Thursday, March 28, 2024

Army Corps of Engineers on way to Baltimore

1100 of them, to remove the bridge wreckage and clear the Baltimore harbor channel.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

A reconstruction of the Baltimore bridge crash from someone with a nautical background

There are a lot of people talking about this who don't know what they're talking about because they've never set foot on a boat, let alone captained one.  Here's a very interesting breakdown of the incident from a professional captain.  The ship broadcast a Mayday call before the crash and AIS data seem to imply that they ran the engines in reverse as the ship drifted off course.  It looks a lot like a failure in the steering system which is all fly-by-wire computer controlled these days.

He also describes the equipment on board - for example, a black box data recorder like airlines have.  I hadn't known that commercial ships have those, but do now. 

The video does not discuss what I am hearing other places, that there was a power outage on the ship, lasting around a minute.  Power came back on, but then failed again.  The ship is Singapore flagged, and Singapore has a reputation for strict enforcement of nautical regulations.

My suspicion is that this was a single point of failure, or a situation where redundant systems both failed at the same time.


UPDATE 26 MARCH 2024 16:50: It's confirmed, the MV Dali lost power for a considerable time before impact, and when power was restored both ran the engine in full reverse as well as dropped the port side anchor.

UPDATE 26 MARCH 2024 17:03: There is a lot of buzz supposedly from Port of Baltimore personnel that the Dali had repeated power outages at dock during the two says before setting sail.  This is unconfirmed, but interesting.

For sure the ship lost power, as you can see in the second video.  When power came back on and the engine ran hard reverse, the "prop walk" kicked the stern to port, taking the ship's heading starboard towards the bridge.  Dali is single screw, so prop walk is a real thing here.

Youtube Shadowbans Climate: The Movie

The Feral Irishman emails to saw that my post about the climate movie looked weird from his Windows computer.  He could watch the movie but there was nothing displayed about Youtube.  Everything looked normal from Safari on his iPhone.

Well, it turns out that Youtube has shadowbanned the film.  This almost certainly made the post look wonky.  If they disappear it I will update the embed to Rumble or something.

You know that you're over the target when you're taking flak.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Air Warfare has fundamentally changed

This is really interesting:

The biggest problem facing the Air Force is that masses of uncrewed drones have now wrested command of the air away from manned aircraft in the skies above the modern battlefield. The drone revolution means that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for the service to achieve air superiority in future conflicts — which has been the centerpiece of its mission for decades. Drones, not manned airplanes, now dominate the skies above ground forces fighting in Ukraine. The contested air littoral has emerged as a critical new subdomain of warfare. It stretches from the earth’s surface to several thousand feet, below the altitudes where most manned aircraft typically fly, and is now dominated by masses of drones. This is a paradigm shift of epic proportions, which will require the Air Force to fundamentally transform itself in a very short period of time. 
It boils down to dollars and cents:

The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the year 2070. These jets, which are wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones in the air littoral, present enormous opportunity costs for the service as a whole. In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000 — so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed — for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”

I have heard that we are building out a fleet of around 1000 F-35s.  For the same cost we could have 32 million drones.  Sure, there's a question of mission flexibility but when you have millions of units to mess around with, that's a whole level of flexibility that you didn't have before.  Quantity has a quality of its own, so to say.  

This is a paradigm shift.

I'd be really interested in analysis from former military Fly Boys like OldAF Sarge or OldNFO.

(via)

Friday, March 22, 2024

WATCH. THIS. NOW!

Yeah, I'm shouting.  This is a fabulous film about the whole Global Warming scam.  It's all there - all the stuff I've been blathering on about for 15 years is in it.  Without all the Borepatchian prose overload, of course.

Well, my ClimateGate Clippy isn't there:

Go watch it.  This is great stuff.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Oww!

 He certainly believes in his product.

Bad security news

This is really bad - the National Vulnerability Database is jacked up:

Vital data used to protect against cyberattacks is missing from more than 2,000 of the latest entries in the world’s most widely used vulnerability database.

A significant number of new CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures) added to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) in recent weeks have lacked enrichment data — details necessary for researchers and security teams to understand the bugs.

The NVD was established in 2005 by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and last year alone, information on more than 29,000 discovered flaws was added to the database.

It is hard to overstate just how important the NVD is to the security industry and to organizations in general. The issue really comes from the explosion of reported vulnerabilities: from around 1,000/year in the 1990s to over 20,000/year today. That's a lot of analysis that is needed.

I hear rumors that NIST has had a budget cut, but quite frankly this doesn't get to the heart of the issue which is that the software industry is not covering the cost of the vulnerabilities that they release. This is an interesting potential solution:

John Pescatore, SANS Technology Institute director of emerging security trends, drew a comparison between cybersecurity and road safety.

“For automotive ‘vulnerabilities’ (recalls) that have to be fixed, vehicle manufacturers are required to notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who has maintained an easy to use database. Those manufacturers also have to pay for the vehicles to be fixed! The NHTSA had a 40-year head start over NIST/NVD, but it really is time for legislation to treat software more like we treat vehicles.”

Right now there is no cost to a company that releases bug-filled software - the cost is born by NIST. I'm not sure that a "Software recall" is the right way to approach this, but a (say) $10,000 charge for each vulnerability doesn't seem unreasonable. Non-commercial software could be for no charge, but the bulk of the CVEs are against software that is sold.

Likely there are other funding solutions, but like I said at the beginning it's hard to overstate just how important the NVD is to companies IT Security programs. Something needs to change. 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Dad Joke CCCXIIII

Which is faster, heat or cold?

Heat is faster.  You can catch cold.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Forgotten Weapons on "Assault Rifles"

Lawrence has a good post up where Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons delves into the topic of just what an "Assault Rifle" is.   Everyone thinks they know all this (I sure did), but they - and I - don't.  For example: Assault Shotguns and Assault Pistols?  Defined by statute.  I did not know that.

Recommended.