NTSB: Uber pedestrian fatality happened because autopilot software didn't understand that someone might jaywalk

Last year an experimental self-driving car from Uber hit and killed Elaine Hertzberg in Tempe, AZ.  The NTSB has completed its investigation and said that the cause of the crash is that the software did not classify her as a pedestrian because it could not handle the idea that a pedestrian might jaywalk:

Radar in Uber's self-driving vehicle detected pedestrian Elaine Herzberg more than five seconds before the SUV crashed into her, according to a new report from the National Safety Transportation Board. Unfortunately, a series of poor software design decisions prevented the software from taking any action until 0.2 seconds before the deadly crash in Tempe, Arizona.

FURTHER READING: Uber manager in March: “We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles”

Herzberg's death occurred in March 2018, and the NTSB published its initial report on the case in May of that year. That report made clear that badly written software, not failing hardware, was responsible for the crash that killed Herzberg. 

... 

Two things are noteworthy about this sequence of events. First, at no point did the system classify her as a pedestrian. According to the NTSB, that's because "the system design did not include consideration for jaywalking pedestrians." 

Second, the constantly switching classifications prevented Uber's software from accurately computing her trajectory and realizing she was on a collision course with the vehicle. You might think that if a self-driving system sees an object moving into the path of the vehicle, it would put on its brakes even if it wasn't sure what kind of object it was. But that's not how Uber's software worked.

I don't find this even a little hard to believe, but you should click through to read the whole article which is simply horrifying.  Computers are really good at some things (like adding up long columns of figures) and really bad at other things (like identifying random objects in real time).  One thing they are terrible at is "common sense" - they don't have any that the programmer doesn't write into the code.  Things like a pedestrian might cross a road somewhere other than at a crosswalk.

I've said for some time that I'll never ride in one of these things, but now I need to expand that - I don't want any of these on the roads where I might be.

No, we can't just invade Mexico to go after the drug cartels

Well, I mean that we could, but that there is precisely zero chance that we would succeed.

Folks are talking about this and I want to throw my two cents in.  Sure, we would initially blow away the cartel's armored vehicles and heavy weapons, but the initial success would be fleeting.  There are a million reasons for this, but here's a quick summary:

• The cartels would hole up in rough terrain, just like Pancho Villa's forces did in the early 20th century.  Sure, we have helicopters which mitigates the lack of roads but the last two decades in Afghanistan do not give confidence in quick military success in mountainous regions.
• The Pancho Villa expedition in 1916 was called off because the Mexican military intervened to oppose American intervention.  Most Americans don't really realize just how viscerally Mexicans would react to US forces on their soil in numbers.
• Since the cartels have bought off most Mexican politicians ("silver or lead" - take the payoff or a bullet) the last point becomes even more relevant.

So it's not a question of whether we'd inflict a lot of damage on the cartels.  Of course we would.  But ultimately we'd leave with our tails between our legs and this would make the situation worse than it is today.

And don't think that we would be safe, north of the Rio Grande.  The size of the drug market is unknown but RAND says that just the US black market for drugs was over $100B in 2010.  Add in the EU, Asia, the Anglosphere, and South America and this is certainly half a trillion dollars a year.  That's a lot of money.  The cartels have used this to purchase heavy weapons and armored vehicles, submarines and airplanes.  But that isn't where the threat ends.

Consider how much computer hacking $50M or so could buy.  We know that the power grid is already compromised - the hope is that it is by nation state actors.  But what if it is Black Hats for hire?  It's entirely plausible that if the cartels face a truly existential threat from the US military that they could take down big parts of our critical cyber infrastructure.  This threat has been pretty clear for a decade; I've been beating this drum for that long, although I've mostly given up by now since it's getting worse not better.  Someone in the cartels will have noticed this.

And so while the idea of "let's go blow the cartels away" sounds good on the surface, it's an enormously bad idea.  We'd be fighting a 3rd generation war while the cartels would escalate to a 4th generation one - and we are entirely unprepared for this.

I'm at an all day meeting, so more thoughts on just how fragile our cyber infrastructure is will have to wait.  But it's not just bad, it's worse than you can possibly imagine.

You want to hurt the cartels, then you dry up the cash flow.  You end the war on drugs, legalize everything, and give the drugs away for free.  They can't compete with free.  Anything short of this and you're just going to get a lot of people killed and end up right back where you started.

Oldest Iwo Jima veteran reports to final muster

Semper fi:

MACOMB, Ill. — The oldest known surviving Marine from the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II has died.

John Moon, of Macomb, passed away earlier this week, Western Illinois University confirmed. He was 103 years old.

Ave atque vale.

Hat tip: The Queen Of The World.

Reproduction firearms

We picked up a flintlock pistol for my pirate costume at Party City, which meant that it was cheap and plastic.  The Queen Of The World thought it looked terrible, and so she went on Amazon and found this:

It is stunningly beautiful - their claim of "Museum Reproduction Quality" is no joke.  The box had a little brochure of some of the items they sell

Lemat pistol:

Broomhandle Mauser:

Thompson (they also have a drum magazine model):

There are a ton more, also including swords and other such.  The workmanship on my pistol is a delight, and it cost around $45 - a lot more than that piece of plastic junk from Party City, but this isn't going to end up in a land fill.  If you like cool old firearms, you'll enjoy their web site.  They even have a blog.

Denix is a small family-owned business that's been around for fifty years, producing a quality product.  If you are a reenactor you can get some kit from them.  If you are putting together a pirate costume, you can get some kit there.  Recommended.

