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Public Demo of Emergency Communications June 23rd and 24th |
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| Topic: Current Events |
10:11 pm EDT, Jun 7, 2007 |
Manchester, TN - Thousands of Ham Radio operators will be showing off their emergency capabilities on June 23rd and 24th. Over the past year, the news has been full of reports of ham radio operators providing
critical communications in emergencies world-wide. During Hurricane Katrina, Amateur Radio
often called Ham radio - was often the ONLY way people could communicate, and hundreds of
volunteer hams traveled south to save lives and property. When trouble is brewing, ham radio
people are often the first to provide critical information and communications. On the weekend of June
23rd and 24th, the public will have a chance to meet and talk with these ham radio operators and see for
themselves what the Amateur Radio Service is about. Showing the newest digital and satellite
capabilities, voice communications and even historical Morse code, hams from across the USA will be
holding public demonstrations of emergency communications abilities.
This annual event, called "Field Day" is the climax of the week long "Amateur Radio Week"
sponsored by the ARRL, the National Association for Amateur Radio. Using only emergency power
supplies, ham operators will construct emergency stations in parks, shopping malls, schools and back
yards around the country. Their slogan, "When all else fails" is more than just words to the hams as
they prove they can send messages in many forms without the use of phone systems, internet or any
other infrastructure that can be compromised in a crisis. More than 30,000 amateur radio operators
across the country participated in last year's event.
"We hope that people will come and see for themselves, this is not your grandfather's radio anymore,"
said Allen Pitts of the ARRL. "The communications networks that ham radio people can quickly
create have saved many lives in the past months when other systems failed or were overloaded.
In the Coffee County area, the Middle Tennessee Amateur Radio Society will be demonstrating Amateur Radio
at Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park, on June 23 and 24, 2007. They invite the public to come and see ham radio’s capabilities and learn how to get their own FCC radio license before the next disaster strikes.
There are 660,000 Amateur Radio operators in the US, and more than 2.5 million around the world.
Through the ARRL, ham volunteers provide emergency communications for the DHS Citizens' Corps,
the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, FEMA and thousands of state and local agencies, all for
free.
To learn more about Amateur Radio, go to www.emergency-radio.org. The public is most cordially
invited to come, meet and talk with the hams. See what modern Amateur Radio can do. They can
even help you get on the air!
Check the ARRL website for a club near you. http://www.arrl.org Public Demo of Emergency Communications June 23rd and 24th |
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It Seems to Us: The Field Day Bug |
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| Topic: Current Events |
7:50 pm EDT, Jun 5, 2007 |
Field Day 2007 should be one for the record books! Sunspots may not be cooperating, but every other indicator points toward an outstanding, memorable event. If you have never participated in an ARRL Field Day -- or if it's been a few years since your last outing -- make this the year you join the fun.
Field Day (FD) always falls on the fourth full weekend of June, which makes it the 23rd and 24th this year. Explaining FD brings to mind the old story of the blind men and the elephant; their description varies widely, depending on what part of the beast they touch. If you experience FD with a group of serious competitors who set out to maximize their score, you will think it is a contest. If you go out with your local general-interest radio club, you might think it's a picnic with a bit of radio operating and public relations thrown in. If you are new to Amateur Radio you're likely to view it as a great learning experience, and if you're an old-timer as an opportunity to renew acquaintances and share memories. For all of us, Field Day is an opportunity to pack a lot of Amateur Radio into one weekend -- an opportunity that has become more valuable as our world has gotten busier and operating from home has become more difficult, either for lack or time or because of antenna limitations. FD gives us a chance literally to "head for the hills," preferably as part of a group; it's more fun to share the experience with others, and more rewarding to learn antenna and operating lore from one another. The operating format is to make quick contacts, exchanging your number of transmitters, operating category and ARRL section with other stations. Each station can be contacted once per band (except 60, 30, 17 and 12 meters, which are off limits) and mode (CW, phone, and digital). CW and