Why I'm not posting about the "the Russians hacked the election" nonsense

Because it's nonsense, and quite shockingly low caliber nonsense at that:

Then there is the persistent incredibly STUPID story that “The Russians Did It!!”. First off, you can’t know if they did the hack, or not. (As pointed out several times already, I’m a computer security guy who had to deal with this stuff professionally for a couple of decades… it’s ‘my business’ and I’m good at it.) My first encounter with The Russians was in about 1986, so call it 30 years ago. To think that only this year they woke up and started hacking is just dumb. They are about 1/4 as active as the Chinese, so anything they have, or did, the Chinese had more of and sooner. Now look at what ‘the hack’ was (and was not): It was NOT a changing of the vote. Recounts and paper ballot States show that. (In fact, they show a little fudging by the Democrats in places like Chicago…but not enough to change the outcome since they are concentrated in places like California where the Dims already run the table). It WAS a publishing of the criminal and completely immoral actual acts and crimes of the DNC, Clinton, Media like CNN and MSNBC and ‘papers of record’ in burning Bernie and going ‘all in’ on biasing the debates (and worse). So at most, it was exposing the truth. Golly, being truthful, such a crime… /sarc

Remember, the Democrats think that you're stupid, and will fall for this drivel.

What's the cost of cybercrime?

$1 - $2 Billion a year for one botnet:

New research suggests that an elaborate cybercrime ring is responsible for stealing between $3 million and $5 million worth of revenue from online publishers and video advertising networks each day. Experts say the scam relies on a vast network of cloaked Internet addresses, rented data centers, phony Web sites and fake users made to look like real people watching short ad segments online.

[blink] [blink]

Wow.

UPDATE 21 December 2016 14:01: Fixed an autocorrect-induced typo.

What does a Climate Scientist say to climate scientists freaking out over the impending Trump Administration?

Dr. Judith Curry runs the school of Earth Sciences at Georgia Tech, and is a peer-reviewed climate scientist.  She is also a "like warmer" - she believes that the climate has been warming (as do I) and that mankind is somewhat responsible (as do I).  However, she does not see things as a crisis, and has repeatedly spoken (including before Congress) on the large uncertainties in climate science.  Her paper The Uncertainty Monster is required reading for anyone interested in the state of the science.

So what does she say to the scientists who are freaking out over Donald Trump?

Get over it, your side lost.  Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.

Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.

Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.

Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on vague conflicting signals from the Trump administration.  Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.

Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems.  The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be hoped, that right there.

I have no idea how something like this could happen

Bing Crosby - White Christmas

One of the Queen Of The World's favorites - the original from the film, 'natch.  This one that is dubbed into German is pretty funny ...



Of if Deutsche is nicht sehr gut fur sie, Perry Como's version is perhaps more gemütlich:

Just between you and me, I have my doubts

The oldest Christmas Carol - Corde Natus Ex Parentis

This was written by the roman poet Prudentius in the late fourth or very early fifth century, although there is some argument that Veni Redemptor Gentium, a carol by Ambrose (Bishop of Milan and one of the Church Fathers) was the first.  Interestingly, both are still performed today over 1600 years after they were written.



Corde natus ex parentis
Ante mundi exordium
A et O cognominatus,
ipse fons et clausula
Omnium quæ sunt, fuerunt,
quæque post futura sunt.
Sæculorum sæculis.

Of the Father's heart begotten,
Ere the world from chaos rose,
He is Alpha, from that Fountain
All that is and hath been flows;
He is Omega, of all things,
Yet to come the mystic Close,
Evermore and evermore.

Michael Buble & Thalia - Feliz Navidad

Love this song.

Travis Tritt - Christmas In My Hometown

Country music can get pretty sentimental sometimes, and there's no time for sentimental like Christmas.  Travis Tritt does an old school country version of Sonny James' 1966 holiday classic.



