Random debate thoughts

Trump had some serious missed opportunities to score some points against Hillary.  The time when she talked about how he wasn't releasing his tax returns and "what is he hiding" didn't get the trumping response I was expecting.  Same thing when she was talking about cyber security and he didn't bring up her email server.

She did better on not looking sick than I had expected.  However, her nurse was in the front row and immediately after the debate Hillary went right over to her and did the whole finger pulling thing.  There is something wrong with her health, although she handled herself well last night.

Trump's biggest job was to show that Hillary's main attack themes against him - that he's unstable and racist - were wrong.  I think he succeeded.  He didn't come off as unstable, just rambly and, well, a little boring.  Probably that was the intent.  I actually think that this is more important than a lot of people think.

Trump seems to learn as he goes.  I expect he will give a better debate performance next time.  It's hard to see how Hillary could improve, and there are a lot of scenarios where she could do worse.  If the goal is to peak right before the election, Trump seems to be in a better position.

The debate

Meh.

Hillary is still a shameless liar. Trump rambles and won't get to the point. I'll be very surprised if this moves the needle.

Hillary exceeded expectations in that she didn't pass out. It's hard to see her improve her performance much in the next debates. Trump has more room to improve.

All in all, that's 100 minutes of my life I'd like back.

"A double charge of canister at ten yards"

Pickett's charge made it all the way across these fields from the opposite tree line. First the Union artillery and then the Union rifles picked the Confederates to pieces. Only a few made it to the monument you see in the foreground where they were obliterated by concentrated fire.



The charge broke and fell back. As the survivors streamed into their lines a trumpet played "Nearer my God to Thee". This guy did a beautiful rendition.



It was very quiet, looking at just how wide those fields are.

Antispam troll level: Grandmaster

Bravo:

Brian Weinreich has been trolling spammers for two years using a bot that fires realistic and ridiculous replies to the pervasive online salespeople. 

The founder of San Francisco firm Density created the bot as a means to waste the time of the blowflies of the internet after being affronted by a deluge of unsolicited sales pitches directed at his "sacred" inbox. 

Weinreich (@BeWeinreich) has posted 16 hilarious conversations in which his bot dubbed Sp@m Looper managed to engage spammers in lengthy chats.

The reason there are no anonymous comments here is that I turned it off 3 years ago - I was getting 100 - 150 spam comments a day and it was just too much work weeding the wheat from the chaff.  This flips the script - making the spammers sort out the wheat from the chaff.  Bravo.

Click through the link if you want his code to run it yourself.

Truth in advertising

The old ones are the best ones.

Josepha Barbara von Auernhammer - 6 variations on a Hungarian Theme

Josepha Barbara von Auernhammer lived in Vienna and studied under Mozart, who she fell in love with.  It was unrequited, and she ended up marrying someone else and having a fairly normal life - other than a minor musical career.  She wrote some good music which (as you'd expect) has a pronounced Mozartian influence.

Farnsworth House Inn, Gettysburg

If you're in the Gettysburg area and are a history buff, this is worth a visit. There is period food in a historic building, and a collection of uniforms from the 1992 film "Gettysburg".



Gettysburg has more than a touch of Disney, but unlike Disney there is a core of real history.

All in all, this is abfun place to stop for an afternoon beer.

Doofus of the Day

Are you running late for a flight?  Worried that you're going to miss it?  Don't do this:

A Canadian idiot has been sentenced to a year behind bars after he was found guilty of calling in a bomb threat because he was running late for his flight. 

Michael Howells, 37, pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal mischief and received 12 months in jail along with a fine of CA$3,844.88 (US$3,000, £2,200). 

Howells was sentenced for the 2014 hoax when, running late for a flight from Kelowna, BC, he phoned in an anonymous bomb threat to the airport claiming the Calgary-bound plane he was due to fly on had been rigged with explosives. His plan was to cause takeoff to be delayed so he'd make the flight.

Good idea, Einstein.  Click through to read the hilarious story about how Officer Friendly apprehended Our Hero.  Snerk.

(Hat tip to Peter)

If Karma ran over Dogma ...

... This would be weird.

An actual reason to ride Amtrak

Best.  Security.  Marketing.  EVER.

"Keep your belt on.  We hardly know you."

[stands]  [clap] [clap] [clap]

More like this, please.

(via)

St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

Photo taken from the roof of the Sofitel, in their Das Loft bar. They have quite a good toasted blood sausage and fennel sandwich, washed down by the local wine.

Vienna was interesting. Between the city center and the airport (and extending all the way to the border) is a huge windmill farm. There must be 500 or a thousand of them. I guess Vienna isn't expensive enough and they need millions of euros a year in subsidies.

Alas, I was too worn out from this trip to go out and see the city, but it looks worthwhile coming back. Tomorrow I'll post about Bratislava, a really interesting place.

Well, tomorrow your time. For me it's 0520 and I'm on the way to the airport. It's always a good flight when you're going home.

Wandering in Copenhagen

All y'all asked, so here it is.

Copenhagen is an interesting place.  One problem with many places in Europe is that the history is so present that it gets almost Disney-esque.  Copenhagen has a pretty interesting mixture of old and new (think "Danish Modern"), as you can see in the picture here.

Just down the street is a delightful old building, which is right next to a brand new one that has clean (almost antiseptic) lines.

Danish Modern isn't really my cup of tea, but it looks like the Danes are making this work for them.  There's lots of construction going on all over the town center, so business seems good.  The one part of the city that does have a more typical don't-mess-with-the-history European feel is the water front. If you turned 180° around on this spot you'd be looking out on the harbor.  All in all, a nice place to walk off the jet lag.

