Is there an Extinction Level Event coming for the Deep State?

An Extinction Level Event is when something - we typically don't really understand what - causes a mass die-off, with 60% or more of species disappearing. The most famous of these was the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs (if you believe that; I'm skeptical that the answer to their demise is so neat and tidy).

Well Donald Trump said he's going to appoint Elon Musk to lead a "Government Efficiency Commission":

Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”

There's no need to look at Tesla's 50% Electric Vehicle market share, or compare SpaceX's launch rate to, well, the rest of the world combined.  Most relevant to this discussion is how Elon cut 80% of Twitter's headcount, turning the company around.

Even though reports have Government employees cutting back expenditures in anticipation of potential cuts, lots of folks are skeptical that this can be done at all.

I'm not one of the skeptics, because I've seen this my very own self, in my career at Three Letter Intelligence Agency.  It was the mid-1980s and I was a wet-behind-the-ears Electronics Engineer in the COMSEC R&D organization.  Their recent triumph was the introduction of the STU-III secure telephone.

The STU-III was a technological marvel, providing high level (Type 1) encryption in a telephony device that, well, worked like a telephone.  And it was delivered 2 years early because of a manager who might be described as the 1980s COMSEC version of Elon Musk.

Walt Deeley was a very senior Intelligence Manager.  He is listed on the NSA's web site:

As Deputy Director of Communications Security in the early 1980s, Mr. Deeley pushed the development and deployment of the STU-III secure telephone, which has been called the most significant improvement to the security of government voice communications in fifty years. He perceived the need for a new approach, and deployed an affordable and effective telephone security system within two years.

...


Walter Deeley was known as a strong-willed manager who pushed his subordinates hard to get results. While a tough taskmaster, the technical advances and mission achievements he led made the United States more secure.

Bold added by me.  Let me give some additional color around that.  He was a legend in the COMSEC R&D organization.  His reputation was equal parts admiration and fear - it was almost like he who must not be named.  People remembered the careers he derailed in his quest for an encrypting telephone.

One story told to me by an old hand was how Deeley had come into the office one Saturday to see how the program was working.  He called down to the program office, and the phone rang and rang and rang.  Finally one guy who happened to be in the office on the weekend answered.  Deeley asked for the Program Manager.  When told that the PM wasn't in because it was a Saturday, Deeley told the guy who was there that he was the new PM and to see him first thing on Monday.  It was very Elon-Must-at-Twitter.

True story - at least I believed it was.  And I for sure wasn't the only one there who did.

So to those who say you can't change how the Government works, color me skeptical.  I'm skeptical because I've actually seen it change (well, heard from people who did).

The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies.  I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount.  That's how the game is played.  So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins.  I expect that this would pay big dividends.

It's sort of like setting one type of dinosaur against another, in a battle to the death.

UPDATE 28 OCTOBER 2024 14:51: Elon says they can reduce the Federal budget by $2 Trillion.

This is what a Preference Cascade looks like

Three months ago I wrote about how Joe Biden was on the receiving end of a Preference Cascade:

A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.

It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.

At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.

And so it turned out to be, with a Palace Coup that forced Slow Joe from the race and handed the nomination to Kamala Harris.  She rode a carefully orchestrated media campaign to some level of acceptance for a while, but the last couple of weeks have been a disaster for her, and the next two look to be worse.

It's a Preference Cascade in action, with each day adding new evidence to the fact that the country is in the process of rejecting her.  Consider:

Via Lawrence, Trump is on track to take every battleground state.  Lawrence also discusses Harris' disastrous Fox News interview and how 60 Minutes had to (deceptively) edit her interview with them.  It's hard to come to a conclusion other than that she's a dope, and the country seems to be coming to that conclusion.  The average of the polls show Trump winning each of these:

All she knows is to play the race and gender card.  It isn't working at all.  Obama even came out lecturing Black men on how they were all misogynistic or something - and he got scorched for his trouble.  Even The View disagreed with Obama on this.

Blogger Ann Althouse looks at the cries of misogyny from the New York Times and doesn't buy it:

If Kamala Harris were a man, she would not have been chosen for Joe Biden's Vice President, and if she were not Vice President, she would not have been the one that the nomination that was stolen from him got handed to. She wouldn't be anywhere near the presidency.

Harris knows this and her people know this. The finger pointing in the campaign has begun.  Democratic Senators are campaigning on their support for Trump.

