 2022 2:00 PM

@ Sam, ALL,

But what is the “Universal Profile”?

“The Universal Profile contains core features such as capability discovery“

That “Capability Discovery” should scare you, because it alows the “network” full access to things you realy would not want it to have like your “phone book” and logs, and it all travels across the network in “plaintext” so anyone who cares to look can see it or even request it… As I’ve said RCS is a security nightmare waiting to happen…

And it is all coming to a 5G phone near you right now as the “GSM Association”(GSMA) says it has to…

Oh have a look at the title of that GSMA page @BT gave you,

“The industry standard for RCS Business Messaging, ensuring the telecoms industry remains at the centre of digital communications“

If that does not make your blood run chill in your veins I’m not sure what will… Because they are going to not just push the fees up as high as possible by every underhanded trick they’ve come up with in the past century, they are also going to “Data Rape, Pillage and Plunder” you every which way they can and they will buy off every legislator they can to stop you stopping them…

Clive Robinson • January 11, 2022 4:18 PM

@ EvilKiru, Chris,

Does anything block me from having multiple block-chain crypto credentials?

There is no “technical reason” but it does rather depend on who the “Gate Keeper” is…

As you yourself note,

being forced to use a single block chain crypto means I wouldn’t be able to use multiple, divergent IDs or emails.

Nearly every Government on the face of this planet will have people in places of power to say “single ID”. You see it with your Social Security number, Your Passport number, Driving licence, etc etc. It gives them power over you in what they see as “their jurisdiction” (not yours).

If you look at history the power of excommunication, exile, banishment, and simple “sending to Coventry” and “turning the back” were very very powerful weapons of social control, that some crave for in every way if not more today.

If you look at cults, they have a simple process,

1, Seperate you from anyone outside the cult.
2, Make you dependent on the cult for friends, family and most other needs via other members.
3, Threaten or actually stop contact with cult members as a method of control and punishment.

So “Do as I say or be in issolation / purgatory”. Governments are no different in this respect

So any ID blockchain will have a gatekeeper, who has power which makes it a “social” not “technical” issue, as many things these days are.

Clive Robinson • January 12, 2022 7:42 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, Freezing_in_Brazil,

Do not be surprised if you surpass it multiple times soon.

The key indicators are not so much the maximum highs or lows, but a mixture of the range, and how fast you go from one end to the other.

If you think of the energy movment involved with a swing, you are making nuclear bombs look a little tame in comparison. Hence the amount of destructive force. But… The amount of energy stored at any point in time is usually very much dependent on the amount of water involved. So vortex winds that come in off of an ocean have real kick and are long lasting. Whilst dry desert vortex winds are mostly “annoying” and short lived.

One very real annoyance of the likes of “dust devils” is radio interferance from triboelectrification much like pulling a plastic comb through dry hair, dry dust particles become charged. This charging does not just helping lift other dust, the voltage can rise to over 10,000volts/meter and when it discharges via ionizing break down the broad band Radio Frequency Interferance can travel for miles, and in the high HF through to UHF the ionized columns act like conductors or elements on directional antennas.

The result is in dust storms radio communications becomes impaired and in some cases with walkie-talkies / handhelds near impossible to communicate.

Due to the lower preasure of the Martian atmosphere it is expected to be rather more of an issue,

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2003GL017879

A couple of decades back NASA did some research, that actually sounds like it would have been a heck of a lot of fun being at the sharp end of,

https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/apr/HQ_04131_mars_dust.html

Sometimes it’s good to get out of the lab 😉

One important discovery is that smaller particles get negatively charged with respect to larger particles. The smaller particles being more easily lifted create the vertical EM fields.

As for the physical damage a Martian Dust Storm can do, due to the very thin atmosphere it has little “punch” however Martian dust is hyper fine, and when charged can get into all sorts of places you would not expect and stick, where it then acts like grinding paste… So even “dusting down” solar panels has some significant issues.

Clive Robinson • January 12, 2022 11:04 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

I know you will not heed my advise 😉

Actually I will… as I’ve said before I don’t do “Slashdot”.

That said sticking the link you gave into a search engine gives some information.

Which leads to a firewalled paper,

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356820828_Obfuscation_Revealed_Leveraging_Electromagnetic_Signals_for_Obfuscated_Malware_Classification

Which in turn, gave up a presentation,

https://team.inria.fr/cidre/files/2021/09/duy-phuc_pham.pdf

And something more usefull to most,

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/raspberry-pi-detects-malware-with-em-waves

As far as I can see the only “new thing” in what they have done is the use of machine learning to detect changes in the software execution signitures, then use it in the equivalent of a matched filter to classify the malware (I did it the other way around, ie used the matched filter to identify the software was not behaving out of specification).

