There is more swag coming. We are looking at T-shirts and polo shirts, as well as more patches.

We just have to let the talented ones loose to get ideas.

Over the next few hours, the site might be a little unstable, or you might see things that are strange. We are adding the shopping capability to the site.

This will include changes to the menus as well as some other parts of the site.

On the grand side of things, you’ll be able to purchase some swag soon.

Many studies have shown that predicting how any single person will react to stimuli is difficult. Predicting how a mob will react is trivial. There are entire areas of study into mob psychology.

A mob can do incredible things. I saw a demonstration of this at SIGGRAPH many years ago. Up on the main screen was a Pong game. Instead of a person controlling the paddle positions, the crowd controlled the paddles.

Each member of the audience was given a ping pong paddle type thing. There was a different color on either side. If you wanted “your” paddle to move down, you twisted one color to the front. If you wanted it to go up, you showed the other color.

A high-speed system was watching the crowd and tallying the level of color and converting that into position information.

I used to be good at this game. I would position the paddle such that a corner would catch the “ball” and that would cause the ball to move rapidly in strange directions. The downside was that I would sometimes miss, and my opponent would get a point.

Played by the mob, it was impossible to get a corner bounce. On the other hand, we didn’t miss. Ever. The ball was moving as fast as the game would allow, and the paddle was still always at exactly the right spot, every time.

That is the power of the mob.

There are some difficult scientific puzzles that need to be solved. They were able to gamify some of them and present them on the Internet. The Internet mob was capable of solving these previously unsolvable puzzles in a couple of weeks.

That is the power of the mob.

A mob is not a protest, it is not a riot, it is not a rally or football fans tearing down the fences to get onto the soccer field. It is in the core, but it is not those things.

To have a mob, you need a certain number of people at a certain density and some sort of “trigger”

If you have a 100 people sitting in the commons listening to a band concert, that isn’t likely to be a mob. Take a 100 people, stuff them into a sports bar during a playoff game and you will have a mob.

In most cases, mobs don’t do anything bad. They all march in a parade. They all cheer when their team makes a point. When the movie ends, they all stream out of the theater. There was a trigger in each of these cases, but that trigger caused the mob to respond in an acceptable way.

In general, the boundary layer between the mob and not mob is where most things happen. The interior often has no idea what is happening at the fringe. They may be contributing to the actions on the fringe without even knowing.

This is how we ended up with grandmothers taking self-guided tours of the Capitol. They were not at the fringe of the mob, they didn’t see anything wrong, so they just moved forward with the mob and found themselves in the building.

They took selfies and walked around inside the velvet ropes. Only to find out later that they were no wanted felons.

The mob is how you end up with a pile of dead bodies at an exit because the door opens inward. The people in the interior of the mob don’t understand they have to pull back to give the front space to open the door.

Because there is mob psychology and people that know how to use it, those with nefarious goals can use that knowledge to turn the mob as they want. These are the people waving people forward while slowly walking backwards. These are the people who are yelling, “We are going IN!”

The mob just responds.

It is also how you end up with good people looting. They are carried with the mob and find themselves “looters” when that was never their intention.

A riot is a mob that has become destructive. The trigger has caused rage and now the mob is raging, destroying, consuming all in its path.

In Wisconsin, a mob of protesters was keyed up. They heard the sound of gunfire, they heard the screams directing them. That mob turned into a violent beast, set on catching and rending its prey dead. Most of the people chasing after Kyle had never considered themselves “violent”. Most would never have thought they were capable of murder.

Multiple people from that mob attempted to murder Kyle. That he survived is a miracle.

For those that know the power of the mob, the mob is terrifying. When they see 200 people with firearms chanting and screaming, they know it takes only a small trigger to turn that mob into a riot. They know this because that is how they react. That is how they plan. That is how they work.

When you watch the left rage, they don’t stop. They seem to have a goal of destructing. Destroying their current target before turning to the next.

Typically, the people of the right stop the violence when the violence against them is stopped.

