The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

by:
Pista:
...a massive layoff: on a Monday morning they held up everyone at the main gate, then asked people to procede in lines to the turnstiles. Those allowed entrance by the turnstile were still employees
My friend told of a corporate headquarters with a public address system. One afternoon the announcements started coming: "Jill Smith, please report to Mike's office." 5 minutes later Jill returns to her desk, packs her stuff and goes. "Fred Jones, please report to Mike's office." Same thing goes on and on all afternoon, and of course everyone in the whole place knew as each victim made their walk of shame. Naturally nobody remaining could concentrate on their work. Hell, half of them were busy copying or deleting files.
Friend said he didn't get the axe that day, but he moved on as soon as he could anyway. Can't say I blame him.

A fair few people in our office were invited into a meeting once. "First, let me tell you that the jobs of everybody in this room are safe," started the manager. We nervously looked round to see who was missing. We never saw the missing ones again.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Warren:
If an article gets to 32768 comments, Godwin's law will have been satisfied some time ago and you should probably stop reading and go to bed....

Stop telling us what to do! You know who else told people what to do? Hitler.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

I'm curious as to how many people used a negative PIN.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Sanity:
Sebastian Buchannon:
And yes I do hope these checks get expanded to railways too and eventually private auto-mobiles, because as far as I am concerned things are still pretty much insecure. I've always said the next attack will be a train or big car driven into a famous building. I hate to be proven right, but I think it's inevitable: Have you noticed there are ZERO baggage checks at train stations? How mad is that. I refuse to travel until they fix this and you should do too.
He talked about driving a train into a famous building and people are believing him? The only famous buildings trains can drive into are famous train stations.

The latest two Aum fugitives were caught THIS YEAR.

But just imagine if there were airport-style security checks at every train station. A 2-hour commute would be preceded by a 6-hour wait in line, and 90% of the world would no longer be able to get to work.

Ignore the terrorists. Anything else lets them win.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Cbuttius:
no, everything is a number and should be stored as a double, even your firstname, surname, SSN and ethnicity.
So I'm 2.15302967322874e-312 The 2.10951510178458e-312 now, am I?

Did you miss yesterday's WTF?

Steve The Cynic:
Of course, perhaps the TSA would take an interest in cross-border passenger rail travel as well, if there was a meaningful amount of it in North America.

While Poland was still under its previous government, and a person of Polish citizenship was working legally as a visiting professor at a Canadian university, he took a Canadian train from one Canadian city to another Canadian city. Unfortunately the train followed tracks into the United States before returning to Canada. US immigration authorities deported the professor, not by driving him to a border point near his destination, but by driving him to a border point near his origin.

Steve The Cynic:
The Schengen Agreement being what it is, a few years back when I travelled by trains from London to Amsterdam, travelling through the UK, France, Belgium, and Holland, I had to show my passport only once, when I got on Eurostar in London.

The Schengen Agreement being what it is, some rail passengers in the Schengen area have to show their passport more often. When our trip from Belgium arrived in France, a sign warned that my wife had better report to the French police. She obeyed. The French police were confused so they had to look up instructions on what to do, but then they obeyed too, stamping her passport.

scooby509 · 2012-08-30 Reply Admin

PedanticCurmudgeon:
Tom:
Sebastian Buchannon:
..misc trollpuke..
Bootlicker.
There are fetish clubs for people like you. Go take your perversions there.
Wow, 5 bites in less than 15 minutes! A masterful troll, sir. 9/10.

Addendum (2012-08-30 13:59): EDIT: Since the arguments continue after the original troll has buggered off, I'm raising my rating to 10/10.

It was, you normally have to troll Youtube to find that many morons that quickly.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

OccupyWallStreet:
fa2k:
Yes! And while we're at it, let's use strings in IP headers. After all, we aren't doing math with them. In fact, we should encode IP headers in XML, just to be sure.

IP addresses ARE strings... IPv4 uses 4-octet strings to represent addresses, IPv6 uses 16-octet strings. Standard fixed-length strings.

Though, to be completely correct, we do math on IP addresses all the time - your computer routinely ANDs the IP address with the subnet mask in order to decide the proper interface to send the IP packet out on. And routers routinely do it all the time for the same reason - to determine the next hop.

It's always been an annoyance that IP addresses aren't aligned in packets (IPv6 fixes this), because it means having to move data around in order to do math operations on them.

You ever used a packet sniffer? No, I thought so! An IP address in an IPv4 packet is transmitted as 4 bytes. Always. Yes, Windows and Linux store IP addresses as Strings, but that doesn't imply that that's what's being stored in memory, used internally or transmitted over the network. It would simply be too inefficient.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Bridget:
Helmet:
Everybody now ....
"That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!"

People still use luggage locks? I was under the impression that with the TSA that's just asking for trouble.

There are special locks that the TSA has keys/codes for. Then there's always the bolt cutters.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

TDWTF is really serving up some mundane stories these days! TRWTF is why I wasted time reading this :(

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Ahhh yes.. George Carlin's favorite line:

"made him so groggy that he blew right through a stop sign on the way to work causing a near-miss with some guy on a bicycle."

