Category Archives: Technology

Another shot at New Orleans

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I commented on this sort of thing last September.  New Orleans had a miss then when Ivan came to town.  But it appears Ivan was a poor shot and minor caliber compared to Katrina–scheduled to hit tomorrow morning:

Hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents fled inland on Sunday as Hurricane Katrina strengthened into one of the fiercest U.S. storms ever seen and barrelled towards the low-lying Gulf Coast city.

…

Katrina had a central pressure — a measure of a storm’s intensity — of 902 millibars, which would make it one of the four strongest storms on record. The Labour Day hurricane of 1935 that hit the Florida Keys, killing some 600 people, was the strongest with a minimum central pressure of 892 millibars on landfall.

They are evacuating the city.  It’s quite possible this will be the last evacuation.  The city is below sea level and it is only going to get worse as time goes on.  As I said last year:

My belief is that long term the people and businesses of New Orleans should close up and move out.  Barring some extraordinary technological breakthroughs in earth moving (I’m talking raising an entire city from deep down under the water soaked earth) and/or lowering the sea this battle cannot be won.  It’s better to surrender gracefully than to let the enemy annihilate you.  Spend the billions on salvage and rebuilding in another location, but surrender the current New Orleans to it’s muddy grave.

This could be the end of New Orleans.  Interesting times we live in.

Update: I’ve been reading some of the articles about Katrina and New Orleans.  They are incredibly sobering. 

Interesting twist on the Nigerian scam

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I’ve been getting hit with the typical Nigerian scam since about 1990–before most people had email.  Back then it was via FAX.  Today a new (to me) twist showed up in my email:

Al salaam,

My name is Haja mashed from Brunei I am a 23 years old and a british citizen who was taken to Brunei by my father 10 years ago. He deceived me that I was going there on vacation and later married me out to a wealthy Prince in Brunei who is 30 years older than me. I was thus forced into marriage and when I objected I was beaten and raped by this Prince.

I was locked up in a house for six months after which I submitted and decided to accept my faith, knowing that was the only way out. After I got my freedom back I have been allowed by my husband to have access to his account and businesses. With the help of a loyal aide I have been able to divert $4.500.000.00 (four million five hundred thousand dollars)as bonds into a private finance house without his knowledge.

Right now I have mapped out a plan of escape out of Brunei,thou I have tried escaping several times and its been fruitless. first of all I have been able to move the fund out of Brunei. This is where I need your assistance,to help me secure the fund from the finance house before I get out of Brunei if I am lucky enough. If you know you are capable of handling such a huge amount of money respond to me and I will compensate you by giving you $1.000.000.00 (one million dollars) of the total fund.

Note also that you must keep this transaction secret as my life is at stake if my husband or any of his relatives hear of this transaction they will stone me to death or hang me. Please reply me here : hajahajaa23@netscape.net

Yours faithfully,

Haja mashed

I’m not the first to have gotten the email or something very similar.  Here are some other reports:

It’s interesting to me it took this “technology” this long to morph into something more compelling–a plea for help from a young woman as well as the “promise” of a large sum of money.  But perhaps it was just that the other version was so successful there was no need to make significant changes.

We dodged a bullet

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We temporarily dodged another attack on our civil liberties in California.  From Sacramento:

Attorney General Bill Lockyer has shelved a novel gun-control measure that would have required manufacturers to stamp microscopic serial numbers on all handgun ammunition sold in California.

Sen. Joe Dunn, a Garden Grove Democrat carrying the legislation for the attorney general, said he needed more time to resolve a heated debate over how much the potentially landmark tracking system would cost and who would pay for it. 

The bill, SB 357, has passed the Senate and is pending in an Assembly fiscal committee as the Legislature pushes through its final three weeks of this year’s session. The measure may be taken up where it sits next year, the second in the two-year session.

The legislation would require manufacturers to imprint or etch a serial number on the end of each slug or bullet starting in 2009. Boxes of cartridges bearing the same number could then be linked to purchasers with the swipe of a driver’s license at the time of sale.

…

Dunn said he will work during the coming months to resolve fears that his bill could pose a financial burden on some law enforcement personnel who are required to purchase ammunition for training.

“It’s a legitimate question that we will respond to,” Dunn said.

He was less optimistic about bringing manufacturers together with companies that have developed methods to code ammunition. Regardless, he predicted the measure will be delivered to the governor next year.

However, opponents say Lockyer and Dunn have yet to sell the proposal to much of the state’s law enforcement community.

Prominent organizations, such as those representing the state’s district attorneys and police chiefs, have declined to endorse the bill, noted Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute, an industry trade group better known as SAAMI.

“I think it’s pretty clear that law enforcement by and large is not supporting this effort,” Keane said.

Manufacturers say the proposal would force expensive changes on a high-volume, low-margin business. Keane and others have warned the required manufacturing modifications would either drive companies out of business or result in steep price increases.

It doesn’t bother them it how much it would cost private citizens or how a black market of out of state or stolen ammo would fill the “market niche”.  It only bothers them that it would be a burden to law enforcement.  I guess that means they serve the state and not the people.  Does the phrase “Police State” ring a bell with anyone?

Wow! Another guy I worked for is in the news

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When I went to work for Microsoft, on contract, back in ’95 I wrote video drivers for Direct X.  My friend Eric Engstrom did the hiring but it was for a position where I reported to Craig Eisler.  As I posted yesterday Eric just sold his most recent company, Wildseed, to AOL.  I didn’t know it, but one of the people involved in the sale at AOL was–Craig Eisler.  Details here but the interesting portion to me is this:

Even before the deal, the ties between Wildseed and AOL were clear. AOL, based in Dulles, Va., recently appointed Craig Eisler to the position of AOL Wireless general manager and senior vice president.

And if you want to know even more about these characters read the book Renegades of the Empire.  It’s a fascinating book, but then I was there for it and saw things from the inside looking out.  And the stories in the book that you might think were too wild be to true have actually been distorted in such a way to make them more tame than they really were.  In reality there were far more wild stories to be told such as when I reported a serious bug I had found to Craig and he kicked a hole in the wall.  Or the motorcycle peeling out in the hallway–melting a hole in the carpet.  Or the “less than legal” fireworks display on the Microsoft campus  (I had NOTHING to do with that!  This is readily determined from the fact there were no windows broken, no craters, and no mushroom shaped clouds).  Or one morning about 2:00 AM hearing, in the next hallway over, cursing, pounding, and what sounded like the tinkling of shattered glass (it was the falling keys from the keyboard Craig was pounding against desk).  Or when the “man with a gun” showed up to visit his ex-girlfriend in a different building Craig decided my office was a good place to visit–never mind that it was against the rules for anyone to have a gun on campus and there was little I could have done to protect anyone from someone with a gun.

I even have a Craig Eisler quote in my quote database:

NO!  END OF DISCUSSION!  SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!

Craig Eisler
Microsoft Software Development Lead
August 1995
(Yelling at a contract programmer who wanted to add hundreds of lines of new code to a project after a code freeze and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer).

And no, I wasn’t the programmer he was yelling at.

And another quote from that same era:

I would have gone postal… but I didn’t have enough ammo.

Josh Baker
August 26, 1996
Explaining why he decided to take a two week vacation in Greece.

He said that in a manner which could have been taken as a joke, but it also could have been taken as something other than a joke.  I had been to the range with Josh and his shooting skills were not particularly good but they don’t need to be if you are just going to be blasting away at “fish in a barrel”.  About two weeks after Josh returned from vacation he was fired–I was at a state of high alert for a month or so until I knew he had found another job. 

Yes, there was a lot of stress there in those days but I thrive on stress and my first few years at Microsoft were among the happiest and most exciting of my time in corporate America.

Connection lost

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Yeah.  I know.  My blog and nearly all my websites went down a little after 7:00 PDT.  It was the connection my ISP has with Sprint.  I’m on the same side of the break as my websites so I can update as desired but only about half the people in Moscow Idaho can view them.  Heavy sigh… at least my income (my wife just went off to her second day of work at her new job) isn’t dependent on having connectivity like some people.

Update: From my ISP:

9:42 update.  A fiber optic cable is cut between here and Potlatch. 

We came back online about 11:15.

AOL buys Wildseed

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A friend of mine, Eric Engstrom who I quote occasionally, just sold his company to AOL.  As Ry put it in an email to me, he “escapes again”.  Ry and I both used to work for Eric at Chromium Communications.  I was his first employee at Chromium.  Chromium morphed into Gitwit and then into Wildseed in a series of restructurings.  The details of the sale aren’t public but I hope Eric gets enough out of it to pay off his debts and at least get back the money he put into it–which was a lot.

Quote of the day–Eric Engstrom

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Computers and the internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual.

Eric Engstrom
October 2003

Job security has it’s risks as well as it’s rewards

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I received this in the latest news email from the University of Idaho here in Moscow where I live.   

Lawrence Johnston, a UI physics professor emeritus, traveled to Washington, D.C. this week to recall the 1945 detonation of the first nuclear weapon. The July 14 symposium marked the 60th anniversary of Trinity, the first manmade nuclear explosion. Johnston witnessed the successful early morning test July 16, 1945, and the later use of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. He is believed to be the only person to witness all three. He lives in Moscow with his wife, Millie.

Johnson, if I recall correctly, invented and received a patent on the detonator for one of the bombs.  He also, again if I recall correctly, built a lot of the instrumentation used to record the effects in the planes that dropped the bombs.  And since they hadn’t asked him to teach anyone else how to run the instrumentation when it came time to drop “the big ones” on Japan he was the only person that knew how to operate the equipment.  Whoops!  He’s was required to go on both missions.

Testing an UltiMAK prototype

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The UltiMAK office is just a few hundred yards away from my house and I have been hanging out there some recently.  They asked me if I would like to test out a prototype scope mount for them.  They supplied the gun and the ammo I just needed to supply the trigger time.  Yesterday, after taking care of my license to manufacture explosives renewal, I went to the range.  Below are some sample pictures–see the rest here.


A new alloy was being tested on the scope mount. No anodizing on the prototype, just the bare aluminum.


The view from 106 yards away.


About three fourths of the way through the tests the target stand on the right blew over and I took a picture of the targets before I continued.

I was shooting the targets in a quasi-random order. For each five shot magazine I would put at least one bullet on each target before shooting a target a second time. Each shot took, on the average, about one second from 106 yards away.  Each magazine change took about seven seconds.  I went through about 450 rounds nearly as fast as I could reload the magazines and get the gun back on target between shots and magazine changes.

The end result was the prototype worked fine.  It got very hot though.  Even the scope got hot enough that I couldn’t keep my hand on it.  Lyle, at UltiMAK, told me that there have been times during their tests they got the scope hot enough that rain drops boiled when they hit it.  Of course these are intended to be torture tests rather than reality testing.

As expected lighters get by security

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As I and others said at the time the ban on lighters was stupid.  There is no practical way it can be enforced.  The newspapers are talking about the results now:

Last winter, when federal transportation security officials began discussing a ban on cigarette lighters in airline cabins, they warned that the lighters might slip past their screening equipment. Some airport managers were skeptical for the same reason.

Turns out they were right, at least if the recent experience of a handful of Twin Cities air travelers is any indication.

A dozen times in the past several weeks, those passengers sailed past airport screeners with at least one lighter in their carry-on bags.

…

“They really can be somewhat dangerous on a plane,” said Roth, a former Secret Service agent. “But the ban [also] is like a no-parking sign — if you find a lighter, it gives you an opening to look for something else that isn’t supposed to be in the luggage.”

One of the strongest congressional advocates for the lighter ban was Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who cited shoe bomber Richard Reid’s attempt in December 2002 to blow up a plane using matches.

If Reid had used a lighter, “the FBI said he would have blown up — the shoe bomber would have blown up the airplane,” Dorgan said during a Feb. 15 hearing.

Dorgan spokesman Barry Piatt said his boss “is keeping his eye on” the lighter ban but has indicated no dissatisfaction about its comprehensiveness.

“Nothing works 100 percent,” Piatt said. “That doesn’t mean things aren’t significantly improved. I think he wants to allow them time to work this. I don’t think anyone expected perfection in the first couple of months.”

‘Improved’?  Yeah, right.  They only lighters they are finding are the lighters people forgot about.  Anyone with a room temperature I.Q. can hide one such the screeners won’t find it.  Hence they are taking lighters from people that had no plans to do anything wrong with them.  The only ‘benefit’ to this policy is making some candidates for mental help feel better–and that especially applies to Sen. Dorgan.

As for Roth–Ayn Rand has him pegged.

Price discrepancy on explosive sniffers

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Last Thursday I posted about new explosive detection machines costing $3 Million each.  Here is an article saying they cost only $130K to $150K each.  A much more reasonable price to pay.  I don’t know which is correct but it really doesn’t matter all that much because the most interesting portion of the article is this:

Sniffers are proving to be very sensitive, said Deirdre O’Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the TSA, sometimes indicating “hits” for persons who might have had contact with substances such as fertilizers, which can be used to make explosives.

So far, she said, sniffers haven’t uncovered anyone of interest or suspicion to law enforcement officials. Still, terrorists have lots of weapons that worry the air travel industry and law enforcement agencies. Shoulder-mounted rockets, for example.

This is the problem… The number of false positives far exceeds the number of valid detections and will always be the case.  If the alarm threshold is adjusted such that a reasonable number of false positives are experienced (say 1%) then a well scrubbed explosive device will pass.  If the threshold is set such that nearly any amount of care in explosive device preparation will be caught then the majority of innocent people will be subject to additional searches.  Because of the high cost (time of the screeners as well as the complaints of the innocent) and predominance of hits being false positives (100% so far) the threshold will be adjusted such that the well scrubbed device will pass without detection.  And this scenario doesn’t even include active opponents working against the machines in the days to weeks ahead of the attempt to get an explosive device past the machines.

Hence the explosive detection machines do nothing but provide comfort for those with mental problems (denial in this case) and actually make things less secure because that same money could have been spent on effective security.

Another airplane insecurity report

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They just don’t and won’t stop.  Here’s another one:

For at least 25 years, the Federal Aviation Administration failed one test after another when it came to airport security. Undercover agents walked through airport checkpoints toting machine guns on their backs and bombs stashed in their carry-on luggage. Agents easily breached security precautions, breezing past locked doors to enter empty planes, mingling behind the scenes with ground crews.

…

“The facts remain the facts,” says Steve Elson, a former undercover FAA security officer who tried to warn the agency it was on the edge of disaster. “It is still child’s play to knock down 50 airplanes in a few hours’ span with near 100 percent chance of success, and probably quite easy to fly a plane into the White House or Congress.”

I contend it’s simply not possible to make airplanes any safer with the current approach.  We need to completely rethink the problem from a clean slate, do some simulations, and reimplement our security based on solid science rather than pandering to the mental disorders and power cravings of a few people.

TSA money is spent on mental problems

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TSA has installed some new explosive detection equipment to screen passengers:

The federal Transportation Security Administration has finished a pilot program, which started in June 2004, by installing explosives detectors for passengers in 14 cities. By the end of September, 44 detectors will be installed in 10 additional airports, including Pittsburgh, the TSA said.

…

The explosives detector looks like a doorframe, like the metal detectors now used at the airport checkpoint. Passengers will stand still for a few seconds while the detector releases several puffs of air.

The detector collects and analyzes the air for traces of explosives, according to TSA. A computerized voice will tell passengers when they can step out of the doorway, said Ann Davis, regional TSA spokeswoman.

The machine, which costs more than $3 million, is an added layer of security, not a replacement for any existing security measures, Davis said.

The pilot program gave the TSA the opportunity to fine-tune the machine’s operations, “and it certainly helped improve customer service by reducing the number of individuals selected for pat-down procedures,” Davis said.

Currently, the only way to check passengers for explosives in Pittsburgh is through pat-downs and random searches, Snell said.

“The machine is also very sophisticated and sensitive, and can detect even the smallest trace element of explosives,” Davis said.

That means heart patients who take nitroglycerin, which is one of the prohibited chemicals, could set off the alarm, Snell said. They might smooth the checkpoint process by carrying the medication in the prescription bottle or have a prescription with them, though they probably would be sent to secondary pat-down procedures.

 Cities in the pilot program were Baltimore, Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York (Kennedy), Phoenix, San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, Jacksonville, Fla.; Gulfport, Miss.; Providence, R.I.; and Rochester, N.Y.

Those to be added along with Pittsburgh are Dallas/Fort Worth, Washington, D.C. (Dulles and Reagan National), Charlotte, N.C.; Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, Fla.; Newark, N.J., New York (LaGuardia) and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

$3 Million for each machine???  My guess is the machines will either generate far, far too many false positives or else not detect explosives carried by someone that put reasonable effort into sealing them up.  There is simply far too much overlap in the residue between someone walking through a recently fertilized lawn, an gravel pit, or construction site or other innocent activity and someone who purposely hid explosives on themselves.  I believe that money is being completely wasted.  Well, perhaps not totally wasted–it will make people with certain types of mental problems feel better.

Quote of the day–Markus Kuhn

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It is well known and widely accepted that homo sapiens are vulnerable to lasting denial-of-service attacks involving pyrotechnically accellerated projectiles.

Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25
In a Usenet post:
Subject: Re: StegOS – taking steganography to the next level
Newsgroups: sci.cryp
Date: 2002-06-20 04:07:12 PST

When “Ballistic Fingerprinting” fails

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This is an even more blatant example of When Prophecy Fails related to the ballistic fingerprinting debacle.

Leah Barrett, executive director of CeaseFire Maryland, said police are not using the database enough, instead relying on a national ballistics database that only has ballistics images from crime scenes. As a result, she said, the national database can’t lead investigators directly to the specific firearm that produced a recovered ballistic image unless the gun is eventually recovered.

She said scrapping the state program could deal a setback to better ballistics imaging.

“I think it’s a real tragedy because other states are looking at New York and Maryland to see how we succeed with this,” she said.

“To see how we succeed with this.”????  The possibility it has failed is apparently not in her domain of thought processes.

“Ballistic Fingerprinting” fails

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If you are even the slightest bit ‘connected’ in the gun rights movement you will already know about what happened in Maryland.  They implemented a database of fired bullets and shell casings from all new handguns sold in the state.. This was an attempt to track down the owner if a bullet or shell casing were found at the scene of a crime.  Gun owners and manufactures told them it wouldn’t work.  They did it anyway.  Now they find out it didn’t work for all the reasons they were told it wouldn’t work plus some at least one new reason.  That reason is that different materials take on the markings differently.  Some bullets are made primarily of lead, some have copper jackets, and some even have steel jackets.  There are numerous alloys of lead too, some even use silver.  Shell casings are made of brass, aluminum, and steel.  If the manufacture supplied a bullet and shell casing made of one material and the criminal used another then the chance of a match is greatly reduced.

What amuses me the most about this is that the system failed and they suggest an alternate scheme that I am certain will also fail.  I have posted on it here:

This qualifies Maryland for a When Prophecy Fails mention.

Others have commented extensively on the report from Maryland:

I have included the entire Maryland report below for those interested in the details.

 

2. Integrated Ballistics Information System Remains under Scrutiny

 

Background

 

The Maryland Integrated Ballistic Identification System (IBIS), operational since October 1, 2000, provides police investigators with a tool to focus an investigation around a firearm. Chapter 2,

Acts of 2000 (Responsible Gun Safety Act of 2000), required that manufacturers submit a test-fired shell casing with each handgun shipped for resale in the State.

The dealer then sends the casing to the State Police after the gun has been sold. The IBIS system receives the casing from the dealer, and firearms investigators and technicians perform a full analysis of the casing. The investigator uses microscopic technology to identify striations and other markings

that are unique to each individual gun. The striations are formed when the gun is fired, as the firing pin strikes the back of the casing, creating a unique series of identifying marks. The aim of the system is to create a massive database of identifying marks, so that any spent shell casings recovered at a crime scene can be compared against the IBIS database, to try to identify the gun used in the commission of the crime. Based on then-current handgun sales statistics, the State Police anticipated that 30,000 cartridge casings would be received annually for input into the IBIS system. As such, the system was designed to hold around 300,000 casings over a 10-year period.

The system has thus far received around 35,000 cartridge casings for input, including around 2,000 from trooper-issued semi-automatic 40-caliber Beretta firearms. There have been 160 requests to match crime-scene casings with the IBIS system, resulting in four “hits” or matches.

 

Costs

 

DSP anticipates continued maintenance supplies and personnel costs of $435,269 for fiscal 2005 to continue to operate the IBIS system. Initial start-up costs of $1.4 million were absorbed in fiscal 2001. IBIS requires one full-time equivalent position to maintain the system. DSP’s Forensic Unit currently assigns three forensic examiners to this program, each devoting one-third of their time to the IBIS system.

 

Problems

 

The State Police are concerned about the lack of hits yielded by the IBIS system, and there have been problems with the system. Some of these problems are the result of operational failings and others simply the result of circumstance.

 

Number of Cartridges Stored – No Link to the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN): Chapter 2 of 2000 included ‘external safety lock’ requirements and the shell casing identification provision. Gun manufacturers were required to add ‘integrated mechanical safety devices’ to firearms, as well as external safety locks to any firearm sold in Maryland.

 

These two provisions made up an effort by the General Assembly to make the prospects of accidental shootings less likely. These two mechanical requirements, coupled with the requirement to test-fire the gun and submit the cartridge casings, has effectively reduced the number of firearms sold in the State. While DSP had anticipated 30,000 casings submitted annually from 215 qualifying manufacturers, the number of casings received since October 2001 stands at around 34,000 from only 49 manufacturers.

In essence, the guns most often recovered from crime scenes are not sold in Maryland, and therefore, not linked (via cartridge casing) to the IBIS system. DSP has also indicated that .38 mm revolvers are often used in crimes, and these guns are less likely to leave spent shell casings.

The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) division of the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have a system in place, similar to the Maryland IBIS system. The NIBIN is a system that uses identical technology to IBIS, to create a national database of crime scene shell casings and bullets. However, a memorandum of understanding between the ATF and State and local law enforcement agencies prohibits the linking of NIBIN to any State or local system, such as IBIS. In that the guns used in Maryland crimes are less likely to be sold in Maryland, the inability to link IBIS to NIBIN prevents the largest field of possible matches from being searched.

 

Time to Crime: The Maryland IBIS system has been in place since October 2000. Criminology research suggests that if a legally obtained firearm is going to enter the stream of criminal activity, it takes between three and six years for this to occur. This ‘time to crime’ statistic indicates that the guns and cartridge casings inventoried in IBIS since 2001 will start to match firearms used in crimes from 2004 to 2007. The statewide deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) inventory saw a similar preliminary waiting period until the number of matches increased dramatically. The DNA database began in 1994, had its first hit in 1998, and has had 72 hits to date. Of these 72 hits, 39 have come in 2003.

 

Glock Casings Unreliable: It has been learned that cartridge casings submitted by Glock firearms did not match the casings recovered from the same gun at crime scenes. As a result, all cartridge casings submitted by Glock were flagged in the IBIS system, and a list of the guns affected by the problem has been generated. Any firearm sold in Maryland from the list was also flagged. The Glock Company indicated that this problem has since been resolved.

 

Change in Striations As Firearms Age and Break-in: Research suggests that as firearms age and are broken-in the internal characteristics of the firing pin may change which will result in different striations being left on the spent casings. This makes the casings submitted by the manufacturer less reliable. The more the gun is fired, the more the striations will change.

 

Modification of Firing Pin by User: Gun users with working knowledge of the assembly process can alter the firing pin of the weapon, which would significantly change the striations left on the cartridge casing.

 

Different Cartridge Casing Materials Used: There is no standard material used to make cartridge casings. These different materials absorb the striations differently. Additionally, if a different material is used in the manufacture process and by the user, it is possible that a spent cartridge casing will not match the casing stored in IBIS.

 

Increase in Database Size Decreased Likelihood of “Hit”: As the number of similar guns stored in the database increase, the likelihood of a match decreases. As an example, there are approximately 2,000 cartridge casings from Trooper-issued firearms. Tests have been run, using spent casings from these guns, and the system has not yielded a match in the top 15. However, the more experienced the examiner who inputs the casing, the more likely that the input will be accurate and reflect the unique characteristics of the gun.

 

Remote IBIS System Failure: DSP purchased a remote IBIS unit to run a search of the found cartridge casings and to submit the findings to the IBIS database to be tested for a match. This device has not worked due to overheating and data transmission problems. The manufacturer has since stopped producing these units. Not only can these casings found at crime scenes not be compared to IBIS while on-site, but DSP cannot link to any other State forensic facility.

 

Future and Alternatives

 

A new technology exists to perform a similar task as the IBIS system. This version of nanotechnology creates a ballistic ID or fingerprint on cartridge casings. The technology would create a number or symbol on the firing pin of the weapon, and this marking would be transferred to the cartridge casing each time the gun was fired. However, this technology would have to be done at the manufacturer level and would lead to resistance from the industry. Research suggests, however, that this ballistic fingerprinting method would be less expensive and more accurate than the IBIS, as the “serial number” imprinting removes the subjectivity inherit in digitizing a visual set of striations. DLS recommends that DSP comment on whether, in light of circumstantial difficulties, this program has justified continued operation.

 

 

Debunking a 9-11 conspiracy

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The following email exchanged occurred during the last few days:

—–Original Message—–
From: PainfulQuestions@XXX.com
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004 11:23 PM
To: Joe
Subject: Since you have experience with explosives…

would you like to take a closer look at the photos from the Pentagon security camera and help settle the dispute over whether the flash is from an explosive or from jet fuel?

Here is a video here that can help you understand why there is a controversy:

http://911sb.org/911CommissionReport.wmv

You can find that video, and more infor, here:

www.HugeQuestions.com

—–Original Message—–
From: Joe
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 7:43 AM
To: PainfulQuestions@XXX.com
Subject: RE: Since you have experience with explosives…

I looked at several of the presentations and I didn’t see the security camera with a flash.  Could you give me a direct link to that image or video?

Thanks.

-joe-

—–Original Message—–
From: PainfulQuestions@XXX.com
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 10:38 AM
To: Joe
Subject: Re: Since you have experience with explosives…

Sorry, I assumed you knew about those security videos. They have been creating controversy around the world for years. This is why “French Fries” became “Freedom Fries”.

In case you never saw this, the site in France that started this controversy is still available: http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm

That web site scrolls left to right, not up and down.

The issue has since been looked into more deeply by people around the world. The security camera videos I refer to, along with an analysis of them, can be seen in the videos here:

http://reopen911.org/pictures_and_videos.htm

Look near the bottom of the page for:

         To download the free Internet Version
         of “Painful Deceptions” DVD click on
          the following links

Then watch those videos. Prepare yourself for the possibility that some of our government officials might be dishonest. Those videos should help you understand the anger towards the USA that you find in Europe.

That video is available in DVDs if you want higher quality, and for as low as $10 with shipping included at:
http://www.EricHufschmid.net/PainfulQuestionsBook.html

Jimmy Walter is also selling the DVD at 888-Investigate, along with books, in at attempt to cover some of his advertising costs.

Eric

—–Original Message—–
From: Joe 
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2004 10:13 AM
To: PainfulQuestions@XXX.com
Subject: RE: Since you have experience with explosives…

I got a chance to review one of the videos that gave some pretty good shots of the Pentagon.  In terms of the fireball I don’t see anything suspicious about it.  The fireballs that I produce are done with one to four gallons of gasoline and one to four pounds of explosives.  Take a look as some of these.  Go through them frame by frame and you will see the fireball does actually expand.  As long as the fuel supply is increasing the fireball with increase in size.  In the case of a plane smashing into a solid object it seems entirely reasonable to me that a fireball starts shortly after the exposed fuel ignites and then as the rest of the fuel is exposed as the tanks are flattened and ripped apart the fireball grows in size.  And consider that some of my fireballs are 30 to 40 feet across with only four gallons of gasoline.  With thousands of gallons of jet fuel much larger fireballs should be expected.  But depending on how it is dispersed and ignited the fireball could be almost any size from non-existent to several hundred feet across.  You will also see that the flame appears to be white hot and actually causes the video camera to adjust the exposure compensating for the brightness to the point that the surrounding landscape turns dark although it is during the middle of the day.

In the case of explosives, properly oxygen balanced explosive mixtures do not generate a fireball at all. There may be very short flash but not a fireball. TNT, by itself, produces a fireball because it has a shortage of oxygen.  Or in other words an excess of fuel.  As the fuel gets exposed to the air it will produce a fireball.  What is usually done is that another compound is added to achieve oxygen balance.  That is why “fuel oil” or diesel is added to ammonium nitrate.  During detonation the AN produces excess oxygen and by adding a fuel the oxygen can be used to increase the heat and hence the pressure of the detonation.  The increased heat also means the reaction is easier to initiate and it propagates easier.  The reason this is important is because I would expect any missile to have an efficient explosive and not have excess fuel to produce a fireball.  Hence if there is a fireball it would have to come from the target not the missile.  Since I doubt the Pentagon was struck in an office containing a tank of some sort of fuel I have to conclude it came from the object that struck it.  Hence, a plane containing fuel is an entirely plausible explanation for the fireball.

I can’t explain everything in the video but many of the things are out of my area of expertise.  I can tell you why I would put the gravel on the lawn however.  Heavy trucks were going to be hauling debris away and new material in.  If the ground had any significant amount of moisture in it the repeated truck crossing would have softened soil and they would have gotten bogged down and stuck.

With the selected set of evidence presented in the videos I can see why people would have some questions.  But I don’t see anything I consider conclusive evidence that anything other than a commercial jet struck the Pentagon.

Here are some specific fireball videos to demonstrate my points:

http://www.boomershoot.org/2003/SundayFireballDemo.wmv
http://www.boomershoot.org/2003/Kim.avi

Or for a fairly complete collection of my fireball videos see this page:

http://www.boomershoot.org/general/fireball.htm
If you have any other questions about this feel free to ask.

 

-joe-

I don’t think he got the answer he expected.  And I doubt he will stop selling his DVDs and books.  But at least I didn’t bolster his crackpot ideas (there were lots of unbiased eye witnesses that saw the plane slam into the Pentagon).

New Orleans may have to face reality

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Hurricane Ivan could put much of New Orleans underwater.  Not just a few inches, but many feet.  In some places the water could be 20 feet deep.  How can this be?  How much rain is Ivan going to dump?  It turns out that the rain isn’t the problem.  It’s that New Orleans is below sea level.  The entire city was built on silt the Mississippi river has dumped over several thousand years.  That silt that is several miles deep.  That silt gradually compacts and “squishes out” and the surface drops.  If left on it’s own the “big muddy” would replenish the silt to above sea level every few years as it overflows it’s banks during high water times.  But levees were built to protect the city from the flooding.  Unfortunately it’s only the battles of the first couple hundred years that can be won.  Eventually the “war” against the river will be lost.  Not only does the city continue to sink but silt from the river is dumped further and further out to sea (something like a thousand tons per day is dropped).  This decreases the slope for the river from New Orleans (and upstream) to the sea.  This means the velocity of the river decreases.  As the velocity decreases the river drops more silt in it’s channel and furthermore it must be either deeper or wider to carry the same amount of water.  Everything is working against New Orleans remaining at it’s current elevation.  This is not like Holland which is also below sea level.  The soil is much different and we have a river running through the city that is raising it’s bed every day.

It will cost billions to put up a mediocre defense against the threat.  One could argue that we should just let the city deal with it on it’s own or move.  The problem is that there is a tremendous amount of shipping that goes on through the Mississippi from the heartlands of the country to the rest of the world and New Orleans is the port that makes it all happen.  If left to it’s own devices the river would have rerouted itself a hundred miles or so to the west years ago.  It’s only the Corp of Engineers that have kept it within the current channels.  Will Ivan be the last battle?  Will this week start the journey for New Orleans to become a silt covered archeological site for some graduate students 50,000 years from now?  What will be the impact on our economy?  How will this affect the election?  Will Kerry claim Bush could have prevented it (hmmm…. I wonder what a small nuke would do to a hurricane out at sea)?

My belief is that long term the people and businesses of New Orleans should close up and move out.  Barring some extraordinary technological breakthroughs in earth moving (I’m talking raising an entire city from deep down under the water soaked earth) and/or lowering the sea this battle cannot be won.  It’s better to surrender gracefully than to let the enemy annihilate you.  Spend the billions on salvage and rebuilding in another location, but surrender the current New Orleans to it’s muddy grave.

Google Adwords suck, Overture rocks

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After having Google tell me they don’t allow people to advertise product related to the exercise of certain civil rights I started looking at alternatives.  It turns out you can place an ad on Overture.com and get advertising to show up on http://search.yahoo.com, http://www.Search.MSN.com, http://altavista.com (defunct as of 2013, see https://digital.com/about/altavista/ for the history), and http://www.cnn.com/SEARCH/.  There are some downsides:

  • The minimum rate is $0.10/click – twice that of Google.
  • Minimum of $50 up front instead of $5.00 from Google.
  • It can take a few days before they will approve your ads compared to minutes for Google.

The upsides are:

    • They didn’t have a problem with my guns and explosives product.
    • They did disallow a few words and phrases but they gave rational reasons and I respect their conclusions.
    • They have better tools for determining the phrases and key words that are being used by people doing the searches.
    • I’m getting a lot more hits!
    • Their tracking is better.  They have a cookie system set up that will report whenever someone clicks on an ad ultimately, even days later, clicks on my entry form.  I can see what key words are actually generating people interested in entering the event versus just looking at pictures and watching the videos.
    • I can see in the log file exactly what the raw query was and how it was morphed into a key phrase of mine to generate a hit.  This means I can figure out the keywords people are using and put those on my pages if it’s a good match.  Key words that aren’t a good match but are still morphed into a hit I can tweak to avoid the hit.
  • No requirement for minimum click rates, Google has been dropping words and phrases if they don’t meet their minimum number of clicks per impression.  My friends and I have probably provided a dozen clicks or so just to keep me from losing the keywords.

Kim du Toit is by far better than anything else, but he is doing this as a favor and I don’t have any control over being able do this on a regular basis.

Here is the break down on people that have clicked on banners, ads, and links from various places so far this month:

KimduToit.com 402
Shotgunnews.com 144
Overture Ads 36 (started on February 14th)
Google Adwords 23 (running all month and probably 12 of those were my own and friends)
JoeHuffman.org (all personal sites): 23
RyJones.org/com Gawth.com EveryoneEveryWhereAlways 17
Xeniahs.org (and other banner ads place by her) 2

So… comparing Overture to Google I get hits at a rate of about 7 a day versus about 0.6/day.  Over ten times as good.  I’m going to tell Google to get lost.  No point paying bigots your money when there are better alternatives available.

Freedom of (some) expression is supported.

Posted on by

I wonder if advertising products used in the exercise of other constitutionally protected rights are in violation of their guidelines.

——

Subject: Re: Your Google AdWords Approval Status 
From: “Joe Huffman” joeh@boomershoot.org
Date: Tue, February 10, 2004 0:45
To:  

I read your “Editorial Guidelines” prior to making making my ad.  I could
not find any restrictions on the product we are delivering, and even after
reading your letter below I am at a loss for your disabling of my
keywords.  We do not sell firearms or ammunition.  We offer training and
opportunity for practice to owners of long range precision rifles.  We
have police snipers, military, and former military personal attending and
teaching at our events.  How do you suggest we reach this audience through
Google AdWords without using some of the keywords you have disabled?

Regards,

Joseph Huffman
Event Director
—-
http://www.boomershoot.org

> Hello Joseph,
>
> Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. After reviewing your
> account, I have found that one or more of your ads or keywords does not
> meet our guidelines. The results are outlined in the report below.
>
> ———————————————-
> Campaign: ‘PPS Boomershoot,’ Ad Group: ‘PPS Boomershoot’
> ———————————————-
>
> KEYWORD(S): 50 cal sniper rifle, 50 caliber sniper rifle, accurate
> rifle, competition rifle, high power rifle, long range rifle, precision
> rifle, rifle event, rifle range, sniper rifle, tactical rifle
>
> Action taken: Disapproved
> Issue(s): Unacceptable content as keyword
> ~~~~~~~~~
>
> SUGGESTIONS:
> -> Keywords: Google policy does not permit the advertisement
> of “firearms and ammunition”. This content is not permitted as ad text
> or keywords. We have therefore disabled the keyword(s) listed above.
>
>
>
>
> ———————
> Please read below for definitions of the issues I found:
>
> Unacceptable content as keyword: In keeping with Google policy, we do
> not permit advertisers to use certain content as keywords for their
> Google AdWords campaigns. Google believes strongly in freedom of
> expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web
> without censoring search results. Please note that the decisions we make
> concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we deliver.
>
>
> ———————
>
> If a keyword has been disapproved, your ad(s) will no longer be
> displayed for searches on this keyword.
>
> If an ad has been suspended, please edit it based on our suggestions,
> and then save your changes to automatically resubmit the ad for review.
> We’re confident that these changes will improve your ad performance and
> increase your return on investment.
>
> Our goal is to help you reach your target audience and maximize your
> investment. All ads are reviewed by AdWords Specialists to ensure that
> our advertisers create successful, high-impact advertising in keeping
> with our program’s Editorial Guidelines.
>
> For more information about our ad requirements, please read the AdWords
> Editorial Guidelines at:
> https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html
>
> Please feel free to email us at adwords-support@google.com if you have
> any further questions or concerns. We look forward to providing you with
> the most effective advertising available.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> The Google AdWords Team