Jan Josef Ignác Brentner - Hymnodia Divina

What's amazing about history is that any of the sources from centuries ago have survived at all.  For most of history, we actually don't have any history at all because the records from the time haven't survived.  Sometimes it's a mystery how some sources have come down to our day.  It's like this with the Czech composer Jan Josef Ignác Brentner.

We don't know a lot about his life, other than he published four collections of his music.  Likely there were not a lot of copies because many that we know existed (because they were mentioned by other people) have not survived.  What's strange is that much of his music has survived in Bolivia.  How it got there any why it wasn't lost there is unknown.

You have to wonder how many other composers we don't know about simply because their works weren't lucky like Brentner's.

One thing that we do know about hi was that today is his birthday, born November 3, 1689.

Environmentalists are stupid

Imagine a country where Environmentalists take over the government.  They institute mandates on using wind and solar power exclusively for the metro in the capital city, and add a carbon tax on all other electrical generation.  To cap things off, they host an international climate conference.  What do you think would happen in this hypothetical scenario?

Well, Chile did all of this, and riots have crippled the country and forced cancelation of the climate conference:

Climate activists and the United Nations are suffering a major black eye this week as protests and riots resulting from high energy prices have erupted in Santiago, Chile.

Chile, which will host a major U.N. climate conference in December, earned praise from climate activists for recently imposing a carbon dioxide tax on conventional energy sources and switching the Santiago Metro system to renewable power. Now, the people of Chile are rising up and firing a shot across the bow of other nations considering similar energy taxes and expensive renewable energy programs.

Environmentalists are stupid because they refuse to recognize that their upper middle class programs are a big, regressive tax on poorer people.  Poorer people have caught on to the fact that they're getting screwed so that upper class people (who generally look down on them) can feel better about themselves.

And so a million people have taken to the streets.  Nineteen are dead - victims of environmentalism.  They're unlikely to be the only ones.

Remember, these idiots think that they're smarter (and nicer) than you and me.  Morons.

Anne Murray - Snowbird

Today the local Harley Owners Group cleaned up trash along one of the county roads as part of the "Adopt-a-Highway" program.  We got a lot - 14 big bags in half a mile or so - which is a sad indictment of the local drivers.

But it was 33° at 8:00 this morning.  Two days ago it was 70°.  Winter is coming.

Who better to sing about winter than a Canadian, eh?  And who better to represent Canadian country music than Anne Murray - who I was somewhat astonished to find that I haven't posted even once in eleven years of country music blogging.  I mean, she has four Grammys.  Probably the reason was that she was as much pop as country (one of the Grammys was in the pop category).  But she has more Gold and Platinum albums than you can shake a snow shovel at, and this was her very first hit way back in 1970.

And did I mention that it was cold this morning, and that winter is coming?  Probably already there up in Spring Hill, Nova Scotia where she hails from.  Brrrr.



Snowbird (Songwriter: Gene MacLellan)

Beneath this snowy mantle cold and clean
The unborn grass lies waiting
For its coat to turn to green
The snowbird sings the song he always sings
And speaks to me of flowers
That will bloom again in spring

When I was young
My heart was young then, too
Anything that it would tell me
That's the thing that I would do
But now I feel such emptiness within
For the thing that I want most in life's
The thing that I can't win

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you 

The breeze along the river seems to say
That he'll only break my heart again
Should I decide to stay
So, little snowbird
Take me with you when you go
To that land of gentle breezes
Where the peaceful waters flow

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you

Yeah, if I could I know that I would
Fly away with you

Quote of the Day: In which I agree with a Democratic Candidate edition

Tulsi Gabbard has a bunch of policy proposals that I don't agree with, but I am 100% with her on this:

I'm running for president to undo Mrs. Clinton's failed legacy. From Iraq to Libya to Syria, her record is replete with foreign-policy catastrophes. It's a primary reason why I resigned as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders. Mrs. Clinton and the powerful media and political network she built up over decades have never forgiven this slight.... Those who are indebted to the war machine and the overreaching intelligence agencies, as well as their cheerleaders in the media, are determined to take me down because they know they can't control me. I'm directly challenging their power.... Democratic candidates adhere to [Hillary Clinton's] doctrine of acting as the world's police, using the tools of war to overthrow governments we don't like, wasting taxpayer dollars, costing American lives, causing suffering and destruction abroad, and undermining America's security.... Only when we recognize the failings of the past -- embodied by Mrs. Clinton and her minions in the media -- can we move forward to a future of peace, dignity, transparency and aloha.

Yup.

Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters

Got to love the '80s big hair.

Civil War approaches - in Britain

The English have a well deserved reputation for politeness.  "Keep Calm and Carry On", "Stiff Upper Lip" and all that.  But the shenanigans around Brexit - where the people voted to leave the EU three years ago, only to see Parliament repeatedly stall and rope-a-dope the result - seems to have the population seeing red:

Violence against MPs is a 'price worth paying' to get the Brexit result they want, say a majority of both Leavers and Remainers in a 'genuinely shocking' survey.

The study, based on polling by YouGov, found 71% of Leavers in England, 60% in Scotland and 70% in Wales believed violence towards MPs was a 'price worth paying' for Brexit.

Among Remainers, 58% in England, 53% in Scotland and 56% in Wales considered violence towards MPs was a 'price worth paying' for Britain to stay in the EU. 

Perhaps this is the reason that Parliament agreed to an election in December, two months before the newly extended Brexit deadline?