Christmas In My Hometown (songwriters: Sonny James, John Skye)

There's a white Christmas in my hometown
Where the streets are snowy, shinin' bright
And the lights on all the Christmas trees are burning
For old Santa's sure to come this very night 

There are jingle bells and Christmas carols singin'
By the children who are walking in the street
Folks are smiling and they're sayin' merry Christmas
For there's joy in their hearts as they meet 

Oh, the Christmas chimes are ringing in the tower
Jingle bells can be heard all around
Time for all to go and wait for Santa's comin'
'Cause it's merry Christmas here in my hometown 

I can hear the reindeer in the distance
All the sleigh bells are ringing loud and clear
Little eyes are closed in their slumber
They are waiting for old Santa to appear

B.B. King - Christmas Celebration

The Department of Energy told Trump to go pound sand. Now what?

The Trump Transition team asked some pointed questions to the DoE. DoE just said that they weren't going to answer.  That does not seem like it will play out well for DoE:

Today, we get the first salvo fired in response. From the Washington Post

“Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of DOE (Department of Energy) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people,” Eben Burnham-Snyder, a DOE spokesman, told the Washington Post in an email. “We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department. We will be forthcoming with all publicly-available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team.” [Emphasis in original.]

When I saw that, I cracked up. Busted out laughing. I thought “You idiots! You just fell into the trap!”

Here’s the deal. The Transition Team sent that memo out. It doesn’t ask for anything other than the duties the employees performed. It doesn’t ask them to change their views or alter their scientific conclusions. It just wants to know, who worked on these projects? There is no reason to refuse that—it’s asked in this situation all over the world. A new boss comes in and says “Hey, who worked on the Jones project?” And Sally and Bob raise their hands. No harm, no foul.

Does anyone really think that the incoming DoE Secretary won't get these names?  Does anyone really think that he won't get the names of everyone who, say, worked on anything to do with the Paris Climate Accords?  Does anyone really think that he won't get the names of anyone who, say, went to Paris on DoE time and expense for the Climate Accord meeting?

Seriously?

But that isn't the avenue of attack here.  What is going to be identified is the committee memberships that are involved.  That's because bureaucrats are incredibly risk adverse, and so they essentially become herd animals.  The herds are called "committees", and like the wildebeest on the African savannah the committee provides protection to the individual bureaucrat:

If you want to take over a bureaucracy, the key thing to know is that a single bureaucrat all alone is almost always a weak, pitiful creature for a simple reason.

He/she finds it very, very difficult to make a decision on his/her own.

Why do you think bureaucracies always spawn double handfuls of boards and commissions and working groups and the like? As a group, they can make decisions, no problem. Might not be good decisions, but they can make them. Plus which it makes them brave to have six or eight other men and women in agreement. But by themselves, chronological inertia takes over, and they slowly sink into their natural vegetative state of torpor.

...

SO … if you want to take over a bureaucracy, how do you do it? Well, you either take over or abolish the groups that give individual bureaucrats power, [or] you isolate or otherwise neutralize the leaders.

The Trump team seems to be determined to attack the entrenched bureaucracy, in a way that I can't remember seeing before.  What is interesting is that the new paradigm is very different from the old:

Old Paradigm: The country wants the government to function and to perform its tasks efficiently.  The bureaucracy wins this game because while the old committees can be abolished, the new Administration cannot succeed without setting up new committees to make the Agency function.  If the Agency employees don't want to play along, the new committees will fail to work well, and the new Administration will fail at making the government work.  Advantage: entrenched bureaucracy.

New Paradigm: The country doesn't give a fat rat's derriere whether the government works well or not, because a plurality or majority of the country thinks that government is the problem, not the solution.  A non-trivial portion of the country may think that the Agency has been politicized and is aggressively implementing policies that the citizens don't agree with.  In this case, all the new Administration needs to do is eliminate the committees that are not desired, and the Agency will grind to a halt on the activities that are politically unpopular with the country.  No need to replace them and make them work, just gum up the works.  Advantage: new Administration.

