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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Good News. A new study, to be published in Environmental Science and Technology in November, has concluded that the manufacturing of specified nanomaterials such as buckyballs and quantum dots is safer than oil refining or making wine. This was based upon an actuarial model that Zurich based XL insurance have developed to assess risks in existing manufacturing processes. Using the model allowed an assessment of the ‘environmental footprint’ of potential nanomaterial manufacturing.
Using a method for assessing the premiums that companies pay for insurance, a team of scientists and insurance experts have concluded that the manufacturing processes for five, near-market nanomaterials — including quantum dots, carbon nanotubes and buckyballs — present fewer risks to the environment than some common industrial processes like oil refining. For two of the nanomaterials – nanotubes and alumoxane nanoparticles — manufacturing risks were comparable with those of making wine or aspirin.
This study does not provide assurances that there may be unknown risks with these nanomaterials.
In developing their risk assessments, the research team developed a detailed account of the input materials, output materials and waste streams for each process. Risk was qualitatively assessed for each process, based on factors including toxicity, flammability and persistence in the environment…
Mark Weisner, one of the co-authors of the study, concluded that,
“We can’t anticipate all of the details of how nanomaterials fabrication will evolve, but based on what we do know, the fabrication of the nanomaterials we considered appears to present lower risks than current industrial activities like petrochemical refining, polyethylene production and synthetic pharmaceutical production”
Let us remind ourselves of Greenpeace’s objective for nanotechnology – reseach directed towards their own chosen goals through government expenditure and a moratorium until the precautionary principle is satisfied.
Greenpeace believes that there may be some advantages in developments in some nanotechnologies. However, we are concerned that any value could be lost if the development processes governing nanotechnology does not prioritise environmental, public health and social goals, and is not sensitive to the needs and concerns of the public at an early stage. Indeed some nanotechnologies could become a real problem. At this stage it is too early to say what the specific problems or advantages might be – but the way nanotechnology develops will have a huge influence on whether the outcomes are good or bad.
We want to see a moratorium on the release of nanoparticles to the environment until evidence that it is safe (for the environment and human health) is clear. In the longer term nanotechnology could produce self-replicating ‘machines’ whose proliferation could be environmentally problematic.
The moratorium may sound innocuous until one realises that the standard of proof required by Greenpeace is never weighed against the potential benefits or lives saved with the earlier deployment of these technologies. The danger is that the tautology of social goals, governmental ownership and control of these technologies for the public good (as defined by Greenpeace), could hinder real progress such as private sector efforts to build the space elevator.
With yet another long international flight stretching ahead of me, I finally have time and boredom enough to write a good deal more on network security issues than I have in the past. I have been at least peripherally involved in the area (self defense of my own and customers business networks) for quite some time.
There has been a sea change in the threat model over the last few years. The underworld of the Gibson novel has come to pass although things are perhaps not so dramatic as in the stories. Reality does not fit neatly between two covers.
I recently wrote about a possible case of industrial scale industrial espionage. There is much evidence in security literature that this is occuring and KGB/FSB bugged Russian hotels are not the only place one need worry. Everyone is getting into the game. For those who might be interested in such things I recommend a Dartmouth paper “CyberWarfare: An Analysis Of The Means And Motivations Of Selected Nation States”, Bilko And Chang, December 2004.
While reading Bilko and Chang a number of other strands of thought came together. It puts a whole new light on the recent move of major internet equipment suppliers into Chinese production facilities. Among these, two are of particular note.
IBM Thinkpads: the laptop of choice of many network professionals.
Cisco Routers: These are ubiquitous in the infrastructure of the Internet from major backbone to small office.
Then there is the Lynn debacle. Michael Lynn gave a presentation at DEFCON this last summer in which he showed beyond a shadow of a doubt Trojans can be inserted into Cisco backbone routers… and by extension most other brands as well. His slide presentation was not of a specific exploit but of a generic method.
Cisco and ISS, the company from which he had just resigned, went totally over the top. They sent a crew to the DEFCON to remove pages from the programs. Afterwards they threatened to sue Michael Lynn unless he agreed to allow their forensics people to cryptographically wipe anything to do with the the research from his disk drives. They sent nasty letters to all and sundry who posted his slide set. They tracked down and took possession of every bit of video of the session they could get their hands on. Despite their best efforts to pull a “1984”, they failed.
It was not just failure, it was total, abyssmal, embarrasing, hang-your-head you idiot failure. Instead of a few interested hackers and security analysts with copies stored in dusty corners of the internet they made it a slashdot affair. Absolutely everyone has the document now. I will not post a link here because if you really are interested you already have a copy and if you do not you can find it easily enough.
Another reason these actions were foolish on the part of Cisco brings me back to the central point of this article. The Cisco heap smash attack described by Michael Lynn was only an improvement on already published literature… and it may have already been implimented… by Chinese hackers.
→ Continue reading: Privacy? What privacy?
