Neighbors get WWII Veteran burial at Arlington

Bravo Zulu:

The 89-year-old pensioner died in December with no will, no instructions and no next of kin. He lay in a cold room at the D.C. medical examiner’s office, where the unclaimed dead are usually destined for a nameless pauper’s grave.

Instead, on Friday, Moore was given a hero’s sendoff at Arlington National Cemetery. A uniformed honor guard escorted Moore’s flag-covered remains. In place of a silent goodbye, a bugler played taps and three volleys of rifle fire marked his passing.

How was a lonely man diverted from the oblivion of a potter’s field for the glory of his country’s most hallowed resting place? It was the work of a family Moore may not have known he had: the residents of State House, a post-WWII apartment building at the edge of Washington’s Embassy Row.

No family, no friends, but neighbors who wouldn't let his body go unclaimed.

Hat tip: Chris Lynch

Sharing

The Queen Of The World was feeling pretty bad when I left for Europe - cough, fever, that sort of thing.  Now I'm over here and what do I find?

Cough.  Fever.  Sinus pressure.  Bah.

We'll see how the rest of the week goes.

Easy with that clutch, Scooter

So Global Warming will cause women to stop having sex?

Yawn.  Add it to the list.

Actually the list hasn't been maintained for years.  The guy who put it together explains:

Footnote (September 2015) Why the list stopped growing.

The time it takes to process a new entry increases approximately with the square of the list length, after checking for duplications, spoofs etc. Starting it was based on the naïve assumption that the rate of appearances would decline as opposing evidence accumulated, but the reverse happened. That’s the difference between science and religion. It was taking over my life, which I did not want to end as a garbage collector. There have since been hundreds more claims of an increasingly ludicrous nature.

About right, there.

Ah, Dusseldorf

Mustard and Altbier. They're REALLY good.

Strangest hotel room I've ever had

The Marriott in Dusseldorf upgraded me to a suite. "Cool," I said to myself. And then found this:




Huh. The rest of the suite is normal (maybe even a little large for a European hotel room). Still, in the hundreds of hotel rooms I've stayed in, I've never had a confrence table and a white board before.

But my suitcase was waiting for me.  Sehr gut!

Great

Last row.

In which I channel my own internal Uncle Jay

I'm off to Frankfurt and United has me in Group 5, meaning the overheads are full. And the flight from Dulles to Newark was delayed. We'll see if my suitcase gets to Deutschland with me.

Then on to Dusseldorf which I haven't been to since 1999. And then on to Bonn. We will see how blogging goes. Maybe unshaven and in dirty clothes ...

Creation

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Via the Astronomy Picture of the Day which has a marvelous explanation about what is going on in the image.

Heh

It's funny because it's true.  Still, I probably need to get one, just because.

(via)

Michel Corrette - Six Organ Concertos

Six baroque organ concertos from the french composer and music teacher Michel Corrette, born on this day in 1707.

The Next Rembrandt

It's a computer:

NG, Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, the Mauritshuis in the Hague, and Museum Het Rembrandthuis assembled a team of art historians,  software developers, scientists, engineers, and data analysts. The team built a software system that was capable of understanding and generating new features based on Rembrandt’s unique style.

They began by taking 3D scans of the 346 paintings by the artist and analyzing them to determine common elements shared amongst the pieces. Based on what the team saw, they felt that in order to best capture Rembrandt’s style the software should create a painting similar to his works. The computer was told to paint a portrait of a caucasian male with facial hair, 30-40 years old, wearing dark clothing with a hat and collar, and that he be facing to the right.

When the software was told to finally use all of the data the team had collected, it created ‘The Next Rembrandt’. The painting consists of over 148 million pixels, based on more than 160,000 fragments of the artist’s’ works. Most importantly, this is not merely a computer image, but was actually 3D printed so that the texture of Rembrandt’s brush strokes could also be captured. The final result is a painting that looks exactly like an original Rembrandt.

No doubt this is in violation of some secret clause of the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty ...

Still, this is pretty cool.  Here's how they did it.



Bootnote: In 1997 I had to take the one year old #2 Son out of the Rembrandt hall in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum because he started screaming his head off.  He did not like Rembrandt, at all it seems.  Still haven't been back to see them.

Helpful advice

Well, that cleared things up.

FBI Director: "I really don't understand computer security"

Well, he used different words to day it:

FBI Director James Comey says the tool his agents bought and used to unlock the San Bernardino killer's iPhone will only work on a "narrow slice" of phones. 

On Wednesday, Comey gave a lecture at Ohio's Kenyon College's Center for the Study of American Democracy in which he said the exploit only works on iOS 9 iPhone 5Cs. Apple only sold 24 million of them. That narrow. The FBI boss wouldn't say where the tool came from. 

"The FBI is very good at keeping secrets," he said. "The people we bought this from – I know a fair amount about them and I have a high degree of confidence that they are very good at protecting it and that their motivations align with ours."

Orilly?  Glad to see you on the case with OPM, Scooter.

The 5C is the last of Apple's 32-bit smartphones (64-bit address spaces have stronger ASLR) and it doesn't have the Secure Enclave cryptographic coprocessor [PDF], which adds extra layers of protection mechanisms in hardware. Without 64-bit and the Secure Enclave, the 5C is theoretically easier to crack than other recent Apple models. 

