Posts by Stoneshop

Re: Chinese agents slip spy chips into Super Micro servers

(They also don't mention what kind of CPU these boards had. They might have used AMD or even ARM CPUs, although given how many Intel based servers there are out there, it's unlikely)

SuperMicro (as the suspected manufacturer) has just a small number of AMD boards in their (extensive) product range, and exactly zero ARM boards.

those FUCKING cables

Re-sealable freezer bags. 1 per cable.

Kind of a cable condom then.

Some time ago I found a handheld computer at a thrift store. Storage was a PCMCIA card using static RAM, with two coin cells for backup power. IIRC its capacity is 256k; programs lived on a second PCMCIA card, 2MB or 4MB (the machine is elsewhere, can't check).

</sarcasm - yes I know it's supposed to be 512MB>

My first digicam came with a 4MB CF card for storage (I bought a 16MB one the next day when I realised that 4MB couldn't even hold half as much pics as a 36 roll of Ektachrome), so a 512k stick doesn't sound out of the ordinary if you go back that far.

Re: never seems to taste the same?

Which is quite enough for a kettle, unless you are trying to boil the water in roughly the time it takes to put water in the kettle.

My GF found a Teasmade at a local charity shop, labeled 'probably broken'. It wasn't, but the expectation that it would heat the water to a boil quite a bit faster than it actually did probably made them slap that label on.

Re: Actually most satnavs are still remarkably unreliable

Garmin is humorously wrong in northern Spain.

Our Garmin device in the car is regularly fed OpenStreetMap updates which are only occasionally incorrect, and then rarely beyond the next update. That said, it still wants me to get off a particular main artery, then straight across the crossroads at the bottom of the slipway and back on the main road again, as it has done for at least the past five years. Probably more of a routing calculation quirk than a mapping error, I expect.

From the 60Csx I expect nothing more than remembering a couple of waypoints, and showing a direction pointer to the one selected.

Re: Determining South (in the Northern hemisphere) from a clock

(Seriously can some kind person explain why it's полярные and thus plural? Enquiring minds etc.)

North AND South pole. The watch will work in either hemisphere as you'd be upside down when in the Southern anyway.

(They couldn't care less about the 38 million Poles to the west of them)

Re: Too many apps

Clouds will move in a different way to the wind direction at lower altitudes.

Better not go visit Norway. I've more than once seen clouds at three different levels move at right angles to each other, with the upper level moving right against the lowest.

Re: installed a jamming device ????

You can't just jam "inside" the embassy easily as radio waves typically go through walls unless you've redecorated with a layer of tinfoil behind your new wallpaper.

I would expect that to be standard minimum procedure for any embassy nowadays.

Re: "Held"

<conspiracy> Maybe the Ecuadorians are now preventing him from leaving and no one has realised? </conspiracy>

Welcome to the Hotel Equadoria.

Re: Just the Allies?

Guess the Axis powers' bombs weren't powerful enough?

The Luftwaffe had significantly less bombers than the RAF had, and they also had less capacity: their one heavy bomber was the Heinkel 177, 10 ton bomb load, mostly used on the Eastern front and only from by and large 1943. 1170 built (including prototypes and small-run specials). The Heinkel 111, Junker 88 and the Dornier Do 17 were used in the Blitz, were built in larger numbers (5500 Heinkels, 15000 Junkers, 2000 Dorniers), but those had a much smaller bomb load, only up to some 3000kg. Blitz raids were also quite spread out over time; they didn't make for concentrated ionosphere disruptions the way the raids over Germany did.

By contrast, at the start of the Area Bombing Directive early 1942 the RAF had the Halifax, Stirling and Lancaster, able to carry well over 5000kg (Lancasters had to be adapted to accept the Grand Slam), the lighter Hampden, Wellington, Whitley and the Mosquito, plus what the USAAF brought to the table once they came in. RAF Bomber Command was able to mount a number of "1000 bomber raids" with, in one case, 2000 tons of bombs dropped.

Re: Other explosives

Individually, the largest weapons dropped apparently caused damage to the aircraft dropping these weapons, which would have been >25,000 feet above the point of detonation.

