…….

Just another Rant.

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According to multiple sources, the law is a codification of the core values of the people. The Ten Commandments are a codification of the major laws of Christianity. The Constitution is a set of limits on government. It does not bind The People.

Using the law to morph behavior is not always a good choice. Most leftist approve of such laws when it morphs behavior in ways they approve, and they melt down if the law moves behavior in ways they disapprove of.

Passing a law making it a crime to “out” a trans student to anybody, including the student’s parents? “Yes!” the left screams. Passing a law making it a crime to hide gender dysphoria and mental distress from parents? “Hell no!” the same people scream.

The Press Harald can’t write without manipulation. (Who am I to talk?) Hellbent on protecting its financial interests … Interesting how everybody that disagrees with them is a paid shill, or just working for the “gun lobby”. I wish The Gun Lobby was paying us as much as the infringers claim they do.

… unwilling to make even the most modest of administrative concessions … Why should we give you even a “modest” concession? You have not shown yourself to be trustworthy.

You claim that the gun rights community shows no qualms about using desperately sad stories into political bargaining chips. Have you seen the blood sucking ghouls that show up after every horrific shooting, attempting to punish me for the actions of another? Have you seen the activists waving the Red Badge of Courage they bought on Etsy at 10 for a $1? Rags dripping with the blood of victims.

All the time, yelling that I should shut up. That my “thoughts and prayers” mean nothing unless I give up my right to armed self-defense.

We say enforce the laws already on the books. Put the criminals in prison and keep them there. Prosecute those that do evil, leave us alone.

I hear your suggestion and offer in return: Take a long walk off a short pier.

That “run-of-the-mill” measure you talk about doesn’t do anything except make it more difficult for the law-abiding. It gives the government information it should not have.

My preferred local gun store is an hour from here. I invest 2 to 6 hours in drive time to pick out a firearm. I invested multiple hours of my labor to purchase the firearm. You want me to have to make the trip at least once more.

And what does that waiting period or background check actually do? Nothing. The Remington 700 BDL in 30-06 I’m looking at doesn’t need to come home with me. I already have a M1 in 30-06. You’re delaying me from purchasing a firearm doesn’t stop me from possessing a firearm. I already have them.

It is unfair that you have printing presses and many people sending you money to write your wrong – minded opinions. Fair doesn’t mean you have to give up your printing press.

My right to armed self-defense comes from my creator. Not you. You can’t take the right away. It always exists. You will infringe to your heart’s content. That doesn’t make it right.

Sen. Anne Carney want’s to make it a crime to sell to a prohibited person, a designation that is being challenged at the Supreme Court. Here’s the thing, it is already illegal to knowingly sell to a prohibited person. What Anne, please her heart, wants to do is remove the word “knowingly” so that if you make a mistake, you go to jail.

Of course, the good people of the Press Herald won’t tell you that.

But the really juicy part of that statement is “very piece of legislation that becomes law does some real good. It helps build a framework for even more protective legislation. She is flat out telling us that she has no intention of stopping here.

This is what you are arguing for. The mouse eating just one crumb, until you find that you have nothing but an empty plate.

As always, you suggest that we “just try it” and see what happens. We can predict with confidence what will happen. It solves any of the issues you say it will solve. So you will come back to the well for another drink. You will continue until I stop you, or I have nothing left.

The big one out front…

We are shutting down our subscription-based services. The original goal was to generate enough recurring income per month to pay the costs of the site. We don’t like asking for donations, and I thought this was a good model.

We considered other models, moving to a pay for views, something like Substack. The other option was to shut the site down completely.

It costs money to run this site. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it all adds up. We have a few things that we pay for, along with the resources.

We aren’t going away.

J.Kb. has hit on the idea of selling swag. His first offering will be a moral patch. It has been designed, it looks good, we’ll be setting up an option to purchase them on the site shortly.

We are also going to be selling “Supporting Person”. I’m not sure exactly what yet. This will allow you to donate money directly to the running of the site.

