Monthly Archives: August 2017

Clips


iPhone

The best I could do with my iPhone camera was the 93%-eclipsed sun filtering through leaves onto the concrete sidewalk.

Nature's psychedelic pinhole camera.

I had my Nikon out there, trying to get some real pictures. I'll see what I got, tonight.


c is for cleek
Nikon D100, 70-300mm, 692nm interference filter


Nikon D100, 70-300mm, 692nm interference filter

And this is a terrible picture. All that blur and halo was caused by light leaking around the edge of my filter. The circular glass filter I used was mounted in a cardboard frame that had started to separate after a few minutes, and I couldn't come up with anything to re-seal it. But, that missing part of the sun is, no shit, a vulture's wing. Wish it turned out better.

GPS spoofing

Why are US Navy ships running into other ships?

One theory is that Russia has developed a way to spoof GPS signals. Imagine the chaos that would cause, if our military suddenly didn't know where it was...

And, imagine the chaos that would cause if a highway full of GPS-dependent driverless cars suddenly didn't know where they were.

GPS spoofing previously required considerable technical expertise. Humphreys had to build his first spoofer from scratch in 2008, but notes that it can now be done with commercial hardware and software downloaded from the Internet.

Nor does it require much power. Satellite signals are very weak – about 20 watts from 20,000 miles away – so a one-watt transmitter on a hilltop, plane or drone is enough to spoof everything out to the horizon.

If the hardware and software are becoming more accessible, nation states soon won’t be the only ones using the technology. This is within the scope of any competent hacker. There have not yet been any authenticated reports of criminal spoofing, but it should not be difficult for criminals to use it to divert a driverless vehicle or drone delivery, or to hijack an autonomous ship. Spoofing will give everyone affected the same location, so a hijacker would just need a short-ranged system to affect one vehicle.

But Humphreys believes that spoofing by a state operator is the more serious threat. “It affects safety-of-life operations over a large area,” he says. “In congested waters with poor weather, such as the English Channel, it would likely cause great confusion, and probably collisions.”

Oh yes. This will happen.

(h/t BJ)

Continuing to be Useless

I complained to Verizon about my robocall problem. They offered to sell me a monthly service that would put pictures next to the incoming calls - pix taken from my contacts list - so I can see if I want to answer the call or not. WTF.

Or, they said I could just change my number.

Idiots.

[He] Went To North Korea

What You've Heard Vs. What [he] Saw...

I'm not about to argue that the country is secretly a paradise. But if we reduce North Korea to a state run by cartoon supervillains, it becomes equally absurd and dangerous. Their government may be atrocious, but there's still a clear logic to their actions -- to dismiss them as lunatics invites the paranoid fantasy and anxiety that nuclear war is just a bored Kim Jong-un's whim away. Unfortunately, our tour didn't get the chance to sit in on any high-level strategy meetings, but that same line of thought extends to everything there. It may be foreign, and it may often be cruel, but it's not a dark fantasyland -- there's a reason for all of it, even if that reasoning rarely accounts for human happiness.

Even mere sightseeing debunked a good chunk of what floats around online. There is, for example, a theory that Pyongyang's metro station consists of just two stops that run only when tourists visit. Well, I rode through six stops, and I can't imagine that the government has nothing better to do with its time and resources than to make hundreds of actors pretend to ride it with us for the benefit of a motley collection of visiting writers, teachers, and computer programmers. Shockingly, it turns out that dictatorships are capable of maintaining basic public transportation, presumably because they like it when their people make it to work on time. But that's all part of the biggest myth about North Korea ...