AngusSF - Slashdot User

Using EMP To Punch Holes In Steel 165

Posted by timothy on Friday January 15 2010, @11:25PM
from the you'll-need-some-big-batteries dept.

angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."

Comment: dBAN and a Drill Press (Score 1) 497

by AngusSF on Monday August 17 2009, @04:34PM (#29097941) Attached to: The Homemade Hard Disk Destroyer

I dBAN drives, but for drives which won't spin up, or for clients who want physical damage to the media, I just drill a few holes through the platters. Cheap and efficient.

Comment: Re:Pentrose (Score 1) 307

by AngusSF on Tuesday December 23 2008, @09:14AM (#26211083) Attached to: Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In

Mod this post +10 ... just as you shouldn't trust Microsoft to guard the security of your Microsoft Windows computer, you shouldn't trust Google's Chrome to guard your online privacy. I use Firefox with CustomizeGoogle, and until Chrome offers a similar add-on, I won't even consider using it.

Stealth Windows Update auto-installed w/o consent 0

Submitted by

AngusSF

on Wednesday September 05 2007, @11:08AM

AngusSF writes "I'm running a little program called Tiny Watcher (http://www.donationcoders.com/kubicle/watcher/) that is a sort of poor-mans freeware HIDS (XP Pro SP2, IE6). Once a night I run it on a test system looking for stuff that has changed in critical areas, and recently it notified me that two files, wups.dll and wups2.dll, in the system32 directory had changed. I finally got around to investigating this and I found that even though I have Automatic Updates set to "Notify", this update was installed stealthily at 3:30 one morning. I found a thread on the Microsoft Community groups which sort-of discusses this: Critical Update slipped in through the back door — in Announcements http://preview.tinyurl.com/39gsrr — the full URL is a 281-character monster: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en -us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.private.security.spy ware.announcements&tid=26e8ce20-718f-44aa-bfcf-06c c172998da&cat=en_US_35183423-7a58-4c2c-881c-928711 0c8cfb&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=en-us&m=1&p=1&mid=d4954b 09-f430-47c2-9a69-f7eb81d9a960 Here's an excerpt:

"dean-dean" wrote: > Windows Update Software 7.0.6000.381 is an update to Windows Update > itself. It is an update for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Unless > the update is installed, Windows Update won't work, at least in terms of > searching for further updates. Normal use of Windows Update, in other > words, is blocked until this update is installed. .... > In XP, it updates the following system32 files to version 7.0.6000.381: > > wuweb.dll > wuaueng.dll > wuapi.dll > wucltui.dll > wuaucpl.cpl > cdm.dll > wuauclt.exe > wups2.dll > wups.dll

Well, it certainly appears that Microsoft is installing updates without permission or consent. I have Windows Update set to "Notify" (XP Pro SP2, IE6), and I run WU manually. The date-time stamp of the directory where wups.dll v7.0.6000.381 is loaded (C:\WINDOWS\system32\SoftwareDistribution\Setup\Se rviceStartup\wups.dll\7. 0.600 0.381\ for the curious) is 8/24/07. When I check "Installed Updates" on the WU site I see that I ran WU on 8/15 (for August's Black Tuesday) and again on 8/29 (for KB933360). I checked all of the updates that occurred after the 7/30 date-time stamp of wups.dll and wups2.dll, and none of them list either file in the "File Information" section for Windows XP. Interestingly a search at microsoft.com for "wups.dll 7.0.6000.381" turns up NOTHING while a search for "wups.dll 7.0.6000.374" turns up a couple of hits, one of which is this KB article "When you use Automatic Updates to scan for updates or to apply updates to applications that use Windows Installer, you experience issues that involve the Svchost.exe process" http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/93249 4 ... I checked my Event Viewer log for anything interesting on 8/24 and I found an entry at 3:34 AM where the Windows Update Agent installed _something_: >> Installation Successful: Windows successfully installed the following update: Automatic Updates All of the other "Windows Update Agent" Event-19 entries in the System Log include a KB number in the event listing: >> Installation Successful: Windows successfully installed the following update: Update for Windows XP (KB933360) I checked on other XP desktops I have handy, all of which are also set to "Notify" _AND_ all of which have non-Admin users and I see date-time stamps from 8/21 through 8/24 for the wups.dll install-directories %SYS32%\SoftwareDistribution\Setup\ServiceStartup\ wups.dll\7.0.6000.381\. This update is particularly disturbing. I find it both curious and very annoying that Microsoft still hasn't learned not to sneak around behind people's backs. I'm curious, does anyone running a WSUS server on their network also have this stealth update on any of their systems? Is this something that was also distributed through WSUS or is this just something that was installed by folks running WU directly from Microsoft? TIA Angus"