The political system tends to lag behind technological change, which is often a good thing. I remember attending a House subcommittee hearing in the 1980s on whether the U.S. should create a phone-computer system modeled on the state-funded French Minitel, a text-only network being promoted as the wave of the future. Fortunately, the Internet exploded – making Minitel obsolete – before Congress could fund such a project.
– Glenn Harlan Reynolds reviewing this book
The possible tenth planet, 2003 UB313, which takes 540 years to circle the sun, in a highly eccentric orbit, has now acquired a satellite. The new moon was discovered two months after 2003 UB313 by the Keck observatory on September 10th and the findings will be published tomorrow. The existence of a moon ensures that Xena will be seriously considered as a tenth planet, since it has the mass to acquire orbiting bodies.
“Since the day we discovered Xena, the big question has been whether or not it has a moon,” Michael Brown, of the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. “Having a moon is just inherently cool — and it is something that most self-respecting planets have, so it is good to see that this one does too.”
The possible 10th planet moves in a highly eccentric orbit, tilted some 45 degrees above the orbital plane of the other planets. Its orbit is also elliptical, zooming in as close as 3.5 billion miles from the sun and moving out to as far as 9 billion miles away.
And, as you know, the self-respecting companion of Xena, could only have been called Gabrielle.
I was only a toddler when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went on that historic walk on the Moon (well, assuming you don’t buy the tedious conspiracy theories that it was all staged in Madison Avenue or whatever), and have been interested in this period of post-war history for a long time. So, for all you space junkies out there, there is a 3-D IMAX documentary on the way, portraying how the whole Moon landings went. Excellent. Book the popcorn and the soda drinks.
The Science Museum in London – one of the greatest – is showing the film.
I do not usually bring my professional activities to the pages of Samizdata, but I have a very interesting little story to tell.
There are things going on out in Cyberspace of which most are little aware. Some will have heard reports saying Cyberwar backed by nation states will soon be able to bring down economies. Other reports equally vehemently say the idea is an over-hyped load of bollocks.
I can tell you from personal experience ‘on the front lines’ there are indeed goings on which I find difficult to explain without recourse to State backed Cyberwar activities as fact. I cannot give specific details: that would be violating customer trust. What I can tell is the broad brush tale of a rather interesting discovery I stumbled upon late one night.
I was trying to assist a ‘Road Warrior’ CEO in getting at his email. This was not my reason for being at the ISP working – I was there on a consulting job – but I was the only one available at that hour. Their customer was in Moscow on a business trip and was becoming more and more strident over his inability to read his office mail.
I began tracing the ISP’s systems and trying to pull needles out of haystacks of system and mail logs. At first I thought he was appearing through a different address than he claimed to be using in his hotel. Proving this was made more difficult by the Moscow hotel not having its systems properly set up.
Someone was reading his mail and it was not him. Further more, that someone was in Beijing. Most disturbingly, it was from a Beijing network through which several years ago I had a near penetration of a firewall of mine. A friend who was a reformed ‘black-hat’ could not even explain what had happened. They were that good. So seeing someone on the same network repeatedly picking up this CEO’s email was a nasty surprise. My investigation suddenly shifted from ‘help the idjit customer’ mode to defense and forensics.
I will not bore you with details. After conferring with some other network and security people I had a story that fit the facts. I cannot absolutely swear the following is what was going on, but I can make a fair case for it.
It seems old hardline KGB have a presence in China and they use Beijing as a cutout for some of their activities. Since the password had to get there somehow, I infer either in the Moscow hotel or somewhere in a nearby Russian backbone node there is a data mining operation going on.
Imagine you are a businessman arriving in Russia for a trade show or other event. You check into the hotel and immediately use the internet connection to pick up your home office email. As you are not a network security expert, you do not realize your normal ‘pop3’ mail pickup is sending a clear-text user name and password when your laptop connects to your office (or gmail) server.
Your poor, unprotected little password gets scarfed up before it reaches the border. Along with other captives it gets passed on to the cutout operation in Beijing. Someone then connects and reads your mail. Presumably all the mail then gets dumped into a huge database where it can be cross-indexed and mined for proprietary data, internal data security info, blackmail possibilities and other attack vectors into yours or other corporate networks.
I could be wrong. There are other scenarios… but not many. One must explain how a password journeyed to Beijing within no more than a day or two of the CEO’s Moscow arrival. This does not happen accidentally.
I find this all quite disturbing.
As I predicted a few weeks ago, SUV-phobes need not get into a hissy fit. The market is changing people’s driving habits:
Toyota Motor Corp. has seen a rise in demand for hybrid vehicles in the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as consumers seek more mileage out of $3-gallon gasoline, a top official said on Thursday.
“At the end of last month, we had a 20-hour supply of the Prius (hybrid sedan),” Jim Press, head of Toyota’s U.S. operations, said at the Reuters Autos Summit, held in Detroit. “We no longer count in days.”
Price increases change human behaviour. Who would have thought it?