Denmark is a pretty expensive country, with the current exchange rate of around 6.5 Kroner to a dollar, prices seem maybe 35% higher than I was expecting.  Maybe my expectations weren't calibrated well, but expect to drop $50 on lunch without too much trouble.

One thing I noticed is that people here are tall (both men and women).  Noticeably tall.  I'm 6' 1", and was regularly looking up at people.  Old Viking stock, I guess.

Also, it didn't seem that there were a ton of immigrants.  Some, yes, but less than I was expecting.  Again, maybe my expectations weren't calibrated properly, but Denmark has some pretty onerous immigration laws - for example, seizing immigrant's money to cover costs of social benefits.  Maybe that's just to encourage them to keep moving to neighboring Sweden.

Oh, and the Tivoli amusement park seemed surprisingly small.  As the oldest in Europe (and maybe the world) and in the middle of some very expensive property values that's not too surprising.

How did we live without bluetooth controlled candles?

[blink] [blink]:

Someone with far more time and money than sense has developed a “real flame smart candle” that can be controlled over Bluetooth. No, really. 

The Ludela smart candle is some kind of bastard offspring of an electric vape and a wax candle. Boasting a “real flame”, the ludicrous Ludela candle comes with a smartphone app that allows idiots who hand over good beer tokens for more than one of these things to control the light (flame) level remotely.

[blink] [blink]

I'm actually speechless.  I'd mock this, but it really seems that it comes pre-mocked.

“The safety module was developed and rigorously tested by some of the world's finest engineers of Surface Ink in San Jose, California."

Well that explains it.  Probably after drinking $43 martinis.  Is it National Punch-A-Silicon-Valley-Hipster Week yet?

A [blank] and his [blank] are soon [blank]

San Francisco watering hole offers a $43 martini:

Epic Steak, a waterfront dining spot popular with the finance and tech sectors that have come to dominate the city's downtown, has begun offering the £33 Fog Point Martini, a drink that bills itself as being infused with, umm, fog. 

The drink, it is said, is made with a special vodka crafted by the Local Hangar 1 Distillery using water gathered from special "fog catcher" machines that condense the water vapors out of the "marine layer" that blows into the Bay Area much of the year. 

That, combined with some vermouth and a lemon twist, will set you back a cool $43 bucks, plus tip, and the gnawing feeling that you have sold your soul to live in an unsustainable bubble society built on delusion and bravado.

Now I like a good martini as much as the next man (Bombay Sapphire straight up, extra olives, don't be chintzy on the vermouth).  But I start to mutter dark comments when the price approaches double digits.  For $43, I'd expect to get right toasted.

But hey San Francisco hipsters - always nice to have another reason to punch you! And El Reg brings the snark:

You will not be surprised to hear that the drink is a hit in the Bay Area and the fog-infused vodka sold out faster than a computer science grad at a VC mixer.

Is it National Punch-A-Silicon-Valley-Hipster week?

Blogging from Europe

I'm in Copenhagen with a layover before flying on to Vienna and then by car to Bratislava. The layover gave me the opportunity to see the town which I had never done before.



This is, of course, the statue of Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid. It was a little disappointing, but the rest of the city is pretty nice.



Posting will be spotty for a couple days.

UPDATE: More Copenhagen here.

Tesla hacked - remotely and while it is in motion

Oopsie:

Chinese hackers have attacked Tesla electric cars from afar, using exploits that can activate brakes, unlock doors, and fold mirrors from up to 20 kilometres (12 miles) away while the cars are in motion. 

Keen Security Lab senior researchers Sen Nie, Ling Liu, and Wen Lu, along with director Samuel Lv, demonstrated the hacks against a Tesla Model S P85 and 75D and say their efforts will work on multiple Tesla models. 

The Shanghai, China-based hacking firm has withheld details of the world-first zero day attacks and privately disclosed the flaws to Tesla.

Here's an idea - now let's make all those things drive "autonomously".  I wonder what that word even means in a security context ...

Why Snowden likely won't be pardoned

Interesting analysis.

Political field report from the wilds of Maryland

The Queen Of The World and I went to the Frederick (MD) County Fair last night.  We both love the county fairs, and this one was only 15 minutes from Castle Borepatch.  While wandering among the booths on the midway, we ran across the Democratic Party booth.  It was heavily staffed, but nobody was stopping by - the crowd completely ignored it.

Then we saw someone walking by with a Trump For President yard sign.  The Queen Of The World wanted one to display over the moat, and so we went in search of the Republican booth.  It was harder to find but had a regular traffic of people coming in and paying $2 for the yard signs*.  I asked one of the guys working the booth how busy they had been and he said that they were swamped, and had sold literally hundreds of signs that day.

In deep blue Maryland.

I don't think that people realize just how this election is shaping up.

A reminder of the unsavoriness of both Clintons

First, Hillary:



This is clearly anti-Hillary agitprop, but in the same way that this was anti-McCain agitprop in 2008:

Note the camera angle selected to cast unflattering shadows.  The video does this too; in my mind that detracts from the video's argument.  However, notice that the video has clear sourcing on just about everything.  As Mythbusters would say, "Plausible".

And some of the weaker points brought up here are discussed by the late, great Christopher Hitchens (whose journalistic credentials are disputed by nobody).  In particular, he goes over Dick Morris and Sid Blumenthal at some length.



