This is what it looked like before the owner’s son took it for a drive:
And this is after the drive got stopped a bit early:
The good news is that the driver and passenger were able to walk away from the wreck, leaving £275,000 of scrap metal behind.
The Economist looks at a possible way to address the known weaknesses of the current internet security defaults:
[A] comprehensive solution would let domain owners confirm that the names and machine numbers issued by a given CA are kosher. Under DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), a standard being developed by Mr Schultze and others at the Internet Engineering Task Force, a browser retrieves a certificate from a web server, but checks with the DNS whether the certificate is in fact the one that was issued to a given domain owner. So, though a CA will still provide a validation step, the domain owner will have had to give it the thumbs up first. To prevent malevolent fiddling the DNS infrastructure itself needs to be secured, too. A long-running effort to do this, known as DNSSEC, hit a key milestone in 2010 and may have enough pieces in place soon to be usable. This is important because DANE would be incomplete without it.
Whilst all current browsers must be updated to take advantage of DANE, the new system can coexist with the old, and a gradual transition can be made. Browser plug-ins could bridge the gap before browser makers build in DANE, too. Those that want the added robustness of the new system — whether individuals, companies, or governments — may accelerate the adoption of updated browsers as DANE becomes available.
These moves do not provide total assurance that what your browser is told about an internet site’s identity and security is true. Trust, but verify — and verify again.
My Rogers email account appears to have a nasty case of rot-13 encoding in the address book. I’d include a screen capture, but now that I’ve told you the trick of decoding it, it’d expose folks’ email addresses, which would be a bit unethical of me. At first, I thought it was just a garble, but I noticed that a lot of the addresses ended in “.pbz” and “.pn” (that’d be “.com” and “.ca” rotated 13 characters).
It’s not crippling, as I can just copy and paste from existing email messages, but it is annoying.
Update, 14 April: It appears to be fixed now.
Strategy Page discusses the first use of the new Israeli anti-missile system to defend civilian targets last week:
Israel has deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome anti-missile system near the Gaza border. One is near the town of Beer Sheva (the largest town in the Negev desert) and another near the coastal city Ashdod (the largest city within range of 122mm rockets fired from Gaza). On April 7th, a 122mm rocket was intercepted near Ashkelon, which is south of Ashdod. This deployment was prompted by an increase in rockets fired from Gaza, and the growing use of longer range (20 kilometers) 122mm rockets. Iron Dome proved that it could work under combat conditions, preventing the longer range, factory made, rockets from landing in populated areas.
This is a big turnaround for this system. Four months ago, the Israeli military revealed that its new Iron Dome anti-rocket system was not meant for defending towns and villages, but military bases. For years, politicians touted Iron Dome as a means of defending civilians living close to rockets fired from Gaza in the south and Lebanon in the north. But it turns out that it takes about 15 seconds for Iron Dome to detect, identify and fire its missiles. But most of the civilian targets currently under fire from Gaza are so close to the border (within 13 kilometers) that the rockets are fired and land in less than 15 seconds. This means that the town of Sderot, the closest Israeli urban area to Gaza, cannot be helped by Iron Dome.
[. . .]
Iron Dome uses two radars to quickly calculate the trajectory of the incoming rocket (Palestinian Kassams from Gaza, or Russian and Iranian designs favored by Hezbollah in Lebanon) and do nothing if the rocket trajectory indicates it is going to land in an uninhabited area. But if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area, a $40,000 guided missile is fired to intercept the rocket. This makes the system cost-effective. That’s because Hezbollah fired 4,000 rockets in 2006, and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza have fired over six thousand Kassam rockets in the past eight years, and the Israelis know where each of them landed. Over 90 percent of these rockets landed in uninhabited areas, and few of those that did caused few casualties. Still, a thousand interceptor missiles would cost $40 million. But that would save large quantities of military equipment and avoid many dead and injured troops. Israel already has a radar system in place that gives some warning of approaching rockets. Iron Dome will use that system, in addition to another, more specialized radar in southern Israel.
According to sources at some of the various suppliers for key iPhone components, Apple may be delaying the next iPhone:
Analyst firm Avian Securities said that production of the iPhone 5 won’t begin till September, meaning a holiday launch at the earliest, or even a New Year’s debut.
The note, reported in Business Insider, is based on chats with key component suppliers, which support a consensus view that launch will be either a late 2011 or early 2012 event.
The note adds that a low-spec, low-price iPhone is also on the Apple roadmap, though exactly where on the roadmap is unclear.
