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| 0743294319
| 9780743294317
| 0743294319
| 3.75
| 206
| 2007
| Sep 18, 2007
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it was amazing
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The effect of Sputnik on the United States was electrifying. I was about 10 at the time. As it happened, we were on the 2nd and last year of our sojou
The effect of Sputnik on the United States was electrifying. I was about 10 at the time. As it happened, we were on the 2nd and last year of our sojourn in Germany where my father was researching at the University of Heidelberg. The effect there was minimal, but from what I’ve read since, everyone in the U.S. was horrified at the pity shown to the United States, now clearly in a distant 2nd place. There is no doubt it had a substantial impact on the presidential election in 1960 along with the non-existent missile gap. The author begins with Soviet initiatives, but most of the book, which covers but a year up through 1958, is devoted to American political in-fighting and initiatives. It was former Nazi rocket scientists like Werner Von Braun(1) and his German colleagues who created their own little enclave near Huntsville, Alabama, that gave the U.S. an edge. Aside from the interesting technical details, D’Antonio provides a broad picture of life in the fifties and especially the cultural changes that were wrought by enormous sums of money poured into places like Cape Canaveral and Huntsville; places that had been mere backwaters exploded into rapidly expanding subdivisions with concomitant increases in real estate values. Sputnik had enormous policy and cultural implications and changes. Soon, in the guise of protecting America from the Red Menace, every group imaginable from the NEA and National Science Foundation, to politicians who wanted more money for their districts, to weapons manufacturers, to the Air Force and Army at loggerheads on which service was to control missiles, was clamoring for huge increases in the federal budget for their projects. Articles in the press, naively drawing on PR the Soviets were putting out, talked about Russian nuclear trains, ships, airplanes and satellites. So, not only was there a missile gap (ironically thanks to the U-2 Eisenhower knew this was a chimera)(2), but a science gap, and education gap, a you-name-it-gap, and anyone who suggested otherwise had to be a Commie. People who formerly had been unalterably opposed to federal support for local education, now changed their tune and bellied up to the trough. Eisenhower was in a touch position. He warned of the military-industrial symbiosis, but the political pressure from both sides was just too much. In the meantime, rocket launches at Cape Canaveral were beset with all sorts of failures, some spectacularly public, others seemingly mundane. In one case, because some special paper had been loaded backwards into the printer, the results appeared to be the opposite of what was good, and the missile was destroyed fearing it would go off course or explode uncontrollably. PR became crucial in the battle between the Army, Air Force and later NASA for control of rocketry. Eisenhower was anxious to have civilian control of space, while the military and people like Edward Teller were anxious to dominate the Russians using military control of space. The perception was the Russians were ahead and they clearly had more powerful rockets, but that dominance vanished quickly. This was the time of Public Relations. Edward Bernays had revolutionized how we view control of consent, and his book Crystallizing Public Opinion and Engineering Of Consent became bibles of the industry. I will have to read them. It’s astonishing today to see what they got away with in the fifties in the name of science. Project Argos, for example, exploded low-yield high altitude nuclear weapons in space to determine the effect of radiation on all sorts of things, but the main objective was to study the Christofilos Effect hoping that it would be possible to protect against a Soviet nuclear attack by exploding nuclear bombs high over the Pacific. The idea was to create a barrier of electrons that would fry the electronics of Soviet warheads, and possibly also to blind Soviet radar to a U.S. counter-attack. I suppose one could argue the tests were a great success because we learned it wouldn't work. It was all terribly secret, of course. A truly fascinating look into the culture and history of the U.S., and to some extent Soviet, space race. (1) Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990. St Martins Press, 1991. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (2) Beschloss, M. (2016). Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 affair. Open Road Media. Jacobsen, Annie. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown, 2014. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 31, 2023
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Apr 21, 2023
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Mar 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0316758469
| 9780316758468
| 0316758469
| 4.18
| 701
| Nov 10, 2010
| Nov 10, 2010
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it was amazing
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Coram begins the begins his hagiography with an explanation of why Americans have an almost mythic view of the Marine Corps, a service that was close
Coram begins the begins his hagiography with an explanation of why Americans have an almost mythic view of the Marine Corps, a service that was close to extinction by the turn of the 20th century -- before Belleau Woods. The American Expeditionary Force under General Pershing was sent quickly to France to bail out the exhausted British and French. Ludendorf, the German General, was about to deliver a hammer blow in an attempt to break through the trench lines and reach Paris. Pershing had forbidden war correspondents from identifying individual Army units, but left an inadvertent loophole with the Marines. The Army despised the Marines, wondering why they even existed as a separate command. At Belleau Woods, however, the Marines, identified as such by Floyd Gibbons, the only correspondent, to go with them, magnificently held off and beat a substantially larger force of Germans, and soon all anyone could talk about was the glorious Marines. Krulak was a Marine. How he got there was quite interesting, but inauspicious. He was a Jew (non-practicing who lied about his background--antisemitism was rife with signs on establishments reading, "no dogs or jews"), short (5'4"), been married (it lasted but 16 days before being annulled as both he and the bride lied about their names), lied about his age, and failed the entrance exam the first time. So why Annapolis? One reason was that his father realized that graduating from the Naval Academy would open many doors for his son. At the academy, because of some "commercial" activity, expressly forbidden by Academy rules, he racked up a huge number of demerits, but thanks to his friendship and mentor, an instructor (and unrequited racist and anti-semite, but then that was the Marine ethos of the time), made it through. Krulak had invented an entire backstory for his biography wholly at odds with his Cheyenne, WY and Jewish reality. Had the Navy known of that fiction he probably would not have made it. Ever since the British debacle at Gallipoli, it had become standard doctrine that amphibious landings were obsolete and would never be part of future actions. The Ellis Report, part of War Plan Orange, presciently predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the island hopping strategy that made winning the war in the Pacific possible. That strategy required a multitude of amphibious landings but the Navy had no craft that would work. Krulak was to be instrumental in fixing that. He and his pregnant wife had been posted to Shanghai, where, in 1937, he took the initiative to watch the Japanese amphibious landings in their conquest of the Chinese mainland. He was stunned to see the radical design of their landing craft and realized the flat-bottomed, ramp-equipped boats were just what the Navy needed. He whipped off a report (he was still a lowly 1st Lieutenant) to Washington anticipating swift action on their designing and building similar craft. The optimism of youth. The story of the development of the famous landing craft and the role played by Krulak and, in particular, by a Louisiana boat builder named Higgins, is fascinating. Both Higgins and Krulak had to overcome Navy inertia and bureaucracy to get the boats built and approved. ( seeThe Boat That Won the War: An Illustrated History of the Higgins LCVP by Charles Roberts, Jr.) Inter-service rivalry also played a part and the Navy never did adopt the design. It was all Marines. Without the mentorship of General Holland Smith, whom Krulak knew from the Academy, however, he probably would have been drummed out of the Corps years before. He was later instrumental in developing tactics for the nascent Marine helicopter program. Krulak was prominent participant in the inter-service rivalries following WW II and I was surprised at the vicious enmity that existed between the Army, which tried to get the Marines disbanded and molded into the Army, and even the Navy, envious of their reputation. The Marines never forgave the Navy for deserting them at Guadacanal. One might make a case that some of the "Chowder Gang's" (the name given to the Krulak led opposition to unifying the services) actions bordered on insubordination in their efforts to thwart Truman's wishes. He was, after all, the Commander -in-Chief. Krulak's certitude in himself spilled over into his treatment of their children, the eldest of whom described their childhood as resembling that of the Great Santini. Reading this book, it's impossible not to come away with the feeling that the Marines won WW I, the Pacific in WW II, and Korea and that Krulak personally saved the Marines from the Marine-hating Army. Then again, Truman, got into a lot of trouble for complaining that the Marines had a propaganda campaign to rival Stalin's. Perhaps he was right. P.S. My granddaughter was a Marine M.P. ...more |
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not set
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Mar 12, 2022
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Mar 12, 2022
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Hardcover
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| B08WK73TZR
| 4.27
| 383
| unknown
| Oct 26, 2021
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it was amazing
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In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk
In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk replied, "Well, the people. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" This book is about a specific case, but it's also about much more, an indictment of the current patent system. Myriad Genetics, a company held the patents on two key genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Everyone has those genes, but women with certain mutations in their BRCA genes face much higher risks of breast or ovarian cancer. Through its patents, Myriad had essentially cornered the market on BRCA testing. The company charged more than $3,000 for a test, and insurers didn’t always cover it. Some women weren’t able to get tested because they couldn’t afford it. And the problem went beyond cost: One woman who joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff tested positive for a BRCA mutation but before undergoing surgical removal of her ovaries wanted a second opinion; because of Myriad’s patents, no other lab could confirm the diagnosis. The Association for Molecular Pathology along with several other medical associations, doctors and patients sued the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office and Myriad Genetics to challenge several patents related to human genetics. The suit also challenged several method patents covering diagnostic screening for the genes. Myriad argued that once a gene is isolated, and therefore distinguishable from other genes, it could be patented. By patenting the genes, Myriad had exclusive control over diagnostic testing and further scientific research for the BRCA genes. Petitioners spearheaded by the ACLU, argued that patenting those genes violated the Patent Act because they were products of nature. They also argued that the patents limit scientific progress. Section §101 limits patents to "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." The district court granted summary judgment in favor of petitioners, holding that isolating a gene does not alter its naturally occurring fundamental qualities. (Judge Robert Sweet was ably assisted by his clerk who had an advanced degree in the bio-sciences. Sweey's opinion is worth reading as a clear exposition of both the science and the legal aspects of the case. You can read it here**.) The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (specializing in patent cases, it was known