So he hit the guy?! Otherwise it'd be a near-hit...

SEMI-HYBRID code · 2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
6:
I am not a number, I am a free man!
No, no, it's "I am not a digit string, I am a free man!"

I am not a digit string, I am Gordon!

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

asd:
I think you would have to be incredibly naive to so readily dismiss the possibility that future incidents could come from rail or road travel as much as from air travel

I think you would have to be incredibly naive to be so much more freaked out by terrorism than the thousands of other, infinitely more likely ways you could die.

If you're so paranoid about being blown up by brown people, move to Nebraska where there's nothing interesting to bomb in the first place.

2012-08-30 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
All together now: It doesn't matter if it's a string of digits. If you aren't going to use it for mathematical purposes, it isn't a number. It's not a PIN, nor an SSN. It's a PIDS or an SSDS. Personal Identification Digit String, Social Security Digit String, etc. And for a ZIP code or "code postal" (the name where I live (northern France) for the local equivalent), we don't even have the excuse of a name that contains the word "number".

Yes. If they stored the PIN as a 4 character string it would've avoided the "range of a 16-bit signed integer" problem entirely; and because strings are easily compressed it might have only cost 1 byte to store each 4 character string instead of 2 bytes.

Strings are wonderful like that. For example, if you store dates as strings you never need to worry if "1/4/2000" is the 1st of April or the 4th of January; and if you store "age" as a string you don't need to recalculate it every year. They're also very portable - you don't need to care if the data is big endian or little endian, or ASCII or EBCDIC or UTF16.

Basically, you don't actually need competent programmers for anything, as long as you store everything as strings. Of course real programmers don't want you to find this out because they don't want to lose their jobs and be replaced by script kiddies.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

David Davidson:
asd:
I think you would have to be incredibly naive to so readily dismiss the possibility that future incidents could come from rail or road travel as much as from air travel

I think you would have to be incredibly naive to be so much more freaked out by terrorism than the thousands of other, infinitely more likely ways you could die.

If you're so paranoid about being blown up by brown people, move to Nebraska where there's nothing interesting to bomb in the first place.

Aha - so the bloke who thinks the stuff at the airport is justified is more paranoid than the bloke who points out there are many, many ways that terrorism might strike....

Interestingly, the comment you quote appears to simply point out that the paranoia about aircraft getting hijacked is no more rational than the equivalent happneing to trains or cars....

But of course (as I just learnt) the internet is no fun unless you're disagreeing with someone....

Scarlet Manuka · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

oheso:
Accalia.de.Elementia:
Yeah, we still fly. Until we solve the problem of quantum indeterminacy direct matter teleportation is never going to be practical.
Some consider that a problem; others, a bonus.

In quantum mechanics, it is considered to be both at the same time.

nomdeplume · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

TRWTF is that they're storing the actual PIN, and not a hash of it. Right?

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

What you are saying is that IP addresses are sets of binary digits with a fixed length that, for human readability, are displayed as decimal digits, right?

pjt33 · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
But just imagine if there were airport-style security checks at every train station. A 2-hour commute would be preceded by a 6-hour wait in line, and 90% of the world would no longer be able to get to work.

Spain x-rays bags before you board long-distance trains, but they're quite efficient and you only spend about 20 minutes waiting. OTOH the effect is just to displace terrorism to short-distance commuter trains.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
All together now: It doesn't matter if it's a string of digits. If you aren't going to use it for mathematical purposes, it isn't a number.

Ah, but storing it as a number is a mathematical purpose!

Steve The Cynic · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

zadg:
On the off chance you're having a go at the "store it as a string" people (which it sort of sounds like you are), I think in this case that's a better solution - or at least an array of digits....

It's a very off chance. I was having a go at the "it's a string of digits, I'll store it in a numeric type even though I won't be adding, multiplying, etc. it" crowd.

QJo · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Brendan:
Steve The Cynic:
All together now: It doesn't matter if it's a string of digits. If you aren't going to use it for mathematical purposes, it isn't a number. It's not a PIN, nor an SSN. It's a PIDS or an SSDS. Personal Identification Digit String, Social Security Digit String, etc. And for a ZIP code or "code postal" (the name where I live (northern France) for the local equivalent), we don't even have the excuse of a name that contains the word "number".

Yes. If they stored the PIN as a 4 character string it would've avoided the "range of a 16-bit signed integer" problem entirely; and because strings are easily compressed it might have only cost 1 byte to store each 4 character string instead of 2 bytes.

Strings are wonderful like that. For example, if you store dates as strings you never need to worry if "1/4/2000" is the 1st of April or the 4th of January; and if you store "age" as a string you don't need to recalculate it every year. They're also very portable - you don't need to care if the data is big endian or little endian, or ASCII or EBCDIC or UTF16.

Basically, you don't actually need competent programmers for anything, as long as you store everything as strings. Of course real programmers don't want you to find this out because they don't want to lose their jobs and be replaced by script kiddies.

