This is SO wrong ...

But I'm doing it anyway.

Hat tip: Rick, via email.

How to reduce School shootings

Seen at a school in Arkansas:

Remember that Jeep computer hack?

Surprise!  It's not just Jeep:

Now, according to a report in Wired, that a host of similar systems used by other car manufacturers are vulnerable to similar attacks:

Over the last week, Kamkar has analyzed the iOS apps of BMW’s Remote, Mercedes-Benz mbrace, Chrysler Uconnect, and the alarm system Viper’s Smartstart, and found that all of those internet-connected vehicle services are vulnerable to the attack he used to hack GM’s OnStar RemoteLink app.

"If you’re using any of these four apps, I can automatically get all of your log-in information and then indefinitely authenticate as you," says Kamkar. "These apps give me different levels of control of your car. But they all give me some amount of control."

And $100 says it's not just Jeep, BMW, and Mercedes ...

On this day in 1938

Lou Gehrig his his 23rd career grand slam.  That record was to stand for 75 years until it was broken by Alex Rodriguez.  There is no record as to whether Gehrig also used performance enhancing drugs.  And since we're talking about A-Rod, here is a musical homage to his career:

About that Ashley Madison "Cheating" website hack

It appears that the data that is being leaked is for real.  Not that you'd do that, of course.

It also seems that there was no verification done on email addressed used in site signup.  This means that anyone could create an account for, say, jeb.bush@state.fl.us and it would be in the database that was just released.  There's an interesting attack that security guys call "Information Poisoning", where the attack is intended to create distrust in a community or data set.  If you can inject enough distrust, then you can render the resource worthless.

Given the recent OPM hack, I'm starting to wonder if this is the wave of the future - injection of embarrassing data into sites like this and then a subsequent hack to expose said data.  Certainly the capability exists to do this sort of thing.

Ah, working from home

I must say that I love my commute, and since everything here uses videoconferencing over the Internet, I love the (mostly) not traveling.  Err, until the Internet goes down.

Like it did yesterday.  In the middle of a big presentation to the Air Force.  Of course, I was the presenter.  Fortunately, the Help Desk at AT&T was completely helpful:

The heart is just exactly the right touch for people all p***ed off about the network going down.  Way to go, Brittany. 

Old fart

As I clean up and sort through the lower reaches of Camp Borepatch, I find long lost wonders.  One was some Kodak slide carousels.  A couple were slides taken by my late Father-in-Law; the ex will be wanting these, no doubt.  One was slides taken by me no doubt on a vacation around 1990 or so - I posted some of these here, and these are very likely of the same vintage.

But one was slides.  As in, Presentation Slides.  On Network Security.  Circa 1994-1995.

[blink] [blink]

I'm trying to remember when I had these made and for which venue, but two decades are somewhat thwarting  my memory.

To add to the feeling of "old fartness", it seems that the crazy hipsters use the term "slidemanship" for something out of Mario Kart.  Back In The Day it was the process of establishing dominance over your audience by first establishing dominance over your projectionist.  Somewhere I have a hilarious writeup about that, which involves backwards slides, slides that are two pieces of film stuck together with wax that slide apart and de-focus when the heat of the lamp melts it, obscure references in Cyrillic typefonts ("Russian?  No, no - Bulgarian, old chap!").

Mario Cart, indeed.  Get offa my lawn, punks. 

Invalid encryption key

Good thing there are some others to try ...

Quotes of the Day: Climate Science is broken

Shot:

“The time for debate has ended”
— Marcia McNutt (editor-in-Chief of Science, next President of the NAS) in “The beyond-two-degree inferno“, editorial in Science, 3 July 2015.

I agree with McNutt: the public policy debate has ended. Climate science as an institution is broken, the larger science community applauds its dysfunctionality, and a critical mass of the US public has lost confidence in it. As a result, the US will take no substantial steps to prepare for possible future climate change, not even preparing for the inevitable re-occurrence of past extreme weather.

Chaser:

It is a sad state of affairs for climate science that this book [Mark Steyn's new book on Michael Mann of "Hockey Stick" fame - Borepatch] had to be written (it was brought on by Michael Mann’s lawsuit – without the lawsuit, Steyn obviously wouldn’t have bothered).   At a time when the U.S. and the world’s nations are trying to put together an agreement to tackle climate change (for better or for worse), Steyn’s book reminds everyone of Climategate, why the public doesn’t trust climate scientists and aren’t buying their ‘consensus.

Both are worth reading in their entirety.

Voting machines: a security nightmare

The Silicon Graybeard points out the least secure voting machines in America:

H/T to Yahoo! Tech for the story.  As usual, the problem is government.  In particular, after the "Hanging Chad" election in 2000, the congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Among other things, the Act banned punched-card and mechanical-lever voting machines.  This led to the inevitable gold rush to suck up that gubmint money by producing voting machines.  And just as the War on Some Drugs money has always been spent so wisely; like the Quadro Tracker, the $1000 empty box with a 'diving rod' on it, so was spent the Help America Vote money.

 It was so bad that Virginia has banned their use because the security is so wretched:

Switching to Epstein's summary for a moment:

If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it was only because no one tried. The vulnerabilities were so severe, and so trivial to exploit, that anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded. They didn’t need to be in the polling place – within a few hundred feet (e.g., in the parking lot) is easy, and within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can. Further, there are no logs or other records that would indicate if such a thing ever happened, so if an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know.

How bad was it?  How about the shiny key to lock the machine?  Epstein reports “All the keys are the same for every Winvote that’s ever been made, because that way it’s easier,”

• Winvote’s machine runs a version of Windows XP that hasn’t had patches installed since 2004 — four years before AVS deservedly went out of business.

• Its wireless network is “safeguarded” with insecure WEP encryption — and the password is abcde. (and that was unchangeable)

• The Windows admin password is (no, I’m not making this up) admin. (and that seemed unchangeable as well)

RTWT for the whole horrifying thing.