It doesn't seem like anyone even needs to lose their jobs, just be made powerless and irrelevant.  I am quite keen to see how this plays out, but the current people at the DoE should not be optimistic of the outcome.

Nat King Cole - Oh Tannenbaum

The Queen Of The World really outdid herself on our tree.  3,300 lights.

A classy tree like this deserves a classy song.

It wasn't my fault!

Use this one weird trick do that Ads DIE DIE DIE

Peter highlights a serious security issue - malware delivered via web ads:

Like many of you, I'm sure, I run ad blocking software, a pop-up blocker, and a script blocker on my Web browser.  In fact, I use multiple Web browsers.  For Web pages that simply must allow scripting, cookies, etc. - such as Blogger, on which I'm writing these words - I use Chrome.  For general browsing, where I don't want to allow Web sites to set cookies, run scripts, etc., I use Firefox, fully loaded with protective software.  As backups, for occasional use when I want to visit a Web site, then instantly clean out whatever it sets in the way of cookies, etc., I use Opera or Edge.  To add to my browsing security, I use a VPN (virtual private network)offering end-to-end encryption, and providing a 'location' that's many hundreds of miles away from where I am.  I want to make life as difficult as I can for scam artists, hackers and intrusive corporate spyware.

I therefore get very frustrated when certain Web sites won't allow access unless I disable my ad blocker, or demand that I disable some or all of my security software in order to use them.  I simply won't tolerate such nonsense. 

This is a serious issue, one that I've blogged about several times.  Web sites typically have little or no control over the ads they serve, and ads are increasingly used by the Bad Guys to serve up malware to unmatched web browsers.  Peter lists a set of tools that I also recommend, but There's another trick that you can use that will deep-six a lot of the web clutter that slows your browser down - and may try to infect it.

Internet Black Holes.  I just made that name up, but it gives you a picture of what this is doing.  If you make as many of the ad sites unreachable to your computer, they can't send you an ad.

Web pages look all nicely formatted, but they're actually a jumble of text, pictures, links, and computer code (especially Javascript).  Going to your browser's menu and selecting "View -> Source"  will show you just how complicated and ugly things are.  Your browser cleans this all up for you, pulling pictures down from links, formatting the text, loading video players, and fetching the ads that are encoded into the (mostly javascript) computer code.

And here is the weird trick: if you tell your computer that a particular ad location is at the Internet  address equivalent of Never Never Land, your browser will never be able to pull down that ad.  Sweet, huh?

What you do is basically override the Domain Name Service (DNS) for a particular set of bad sites.  DNS is what translates names (say, "www.google.com") into an IP address (I'm too lazy to look it up, but it will look something like "172.63.108.7").  DNS runs automagically, where your computer asks a DNS server (typically your home router) to give it the IP address for the name that you're trying to reach.

Except you don't have to always use DNS.  You can selectively (and most importantly, at no effort by you whatsoever) override DNS if you have some of these translations in a "hosts" file on your computer.  Your computer actually looks there first, and only asks DNS if it doesn't find what it's looking for.  If you have a bunch of ad sites in your hosts file, with an IP address pointing to Never Never Land, your browser will never send out DNS requests for those sites, and you will never see the ads (and the malware delivered with them).  Cool, huh?

As a note to the curious, "Never Never Land" has an IP address of "127.0.0.1".  This is called the "loopback" address and means that it's referring to your very own computer (whatever the real IP address is).  Since you almost certainly aren't running a web server on your own computer, and certainly aren't hosting those ads on those URLs, your web browser will get a whole bunch of 404 messages instead of ads.  And it will get them fast, because it doesn't have to wait for DNS to reply.

The only thing you need to know is "where can I get a hosts file that is already made up, because I'm far to busy to do it myself?"

