Wow to prevent your computer from upgrading to Windows 10

From a thread at Slashdot:

Import this into your registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx]
"DisableGwx"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
"DisableOSUpgrade"=dword:00000001

I've done this on 4 or 5 machines at work that we have to keep on 7 and any sign of Windows 10 has completely vanished.

I haven't done this because I run Linux but there you go.

Hitler was wrong about Donald Trump

Politicians

Be careful when you sign up for an online shopping account

The user agreement may say that they're going to charge you every month to "join" their club:

A first-time visitor to Adore Me’s website can peruse bras, undies, and pajamas, just like any other online retailer, and no subscription is required to make a purchase. But the startup says nearly all of its sales come through its VIP Membership. These subscribers get access to discounted underwear—and they are billed at least $39.95 every month for store credit, even if no purchase is made. Want to avoid the charge? You must act during the first five days of the month.  

The specifics of the membership model were unclear to Taylor when she opted for what appeared to be a fabulous introductory discount on her first purchase. “‘Free’ was blasted everywhere on their website,” she says. “I felt really misled.” (Adore Me has made adjustments to its membership model and says customer complaints have been falling.) 

Once freed from the hold music, Taylor got the bad news: Adore Me would refund her the current monthly membership charge and provide store credit for two past months; the rest of the billings, totaling nearly $240, would be lost forever under a use-it-or-lose-it policy that has since been rescinded. No, she couldn’t speak to a manager.

The End User License Agreement (EULA) - you know, that thing that you click "I agree" without reading - is a mystical, magical place.  There be dragons.

You should read it.  Srlsy.

Oh, blast it all

It looks like I wasn't the first to say Trumpy McTrumpyface.

OK, then. How about President Trumpy McTrumpyface?

Murphy's Law, Babylonian edition

Everything you know about Ty Cobb is wrong

It seems that he was a nice guy.  Man, did he get bad press.  The article explains why.

Hat tip: Chris Lynch.

Be careful using an ATM

"Skimming" devices can steal your account information and PIN:

In a series of recent alerts, the FICO Card Alert Service warned of large and sudden spikes in ATM skimming attacks. On April 8, FICO noted that its fraud-tracking service recorded a 546 percent increase in ATM skimming attacks from 2014 to 2015.

“The number of ATM compromises in 2015 was the highest ever recorded by the FICO Card Alert Service, which monitors hundreds of thousands of ATMs in the US,” the company said. “Criminal activity was highest at non-bank ATMs, such as those in convenience stores, where 10 times as many machines were compromised as in 2014.”

A skimmer is a tiny device that thieves insert into the card reader.  It captures the information off of your ATM card before passing it to the actually ATM hardware.  A hidden video camera records your PIN.  The thieves then make a new card and empty your bank account.

The biggest risk is at non-bank ATM machines:

Some financial institutions are taking dramatic steps to head off skimming activity. Trailhead Credit Union in Portland, Ore., for example, has posted a notice to customers atop its Web site, stating:

“ALERT: Until further notice, we have turned off ATM capabilities at all 7-11 ATMs due to recent fraudulent activity. Please use our ATM locator for other locations. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

My recommendation is to get your cash at your bank's ATM.  If you want to be extra secure, use the ATM in their lobby - it is very difficult for someone to install a skimmer there because of the surveillance.

Boy, Hillary sure hates free speech, doesn't she?

At least if someone says something she doesn't like.

Say what you will about The Donald, he doesn't care what you say about him.  Or can stick up for himself, which may be saying the same thing.

Shamelessly stolen from Chris Lynch, who you do read every day.  Right?

Who knew that dieting was so easy?

Remember, you can do it!

"Climate Change" is boring

Word:

I find the climate debate increasingly boring.  I don't think the arguments going on today are really much different than those that were going on five years ago.

Some of all y'all still email me the latest stupidity du jour on the whole debate, but I just haven't been feeling it for two or three years.  It's all been said, and said again, and again.  Nobody (on the left) is actually listening, and nobody actually cares about the actual, you know, science.

And so I don't post much about it.  I've kind of said what I want to say.

But Coyote has been doing a great series on the actual science.  What looks to be the last of the post (with links to the others) is here.  If you want to be in the know, bookmark that link.

Trumpy McTrumpyface

Someone had to say it ...

I'm also just following along at home for amusement: the whole thing looks like the optimates vs. the populares, not the Founding Fathers.  I will likely vote because the Queen Of The World is more filled with civic spirit than I, but it may be another vote for Gary ("Who?") Johnson.  It would be kind of cool if John McAfee became the Libertarian Party candidate - we could use a platform of hookers and cocaine.

But looking at the yelling about The Donald, I'm struck by his support from the working class.  The best I can figure is that while he's a rich guy, he's the only one who's pushing Poor People's Leftism.  That link is worth a read.

