55 year old bug fixed

This may be the oldest bug fix in history, in the 1969 "Lunar Lander" text based computer game.  I really enjoyed that, back in the 1970s.

And yes, it printed out on paper.  The story is very cool:

In 2009, just short of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I set out to find the author of the original Lunar Lander game, which was then primarily known as a graphical game, thanks to the graphical version from 1974 and a 1979 Atari arcade title. When I discovered that Storer created the oldest known version as a teletype game, I interviewed him and wrote up a history of the game. Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.

...

Fast forward to 2024, when Martin—an AI expert, game developer, and former postdoctoral associate at MIT—stumbled upon a bug in Storer's high school code while exploring what he believed was the optimal strategy for landing the module with maximum fuel efficiency—a technique known among Kerbal Space Program enthusiasts as the "suicide burn." This method involves falling freely to build up speed and then igniting the engines at the last possible moment to slow down just enough to touch down safely. He also tried another approach—a more gentle landing.

"I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel," Martin wrote on his blog. "Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing 'divide by two' that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years."

Very cool story.

Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

OldNFO points out a post at Lawrence's place about how Adobe has changed their terms of service.  Basically, you have to agree that they own all the work you create with their software, in order to get access to your work that you created on their software.

Sweet. 

Now IANAL, and so don't know how the (inevitable) Class Action lawsuit(s) will play out.  However, I am an enthusiastic user of The GIMP, a free (as in speech) Open Source Photoshop-alike application.

Yes, it has a Photoshop-worthy learning curve, but it is full featured and powerful, cross platform, and free.  No weird terms of service getting changed at midnight.

If you're looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I highly recommend this.

Are any readers familiar with configuring Palo Alto Networks gear?

I know Cisco, not Palo Alto.  If any of you do know hoe to do this, Old NFO could use some help.

If Bach (or other composers) wrote the Cantina song from Star Wars

These guys are really good.  This is great fun.  I particularly like the Oscar Peterson version, and the Pete Townsend (Teenage Wasteland) one is a hoot.

Costco wines tasted by professional Sommelier

I ran across this because the Youtube algorithm tossed it up in my feed (Lord knows why).  But Andre Mack seems to have some chops as a sommelier, and he has a really interesting tasting of Costco (Kirkland Signature) wines.  These range from $4 to $30 a bottle, mostly in the $8 - $12 range.  Bottom line: some dogs but surprisingly few.

My impression: can confirm on the Kirkland Pinot Grigio.  It's not something you'll find at a Michelin Star restaurant, but it's really good vino locale (or in French, le bon vin de table).  And it comes in the 3 liter box for $13.  Endorsed.

So I watched this and thought that Mr. Mack seems legit.  As a follow up, I watched this tasting of the same wine from different vintages, 1978 to 2016.  I believe that Mr. Mack is indeed legit.  There's good stuff here.

I like how he describes himself as a wine "nerd" - guilty as charged, although my days of real wine nerdism are a third of a century in the rear view mirror.  I even built a wine cellar under the basement stairs.  What Mack says here about how wine ages is exactly what I saw with a case of Bordeaux (1986 Gruaud Larose).  Over the span of six years the wine definitely and obviously changed each year.

Ya know, if I had kept that untouched, the $30/bottle (1990 dollars) would be now worth ~ $300/bottle (2024 dollars*).  But you need to not move every 5 years, so that won't work.

But watch the first video for sure, and go get you some legit cheap wine at Costco.  I hadn't known that they're the top wine merchant in the US.

*About 30 cents/bottle in 1990 dollars, given how inflation is running.

Nikalaus Wirth, R.I.P

Computer scientist Nikalaus Wirth passed away on New Year's Day.  Wirth is known for creating the Pascal computer language - full disclosure: I wrote a fair amount of code in Turbo Pascal way back in the day. 

Pascal passed out of fashion (if indeed it was ever fashionable) a long while back.  What I remember of Wirth was his wit.  Asked at a conference what the proper pronunciation of his name was.  He answered that you could call him by name, in which case it was pronounced "Weert".  Or you could call him by value in which case it was pronounced "Worth".  Funny, in a really geeky way.

A very literary Christmas

The Queen Of The World got me a Barnes & Noble gift card, so we went out to an actual bricks-and-mortar bookstore (do they really have those?  As it turns out, yes they do).

