korethr

> The shutdown mechanisms are specifically about the containment of heat. The problem is generally about a reaction not being shut off.

Indeed? I was of the understanding that the shutdown mechanisms were specifically for halting the chain reaction, and largely a solved problem with mature tech, and it was containing the decay heat of Gen 2 designs that was the trickier problem.

I am happy to be wrong about the latter, though perhaps not as happy to be wrong about the former.

> Now healthy people with a fraction of a percent risk of hospitalization, much less death, act like agoraphobes - apparently willing to do so indefinitely.

If someone wants to be an agoraphobe, they can do so. But what bugs me is that these newly-minted agoraphobes seem to treat their agoraphobia with the same fervor and source of moral purity as a religion. To speak the heresy that one might have some control over what existential dangers await beyond one's front door is met with the same screeching panic that would follow suggesting all pre-pubescent children should be required to participate in satanic sex orgies. By refusing to be (as much as) a victim, you are an active threat to all that is good and true in the world.

I like to joke that I don't go outside because the day star is trying to kill me with radiation burns. And then I laugh at my silliness, put on sunscreen, and go outside anyway. But imagine being scolded by someone that, your not-easily-burning darker skin be damned, because you don't think you need sunscreen, you are the reason their dearest grandmother died of skin cancer. All the while recording you with their phone so the whole Internet will know that you, a science-denying anti-sunscreener, are also a killer-of-grandmas.

It's kinda like that.

So, do these operate on the same design principles as the various Gen 2 reactor designs that have been involved in nuclear accidents, e.g. Three Mile Island, or Fukushima? I raise this question not out of an anti-nuclear hysteria, but a wondering if the safety issues that seem inherent in those designs are addressed in these micro-reactor designs.

I'm not particularly worried about shutdown mechanisms, but more so about containment of decay heat after an emergency shutdown event. By my understanding, our current reactor designs still produce decay heat for a time after shut down, and that heat still needs to be dealt with. And it was this decay heat and the failure to control it that lead to the Three Mile Island and Fukushima incidents.

Decay heat isn't a concern for naval reactors because 1) they're much smaller than a commercial power reactor, with order(s) of magnitude less output, and 2) they have the ocean to use as a heat sink to prevent overheating. Micro-reactors probably also have the first advantage, with outputs ranging from 1-20 MW. However, 60-1200 kW is still not as easily shrugged off when you don't have an ocean to dump heat into. IME, 60-1200kW is enough to heat steel, if not to melting, to certainly a loss of strength, and that does give me some worry about damage to containment.

So I guess my main concern is thus: Are these things being designed to be able to safely shed their worst-case heat completely passively in an emergency?

If so, awesome, and I look forward to the possibilities these designs open up.

> What I'm very curious about is what makes me perceive risk so much differently than these others. I'm wondering if it's conditioning (I spent a big chunk of my life building houses, and therefore climbing on extension ladders and walking on roof trusses was a daily ritual), childhood (I was in unstable environments a lot), or just brain wiring from birth.

I'm guessing conditioning is a big part of it.

I'd wager the majority or people with more hysterical reactions have lived fairly comfortable lives, without having to face much in the way of dangerous risks. And without that, they also fail to also learn that risks and dangers can be controlled and mitigated. Or that even mild preparedness can mean the difference between recoverable injury and death. So absent this personal experience of a counterpoint to the hysteria on the news, they're more likely to accept prognostications of certain horrible doom uncritically.

If anyone is interested in starting composting at home, I can recommend a Hotbin[1][2]. I recently purchased one and have had a good experience with it so far.

Being made entirely out of expanded polypropylene (not polystyrene/EPS/styrofoam), it is well insulated, can come up to 140°F in 3-7 days[3], and hold steady in the thermophilic range of 100°-140°F continuously so long as it is fed regularly. At those temperatures, those things you normally could not compost without horrid smells or pathogen concerns, like meats, fats, or pet wastes, will break down quickly and safely. Per the manufacturer, due to its insulated nature, it can hold those temperatures even in the dead of winter, making it useful year round instead of just a summer thing.

Yes, it's more expensive than other bins at the same capacity. But if you want to divert your kitchen waste stream from the landfill into producing a useful soil amendment for your own or others' gardens, it's worth it, IMO.