"and if you store "age" as a string you don't need to recalculate it every year."

Good job I wasn't drinking a cup of coffee or I'd have had to wash my laptop and medicate my sinuses.

Excellent troll. Best I've seen for ages.

Cbuttius · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

[quote user="cellocgwAnd how many bombs have been set off in USA trains and busses? You're either an amateur troll or a professional moron.
BTW if "the terrorists" "come back" I'll do the proper thing: ignore them. You simply have no concept of the intent of a terrorist. [/quote]

Not in the USA, but in the UK the 7/7 attacks in 2005 happened on the underground and buses.

In the early 2000s, bus-bombings in Israel were very common.

Northern Ireland had car bombings although the IRA didn't do suicide bombing and would leave the car before blowing it up in a crowded area.

Gurth · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

gury:
1 x 2 = 3, but only when x equals 1.5....

FTFY.

(Hint: x is not the same as ×.)

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

asd:
cellocgw:
Sebastian Buchannon:
This is offtopic...

And how many bombs have been set off in USA trains and busses? You're either an amateur troll or a professional moron.
BTW if "the terrorists" "come back" I'll do the proper thing: ignore them. You simply have no concept of the intent of a terrorist.

Interesting point. How many bombs have been set off in a plane in the USA?
Not a lot. Probably about none, I should think.

In fact (and I think this is the OP's point) pre-911 noone had really considered a plane deliberately aimed at a building to be a threat. <snip>

Nonsense. When I started working back in 1999, the company that hired me presented itself as having the best security in the country. One of the examples was: this building was designed to withstand a plane crashing into it. They even had photoshopped a slide with a picture of their building and an approaching aircraft.

I'm sure this is were the terrorist got their idea from

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Every time the police catch me nearly killing a complete stranger, it has always been because of an inexplicable one-off fault in an alarm clock. All 93 times.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

That's bullshit in this case. The problem was that insufficient space was reserved for the PIN, not the way of storing it. And given the PIN system they use, no problems can ever occur as a consequence of storing it as, say, a dword. Nobody needs ‘sage’ advice that doesn't actually help anyone.

_undefined · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
And for a ZIP code or "code postal" (the name where I live (northern France) for the local equivalent), we don't even have the excuse of a name that contains the word "number".

Also in some countries postal code can have letters. Currently they all use latin letters, but in the past there were systems based on Cyrillic and there are no warrants about future. So, please use Unicode strings of unlimited length. Also there are places without postal codes in countries with postal code systems and there are countries without postal code system, so please provide interface in your form to choose between them and please don't store your data in Oracle where null and empty strings are equal.

QJo · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

_undefined:
Steve The Cynic:
And for a ZIP code or "code postal" (the name where I live (northern France) for the local equivalent), we don't even have the excuse of a name that contains the word "number".

Also in some countries postal code can have letters. Currently they all use latin letters, but in the past there were systems based on Cyrillic and there are no warrants about future. So, please use Unicode strings of unlimited length. Also there are places without postal codes in countries with postal code systems and there are countries without postal code system, so please provide interface in your form to choose between them and please don't store your data in Oracle where null and empty strings are equal.

In fact, if you're planning on selling outside of a social group that contains few more than your friends and family, it's recommended that you store all text that serves to identify your users as Unicode. Although there is a case for implementing some sort of check on the length of certain fields, to guard against malicious users who, in order to cause problems in your storage media, cut and paste the entirety of e.g. War and Peace into the postcode field.

no laughing matter · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Gurth:
gury:
1 x 2 = 3, but only when x equals 1.5....
FTFY.
(Hint: x is not the same as ×.)

11.52 = 3?

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

asd:
cellocgw:
Sebastian Buchannon:
This is offtopic but I find it pretty obscene that less than two weeks before September 11 people on here are complaining about necessary security checks at airports.
And yes I do hope these checks get expanded to railways too and eventually private auto-mobiles, because as far as I am concerned things are still pretty much insecure. I've always said the next attack will be a train or big car driven into a famous building. I hate to be proven right, but I think it's inevitable: Have you noticed there are ZERO baggage checks at train stations? How mad is that. I refuse to travel until they fix this and you should do too.

BTW it's a complete myth that you can get a cavity search just because you "smell funny". The dogs they use are properly trained and don't screw about. If you smell "funny" to them it's not because you forgot to wash it's because you are a crack head end-of-story. 90% of the time this is the case.

Look I am not saying the TSA are perfect or even defending them, but the world is now a different place. Besides you'll be the first ones jumping on the blame game train if the terrorists come back.

And how many bombs have been set off in USA trains and busses? You're either an amateur troll or a professional moron.
BTW if "the terrorists" "come back" I'll do the proper thing: ignore them. You simply have no concept of the intent of a terrorist.

Interesting point. How many bombs have been set off in a plane in the USA?
Not a lot. Probably about none, I should think.