digital contacts are worth twice as many points as phone, so there is an incentive to be able to do more than just talk (not that good phone operating is easy -- picture an Air Traffic Controller at Atlanta Airport!). While the FD focus is on setting up temporary portable stations operating on emergency power, stay-at-homes and mobiles also can participate. Since 2003 there has been a special category for stations operating from established Emergency Operations Centers. The goal is to show that we can communicate with one another, no matter what, without the need for any infrastructure. This is a capability that we tend to take for granted, but that is increasingly rare -- and increasingly valuable -- as the world becomes ever more dependent on complex telecommunications systems to cope with daily life. Cell phones are ubiquitous these days, and it's natural to rely on them -- but what do we do when they don't work? Most people have no answer to that question. As radio amateurs, we do -- but only if we keep our batteries charged, our equipment ready, and our operating skills honed. So look up your local club and get to it. It is fun and educational... and you don't have to be a ham to come and have fun. Field Day is always the fourth full weekend of June, beginning at 1800 UTC Saturday and ending at 2100 UTC Sunday. Field Day 2007 will be held June 23-24, 2007. It Seems to Us: The Field Day Bug |
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Groups call for competitive spectrum auction |
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| Topic: Current Events |
5:56 pm EDT, Jun 5, 2007 |
New broadband providers should be given a better chance of winning pieces of valuable wireless spectrum to be auctioned by early next year, several groups said Friday. The groups, including Google Inc., startup Frontline Wireless LLC and consumer advocate Public Knowledge, called on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to change the way it auctions spectrum when it sells off 60Mhz of spectrum to be freed up when U.S. television stations move to all-digital broadcasts. We need to have a better choice than big carriers eating up all the spectrum. The airwaves are cramped enough... Groups call for competitive spectrum auction |
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Libby Sentenced to 2 1/2 Years in Prison |
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| Topic: Current Events |
5:52 pm EDT, Jun 5, 2007 |
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison Tuesday for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation - the probe that showed a White House obsessed with criticism of its decision to go to war. Good... Libby Sentenced to 2 1/2 Years in Prison |
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Browns Ferry 3 nuclear power site scrammed |
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| Topic: Current Events |
9:09 pm EDT, May 24, 2007 |
"Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems"
<"Peter G. Neumann"
Tue, 8 May 2007 10:58:28 PDT This is another example of a system environment in which components that
were supposedly not safety related could compromise safety. The case is of
considerable interest to RISKS. On 19 Aug 2006, operators manually scrammed Browns Ferry, Unit 3, following
a loss of both the 3A and 3B reactor recirculation pumps, as required after
the loss of recirculation flow -- which placed the plant in a high-power,
low-flow condition where core thermal hydraulic stability problems may exist
at boiling-water reactors (BWRs). Generally, intentional operation is not
permitted under this condition. Although some BWRs are authorized for
single loop operation, sudden loss of even one pump could present the plant
with the same stability problems and could result in the reactor protection
system initiating a shutdown of the plant. [Source: Effects of
Ethernet-based, Non-safety Related Controls on the Safe and Continued
Operation of Nuclear Power Stations, United States Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, Washington, DC 20555-0001,
17 Apr 2007; PGN-ed, although the following text is abridged but unedited.] The initial investigation into the dual pump trip found that the
recirculation pump variable frequency drive (VFD) controllers were
nonresponsive. The operators cycled the control power off and on, reset the
controllers, and restarted the VFDs. The licensee also determined that the
Unit 3 condensate demineralizer controller had failed simultaneously with
the Unit 3 VFD controllers. The condensate demineralizer primary controller
is a dual redundant programmable logic control (PLC) system connected to the
ethernet-based plant integrated computer system (ICS) network. The VFD
controllers are also connected to this same plant ICS network. Both the VFD
and condensate demineralizer controllers are microprocessor-based utilizing
proprietary software. The licensee determined that the root cause of the event was the malfunction
of the VFD controller because of excessive traffic on the plant ICS network.
Testing by site personnel performed on the VFD controllers confirmed that
the VFD control system is susceptible to failures induced by excessive
network traffic. The threshold levels for failure of the VFD controllers due
to excessive network traffic, as determined by the on-site testing, can be
achieved on the existing 10-megabit/second network. The NRC staff's review
of industry literature and test reports on network device sensitivity, and
the threshold levels for such failures, confirmed these testing results. The
licensee could not conclusively establish whether the failure of the PLC
caused t... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ] Browns Ferry 3 nuclear power site scrammed |
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Networking trouble caused nuke plant to shut down... Lack of firewall may have led to faulty networking code causing the plant's water pumps to fail... |
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| Topic: Current Events |
8:59 pm EDT, May 24, 2007 |
Water pumps need firewalls too. That's what operators of the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA's) Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant discovered last August when they were forced to manually shut down one of their plant's two reactors after networking problems caused two water pumps to fail and threatened the stability of the plant itself. On Aug. 19 2006, operators found themselves in a potentially dangerous "high power, low flow condition," when one of the plant's two operating reactors was not recirculating enough water to properly cool itself, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said in a note sent to operators last month. Operators were forced to perform a "manual scram," or shutdown of the plant. Built in 1974 in northern Alabama, Browns Ferry was once the world's largest nuclear reactor. Although the Browns Ferry incident wasn't anywhere close to a nuclear meltdown, it was a serious situation, said Eric Byres, CEO of Byres Security, in Nanaimo, British Columbia. "They realized that their recirculation system wasn't working and they were in danger of something undesirable happening," said Byres, an expert in industrial systems security who was consulted on the matter. The cause of the pump's failures? "Excessive traffic" on the closed Ethernet network used by the plant's control systems, the NRC said. The NRC report said the origin of this excessive traffic was unclear, but Byres suspects that the problem was due to faulty networking code the controllers used by the plant's recirculation pumps. They may have suffered from the same well-documented networking flaw that has taken down similar systems in food processing, steel, and pulp plants in the past, Byres said. "I'm personally aware of at least a dozen incidents at this point that relate to this particular fault," he said. Although he declined to name the manufacturer of this product, Byres said that it has a known bug that can cause a crash by generating too much networking traffic. "It's like the loud guy at the bar standing at the table," he said. "It kind of cuts down on the ability of everyone else to have a decent conversation." After the incident, Browns Ferry's operators began developing firewalls for the different controllers on their network as well as a network firewall device to limit the traffic between devices within the plant's internal network, the NRC said. Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives believe that more should be done, however. Last week Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-Miss.), and James Langevin, (D-Rhode Island), wrote the chairman of the NRC expressing their concern that the Browns Ferry failure may have been due to an outside attack. "Without a thorough, independent review of the logs and associated data, the assumption that this incident is not an outside attack is unjustifiable," they wrote. Byres agreed that a more thorough investigation would be useful. "It's unfortunate that they didn't dig in further," he said. "These types of glitches are well known." Virtually no control systems use firewalls at present, although that is starting to change, Byres said. "The idea is still in its infancy, but -- particularly in the oil and gas industry -- there's starting to be a lot of interest in doing this sort of defense-in-depth," he said. Water-pump firewalls are coming none too soon, Byres believes. "The secretary at that nuclear plant has a firewall on her desktop, but we'll put a [control system] out there that's absolutely mission-critical and that has absolutely no protection on it." WTF? Networking trouble caused nuke plant to shut down... Lack of firewall may have led to faulty networking code causing the plant's water pumps to fail... |
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FRONTLINE: Spying on the Homefront |
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| Topic: Current Events |
10:46 pm EDT, May 15, 2007 |
"Is the Bush administration's domestic war on terrorism jeopardizing Americans' civil liberties?" I just watched this on PBS and I have to say it is really sad to see the USA turning into a 'police state'. What really makes me question all of this is the lawsuit against AT&T http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/ ) and the recent merger of AT&T and Bell-South. If AT&T is in cohorts with the NSA to do a domestic dragnet style spying on Americans, now it could be done with greater simplicity to local data and phone traffic. Also when the government officials were questioned on this or that they all kept saying "...in this program," in reference to domestic spying on Americans. Am I the only one annoyed (to put it lightly) by all this "plausible deniability-ish" like comments off the lips of the very people who were elected into abide by the law not break it? The video will be online tomorrow and transcript will be up in a week. I would like readers to watch and comment on this as it is something I am interested in and want to know what you think.... FRONTLINE: Spying on the Homefront |
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'Grandpa Munster' dead - Feb 5, 2006 |
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| Topic: Current Events |
9:15 am EST, Feb 6, 2006 |
The actor was widely reported to have been born in 1910 -- which would have made him 95 or 96 -- but his son Ted Lewis said Saturday that his father was born in 1923. Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared. "To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement," White said. Lewis, sporting a somewhat cheesy Dracula outfit, became a pop culture icon playing the irascible father-in-law to Fred Gwynne's ever-bumbling Herman Munster on the 1964-66 television show. He was also one of the stars of another classic TV comedy, playing Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?" (Watch scenes from Lewis' life -- :41) But Lewis' life off the small screen ranged far beyond his acting antics. A former ballplayer at Thomas Jefferson High School, he achieved notoriety as a basketball talent scout familiar to coaching greats like Jerry Tarkanian and Red Auerbach. He operated a successful Greenwich Village restaurant, Grandpa's, where he was a regular presence -- chatting with customers, posing for pictures, signing autographs. A ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate against incumbent Gov. George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as "Grandpa Al Lewis." He didn't defeat Pataki, but managed to collect more 52,000 votes. Lewis was born Alexander Meister in upstate New York before his family moved to Brooklyn, where the 6-foot-1 teen began a lifelong love affair with basketball. He later became a vaudeville and circus performer, but his career didn't take off until television did the same. Lewis, as Officer Schnauzer, played opposite Gwynne's Officer Francis Muldoon in "Car 54, Where Are You?" -- a comedy about a Bronx police precinct that aired from 1961-63. One year later, the duo appeared together in "The Munsters," taking up residence at the fictional 1313 Mockingbird Lane. The series, about a family of clueless creatures plunked down in middle America, was a success and ran through 1966. It forever locked Lewis in as the memorably twisted character; decades later, strangers would greet him on the street with shouts of "Grandpa!" Unlike some television stars, Lewis never complained about getting typecast and made appearances in character for decades. "Why would I mind?" he asked in a 1997 interview. "It pays my mortgage." Lewis rarely slowed down, opening his restaurant and hosting his WBAI radio program. At one point during the '90s, he was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show, once sending the shock jock diving for the delay button by leading an undeniably obscene chant against the Federal Communications Commission. He also popped up in a number of movies, including the acclaimed "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "Married to the Mob." Lewis reprised his role of Schnauzer in the movie remake of "Car 54," and appeared as a guest star on television shows such as "Taxi," "Green Acres" and "Lost in Space." But in 2003, Lewis was hospitalized for an angioplasty. Complications during surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee and all the toes on his left foot. Lewis spent the next month in a coma. A year later, he was back offering his recollections of a seminal punk band on the DVD "Ramones Raw." He is survived by his wife, Karen Ingenthron-Lewis, three sons and four grandchildren.
'Grandpa Munster' dead - Feb 5, 2006 |
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Sony/ BMG Now Accused of Copyright Infringement! |
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| Topic: Current Events |
3:18 am EST, Dec 27, 2005 |
Sony's recent debacle with the DRM is not going to die a quiet death. It seems that the code that Sony used to protect it's cd's from being copied contains copy protected code, at least that is what Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon contends. Finnish software developer Matti Nikki, has uncovered multiple components of the DRM software that reference LAME open source MP3 code Code in the LAME application is licensed under the lessser GNU General Public Licence (LGPL).
Kinda old news but still shows who talks and who walks.... Sony/ BMG Now Accused of Copyright Infringement! |
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Gray Line to Offer Katrina Tours |
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| Topic: Current Events |
8:54 pm EST, Dec 24, 2005 |
Gray Line New Orleans will begin giving visitors a closeup look next month at Hurricane Katrina's damage in New Orleans. Like gawkers at a highway accident, tourists will get a first-hand look at America's worst catastrophe.
According to the company, participants will get an eyewitness account of the events surrounding the most devastating natural disaster on American soil. The company's promotional material promises...
Read on.... This is just sick .... Gray Line to Offer Katrina Tours |
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