I'm sure that my readers will recognize the Blumenthal name as the same one that the Trump campaign says (via a former McClatchy bureau chief) started the whole Obama "Birther" business back in 2008.  Sidney was seemingly useful to the Clintons over the course of two decades.

I can understand how someone would want to vote for her because they self-identify as a Democrat.  Tribal instincts run deep in the human psyche.  I may not agree with their choice, but we are not rational beings - rather, we are rationalizing beings.

But this is who the Clintons are.  This is who Hillary is.  The only excuse to vote for her is because of a tribal instinct.  Remember that.

So would Donald Trump be a good President?  I certainly can't say.  What I can say is that the single biggest political problem facing this Republic today is a crisis in governmental legitimacy.  Hillary is astonishingly unequipped to deal with this.  Trump, as an outsider in the political arena at least has the possibility.

Pondering mortality

Kudzu faces that final decision that we must all one day make for a loved pet.  His pondering is worth your time.

Tommy Collins - It Tickles

The 1950s saw the emergence of a unique sound in Country music.  The Bakersfield sound was sort of the punk rock of 1950s Country - a reaction against the over-produced Nashville product, with a focus on the electric guitar.  Tommy Collins was one of the pioneers of this sound, and this sound was one of his first.

The Bakersfield sound led ultimately to Merle Haggard who influenced pretty much everyone in the music industry.

An apology to our readers

I'm embarrassed to have to post this, but please note that any blog comments that you see here from "Mrs. Borepatch" are from the ex-Mrs. Borepatch.  The Queen Of The World is an entirely different person.

The Queen and I both regret this public display and hope that you all understand.

Pokemon R00t - I choose you!

Half a million users have downloaded a Pokemon Go app that pwns their phone:

An Android app masquerading as a guide for Pokemon GO players is rooting devices and secretly installing adware and unwanted apps on the user's smartphone. 

The app, named Guide for Pokémon Go, made its way onto the official Google Play Store, from where over 500,000 users downloaded and installed it on their smartphones.

Remember Borepatch's First Law of Security: "Free download" means "Open your mouth and shut your eyes."

 Let's be careful out there.

The neighborhood children will need therapy after this

Remember how the FBI wanted Apple to unlock the San Bernadino terrorist's iPhone?

Remember how they said it was impossible for them to do it without Apple's help?

Yeah, not so much.

Shorter FBI to Apple: "Please unlock this for us because we're lazy and incompetent and unable or unwilling to do our jobs investigating terrorists.  But it would be great if you'd give us the ability to unlock non-terrorist's phones anytime we want."

Well that's your problem, right there

Quote of the Day: Death of the Media edition

Heh:

[The MSM] can't help her now. They tried too hard before. Too bad the Democratic Party didn't give us a democratic experience this time. They foisted a candidate on us, they rigged it, with the assistance of the media. And now the candidate we didn't want zombie-walks and stumbles to the finish line, and there is nothing the Party or the media can do to stir up our affection. Meanwhile, the man the media loved to hate is powering through to the Presidency, looking only stronger for all the shots he took.

Ann Althouse on the Gallup poll showing trust in the media at an all time low.

Now you can kill any device with a USB port

There's all sorts of mischief you could do with one of these:

Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester's repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it. It works like this: when the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges -- all in the matter of seconds.

On unprotected equipment, the device's makers say it will "instantly and permanently disable unprotected hardware".

I guess it's worth repeating my advice to be very suspicious of any USB stick you find lying in the parking lot.

The only good news about this is that the Bad Guy has to have physical access to the target device, but still ...

Spider Halloween costumes

Android really, really wants to know where you are

This is creepy:

Security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam reported on Twitter that he "almost had a heart attack" when he walked into a McDonald's and was prompted on his phone to download the fast food restaurant's app. 

Al-Bassam dug into his phone's apps to figure out how that had happened, and was amazed to find that his suspected culprit – Google Maps – was not responsible. It was Google Play that had monitored his location thousands of times. 

Again, this is deliberate: Google is using your location to tout apps to you. If you wander into a pharmacy, you'll be offered software to print your photos, for example. 

If you're not keen on this, the options are not great: you can either delete Google Maps and/or Google Play, or you have to repeatedly turn your phone's location services on and off as required throughout the day, which is extremely irritating. 

"Kind of defeats the purpose of fine-grained privacy controls," Al-Bassam noted, adding: "Google is encouraging developers to use the Play location API instead of the native Android API, making an open OS dependent on proprietary software."

I just turned off location services.

Democrats feel the Bern!

Ouch.  Ouch:

People wanted her to act more like Bernie, but I don’t think they meant the one from ‘Weekend at Bernie’s'.

When you've lost The New Yorker, it's a Bad Moon Rising.

Hitler runs the Democratic National Committee?

Explains rather a lot, really.

A Field Guide to Trump supporters

Over at The Gormogons.  It's an interesting take, although it doesn't quite feel complete (for example, it leaves out Tribal Republicans who would vote for Buckley's recommendation).  However, this comes pretty close to my own position:

Burn It All Downers are those who want Trump to win because they figure he’s the candidate most likely to cause a collapse of the current corrupt order, forcing a rethinking of America’s entire structure. To ‘Puter, this is the most logical and sound reason to consider voting for Trump. Trump *is* the most likely to immanentize the eschaton, in the same way that getting the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper together freed Zuul from his captivity and brought our destructor, the 50 foot Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. Large chunks of the non-racist Alt-Right along with certain despairing conservatives make their home in this group.

