Congratulations to my Son-In-Law

Promoted to Chief Petty Officer.

What happens when someone pwns your car when you're driving?

Nothing good:

Car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have again hacked a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, this time by physically linking a laptop to commandeer its steering and kill the brakes. 

The duo have captured the hack to be presented at Black Hat Las Vegas this week in video proof-of-concept demonstrations. 

The compromise requires attackers to be physically present in order to compromise the car. 

However Miller confirmed this writer's suggestion that the attacks could be carried out using a concealed device which either contains automated and timed commands, or iwth remote attacks over a wireless link.

Watch the horror unfold:



We're in the early stages of people figuring out what the attack vectors are, but those will develop and grow more sophisticated over time.  That '67 GTO is looking safer and safer ...

I know people who used epoxy to fill USB connectors.  I'm thinking about doing this to the Wrangler's computer interface connector.

Security wasn't an afterthought.  It wasn't thought of at all.

Wait, what?

35 years ago, video killed the radio star

On August 1, 1981 MTV broadcast its first music video.  Now, the last VCR has been produced.



Back In The Day, buddy 2cents and I demanded our MTV ...



There was a brief golden age, before people realized that music videos had to make money.  Back when people would make videos like this:



... or this, which was maybe the apogee of music video production.  Directed by actual Hollywood director John Landis (directed The Blues Brothers, American Werewolf in London, others):



But mostly when I look back on this era, I remember Big Hair.  My flaming youth, right there ...



This was back when America was winning the Cold War, is all I can say.

Russian hackers and electronic voting machines

I've said that I'm skeptical as to whether the Russians actually hacked the DNC email server.  However, there's no question at all whether they could have.  As to Hillary's home brew server, everyone seems to be operating from the starting assumption that they read all her email.  This is much more likely than not.

There's also no question that the biggest story is whether the use of electronic voting machines would let the Russians (or someone else) rig an election:

Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with Internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack.

[Your iPhone just got less secure. Blame the FBI.] 

But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.

We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.

The cynic in me thinks that the two political parties loved electronic voting machines because they saw the opportunity to do industrial scale voter fraud.  Certainly there was a rush to deploy these after the 2000 election.  Of course, security was not an after thought - 15 years later we're still dealing with what was well known at the time.

And now everyone is worried about the Russians rigging an election?  Good grief.

Bring back paper ballots.  You need physical access to tamper with them, so you can't do it from Minsk ...

This is not the future I was promised

I had to reboot the coffee machine in the office.

I support Gary Johnson and Donald Trump, it seems

Take the quiz.

Never heard of Castle, but it seems that I may be closer to him on policy choices.  I voted for Johnson last time around.

(via)

Blake Shelton (with Pistol Annies) - Boys 'Round Here

My wife almost killed me on the John Deere.  That could be a Country song.

We went up to Ohio to get her Dad's lawn tractor.  It was a little exciting using ramps to get it up into the pickup truck, and even more exciting backing it down.  But nothing was as exciting as when she was riding me around and gave it some gas.  It was a good thing that the lawn tractor was on a lawn ...

Every now and again we get our Redneck on.  As you'd expect, there's a song for that.  Blake Shelton said of the song "That song had me from the first, ‘cause I thought about all the guys I know back in Tishamingo. None of them listened to The Beatles. They listened to Hank, or these days you’ll hear Jason Aldean blaring out of somebody’s car coming from a mile away. It’s just how they are, and that song is just written exactly how I live."

Looks like that's how the Queen Of The World and I live, too.  At least this weekend.

The video includes the lovely Pistol Annies, who include the former Mrs. Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert.