The entries look pretty legit, although I can't vouch for everything.  There is non-ad stuff (like Sitemeter - the Sitemeter host that this blog used to point to is listed there) which will break, but it doesn't look like it will break much (or anything) that you'd notice.  And you want to zap a lot of the annoying stuff that Peter was talking about?  This is your huckleberry.

There are installation instructions at the link, and it looks like the file is updated regularly, so give it a try.

Disney sued over H1-B visa staffing

Laid off Disney IT staff suing Disney for racial discrimination:

Court papers, filed on Disney's home turf in Orlando, Florida, state that in October 2014, the Mickey Mouse operation told 250 or so technicians that they were being laid off and that they could apply for other roles within the entertainment giant. The lawsuit claims the techies were not successful, and instead the positions were taken by non-Americans on H-1B visas, who had to be trained by the axed IT bods. 

Essentially, it's alleged Disney racially discriminated against its own experienced American workers by replacing them with non-citizen rookies parachuted in from India. 

"Between October 2014 and January 31, 2015, Plaintiffs applied for employment in several available positions posted by Defendant," the filing [PDF], submitted on Monday, reads. 

"Plaintiffs were well-qualified for these positions, but were denied further employment with Defendant. On or about January 31, 2015, Defendant terminated the employment of Plaintiffs based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals."

I'm quite interested to see what Trump does about this.  The Silicon Valley big wigs are meeting with him today - I wonder if this will be a topic.

Peter, Paul and Mary - A Soalin'

I grew up with Peter, Paul, and Mary.

NSA suffering morale problems

Quite frankly, this is no surprise:

Low morale at the National Security Agency is causing some of the agency’s most talented people to leave in favor of private sector jobs, former NSA Director Keith Alexander told a room full of journalism students, professors and cybersecurity executives Tuesday. The retired general and other insiders say a combination of economic and social factors — including negative press coverage — have played a part.

“I do hear that people are increasingly leaving in large numbers and it is a combination of things that start with [morale] and there’s now much more money on the outside,” Alexander said. “I am honestly surprised that some of these people in cyber companies make up to seven figures. That’s five times what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff makes. Right? And these are people that are 32 years old.”

Note that General Alexander left NSA a couple years back, charging a cool $1M a month for his (no doubt valuable) consulting services.  Perhaps Alexander is just jealous that they're doing it younger than he did.

I remember my days there.  We had absolutely no doubt that we were the Good Guys, and that we were protecting the American people.  Of course, that was long before the Agency went feral.

Jeff Gordon test drive prank

A disguised Jeff Gordon takes a Camaro for a test drive with a car salesman.  Hilarity ensues.



You're an idiot and I'm going to kill you!

Well, this is the Internet, and so people started calling it a fake.  So a disguised Gordon poses as a taxi driver and gives a ride to one of the most (ahem) vocal critics.  Hilarity ensues once again.



Man, this is some funny stuff.

Sammy Davis Jr. - Christmas time all over the world

Separation of Powers - half gone?

Aretae is back, with a post pondering Separation of Powers as envisioned by the founders and as recognized today.  His take: half of the original mechanisms are now gone:

Overall, there were at least eight elements built into the fabric of the federal government for the purpose of balancing the states’ power against that of the federal government. There are still four left.

Actually, by his count there are three left.  His first one is Secession, which Foseti dealt with some time back.  That link is well worth a read.

In unrelated-but-related news, we are told that the grandsons of John Tyler - the 10th U.S. President - are still alive:

The Tyler men have a habit of having kids very late in life. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, one of President Tyler’s 15 kids, was born in 1853. He fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928.

And so back to Aretae's list.  All eight elements were in full force when Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr's father was born.  Five were left when he was born, and he has watched another two be eliminated.

TL;DR: it only took two generations for the majority of the pillars of Separation of Powers to be eliminated.  Moldbug said something similar, although in eleventy million more words.

But hey, Aretae's back!  Go leave him some welcome-back comment love.