This is surely a worrying development for the iPhone elite — not only could such a nano-iPhone divert some components, further pushing back the iPhone 5, but it would mean that “ordinary people” can get their hands on a fondleslab.
My own iPhone 3G is still holding up well (I’m not a particularly abusive owner), but I’ll finally be out of contract with Rogers in August, so the delay in the next iPhone release may increase the chances of me switching to an Android phone instead.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is critically important to safe communications on the internet. It may also be “hopelessly broken“:
SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the rightful owners of the domains visitors are accessing, rather than impostors who have hacked the users’ connections. Countless websites also use SSL to encrypt passwords, emails and other data to thwart anyone who may be monitoring the traffic passing between the two parties.
It’s hard to overstate the reliance that websites operated by Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Bank of America and millions of other companies place in SSL. And yet, the repeated failures suggest that the system in its current state is hopelessly broken.
“Right now, it’s just an illusion of security,” said Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher who has repeatedly poked holes in the technical underpinnings of SSL. “Depending on what you think your threat is, you can trust it on varying levels, but fundamentally, it has some pretty serious problems.”
Although SSL’s vulnerabilities are worrying, critics have reserved their most biting assessments for the business practices of Comodo, VeriSign, GoDaddy and the other so-called certificate authorities, known as CAs for short. Once their root certificates are included in Internet Explorer, Firefox and other major browsers, they can’t be removed without creating disruptions on huge swaths of the internet.
Apparently, the navy’s purchase of used British submarines has still not been completed: the boats are in our hands, but they’re still unarmed:
The country’s stock of second-hand submarines — already beleaguered with repairs and upgrades — is incapable of firing the MK-48 torpedoes they currently own.
When Canada purchased its current fleet of four submarines from Britain in 1998, they were fitted for British torpedoes. At the time, Canada was heavily invested with the modern MK-48 torpedo system and did not want to abandon it.
Like any shopper trying to justify a second-hand purchase in the face of an obstacle, they figured it was still a good deal. They “Canadianized” the submarines, but, 13 year later, they still haven’t got around to the “weaponization” part.
“The Canadian Forces has always intended for the Victoria Class submarines to carry and fire the Mark 48 torpedo,” wrote Denise LaViolette, the director of navy public affairs, in an email. “Initial weapons certification will be progressed early in 2012 in HMCS Victoria for Pacific operations followed that year by HMCS Windsor for Atlantic operations.”
I noted the lack of torpedo armament on the Canadian sub fleet back in 2004. I had no clue that they’d still be unarmed in 2011!
Later that same year, I said:
As I’ve said in other posts, I’m not a former Navy person, so my knowledge of the situation is neither broad nor deep. I’m moderately well-read on naval mattters, but that’s the limit. On that basis, I thought the purchase of the Upholder subs was a brilliant solution for both the Canadian and Royal Navies: we got a heck of a deal and they got the subs off their inventory. It really did look like a win-win, and both sides thought they’d gotten the better of the bargain.
In the long run, this may still turn out to be true. I certainly hope so.
As several others have noted, until we find out exactly what happened on HMCS Chicoutimi, we can’t make any determination about whether the subs are going to be safe and effective vessels for our navy. And, as Bruce R. pointed out the other day, if we want to retain any claims of sovereignty over the coastal waters of this huge country, we need those subs in the water now.
Well, the subs have been in the water for several years, but without torpedoes, they’re not fully functional.
Update, 12 April: Strategy Page has a useful summary of the history of the Upholder/Victoria class submarines:
It all began in the 1990s, when Canada wanted to replace its 1960s era diesel-electric subs. This did not seem possible, because the cost of new boats would have been about half a billion dollars each. Britain, however, had four slightly used Upholder class diesel-electric subs that it was willing to part with for $188 million each. Britain had built these boats in the late 1980s, put them in service between 1990 and 1993, but then mothballed them shortly thereafter when it decided to go with an all-nuclear submarine fleet.
So the deal was made in 1998, with delivery of the Upholders to begin in 2000. Canada decommissioned its Oberons in 2000, then discovered that the British boats needed more work (fixing flaws, installing Canadian equipment) than anticipated. It wasn’t until 2004 that the subs were ready, and that one year one of them was damaged by fire, while at sea. This boat is to be back in service next year. By the end of this year, three boats should be back in service. Maybe.
[. . .]