Computer forensics expert Jonathan Ździarski told The Register that is was highly unlikely that only the 5C was affected by the crack – older models are almost certainly vulnerable too, using the same technique, and newer iPhones could also be at risk. 

While Ździarski said it was unlikely that the FBI had a working exploit for iPhone 5S and 6s, that still left around 24 million 5Cs and millions more older models crackable. Porting exploits to a 64-bit operating system isn't necessarily all that hard, Ździarski said, and simply admitting there was an exploit would galvanize security researchers to look for bugs.

And so what do we know about Director Comey's understanding of computer security?  He thinks that you can keep something a secret once everyone knows that it can be done.

And this is precisely why Apple refused to break their software for him.

Good friends

This guy needs some.

Question authority

Security for car computers

New company aims to provide it:

Car security startup Karamba Security has emerged from stealth with $2.5m in funding and a plan to revamp in-car security. 

Karamba has developed a technology that hardens the externally-facing electronic control unit (ECU) of cars in order to defend against hack attacks. The software is designed to protect a car's externally connected components, identifying attack attempts and blocking exploits from infiltrating the vehicle's network via the internet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or other connections. 

Externally facing controllers manage the telematics (sensors, instrumentation, navigation, etc), infotainment (radio, head unit, etc) and on-board diagnostics (OBD) of the vehicle. Karamba's tech is designed to block attacks from ever infiltrating the car's controller area network (CAN Bus). The technology ensures that only explicitly allowed code and applications can be loaded and run on the controller

This seems entirely sensible.  When I replace the Jeep, I may look into one of these.

R.I.P., Merle

Thanks for all the great music.

Great overview on Global Warming science

I haven't posted much on this topic for a while, since I've more or less come to the conclusion that this is religion, not science and most people who want to believe it do NOT want to know any science that contradicts their views.  And so it's shouting into a hurricane, and I've gotten pretty tired of it.

Byt Coyote Blog has a good series that discusses the theory and the data, and the mismatch between the claims and the observations.  And he is using the IPCC's predictions and data.

Recommended, especially if you still like to shout into hurricanes.

Editors and fact checkers

Layers of editors and fact checkers ...

If you're not paying for the service you're the product, not the customer

The dating site Tinder exposes a lot of information about people who sign up.  Lots of data:

Tinder isn’t as private as many of its users think, and a new website which aims to exploit that is causing concern among users of the dating app. 

Swipebuster promises to let Tinder users find out whether people they know have an account on the dating app, and even stalk them down to their last known location.

No hacking involved - Swipebuster uses Tinder's published API to get the data.  And this is interesting:

Although the site seems targeted at those who want to catch cheating partners on the app, its developer says he had a different motivation in mind, telling Vanity Fair that he wanted to highlight oversharing online. 

“There is too much data about people that people themselves don’t know is available,” the anonymous developer said. “Not only are people oversharing and putting out a lot of information about themselves, but companies are also not doing enough to let people know they’re doing it.”

Yup.

Good advice

I want one.

Good thing that NSA is collecting all that metadata

ISIS has figured out how to make that irrelevant:

ISIS figured out that if you give a leader resources, a target, and a time to get it done, then tell him to get it done however he can, you will get big, nasty and above all successful terrorist attacks in western nations, because such methods do not require detectable electronic communications.

But at least it's good for identifying the Administration's potential enemies, amirite?

Crony Capitalism - not just for Wall Street

It looks like Google owns the White House.

I wonder what  they give in return that makes them so valuable.

International Square Root Day

But remember: pi are not square, pi are round ...

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

Some of you may have heard about the brouhaha over the weekend from Lamdbaconf, a conference on technical computing (a lot on LISP, for those who care).  A talk on the Orbit computer language came under attack from a bunch of Internet Fascists (commonly called "Social Justice Warriors" or "SJWs") because while they don't care about Orbit or Lambdaconf or even computer programming, they know who they hate and will walk a mile to see that anything from those they don't like is silenced.

"I did not read Pasternak, but I condemn him."

They got some of Lambdaconf's sponsors to pull out of the conference.  But then the tech community rallied to defend, well, what makes the tech community great:

So far, so wearily familiar – Marxist thugs versus free expression, with free expression’s chances not looking so hot. But there’s where the story gets good. Meredith Patterson and her friends at the blog Status 451 organized a counterpunch. They launched an IndieGoGo campaign Save LambdaConf …and an open society.

I got wind of this a bit less than two days ago and posted to G+ asking all 20K of my followers to chip in, something I’ve never done before. Because, like Merry, I understand that this wasn’t actually about Mencius Moldbug at all – it was about opposing a power play by the political-correctness police. The IndieGoGo campaign was our chance to strike back for liberty.

A day later it was fully funded. ClarkHat’s victory lap makes great reading.

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Bootnote: Urbit is pretty strange, but very interesting and very subversive.  The fact that the SJWs don't understand that it's much more subversive than anything they advocate tells you haw smart they are.  Or how dishonest they are - some likely are smart enough to understand and don't like the idea of tools that would let someone sidestep their grotesque fascist thought control.

Bootnote 2: Yarvin (who used to post under the nom de blog Mencius Moldbug) is also pretty strange and (intellectually) pretty subversive.  My suspicion is that the SJWs don't want subversive ideas floating around now that they think they're in control and want to impost their grotesque fascist thought control on everyone.

