OT, but fun: Re: Homing In on Laser Weapons (was Re: US developing untraceable weapons)
On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Steve Schear wrote: Information about the damage such lasers could inflict is classified. But in general, experts say, a 25-kilowatt laser could blind an enemy sensor several hundred miles away. It also could put a hole through a sheet of metal from a distance of several miles. A few assumptions and you can estimate the damage. Is that laser power level or source power level? Peak powers in the terrawatt range are normal, but energy level is usually only a few joules. If it's CW, then 25kJ/sec on a 1cm^2 area could do some useful damage to most anything. Correspondingly, a 100-kilowatt solid-state laser -- the Holy Grail for weapons developers -- could deliver a destructive beam to a target dozens of miles away, making it an effective tactical weapon. With the engines of a B2 bomber maybe... Lasers do have one big drawback. The beam is not very effective in inclement weather and requires greater levels of energy to pierce thick clouds. Use a better wavelength dummy... Because of the relative motion and closing rates of actively engaged combat systems and the ease with which the missile surfaces can be hardened against directed energy, I suspect fielding an effective system will be as difficult and expensive as the antimissile systems now under development. Light speed is faster than any mechanical motion we can do for the forseeable future. 10^4 Joules is needed to do damage, so if that can be delivered in a millisecond the receiving end is gonna have problems. An interesting defense would be an easy to ablate surface that ionizes at low energy so the laser can't penetrate very deep. After 30 seconds, the receiving end is still gonna have problems. So if the missle can close the range to the laser in less time than that, the laser has problems. For every weapon there is a counter :-) Just like crypto... Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: CDR: ISP Utilty To Cypherpunks?
Nin hao, On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, David E. Weekly wrote: Cypherpunks, I run a 501(c)(3) non-profit focuses on providing free, donation-based colocation to individuals and other non-profits (i.e., no companies are hosted. Additionally, we try to do things that are useful to the not-for-profit Internet community as a whole; for instance, we run a freenode.info IRC server (freenode is used by a lot of Open Source development groups to coordinate developer teams). I'd like to understand how we could be useful to the cypherpunk community. I've got some wild guesses (run a public keyserver, run a mixmaster node, etc), but I don't really know what is most badly needed, or how we could provide the most bang for the bandwidth buck. (We do pay for bandwidth, so serving up Debian ISOs is not a viable way we can help the community at this time.) Ideally, we'd like to find applications that don't use a lot of bandwidth (500kbps aggregate), but require a server that's got a fixed IP, is up all the time, and has very low latency to most of the Net. How can we help? Hangar 18 http://open-forge.org (Join the hangar18-general list for direct participation) The sponsoring company In Silica, LLC should go live within the next several days (I believe the papers get submitted to the state this afternon around 2pm). It will operate via a DBA for Open Forge to support Open Technology public distributed networks (among other Open Technology projects, like a P2P laser comm we're building). With respect to Mixmaster, Wolf is already set to begin porting to Plan 9 as soon as we get the first clusters up (by Jan 1 is our current target). We are building machines now. All in all we've got about a half dozen volunteers and approximately 40 machines. It is a mix of Linux, Plan 9, BSD. We have one Plan 9 R3 I/O-Auth server installed but not configured (these 16/6 weeks at work are killing my project time). We have another Plan 9 R4 I/O-Auth server being built. At least two members of Hangar 18 are building boxes to add. I believe both of these will be process servers for the general pool. A core 80G 9P file server will be coming online also, limited usage and content type (eg no music swapping/sharing). We also have a node in NYC (though it's a little light right now on services - Hi Carlos!). Zai jian. -- We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
Re: CDR: Re: ISP Utilty To Cypherpunks?