as the "nerd's" court) reversed, holding that isolated genes are chemically distinct from their natural state in the human body. In March 2012, Petitioners sought certiorari; and in light of Mayo Collective Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Federal Circuit judgment and remanded, i.e., sent it back for further consideration On remand, the Federal Circuit again upheld the patentability of the BRCA genes. Again appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that genes were not patentable although cDNA was, as it was not a product of nature. The case was unusual in that the Solicitor General's Office took a position in opposition to that of the Patent Office which had declared that since they had permitted patenting of genes already, to reverse that would just mess up previously decided cases. That the SG's office did so, was the result of compromise worked out by many agencies brought together at the behest of Obama to determine what the position of the government should be. (It's worth remembering that Obama's mother had died of ovarian cancer at 56, fighting insurance companies until her death, and his grandmother died of breast cancer.) The compromise was orchestrated by Mark Freeman who serves a gold star for bringing such disparate parties together. It's also notable that Francis Collins, NIH director was adamantly opposed to gene patenting. He had been a co-worker with Mary Kelly and Mark Skolnick in isolating and linking the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations to breast and ovarian cancers. Skolnick had recognized the monetary potential in their discovery and founded Myriad genetics, over the opposition of Kelly and Collins, which monopolized BRCA testing and made lost of money. There are some very appealing characters: Lori Andrews, the "Gene Queen" an attorney who was upset with the patenting of a test for Canavan Disease; Michael Crighton, whose book Next and NYT op-eds laid some of the public groundwork for the court cases; Dan Ravicher, a successful patent attorney who became disillusioned with the way patents were destroying innovation and who formed his own public interest firm to challenge patents; Tania Simoncelli, the individual most responsible for getting the ACLU interested in gene-patenting; and Chris Hansen, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the court. A very interesting read that raises all sorts of bioethical, medical, economic, and legal issues. **https://patentlyo.com/media/docs/2010... ...more |
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Mar 07, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0385542585
| 9780385542586
| 0385542585
| 4.13
| 1,675
| Aug 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
|
it was amazing
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Veritas in Latin translates as "truth". Sabar has written a detailed and fascinating book about how that was achieved in the case of a papyrus fragmen
Veritas in Latin translates as "truth". Sabar has written a detailed and fascinating book about how that was achieved in the case of a papyrus fragment that had a series of words that could be interpreted to suggest that Jesus was married (ala DaVinci Code -- a fun book, btw.). Sabar's story contains confirmation bias, hubris, amateur scholars v. professional scholars, and academic jealousies. Truths might take a while to get into the Ivory Tower but they do make it eventually. The temptation to read a concept into something because it matches an agenda we already subscribe to is an overwhelming temptation. Karen King, esteemed professor in the Divinity School at Harvard, fell victim to a forged papyrus that could (! not necessarily) have suggested Jesus had a wife. (That it's much more likely he was gay, given his predilection for hanging out with guys, has been suspected in other quarters.) Nevertheless, this scrap of papyrus was a dream come true for King who had argued the Church's position on women was all wrong. The story is fascinating. Two amateur Coptic scholars, one an atheist, when they had a chance to look at the fragment, realized the translation and wording was lifted verbatim from the Gospel of Thomas and the translation of the word for "my" most likely had a different meaning anyway. Other professional scholars also revealed doubts although their argument that the grammar was inappropriate for the time period didn't convince me. All you have to do is watch television or listen to conversations on the street and you will quickly realize how perverted colloquial grammar can become. Words like notorious, infamous, and famous have all become synonymous, ruining any former subtleties, not to mention confusion of ran and run, nor the infamous "he gave it to you and I" which sends shivers down my Strunk and White. (If you don't know what Strunk and White is, then you're part of the problem.) Not to mention the total destruction of the past tense by the historical present. End of rant. Sabar had followed the story from the beginning and it was his article in the Atlantic that reopened the furor. He had taken the time to track down the origin of the fragment and doggedly sleuthed out the seller of the fragment, something King most assuredly should have done. Along the way, Sabar discusses the history of our attitudes toward marriage and Augustine's obsession with sex as well as the non-canonical Gospels. It all provides very appropriate context. In the end I don't damn King as much as others have in the media. We ALL suffer from confirmation bias and her case is simply confirmation of how powerful it can be. (Puns intended.) ...more |
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not set
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Dec 07, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1681771543
| 9781681771540
| 1681771543
| 3.98
| 635
| Jun 11, 2015
| Jul 04, 2016
|
it was amazing
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One of the most overlooked parts of the Muller report is the detailed information the FBI, et al., collected on Russian interference in the 2016 elec
One of the most overlooked parts of the Muller report is the detailed information the FBI, et al., collected on Russian interference in the 2016 election. They determined the names and location of the GRU officers and cyberspies who conducted the operation, what they did and how they did it. It was an extraordinary piece of sleuthing. Cyberspies places all this in historical context. This book has something for everyone: history, spying, and interesting characters. While he argues that "hacking" using technology has a long history dating back millennia, he chose to begin with the cutting of German cables on the ocean floor during WW I. Leaping-frogging rather quickly he then begins with the use of computers (people, those who computed) and especially Flowers and Turing who respectively understood the larger picture and how "valves" (vacuum tubes in American) could be used binarily to process data. Along the way, he tries to answer questions of what cyber spying is, how such developed and its impact in today’s world politically, economically, and in the intelligence communities. An ambitious goal indeed.i.e. There are two key components to the world of spies: attribution, i.e. can you trace back a decision or instruction to its source; and integrity, the accuracy of the data, for getting just one component of a message wrong could mean sending a missile to the wrong target. Scrambling a message so it can't be read by the unauthorized is an inherent part of spycraft and technology has made all of that both easier and more difficult at the same time. “Few outside the intelligence world understand the extent to which spies in the US and Britain perceive technology as an existential threat to their work,” Corera writes. “An arms race is on between spy services to exploit technology. Only those who adapt will survive.” Spying has more than just military significance. The Russians and others have taken economic espionage to a new level. Collecting information peripherally is important. The author provides an example of Russian trolling for information about a particular executive whom the intelligence services had determined was gay but not out of the closet. “The hackers then sent him an email from a gay rights organization which they suspected he would open since it looked as if it was sent to him, but in fact held malware,” Corera writes. “They then counted on the fact that, even if the executive did suspect it was malware, he would not be willing to go to his company’s IT department or security team for fear it would reveal his sexuality. This is classic, high level, targeted Russian espionage.” There's intelligence and then there's information. Spying in common parlance conjures up images of dangerous men with guns in tuxedos in scary situations who can leap tall buildings in a single jump. Or the silent bureaucratic types of Le Carre. The author has a wonderful metaphor for the difference in how spying is done by different countries. Let's say you want to find out what kind of sand is on a particular beach in some foreign country. The UK would send a submarine with divers in wet suits (bow ties and suits underneath) to surreptitiously retrieve a sample of sand from the beach. The Americans would use technology to and fly satellites, drones, and planes over the area to take lots of pictures. The Chinese would send tourists to the country to have a good time, visit the beaches, and then shake out their towels when they got home. It's a comprehensive look at how spying developed, including the misconceptions about what spying is and its development over time into not just military purposes uses but economic, as well. Corera includes a detailed history and an examination of how cyber spying was affected by the revelations of the collection of data by government agencies by Snowden, and suggestions on what the future of cyber spying and offensive actions may hold for us. It's organized in a logical chronological way and intricate cyber threats and attacks are explained clearly. The scale of cyber espionage has evolved way beyond the wildest dreams of a former Stasi officer who noted their maximum capability was to tap forty lines at once. Now, given that almost all of the world’s internet traffic flows at some time or another through the United States, the NSA, with its sweeping authority and collection devices, has access to everything. Worried about public encryption keys, they sweep up and store ALL of the telephone traffic in the U.S. and many other places arguing they don’t listen to the content but merely search the metadata attached to digital traffic. And since even analog conversations get converted to digital at some point, that’s everything. Metadata is easy to search and often more revealing than content. In their search to build an even larger haystack (you can’t find the needle without the haystack) they even resorted to techniques even aside from the famous clipper chip debacle. In one instance, discovered by Kaspersky Labs, they arranged to have malware hidden into DVDs that were given to participants of hacker and security conferences attended by analysts from all around the world that contained records and presentations of the conference. This gave them worldwide access to computers run by the most sensitive personnel. Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s spying capabilities had less affect on national security than it did on business. It’s hard to maintain a global outreach and increase your revenue if it becomes widely known that anything you do using the company’s products will become NSA fodder. Zuckerberg, in particular, was furious after the revelations, complaining to Obama that his business model was being hurt. Screw national security; you’re hurting our business, was the message. 1984 doesn’t even remotely compare to today’s capabilities. Some reviewers have complained that a weakness of the book is its specialization and detail; that's what I liked. Unfortunately, the world changes so fast that more recent events are obviously not included. Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg fills that gap and should also be read. Overall a fascinating glimpse at the evolution of the new cyber world. N.B. Years ago I read Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (1990) (how the author tracked down a spy ring because he wanted to know how and why 75 cents of computer time was unaccounted for.) Stoll is highlighted for his work in this book. Stoll also wrote (in 1996) a prescient view of the problems inherent in the Internet: Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway . For a truly prescient view of the problems with interconnectivity written in 1955, see a SF masterpiece by Thomas Ryan, The Adolescence of P-1 ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 17, 2021
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Sep 15, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0399562192
| 9780399562198
| B07JD1JDF9
| 3.95
| 972
| Jul 09, 2019
| Jul 09, 2019
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really liked it