One quibble that I have with 'Puter is in one of his footnotes:

Bonus reasons Former Never Trumpers hate Trump: ... he has fascist tendencies;

I don't think that he's a fascist more than all of the rest of the political and business elite.  He's either a fascist like them or a dirty commie like them.  To my mind, there's not enough distance between the two types for light to shine through, but that's just me.  (Click through that link for an explanation)

Good advice for posting

Fortunately of this blog, there's no rule saying you need to keep your posts short!

Camping

We went camping in Williamsburg last weekend, at a beautiful little campground.

It was fun, and your humble blogger did all the cooking over the campfire.  It just goes to show that you can eat gourmet even when you smell like wood smoke.

Apologies for the lack of posting.  I'll kick start the blogging machine to get things back to normal.

Garth Brooks - The Dance

My Father-In-Law's burial reminded me of Dad's.  The military does the services with a precision that comes from repetition.  I posted this song once before, about how I used to roll my eyes at the maudlin lyrics.  I was young and foolish at the time, and hadn't been through loss that was so, well, final.

But life is for the living.  We know that the song will someday end, but ours plays on for now.  Seize the day.  Even now envious time is fleeing.

Semper Fi, Code Talker

One of the last of the World War II Code Talkers sets out on the Navajo Beauty Way:

Joe Hosteen Kellwood, a Navajo Code Talker from World War II, died Monday in Phoenix at the age of 95. 

...

He was trained at the Navajo Talkers’ School at Camp Elliott in San Diego. In the interview, he remembered a moment when his sacred rituals conflicted with military rules. He had boarded a transport ship headed for Melbourne, Australia, where he would join the 1st Marine Division, 5th Marine Regiment.

Kellwood had corn pollen, a gift from his uncle, who told him in Navajo to use it during his journey. His uncle called the Pacific Ocean a mother figure for their people. In the Republic interview, Kellwood said his uncle had told him to stand by the ocean, place corn pollen in his mouth, on his head, into the air, and pray to the Holy People.

Rather than ask his ranking officers for permission, Kellwood mixed a piece of gum with corn pollen. He chewed it into a ball and spat it into the ocean. The ritual gave him confidence he would return safely.

You can read their story in their own words in their book Navajo Weapon.  All of the original team have passed, and almost none of the rest remain.  Those all prepare for this last journey.

In beauty I walk.
With beauty behind me, I walk.
With beauty above me, I walk.
With beauty around me, I walk.

It has become beauty again.

- Navajo Blessing Way prayer

Hat tip: Chris Lynch

I can get behind this

Teach your children well.

If you have one of those new Samsung Galaxy 7 phones, bring marshmallows

Man's phone burned up, taking his Jeep with it:

Samsung's ill-fated Galaxy Note 7 is once again being blamed for causing a serious fire. 

A man in St Petersburg, Florida, claims that while charging inside his truck, the phablet combusted and caused a massive blaze that totalled his Jeep Grand Cherokee. 

Lydia Dornacher told Tampa Bay news station Fox 13 that she and her husband Nathan were attending a Labor Day garage sale Monday morning when he plugged the Note 7 into the truck's center console to recharge. 

The family said that while they were away, the Note 7 caught fire inside the car.

And while the article didn't say, we can assume that he was tragically marshmallow-less.

Oh, and if you have one and fly with it despite the FAA's warning not to, make sure that you bring enough marshmallows for everyone on board.

Volley

21 guns this morning for my Father-In-Law, MSGT Bob Garrett.



One nice thing about being in the Washington D.C. area is that The Queen Of The World and I will be able to visit him regularly.

The computer is never wrong

The airplane, however, is at the wrong airport:

Finger trouble with onboard navigation systems led to an Air Asia flight making a two-hour internal hop in Australia before its scheduled journey to Malaysia. 

An investigation report by the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau (ATSB) into the March flight disclosed the cockup, which it said was down to the A330's captain “inadvertently enter[ing] the wrong longitudinal position of the aircraft.”

And so the plane ended up in Melbourne rather than Malaysia.  This is the type of sequence of errors that gets people killed.  Nobody hurt in this case, thankfully.

I highly recommend everyone clicking through to read the entire comedy of errors.  This is precisely why we should not put too much faith in technology.

Wait, what?

The NSA continues to damage America's economy

This will no doubt get customers flocking to buy gear from Cisco:

Tens of thousands of Cisco ASA firewalls are vulnerable to an authentication bypass exploit thought to have been cooked up by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). 

The "Extra Bacon" exploit was one of many found as part of an Equation Group cache leaked by a hacking outfit calling itself the Shadow Brokers. 

Equation Group is thought to be an offensive NSA Tailored Access Operations unit. The leaked exploits and the tools stolen by Shadow Brokers are thought to have come from a compromised command and control staging server. 

Cisco has rushed out patches against the Extra Bacon exploit, while researchers extended the attack to compromise more modern ASA units.

Add to this the way that NSA used to intercept Cisco devices on the way to delivery (so they could install bugging devices).  Nice work, security apparatus!

Oof

I spent the day widening the moat here at Castle Borepatch.  Tomorrow a Crepe Myrtle gets delivered - one that's big enough that delivery was in order.  And so it was to the shovel, widening the moat in preparation.

Note to self: talk to the Czar of Muscovy to find out where you get some Tcho-Tchos.

But ouch.  I'm getting too old for this.

If you're falling, dive

Found by The Queen Of The World.

Things I did not know

I've put 2,000 miles on the Harley already. It doesn't sound like much in 14 months but this was when I was selling Camp Borepatch, getting married, and moving. Oh, and unlike in Georgia, there was actual winter up here.