On Fri, 01 Nov 2002, Jim Choate wrote: Nei sche szche. The question is, how does one construct a censorship-free search engine. Plan 9 http://plan9.bell-labs.com An OS is not a search engine. Hangar 18 http://open-forge.org A service might be a search engine. Give plan9 a rest, already. Everyone loves the OS they use. (Sorry to respond to Jim, but I'm grumpy this morning. Something about coding until 7AM does that to me...) -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] Naturally the common people don't want war . But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. -Hermann Goering
Re: Katy, bar the door
At 09:32 PM 10/31/2002 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 05:09 PM, Steve Schear wrote: Unfortunately, there are many gasses which kill or disable with only a small dosage (e.g., VX). Unless the cabins are equipped with toxic air sensors (possible in a few years with all the biochip work underway) I think the masks may be be too little too late. I'm missing the gist of this scenario. If the attackers/hijackers cannot get into the cockpit and gain control of the plane, then the most they can do with disabling/lethal/nerve gases is to cause the plane to essentially crash randomly...which kills a few hundred people, but probably not many more. This may be more than sufficient to place a final nail in the airline industry coffin. Killing NY sheeple in high rise buildings isn't the only way to hurt us. steve
RE: OT, but fun: Re: Homing In on Laser Weapons (was Re: US deve loping untraceable weapons)
Mike Rosing[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Steve Schear wrote: Information about the damage such lasers could inflict is classified. But in general, experts say, a 25-kilowatt laser could blind an enemy sensor several hundred miles away. It also could put a hole through a sheet of metal from a distance of several miles. A few assumptions and you can estimate the damage. Is that laser power level or source power level? Peak powers in the terrawatt range are normal, but energy level is usually only a few joules. If it's CW, then 25kJ/sec on a 1cm^2 area could do some useful damage to most anything. This is a game we can all play. Lasers as weapons have 3 major modes of action. 1. Blinding sensors. This could be temporary, or permanent, depending on the sensor and the power level. Firing 100kW at a Sidewinder, Copperhead, or modern equivalent would probably ruin it. Ditto for laser or video guided precision muntions. (Note that human eyeballs count as sensors for this purpose (ugh!)). 2. Burn-through. If enough energy is absorbed by the target, it heats to the point where it starts to lose structural integrity. This can directly make it useless, set fire to internal components, fuel, or explosives. A missile under thrust is highly stressed, and can buckle. A airframe can lose streamlining, and rip apart. Usually requires a lot of power. 3. Ablative blast. A short, intense hit with a laser can cause the a thin layer of the surface to vaporize. This vapor expands very rapidly away from the underlying surface, and due to conservation of momentum, provides a physical blow to the remaining material. Requires a brief, high-intensity pulse. Correspondingly, a 100-kilowatt solid-state laser -- the Holy Grail for weapons developers -- could deliver a destructive beam to a target dozens of miles away, making it an effective tactical weapon. With the engines of a B2 bomber maybe... Lasers do have one big drawback. The beam is not very effective in inclement weather and requires greater levels of energy to pierce thick clouds. Use a better wavelength dummy... Wavelength changing won't help with clouds much (that's why they're white). Suspended droplets of water are going to disperse any wavelength they don't absorb. At higher energies, you could burn a hole through the cloud, but that leads to other problems. For a start, the cloud is moving, so the hole is not stable. Second, a high intensity continuous beam causes 'thermal blooming'. When the laser heats the air within it's beam, that air expands, lowering it's refractive index compared with the surrounding air. This causes the beam to refract outwards, like the bell of a trumpet. At even higher powers, the air itself will ionize. The plasma is highly absorbtive. Some of these problems can be avoided by using very short pulses. Also, if the laser is mounted in an airplane, the beam is, for most of it's path travelling through 'fresh' air. One other trick would be to use a 'target designation laser' of one wavelength, and then have two or more weapon lasers converge on the designated target simultaneously from different locations. Peak power is then reached only on target. Because of the relative motion and closing rates of actively engaged combat systems and the ease with which the missile surfaces can be hardened against directed energy, I suspect fielding an effective system will be as difficult and expensive as the antimissile systems now under development. Light speed is faster than any mechanical motion we can do for the forseeable future. 10^4 Joules is needed to do damage, so if that can be delivered in a millisecond the receiving end is gonna have problems. An interesting defense would be an easy to ablate surface that ionizes at low energy so the laser can't penetrate very deep. After 30 seconds, the receiving end is still gonna have problems. So if the missle can close the range to the laser in less time than that, the laser has problems. See 'ablative blast' above. This might work for a ground target, but a airborne one would have real problems. For every weapon there is a counter :-) Just like crypto... Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike Peter Trei
P2P ordered to monitor users, files
Can't wait until some lawyer in a black robe tries to understand Freenet... which works with Java 1.4.0 on Win95, BTW File-swapping 'Madster' must track songs Friday, November 1, 2002 Posted: 10:03 AM EST (1503 GMT) ALBANY, New York (AP) -- The file-sharing service Madster must keep a list of songs available through the system as part of a court order to block access to copyright works. U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen in Chicago granted a preliminary injunction against the service Sept. 4. The judge sided with recording company officials who claimed Albany-based Madster violated copyright law just as Napster had before it. Aspen waited until this week, however, to release terms of the injunction to give the two sides time to suggest wording tailored to stop only the transfer of copyright files. In addition to disabling access to copyright works, Aspen directed Madster to monitor its system and keep a list of any and all sound recordings and musical compositions being made available. That list must be shared with recording companies upon five business days notice. Service must comply The service also must file regular reports detailing its compliance. Madster founder Johnny Deep did not immediately return calls Thursday. He has said that he didn't know of a way to filter copyright files because the transferred material is encrypted. snip http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/11/01/madster.ruling.ap/index.html
Re: CDR: Re: ISP Utilty To Cypherpunks?
