America's Dunkirk

I was going to post this yesterday, but ASM826 posted about the victims of that day.  But this story is exceptionally well-told and deserves to be remembered.

No training.  This was just what people did that day.

- One of the captains that evacuated Manhattan on 9/11 

It's not quite fair to call this "America's Dunkirk", since the English Channel is a lot wider than the Hudson River.  And the Luftwaffe had something to say in 1940, that they didn't have in 2001.

But this is a great story, well told by Tom Hanks.  About the time that the Coast Guard sent out a radio message to all boats that can help evacuate Manhattan.  This is the story of the boats who responded, and evacuated a Million people in a day.

 I've posted about this before.  But this seems somehow apropos.  And click through to that post to see the comment from Friend Of The Blog Paul, Dammit! who knows a bunch of the people interviewed in this.  It's worth your time. 

Christine Lee Hanson

 Christine Lee Hanson would be 25 now, graduated from college, and starting her adult life.

 Christine was two years old. Her parents were taking her to Disneyland. They lived in Groton, Massachusetts and were on Flight 175 on a beautiful September morning twenty-three years ago today. She became the youngest person to die in the terror attack of September 11th, 2001.

At the end, her father was on the phone with his father. When the phone went silent, Christine's grandfather hung up. They had the TV on and watched the plane strike the tower at the same time. His wife says he was never the same.

Martin Luther King once said in a speech, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

I hope that this is true.

Remember.

One More, Just Because

Rest In Peace, James Earl Jones

Doubtless Dwight will cover this in full presently.  But he was an actor that I enjoyed pretty much throughout his entire career (who can forget him in The Sandlot?) - but one role stands out in my mind: his guest appearance (as himself) on The Big Bang Theory.

And this scene was hilarious (from that same episode) but I had never heard the full story:

May flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.

Crossbow season

For deer, anyway.  Tacitus has been practicing.

He's also pondering ancient Roman ballistae, but I think that would be for something larger like an elk or maybe a moose ...

Seth Weeks: Polka Caprice for Mandolin and Piano

Seth Weeks is an interesting composer for a couple reasons: he composed for the mandolin, and he was black - back in the 19th and early 20th centuries when that was a definite limitation on how musical society would accept him.  Despite that, he was the prime mover in bringing on what is called the mandolin's golden period.  He became prominent enough that he toured in Europe and lived there before World War I and in the 1920s.

It was in Europe that he recorded his music, with Edison Records in London and Gerliner Gramophone in Berlin.

Born on this day in 1868, he lived to the ripe old age of 85.  There are not a lot of performances of his music on Youtube, and this doesn't have a lot of views.  That's a shame - he was an unusually interesting composer.

Well, that's one way to improve the Internet coverage on a Navy ship

Navy finds hidden Starlink dish on ship:

Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship.

They called the resulting Wi-Fi network "STINKY"—and when officers on the ship heard rumors and began asking questions, the leader of the scheme brazenly lied about it. Then, when exposed, she went so far as to make up fake Starlink usage reports suggesting that the system had only been accessed while in port, where cybersecurity and espionage concerns were lower.

Well, it is a pain in the rear end to get hooked up to SIPRnet ... 

Of course, there's been a general helping of Courts Martials to everyone involved.

And the funniest bit?  Elon Musk had Starlink change the default WiFi SSID to "Stinky" to encourage customers to change the damn defaults.

Dad Joke CCCXXXX

How do you stop an astronaut's baby from crying? 

You rocket.

What is this, 1990?

SolarWinds issues security patch to eliminate hard coded password:

SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product that can be used by remote, unauthenticated attackers to log into vulnerable instances, access internal functionality, and modify sensitive data

The software maker has now issued an update to address that critical oversight; its users are encouraged to install the fix, which presumably removes the baked-in creds.

[blink] [blink]

What makes this even more double-plus ungood is that SolarWinds is a security company.  They know that hard coded passwords are not just A Very Bad Thing Indeed, but considered harmful*.

I guess the only other possibility is that they don't know this, but I just don't believe that.  Heads should roll over this.

* Old computing graybeards will remember the ACM paper "GoTo Considered Harmful" which created such a furor that "considered harmful" is now considered harmful when used descriptively.

Except here, where it is 100% justified.