75 years after "The Hardest Day"

August 1940 saw the German Luftwaffe try to establish air superiority over Great Britain.  Hitler's planned invasion of that island was running out of time - the English Channel gets notoriously stormy in the autumn, and mid-August was getting perilously close to autumn.  But Hermann Goering assured the Fuhrer that he had the Royal Air Force on the ropes.  One more big push would break RAF Fighter Command.

August 18 was that big push.

But it didn't go that way.  Hundreds of RAF Fighters rose to savage the German bombers.  While this "Hardest Day" was just about exactly a draw in terms of losses, it showed that the RAF was most definitely not on the ropes.  While the Battle of Britain would go on for weeks, Hitler's mind was already shifting to the Eastern Front.  In Churchill's immortal words, never had so many owed so much to so few, those who flew sortie after sortie on that Hardest Day.



Three Quarters of a Century later, those Few are few indeed.  Per Ardua ad Astra, indeed.

Um, yeah

Want me to keep holding your beer?

Donald Trump: American Caesar

Shot:

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics, focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I don’t think he put much effort into it. Imagine what he could do if he gave up golf.

As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every time.

Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.

I also saw some Internet chatter about the idea of picking Mark Cuban as Vice Presidential running mate. If that happens, Republicans win. And I think they like to win. There is no way Trump picks some desiccated Governor from an important state as his running mate. I think Cuban is a realistic possibility.

Chaser:

Trump is a complicated subject... because its insane... but the situation is so nutty that he starts to make sense... which tells you how insane the situation is...

Americans are furious. Both sides of the political spectrum.

Republicans are pissed.

Democrats are pissed.

No one trusts anyone.

Both side's politicians are full of shit.

There is a general consensus that the elites are fucking over the people at large.

The republicans tried to purge their own party with the "tea party" and similar things.

Democrats only see this form their perspective but they don't realize that a fair amount of the animus was directed at the establishment republicans which is why the establishment doesn't like the tea party.

The democrats tried to purge their own party with stuff like code pink, occupy wall street, and now black lives matter.

And all of this is failing. The Establishment of both parties is very good at stonewalling this stuff. Black Lives Matter shows up to a Bernie speech and basically takes it over.

They try the same thing at a Hillary speech and they don't even get in the front door.

Think about that.

And that's basically what has been going on. So what is Donald Trump?

In my view, he's a purgative. A drug you take to induce vomiting. You accidentally eat poison... it has to get out. So you take a purgative... and you vomit.

The Tea Party failed, because it was subverted by the Establishment.  I was a fan of "Vote Them All Out", but that failed because the Establishment funded the primary races to keep reformers out.

The Slashdot commenter puts his finger on the dynamic that Trump has tapped into.  Everyone hates the government and the politicians.  Everyone.  Up until now it's been irrelevant, since the Establishment has not allowed any alternative.

But Trump doesn't need them, and doesn't want them.

Julius Caesar was a master of New Media, back in the Roman Republic days.  His Gallic War was widely distributed in Rome (by Caesar's allies) and became wildly popular.  Caesar looked different from the corrupt Senate establishment.  People were sick of the Status Quo.

Caesar didn't need the Senate, because he had the public.  When it was a choice of the Senatus or the Populusque Romanus, the Status Quo collapsed.  Whether that was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing has been the subject of debate for two millennia.

Adams again:

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics, focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I don’t think he put much effort into it.

My estimation of Trump has gone way, way up.  This is new, and significant, and I'm not sure if any of the other candidates have any idea how to deal with him other than hoping that he gets bored and leaves, or makes a set of gaffes that will cause him to implode.  That's not looking like where the smart money is betting.

Would a Trump Presidency be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?  There's a pretty good chance that we're fixin' to find out.  But Trump is focused on what the market wants, and what the political market wants right now is a change from the Status Quo.  And quite frankly, there are quite a few Agencies where "You're Fired" would not only be effective in correcting the path the Republic is on, but would be wildly popular with the Populusque Americanus.

40 years of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

Peter noticed the anniversary, which I'd totally missed:

It's become the longest-running movie in history: literally, it's always been playing in a cinema somewhere in the world since that date. No other film in entertainment history can make that claim over so long a period. In fact, RHPS has been called 'the most iconic cult movie of all time'.

I think I first went to see it in the late '70s, with 2cents.  It was an eye-opener: not so much the movie (which was funny-in-a-schlocky-way) but the audience participation part.  There were accepted catch phrases that the audience would holler at the screen: "Where's your neck?" (at the narrator).  "Ass****!" at the male lead (Barry Bostwick; I could never watch his later performance as George Washington without hearing that whispering in the back of my head).  You would fling props at the screen: rice at the wedding scene, toast at the banquet when Dr. Frank N. Furter (played by Tim Curry; I couldn't get that image out of my mind when I saw him in his later role in Hunt For Red October).

A couple years later, 2cents and I were at another screening.  There were a group of guys in the row in front of us, and one of them was clearly at the movie for the first time - they were explaining all the audience participation parts to him.  At the banquet scene, things played out sort of like this:

His friends, to him:  The toast - where's the toast?

Him: I don't have it.  I ate it.

2cents (and me), pointing at him: Ass****!

Good times, good times.

If you were a RHPS fan, click through to Peter's post, which will be a waltz down memory lane.

Alan Jackson - Chattahoochee

Vickery Creek, flowing towards the Chattahoochee.  Photo copyright Borepatch

I can walk from Camp Borepatch to the Chattahoochee river.  There are very nice trails through National Forrest parkland (the picture here is from this parkland), there's a lively riverside activity scene on the river.  In all the years I've lived here, I'd never gone tubing on the 'Hooch.  So we went last weekend.

Remember, it's August, so it's hotter than a hoochie coochie.  You bet there's a country music song about that.

Alan Jackson was one of the stars that blazed brightly in the 1990s, with 35 Billboard #1 country hits.  This was one, which won CMA song of the year in 1993.  As a Georgia boy, he was familiar with the 'Hooch.  Asked about the song, he said:

It's a song about having fun, growing up. and coming of age in a small town - which really applies to anyone across the country, not just by the Chattahoochee. We never thought it would be as big as it's become."