For those that have already paid for the upcoming year. Thank you very much. I hope that you will consider that membership a “donation”. If you feel strongly, please contact me at awa (at) troglodite.com.

I intend to continue the Friday Feedback articles. Multiple reasons, one is that it is a day when I don’t have to research and invest time to write. The second is that it gives you a place to comment without being off-topic.

If you can think of swag you’d like us to consider, please let us know.

Thank you for staying with us. We are glad to have you with us.

One of the dirty facts about technology is that it will always be used to abuse people.

Those wonderful field telephones? Yeah, they work just fine as a torture device.

The first photographs were interesting, but photography really took off when they started taking “pornographic” images.

The story is that the first really popular recordings were of women “talking dirty” or making “those sounds”.

The Internet is not really different, and before the internet, all the other methods used for transmitting data from computer to computer. As soon as the techies were able to actually visualize the data, they used it to send pornographic texts and images.

Unfortunately, one of the nasty types of filthy is child pornography. It exists on the Internet, and the good guys have been working to shut it down from day one.

I once owned an Internet Service Provider. A dial-up service. You would tell your computer to connect to the internet. It would call a modem at my service, and we would give you a temporary IP address for the duration of your call. Shortly after you disconnected, somebody else would dial in and get the same IP address.

When you connect to a remote computer over the internet, your computer has a unique, at that moment, IP address. That is how the remote computer knows where to send the responses.

When using certain security tools, you connect to a node. Your computer is now known to have connected to that particular node. That node then encrypts your incoming messages and sends it to another node in the secure network. At some point, your packet pops out of the secure network and goes to its final destination.

The remote computer then responds to your node by sending it back to the secure network, never knowing your IP address.

VPNs work similarly, but have other issues. The biggest of which is that there is a one-to-one mapping from your computer’s IP address to the address you are assigned while using the VPN. That mapping can be captured in logs.

How does this all relate to Subpoenas?

We got a couple from law-enforcement for records.

We did keep logs. I’m good at keeping logs. I use them to figure out who is doing things on my equipment and how that relates to over all services.

One of the cases was from Customs. The first thing it said was that we could not tell the target that we were going to be providing data. They then asked for all of our logs for an extended time period.

We told them, “No. You will provide enough information for us to do a targeted data retrieval.”

They then told us, “We are tracking child pornography.” I was all for that. I finally got them to give us specific time periods.

They wanted all the data for those periods. That is IP addresses to people.

We did our own analysis of those time periods, identified the one commonality, extracted that data, provided it to law enforcement.

We got back a “Thank You”. It made us feel good.

As a good service provider, I want to protect your data as much as possible. I do not allow law enforcement to go on fishing expeditions.

We also got a subpoena from the FBI. Again, they wanted all the records for an extended period. We contacted them and got nowhere. Our lawyers told us, “Give them what they asked for or go to jail.”

So we did. They had told us to “fax the logs” to them and gave us a toll-free fax number.

We pulled the data they were requesting. We randomized the order, so it was no longer in sequential order. This was then turned into PDFs. We applied a noise pattern to the PDFs, randomly flipped pages upside down, then hit the send button.

One of our modems called their fax and started talking FAX at it. Our software then proceeded to attempt to send 11,000+ pages of logs.

We got disconnected after about 200 pages. I reached out to the people at the FBI that were requesting the information and asked them what they wanted to do. They refused to answer.

So we told our computer to resend if it failed.

Five days later, they told us they no longer needed our logs.

In both cases, we went out of our way to:

1. Make sure that the “request” we got from law enforcement was legit
2. Make sure that the “request” was actually an order
3. That the order legally required us to comply
4. That the order was as limited in scope as it could be.
5. That we did our utmost to protect our clients.

Liberty Safes done fucked up. They should have waited for a subpoena. Having gotten that subpoena, they should have responded and kept their mouths shut.

None of my safes or lock boxes have original combinations. For mechanical locks, this is good enough. The mechanical locks don’t have magic by passes. You can observe that yourself.