Everything is breaking Trump's way as the majority of the undecided voters decide that she's a Dimwit.  This is a Preference Cascade in action - despite the media gaslighting, despite Google and Facebook pushing Harris and shadow banning Trump, despite deceptively edited TV interviews, people are deciding that their gut feeling is the same as millions of other people's.  They're realizing that they're not alone - and in fact are in the obvious majority - and are now no longer afraid to say this.

And potential political allies are slowly moving away from her.  If we can see high profile ones like Senators, there are a whole lot more in the party doing it too.  The number of Democrats who will put their necks on the chopping blocks is dropping like a rock.

My sense is that the whole thing is over, and this will be a landslide as the country shows that you can't beat something with nothing.  Sure there will be a cheat, but it won't be as big or as blatant as in 2020 because the people you need to pull that off are already second guessing their support for her.  How many will be willing to go to jail to cheat for someone that literally nobody has ever voted for?  Each day, that list gets shorter.

CMP Sales Update: M1 Garand in 7.62 NATO

Starting at $900, which is a pretty darn good deal.  Yes, this rifle is Old School.  But every time I have mine at the range a bunch of guys shooting AR pattern rifles wander by to oogle it.

 No school like the Old School.

Police increasingly use facial recognition technology

It seems that they often withhold that information from Courts and defense attorneys:

Police around the United States are routinely using facial recognition technology to help identify suspects, but those departments rarely disclose they've done so - even to suspects and their lawyers.

Documents concerning the use and disclosure, of facial recognition technology were provided to the Washington Post as part of its ongoing investigation into use of the technology in the US, but only from around 40 departments in 15 states out of the "more than 100" departments who were asked. Most, WaPo noted, declined to answer anything.

Police records reportedly indicate that, aside from not disclosing that facial recognition technology, police also frequently obscured use of the technology by saying they identified suspects "through investigative means," while others have outright policy documents that tell officers to "not document this investigative lead."

In multiple cases documented in police reports and court filings, WaPo found those charged with crimes based on facial recognition often weren't aware that it had been used to identify them until after they were already in jail – several times incorrectly.

Emphasis added by me.

It seems that the Police sometimes don't even tell the DA's office about this.  While I Am Not A Lawyer, this seems like a great argument to abolish Qualified Immunity.  The secrecy itself is the best evidence that the process is being abused.  I mean, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, right?

Florida Amendment 3

So Florida voters can amend the Florida State Constitution via the ballot.  Next month has a number of amendments for voters to consider, most notably Amendment 3 to legalize marijuana.  I've been increasingly skeptical about this simply because there is a very well funded TV advertising campaign.  Someone is putting a lot of money into this, which I find suspicious.

Well, the devil is in the details, and the fine print for Amendment 3 is, shall we say, interesting.  The Polk County sheriff cuts through a lot of the fog in a way that I find pretty convincing.  While I'm not adverse to legal pot, this seems to be a pretty bad way to go about it.  I'm not a fan of changing the Constitution so that particular interests can make money.

Thoughts on hurricane prep

Overall we are pretty pleased with how our preps went.  We have a "hurricane kit" which is 3 storage tubs of stuff plus water jugs and equipment like a generator.

I plan on adding a set of tiler's knee pads to the kit for when I have to be on my knees setting up the hurricane shutters.  I also think I'll add another 5 gallon gas can, just for an extra window.  That will give be about a week of generator time.  

I'll also get a one gallon gas can so that I don't have to lift 5 gallons of gas to gas up the cars.   I don't like to keep gas around when we don't need it because you have to put in a stabilizer and it still ends up getting gunked up.  I just fill up the cars (which keeps me out of the post-storm lines at the gas station) but transferring it to make the lift lighter would be good.

With the water cans we were in good shape, and we filled up the bath tub and washing machine for wash water.  I am pretty comfortable that we could have ridden out a week fairly easily, maybe two with our water filters.

I'm thinking about getting Starlink for Internet because that will be back as soon as the storm passes; no linemen needed.  The kit is $350 and install is ~ another $350.  Not sure I want to spring for that right now.

I do think that a battery radio with AM/FM/Short Wave needs to be an addition to our kit.

I'm shocked at the number of neighbors who had essentially no preps at all.  This was maybe a good window into what things might be if something serious happens.  Since I'm the guy with the loud generator, this would make me a magnet.  Ugh.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, if you're in the Great White North at least.

 

Well that was different

Back now - the Internet connection returned from where hurricane Milton blew it away to late last night.

We had a fair amount of damage.  We figured we did when we heard the hurricane make weird noises on the roof.  Ah, well - Florida.  You catch a Cat 5 over your house every now and then.

