I feel ya, man.
Tools
Forest for the Trees
On a national news interview with Gayle King today, Zuckerberg bragged about “taking down 18 million pieces of misinformation.” Fine, if that’s how they expect to stay busy, but it’s half-assed self promotion. People with a smidgen of common sense understand treating symptoms as opposed to root causes, is a never-ending struggle, often doomed to failure. Sounds like he’s trying to play a fine-grained game of digital whack-a-mole – to the detriment of society and democracy.
The issue Zucky-boy deliberately omits, overlooks or otherwise skirts in attempts to pin him down on the topic is simple: The distinction between the misinformation and the people spreading it. It will only be curbed by stopping the people doing it. That means bannings, blocking IP’s, even ranges of IP’s where Russian cyber criminals and Chinese data thieves lurk – not to mention the Covidiots. But alas, that might impact the bottom line.
Any”thing” can easily create and exploit a FB account. Maybe a little user vetting? Apparently the country’s not worth it.
Fuckbook’s Most Viewed Article In Early 2021 Raised Doubt About COVID Vaccine.
Boeing Boondoggles
I’ll take a wild-assed guess and surmise the main reason for the rear vision system failure was pretty simple and easily avoided. My hindsight is after all, 20/20. It was deemed too expensive to put the boomer in the back where they belong, opting rather for a more profitable, easy electro-digital solution. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I expect Boeing to fall flat with the Starliner in coming days/weeks as well. There must be alot of employees at the company unhappy with what they are doing, how and why they are doing it that way. The software-controlled valves in the Starliner booster system are certainly orders of magnitude more complicated than any remote vision system.
Good luck.
LATE UPDATE 15 August: Mission scrubbed.
Nailed It
Billionaire Astronauts
I’m making a rare exception to posting policy acknowledging Blue Origin’s successful mission today. Posts here are typically supported with links to relevant information, but not this one. The following is purely my opinion on the topic.
Many judgements and accusations surrounding wealth disparity and income inequality have been leveled against people like Musk, Brandon and now Bezos, with regard to the commercial space industry. I call it antithetical hypocrisy. It is a more secular non-political form of hypocrisy held by people living their daily, mundane lives in the lap of technology born from space programs.
Anyone enjoying their cellphone/Internet, powerful pharmaceuticals, high tech apparel, fashion accessories, cars, and a plethora of advances in techno-driven manufacturing can thank space exploration and research. It all sources from programs like DARPA, NASA and others, pushing the envelope to meet the next challenge and conquer another frontier.
So if it takes alot of big dick energy and billionaire dollars to get it done, – more power to ’em! And if they just want to have some fun and take their friends for a ride, that’s cool too.
The Internet is Magic!
..to an alarming number of users. I’ll never forget a visit home on leave to PA back in the late 80s. Went to the CO (Bell Telephone Central Office switching station) on a side trip with Dad to buy some tires for ‘ol Betsy. I recognized the washing-machine-sized disk units similar to the ones we had at Buckley and asked what was up. Staring intently at a small CRT monitor, Dad replied “No clue. Somehow the connections get from here to there, but there’s no wires I can see. Must be magic. We’re having a training class on it next week.”
Information floating around “the Net” is no less magic to a majority of consumers, than those phone calls stuck in an early generation disk drive were to my father. The question on everybody’s mind consciously or not, is what to do with all the magic stuff the Internet constantly bombards us with?
It’s a simple trust issue that’s been around since the first smoke signals wafted across Africa in the birth of telecommunications. The correct answer is NOTHING – until either the information becomes a verifiable known quantity or the risk of not acting on it becomes too great. Knowledge owners make the true stuff a scarce commodity for good reason. The root of all power comes from knowledge, and what’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander.
I found the news story about Canadian Qanons harassing people over the queen of the great white north unusually disturbing. Reality is, the FAANGs are making alot of money with Internet-borne digital apparitions of all kinds. The politicians are generating alot of power with widespread digital disinformation – backed up in analog on Fox! Bad actors have unfiltered access into the minds of a populace through the unregulated magic medium called an Internet connection contained on any cellphone.
Free speech? You get what you pay for. Dumb people rant about magic. Others wonder WTF.