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I lived through all of the monumental changes described in this fascinating book, yet much of the politics and inside information had totally escaped
I lived through all of the monumental changes described in this fascinating book, yet much of the politics and inside information had totally escaped me. I was surprised at the monumental role Stanford University played in the foundation of Silicon Valley. As money poured out of the federal government to support all sorts of military projects during the hot war and then the cold, the university moved to become an engineering school, to the consternation of the Humanities faculty. They developed one of the first research parks, that became a magnet for tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and many others. They were fortunate to have a huge land grant from their founder, some 9,000 acres, that was becoming prime land worth a fortune. Tech companies were thrilled to have top engineers at the university whose motto was becoming turning that intellectual capital into engineering real products, at that time mostly military. Stanford also became the home of the Hoover Institute (Herbert had spent the last few decades of his life there) lavishly supported by Packard one of the original occupants of the research park. A strong proponent of free market capitalism and anti-Communism they were myopic in refusing to see how the government through military grants and contracts was its own form of Marxism. The Valley was also lily white. It was populated almost exclusively by men in white shirts and thin ties who had engineering degrees. Even the blue-collar workers in the assembly plants were close to 100% male and white. Meanwhile, progress was being made on interconnecting people to mainframes, along with the development of mini computers like those made by DEC. Without the earthshaking FCC decision of 1968, however, most of that would have remained small. The CarterFone was invented by Thomas Carter, a Texas rancher who needed some way to communicate with the employees on the vast expanses of his ranch. It was a device that connected the standard AT&T telephone set to a wireless radio. He may have gotten the idea from phone patches used by Amateur Radio operators (I am WB9VEG and used to entertain the kids while traveling by using my equipment to call a phone patch and then connect to the local phone network to call relatives thus avoiding toll calls; it was a precursor to car phones, all made obsolete by cell phones.) in the early sixties. His invention worked well but Ma Bell insisted that only equipment they made could be connected to their network so they sued. (Hams had been frowned on but were such a small community and experimental they were probably ignored.) Carter fought back and in 1968 the FCC ruled that AT&T could not have a monopoly on equipment and third parties could connect different devices to the network. The Carterfone looked a lot like the phone modems we used to connect to in the eighties to send digital signals over the networks that became the internet. It converted digital signals into analog and vice versa. This ruling unleashed a tidal wave of innovation and progress that would never have happened without that ruling. (The story of the Carterfone is really interesting and more can be found at https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cg....) Venture capitalists played a huge role in building the area. For women, many of whom had been "computers" during and following the war, so it wasn't a question of skill or knowledge, there was no support, mostly because they virtually did not exist. It was a white, male dominated world. The boys all knew each other, had gone to school together, thought the same way, and supported each other. There were four other factors that provided a fertile ground for the technology explosion: cheap land, changes in the immigration law, non-enforcement of non-compete clauses, and the development of a high quality education system. Cheap land is self-evident. The sweeping changes under Johnson in the sixties removed the old quota system by country and made merit and skills the primary determinant for entry into the U.S. The technology centers profited immensely as bright, determined, and skilled immigrants flooded the U.S. Governors Pat Brown and Earl Warren, of opposite parties, both believed education was important to growth and the system they developed was soon the envy of the world and provided Silicon Valley with a steady stream of well-educated recruits. The factor that surprised me was that California was virtually the only state that would not enforce non-compete clauses. This meant that engineers could jump ship and start their own little company using the skills and knowledge they had acquired at their previous company. This created an incredibly competitive and productive and fast-growing environment that produced new technologies almost overnight. One quibble is the emphasis on hardware development when I think the most important part of technological advances came from software. Just as Visicalc provided the impetus for businesses to acquire personal computers, the development of LANs and GUIs moved controlled out of the MIS departments into the personal realm, although as we now have seen, in the corporate and educational spheres connectivity is now back in the hands of IT. It's also important to recognize that without the massive infusions of government money almost all of the development would have gone nowhere. Very enjoyable read. ...more |
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Jul 24, 2020
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Jul 24, 2020
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ebook
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| 1594206015
| 9781594206016
| 1594206015
| 4.06
| 1,069
| May 19, 2020
| May 19, 2020
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it was amazing
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As it happens, I just ran across an article pertinent to this book and review: https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyber-budget-shows-what-us-values%E2%80%94a
As it happens, I just ran across an article pertinent to this book and review: https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyber-budget-shows-what-us-values%E2%80%94and-it-isnt-defense Ironically, Gellman was not the first choice for Snowden to use as a conduit for the extraordinary information he had gleaned from the NSA related to their surveillance of U.S.citizens. Glenn Greenwald had ignored Snowden's tentative approach, all cloaked with great secrecy, of course. Gellman's description of the techniques he used to hide what he was doing was fascinating by itself. What did Snowden reveal? The NSA's stated goal is to collect and process everything, all communications. They have a huge volume problem. They try to filter out the junk and ignore the spam, but sophisticated opposition has realized that spam can be used to hide messages. They look for anything with lists, address books connected to individual accounts, to build sophisticated social network analysis. A lot of digital traffic moves through the United States making the NSA's job easier. Even a phone call from Spain to Colombia may be routed through the U.S. Fears of Chinese dominance through Huawei may be justified. The NSA has legal coercive powers to force communications entities to turn over anything they ask for. So if they are denied access in the U.S., they simply go to one of the social network technologies centers in another country and get it from there. General Hayden former NSA Director justified the sweeping collection of data by saying that "you can't find a needle in a haystack without the haystack." But just as it would be useful to search every house on the block to find something doesn't mean you should be allowed to do it. Gellman insists that Snowden's revelations did more good than harm but he cocedes that some harm may have been done. The Communications system is so complicated and intertwined that Snowden insists that many processes the NSA had in place change and don't work any more simply based on changes to the communications infrastructure that had nothing to do with Snowden. Firmware gets updated, hardware and software changed, so much of their success must rely on mistakes made by others and the capabilities are constantly being changed. Perhaps an irony of Snowdon's actions is that he revealed how poor the NSA was at keeping its own secrets. We have learned since that the NSA "lost" many very sophisticated hacking tools, which were later used to wreck substantial damage around the world when modified slightly by malicious hackers. Another irony is that some of the NSA's biggest defenders and Snowden's antagonists have done a 360 since Trump and his tyrannical postures have been revealed. Government can't be trusted and the president has no interest in any legal restraints on his power. Jim Clapper who originally wanted Gellman arrested now questions whether there are enough restraints in place to prevent abuse. The Internet is far more secure than it was before the revelations and even some national security types and James Comey said to the author that Snowden did more good than harm. Gellman met many times with Snowden and the section on their relationship is fascinating. How they communicated, how trust changed and morphed. Snowden is a man of very strong principles and a zealot, perhaps overly confident in his own rightness. An autodidact, he's very well and widely read so discussions would range over many areas. Ultimately, Snowden got stuck in Moscow because the U.S. canceled his passport hoping to keep him in Hong Kong but he was already on a plane intending to transfer in Moscow for elswhere, but when they landed the authorities said he could not leave because his passport was no longer valid. Gellman suffered no legal consequences for publishing the Snowden material, and in an interview on Lawfare, Gellman makes the distinction between espionage and reporting. The spy seeks out information that he wants to keep secret and to use that information to harm his adversary. The journalist, on the other hand seeks to make the information public to encourage debate as to whether his society wants to approve and continue certain actions. That kind of debate is essential in a free and democratic society. Much of the distrust for government stems from Watergate and Vietnam during which it became clear that government was lying to the public to prevent them from know what their government was doing. Snowden's revelations have not assuaged that distrust. ...more |
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Jun 2020
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Jun 01, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 9781250221841
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| Jun 16, 2020
| Jun 16, 2020
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it was amazing
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My thanks to NetGalley for the pestering me to read this book before it became generally available. It's a fascinating glimpse into the very few soldi