Cats and dogs, living together

Microsoft is drinking the Linux kool aid, big time:

So the latest news is that you can run Ubuntu and bash on Windows 10. In other words, from the bash command-line, you execute apt-get to get/run any Ubuntu binary -- the same binary that runs on Linux. How do it work?

I don't know yet, but browsing around on the Internet suggests that it's a kernel driver in Windows that emulates Linux system calls.

Native Linux commands to install and run Linux commands - on Windows.

[blink] [blink]

I do believe that this is one of the signs of the apocalypse ..

Scattered, covered, and smothered

Because that's how the Queen Of The World rolls..




Wolfgang and I drove to the ATL yesterday. I get time with friends and Wolfie gets puppy play.

A love letter to Baseball

The Smithsonan Channel is running a show called Major League Legends.  It is outstanding - in fact, it earns the coveted adjective "Borepatchian".

Really.  It's all there: Ted Williams and "The Gods do not answer fan mail."  Lou Gehrig - perhaps experiencing a premonition of the fate awaiting him - breaking into tears during this opera.  Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey.  If you like Baseball (as I do), I cannot recommend this show more highly.

And so let me close, filled with hope.  It's springtime, the season of renewal.  The season when you hear clearly the eight most beautiful words in the English language.

... and the home of the Brave.  Play ball!



Yeah, I know that I already posted a Saturday Redneck song today.  It's Opening Day tomorrow.  And I love this song.

And the Queen Of The World called me an "Intellectual Redneck".  She spoils me rotten.

Suzy Bogguss - Drive South

The Queen of the World has been back in the ATL on business, and so Wolfgang and I are loading up the Jeep and pointing the tires south.  There's a Country music song for that, one that captures the whole sublime gestalt of "absence makes the heart fonder".

Suzy Bogguss took John Hiatt's song and drove it to number 2 on the charts.  It was her biggest hit, back in 1992.



Drive South (Songwriter: John Hiatt):

I didn't say we wouldn't hurt anymore
That's how you learn, you just get burned
But we don't have to feel like dirt anymore
Though love's not earned, Baby it's our turn
We were always looking for true north
With our heads in the clouds, just a little off course
I left the motor running, now if you're feeling down and out

Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love
Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love

I'm not talkin' 'bout retreatin' little girl
Gonna take our stand, in this Chevy van
Windows open on the rest of the world
Holdin' hands, all the way to Dixieland
We've been tryin' to turn our lives around
Since we were little kids, it's been wearin' us down
Don't turn away now Darlin' lets fire it up and wind it out

Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love
Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love

I heard your mama callin', I think she was just stallin'

Don't know who she was talkin' to, baby me and you
We could go down with a smile on, don't bother to pack your nylons
Just keep them pretty legs showin', it gets hot down where we're goin'
We were always looking for true north
With our heads in the clouds, just a little off course
I left the motor running, now if you're feeling down and outCome on baby drive, come on baby drive south, come on baby drive south

Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love
Come on Baby drive south, with the one you love

It's that kind of week

Made of win

Trust me, watch this.



Young miss Jordan was 8 years old when she performed this on Norske Talenter (what looks to be the Norwegian version of American Idol).  Wow.

(via)

Grumpy

That would be me.

Bah.

Your moment of Zen

Southport, N.C.  A lovely little town, although the property values are approaching the absurd.

Snowden helped, rather than hurt

Says former aide to Colin Powell:

The leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about US worldwide surveillance have helped rather than harmed America, and the leaks haven't endangered lives. 

Lawrence "Larry" Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the last Bush administration, said that he believed Snowden's assertions that he leaked out of concern for the US breaking both domestic and international law. 

"I think Snowden has done a service. I wouldn't have had the courage, and maybe not even the intellectual capacity, to do it the way he did it," he told Salon magazine.

Snowden told the truth and is on the run.  General Clapper perjured himself to Congress and has yet to be prosecuted.

Badass of the year

Russian Special Forces officer surrounded by ISIS calls in airstrike on himself.

Hat tip: Chris Lynch.

Jesus Christ Has Risen Today

Yes, I know I posted this on Easter before,  If you're lucky to go to a church with a superior choir and organist, this as a recessional will make the hair stand on end and let you know precisely what Easter is about.



If you're lucky.  The Lord is risen indeed.

Wounded, Not Broken

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for

--Paulo Coelho .

It's said that the longest journey that a man will ever take is the eighteen inches between his head and his heart.  Some don't survive that trip. Those left behind pick up the pieces as best they can, but things are never fully complete.  Pieces are lost.  We see the picture, and the gap, all at the same time.  Forever incomplete.

This road has a fork, a choice of two paths.  One leads to the dead end, the washed out bridge, the sudden crash that leaves you broken.  The other leads on, to whichever rendezvous with destiny is in our stars. This is the hard path. It is a path that we will travel scarred and wounded.

We are wounded because we loved that which is lost to us. We get up and continue the journey because we love that which remains.

The Deity has given us free will.  We always stand at that fork in the road, and He steps back to let us choose.  He forgives us when we turn away, looking at that hard road, after all, his Son did, too.

Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me ...

