Aloysius Hettiarachchi

It was yesterday that BBC and other main world media showed how some devices exploded on vegetable stalls in open air markets somewhere in Lebanon. I do not think what they showed in the markets were pagers. Most likely some of them were just mobiles the vendors placed on their tables while selling vegetable in addition to pagers the terrorist (or freedom fighters to some others) may have used for communication elsewhere. And today their motor cars also started exploding. Can it not happen in our country on the election day to disrupt it?. How can this happen?. This is my two cents worth on the subject:

About three weeks ago one of my old desktops made a huge noise when I switched it on. I thought something inside exploded. There are no batteries inside desktops except a 3-volt battery for the timer, unlike in a laptop in which there is a battery to store power. When I took it to the vender who sold it to (in 2013) their technicians told me that it could have happened if ants go inside and sit between two of those connectors bridging them. The power already in some capacitors can discharge making a loud noise. They told me the remedy is to replace the power unit. This was the case when I replace the old unit with an external one. What I am going to describe is how this type of explosions could be done remotely via internet. I hope those well versed in these technologies would enlighten the readers better.

Beirut was the first place I set my foot outside Sri Lanka in 1975 on my way to Kano, Nigeria. It looked an affluent place with flashy cars and high-end hotels; the young guys would rev-up the engine of their cars so much so that the wheel would turn a few times before the car took off. However, the British Airways flight that took me to Beirut from Karachi on transit announced that it would be their airline’s last flight to that city, as a civil war has erupted in that place. At the airport I noticed that each official looking at the other in a suspicious way. That situation has descended to the present level that people are divided on ethnic and religious lines and don’t know who is doing what. In a diverse country can it not happen to us with so much of foreign meddling as at present.

A couple of years ago I wrote in this collum about hacking of mobile phones by NSA Group of Israel using a virus named Pegasus with a video by ColdFusion, a website created by a Nigerian researcher living in Australia; it had over million hits at the time. I did so when I felt that my phone also was hacked due to some activities of guys wearing dresses of a certain colour. He explained how the Chip fabricating companies like Intel are mandated by their governments to include a mechanism ostensibly for the exclusive use of the owners of the machines to find out the activities of the users if they so wish. This may actually be for the governments to track what the users do, if they want for security reasons. One person by the name Edward Snowdon who worked for a NSA contractor ran away from the job and published leaked documents as a whistle blower. He stayed for a while in Russia and ended up in Ecuadorian embassy in London where he sought refuge for many years. Another by the name Julian Assange, an Australian who had been dabbling with computers from childhood and became a hacker is another guy who made huge din about secret documents in Wikileaks. But none gave away the secret behind how they could get into a computer system. So, both have been spared.

At the moment, as far as I know, there are two main computer architectures which have been used by the computer processor chip manufacturers. They are the CISC or Complex Instruction Set Architecture and the RISC or Reduced Instruction Set Architecture. The former has about 1500 instructions defined while the latter has about 50, hence the name reduced. In all desktops and laptops (except those with M1, M2 etc belonging to Apple) run with former while 99% of popular mobiles run with the latter. The particular architecture those mobiles used is called ARM (or Advanced RISC Machines), a product developed by British engineers initially in Cambridge University. It’s a fascinating story how a young girl studying in it figured it out even to the extent of challenging those in the silicon valley experts in this craft. And today the ARM is everywhere controlling our day to day activities. Thousands of engineers are employed in that company and we even do not know who actually owns it as at present. How it is doing, is the most intriguing question. It is explained by the Nigerian youtuber in his ColdFusion video which I referred to earlier.

The programming language Linux was initially developed by a student by the name Linus Torvalds in the University of Helsinki, Finland with about 12k lines of codes as an open source programming language. Many free lancing coders contributed to it and presently it has some 30 million lines of codes, but managed by Linus himself via a platform called Git. However, the interesting part is this: at the beginning there was an allegation that he copied the mini operating system developed by Professor Andrew S Tanenbaum called MINIX having 10k lines of code. He is exactly of my age and is a professor in the University of Vrije, in Amsterdam. His book by the name Structured Computer Organisation” was used by almost all IT university students including my daughter who studied in University of South Australia. His book she left behind where I was working overseas inspired me to study this subject of computer architecture as hobby.  I had to purchase an used paperback copy with an equivalent of S$50, although the good professor has given permission  to an Indian printing company to distribute it at a cost of Indian Rupees 550 only in the South Asian countries including Sri Lanka; its not available in any of the book store in the country. It’s the equivalent of the bible to Christians in my view.

The allegation was that the Jewish professor’s tiny operating system is in all processor chips running both CISC and RISC architectures at the hardware level. And it can be used to do spying on users or whatever they want to do remotely. Perhaps it can shunt two connectors in the chip that controls power and you can imagine what would happen if the battery is fully charged. With the use of internet, GPS that gives your location anyone who knows how to access the MINIX and use it can damage all devices in a certain area at a given time. There were videos that describe how to get the code to open the access to MINIX in any device. Perhaps the airlines bans the transport of tablets in bags due to this reason.

We, too are in a critical juncture now. We should be careful in the use of technology these days. To be forewarned is to forearmed, they say.