Saturday, September 22, 02001
Here's a picture of my brother at one of his "circuit parties". He's the guy on the right.
Posted at 03:10 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, September 20, 02001
My grandfather died last night, so there will probably not be many posts over the next few days.
Posted at 12:27 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, September 19, 02001
Willie Brown trolls for disaster relief funds in his jurisdiction. Bad Willie !!
Posted at 04:44 PM EST [Link]
It's about time someone starts to question why it was possible to fly a plane straight into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
It should be considered an engineering design flaw that this sort of flight path was allowed in the first place.
Instead of focusing solely on keeping terrorists off planes, we should also be looking at fixing the air traffic control system so that planes cannot be used as missiles again. Below are an off-the-cuff possible approach I came up with on the drive home from work today that might be useful for at least considering the possibility.
- I assuming the plane already has access to a GPS and/or can track where it currently is based on the data it's getting from its sensors. I'm also assuming this data can't be changed from the cockpit: The pilot shouldn't be able to reprogram the plane to think it's near Philadelphia when it's actually near Paris.
- The plane should know where it's going, and this data should be stored somewhere independent of the cockpit. This data should be stored into the airplane's databases by the air traffic control system using suitable strong encryption. The encryption should at lease be strong enough so it couldn't be cracked in less than two days. This destination data will be used to determine the degree of artificial feedback to provide to the pilot when the plane drifts off course.
- The plane should also contain a database of possible targets, such as cities, power plants, dams, historical areas etc. Since the database is potentially huge, the air traffic control system transmit items in the planes range as the aircraft moved from sector to sector across the countryside. This list of targets will be used in while generating artificial feedback.
- The plane should also contain a database of safe crash landing zones. Much like the targets, these zones could be transmitted in-flight. The idea here is to provide the plane with suitable good places to head towards when providing artificial feedback.
- By monitoring the plane's current location, and it's intended destination, "artificial feedback" can be sent back to the pilot. This could be provided in the form of a tendency for the plane to veer towards it's intended target. Steer the plane too much off course, and the plane would introduce some fluctuations in the pilot's chosen flight path, in effect introducing turbulence, which could act as a form of in-flight rumble strip. This should be enough to waken a dozing pilot, and alert passengers that something is going wrong.
- The artificial turbulence would get worse as the plane continued veering off course. Once it passed a certain threshold, the plane would cut off cockpit control, look at it's list of suitable crash landing zones, and crash land the plane in autopilot. Or possibily pass cockpit control to someone pn ground who could control the plane remotely.
- Likewise if the plane sensed that it was approaching one of the possible targets, it would also introduce artificial feedback into the pilots intended flight path, in effect forcing the plane away from the possible targets. The closer the plane got to the target, the stronger the introduced feedback would be, steering the plane away from the target more violently as the plane as the risk of collision increased.
- Again, after a certain period of being forced towards a target, the cockpit would be cutoff, and the plane would go into automatic crash land mode, or remote control mode.
- Air Traffic control could provide a new destination in flight, but it would have to provide the keys necessary to "unlock" the current destination loaded in the plane using some suitable strong encryption algortithm for authorization.
- Any unauthorized tampering with the databases discussed above, or the planes GPS system, would force the plane to go into autopilot or remote control mode.
Hopefully this is enough to show that some technological changes in air traffic control and plane design could be implemented that could cut down on the "missle plane" design flaw. Please keep this in mind when you hear a politican tell you have to trade in your civil liberties for your safety. In many cases, it may be that you're giving up your freedom so that some technological bug won't have to be fixed. In other words, someone's profits are being put ahead of your rights. Don't let this happen. Eternal vigilance blah blah blah. Et cetera, et cetera.
Engineers in general should consider the ways their products could be misused by terrorists, and consider these design flaws, and then go to work fixing them. If you uncover such a flaw in a product you're working on, and your employeer is unwilling to incur the cost of fixing it, consider blowing the whistle on the project. At the very least place an anonymous call into the anti-terrorist 1-800 numbers I'm sure are being put in place at this very moment.
Posted at 02:08 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, September 18, 02001
I had originally meant to donate my $300 tax refund to causes the current administration was stomping upon. The recent attack has reminded me I was going to do this. Here's who I ended up donating to. I ended up not giving to any environmental groups, but I'm more worried about vigillantes and domestic terror now. I did this through the Cisco philantrophy site, so they're matching the funds. I suggest others donate their tax refunds, and if possibile get their corporate masters to ante up as well.
Red Cross: 50%
General disaster relief
National Council on US-Arab Relations: 15%
Southern Poverty Law Center: 12%
For their work on supporting tolerance.
People for the American Way: 12%
Support for civil liberties and for keeping a watch on Religious Right.
National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League: 12%
Based on Jerry Falwell's recent comments blaming of the attack on feminists, lesbians, etc, as well as recent stories posted here.