The story of the Cross is not the story of Jesus alone. When the suffering on Good Friday happened, there were others that took their own hard path and stayed. Mary his mother, Mary of Magdala, and John the Beloved. They stood and gave witness. They accepted the suffering when they could do nothing more, and as that most horrible slow death by torture happened, they grieved because they loved.

And the story of the Resurrection is not the story of Jesus alone. The first witnesses are Mary his mother, Mary of Magdala, and Joanna, women coming to the tomb in their grief with spices to properly anoint the body. They find the tomb empty.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?
 

It was unbelievable. A man returned from crucifixion. Resurrected. It is still unbelievable. Do we dare believe?

So, this Easter, I am wounded, not broken. We have all been given the gift of life and life is for the living. The story of Jesus is story of a life lived with courage and joy. It is not just Good Friday and the Cross. Life is new births, laughter, moments of joy, a lover's kiss. Life is resurrection. Life calls me to bind my wounds and live on with that same courage. To remember what was with nostalgia and to look forward to what is yet to come with hope.

This Easter day, may the Spirit fill you to overflowing, even to that part of you which may never again be whole.

He is risen. 

Alleluia.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
--Martin Luther

 

**Cowritten by Borepatch and ASM826

Seen at the Harley dealer

The riding class is using the new 500 cc model (I think this is the one built in India). It doesn't sound like any Harley I've ever heard, but neither does the V-Rod. Sounds like a Honda, in fact.




All tricked out for newbie riders who might drop it. The folks at this class were doing OK, though.

But this was my lucky day for shopping ...

Common Core math

It's awesome.

Seen at a church

Awesome.

Free trade considered harmful?

98% of Economists agree that free trade is beneficial for both countries in an exchange, and should be part of your healthy breakfast.  Eat more.  More, more, more.

The problem is Bastiat's "seen and unseen" problem.  It's easy to measure trade volumes, so that's what we do.  That's what the Economists look at, which is why they all tell us it's good for us.  They're right in that assessment, as far as it goes - what they see is beneficial.

But what about what they don't see?  Andy Grove dies this week, and the ex-Intel CEO had some very strong feelings about important things that are hard to measure.  The unseen:

The lesson Grove had learned at Intel was that success was all about scale. As soon as a country loses its high-tech manufacturing base, it forgets how to do many things, and loses its ability to scale in a new marketplace. The spoils go to those who retain a competitive manufacturing base. 

TVs were a good example, Grove wrote. Princeton economist Alan Blinder had written that the absence of TV production in the USA, as TVs became a low cost "commodity," was a good thing. 

"I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."

Smart developing nations have long ignored Ricardo's "Comparative Advantage" argument, for precisely this reason.  Alas for our corrupt political class.  They've sold our future to Wall Street for a mess of campaign contributions.

Rest in peace, Andy Grove.

Is it time to end the War On Drugs?

Experts say no.

Well, they're experts, right?

(via)

Jim Hall - Good Friday Blues

More like jazz than blues, but perhaps that leads to the introspection fitting the occasion.

Hackers take over city water purification system

Change the settings on how the water is treated:

A group of hackers, previously involved in various hacktivism campaigns, have accidentally made their way into an ICS/SCADA system installed at a water treatment facility and have altered crucial settings that controlled the amount of chemicals used to treat tap water.

This strange hacking incident is described in Verizon's 2016 Data Breach Digest (page 38, Scenario 8), a collection of case studies that the company's RISK team was brought in to investigate.

The victim of the hack is a company that Verizon identified under the generic name of Kemuri Water Company (KWC). As the RISK team explains, the company noticed that, for a couple of weeks, its water treatment center was behaving erratically, with chemical values being modified out of the blue.

Suspecting something was wrong - and something that its IT staff wasn't able to spot - the company brought in Verizon's RISK team to investigate.

KWC was exposing its internal network to the Internet

Good idea, Scooter.  Stalin would have had you shot.

The fall of Rome and a lesson for our times

From Victor Davis Hanson:

And I’ll conclude with a spoiler from his finish because I think it’s so profound. Describing the fall of Rome to a band of thugs after a much smaller Roman Republic had defeated much larger and more dangerous threats:

“Fast forward to the 5th century AD, is this the Roman Republic, 1/4 of Italy? No. It now encompasses 70 million people, from Mesopotamia in the East to the Atlantic ocean in the West, to above Hadrian’s Wall in the North to the Sahara Desert in the South, one million square miles. And they’re attacked, not by a formidable power, the inheritor of classical military science like Hannibal, but a thug like Atilla with some Huns and Visigoths and Vandals. By any measure, the threat was nothing compared to the threat that Romans faced when it was much, much smaller. But why in the world could they not defend themselves….?

The answer is…in 216 BC a Roman knew what it was to be a Roman. And they were under no illusions that they had to be perfect to be good. All they believed was they had an illustrious tradition that was better than alternative and could be better even more…In 450 AD I don’t think the average person who lived under the Roman Empire…knew what it was to be a Roman citizen, he did not believe that it was any better than the alternative. And when that happens in history, history is cruel, it gives nobody a pass. If you cease to believe that your country’s exceptional and has a noble tradition, and it is good without without being perfect, and it’s better than the alternative – If you cease to believe that! – there’s no reason for you to continue, and history says you won’t. And you don’t.”