I'll put up some thoughts later, but the one that really stands out is how I was the only guy with a working generator.  Even people with medical devices that plug into the wall didn't have anything.  It didn't look like most people did any prepping at all other than grab some extra toilet paper and maybe a case of water bottles.

I'm glad that I went to Home Depot for roof tiles on Thursday afternoon - there aren't any within a hundred miles now.  We're newbies in Florida and even we know that was going to happen.

Florida Man lives in my neighborhood?

Sumd00d posted to the neighborhood Facebook group, recommending that people prepare their lanai screen for the high winds by cutting them.

[blink] [blink]

That's some righteous hurricane prep, right there [rolls eyes so hard you can hear it over the hurricane]

My thought is why not open all your windows to keep the wind from blowing them out, amirite?  Sheesh.

Hurricane memes

They're funny because they're true ...

 

Dear God: it would be OK to let this hurricane season be over ...

 

That dot that says "M" on Wednesday at 7PM?  Yeah, that's right over my house.  They're calling for Cat 4 and a 12 foot tidal surge.  We're on moderately high ground - if we flood then 80% of Florida is basically gone, but the folks on the barrier islands are looking at a fresh hell coming at them.

As is Joint Base McDill.  Maybe if it hits there the military can get some quicker rescue going when it hits there than they did in North Carolina.  Yes, that's pretty nasty to write.  The fact that you can write that is even nastier, IMHO.

This seems to be a useful site, if you're on the water:

I give NOAA a lot of flak for their climate change nonsense, but this is exactly what you would want from a world class national weather bureau.  The model may be wrong - all models are - but the fact that the tidal surge arrives at high tide is no bueno for McDill.  I hope they are taking action, and I hope that people along the water are evacuating.

Lord Almighty, what a hurricane season.

Music from St. Catherine's Monastery

St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is said to be the oldest continually inhabited monastery, founded by Emperor Justinian the Great around 550AD.  It has a library that has survived the ages, perhaps because they have a document said to be signed by Mohammad himself saying that the Monastery was under his protection.  Even if it was a forgery, it seems to have been an effective forgery.

It has perhaps the most impressive collection of icons in the world.  For example, the oldest known icon of Kristos Pantokrator, dating from the 6th century:

St. Catherine's has just offered full size (or reduced size) museum quality reproductions of many of its icons:

For the first time in its 1,500-year history, Saint Catherine’s Monastery is offering certified replicas of its most famous Byzantine icons. These replicas, available in actual size and true-to-life color, allow people worldwide to own a piece of this sacred art.

This groundbreaking project is the result of a three-year collaboration between the Monastery, the Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery, and Legacy Icons. Dr. Peter Chang, President of the Friends of Mount Sinai Monastery, called the partnership a “significant milestone in our ongoing mission to support Saint Catherine’s Monastery and its invaluable contributions to Christian spirituality and global civilization.”

The first set of replicas includes some of the Monastery’s most treasured works:

• Christ Pantocrator (6th century)
• Moses and the Burning Bush (c. 13th century)
• Saint Catherine with Scenes of her Life (18th century)

You can view (and purchase, if you'd like) the reproductions here.  They look to be very high quality (to me, at least).  As the original linked article says:

These replicas are created using high-resolution scans, capturing even the tiniest details. “To be able to look into the depths of the cracks and original paint strokes with this clarity is breathtaking and we look forward to shipping these for all to appreciate,” said David DeJonge, founder of Legacy Icons. The replicas are printed on high-quality Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper and mounted on solid hardwoods, ensuring they are as authentic as possible.

A portion of the purchase goes to support the Monastery's preservation activities.  Remember, this Monastery has been working and collecting manuscripts continually for 1500 years.

Here is a recording of traditional music from the Monastery.

Meta fined for storing user passwords with no encryption

Holy cow, I've been in this industry for decades and can't remember a time when everyone knew that you encrypted the damn passwords*:

Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.

Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database that had been searched by roughly 2,000 company engineers, who collectively queried the stash more than 9 million times.

This is such a rookie mistake that it makes you wonder what those 9 million queries were looking for.  Meta has such a horrible reputation for abusing its users privacy that the suspicion is that this was just one more wring on that rag.  That's only a suspicion, but Meta has certainly earned that suspicion over the years.

* Yeah, yeah I know - one-way hash.  I try not to use too much tech jargon.