Boys 'Round Here (Songwriters: Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson, Craig Wiseman):

Well the boys 'round here don't listen to The Beatles
Run ole Bocephus through a jukebox needle
At a honky-tonk, where their boots stomp
All night; what? (That's right)
Yea, and what they call work, digging in the dirt
Gotta get it in the ground 'fore the rain come down
To get paid, to get the girl
In your 4 wheel drive (A country boy can survive)

Yea the boys 'round here
Drinking that ice cold beer
Talkin' 'bout girls, talkin' 'bout trucks
Runnin' them red dirt roads out, kicking up dust
The boys 'round here
Sending up a prayer to the man upstairs
Backwoods legit, don't take no sh*t
Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit

Aw heck
Red red red red red red redneck

Well the boys 'round here, they're keeping it country
Ain't a damn one know how to do the dougie
(You don't do the dougie?) No, not in Kentucky
But these girls 'round here yep, they still love me
Yea, the girls 'round here, they all deserve a whistle
Shakin' that sugar, sweet as Dixie crystal
They like that y'all and southern drawl
And just can't help it cause they just keep fallin'

For the boys 'round here
Drinking that ice cold beer
Talkin' 'bout girls, talkin' 'bout trucks
Runnin' them red dirt roads out, kicking up dust
The boys 'round here
Sending up a prayer to the man upstairs
Backwoods legit, don't take no sh*t
Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit

Let me hear you say
(Ooh let's ride)
(Ooh let's ride)
Down to the river side

(Ooh let's ride…)
Hey now girl, hop inside
Me and you gonna take a little ride to the river
Let's ride (That's right)
Lay a blanket on the ground
Kissing and the crickets is the only sound
We out of town
Have you ever got down with a…
Red red red red red red redneck?
And do you wanna get down with a…
Red red red red red red redneck?
Girl you gotta get down

With the boys 'round here
Drinking that ice cold beer
Talkin' 'bout girls, talkin' 'bout trucks
Runnin' them red dirt roads out, kicking up dust
The boys 'round here
Sending up a prayer to the man upstairs
Backwoods legit, don't take no sh*t
Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit

(Ooh let's ride)
Red red red red red red redneck
(Ooh let's ride)
I'm one of them boys 'round here
(Ooh let's ride)
Red red red red red red redneck
(Ooh let's ride)

(Ooh let's ride…)
Well all I'm thinkin' 'bout is you and me, how we'll be
So come on girl, hop inside
Me and you, we're gonna take a little ride
Lay a blanket on the ground
Kissing and the crickets is the only sound
We out of town
Girl you gotta get down with a…
Come on through the country side
Down to the river side

The "Russians hacked the DNC" story is wrong

At the very least, it is journalistic malpractice and we should consider it wrong until proven otherwise.  Robert Graham (an Internet Security bigwig) posts at length about this:

People keep citing this New York Times article by David Sanger that attributes the DNCleaks to Russia. As I've written before, this is propaganda, not journalism. It's against basic journalistic ethics to quote anonymous "federal officials" in a story like this. The Society of Professional Journalists repudiates this [1] [2]. The NYTime's own ombudsman has itself criticized David Sanger for this practice, and written guidelinesto specifically ban it.

Quoting anonymous federal officials is great, when they disagree with government, when revealing government malfeasance, when it's something that people will get fired over.

But the opposite is happening here. It's either Obama himself or some faction within the administration that wants us to believe Russia is involved. They want us to believe the propaganda, then hide behind anonymity so we can't question them. This evades obvious questions, like whether all their information comes from the same public sources that already point to Russia, or whether they have their own information from the CIA or NSA that points to Russia.

Everyone knows the Washington press works this way, and that David Sanger in particular is a journalistic whore.

There's more, and you should read the entire post.  In my opinion, this is exactly right.  I've been skeptical about this, but anonymous "tips" basically say "trust me".  I'm sorry, but the last decades have shown that we shouldn't trust the Press.

The echo of Jackboots

It may be stirring in France, as a frightened population rushes to join gun clubs.  Why?

As a Brit who has lived in France for 15 years, I like to think I know my neighbors pretty well. I've pretty well mastered the language, and have even been elected to the local council. So my observations are not a tourist's snapshot. I talk to a lot of people at every level of French society and I am detecting a change of mood. And the mood is turning nasty.