We were flying at 6,000 feet which was the minimum height to drop the 4,000 pounder. We dropped it in the middle of town [Koblenz], which gave the aircraft a hell of a belt, lifted it up and blew an escape hatch from out of the top.

— Jack Murray, pilot of "G for George", reporting on G for George's mission on 17th April 1943.

The 8klb and 12klb ones would have had a greater minimum safety height, but more like sqrt(2) (8 klb) or sqrt(3) (12 klb) times those 6000ft, if that, because of blast front area. And with a single plane dropping a large explosive load you get to add horizontal speed against time for the bomb dropping to the height where it should explode

Re: Partial truth, partial cover up ?

Operation mincemeat corpse was discovered by the Spanish and the information reported to the Nazi command.

Which was part of the ruse. Spain was technically neutral, although quite chummy with the Germans. The Mincemeat group figured that either the letters and other items themselves would pass German hands for copying and inspection before Spain handed them back to Britain, or the Spaniards would do that for them. Afterwards the letters were checked, and they had indeed be opened so that part of the operation could be verified to have worked. With Axis troops actually moving to the Balkan Churchill was then notified of "Mincemeat swallowed whole".

Re: other type of personalization was the Morse code sending itself

I don't know if oscilloscopes were around during the war years but were used in the '60s.

They were essentially the basis for radar, to the point that initially radar was just displaying the scope trace for the echo from a (semi)fixed[0] antenna. Only later the rotating sweep came along.

They certainly weren't used widely for identifying enemy transmitters, if at all.

[0] The antennas could usually be rotated, but only slowly because of their size. More like getting them pointed in a particular direction and sort of tracking a target.

German naval cryptologists added a 4th wheel to Enigma

That only effectively added a second 'reflector' [0] to the unit, and while that added cryptological complexity it was way less than the Germans thought it would. Every keystroke moved the rightmost wheel, then on one full rotation it moved the next one on the left, etc. So the fourth wheel hardly ever moved unless they had a very long message, and only its internal wiring and the starting position added to the coding.

[0] a disc to the left of the rotors, wired so that a current through the rotor wiring got routed back through the rotors again and to the 'display', a field of small lightbulbs displaying the (de)coded character for the pressed key. This made that the coding and decoding could be done on the same device with matching rotors and starting setting.

Re: Partial truth, partial cover up ?

German intelligence were seemingly often rubbish (though not always). They made some terrible errors.

A particularly stunning bit of leading German intelligence, and with it the General Staff, by the nose has been Operation Mincemeat, IMO. At its centre was a corpse with fabricated documents including a letter by the vice chief of the Imperial General Staff to the British Commander in North Africa, detailing an invasion of continental Europe via Greece and the Southern Balkan, with a decoy attack on Sicily. As the German Abwehr after much scrutiny decided that yes, this person and the papers he carried were authentic, a fair bunch of personnel and material were moved from Italy to the Balkan. It took weeks before the Germans actually figured that the Sicily invasion was the real one.

German Intelligence did not just suffer from hubris, they also had the disadvantage that after the Battle of Britain they had way less possibilities to use aerial reconnaissance to corroborate info, as well as less human bodies doing the spying thing.

Re: Cribs from touch

The other type of personalization was the Morse code sending itself.

Yes, but that was for the people listening to pick up. Most of those were ordinary citizens that had (or got) a suitable receiver, with motorcycle messengers collecting the messages that were copied down. They did get told, if not trained, to spot particular operators by their keying. And of course particular Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine stations were listened to by army staff radio operators, with a quicker way to get interesting messages to the code breakers.

Re: Standard German and Dialects?

one look-out post sent "Nothing to report" day after day, using different keys,

The Wehrmacht (army) had some 40.000 Enigmas in use, and more than once a sloppy operator accidentally sent today's first message with yesterday's setting, then resent it with today's. If yesterday's code was already broken, then so was that day's. And if not, it certainly helped. Repeating a particular message, with some words abbreviated the second time, that the intended receiver hadn't been able to copy down correctly also offered cracking advantages.

The Kriegsmarine had way less devices and operators, and much tighter code discipline as well.