October 04, 2018
Are we Surprised? No. (UPDATED)
Are we terrified concerned?
Yes.
It appears that there has been a hack involving at least 30 companies, as well as the D.O.D and C.I.A.
Worse, it's a hardware issue.
Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.
One can assume that this is NOT an isolated incident. This is probably one of many, and one can infer that very little is now beyond the reach of the CCP. On a global level, it is very likely that all those Chinese funded infrastructure projects in Oceana, Latin America, Africa and South Asia are riddled with similar, and perhaps more hard to detect bugs, possibly embedded into the very structures of the facillities.
Pretty much every technical advancement made by compromised companies as well as state and military secrets can now be assumed to be in China's possession.
This doesn't mean they know them all yet. The sheer quantity of data that China must now have to sift through is daunting, and to be useful needs to be looked at by people who have enough knowledge in the given subject matter and sufficient imagination to be able to recognize something's merits. Encryption is a further obstacle. However, they probably have at least as big an edge on our Military as we had over the Japanese and German's after breaking or acquiring their respective codes in WW2.
This turn of events should not be the least bit surprising given that our self anointed aristocracy has off-shored much of our electronics manufacture to China (because slave labor is so cheap). Well, as we learned from Google & Facebook, if one finds something exceedingly cheap, one might well be the product.
Of course, knowing is the first step to fixing, so it should be pretty straightforward to correct this right?
Fixing this is beyond daunting. The expense of pulling out all the old circuit boards is going to be phenomenal and replacing them is subject to the same issue. The complexities of the global supply chain means that tracking down not just the manufacturers, but subcontractors, will be next to impossible.
Going forward, we may need to have some blockchain certification for all our electronic components, certainly for D.O.D. related applications. This is a sufficient breach of trust with sufficiently troubling ramifications that it ought to remove some of the opposition to restrictions on imports from the Middle Kingdom.
If oughts were dollars though we would have no debt.
This is outside my ballywick, so I eagerly look forward to the perspectives of commenters on this mess.
UPDATE: In the comments section, Pixy Misa is expressing considerable skepticism. Pixy is the owner and administrator of the Mee.Nu domain (Praise the lathe of the maker!) and an IT professional himself. He has an extensive disquisition on this topic over at his place that you should read in full.
Now. Answer the following question. Did you read Pixy's post?
No: Go back and read it.
Yes: Proceed.
I found the story credible because I already have concerns about China and spying. That something like this could be done seems completely plausible.
However, all other sources I've looked at since posting this have been either rewritten versions of, or link back to, the Bloomberg article with no additional info. The Bloomberg article is anonymously sourced.
One thing I had not fully grokked, but Pixy mentions extensively, is how LONG this story has been in development.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is a very real thing.
To Wit: The following excerpt from the article on the nuts and bolts of the alleged hack sounds plausible to me, partly because it comports with my limited understanding of how these systems work, but mainly because the words, Dilithium, turbo-encabulator, and Midichloreans do not appear anywhere in it.
Officials familiar with the investigation say the primary role of implants such as these is to open doors that other attackers can go through. "Hardware attacks are about access,†as one former senior official puts it. In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people familiar with the chips’ operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of the operating system were being stored in the board’s temporary memory en route to the server’s central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the order of the instructions the CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create disastrous effects.Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code. The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off.This system could let the attackers alter how the device functioned, line by line, however they wanted, leaving no one the wiser.
In the comments, Pixy (who, again, does IT for a living) seemed spectacularly unimpressed with the plausibility of this scenario.
Over at Medium, one of those linked to in Pixy's piece on the subject has objections , but they are mostly about how on earth this would have been detected, as it would have been an insanely comprehensive audit to detect this. However, he closes with this...
For me, Bloomberg’s article could go either way. The logic of backdooring the BMC makes a lot of sense. Whether it happened in this case — given all the categorical denials — I have no idea.
I will go so far as to say that I think something along these lines is likely to happen at some point, however, if this story does turn out to be bunk then Bloomberg will, via the cry wolf effect will have facilitated the very thing they pretended to report on.
This story is looking sketchy, but for now, we await more info....
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October 03, 2018
Houston Shuts Down Robot Brothel
So...someone was opening a brothel in Houston, cleverly cutting down on payroll and getting around local vice laws by replacing their...er...customer service professionals with animatronic Tengas.
The city of Houston, belatedly realizing that there was no law on the books against robo-ho's, sprung into action and passed some updates to their zoning and vice laws.
Houston is now safe from the shame of being at the forefront of the newest manifestation of the oldest profession.
As someone with a functional amygdala who understands that sex doll time shares are as close to objectively disgusting as something as subjective as disgusting can be...
...and perhaps problematic in other ways...