In fact (and I think this is the OP's point) pre-911 noone had really considered a plane deliberately aimed at a building to be a threat. As a result of what happened the world has gone security crazy (or at least, likes to give the impression of security - I think most people agree security screening has very limited success). Any future attacks, however, are likely to be equally unexpected and will not necessarliy target planes (Sarin gas attacks in Japan's subway, the London Bus Bomobings etc). One of the problems with a lot of these sort of attacks is that they are planned independently, so unlike a single mass-murderer there is unlikely to be much pattern between how attacks are planned and implemented.

I think you would have to be incredibly naive to so readily dismiss the possibility that future incidents could come from rail or road travel as much as from air travel - and there's nothing to say they would even relate to travel. Mass gatherings that often have limited security (like sporting events or rock concerts) could also be targeted in the future...Or perhaps an online attack that aims to take out key infrastructure to simply cause panic, looting and general riot....

Everyone is missing the point.

The problem with planes isn't someone setting a bomb off on them. The problem with planes is someone turning it into an unstoppable missile. Short of putting automatic shut-down protocols on commercial planes (at the peril of everyone on board), there's not much you can do to stop a successfully hijacked plane quickly.

Your options after hijacking a train are limited. You're not going to "drive a train into a crowded building" unless that crowded building also happens to be built on the tracks of the train. (And don't go into "they can blow the tracks!", because there are safeguards against that kind of thing.)

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

bjolling:
asd:
cellocgw:
Sebastian Buchannon:
This is offtopic...

And how many bombs have been set off in USA trains and busses? You're either an amateur troll or a professional moron.
BTW if "the terrorists" "come back" I'll do the proper thing: ignore them. You simply have no concept of the intent of a terrorist.

Interesting point. How many bombs have been set off in a plane in the USA?
Not a lot. Probably about none, I should think.

In fact (and I think this is the OP's point) pre-911 noone had really considered a plane deliberately aimed at a building to be a threat. <snip>

Nonsense. When I started working back in 1999, the company that hired me presented itself as having the best security in the country. One of the examples was: this building was designed to withstand a plane crashing into it. They even had photoshopped a slide with a picture of their building and an approaching aircraft.
I'm sure this is were the terrorist got their idea from

Similar quotes about similar situations have been made. Namely, the architects for the world trade center.

The fact of the matter is, those cases were planes crashing into a building due to malfunction or pilot error. The significance being a plane that's crashing like the Hudson River Landing is going significantly slower than a plane that's deliberately smashed into a building.

Not to say that you're wrong, after all it's been revealed that a government agency of ours was assessing the risk of hijacked planes flying into buildings before it actually happened. But lets be clear of the difference in the two scenarios.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
Certainly 32,767 comments ought to be enough for anybody.

That's what they said about kilobytes once.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Don L:
OccupyWallStreet:
fa2k:
Yes! And while we're at it, let's use strings in IP headers. After all, we aren't doing math with them. In fact, we should encode IP headers in XML, just to be sure.

IP addresses ARE strings... IPv4 uses 4-octet strings to represent addresses, IPv6 uses 16-octet strings. Standard fixed-length strings.

Though, to be completely correct, we do math on IP addresses all the time - your computer routinely ANDs the IP address with the subnet mask in order to decide the proper interface to send the IP packet out on. And routers routinely do it all the time for the same reason - to determine the next hop.

It's always been an annoyance that IP addresses aren't aligned in packets (IPv6 fixes this), because it means having to move data around in order to do math operations on them.

You ever used a packet sniffer? No, I thought so! An IP address in an IPv4 packet is transmitted as 4 bytes. Always. Yes, Windows and Linux store IP addresses as Strings, but that doesn't imply that that's what's being stored in memory, used internally or transmitted over the network. It would simply be too inefficient.

All the time actually.

And an IPv4 address IS a string... 4 octets long. IPv6 has an address string that's 16 octets long.

It's a fixed-length string. Of course, it's also horribly inconvenient to display properly so we often like to make the string prettier by restrcting the characters it could use. But the 4 or 16 octet string is what's used on the network.

Ethernet packets are variable length strings ranging from 64 to 1500 octets, with a special jumbo mode of 9000+ octets being possible.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

AN AMAZING CODER:
The problem with planes isn't someone setting a bomb off on them. The problem with planes is someone turning it into an unstoppable missile.

Kamikaze.

AN AMAZING CODER:
Your options after hijacking a train are limited. You're not going to "drive a train into a crowded building" unless that crowded building also happens to be built on the tracks of the train.

Like airports. Or some train stations which are just plain huge train stations.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

QJo:
In fact, if you're planning on selling outside of a social group that contains few more than your friends and family, it's recommended that you store *all* text that serves to identify your users as Unicode.

There's no need to exclude your social group. If you want to write my wife's address and name wife using characters that are normally used for each, you need Unicode.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

When it comes to handling IDs, I prefer to just use strings, no matter how big or small the ID is. SSN? String. Employee ID? String. Why? Because by using strings, I don't have these kinds of problems. The string knows to resize itself to accommodate the space needed. 16 bits? 32? 64? It doesn't matter. It handles any and all sizes.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Marroochy:
the authorities will naturally take the attitude that noone (other than the authorities - who have little interest in PLANTING stuff) could have tampered with a locked bag).