Plus there's great back roads riding here in northern Maryland. Just today we rode from Castle Borepatch to Wight's Ferry and t[k the ferry across the Potomac to Leesburg, Virginia. Leesburg has one of the great biker bars, the Downtown Saloon. It's across the street from the courthouse and it's had this sign in the window for ages:



"Better here than across the street."

Now that things are settling down, I'm looking forward to putting a lot more miles under the tires.

Jan Antonín Losy, Count of Losinthal

One of the great lute players of the late Baroque period turns out to have been an aristocrat.  Jan Antonín Losy was a German (well, Bohemian) nobleman, the Count von Losinthal.  His castle in the Czech town of Štěkeň is shown here.

Nice place.

Unusual for a noble of the day, he attended University in Prague.  Typical of a noble of the day he traveled extensively as a young man.  During these travels he seems to have spent considerable time with musicians, developing a talent for the lute.  His talent was such that he developed a reputation as one of the finest lute players in Europe.

Despite this reputation, he published very few of his compositions during his lifetime.  Likely this was because music was a hobby to him, rather than a profession.

Online reviews

Not so helpful, actually.

Ray Charles - You Don't Know Me

1962 saw a very unusual album released.  Blues giant Ray Charles recorded "Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music" which included songs in the Country and Folk genres.  It was a spectacular success, selling over half a million copies in the first three months after release.  The singles from the album were selling at a rate of 100,000 a week.

It was also a critical success: Charles won a Grammy for this in 1963, and the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 2001.  This album is listed at #49 of CMT's top 100 Country albums, and Rolling Stone lists this at #104 of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.

Listening to it, I can't help but think about how much it sounds like something from Patsy Cline.



You Don't Know Me (Songwriters: Cindy Walker, Eddie Arnold)

You give your hand to me
And then you say hello
And I can hardly speak
My heart is beating so
And anyone can tell
You think you know me well
But you don't know me (no you don't know me)

No you don't know the one
Who dreams of you at night
And longs to kiss your lips
Longs to hold you tight
Oh I am just a friend
That's all I've ever been
Cause you don't know me (no you don't know me)

I never knew the art of making love
No my heart aches with love for you
Afraid and shy I let my chance go by
The chance that you might love me too (love me too)

You give your hand to me
And then you say goodbye
I watch you walk away beside the lucky guy
Oh you will never know
The one who loves you so
Well you don't know me

I never knew the art of making love
No my heart aches with love for you
Afraid and shy I let my chance go by
The chance that you might love me too (love me too)

You give your hand to me
And then you say goodbye
I watch you walk away beside the lucky guy
Oh you will never know
The one who loves you so
Well you don't know me
You don't know me
Oh you don't know me

All ready for football

Maybe a little too much tailgating before the game, though.

Fed.Gov: We're not sure about these self-driving cars

Outbreak of sanity:

Fully autonomous cars may never reach public roads, according to the chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board. 

Speaking in an interview with MIT Technology Review, Christopher Hart said: “I'm not confident that we will ever reach that point. I don’t see the ideal of complete automation coming any time soon.” 

... 

“Some people just like to drive. Some people don't trust the automation so they're going to want to drive. [And] there’s no software designer in the world that's ever going to be smart enough to anticipate all the potential circumstances this software is going to encounter,” Hart said.

It's almost like the NTSB reads Borepatch.

Your feel good story for the day

Not all football players are jerks, and in fact most aren't.  Some have big hearts, and aren't afraid to show it.

Bravo Zulu, Mr. Rudolph.

Hat tip: Chris Lynch.

That'll wash out, right?

The Fed.Gov is saving money, for a change

Credit where credit is due:

The Federal Transit Administration has informed Honolulu Area Rapid Transit (HART) that it will not help cover cost overruns associated with the agency’s 20-mile rail line. The project was originally supposed to cost about $5.1 billion, which was already ridiculously expensive, but now is projected to cost at least $8 billion and possibly as much as $11 billion.

The FTA has a long-standing policy that it won’t help cover cost overruns (a policy that is sometimes overturned by Congress). But in this case, the FTA has added a new twist. In light of the cost overruns, HART has proposed to build just part of the project, leaving uncompleted the five miles of the line that would have attracted the most riders. But the FTA says that, in that case, it won’t be giving HART $1.55 billion that the agency is counting on. That means HART won’t even be able to complete the part of the project that it planned.

The whole plan is nuts (RTWT for the gory details), but kudos to the FTA for saying no bueno to the request for more dosh.

Hack the stock market

This is a pretty interesting attack:

The story so far

tl;dr: hackers drop 0day on medical device company hoping to profit by shorting their stock

That's almost a 10% drop in the share price.  Based on a Market Cap of $20B, that's a $2 Billion dollar move, all based on security vulnerabilities.  But I'll bet that there wasn't enough money at St. Jude for a proper security design.

I expect to see more of this.

40,000 comments

The Silicon Graybeard left comment #40,000 here. Eight years ago that wasn't something that seemed even concevable.

Those of you who stop by regularly, you can't even begin to know how much I appreciate our community here.

That's not helpful

It reminds me of Mark Twain's essay, "The Awful German Language".  He read a book in German but didn't understand what happened in the story.  You see, all the verbs went to the last page and someone had torn out that page.

Why we may never have self-driving cars

The problem is really, really hard:

Automobile drivers, for obvious reasons, often have much less time to react. “When something pops up in front of your car, you have one second,” Casner says. “You think of a Top Gun pilot needing to have lightning-fast reflexes? Well, an ordinary driver needs to be even faster.” 

