good security advice from r/tumblr
https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/jvijpc/make_sure_to_stay_secure/

most sites give you three guesses before locking you out and if you use one of the most popular two genders, this makes it easy for hackers!

GENDER: _
"male"
INCORRECT. 2 TRIES REMAIN.
GENDER: _
"female"
WELCOME TO THE SYSTEM. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRANSFER MONEY OR LAUNCH NUCLEAR MISSILES?

instructions unclear. my bank account now has 27$ and three hydrogen bombs

me: I'd like a loan
bank manager: do you have any collateral?
me: no, but I have this. *pushes in cart*
bank manager: I don't think we can take that.
me: oh, you misunderstand *takes out arming key*

bank manager: ahh, but you're a fool. You have to turn both keys at once, and there's only one of you. And don't even think of asking me to help.
me: you're right, I am a fool... unless I had something to help me.
bank manager: you mean....
me: YES *pulls out grabby arm thing*

that one isn't that unrealistic. I can't find a reference right now, but I remember reading that there was some air force officer who realized you could bypass the two-man rule launch keys (which have to be turned simultaneously) with some string.

I did find a declassified picture of the Permissive Action Links system and OH GOD IT'S JUST A CHEAP COMPAQ LAPTOP

this is apparently related to the 1995 Code Management System which simplified the whole arming process by replacing parts of it with software on standard computers rather than custom hardware.
This included some custom crypto processors installed in 1997

and given that it was 1997, the crypto chips had a y2k bug

WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN THIS

fun fact: the PAL systems are self-powered.
They use radioisotope generators, like those used on space probes.

which makes sense I guess.
the last thing you want to happen is that WW3 starts and it turns out you can't arm your nukes because the batteries are flat and no one has any spare D-cell batteries

fun fact: there's a declassified discussion about how the british prime minister would be able to authorize their nuclear strike, if WW3 started while they were on the road.
They set up a radio system to alert the prime minister, but it was one-way.

so the plan was for the PM to simply pull over and use a payphone. They then realized that they should make sure all official drivers carry enough change at all times, so that they wouldn't have to worry about WW3 starting and the PM doesn't have coins to make a phone call

fortunately they avoided that silliness... because someone pointed out that they could dial the operate and request the charges to be reversed.

yes, the official plan for WW3 starting was for the UK PM to find a payphone and make a collect call to the Ministry of Defence

anyway, everyone's favorite fun fact about these super-secure Permissive Action Links that protect all nuclear weapons?
The Navy doesn't use 'em.

I guess they figure that by the time you manage to capture a nuclear sub and break into the safe and get the codes, you're pretty much already there, so it'd just be a waste of space.

Here's another picture of the quality UC1583 Compaq Edition Permissive Action Link.

I wonder if they worked with Compaq to modify the laptop or if they just designed an RTG with a Compaq Laptop Charger cable

NASA worked with IBM to modify Thinkpads for use on the ISS, for example. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1065034980940640257

so maybe the department of defense (not to be confused with the ministry of defence, which is very different) asked Compaq to build them some weird-voltage laptops?

I wonder what the battery situation for those compaqs are?
Because it has an RTG that's gonna last decades, having a nimh/lipo/nicad/whatever battery is just gonna lower the lifespan.

and speaking as someone who runs a lot of very old laptops: I wonder if they remembered the CMOS battery?
Because while you can get most laptops from like 1991, yank the battery, and power them off AC power just fine, the CMOS battery will be flat.

WW3 starts and the US can't launch any (land/air-based) nukes because it turns out the BIOS battery died in 2003 and the crypto won't work without the date/time being set correctly

brb I have to find out some stuff and maybe SAVE MY COUNTRY

I should start collecting pictures of creepy laptops.
This one similarly can kill but only one person at a time. It's Philip Nitschke's "Deliverance Machine", a euthanasia device. It was used at least once.

BTW, for the US navy: they use a two-keys system where the commanding officer and the executive officer have to authorize launch, but the keys are kept in special combination-lock safes, and no one on board has the code to the safes.

the idea is that when they're authorized to launch, it'll come as a launch order (either from radio or from a local higher-ranking officer) which will include the code to the safes.

so it'll be like "you are now authorized to blow up INSERT CITY HERE. And the code is the same as my measurements, 36, 24, 36.
May God have mercy on all our souls. Signed, The Sexy Admiral"

The UK's nuclear subs have a thing called the letters of last resort. There's similarly a special safe on each submarine, which contains a sealed letter from the prime minister.

The captains are instructed to open them if they have reason to believe that the UK government has been incapacitated.
Like for the Polaris subs, they open them if they have evidence of a nuclear attack, or the UK navy has been radio silent for four hours.

and the Vanguard submarines have a more complicated set of checks, which reportedly include checking that BBC Radio 4 is still broadcasting.

In any case, when a new prime minister takes office, they write up a new set of orders, and the old ones are destroyed unopened, so that no one knows what they say.

but there are four known options:
1. Retaliate with your nuclear missiles
2. Don't retaliate
3. Use your own judgement
4. Place yourself under the command of the US or Australia, and let them decide what to do.