Chattahoochee (Songwriters: Alan Jackson, Jim McBride)

Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie
We laid rubber on the Georgie asphalt
We got a little crazy but we never got caught

Down by the river on a friday night
A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight
Talking 'bout cars and dreaming 'bout women
Never had a plan just a livin' for the minute
Yeah way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me
But I learned how to swim and I learned how I was
A lot about livin' and a litttle 'bout love

Well we fogged up the windows in my old chevy
I was willing but she wasn't ready
So a settled for a burger and a grape snowcone
Dropped her off early but I didn't go home

Down by the river on a friday night
A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight
Talking 'bout cars and dreaming 'bout women
Never had a plan just a livin' for the minute
Yeah way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me
But I learned how to swim and I learned how I was
A lot about livin' and a little 'bout love

Way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie
We laid rubber on the Georgie asphalt
We got a little crazy but we never got caught

Well we fogged up the windows in my old chevy
I was willing but she wasn't ready
So a settled for a burger and a grape snowcone
Dropped her off early but I didn't go home

Down by the river on a friday night
A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight
Talking 'bout cars and dreaming 'bout women
Never had a plan just a livin' for the minute
Yeah way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
Never knew how much that muddy water meant to me
But I learned how to swim and I learned how I was
A lot about livin' and a little 'bout love

Grumble

I seem to be burning through vacation days getting Camp Borepatch fixed up to sell.  Everything takes longer, i guess.

Not more expensive - that seems to be tracking nicely.  Well, closely ...

Ah well - mustn't grumble.  I smell coffee.  Yay, coffee!

A metaphor on Megyn Kelly's approach to Donald Trump

Chrysler gets sued for lousy security

Three weeks back we saw that late model Jeep Cherokee autos could be hacked remotely.  The shoe that we've been waiting to drop, has dropped:

LAST MONTH’S JEEP hacking scandal has already been followed by a 1.4 million vehicle recall and a well-timed Senate bill. Now Chrysler faces that other inevitable punishment: a potentially massive lawsuit.

On Tuesday three Jeep Cherokee owners filed a complaint against both Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Harman International, the maker of the Uconnect dashboard computer in millions of Chrysler vehicles. A security flaw in that cellular-connected computer served as the entry point for security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller when they showed WIRED last month that they could wirelessly hack into a 2014 Jeep over the internet to hijack its steering, brakes and transmission. Now the small group of plaintiffs is hoping to invite anyone with those vulnerable Uconnect systems in their car or truck to join them in their litigation. If their complaint is certified by a court as a class action, the broad spectrum of affected Chrysler vehicles means it could snowball into a case with more than a million potential plaintiffs.

What damages are assessed when it's no longer possible to have confidence in the security and integrity of your car?  What are the damages if you always wonder if you're about to die when you start it up?

U.S. Government wins coveted "My Little Pwnie" award for best hack of the year

H4x0Rz R m4g1C

 And by "coveted", I mean "really, really wish this hadn't happened":

Black Hat 2015 For the past nine years Black Hat has staged its Pwnie Awards, devoted to recognizing the best and worst aspects of computer security, and this year's winner of the least welcome award is the US government's Office of Personnel Management.

The OPM won in the "Most EPIC Fail" category after hackers, possibly from the Chinese government, ransacked the agency's servers to steal confidential information on up to 21.5 million past and present government employees.

"The OPM let you and everyone else down. So much so, that the USA government might actually be pulling covert agents out of foreign countries. USA #1," noted the panel of judges.

The hack caused the resignation of the OPM's head and a frantic effort by other government departments to get themselves protected. No one from the OPM was present to pick up their pony-shaped award.

Let's just let that run over the tongue, shall we?  No one from the OPM was present to pick up their pony-shaped award.

Lulz.

Epic, epic fail, and recognized as such.

Ah, the joys of getting the kids to clean up so I can sell the house

Going pretty well.

Yeah.  Going really well.

Lies the gun banners tell

Refuted by facts CrimeThink™

• Banning guns would not reduce murder and suicide
• No rise in mass shootings
• Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware

There are a bunch more.  Go and bookmark this one.

(via)

Keynesian Economics, explained

A parable:

Krugman and Bernanke are walking down the street and see a pile of dog s***. Bernanke says “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars to eat that pile of s***.” Krugman does it, gets paid, and they keep walking. After a while they see another pile of s*** on the road. Seeing an opportunity for revenge, Krugman says “Tell you what, I’ll give YOU twenty grand to eat that pile of s***.”

Click through for the hilarious ending.  And it's 100% true, which makes it even better.

Why yes, I am getting more exercise lately

Samsung and HTC phone users: do NOT enable the fingerprint option

The phone doesn't protect your fingerprint data:

Four FireEye researchers have found a way to steal fingerprints from Android phones packing biometric sensors such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the HTC One Max.

Oh, Come on I hear you say.  This is a Security feature, I hear you say.  Just how bad can it be?

The team found a forehead-slapping flaw in HTC One Max in which fingerprints are stored as an image file (dbgraw.bmp) in a open "world readable" folder.

"Any unprivileged processes or apps can steal user’s fingerprints by reading this file," the team says, adding that the images can be made into clear prints by adding some padding.

Well there's your problem, right there ...

$5 gets you $10 that it's not just Samsung and HTC.  My advice is to turn off the damn fingerprint recognition and browse through the file system, deleting any .BMP files that look like biometrics.  And maybe run the phone through an industrial shredder ...

I went shooting on my birthday

I realized that I hadn't been shooting yet not just this year, but all of last year, either (!).  I've been making Baby Vulcan cry.

And so off I went.  Noise was made.  Holes were punched in paper.  I was both pleased at my marksmanship and disgusted at my marksmanship.  All in all, a normal range trip.

Somehow, I find that strangely reassuring.