In other words, the everyday driving environment affords so little margin for error that any distinction between “on” and “in” the loop can quickly become moot. Tesla acknowledges this by constraining the circumstances in which a driver can engage Autopilot: “clear lane lines, a relatively constant speed, a sense of the cars around you and a map of the area you’re traveling through,”  according to MIT Technology Review. But Brown’s death suggests that, even within this seemingly conservative envelope, driving “on the loop” may be uniquely unforgiving.

Clear lanes, constant speed, awareness of cars around you, a good map.  That's about as easy as you can make it for the guidance system, and it's still too hard.

But NASA has been down this road before, too. In studies of highly automated cockpits, NASA researchers documented a peculiar psychological pattern: The more foolproof the automation’s performance becomes, the harder it is for an on-the-loop supervisor to monitor it. “What we heard from pilots is that they had trouble following along [with the automation],” Casner says. “If you’re sitting there watching the system and it’s doing great, it’s very tiring.” In fact, it’s extremely difficult for humans to accurately monitor a repetitive process for long periods of time. This so-called “vigilance decrement” was first identified and measured in 1948 by psychologist Robert Mackworth, who asked British radar operators to spend two hours watching for errors in the sweep of a rigged analog clock. Mackworth found that the radar operators’ accuracy plummeted after 30 minutes; more recent versions of the experiment have documented similar vigilance decrements after just 15 minutes.

The fallback for the guidance system is to have the driver take over, but it looks like people don't handle this situation very well.  And it also looks like people don't want to handle the situation well.

According to some researchers, this potentially dangerous contradiction is baked into the demand for self-driving cars themselves. “No one is going to buy a partially-automated car [like Tesla’s Model S] just so they can monitor the automation,” says Edwin Hutchins, a MacArthur Fellow and cognitive scientist who recently co-authored a paper on self-driving cars with Casner and design expert Donald Norman. “People are already eating, applying makeup, talking on the phone and fiddling with the entertainment system when they should be paying attention to the road,” Hutchins explains. “They’re going to buy [self-driving cars] so that they can do more of that stuff, not less.”

This problem (self-driving cars) smells a lot to me like what we've seen in the Artificial Intelligence research community.  There have been widely publicized advances on very narrow, specific technology problems, but AI has remained "just 5 years away" for 30 years.  The problem there is that we really don't know what Intelligence is (at least in enough detail to specify it for a computer).  Likewise, we don't understand how to safely react to the myriad of potentially dangerous driving situations to be able to specify it for the computer.

Maybe it's just that computers process data so differently from us that we simply can't specify these things.

Bottom line: don't expect a self-driving car anytime soon, no matter what the auto companies are saying.

Idiots

This is why you get more government regulation:

An airliner circling Heathrow narrowly missed colliding with a drone flying at 7,000 feet – while another aircraft approaching the London airport saw a drone hurtle past just 30 feet from its cockpit. 

The first near miss took place in mid-May when an Airbus A319 pilot flying to Heathrow saw a one metre-long drone, painted green and purple, “extremely close” to his aircraft. 

The drone, which was flying just above the airliner's level, was only 10 metres (30 feet) from the cockpit. Investigators thought the operator was flying on first-person view using the drone's cameras. 

The UK Airprox Board graded the risk of collision as Category A, the most severe level.

In the second incident, which took place a fortnight after the first, an Airbus A320's first officer saw “a white, twin rotor drone pass by the right wingtip” barely 100m away as the aircraft was descending through 7,000ft over New Malden, south London.

Let's see now: Flying a drone over 1000 feet?  Check.  Flying a drone near an airport?  Check.  Flying a drone in the approach path for the airport?  Check.

Idiot.  He's peeing in everyone else's cornflakes.  It makes me want to take up drone skeet like that lady in Virginia.

About that iPhone emergency patch

The government of the U.A.E. used it to to target a human rights activist:

I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report: “The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender,” authored by senior researchers Bill Marczak and John Scott Railton.

If you are one of hundreds of millions of people that own an iPhone, today you will receive a critical security patch.  While updating your software, you should pause for a moment to thank human rights activist, Ahmed Mansoor.

Mansoor is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, and because he’s a human rights activist in an autocratic country his government views him as a menace.  For security researchers at the Citizen Lab, on the other hand, Mansoor’s unfortunate experiences are the gift that won’t stop giving.

Interesting story.

R.I.P. Gene Wilder

Thanks for all the laughs.

About Colin Kaepernick

When they say it's about the principle, it's actually about the money.

Chris Lynch has a great analysis about how Kaepernick - a backup quarterback - has created a controversy that will give him a big payday:

Kaepernick has a disastrously large contract. He signed a 6-year $114 million contract in 2014 that has $61 million guaranteed. He could have used some of that $61 million to quietly become a benefactor to so very many. Instead he's become a lightning rod, complete ingrate prick, salary cap albatross or potential season long distraction depending on your point of view.

From the San Francisco 49er's point of view this is a distraction they didn't need from a player with an almost $20 million cap hit if they cut him. For their back-up QB! And if the team cuts him there will be people who complain that it was because Chip Kelly doesn't like black people ...

I have to wonder if this is some sort of diabolical genius on the part of Kaepernick. Say if he no longer wants to play football but wants to collect all of his guaranteed money. This would be almost the perfect plan. Just sitting during the anthem isn't against the law or even team policy. Sure many people will hate him but this might be a way out of playing football and maybe even into some high paying speaking gigs for clueless kids at liberal arts colleges. I haven't seen anything this diabolical since Al Gore made millions pretending to care about global warming.