Note to self

Be more careful when introducing different food to Wolfgang.  Explosive diarrhea every 2 hours for a day makes for an exciting day (and night).

Dear self: don't do that again.

Off to the vet.

Why is there so much credit card fraud, part 2

Stores can't upgrade to newer, safer equipment because it hasn't been certified.  The banks own the certification companies, and there's no incentive to hurry certification because the stores are (since October 2015) 100% liable for all fraud.

Avi Kaner, a co-owner of the Morton Williams supermarket chain in New York, has spent about $700,000 to update the payment terminals at his stores.

Trouble is, he cannot turn them on.

The new terminals can accept credit and debit cards with embedded digital chips, a security feature intended to reduce the number of fraudulent purchases.

But before the payment systems can work, they must be certified, a process that Mr. Kaner and many retailers around the country are waiting to happen. In the case of Morton Williams, the holdup has lasted several months.

The cost of waiting, retailers say, is piling up.

And so the stores are suing:

Payment processors “don’t have any incentive to hurry the certification along,” said Patrick J. Coughlin, a lawyer for retailers in a recent lawsuit that accuses the major card networks of deliberately creating impossible requirements for merchants. “They’re not the ones paying the fraud charges.”

The whole thing is a mess.

Why is there so much credit card fraud?

Because implementing the new security technologies can cost a lot more than the fraud loss.  From the comments at Brian Kreb's blog:

I can tell you first hand why so many retailers haven’t implemented EMV: cost. We did the analysis, and our fraud per year number is way below the implementation costs – and I mean WAY below. So our position has been not to spend the money to implement EMV, and eat the fraud costs because of it, as that is a much smaller number. For other retailers that is going to be a different cost benefit analysis, but if you don’t sell reloadable gift cards (or implement a policy like this one to not allow buying with a CC), and you don’t sell high dollar items that are easy to flip for cash, it isn’t worth the cost.

The implementation costs for EMV, much like E2E encryption, are ridiculous. You have a recurring licensing fee from the manufacturer of the PIN pad devices for each device, and that is IF you already have hardware to support EMV, which for many retailers isn’t the case. Or you have older hardware that does support EMV, but the hardware is already maxed out and you would have to remove 1 feature from the hardware just to accommodate EMV. If a retailer has to replace the hardware, you are talking about anywhere from $200-$1000 per lane per store in hardware alone, not counting the costs to send out someone to replace them all. Even if you have all the hardware in-place, and can eat the EMV feature license cost, you still have to spend the money with your POS integration partner to do all the POS software work to even handle EMV, since the transaction occurs in a different way, and completely different data is sent to and from the POS. As is the case anytime you are working with a vendor on software customization, the integration costs are nothing to sneeze at.

If you think not in terms of security, but rather in terms of managing risk, this makes perfect sense.  It doesn't make sense to pay $100 to stop $20 of fraud.  Now what this particular store does is different than what other stores do, but this is the right way to look at the problem.

Apparently, you can't fix that with Duct Tape

The public wants privacy

How do we know?  Congress knows:

In a rare display of bipartisanship the US House of Representatives has passed the Email Privacy Act(EPA) in a 419-0 vote. 

The legislation updates the antiquated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and closes an important privacy loophole. Under ECPA the police could examine any email that had been read or that was more than 180 days old with only a subpoena, whereas under the EPA they would need a warrant obtained from a judge.

Is this a fig leaf?  Probably.  Will this change much?  Unlikely.

But Congress knows that people are unhappy with police snooping.  They know it to the degree that not a single vote was cast against this.

What hath NSA wrought ...

I could go with this

They should put Prince on the 20 dollar bill and call it $19.99. It will be the bill formerly known as twenty. pic.twitter.com/8deZSGnu8e

— John Dee (@brokencountry1) April 24, 2016

(via)

Lego wars

Get ready to rumble!

A Lego-mad fisherman spent three years building the world's biggest model of a US warship - only to find an American rival had beaten him by inches. Jim McDonough painstakingly built a 24ft scale model of the 890ft USS Missouri with thousands of toy bricks in Redford, near Arbroath in Angus. When he embarked on the model in his garage three years ago, his research told him it was going to be the biggest Lego ship in the world. 

Here's a picture of Our Hero with his creation:

Alas, it was not to be:

But it seems his effort was in vain - after he was been pipped at the post by Minneapolis-based enthusiast Dan Siskind, whose creation is 25.5ft long.

Mr Siskind used more than one million Lego bricks to recreate the 1:35 scale of the USS Missouri.

Here's the undisputed world champion Lego battleship:

Pretty cool, in a scary sort of way.

Unhappy spy chief is unhappy

Awww:

THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE on Monday blamed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the development of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption.