1. https://hotbincomposting-us.com/ (US)

2. https://www.hotbincomposting.com/ (England)

3. No, I am not exaggerating. Ambient to 140°F inside a week is completely doable.

I didn't post about backups to imply that they're the solution to ransomware. But having seen what ransomware can do, I know that backups can be the difference between loss of productivity, and the end of the business.

If you are keeping to best practice, including the things you recommend, then you should hopefully never need backups. But I see backups akin to seat belts, motorcycle helmets, fire extinguishers, et. al. They are things you should hopefully never need if you aren't doing anything stupid or dangerous, but if the situation ever goes sideways, can be the difference between surviving or not.

I thought this was sufficiently implied with "keep them segregated from the rest of your infrastructure," but yes, you are correct. It is important to have a set of backups that can't be destroyed by the attackers. You might get lucky that your hand-rolled solution is so hacky that a ransomware gang overlooks it. But better to not rely on that luck.

In the past, this was achieved by having a set of tapes offsite. Today, one might configure Veeam to lie when issued a delete command, and instead send the data off to an Amazon glacier instance that requires different credentials to read, write, and delete.

Backups.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of backups. Take backups, verify your ability to restore from them, and keep them segregated from the rest of your infrastructure. It doesn't matter how inelegant and hacky your backup solution is, so long as you can restore from it. Any backup you can restore from is better than no backup.

You might get a call from one of your application engineers shortly before bed on a Friday night that the web front-ends are acting weird, and they can't get in to troubleshoot, and then 10 minutes later come to discover that the latest strain of Ryuk has laid waste to 2/3s of the servers and workstations across the company. And then all of a sudden, those VM snapshots you'd been copying off to another file share with a shell script have become your salvation. Yeah, containing Ryuk and the rest of incident response mode are going to suck, but at least now you don't have to write an apology to your customers that the data they entrusted to you has been irrevocably lost.

In case you're wondering, no, that did not literally happen to me. But it is a mild fictionalization of someone I know.

Keep backups, and test your restores regularly, people.

I will offer a counter-example to this. I was an alternate for my local county's grand jury for a year. I was selected through the same voir dire process used to place me on a petit jury for a criminal trial years later. It was wholly random. AFAIK, I didn't end up in the jury pool because I knew a prosecutor or cop. Were "I know a guy who knows a guy" the selection criteria, I would have never ended up on the grand jury, as my father was personal friends with a local defense attorney; the question posed to me wouldn't have been if I hate cops, but whether I knew or was associated with anyone sharing the same name as my father.

In my experience, it depends on the band and the venue. Indoor venues are a lot harder to get the bass resonance right. I don't think I've ever had bad sound (for whatever style of music was being performed) at an outdoor venue. One band I saw at both an indoor and outdoor venue. At the indoor venue, the sound was a constant woom-woom of bass resonance from the kick drum, with the snare poking through. At the outdoor venue, I was able to hear all the instruments well balanced with one another.

Dollars to doughnuts the PPPoE implementation is tied into a billing system.

Just because they are major places doesn't mean they are right or such practice buys any improvement in security worth the operational cost it imposes.

There's a difference between blanket blocking all ICMP and selectively blocking or rate-limiting a subset of ICMP messages according to an accurate threat model for your various networks. The latter, properly done, is unlikely to break MTU discovery or your own ability to troubleshoot and monitor your own hosts/networks. The former is what makes network engineers want to eviscerate you and use your gut as patch cables.

Is it just me, or does his look quite a lot like a population density heat-map? XKCD 1138[1] comes to mind.

For those persons concerned solely about light polution, this is definitely useful. But another thing I think would be interesting is this map, corrected for population density. Mentioned down thread is that different localities have different rules affecting lighting, and that this can be seen in the map. Correcting this map for population density would probably show that even more.

1. https://xkcd.com/1138/

And when I am in my less charitable moods, I would claim that said people are unqualified to not just to configure networks, but to have opinions worth considering when it comes to setting network policy.

> Of course, there was a misconfigured firewall that wouldn't fragment and wouldn't send "ICMP won't fragment".

Blocked or dropped ICMP has caused me heartburn as well. I am pretty sure my co-workers are used to my "blocking ICMP is Evil Bad and Wrong" rants by now.

