Commodore 64 stuffs up police inquiry

[Big Daddy Kane]

Commodore 64 stuffs up police inquiry (http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=34182)
Data untransmittable

By Nick Farrell: Wednesday 06 September 2006, 08:58

COPPERS INVESTIGATING the kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch say their investigation is hampered by the fact that the kidnapper used a Commodore 64.
Kampusch was kidnapped and held for years by telecom engineer Wolfgang Priklopil before she finally escaped. Priklopil later topped himself.

Police trying to find out Priklopil's motivations have found a Commodore 64 which he appears to have used extensively around the time of the kidnapping. The only problem is that they can't transfer the data to a PC without losing some of it.

Maybe the problem is that they are looking for a hard-drive.

[Viss1]

10. ? kidnap evidence
20. Run

[Kremithefrog]

He did it. End of investigation.

[TaurusKev]

w00t! Commodores! I love those machines.

10 PRINT "Lol, I kidnapped her :D "
20 GOTO 10
SAVE"LOL Kidnapped",8,1

[Viss1]

Ha ha, I forgot about the ",8,1"

[Big Daddy Kane]

Guess it's like DOS, but a bit more difficult then?

And holy crap, I've been learning this intrusion detection alarm system all week... They brought the instructor here to teach a class of 12 instead of sending the 12 of us to Texas to their $5000-per-head class ($60,000 there) since it's cheaper to bring him here and pay him all-inclusive instead of taking 12 of us to Texas and paying every one of us all-inclusive (guys here from other USAFE bases can eat free at the chow hall on base, so no food cost, just had to get a rental van for each base so they could get to billeting/chow hall/etc).

Thing sucks huge balls! I mean, their firmware is still using command prompt inputs with a cheap and hard to use ASCII GUI that was originally programmed in 1989 (which explains the look and feel). No major updates in almost 20 years? :shrug:

Guess they make it complicated for one or more of these reasons:
● Only need to be trained once to operate the system forever (a pretty good one, but it's harder to train and you'll probly forget how to configure it after a while)

● Don't want to fix what's not broken (I hate that way of thinking)

● Don't want to pay programmers to make a new system (unlikely since they've developed the Windows front end way after they originally made the system)

● Want you to keep needing very expensive refresher training (the $5,000 per head class) just to be able to operate the system (my opinion, it's this one... $55,000 just to send 12 people to the class... they're banking if they make the system extremely difficult to maintain!)

Their new master system (the part that stores all the programming that all the sensors eventually report their status to) is supposedly pretty awesome (is a moot statement due to the instructor thinking even the old stuff we have are the coolest things since sliced bread!). The instructor told us it's Windows based. Also, you must buy the entire master system to get this upgrade, they don't offer it via a firmware update (or even with the hardware update chip it supports :nonono: ). It's a huge corporation that owns them, only in the business to make money, not satisfied customers.

He says that besides the system being faster and able to do more things (has more inputs/outputs and are completely user-configurable), the underlying programming and the GUI setup is essentially the same thing as what we have now. You still need to run the program below on the PC terminal that interfaces with this new system (which is where the "DOS-like GUI" is actually running on) About the only major change is you can navigate with a mouse instead of the keyboard-only version they have now, which makes it quicker and easier to program it since you don't have to remember the shortcuts to navigate (which most are not displayed, only the shortcuts the cops would normally see when they would need to acknowledge and stuff).

Only major improvement they did was a very Windows-like-thing, which is ok I suppose since they use a PC with XP that interfaces with the master system (note the terminal is not required... you can program the master system from a laptop and let it run on it's own... just won't know when an alarm goes off!). They developed a new windows program that interfaces with the existing DOS-like monitoring/config program.

The new program can display a digital map of the area being covered by one of the alarms that can show where each sensor is located. It can also be operated via touch screen, which is on the newest terminals. The touchscreen function is nice, because you can lock down the new program to only allow the operators read-only rights to just the map and alarm sensors, and lock up the PCs keyboard with the tower so nobody can hack into it very easily. Only problem is, this actually pretty cool program cannot itself communicate with the master system board, so it just relays information to the DOS-like program running behind it that ends up interfacing with the system master.

Of course, they could be in development with a new GUI that can communicate (and easily configure!) the master system... But so far it's been 10 years since this Windows front-end was created :blackeye:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Related to above, today we were learning on how to set up alarm points (the sensors).

The certain intrusion detection system from them we use can do limited access control (which is how a person is allowed to enter the building), but the instructor thought it could do everything you would need for simple access control.

We stumped him with a certain access control setup (that I will not discuss) because of a function that allows you to activate an alarm if 2+ sensors are activated (but will not activate it if only 1 was activated). There is a built in function for this, but with our certain scenerio and testing equipment (actually the instructor brought this special test box that simulated sensors for all sensor inputs being in whatever state they can operate in), it was completely ineffective in setting off the alarm under certain conditions.

The only reason why this doesn't work is because they either forgot to add a feature to the function above, or failed to add it, since this isn't an access control product. To get access control, we'd have to pay buko bucks for an additional system from them... or about 5 years ago whoever decided to make USAFE standardized with this system could have chosen a much cheaper and simpler system (that includes access control on the same system) that was chosen to be standardized in PACAF and most CONUS bases... Whoever decided this was sold by the "you need the 10,000 features and super flexible system we have" sales tactics of these or something, but never even considered the people that maintain it. Guess that's just how the government works though:blackeye:

The exclusion of that setting makes it impossible to use this in certain access control setups like the one we were trying to do.

However, the program offers a special config area where you can use AND, OR, and XOR logic to program certain sensors to do a certain function when something else happens. This made our scenario work, but not in the built-in function he wanted us to configure and test...

Anyway, there's my rant for a while!