Professor Wyn Jones said: 'It's not often that one finds oneself shaken by research findings, but in this case it's hard to not be genuinely shocked - not only by the fact that so many think that violence is a likely consequence of Brexit, but that so many on either side of the Brexit divide seem to think that such events might be "worth it" in order to secure their preferred outcome.

'Given that we appear to be on the brink of another general election in which further polarisation could be a deliberate campaign strategy for some parties, these findings should give all of us pause for thought and underline the importance of responsible and measured debate.'

Alas, Prof. Jones, that ship has fair sailed.  Is it even possible to have "responsible and measured debate" when the democratic institutions have repeatedly scorned the people's stated (and voted) preference?  If Parliament can continue to reject the election result, then why should the people not assemble with pitchforks, torches, and generous quantities of tar and feathers?

Of course, I speak as a filthy Colonial, whose forebears long ago decided what the proper response to taxation without representation was.  Oh, and saying "But you do have representation, only not in Brexit" is weak (and since it's England, likely warm, too) beer.

Oliver Cromwell's statue stands outside the Halls of Parliament.  He ran roughshod over that body, during a divided time in England's past.  Many died, before sanity returned to the land.  We shall see if the British people - and their elected representatives - have an appetite for a repeat.

Cool Halloween costume, bro

LOL

Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party

Time to get ready for Halloween with some 1980s music.



Sure miss Rodney Dangerfield, though.

Most of what you're taught about the Civil War is wrong

I've been saying this for a while now, but Brock Townsend has another (great) example.

The best Halloween mask ever

pic.twitter.com/WrSVQBPvsT

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 29, 2019

But, but, but - he was an Islamic Scholar

Err, one that burns captives alive.  But don't ask the Washington Post, because they want this news to die in the Darkness ...

Good Dog.  Do you have a bone to chew?

Nina Simone - I put a spell on you

Get ready for an enchanting Halloween with Nina Simone.

Samsung Galaxy 10 fingerprint unlock is hopelessly broken

It's not just Google's Pixel 4 biometric system that's a security nightmare:

Samsung is reportedly rolling out fixes for a glitch that allowed anyone to dupe its Galaxy S10 fingerprint authentication sensor.

Samsung has reportedly started rolling out a software patch for the Galaxy S10 and Note10, addressing glitches in both phone models that allow the bypass of their built-in fingerprint authentication sensors.

The problem for Android users is that you don't get the security updates from the phone manufacturer, you get them from your telephone carrier.  This means that even though a fix is available from Samsung, it likely will get delayed as the carrier reviews and authorizes the fix.

Note: Apple iPhone users do NOT have this problem - security fixes come directly from Apple.

So just how bad is this fingerprint problem?  Banks are removing the Samsung mobile banking app from Google Play:

A security vulnerability that allows anyone to unlock a Samsung Galaxy S10 protected with a fingerprint has convinced banks that it’s time to enforce new protection rules, at least for this particular model. 

As a result, some banks removed their mobile banking apps for Samsung Galaxy S10, while others released updates to disable fingerprint support when apps are installed on this Samsung smartphone.

Banks do not mess round with security.  This is pretty embarrassing to Samsung, and exposes a pretty big weakness in the Android ecosystem (delayed security patch availability).

If you have a Samsung Galaxy 10 you should disable the fingerprint reader right now.  Oh, and don't use the facial recognition to unlock the phone either.

Top UK Gov't Scientist: NASA may have faked climate data

The guy is retired, which you'd pretty much have to be in order to blow the whistle on this sort of thing:

Retired Principal Scientific Officer (PSO) for the British Government exposes “discrepancies” in NASA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) which serve to make recent temperatures seem warmer.

The “mistakes” point to possible fraud intended to give scientific credence to tax-raising UK and US climate policies.

Nothing new to long time readers, of course.  But this is a very high level disclosure from inside what is frequently referred to as the "scientific consensus".

Our insider source reveals that global land temperature anomalies estimated as high as 1.23°C today were actually occurring routinely as far back as 1934. These temperatures were only surpassed again in 2015.

Persuaded by the raw data he examined, the former top UK government expert is adamant there is nothing abnormal about recent global temperatures.

Remember all those temperature records set in the 1930s heat waves that still haven't been surpassed:

You want to see a real heat wave?  Look at July 1936.  ElevenStates set high temperature records that stand to this day.  That Wikipedia page is a little shifty on this, trying to hide the decline in record temperatures.  You'll see an asterisk next to South Dakota, which the Wiki page says means Also on earlier date or dates in that state.  So what was that earlier date for South Dakota?  July 1936.

Oh, and three more States set high temperature records the next month, August 1936.  That makes 14 out of the 50 States suffered record high temperatures in the summer of 1936.  That's almost 30% of the States.

A suspicious sort of person might wonder whether the scientific evidence for global warming was so strong if all this manipulation, misdirection, and hiding the decline is such standard operating procedure.  And I've been posting for a decade on how the sausage is made:

You read in the press about how much the temperature has risen in the last 100 years. There's an interesting story in the data, but the press doesn't know it.

The data has two components: the raw measurements themselves, and a set of adjustments.

Adjustments are made for a bunch of reasons: time of observation adjustments (you didn't take a reading at exactly the same time each day), environmental changes, weather station site relocations, urbanization, etc.

An interesting question is how much of the 20th century's temperature change is due to adjustments? As it turns out, the answer is all of it.

They keep moving the shells around, but keep your eye on the one covering the marble.