...let me say that this is why we need smaller, less intrusive government. I'm not completely opposed to zoning laws, but this is not a hog farm or an antimatter containment facillity in a downtown, it wasn't going to be oppressing anyone or depriving them of their rights. It was going to be a business making somebody money, making somebody happy and contributing to the tax base of the city to pay for things Houston might need like...flood control. But now, because someone couldn't stand that something they didn't like would be happening behind closed doors, well, a small business never got off the ground.
I further note that Houston's regulatory dragnet seems to have applied to magical maids with glasses as well...at least at the time of writing.
Ubu are you OK?
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Oh. Wow. This Looks...GOOD!?
I think Miles Morales is going to work out just fine.
This is very promising...right up until that point that the trailer becomes sublime.
It looks really fun, and as a special bonus it seems to be completely respectful of Marvel canon.
ALL OF THE CANON.
Oh my stars and garters, this is on my watch list!
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October 01, 2018
Boof?
"...I Repeat: Bravo Oscar Oscar Foxtrot.
All Blue Blaze Irregulars set condition at Defcon π."
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September 30, 2018
Further Illustrating Our Policy of Compensating For Writer's Block By Posting You-Tube Links
One of In Range TV's Q&A sessions, this time without Mr. McCollum who is doing research abroad. I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on any of the answers, but I'm particularly curious as to the opinions of any lurking IT professionals regarding the advice and disquisitions regarding i-Phones and Cloud services at 32:10 and 33:45 respectively.
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September 29, 2018
Well. That Was Fast.
Also: The world has gone mad.
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28 Days
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September 28, 2018
The Storm Came Back. It Wouldn't Stay Away.The Storm Came Back, Yes We Thought It Was a Goner But the Storm Came Back. It Wouldn't Stay Away.
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September 27, 2018
Wait....
So...Bowser's a Girl Now?
more...
I seem to have missed something.
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September 23, 2018
Medieval Meltdown (UPDATED)
Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown is a medieval studies professor at the University of Chicago. Some years ago she wrote a post on her blog entitled Three Cheers for White Men which is only 228 words long so you should go read it now...
UPDATE: This is a more recent article that is less comprehensive, but potentially less triggering than, the one linked at the end of this post. END UPDATE:
There. Was that so bad?
Well, that post got noticed by the professionally outraged in 2016 and caused, shall we say, a scene, which has been building ever since.
Fast forward to last month, and it appears that this is coming top a head and the National Association of Scholars has asked the University of Chicago to confirm that she is a scholar in good standing, because things are just that insane now.
There's now a very comprehensive and interesting article on the broader details and implications of this written by...umm...well...
There's no way to sugar coat this.
The article is by Milo Yiannopoulos.
"WAT!?"
It's 16,201 words and despite the author's well earned reputation, is calm, fair, measured, reasonably balanced, informative and completely devoid of profanity except for a few instances necessitated by directly quoting college professors.
It really is a top notch article, but you'll probably want to run to the loo first and perhaps get some snacks.
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September 20, 2018
Take Heart!
Be not dismayed by the last post. Face today's challenges with optimism and a smile!
Plus Ultra!
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Dispatches From the Department of Disquieting Developments
Pixy linked to this the other day and I think it really deserves rather wider distribution.
On the surface, it's a very dry, inside baseball discussion by a Paul M. Jones discussing a proposed Code of Conduct for open source code and IT work. This sounds both benign and banal until you realize that where benign and banal cross is their...intersection
The Contributor Covenant version on which the RFC is based is authored and maintained by intersectional technologist and transgender feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke.
"Well, I'm sure THAT won't
immediately go pear shaped."
And yeah...It's about as much a dumpster fire as one might expect, but, like so much else today has some really creepy undertones.
I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, which is replete with links to various other takes on the issue including Ehmke's. I further urge you to bring it to the attention of people with larger readerships.
The apparent importance of one proposed COC may seem deceptively limited in scope, but the implications are quite troubling and reflect what is already happening. Several examples from the tech world over the last few years are been brought up in the notes at the end.
This far beyond coders, pretty much everybody can be burned by this.
Very related is this recent piece from The Phantom Soapbox which, while Twitter related takes a look at similar impulses...
They are watching other people be drummed out for the sin of "not a team player" because their hobby is shooting, or hunting, or even fishing. (Fish have feelings too, you murderer!!!) Or somebody found a pic on-line of them at a Pro-Life rally, or somebody saw them walking into a church on Sunday morning.
Speaking of the Stassi, this video that keeps popping up on Instapundit every few months is also relevant and shows where we are going to end up if we as a society don't get off the PC train.
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September 19, 2018
AVAST! Ye Land Lubbin' Scallywags!
Let the log show that this be the 19th of September.
Scrimhaw by Maomaouzi
Today is the day we go below decks to divvy up our ill gotten booty...
...
...
Or just look at it.
more...
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September 18, 2018
Just as God and Robert Heinlein Intended
Space X has redesigned their interplanetary rocket, the BFS.
