Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Battle of Bunker Hill, Percy Moran, artist, copyright 1909. Prints and Photographs Division On June 17, 1775, American troops displayed their mettle in the Battle of Bunker Hill during the siege of Boston, inflicting casualties on nearly half of the British troops dispatched to secure Breed's Hill (the actual site of the battle). Five thousand British troops under the command of General Gage stormed Breed's Hill, where colonial soldiers were encamped. In their fourth charge up the hillside, the British took the hill from the rebels, who had run out of ammunition. The last rebels left on the hill evaded capture by the British, thanks to the heroic efforts of Peter Salem, an African-American soldier who mortally wounded the British commanding officer who led the last charge. After suffering 1,000 casualties during their charges on Breed's Hill, the British discontinued their assaults on rebel strongholds in Boston. When George Washington assumed command of colonial forces two weeks later, he garnered ammunition for Boston troops and secured Dorchester Heights and Bunker Hill. 2:45:45 PM

Decorating Martha Stewart's Jail Cell (27 entries) 2:42:19 PM

The manual "Keeping Your Jewish Institution Safe," published by the Anti-Defamation League, is actually a pretty good anti-terrorism and security manual. 2:40:28 PM

Good article on how we might preserve privacy in the face of the Total Information Awareness program. 2:39:13 PM

Black box recorders in cars, originally intended to determine the cause of death in an accident, are increasingly being used in court. People can be sent to jail, or be held liable, based on the contents. But since the system was not designed for use in an adversarial setting, my guess is that the security surrounding these devices is minimal. 2:37:31 PM

Seattle police needed a DNA sample from a suspect. So they mailed him a letter, and tricked him into mailing a reply back in an envelope he licked. There was enough DNA there to link him to the crime. 2:36:32 PM

The threat of cyberterrorism is causing much alarm these days. We have been told to expect attacks since 9/11; that cyberterrorists would try to cripple our power system, disable air traffic control and emergency services, open dams, or disrupt banking and communications. But so far, nothing's happened. Even during the war in Iraq, which was supposed to increase the risk dramatically, nothing happened. The impending cyberwar was a big dud. Don't congratulate our vigilant security, though; the alarm was caused by a misunderstanding of both the attackers and the attacks. These attacks are very difficult to execute. The software systems controlling our nation's infrastructure are filled with vulnerabilities, but they're generally not the kinds of vulnerabilities that cause catastrophic disruptions. The systems are designed to limit the damage that occurs from errors and accidents. They have manual overrides. These systems have been proven to work; they've experienced disruptions caused by accident and natural disaster. We've been through blackouts, telephone switch failures, and disruptions of air traffic control computers. 2:33:10 PM

With light-speed agility, an experimental chip in a QuickSilver Technology laboratory here fluidly executes the three distinct tasks of conducting a cellular phone call. The chip searches for a local cell site, verifies that the caller is an authorized network user and then puts the call through. It may sound as mundane as phoning home. But to a growing school of chip designers, the three-step feat exemplifies the most fundamental change in computing in decades. Today's cellphones require three different chips to perform the same tasks that the single QuickSilver prototype can execute — thanks to an emerging type of chip architecture known as adaptive, or reconfigurable, computing. "Until now, the hardware had to match the problem," said Paul Master, QuickSilver's chief technology officer. "Now we can change that." Under this new approach, software is able, on the fly, to effectively redraw a chip's physical circuitry. Not only can adaptive computing enable a single chip to perform tasks normally requiring several, it can add speed while saving cost and energy when compared to today's conventional static chips in which circuitry is inflexible. [New York Times: Technology] 2:08:08 PM

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