“As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” James Clapper said during a breakfast for journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

I've been saying for quite some time that the grotesquely promiscuous spying by the Intelligence Community - spying aimed at the innocent civilian population - is having a big, negative impact on the commercial Internet security industry.

And why hasn't General Clapper been imprisoned for perjury to Congress?

The NSA has really messed this up, and that toothpaste isn't going back into the tube.

Thanks, just water for me ...

Your team's odds of winning the World Series

Interesting on-going analysis at 538.com.  They update it after each game.

The Braves look awful, but you don't need 50,000 simulations to tell you that.  The Red Sox look better than I would give them - their starting rotation has a bunch of question marks.

Update of the Queen Of The World

The crazy strong antibiotics seem to be doing some good, although the pneumonia will take some time to kick.  She wanted me to thank all y'all that left best wishes.

Bloat

It is said that code will expand to fill the available memory.  It looks like it will also expand to fill the available network bandwidth:

The average web page is now roughly the same size as the full install image for the classic DOS game Doom, apparently. 

This is according to Ronan Cremin, a lead engineer with Afilias Technologies and dotMobi's representative for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). 

Cremin points to data from the HTTP Archive showing that, at 2.3MB, the average page is now the same size as the original DOS install of the id Software mega-hit.

I remember back in the '80s, working on a minicomputer that had a real-time OS.  The biggest you could gen the kernel was 64KB.  Punks these days don't no programming ...

About the lack of posting

The Queen of the World has pneumonia.

500 years of beer

Signed into law on this day.

Happy birthday to Her Magesty Queen Elizabeth

90 years old today. And I believe the longeat reigning sovereign in British history.

FBI leader: We don't know how to hack phones

This explains a lot, really:

A high ranking technology official with the FBI told members of Congress Tuesday that the agency is incapable of cracking locked phones and devices on its own, even with additional resources.

...

Several lawmakers, including Rep. Diana DeGette, invoked the San Bernardino episode, and asked why the FBI could not improve it’s own expertise in cracking encrypted devices. If it were to do that, she argued, the agency would no longer need to challenge technology companies, like Apple, in court or purchase hacks from outside parties.

Hess countered that the types of one-off exploits needed to crack encrypted devices may require resources unavailable to the FBI. “Those solutions may be time intensive, they may not eventually be effective, they may require an additional amount of resources, or an additional amount of skill, in order to get to those solutions,” she said.

I'm not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed that the Federales are not competent to do investigative work.

The healing power of music

Bob over at The Drawn Cutlass has an amazing musical find.  Go listen to the music but make sure to click through to the story.

Wow.

4/20 Day

It seems that the stoners celebrate this day, for some reason.  That's not my poison of choice, but this is:

Sweetwater 420 IPA.  An Atlanta beer, it looks like they're getting serious distribution.  I can get it up here in Yankeeland, even.

Windows users: uninstall Quicktime

Big security holes will never be patched:

Microsoft Windows users who still have Apple Quicktime installed should ditch the program now that Apple has stopped shipping security updates for it, warns the Department of Homeland Security‘s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). The advice came just as researchers are reporting two new critical security holes in Quicktime that likely won’t be patched. 

“According to Trend Micro, Apple will no longer be providing security updates for QuickTime for Windows, leaving this software vulnerable to exploitation,” US-CERT wrote.

Apple has an Uninstall Quicktime page for your convenience.

Big Science is broken

Reproducibility failures everywhere, incentive structure stifles new theories challenging establishment ones, peer-review basically provides no value.  It's all here.

I'd like to see Big Science dethroned from its current perch as a modern day religion, but there are too many political groups invested in it for that to happen.

Last Midway dive bomber pilot turns 100

Nice story.  And this cracked me up:

After the war, his family used to take him on roller coasters but he fell asleep on them, finding them boring after diving down on Japanese carriers from 20,000 feet.

Hat tip: Chris Lynchm.

The sign making department has a sense of humor

About that 60 Minutes iPhone hack

While it might have made for good TV, it's not a common threat scenario:

America's flagship news program 60 Minutes has demonstrated how to "hack" a US congressman's smartphone. One little thing to bear in mind about this incredible scoop: the vulnerability has been in circulation since 2014 ... and it requires high-level access to global phone networks.   

John Marinho, vice president of cybersecurity and technology at cell network group the CTIA, said: "While we are aware of the research hackers’ manipulation to exploit SS7 technology in the international wireless networks, it’s important to note that they were given extraordinary access to a German operator’s network. 

"That is the equivalent of giving a thief the keys to your house; that is not representative of how US wireless operators secure and protect their networks". 

So, is this possible?  Yes - and not just for iPhones (Android is also vulnerable).  Is it likely?  Not a bit.  You either need the connivance of the carrier or the carrier's network has to be really badly pwned by the Black Hats.  In either of these cases it's not at all clear how secure your phone would be.

