Well, ya, picking "off site" as the next office in your building would not be so good. :)

I knew one place in an area that was prone to rather bad weather, and their "off-site" choice was a guy's house about 10 miles from the primary site. Sure, it sounds good if the building burns down. Not so good if the area is flooded. His response was something to the effect that his house was 10 feet higher above sea level, so it was "safe".

That didn't matter. The tapes they were backing up to were never checked. They had no disaster recovery procedure in place, and when the day came that they needed to recover from a tape, they found out it hadn't actually recorded anything in years. Oops.

Sometimes being in the same country isn't really a good thing. If your primary site was Kiev, and the backup site was Vladivostok, things could have gotten touchy during that whole Soviet Union collapse thing.

We like to think the same can't happen here, but just as easily we could find that New York and Los Angeles end up in two distinct countries, possibly with other countries in between. I guess worrying about tax records from 1986 wouldn't be such a big deal then.

So workstations on an airgapped network can never get software upgrades?

Or data to be processed?

It can do bursts of computation, memory access, or anything else that varies the amount you wiggle voltages or currents on wires in a way that emits radio waves. You can do it without even trying (which is one way some smartcards exposed private keys ...).

In the days of CRTs that applied especially well: Graphics output could modulate the beam and generate a LOT of radio. (Doing gray scales by making shifting fine patters would be an especially "in your face but you can't see it" approach.) A fast photocell could read it from the light, as well.

Preventing / shielding against things like this is what "Tempest" is about.

I recall, back in the late '60s / early '70s, when I was doing software on a machine at a classified site. It had a music program that worked by wiggling the lines on three console display lamps that were also connected, by three resistors (forming a cheap D2A converter) to a volume control T-pad and a loudspeaker. Turns out it also modulated the memory access and/or other signals - a lot. I had left it playing "moon river" overnight, drove up to the building, and heard it on my A.M. radio.

I realized it would have been trivial to exfiltrate a small amount of data, even on my starving student budget, by emulating an FSK modem and hooking a transistor radio to a battery-powered tape recorder (about the size of a briefcase in those days) left in the trunk of my car. (Not that I'd have needed to, since I could carry mag tapes in and out, but as a "white hat", how could it be done, exercise.)

The security guys figured that out, too. A bit later I got a ping from management: Some guys from Washington had also driven up, noticed the arcade-quality "music", and given them grief about it.

WHERE THE FUCK DOES EVERYONE GET 1/4 OF A YEAR.

From TFA, as quoted in the story post:

The low numbers didn't stop some state officials from defending the initiative. "Given the program was only up and running for basically one quarter of a year," Andrew Kennedy, a senior economic development aide to Governor Cuomo, told Capital New York,

Did you try actually reading it all before posting?

Wait a second -- this program has only been running for one quarter of a year? 76 jobs doesn't sound that bad, on such a short time frame.

Damn right!

It takes a substantial time to set up a company. (The startup I just helped start up took over five months before I was actually "employed" (and over 6 before the payroll was in place to pay me as an employee with a W2 rather than a consultant with a 1099).)

Three months and they ALREADY have 76 new jobs? It sounds like there are some bats exiting hell!

Come back in a year and see how many there are, and how fast more are being added.

And when counting the cost of the program versus the benefits of it, don't forget to take into account that investments provide their payback over time - so count those costs against the paybacks from several years.

Exactly. You can't defend against every threat. The best you can do is go with redundancy. The chances of one site being destroyed by fire, flood, tornado, or loss to burglary is slim. The chances of 2, 3, or 10 sites all simultaneously suffering the same fate is very very slim.

I didn't even know FlightAware had a program like their ADS-B FlightFeeders I checked their map, and I'm a bit farther North in my area than the nearest feed, and there's a large gap to the next.

I have some questions for you. Hopefully you read this. What services accept hobbyist input, besides the ones in the article? Is there hardware you recommend for cheap and reliable?

I only took a quick look through, so I have more reading to do. Is there a software that reports to multiple services? Like Cumulus for my PWS reports to 5 plus two of my own personal feeds.

I've had a weather station up for a few years, and it's been feeding off to APRS/CWOP/FindU, MetOffice.gov.uk, PWS Weather, Weather Underground, Weather Underground, and my own twitter feed and web site. It's nice putting up a resource that can be useful to everyone. As I understand it, that data is in turn aggregated by major weather services to give better weather reporting and forecasting. It helps the weather stations report with resolution down to "It's raining on X street, but Y street is still dry."

It's also useful so family and friends can check on the weather here. Not just "some reporting station within 50 miles, here", but "right at his damned house, here". When I'm away from home, I can check the weather there, so I know what I'm going home to.