My thanks to NetGalley for the pestering me to read this book before it became generally available. It's a fascinating glimpse into the very few soldiers charged with operating what we used to call "Star Wars" defense system. Developed mostly under Bush II, they are highly trained in a system that, if it doesn't work in a real attack, would submit the country to nuclear devastation. The threat, as it evolved in the early 21st century, was seen mostly as coming from North Korea that vacillated between belligerence and seeking respect, both aspects leading them to the belief that a nuclear arsenal was the only way to satisfy both aims. Fort Greeley in Alaska was reinstated as the base for the Missile Defense unit. It was about an unhospitable as one could imagine. It had been an active base during the sixties but then abandoned. Housing for families was virtually non-existent and soldiers had to commute by small airplane to Anchorage (a very scary proposition) when they had time off, of which there was little. Another concern was the rumor that the army had forgotten to take a pallet of VX gas artillery shells off the frozen Blueberry lake one winter and it went to the bottom during the spring melt. To quell rumors of its existence, the army drained the lake only to discover the rumor was true and the extremely toxic chemical weapon was indeed found at the bottom of the lake. The author doesn't say how they were disposed of. Maybe they let kids play with them. Integrating base security with those residing on base in such a relatively small area led to a funny concern. The MPs would drive around the base perimeter with .50 calier machine guns on their vehicles. “Sir, we have TWIGs driving around with .50 -cals,” Kiraly warned the battalion’s executive officer, Wayne Hunt. Teenagers with Guns— TWIGs. “A .50-cal will range into the garrison, right next to the missile field,” Kiraly said . “What if there’s something in the wire, and they shoot into the housing area? It’s only a couple hundred meters.” TWIGS indeed. A different set of TWIGS was in charge of sophisticated interceptor missiles. I would not want to have been stationed at Fort Greeley where they kept diffing up canisters of things that scared the crap out of the disposal teams. The EOD guys stopped laughing once they got to the canister and looked up the numbers on the data plate. There were some frantic radio calls and Scott and Marrero were ordered to leave. They never found out why. Soon afterward, while the MPs were clearing the woods away from the perimeter to build a new headquarters facility, they stumbled upon a buried batch of old Chinese mortars. And after that, contractors were digging new telephone lines near the fort’s chapel, and about five feet down they unearthed a large sealed drum. Scott and his patrol were ordered to guard the drum until EOD arrived the next day. He never found out what was in it." Hope they didn't buy their kids shovels for birthdays. The book has excellent chapters on the history and development of anti-missile missile systems. They had their beginning with attempts to shoot down V2 rockets, but the excessive amounts of shrapnel would have injured more on the ground than the rockets themselves which were ultimately rendered harmless following Montgomery's destruction of the launch sites. With the development of Soviet ICBM capability Kennedy was at first a fan of the Nike Zeus program that had evolved into the Nike-X system. It never had a chance for live testing as McNamara and Johnson believed the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario was the best deterrent and that continued development of any anti-missile defense system could be seen as destabilizing parity. All throughout this period, scientists debated whether such a system was even technologically feasible, not to mention the political debate over where to install the systems, i.e. which cities warranted protection and which not. Administrations waffled on whether deployment was in the best interests until Reagan who wanted a bargaining chip in negotiations and he took what was now called "Star Wars" to a new level. That never went anywhere technically and it was gradually shelved until 9/11 when Congress was willing to fund anything that even hinted at defense. By now, the technology had morphed into "hit-and-kill" whereby the ABM was expected to actually hit the incoming missile thereby destroying it. This required close interaction of radar systems and missile batteries, and the Bush administration was focusing on rogue nations like Iran and North Korea. Bush wanted everything up and running by the end of 2004. It was an interesting way to fight and An Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre would make excellent simultaneous reading. The software was specialized and "If not constrained, the system would automatically take an aggressive approach and not necessarily the approach Northern Command or the White House wanted to take." Enter the main focus of the book that is on the really very few who man (and a surprising number of women) the system connecting Colorado and Fort Greeley and the radar links. Highly recommended for anyone interesting in the Cold War, MAD, and ABM systems, and the constraints of technological warfare, not to mention politics and the general reader. Entertaining and informative. ...more |
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Apr 18, 2020
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| 677
| 1991
| Jun 22, 2017
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it was amazing
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There are many interesting parallels in this story to the current issues with the 737 Maxx: The CAA ( predecessor to the FAA) was heavily involved in
There are many interesting parallels in this story to the current issues with the 737 Maxx: The CAA ( predecessor to the FAA) was heavily involved in certifying new aircraft, but because of reduced staffing many of the tasks were left to the company. For years the CAA had utilized a “designee” system to assure compliance with its regulations. Under this system, key employees of the applicant manufacturer were delegated to approve test methods and data, blueprints, design work, etc. The perennially money-starved CAA simply did not have the manpower to monitor aircraft design. Sound familiar? The DC-6, Martin 202, and Constellation all developed bugs that made it through the certification process. Engineering progress is often measured by learning from mistakes. Unfortunately disasters are essential to help us learn as Henry Petroski has so eloquently written about in To Engineer is Human: The Roles of Failure in Succesful Design. The Lockheed Electra, one of the most tested and lauded aircraft in the early sixties, was a marvel -- until the wings began to fall off. It was a ship that fulfilled the pilot’s prerequisites for a transport better than any other plane in history. It had enormous reserve power. It handled smoothly, docilely, responsively. It was fast, versatile, uncomplaining and even — for such a huge aircraft — forgiving of mistakes. In brief, it was a pilot’s airplane. Investigation following two crashes showed that the outboard engine mounts were not strong enough to damp a phenomenon called "whirl mode flutter" (analogous to the wobbling of a child's top as it slows down). "When the oscillation was transmitted to the wings and the flutter frequency decreased to a point where it was resonant with the outer wing panels (at the same frequency, or harmonically related ones), violent up-and-down oscillation increased until the wings would tear off." After two violent crashes where the wings had been torn off, a crash (pathetic pun) effort was made to determine the cause. Resources of competing companies like Boeing and Douglas were offered and used. Wind tunnel tests and thousands of hours of test flights finally revealed the problem." Basically the trouble had nothing to do with the Electra’s strength. It involved stiffness — stiffness of the nacelle structure. Stiffness is not the same as strength. If one confuses the two, it is like thinking glass and air are the same because both are transparent. And in an airplane, stiffness is the chief resistant force against flutter. What had happened to the Electra was devastating in its deadly simplicity. At enormous cost to Lockheed, the planes were all retro-fitted and it went on to have a reasonably successful commercial life. The hull plan is still being used in P-3 Orions. It took a while for the aircraft to get beyond its "jinxed" reputation, especially following a crash where on takeoff three of the planes engines shut down after ingesting hundreds of starlings. Yes, birds are still a problem. (The book was written in 1963.) I remember flying in an Electra in 1968, several years after the problem was fixed. It was a nice airplane. But I won't get on a DC-10. ...more |
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Feb 29, 2020
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Mar 2020
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Feb 29, 2020
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| 1982107294
| 9781982107291
| 1982107294
| 4.07
| 915
| Jan 28, 2020
| Jan 28, 2020
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it was amazing
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I read Kaplan's Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and discovered it to be a very lucid explanation of the technological challenges faced
I read Kaplan's Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and discovered it to be a very lucid explanation of the technological challenges faced by the security departments around the world. So naturally, I was anxious to check out his most recent book, courtesy Net Galley, for which I am grateful. It's an immensely enjoyable, if a bit scary, book about the political infighting and territoriality of the armed services and policy development of nuclear weapons. There was a lot of jockeying between the Navy, Army, and Air Force as to who would control "the bomb". and unfortunately much of that in-fighting controlled policy. Curtis LeMay, a brilliant leader in the organization and implementation of the bombing campaigns (read fire-bombing) in Europe and then Japan, as head of the Strategic Air Command was all in favor of a virtual first strike with everything as the SAC bombers were quite vulnerable. (His philosophy was simply to bomb everything.) The Navy, meanwhile, was eager to get funds for the development of large numbers of ballistic missile equipped Polaris submarines, arguing that if the Russians never knew where you were the deterrent effect was far greater and more valuable. The Army, on the other hand, promoted the use of smaller tactical nukes on the battlefield suggesting that a nuclear counterattack to defend Europe against Russian aggression would lead to a Russian withdrawal and peace discussions. The casual manner in which civilian casualties (not to mention military) were discussed was a bit disheartening. The man who replaced LeMay at SAC was Thomas Power. Even LeMay thought he was excessive: "There was a cruelty to Power’s zest for bombing cities. Even LeMay privately referred to his protégé as a “sadist.” When Bill Kaufmann briefed him on the Counterforce strategy at SAC headquarters, Power reacted with fury. “Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” he screamed. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!” After a bit more of this tirade, Power said, “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!” Kaufmann snapped back, “You’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.” Power stormed out of the room. " One surprising and note-worthy section was on how Cheney, of all people, was instrumental in reducing the huge number of weapons by half. All of the president's since have failed to reject the no-first-strike policy. Trump, himself, in his on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea didn't hesitate to wave the arsenal and threaten its use. Kaplan describes the abyss that policy makers then and since have become trapped in. The mere idea of how many times cities (people) need to be nuked in order to assure our victory, even as we ourselves are annihilated, inevitably leads to comparisons with Alice in Wonderland. That about sums up the insanity faced by all the presidents since Hiroshima. The importance of policy discussions and analysis worries me when I read that our current president disdains not just the briefing books, but the idea of analysis, preferring to rely on his "gut feeling" no doubt the most attuned gut in the history of the world. But then he's such a self-described "stable genius." A good companion book to McNamara's memoir, "In Retrospect" and Ellsberg's "Secrets." Each is ostensibly more about Vietnam but each reveals much a bout how decisions are made in government. Other titles I will have to read are Kaplan's "Wizards of Armaggedon", Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine," and Bruce Kuklick's "Kennan to Kissinger" and I'm sure many others, but we only live so long. ...more |
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Apr 02, 2020
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Jan 21, 2020
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| 0385544413
| B07GD4MFW2
| 4.36
| 8,342
| Nov 05, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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it was amazing
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Greenberg writes for WIRED magazine and is a specialist in cyber security and privacy issues. This book is an extremely readable account of a Russian