The problem is that the subs were bought without a through enough examination. It was later found that most major systems had problems and defects that had to be fixed (at considerable expense). Thus these boats have spent most of their time, during the last decade, undergoing repairs or upgrades. The final fix will be to get the torpedo tubes working. In any event, a Canadian [submarine] has never fired a torpedo in combat, mainly because the Canadian Navy did not get subs until the 1960s. Lots of Canadian surface ships have fired torpedoes in combat, but the last time that happened was in 1945. The sole operational Victoria class boat is on patrol in the Pacific, listening for trouble which, if found, will be reported to the proper authorities.
The assumption was that wind farms would produce 30% of their theoretical maximum over time (the wind doesn’t blow all the time, so no wind farm will ever produce 100% for more than a short period of time). This number now appears to be too optimistic:
A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.
The report [. . .] was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.
[. . .]
In general, then, one should assume that a wind farm will generate no more than 25 per cent of maximum capacity over time (and indeed this seems set to get worse as new super-large turbines come into service). Even over a year this will be up or down by a few per cent, making planning more difficult.
It gets worse, too, as wind power frequently drops to almost nothing. It tends to do this quite often just when demand is at its early-evening peak:
At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
And unfortunately the average capacity over time is pulled up significantly by brief windy periods. Wind output is actually below 20 per cent of maximum most of the time; it is below 10 per cent fully one-third of the time. Wind power needs a lot of thermal backup running most of the time to keep the lights on, but it also needs that backup to go away rapidly whenever the wind blows hard, or it won’t deliver even 25 per cent of capacity.
Lewis Page looks at the Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV):
No doubt regular readers will recall the US military’s cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates — warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains might twist and turn.
The Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) project is intended to produce “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”. The uncrewed frigate would have enough range and endurance for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, being able to cross oceans and fight its battles largely without any human input — communications back to base would be “intermittent”, according to DARPA.
As you might imagine, there are lots of potential issues to sending an armed, unmanned ship out into the ocean, including how to handle interactions with other users of the sea lanes. It’d be worse than embarassing to the US Navy to have one of their fancy new ACTUV vessels get tangled up in a fishing net or get caught in the middle of a regatta.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been decided that the best way to hammer out a set of tactics for ACTUVs is to develop a game-style simulation pitting ACTUV against submarine and get people to play it — so crowdsourcing the methods and tactical principles that will then be coded into the robo-frigates’ AIs.
The new game — from which these visuals are drawn — is called ACTUV Tactics. The game engine is used in various military sims and in the Dangerous Waters commercial release of 2005. [. . .]. In it, a player tries to find and track an enemy submarine while avoiding collisions with commercial vessels and the like. Various different proposed models of ACTUV robo-frigate are available: Gator, Remora, Seahorse, Shark and Triton.
The Guardian tried to enlist the brainpower of the crowd to solve the problems at Fukushima. As innovative as some of these solutions might be, it does demonstrate that there are things that cannot be crowdsourced:
Todd: “Build the worlds biggest tank over the whole site with pre-fab tilt slab concrete. […] I have done similar projects on a smaller scale but not with nuclear waste.”
Weston, Nuclear Radiologist: “repair the reacters befor any thing else bad happiens”
Andrew, Inventor: “water problem is un-fixable. Stop trying. Let it run off into the Pacific.”
Hugh, Geology Student: “I would use explosive materials to detach the Fukushima plant from the main land, use air-bags to float it 50km out into the pacific and then sink the whole lot 7000m down to the bottom of the Japan Trench.”
Max: “I suggest removing radioactive contamination there by using a small controlled explosion of a specially engineered nuclear device at the site of the stricken Fukushima plant”
OmegaSector: “IN FUTURE, ALL NEW NUCLEAR REACTOR MUST BE BUILT OVER A 1.2 km hole. Any out of control reactor, one press of a buttom and boom, the reactor will fail down 1.2 km and then seal up with soil.”
Denny, Assistant to Dr Strangelove: “Small scale nuclear strike.”
Kevin: “Japan has over 30,000 suicides per year — that’s over 80 per day. Since these people are planning to kill themselves anyway, how about the government asking for volunteers to go in, fix piping, visually inspect the damage, etc..?”
Not Einstein: “friendly radiation… to probably cancel out its effects. Its more like injecting good cholesterols to fight off bad ones in your body. I am not versed in these nuclear technicalities but I do understand philosophy of things, and sometimes you just need to fight fire with fire.”
Oscar. Mike. Golf.
XM25 from PEO Soldier on Vimeo.