The 49ers simply cannot win now.  If they cut him there will be a huge outcry against them.  Remember, this is San Francisco, perhaps the most famously liberal area in the country.  While your typical football fan is more patriotic than the average bear, it's Silicon Valley wealthy who fill the stadium in Frisco.  They're all to the left of Karl Marx.

Or the 49ers keep him and pay him, even though he's only gone 10-14 in the last two seasons.

He's got them over a barrel, right good.

Internet Of Things gets a security patch?

I did not expect that:

In a shocking development, smart lock manufacturer August has been caught promptly patching security holes discovered in its product. 

At this year's DEF CON, security researcher Anthony Rose gave a presentation where he outlined how a whole range of "smart locks" were hackable. 

... 

But what was surprising was that just 10 days later, August had put out patches that fix the holes. Even Rose was surprised, tweeting: "August just patched their web services to stop guest from being able to insert backdoor keys in homekit locks! Kudos to their engineers."

Kudos indeed.  Now if we could just get the other 11 manufacturers named by Mr. Rose to act likewise, we'll really get somewhere.

Quote of the Day: On Democracy

Interesting:

What you have under a representative, egalitarian, winner take all, democracy is a shifting coalition of about 51% of voters aligned to threaten about 49%.

If you’re getting more than 51% of the vote (which is certainly possible) that just means you’re leaving rents on the table. You could take more, and/or give less, and still win the election.

Additionally, maximum rent extraction occurs if your coalition comprises the cheapest 51% of voters, in other words, the most useless and parasitic.

His conclusions are also pretty interesting.  I would add that this situation is very likely to be Game-Theory stable as well - meaning that the only (likely temporary) way out is an external shock, or internal revolt.

Implications for the Trumpening are left unexplored.

Red Rooster Carry Out - Damascus, MD

This place is (as they say in New England) wicked local. While they have sandwiches, and BBQ chicken is king. $2.99 for two pieces of dark meat. They also have dinners which include fries, cole slaw, and a biscuit.

It was $12 for one dinner, 2 extra pieces of chicken, and two drinks. Everything tastes great.

Probably that's why they've been here since 1971. Recommended.

William Herschel - Symphony No 12 in D major

Image via Der Wik

On this day in 1789, William Herschel discovered Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.

Herschel was a polymath in an age famous for polymaths.  As an astronomer, he discovered the planet Uranus as well as four moons of Saturn.  As an economist, he noted the striking correlation between the number of sunspots visible on the sun and the price of grain.  When experimenting with new techniques for observing sunspots, he discovered infrared radiation.  He was the first to note that the Martian ice caps vary by season.  Pointing his magnifying devices inwards, not outwards, he established via microscope observation that coral was not a plant (the cells did not have cell walls).

In his spare time, he was a prolific composer, with eighteen symphonies and many shorter works to his credit.  His was a remarkable  career in an age of remarkable careers.  So remarkable that I've posted his music before, as well as mentioning him in a number of other posts.  He may be the only scientist that could have his own blog post tag here.

Your travel Protip for the day

Uncle Jay brings the snark as only he can in a hilarious post that ends with really good advice for when you fly internationally.

And since he really is a professional traveler, this really is a ProTip ...

Steve Earle & The Dukes - The Other Kind

Steve Earle has led a life that would make a good country song: dropped out of high school, worked blue collar jobs during the day while playing in a band at night, married seven (!) times, did time in prison for drugs and weapons charges.  But through it all, he's written a ton of great music that blends country with good solid rock.

This song from his 1990 album The Hard Way reached #37 on the rock charts.



The Other Kind (Songwriter: Steve Earle)

I woke up this morning and I took a look around at all that I got
These days I've been lookin' in the mirror and wondering if that's me lookin' back or not
I'm still the apple of my mama's eye
I'm my daddy's worst fears realized
Here of late all this real estate don't seem all that real to me sometimes

I'm back out on that road again
Turn this beast into the wind
There are those that break and bend
I'm the other kind, I'm the other kind

Now my old buddy, what's his name, says, "Man what the hell are you thinkin' 'bout
Fool, you got two of everything, but you hang your head just like you was down and out";
And I'm damn sure not suffering from a lack of love
There's plenty more where that came from
Ah - but leave it up to me to say something wrong and hurt someone before I'm done

You see it used to be I was really free
I didn't need no gasoline to run
Before you could say Jack Kerouac you'd turn your back and I'd be gone
Yeah nowadays I got me two good wheels and I seek refuge in aluminum and steel
Aw, it takes me out there for just a little while
And the years fall away with every mile

URGENT: Yeah, you really need to update your iPhone

The good news is that I haven't heard of mass attacks (yet) using these attacks.  The bad news is that it typically doesn't take long for those to start once the Bad Guys know that something is possible.

The attack sends a web link to a page that contains malware.  This malware is unpleasant - it's the first remote jailbreak exploit, so it basically takes total control of you iDevice.

In your iPhone (and iPad), click the "Settings" app, then "General" then "Updates" and select "Check for updates".  You want iOS 9.3.5.  I'm not sure if this applies to iPads as well but recommend that you check.

Like I said, I expect there's a Bad Moon rising.  We'll likely see mass exploitation of this in a few days.

Wolfgang would not like this

He's the only dog I've ever known who won't stick his head out of the car window.