KIA cars can be hacked with a smartphone

I hope you don't drive a KIA.  This is actually a failure of post manufacturing security processes, not that it makes things any better:

Sam Curry, who previously demonstrated remote takeover vulnerabilities in a range of brands – from Toyota to Rolls Royce – found this vulnerability in vehicles as old as model year 2014. The mess means the cars can be geolocated, turned on or off, locked or unlocked, have their horns honked and lights activated, and even have their cameras accessed – all remotely.

...

The issue originated in one of the Kia web portals used by dealerships. Long story short and a hefty bit of API abuse later, Curry and his band of far-more-capable Kia Boyz managed to register a fake dealer account to get a valid access token, which they were then able to use to call any backend dealer API command they wanted.

"From the victim's side, there was no notification that their vehicle had been accessed nor their access permissions modified," Curry noted in his writeup. "An attacker could resolve someone's license plate, enter their VIN through the API, then track them passively and send active commands like unlock, start, or honk."

Security wags have long called this sort of architecture "broken by design" - it was intentionally set up to allow privileged access via a poorly authenticated system that has to scale through a big organization.  I don't have much confidence that KIA can fix this, or that they will likely want to.

And oh yeah - there's a smartphone app to help the Bad Guys.

All I can say is that 1968 Goat isn't vulnerable to this attack, and will never be.

 

Satellites are revolutionizing Mayan archaeology

I'm starting to tread on The Silicon Graybeard's turf, but this is really cool:

Satellites are helping scientists spot more ancient Mayan ruins than ever before, which is no small feat considering how thick the forest is in the indigenous group's ancestral lands.

"Archeologists have mapped more Mayan sites, buildings and features in the past 10 years than we had in the past — preceding — 150 years," Brett Houk, an archaeology professor at Texas Tech University, told attendees at a NASA-led space archaeology conference Sept. 18 to which Space.com received an exclusive invite.

Archaeologists are finding these ruins faster due to better satellite technology. Using a pulsed laser technique called lidar, or light detection and ranging, satellites can peer through the dense canopy surrounding typical Mayan sites, Houk explained at the two-day livestreamed NASA and Archaeology From Space symposium.

I found the arguments in Charles Mann's 1491 to be pretty convincing that American populations were much larger than previously thought prior to Columbus' voyage.  This seems to be evidence in favor of that thesis.

Other places this technique should be easily applicable are the Amazon basin (which Mann claims hosted a very large population) and likely Cambodia/Angkor Wat.

 

An appeal for baby Ty

A young couple near where we live both work at Lowe's.  Their baby was born in August, but has had some serious health problems and been hospitalized for weeks.  The family has posted a GoFundMe to raise money for the insurance deductable.  I know that things are tight for lots of folks, and people in the mountains are hurting from the hurricane, but they're a young couple just starting out - not making a lot of money - and their baby is really, really ill.

Help baby Ty.

But I Am Living Still

Kris Kristofferson, 88.

UPDATE 30 SEPTEMBER 2024 12:35 [Borepatch]: I first posted about Kristofferson here.  Quite a man.

Old tools are gold

So this guy has a hydraulic press and he runs both a 100 year old American sledge hammer and a new (Harbor Freight looking) Chinese one through it.  The old one was unscathed; the new one gets squished.

A sledge hammer gets squished. 

But then the guy returns the old one into like new condition.  If you like old tools, this is 8 minutes worth your while.

Well that went by fast

Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind.  Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.

So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:

Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.

...

While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.

Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.

Hurricane thinking

Divemedic has some thoughts that are worth your time.  The Silicon Graybeard does his preps.  We're battened down for the fifth storm in the four years we've been here.

Good luck to the folks in the Florida panhandle, who must be getting really sick of all this.

US bans Chinese "Connected Car" tech

They say it's a security concern.  They're right:

Now, the US Commerce Department is set to enact a de facto ban on most Chinese vehicles, by prohibiting Chinese connected car software and hardware from operating on US roads, according to Reuters.

The rationale? National security concerns. "When foreign adversaries build software to make a vehicle [connected], that means it can be used for surveillance, can be remotely controlled, which threatens the privacy and safety of Americans on the road," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

"In an extreme situation, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States all at the same time, causing crashes, blocking roads," said Secretary Raimondo, a scenario we saw depicted in Fate of the Furious (where it caused me a headache), as well as more recently (and to better effect) in Leave the World Behind.

Yup.

Now I expect there's a whole lot more behind this and the security risks are just nice window dressing, but it's pretty hard to argue with this.

Dad Joke CCCXXXXI

Did you hear the joke about paper?

Oh never mind - it's tearable.