If you look back on this blog you will find I’ve talked at length with @Nick P, @Wael and others about such signitures as part of “Castles-v-Prisons” about a decade ago…

As I’ve observed in the past, you will read things on this blog, that will take on average about eight years to either get an accademic paper, or turned into malware and get found and become public knowledge that way…

Why the long delay I’ve no idea, but I guess that’s the way it is.

But… Look at it this way it’s now not just that University in Israel doing it, there is now one in France…

P.S. Oh for those reading “an H-Field probe” and wondering what it does / is… It picks up the magnetic field rather than the E or electric field in an electromagnetic signal and provides a voltage proportional to the current at the oscilloscope input. At it’s simplest an H field probe is simply a small coil of wire soldered onto the end of a piece of coax cable. Unfortunately it will also pick up some “E-Field” to eliminate this you simply sheild the coil, but… You should have a gap in it that is at the balance point. If you want to know more,

https://www.eng.mu.edu/~richiej/seminar/aidi.pdf

Clive Robinson • January 13, 2022 6:48 PM

@ lurker, ResearcherZero,

A little more on that over rated tableless ping pong story from “Guzz-under”… Looks like other people are realising the “walk tall” but in reality “crawl small” of the Morrison mob is getting entertaining and is worth another bowl of popcorn,

https://www.politico.eu/article/australia-paralyzed-deporting-novak-djokovic-tennis/

Oh and no doubt the fact that it’s also leaking out that the “mob” has a bunch of crooks in it who have blatently lied, and are now seeking every trick they can to avoid being investigated is adding fuel to ensure that warm toasty feeling to the podia is kept.

But the question remains if “Scott from marketing” does not get back in in the very near future, will the replacment be better or worse?

Many like to think an alternative could only be better… But this is “Guzz-under” where oppinion on what is good or bad in representation is judge by the “third beer test”…

There is an old saying about alcohol,

“Many things can be preserved in alcohol, but dignity is not one of them.”

To which I would add probity, integrity, honesty, honour, and most other morals and ethics you would want to see in a citizen of good standing. So the fact that the “mob” is apparently berfet of these qualities speaks volumes…

Clive Robinson • January 14, 2022 9:01 AM

@ ResearcherZero, ALL

With regards,

“Havana Syndrome is believed to be caused by microwave emissions and Moscow is known to have employed RF/MW capabilities since the Cold War.”

No “RF Microwaves” are at best an assumption that,

“Ferguson, however, managed to capture the mysterious noise on his phone and played it back for Mitchell during the interview.”

Might show to be incorrect.

What we do know, “insults” to the head can give rise to brain damage that causes change of personality, cognative function, and loss of coordination. But we also know that our current tests do not show it up except in detailed autopsy tests. If you search NFL with brain damage you will find out a lot about it.

We also know that radient energy can cause cause insults. The problem is that nearly all public research has only been about the “heating effect” caused by the energy absobtion over time. You can carry out a simple experiment to show there is a “percussive” effect. All you need is a high power photographas flash gun and some aluminium foil. When the light pulse hits the foil you hear a sound from the foil that is way to fast for the expected heating effect. You get similar with other effects such as magnetoconstriction. In essence radient energy hits an object that acts as a transducer and converts it to another form of energy in the case of the above flash gun it’s radient acoustic energy.

So we are looking for a radient energy source and a transducer as well as a fragile energy absorber.

We are assuming that the energy absorber is the brain and it would appear blood enzimes taken very shortly after an incident do show that brain damage has occured.

The problem is “radiation transport” an entropy effect that takes coherant energy to random heat via a series of steps via a chain of transducers.

The end of the chain is heat, but is it heat that is causing the brain damage?

Possibly not. Take a very fine crystal structure and apply heat to it slowly and not much happens for all the energy you put in. However tap it with a tiny in comparison mechanical energy and it breaks or shatters, the fact that the energy then becomes thermal energy is fairly irrelevent to the process of breaking. This issue exhibits in other ways like “self resonance”, thus you have to know what it is you are looking for to demonstrate what is going on, by what mechanism etc to get from “cause” to “effect”.

But there are two things you don’t hear getting talked about,

1, Directivity.
2, Down conversion.

And it’s something that puzzles me, and makes me wonder if some people are deliberately keeping quiet for some unstated reason.

We know that all radient energy can be focused the problem is that the size of the focusing mechanism is proportional to the wavelength of the energy involved. The higher the frequency the smaller the focusing mechanism can be, therefore the less obvious it is. So that is why they are saying “microwaves” and people are leaping to the assumption it is EM / RF radient energy rather than say acoustic or some other mechanical vibration.

But early descriptions of this effect would indicate originally it was “highly focused” getting such a tight beam would require an inordinantly large focusing mechanism… So again people are ruling things out based on assumptions.

