Tanker Truck Shut Down Via Satellite 529
unassimilatible writes "Satellite Security Systems, in cooperation with the California Highway Patrol and InterState Oil Company, demonstrated the first wireless remote shutdown of a fully loaded, moving gas tanker truck. Described as "a viable solution to the challenge of controlling rogue hazardous waste vehicles that could pose a threat to homeland security," satellite communications were used to disable the truck in seconds, 530 miles from the demonstration site. But that's not all. California Assembly Bill (AB) 575 (PDF link) would require truck disabling devices, global positioning or other 'location reporting systems' on all hazardous material haulers. With all of the police pursuits in California, can mandatory GPS and disabling devices in all vehicles be far away?"
And when the bad guys get it? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't really think it bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:1, Interesting)
speed limit (Score:2, Interesting)
I once got a fine, by snail mail, one month after driving a 100km/h on an highway because some Belgian cop decided to put a 50km/h speed limit fine 10 meters OVER the lane.
I argued that the traffic was dense, so this only meant everybody was driving that fast but this just didn't help.
Now, once we get some very personal speed limitation, I hope they'll take our car engines into account : some get damaged quicker at 120km/h than at 128km/h... might be a resonance issue but if they waste my engine with an unadapted control device, they'll have to pay.
I however guess that we'll eventually get some custom processing which may allow awaken BMW drivers to speed up at night on straight highways if there's nobody in a 10km radius. If not, then it only means such laws are meant to milk the drivers with idiotic fines...
Solving the wrong problem, largely (Score:3, Interesting)
In the case of bulk industrial transport, it's painfully obvious that what's needed is not just more automation, but a shift away from roads and onto rail.
Rail is much safer and better controllable than road traffic. No-one would argue against remote control (at least emergency override) of train traffic, indeed I believe this had been standard operating procedure for some time in many countries.
The logic is flawed (Score:5, Interesting)
A) Break into a truck depot at some obvious time (where there just happens to be a truck full of something nasty) and put the pedal to the metal
and hope no one stops you before you reach your target. Or
B) Steal a truck WEEKS in advance , have time to throughly remove any id , electronic shutdown aids, put fake plates on , respray, fill with a chemical
of your choice and drive normally into the city unrecognized?
Terrorists might be evil but generally they're NOT stupid. The is just more balony about "stopping terrorism" that we've had
consistently since 9/11 and I for one am sick of being treated like some wide eyed brainless child who's supposed to accept all these removals of libery
with a thumbs up and a "god sake america!"
The problem with this. (Score:5, Interesting)
So this fancy-shmancy Homeland Security plan can be defeated with a trashcan. Satellite signal blocked = No shutting the truck down remotely. And I know what you're all thinking, "What a redneck, we could just make it where X minutes of signal blockage shuts down the truck!" Right. And if there's a traffic jam in a tunnel, you'll just exacerbate it by having a dead truck there? This is just another of the gov't's "Big Ideas That Will Not Work."
It's easy to block those satellite signals, and it's not reasonable to put a timer on it so that X minutes of no signal == shut down truck.
Most HAZMAT isn't (Score:4, Interesting)
The nasty McGuffins in movies just aren't. If it's unstable, no-one wants to transport it, and will neutralize on-site. About the worse thing I've seen is used transformer oils (PCBs) and cutting oils.
There _are_ serious road-vector hazards (LPG, halogens), but no one is talking of them.
Re:Solving the wrong problem, largely (Score:3, Interesting)
You can think of it as the broadband problem, but without the luxury of counting RF carriers. Much of the US population has broadband available, but more than 95% of the US landmass does not have access to hardwired broadband. Build a house 300 miles from the Washington DC and you'll find that "high speed internet access" means that they've upgraded to V.90 modems in the pool two years ago (I'm not joking!). We already have copper to most US homes (can you say "Universal access fee?" I knew you could), but just dropping in the switches and repeater stations is prohibitive for the outlying communities.
Now, back to rail. It's not $1.50 a foot for cable, plus $500 a pole to string it. Now your talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile - maybe millions. And that doesn't count the court costs for the land you're going to take via eminent(sp) domain. If you take a look, hazmat producing/storing/disposal sites tend to be in remote areas. It's partly safety, partly NIBMY resistance. There's no rail out there to use.
Rail is a fabulous idea for transportation of all sorts of things. It's perfect for, say, Denmark, or Disney World (uniform high population density or planned community) but not for the wide open spaces and independant "frontier" lifestyle of most of the US or Canada. Heck, I'd take rail to the office if I could, but as I live on the top of a mountain, my entire town (several square miles has only 1500 residents, and I'm the only one who works in the old school building I rent, it's not really a luxury I'll have in my lifetime.
There are a few nut cases out here (south west Virginia) who think that adding a rail line in the I-81 corridor will help the traffic on the interstate. Not a chance - even if only 30% of the truck traffic were local in origin or destination, you would still need to get the cargo to a rail station at each end. It's just not a practical solution.
Re:So much for homeland security (Score:4, Interesting)
But presumably these trucks are mass produced, and so the control box is likely to be in the same place in each one. Find out where it goes (either by industrial espionage, or just stripping one down and looking for it) and that little bit of security through obscurity is useless.
To hack it you would have to be INSIDE the control center as (I hope) they don't allow the systems on the Internet, the beam things up directly from a sat. dish on sire.