Greenberg writes for WIRED magazine and is a specialist in cyber security and privacy issues. This book is an extremely readable account of a Russian hacker group nicknamed Sandworm that succeeded in shutting down a substantial amount of infrastructure throughout the world but was aimed primarily at Ukraine. The attacks targeted every aspect of Ukrainian society: government servers, media organizations, transportation hubs. Ukrainian cyber experts could only watch as systems began to crash all around them. Public web sites, trains, banking systems and ATMs were disrupted. Finally, the electricity grid collapsed plunging hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into darkness. Having read several articles and books on Stuxnet, the successful destruction of Iranian nuclear centrifuges by the U.S. and Israel, I was anxious to read Greenberg's book. "Zero Day" security flaws are software holes that have never been used before so their vulnerability has yet to be discovered or fixed. Knowledge of these is precious to those wishing to penetrate systems. The Sandworm group (the name came from a Frank Herbert novel, Dune) has access to several and used them to great effect. The group went to great lengths to disguise themselves and hide. To Greenberg's credit he is able to explain how experts deciphered what group was responsible and he does it in language free of technical jargon. Just a few months ago, a Netherlands researcher wanted to come to the U.S. to present a paper on the vulnerability of the industrial control system. There are almost 30,000 of these devices (programmable logic controllers) that control everything from wastewater plants to the electrical grid. The researcher, thanks to America's arcane and silly visa system, was not admitted and so unable to present these important findings. Fortunately he was able to post them to his blog. Whether that resulted in a wider dissemination of the information than had he delivered his talk is academic, perhaps. ** Researcher Wojciech, used standard OSINT techniques (the CIA has identified five main OSINT fields: Internet, media, geolocation, conferences, and online pictures) to analyze the exposed ICS devices. Many of these are used in critical infrastructure that would include dams, electrical grid, reactors, health treatment facilities, etc. Critical infrastructure developed by OSINT can be used not just by espionage agencies, but also criminal elements who may seek to gain monetary advantage by holding these devices hostage. OSINT techniques are passive, in that the target remains completely unaware it is being surveilled. Access may be gained by open ports, IP addresses, knowledge of details of the specific devices and how they work -- all freely available online and elsewhere -- and even responses from the device itself. Here's an example of device information that's available that even includes the phone number: There are several programs that permit searching the internet for active ICS devices (https://www.shodan.io for example.) The author lays out precisely how to go about searching. Many of these devices have open management ports that are convenient for technicians to access the devices remotely for maintenance. That, however, makes them extremely vulnerable to malicious actors. General contractors with government contracts are particularly vulnerable as they have a history of being more open and thus more vulnerable. That hackers can cause innumerable problems has already been shown in Ukraine, Estonia, and Georgia where the Russians devastated each country's infrastructure. Andy Greenberg in Sandworm documents what happened in several cases. In Ukraine access to the banking system was eliminated. It took forty-five seconds to bring down the network of a large Ukrainian bank. A portion of one major Ukrainian transit hub…was fully infected in sixteen seconds. Ukrenergo, the energy company…had also been struck yet again…the effect was like a vandal who first puts a library’s card catalog through a shredder, then moves on to methodically pulp its books, stack by stack. Ukraine became a testing ground for Russian hacking. Disinformation to spread distrust in the election and tampering with the infrastructure were simply test runs for their successful attacks on United States electoral trust in 2016 and 2020. Ukraine had taken the brunt of Russian abuse for centuries and Greenberg's short history of those onslaughts was suitably horrifying. (See also Anne Applebaum's Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine to understand why Ukraine at first welcomed the Nazis.) US officials, typically heads in the sand, refused to admit something similar could happen in the U.S. yet we now know that Russian hackers infiltrated the U.S. election system and may well have manipulated the outcome in a variety of unorthodox ways. In 2016, Iranian hackers attacked several US banks causing millions in damages and shut down a dam presumably in retaliation for the Stuxnet attack. The attacks themselves were quite unsophisticated, mostly DDoS attacks that even the most unsophisticated hacker can pull off. There is software (malware, really) that has been designed for specific purposes; Stuxnet is but one example. Another, discovered by the security firm Dragos, was CrashOverride***, only the fourth example of malware designed to attack and manipulate the controllers in electrical grids. "The functionality in the CRASHOVERRIDE framework serves no espionage purpose and the only real feature of the malware is for attacks which would lead to electric outages." Greenberg shows that a variety of software is available, even for sale, that permits relatively easy access for anyone, but can also be used to hide the origin of the attacker. To make matters worse, Greenberg wrote in Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/plundervo...) of researchers who had managed to access and control Intel processors (a vulnerability that has since been fixed) by manipulating the internal voltage of the processor. You can induce faults by lowering or changing the voltage and once you can do that you can change the output by manipulating the faults. The technique, called Plundervolt, was discovered concurrently by a researcher in Beijing. (Take from that what you will.) In his book, Greenberg focuses on Sandworm, a group of hackers and software named after the malicious creature in Dune (cyberanalysts had discovered that preference while doing research on the code - don't ask me how.) They determined there was evidence that Sandworm had been infiltrating critical infrastructure—some of it in the United States—since 2011 and had already developed a weapon that could knock it out. When it was used against Ukraine, it had evolved even further. The hackers had, in other words, created an automated cyberweapon that performed the same task they’d carried out the year before, but now with inhuman speed. Instead of manually clicking through circuit breakers with phantom hands, they’d created a piece of malware that carried out that attack with cruel, machine-quick efficiency. PowerPoint users need take note that the program has become so large and now includes so many useless features that it has almost become its own programming language. The Sandworm group utilized the ability to place objects and run programs within slides to place malware within the users computer that would download or run other programs unbeknownst to the user. They managed to fix the system in about an hour, but the point was made. Another group calling themselves ShadowBrokers made off with a whole set of penetration tools developed by the NSA and turned them loose in the wild where virtually anyone with a modicum of knowledge can make use of them. Shadow Brokers caused immense harm when they released EternalBlue, malware that spread faster than anything anyone had seen before. Within minutes it had disabled pharmaceutical companies, and Maersk, the huge shipping company was brought to its knees. “ 'For days to come, one of the world’s most complex and interconnected distributed machines, underpinning the circulatory system of the global economy itself, would remain broken,” Greenberg writes of the attack on Maersk, calling it “a clusterfuck of clusterfucks.” The company was only able to get its ships and ports back in operation after nearly two weeks and hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, when an office in Ghana was found to have the single computer that hadn’t been connected to the Internet at the time of the attack.' " **** I've been reading a lot of books and articles on the potential for cyberwarfare. The potential is there for even non-state actors to operate in the shadows and do tremendous harm. Then again shutting down most of our industry might solve the global warming worst case scenarios. One apocalypse preventing another. **https://www.icscybersecurityconferenc... ***For a review of CrashOverride designed to attack electricity grids, see https://dragos.com/wp-content/uploads... ****https://www.i-cio.com/management/insi... Note that this source places the lone saved Domain Controller in Nigeria rather than the more accepted Ghana. ...more |
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Apr 28, 2021
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Nov 17, 2019
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| 1250191270
| 4.26
| 338
| Jul 30, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
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A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israel
A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israeli-Arab relations. Katz, enamored of the Israeli armed forces, writes hagiographically about the Israeli strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007. Justification for this act of war was the assumption that a nuclear power plant -- Israel has several in addition to nuclear weapons -- could only be used to create the material for nuclear weapons, the presence of which Israel assumed could only be an existential threat to their country. ** There is an assumption that some countries act responsibly when it comes to nuclear weapons and others are not. Israel, while never admitting publicly it has nuclear weapons, clearly does, yet cannot seem to understand why that knowledge would not encourage hostile neighbors to want the same. Another assumption is that democracies will always act more sensibly than authoritarian governments. Recent events in the United States reveal just how fragile that assumption is. It's an assumption Plato warned about a millennia ago when he foresaw the seeds of its own destruction built into democratic governments. Israel has determined (at least the more recent governments) that countries in the Middle East will not (except for itself) be permitted to have nuclear weapons nor nuclear power plants that might be used to create the seeds of a nuclear weapons program. They see it as an existential threat. Then again, they see almost everything they don't like as an existential threat. From his extensive interviews with the decision-makers, advisers and planners — American and Israeli — Katz, the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, has written a gripping story of the Sept. 6, 2007 destruction of a secret, nearly completed al-Kabar nuclear reactor in Syria. knowledge of which was confirmed only in March of 2018. The Syrian strike at al-Kabar was not the first time the Israelis felt compelled to act. On June 7, 1981, the IAF destroyed a nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq, which was, at the time, a nation ruled by Saddam Hussein, another dictator willing to use chemical weapons. A fascinating portion of the book is devoted to the discussions within the Bush administration on the proper response to the intelligence that had been shared by Israel about the construction of a reactor in Syria. It was the hawks (Cheney et al) v diplomats (Rice eta al.) each with valid concerns and suspecting different outcomes. What was the possibility of a wider war? What would be the reaction of the Russians? Would this help or hurt the Iranians? Was the intelligence legitimate. It was an example of how government should work, but often doesn't. Cheney, ever the hawk and advocate of preemptive strikes, whatever the issue, was alone in thinking the U.S. should bomb the site. Everyone else in the Cabinet thought otherwise. The Iraq war, begun on faulty intelligence, was not going well and the feeling was that each administration gets just one war; trying to conduct two would lead to disaster. A more nuanced role proposed by a few was that the facility should be destroyed, but better that Israel should do the bombing. It would reinforce the view that Israel had rebounded from the Lebanese debacle and help issue a warning that Israel could handle its own affairs and protection and was not the minor stepchild of the U.S. The author claims at the end of the book that it was less about the strike than decision-making. That's certainly true. But what a messy process, indeed, influenced less by reality than perceptions, ideology, religion, and politics. **It was just learned that Syria fired a missile that landed perilously close to an Israeli nuclear plant in April 2021. Israeli responded with a retaliatory strike. Agence France has reported that Israel is suspected to have between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons. [https://www.france24.com/en/middle-ea...] ...more |
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Aug 2021
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Sep 18, 2019
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| 154176238X
| 9781541762381
| 154176238X
| 3.75
| 2,043
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was amazing