Most astronomers know you do not need a single improbably large focussing mechanism. You can get the same effect with two small focusing mechanisms spaced widely appart. It’s the basis of “Very Long Baseline” systems which have used Earths orbit as the base line to give an effect comparable to a dish the size of earths ordit… Or about 10-15 light minutes in diameter.

One of the arguments you hear about sound and Havana syndrome is “high -low” that is it’s assumed to be outside of adult human hearing so below 50-100Hz or above 15kHz. Two arguments arise, the first is the wavelength of low frequency does not alow it to be focused, and the second is the sort of wavelengths required to get the very tight focus are quickly absorbed in the atmosphere.

Whilst both are true they kind of miss the point because again the assumption is a single emitter or focusing mechanism…

Ask yourself what would happen if you used two beams that were in some way synchronized?

The Germans asked this question during the second world war, and they found out it was a very effective form of boming aid. You can read up about it in the 1973 Book by Prof R. V. Jones which extensively covers it under “The battle of the beams” chapters. So the information has been in the public domain for rather more than half a life time.

Which brings us to an interesting point. Many of the immediate effects described by the sufferes are matched by the effects of very low frequency sound below 20Hz and can become severly acute when they approach that of brain waves. Which is a known problem in that flashing light at similar frequencies can induce epileptic fits, that have an accumalitive effect of brain damage.

But that is very low frequency needing enormass “sub woofer” focassing mechanisms is what you get told.

Well it’s not true, all you need is a trasducer with a square law response that effectively mixes two frequencies and produces both a “sum” and more importantly “difference” frequency. There are plenty of biological structures that have a non linear or near square law response to radient energy.

So if my two emitters send out signals that have a difference in frequency that is known to cause epileptic or similar disfunction in the brain it’s effect only occurs in a tightly focused spot where the beams cross…

I would be very unsurprised to find out if such is found with Havana syndrom…

In part because as they say “been there done that…” and I described such an “anti-personnel” system on this blog years befor Havana Syndrome became newsworthy, oh and yes it can be used to render individual people unconcious in crowds. The idea was a way to take out “ring leaders” and “agitators” in crowds before they became riots. Unfortunately the system could just as easily kill people…

Clive Robinson • January 16, 2022 8:18 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, flat, Winter,

The alleged REvil bust may have just been for cash flow purposes.

That certainly would have helped sweeten the idea, but there was a lot more behind it.

Putin uses “deniable tools” as a standard part of the way he operates, and it’s been a “White Russian”(Bela Rus)[1] way of doing things for around three centuries. With the “Behind the cloak lies the dagger unseen” behaviours of spycraft and covert disruptive activities that turned Russia into a world center for spycraft that without doubt provided the triggers for “The Great War”/WWI and upto the Civil War towards the end of WWI when the Bolsheviks who were undeniably worse turned inwards.

Now there are two sets of people,

1, Criminals
2, Covert Operatives

Who’s very existance and survival relies on them not drawing attention to themselves.

So what should that tell us about the way “Criminals used as covert operatives” should behave?

Well they did not and they became a serious embarrassment that could nolonger be denied even to Putin’s own people.

What generally happens to serious embarrassments? Well initially they get “distanced” and if they carry on eventually “terminated”.

So their partying, lording it up days were numbered as their “protector” was drawing increasing heat.

I believe one or two saw what was comming –maybe they were warned– and had the sense to get the heck out of the way…

I suspect even Putin knows he is “not untouchable”, nobody is, which is why “behind the cloak…” works so well. As we should all know “an effective tools get honed with use”…

So do not be to sure “REvil is dead and buried”… Something tells me it will be back leaner, meaner and most certainly not as a zombie of it’s former self.

[1] White Russian is a loose term originally about a people and place (Belarus means White Russian). But it gained a new meaning that came about with Peter the Great moving the political center of Russia from Moscow to what had been swampy land in some outer province of Europe that got called St Petersburg. The politics got changed fairly radically and certain Baltic-German behaviours got incorporated. These included an upsurge in the “behind the cloak” activities that caused much disquiet and issues after Peter the Great’s death without clear succession. Howevere White Russian gained a new meaning after the Bolshevik uprising, and was used as a refrence to those that had been on the loosing side that supported the Tsar.

Clive Robinson • January 16, 2022 2:39 PM

@ Winter, MarkH, ALL,

Inevitably, quite a number of cases do have solid evidence.

Sorry as I anoyingly point out “solid evidence” is insufficient in oh so many ways, it simply won’t get you a criminal conviction in any half way sensible jurisdiction.

The burden of proof has to meet certain internationally recognised standards and in both the cases you mention it actually does not meet the “beyond reasonable doubt” burden of proof. I wish it were otherwise but those rules are there for good reason to protect the weak defendant against the power of a strong, conniving or both state.

I’ve seen to many false imprisonments to want nations playing that stupid game of politics with each other it can only go one way…