Ten years of annoyance with the NRA

Well, I've been posting about it for ten years.  Sadly, it doesn't look like much has changed.

Posted on October 28, 2009.

Dear NRA ...

I signed back up when your folks called last night. Yes, I know that I let my subscription expire - I'll give you another try. I even signed #2 Son up, because he might even read your kids magazine. But now that we're BFF again, let me give you some advice.

When someone lets their membership lapse, you really should ask them why.

I even tried to tell your folks, but they weren't interested in much more than my credit card number. I guess that's what you pay them for, so I don't have a beef with them. But your membership department lost an opportunity for figure out why one of your members thinks he may drop you like alfredo.

But as I said, we're like totally BFF again, so I'll tell you anyway:

When I look at the legal battle around the Second Amendment, you're not a leader - you're a follower. Leaders lead.

So lead.

Love, Borepatch

P.S. Maybe if you can work to get the Second Amendment incorporated, we could celebrate! I mean, Mom and Dad might even let you come to a sleepover!!!1!

P.P.S. Lead.

Pirate Cove at Castle Borepatch

Click to embiggen.  The Queen Of The World had a vision of Halloween and it came out pretty well.  We went a little overboard but it's fun to see families come around with their kids to look at it.

The Ghost of World Series Past

The teams in this year's World Series are pretty evenly matched, and it looks like the series can go all the way to game seven.  It's not always like this.  Fifteen years ago today the Boston Red Sox completed their four game sweep of the St. Lewis Cardinals, capping the most spectacular comeback in Baseball playoff history.  Down 3 games to none to the New York Yankees, they rallied to sweep the Yanks in the next four games to win the American League pennant, and then stomped the Cardinals in the Series.

The "Curse of the Bambino" was over.  All New England celebrated, including your humble host who carved the box score in Jack-o-lanterns.

André Caplet - Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Alan Poe achieved fame in France before he did in America.  He influenced Jules Verne and several composers wrote music on his stories.  Claude Debussy started an opera on The Fall Of The House Of Usher but died before completing it.  Debussy's assistant André Caplet wrote this about one of Poe's creepiest stories.  The 1964 film with Vincent Price scared the bejeebus out of me when I was a kid.



But today is about Caplet, not Price.  Caplet was a musical prodigy and beat Maurice Ravel for the 1901 Prix de Rome.  Debussy hired him and they collaborated successfully for a decade - even four years when Caplet was conductor for the Boston Opera.  He returned to France in 1914 when the War broke out and enlisted in the Army.  He was gassed in the trenches and while he survived it wrecked his health.  He was only 46 when died in 1925.

He was a prolific composer and you can only imagine what he might have produced had the War not devoured him.  You can say that about lots from his generation.  Today's work is fittingly creepy for the story and the Halloween season.

Not that kind of pirate ...

I have a ship.  It's the annual Halloween party at the local watering hole, and so the Queen Of The World and I are getting on our pirate best.  Pictures anon, if folks care.  Here's one from days of yore.  The costumes are considerably more elaborate now.

Dang, she sure is pretty.

Alan Jackson - Midnight in Montgomery

Alan Jackson owned the airwaves in the early 1990s, so much so that this single was a bit of a disappointment - it only made it to #3 on the charts.  But Halloween is coming and what better country music for Halloween than a song with the ghost of Hank Williams?



Midnight in Montgomery (Songwriters: Alan Jackson, Don Sampson)

I was on my way to Mobile, for a big New Year's Eve show
I stopped for just a minute, to see a friend outside of town
Put my collar up, I found his name, and felt the wind die down

And a drunk man in a cowboy hat took me by surprise
Wearing shiny boots, a Nudie suit, and haunting haunted eyes
He said friend it's good to see you, it's nice to know you care
Then the wind picked up and he was gone, was he ever really there?

'Cause it's midnight in Montgomery
Just hear that whip-poor-will
See the stars light up the purple sky
Feel that lonesome chill
'Cause when the wind is right you'll hear his songs
Smell whiskey in the air
Midnight in Montgomery
He's always singing there

Well I climbed back on that Eagle, took one last look around
Through red tail lights, a shadow moved, slow across the ground
And off somewhere a midnight train is slowly passing by
I can hear that whistle moan, I'm so lonesome I could cry

'Cause it's midnight in Montgomery
Just hear that whip-poor-will
See the stars light up the purple sky
Feel that lonesome chill
'Cause when the wind is right you'll hear his songs
Smell whiskey in the air
Midnight in Montgomery
He's always singing there

Yeah, he's always singing there
Oh, Hank's always singing there

Jackie Gleason - Music For Lovers Only

If all you remember of Jackie Gleason is "The Honeymooners" and "smokey And The Bandit" then this may be a surprise: This album still holds the Billboard record for the longest stay on the Top Ten chart - 153 weeks, which is basically three years).

Gleason composed music.  He got the idea for this album when he was watching a Clark Gabel movie and had the thought that the film was terrible but the music made it tolerable.  He left the theater thinking that if Gabel needed a good music score then what hope does a guy from Brooklyn have?  And so he wrote this.

It's pretty good.  It's background music for you and your Lady, but that's what he wrote it for.  He can set the mood, but you need to do the rest.

Fake climate data

There is a lot of complaining about the climate databases (I do this all the time), but most of it is about how existing data is changed.  It's not quite right to call this "fake" - it's "changed".  But there is fake data out there, and quite frankly nobody quite knows how much there is.  This post from ten years ago explains how that's done.