Agree that the danger of the Bad Guys taking advantage of "locks" that arent, is very real.

Disagree that the authorities dont plant stuff. They do it all the time. You only find out about it when it goes wrong, eg [http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2008/05/26/japan-drugdog.html].

I dont fly, and its not because Im afraid of aeroplanes.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
AN AMAZING CODER:
Your options after hijacking a train are limited. You're not going to "drive a train into a crowded building" unless that crowded building also happens to be built on the tracks of the train.
Like airports. Or some train stations which are just plain huge train stations.

OK, wiseguys. You've seen too many Hollywood films with "unstoppable" and "runaway" trains. First, a train doesn't just go where and when it pleases. Its route is determined by track switches that have to be thrown either by the driver or trackside staff, depending on conditions and location. Some switches are remote controlled and can't be thrown manually without a special tool. So if you want to drive a train through a famous station, you can't just steal a train and start driving - you can't get it out of the yard without derailing, unless you get the yard staff to co-operate and not get suspicious when somebody they'd never met before wanted to take an engine out without a timetable or train number or any job assignment. Of course you'd have to know how to operate the engine, know which engine to take that would be ready to go, know where to pick up the keys and reverser handle... at which point it would serve you better to forget about the silly terrorism business, which could land you in jail or killed, or both, and sign up as an engineer for the railroad.

Oh, but we were originally talking about inspecting the passengers' luggage in case one of them were to ram the train into the station. Once you're boarding the train, it has a full staff, working engine(s), functional brakes, and it's under the watchful eye of traffic control (the details of which vary depending on location).

What's more, there's already at least one person in the cab of the engine, and the train is fully capable of performing an emergency stop even without that person. Also, depending on jurisdiction, it very probably has equipment in place to enforce signals and speed limits - besides which there's the point of switches and routing...

Finally, it's not necessarily even possible to walk from the passenger cars to the engine whilst the train is moving; you may well be watching the nose and windshield of the last engine from the end door of the first car. If not, the cab door will be locked to give the driver peace to do their job.

Be as it may, if you were fully convinced you could somehow get around all this, what would scanning your luggage reveal? Tools? Al-Qaeda membership card?

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

I am the only person who thinks the guy's "near-miss" with a guy on a bike wasn't especially humorous?

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

conifer:
Norman Diamond:
AN AMAZING CODER:
Your options after hijacking a train are limited. You're not going to "drive a train into a crowded building" unless that crowded building also happens to be built on the tracks of the train.
Like airports. Or some train stations which are just plain huge train stations.
You've seen too many Hollywood films with "unstoppable" and "runaway" trains.

No, I live in a country where trains frequently and intentionally run on tracks to airports, where trains frequently and intentionally run on tracks to plain huge train stations, and lots of other stations too.

conifer:
First, a train doesn't just go where and when it pleases. Its route is determined by track switches that have to be thrown either by the driver or trackside staff,

I think it's the driver. Crashes are caused by drivers exceeding speed limits on curves, drivers ignoring signals, etc., so I think drivers still have enough control to command switches to switch too.

A hijacker would have the same degree of control.

Even if switches were controlled by ground staff in nearby stations, if ground staff don't know that the train is hijacked then they'll still direct the train to the same airport or same huge ordinary station or wherever it was supposed to go. A hijacker will still have an easy time of delivering and exploding their bomb.

conifer:
Of course you'd have to know how to operate the engine, know which engine to take that would be ready to go,

The one at the front of the train.

conifer:
it would serve you better to forget about the silly terrorism business, which could land you in jail or killed, or both,

Aha, so THAT's how we know that 9/11 never happened and all those news reports were fake.

I bet a hijacker can learn to operate a train faster than they can learn to fly a plane, even though they didn't need to learn how to land a plane.

conifer:
Oh, but we were originally talking about inspecting the passengers' luggage in case one of them were to ram the train into the station. Once you're boarding the train, it has a full staff, working engine(s), functional brakes, and it's under the watchful eye of traffic control (the details of which vary depending on location).

So what? They still won't know about the bomb until it's too late. Or if a hijacker takes the driver's seat, no one will know about the ramming plan until it's too late. Or as a non-hypothetical case, if you're willing to consider the real world, no one knew about the sarin until it was too late. The reason inspections won't occur is that they'd turn a 2 hour commute into a 6 hour wait in line followed by a 2 hour commute, and 90% of the world won't be able to get to work any more.

You have to ignore the terrorists. Anything else lets them win?

conifer:
and the train is fully capable of performing an emergency stop even without that person.

Yes, and I'm not sure what conditions caused it to be operated, but for anything other than an earthquake it surely depended on a human knowing of a reason to pull a switch someplace.

