Interpol is reporting a big win after a massive combined operation against online criminals made 41 arrests and seized hardware thought to be used for nefarious purposes.
Operation Synergia II – the follow up to the first Synergia raids that were announced in February – saw cops in 95 countries crack down on phishers, ransomware extortionists, and information thieves around the world. The operation was carried out in conjunction with the corporate world, specifically Group-IB, Trend Micro, Kaspersky and Team Cymru.
In addition to the arrests, Interpol revealed 65 people are still under investigation and claimed to have shuttered 22,000 IP addresses, taken control of 59 servers and 43 other computing devices.
For the longest time much of the media has fed us the idea that “union = overpaid/lazy/bad”. Now we should all have the following ingrained in our skulls by now, “the media lies”.
Proceeding from that “law” (it really should be a scientific law at this point) we can deduce that the media is lying about unions. The real question to ask ourselves is, “why?”
Designed for those who wish to take their passion for the venerable M1 Garand to the next level, the Advanced Maintenance Class (AMC) held in Anniston, Alabama, offers students a unique opportunity to receive unparalleled training from our knowledgeable Custom Shop Staff and build their very own M1 Rifle.
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Due to limited spaces and high demand, CMP will hold a random drawing to select participants. Interested individuals may enter the Random Drawing between November 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.
If this is your bag, baby, then get on over there.
Four members of the now-defunct REvil ransomware operation have been sentenced to several years in prison in Russia, marking one of the rare instances where cybercriminals from the country have been convicted of hacking and money laundering charges.
Russian news publication Kommersant reported that a court in St. Petersburg found Artem Zaets, Alexei Malozemov, Daniil Puzyrevsky, and Ruslan Khansvyarov guilty of illegal circulation of means of payment. Puzyrevsky and Khansvyarov have also been found guilty of using and distributing malware.
...
REvil, which was once one of the most prolific ransomware groups, was dismantled after Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced arrests against several members in an unprecedented takedown.
They aren't just going to prison, they're going to a Russian prison. More of this, please.
So their live streaming of the Mike Tyson fight last night was an unmitigated disaster. But come on - you'd think that Netflix IT would understand how to spin up capacity to meet demand. Maybe their replacements will.
For those who like the Sweet Science (or who used to), this is a fascinating episode from Hard Core History about how boxing has changed over time, mostly for the worse. Dan Carlin interviews Mike Silver, author of The Arc of Boxing which is a terrific read. I'm in general agreement with both the podcast and the book, although have to admit that I quite enjoyed the Barrios/Ramos bout last night. It had a very Friday Night Fights feel to it.
A 25-year-old man in Ontario, Canada has been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting more than 160 companies that used the cloud data service Snowflake.
On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario, on a provisional arrest warrant from the United States. Bloomberg first reported Moucka’s alleged ties to the Snowflake hacks on Monday.
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In a statement on Moucka’s arrest, Mandiant said UNC5537 aka Alexander ‘Connor’ Moucka has proven to be one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024.
Too bad we can't send him to a Russian prison, nyet?
On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.
Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.
Of course, they use it because it's cheaper than paying a human transcriber. So riddle me this, Healthcare Administrator: what do you call yet another AI that lies all the time? A day that ends in "-day".
While the vast majority of people over 50 look for health information on the internet, a new poll shows 74% would have very little or no trust in such information if it were generated by artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, 20% of older adults have little or no confidence that they could spot misinformation about a health topic if they came across it.
That percentage was even higher among older adults who say their mental health, physical health or memory is fair or poor, and among those who report having a disability that limits their activities. In other words, those who might need trustworthy health information the most were more likely to say they had little or no confidence they could spot false information.
People are smart enough to catch a whiff of marketing Bravo Sierra.
From now on I will start asking all of my healthcare providers if they do transcription, and if so whether they use AI for the transcription. If they do I will demand to review the transcript. If they won't, I'll get a different provider.
A journalist with the London Telegraph has been visited unannounced at her home by police in the UK who told her they are investigating a “non-crime hate incident” over a tweet she posted a year ago.
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Allison Pearson relates what happened on Sunday in an article, noting that police will not tell her which post is the subject of the investigation, nor will they tell her who her accuser is or what they feel offended about.
Well okay, then.But the UK Plods seems to have forgotten the old saying to not mess with someone who buys ink by the barrel:
Way to shine a spotlight on your policy, dumbasses. Streisand Effect much?
I've been a bit startled by the unhinged reaction by so many Democrats to Trump's rather resounding victory. Probably I shouldn't be - after all the lesson of Facebook (and most social media) proves the old adage that it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than it is to open it and remove all doubt.
Sure, I've been wrong all the time in the past (click on the tag for polls - often wrong but at least I showed my work). But when things didn't go my way it was a shrug and get on to what's next. That's not what we see at all.
Sure, the Democrats never really talked much about issues that most people care about - are you better off than you were four years ago, that sort of thing. Instead, for the last four years it's been OrangeManBad, and nothing but OrangeManBad. Now they are standing amidst the destruction of their hopes as the Great Orange Whale swims off to the White House.