How dangerous is nuclear power? Think about Chernobyl, all those people who have died from radiation as a result of that huge disaster…. A total of 59 over 20 years, it turns out.
The world’s worst nuclear accident is significantly less dangerous to the general public of the continent of Europe than, say, Metropolitan Police drivers, never mind the continent’s public transport systems and its oil refineries. I am unaware of any casualties caused by wind farms, but it is hard to build tall things without someone managing to fall off, or some heavy bits dropping off occasionally.
Buses kill. Ban them now!
I think the field known as nanotechnology just took another pretty major advance, judging by this story:
Scientists have made a breakthrough in nanotechnology which could hasten the development of molecular machines that could act as artificial muscles or drug delivery systems in the body.
Chemists at Edinburgh University said on Wednesday they had built molecules that can move objects larger than the size of an atom in an advance in the technology that deals with manipulating materials on a minuscule scale.
If nanotech can be harnessed to deliver potentially life-saving drugs to parts of the body, to deal with conditions such as cancer, for example, its impact on health care could be enormous. And knowing a few people who suffer from cancer, including a good friend of long standing, this is a very personal issue for me.
Americans are working on nanotubes. In Germany, they are making artificial diamonds that are tougher and denser than the naturally occurring kind.
Here in Britain, in Somerset to be precise, we are harnessing, as Ananova reports, hamster power:
We’ve often wondered for what purpose exactly hamsters were put upon this earth, and now we know: to charge mobile phones.
Sixteen-year-old Peter Ash, of Somerset, finally cracked this age-old poser after his long-suffering sister complained of pet hamster Elvis scuttling away for hours during his nocturnal exercise wheel regime.
Ash told Ananova: “I thought the wheel could be made to do something useful so I connected a system of gears and a turbine.” He then patched the output to his mobe’s charger and voila! – free hamster energy at around thirty minutes’ talktime for every two hamster wheel minutes.
My thanks to Michael Jennings for emailing me the link to this important news. In his email, he noted the educational angle. Apparently this was a school project, but was not marked very highly.
Surprisingly – and considering all the current moaning about falling exam standards, etc, etc – Ash only got a “C” for this contribution to his GSCE science course and, undoubtedly, a clean-energy future for all our children. Perhaps if he’d knocked together a desktop cold fusion reactor powered by supercharged, neutron-emitting guinea pigs suspended in deuterium gas he might have earned himself an “A”.
To be a bit more serious, I think the real story here is not just a new way to get power, but the fact that nowadays a little bit of power can go a whole lot further than it used to. Hamsters have long had it in them to crank out a dribble of electricity. What is new here, surely, is the “mobe” which makes such good use of it.
Over the weekend, Bill Oddie fronted a TV show about dinosaurs, in which, in order to learn how fast dinosaurs could run, an ostrich called Sharon was asked to run on an exercise machine. She apparently enjoyed doing this a lot. (The point was that ostriches have similar legs to what dinosaurs used to have. Work out how fast and for how long ostriches can run, with their legs, and you can calculate how fast and for how long the dinosaurs could run.) Maybe Sharon and her sisters and brothers could get jobs generating electricity.
Maybe gymnasia could double up as places where you can recharge your phone. By the sweat of your brow, I mean. Not just by handing it in at the desk and collecting it later. That way, you earn the right to spout rubbish over it to your idiot friends.
“Organic farming has been put forward as one of the major pillars of a new, more-sustainable human society that would be “kinder to the earth”. Unfortunately, organic farming cannot deliver on that promise. In fact, organic farming is an imminent danger to the world’s wildlife and hazard to the health of its own consumers.”
Dennis Avery, quoted in Fearing Food, (page 3) by Roger Bate and Julian Morris.
Something for George Moonbat to ponder, I reckon.
Is there anything, anything, now going on in what used to be called, either with delicate euphemism or with a sneer, the “developing world”, but which now really is the developing world, that is more encouraging than the rapid spread throughout said world of portable telephones?
I have just done a piece for the ASI blog about this process in Africa, linking to this New York Times article. And the Private Sector Development blog (whom I have just added to my personal blogroll here), in addition to supplying the same link today, have also linked to of a recent Economist piece on the same subject. Pablo Halkyard also links to this Wall Street Journal piece.
It is not all good news. It never is. Governments all over the place are now demanding extortionate connection taxes, to the point where the tax bill is starting seriously to outweigh what would have been the regular cost. Sounds like those cheap European air tickets that I sometimes buy on the internet for peanuts, where the government then charges me peanuts times four. Nevertheless, even there the news is partly good, because at least some governments are learning that if they cut connection taxes down to something more in line with the extreme cheapness of the service itself, people are more ready to pay such taxes. That is because illegal phones are more likely to go wrong and harder to get mended if they do go wrong. Is the unwillingness of people to pay big taxes good news or is their willingness to pay small taxes bad news? You decide.
The portable phone quote that made me smile the most this morning was this, from the Economist piece:
(Oh, and the “digital divide” vanishes, too.)
I especially like the brackets.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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