I have some thoughts and links on the 10th anniversary celebration, over at Ricochet:
Basically, the late Jim Benson of SpaceDev (now part of the Sierra Nevada corporation, which finally seems to have given up on its own plans to use a hybrid motor for its Dream Chaser vehicle) sold Burt Rutan a bill of goods with the hybrid, with claims of simplicity and safety. In fact, as many of us told him at the time, he’d have been a lot better off purchasing a liquid engine from XCOR, but they didn’t have a sufficient track record at the time for him to think they could meet the deadline to win the prize. Then, once they’d (sort of) succeeded in flying something into space, they continued on with what they thought they knew. They’ve been in a sunk-cost trap ever since, unable to get themselves out of the hybrid-propulsion rut.
As I’ve long noted, the delays in the arrival of commercial spaceflight have been a combination of people who knew what to do not having money, and the people how had money not understanding the problem, and being too arrogant to listen to the veterans. Only now is the crucial combination of money and know how finally coming together.
As I note there, I stopped by XCOR in the morning before the event. Looks like they’re making good progress in bringing the spacecraft together.
YouTube had detected that I was using a 30-year old performance now owned by Sony, and thus I was VIOLATING EVERYTHING HELD SACRED or words to that effect. One had to marvel at a system that could detect such things, especially since the impression one gets from reading YouTube comments is that the service is aimed at a unique species of chimp that is making the transition from flinging its feces as a means of expressing disagreement to typing words which occasionally add up to an actual sentence.
It’s possible someone would have watched the video, and thought: Interesting piece, this Mahler thing. Even though I have heard but two minutes I believe I have grasped the totality of the work, and will refrain from seeking out the entire movement. Surely more could only add up to less. And thus Sony would be deprived of 23 cents in royalty.
Well, I didn’t own the copyright, and while I could claim Fair Use under the guise of using Mahler’s early use of his own Judaic heritage to score slo-mo goose-stepping spark plugs as means of examining the composer’s nominal acceptance of Christianity to ward off the anti-semitism of fin de siecle Vienna, ahhh, to hell with it.
And yes, before you ask, I am indeed behind on my Lileks.
I didn’t mention this earlier in the week, but SNC is teaming with StratoLaunch to get a subscale version into orbit. If it’s 75% scale, I figure that’s about 40% of the current interior volume, which lines up with their claim of being able to carry two or three passengers (the full-scale system is designed for seven). The big advantage of such a system would be single-orbit rendezvous, and runway landing, so if it happens, there’d certainly be a market niche for it.
“People look at these things and see them as nothing more than storage devices,” says Caudill. “They don’t realize there’s a reprogrammable computer in their hands.”
In an earlier interview with WIRED ahead of his Black Hat talk, Berlin-based Nohl had said that he wouldn’t release the exploit code he’d developed because he considered the BadUSB vulnerability practically unpatchable. (He did, however, offer a proof-of-concept for Android devices.) To prevent USB devices’ firmware from being rewritten, their security architecture would need to be fundamentally redesigned, he argued, so that no code could be changed on the device without the unforgeable signature of the manufacturer. But he warned that even if that code-signing measure were put in place today, it could take 10 years or more to iron out the USB standard’s bugs and pull existing vulnerable devices out of circulation. “It’s unfixable for the most part,” Nohl said at the time. “But before even starting this arms race, USB sticks have to attempt security.”
Caudill says that by publishing their code, he and Wilson are hoping to start that security process. But even they hesitate to release every possible attack against USB devices. They’re working on another exploit that would invisibly inject malware into files as they are copied from a USB device to a computer. By hiding another USB-infecting function in that malware, Caudill says it would be possible to quickly spread the malicious code from any USB stick that’s connected to a PC and back to any new USB plugged into the infected computer. That two-way infection trick could potentially enable a USB-carried malware epidemic. Caudill considers that attack so dangerous that even he and Wilson are still debating whether to release it.
I find it interesting that we are so advanced with visuals, but computer voices are still way behind. So at least voice actors in Hollywood will have jobs for a while.