Comment Re:Remember TEMPEST? (Score 1) 264
Hi.
the Nyquist limit of the audio sampling hardware of a cell phone over instruction rate of a modern CPU is a pretty small fraction.
Hi.
the Nyquist limit of the audio sampling hardware of a cell phone over instruction rate of a modern CPU is a pretty small fraction.
The "audio" in question is most likely all below 24 kHz, that being the Nyquist limit for the 48 kHz sampling hardware, unless it happens that some phones can actually sample faster, and have microphones that can respond to higher frequencies.
The instruction rate of the CPUs in question is many times that frequency.
It doesn't sound likely.
Using multiple cores turns out to help the attack (by shifting down the signal frequencies).
Say what? Through what mechanism would multiple cores shift down the frequency? And what about parallel instruction streams contributing to noise?
TEMPEST was a details-secret government requirement meant to defeat means of eavesdropping on classified computer data from its electromagnetic emissions. I guess they need to include audio too.
My impression is that the noise comes from the power supply, not the CPU. I can certainly hear it with some computers, and it is related to work on the video card in my experience. I'm astonished that you can actually pull data from that, and in fact I'd like to see independent confirmation before I believe it.
My google search on the issue came up with Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Bangladesh. Two of which seem to be African, the latter South Asian I guess.
I'm sure you can come up with better data.
Besides infant mortality, there's probably unreported miscarriage.
When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.
A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.
OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.
And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.
'What do we get for that DRM?'
Did "we" vote on this? Let's look at their members list: Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Csico, Comcast, Cox, Google, Huawei, HP, Intel, LG, Netflix, Verizon, Yahoo!, Zynga and
And those are just the companies I recognize that have a serious amount of money to be made on DRM (hello, Netflix?!). If I examine closer, there are much smaller players like, say, Fotosearch Stock Photography and Footage that sound like they would gladly vote for DRM in order to "protect" their products/satiate content owners.
This might as well be how Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm blew it. And I'm probably leaving off a few companies.
IMO it all comes down to arrogance about your own platform. In Nokia's case that was Symbian.
only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere. Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040
Do they honestly believe there is some total quantity of emissions that can be tolerated? I mean as opposed to a rate of emissions - like annually. We know that the system recycles carbon taking it out of the atmosphere, and we know that the rate it's removed increases as the concentration increases. So if we assume there is a limit, it should be on the rate of carbon emissions and not the total emitted over time.
If you read the "Summary for Policymakers" PDF document linked in the summary, there is no talk of "total quantity of emissions tolerated" or any of this trillionth ton idea. Instead it appears to be talking about . In fact, it appears to reside solely in that New York Times article that very clearly says:
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels and thus avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change, the panel found, only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report.
(emphasis mine) So to answer your question: The trillion tons is an estimate of what we would need to burn in order to hit an internationally agreed limit that would likely produce the worst effects of climate change. The number of tons we burn is even an estimate. It's all estimates because we don't have parallel Earths where we can keep controls and change one variable to see what happens. If you don't accept the ability of making estimates with levels of certainty, there is no way to make any statements about the effects of putting carbon into our atmosphere on a global scale.
These guys are looking dumber all the time.
I suppose it would appear that way if you only get your information from The New York Times and throw away everything they're actually saying.
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton
