Category Archives: Technology

Quote of the day—Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff

Posted on by

The real problem with #Bitcoin isn’t volatility. Volatility means Bitcoin can’t function as a currency, but it makes it very appealing to traders and speculators. The real problem is that Bitcoin has no underlying value to support its price, making a terminal collapse inevitable.

Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff
Tweeted on January 10, 2022
[That is what I believe too. I mentioned the volatility, appeal to traders, and no underlying value in a discussion with a coworker last month after he told me about setting up the server rack in his garage to mine Bitcoins. My coworker wasn’t accepting my arguments. I tried comparisons to other mined products such as gold and silver. He seemed to understand what I was saying but could not be convinced Bitcoin is a high risk investment.

Schiff claims the following credentials:

Chief Economist & Global Strategist: http://Europac.com, Chairman: http://SchiffGold.com, Founder: http://EpacFunds.com , Host: http://SchiffRadio.com

That Schiff sells gold probably gives him a blinding bias but he, and I, may still be correct. I just don’t know. And that I, and apparently Schiff, cannot make an accurate prediction as to when the demise of Bitcoin occurs gives me concern that we are mistaken in our belief.

I’m more confident in prediction about the financial collapse of the U.S. government than I am of predicting about the demise of Bitcoin. Yet, I still believe.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Hannah Furfaro

Posted on by

Similar in nature to vaccines against disease, addiction vaccines stimulate the body to create antibodies that recognize a drug, and prevent or slow it from reaching the brain. A shot every few months, or once a year, has the potential to seriously ease a person’s path to recovery. 

Hannah Furfaro
January 5, 2022
To fight opioid crisis, UW researchers take new shot at developing vaccine against addictive drugs
[Interesting. I never who have guessed such a thing was possible. But now that the idea has been presented I can imagine “vaccines” for all kinds of things.

The first one that came to mind was one prevent Marxist beliefs. That was quickly followed by the concern that someone would probably develop, and the government would soon mandate, a vaccine to prevent individualism and/or suspicion of large government.

I soon returned to the present day and reality by reminding myself there has been a vaccine for the lethal variants of Marxism since before the mutations first started spreading over 100 years ago. Current prices vary from less than $0.10 to over $5.00 dollars a shot. And, if properly injected, they will cure as well as provide lifelong 100% immunity from infections. Even though the shots are widely available, inexpensive, and effective we still have rising Marxist infection rates. It seems to me there will have to be mandates to achieve herd immunity. This is because the voluntary inoculation rates are so very low..—Joe]

Labradar accessory

Posted on by

I have a Labradar chronograph. It is more expensive than previous chronographs I have owned but as I have outlined before it has some major benefits.

There are some some issues with it too. It’s not required, but there is an app for use on your Android or iPhone. The app improved the usability considerably even though it wasn’t the best design and it would disconnect when the phone turned off the screen.

Then my phone had to be replaced. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S21 5G. Name brand, should be good, right? The Labradar will not connect with it. The phone recognizes the chronograph Bluetooth is up and running but cannot make the connection. It turns out many other people are having the same problem with other Android phones and tablets as well as iPhones.

The Android app hasn’t been updated since it was released on June 14, 2018. I have two very cheap older Android phone scheduled to arrive in a day or two and I’m hoping one of them will work.

Another issue is that you have to have the unit pointed at your target such that the bullet stays near to the center of the radar beam. You are supposed to use the notch on the top as a sight:

image

This is far from the best sight and is marginal at best.

While looking for a solution to the Bluetooth phone application issue I ran across a solution to the sighting issue. Actually, three solutions:

  1. Low profile without a bubble level.
  2. With a bubble level.
  3. Standard height without a bubble level.

I ordered option three on Saturday afternoon (Christmas day!) and it arrive today just four days later.

It took me less than 25 seconds to install it.

image

image

20211229_183407

20211229_183351

It fits perfectly and solidly. It deserves the average of five stars on the reviews it is getting.

Now if I can just get a phone to run the out of date app and connect to the unit. I think I could reverse engineer the API and write my own app but that is an extreme last resort.

Update: I tried two different phones:

The View 2 would not connect. The View 3 would sometimes connect five times in a row. Then it would fail 20 times in a row. I returned both of them and ordered a phone using Android 9 with 1 GB RAM. I have my suspicions that it is a timing problem. It seemed that if I were to reboot the phone then immediately try to connect to the chronograph the odds of connecting were better than 50%. But I didn’t try that enough to have a good sample size. I’m hoping that with not much RAM (and reviews complaining about how slow the phone is) that it may reliably connect to the Chronograph. The phone should arrive late next week. I’ll let you know….

Zero click exploit for iPhone

Posted on by

This is amazing (emphasis added):

Project Zero said the exploit effectively created “a weapon against which there is no defense,” noting that zero-click exploits work silently in the background and does not even require the target to click on a link or surf to a malicious website. “Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit,” the research team said.

The researchers confirmed the initial entry point for Pegasus was Apple’s proprietary iMessage that ships by default on iPhones, iPads and macOS devices.  By targeting iMessage, the NSO Group hackers needed only a phone number of an AppleID username to take aim and fire eavesdropping implants.

…

Within Apple’s CoreGraphics PDF parser, the NSO exploit writers abused Apple’s implementation of the open-source JBIG2, a domain specific image codec designed to compress images where pixels can only be black or white.

Describing the exploit as “pretty terrifying,” Google said the NSO Group hackers effectively booby-trapped a PDF file, masquerading as a GIF image, with an encoded virtual CPU to start and run the exploit.

“JBIG2 doesn’t have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That’s exactly what this exploit does,” the researchers explained.

“Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, [NSO’s hackers] define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It’s not as fast as Javascript, but it’s fundamentally computationally equivalent.”

“The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying,” the Google researchers added.

I wonder how many other zero click exploits are active in the wild right now.

We live in interesting times.

Quote of the day—Dr. Monica Gandhi

Posted on by

I think the mRNA vaccine technology is going to have a huge role to play for other pathogens. The mRNA platform allows the human host to generate a protein of the virus or other pathogen to which to raise an immune response, and has been revolutionary for COVID-19. So, after trying so many other vaccine candidates before for HIV without success, this is a very promising platform to hopefully reach this elusive goal.

Dr. Monica Gandhi
December 15, 2021
Scientists are closing in on an HIV vaccine
[I remember when AIDS first hit the news. People didn’t even know if it was a virus. Just like all the different theories about COVID and the vaccines today there were strange things believed by people about AIDS. I remember one guy who claimed there were studies which proved K-Y Jelly caused it. The better known conspiracy theory is that it was a man-made pathogen created to exterminate homosexual men.

Of course it has been conclusively proven that it is a virus, named HIV, and it is believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa. Back in the early 1980’s I expected, “They will get this figured out in a couple years.” Forty years later yet another “promising vaccine” is in the works. And it will have all, and perhaps more, of the baggage carried by the mRNA COVID vaccines.

Looking at the parallels of the conspiracy theories associated with this pandemic and AIDS, I have to wonder if the resolutions will have a similar time decay constant.—Joe]

Warp drive background

Posted on by

This article came out prior to the announcement of the creation of the first warp bubble. It provides relatively easy to understand background material on the theory of warp drive.

Job security

Posted on by

Every day I take a quick glance at my tools I can see evidence of the constant attempts to gain illegal access to my company’s computer networks. Each day there are 10s of thousands of probes from thousands of IP address.

To the best of my knowledge my company doesn’t do this sort of thing but people on my team sometimes talk about it and wonder if we should do it:

Microsoft Seizes 42 Websites Used by China-Based Hacking Group to Carry Out Cyberattacks on US Organizations

So far, the company said its Digital Crimes Unit, through 24 lawsuits—five of which were against nation-state actors—had taken down more than 10,000 malicious websites used by cybercriminals and almost 600 used by nation-state actors, and had blocked the registration of 600,000 more.

It’s very resource intensive to push these things through the legal system. Resources that could be used to harden and/or detect and remediate breaches. There are no easy answers and I don’t fault management for the decisions they have made.

I just know that, for me, as long as there are evil people out there, it means I will have job security.

First warp bubble created

Posted on by

I wish Eric Engstrom were still alive. He died just over a year ago and planned to live long enough to travel to other solar systems in warp drive capable ships. This plan of his was one part of his recruitment speech when he wanted me to join his startup company Chromium Communications.

Today it was announced some scientists accidently created a Nano sized warp bubble. This the first step in creating a warp drive:

I guess I and other friends of Eric will have to take those trips without him.

Good to know

Posted on by

FBI document shows what data can be obtained from encrypted messaging apps:

App Legal process & additional
details
Apple
iMessage		 *Message content
limited.
*Subpoena: can render basic
subscriber information.
*18
USC §2703(d): can render 25 days of iMessage lookups and from a
target number.
*Pen
Register: no capability.
*Search
Warrant: can render backups of a target device; if target uses
iCloud backup, the encryption keys should also be provided with content return
can also acquire iMessages from iCloud returns if target has enabled Messages in
iCloud.
Line *Message content
limited.
*Suspect’s
and/or victim’s registered information (profile image, display name, email
address, phone number, LINE ID, date of registration, etc.)
*Information
on usage.
*Maximum of seven days worth of
specified users’ text chats (Only when E2EE has not been elected and applied and
only when receiving an effective warrant; however, video, picture, files,
location, phone call audio and other such data will not be
disclosed).
Signal *No message
content.
*Date
and time a user registered.
*Last date of a
user’s connectivity to the service.
Telegram *No message
content.
*No

contact information provided for law enforcement to pursue a court order. As per
Telegram’s privacy statement, for confirmed terrorist investigations, Telegram
may disclose IP and phone number to relevant authorities.
Threema *No message
content.
*Hash
of phone number and email address, if provided by user.
*Push
Token, if push service is used.
*Public
Key
*Date (no time) of Threema ID
creation.
Date (no time) of last
login.
Viber *No message
content.
*Provides
account (i.e. phone number)) registration data and IP address at time of
creation.
*Message history: time, date,
source number, and destination number.
WeChat *No message
content.
*Accepts
account preservation letters and subpoenas, but cannot provide records for
accounts created in China.
*For non-China
accounts, they can provide basic information (name, phone number, email, IP
address), which is retained for as long as the account is
active.
WhatsApp *Message content
limited.
*Subpoena: can render
basic subscriber records.
*Court
order: Subpoena return as well as information like
blocked users.
*Search
warrant: Provides address book contacts and WhatsApp
users who have the target in their address book contacts.
*Pen register: Sent
every 15 minutes, provides source and destination for each message.
*If
target is using an iPhone and iCloud backups enabled, iCloud returns may contain
WhatsApp data, to include message content.
Wickr *No message
content.
*Date
and time account created.
*Type of device(s)
app installed on.
*Date of last use.
*Number of messages.
*Number
of external IDs (email addresses and phone numbers) connected to the account,
bot not to plaintext external IDs themselves.
*Avatar image.
*Limited
records of recent changes to account setting such as adding or suspending a
device (does not include message content or routing and delivery
information).
*Wickr version
number.

Prepare appropriately.

Skynet smiles

Posted on by

I sometimes joke about the Skynet of the Terminator movies. And occasionally I get serious about it. But this is the first time I ever had a strong Skynet inspired chill engulf me when read about a new technology:

The 2.6 trillion transistors in the WSE-2 are organized into 850,000 cores. According to Cerebras Systems, the chip’s cores are optimized for the specific types of mathematical operations that neural networks use to turn raw data into insights. The WSE-2 stores the data being processed by a neural network using 40 gigabytes of speedy onboard memory.

Cerebras Systems says that the WSE-2 has 123 times more cores and 1,000 times more on-chip memory than the closest GPU.

I’m not sure why that emotional response occurred. It was as if some threshold had not just been crossed, but leaped over by such a huge margin. The potential threat became, not just real, but something much greater than that. I can’t say that I know or even really suspect that is true. It was just an emotional reaction.

However, see also what Elon Musk has to say about AI:

Never forget that a computer’s attention span is no longer than its power cord.

Prepare appropriately.

Dark lightning

Posted on by

“Dark lightning” has apparently been known since 1994. However, I had not heard of it until recently. Here is what NASA said about it in 2013:

Researchers studying thunderstorms have made a surprising discovery: The lightning we see with our eyes has a dark competitor that discharges storm clouds and flings antimatter into space.

Storm clouds are sometimes producing anti-matter? Wow!

Quote of the day—BioViva Science

Posted on by

In fiction and the popular imagination the quest for youth is associated with a bevy of unsavory characters: pharaohs, vampires, and Saturday morning villains. Yet the real face of longevity research is us, all of us. All of us who have ever had to watch a friend or family member lose everything to an age-related illness, all of us who have had to sit by while a “natural” process executed an innocent person. What sort of perverse imagination could think anyone deserves to die in this way?

BioViva Science
Email sent on November 11, 2021
[I’ve had many people tell me something to the effect of there being something wrong with wanting to live for much longer than the currently expected lifetimes. The reasons were varied and none were compelling to me. Probably the best was something to the effect that there needed to be “room” for new people with new ideas to prevent a stagnation of civilization and possibly technological advancement.

The worst was rather personal.

As my mother was sliding away with Alzheimer I had a friend cheerfully tell me I should enjoy the natural aging. As that is what she did as her grandfather as his brain failed and he could no longer recognize family and friends or speak coherently.

I didn’t accept her advice then and I don’t now.

There is evidence scientists are close to effective treatments if not outright cures for dementia. With my family history I see this as a race between scientists and time. I have a rather keen interest in this race as my life has a much higher than acceptable risk of being decided by the winner.—Joe]

Slowly at first then rapidly

Posted on by

Shortages of both goods and services combined with massive government spending are resulting in inflation. And now there are predictions of increasing electrical power outages:

Longer, more frequent outages afflict the U.S. power grid as states fail to prepare for climate change

Across the nation, severe weather fueled by climate change is pushing aging electrical systems past their limits, often with deadly results. Last year, the average American home endured more than eight hours without power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — more than double the outage time five years ago.

I suppose you can call it “climate change”. Assuming it’s the political climate you have in mind. From the same article:

…state regulators largely have rejected these ideas, citing pressure to keep energy rates affordable. Of $15.7 billion in grid improvements under consideration last year, regulators approved only $3.4 billion, according to a national survey by the NC Clean Energy Technology Center — about one fifth.

After a weather disaster, “everybody’s standing around saying ‘why didn’t you spend more to keep the lights on?’” Ted Thomas, chairperson of the Arkansas Public Service Commission, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But when you try to spend more when the system is working, it’s a tough sell.”

Politicians are demanding “green electricity”. But most types of “green electricity” are unreliable and more expensive. And at the same time there are demands to remove hydroelectric dams. Then they demand electricity be “affordable”. The grid is aging and stretched to the limit by increased consumption, decreasing production, and regulators don’t allow rate increases to replace and improve the equipment. Socialism, it’s the poison pill working it’s evil upon humanity.

A phrase comes to mind which was commonly used in regards to the “eco-freaks” when I was electrical engineering school, “Let them freeze in the dark.”

But the problem is it won’t be those who created the problem who “enjoy” the fruits of their work. It will be those who are out of political favor who will be last in line to get their share of the rationed electricity, food, medical care, etc.

Our situation will likely slowly deteriorate on all fronts then as all the reserves in the system are consumed it will be a rapid, catastrophic, and systemic failure. Prepare appropriately.

I need to include good backup electricity for my underground bunker.

The TRUTH is here!

Posted on by

It has been claimed:

The TRUTH is here!

From, and for, a politician?

Yeah. Sure. Thanks for the info. I’ll check in occasionally.

Quote of the day—kot-begemot-uk

Posted on by

Hal, put your signature on the patent application
I am sorry Dave, I can’t do that

kot-begemot-uk
September 24, 2021
Comment to UK Appeals Court Rules AI Cannot Be Listed As a Patent Inventor
[Interesting topic. Currently the world courts are divided on the subject.

In August, an Australian Court ruled an AI can be an inventor. A U.S. court agrees with the UK ruling that an AI cannot be listed as an inventor.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jennifer Granick

Posted on by

Trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past. This is a virtual dragnet through the public’s interests, beliefs, opinions, values and friendships, akin to mind reading powered by the Google time machine. This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation.

Jennifer Granick
Surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Exclusive: Government Secretly Orders Google To Identify Anyone Who Has Searched A Name, Address And Telephone Number
[As I have mentioned before I’ve been impressed with Granick on Internet freedom issues.

Avoid the use of Google. They are evil. Use DuckDuckGo or something similar, use a privacy window in your browser and consider using a VPN such as Private Internet ACCESS.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Annalee Armstrong

Posted on by

HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can’t remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019.

…

The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.

Annalee Armstrong
September 27, 2021
Excision’s CRISPR gene editing therapy for HIV is heading into human testing after FDA clearance
[A few months ago a male friend (who I suspect is bi-sexual) pointed out that COVID-19 is not the first pandemic our generation has lived through. My thinking about this enabled a quick response to different friend just a few days later who was pontificating on how COVID-19, “Hit the sweet spot of infectiveness and lethality.” I disagreed, “It could be a lot more lethal.” “Not really”, he replied, “It would be hard to be more lethal and still infect a lot of people because it would kill people before they could infect as many people as it does.” I had a three letter acronym response, “HIV”.

He immediately conceded. A disease as infectious as chickenpox with the silent latency and deadliness of HIV would have the potential to exterminate humanity.

I fear that as long as we have global trade if we don’t develop the ability to respond to new diseases in timeframes of weeks, or perhaps days, some disease will, “Find the sweet spot” (or be engineered) to close the curtain on humans.

HIV was first recognized as a new disease in 1981. At the time I figured scientists would have it figured out and curable in “five or ten years”. Forty years later a promising cure is going into human trials.

Herpes too was a pretty big deal in the mid 1980s. Like HIV, herpes is now treatable but incurable. That may be changing in the next few years.

Think of all these diseases as practice for the future.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Doyle Rice

Posted on by

The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.

Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts.

Doyle Rice
September 17, 2021
Scientists created the world’s whitest paint. It could eliminate the need for air conditioning.
[Of course it will make the building cooler in the winter as well.

Still, I love living in the future.—Joe]

Of course there is Wi-Fi

Posted on by

Earlier this evening I finished installing and testing the solar powered Wi-Fi for my gun range:

20210910_194335

I’m paying for 6Mpbs/3Mpbs and SpeedTest.net says this is what I’m getting from a server in Seattle at 9:30 PM and two Wi-Fi hops from my router which is a half mile away:

image

I’m pleased with the result.

Poor passwords

Posted on by

I work in computer security. The following were recently shared in one of the threat intel channels I follow.

Rather lame, but it’s what Hyatt Hotel prohibits as passwords in their network: https://www.hyattconnect.com/files/passwordpolicy/dictionary.txt

This is claimed to be the largest collection of actual passwords ever assembled.

The download link on the web page given by the link above is very scary (if you can even find it). I downloaded the .gz file, decompressed it, and packaged it up as a .zip file here: https://www.joehuffman.org/misc/RockYou2021.zip