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Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting origina Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting originally of bored but talented teenagers who enjoyed reverse engineering phone systems and early computer software, they evolved into "hactivists" (hackers with a mission), many of whom went on the become influential and and important members of the establishment. Menn follows the individual careers of cDc members who initially focused on security flaws in Windows. They were completely apolitical but then morphed into " human rights activists and internet freedom advocates, eventually becoming security advisers for powerful institutions. The hackers all started out delighting in discovering security holes in early Windows software but were dismayed by the reaction of the software giant when these holes were pointed out to them. The reaction was a large ho-hum. suggesting that and if you wanted to have a secure system, "go buy Windows NT. That's an irony since no one "buys" software, you buy a license which immunizes the software developer from accountability and permits them to see access to a product that's defective. Their dismay is illustrated by this anecdote. The cDc had created a program that revealed the flaws in Windows but it was also a tool that could be used for less than savory purposes. They released it free to everyone as open source so others could revise and manipulate it. The establishment wasn't sure what to make of it. The FBI, while trying to discourage its release decided it didn't violate any existing laws. The anti-virus business was not pleased as it also showed how weak their software was, but many security professionals decided it was a necessary evil if for no other reason than to force Microsoft to fix their security holes. “Microsoft is evil because they sell crap.” One of the cDc members took a copy of the program on a CD to a Microsoft higher-up. He said thanks and was about to insert it into his CD-ROM drive when she, horror-stricken, asked if his computer was networked. It was. She then asked if it was sand-boxed (programs loaded were quarantined until proven safe.) No, was the response, to which she, shocked, pointed out to him that he was just about to load a program from someone he didn't know, a self-identified hacker, into a computer that was not sand-boxed and connected to his entire network and therefore completely vulnerable. That was their state of mind. Eventually, major businesses realized how important these hackers were and many moved on to become security professionals. As their prominence grew so did the counterculture environment of the early movement begin to fade and they became more political especially after the Chinese student movement was squashed. They began to create software intended for use by dissidents and other cultural reformers, anyone anti-authoritarian. Under Obama, through Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the hacktivism championed by Brown and the cDc to help with dissident subversion of foreign governments would become American foreign policy, part of a program informally known as “internet in a box.” While generally laudatory, Menn doesn't like all of them. Julian Assange and Jake Applebaum of Wikileaks and the TOR project are not portrayed sympathetically, "draping themselves in morality while serving other causes.” Assange was known for his sexual straying and his current behavior certainly distracts from the more positive aspects of Wikileaks. Menn is also not afraid to criticism the industry proposing that cybersecurity problems today are at least partly the result of terrible business and engineering decisions made decades ago. These decisions caused problems that still exist. Whether the movement of the hacktivists into the world of corporate and individual greed will be able to remedy some of those structural problems without becoming part of the problem themselves remains to be seen. To some extent it's the old story: countercultural anti-authoritarian types find success and join the corporate elites. How many Vietnam's most vocal protesters went on to become a prominent part of the culture they had so despised? Beto O'Rourke, one of the early cDc members is now running for President and another is security chief for Facebook! How well did that go... Great read. ...more |
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Aug 11, 2019
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Aug 11, 2019
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| 152473165X
| 4.41
| 263,851
| May 21, 2018
| May 21, 2018
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it was amazing
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Listened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that w
Listened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that work involved cleaning.) As almost everyone knows Elizabth Holmes had dropped out of Stanford so she could get rich. She had an idea for a device that would revolutionize blood testing, a nifty idea. Unfortunately it never worked but she insisted in public it did and fraudulently manipulated the data behind the scenes to prevent investors from recognizing that. When VP Biden visited the Theranos lab in 2015 he was presented with rows of machines. The Problem was they were all fake. She persuaded numerous well-known people to sit on the board and invest. As a young, attractive woman, perhaps that influenced the older men who jumped on board. (Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were among them. Ironically, Schultz, who got his grandson a job at Theranos, refused to believe him when the grandson reported the "place was rotten.") I don't know. Then again, I always wondered about John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin who seemed to offer little except a nice face. The media fell for it, too. Adoring profiles appeared in numerous magazines that did not do their homework. CEOs at Safeway and Walgreens were not immune to her spell. I found this quote from the NY Times review particularly apt: "Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners. The media was completely bamboozled and fawned all over her. All sorts of evidence was there from employees who were quitting in droves, but they were never interviewed. The old geezers on the board had even been warned by relatives who worked at the company to no avail. The old guys were so enamored of this pretty thing with nice legs that they abandoned their fiduciary responsibility and really should have been held responsible for the disaster. David Boies doesn't escape condemnation either. The esteemed lawyer who charged $1000 per hour had a stake in the company, violating all sorts of ethical tenets, sued anyone who might say something negative about the company, harassing them with private detectives and threats.* Holmes and her erstwhile boyfriend, ex COO of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani, are now under indictment facing decades of imprisonment if found guilty. As further evidence of her cold manipulative personality, detractors cite her becoming pregnant just before the trial was to begin (resulting in a postponement) as a calculated move to garner sympathy. The story is not over and several podcasts (The Dropout and Bad Blood: the Final Chapter) are reporting on the trial. Society functions well only when there exists a level of trust. We want (and need) to assume that people are not fooling us. It's OK to be moderately skeptical but actions like Holmes's raise the skepticism bar to an impossible level that will eventually stifle progress. *see https://isb.idaho.gov/blog/theranos-a... for more. ...more |
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Nov 02, 2021
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Jan 06, 2019
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| 1451692285
| 3.77
| 756
| Feb 01, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
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it was amazing
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Russell Gold is a Wall Street Journal reporter whose family had purchased a small Pennsylvania farm as a retreat from Philadelphia. His parents were
Russell Gold is a Wall Street Journal reporter whose family had purchased a small Pennsylvania farm as a retreat from Philadelphia. His parents were approached by an oil company offering them $400,000 plus royalties for the right to drill under their land. Being old time sixties environmentalists they were reluctant but it’s a lot of money and since almost all their neighbors had bought in they figured they might as well. He returns to their story periodically throughout the book to highlight the personal conflicts people have. Gold provides a riveting account of the development of fracking from its extraordinary technological success to its environmental impacts. It’s truly astonishing that this intricate technology has resulted in the United States becoming a net energy exporter barely a decade after “peak oil” had been proclaimed. The book mixes technical details with profiles of the major players, often focusing on the financial details, which can’t be easily separated from the evolution of oil drilling. It’s perhaps ironic, that most of the anti-fracking environmental antagonism comes from geographical areas not affected by the drilling. Larger cities that depend on natural gas and heating, for example, have become hotbeds of anti-fracking activity, yet those people are little affected by the economic and environmental plusses and minuses of the activity except for lower prices for energy. Some of the allegiances formed to promote fracking are interesting. The Sierra Club worked with Chesapeake Energy to fight the development of coal plants in Texas and elsewhere, arguing that global warming was a far greater threat.* That Chesapeake was giving them substantial amounts of money didn’t hurt either, but the environmental group has become split among those favoring just conservation opposed to some realists arguing that it’s better to focus on energy that reduces the carbon footprint like natural gas and nuclear power. Ironically, the shift to natural gas means the U.S., which hasn’t ratified the Kyoto protocols, will come closer to meeting the reduction in carbon emissions than any of the signatories. Gold says that’s a very good thing and supports fracking (the reason why it’s now spelled that way as opposed to the more technically popular “fracing” is interesting) but notes the industry and regulators need to work on better sealing of the wells which is where most of the problems arise. Surprisingly, there was no mention of fracking-generated earthquakes, although perhaps being published in 2014, the concern had yet to be raised. No energy generating process is unopposed. Dams drown villages; mines are dirty and dangerous; transporting fuel in pipelines, ships, and trains risks spills and fires; drilling is obnoxious, wind generators destroy the landscape and kill birds; and nuclear, in many ways the least harmful, suffers from ignorance of new technology and problems of early technology. A very interesting read. *Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame has embraced GMOs, nuclear energy, and other technologies, arguing that global warming is the greatest threat. An interesting article detailing his evolution in thinking is http://e360.yale.edu/features/stewart... ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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May 07, 2017
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May 07, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 3.59
| 4,563
| Jan 01, 2012
| Mar 06, 2012
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it was amazing