If the field trials in Afghanistan go well, this could be a very useful addition to the US Army’s armament collection. As the video shows, however, firing a 25mm round means there’s quite a kick to the soldier firing the weapon. The capability the weapon provides, however, isn’t available at the squad level any other way, so just hand it to your biggest trooper . . .
Reports of corruption among top officials and soaring costs for China’s HSR network:
. . . question-marks have been raised over these plans after the sacking in February of Liu Zhijun, the minister responsible for building the high-speed network. He was accused of skimming off as much as 1 billion yuan ($152m) in bribes and of keeping as many as 18 mistresses. Zhang Shuguang, another top official in the railways ministry, was later dismissed for corruption. Separately, on March 23rd, state auditors reported that $28m had been embezzled from the 1,300km high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai, the highest-profile of China’s many rail projects.
Public support for high-speed trains is muted. The trains may reach 350km per hour but fares are proportionately eye-watering. That is all right for well-heeled travellers, happy to have an alternative to flying. But tens of millions of poor migrants who work far afield and flock home for the Chinese new year are being priced out the rail market and have to go by bus (the number of bus journeys is soaring).
The sacking of top officials may be the result merely of one of China’s periodic anti-corruption campaigns. Or it may be the upshot of a high-level factional or personal battle, in which corruption charges are often a favourite weapon. If so, the dismissals would not necessarily affect railway development.
An interesting article looks at a claim by an obscure band that their debut CD had been pirated over 100,000 times:
Late last week, TorrentFreak was contacted by a guy called Wayne Borean who alerted to us to a somewhat heated debate he’d been participating in on the ‘Balanced Copyright For Canada’ Facebook page.
“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum — because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.
Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.
“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads — ILLEGAL downloads — has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.
That’s really terrible, isn’t it? An obscure band, hoping to make it big by selling their CD have an illegal audience more than 300 times their number of Facebook fans? How did all these illegal downloaders even find out about the band? Well, perhaps they didn’t:
At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.
[. . .]
As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion [. . .]
We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.
I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.
Update, 5 April: Apparently you have two choices in a situation like this. 1) Own up to being mistaken and apologize for making a stink about a non-issue. 2) Double-down on stupid:
A day after One Soul Thrust’s manager had the entire Internet explain to him that his band’s music wasn’t being downloaded 100,000 times on BitTorrent sites, he’s still in deep denial. Today’s post is all about how the pirates attacked him “[b]ecause a debut album by an independent Canadian band is listed on torrent sites around the world and we had the audacity to point that out.” Um, no it’s not. It’s not listed on any torrent sites. As far as anyone can tell, not one human being on this planet has torrented this band’s CD. Dude, you made a mistake, you freaked out, you looked a little naive. Now you’re looking like an ass. Quit while you’re ahead, maybe?
Creative comments to that last post include 1) someone, somewhere actually upload the album to a torrent site, just so the band doesn’t look quite as pathetic, and 2) replace each track with varying length versions of a certain Rick Astley tune.
Mr. Glover, a professional broadcaster and columnist, has determined that the collapse of civilization will come from internet trolling denialists:
It’s increasingly apparent that the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation, beating out previous contenders such as nuclear holocaust and the election of George W. Bush.
The agents of this planetary death will be the climate-change deniers who, it’s now clear, owe much of their existence to the internet. Would the climate-change deniers be this sure of themselves without the internet?
Somehow I doubt it. They are so damn confident.
They don’t just bury their heads in the sand, they fiercely drive their own heads energetically into the nearest beachfront, their bums defiantly aquiver as they fart their toxic message to the world. How can they be so confident, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?
It’s the internet, of course, and the way it has given climate-change deniers the perfect forum — one in which groups of quite dim people can swap spurious information, reassuring each other there’s no evidence on the other side, right up to the point they’ve derailed all efforts to save the planet. Call it ”mutually reassured destruction”.
. . . to the rails, not the throne:
The King Edward II steam engine was first used by Great Western Railway in the 1930s, pulling trains between London Paddington and the west of England.
However, it had been left to rot in a scrapyard in Barry, Wales, until it was saved for preservation by the Great Western Society.
No 6023 King Edward II is one of only three surviving locomotives of its class, built by GWR in 1930 for taking express trains over the steep banks of South Devon.
It’s always nice to see successful restoration efforts by private groups and individuals, although this particular one drew this comment from “jackcade”:
King Edward II? The fireman better make sure he doesn’t let his poker get too hot or someone might get hurt.
Photo from the restoration website, showing the engine right after repainting:
H/T to Elizabeth for the link.
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