For keyed lock boxes, the locks have been replaced. The circular keys are fairly standard. I went to a locksmith in a different county and purchased replacement locks with cash.

That wasn’t paranoia. That was stupid on my part. I had lost the keys to my big lock boxes in a move and needed to get into them. I drilled the lock out, then was able to open them, since I destroyed the lock, I needed to replace them. Oh, the boxes were empty because we were moving them.

The locksmith I contacted was working out of a work truck that was close to me that day, he didn’t take credit cards, so I paid in cash.

I refuse to get biometric locks nor locks with electronic keypads. If they have biometric locks, then the courts can forcibly unlock them with you. Did you lock your phone with facial recognition? No problem, two burly cops hold you up, and they point your phone at you and “bing” it unlocks.

Did you use a fingerprint to lock your phone? Same thing, they just have to run your finger of the reader and they are in.

If it is electronic, then I have reliability concerns. And it suggests that there can be multiple allowed combinations. Many of the electronic pads come from the factory with an option for you to have multiple codes to unlock.

Now, this is a bit different from the High-end electronic locks. I’ve seen one where you spin the dial to generate enough electricity for you to then rotate the dial to enter the combination. The location of the numbers on the dial changes after each charge spin. Each time you enter a combination, it discharges.

This means that the owner can attempt to unlock it as many times as they need/want. The bad guy can’t use mechanical assistance.

We have turned off the restriction on who comments. It is now back to the old method. If you have an account, and you are logged in, that will work. If you are not logged in, then it will ask for your email, name and optional website.

More info tomorrow.

Normally in one of these articles, I would be quoting their words, pointing out how horribly wrong the state is, how the state is cheating, lying or otherwise attempting to put their thumb on the scales of justice.

Not so today. The attorneys representing the Senate President and General Assembly Speaker do a good job of presenting their position.

The form of these briefs is pretty set, a cover page that fully identifies the case and any cases that have been absorbed into this case, identification of the lawyers who are responsible for the document, theses are not always the person who wrote the brief, the person being represented, Table of Contents, Table of Citations/Authorities, introduction and optionally a summary of the argument, the arguments. That’s followed by other stuff, a conclusion and such.

In many of these briefs, the author uses the introduction and summary to make unsupported arguments and to attempt to set the stage for later misrepresentations.

This is the place where they attempt to put the ear bugs in place. The place where they give the judge(s) a limb to grab onto when they want to rule in a particular direction.

We saw all of that in the state’s official response. This brief doesn’t go down that path. It is very clean.

Read More

On July 21st, 1861, the first battle of the War of Northern Aggression was fought. Just weeks prior, a Major in the Yankee army wrote a heartfelt letter to his love, his wife, the mother of his children.

Because he was an educated man, his letter is educated. It still pulls at the heart, all these decades later.

He died at the Battle of First Manassas after his legs were shot off with a cannonball. This was a survivable event at the time. Unfortunately for the Yankees, they lost the battle and had to retreat.

Major Sullivan Ballou was left behind along with the other wounded. He died within weeks. His letter was found in his gear and sent back to Rhode Island, where the governor presented it to Sullivan’s wife, Sarah.

The letter was used by Goodnight, Texas for their song Dearest Sarah.

(1750 Words)

We live in a society of people actively attempting to pervert history.  We have evolved myths that have no true connection to historical reality.   The uneducated and under educated of the country then make decisions based on myth and emotion.  Often to the long-term detriment of our country.

There is a concept of the evil corporation.  Evil corporations are a stereotype that has very little relationship to reality.

We hear about the greed of the oil companies, taking advantage of the little guy at the gas pumps.  We don’t hear that the oil company is making pennies on the gallon while the state rakes it in.  You won’t get the rubes to strike for less fuel taxes.   What they strike for is to get the oil company to pay the taxes instead of them.

No corporation has ever paid a single penny in taxes.

Hard to believe?

Taxes are an expense. For a corporation to survive, they have to have more income than expenses. Since taxes are an expense, those taxes are baked into the price of goods and services. If the state raises taxes on a business/corporation, the business/corporation will just raise the price of their goods and services.