IMO, the CompSci department would be the one most severely and immediately affected. Is it not better that the CompSci dept head addresses the issues of their department before the dean has to get involved?

I would love it if those down-voting this comment would explain why. Is this comment untrue? How? Does not metal siding end up grounded, however weakly, by rain downspouts anchored to the side of the house then contacting the ground. Does not a relatively contiguous grounded metal sheet around the exterior of a building attenuate 2.4 and 5Ghz?

I actually tried coordinating an effort like this with my neighbors when I lived in an apartment complex. That effort very quickly died, for most neighbors not knowing much about their wifi other than that the box with blinking lights made the Internet go, and not a single stock firmware I encountered exposing a TX power setting anywhere in the configuration interface.

Hopefully someone with that much kit would be the kind enthusiast who'd be running firmware that allows you to turn TX power below 100%, but it could just as likely be someone who really likes being able to set their light bulb color from their iPhone.

I'm probably romanticizing and projecting, but I imagine that scenario going something like this:

* lrvick knocks on guilty neighbor's door.

* guilty party's non-technical brother answers

Brother: Yeah?

lrvick: Hey, I notice you guys have an antenna on the east side of your roof pointed at my house, is that yours?

Brother: Huh? No, that's my sister's.

lrvick: Is she around? It's messing with my Netflix and I'd like to talk to her about it.

Brother: Oh, um, yeah. hold on...

* Brother leans away from door into house and shouts inside, "Hey sis! Neighbor at the door for you!"

* lrvick waits.

* Guilty sister walks up to door

Sister: Can I help you?

lrvick: Is that your antenna on the east side your roof?

Sister: Yes.

lrvick: So, the past month, someone's been messing with my wifi with deauth attacks.

Sister: *mildly indignant* I'm not doing that.

lrvick: Well, The past week, I spread a bunch of sensors around my property and a couple of the neighbors and logged the 2.4Ghz spectrum for the area. I correlated everything and triangulated the attacks to that antenna of yours, which just so happens to be aimed at my house. Here's the logs and spectrum heat maps if you'd like to see.

* lrvick offers Sister the printouts he brought with him.

* Sister takes, looks them over and starts to get that embarrassed flush in the cheeks and ears characteristic of someone who knows they're busted.

Sister: I mean --

lrvick: I'm actually not even mad. It's kind of illegal, but it's also ballsy and I respect that. But I'm not the kind of person to go snitching to the FCC first thing. You do know if we're competing for spectrum, you can come talk to me, and we can coordinate a plan over a couple beers, right?

* Three months later lrvick and Sister are co-presenting a talk at the local hackerspace on counterattacks to deauth attacks.

And yet, there are Fortune 100 financial institutions that require their vendors to have a policy of mandatory 30 day rotation for sysadmins and 90 days for non-privileged persons. Companies that don't have and enforce said policy are unqualified for the privilege of vendorhood. Pointing out this Microsoft paper, the NIST guidelines, or the NCSC guidelines will just get the subcontracted droids giving you a negative mark on your annual vendor security assessment.

No, I am not jaded or bitter on this topic. Why do you ask?

As someone who's painted professionally, I can confirm the truth of this.

The big box stores employees at the paint counter seem as ignorant as a novice about the vagaries of application most likely because they themselves are novices. They may know quite a bit about colors and matching and how to work the mixing machines, but they probably don't have much more experience painting than the average homeowner. That knowledge comes more from doing, whether its a handful of projects as a homeowner, or regularly as a professional.

IMO, the stores could do better about offering basic information about this, about when one would need a primer, or just a topcoat, what kinds of paint bases are appropriate for what applications, what kinds of application methods are appropriate, etc. Instead, the response of the big box stores seems to be to skip the question entirely with combined products, e.g. "paint and primer in one".

Upton Sinclair supposedly said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

That would be why SEs at Google et. al. seem incapable of understanding. The business model, and thus, their salaries, is dependent upon tracking people, consent or no.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the Sparkfun and Adafruit breakout boards are indeed a boon for prototyping. It's just that many hobbyists (myself included) get as far as the prototype working as intended, and call it a day. And with "Sparkfun spaghetti" and "Adafruit anarchy" I now have phrases to describe what the inside of those prototypes often look like.

