A friend at work has been pointing me to some interesting videos out of Iraq. Having always been fascinated with military technology, I found this video particularly intriguing. It is video from an Apache attack helicopter watching (and subsequently eliminating) insurgents as they place an RPG in a field. This is a true testiment to the awesome power of its 30mm gun. Pay attention to the radio communications between the pilot and the forward-air-controller.

Warning: not suitable for children!

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

The BBC has a report about the security of British nuclear bombs prior to 1998:

Newsnight has discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF’s nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the Bomb itself. While American and Russian weapons were protected by tamper-proof combination locks which could only be released if the correct code was transmitted, Britain relied on a simpler technology

Papers at the National Archive show that as early as 1966 an attempt was made to impose PAL security on British nuclear weapons.

The Chief Scientific Adviser Solly Zuckerman formally advised the Defence Secretary Denis Healey that Britain needed to install Permissive Action Links on its nuclear weapons to keep them safe.

“The Government will need to be certain that any weapons deployed are under some form of ‘ironclad’ control”.

The Royal Navy argued that officers of the Royal Navy as the Senior Service could be trusted:

“It would be invidious to suggest… that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders”.

Neither the Navy nor the RAF installed PAL protection on their nuclear weapons.

You can read the full article HERE.

There’s a great piece in The New Yorker about the history and unreliability of FBI criminal profiling. It’s a fascinating article, especially if you’ve enjoyed Thomas Harris’ books (such as “Silence of the Lambs”), where profiling is featured heavily. I found this statistic interesting:

In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent…

The issue is that profiles are usually very vague, and possess traits similar to how magicians and fortune tellers give readings. From the article:

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse — the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (”I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (”I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess — all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

And regarding the case of the BTK killer:

They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105… He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified — and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.

Click HERE to read the full article.

Defence Tech has a post on the new helmets for pilots flying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. From the article:

An MoD spokesman said: “Unlike other jet aircraft the JSF, which is planned to replace the Harrier, does not have a traditional head-up display

Instead the computerised symbology will be displayed directly on to the pilot’s visors, providing the pilot with cues for flying, navigating and fighting the aircraft. “It even will superimpose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below - like something out of Terminator.

Pretty freaky looking… read the full article HERE.

Tweakers.net has an excellent article describing the process and tools Intel uses to bring a CPU into production. It focuses mainly on the new Penryn processor, which was designed at the Folsom campus where I used to work. I’ve worked in some of these labs (debugging chipset firmware problems), and they are just as impressive as they sound. The article also does a good job of describing the tick-tock model of design scheduling, and how various “errata” (i.e. bugs) remain in each processor. Hope you enjoy the article as much as I did.

Add another entry to the stupid patents list… this one from Amazon (actually, it’s subsidiary A9). In summary, the patent (7287042) encompasses adding an unformated string to the end of a URL that can be used for searching. For example: if my site supported it, “www.tdistler.com/Stupid Patents” would generate search results for “Stupid Patents”.

I always enjoy reading Alex Papadimoulis’ blog Worst Than Failure (WTF). It recounts stories of software errors, ridiculous coding solutions, and tales of failed engineering interviews. It’s a great place to learn from other people’s mistakes, and have a few laughs along the way.

Occasionally, Alex posts a more serious article about the process of software engineering. I enjoyed his latest on Avoiding Development Disasters.

This is too good not to post:

Picture source

Back when I worked at Intel in their System Software group, we were working on an embedded OS kernel that would run on the chipset and help provide firmware based security for the enterprise.This technology was called Active Management Technology (AMT). The OS was host to various embedded security applications that monitored and controlled the system. We were also working with another team that was developing a secure hypervisor that would provide an isolated environment for the user OS (like Windows, Linux, etc). All of this was designed to allow an enterprise IT department more control over its machines and help isolate malware infected computers from the network. It also allows IT to more easily manage and repair systems remotely. Click on the link above if you want to read more.

Anyways, a few months ago, Intel made this music video promoting the technology:

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

Funny… but frustrating because this really happened. Watch the video HERE.

What’s the take-away from this: terrorism has succeeded because we are now so paranoid. As Bruce Schneier says: “Refuse to be terrorized people!” This is so silly considering food poisoning kills 5,000 people A YEAR, compared to the 3,184 that died from terrorism in 2001, which INCLUDES 9/11 (RAND corporation). If you exclude 9/11, most of the yearly numbers hover around 600 in recent years.

We need a memorial and special holiday for food-poisoning victims… but I digress…