New web browser privacy add-on

Privacy Badger is an add-on for the Firefox and Chrome browsers that will thwart a lot of online tracking that marketroids do:

EFF is excited to announce that today we are releasing version 1.0 of Privacy Badger for Chrome and Firefox.  Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden trackers that would otherwise spy on your browsing habits as you surf the Web.

...

As you browse the Web, Privacy Badger looks at any third party domains that are loaded on a given site and determines whether or not they appear to be tracking you (e.g. by setting cookies that could be used for tracking, or fingerprinting your browser). If the same third party domain appears to be tracking you on three or more different websites, Privacy Badger will conclude that the third party domain is a tracker and block future connections to it.

For certain websites, if Privacy Badger were to block an embedded domain entirely it would break the site's core functionality. For example, if Privacy Badger were to block 'licensebuttons.net,' Creative Commons buttons would no longer load. In these cases Privacy Badger blocks the domain from setting or receiving any cookies or 'referer' headers, but allows the embedded content to load.

Pretty neat.  I like the Electronic Frontier Foundation guys.  Recommended.

A birthday grumble.

It's my birthday.  Yay. /sarcasm

Damn.  Need a bigger cake.

My present is to work on fixing up Camp Borepatch to sell it.  Yay. /sarcasm

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

- H. L. Mencken

Friday Motor Madness - BMW Z1

This is the first of a new series of posts, highlighting oddball, unusual, and cool cars.  In this post, we go back to the future with the first car in BMW's Z line of roadsters.  It had so many unusual features that it led to the Z moniker itself, for Zukunft - "future".

Picture via Topspeed.com

Introduced at the 1987 Frankfurt Motor Show, the Z1's retractable doors and removable thermoplastic body panels made it the sensation of the show.  BMW quickly received 5,000 orders before manufacturing even began.

Picture via Topspeed.com

The panels contributed nothing to the car's structural integrity, and were explicitly designed to be removable and swappable.  BMW encouraged customers to purchase a second set of panels in a different color, letting them change their car themselves.  BMW's claim that the swap would only take 40 minutes was considered to be rather a joke (if you weren't a Bavarian mechanic).

Alas, only 8,000 were built.  The Z1 used a stock 2.5L engine (from the 325 series) and the 9 second 0-60 made this somewhat less than the ultimate driving machine.  Only built between 1989 and 1991, they are quite rare and prices are correspondingly high.  While this isn't by any means a performance car, it's terribly quirky - it's as close as BMW ever came to the Jeep Wrangler's removable doors.  In Europe it's legal to drive with the doors retracted (it seems that it's not legal to do this here in the USA).

If you're interested in this unique motor, I recommend you click through to the excellent article at Topspeed.com.

More on shooting down drones

I am not a lawyer, but some lawyers (well, law professors) are looking at this and think that it may be justified:

Robots can pose-or can appear to pose-a threat to life, property, and privacy. May a landowner legally shoot down a trespassing drone? Can she hold a trespassing autonomous car as security against damage done or further torts? Is the fear that a drone may be operated by a paparazzo or a peeping Tom sufficient grounds to disable or interfere with it? How hard may you shove if the office robot rolls over your foot? This paper addresses all those issues and one more: what rules and standards we could put into place to make the resolution of those questions easier and fairer to all concerned.

The default common-law legal rules governing each of these perceived threats are somewhat different, although reasonableness always plays an important role in defining legal rights and options. In certain cases - drone overflights, autonomous cars, national, state, and even local regulation - may trump the common law. Because it is in most cases obvious that humans can use force to protect themselves against actual physical attack, the paper concentrates on the more interesting cases of (1) robot (and especially drone) trespass and (2) responses to perceived threats other than physical attack by robots notably the risk that the robot (or drone) may be spying - perceptions which may not always be justified, but which sometimes may nonetheless be considered reasonable in law.

We argue that the scope of permissible self-help in defending one's privacy should be quite broad. There is exigency in that resort to legally administered remedies would be impracticable; and worse, the harm caused by a drone that escapes with intrusive recordings can be substantial and hard to remedy after the fact. Further, it is common for new technology to be seen as risky and dangerous, and until proven otherwise drones are no exception. At least initially, violent self-help will seem, and often may be, reasonable even when the privacy threat is not great - or even extant

And it's not just the profs saying this.  Homeland Security says it, too:

The US Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence assessment to law enforcement agencies Friday warning that recreational drones "could be used by adversaries" to attack the United States.

...

The report added that drones "could be used by adversaries to leverage UAS as part of an attack" and that an "emerging adversary use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems present detection and disruption challenges."

Best to shoot it, just to be sure.  And remember to double tap.

New email attack in progress

OldNFO emails with breaking news:

I want to bring your attention to a potentially dangerous phishing email that contains a malicious link.  If you received any email from any of these email addresses: 

USAA.WEB.Acces.Activity@usaa.com

USAA.WEB.restricted@usaa.com

USAA.WEB.SECURE.Customer@usaa.com   

And the Subject Line is:  "Your USAA Account Computer/Device Preferences Notification." 

DO NOT OPEN the email.  DELETE THE EMAIL IMMEDIATELY.  Then DELETE the email from your Deleted Items folder.  The email contains a malicious link that can attack email and other Information Technology systems.

I have been getting email saying that I have a voice mail message.  I don't use the app that the email claims to represent.  If you get emails from what look like companies you don't use, they are almost certainly attacks.  If you get "security" emails from companies that you do financial business with, they are almost certainly attacks.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[gasp] [gasp] [gasp]

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

But this time, we'll vote ourselves out of this mess.  There will be the Leader on the White Horse to save us!  A Leader funded by the same Oligarchy, no matter which party [*cough* *cough* BUSH] [*cough* *cough* CLINTON] that Leader represents.

But relax, Citizen.  All is well.  The circus is amusing and the bread is free.  And the chocolate ration has been increased from 3 ounces to 2½ ounces ...

A parable on Obamacare

 

Here endeth the lesson.