While the rubes have no problem with a company saying “The cost of steel went up 10%, we have to raise the price of our goods by 10% to compensate.” They might grumble, but they don’t get angry.

If a company says, “The state raised the cost of doing business by 10%, we have to raise the price of our goods and services by 10% to compensate.” The rubes have a meltdown. The EVIL corporation/business should just take those taxes out of profits.

If grandma has income based on dividends and the corporation takes the taxes out of their profits, then grandma gets less. Dividends are the corporation sharing the profits with the shareholders/owners.
Read More

TL;DR; Go to DiveMedic’s site and read everything he has on radios and communications. He covers it much better than I can.
Area Ocho His website is on my “must read” daily list. He is quite knowledgeable in many areas.

Having said that, the next thing to know is that communications is shit in an emergency.

You’ve read J. Kb’s description of losing power. For me, losing power means I can’t work. It means I cannot monitor the servers and sites as closely as I would like.

Why does communications go bad in a simple power outage?

There are two “wires” that come into this house. One is for power, the other is for the internet. That second is fiber.

I can keep power to the networking gear and the fiber modem, even with extended power outages. That doesn’t help much when the fiber repeaters have lost power. The same was true back when I had cable for internet. Lose power to the town, and Comcast lost power to their stuff as well.

In the good old days of “landlines”, back when people just called them “phones”, every house had two pairs going into the house. The power to run your telephone comes from the phone company’s central office (CO). It was 48 volts, are low voltage. You only lose your phone service if the wires to your home are cut.

The CO had emergency backup generators, even if the entire town was without power, the CO still had their own power source.

There are fewer and fewer people using landlines these days. There really is no need. With cell phones and internet calling, everything is just possible without the phone company.

My home and office are on a software PBX. This is a digital phone exchange that lives out there in the cloud. When you call the office or the house, that call is routed over the standard phone system to my Voice over IP provider. The VoIP provider then forwards that call, over the inter net using SIP, to my PBX. My PBX then sends the call to my computer, my smartphone, the house devices or the office devices.

All of that call data comes in over the Internet.

One of the very cool things about using VoIP is that I can and do have phone numbers outside my state and country. My clients in Canada can call a local to them number, and it rings in my ears.

But what happens if the Internet goes down?

My backup is my cell device. I can use my cellphone as a modem, connect it directly to my router and the entire house or office is back online, sharing that one link to the outside world.

Except for running out of data, it works wonderfully.

For the geeks, this is not the same as using your cell to set up a “mobile hotspot.” When you do that, you are using an “extra” service from your cell provider. When I use my cellphone as a modem, it looks just like a single connection, so no extra charges.

The problem is one of bandwidth.

It used to be that Comcast would advertise these fantastic speeds, “Up to 10Mbit/second!” (Old days). Why “up to?” Why not just say “10Mbit/second?”

The reason was that it was a shared resource.

Think about it like a highway. The feeder road is a private road from your house, but once you get on the highway you are competing with all the other traffic on the highway. If there is too much traffic, everybody slows down.

We call this a broadcast system. Every time one of your devices sends a message on the network, it consumes a tiny slice of the available traffic. Like our highway example, before your device transmits, it looks to see if there is any traffic. If there is no traffic, it sends. If there is traffic, it waits. After it sends, it looks to see if there was a collision. If there was, it retransmits using the same logic.

We’ve moved to point-to-point networking, for local networks. Your computer still checks to see if anybody else is transmitting, the answer is always “no”. It then sends. It uses different physical wires for sending and receiving.

Your device’s message is received at a switch. That switch then waits for a clear time to resend your message to the next switch/router until your message is received at its final destination.

Wonderful.

Comcast cable internet is a broadcast system. Once enough people are using it, the amount of space for your message drops. There is this tipping point where the people using a broadcast service go from “everything is fine” to “nobody can get anything to work.”

That is precisely what happens when the town loses power.