Maybe it's time to reread that novel, and an exercise in understanding the broken political philosophy of the Democrats. But then again, I don't think that *I* need to reread it.
They do.
Absurdum est ut alios regat, qui seipsum regere nescit.
It is absurd that a man should rule over others, who cannot rule himself.
It's the soldier, not the reporter who has given us Freedom of the Press. It's the soldier, not the poet, who has given us Freedom of Speech. It's the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the Freedom to Demonstrate. It's the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the Right to a Fair Trial. It's the soldier who salutes the flag, serves under the flag and whose coffin is draped by the flag, Who gives the protestor the right he abuses to burn the flag.
Only two Presidents have been elected to non-consecutive terms. The first was Grover Cleveland who served as 22nd (in 1884) and 24th (in 1892) Presidential terms (his two terms interrupted by Benjamin Harrison in 1888 even though Cleveland won the popular vote). Long time readers will know that Cleveland is very much a Friend of the Blog, being listed as one of the top US Presidents since forever.
The second, of course, is Donald Trump - Presidential terms 45 and (now) 47. We will see how history rates his two terms; 45 was pretty successful but with a lot of important stuff left undone. His great Presidential flaw was the people he appointed do implement his policies where they often submarined him.
We will see how much he learned from that. Glen Reynolds posts some interesting ideas (you should absolutely read the whole thing; it's certain that Trump's people have):
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him. Here’ssomethingI wrote in 2017:
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
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.
So we shall see what we shall see. The results from last night were not the landslide I was sort of expecting (although it was a solid win). I expect there was some cheating but nothing like what we saw in 2020 - because as I've been saying, party apparatchiks saw the same Preference Cascade forming and a lot fewer were willing to risk jail to cheat for a loser.
But like Donald Trump, the USA dodged a bullet last night.
Well, and our precinct, at least. I'm not sure what that means - there's no way that Kamala Harris will win deep red Manatee County, Florida. But Republican voters seem eager to turn out and vote.
No, it's not because Harris is mad as a hatter on the Green New Deal or because Trump will kill all of this off - although both are entirely correct. No, this is thinking about the polling which shows the race to be neck and neck even though it is anything but.
Long time readers know how I bang on and on about the hideous data problems in today's Climate Science. I've been doing this for fifteen years - this post may not be the earliest where I delved into the problems in the climate databases, but it's one of the earliest. How To Create A Consensus On Global Warming:
We keep hearing people tell us that there is a "consensus" that the
planet is warming, because the "science is settled". Longtime readers
know my feelings on the latter, so there's no need to rehash old
arguments. Instead, I'd like to look at how one might go about
manufacturing a consensus. It's actually not hard.
Step 1: Change the data
[lots of details on data manipulation and shenanigans removed]
We see this in high fidelity in the polls for this election. There are a million ways to manipulate the polls to give you the results you want, such as estimates of Republican vs. Democrat turnout. In essence, I'm not objecting so much to the results of the polls, but rather to the assumptions that go into the sausage-making machine. Change the assumptions, change the output.
But my old post also highlights a key issue in play on today's polls:
Step 2. Fund only scientific research that confirms warming.
Who is paying for these polls, and what are their agendas? Quite frankly, we don't know either of these but the polls are acting in very close agreement. You could look at that as a measure of accuracy, or you could look at that as an outcome of the agendas - such as shaping public opinion and expectations.
Now I may just be nasty and suspicious but there is a way that we can test whether my suspicions hold water. It's the same thing we can do with Climate Science, to validate what we hear from the establishment scientists. All we have to do is ask a simple question: if the data are so settled, do we see lots of corroborating evidence or do we see a lot of evidence contradicting the establishment view?
In both cases, we see a lot of evidence contradicting the official narrative.
For example, for Global Warming, we see all sots of non-warming things:
You would think that if the science really were so settled that evidence for Global Warming would be falling off the trees. It's not.
And so with evidence for a "neck and neck election". If it were so settled - after all, essentially all polls say exactly that - then why all the evidence that says it's not?
Donald Trump campaigns for Arab-American vote in Detroit
LA Times, Washington Post, Gannet refuse to endorse Harris
All the betting sites have Trump not just ahead, but way ahead.
Even the crooked polls have Harris neck-and-neck, where both Hillary and Biden were up by 5 or 6
Barack Obama is trying to shame Black men to vote for Harris. And it's not working.
If it were a neck and neck race, you'd see a bunch of these on Harris' side, too. You don't.
Remember, we're in the middle of a preference cascade. Don't pay any attention to the polls which are trying to gaslight you. Pay attention to what you see with your own eyes. And as to the "margin of cheat" you can believe that a bunch of Democrat operatives are doing exactly that right now, and wondering if they want to risk 10 years in Club Fed to try to push a loser across the finish line. A bunch of them will take a hard pass on that.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