Normally, it takes quite a bit to excite my neighbors under the languid southern sun, but as one horror has followed another, I am no longer taking for granted that they will put up with this much longer.

Tom Wolfe once joked that fascism is always descending upon America but always landing in Europe.  France has a long history of native grown fascist movements, as a reading of the Third Republic will reveal.  The movements then were driven by the same dynamic we see today:

Traditional politicians are failing France's citizens. The president, Francois Hollande, has so far responded feebly to this. After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine, he suggested that radicalism could be avoided by making school children recite a pledge of allegiance to the French state. 

Last week, Manuel Valls, the prime minister, further infuriated my neighbors by suggesting that they should just "learn to live" with terrorism. No wonder the extreme nationalist politicians are gaining ground.

I need to point out that this article is at CNBC, for crying out loud.  As you'd expect from a reliably lefty media outlet it does a tip of the hat to the (very real) problems of discrimination faced by France's muslim community.  But the entire article is grim.  People are buying guns - lots of guns.

Me, I blame Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and America's lack of an Assault Rifle gun law ...

Hat tip: American Digest.

Of Free Trade, Bastiat's "Seen and Unseen", and the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party

Peter has a good post up about free trade. I left a comment about how economists (like everyone) suffer from Bastiat's "The Seen and the Unseen" fallacy - you notice what you measure and you don't notice what you don't measure.  Economists measure the amount of trade, and increasingly do not measure the actual impact of unemployment (not least because the way unemployment is measured has become corrupted by a cynical government.  And suddenly I'm afraid that I found myself in a rant.

It's not Peter's fault - I've done this before, on this topic, and this post is really a combination of two older posts that are suddenly made fresh by the Trump phenomenon.  You want President Trump?  

This is how you get President Trump.

Globalization is presented in a very sterile manner.  That's because the people who benefit from it are the Intellectual Class - the Harvard Business School types, the Banksters, the Intellectual Class hangers on.  Lots of dusty figures and graphs.  It's left to the artists - in this case, a latter day Woodie Guthrie - to give it a human face.



The plant in the video was the Goodyear factory in Union City, TN.  It closed in 2011. When I was a lad, Woodie Guthrie was a hero of the Left, a man who stuck up for the Little Guy who was oppressed by the Powers That Be.  Nowadays, this is called right wing hate music.  Just because.

Quite frankly, there's nothing that more clearly demonstrates the decadence of the Left.  And nothing that more clearly demonstrates why I hold them in contempt.  It's all upper middle class SWPL self-interest, and I say this as someone who's been sort of upper middle class for a long time.  The people in this video are our neighbors.  Where, o where is Hollywood and the Left?  The World wonders.

Actually, we don't.  That's where the contempt springs from.  The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.

HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I used to be a Democrat.  I used to hold elective office in the Democratic Party Apparat (County Council, as a matter of fact).  I'm registered Independent - as I've been since the 1980s - but have never been a Republican, and have no plans to change that.

I grew up pretty liberal, as childhood friend 2cents could tell you.  Quite frankly, I'm one of the millions who think that they didn't leave the Party, the Party left them.

And that makes a difference.  While I think that the GOP is the Stupid Party, when I look at what the Democratic Party has shrunk to, the only word that comes to mind is "evil".  I mean that quite literally.

They have sold their souls to those who used to be considered their worst enemies.  They've shaved much of their souls off, and burned them as an offering on the altar of Wall Street and the Banksters.

Where I came from, that used to be called hypocrisy.

I was trained not just as an Engineer, but as an Economist, and so I understand the theories of technological advancement displacing unskilled labor, and the theories of international trade and advantage.  Indeed, I've spent my career in an industry that has benefited from that trade and America's differentiated value as we built the Internet.

And yet I never forgot that Dad was born on a kitchen table, and grew up dirt poor in the Depression.  That runs deep, to my bones - which is why I'll never be a Republican.