All those moms that live on the book of face switch to using the cell network. All the people taking pictures are using the cell network. The business that depend on network connectivity start using the cell network.

And the cell network melts.

The network is still there. It is still capable of moving the same amount of data. Your signal to the cell tower is just as good as it always was, the cell network just doesn’t have the bandwidth to support that many simultaneous connections.

I used to own an ISP. Dial-up internet provider. We were small, we only had a few points of access (main phone numbers). At each location, we had multiple digital modems.

Here is the deal, for every 24 incoming lines we need a T1 connection. 1.44Mbits/second. We had 5 of these at our main location, 3 at our secondary and 2 at our tertiary location.

The secondary and tertiary locations had a single T1 link back to the primary location. That means that we were stuffing 3×24 users down one of those links and 2×24 down the other.

All of that was then stuffed down our T1 link to our upstream provider.

That means we had 240 dial-up modems, requiring 10 T1s worth of incoming lines going into a single line heading upstream.

We had around 2000 customers using those 240 dial-up modems.

We had zero complaints about busy lines when people called in. We had zero complaints regarding slow data.

This is because of the multiplexing going on. At the time, most people didn’t actually move a lot of data. My computer, at idle today, moves more data than 200 of my customers use to in a day.

What this all means is that depending on your cell phone in an emergency is not a good plan.

I have 3 Baofeng 5ur radios. I will be picking up some antennas for them shortly to extend their range. Three was the smallest number I considered usable. I also have four Midland FRS radios. The FRS radios I can, and do, use. The Baofeng are for receiving only.

I just finished adding the channel 3 frequencies to all the Baofengs.

The following is the page I used to get my radios up and running. I used my google-foo to locate good frequencies in my local area. Do the research now, you won’t have internet in an emergency.

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The alarm went off, I opened my blurry eyes and reached for my phone. Click… click… 03?!?!!?

I started looking. I log into my server from my phone, clicking away to get a status. The database engine is in a crashbackoff loop.

About that time, I noticed that Miguel had contacted me with a very polite 503? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

As I have talked about, I’m upgrading the infrastructure that GFZ uses. The previous round of downtime resulted in me opening tickets with Linode and escalating to the point where less than a week ago I got an update, “We resolved the issue you reported”. They had known about the issue for over a year. It just wasn’t important enough to fix until their client, me, raised a fuss.

One of the side effects of this upgrade process is that I’ve had to increase the number of nodes and the size of nodes. All of that is going well.

It is unclear to me why the database engine crashed, only that it did.

To that end, I have removed that database engine from production. Moved all the data to the larger, more stable, database engine. This database engine is using the new persistent (CEPH) storage engine. While it is not “crash proof” it is less prone to failures because of the way the data is now stored.

In addition, it is much easier to get backups of the data.

I’m going to take the plunge later today and move the assets from the storage it is currently using to the new storage system. This offers numerous benefits, not the least of which is that I can do rolling upgrades of the software.

Yesterday I upgraded ‘WordPress’ on multiple sites. With the new infrastructure being used by some of those sites, there was zero downtime. K8S started a new pod with the new software. When it was stable, it terminated one of the old pods. It then started a second pod with the new software. When it was stable, it terminated the last old pod. Zero downtime.

For GFZ, using the older infrastructure, the old pod was terminated, the new pod was started, once it was stable, service resumed.

Regardless, I’m hopping for a quiet day.

My wife was at work today at a mandatory staff meeting. They were going to be doing some team building, setting up team goals, and in general introducing management to the staff.

My went to sit down and managed to crush her finger in the moving parts of the folding chair. Instant pain and blood.

Being a trooper, she snuck off to the restrooms, cleaned up the bleeding, bandaged her finger from her IFAK. She reports it was “a lot of blood.” When she got back to the staff meeting, they were doing a team build exercise that required a bunch of standing and sitting.

She decided it wasn’t a good idea to do it. Her supervisor noticed her not participating and asked why. My wife told him that she felt a little woozy. Like she might faint.