It would actually have the opposite effect. Rather than willingly taking on co-conspirators, a would-be attacker is more likely to be paranoid of everyone and not let anyone know his plans.

That brings us full circle back to the "He was a nice guy. Very quiet. Kept to himself. He didn't leave the basement much. We were really surprised to hear about [some action] on the news."

Without co-conspirators who turn on him, or accidentally trusting investigators as co-conspirators, or getting caught buying supplies, that makes them much harder to find until the attack happens.

I'm not saying that investigators instigating someone who could be an attacker, into actually doing an attack in a horribly flawed way (like a bomb made of 2000 pounds of dirt) is a good thing. I don't know everything that happened. I've only seen a few news reports on this one. If he really was the instigator and the investigators just provided some technical "assistance" in making a dud bomb, that was probably a good thing.

If they just picked a random target with little interest, and convinced him that he must make the dud bomb so they can bust him in a terrorist plot, that's something else entire, and they will get bitchslapped by the courts for it.

Modern Li-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 85%.

And some of the high-power, super-fast-charge Li-* batteries coming into production have efficiencies in the high 90s.

They have to. One of the limits on the charging and discharging rate of the batteries is the inefficiency. That lost energy doesn't just disappear. It turns into HEAT, INSIDE the battery. If you can dump 3/4 of a high-capacity battery's capacity into it in a couple minutes, without melting it down or setting it on fire, it's because the battery didn't turn much of the energy into heat. (Ditto on pulling it back out quickly.) That means it went into chemical storage, rather than loss.

The next topic is "general warrant". One of the reason US revolution took place is because of unhappiness due to King George's general warrants, allowing to search everyone without reason. The outcome was 4th amendment which clearly defined that persons and their private life are untouchable, unless there is suspicion, affirmed by the government servant and approved by the judge.

Spying on the population was also a big driver behind the THIRD amendment:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

While forcing the colonists to provide housing and upkeep for the soldiers sent to oppress them was an economic issue, there was more to it than that.

A soldier "quartered" in a colonist's house also served as a spy for the crown and its army. He eavesdropped on the conversations of the family and visiting friends. He had the opportunity to view their records when they weren't home (or even if they were). He reported anything suspicious to his unit. His presence inhibited getting together with others to hold private discussions, especially about opposing (by protest or otherwise) anything the government was doing. He was a continuous walking search, fed and housed by the people he was investigating.

It seems to me that law-enforcement and intelligence agency spyware, such as keyloggers and various data exfiltration tools, is EXACTLY the digital equivalent: It is a digital agent that "lives" in the home or office of the target. It consums the target's resources (disk space, CPU cycles network bandwidth) to support itself. It spies spying on the activities and "papers" of the target, reporting anything suspicious (or anything, actually) back to its commander, to be used as evidence and/or to trigger an arrest or other attack. It is ready, at a moment's notice, to forcefully interfere with, destroy, or corrupt the target's facilities or send forged messages from him.

Spyware is EXACTLY one of the most egregious acts (one of the "Intolerable Acts") that sparked the American Revolution. I'd love to see the Third brought back out of the doldrums and used against these "digital soldiers" the government is "quartering" inside our personal and private computing devices.

I'm with you.

He had already been busted and slapped on the wrist:

The only problem here is that he's being charged with a felony, because hacking laws on the books don't make a distinction between "petty" hacking and "grand" hacking. There's no shoplifting equivalent on the hacking books; it's all grand theft auto.

The teacher needs reprimanded by his IT department and his leadership (principal, union, whatever).
The kid needs his wrist slapped, and and county attorney needs to decide not to file charges, charge him with some sort of misdemeanor mischief charge instead.

You kid, I'm sure, but Land O'Lakes is part of the Tampa Florida MSA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Hopefully, the said trapped newbie programmer will give up on complaining at the door rather quickly.

And, yes, you're correct, that was suppose to be "or". As they won't find a dehumidifier, soda, ice, or fruit, most of those arguments won't matter.

The finest mechanical lock pick isn't much use against an electroncially operated solinoid acting as a deadbolt.

I think you over-thought a joke. ... unless those are what are being yelled at you by a child behind the aforementioned door. :)

Give the kid a computer, and programming book.
Install an electronic lock on the door with an interface to the computer.

Give them simple instructions.

Write a program to unlock the door.

If you get out, you can eat again.

If you can't, you will die in this room.

A person typically dies without water in 7 days, and without food in 14 days.

Good luck.

Some were over telegraph wires too. I like this story.

Atkins continued to call Cuba and finally came back the words, clear and distinct: "I don't understand you."

With those words, international voice communication began.

... and Verizon is still asking "can you hear me now."

... and this guy keeps answering the calls. I feel his pain.