Antonio Vivaldi - The Four Seasons (L'autunno)

Yesterday marked the Autumn Equinox, the first day of autumn.  The Silicon Graybeard posts about what this means in Florida; he's on the Atlantic coast so it's a little cooler there than here.  But the forecast here is calling for temperatures to drop into the mid 80s during the day and even below 70 (!!!) at night this coming week.  Autumnal indeed.

As you'd expect, there's terrific classical music for this occasion; as a matter of fact, you've probably heard it.

Antonio Vivaldi was one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his Four Seasons suite of four violin concertos is without doubt his most famous work.  Sadly for him, it didn't help him very much - the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died before appointing him court composer, and Vivaldi (like Mozart after him) died in poverty.

But there aren't many who leave behind a legacy such as this.  Vivaldi's life story in a way matches the mood of autumn, with a glorious youth behind it and a cold, poor finish ahead of it.

But don't let me harsh your mellow!  The music is sublime, and the temperature (in Florida at least) will barely drop below 70 ...
 

Do you have a D-Link home wifi router?

Lots of important security patches are out.

Secret or no secret?

If this were such a big deal, would the Chinese be talking about it?

According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22.

...

The research details how the academics were able to recognize the rough location of a commercial drone by observing disturbances in electromagnetic signals from Starlink satellites caused by aircraft passing through them. The system could "provide significant advantages in detecting small and stealth targets," the team claimed.

The academics, led by professor Yi Jianxin from Wuhan University's School of Electronic Information, launched [paywall] a commercial DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and sent it over the coast near the Chinese city of Guangdong. The researchers chose the drone as they estimated it has the same radar signature as a modern F-22 fighter.

They reported being able to detect up the drone – not by hammering it with easily identifiable radar pulses (which would invite a counterattack in a war situation) but by identifying where the drone reflected the signals from a Starlink satellite orbiting overhead. The test was overseen by the Chinese government's State Radio Monitoring Centre.

This looks to be pretty similar to a system of passive radar that the Germans used in World War II.

You would think that if this were effective (or if the Chinese thought it could be made to be effective), they wouldn't say anything about it.

So what I'd like to know is ...

How did the would-be assassin know where and when to find Donald Trump?  Was he just lucky like Gavrilo Princip?  Or was he "lucky" like Thomas Matthew Crooks?

Antonín Dvořák - Introduzione from the oratorio Saint Ludmila

Tomorrow is the feast day of Saint Ludmila of Bohemia, grandmother of Good King Wenceslaus of Christmas Carol fame.  As queen, she was instrumental in converting the kingdom to christianity but was murdered by her daughter-in-law (mother of Wenceslaus).

By the 19th century St. Ludmila took on aspects of national hero, and the preeminent composer of 19th century national music wrote this oratorio in her honor.

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.

Dad Joke CCCXXXVIIII

Tuna sends in another one (thanks!):

Why can't accountants get library cards?  Because they're bookkeepers.

How the Working Man got stabbed in the back

It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer".  It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular.  Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.

It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club.  Man is that different now.  I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.

Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics.  You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark.  An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:

Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.

Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.

I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.

The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.

Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.

Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen?  No?  Better to kill 10 million of them?  Oooooh kaaay.

Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.

And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.

During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.

Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists!  Don't look at the wall decorations!  I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!

Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.

So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys.  What to do, what to do?

Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs.  Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right?  Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.

Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense.  These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats.  Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.

I wrote about that at length here.

And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland.  And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago?  How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century?  Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?

Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:

This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.

To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.

Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.

Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?

Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants?  Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty.  Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.

This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime.  I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street.  Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg.  Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).

It's all upside down.  And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason.  On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really.  They sure must have had some powerful motivation.

I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.

Dad Joke CCCXXXVIII

Why do math teachers make good dancers?

Because they have algorithm.

And the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award goes to ...

So UK Prime Minister Keir "Two Tier" Starmer has decreed that people saying hateful things will be jailed because their speech is actually violence, and he's making room for them in His Magesty's prisons be releasing violent criminals because their violence is actually speech, you guys.

Some big shot police constable has even said he was going to go all 1775-Bunker Hill on Americans for their speech, which is totally violence.  Ooooh kaaay,

All this totalitarianism reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union, back in the day.  It was said about Leonid Brezhnev (and likely others).  I've somewhat rewritten it for modern times.  See if you can tell the difference.

So this guy goes to Red Square Hyde Park Speaker's Corner and yells "Leonid Brezhnev Keir Starmer is a senile fascist old fool!"  Of course, the police swarm him and drag him off to Ye Olde Gaol.  He is sentenced to ten years and ten days in durance vile - ten days for slander and ten years for revealing State Secrets.