Also, depending on jurisdiction, it very probably has equipment in place to enforce signals and speed limits - besides which there's the point of switches and routing...

conifer:
Finally, it's not necessarily even possible to walk from the passenger cars to the engine whilst the train is moving;

The engine is in the first car. There's a glass door separating the driver's room from the rest of the car. I suppose subways in the US might have a metal door separating the driver's room from the rest of the car, so hijacking might be tougher, but still no one's going to know about the bomb or the sarin until it's too late.

conifer:
Be as it may, if you were fully convinced you could somehow get around all this, what would scanning your luggage reveal? Tools? Al-Qaeda membership card?

As a matter of fact, if scanning were practical, if everyone would wait in line 6 hours before taking their 2 hour commute, then scanning would have revealed the components for sarin. The terrorists were carrying both components and one terrorist even used an umbrella to try mixing the two when they didn't mix by themselves as quickly as he hoped. But anyway, scanning isn't going to happen, at least not for ordinary trains.

Scanning does take place at airports, AFTER arrival.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Mark Wilden:
I am the only person who thinks the guy's "near-miss" with a guy on a bike wasn't especially humorous?

I agree. Some WTFs aren't humorous at all. Some WTFs need to be publicized just because they're WTFs.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

Anon:
Steve The Cynic:
All together now: It doesn't matter if it's a string of digits. If you aren't going to use it for mathematical purposes, it isn't a number. It's not a PIN, nor an SSN. It's a PIDS or an SSDS. Personal Identification Digit String, Social Security Digit String, etc. And for a ZIP code or "code postal" (the name where I live (northern France) for the local equivalent), we don't even have the excuse of a name that contains the word "number".
And if it isn't a number, don't take short cuts and store it in a data type meant for storing numbers.

Bah.

Back to work...

Well in that case they knew it would be a 5 digit number, why make the indexing slower by using a string?

Why do you think the indexing is slower for strings than numbers? A DBMS isn't going to store numbers as a float or an integer, after all. (Even MySQL doesn't do that...) And if you declare a zipcode as, e.g., "char(5)", why couldn't they optimize for the incredibly common case of "short strings that can be stored in a machine register"?

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

AN AMAZING CODER:
asd:
cellocgw:
Sebastian Buchannon:
This is offtopic but I find it pretty obscene that less than two weeks before September 11 people on here are complaining about necessary security checks at airports.
And yes I do hope these checks get expanded to railways too and eventually private auto-mobiles, because as far as I am concerned things are still pretty much insecure. I've always said the next attack will be a train or big car driven into a famous building. I hate to be proven right, but I think it's inevitable: Have you noticed there are ZERO baggage checks at train stations? How mad is that. I refuse to travel until they fix this and you should do too.

BTW it's a complete myth that you can get a cavity search just because you "smell funny". The dogs they use are properly trained and don't screw about. If you smell "funny" to them it's not because you forgot to wash it's because you are a crack head end-of-story. 90% of the time this is the case.

Look I am not saying the TSA are perfect or even defending them, but the world is now a different place. Besides you'll be the first ones jumping on the blame game train if the terrorists come back.

And how many bombs have been set off in USA trains and busses? You're either an amateur troll or a professional moron.
BTW if "the terrorists" "come back" I'll do the proper thing: ignore them. You simply have no concept of the intent of a terrorist.

Interesting point. How many bombs have been set off in a plane in the USA?
Not a lot. Probably about none, I should think.

In fact (and I think this is the OP's point) pre-911 noone had really considered a plane deliberately aimed at a building to be a threat. As a result of what happened the world has gone security crazy (or at least, likes to give the impression of security - I think most people agree security screening has very limited success). Any future attacks, however, are likely to be equally unexpected and will not necessarliy target planes (Sarin gas attacks in Japan's subway, the London Bus Bomobings etc). One of the problems with a lot of these sort of attacks is that they are planned independently, so unlike a single mass-murderer there is unlikely to be much pattern between how attacks are planned and implemented.

I think you would have to be incredibly naive to so readily dismiss the possibility that future incidents could come from rail or road travel as much as from air travel - and there's nothing to say they would even relate to travel. Mass gatherings that often have limited security (like sporting events or rock concerts) could also be targeted in the future...Or perhaps an online attack that aims to take out key infrastructure to simply cause panic, looting and general riot....

Everyone is missing the point.

The problem with planes isn't someone setting a bomb off on them. The problem with planes is someone turning it into an unstoppable missile. Short of putting automatic shut-down protocols on commercial planes (at the peril of everyone on board), there's not much you can do to stop a successfully hijacked plane quickly.

Your options after hijacking a train are limited. You're not going to "drive a train into a crowded building" unless that crowded building also happens to be built on the tracks of the train. (And don't go into "they can blow the tracks!", because there are safeguards against that kind of thing.

It's the exact opposite situation, in fact, using planes as missiles became obsolete on 9/11 when Flight 93 rushed the cockpit. Passengers aware of the danger and reinforced cockpit doors have made that tactic completely worthless.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

fgh:
But of course (as I just learnt) the internet is no fun unless you're disagreeing with someone....