Ripogenus Dam

The science is settled.

OK, so what's with the Ripogenus Dam?

You don't get much more rural than that. Way, way up the west branch of the Penobscot river in Maine, it's the sort of place that Boy Scouts go for week long canoe voyages through the wilderness. In 1972, a dozen fellow teenagers and I from Troop 47 spent a week a hundred miles from any other living soul.


In 1972, there was a Weather station at the Ripogenus Dam. It collected temperature readings every day. Those readings were included in NASA's GISS temperature reading data set. Its readings were included in GISS until 2006, along with data from thousands of other weather stations. There's really only one little problem.

The Ripogenus Dam weather station was decommissioned in 1995.

So for ten years, GISS reported temperature readings from a station that didn't exist. How? Filnet.

Part of the USHCN data is created by a computer program called “filnet” which estimates missing values. According to the NOAA, filnet works by using a weighted average of values from neighboring stations. In this example, data was created for a no longer existing station from surrounding stations, which in this case as the same evaluation noted were all subject to microclimate and urban bias, no longer adjusted for. Note the rise in temperatures after this before the best sited truly rural station in Maine was closed.

"Urban bias" is the technical term for when a weather station reads artificially high temperatures because the station is situated in an urban location where there are lots of buildings and parking lots to absorb the heat from the sun. Filnet took temperature readings from other weather stations - stations in urban locations where reading are higher because of the surrounding asphalt heat collectors - and used it for the most rural station in the state.

Remember how 1998 was the "warmest year in a millenium"? Well, it was warmer than it would have been if the Ripogenus Dam's readings hadn't come from Millinocket.

The question is: just how unreliable is the data? Lots.

How can we trust NOAA/NASA/Hadley assessment of global changes given these and the other data integrity issues? Given that Hadley has destroyed old original data because they were running out of room in their data cabinet, can we ever hope to reconstruct the real truth?

Given that there are only 30 or 40 stations that have been providing temperature readings from the Civil War up to today, given that "adjustments" are made to the temperature data via an arcane and opaque process and may represent most or all of the warming in the 20th Century, given that scientists refuse to release their data (or the raw - unadjusted - data has been destroyed), given how some of the data sets rely on tree rings from a single tree, how can we trust the data?

The Ripogenus Dam weather station was giving ghost readings for a decade. How many other non-existent weather stations are still generating new data? The World wonders.

The rules for The Blues

While it might seem a little fussy to have a set of rules for The Blues, it's OK if they're hilarious blues.  For example:

Good places for the Blues:

a. highway
b. jailhouse
c. empty bed
d. bottom of a whiskey glass

Bad places for the Blues:

a. Nordstrom’s
b. gallery openings
c. Ivy League colleges
d. golf courses

LOL.  There's much Truth in this list.  I have proof.  Go read the list and then listen to this.  It's kind of uncanny.

The PATRIOT Act

There's an excellent article on the USA PATRIOT Act at Ammo.com.  There's lots of background there (I hadn't known or had forgotten that Obama extended the act; thanks for nothing, Democrats).  This bit seems dead on:

Do we still need the PATRIOT Act? Did we ever? All laws are certainly a product of their times. But this seems much more acutely true of the USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed in a rush and under duress without due consideration.

Particularly in light of the revelations from Edward Snowden – that the government is spying on everything they possibly can – it’s worth asking if there’s any walking back. He points out that the police state apparatus was originally for drug dealers, then for terrorists, but ultimately ended up being applied to anyone and everyone.

It's a strange world where I have to post about how to hide your data transmissions from the NSA - if in fact you even can.  The Dread Pirate Roberts saga suggests that you can't.

Wow, this really is an environmental emergency

I had no idea.  Fortunately, there's a plan to address it.

For all you James Burke fans out there

I am a huge James Burke fan, and Google tells me that maybe ten posts here talk about him.  His TV series The Day The Universe Changed and its companion book would make a pretty decent curriculum for early teen kids who would learn more (and have more fun doing so) than 99% of their age peers.

I know that I'm not the only fan, as any post about him gets a bunch of comments with fanboi squees - and interestingly the Amazon link above has people selling their hardcover edition of the book for $100(!!!).

The problem for us Burke fans is that the gentleman is getting on in years and hasn't done anything new in a while.  Well fear not, Gentle Reader, help is on the way.

Dan Carlin produces a very entertaining history podcast called Hard Core History.  He approaches history as a Who Done It mystery, or a crime scene investigation.  He also points out that many (maybe even most) historians aren't really historians, they're screen writers.  They - especially the ancient ones - were writing to entertain an audience.  I find it a very interesting analogy.

Well, it turns out that Carlin is also a Burke fan, and had the man himself on one of the podcast episodes.  You can download the MP3 for free here.

You're welcome.

The Beat Daddys - Beverly Hillbillies (Blues cover)

You know this song, but probably haven't heard it done this way.  Back In The Day, The Queen Of The World saw them in a hole in the wall in Evanston, IN.  The dance floor was packed.

The lesson of Pope Formosus

Pictura per Wicipaedia

A very strange trial commenced in Rome in 897 AD, a trial of a dead man.  Pope Formosus had died the previous year, but his body was exhumed and he was put on trial in the Cadaever Synod.

His late Holiness was accused of improperly assigning Bishoprics, of perjury, and of serving as a Bishop before he had been ordained.  His corpse was dressed in his vestments and propped up on a throne during the proceedings.  Eventually Formosus was (posthumously) convicted of the charges.  The vestments were stripped from the corpse, his memory was damned, the three fingers he used in blessings were hacked off, and his body was thrown into the river Tiber.