And yet I look at the Democratic Party, the party of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the Recording Industry, Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, and I want to vomit.  Bill Clinton destroyed the soul of the Party; NAFTA was only the start of a long and (literally) sordid list of betrayals where bit by bit, the Party's soul was gradually sliced off until the only thing left was appetite.

Democrats love him because he won elections, but he destroyed the Working Class.  NAFTA was intended to pad the bottom line of the Fortune 500.  It came at the expense of the Working Class.  But the Fortune 500 contributed large amounts of money to his campaign, and to the Democratic Party.

Repeat for the Bank bailout.  Repeat for the Federal Reserve monetizing the debt and causing an inflation that the Government no longer tracks (they changed how it's counted to make it go away).  Repeat for the EPA refusing new oil drilling permits and refinery permits, causing gasoline prices to double (oops, energy isn't included in the inflation indices any more).  Repeat for SOPA and the galaxy of Intellectual Property laws that would criminalize the Middle Class, saving the RIAA the expense of suing.

Now add in Obamacare which gutted the 40 hour work week, and the push for "immigration reform" - bringing in between 12 and 20 Million more workers that are willing to work for lower wages than unemployed former Working Class Americans.  Because the Powers That Be in the Democratic Party smell new votes.  Not Middle Class votes, but hey - eggs, omelets, right?

Add in the EPA and a thousand other regulatory agencies making it impossible to build a factory in this country.  The Chinese can have it up and running in six months, just like we used to - but the Democratic Party's environmentalist allies (and their allies in government agencies who benefit from this jobs killing red tape) have a monomaniacal drive for more, more, ever more regulation.  If that kills the working class then gosh: don't they vote Republican anyway?

And throughout all of this, you hear an endless litany of "the Democratic Party is the party of the little guy".  The biased Media never calls them on any of this.  And I (and presumably you) are racist wingnut h8trs because we see the betrayal for what it is:

Evil.  These are real people, with real lives and dreams.  Those are being destroyed by the Democratic Party.  The Democratic Party is impoverishing the Middle Class, all the while claiming to be sticking up for it.  I have data.

What's the Matter with Kansas?  What's the matter is that the good citizens there haven't strung up every Democratic politician from a lamp post.

My mother gave birth to me on the kitchen table that I ate off until adulthood.  I have always considered the humble conditions of that birth to be a distinction, one to be proud of.  In spite of the humbleness of that birth, I was able to become a university professor, author of several books and many articles, and to be blessed with marriage to a wonderful woman and father to three fine sons.  Having accomplished that from such a birth had given me bragging rights.

- Dad

Dad made a shift from being a Republican to a pillar of the Democratic Party because of this.  I've made the shift away from the party for exactly the same reason.  I'm not cynical or evil enough to stomach what the party has become.

Well played, Gardiner.

The Castle Borepatch garden is bearing tomatoes.  They're pretty danged good.

"Smart" lightbulbs are pretty stupid

From a security perspective, that is:

Nine security holes, four of them still unpatched, have been found in the Osram smart light bulb system, potentially giving attackers access to a home or corporate network. 

The issues in the Lightify Home and Pro systems range from cross-site scripting (XSS) to problems with the ZigBee and SSL protocols to insecure encryption key handling. They were discovered by security company Rapid7. 

Some of the programming bugs are pretty amateurish, raising the larger question of what kind of security review the products go through before being put on the market.

Security wasn't an afterthought - it wasn't thought of at all.

My recommendation is to assume that any "smart" appliance is an open door to hackers.

Yeah, I could get behind this

Must read on the Trump phenomenon

Via Isegoria (you do read him every day, right?) comes this:

... humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us.  And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe.  By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.  So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.

...

What does it mean for our politics?  To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s appeal.  He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they’re good or bad.  I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion.  Each time someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.  The people back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and they’ve been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the condescenders.  If nothing else, Trump does that. 

