Ben's Bits

Check out this BBC video of a test drive in the GM Highwire. This experimental car has a few interesting tricks up it's sleeve. In fact, if I was in marketing I would call a production model the "GM Chameleon".

Author Ross Anderson has convinced his publisher (Wiley) to let him make his book, Security Engineering, available for free online. I'll let his reasons speak for themselves:

My goal in making the book freely available is twofold. First, I want to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I think that many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. I don't expect to lose money by making this book available for free: more people will read it, and those of you who find it useful will hopefully buy a copy. After all, a proper book is half the size and weight of 300-odd sheets of laser-printed paper in a ring binder. (My colleague David MacKay found that putting his book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. Book publishers are getting the message faster than the music or software folks.)

If more authors and publishers felt this way the world would be a better place. If I'm going to read an interesting book I'm going to buy it and carry it around in dead-tree format but for searching quickly for something that "I know I've read somewhere" it's hard to beat a digital format.

In the past I've had good luck purchasing inexpensive elecotronics lab equipment such as autoranging digital multimeters from circuitspecialists.com and would still recommend them but another option has come to my attention. In reviewing some of my literature from the January Consumer Electronics Show (read: working on the backlog of work on my desk) I stubled across the multimeterwarehouse.com website. To be sure these folks specialize in meters and a few power supplies, not the broader range of equipment that Circuit Specialists has, but if you need to outfit an electronics lab, shop or just yourself with a handy digial multimeter they may be just the ticket.

In a recent post to Dave Farber's Interesting People email list by Perry Metzger makes a number of good points about the current ban on carry-on liquids during air travel. I share many of his sentiments and encourage you to give it some critical thought as well.

First they came for the nail clippers, but I did not complain for I do not cut my finger nails. Now they've come for the shampoo bottles, but I did not complain for I do not wash my hair. What's next? What will finally stop people in their tracks and make them realize this is all theater and utterly ridiculous? Lets cut the morons off at the pass, and discuss all the other common things you can destroy your favorite aircraft with. Bruce Schneier makes fun of such exercises as "movie plots", and with good reason. Hollywood, here I come!

We're stopping people from bringing on board wet things. What about dry things? Is baby powder safe? Well, perhaps it is if you check carefully that it is, in fact, baby powder. What if, though, it is mostly a container of potassium cyanide and a molar equivalent of a dry carboxylic acid? Just add water in the first class bathroom, and LOTS of hydrogen cyanide gas will evolve. If you're particularly crazy, you could do things like impregnating material in your luggage with the needed components. Clearly, we can't let anyone carry on containers of talc, and we have to keep them away from all aqueous liquids.

See the elderly gentleman with the cane? Perhaps it is not really an ordinary cane. The metal parts could be filled with (possibly sintered) aluminum and iron oxide. Thermit! Worse still, nothing in a detector will notice thermit, and trying to make a detector to find thermit is impractical. Maybe it is in the hollowed portions of your luggage handles! Maybe it is cleverly mixed into the metal in someone's wheelchair! Who knows?

Also, we can never allow people to bring on laptop computers. It is far too easy to fill the interstices of the things with explosives -- there is a lot of space inside them -- or to rig the lithium ion batteries to start a very hot fire (that's pretty trivial), or if you're really clever, you can make a new case for the laptop that's made of 100% explosive material instead of ordinary plastic. Fun!

No liquor on board any more, of course. You can open lots of little liquor bottles and set the booze on fire, and besides, see the dangers of letting people have fluids. Even if you let them have fluids, no cans of coke -- you can make a can of coke into a shiv in a few minutes. No full sized bottles of course, since you can break 'em and use them as a sharp weapon, so no more champagne in first class either, let alone whiskey.

Then, lets consider books and magazines. Sure, they look innocent, but are they? For 150 years, chemists have known that if you take something with high cellulose content -- cotton, or paper, or lots of other things -- and you nitrate it (usually with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids), you get nitrocellulose, which looks vaguely like the original material you nitrated but which goes BOOM nicely. Nitrocellulose is the base of lots of explosives and propellants, including, I believe, modern "smokeless" gunpowder. It is dangerous stuff to work with, but you're a terrorist, so why not. Make a bunch of nitrocellulose paper, print books on it, and take 'em on board. The irony of taking out an airplane with a Tom Clancy novel should make the effort worthwhile.

So, naturally, we have to get rid of books and magazines on board. That's probably for the best, as people who read are dangerous.

And now for a small side note. It is, of course, commonly claimed that we have nitro explosive detectors at airports, but so far as I can tell they don't work -- students from labs I work in who make nitro and diazo compounds for perfectly legitimate reasons and have trace residues on their clothes have told me the machines never pick up a thing even though this is just what they're supposed to find, possibly because they're tuned all the way down not to scare all the people who take nitroglycerine pills for their angina.

Now, books aren't the only things you could nitrate. Pants and shirts? Sure. It might take a lot of effort to get things just so or they will look wrong to the eye, but I bet you can do it. Clearly, we can't allow people on planes wearing clothes. Nudity in the air will doubtless be welcomed by many as an icebreaker, having been deprived of their computers and all reading material for entertainment.

Then of course there is the question of people smuggling explosives on board in their body cavities, so in addition to nudity, you need body cavity searches. That will, I'm sure, provide additional airport entertainment. By the way, if you really don't think a terrorist could smuggle enough explosives on board in their rectum to make a difference, you haven't been following how people in prison store their shivs and heroin.

However, it isn't entirely clear that even body cavity searches are enough. If we're looking for a movie plot, why not just get a sympathetic surgeon to implant explosives into your abdomen! A small device that looks just like a pace maker could be the detonator, and with modern methods, you could do something like setting it off by rapping "shave and a haircut" on your own chest. You could really do this -- and I'd like to see them catch that one.

So can someone tell me where the madness is going to end? My back of the envelope says about as many people die in the US every month in highway accidents than have died in all our domestic terrorist incidents in the last 50 years. Untold numbers of people in the US are eating themselves to death and dying of heart disease, diabetes, etc. -- I think that number is something like 750,000 people a year? Even with all the terrorist bombings of planes over the years, it is still safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport, and it is even safer to fly than to walk!

At some point, we're going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I'm happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?

If you haven't seen it yet be sure to check out the "Canon Rock" guitar video by funtwo. This electric guitar version of Pachabel's classic "Canon in D" was arranged by JerryC in the style of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (another great group). While JerryC has his own version I prefer the cover by funtwo. The arrangement apparently requires that you have mastered the skill of sweep-picking, something easier said than done. The video has gotten popular enough that New York Times reporter Virginia Heffernan did some research published in this article about just who funtwo is and, after discovering at least one imposter, ended up concluding it is Jeong-Hyun Lim a 23 year old from Korea who studied at Auckland University in New Zealand where he mader the now famous recording. For those interested you can still download a copy of the original WMV file from the site where it was originally uploaded by funtwo, the Korean music site mule.co.kr.