And Donald Trump complains about Nancy Pelosi ...

It seems that some of this spirit remains in Rome and the Church to this day.

But all of them are 100% constitutional

No doubt.

Looks like the Red States are the worst abusers of Red Flag laws.

Google's Pixel 4 face unlock system: Broken as designed

There's a "bug" in the new Pixel 4 phone, one that lets someone unlock your phone even if you're asleep.  Or, say, the Cops want to see what's on it and you're not cooperating.  The fix will take rewriting the code, and so it will take a while:

When the Pixel 4 ships this week, it will be releasing to consumers with a face-unlock security issue that will apparently stick around for some time. Unlike the iPhone's FaceID (and Google's earlier face-unlock system on Android 4.1), the Pixel 4's face unlock doesn't look for the user's eyes, so the phone could be pointed at a sleeping or unconscious owner and unlocked without their consent. This weekend, Google said in a statement that a fix "will be delivered in a software update in the coming months."

What this means is that the design of the system never considered that someone might not want their phone unlocked when they're sleeping.  That speaks volumes to how much Google values your privacy.

Here's a security ProTip: Don't ever ever ever use face recognition or fingerprint reading to unlock your phone.  Unless you want this sort of thing to happen to you.

Here's a second security ProTip: Don't ever buy a phone from Google.

The mockery started really early in Obama's first administration

From ten years ago, only nine months into Obama's first term.  Funny that nobody makes up stuff like this about Donald Trump.

Originally posted October 22, 2019.

Obandoke, omae

Hey dude, feel your soul heal:

A contributor to a mailing list for Japanese-English translation that I read reports that the verb obamu is gaining currency on the Kyoto University campus. He writes, “It means something along the lines of, ‘to ignore anything which appears to make you likely to fail or (be) wrong, and blindly surge ahead (preferably chanting, “yes we can, yes we can”)’.” He adds that he heard a friend jokingly try to cheer someone up by saying, “obandoke, omae.” (オバんどけ、お前.) 

If I had to translate that on the fly, it would come out something like, “Lighten up and think positive, guy!”

There do seem to be different interpretations - as you'd expect for a neologism:

I found it as an entry dated 22 September in a collection of slang and modern usage put together by the Japanese Teachers’ Network in Kitakyushu. Here’s what they write: 

obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (拒む, which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).

They give the following example: 

ほら、何落ち込んでいるんだよ。オバめよ、オバめ。 

Or, “Hey, why are you so down in the dumps? Cheer up, cheer up!”

So to those who find themselves newly added to the unemployment rolls, or to one-time allies in Eastern Europe facing alone a newly resurgent Russian Bear, let me just say "Hey, why are you so down in the dumps?  Obandoke, omae!"

Ampontan is a very interesting blog that gives you inside baseubaru from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Hat tip: Don Surbur.

Alexa and Google Home - a Trojan Horse?

After many years have slipped by, the leaders of the Greeks,
opposed by the Fates, and damaged by the war,
build a horse of mountainous size, through Pallas's divine art,
and weave planks of fir over its ribs:
they pretend it's a votive offering: this rumour spreads.
They secretly hide a picked body of men, chosen by lot,
there, in the dark body, filling the belly and the huge
cavernous insides with armed warriors.

- Virgil Aeneid, Book II

The Turkish city of Çanakkale rests directly on the Dardanelles - the straight that separates Europe from Asia. It is the nearest city to the ancient city of Troy, made famous by Homer's Illiad and Virgil's much later Aeneid. These stories tell the tale of the Trojan Horse, where a gift is actually a ruse to smuggle unpleasant things into a place, generally to the ruin of said place.

Everyone knows the story of the Trojan Horse.  Çanakkale has a giant Trojan Horse on its waterfront.  You may even recognize it - it was built for the 2004 film, Troy.  The story is so well known that it's a tourist destination.

In computer security the term applies to malicious software that pretends to be useful.  Long time readers may recall Borepatch's First Law of Security: Free download is Internet-speak for "Open your mouth and close your eyes".  Sadly, this problem has been around for a long time and seems to be getting worse.

Alexa and Google Home appliances both allow third party apps, like the ones you get on your phone.  Well it turns out that these apps can listen in on the speakers in these devices:

By now, the privacy threats posed by Amazon Alexa and Google Home are common knowledge. Workers for both companies routinely listen to audio of users—recordings of which can be kept forever—and the sounds the devices capture can be used in criminal trials.

Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps—four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"—that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these "smart spies," as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords.

"It was always clear that those voice assistants have privacy implications—with Google and Amazon receiving your speech, and this possibly being triggered on accident sometimes," Fabian Bräunlein, senior security consultant at SRLabs, told me. "We now show that, not only the manufacturers, but... also hackers can abuse those voice assistants to intrude on someone's privacy."

Fail.  Security wasn't an after thought, it wasn't thought of at all.  My recommendation is that you - like me - simply don't buy any of these damned things for your house.

The inability of government security programs to work

A reporter once asked security guru Bruce Schneier what he would do to make the TSA more effective. Schneier replied that if he had the agency's budget, he'd give it back.  He added that only two things have improved airline safety after 9/11: strong cockpit doors and the passenger's realization that they have to fight to live.  And yet airport security is worse now than it was then.

This post from ten years ago still rings true.