It was a blast, and a bit of a blast from the past.  The whole Borepatch clan would go out Christmas shopping Back In The Day, and we'd spend an inordinate amount of time in bookstores.  TQOTW and I were in the bookstore for a couple of hours.  I'd forgotten just how much better book shopping at a bookstore is, as opposed to online.

Sure, online lets you get that book you already know about instantly, no fus and no muss.  But there's no good way to browse.  Basically, online handles the known knowns, but in the store is unbeatable for unknown unknowns.

For example, I didn't know that I wanted this until I was browsing: Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams. (Williams was Glenn's wingman in the Korean War, flying combat sorties)

I also didn't know that I needed Barry Strauss' Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors From Augustus To Constantine.  I had listened to Robin Pearson interview Prof. Strauss on The History Of Byzantium podcast (you can listen at the link; recommended), and lo and behold here was the book.  Done and done.

Likewise with Tom Holland's new book Pax: War And Peace In Rome's Golden Age.  Like with Strauss, I had heard Robin interview Tom Holland on the same podcast.

I had wanted Max Miller's new cookbook, Tasting History.  We've seen Miller's videos here before (for example, Trader Vic's original Mai Tai).  Miller recreates recipes from the past, going all the way back to ancient Babylon (!).  I think the first of his videos I posted was about feeding the Roman Army.  He is entertaining and the recipes looked really interesting and now that there is a cookbook of the recipes I thought I'd get it.  We'll see if TQOTW lets me make any of these in her kitchen.

All in all, podcasters were well represented at the bookstore.  Both of Mike Duncan's books were there.  Already had both, but was happy to see that he's currently in stock.

So it was a great afternoon with The Queen Of The World (who also scored some history books - she's not just a pretty face, she's also wicked smart).  Bricks and mortar bookstores for the win.

Dad Joke CCIC - Special Cisco edition

In honor of the Cisco bug from hell, here are some computer networking Dad Jokes:

Five routers walk into a bar.  Who gets the car keys?  The Designated Router.

An IPv6 packet walks into a bar.  Nobody talks to him.

What did the OSPF router say to the other OSPF router?  Hello.  Hello.  Hello.

I would tell you a joke about UDP but you probably wouldn't get it.

Why yes, I am a nerd.  Why do you ask?

Interesting new WiFi security tool

This is pretty geeky, but is also pretty interesting:

Cybersecurity researchers have released a new tool called 'Snappy' that can help detect fake or rogue WiFi access points that attempts to steal data from unsuspecting people.

Attackers can create fake access points in supermarkets, coffee shops, and malls that impersonate real ones already established at the location. This is done to trick users into connecting to the rogue access points and relay sensitive data through the attackers' devices.

As the threat actors control the router, they can capture and analyze the transferred data by performing man-in-the-middle attacks.

Trustwave's security researcher and wireless/RF tech enthusiast Tom Neaves explains that spoofing the MAC addresses and SSIDs of legitimate access points on open networks is trivial for determined attackers.

The devices of those who revisit the locations of open wireless networks they previously connected to will automatically attempt to reconnect to a saved access point, and their owners will be oblivious to the fact that they connecting to a malicious device.

Snappy is a free tool (available in about 100 lines of Python source code) that will tell you if the access point that you're connecting to is the same one that you connected to before.  There are all sorts of parameters that an access point advertises, including name (this is what rogue access points advertise) but also things like vendor, supported data rates, channel, and max power (among other things).

Snappy compares all of these to what your legitimate access point advertises and warns you if there is a mismatch.  Clever.

It's also clever to name your access point "Rouge".  Well, it was in 1998.

 

Dad Joke CCLXVII

Have you heard of the band 1023MB? 

They haven't got a gig yet.

Oh bother

It seems that people have been trying to use ChatGPT to translate Linear-A, but there are just too few texts to allow translation.

Oh, well.  I've thought for some time that they would just be ancient Minoan shopping lists, anyway. 

If you use Signal ...

Someone (maybe LindaG?) left a comment a week or two back about how "Signal is removing support for Android".   There seems to be some confusion about this, enough so that Signal put up a good blog post that explains what's going on.

Short answer: Signal is still going to support Android, but they are removing the SMS feature from their Android app.  This is overall A Good Thing.  So keep using Signal on Android.

Longer answer: SMS (Short Message Service, generally called "Text" by everyone normal) is what phone companies use to allow short, text based person-to-person or group chat messages.  It's been around for a long time - at least 20 years and probably longer.  It was a clever hack to the telephony protocols that allowed short messages to be sent without setting up a circuit (i.e. phone call), so it gave users something they liked without really adding much stress to the phone network's capacity.