(Links to the sites above will be added later tonight - use google for now, you lazy slugs)
Posted at 02:15 PM EST [Link]
As if Waagy's antics were not enough, anti-abortion militants seem to be passing out the Kool Aid by listing the president on their hit list. You know, that list where they don't actually tell the true believers to go out and kill doctors, but then they mark out their name when one of them is murdered. I won't grace it with a link.
Posted at 02:00 AM EST [Link]
Well I'm back in Ballston now, and everything looks pretty much the same as it did when I left.
The trip itself was surprisingly calm. We left the hotel at 5:30, got to the Petaluma office around 6:00, dropped off the laptops and my bag at the shipping department, and headed for the airport. I went back to my original plan of bringing just my cellphone, some books with me.
We got minorly losted trying to find the car rental drop off, but made it to the airport around 8:00. The rental car dropoff was normal, and by 8:30 we were through the ticket line and past security. There were a lot of cops of various flavors, but no obvious military people - no one with machine guns or anything like that. The shops were open. Most people had carry on luggage, so of it much larger than it should have been, and lots of people had laptops.
Increased security for me consisted of showing my ticket and ID to 3 or 4 people in quick succession, and then waving that wand-thing waved around me for a while. Bing made it through the security without having his backpack being checked. One bit of security weirdness was that after we dropped off the rental car, Bing, I and two other people made a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the workers portion of the car rental building. We all turned around, and eventually found our way to the airport shuttle.
Then we waited for three hours until the plane took off. We had given ourselves a lot more time than the two hours suggested by the airlines, since we were coming in 70 miles outside of Sand Francisco, and didn't know what the rush hour would be like. Turns out there apparently isn't a rush hour in San Francisco, or at least it begins after 8:00AM !
The flight itself was pretty normal and uneventful. The only bit of weirdness was when a guy, who I assume was a marshal, went to the front of the plane and read a magazine for a couple of minutes in the middle of the flight.
After we landed, I bummed a ride with Bing's family from Baltimore back to Northern Virginia. I has happy to see my car was intact, but I still removed the bumpersticker anyway. Then I went off to the store and bought some toiletries, since I left them all in my travel bag. All in all, it took about 16 hours to get back from the time I left the hotel to the time I got in my apartment. It will be good to sleep in my own bed tonight. I will be aiming at getting into the office around noon tomorrow.
Posted at 12:16 AM EST [Link]
Monday, September 17, 02001
Bing is back, safe and sound in Santa Rosa.
Posted at 01:35 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, September 16, 02001
Bing just called to tell me he is stuck in San Francisco since the car won't start. I'm assuming he left the lights on when he went in for his noodles, and he needs a jumpstart. He is calling National now, and will be trying to contact AAA as well. I am guessing he will be getting in pretty late, and it's going to be difficult for him to get up in time tomorrow morning. That, of course, is assuming he'll be able to get the car back to Santa Rosa tonight. Fun, fun, fun !
Posted at 11:40 PM EST [Link]
An extremely creepy entry in my referer logs prompted me to see what this blog's featured domestic terrorist has been up to recently. Looks like he's been practicing his carjacking and pipe bomb making skills. Great. I suppose he's never going to get caught now, seeing he's not of Middle Eastern descent.
Oh, and the Dewitt County Jail is still fixing the design flaw that allow Waagy to escape in the first place. It's been eight months, guys.
In other domestic terrorism news, it looks like one of them has murdered a US citizen in Arizona.
Posted at 11:36 PM EST [Link]
Today I wandered around Santa Rosa for a while. Bing and I went to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, then Bing took the car into San Francisco to get some noodles (140 miles for some noodles ! I hope its worth it !) I stayed behind to relax a little and hack. I got bored after a little bit and wandered around the town a little bit. The weather was extremely nice, and I probably got a 5 or 6 mile walk in. I think it did a lot to burn off some excess stress. I came back and hacked some more.
I talked to my parents and they told me someone from my highschool is missing after the attack. I also found out that the chaos and bomb threats extended to at least my hometown. As far as I know, nothing like that happened in the Santa Rosa / Petaluma area.
Our flight is still scheduled to take off tomorrow. It's a nonstop from San Francisco to Baltimore. I'm a little worried about the same sort of attack happening with longrange East-bound flights.
I'm actually more worried about what its going to be like in Ballston when I get back. Are there going to be troops deployed in my neighborhood ? Am I going to be able to walk around freely, or will I need to show some ID at each corner ? I'm sure I'm overreacting, and by the time I get back, the Ballston area will look the same as I left it.
Except of course, for the vandelism I'm assuming has been dished out on my car because of the "Vote Green: Overgrow the Government" bumpersticker that's been taunting people for almost a week now. I'm planning on removing the sticker once I get home out of respect for the firefighters and rescue workers who were killed.
Posted at 11:02 PM EST [Link]