I grew up comfortably in this "Intellectual Class" but Dad remembered the hard days of the Depression and his Grandfather's hardscrabble farm.  The angriest I remember him getting at me was when I casually tossed out some sneering reference to the problems of the Working Man.  He had no patience for that sort of thing, and so I had a correction to the Class Condescension problem at quite an early age.  Fortunately, it stuck.

And so while I am a card-carrying member of the Intellectual Class (multiple papers published in the technical literature and all that), I feel this same rage at the sneers from people who should know - and behave - better.  There's no mystery to me about what Trump's appeal is, and in fact there is a sense of kindred spirit: he, too, came from this same class.  He, too, rejected the easy prejudices of that class.  He, too, is impatient with those who should know better.

It's quite an interesting interview, and I highly recommend it.

I'm skeptical about the whole "Russian Hackers got into the DNC email"

I'm increasingly skeptical that Vlad Putin hacked the DNC email servers and released the emails to help get Donald Trump elected.  Sure, it could have happened, but a number of things have me saying "Hmmmm":

1. While the Russians certainly have the capability to do a hack like this, I don't see the motive.  If they want to get Trump elected, why not release the emails from Hillary's servers?  That would be much more damaging than the DNC emails which haven't really done anything other than make Bernie Bros angry.  Letting it be known that they were reading her email while negotiating with them would be terribly damaging.

2. The story about Russian hackers came out almost immediately after the Wikileaks announcement.  How on earth would anyone have been able to know who did the hack in that short a period?  The Press picked this up and mouthed the story as you would expect from Running Dog Lackeys of the Democratic Party, but there's very little evidence being offered.

3. There are other plausible actors who would be more embarrassing to the Democrats.  It's not beyond belief that an IT Administrator was a closet Bernie Bro who caught a whiff of what was going on, and leaked the emails to Wikileaks.

All in all, I'm taking a wait and see approach to this.  But for now, I'm not buying the "Hacked by Rookies" thing.

Smart guy

Environmentalism is a scam

It's not about the principle, it's all about power and filthy lucre:

How do humans save nature? By caring for people. Poor nations access cheap and reliable energy to grow more food on less land, create jobs in cities, and reduce fertility. All of this urbanization & increasing yields returns the countryside to grasslands, forests and wildlife. In rich countries — where forests & wildlife are returning — the key to environmental progress is to move to ever-cleaner and safer forms of energy, including nuclear power.

Unfortunately, both of these strategies are increasingly opposed by powerful interests. Using a variety of policy and regulatory mechanisms, large NGOs, European governments, and financial institutions in rich countries are forcing the closure of our largest source of clean energy, nuclear power plants, all while diverting funding from cheap and reliable power to expensive and unreliable off-grid solutions incapable of lifting billions from poverty.

A new group has formed to seize the bull by the horns:

Our ambitions are immodest: we seek to double the rates of both a. electricity growth in poor nations and b. new clean energy generation globally by 2025. Our strategy is to build a grassroots social movement capable of changing minds and policies.

We seek first to stop the premature closure of nuclear plants, restart shuttered plants, and increase the rate at which nations build new nuclear plants, whether Generation III or Gen IV. Second, we seek to motivate policymakers, private banks and public financial institutions to significantly reduce the cost and increase the availability of credit for inexpensive baseload electricity in nations where people still rely on wood and dung as their primary energy.

This actually makes enormous sense, and so we can expect that it will be opposed tooth and nail by all Right Thinking People™.

Sunday, Puppy Sunday

Golden retrievers at a water park.



Someone wants a Golden Retriever puppy.  Not sure how you say "no" to someone whose title includes the word "Queen" ...

Adolphe Adam - Overture to Si j'étais Roi

You have heard one of his compositions, and likely can sing along to it.  Here's the song:



Adam was what you might call a "natural".  As a child, he didn't like his structured music lessons, preferring to improvise.  He was a prolific composer of operas and ballets, and a professor at the Paris Conservatoire.  His music is very listenable, and he really deserves to be know for more than a single Christmas carol.

Today's classical composition is the overture to the comedic opera Si j'étais Roi (If I were King):