Word

Quote of the Day goes to B, who hits center mass:

50 years from now, no one is gonna bother to restore an electric Mustang to collect or drive.

Just sayin’.

Yup. 

Ronnie Dunn - Cost Of Livin'

Farewell to the Washington Post.  Journalists never cared when mills across the land shut down and people and towns were wiped out; now it's wailing like the End Of The World by journalists, for journalists.

I'm having trouble summoning up sympathy.  Welcome to the club, pal.

Elon's city on Mars

This is a fascinating breakdown of the (quite serious) engineering problems facing SpaceX as they attempt to build a Mars city. 

Deap sea video of German Battleship Bismark

Last year a company called Magellan sent a deep sea rover 15,000 feet down to the site of the final resting place of the battleship Bismark, sunk 86 years ago.  The video is simply spectacular.  Here is a shortish excerpt with commentary. 

And since we're talking about the Bismark, this song is obligatory.

The EPA makes everything worse, vol CXVI

In this case, marine diesel engines which used to be famously long lived.  The Detroit Diesel engines of old were famous for running 20,000 or 30,000 hours before a four day rebuild at the dock set them up for another 20,000 or 30,000 hours.  You couldn't kill these engines.  Rather, you would leave them to your kids in your will.

That's over now, and it's because of the EPA.  Over a span of 15 or 20 years, they ratcheted up the emission requirements for these engines to the point that Detroit Diesel would be fined millions and millions of dollars for selling their old (famously reliable) design.

And so now you have to rebuild after 10,000 hours, and you have to replace three times as many parts.  Plan on a month, rather than four days.

This is a very interesting video on the subject.  While I'm not an expert on diesel engines, it certainly seems solid from an engineering perspective. 

Here are the main points.

1. Pressures have gone from 10,000 psi to 30,000 PSI for a bunch of EPA-imposed constraints.  This shortens the lifespan of parts used in the engines.

2. The higher pressure means that engines are much more vulnerable to bad diesel fuel: water particles or tiny flakes of rust now essentially sandblast the pistons, valves, and cylinders.  This didn't used to take place at the old lower pressure.  This sandblasting effect shortens part life even more, which makes engine rebuild and cost even higher.

3. Because parts will fail much more often now, manufacturers put all sorts of sensors in place.  The sensors themselves can fail - the high seas is a notoriously unforgiving environment and salt water will get into the engine room.  This causes corrosion, which triggers sensor faults.  The engine's computer (itself a new thing, with software of questionable quality) will detect the fault and sometimes put the engine into "Limp Home Mode" - not allowing it to go above, say, 1000 RPM.  A ship in a storm may find its engine dangerously under powered, putting at risk the lives on board and the safety of the ship itself.  If a ship sinks in a storm under these circumstances, the fuel oil in the tanks will pollute the environment.

4. Not pointed out in the video, ocean-going vessels do not have to worry about emissions.  From a pure regulatory perspective, that is.  However, finding a new engine with all the design "upgrades" discussed here is the challenge.  I don't know what EU regulations are, so maybe a MAN engine doesn't have to deal with this.  But I'm nasty and suspicious and think that EU regulations could be even worse than EPA's.

Thanks a whole lot of nothing, EPA.  You're supposed to protect the environment. Oh, and not get Americans killed.

The only thing I think is unfair about the video is the title.  Engine manufactures design their engines to fail after 10 years because the EPA forces them to. 

You could roll back all the environmental regulations since 1990 and shutter the EPA and this Republic would be a whole lot better off. 

Secure Your Home Network: Which of your devices can you trust?

And more importantly, which should you not trust? 

This post is the fourth in a series on how to make your home network harder to attack.  Here are links to posts one, two, and three.  

Now you might think the question in the post title is a bit strange - after all, these are you devices, so you'd think that they're all trustworthy.  You'd be wrong.  There are at a minimum two different categories of trustworthiness:

Your main computing devices.  These are computers (duh) such as laptops and desktop computers, servers (a future post will talk about why these can be useful to you, and your cell phones (which are nothing but tiny hand held computers).

Now I've been in security for long enough that I get a bit twitchy about mobile phone security (I'll address this in a future post as well).  However, that ship has sailed and even a security nerd like me won't bother making a separate network just for these.  So they're computing devices for this discussion.

Then there's everything else.  It's surprising how any Internet-connected thingies there are these days.  Ring doorbells, Nest thermostats, online appliances (fridges, washing machines, etc).  At this point the Borepatch from four years ago would have told you to just walk away from all this nonsense.  Don't Internet-enable anything in this category.

Today's Borepatch sighs and tells you that this is coming to a home near yours.  It's here in my home.  No, not the thermostat (which was installed by the previous owner and which I have not connected to the WiFi).  However, the TVs all come with streaming apps for Netflix, Prime, and Youtube (among dozens of others).  And The Queen Of The World reminds me that the kids like to stream when they come and visit.  She likes it when they come and visit, as do I.  And so we have to do something for these devices.

Fortunately, you don't need any new kit to do this.  If you remember from the last post on water tight compartments, you don't own the Internet box from your network provider.  Basically, you can't trust it, so you install a new firewall box running DD-WRT.  It's trustworthy because you own it and have your own software and configuration on it.

All of your main computing devices connect to it's WiFi.  All of the other devices (doorbells, thermostats, TVs, appliances) connect to the WiFi from your network provider's box.

What you've done is to put a firewall between your computing devices and your untrusted devices.  It doesn't matter if your TV gets hacked because it can't get through your DD-WRT firewall to your computers.

Likewise, your TV is at least somewhat protected from the outside world because it's behind the firewall in your network provider's box. 

Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk about Starship

This is a fascinating conversation. 

This is SO not like the NASA interviews when I was a kid.

"One more war in the West and the civilization of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome"

Who would have guessed a hundred years ago that Stanley Baldwin was right? 

 

I dunno - he looks a little Woodrow Wilsonish to me.  But if you're right, you're right.

And Nota Bene: it seems that DuckDuckGo can't find the link to that last post.  Strangely, Google can.  Search sting site:borepatch.blogspot.com best worst presidents on each site. So long, DuckDuckGo, it's been fun.  But I can't trust you, and neither should my readers.