Can we learn and change course? Or are we doomed to travel that road once more?

It's a long but excellent talk at the link, full of insight.

I-95: the Spring Break highway

Literally:

MELBOURNE, Fla. - A crash involving two tractor-trailers hauling beer and chips overturned on Interstate 95 in Brevard County, spilling the snacks all over the roadway and blocking lanes for hours on Wednesday morning.

The crash was reported at milemarker 187 in Pineda Causeway just after 3:30 a.m.

Florida Highway Patrol said the tractor-trailer carrying Busch beer was driving southbound on I-95 when the driver attempted to move into center lane and swerved to avoid another vehicle.

The front of the Busch beer truck then struck the Frito-Lay truck, prompting the Frito-Lay truck to overturn and spill beer and chips onto the roadway, according to FHP.

No mention as to whether a salsa truck was in the area.

Hat tip: Rick, via email.

Yikes!

Best money that guy ever spent.

Let's play the Intellectual Consistency game!

Heh:

Double heh:

More here.  Of course, we all have our own inconsistencies.  Mr. Emerson's excellent advice is what I like to fall back on.

(via)

Your Apple everything is vulnerable

Patches for Macs, iPhones, tablets, TVs, the whole shebang:

Updated Apple has today emitted security updates for pretty much everything it makes, and you should install them as soon as you can because it's all bad news. 

iPhones, iPads and iPods should grab iOS 9.3, Macs should fetch OS X 10.11.4 or Security Update 2016-002 for non-El Capitan Macs, Apple Watches should get watchOS 2.2, and Apple TVs should install tvOS 9.2. Your hardware should eventually offer the updates to you automatically, or you can follow these instructions to get going right away.

The details are pretty boring to anyone who isn't a security geek like me, but these are pretty serious.  Let's get patching.

UPDATE 25 March 2016 09:27: If you have an iPad, DO NOT update it with this patch.  It seems that the patch has been bricking iPads left and right.  Apple says it's working on a fix.

The day after St. Patrick's Day

Maybe painting lines on the road is not such a good idea ...

The Trump Insurgency

Interesting:

What's most surprising to many pundits and analysts is that Trump has done this without presenting all of the detail plans, voluminous position papers, etc. that we've come to expect over the last couple of decades.

He has simply refused to play by those rules, and he's not paid a price for it.

Trump is able to pull this off because he's not running a political campaign.  Instead, he's running an insurgency. 

Not only that, it's a very specific type of insurgency.    ...

This means he is playing by very different rules than his competitors.  Let me walk you through an example of what I mean by that. 

RTWT, which is pretty darn interesting.

Which side goes on the left?

Dang it.

A digital Berlin Wall

18 months ago when the secure email service Lavabit shut down rather than give up its encryption keys to The Man, I wrote about how this is a long term disaster to the US Intelligence services:

The NSA has shot itself in the foot.  Not only have many people in the security community refused to cooperate with them anymore, some very smart folks have chosen to actively try to make NSA's life more difficult.

Me, I don't expect that NSA can possibly reform itself, and likely it will double down on its counter productive domestic snooping.  That will keep pouring gasoline on this fire, leading to even less cooperation and even more active monkey wrenching.

And now to current news: Apple's software engineers don't want to work with the FBI:

Apple's refusal to build a crippled iOS that will help the FBI unlock a killer's iPhone goes far beyond the executive suite. Some of Cupertino's own engineers are refusing to work on the operating system in case they are forced to aid the US government. 

Register sources familiar with the matter told us that, since the start of the iGiant legal showdown with the Feds in early February, Apple developers have been reluctant to work on certain iOS projects and engineering assignments for fear of being summoned by the FBI and forced to break their own product under legal duress. 

The opposition to the FBI's demand runs so deep that some Apple engineers have even threatened to walk away from the company: The New York Times cited "current and former" employees who said members of Apple's engineering teams are prepared to quit if they are ordered to weaken iOS's security mechanisms.

It is hard to overstate just how deeply people in the security industry feel this.  There's a real pride in being the Good Guys, in fighting the Good Fight, in making the World a Better Place.  The FBI is insisting that they violate that.

Things are getting quite interesting here.  Apple is in a real jam - if their very best security developers simply refuse to break the iPhone's security (which is exactly what is being asked), then if Apple cooperates they will be forced to rely on the second (or third) string engineers.  The chances that some horrible security bug gets inadvertently added to the code goes way, way up.  If the bug is bad enough, Apple could lose market share.

Given that the FBI can get everything they need from either the telephone companies (emails, chat messages, the iCloud backup, call records) or the NSA (who everyone thinks can break the phone anyway), Apple deserves to lose market share if they don't fight this all the way to the Supreme Court.

One thing to watch for: if Apple is serious, expect them to announce that they are considering relocating the company to a different country.  They have a ton of cash in overseas banks anyway (because of the idiotic corporate tax rates), so this seemingly wouldn't be difficult.

At that point about all the FBI could do is erect a digital Berlin Wall to keep people from leaving.

Crony got to crony

How bad is the Trans Pacific Partnership - the monster trade deal negotiated in secret?  You could imagine, but you'd under estimate it:

Part of the trouble with the TPP is the remarkable lack of balance within the intellectual property chapter. For example, early drafts of the agreement that featured provisions emphasizing balance and the public domain were opposed by the U.S. and ultimately removed. The lack of balance is also evident in how new rights are treated as mandatory requirements, but user-focused provisions are typically just optional.