The fly in the ointment is that SMS really isn't very secure.  We've known about this for a long time; I posted about this probably almost ten years ago (too lazy to chase this down in the almost 14,000 posts here).

Since Signal is all about security, they've finally dropped their SMS support feature.  I think this was just used as an add on to their login mechanism - you not only had to enter your password but you had to have a second method of verifying that you are actually you.  Signal would send your phone (well, the Signal app on your phone) a text with a secret code that you'd enter to complete your login.

Since SMS is not secure, this isn't a great way to add this second authentication step.  So Signal has added their own mechanism where their server sends a (secure) message directly to the Signal app.  In general, this is a security improvement over SMS.  There's more detail at their blog post, but as I said earlier, from a security perspective this is A Very Good Thing.

So I hope this clears up the confusion.  Signal is still there, on Android, and more secure than ever.

LOL [snort]

 Man, that's funny.  Any yes, I am a nerd.  Why do you ask?

Shamelessly stolen from Jennifer who has a bunch of them.  This one may not even be the funniest.

Obsolete from the beginning

One classic problem with weapons systems is that the march of technology renders them obsolete, and the faster the technology advances the shorter the useful life of the system.  Via a wikiwander I have found perhaps the ultimate example of this: the SMS Hessen.

The German Kaisar was a big naval enthusiast and so built up a fleet of cutting edge battleships (including the Hessen).  Then the Royal Navy introduced the HMS Dreadnought which completely changed the game.  All existing battleships were instantly obsolete - including the Hessen which had only been commissioned a year previously.

Interestingly, the SMS Hessen remained in one form of service or another in the German fleet and then later in the Soviet fleet until 1960 when it was scrapped.  That is 55 years of obsolescence embodied in one warship.  That has got to be some sort of record.

There's some interesting stuff on the Wiki page for WWII Battleships.  One that caught my eye was a ship with an even longer life than the Hessen: the Turkish battleship Turgut Reis which began its service as the German battleship SMS Weissenberg in 1894 which was sold to Turkey in 1910 but wasn't scrapped until 1957 - 63 years later.  At least the Weissenberg wasn't obsolete for the first 12 years of its service.

To close out this post, Glen Filthie found a lego stop motion video of the hunt for the Bismark.  Recommended.

Memories of July 4th past

ASM826 posted about a July 4th from living memory.  But there are other things about July 4th that make you think that Divine Providence  did, as Otto von Bismark remarked, look out for the United States of America.

Lots of people know that fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Independence Hall, both John Adams (President #2) and Thomas Jefferson (President #3) passed on to that Undiscovered Country from whose borne no traveler returns.  But they weren't the last.  five years later, James Monroe (President #5) joined them.

With 45 Presidents (not counting the current pResident of the office), you would expect 0.12 Presidents to have dies on any given day of the year.  But today, there are 3 - that's 25 times the number you would expect.  I don't know what the standard deviation is here, but this has to be ten or twenty sigma from what you would expect.  Yes, I'm a nerd here, but those of you who Get This will feel the hair on the back of your neck go up.

Divine Providence is not done with this Republic.

The Democratic Party loses the signal

Electronic communications rely on the concept of a Carrier Wave.  Basically, this is a well-defined electronic signal that all devices can "tune" into, and upon which the actual message is transmitted.  If you lose the carrier, you lose your connection and you can't communicate with anybody.

You Old Farts will remember the old dial-up modem days.  You see, most houses back in the paleolithic age (say, the 1990s) only had one phone line.  Hen Junior wanted to jump on Compuserve (or, Lord forbid, America Online), his biggest worry was often that Mom would pick up the phone to call a friend.  When the phone went off-hook, the carrier signal went all skew-wumpus* and the modem connection dropped.  There was even a long running BBS joke Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Good times, good times.

Well, the Democratic Party has had control of the carrier wave to the American people for a long, long time.  The first post I tagged Biased Media was way back in 2008, and it was obvious even back then.  They've been used to jamming the Republicans access to the Carrier for a long time.  This has given the Democrat's a big advantage for a long, long time.