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If you are looking for information about Alan Turing, look elsewhere. The title is a metaphor. The Nazis did the U.S. a huge favor with their boorish a If you are looking for information about Alan Turing, look elsewhere. The title is a metaphor. The Nazis did the U.S. a huge favor with their boorish and stupid racial policies. Many prominent Jews were brilliant mathematicians and physicists, and when the “cleansing” of universities began by the Nazis, people like Van Neumann, Einstein, and many others fled to the United States where they were of immense assistance in the development of the atomic bomb. This book is about the origins and development of the digital age and Dyson spends considerable space on the people and institutions key to that development. The Princeton Institute for Advanced Research, for example, under Abraham Flexner and Oswald Veblen, recruited many of these refugees who helped build the Institute into one of the premier research institutions. I suppose it all has special interest for me as my life span parallels the development of the computer. I was born in 1947. In the 7th grade I became fascinated by ham radio and electrons and studied the intricate workings of the vacuum tube, a device for which I still have some reverence. I’m still dismantling and messing with the insides of computers. Ironically, given the book’s title, John Van Neumann takes center stage with Turing playing only a peripheral role. Van Neumann’s interest in digital computation was apparently sparked by reading Turing’s seminal article. “On Computational Numbers” that led him to the realization of the importance of stored program processing. What Turing did that was so crucial was to take Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness theorem that permitted numbers to carry two meanings. Turing took that and thought up the paper tape computer that produced both data and code simultaneously. That realization alone was fundamental in providing the basic building block for the computer. The builders had conflicting views of the incredible computational power they had unleashed that was to be used for both ill and good. Van Neumann recognized this: “ A tidal wave of computational power was about to break and inundate everything in science and much elsewhere, and things would never be the same.” It would have been impossible to develop the atomic bomb without the computational abilities of the new “computers.” So naturally, the Manhattan Project is covered along with the influence of the evil Dr. Teller (I must remember to get his biography,) who was the character (Dr. Strangelove) brilliantly played by Peter Sellers. After the war, Teller pushed very hard for the development of the “super-bomb” even though he knew, or must have known, that his initial calculations were flawed because he didn’t have the computational power to do them completely. One number that I questioned was the Dyson’s reporting that when the Russians exploded a three-stage hydrogen bomb in 1961, the force released was equivalent to 1% of the sun’s power. That sounds wildly improbable. Anyone able to contradict number? Some interesting little tidbits. One computational scientist refused to use the new VDTs, preferring to stick with punched cards (he obviously never dropped a box of them) which seemed far more tangible to him than dots on a screen. I guess fear of new technology is not reserved for non-scientists. One of the major and very interesting questions addressed by Turing and reported on in the book is what we now call artificial intelligence. When we use a search engine are we learning from the search engine? or is the search engine learning from us? It would appear currently the latter may be true. Clearly, the search engines have been designed to store information and use that information to learn things about us both as a group and individually. I suspect that programs now make decisions based on that accumulation of knowledge. Is that not one definition of intelligence? (I will again highly recommend a book written and read quite a while ago that foresaw many of these issues: The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas Ryan (1977)** . Note that Turing talked about the adolescence of computers and likening them to children.) Some reviewers have taken Dyson to task for emphasizing abstract reasoning that went into the development of the computer while downplaying the role of electrical engineers (Eckert and Mauchly) in actually building the things. I’ll leave that argument to others, not caring a whit for who should get the credit and being in awe of both parties. On the other hand, the book does dwell more on the personalities than the intricacies of computing. There are some fascinating digressions, however, such as the examination of digital vs analog and how the future of computing might have been altered had Vann Neumann not tragically died so young as he had a great interest in biological computing and the relationship of the brain to the computer. **For a plot summary of The Adolescence of P-1 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ado... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 28, 2015
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Jul 28, 2015
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ebook
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| B00APNRSFC
| 3.85
| 60
| Dec 16, 2012
| Dec 03, 2013
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liked it
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I've been fooling around with several (10+) different Linux distros and I really like Linux. I have pretty much settled on about six different distros
I've been fooling around with several (10+) different Linux distros and I really like Linux. I have pretty much settled on about six different distros that I have set up as dual boots (often with more than one distro in addition to Windows) on several laptops I've fixed up. Mint is one of the best, and I thought this book would be useful in filling in some gaps. It's a bit elementary for me, but would be excellent for someone just jumping in with little technical experience.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 21, 2014
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Oct 22, 2014
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Oct 21, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 0805092633
| 9780805092639
| 0805092633
| 3.79
| 4,178
| Aug 06, 2013
| Aug 13, 2013
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it was amazing
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I love ships. I remember looking at a silhouette picture of an old man in my ChildCraft set, his hand on the shoulders of a young boy, looking out ove
I love ships. I remember looking at a silhouette picture of an old man in my ChildCraft set, his hand on the shoulders of a young boy, looking out over the sea at a three-masted schooner. The image still creates a frisson of nostalgia for something I never really experienced but always wanted. Some of that interest stemmed from four voyages on transatlantic liners to and from Europe in the fifties and sixties when I was younger, and I’m sure that my view was unrealistic and nonrepresentational as I watched movies and enjoyed the sumptuous meals. (We will NOT discuss the bouts of seasickness that preceded succeeding pleasurable days.) I have zero interest in taking a cruise since they seem to be simply resorts with no destination and gambling dens. And the idea of dressing for dinner? And too many people! Geesh. I want to GO someplace and watch the business of shipping, to see how things work.. I’ve read accounts of traveling on freighters (a list is below of some related books) and would still like to try it some day (the mal-de-mer does give me pause, however.) This book is the next best thing. This book does tend to take the shine off the freighter business. One thing I did not know was that while shipping is a relatively green form of transportation (well, except for the particulates), it generates considerable *noise* pollution. Supertankers can be heard coming through the sea a day before they arrive at any given location which drives away most sea life. Oil spills have been greatly reduced, however. Between 1972 and 1981, there were 223 spills. Over the last decade there were 63. An industry publicist reported, “More oil is poured down the drain by mechanics changing their engine oil than is spilled by the world’s fleet of oil tankers.” The industry, itself, is dangerous, poorly paid (by our standards - not theirs) , and virtually unregulated, with ships being flagged under whatever country has the lowest taxes and the fewest inspectors. Double bookkeeping and non-payment of wages is common and criminal actions are impossible to prosecute. Where does a Croatian sailor attacked by a Filipino mate file a complaint? Cell phones are useless and there is no private internet so reporting incidents or getting assistance is impossible. The captain is God and Supreme Magistrate all rolled into one. “Buy your fair-trade coffee beans by all means, but don’t assume fair-trade principles govern the conditions of the men who fetch it to you. You would be mistaken.” Piracy is not the glorified practice of movies and childhood. (Harvard Business School chose Somali piracy as the “business model of the year” in 2010.) The author spent a week on an EU counter-piracy patrol vessel which reduced the number of incidents from 200 in 2009 to only thirteen in 2013, but ships passing through the Gulf of Aden (and more than half do to get to the Suez canal) still must hide out in safe rooms on board if fighting them off with firehoses fails, while awaiting naval rescue. Crews are like prisoners even while not under attack, live basically on two decks. (Samuel Johnson famously wrote that “being on a ship is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Yet “When the academic Erol Kahveci surveyed British prison literature while researching conditions at sea, he found that “the provision of leisure, recreation, religious service and communication facilities are better in U.K. prisons than … on many ships our respondents worked aboard.” ) Mostly we ignore, or chose to remain ignorant, of seafarers. “ in 2011, 544 seafarers [were] being held hostage by Somali pirates. I try to translate that into other transport industries; 544 bus drivers, or 544 cabdrivers, or nearly two jumbo jets of passengers, mutilated and tortured for years. When thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days in 2010, there was a media frenzy. Fifteen hundred journalists went to Chile and, even now, the BBC news website maintains a special page on their drama, long after its conclusion. The twenty-four men on MV Iceberg held captive for a thousand days were given no special page and nothing much more than silence and disregard.” The company she sails with is Maersk, a company just slightly smaller than Microsoft yet one that hardly appears on anyones radar even though it accounts for 20% of Denmark’s GDP. The ship is the Kendall. She uses that voyage as a springboard to discuss the impact of shipping on the ecology, piracy, anti-piracy and the business of shipping. Chapters focus on different issues: poor working conditions, a trip on one of the patrol boats, a pirate’s trial leading to a discussion of the different perspectives on Somalian piracy (she is not at all sympathetic,) and the huge amount of tonnage lost at sea and what the effect might be of floating Nikes and sunken computers (not good.) The economics of shipping are rather mind-boggling. Would you have guessed that it’s cheaper to ship fish to China from Scotland to be filleted and processed than to pay Scottish workers to do it? Shipping blouse from China to the U.S. coast less than one cent, even while the large container ships burn thousand of dollars of bunker fuel (like tar and about as dirty) per hour. Containers have made loading and unloading so fast that sailors and officers have no time in port to relax. Security is a huge issue in her mind. Only a minute portion of containers are ever inspected and they are used to smuggle all sorts of goods and probably weapons. “ One of the crew tells me he can overcome the blankness of the boxes, although that’s not how he phrases it. He can break a container seal and reseal it convincingly, although I suspect his intent would be for monetary, not intellectual, gain. This skill is more common than it should be. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported on a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol study that “existing container seals provided inadequate security against physical intrusion.” Criminals who don’t know how to reseal a seal could do an adequate workaround by taking the door off. Much of modern security rests on theater and assumption. That applies to airport lines, questionable laws about liquids, and the supposed safety of twenty million containers containing who knows what. Who does know? Only 1 to 3 percent of containers in Europe are physically inspected.” Really interesting book. BUT, I still want to take a voyage on a freighter. Recommended reading: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... (anything by Max Hardberger) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 16, 2014
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Apr 12, 2014
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Mar 16, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0486213978
| 9780486213972
| 0486213978
| 4.20
| 46
| 1957
| Jun 01, 1972
|
really liked it
|
Extraordinarily interesting. John Toland melds personal recollections and experiences with sound historical research to always provide for a hard-to-p
Extraordinarily interesting. John Toland melds personal recollections and experiences with sound historical research to always provide for a hard-to-put-down-read. Did you know that a Dr. Andrews had invented a dirigible that could fly against the wind with no ostensible form of propulsion? He claimed he sailed it like a sailing vessel and it had to do with the shape of the balloon. He made several demonstration flights but was unable to interest the War Department during the Civil War, his requests for an audience being lost, all sorts of silly reasons. Following the Civil War he tried to form a company that would provide transportation between Washington and New York and to that end formed a company with stock to defray the cost of the Hydrogen. Again he made several very successful flights (he called his device the Aereon) but the company failed along with many others during a stock market crash. No one has since been able to fly a dirigible with a source of propulsion. His secret went with him to the grave. Each of the major advances in airship flight is examined. Most of the record is filled with disasters as inexperience coupled with over-enthusiasm and wild optimism resulted in a lethal combination. But some heroic stories as well: the efforts of General Nobile to reach the North Pole and his extraordinary survival on ice floes after the crash of the Italia; the tragic loss of the Shenandoah, plus the time when the Los Angeles went vertical while moored (picture included.) These things were immense, stretching over 800 feet in length, longer than any battleship at the time. Indeed, the military considered them as potent weapons. Several carried small airplanes that could be lowered and flown off from the airship and then recovered by the pilot flying on to a hook hanging from the airship’s hangar. The U.S., as virtually the sole producer of helium, a non-explosive, lighter-than-air gas, used airships to good advantage patrolling the east coast during WW II where they were effective in protecting convoys from U-Boats. Everyone knows the story of the Hindenburg including the near insanity that disaster caused in the radio announcer. (You can watch the explosion on Youtube). Few realize the amazing around-the-world trip of the Graf Zeppelin, his (in German the zeppelins took the masculine article) trip that averaged over seventy mph and went through several storms. For a more detailed account of Zeppelin history, I recommend Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2014
