Liquid Explosives (by alaric)

Here's an interesting technical analysis of all this talk of taking explosives on board planes in liquid form.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html

Where it really gets interesting, though, is towards the bottom. The author argues that stopping people from taking nail scissors and liquids on board planes is pretty stupid, since a clued-up terrorist could still hide plane-destroying materials in any metal object (sintered iron and aluminium = thermite, basically indetectable until it becomes a fireball), hide bombs in their body cavities, form hard plastic explosives into the shape of any object, convert a soft drinks can into a knife with just a couple of minute's work, etc.

The techniques developed by prisoners to improvise weapons from what they have to hand, or to smuggle and hide drugs, should give us some inspiration of what an organised terrorist group should be able to manage.

So should we give up and cower in fear? No. The fact that the terrorists aren't managing to make planes fall out of the sky can probably be put down to one of a few possibilities.

1. There just aren't enough people willing to die for their cause; motivating intelligent people to be suicide bombers is hard
2. Real security is provided by proper police work - identifying terrorists and tracing their networks to identify all the people involved in a plot, then arresting them - and that's working. Causing all this disruption at the airports in the name of security is pointless; once somebody's decided to down a plane, if they managed to recruit suicide bombers and get the materials and get them to the airport, the opportunity to actually stop them has already passed.

I'd like to see more money spent on actual policing - and less trivially-avoided, expensive, unpleasant, liberty-destroying measures like mass surveillance, laws against cryptography, and airport/train station/port screening. Sure, have an impressive-looking police presence at the airport to deter the weak-willed would-be bomber, but please, don't strip search me and make me spend an eight hour flight without my laptop.

Virtual machines (by alaric)

Once upon a time, computers were generally mainframes - mainly because we hadn't yet learnt to make small computers.

As technology progressed, computers became smaller, and more ubiquitous.

However, at the same time, the role of the network became more and more important. At first, the model du jour was that there'd be a PC on every desk, and as a bit of a hack, networks were designed so that you could shares files between the PCs. But each file still sat on one machine, and the others just accessed it over the network.

Read more »

WordPress upgrade (by alaric)

I've upgraded the blog to the latest WordPress at the time of writing (2.0.4).

Perhaps this will fix the problem with our RSS feeds!

Also, it's let me use some of the newer plugins, such as the creative commons one (note our nice Creative Commons licence link logo in the 'meta' section on the right - and the nice RDF licensing metadata in the HTML source!)

I've also added plugins that generate siteinfo.xml and sitemap.xml files. The more metadata, the merrier.

NetBSD/cute: kitten(4) (by alaric)

Well, the latest snapshot of NetBSD/cute now supports the kitten(4) driver.

I tried to get a screenshot of kitten running with my two black and white devices, but while I was preparing it, I ran into a resource conflict with the existing baby(4) driver:

I managed to jury-rig a bus isolation mechanism, however:

Hobby OS projects (by alaric)

There are a lot of hobby OS projects out there. The Wikipedia article barely scratches the surface; I've come across projects to build Lisp-based OSes, 32-bit multitasking extensions to DOS, you name it.

Lots of people decide they want to write an OS. They look at a world dominated by Windows, with open source UNIX clones and MacOS bringing up the rear, and think: "I can do better". And they usual don't get too far. Even if you do write a full operating system, able to utilise a wide range of hardware and with all the applications home and business users need, you'll still have a hard time getting people to use it - because it's unfamiliar.

I'm proud to say that I, too, am writing my own OS. Read more »