Of course.  Users haven't dropped boatloads of cash into the pockets of politicians.  Copyright owners have.

... extension of criminal penalties for rights management information violations,

Because it's too costly to sue people who infringe, and so instead they should be jailed.  Because campaign contributions, or something.

 Criminalization of trade secret law runs counter the established approach in most TPP countries and is the direct result of U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbying efforts.

Because campaign contributions.

This is precisely what you would expect to come out of a smoke filled room.  To look at this is to entirely understand the Trump phenomenon.

Happy Spring

With its obligatory theme song.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: - The Lark Ascending

Today is World Sparrow Day.  Really.  It's to raise awareness of the house sparrow.

Really.

It seems that this awareness raising is needed, because there doesn't seem to be any classical music glorifying the sparrow.  Larks, sure:



Poor sparrow.  Do what you can to help.

Sunday, Puppy Sunday

Wolfgang keeps a watchful eye out.

Luke Bryan - Rain Is A Good Thing

It's spring at Castle Borepatch.  Sadly, rather than 75° and motorcycles, it's a cold rain.  Oh bother.

But this is a sign of things to come, and there's a Country music song to remind us of that.  It hit #1 in 2009.



Rain Is A Good Thing (Songwriters: Luke Bryan,  Dallas Davidson)

My daddy spent his life lookin' up at the sky
He'd cuss, kick the dust, sayin' son it's way too dry
It clouds up in the city, the weather man complains
But where I come from, rain is a good thing

Rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey
Whiskey makes my baby feel a little frisky
Back roads are boggin' up, my buddies pile up in my truck
We hunt our honeys down, we take 'em into town
Start washin' all our worries down the drain
Rain is a good thing

Ain't nothin' like a kiss out back in the barn
Wringin' out our soakin' clothes, ridin' out a thunderstorm
When tin roof gets to talkin'; that's the best love we made
Yea where I come from, rain is a good thing

Farmer Johnson does a little dance
Creeks on the rise, roll up your pants
Country girls, they wanna cuddle
Kids out playin' in a big mud puddle

Rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey
Whiskey makes my baby feel a little frisky
Back roads are boggin' up, my buddies pile up in my truck
We hunt our honeys down, we take 'em into town
Start washin' all our worries down the drain
Rain is a good thing 

Rain is a good thing, rain is a good thing, rain is a good thing

80% of life is this

Why security is hard, redux

Le sigh:

The [Home Depot] was accused of having ignored warnings from its security staff that its anti-virus software had not been updated for over seven years, and it was discovered that ineffective password security had allowed hackers to plant information-stealing malware on sales terminals.

From the agreement in the class action suit against the company.  They'll pay around $20M, almost half of which will go to the lawyers.

Damn, I picked the wrong field.

Why security is hard

It's done by people:

In documents published earlier today, hundreds of pages of previously sealed material related to the Feds' battle with Lavabit were made available. It was immediately noticeable that there were huge swathes of redactions, most of them covering the email address and details of the individual the agents were specifically looking for and why.

It has long been rumored or assumed, though never officially confirmed, that it was Snowden's account that was under scrutiny, particularly given the timing of the case: the documents were filed against Lavabit soon after Snowden said he was the source of the NSA PRISM leaks.

But no one has ever been willing to confirm it, and the huge redactions in the documents made it clear that the FBI was determined to keep up the pretense.

Except...

They missed a single reference. One of the first things we did on downloading the 560‑pages [PDF] was run a search on the word "Snowden" and lo and behold – on page 79, while noting that the entire record was under seal, up pops the email address "Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com."

I'm actually not laughing at the screw up, and you shouldn't, either.  This shows how security goes wrong for people who know better.  Consider:

The FBI is strongly motivated to keep as much of their investigation under wraps.  They're out to get Snowden, one way or another.

They have the expertise to do the job.  Hundreds of references were properly redacted.

Their reputation has been damaged by this - many people's first (and likely last) impression of them will be "screwups".  This is yet another motivation to spend the time to do it right.

And they didn't.  Even with all this motivation and capability, they didn't.  And quite frankly, this sort of thing is inevitable, which is why secrets leak even in wartime.  OPSEC is hard because it has to be 100%, and perfection is only to be found in the next world, not this one.

And so I find myself somewhat sympathetic to the hapless G-Man who did this.  I'm not sympathetic to this, though:

In the case, federal investigators insisted on being given the private keys and source code to the Lavabit encryption engine so that they could access and read all emails without the individuals in question being aware of their actions.

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison fought and lost the order, was found in contempt, and told to pay a fine of $5,000 per day until he handed over the private keys. Two days later he did so and then promptly and publicly shut the entire service down.

Levison later claimed that the Feds changed tactic after that and ordered other email providers to both hand over their keys and keep services running so they were able to snoop on people's communications.

It was a good run for the Republic, but the Praetorians will brook no defiance.

A German Shepherd lession in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape

Keep the faith, Luna:

Fishermen like to tell stories, but Nick Haworth will have a whopper of a tale.