|
Jul 12, 2012
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374120366
| 9780374120368
| 0374120366
| 4.28
| 18
| 1993
| Jan 01, 1996
|
it was amazing
|
Read in conjunction with Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster The author, a huge fan of Richard Feynman, draws on Fe Read in conjunction with Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster The author, a huge fan of Richard Feynman, draws on Feynman's work to discuss the problems and events leading up to the Challenger accident. I remember being at we work when one of the other deans popped in to report the explosion. This was still when Shuttle launches were watched with great interest by the public and the presence of Christa Maculiife added especial interest. Her kids were watching in school. Just imagine... The Rogers Commission was the result, and Feynman's famous demonstration with ice water and the O-rings made everyone's favorite list of stories. Reagan in his memoirs dismisses the accident in two sentences. We had a problem, identified it, and got on with things. The author explains the systemic flaws in this book that cannot be dismissed so easily. NASA was symbolic of large systems that surround us today, all very complex, that often devolve into uncontrollable entities where individuals eschew responsibility and suffer from bitter internal politics. Jensen examines the role of management theories in the structure of these large scale systems and the rise of HR (now, as we all know, totally out of control.) He cites Weber’s book on management (it’s impossible to have a large system without a bureaucracy) and discusses the set of principles Weber regarded as key. Note that one of them communication, and how to sort out what’s important from the river of data, was to play a part in the Challenger disaster. Jensen does a very nice job of the examining management change during the early 60's you have a cyst was on teamwork working together I'm not punishing people for failure and the way management changed over the years before the Challenger accident is instructive He draws heavily in this section on a book I think everyone should read: Normal Accidents. The substantial disadvantages of tightly coupled systems resulted in several problems for NASA and the Apollo and Gemini programs. Another interesting facet of the book is his examination of the relationship between the industrial/military complex (as defined by Eisenhower) and how NASA was taken over by the military once the lustre of space exploration had waned. The defense department and contractors had so intertwined contracts with thousands of communities and businesses, that it became increasingly difficult for Congressmen to vote against military (and by extension NASA since the military was now often dictating NASA specs) expenditures. Soon, as military companies merged large monoliths were created who, thanks to cost-plus contracts, could charge whatever they wanted. We had created a society of state capitalism. But it wasn’t just corporations who fed at government's teat. Universities fought to get grants at the expense of academic freedom. Soon an astonishing 88% of CalTech’s budget was from the government; 66% of MIT’s and even 25% of Harvard’s. Even as the military denigrated the civilian NASA’s efforts, they were attempting behind the scenes to gain control over the program and the budget. Edward Teller was pushing Star Wars to a technologically ignorant president who loved the fantastical concept. (Never mind that cost estimates approached one trillion dollars -- the balance wouldn’t come due until he was out of office.) NASA meanwhile, had been taken over by true believers ever mindful of the need to keep the budget money flowing. Shuttles were often cobbled together from cannibalized parts from other shuttles to keep to the schedule. (The Air Force had estimated. there was a 1 in 35 chance of a disaster, making the program the most dangerous technological initiative ever.) NASA was not above telling its own version of everything. “Of all the organizations that I have dealt with … I have only seen one that lied. It was NASA. From the top to the bottom they lie … The reason they lie, of course, is because they arc wrapped up in a higher calling. In their eyes they arc white lies. They tell lies in order to do what has to be done. Because in the end the result will be for the betterment of the public. So they arc not lying from evil. But. nevertheless, they are lying.” Can you imagine starting from scratch and putting a man on the moon in today’s contentious environment? We’d never make it to Boise. And to follow up on that achievement, the shuttle was developed under extraordinary conditions. “Never before had a new spacecraft carried human beings on its maiden trip. And never, ever before had anyone tried to bring a spacecraft the size of a DC-9 back down through the earth’s atmosphere. Never before had there been rocket engines as powerful as those which would be required here; never before had a rocket engine filled with highly combustible liquid oxygen and hydrogen been ignited on the ground, while positioned right alongside an enormous fuel tank. And never before had it been necessary for a rocket engine to be reused, or to have a total combustion time of over seven hours. All previous rocket engines bad done well if they lasted a modest number of minutes before petering out.” And then they wanted to put non-test-pilots on the thing. The idea that an ordinary citizen could travel along was strongly resisted by the astronauts who understood the risks, but management wanted to show the public that space travel could be safe as commercial air travel. But no flight went without some difficulty. In one case a supplier had left out two pins from a spacesuit. Metal shavings were found blocking an oxygen release vent. Fortunately, the mission had to be cut short for other reasons. Had they tried to use the spacesuit it could have exploded, possibly smashing a hole in the orbiter. Problems with brakes were endemic. And the tiles (later linked to the Columbia disaster) were a constant problem. The problems with the Columbia in the mission preceding that of the Challenger laid the foundation for its explosion. Delayed seven times, it was supposed to carry a Congressmen (who claimed God was instrumental in his going) into space. Each delay meant the countdown (some 2,000 pages) had to be restarted. Then there was a weather delay in getting the Columbia back, a problem because they needed parts off it for the Challenger. Reagan was feeling the pressure from Mondale to do something about education, so sending a teacher up on the shuttle was to afford him multiple opportunities to show off his emphasis on education and undercut Mondale. And the news media didn't help either with constant sarcasm about the delays. Peter Jennings reported that NASA was being challenged to get Challenger off on time. The NASA manual with regard to cold was changed several times to fit the circumstances. So the pressure to launch was immense. And we know the result. Less a history of just the Challenger disaster, Jensen writes of the history of rocket development in the first section at some length, a distance some readers who prefer focus on the Challenger accident may not wish to travel. I thought it was excellent and provided a good background for some of the technical detail down the road. An excellent book. edited 12/30/2018 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 16, 2014
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Jul 11, 2012
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Apr 21, 2023
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Mar 31, 2023
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| 4.18
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it was amazing
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Mar 12, 2022
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Mar 12, 2022
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| 4.27
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it was amazing
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not set
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Mar 07, 2022
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|||||
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Dec 07, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.98
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it was amazing
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Jun 17, 2021
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Sep 15, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Jul 24, 2020
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Jul 24, 2020
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Jun 2020
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Jun 01, 2020
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| 3.51
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it was amazing
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Apr 18, 2020
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Apr 18, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Mar 2020
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Feb 29, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Apr 02, 2020
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Jan 21, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.36
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it was amazing
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Apr 28, 2021
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Nov 17, 2019
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| 4.26
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really liked it
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Aug 2021
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Sep 18, 2019
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|||||
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Aug 11, 2019
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Aug 11, 2019
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|||||
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| 4.41
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it was amazing
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Nov 02, 2021
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Jan 06, 2019
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|||||
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| 3.77
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it was amazing
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May 07, 2017
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May 07, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.59
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it was amazing
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Jul 28, 2015
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Jul 28, 2015
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|||||
|
| 3.85
|
liked it
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Oct 22, 2014
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Oct 21, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.79
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 12, 2014
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Mar 16, 2014
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|||||
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| 4.20
|
really liked it
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Aug 2014
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Jul 12, 2012
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|||||
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| 4.28
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it was amazing
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May 16, 2014
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Jul 11, 2012
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