I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers, and hardened telephone exchanges were...
PAYPHONES at High Volume Existing sites! Earn BIG $$. Money Back Guarantee! Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the...
Prescript: I originally started writing this with the intent to send it out to my supporter's newsletter, EYES ONLY, but it got to be long and took basically all day so I feel like it deserves wider circulation. You will have to tolerate that it begins in the more conversational tone I use for the supporters newsletter. I am going to write a bit...
According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio technology means that modern communications standards...
We currently find ourselves in something of a series, working our way from private lines to large private line systems like the four-wire private-line national warning system. Let's continue to build on the concept of the private line into large corporate systems. In principle, a large organization in want of a private telephone system could...
Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed the extensive and variable products that AT&T and telephone operating companies sold as private lines. One of the interesting properties of private line systems is that they can be ordered as four-wire. Internally, the telephone network handles calls as four-wire with separate talk and listen pairs (or...
I have been meaning, for some time, to write about common carrier switching arrangements (CCSAs). These could be considered an early form of products like "virtual private ethernet:" a private telephone network that was served by the same switching machines that handled the public telephone system. A CCSA is, in effect, a "virtual telephone...
I am making steady progress towards moving the Computers Are Bad enterprise cloud to its new home, here in New Mexico. One of the steps in this process is, of course, purchasing a new server... the current Big Iron is getting rather old (probably about a decade!) and here in town I'll have the rack space for more machines anyway. In our modern,...
Billboards Route 66 is often viewed through the lens of its billboards. The Jack Rabbit Trading Post, a small store a few miles out of Joseph City, would hardly be remembered were it not for its billboards spanning four states. The tradition of far-advance billboards is still observed today. Albuquerque's roadside stop operator Bowlin puts...
Did you hear that Elon Musk dug a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center? I think it is pretty universally known by now that the "Las Vegas Loop" is impractical, poorly thought out, and generally an embarrassment to society and industry. I will spare an accounting of the history and future of the system, but I will give a bit of context for...
So, let's say that a security vendor, we'll call them ClownStrike, accidentally takes down most of their Windows install base with a poorly tested content update. Rough day at the office, huh? There are lots of things you could say about this, lots of reasons it happens this way, lots of people to blame and not to blame, etc., etc., but nearly...
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could probably buy Jimbo Wales a nice...
Cathode Ray Dude, in one of his many excellent "Quick Start" videos, made an interesting observation that has stuck in my brain: sophisticated computer users, nerds if you will, have a tendency to completely ignore things that they know are worthless. He was referring to the second power button present on a remarkably large portion of laptops...
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor Vehicles," or DMV. Actually, the universality of the term "DMV" seems to be overstated. A more general term is "motor vehicle administrator," used for example by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to address the inconsistent terminology. Not happy with...
In a previous episode, I discussed audio transports and mention that they have become a much less important part of the modern home theater landscape. One reason is the broad decline of the component system: most consumers aren't buying a television, home theater receiver, several playback devices, and speakers. Instead, they use a television and...
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time I had two NVMe drives in two...
Some things have been made nearly impossible to search for. Say, for example, the long-running partnership between Epson and Catalina: a query that will return pages upon pages of people trying to use Epson printers with an old version of MacOS. When you think of a point of sale printer, you probably think of something like the venerable Epson...
For those of you who are members of the Matrix project, I wanted to let you know that I am running for the Governing Board, and a bit about why. For those of you who are not, I hope you will forgive the intrusion. Maybe you'll find my opinions on the topic interesting anyway. I am coming off of a period of intense involvement in an ill-fated...
I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writing projects only to have them just Not Work Out. It happens sometimes: I'll notice...
Sometimes, when I am feeling down, I read about failed satellite TV (STV) services. Don't we all? As a result, I've periodically come across a company called AlphaStar Television Network. PrimeStar may have had a rough life, but AlphaStar barely had one at all: it launched in 1996 and went bankrupt in 1997. All told, AlphaStar's STV service only...
So let's say you're working on a household project and need around a dozen telephone cables---the ordinary kind that you would use between your telephone and the wall. It is, of course, more cost effective to buy bulk cable, or simply a long cable, and cut it to length and attach jacks yourself. This is even mercifully easy for telephone cable,...
In the 1450s, German inventor Johannes Gutenburg designed the movable-type printing press, the first practical method of mass-duplicating text. After various other projects, he applied his press to the production of the Bible, yielding over one hundred copies of a text that previously had to be laboriously hand-copied. His Bible was a tremendous...
Across the United States, streets are taking on a strange hue at night. Purple. Purple streetlights have been reported in Tampa, Vancouver, Wichita, Boston. They're certainly in evidence here in Albuquerque, where Coal through downtown has turned almost entirely to mood lighting. Explanations vary. When I first saw the phenomenon, I thought of...
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired. You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name. ShotSpotter has attracted a lot of press and plenty of...
It's one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology. From cloud operator servers to embedded controllers in appliances, there must be uncountable devices that think they are connected to a TTY. I will omit the many interesting details of the Linux terminal infrastructure here, as it could easily fill its own article. But...