Oh yes, it is.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

Ron:
So he hit the guy?! Otherwise it'd be a near-hit...

It's a matter of interpretation. You're interpreting "near-miss" to mean "nearly a miss, but actually a hit". The intended interpretation is "a miss that was near, not distant".

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
No, I live in a country where trains frequently and intentionally run on tracks to airports, where trains frequently and intentionally run on tracks to plain huge train stations, and lots of other stations too.

I thought you were talking about hijacking a train to ram it into a building; I must have misunderstood you. You've made it abundantly clear that you don't know jack about railroading. It's OK, most people don't, even though they imagine a lot of things.

Norman Diamond:
A hijacker will still have an easy time of delivering and exploding their bomb.

I initially understood that you were talking about ramming the train itself into something solid, but apparently you were talking about taking a bomb on board and blowing it up in (under?) a significant building. Bombs on trains have happened, but to my understanding, most that they've accomplished is blowing a hole in train and more holes in some unfortunate people inside. Most railroad stations, even ones under buildings, are very open, so a bomb that goes off inside a confined railroad car made of really thick metal has a really hard time doing structural damage. Don't forget that an underground railroad station (mainline or subway) has to withstand accidents, such as a train derailing into a supporting column, so they tend to be heavily built.

Norman Diamond:
conifer:
Oh, but we were originally talking about inspecting the passengers' luggage in case one of them were to ram the train into the station. Once you're boarding the train, it has a full staff, working engine(s), functional brakes, and it's under the watchful eye of traffic control (the details of which vary depending on location).
So what? They still won't know about the bomb until it's too late. Or if a hijacker takes the driver's seat, no one will know about the ramming plan until it's too late. Or as a non-hypothetical case, if you're willing to consider the real world, no one knew about the sarin until it was too late. The reason inspections won't occur is that they'd turn a 2 hour commute into a 6 hour wait in line followed by a 2 hour commute, and 90% of the world won't be able to get to work any more.
You have to ignore the terrorists. Anything else lets them win?

There have been a few train bombings plus the 1995 sarin attack. The way I see it, having or not having inspections is a judgement call. Some long distance high speed trains have some kind of inspections in place. In a crowded subway station it would be simply impossible.

I did read - somewhere - that one thing that did help the UK fight the IRA terrorists was an agreement that IRA strikes should not be front page news. The IRA were after publicity, and it was made harder for them to get it. Unfortunately I can't verify or recall the source, so you can take that with a pinch of salt.

I did take two seconds to search for some actual train hijackings. Yes, they have happened. In a variety of ways. By both terrorists and lunatics. About five cases globally within the past 40 years.

Norman Diamond:
The engine is in the first car. There's a glass door separating the driver's room from the rest of the car. I suppose subways in the US might have a metal door separating the driver's room from the rest of the car, so hijacking might be tougher, but still no one's going to know about the bomb or the sarin until it's too late.

So are we talking about mainline railroads or subways here? Because it actually matters. Sounds to me like you've seen pictures of, or visited some particular type of train, possibly a Siemens Velaro, that has such a wall. A Velaro is a long distance high speed train with passenger volumes vastly different from subways. There are locomotive-hauled trains where there's no access from the engine to the passenger cars. There may even be cars in between without any end doors, such as mail, freight, or vehicle transport cars.

The engine may be first in the train. It may also be the last, in which case there will be a control cab in the first car. It can also be in the middle, in which case there are control cabs in both ends. There may also be engines in both ends of the train. The train may even be split along the route or coupled to another train, so none of this is necessarily constant. In the case of a multiple-unit train such as the Velaro, there are traction components all over the train, so you can't really talk about an "engine". There's a cab in the front of the train, that's about all you can say, and that's what matters for controlling the train. Of course, there are fully automatic, driverless subway systems - no separate engine, no cab...

Norman Diamond:
As a matter of fact, if scanning were practical, if everyone would wait in line 6 hours before taking their 2 hour commute, then scanning would have revealed the components for sarin. The terrorists were carrying both components and one terrorist even used an umbrella to try mixing the two when they didn't mix by themselves as quickly as he hoped. But anyway, scanning isn't going to happen, at least not for ordinary trains.
Scanning does take place at airports, AFTER arrival.

Like I said, it's a judgement call to decide on inspections. It's about balancing risks and returns. They may be warranted in some conditions, and impractical in others. I know of border crossings where freight trains are X-rayed for contraband. Improvements in maintenance, staff training, and working conditions are more likely to produce better returns in safety than scanning each and every passenger. Some specific cases may warrant inspections, such as the Eurotunnel. It's all about looking at the big picture; how many injuries and deaths occur on the system and why, what can be done to improve the situation, and what things are likely to cause problems in the future, and how they can be prevented. Wasting passengers' time is taken into account as part of the judgement.

However, there's a difference between a train and a plane, and a certain similarity between the Eurotunnel and a flight. Let me know when you figure out what it is.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

conifer:
I initially understood that you were talking about ramming the train itself into something solid, but apparently you were talking about taking a bomb on board and blowing it up in (under?) a significant building.

