The US military’s unmanned Predator and Reaper drones are continuing to fly remote missions overseas despite a computer virus that has infected their US-based cockpits.
Government officials are still investigating whether the virus is benign, and how it managed to infect the heavily protected computer systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where US military pilots remotely fly the planes on their missions over Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
“Something is going on, but it has not had any impact on the missions overseas,” said a source, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Armed tactical unmanned planes have become an increasingly valuable tool used by the US military to track and attack individuals and small groups overseas, but the virus underscores the vulnerability of such systems to attacks on the computer networks used to fly them from great distances.
Rob Densmore, former US navy airman, told Al Jazeera that the infection was a common keystroke logging virus – which registers the keystrokes pilots use to control the unmanned drones from afar.
“It has to have a point of access, so we know that thumb drives – basically USB drives – are used to upload navigational information, guidance information to Predator and Reaper drones.
“And if there’s a way somehow that that information, or that thumb drive, can come into contact with a network or with the internet, that’s where the danger is because that basically means that information can be carried across from the Reaper drones.”

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/10/201110816388104988.html

Government approach to security can be described as designing an unsinkable boat that has no doors between compartments and then, to make it usable, cutting a random and increasing number of undocumented holes between compartments.

So the court said Matthew Neumann and Nicholas Tides were properly fired in 2008 for violating company policy of disclosing company information to the media, in this case the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, without company authorization.

In 2007, the PI wrote: “Boeing and its external auditors have rated the company’s inability to patch database and software development security holes as a ’significant deficiency’ with the computer infrastructure since 2004 — the first year it had to comply with the 2002 law. The failure has been deemed serious enough that for three years in a row, finance teams have spent the last 45 days of each year testing whether financial numbers are correct.

from Wired.

Most of the diplomatic messages released by Wikileaks have been traced to a US defence department network, known as Siprnet, used for the exchange of classified information, media reports say.

[..]

It is thought about 2.5 million US military and civilian personnel have access to the network.

However, Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information.

Siprnet uses the same technology as the internet, but has dedicated and encrypted lines that are separate from all other communications systems, according to a defence department users’ guide.

The system is protected by a series of security measures, the guide adds:

• All users must be approved and registered
• Passwords are complex, and must be changed every 150 days
• Only accessible from specially enabled computers in secure location
• Computers must not be left unattended
• No linking to civilian internet without prior approval
• Media storage devices become classified at secret level once connected to Siprnet-enabled computers
• Audit trail of all users, including identity of all persons accessing Siprnet

However, the guide says that technological advances in storage devices have made it easier to remove classified information from secure areas [...]

It is alleged that an online security system to detect suspicious use of Siprnet was switched off on computers used by the US military in Iraq following complaints that it was inconvenient, the UK’s Guardian newspaper reports.

. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618

So you release data to 2,500,000 human beings scattered around the world and are surprised when your (expensive and annoying) security measures don’t work.

Oh.

According to a bulletin issued by the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), an electrical fault led to a series of display and control problems. These included the intermittent failure of both pilots’ electronic displays and the uncommanded application of left rudder trim.  [..] The crew also reported hearing “chattering” from the circuit breaker panels. During the incident the crew flew the A321 manually, referring to the standby instruments which continued tofunction normally. The problem was rectified after the crew switched off the No. 1 generator in response to an ‘ELEC GEN 1 FAULT’ message on the Airbus’s ECAM warning display, says the AAIB. The cause has been traced to an electrical problem and the AAIB says that Airbus indicates that a reset of the Flight Augmentation Computer, caused by an electrical power interruption, can result in incremental offsets in rudder trim.

for i = 1 ... n
      create thread i
             do something
end for

as if that was the only way to express parallel computation. This is such an awkward way of looking at problems.  I think many problems come from the sloppy “non-determinism” of the operating systems and multi-core machines.  One of the few  interesting ideas seen in the last 20 years on parallel processing is the Google map-reduce scheme ( . But what I find impressive is bashreduce. This is really a clever trick and a great validation of the UNIX toolset design (as if it needed another validation).

It is becoming more common for fire ants to build nests in pad mounted equipment. Their nesting materials can cause short circuits, the ants can eat away at conductor insulation, and they make equipment maintenance a challenge.

from Power System Reliability, by Richard Brown, in the Electric Power Engineering Handbook

The subdued poetry of engineering documents “and they make equipment maintenance a challenge“.

“What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.

Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same computer, WPXI-TV reported.

President Barack Obama will have a beloved BlackBerry — and maybe a second, more secure smartphone-like device — with him in the White House.

The president has been adamant about continuing to use a BlackBerry, a smartphone with Internet and e-mail access, despite concerns that are likely making the National Security Agency as nervous as the Secret Service on Inauguration Day when Obama left his presidential limo twice to walk and wave to crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue. MSNBC

A parallel computer system which has a primary task processor, a second primary task processor, a secondary task processor acting as a backup for the second primary task processor transfers messages by: sending messages from the primary task processor to the second primary processor with the second primary task processor operating on the messages by initially storing a received message in a queue and thereafter reading the message from the queue for processing in accordance with the task associated therewith and accumulating a count of the messages read from its queue; and sending the same messages from the first primary task processor to the secondary task processor which stores the messages in a message queue for possible use if the second primary task processor fails. If a primary task processor fails after processing a given number of messages, the secondary task processor associated therewith starts processing the messages in its queue but after having discarded the first given number of messages.