More on Windows 10 and privacy

As a follow up to yesterday's post, here is an excellent, detailed walk through of what you should think about turning off when you install or upgrade to Windows 10.

Also, you will want to go to Microsoft's opt-out web page to get rid of targeted ads.

What will Obama's climate policy do to your electricity rates?

Quadruple them.  How do we know?  Because he said he wants the USA to get 28% of its electricity from renewables (vs. the current 4%)*.  There are multiple countries in Europe who get 30% of their electricity from renewables.  Guess what their electricity costs (and no fair peeking at the title of this blog post).

* The plan seems to exclude hydro power, which provides some more of our electricity.

Windows 10 doesn't have spyware

It is spyware:

I really want to upgrade to Windows 10, but have begun seeing stories come out about the new Terms and how they affect your privacy. It looks like the default Windows 10 system puts copies of your data out on the "cloud", gives your passwords out, and targets advertising to you. The main reason I am looking to upgrade is that Bitlocker is not available on Windows 7 Pro, but is on Windows 10 Pro, and Microsoft no longer offers Anytime Upgrades to Windows 7 Ultimate. However, I don't want to give away my privacy for security. The other option is to wait until October to see what the Windows 10 Enterprise version offers, but it may not be available through retail. Are the privacy minded Slashdot readers not going with Windows 10?

It's a pretty reasonable thread at Slashdot - meaning nobody accuses Bill Gates of putting puppies in a blender.  But the default Windows 10 privacy settings are really, really bad.  Basically they're Google snooping on everything that you do, except that they make you pay for the privilege of using their OS.

This is a good article on all the things you need to do to turn this off.  It's unclear whether the monthly Windows Update security fixes will reset the privacy settings to the defaults; Windows 10 users will want to check this each month.  It's less unclear whether Microsoft will share your usage habits with NSA - of course they will.

Or you can just switch away from Windows.  Microsoft is clearly looking for other ways to milk its customer base, and this snoop-o-matic presumably is only the first of many initiatives from Redmond.  Here's a balanced video from a couple years back discussing the pros and cons of switching to Linux from Windows.  Me, I made the jump a long, long time ago and have never looked back.



No built-in spyware on Linux, and you don't have to keep checking to see if some security fix just stealth changed your settings.  If you surf the web, read email and RSS feeds, and do Office app work, Linux will be fine for you.  If you game, why don't you have a Playstation?

Seikilos epitaph - Music from Ancient Greece

The Death of Paulus Aemilius at Cannae by John Trumbull, 1773

Two great battles were fought on this this day in the ancient world.  In 338 B.C. Philip of Macedon crushed the Greek city states at Chaeronea, setting the stage for his son the Great Alexander to embark against the Persian himself.  A century later in 216 B.C. Hannibal won perhaps the greatest victory of all time, utterly destroying  the Consuls Lucius Aemilius Pallus and Gaius Terentius Varro - and their eight legions - at Cannae in the southern part of the Italian peninsula.

What both of these locations had in common was that they were Greek, and would have recognized this music.  The Seikilos epitaph is an inscription from a tombstone outside the ancient Greek city of Ephesus.  While it may be the oldest musical inscription for which we have both the musical score and the lyrics, this is not entirely clear.

What is clear is that this musical style would have been familiar to both Philip of Macedon and many of the combatants at Cannae.  The lyrics are an epitaph from a man named Seikilos to his wife Euterpe.  They translate roughly as:

While you live, shine
Don't suffer anything at all;
Life exists only a short while
And time demands its toll.

Good words to live by, infused with the still robust stoic philosophy so prevalent in the ancient Greek world.

Thoughts on getting the house ready to sell

I'm getting Camp Borepatch ready to sell - the boys are getting their own swinging bachelor pad and Wolfgang and I would be rattling around in a big ol' empty place.  Plus, the market is roaring here in the ATL, and for once in my life I want to see what it's like to sell a house in an an up market.

And so I'm going through room-by-room clearing out junk and setting things up so that the house will show well.  I've discovered some interesting things:

• I have boxes that I've never unpacked since moving here from Mordor on the Charles Massachussets.  "Boxes", as in plural.
• I've discovered that the empty downstairs room that has the freezer and a fridge for the kids will make a dandy shop.  The table saw and other implements of destruction have decamped there.
• I'm filling a Bagster with junk.  Bagsters are the shiznit.  I may get another before I'm done.
• Crews (plumbing, landscaping, etc) are OK when you're (ahem) of a certain age.
• I kind of think that I'm doing what's called "decorating".  I wasn't allowed to do that in the past ...

All in all, things are proceeding.  It's a bit odd to think that I will soon end up in the same situation where I was at FOB Borepatch - on my own, away from the family, only permanently this time.  It's very odd that I'm looking forward to this.

What socialism does to you

It makes people very unsympathetic to a Greek bailout by the EU:

Half a continent away from Athens, Milda is unimpressed. Watching reports of the Greek predicament on the news, the Latvian pensioner has little sympathy for her counterparts 1,800 miles to the south.

“Can’t they get by on €120 a week?” she asks, referring to the latest cash limits on pensioners introduced in Greece. “Life’s less expensive down there. It’s warmer, they don’t have to pay for heating or winter boots, and fruit and vegetables must be cheaper.

...

From central European minnows such as Slovakia to Baltic eurozone republics such as Latvia and Lithuania, hard-pressed pensioners and workers earning barely €500 a month are at a loss as to why Greece should qualify for more largesse.

Milda’s monthly pension is €293 a month , well under half the current level in Greece. When Latvia went through a similar debt crisis in 2009, it imposed swingeing budget cuts and tax increases worth about 15% of GDP over three years. Output fell by a quarter and unemployment soared to more than 20%. The population fell as people left in droves.

These measures were hugely controversial at the time, and many people thought they would lead to catastrophe. The US economist Paul Krugman predicted at the end of 2008: “Latvia is the new Argentina.”

By the second half of 2010, however, the economy had started to grow again, and from 2011 to 2013 Latvia was among the fastest growing countries in the EU. Despite the fact that the currency was not devalued, exports are now at record highs, some 60% above where they were before the crisis.