That's been going away for a long, long time.  Reagan beat Carter, and then whats-his-name from Minnesota.  The Republicans swept control of Congress in the 1990s.  The whole "Bush lied" (about Iraq) dates back to Hillary Clinton who needed Media air cover for her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2003.  Sure, Obama won in 2008 but the 2010 elections decimated the Democratic Party, as the country reacted in revulsion to the far left-wing policies of his administration.

In my counting, that's 40 years of increasing rejection of the Democratic Party's narrative pushed by an increasingly weak and irrelevant media.

And so here we are at today.  We've had two mass shootings in as many weeks, and three or four in the last couple of months.  It's so perfectly set up to support the Democratic narrative that people are wondering if this is yet more FBI instigation**.  And yet, it's not moving the needle in the Democrat's favor.  Consider:

• Senate Majority Leader (Democrat) Chuck Schumer has refused to move forward with a gun control bill.  This is despite all the recent mass shootings.  Schumer may be a jerk but he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to look at what the polls say about issues.  The American people are entirely uninterested in more gun control, and forcing his party to put their necks on that chopping block is something that he (wisely) will not do.
• Covid is over, and every time a (Democrat) politician or bureaucrat suggests further lock downs or restrictions this "news" disappears from the media in a day.  It's political suicide, any why the Democrats would love to ride that crisis further, they know they'd just ride it into the ditch.
• Russia! Russia! Russia! is over.  Polls are starting to show that people want sanctions to end so we can import oil from them to drop gas prices.  The joke is I can't believe that it's MonkeyPox season!  I still have my Ukraine decorations up!
  

• Oh, yeah - I forgot all about the riots.  And MonkeyPox?  Bitch, please.

Each of these has had a shelf life measured between 2 months and 2 days, but the lifetime is shortening.  And as this has played out, Joe Biden's approval ratings have continued sinking.  He's now the least popular "President" since Harry Truman.  That's 70 years.  If you actually remember Harry Truman, you're really, really old.  Polls repeatedly show that people would prefer Republican candidates over Democrat ones by 5, or 8, or 10 points.

My point is that the media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) is that crisis after crisis after crisis, all blamed on the Republicans, or Vladimir Putin, or White People have had precisely zero effect.  Nada. Nichto.  ничто.  无.

So to my point - The Democrats are very unpopular, and are getting increasingly unpopular.  The Media has lost all ability to change this trajectory.  We will leave for another day the question of whether the Republicans will be any better, but in all honesty - could they possibly be worse?***

We will also leave for another day the question of how legitimacy is established in a "Western Democracy" when elections are repeatedly stolen.  There's no question that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are up to this, and since "free and fair elections" are the bedrock of the American sense of political legitimacy, what happens when this is under minded needs to be explored in more detail.****

I shall endeavor to address these open items this weekend.  But I maintain what I said ten years ago after another notorious mass shooting: no new gun control laws are on offer.  And if Republican s are smart, after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade they should counter all gun control proposals with "Common Sense" abortion control proposals.  You'd have to pop popcorn to enjoy the meltdown that would induce.

* Technical term in computer networking, I was told.

** Remember the jury that refused to convict the people who were "plotting to kidnap" the Michigan Governor because almost all of the folks who were involved were FBI? 

*** Spoiler alert: maybe.

**** Spoiler alert: nothing good.

NSA: "No known problems" in Quantum Computing resistant ciphers

Story.  Bruce Schneier (a crypto heavy-hitter) says he believes them. 

I'm not so sure.  Long term readers will remember how the NSA subverted commercial grade encryption.  I wrote about it at some length here and here and here.  Each of these were pretty damning:

1. These were all independent attempts to undermine commercial crypto.  In other words, NSA has tried at least three times to break crypto so that they can ready whatever they want, whenever they want.
2. Each of these attempts is very well documented.  NSA's fingers were found in the cookie jar, without question.
3. NSA's public statements need to be very carefully parsed.  I was at the Black Hat security conference and listened to NSA Director Alexander assure everyone that NSA analysts didn't just go joy riding through the data bases of stuff they collect from you and me; it was only hours later that the disclosure came out that, well, yeah they do.

So is this crypto on the up and up from NSA?  I don't know.  I'm sure not a crypto mathematician but their track record on trustworthiness leaves me wondering if they know something that we don't - a something that is classified so that they're technically truthful when they say there are no "known" (err, and unclassified) weaknesses.

Man, I'm so old that I remember when the NSA crypto nerds were the good guys ...

May the Fourth be with you

But remember, beware the Nerd Side of the Force ...