The world's cutest terror suspect

Todd Brown is the proud dad of an adorable little girl. A little girl that he found out, is on the TSA's list of potential terrorists.

It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.

Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.

Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.

This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.

An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:

They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.

Bingo.

A long time ago, I posted about false positives and why the TSA doesn't go after everyone on one of its lists:

If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700 [people in our thought experiment]. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.

There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billionbucks. So they turn the system off.

And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really.  5 year olds, too.

Actually, they haven't turned the system off. Rather, they've shifted the cost of the investigation to Mr. Brown and people like him.

From the TSA's perspective, this makes sense. From our perspective, it's annoying. It's double-plus annoying when there's nothing that tells you that you're likely a false positive in their system. There is, of course, a sure-fire way to reduce your chance of triggering a false positive in the TSA's system to zero. Guaranteed to work every time.

Drive.

Johannes Caioni - Codex Caioni

Dracula's Castle

We don't have music from the era of Vlad Dracul, at least not from Transylvania where he spent his life fighting the Turks.  We really don't have music from the Turks from that era, although interestingly we do have a fair amount of music from Roman Constantinople before its fall.  All of that was going on at the same time in the Balkans, in a big mix of cultural clashing and mixing.

However, we do have music from Transylvania only a couple of centuries later, written by a Transylvania.  Well, a Wallachian, from the area on the north bank of the Danube where it flows into the Black Sea.  We think of Dracula has inhabiting a castle in the Carpathian mountains; those were the northern border of Walachia.  Vlad was the Prince of Walachia before he became the Prince of Darkness.

Johannes Caioni grew up in this area in the 17th century, 200 years after Vlad impaled his enemies.  A monk, he was educated by the Jesuits and became a composer.  His work survives because he set up a printing press to publish educational and religious books for the nearby villages and towns.  He also published his music, and some works went through multiple editions.

What is interesting about his music is that he used many themes from the folk music of the time.  And so while this isn't the music of Vlad Dracul, it might have the flavor of the music he would have recognized.

The Climate Models are junk

We've known this for a very long time.  I posted this ten years ago on this day, so I've been complaining about it for a very long time.

Arrogance

Ever wonder how someone makes a computer model of a really complicated natural system? Say, the World's Climate? You make a lot of simplifying assumptions. Micro effects are chaotic and can't be mapped to macro effect? Replace it with a seat of the pants estimate. You're an atmospheric physicist but you need to model oceanic thermal transfer? Well, air is a fluid, sort of.

But if some snotty-nosed blogger asks to see your source code or data, you get offended. After all, you were always the Smartest Kid In Class. You're published.  In peer-reviewed Journals!

The problem for the in-group is when the out-group is as smart as they are:

I was trained as a physicist and was granted a PhD for my postgraduate work in upper atmosphere physics. In the early 1980s I joined the CSIRO’s Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) for a time. Much of the theoretical side of oceanography entails fluid dynamics which, because of its heavy mathematical load, is regarded as a sub-discipline of applied mathematics rather than of physics. Because of this, in my view, many practitioners of oceanography and climatology have a cavalier disregard for experimental testing and an unjustified faith in the validity of large-scale computer models. Later in my career I was involved in running and refining numerical fluid dynamical models, so I gained some insight into how this modelling is done and how rigorously such models need to be tested. Naval architects and aerodynamical engineers do such testing in wave tanks and wind tunnels. 
Meteorologists regularly test model “skill”. Climatologists don’t seem to have a concept of testing, and prefer to use the term “verification” instead—that is, they do not seek to invalidate their models; they only seek supporting evidence.

Sheesh. What would an Atmospheric Physicist who worked on Oceanography know about how the atmosphere and oceans effect the climate? Must be some sort of denier, or something. Reid continues:

Back in the early 1990s when I was still working for the CSIRO and the early versions of the AGW theory started to gain currency, I was rather bemused by the passions which were aroused in my colleagues and the gullibility with which predictions of future climate disaster were accepted. Surely the jury is still out, I thought. I remained agnostic about the theory. More recently, after reading the literature and looking in detail at the output of one well-known climate model (HadCM3) I have changed my stand. I now believe it is nonsense for the following reasons.
[snip]
Second there are the climate models themselves. In discussions with colleagues, arguments always seem to come down to “But the models show …” Those who use this argument seldom have modelling experience themselves and share the lay public’s naive faith in the value of large computer models.
I have been a fluid dynamical modeller and I know how flaky numerical models can be for even a relatively small chunk of fluid like the Derwent Estuary. The models are highly unstable and need to be carefully cosseted in order to perform at all realistically. One reason for their inherent instability is that the mesh size of the model grid (typically hundreds of metres to hundreds of kilometres) is always much larger than the scale at which friction and molecular diffusion operate (millimetres or less). These are the forces which act to damp down oscillations by converting free energy to heat. In order to get around this difficulty, in order to keep a model stable, it is common practice to set certain parameters such as eddy viscosity unrealistically high to compensate for the absence of molecular friction. This is reasonable if we are using the model to gain insight into underlying processes, but it means that fluid dynamic models are not much good at predicting the future. There is no exact correspondence between model and reality, and the two soon part company.

It's too hard to model the fluid dynamics of one river mouth, but the climate of the entire world? Don't worry, they have it covered.