The 55 meter long rocket now has three rather than two fins, each sporting a landing leg, presumably this gives it a wider footprint and more stability when landing on Luna, Mars, Callisto or Mercury. Its aerodynamics have been revised to further facilitate aerobraking.
The ship is to start doing short test flights next year but its big trial run will be a circumlunar test flight about 5 years from now. In addition to a crew of engineers and technicians to evaluate the ships performance and some scientists to do observations during the voyage, Must has, with his typical fair, provided luxury accommodations for some paying passengers on this flight.
Well, Monday, it was revealed that Yusaku Maezawa., a Japanese billionaire, publishing magnate, fashion guru and art connoisseur has bought up bought ALL the tickets. He plans to distribute the 6 to 8 other seats amongst various artists in the hopes they will use the experience to further their art.
Elon Musk is focused almost fanatically on the settlement and eventual terraforming of Mars, though this rocket has far broader potential. Space X is touting the design for exploration and settlement as far afield as the outer solar system. However, the ship is non nuclear and relies on solar power for electricity, which is only really practical as far out as the Jovian system.
"He says with all the knowledge and expertise that a History major has in such matters."
That being said, The space between Jupiter and Mercury is really, really big.
Furthermore, the engines run on Methane + Oxygen and the ship is designed with in-situ propellant manufacturing in mind. That is, given enough carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and sufficient solar power, it can make its own fuel. Mars, with its ice and CO2 atmosphere is ideal for this, but many asteroids, particularly the Trojans have considerable potential to be so utilized with some effort. This ship can potentially fuel itself and go anywhere within the limits of its solar collectors. Musk specifically proposes establishing propellant depots on Mars and Ceres to facilitate this.
There's more from Musk here:
One of the concerns I keep hearing is that the Techweasels intend to use space as an escape route to abandon us and space will be the playground of the ultra rich.
Roberta-X has thoughts on this.
I know it has become fashionable these days to decry space as a place where the rich will flee to escape us clods -- but in fact it is harsh and desolate, a set of environments where recycling isn't just a nice idea but a near-necessity -- and where conditions are such that you're already set up to work with harsh and dangerous processes while being isolated from them. We can extract exotic metals and process radioactives on the Moon all we like and not endanger a single newt or squirrel -- or person, if they do it right -- and the aftermath won't be a spreading contaminated lake in China or a massive disposal problem in the Pacific Northwest.
Or, I suppose, we can hunker down in shared, egalitarian* poverty and every year there will be less and less, until one day, it'll all be gone.
Someone's gotta do the plumbing, someone's got to run the HVAC, and the aristocrats who aren't going to get their hands dirty aren't going to long be running things. What's going to be needed in space are going to be overwhelmingly what is seen today as blue collar, engineering, mining, construction/repair, mechanics, farming, doctors and short order cooks who can make the tilapia and zinnia taste different the thousandth time around.There will be very little need for lawyers, and NONE for sociology majors. I rather suspect that the need for an aristocracy whose jobs are based on status and appearances will not be strongly felt by the majority of those who will inhabit at least the early settlements.
There was a similar issue in Jamestown in the early 1600s. The expedition was run by aristocrats who had skillsets that simply did not mesh well with the needs and morale of the larger organization. This situation did not last long.
That aside, it is worth noting that Musk is particularly interested in making sure that his transportation system is affordable by ordinary people and not just the billionaires whose high end flights are financing it. It's mentioned in the above video when he discusses the Moonbase.
Yes. The Moon Base.
This Kurzgesagt video got a response from Elon Musk within 24 hours.
You know, this here 21st century is finally starting to show real potential.
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What a Difference Two Days Make
Well, the folks lost everything outside the house, the shop, the barn, and the 80 years of accumulated tools in it, the heirlooms, the lawnmower, the backhoe, the trailer and my brother's johnboat (which is now under the command of navy ants somewhere downstream),
However, before bailing, my Dad, being a southerner, had performed a last futile gesture in service of a lost cause.
He caulked the garage level doors shut.
Well, yesterday morning the stain of the waterline was above the garage floor...but the garage and family room floors were dry. NOTHING in their house was lost!
Everything else is gone, but they're alive, their house is OK (wait...can we say "OK" anymore?)
The biggest surprise of all was that their boat which was moored at Atlantic Beach somehow survived with only minor damage.
Alas, their generator was not so lucky, so they're with me for now. We'll be heading back down to clean things up in a few days.
The whole area though, has been utterly thrashed. Trees and powerlines are down everywhere and the main roads are washed out...as in big ravines where a road used to be. Tornadoes tore through the downtown, roofs are missing, some buildings are just piles of rubble next to anomalously pristine structures...there is no power and the mosquitoes are like something from The African Queen.