Dangerous out there it is.

April Fools tech humor

Back in the early 90s I was a nerd [pauses to let shocked gasps die down].  There was a couple year period where I read every single one of the Internet specs that were released.  These documents are rather strangely named "Request For Comment" or RFCs.  Since it was my job to know nerdy Internet stuff then, I read 'em all, probably a couple a week back then.

Well every April Fools Day there would be a joke RFC.  There's a pretty good Wikipedia page that lists them.  Here's a recent example: RFC 8565, Hypertext Jeopardy Protocol.  The Abstract reads:

The Hypertext Jeopardy Protocol (HTJP) inverts the request/response semantics of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Using conventional HTTP, one connects to a server, asks a question, and expects a correct answer. Using HTJP, one connects to a server, sends an answer, and expects a correct question. This document specifies the semantics of HTJP.

Pretty funny right there, in a very nerdy way.  But one that I remember from way back in the day was RFC 1149, Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carriers.  Basically it was sending Internet messages by carrier pigeon.  We yuked this up around the coffee mess.

Well, it turns out some nerds actually implemented this - they built a working system that used pigeons:

Finally, rfc 1149 is implemented! On saturday 28th of april 2001, the worlds very first rfc 1149 network was tested. The weather was quite nice, despite being in one of the most rainy places in Norway.

The ping was started approximately at 12:15. We decided to do a 7 1/2 minute interval between the ping packets, that would leave a couple of packets unanswered, given ideal situations. Things didn't happen quite that way, though. It happened that the neighbour had a flock of pigeons flying. Our pigeons didn't want to go home at once, they wanted to fly with the other pigeons instead. And who can blame them, when the sun was finally shining after a couple of days?

But the instincts won at last, and after about an hour of fun, we could see a couple of pigeons breaking out of the flock and heading in the right direction. There was much cheering. Apparantly, it WAS our pigeons, because not long after, we got a report from the other site that the first pigeon was sitting on the roof.

Read the whole glorious thing here.  Linux nerds FTW!

Robert Heinlein (and most classic SF writers) were right

Well, they were right about one thing - a ginormous room to house computers in their novels.  Let me explain.

Tam writes (and I wholeheartedly agree) that "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is Heinlein's finest novel.  Go read her kind-of review, but this part triggered a thought:

About the most noticeable anachronisms are that almost all communication seems to be by wired landline, although low powered suit radios are mentioned, and the idea of a huge room-sized computer running most of the moon is odd if you allow yourself to stop and think about it, but the plot steps along well enough that you probably won't.

Strangely, a huge room housing a computer that runs the Moon is sort of what's shaping up in today's modern IT technology.  Computing is racing to "The Cloud" which is a series of technologies that let you basically rent computer time from service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS).  The key breakthroughs that made this possible include:

• Ubiquitous high speed Internet access;
• Scalable, reliable, Open Source operating systems (e.g. Linux)
• Enhancements like Docker and Kubernetes that let microservices spin up as needed, and spin down when they are no longer needed.

What's weird is that things have come sort of full circle from the 1960s and 1970 where you had the computer room behind glass walls and you submitted programs to the Operator at the desk.  Only now everything is automatic and controlled through an API.

What's driving this is that if you use the Cloud you get a lot of benefits:

• Higher availability that you could likely afford on your own.  Maybe not the fabled "Five 9s" (99.999% uptime) but for sure 3 Nines.  This is probably prohibitively expensive for you to do on your own because you have to buy a bunch of servers and put them in geographically separated data centers.
• Better security than you could probably afford on your own.  Good security is expensive, but if the servers are cookie-cutter installs then one security guy can cover a lot more of them.  Remember you need both computer security as well as physical security for the data center, which don't come cheap.  The Cloud dramatically lowers the cost to run a secure data center because you amortize the cost over many customers.
• You don't need as much hardware because more capacity spins up as you need it and spins down when you don't.  You only pay for what you need, rather than a big fat check to cover the peak if you were to do it on your own.

And so things look like this now:

I think Heinlein and Asimov would recognize this instantly.

What's really weird about all of this was this story from Back In The Day.  I was at an early Internet conference (1992?) at a session on High Speed Networking (back then, 200 Mbps was righteous).  One presenter made the comment that if you imagine a fast enough network you could run the entire country from Data Centers in Kansas City.  We all laughed.

Except maybe you could run the country from Data Centers in Kansas City.  Funny how what's old is new again.