I must admit here that I'm certainly no climatologist. However, my entire industry (Internet Security) exists because - I'm afraid that there's no good way to say this - all programmers are lousy. If it weren't for bugs (and most of the time, it's bugs that we've seen again and again and again), you wouldn't need our products. There are two types of bugs:

1. Programming mistakes. In security, these aren't bad enough to make the program crash (or someone would find in during Quality Assurance testing, duh). These are the easy bugs. Something's broken, and needs to get patched.

2. Architectural flaws. It's not a bug, it was designed that way. These are bad security juju, because the security "bug" might not be fixable at all, or it requires heroic efforts to fix. Programmers hate these bugs: not only are they a pain in the tail end to deal with, but the other programmers laugh at them because their program is broken as designed.

So, are there any bugs in the models? Speaking professionally, we should expect roughly one security bug per 1000 lines of source code. How many lines of source code are there in something that models the climate of the earth? We don't know, because the scientists won't publish their source code. But don't worry, I'm sure it's all wicked smart and accurate and everything. And well tested.  Oh, wait:

A scientific theory is not tested merely by looking for confirmations but by conscientiously trying to “break” the theory, by trying to disprove it. The AGW theory is encapsulated in the IPCC assessment reports. The models discussed in these reports have not been tested in this way. These reports include sections on “Verification and Validation” but none on testing. “Verification” means that only data which support the theory are examined and data which do not support it are ignored. Indeed the authors of this section in the IPCC Third Assessment Report specifically dismiss the need for rigorous testing when they state: “our evaluation process is not as clear cut as a simple search for ‘falsification’” (Section 8.2.2 on page 474). Effectively what they are saying is: proper scientific testing is too hard and we are not going to bother doing it.

Testing is hard, and often thankless. And really, really important. A company that doesn't test its products goes out of business, because customers won't put up with lousy output.

Go read the whole thing. This is one of the most interesting articles on the science behind AGW that I've seen in a while, and I look for this sort of thing. The quality control of much - if not most - of the AGW research looks terribly shoddy.

WWII Medal of Honor recipient reports to the Final Muster

Technical Sgt Francis Currey, dead at 94.  Dwight has an excerpt from his Medal Of Honor citation, which is simply astounding.  RTWT at his place; I'll give you two excerpts from his NYT obit to illustrate just how bad ass he was:

By the time the European war ended, he had been awarded a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for exploits after the events at Malmedy and three Purple Hearts, in addition to his Medal of Honor.

Dayum.  Here's Wikipedia's depiction of his ribbons:

You don't see that every day.  And this is cool (again, from the NYT):

In the late 1990s, Mr. Currey became the first Medal of Honor recipient to be portrayed as a G.I. Joe action figure. In his later years, he was honored at an annual parade in Hurleyville.

Ave atque vale.

Red Sovine - Phantom 309

Halloween isn't generally thought of as the time for irony, but Red Slovine's life was sure filled with it.  Born Woodrow Wilson Slovine, he was nicknamed "Red" not after his namesake's politics but rather his red hair.  His early career was filled with struggle for success, taking him to Shreveport where he found himself on a radio station performing with Hank Williams.  Hank used some connections to jump start Red's career.  He had a series of hits in the 1950s and joined the Grand Ole Opry.

But we don't remember him for his Opry days, but instead for his truck driving songs.  He pretty much created the genre, and this example is a good one for the Halloween season - a hitchhiker is picked up by a ghostly truck driver, one who died years ago avoiding a crash with a school bus.

But the final irony for Slovine was that he died in a traffic accident.  He had a heart attack while driving and ran into a tree.



Phantom 309 (Songwriter: Tommy Falle)

I was out on the West Coast, trying to make a buck and things didn't work out; I was down on my luckGot tired a-roaming and bumming around so I started thumbing back East, toward my hometown.Made a lot of miles, the first two days and I figured I'd be home in week, if my luck held out this wayBut, the third night I got stranded, way out of town at a cold, lonely crossroads, rain was pouring down.

I was hungry and freezing, done caught a chill when the lights of a big semi topped the hillLord, I sure was glad to hear them air brakes come on and I climbed in that cab, where I knew it'd be warm.At the wheel sit a big man, he weighed about two-ten he stuck out his hand and said with a grin"Big Joe's the name,” I told him mine and he said: "The name of my rig is Phantom 309."

I asked him why he called his rig such a name he said: "Son, this old Mack can put them all to shameThere ain't a driver, or a rig, a-running any line ain't seen nothing but taillights from Phantom 309."Well, we rode and talked the better part of the night when the lights of a truck stop came in sightHe said: "I'm sorry son, this is as far as you go cause, I gotta make a turn, just on up the road."

Well, he tossed me a dime as he pulled her in low and said: "Have yourself a cup on old Big Joe."When Joe and his rig roared out in the night in nothing flat, he was clean out of sight.Well, I went inside and ordered me a cup told the waiter Big Joe was setting me upAw you could-a heard a pin drop, it got deathly quiet and the waiter's face turned kind-a white.

Well, did I say something wrong? I said with a halfway grin he said: "Naw, this happens every now and thenEvery driver in here knows Big Joe but son, let me tell you what happened about ten years ago.At the crossroads tonight, where you flagged him down there was a busload of kids, a-coming from townAnd they were right in the middle, when Big Joe topped the hill it could have been slaughter, but he turned his wheel.

Well, Joe lost control, went into a skid and gave his life to save that bunch-a kidsAnd there at that crossroads, was the end of the line for Big Joe and Phantom 309But, every now and then, some hiker'll come by and like you, Big Joe'll give them a rideHere, have another cup and forget about the dime keep it as a souvenir, from Big Joe and Phantom 309!