Staff noticed my wife turning white, rushed and got her to the floor safely and her head on padding. No clunks. No head bangs. She did pass out/faint.

EMS was called, she came around to EMTs doing their thing. EMTs asked if she wanted to go to the hospital, but they didn’t see anything that required an ER visit. Told her about the local urgent care.

She declined the ambulance trip. Her supervisor sent her home. Which actually meant that I went to get her and youngest child drove the car back.

That’s the end of the setup.

We got the wife into see her doctor. X-Rays done. No broken bones. But she needs the finger splinted. The X-Ray doc wasn’t in to read them, so she was sent home to wait for a call.

At home, we dive into the “comprehensive” medical kit to grab the SAM finger splints. No joy. The medium and large are there, along with the wrap and everything else required. No small splints.

We next hit up the hiking FAK. It is smaller than the comprehensive but still more complete than IFAKs Sure enough, it has the medium and large SAM splints, no finger splints.

Ok, I’m getting irritated. I grab my EDC bag. This bag has an IFAK in it with blowout support. It is not “just” a blowout kit, as it has single dose medications and band-aids and the like. It has a C.A.T. on the top of the kit and an Israeli bandage in the side pocket. Both quick access. The SAM splints are right there. In medium and large.

At that point, I just gave up. Did the Popsicle stick splint, picked up the real deal from the local CVS. Her finger is properly splinted now.

And I have two sets of 3 on the way from Amazon.

The damaged finger was in the in-between space. It wasn’t big enough to be part of my standard inventory process. It wasn’t so small that all the kits had the right gear. It was in the evil Goldilocks zone.

To be clear, if this had been an “emergency” I would have just cut a finger splint from one of the larger SAM splints. That’s an excuse for why I didn’t notice the missing finger splints.

The splints were used when a friend really messed up her thumb. The SAM splints were the only thing that gave the right support, comfortably. We handed her the 3 or 4 we had on hand and expected the replacement. The replacements never showed up.

There is a great deal of thought that goes into our medical kits. They are designed to ramp up. The IFAK on my ankle is not there for anything except blowouts. Stop the bleed, plug the hole, get the victim transported.

The next step-up has more. While the ankle kit has a SWAT-T style of Tourniquet, the blowout kits have CAT TQs or equivalent. ALL name brand and all from a reputable supply house, NOT Amazon.

The next step-up is the car kits. Above that is the group hiking kit. Finally, there is the house kit.

Each step adds more capability and more duplicates. The house kit has a box of gloves instead of the one or two pairs in the smaller kits. It has bottles of OTC medications instead of single dose packets. It has the suture kit and the gear to make a semi sterile work environment.

Am I qualified to use all of that gear? No. Do I know people who are capable and qualified? Yes.

Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul, and Mary told a story about going to Russia with a tourist group. One of the guys in the group approached her and asked, “Should I bring my guitar?” He didn’t intend to offend her by assuming she would be singing songs with them, but wanted to offer. Mary said “sure.”

They make it to Russia and the group is having a fun night and the singing starts. Guy hauls out his guitar and goes to hand it to Mary. She looks at him and says, “I don’t play guitar.”.

She didn’t play guitar, neither did the guy. He just assumed she would be able to use the tool he brought to the rumble.

There are things that are in my kits that I don’t know how to use. That’s fine. If there is somebody that can, I have the tools. There are a remarkable number of highly trained medical people that don’t have the medical gear I have on hand. They know that they will just go to the office/hospital and the gear will be there.

I also have the manuals on how to use these things and the practice gear. If I have to, I’ll learn damn quick.

So go take the time to inventory your medical gear. Replace the batteries while you are at it. Test that all the battery-powered things still function. Compare that list with what you think is in that kit. Update the list to what should be there and restock.

If there are meds that expire, make sure you replace the expired meds.

Then put a reminder to do it next year, this same time. And every year thereafter.

Oh, when you find gear that is expired and needs to be replaced, that is a good time to use the expired gear for training purposes.