Hacker News: jloughry

New comment by jloughry in "The inception bar: a new phishing method"

jloughry — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 18:48:27 +0000

That exists: look for 'trusted path'. It was a feature of compartmented mode workstation (CMW) operating systems like Trusted Solaris and lives on in the requirement to use Ctrl-Alt-Del to call up the Windows login prompt. In Trusted Solaris (TSOL) it was a dedicated area of the screen—along the bottom—where no user mode process was allowed to write; the OS displayed a special symbol there (sort of like the padlock in a web browser) when the user was interacting directly with the OS. Some CMW systems even implemented that functionality in hardware, electronically compositing windows from different physical frame buffers to the video display. Ctrl-Alt-Del is actually in hardware, too (or it used to be); the keyboard interface on the first IBM PC detected that specific key combination and toggled the reset line on the CPU (or maybe it was an interrupt; I forget). Every subsequent PC-compatible machine, to this day, has the same functionality built in to the hardware, on the A20 reset line. It's mostly vestigial today.

New comment by jloughry in "Dark Matter Detector Records One of the Rarest Events Known to Science"

jloughry — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 19:35:18 +0000

Also, you don't want to breathe it; xenon is an anesthetic gas and will put you to sleep.

New comment by jloughry in "Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions"

jloughry — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 19:53:34 +0000

This is one global-scale geoengineering project I can rally get behind. It has the smallest chance of catastrophic second-order effects of any of the several methods I've heard of.

New comment by jloughry in "A researcher needed three hours to identify me from my DNA"

jloughry — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 17:32:35 +0000

Mother's maiden name is documented to have been in use for authentication at least as far back as 1882, and even then it was known to be a weakness [1, §3].

[1] Stephen M. Bellovin. 'Frank Miller: Inventor of the One-Time Pad'. Cryptologia 35(3), pp. 203–222, 2011. DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2011.583711

New comment by jloughry in "The Clock (2003)"

jloughry — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 22:40:36 +0000

It could be a 12V AC adapter. Not too common, but they do exist. Four of the myriad diodes would be connected in a bridge rectifier to convert the AC to DC. (I don't see any smoothing capacitors though....)

Depending on how creative you wanted to get, a clock might be designed to run directly on a pulsating rectified DC supply. That would give you a sort of baseband embedded clock signal at 120 Hz. Or use two half-wave rectifiers and design the whole clock based on trinary logic, +12V/0/-12V.

Realistically, since the mains connection is hidden behind the frame, it would be easy to tap off internally a connection to the 12V AC signal from the secondary of the transformer, before it gets rectified and filtered to DC.

New comment by jloughry in "LIGO gravitational wave detectors that hunt for ripples in space-time upgraded"

jloughry — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 16:56:03 +0000

Build one near the Equator.

New comment by jloughry in "Hard disks can be turned into listening devices"

jloughry — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 19:58:41 +0000

Yes:

Interestingly, the audio chipsets in modern motherboards and sound cards include an option to change the function of an audio port at the software level, a type of audio port programming sometimes referred to as ’jack retasking’. This option is available on most audio chipsets (e.g., Realtek’s audio chipsets) integrated into PC motherboards today. Jack retasking, although documented in the technical specifications, is not well-known [34]. For an in-depth technical discussion on malicious retasking of an audio jack, from the hardware to the operating system level, we refer the interested reader to the following previous work [29].

References:

Mordechai Guri and Yosef Solwicz and Andrey Daidakulov and Yuval Elovici. 'MOSQUITO: Covert Ultrasonic Transmissions between Two Air-Gapped Computers using Speaker-to-Speaker Communication'. arXiv preprint 1803.03422v1 [cs.CR], 9th March 2018.

Mordechai Guri and Yosef Solewicz and Andrey Daidakulov and Yuval Elovici. 'Speake(a)r: Turn speakers to microphones for fun and profit'. 11th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 17). USENIX Association, 2017.

New comment by jloughry in "Black Hole Propulsion as Technosignature"

jloughry — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 19:58:23 +0000

Lightsail. You carry a laser and a lightsail. You shoot the laser at the black hole and the laser light gravitationally slingshots around the black hole, returning to you with more energy than you gave the laser. The returning laser light pushes your lightsail. The black hole needs to be moving for this to work, although it doesn't really matter what direction the black hole is moving.

New comment by jloughry in "Amateur astronomers tracking the world’s spy satellites"

jloughry — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 18:24:22 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-36

It was an experiment to test radiation effects; the In-flight Radiation Dose Distribution (IDRD) experiment:

This joint NASA/DoD experiment was designed to examine the penetration of radiation into the human cranium during spaceflight. The female skull was seated in a plastic matrix, representative of tissue, and sliced into ten layers. Hundreds of thermo-luminescent dosimeters were mounted in the skull's layers to record radiation levels at multiple depths. This experiment, which also flew on STS-28 and STS-31, was located in the shuttle's mid-deck lockers on all three flights, recording radiation levels at different orbital inclinations.