Why self-driving cars are a lot further from practical use than we think

It turns out that this is a really, really hard problem:

Rosenband added that four-way junctions with no lights are still a nightmare for the robot cars. An example junction is California and Powell in San Francisco, which has the added bonus of two cable car lines going through it. Human motorists rely on eye contact to know when it's safe to go or just take the initiative and move first. A driver-less car gets stuck trying to safely nudge its way across the box. 

"At four-way stops, oftentimes cars arrive sorta at the same time and it's a coin flip for who goes first. We have to make it comfortable for the person in the car; you don’t want the vehicle to inch forward and then slam the brakes, and you also want to be courteous to other drivers," Rosenband explained.

This is a great overview of the problems of computer/sensor recognition of what is trivially easy for humans.  There are great examples here of the problems that we overcome instantly and naturally, but which flummox the computer:  the red balloon next to a green traffic light, the traffic light partially obscured by a bus, a traffic light with the setting sun right behind it which blinds the sensor.

We handle this via common sense, but you can't program common sense.  They're trying, though:

You can teach a computer what an under-construction sign looks like so that when it sees one, it knows to drive around someone digging a hole in the road. But what happens when there is no sign, and one of the workers is directing traffic with their hands? What happens when a cop waves the car on to continue, or to slow down and stop? You'll have to train the car for that scenario. 

What happens when the computer sees a ball bouncing across a street – will it anticipate a child suddenly stepping out of nowhere and chasing after their toy into oncoming traffic? Only if you teach it.

And this is the heart of the problem: you have to define literally every possible failure condition and program those into the software.  Even with machine learning, there are too many to be practical.  If you miss one and a car kills someone, the lawsuits will be enormous.

This is an outstanding article on the complexity that technologists are trying to bite off.  While unstated, you get a real feel for how they want to fly high - perhaps so close to the sun that their wings will melt.

Atom Smasher has lost his dog

"I know every dog is the best dog ever, but Sam was the best dog ever."

We love them because they love us unconditionally.  In their eyes we see ourselves reflected, not as we are but as we would wish to be.

Near this Spot are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferosity,
and all the virtues of Man
without his Vices.

- Lord Byron's epitaph to his beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain

Man, it's hard to buy a gun there

Especially if you're a senior citizen and somewhat hard of hearing ...

Ouch!

But this sure is funny:

A plucky German nudist out for a swim at a local lake was left in agony after an angler hooked his worm. 

Herbert Fendt - an alias the embarrassed man adopted to spare his family's blushes - was taking a dip in the Kaisersee, near Augsberg in south-eastern Germany, when the tackle-on-tackle action occurred. 

Initially the man thought he’d caught his todger on some weeds in the lake - a popular spot for fisherman and nudists - but soon discovered the cause of the pain. 

“I cried out to the fisherman ashore shouting ‘do not pull, do not pull’. I was terrified he was going to try to reel me in,” Fendt told the local press.

The rest of the article is just as funny.  The Germans are indeed very german.

Patriot Guard Riders escort Civil War veteran from Oregon to Maine

Wow:

Desjardin learned that the 20th Maine veteran’s ashes were in Oregon when he was researching what had happened to each soldier who fought in the regiment. He proposed the state bring Williams home.

“I discovered that his remains were in a can on a shelf in a shed out in Oregon and had been there for 94 years, unclaimed,” the historian said. “Back home is better than a shelf on a shed in Oregon.”

This is the Patriot Guard Riders:

They escort the living and departed veterans on their journeys.  They escorted Pvt. Williams in relays all cross the country:

Williams’ ashes traveled across the country in style, accompanied by a battalion of Patriot Guard Riders who handed the box off from one group of motorcyclists to the next like a kind of modern-day Pony Express. Many of those riders came to Togus on Monday to witness Williams’ cremains being handed over to Maine VA officials, including Neil Wagner of Royersford, Pennsylvania.

“When I found out they were bringing a Civil War veteran, I said, ‘I can’t miss this one.’ I could be part of history,” he said. “It was very humbling. Every time he was handed off to a different guard group there were tears shed because he was getting closer to home.”

And 150 riders met him at the state line, to escort him back to Maine.  Bravo Zulu.

If you're in Augusta, Maine, you can pay your respects to Pvt. Williams through mid September at the Maine Veteran's Memorial  Cemetery, after which he will be buried next to his parents.

Hat tip (and thanks) to childhood buddy Rick for a pointer to this story.

Well, so much for Gary Johnson

He wants a carbon tax to "fight global warming":

Libertarian Party presidential nominee and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson said he’s no skeptic of man-made global warming and endorsed a “fee” on carbon dioxide emissions.

So why a tax?  I mean, these are libertarians (excuse me: Libertarians).  You'd think that they'd want a market.  The problem there is that we've seen a market tried, and it collapsed from all the fraud:

The alternative to a carbon tax is a carbon market, but as the European experience demonstrates, carbon markets lead to massive corruption and inevitable collapse.

The reason is very simple – with a carbon market, unlike a real market, fraud benefits all the market participants.

Fraud benefits the issuers of fake carbon credits – they get to make money for nothing.

Fraud benefits the purchasers of carbon credits – a flood of fake carbon credits keeps prices down.

Fraud benefits market regulators – they get rich turning a blind eye to the fraud.

The only people carbon fraud doesn’t benefit is anyone silly enough to think that market based carbon pricing can make a long term difference to CO2 emissions.

And so, the tax.  That will never collapse from rent seekers gaming the system (*cough* E.P.A. *cough*).  You'd think that the problem here would be blindingly obvious for a Libertarian.

Bah.  I even voted for him last time around.  But if this is what Libertarian looks like, then no thanks. But then, I'm not a libertarian.