But this does imply that a Trident submarine contains all the information needed to launch a missile, while a US missile submarine does not.
So a mutiny on a Trident sub could launch unauthorized missiles, it couldn't on a US sub (at least without involving safecrackers)

and I imagine the US navy worries a lot about safecrackers, like the UK navy worries about who exactly they put in charge of their tridents

one thing that surprised me reading about the letters of last resort is that they always say "the prime minister writes 4 identical letters"

I didn't realize the Trident program (well, programme) was always consistently four submarines, rather than a varying number.

and "identical" is fun, too.
there's four (known) options.
a PM could write each option and randomly distribute them to each submarine, and no one would ever know

the fun thing about there being four is that pictures of all four will fit in one tweet.
Those boats are the HMS Vanguard, HMS Victorious, HMS Vigilant, and HMS Vengeance

It's been joked before that they were alliteratively named like this because the Ministry of Defence are big fans of the movie V for Vendetta.

This is obviously untrue because the class was introduced in 1994, and the film came out in 2005.

They're clearly named that way because the MoD are big fans of the original 1988 graphic novel.

Anyway the "four subs" isn't "four out on patrol", it's "four subs total, with one on patrol at all times".

Here's hoping for the UK's sake that if they ever get into a nuclear war, it's the HMS Victorious.

The others are good adjectives and all but that's the one that says "winning", literally.

I imagine in the basement of some MoD building there's a super top secret document containing other positive V-adjectives they can pull from in case they ever have to build more nuclear-missile boats.

can I just say that the most annoying thing about nuclear-missile-submarines is that you can't just call them "nuclear submarines"? because that doesn't mean "can launch nuclear missiles", it means "is powered by nuclear reactors"

and while the two go hand in hand, there's really no reason why you couldn't have a non-nuclear submarine that carries nuclear missiles, or a nuclear-powered submarine with no nuclear missiles.

The US Navy classifies nuclear-missile-submarines as "SSB" and "SSBN"
SSB is "Submersible Ship, Ballistic [missile]"
SSBN is "Submersible Ship, Ballistic [missile], Nuclear-powered"

I think all the nuclear-missile-submarines the US has ever deployed were SSBNs? But some other nations have done SSBs, like the first ones: The Soviet Union converted six Zulu-class submarines in 1956 to launch R-11FM Scud missiles.

I think actually the Soviet Union may have been the only nation to operate non-nuclear missile submarines?
They also operated some Golf/Golf II class diesel-powered submarines armed with Scuds.

Although reportedly China still has a Golf-class which they use as a testbed.
Which makes sense. If you're going to test a new submarine-launched missile, the last thing you want to do is blow up a nuclear reactor if it goes wrong.

It sounds weird talking about the Soviets launching Scuds because that name is very much affiliated with Iraq (and to a lesser extent some other middle-eastern nations) but it was originally a Soviet design, they just sold it to a bunch of other nations.

Specifically the "Scud" means the R-11 Zemlya designed in the early 50s, and the R-17 Elbrus from the late-50s early-60s. ("Scud" is the NATO reporting name)

The original idea for the R-11 was "Similar performance as a German V-2, but half the size"

FUN FACT (that isn't any fun)
The Scud is the second most used ballistic missile in history.
It's still beaten by it's inspiration, the V-2, which had over THREE THOUSAND fired.

which is a scary number considering that the operational history of the V2 was "September 1944 to March 1945"
six months, 3000 missiles.

Whereas the Scud has been deployed since 1956 and last used in... October of this year.

yeah... that's a bunch of wars.

Anyway a Scud missile is also the one that got through a Patriot anti-missile battery and blew up a US barracks, but that was less "the Scud is an amazing stealth missile" and more "The Patriot didn't work". I did a thread on that: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1186370727697453057

ANYWAY I gotta go get coffee, and add this to my increasingly long list of "threads Foone somehow managed to make about the history of nuclear power/weapons/war" on my wiki

Here's that newly updated list:
https://floppy.foone.org/w/Twitter_Info_Threads#The_Cold_War_.26_Radiation

and as I try to remember to do after a long thread like this, if you enjoyed this feel free to support me making threads like this by sending a dollar or two on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing 

or set up a monthly donation with the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/foone 

I'm off to coffee. please don't fire any nuclear missiles while I'm gone.
but if you have one of those compaq-laptop-powered PAL systems, I'll take that off your hands.

oh, man, I think I figured out the CMOS battery dilemma: I don't think they have one.
Think about it: a CMOS battery is there to keep the clock going and store the BIOS settings when it's turned off, right?

but I bet you they designed these compaqs so that they DO NOT TURN OFF.
Think about it: They have an uninterruptable battery that lasts DECADES.
Why would they ever turn off?

It's an old enough laptop to not need active cooling.
Other than a spinning hard drive, it has no moving parts. Components tend to fail when powering down or up, because of thermal stresses... so just leave it on. Always. 24/7, for decades.

They might even replace the hard drive with a RAM disk.
Why not?
It's not like it ever turns off.

FUN FACT ABOUT THAT: RTGs tend to use plutonium, and there's not a lot of that on hand, because you pretty much only make it when you want nukes.
So all those recent NASA missions that use RTGs? they use plutonium from decommissioned Soviet (later, Russian) nuclear missiles

which I think is kinda beautiful?
There's the radioactive heart of a weapon of mass destruction... now driving around Mars and doing SCIENCE instead of DEATH

I imagine the PAL thing annoys some old navy programmers.
You have Slashdot threads were arm chair sysadmin are bragging about 10 years of uptime and they want to yell "I have systems which have been running since before the cold War ended, on ms-dos!"

But they can't, because it's all classified.

The saddest story. Three decades of uptime, never bragged about.