In the past (in fact two years ago, proof I have been doing this for a while now!) I wrote about the "inconvenient truth" that structural aspects of the Internet make truly decentralized systems infeasible, due to the lack of a means to perform broadcast discovery. As a result, most distributed systems rely on a set of central, semi-static nodes...
Last time, we left off at the fact that modern films are distributed with their audio in multiple formats. Most of the time, there is a stereo version of the audio, and a multi-channel version of the audio that is perhaps 5.1 or 7.1 and compressed using one of several codecs that were designed within the film industry for this purpose. But that...
Stereophonic or two-channel audio is so ubiquitous today that we tend to refer to all kinds of pieces of consumer audio reproduction equipment as "a stereo." As you might imagine, this is a relatively modern phenomenon. While stereo audio in concept dates to the late 19th century, it wasn't common in consumer settings until the 1960s and 1970s....
Previously on Deep Space Nine, I wrote that "the mid-2000s were an unsettled time in mobile computing." Today, I want to share a little example. Over the last few weeks, for various personal reasons, I have been doing a lot of reading about embedded operating systems and ISAs for embedded computing. Things like the NXP TriMedia (Harvard...
USB, the Universal Serial Bus, was first released in 1996. It did not achieve widespread adoption until some years later; for most of the '90s RS-232-ish serial and its awkward sibling the parallel port were the norm for external peripheral. It's sort of surprising that USB didn't take off faster, considering the significant advantages it had...
Programming note/shameless plug: I am finally on Mastodon. The history of the telephone industry is a bit of an odd one. For the greatest part of the 20th century, telephony in the United States was largely a monopoly of AT&T and its many affiliates. This wasn't always the case, though. AT&T held patents on their telephone implementation, but...
The term "VHF omnidirectional range" can at first be confusing, because it includes "range"---a measurement that the technology does not provide. The answer to this conundrum is, as is so often the case, history. The "range" refers not to the radio equipment but to the space around it, the area in which the signal can be received. VOR is an...
I'm heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of industry extravaganza there could be. In that spirit, I thought I would write something quick and oddly professional: I'm going to complain about Docker. Packaging software is one of those fundamental problems in system administration. It's so important, so influential...
I have always been fascinated by the PABX - the private automatic branch exchange, often shortened to "PBX" in today's world where the "automatic" is implied. (Relatively) modern small and medium business PABXs of the type I like to collect are largely solid-state devices that mount on the wall. Picture a cabinet that's maybe two feet wide, a...
Nuclear weapons are complex in many ways. The basic problem of achieving criticality is difficult on its own, but deploying nuclear weapons as operational military assets involves yet more challenges. Nuclear weapons must be safe and reliable, even with the rough handling and potential of tampering and theft that are intrinsic to their military...
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly unhealthy. Still, it's a familiar kind of noise to anyone who regularly works around kilowatt quantities of commercial...
Correction: a technical defect in my Enterprise Content Management System resulted in the email having a subject that made it sound like this post would be about the classic strategy game Go. It is actually about a failed website. I regret the error; the responsible people have been sacked. The link in the email was also wrong but I threw in a...
I'm working on a side project right now, one of several, which involves telematics devices (essentially GPS trackers with i/o) from a fairly reputable Chinese manufacturer. The device is endlessly configurable and so, like you see with a lot of radios, it has a UART for programming. The manufacturer provided a cable for this purpose, and when I...
Let's talk about overhead paging. The concept goes by various names: paging, public address, even intercom, although the accuracy of the latter term can be questionable. It's probably one of the aspects of business telephone systems that gets the most public attention, on account of the many stories (both true and mythical) of the exploits of...
Programming note: this post is in color. I will not debase myself to the level of sending HTML email, so if you receive Computers Are Bad by email and want the benefit of the pictures, consider reading this online instead (the link is at the top of the email). In the aftermath of a nuclear attack, United States military and government policy...
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that actually has the money (whether...
I had meant to write something today, but I'm just getting over a case of the COVID and had a hard time getting to it. Instead I did the yard work, edited and uploaded a YouTube video, and then spewed out a Cohost thread as long as a blog post. So in lieu of your regularly scheduled content, I'd like to link you to the Cohost thread on the...
In a couple of days, I pack up my bags to head for DEFCON. In a rare moment of pre-planning, perhaps spurred by boredom, I looked through the schedule to see what's in store in the world of telephony. There is a workshop on SS7, of course [1], plenty of content on cellular, but as far as I see nothing on the biggest topic in telecom security:...
Remember Free Public WiFi? Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to pay in excess of $15 a day for the internet. As I remember,...
Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am bad at computers (yet another case of "forgot to enable the systemd unit"). It's fixed now. The unsubscribe link was also broken and is now fixed but, you know, maybe that was a feature. Did wonders for reader retention. You may have seen some recent press coverage about...
Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some strange places. There are conspiracy theories, of course, and there are people who insist on their version of events so incessantly that details of dates and places can become heated arguments. There is also the basic nature of the internet: the internet has a wealth of...
I currently find myself on vacation in the Canadian Rockies, where internet is hard to come by. But here's something short while I'm temporarily back in the warm embrace of 5G: more about burglar alarms. I recently gave a presentation on this topic and I'll probably record it for YouTube when I'm back home, but I think the time has finally come...