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from the its-my-ball-and-I'm-taking-it-home dept.
Axios: Kelly, Secret Service agent scuffled with Chinese officials over nuclear 'football'
White House chief of staff John Kelly and a Secret Service agent scuffled with Chinese security officials over the U.S. nuclear "football" during a trip to China in November, Axios reported Sunday.
[...] The interaction reportedly took place during President Trump's trip to Beijing's Great Hall of the People. The aide carrying the briefcase was blocked from entering the hall, and another official quickly told Kelly, five sources told Axios.
Kelly then came over and told the officials to continue walking in, after which a Chinese security official grabbed at Kelly, and the chief of staff pushed him off, according to Axios. A Secret Service agent then tackled the Chinese security official, the publication reported.
U.S. officials were asked to not discuss the interaction, according to Axios. Chinese officials were never in possession of the bag containing the launch codes, and a top Chinese security official apologized to the Trump team afterward.
The nuclear football (also known as the atomic football, the President's emergency satchel, the Presidential Emergency Satchel, the button, the black box, or just the football) is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the President of the United States to authorize a nuclear attack while away from fixed command centers, such as the White House Situation Room. It functions as a mobile hub in the strategic defense system of the United States. It is held by an aide-de-camp.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:20PM
Boy, you aren't kidding there. Like a friggen bean bag. Mash here, vulnerability goes over there.
I would say by far most of the time I spend designing stuff, is not just to make it work, rather its to make it fault tolerant. I can't design it out altogether, but at least I isolate as much as I can so something bad may burn out an interface, but I sure want to keep the central "heart" beating so it can at least diagnose and report the failed interface. Which is my rationale behind many Arduinos linked through isolators.
I never know when someone is going to accidentally feed line power into a millivolt current sense input, thinking its the voltage monitor input. It *will* fry. It will definitely take out the digitizer. Screw up the board ground big-time. But it should not make it past the isolator. The next level up will see the interface no longer responding and diagnose/report the problem.
One thing I won't tolerate is the entire system suddenly going dark. If all hell breaks loose, I want to go to the supervisory unit, dial up its interfaces, and see for myself what the interfaces are reporting - even if they are not reporting at all. I can do manual interrogation and see for myself.
The system is primitive by today's standards, but there is a certain elegance in simplicity. Its not GUI. Its several 20char x 4line LCD's. A pair of quadrature encoders with pushbutton shafts are the main operator interface. It lets me scroll things and select certain things. If I want, I can send outputs to a VGA monitor. Text only. Something like 50 lines of 100 characters. One of the old SVGA modes. Handled by a Parallax Propeller. A guy over in England builds those. That way, I can easily monitor all inputs/outputs so I can personally see if all is in order.
I have many CPUS running simultaneously. Some of them are in risky places. Its up to the galvanically protected ones to keep tabs on their subordinates. None of them are very complex. Most of the CPU's are interchangeable - just have to have the proper code for their station-in-life programmed into them. This is still very preliminary.
I hope to release the whole shebang to open source once I have quality stuff to present. And make myself available for hire should someone want something special. The way I have this architecture designed, I can interface to damned near anything that does not require high-speed servicing. Sense or control. Its a piece of art, and its taking me a helluva long time to get it right. Seems like every time I think its perfect, its not. If someone was paying me to do this, they would have fired me a long time ago. Someone said there comes a time in the life of any project to shoot the engineer and begin production... but the executioner has not shown up yet. I want this to be something I am proud of... not another rapid-design pile of junk made to order for a bean counter, using as few of the cheapest beans I can find.
Every prospective employer I have found so far flat does not want to wait... they want to hit the ground running, with product within the quarter. Geez, I have been working on this thing for about five years now. Paying due diligence to all the detail is *very* time consuming.
Especially if one is trying to design a set of "Lego" so as to be easily adaptable to plug custom designed stuff in - without running out of I/O pins. ( Yes, I have that problem neatly nipped. ). Seems Arduino and Propeller were made for each other.
Once I get going on this and get some working capital, I have met one guy in particular, homeless, and in the riverbed, and know of a couple of others. I would love to get a source of funding so I can hire these guys and get them programming these things, and working up propeller code. I have many interfaces I want to port to Propeller. Especially things like stepper motor control.
But right now, I am retired and am funding it from my social security, which limits me to maybe a board run every two months or so. Working for pay doesn't help me much until I get paid enough to overcome the tax burden earning anything nets me. If I get paid a little bit, all they have done is stir up a tax nightmare for me. Best not take any pay at all, as fishing through tax requirements consume hours - hours I would much rather spend doing my designs.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]