I remember being in Poland in 1996.  The Poles thought that their long term prospects were better than those of the former East Germany.  I asked why, and they told me "Because we know that we have to do this for ourselves.  Nobody is going to help us out."

A couple days ago, ASM826 posted about the implosion of K-Mart.  It's so bad that they're starting to look like Venezuelan supermarkets:

Basic needs of the people are not being met in the South American country where socialism is in full effect. There have been shortages of toilet paper and diapers, people have to wait in line to pay over $700 for a condom, and most recently the government is asking for a share of produce from shopkeepers following a food crisis.

There was an old saying in Africa, back during the Cold War.  If the ruling elites wanted their kids to grow up to be socialists, they would send them to university in Paris.  If they wanted them to grow up to be capitalist, they would send them to university in Moscow.

More lies from the NSA?

NSA claimed that they were not allowed to listen in on a call from San Diego to Osama bin Laden in the run up to 9/11, and therefore needed the PATRIOT Act and the massive domestic surveillance program to prevent this from happening again.  Former NSA insiders are disputing this, saying that this was an internal NSA screw-up on multiple levels:

In an agency filled with secrets, the NSA’s failure to detect the 9/11 plot or help other agencies do so is probably its deepest and darkest. For years, rather than reveal the true nature of the blunder, the agency has instead propagated the fable that it missed that San Diego call in 2000 for technical reasons. Consequently, the Bush and Obama administrations conducted what amounted to ironclad surveillance of Americans’ phone activity for more than a decade.

The dragnet metadata operation, finally declared illegal by a federal appeals court this year, was likely the largest and most secretive domestic surveillance program ever undertaken. Yet the public only became aware thanks to the information leaked by Edward Snowden. Today, other NSA whistleblowers are claiming that the program was based on a lie. They’re also demanding answers to tough questions: How were certain key phone numbers missed in surveillance—or were they at all? And why did the NSA refuse to share with the CIA and FBI the full details of what it collected from bin Laden’s operations center in Yemen?

Fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks, it seems time for the NSA and the White House to reveal what really happened—and to replace, once and for all, fiction and lies with facts and the truth.

This is Jim Bamford, so you might take this with a grain of salt.  However, he has sources on record here; also, General Clapper is still not behind bars for perjury before Congress.

Told ya

Tam gets her security blogging on:

While the nerd community on social media is absolutely freaking out over the possibility of "hacking sniper rifles", I can't help but think that being able to hack a Tracking Point rifle is like knowing how to hot-wire a Ferrari Enzo: Fascinating at parties, but not a skill you'll get much chance to ever use.

Your humble host on the subject, a couple years ago:

When I saw this I said to myself, "Self, what do you bet that there's no security in that wireless server?"  My Self is pretty nasty and suspicious, and thinks that if he reached into the bag of 'sploits you'd pwn that rifle before you could say "Hey Verne, hold mah beer."  Like I said, he's nasty and suspicious.

But the chances that the code is wide open is high.  What would you do if you took over Sund00d's high tech scope?  Change the aim point so that it shoots wide by 10 MOA?  This scenario is filled to overflowing with LULZ.

Not that it took any deep insight or genius to make that particular call, but I did told ya ...

A lesson on discrimination for the USA from Europe

Why a lesson for us?  Because Europe seems to be 20 years ahead of us in the Progressive March, and because we're always told that we "need to be more like Europe" by our Betters™ here.  So what's coming?

This:

George X. Doležal: ČEZ has discriminated against the Romani [Gypsies]. It didn't let them steal power.

The European Court of Justice has made a groundbreaking verdict against our ČEZ. To steal electricity is, as the judges implicitly state, a democratic right. The provider of power isn't allowed to place any technical hurdles that would prevent the consumer from stealing electricity. If the provider does so, it is discrimination.

Get ready, here it comes.  It may be part of Donald Trump's appeal that he's the only one who would actively denounce this sort of thing.

Here's your chance to drunk dial Stephen Hawking

Reddit has an Ask Me Anything for the most famous physicist of our day.  Go ahead and ask him - pork or beef for BBQ?

And the title refers to this, of course:

So much security fail

Maybe it's just me, but if I were to design a safe, I wouldn't make it electronic.  Safes have been around for years and years, and any software you might add almost certainly would make it less safe.  Case in point:

"One of the main vulnerabilities we are focusing on comes by way of a USB port that is on the exterior of the safe," Salazar told eWEEK. "We have created a little tool that we can just plug into the safe, wait 60 seconds for the tool to do its work, and then the safe doors will open and you can take all the cash out."

Other than that, it's totally safe.  Right?  Oh, wait:

It might raise eyebrows that the operating system that powers CompuSafe Galileo is Windows XP, which Microsoft no longer supports.

[blink] [blink]

This is why we can't have nice things - they all have software.

What's the effective range of your combat rifle?

40 to 100 yards.  Interesting.

The most expensive computer security bug ever?

Chrysler has issued a recall of 1.4 million vehicles that are vulnerable to remote hacking via the Intermet. Basically everything they've built in the 2013 through 2015 model years are effected, including RAM pickup trucks and Viper sports cars. Basically the whole product line.

Owners don't need to take their cars back to the dealer; rather, Chrysler will send them a software update on a USB stick. That got me thinking about what this cost.

Short answer, maybe $20M.

This is based on an estimate of $15 per car to cover the cost of the USB device, loading the software on it, and mailing it to the owner. Sure, customers can download it from Chrysler's website to their own USB. That should cover a couple thousand out of the $1.4M ...

Man, you could have gotten a lot of security design work for $20M.

And the punch line? Good chance the "fix" won't fix everything and so they'll have to do it again. And that we'll hear this from other vendors too.

Should you shoot "Gangsta style"?

Only if you're Jerry Miculek ....



Of course, it's never a bad idea to pattern your shooting off of what Jerry Miculek does. If you can pull it off, that is ...

Who is the Hammer of the Progressives?