Maybe I gave away my edits right there ...

And so the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award for Totalitarianism goes to Brit PM Keir Starmer, for fascism above and beyond the call of duty.  Well done you dirty commie bastard.

Time to patch your Windows computer

Microsoft has released a fix for a severe vulnerability in this month's Windows Update.  The problem here is that a Bad Guy sending a specially crafted IPv6 packet can run code on your computer.  Basically it's a spammer's/hacker's dream, and now there is demonstration code in the wild to do this.

If you run Windows 10 or 11, this is probably bad news for you.  Here's what you need to do:

1. Check to see if you are reachable using IPv6.  If you only have IPv4, then you don't need to worry.
2. If the site in the link above can reach you with IPv6, you need to run Windows Update.  Go to the Start Menu and type "Windows Update" in the search bar which will take you right to the update program.
   

I must say that I was surprised about my IPv6 connectivity.  But this is a really nasty bug, so get patching.

FBI security measures laughably weak

The FBI Inspector General has issued a scathing report about the Bureau's lackadaisical  attitude towards protecting sensitive data:

The FBI has made serious slip-ups in how it processes and destroys electronic storage media seized as part of investigations, according to an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.

Drives containing national security data, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act information and documents classified as Secret were routinely unlabeled, opening the potential for it to be either lost or stolen, the report [PDF] addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray states.

...

The OIG report notes that it found boxes of hard drives and removable storage sitting open and unattended for "days or even weeks" because they were only sealed once the boxes were full. This potentially allows any of the 395 staff and contractors with access to the facility to have a rummage around.

There is a photo of the storage facility at the link, and it can only be described as horrifying.

I guess they are too busy spying on regime enemies to, you know, take security very seriously.

Well, that doesn't sound like much of a "Cybersecurity Lab"

Cybersecurity Lab didn't use antivirus:

Dr. Emmanouil "Manos" Antonakakis runs a Georgia Tech cybersecurity lab and has attracted millions of dollars in the last few years from the US government for Department of Defense research projects like "Rhamnousia: Attributing Cyber Actors Through Tensor Decomposition and Novel Data Acquisition."

The government yesterday sued Georgia Tech in federal court, singling out Antonakakis and claiming that neither he nor Georgia Tech followed basic (and required) security protocols for years, knew they were not in compliance with such protocols, and then submitted invoices for their DoD projects anyway.

It seems that Dr. Antonakakis wasn't much impressed with antivirus products.  Fair enough - it's a perpetual game of locking the barn door after the horse got out.

But the contract said that the lab would follow particular standards (in this case, NIST 800-171) which mandates antivirus, and the lab issued compliance statements with the invoices they submitted.  This case seems pretty cut and dried.

And not at all impressive for Georgia Tech Cybersecurity Lab.

 

Dad Joke CCCXXXVII

Tuna sends in a good one.  What do you call a stolen Tesla?  And Edison.

Calvin Jackson and George Stoll - Concerto For Index Finger featuring Gracie Allen

The Queen Of The World and I like watching the old TV shows ('50s, '60s, and '70s).  One of these is The George Burns Show, the star of which really is Gracie Allen who would steal the show pretty much every time.  Well, TQOTW discovered this gem from the last film appearance by Gracie, the 1944 film Two Girls And A Sailor.  It had an all star cast but Gracie stole the show with this hilarious number.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

So it's Price Controls now, eh?

So Kamala doesn't know much about history, it seems.  Or economics.

Dad Joke CCCXXXVI

To the guy who invented zero: thanks for nothing, pal.

Disney+ Terms of Service does not give blanket immunity

Sanity breaks out at Disney:

Disney said it is abandoning its motion to compel arbitration in a case filed by a man who alleges his wife died from anaphylaxis after a restaurant at a Disney complex failed to honor requests for allergen-free food.

Disney's motion to compel arbitration controversially cited the Disney+ streaming service's subscriber agreement, which includes a binding arbitration clause. The plaintiff's lawyer called the argument "absurd."

Disney confirmed this week that it will withdraw the motion, which it filed on May 31.

Good.  It was a stupid argument anyway.  Man, they generated a lot of ill will with that bone-headed move, though.

 

 

CMP Update

CMP is selling a limited number of M1917 Enfield rifles.  Now, I love my Enfield, but I don't love having to stock both .303 Brit and .30-06 ammo.  The nice thing about the M1917 is that it has the silky smooth Enfield action but is chambered in good old American .30-06 which you can find pretty much anywhere.

