Haystack II

According to this story in Fast Company, it seems Iranian authorities were well aware of Haystack and exploited its numerous flaws to monitor the (alleged) dissidents who had swallowed Heap’s snake oil.

I told you so.

The author of the piece, Niel Ungerleider, asks: “Can someone make a Haystack that works?” My answer remains unchanged: an unconditional, resounding “no”. Haystack is profoundly, fundamentally, conceptually flawed, because of a little thing called traffic analysis. In the words of Jacob Appelbaum, quoted in the Fast Company piece: Haystack “effectively alerts authorities that you are trying to use it.”

Shiny!

Brakes are generally considered a good thing to have on a car.

Just short of three hours of work—closer to two if you subtract the time spent before (changing clothes, laying out the tools and parts) and after (cleaning my tools and putting them away, tidying the workshop, washing, changing clothes).

I don’t have a micrometer, so I didn’t measure the pads and disks I replaced, but judging by eye, the outboard pads were fine, but the inboard pads were close to or at the legal limit, and the disks were well below it.

Skilled programming

From the VxWorks Kernel Programmer’s Guide:

Prior to VxWorks 6.0, the operating system provided a single memory space with no segregation of the operating system from user applications. All tasks ran in supervisor mode. Although this model afforded performance and flexibility when developing applications, only skilled programming could ensure that kernel facilities and applications coexisted in the same memory space without interfering with one another.

…whereas now, I guess, any idiot and his dog can write a well-behaved VxWorks application…