I was not talking about derailments, except coincidentally when mentioning that drivers have enough control that they can cause derailments. Yes I was talking about bombing significant buildings.

conifer:
Most railroad stations, even ones under buildings, are very open, so a bomb that goes off inside a confined railroad car made of really thick metal has a really hard time doing structural damage. Don't forget that an underground railroad station (mainline or subway) has to withstand accidents, such as a train derailing into a supporting column, so they tend to be heavily built.

The World Trade Center was heavily built too, and was hardly affected by its first bombing (in its underground parking garage). I think when terrorists want to destroy a building they'll find a way. But notice that terrorists often look to kill and injure humans regardless of whether surrounding structures might not be damaged by sarin or nails or whatever.

conifer:
Norman Diamond:
The engine is in the first car. There's a glass door separating the driver's room from the rest of the car. I suppose subways in the US might have a metal door separating the driver's room from the rest of the car, so hijacking might be tougher, but still no one's going to know about the bomb or the sarin until it's too late.
So are we talking about mainline railroads or subways here? Because it actually matters.

It doesn't matter here. In fact not only are the trains designed the same, but in many cases they are the same, when a train passes a particular station it moves from being an above-ground train operated by one company to being a subway operated by a different company.

conifer:
However, there's a difference between a train and a plane, and a certain similarity between the Eurotunnel and a flight. Let me know when you figure out what it is.

If Aum had succeeded, they would have killed everyone in Kasumigaseki station and a few others, on every train that they arrived in, or in the platforms and passageways of the station. Hijackers other than Osama's crew usually take humans as hostages with the action and/or threat of murdering the humans to make their case. The vehicle is just a vehicle. Let me know when you figure out how immaterial the difference is.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
It doesn't matter here. In fact not only are the trains designed the same, but in many cases they are the same, when a train passes a particular station it moves from being an above-ground train operated by one company to being a subway operated by a different company.

Are you in Frankfurt by any chance?

Norman Diamond:
If Aum had succeeded, they would have killed everyone in Kasumigaseki station and a few others, on every train that they arrived in, or in the platforms and passageways of the station. Hijackers other than Osama's crew usually take humans as hostages with the action and/or threat of murdering the humans to make their case. The vehicle is just a vehicle. Let me know when you figure out how immaterial the difference is.

All I'm saying is that terrorist strikes against railroads have happened, and trains have been hijacked, but not very much in the way you pictured it, and if you're going to talk about something, please do two minutes of research about it. There are enough people who have Hollywood movies in their respective heads, and who set up all kinds of impractical cunning plans to foil the schemes that only exist in those movies, not to mention the few nutcases who try to implement the Hollywood movie schemes.

There are actual, good, working security measures to be made, but they are often boring, not very visible, and involve experience, judgement, statistics, probabilities, and percentages, which nobody understands anyway.

Watson · 2012-09-03 Reply Admin

AN AMAZING CODER:
bjolling:
...One of the examples was: this building was designed to withstand a plane crashing into it. They even had photoshopped a slide with a picture of their building and an approaching aircraft.
I'm sure this is were the terrorist got their idea from

...

The fact of the matter is, those cases were planes crashing into a building due to malfunction or pilot error. The significance being a plane that's crashing like the Hudson River Landing is going significantly slower than a plane that's deliberately smashed into a building.

While Columbia was on orbit during its last mission, Boeing were asked about the potential for damage from a lump of insulation foam that had been seen to break off and hit the shuttle. The lump was estimated at around 1920 cubic inches. The PowerPoint presentation basically ran,

Boeing:
•IT LOOKS OKAY. •Our model reckons it's okay. •One of our models reckons it's okay. •We haven't actually done any tests on this. •We didn't test to see what would happen if a lump of insulation foam hit the leading edge of the wing, only the tiles underneath the wing. •The biggest lump we ever tested with was 3 cubic inches.

Kuba · 2012-09-03 Reply Admin

AN AMAZING CODER:
Everyone is missing the point.
The problem with planes isn't someone setting a bomb off on them. The problem with planes is someone turning it into an unstoppable missile. Short of putting automatic shut-down protocols on commercial planes (at the peril of everyone on board), there's not much you can do to stop a successfully hijacked plane quickly.

Your options after hijacking a train are limited. You're not going to "drive a train into a crowded building" unless that crowded building also happens to be built on the tracks of the train. (And don't go into "they can blow the tracks!", because there are safeguards against that kind of thing.)

If you blow up the tracks, you only do it because the cargo is going to be destroyed, releasing toxic stuff or blowing up. Or both. Doesn't make much sense otherwise, unless you simply want the carnage from a derailed trail.

At least in Europe most trains are electric fed from a catenary or a 3rd rail, so you can't really expect to escape in them, they'll kill the power and that's it. Never mind they could switch you on a spur ending at a wall. Also, many railway systems do in fact have fleet-wide radio commanded emergency braking, I've personally seen such a system in Poland.

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