The California man’s beloved dog, Luna, has returned more than a month after she fell overboard in the Pacific Ocean and was presumed drowned.

But fate was on her side, as was her will to live.

She was presumed lost at sea. Until Tuesday morning, that is, when staff arriving for work at the island’s Naval Auxiliary Landing Field spotted something unusual – a dog sitting by the side of the road. Domestic animals aren’t allowed on the island for environmental reasons.

It was Luna.

“She was just sitting there wagging her tail,” DeMunnik said. The staff called to Luna, and she came right over.

Wolfgang says, "Ooh rah!".  And well done to the swabbies.  RTWT, which is the best thing you'll have read all week.  Or we can't be friends anymore.

Heh

I used to watch a couple of his cooking shows, and thought he had some good recipes.  But his personality was a little (*ahem*) rich and I knew a number of people who just couldn't get past that.

Antivirus for your car

OK, that title isn't actually correct, but hey - it got you reading this, right?  Long time readers remember that one of my pet peeves is computerized cars.  As I often rant, security wasn't an after thought - it wasn't thought of at all.

Well, that may be changing:

IBM is developing a security stack for connected cars as part of a wider strategy to secure vehicles against a growing range of hacking attacks.

Some describe modern cars as computers on wheels but for Martin Borrett, CTO IBM Security Europe the range of communication options (Bluetooth, 3G) and range of embedded computing technologies is turning vehicles into “small data centre on wheels”.

That's an interesting way to look at it - actually a technologically mature way to look at it.  After all, while networked computers are brand spanking new in cars, we've been dealing with security for networked computers since the 1980s.

Designing a secure vehicle needs to happen alongside creating a trusted supply chain, hardening a vehicle and creating a trusted maintenance ecosystem.

Hells yeah.  It's refreshing to hear someone talking like this.

Multiple integrated levels of protection are needed. IBM's vehicle security stack features secure identities, secure data storage, secure access, secure communication, intrusion detection and protection, security intelligence and security of operations and execution.

A cynic would say that IBM has these security technologies, so "of course a connected car needs them.  That skates by the fact that the system and ecosystems of the connected car/truck do need the same sort of protections that networked computers need.  IBM has pretty decent technology and system here, and they cover a lot of bases.  One of their selling points historically has been that they can integrate  lot of different things into a solution, and this would be pretty important to a car manufacturer, I'd think.

Disclosure: I know some of the folks at IBM's security division, because I used to work with them in one of my startup days.  They're pretty smart, and IBM is pretty serious about this field.

A recent presentation by Borrett on the security of connected cars, delivered at the mobile and cloud conference InterConnect 2016 in Las Vegas last month, can be found here. The talk was entitled Code is my co-pilot: Security & privacy in connected vehicles.

Cute.

Will this be a panacea?  Of course not.  Would I want one of these if I had a "connected car"?  Hells yeah.

Irony, sweet irony

The Linux operating system has been dominant for servers for years and years because it's fast, stable, secure, and free.  It formed the core of the Android operating system and so it's all over the place now - fast, stable, secure, and free are winners in the mass market as well.  The fact that you could keep around old server hardware that was too under powered to run the latest Microsoft server software, and the old nag would still be useful meant even more savings.

But it was always a niche OS for desktops, pretty much only used by nerds like me (confession: I've used a Linux desktop since 1994, and the 0.99 kernel).  The issue hasn't been with the Internet "killer apps" - email and web browsing.  These work great.  It's not even that the office apps (OpenOffice and the newer/better LibreOffice) don't work.  Microsoft keeps changing the data format of the data files in their Office suite to keep out the competition, but the Linux apps provide 95% of the functions.

But Linux has something like 1% of the desktop market.  It seems that fast, stable, secure, and free just isn't enough when there's one killer app that has really not been supported well: gaming.

Linux has always been pretty bad here.  It's been a chicken-and-the-egg problem: the graphics board companies haven't invested in Linux device drivers because the market was too small, and hard core gamers wouldn't install Linux because they couldn't use their uber graphics hardware (for that extra frisson of excitement during the post-explosion splatter).  Game over, dude.

Except nasso fast:

Making the rounds on the Internet today is a rumor that NVIDIA Corp is allegedly working on their own Linux distribution.

Generating interest on Reddit and elsewhere is that NVIDIA is supposedly developing their own Linux distribution / operating system. This Linux OS would supposedly be suited for gamers.

The premise isn't really different from Valve's OS and the only "proof" is an alleged screen capture of an installer screen for this operating system supposedly going by the "NLINUX" codename at NVIDIA.

Sure, this is a rumor, but SteamOS is built on Linux, and Steam is pretty quickly becoming the gaming platform of choice.  nVidia is ging to have to support Linux drivers anyway, and so this is actually plausible.

Sure, if we're doing chicken metaphors we should remember not to count this until it hatches.  But the irony of Linux coming to the desktop to support Power Gamers is pretty rich.

Sunshine and kittens

Been a bit resigned over the political silly season, and so here's cute kitten stuff to lighten the mood.  Wait, what?

Many political pundits wrote off Donald Trump's presidential ambitions after he killed rival Jeb Bush's pet kitten on live television Saturday.

But a new poll released today shows that the eccentric billionaire now leads the GOP field by an even greater margin than before.

Dang it.