Your ignornace of technology is showing. You should do more research into 9P. -- We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Jamie Lawrence wrote: On Fri, 01 Nov 2002, Jim Choate wrote: Nei sche szche. The question is, how does one construct a censorship-free search engine. Plan 9 http://plan9.bell-labs.com An OS is not a search engine. Hangar 18 http://open-forge.org A service might be a search engine. Give plan9 a rest, already. Everyone loves the OS they use. (Sorry to respond to Jim, but I'm grumpy this morning. Something about coding until 7AM does that to me...) -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] Naturally the common people don't want war . But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. -Hermann Goering
Re: Flight security analysis (was Re: Confiscation of Anti-War Video)
On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 01:35:06PM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 02:45 PM 11/1/02 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 30K feet, you have about half a minute before you pass out Which isn't the problem it's the -40F that kills you. You freeze your ass off well before you ever die from lack of oxygen. The vast majority of folks can hold their breath long enough for a jet to go from 30k to 10k in a emergency dive. Less than 60s. Wow, Choate biophysics now. Do the thermal conductivity/inertia calcs. -40F *air* can't drop your coretemp in 30 seconds. Do the math. Or go up to the Dakotas this winter and step outside for half a minute. It hurts but doesn't kill that quickly. We lived for a long, long time in far northern MN in a cabin with no electricity or running water. When I had to pee in the middle of the night, I'd just run outside and pee in the yard. Summer or Winter, it made no difference, and I never found it a problem standing out there buck naked and barefoot at 30 below. Can't imagine that 40 below would be much different. And since my wife objected to yellow snow right by the house, I had to walk at bit away, not clear to the outhouse, but a piece. OTOH, I did once when we lived up about halfway between Jasper and Prince George, BC fall thru the ice in the Fraser River up to my waist (fully clothed tho) and my legs lost all feeling almost immediately. Of course, that river up there was pretty close to being straight off a glacier and was too cold to swim in even in July or August. I likewise went thru the ice to my waist in N. MN once and it wasn't bad at all. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com War is just a racket ... something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small group knows what its about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. --- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933 Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present day, has been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to faciliate our exploitation of resources. - Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General http://www.thesunmagazine.org/bully.html
LIDAR/Lasers
Some of these problems can be avoided by using very short pulses. Again you get into dwell, the short pulses -must- be made up for by increasing the PRR and this defeats the who purpose of the short pulses since you need more of them (we're talking an integration effect here so it doesn't take much to understand why duty cycle isn't as important as you make it out to be IR is not particularly better than visible for most wavelengths, and fog is the real killer (as opposed to rain or even snow). But I know the LIDAR folks found that there ARE some nicer wavelength windows within the IR band. As for pulsed lasers, here's where my knowledge of military applications fails me (I used to work in civilian ultrafast/femtosecond optics.) As for pulsing such a laser, I can't quite imagine WHY this would be attempted for damage reasons (reconaissance is a different sotry). If the pulsing is in the millisecond regime or faster, I would imagine this is only to allow for population re-inversion of the laser material (ie, to keep it lasing at higher peak power). But I assume the military's laser research in the wavelengths of interest are well beyond the need for this. Of course, there's the easy possibility that the military does use fast pulses for the purpose of knocking out certain sensor materials via 2nd order/nonlinear processes. As we found out back in 92 or so (from some declassification), the military's optical research in Adaptive optics was in some ways 30 years ahead of the civilian world. Who the heck knows what they're doing with laser pulses. _ Unlimited Internet access -- and 2 months free! Try MSN. http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/2monthsfree.asp