Michael Collins
Sorry for the late posting on this, but it seems I’m always in catch-up mode these days. The astronaut community is large, diverse and growing fast. It wasn’t that long ago there were only a dozen or so, doing some pretty incredible stuff. Michael Collins was one of those early pioneers leading the way in space travel.
“We … know how lucky Mike felt to have lived the life he did … Please join us in fondly and joyfully remembering his sharp wit, his quiet sense of purpose, and his wise perspective; gained both from looking back at Earth from the vantage point of space and gazing across the calm waters from the deck of his fishing boat.”
Did You Know We Have a Cyber Army?
There’s alot going on in government even they don’t know about. As the spy game morphed into the digital world over past decades, the U.S. allowed itself to be out-paced on the tech front for the 1st time ever. Paul Nakasone has addressed this problem.
I was a member of that team the lion’s share of my working life during times it seemed the higher up bean counting managers were lucky to remember their own email addresses, much less recognize cyber threats. It took some regrettable missteps, but I’m confident people like Nakasone leading from the front where all true leaders go, have things well in hand now.
Can’t Wait to Setup My New Account
I’m fairly well accustomed to being banned from various social media platforms and message-boards around the Internet. I dabbled in that crap for many years, no different than most I assume, in my curiosity to explore the digital horizon. But it didn’t take long to realize what it was and what it meant: Fraud, hate and bigotry. That’s what you have when like-minded Americans get together to discuss their fears and foibles online these days.
But there’s a whole new land of cyber opportunity opening soon!
“Former Trump administration senior adviser Jason Miller said Sunday that the former president plans to return to social media in the coming months with his “own platform.”
“Trump has a long history of bold ideas that didn’t pan out — from a faltering airline to a defunct professional football league to countless offshoot products that failed.”
Good luck with that. I encourage everyone to join, lurk and learn. Sun Tzu was right about at least one thing, and this is WAR. IP addresses are a dime a million, and I have three legitimate email addresses that will certainly become banned once again from groups of people who don’t like my politics, among other things. But they’ll get well deserved face-fulls of it before I’m done. Three times. Then I’ll go the “il”legitimate route and really crank it up. I can use my power for evil too. White-hat targets are drawn. Just waiting for the shooting range to open up, so we can start Rockin’ the Casbah on geeknet…
The Definition of Badass
It’s pilots, no doubt in my mind. They have the toughest jobs, right up and down the line, whether they are responsible for hundreds of lives airborne, or innocent civilians on the ground, their fingers are on the trigger. One in particular stands out, setting the example for all to follow. Gordo was the only one in danger on that last Mercury mission, But he set the standard, even Chuck Yeager ate crow on.
The definition was given by an un-named NASA co-worker after splashdown. “He knew what he was doing and could always make things work.”
Cyber Insecurity
It’s gonna get worse, before it gets better. Solarwinds fallout is looking to be so widespread, it’ll end up lumped into dozens if not more discreet attack vectors before it’s in the books for good. Of course M$ ends up being a primary target, due to their perennially weak security posture. I wonder what it will take to make Republicans realize working treasonous deals with our enemies is a short term-gain, at best – long term debacle, in all reality.
This is what I’m Talking About
“My battle with cancer really prepared me for space travel,” Arceneaux told the AP. It made me tough, and then also I think it really taught me to expect the unexpected and go along for the ride.”
Talk about inspiration. What’s it take to get YOU going? This kid’s doing better than most anybody else – with a prosthetic leg!
New Network Architechture
The current state of a long-running 5712 project to lock things down in the face of ever-degrading Internet security is depicted below. I meant to do this a long time ago, but it was too easy and inexpensive to use the readily-available COTS tools. And it’s hard. That’s why it took so long, and also one reason top tier network and system security people command big dollars in the high tech job market. The ongoing Solarwinds fiasco finally drove home the need for me to get this done.
The long, broken line sweeping around the right side and top portion of the pic is the path anything other than Wifi takes in and out of our network. Incoming to the public-facing web, gets passed by the DSL modem firewall to start with. Then an enterprise class NIDS(k) continuously analyzes all traffic on the Wifi-Centurylink DMZ portion of the network in real-time for malicious content, while a true stateful firewall running on my personal workstation(f) routes everything in and out of the wired network on a different subnet.