Voters of the World, Unite!

Seems the Sanders campaign isn't very happy about this:

If you want to know why Democrat leaders and party officials are scared to deathski about Bernie Sanders at the top of the ticket in November, take a look at the Featured Image, the graphic on a T-Shirt sold by Liberty Maniacs. 

Bernie is doing well in head-to-head polling against Republicans because Republicans, including yours truly, have laid low in going after Bernie. Hillary, meanwhile, is too afraid of the progressive base of the Democrat Party to lower the hammer-and-sickle on Bernie’s head through negative advertising. 

Buzzfeed reports that Team Bernie is not happy with the T-Shirt and related merchandise:

An online merchant has accused the Bernie Sanders campaign of “trademark bullying” after a Bernie 2016, Inc. attorney sent him a cease and desist letter regarding T-shirts, mugs, and sweatshirts depicting the candidate with historic communist leaders.

No word on whether Leninaide was the official soft drink of the Sanders campaign.

"Solar Flare". Riiiight.

Swedish Air Traffic Control administration says that it wasn't a Russian hack that took down their system.  It was a "Solar Flre".

Riiiiight.

Not in Germany anymore

Five year olds learning baseball. They're good at the "kick dirt" part.

Detroit Airport stinks

Long line at passport control. They're obviously not set up for this. Lobg line at customs - it was manned with a skeleton crew.

And then you have yo go back through TSA screening. What a stupid airport.

Auf wiedersehen, Deutscheland

I'm at Flughaven Frankfurt spending my euros on breakfast. It's always a good flight when you're going home.

And I probably won't show this picture to #2 Son. The drinking age here is 16. The kid on the far right looks to be about that old.

A look into the climate databases

Coyote Blog continues his excellent series about climate change/global warming, this time talking about the databases of historical temperature.  This is something that long term readers will recall is my biggest beef with the "establishment" science.  Coyote does a great job introducing the issues in an easy to understand manner, with illustrations.  Like this:

That's a weather station.  Just how accurate do you think its measurements will be?

Highly recommended.

Just how bad is the proposed anti-encryption law

It's bad, filled with magical thinking:

All providers of communications services and products (including software) should protect the privacy of United States persons through implementation of appropriate data security and still respect the rule of law and comply with all legal requirements and court orders.

This is the crux of the issue. The senators want to have their cake – by requiring tech companies to protect their customers' data – and eat it too – by insisting that law enforcement can break the code. 

According to the best minds in cryptography this simply can't be done – it's not a moral or legislative issue but a mathematical one. Once you introduce a flaw into an encryption system, it's impossible to stop others finding it, especially since you are mandating it is there by law and the prize is free access to all US data traffic, as evidenced in the Juniper case.

Of course, Congress doesn't care that this is impossible, as long as they have a fig leaf ("protect the privacy of United States persons") to cover that ugly decrypt-anything-we-tell-you-to thing.  It tastes great and it's less filling.  And it makes you lose weight, too!

And protections against abuse have been stripped:

As we have mentioned, there are also now no restrictions on what kind of court order can be used to force companies to hand over data to the police. As we've seen with the Patriot Act in the US and RIPA in the UK, once you give police these powers, they will use them for everything because they cut down on the workload required. 

The original draft did include caveats to which types of court orders could be used, but those requirements are now gone.

And this is bi-partisan.  Forgive be for being unimpressed with the Republican Party's commitment to liberty.

Lottery machines hacked

It was an inside job by IT:

The number generator had apparently been hacked to produce predictable numbers on three days of the year, after the machine had gone through a security audit.

Note that last bit. The software would only produce the non-random results after the software security audit was completed.

Russia hacks Sweden's air traffic control?

Maybe:

Sweden suspects a hacker group linked to Russian intelligence was responsible for an attack on its air traffic control systems last November, we're told. 

Air traffic control systems across much of Sweden were unavailable on November 4. Computer problems meant air traffic controllers were unable to use their displays, an issue that prompted the cancellation of multiple domestic and international flights. Arlanda, Landvetter and Bromma airports were particularly affected. 

The Swedish Civil Aviation Administration publicly blamed a solar storm. However, behind the scenes the Swedes were notifying NATO about a serious, ongoing cyber attack, Norwegian news outlet aldrimer.no reports.

It's not often that you hear outages were caused by Cosmic Rays ...

In other news, Airbus says it gets hacked a dozen times a year.

It seems that I don't live in a bubble

Alas, I'm pretty average:

You got 47 points.

The higher your score, the thinner your bubble. The lower, the more insulated you might be from mainstream American culture.

42–100: A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits. Typical: 66. 

 Do you live in a political bubble?

(via)

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.