Some ideas survive election cycles.  This one is from the last election cycle.  You know - the one where the GOP dude would have given us more gun control?  But what I said back then about Newt is perennially green:

There are many things that I do not like about Newt, but one advantage that he has over the entire GOP crowd is that he knows how to deflate the Democrat's ideology, to show not that it is mistaken, but that it is immoral.  Four years of that hammer will leave the political discussion in this country profoundly different.  The Republic needs that, and someone who will not flinch from repeatedly telling the opposition that they hate the poor:



It's the same conflict of visions.  Today's UK is profoundly different than it was in 1979, because the Iron Lady refused to back down in the face of a left - unions, the media, the universities - that held her in withering contempt.  By returning that contempt with equal fervor and backing it up with unarguable facts, she wrenched the Realm off of the track to ruin, to the point that "Red" Ken Livingston is a curiosity, and not the head of the Labour Party.

So who will fight this fight this today?  Which GOP candidate will attack their world view?  Who is the Hammer of the Progressives?

Sadly, to ask the question is to answer it.  What's been on offer has not inspired us.

You gotta watch out for the Old Guy

This is funnier than heck, and I had tears running down my face.  Well played, sir.  So very well played.



May not be entirely safe for work, at least if you have the speakers too loud.  Only a little naughty, but we live in the End Times ...

If you own a late model Jeep Cherokee, you're pwned

And by that, I mean pwned:

The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

How bad is it?  This bad:

Miller and Valasek’s full arsenal includes functions that at lower speeds fully kill the engine, abruptly engage the brakes, or disable them altogether. The most disturbing maneuver came when they cut the Jeep’s brakes, leaving me frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-ton SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch. The researchers say they’re working on perfecting their steering control—for now they can only hijack the wheel when the Jeep is in reverse. Their hack enables surveillance too: They can track a targeted Jeep’s GPS coordinates, measure its speed, and even drop pins on a map to trace its route.

I've been talking about this for years and years.  Here's an example from four years ago:

The rush to computerize your car is basically over, which means the rush to pwn it has begun in earnest.  Fortunately (for the Bad Guys), security was never part of the design - for example, all of the non-critical components (like cell phones, music players, and GPS nav units) are on the same network as the critical ones (brakes, throttle, transmission control).

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Sigh.

It looks like the automakers are fixin' to learn what software companies learned decades ago:

• If a software developer finds a security bug right after he wrote the code, it costs a few bucks to fix.
• If QA finds the security bug a couple months after the developer wrote it, it costs hundreds of dollars to fix.
• If the customer finds the security bug years after the developer wrote it, it costs thousands of dollars to fix.

Oh, and the rest of you who don't have Jeep Cherokees?  You're probably pwned too.  That's another reason to ride a Harley.  Or one of these:

Remotely hackable cars are a PR nightmare, but I expect there will be a bunch of these stories over the next few years.  The rush to market with lousy security designs will cost the automakers millions of dollars.  All I can say is that stupid is expensive.

Best wishes to Greybeard

Recovering from heart trouble.

Pluto: can't we just be friends?

Heh.

Thoughts about Donald Trump

Boy, the establishment hates his guts.  And he's polling so well that he's the front runner.  These two issues are joined at the hip, as the bulk of the American people despise the establishment.  Trump's candor and forthrightness (well, so far at least) cut through the clutter and resonates with regular people.

This analysis isn't anything new - you've heard it already.  You've also heard that people like him because he fights - he doesn't back down, issue phony "sorry if anyone was offended" apologies.  He's the 2015 version of Newt Gengrich.



Newt did the same thing - see how he instantly rejects the premise of the question?  Notice that the audience cheers this rejection even before he has elaborated on his single word answer?  Notice how when pressed, be unleashes a smackdown on his hapless questioner?  See how the audience cheers, to the point that you have trouble hearing the moderator try to segue to a commercial break?

Trump does that.  The other Republican candidates should be nervous about the first debate with Trump, because The Donald will basically ignore them and simply trash the establishment media moderators.  The audience will love it.

Just like Newt did.

And just like Newt, he will have a metric ton of contradictory past statements that will leave everyone wondering if they can trust him.  Me, I don't trust him - not at all.

But you know what?  I'm getting a bunch of emails from smart people saying they like what they hear from him.  And unlike Newt, Trump can fund his own campaign.  He doesn't care that the panicked GOP establishment just dropped $120 Million into Jeb's coffers.

This is getting interesting.  In a very end-of-the-Roman-Republic sort of way.  Me, I'm getting some popcorn, because this is fixin' to get good.  The circus is entertaining, and the bread is free.

The end of the Lee-Enfield era?

Aaron finds that the Canadian Rangers are fixin' to replace their Enfields.  It seems that this will be the end of that venerable rifle's use by combat units.

That's been a long, long run - it was the Rifle of Empire, serving in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.  Over 19 million were manufactured.  This is unsurprising, since it it not just supremely accurate but a pleasure to shoot as well.

Music for the bonfire

As the Republic lurches towards the Abyss in this Cold Civil War, what is a playlist for the End Of Days as the flames lick at the foundations of the Common Weal?  Here's one suggestion; I hope that the Bonfire will be as lighthearted.  Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.



Remember, the Agents of the Surveillance State are predictable.  Hey Federale, where you going to run to?

A parable on taxation

You only get the green stuff that you can actually reach.

It's amazing how many Smart™ people in politics simply don't get this concept.

In re: the Confederate Flag, and other matters

Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, [France] entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

- Charles Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

- Voltaire

So we see that the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is now DoublePlusUngood Crimethink™, as is an off-hand joke by a Nobel Prize winning cancer scientist, as is the opinion of the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and some poor rocket scientist who wore his lucky shirt to the comet landing of his space rover.

As are the travails of many others who find themselves on the wrong side of RightThink™ in this current Cold Civil War.  They can all console themselves that they will merely lose their jobs, their houses, and their families.  The Chevalier de la Barre did far worse than them, Back In The Day.

But the crime was the same.