'The Crystal Coast' is in for a rough couple of months and I understand that things are far far worse to the south and west. The attention of the nation however, is now elsewhere, distracted by court intrigues and aristocrats posing, but people are still suffering and even dying.
The calamity was and is real, even though some of the reporting was not.
Don't forget them.
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September 16, 2018
A Small, Category 2 Hurricane When it Came Ashore (UPDATED)
My parents live just outside of Morehead City, on high ground in a little town called Newport. The other night they decamped to my sisters house in Ahoskie (well inland) and awaited the storm's passing.
Here in most of Hampton Roads, Hurricane Florence brought grey skies, some gusts and intermittent rain. At the state line on the coast around Pungo and Bellhaven however, the storm's effects got rather worse. Farther south still, it is, as most of you know an ongoing disaster of the first order.
Now Florence came ashore just south of Morehead, which means that city was in the storm's dangerous quadrant, bearing the brunt of the winds and surge. News reports indicated that damage was about as bad as one would expect with the addition that a couple of tornados had swept through the area, one sweeping through the middle of the town.
Yesterday afternoon I was informed by my sister that since the storm had passed south..."They've gone to Morehead". I started to head down there, but I was then informed that it was no longer possible to get there from here.
Then she explained...
When they arrived they discovered that despite many trees being down on their property in the woods, the house was completely undamaged. There was no power and there was some standing water near the barn, which in the 40+ years the family owned the property has never happened. The barn is well down the hill though. A little outbuilding along the driveway which was full of family heirlooms, holiday ornaments, and such was also undamaged. So there was considerable cause for joy. Likewise, a nearby trailer park had had almost all the trees go down, but miss every single trailer. The inhabitants had comer over from the shelter across the bridge and were cleaning up their yards but there was no crisis. My uncle was not so lucky, having had a tree go through his roof, but my dad helped him get the tree out and the hole covered to keep out the intensifying rain. The rain got quite torrential, despite the storm having passed (there was virtually no wind at this point). They went back across town to their house and set up the generator to keep the freezers cold and run the water pump. Shortly after they finished that, Dad noted 4 feet of water at the barn...all the power tools were in danger. My dad ran down to the barn, but by the time he got there it was six feet deep, so the, power tools were not going to be saved, he started back and discovered that the clumps of what appeared to be peat moss floating, were, in fact, Brazilian Fire ants doing their amazing water thing. Trying desperately to get the invasive flesh eating, venomous annoyances off of him he found he was suddenly, literally, over his head and swam to the johnboat which was floating off its trailer, He unfastened it and discovered as he crawled in it that it was full of...more fire ants. He abandoned the johnboat to the chitinous corsairs and it drifted off into the forest carrying its payload of pain. He swam back where he had moments before been able to wade, holding onto trees against the accelerating current and finally got back to the house, washed off, applied iodine and alcohol, and took benadryl. Soon, the water was up to the barns roof. The shack with the Christmas stuff was half under water...fire ant water. It was shortly after this that they called my sister and informed her that there were so many trees down, that they could see all the way to the bridge over the Newport River...or at least where the road entered the river where the bridge had just been.
They are cut off, the bridge is out, they're on what amounts to a temporary island now and the water was three feet from the garage when they called my sister.
A little while later, my Mom called and informed me that all the roads going through New Bern and to Moorehead were now closed. I also found out that the "They" that my sister had been talking about was my Dad and Brother in Law...my Mom is still with my sister, which is a big relief.
Anyway, both of them seem to be OK, but it looks like Mom and Dad are going to loose everything. The water rose rose unbelievably fast and well above what it had been before the storm proper had moved on.
The damage came not from the wind or the storm surge, but the rain on the back end of the storm, which raised the Newport River to levels it has never been. They lost everything a full day after the storm had passed, there was no wind to speak of according to Dad, and lots of unsuspecting people were coming out to clean up, when a flood of 300 years hit.
I'll be heading down there as soon as the roads are open again.
Blogging will be on hiatus for a bit.
UPDATE: They're both back at my sister's. Dad's bandaged and puffed up like a balloon from the fire ants. The water is reportedly still rising. We will likely be going down there tomorrow or Tuesday to clean up and see if their boat survived.
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September 14, 2018
An Admittedly Poor Substitute For Actual Content:
But the editing is quite good.
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September 12, 2018
Sneaky Storm is Sneaky
It looks like the storm so many of us have been getting prepared for and/or fleeing has cunningly dodged our preparations and is heading to inflict itself upon people who have had little reason to evacuate or otherwise prepare. (These North Atlantic storms almost never turn south and this is the only one I'm aware of that ever did so while moving east).
We look to have dodged the bullet here, but things are going to be terrible for those this to the south that this storm has caught flatfooted.
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The 21st Century is Here!
Finally! Exactly the sort of human augmentation that science fiction has been promising us!
Beware of Penguins.
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September 11, 2018
Remember
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