I'm not sure I trust that Donald Trump fellow

He has a particular way of talking that avoids the issue.



I guess I better get used to it - if the Establishment doesn't have him assassinated, he's going to be the next President.

Retro duneon gaming

The Embedded Theologian finds a site with dozens (hundreds) of first person dungeon games from the 80's.  I lost a lot of time on Bard's Tale, back in the day.

I don't think that this will appear on menus soon

No thanks, I think I'll just have a burger:

With a name like assfish, you're probably used to being the butt of jokes, not a top news item.

After seeing a number of stories pop up about a funky little fish newly displayed at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Weird Animal Question of the Week decided to take the author’s prerogative to ask “What in the world is a bony-eared assfish?”

Well, then.

(via)

Major web sites serving up malware via ads

Big sites, probably you visit some:

Top-flight US online publishers are serving up adverts that attempt to install ransomware and other malware on victims' PCs.

Websites visited by millions of people daily – msn.com, nytimes.com, aol.com, nfl.com, theweathernetwork.com, thehill.com, zerohedge.com and more – are accidentally pushing out booby-trapped adverts via ad networks, warn infosec researchers.

These are served up via flash, which gives you some options to protect yourself:

Patching regularly, uninstalling Silverlight or setting plugins such as Flash to click-to-play, will defend against attacks from dodgy banner adverts.

All good advice.  Windows Update should be set to automatic*, Silverlight is not needed anywhere that I've seen and can be uninstalled, and using Flashblock or setting your browser to click-to-play are all excellent suggestions.

* Careful about the Windows 10 upgrade pester offer.  Read the popup carefully - the opt out is way at the end.  Tricksey hobbitses ....

Cthulhu 2016

OK, here's a candidate I might be able to get behind.

The web site is an absolute hoot - it has that "real candidate" smell to it - you know, the one that comes in a can with the K Street Lobbyist.  And there's a platform that I can whole heartedly endorse:

There is no special interest or issue too small for Cthulhu to fix. If puppies are being abused, Cthulhu will ensure puppy abusers will meet their end. If vegans are protesting your rendered meat product, vegans will become rendered meat product.

Mmmmm, vegans!

And like another front running candidate, he had a Reality Show, too:

The Art Of Noise - Paranoimia

The '80s was a great decade for music.

Well that's your problem right there

Former counter-terrorism chief: Apple is right to resist the FBI

You might agree with this; I couldn't possibly comment:

A former counter-terrorism chief has laid into the Feds over its ongoing Apple iPhone battle – saying FBI director Jim Comey is exaggerating the need for access and that if agents really wanted into the phone, they would just send it to the NSA.

Richard Clarke was national security advisor and head of counter-terrorism to presidents Clinton and Bush. Speaking to National Public Radio (NPR) on Monday, he was blunt about what he feels is the FBI's goal.

"[The FBI] is not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent," Clarke said. "Every expert I know believes the NSA could crack this phone. They want the precedent that government could compel a device manufacturer to let the government in."

Tagged with "Government power grab" because, well, you know.

Donald Trump: trolling the left, Alinsky style?

Hmmmm:

By choosing to hold a rally at UIC, Trump knew that he could get his enemy to demonstrate who they are and what tactics they prefer. It does not make him responsible for what they chose to do. And what he ultimately chose to do was prevent violence, not promote it.

Trump was pushing a negative so hard it became a positive and allowed him to ridicule his opposition. BLM, OWS and SJWs are being turned into the Bull Connor of the 21st century by their own actions. Trump is just giving them the opportunity to reveal themselves. Then he makes them live by their own rules. On Hardball:

MATTHEWS: When you set up rally in Chicago where it’s mostly Hispanic and blacks, you knew there would be a lot of people that have the time to come out and protest your situation. It was no surprise here, was there in what happened? Given the venue of your event, TRUMP: It shouldn’t matter. You’re the first one to say it. It shouldn’t matter whether it was whoever lives in the city. It shouldn’t make a difference. Whether it’s white, black, Hispanic, it shouldn’t matter.
MATTHEWS: They don’t like what you’re saying. They don’t like what you’re saying.
TRUMP: We shouldn’t be restricted from having rally here because of ethnic make up or anything like that. I’m somebody that feels strongly it shouldn’t make any difference. You usually feel that too. I’m surprised you’re bringing this up because it shouldn’t matter,

Do you believe those were spontaneous responses?

Like I said, hmmm.  Trump has been a master of communicating on an emotional level with voters (for better or worse).  The Establishment has been oscillating between the egghead cerebral and the hysterical name calling.

This could be battlefield preparation in action.  I guess we'll see.

I have no idea whether the coming Trump Administration will be good for the Republic or not, but it's starting to look inevitable.  Still, there's a craftsmanship to his campaign that is not just impressive, but sometimes fun to watch.  Epic troll is epic.

So would the establishment assassinate Donald Trump?

I find that idea hard to believe, although they sure seem to hate his guts.  However, after the riot shutting down his Chicago rally, we will have to see how things develop.  Things have a way of getting out of hand when you think of the mob.



That said, so I think that many in the establishment would be sorry if this came to pass?  No.

The question is, during an election where the establishment is held in contempt by many of the voters, how would the country react?

R.I.P. Keith Emerson

A fanfare for a most uncommon man to sing the to thy rest.