Both Field Grade and Service Grade are available, starting at $1000.

Huh

We voted at the primaries today.  Had to show photo ID.  I wonder if this is just a GOP Primary thing, or if it's the MOST RACIST THING EVER

The buzz from Black Hat this year

Every year in the heat of the Las Vegas desert is the Black Hat Briefings, the premier computer security conference.  There's always interesting news from the briefings (and from the much less buttoned down conference, DEFCON, which runs immediately afterwards).

So what's the buzz from Black Hat this year?  It seems that Palo Alto Networks had Booth Bunnies at their display booth:

[blink] [blink]

Now I did my share of manning the booths (yes, I was a Booth Bunny, thank you for asking) back in the '90s and the '00s.  But even in the '90s we were considerably more buttoned down than this, and for good marketing reasons.  Sure, some of the attendees might like the scenery, but some will not - and some of them will very much not like the scenery.  This has been known to be bad conference marketing juju for literally decades.

Of course, the Palo Alto Networks' Chief Marketing Officer had to go full frontal groveling* in his apology:

PAN's chief marketing officer Unnikrishnan KP, or Unni as he's often called, issued his apology earlier this week calling it "tone deaf."

"Last week at Black Hat in Las Vegas, an unfortunate decision was made at a Palo Alto Networks event to have hostesses wear branded lampshades on their heads," he said. "It was tone-deaf, in poor taste, and not aligned with our company values or brand campaign. 

"I take full responsibility for this misjudgment and have addressed it with my team and am taking steps to prevent such misguided actions in the future.

"Please accept my heartfelt apologies for this regrettable incident."

Nikesh Arora, PAN's chairman and CEO, doubled down on the apologies on Tuesday, echoing the points made by Unni, adding that what happened was "unacceptable."

I expect the headcount at Palo Alto Networks' marketing department has gotten a spin.  We apologize again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

* See what I did there?  I crack myself up.

Is this the most Florida thing that has happened this year?

If not, it's close:

More than $1 million worth of cocaine washed up on a beach in the Florida Keys after Hurricane Debby battered the Gulf Coast’s Big Bend Monday morning, officials said.

Debby, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane early in the morning, carried more than two dozen 70-pound packages of cocaine ashore as winds topped 80 miles per hour, the US Border Patrol said.

“Hurricane Debby blew 25 packages of cocaine (70 lbs.) onto a beach in the Florida Keys,” US Border Patrol acting chief patrol agent Samuel Briggs II said in a social media post.

 Well all right then.  I love Florida, but it has some goofy branding.

Now this seems like an interesting opportunity

So some self-important English Plod said he was going to criminally charge and extradite US citizens for exercising their first amendment rights on US soil.  Interesting.

Quite frankly, this seems like a golden opportunity for political candidates here to get a "gimmie" issue.  Sticking up for the first amendment seems like a layup.  And if as I suspect the Democrats are institutionally incapable of sticking up for free speech, then this is a gold plated opportunity to paint them as the party of censorship - not to mention being weak on foreign policy.

Like I said, this issue looks like it's 100% upside.

Dad Joke CCCXXXV

I got hooked on auctions after only going once ... going twice ...

If you use 1Password on Mac, you need to get patching

Le sigh:

Password manager 1Password is warning that all Mac users running versions before 8.10.36 are vulnerable to a bug that allows attackers to steal vault items.

...

Think you might be vulnerable? No mitigations were provided by 1Password, so patching up to version 8.10.36 is your only shot at securing those credentials.

Password Managers are great security tools because they make it easy to have very strong passwords (basically, random gobledy gook) for your online accounts.  They remember these passwords so that you don't have to.

But they're not magic, they're software.  That means that even they can get security bugs.  If you use 1Paddword on Mac, make sure you upgrade it to 8.10.36 which fixes this.

 

Wow, that was a lot of rain

Yeah I know - hurricane season in Florida.  Ian kind of blew past us a couple years ago and while it did have hurricane force winds here the rain went by pretty quickly.  Debbie was the opposite - only 40 MPH gusts or so, but two solid days of soaking.  They even had to do an emergency release of water from the Lake Manatee dam.

So yeah, it's pretty wet.

 

CMP Update - Krag-Jorgensen Rifles

Spendy, but pretty sweet.

I mean, who ever said "Civilize them with an AR"?  But expect to spend $1200+.

