by [TC]²
A monthly column of technology rambling, rumination and reality
By: Jud Early, Corporate Vice President, Research, [TC]²
May 2005
Hello, faithful readers,
The April column ended with our travels in Belgium, where we visited Picanol.
At the time of our visit, a new demonstration center was being readied for the roll-out of the new Omni Plus 800 loom to European visitors and press who were expected the following week. The new machine is quite impressive
. Operating at a speed of 1500 picks per minute, the machine reaches operating speed within one pick, and stops equally fast. This is done through a new drive system that incorporates a direct drive motor, eliminating the gearbox and drive system found on older weaving machines. You may not find this significant, but it speaks volumes about the engineering capability of this company. First, it is not just marketing hype. The machine does indeed accelerate in less than one revolution to full speed. 
A flat panel display that is the operator interface to the machine shows graphically the rotational speed of the loom, and while running at full speed, the minor variations in rotational speed as the various loads are applied and released in shedding and beating up between picks. There is no shuttle, the filling yarns are jetted through the shed with compressed air. Power consumption is reduced to 30% of normal for a machine of this type. The motor control system provides an 80 Kilowatt surge to start the motor, dropping back to a low level while running. Electricity costs are mitigated, and drive mechanisms are simplified.
This is possible because the motors are designed and built by Picanol. The motor technology is known as switched reluctance in Europe, while in the United States the terminology is variable reluctance. What this means is that the motor has no windings on its rotor, and the stator windings are near the outside of the motor case, positioned around pole pieces that face the rotor. There are no mechanical switches inside the motor, nor are there any magnets, as might be found on some variable reluctance motors. Switching of the pole windings is done externally to the motor, in a solid state control panel containing high power semiconductors that actually switch the current from pole to pole. The faster that switching is done, the faster the motor speed. This is not rocket science, but the ability to accelerate the motor and its coupled inertia load in less than a single revolution is quite remarkable. Huge capacitors attached to the drive system are charged at times that starting and stopping are not needed. When the command to start is received, the control panel switches the highly charged capacitors into the winding that is in position to start, followed by the next and so on, dropping out after the motor shaft has rotated approximately one-half revolution. Running current is then applied by rapidly switching from pole to pole to keep the motor and its coupled load running at the desired speed. Stopping is a reverse of starting. By applying a powerful burst of energy to the windings in reverse fashion, the motor can be stopped instantly. The rotor, consisting of stamped steel laminations and without any permanent magnets, should have infinite life. The motor housing, with its windings is actually receiving the heavy power influx, but for only a short time, so the motor is able to run cooler and should also have an extended life. The electronics, designed, tested and packaged by ProTronics, a company owned by Picanol and also located in Ypres, Belgium, builds all the motor controllers and panels for Picanol machines, as well as contracting electronic design and development for outside clients. Much of the work at ProTronics is testing. Engineers design systems, and after design, other engineers design test systems to exercise the electronics under simulated and real loading conditions. The testing that is done before release of any system ensures reliability in the field. The concrete floor literally moves under your feet as this machine is put through its paces.
Readers of the [TC]² Technology Communicator have by now, read about the rest of our trip. Visits and meetings in Northern Ireland, England and Germany were completed as planned. Our final stop at Hohensteiner Institute allowed us to see the broad range of services offered to clients around the world. The main headquarters is in a three hundred year old castle, perched atop a hill with great views across the valley below.
The next leg of our technology tour begins on Friday the 13th of May, with destination of Bangkok Thailand, returning to Osaka Japan for the JIAM Show. I'll be writing and snapping photos, so stay tuned as we continue to gather info on the current state of technology and business strategy from around the world.
Printing 2005: A Digital Reality
This symposium, sponsored jointly by AATCC and [TC]² will be held May 24 through 26 at the New School University in New York City . On Wednesday May 25 th I'll be presenting on Finishing the Job: An Overview of Ink Jet Fixation Equipment. During the symposium, I'll be covering the presentations for Techexchange.com and will update you, our faithful readers on new ideas, processes or products. I encourage everyone who can to attend. Register on-line at www.aatcc.org.
On-line Extortion
For those of us who use the web for research and the transport of e-mails to friends, colleagues, and Grandma, little thought is given to the darker side of web activity. Before spam filtering, we all were exposed to some of the seamier offerings such as pornography, prescription drugs offered in questionable ways and get rich quick schemes. Where there is the opportunity to flaunt the law, there is someone out there who is willing to do so. These minor league offenses pale in comparison to the extortion threats that companies and on-line operators may face. This item is just to let you know what is going on, below the radar of most of us.