That only increases the difficulty of the attack, it doesn't make it impossible. If the control computers are on the company's network, then it may be possible to get in with a laptop and connect to the network that way. Ultimately though, if a group is resourceful and determined enough, they could just turn up with some firepower and take the place by force.
Note that I'm not screaming that the sky is falling - just pointing out that very little is impossible. I actually agree with you that this is probably a pretty good idea, for that class of transport. Making something harder to do than it's worth is what security is all about, after all.
In the land of the indolent (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not true. Most europeans have no concept of war. Most of those that have experienced the privations of war are dead (except in those countries that can't resist a good civil war).
Countries like the US and Britain think it is a good idea to invade a defenceless country and even worse, try to make out that those that do not want to kill defenceless people are cowards
Oh please, get off your high horse. France didn't get involved because it was still owed a lot of money from arms sales in the 1980's and illegal sales in the 1990's.(the war referred to in the following quote is the Iran/Iraq war)
In 1987 the Paris-based Le Monde estimated that, between 1981 and 1985, the value of French arms transfers to Iraq was US$5.1 billion, which represented 40 percent of total French arms exports. Paris, however, was forced to reschedule payment on most of its loans to Iraq because of Iraq's hard-pressed wartime economy and did so willingly because of its longer range strategic interests...French military sales to Iraq were important for at least two reasons. First, they represented high-performance items. Iraq received attack helicopters, missiles, military vehicles, and artillery pieces from France. Iraq also bought more than 400 Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missiles and at least 200 AS30 laserguided missiles between 1983 and 1986. Second, unlike most other suppliers, France adopted an independent and unambiguous arms sales policy towards Iraq. France did not tie French arms commitments to Baghdad's politico-military actions...(source [allrefer.com])
More recently, France helped move missile material from China: "The French connection - brokering the deal among the Chinese producer, the Syrian land transporter and the Iraqi buyer - is no great secret to the world's arms merchants. French intelligence has long been aware of it. The need for a French export license as well as UN sanctions approval may have been averted by disguising it as a direct offshore sale from China to Syria." (source [iht.com])
France didn't get involved because it was owed money and knew once the deals were exposed wouldn't receive a franc.
That is why countries like France and Germany do not want to go to war for oil.
Really? So by implication the US and GB went to war for oil. Can you support this? I'm not aware of any "oil dividend" either nation has received...no spoils of war. You shouldn't spout rhetoric unless you can support it.
The real reason france and germany didn't go to war is because going to war would interfere with vacation time.
Germany has the shortest work week of any industrialized nation in the world. Depending upon the source, the average German work week ranges between 35 and 38.5 hours. In addition, Germany has a number of national holidays, which decrease the calendar work year that already includes between four and six weeks vacation. (source [davidson.edu])
Of course, the french have that 35 hour work week with a similar amount of vacation time. See, that's why all the useful things like the Internet and computer you are using and the airplane you take on vacation were invented in the US.
Re:In the land of the indolent (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike most North Americans, most Europeans where in the middle of the cold war, most people in Germany had relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Most Europeans can drive for a couple of hours and still see how "bad" it was over there, you can still find places where you can see bullet holes in Walls. If you go through some woods you can still see bomb craters, some old, destroyed buildings.
If you go a bit east of Berlin and walk through woods and fields you can still find human remains from the battle of Berlin in '45.
If you have a Metal detector you can still find bullets, Dog Tags and other stuff.
Even though "Western Europe" was pretty much war free for the past 50 years, conflicts where always raging nearby. While the US lived in "harmony" with itself there was terrorism in Europe (think RAF in Germany for example).
Yeah, Europeans have no concept of cultural diversity either, right?
Go, get a passport and travel a bit.
If anything they were afraid of loosing Euros. But in reality the US supplied just as much, if not more, materials to Iraq than the Europeans did.
Furthermore, it is very clear that the US Government knew what Saddam was using it for. While in Germany for example there were public investigations into the involvement of the then German Government in those deals and the companies fined money, the US didn't do anything like it.
Despite that there even is Photograhic evidence that Rumsfeld was shaking hands and telling jokes with Saddam.
Well,
it looks like you still pay the price in Blood these days, but you honestly think the US went in there out of the good of their heart? When was the last time the US did something just out of pure humanism?
The reality is the US is about money (or the illusion of it), humanitarian effort don't quite fit in there.
So tell me, why exactly did the US go into Iraq (and the UK happily followed)? If it wasn't for the oil, then it was for what? WMDs?
Wow, now that was a real good argument.
Actually the Computer was invented in Germany, too bad, so was TV btw, but heck, who really cares right?
You are just jealous because people can actually live a happy life without working 50 weeks out of the year.
Furthermore, you seem to think the more people work the more productive they are, that this might not be the case somehow escapes you.
I worked in both places and I can tell you that the per hour productivity in Europe is a lot higher, when people are at work, they work, don't talk at the water cooler, but hey, it's all about stereotypes here, isn't it? No real arguments, so use stereotypes.
Current Events (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So much for homeland security (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I don't agree with those, but my point is that everyone has something they think is being taken away from them. You will only have maximum rights when all laws are gone, but you can bet your ass that the basest human desires will rule the day and things will be far from rosy. The one thing people know how to do best is be cruel to their fellow man. With each step further away from barbarism, the collar around your neck fits tighter and tighter.