New comment by jloughry in "The Headlight of the Future Is a Laser"

jloughry — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 02:17:26 +0000

Here's the most recent article I've seen:

https://www.designworldonline.com/energy-efficient-lighting-...

Near the end of the article is a diagram of the new SDL (Dr. Shuji Nakamura's new company) laser diode, phosphor, and beam dump in an SMD package.

New comment by jloughry in "China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout"

jloughry — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 16:49:37 +0000

From The Martian by Andy Weir:

"They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially 'colonized' it. So technically, I colonized Mars."

New comment by jloughry in "The Headlight of the Future Is a Laser"

jloughry — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 15:24:23 +0000

The laser doesn't illuminate the road directly; it excites a phosphor puck that lights up white and is then focused and aimed like a regular incandescent filament or gas discharge arc. Just like white LEDs, only much more efficient.

New comment by jloughry in "Real-time readouts of thinking in rats"

jloughry — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 17:11:15 +0000

TIL tetrode has a special meaning in biology: a four-conductor microelectrode for probing neurons that gives essentially a direction reading along with amplitudes from each of the four electrode components.

New comment by jloughry in "Norwegian frigate sinking has far-reaching implications"

jloughry — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 03:00:22 +0000

This seems to be relevant:

https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/docs/DDG51_04-97.htm

New comment by jloughry in "Apple's T2 chip will prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your microphone"

jloughry — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:24:37 +0000

That hardware capability is exploited in the following paper, if you want to know the details:

Mordechai Guri et al. (2016) 'SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit'.

http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/advanced-cyber/system/files/SPEAKE(a)...

By Mordechai Guri, Yosef Solewicz, Andrey Daidakulov, and Yuval Elovici.

New comment by jloughry in "What the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High still tells us about air combat"

jloughry — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 20:49:44 +0000

You're right. Those people weren't working on a software project; they were in a fight for their lives—literally—with an enemy they just barely won against. It's not the same thing at all. But it is worth watching for the depiction of how hard humans can work, together, for a common objective when the ONLY thing that matters is getting through. I can't think of a single major character not damaged, broken, or killed by the end of the movie. I guess it resonated because that's the only kind of environment I've ever worked in. Yay, Lockheed.

New comment by jloughry in "What the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High still tells us about air combat"

jloughry — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 16:15:33 +0000

Twelve O'Clock High is a masterclass on running a software project. The higher-ups can see that something is wrong with the team; it's not performing as well as it ought to. The outsider comes in, figures out what the problems are, and fixes them. Not an easy fix, not a quick one, and it takes an awful toll on several people. But the team ends up working well again.

I show this movie to everyone I can. It's full of lessons.

New comment by jloughry in "Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction"

jloughry — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 22:04:41 +0000

George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories from 1942–1945 are wonderful—if you like the idea of vacuum tube technology taken to extreme lengths.

Lots of fun in those stories for engineers and hackers: spaceships that can accelerate at six gees but the passengers can't, capacitors charged up in the gigajoule range, walk-in electron guns (why bother with vacuum pumps when you're in space and can just build devices in the "open air"?), stock market manipulation by means of speed-of-light delay, and SLAs.

New comment by jloughry in "Z80 computer wirewrapped on perfboard"

jloughry — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 09:00:46 +0000

This company sells new S-100 boards!

http://www.s100computers.com/Cards%20For%20Sale.htm

They have a Z-80 board. Lots of information about it here:

http://www.s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/Z80%20Board...

They also sell S-100 backplanes, serial boards, display boards, memory boards, and so on.

They have a Z80 single board computer too:

http://www.s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/Z80%20Board...

I have no connection to the company; I just think it's neat.

New comment by jloughry in "Minivac 601"

jloughry — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 18:47:55 +0000

From chaper 3 of Marketing That Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing Can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company by Lodish et al. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2007)

Many colleges and some upper socioeconomic high schools also bought the MINIVAC as an educational aid. However, no one in the third segment, the corporate sector, bought the product. The entrepreneur interviewed some target customers to try to find the problem. He found out very quickly. The typical description of the MINIVAC by the corporate types was: "Oh, that—it's just a toy!"

The entrepreneur was creative and he listened carefully. He also understood marketing. His next product was the same basic kit—with the switches upgraded to higher tolerances and the machine color changed from blue and red to gunmetal gray. The name was changed to the MINIVAC 6010 and he increased the price from $79.95 to $479. The MINIVAC 6010 sold very well to the corporate segment at $479.