Crowdstrike threatens Delta Airlines

Wow:

CrowdStrike says it is "highly disappointed" and rejects the claims made by Delta and its lawyers that the vendor exhibited gross negligence in the events that led to the global IT outage a little over two weeks ago.

That's according to a letter, seen by The Reg and sent to David Boies, partner at the law firm Delta hired to investigate the airline's legal options after it struggled more than most to bring its systems back online, leading to a sprawling list of flight cancellations.

The Falcon vendor reiterated its apology to Delta and the wider customer base. It then went on to remind Boies, known for his work as special counsel during the 1990s US antitrust trial against Microsoft, that it had been proactive in reaching out to Delta, offering support to the airline "within hours" of the incident unfolding.

...

CrowdStrike's lawyer, Michael B. Carlinsky, then poked the bear further. He said that among other things, in this hypothetical trial Delta would also need to explain why it took so much longer than competitors to recover from the same issue, why it refused the free on-site help CrowdStrike offered – the support that led to faster recovery times than Delta's, and the operational resiliency of its IT infrastructure.

This is hands down the biggest screw up - ever - by any security vendor.  I guess that a screw up this big is a potential extinction-level event for Crowdstrike but this sure doesn't sound like it will calm down their customer base.  OK, so they offered some help when they took down Delta, and Delta didn't jump on this.  That sounds like it's 1% on Delta and 99% on Crowdstrike.

But that's not what's going on here - it's explicitly telling a customer that they will drag them through the mud if the customer sues them for their monumental screw up.

Holy moley.

The weather for today

Wet.  With continued wet throughout the day.  It's Florida in hurricane season, right?

And to answer Graybeard's question, yes we are within the white cone:

So yeah, it's raining.  But it's not so bad.  Consider:

• It was supposed to start hammering down rain from midnight last night.  I kept waking up because there wasn't noise of rain on the roof.
• While it looks like it will rain most of the rest of the day, it looks like the worst is already over.  It's more than a drizzle, but there's not a lot of wind.
• Back when Wolfgang was still alive, there were times that he didn't want to go out because it was raining so hard.  This isn't one of those rain storms.
  

So we're fine.  My generator started up first pull a couple weeks back (you do run it every month, don't you?) so we weren't worried about all the TV  ZOMGwe'reallgoingtodie!!!11!!

I mean, it's Florida in hurricane season, right?

Anyway, it looks like Graybeard is going to have a more interesting week than I will:

The other is that back in May, I got a reminder from "the system" that I'm due for a routine colonoscopy. The appointment, made well in advance, is for Tuesday. Those of you who have been through this know that the worst part of it is the night before, which is Monday night. With luck, the storm will stay on that track and be centered somewhere near the Georgia/South Carolina border. With bad luck, I'll be having to be working outside while the storm is clearing out - or stalled too close for comfort. Bad luck could mean not being able to put the tower back up for days.

The last time I went through this, I found that some car seat belts would prevent "liftoff" off the toilet seat and the troublesome, messy aspects of uncontrolled flight around the bathroom. The hardware is still bolted to the floor in the bathroom, I just need to remove a nut, put down the belt, and tighten the nut back down. One on each side of the toilet. It's a five minute job but can save hours of cleaning.

I wonder if this is something that NASA and Boeing can use to try to fix the Starliner thruster problem ...

UPDATE 4 AUGUST 2024 14:48: A day like this is perfect to just not go anywhere and watch old movies.  For example, the 1944 Arsenic and Old Lace starring Cary Grant*.  We hadn't seen this in forever, and both of us laughed out loud all the way through it.  Makes you wonder why they can't make films like that anymore.

Arsenic wasn't nominated for any Oscars that year, which seems odd until you think about the other films that were nominated - Double Indemnity and Gaslight to name only two.  Ingrid Bergman (deservedly) won Best Actress that year for Gaslight; interestingly, Cary Grant was nominated for Best Actor but for a different film that year, losing to Bing Crosby in Going My Way.  Just a casual year of films all of which were better than anything produced in the last decade. [/rant]

Oh, and a quick note to all the Florida newbies: it's summer, we get storms here.  Don't panic.  This isn't a snowstorm up north where nobody can drive for a week until the roads get plowed.  It doesn't do you any good to buy out the milk and frozen goods if the hurricane takes out everyone's power for a week.  Don't go to the grocery store for your panic buying, get a darn generator.

To those of you considering moving here from up north, don't.  It's too perilous.

And gas for it.**

* And also Edward Everitt Horton, best know (to old farts like us) as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales on Bullwinkle.

** Dual fuel is even better, with propane tanks.