Jean-Francois de la Barre was a punk.  He and his aristocratic buddies were cut-ups and petty hoodlums in late eighteenth century France.  But he went too far, showing disrespect to a religious procession.  It was said that he failed to doff his hat to the Cross as it went by.

For this, he was convicted in a court of law.  The Parlement of Paris upheld the sentence of death, and added (no doubt as an after thought) that he should be tortured first.  And so it was written, so it was done on this very day in the year of our Lord 1766.  He was an example to All Men about what not to do to cast disrespect on the Ancien Regime.  To make sure that nobody didn't get the point, his corpse was beheaded and burned with a copy of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary nailed to it.

Today's Old Regime is more merciful: you will not be killed, but will merely lose your job, your living, your flag, your history.  All is for the best, Citizen, in the Best of All Possible Worlds.

And how do we know that the Left is truly ignorant of history (likely willfully so)?  They know nothing of Voltaire.   But it's OK.  They're ever so much smarter (and nicer - remember the "no more beheading" thing?) than you or I.  And rejoice, Citizen!  The chocolate ration has been increased from 3 ounces to 2½ ounces!  The People's Revolution is glorious, is it not?

A thought for today

Heh

Frivolity

The world is an interesting place right now.  Here is a short list off of the top of my head about events that are occurring, events that may have long-term historical impact:

• Greece looks like it will finally leave the Euro.  This may participate a financial crisis as Greek government bonds are repudiated; almost all of these bonds are held by European banks.
• The Middle East is even more messed up than normal, with ISIS fighting pretty much everyone, Iran going nuclear, and Saudi Arabia likely already in possession of one or more nuclear weapons.  Non-Proliferation has collapsed, and in the most unstable part of the globe.
• Vladimir Putin is threatening Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states.  The "Reset" has been shown to be a joke.
• China has achieved something not seen for 70 years - the re-armament of Japan in response to aggressive Chinese moves in the South China Sea.
• The economy is stalling out (again, if indeed it has ever recovered from the Great Recession).  Record numbers of Americans simply do not work.

So what are the news topics of the day?  What are the stories that get wall-to-wall coverage in what remains of our hollowed-out Press?

Some people don't like a flag.  And Bruce Jenner says that he's a woman.

A cynic would say that the frivolity is nothing but the Media trying to protect the Obama Administration from the results of their terrible policy choices.  In which case, of what use is the Media?  The truly terrifying alternative is that this merely reflects the decadence of this age of the Republic.

But all is well, Citizen.  The Circuses are entertaining, and the Bread is free.  And the Chocolate Ration has been increased from 3 ounces to 2.5 ounces ...

Borepatch, signing off

It's been a long run, but two weeks before my seventh blogiversary I'm hanging it up.  I actually don't expect this will be a big surprise for most of you - I havent been posting much lately and it certainly hasn't been high quality.

Quite frankly, it's been a chore.  The Muse doesn't hang out at Camp Borepatch anymore, and that makes it work.  There's been too much turmoil in my life over the last few years, and that's taken it's toll.  I don't have the mental energy to post anymore.

And so it's time to sign off.

I've made some very close friends from this, and that means more than I can say.  I'll still be around, but just not posting much. Unless the Muse comes back.

Thanks to everyone who comes here regularly.  You've left almost 40,000 comments here (!!!!!) which is nothing short of mind blowing.  I feel a bit like I'm letting you down, but I'm just out of gas.

So it's time to get back on the motorcycle and put some miles under the tires.  Screw it - let's ride.

Rest in peace, Sir Christopher Lee

You were a total bad ass. . We will miss you.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

On the rooftops of London - coo, what a sight

View from the office:

It's a long way from Mary Poppins ...



Some things still look the same, though.

Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement's

I was out for a London walkabout, trying to walk off jet lag, and passed by a very pretty Christopher Wren church.  That isn't unusual - London has 52 churches built by Sir Christopher after the great fire of 1666.  Indeed, there are Christopher Wren tours to see them all which may be a little much even for an architecture buff.

But this is no ordinary church.  It's St. Clement's Danes, the central church of the Royal Air Force.

The church's history goes way, way back into the dark ages.  The "Danes" in the name refers to the Vikings who conquered England in the tenth and eleventh centuries.  The church is so old that it was repaired by William the Conqueror.  The Great Fire of 1666 burned the church, giving Wren the opportunity to build the current structure, which stood until the Blitz.  The Luftwaffe pretty well flattened it.

After the War, the RAF led a fund raiser to restore the church, which was restored to much the same as in Wren's day.  With some embellishments:

The lighting sconces have the arms of various RAF commands (here is the one for Strike Command).  The floors have 800 badges for the commands, groups, squadrons, and other units.

As you'd expect, there are small memorials all around the church to the men and units who served and often died in the air.  It was quite a pleasant, unexpected surprise to wander into.

Tanks for the memories

Tanks at the Imperial War Museum.

Russian T-34:

Sherman:

World War I British tank in a very unusual mounting configuration (driving over a trench):

If you're in London, this is a great, free museum.  It's walking distance from Waterloo Station.

Bah

Blogger won't upload the photos I took (presumably because they're too large) and the Android Youtube app won't give me an embed code.  Blogging is pretty limited from the Android phone.

Remembering D-Day

I went to the Imperial War Museum.  It seemed an appropriate day to do it, and judging from the crowds i wasn't the only one who thought that.

On the tube there was an elderly gent in black suit and bowler hat who sported a fistful of medals on his chest.  He looked a decade or two young to be at D-Day, but there was action aplenty during the later days of the British Empire.

I tried to blog but Android ate it

Really.  The home button is right next to toe space bar and the Blogger app doesn't autosave when you go to the home page.

Boarding soon and no time to reconstruct the global warming post.  If you're interested in how the latest report is bollox, go here.

Any readers up for a blogmeet in London this weekend

I hear that the Imperial War Museum is free admission.  I should be downtown London by 0900 or so British Summer Time.

Leave a comment if you're in the neighborhood.