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Most of my readers are USA based, but many of you aren’t. It is Thanksgiving this week in USA, and I am committed to disconnect more, but not completely as next week is a busy week traveling to Atlanta and North Carolina.
I won’t be blogging much for next couple of weeks with vacation and traveling.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I think there should be a “Life is Good, Disconnect” T-shirt. Although that is probably not as appealing as these.
Battery life is the main thing that defines the user experience. In the old days, there may have been phones that used power when off, draining the battery. In the highly competitive world of smartphones who would drain the battery now?
Arstechnica has a post that Privacy int’l is asking manufacturers how the NSA can track their phones when powered off. This is funny that someone actually thinks the phones are still connected.
Back in July 2013, The Washington Post reported that nearly a decade ago, the National Security Agency developed a new technique that allowed spooks to “find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this ‘The Find,’ and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.”
Many security researchers scratched their heads trying to figure out how this could be so. The British watchdog group Privacy International took it upon itself to ask eight major mobile phone manufacturers if and how this was possible in August 2013. On Monday, the group published replies from the four firms that have responded thus far: Ericsson, Google, Nokia, and Samsung. (Apple, HTC, Microsoft, and BlackBerry have not yet sent in a response.)
A research officer at the organization, Richard Tynan, wrote that “two themes stood out among the companies that replied: hardware manufacturers claim that they strive to switch off almost all their components while the phone is powered down, and if tracking occurs it is likely due to the installation of malware onto the phone.” Here are a few of the responses:
According to Tynan, Google responded:
When a mobile device running the Android Operating System is powered off, there is no part of the Operating System that remains on or emits a signal. Google has no way to turn on a device remotely.
Samsung Vice President Hyunjoon Kim noted that “without the power source it is not possible to transmit any signal, due to the components being inactive. Thus the powered off devices are not able to be tracked or monitored by any third party.” Meanwhile, Nokia’s Vice President and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Chad Fentress said:
Our devices are designed so that when they are switched off, the radio transceivers within the devices should be powered off. We are not aware of any way they could be re-activated until the user switches the device on again. We believe that this means that the device could not be tracked in the manner suggested in the article you referenced.
ABC reports on the NSA data center and has a quote.
"The failures that occurred during testing have been mitigated," Vines said in a statement. "A project of this magnitude requires stringent management, oversight, and testing before the government accepts any building."
I was thinking maybe somewhere buried deep in the huge stack of requirement documents are that the NSA data center is a Cloud environment. And, someone could interpret the Cloud as we need lightning. :-)
Here is an Arc Flash Demonstration with sound.
With all this PR on the electrical problems that are a whole of people at the NSA trying to figure out what went wrong with the electrical design, equipment, and installation.
LitBit's Scott Noteboom made a grand claim.
led development and/or operations of many of the world's largest and most innovative data centers, which have served companies including: Apple, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.
Here are some other data points to evaluate the statement and to get you thinking.
On Microsoft, Mike Manos tweeted this statement.
Mike Manos@mjmanos
@greenm3 WRT- bit.ly/1eNdk4y Hmm-In all my time running that program thru today - this person never worked on anything for Microsoft
DCD references how DLB Associates was the external resource working on Google's data centers.
Today, both the best and worst kept secret in the data center industry is that DLB Associates was lead design engineer on Google’s initial data center campus build out (a well-guarded secret for the first seven years of Google’s build program). While Google provided the conceptual design and placed a high priority on efficiency, DLB designed the campus and buildings as well as the majority of the MEP infrastructure.
In the data center industry you can make all kinds of claims. The diligent will reference check. I wonder who at Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google LitBit points you to when you want to get the details on how they had been served.
I just got back from Iceland and took my camera gear. After a few days going through my gear in the hotel I saw one of my folding knives was in the camera bag. I made it through security once, but I wasn't going to try again so checked one bag with the below knife in it.
Here is a video of the knife.
Why did I have a knife in my camera bag? When you have $3,000 worth of camera and lens, and another $3,000 Mac Book Retina it's a bit of insurance to have when walking around with the gear. Plus its handy to have a good knife.
How did I get through security? With all the camera gear batteries, cables, tablet in the camera backpack it was probably hard to see the knife since it was in a side pocket position like this to the X-ray scanner.
Next time I'll double check the side pockets of my camera bag to make sure I take the knife out. :-)