Costa Rica has become a haven for on-line gambling operations. Hundreds of bookmakers take in many millions of dollars in wagers. The fall and winter in which professional and college sports are at their peak, and with the Super Bowl as the crown jewel, these wagering establishments accept bets from the United States and from around the world, operating outside the laws that would prohibit if done within our borders. Many of these have faced extortion demands and a number have quietly paid the criminals who threaten their businesses.
Before you say righteously to your self, “aha! They are getting what they deserve”, be aware that similar threats are being made to medium and large size companies operating legitimate businesses within our national borders. It could happen to your bank, or even to your business. Naturally, no one wants to talk about this problem, so I'm bringing it to your attention. So, what is the problem, what is the crime?
When we use our browser to fetch a page from a web site, a request is sent, and the server that holds the file that contains the page responds to the request by sending back to your browser packets of data that are assembled by the requester's computer and displayed within the browser. In the early days, before server redundancy was widely used, we would often receive the packets in a stuttering form, and the page would load slowly. In many cases this was due to the server having to handle many requests at once, and was kept busy sending packets of data to the many requesters, and trying to keep all of them satisfied. Now, with broadband, and servers that are many times faster and often with deep redundancy, pages snap onto the screen in the blink of an eye. Picture though, a server that is handling requests from a thousand requesters at once, or from ten thousand requesters all asking for the same page at one time. If enough requests are received at one time, the server cannot keep up, and unless there is a safe failover, will crash, leaving the requester with a “page not found” message. If these requests had all come from one source, the attack is called a denial of service attack, or DoS. Even a fast computer sending requests to the same URL will probably be outpaced by the server, and except for being slow, everything works as it should. However, if ten thousand computers or twenty thousand computers were all sending as fast as they can send, even the most robust of servers would fail. This type of attack is known as DDoS, or distributed denial of service. How is this done?
Criminals, working in small groups, or groups working in concert with groups have compromised hundreds of thousands of computers, without the owners even knowing it. These zombie computers are organized into a bot-net, and can be controlled from a safe location. Some are in university settings, some are in businesses, but most are consumer computers that are connected to the Internet through an always-on connection, and are able to be controlled remotely from a location that is outside of the long arm of the local law. These criminals are more organized than we would like to believe, and communicate within chat rooms that provide a meeting spot. At a given time, the command is sent to the bot-net to begin requesting pages from a target server. The target server becomes overloaded in a short time and fails. Service is denied to those who legitimately request a page from the server.
As one might imagine, when a bookmaker's servers go down, not only is there a loss of revenue, but the confidence of the bettors is shaken, and hard-won customers are lost to competitors. The competitors are often friendly with each other. In one seven story building in San Jose Cost Rica, almost every floor is home to a different bookmaker, or to a telecom center to support the communications that such enterprises require. Still, a loss of customers to a competitor is not a good thing, and when threatened with loss of even one day of business, the operators of these gambling sites will often just pay the extortionists demands. One owner decided to stand his ground, only to be shut down within hours by DDoS attacks. Losses of $100,000 per day were incurred while he strategized at how to beat the demands. Eventually, by hiring an specialized consultant, who set up powerful server farms that could not only handle the DDoS attacks, but intercept and filter out the bot-net requests, and forward legitimate requests to the bookmaker, was he able to beat the crooks by having servers that were bigger than anything that could be thrown at them by crooks. In this case over a half million dollars was lost in revenue. The cost to maintain the filtering server farm? About $50,000 per year. The service is now used by banks, brokerages, and of course gambling operators.
Another tactic used by miscreants is to threaten companies with releasing e-mail containing child porn onto the web bearing the address of the company. This does not require that you have a web site, just that you have an e-mail address, and a reputation to protect. This crime has been employed against small and medium size companies, but there is no quantification of how often it has occurred, nor is there a lot of interest in revealing how the attack was mitigated.
If all this sounds a bit like science fiction, I encourage you to do your own research. Security journals published by reputable publishers carry stories like the ones above. There is little protection against this type of crime. The FBI has been able to lure some of the criminals to the United States by promising jobs as hackers, and then arresting the applicants after they incriminate themselves. If your company should ever face a similar situation, immediately call in the FBI, and begin a search for a reputable firm or consultant who can help with planning a counter strategy.
On The Lighter Side
Our webmaster, Walt McKinney has written an article that I think you may find interesting. Walt is responsible for keeping the [TC]² and Techexchange web sites running properly, and also assembles the Technology Communicator and the Techexchange newsletter, managing the delivery by e-mail to each of you. I am pleased to add Walt's article to this column.