The Synology NAS now sits powered down as a cold storage backup location. If the vendor installs updates, they have root on the box. That just doesn’t work in my environment any more after Solarwinds. I’ll take my chances with open source. The web site and everything else system-wise now hosts from the 2nd gen Ryzen(f) at the core including database, security cams, proxy, firewall and routing. The only data it will hold is the security cam video in the final stage of this project, coming soon as I save enough cash to spend a couple grand building a new workstation and buy some 10GbE parts for a high-speed edge between the data repositories.
Here’s what it looked like in the last iteration a couple years ago. This is what happens when a Systems Engineer retires too soon. 😉
Migration Complete
2nd Gen Ryzens are only a couple years old in the market, but already in the high tech history dustbin. It’s hard for me to imagine how the 3rd Gen 5k model going into my next build can really be that much better. This old 7/27 now forms the core of a fairly sophisticated SOHO architecture, hosting a ton of services, all while doing the network firewall dance underneath.
The system dashboard screengrab below was taken while simultaneously running a local copy of the data volume and encoding an mp4 video with a well-resourced Windows VM running in the background. You don’t notice even the slightest slowdown working at the console. I thought the reviews were too good to be true. It spent the past year+ basically wasted as strictly a personal workstation content creation machine.
Kinda like race cars – there’s lots of people driving them, not alot of real race car drivers around, tho. It’s not as much about the horsepower, as how you use it.
Software Security is a BIG reason to stay away from the commercial kind. Here’s the other good reason. I’ll try to get around to updating the network diagram to better show whats happening after things get settled in.
Watch for the Echo Chambers
Trump’s Twitter banning, despite being welcome relief from relentless Trump fog, only portends higher intensity in the fringe webspace. Parler was just a shot across the bow.
These craven seditionists will re-group in more cyber-clandestine fashion soon. Keep an eye and ear out for them – they won’t be hard to spot. Recruitment is their only hope to advance the cause. It’ll take more than a few thousand white trash rioters to overthrow this democracy. And keep #19 in perspective. The dividing line between cyber and real is expanding all the time.
What Happened to my Internet?
Stuff Migrated
Data storage finally outgrew the 1Gb network’s capacity to effectively back it up in a timely manner. Then Solarwinds effectively demonstrated how vulnerable users of commercial software are. The nefarious n’er-do-well cyber vector is officially un-constrained. Remote users may not appreciate it, but the site is now hosted on a beefy 2nd gen Ryzen with plenty of RAM, running nothing but open-source software. Moving things off the old Synology NAS was a week-long project fraught with bumps in the sysadmin road and learning updates aplenty.
The video-monitor project mentioned in the last post yesterday was a 3-day debacle, due mostly to my own rusty admin skills. There were import issues with the WordPress site, so look for missing images and broken links until I go back and fix everything. I’ve yet to have a WordPress site of any size import correctly.
The Synology stuff is great kit, but aimed more at corporate customers with deep pockets on the high end, with minimal performance and capability on the low end. My DS418play is a great little mid-tier 4-pocket raid machine that served well for several years, performing all the typical LAMP duties associated with a web site like this. But it’s mine in name alone, with no OS/application control. Can’t trust it anymore, and it contains spinning disks. Pretty sure I never trusted the DSL router either, but at least it’s a throwaway item.
Planned new topology will be a 10Gb edge behind a proper stateful firewall. Activating a 2nd interface on this machine will be the day it moves into pure server status and I start building a new workstation. That last portion of the project awaits funding.
The 5712 Trumpomania silver lining: Build Back Better!
Late Update 8 Jan: Turns out every local WordPress link is off by the same .php value and there’s ALOT of missing carriage returns. I’ve been displeased with the direction WordPress is heading – this just confirms my fears. I believe this is actually the first time I’ve run the latest version. Synology is always versions behind and even runs an ancient kernel. I’m sure i’ts been securely Synolygized, but…
I have a feeling alot more software licences are going to soon be re-written, or alot less COTS is gonna be found in the networks. Can’t trust ’em.