I like that phrase, "Sparkfun spaghetti". I shall be stealing it.

I know someone who works for one of the major US pizza chains. He was faced with a similar request. At first, it was just a polite request. Then it became a condition of employment. He rightly did not want a pizza corporation tracking his every move 24x7. His solution was to buy a 2nd phone to be his 'work phone'. Said work phone gets left in the vehicle he delivers pizzas with, and gets turned on and off with the start and end of his shift. His position being that if his employer requires his location data as a condition of employement, then his employer will have only that location data relevant to his duties.

I can understand why a pizza chain or other business that delivers food would want this info. How often has it been that you've ordered a pizza, or Chinese, or tacos, and found yourself wondering, "Where the hell is my food? I'm hungry _now_." With the tracking of delivery persons, you can pull your magic rectangle out of your pocket and see that, oh -- the driver is stuck at that one intersection where the thrice-damned stoplight takes at least 10 minutes to cycle -- the same light constantly camped by traffic cops who issue tickets to everyone who does an illegal turn leave the intersection for an alternate route.

However, not everyone has the means to do what my friend did -- buy a second phone. And people are right to worry about how their off-the-clock location data will be abused and fall into malicious hands.

I suspect we're going to see more and more employers pushing towards mandating location tracking, even ones with less legit business needs than food delivery. I can only hope we'll see pushback against that.

If certain corners of the Internet oft derided as right-wing whackjob conspiracy theorists are to be believed, not only is China betting that the West is in irreversible decline, but is covertly actively sewing the seeds of the factors driving that collapse.

There is. The main thing is reducing one's food waste in general. That requires some mindfulness with regard to one's food purchasing, storage, preparation, and disposal habits. Unfortunately, IMO, not everyone seems able or willing to do so.

For those who can and are willing, there are a number of things you can do as an individual. They mainly come down to the three Rs environmentalists would have us apply to our waste stream in general: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, ideally in that order.

Reduce: Focus on right-sizing your purchasing of perishables, so to minimize the amount of spoilage you have to throw away. Also work on right-sizing the amount of food you prepare, to minimize the amount of leftovers you have to throw away. Taking the time to do some meal planning for the week can help with this.

Deliberately purchase the ugly perishables in the grocery store. Often, meat near its sell-by date and misshapen vegetable produce are heavily discounted to incentivize its purchase so the store doesn't have to throw it away. Said discounted perishables are often perfectly functional. The lopsided apple still tastes like apple. You were going to marinate that flank steak anyway, which turns beef brownish in color, so who cares if a corner of it is turning from red to brown? Have means of preservation and storage can also help. Fruits can be dehydrated and turned from a perishable to a non-perishable that can be stored long term. Even a small chest freezer lets you keep the meat you know you won't get to this week.

Reuse: Find ways to recook your leftovers. Still have a chicken breast from dinner a couple days ago? Shredded chicken enchiladas. Instant ramen is kind of boring. Instant ramen with the leftover porkchop chopped up and mixed in is not only less boring flavor-wise, but is also more nutritious. The ham from Easter dinner makes a fine addition to the morning omlet.

Also the not-directly-edible portions of many foods can be put to use. Citrus rinds can be dried and used as a spice for appropriate recipes, or to add some extra flavor to your green tea. Meat bones can be boiled or simmered to make a broth or stock that can serve as the base for soups, gravies, and other foods. The pits of stone fruit can be roasted to destroy the cyanide-producing compounds and turn the kernels into a nutty snack. And so on.

Recycle: Your spoilage and non-edibles can be composted. This is actually better than the landfill. The decomposition that happens in a landfill is largely anerobic, and produces methane and other gases that have higher global warming potential than CO2. The decomposition that happens in a compost pile is aerobic. Yes, aerobic decomposition does emit CO2, but not all of the carbon added to the pile becomes CO2. A good deal of it becomes sequestered in the produced compost.

Even if you don't have the space to compost your food waste because you live in an apartment, you can still compost. Odds are, there's one or more compost collective in your city that will be happy to collect your food waste on the regular and provide a bin for you to use.

"And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants."[1]

1. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks