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Tag Archive for ars technica

Not For Us

May 14, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Not For Us

http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2015/05/meta-analysis-finds-self-braking-cars-reduce-collisions-by-38-percent/

I’m intimately familiar with programmed responses and how changing the technology that trained them can f*ck you up.  When I started driving, the standard practice was never to slam on your brakes when you got into trouble.  You pumped your brakes.  It kept them from locking up, it made your taillights flash to warn the car behind you.  It helped keep you from locking up all over so that you could continue to react as you slid, in the unstoppable grip of physics, down the roadway to your certain doom.

Then the technology got better.  Cars have computers that take care of the brake management for you (usually) so pumping the brake in most modern cars has become counter intuitive.  It f*ucks up the computer, throws it’s braking off sync.  So now, after decades of pumping the brake, I now have to do the opposite.  I have to stomp ont he brake and hope the computer is smarter than I am (let me point out, I work with computers, so I am intimately familiar with “smart” machines and the misconceptions that go with them).

What they describe here in the Ars Technica article is one step further.  They are discussing systems to handle the braking for the the driver, which means no foot-stomping at all.  That’s an even more drastic change than the one we went through from pump to stomp.

 

 

 

The ultimate in brute-force attacks…

March 18, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The ultimate in brute-force attacks…

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/cutting-edge-hack-gives-super-user-status-by-exploiting-dram-weakness/

 

This here.  This is a bit of out-of-the-box thinking that I admire.  Just a little bit.

The way this attack works is via a hardware hack, see, in this particular class of DIMMS the chips are very close together.  So close together that accessing one repeatedly in just the right place can jump the gap to the next and make a change over there.

It’s the bit-level equivalent of using a double-boiler.  You heat the water on the outside and the transference affects the chocolate on the inside.  (Okay, clumsy metaphor but mmmmmmmm…. chocolate).

At this current stage, it’s probably best used for simply f*cking up the other person’s computer (rather than a full-blown hack), but still, as a thought process, it’s very old-school, using the properties of the hardware itself, rather than trying to get in through the software.