Again, consider the mob at the Capitol. There was serious pushing, shoving, and attacking the doors. They seemed intent on getting into the building. We don’t see that rage turned against the police.

Once they gained entry, for the most part, they were non-destructive.

Now consider what we have seen when the left riots and storms a building. When the building is breached, the mob crashes into the building like a wave, sweeping everything in its path, leaving destruction in its wake.

That is why we are feared. They know what they do. They expect the same from us. They don’t get it. That level of self-control is terrifying to those in power.

When someone rages, screams at the sky, shakes his fist at god and the world, we ignore them. The cruel laugh at them.

The quiet man with a will to succeed is a 1000 times scarier.

Many moons ago, I played D&D with my friends. Most dungeons are designed to allow your party to become stronger as they progress downward. Each level is stronger, more powerful creatures. The party learns to be careful. Locked doors are the norm. Death waits around each corner.

Our party was deep in the dungeon, barely surviving each encounter. We came to a door and prepared to breach and take out the monster on the other side.

Our door kicker tests the door and finds it unlock. He signals to us and the breach begins. Our party pours into the room prepared to battle anything. And skidded to a stop in pure terror.

The scariest monster we had yet encountered was there. And we had upset it. We slowly started backing out of the room, apologizing all the while.

What did we see in that room? A skinny old man, naked, dripping wet as he dried his hair.

Anything that is that casual about their safety at that level of the dungeon is to be feared.

The powerful look at a peaceful mob of well armed people and they are terrified. What is that dripping wet old man going to do if he gets angry?

During the Trump administration, we saw riot after riot called “protests.” We saw that the “protesters” arrived with weapons, shields, armor, and attitude. We saw them engage violently with the police.

The courts and prosecutors turned a blind eye to the looting, rioting, and violence.

A new normal had been established.

On January 6th, people arrived at the Capitol to attend a speech, rally, and protest. Being law-abiding, they left their firearms and most weapons back in their hotels. Often with somebody to babysit the weapons.

Nothing to put the kabash on a peaceful protest than to come back to your hotel room and find that your firearms have all been stolen.

There was violence that day. There were people pushing and shoving. Nothing we had not seen over the previous year. There were people getting pepper sprayed. And there were people spraying the cops back.

All of that is captured on video.

There were also people that entered the Capitol building.

There does not seem to be anybody actually arrested that day.

No, that happened days and weeks later. The police stacked up and arrested those who attended. It is likely that they limited that to enemies of their state and people identified in the Capitol building. I’m not interested in having that discussion.

On Sunday, many people showed up in Old Town, New Mexico, which is part of Albuquerque.

The new normal suggests that it was a success.

We do not know

For all we know, there is a group of pigs going over all the video of that protest, identifying people. Once they have identified their enemies, we can expect arrests.

To finish out the articles by me and Hagar, I offer you this opera singer’s take on child abuse:

(1350 Words)

If there is one thing that we at GFZ all agree on, it is that child molesters are despicable and should be dispatched with as much pain to them as possible. For all the media’s yelling about how many women are sexually assaulted, it seems pretty hard to say “not all men”. It is also incredibly disheartening to read that many, if not most, of the people incarcerated for violent crimes were themselves the victims of child abuse.

Some of the statistics that we are given don’t pass the sniff test. “1 in 4 women will be raped while in collage.” That may be true, but it is unlikely. If it was true, it means that sending your daughter to collage is more likely to get her raped than sending her to some third world shitholes.

That particular number comes from a bogus study which I’m not going to look up. Short story from memory, the study was done at a community collage with many of the women reporting having been raped not living on campus and often times having been raped before coming to collage. I.e., many of the self reported victims were older women.

I have a “paladin complex”. That is, I have a tendency to attempt to rescue people. It is how I ended up with my first wife. She needed me to rescue her. During our time together, I learned that she had been abused by her father as she was growing up.

She wasn’t sure it was real or just a bad/fake memory. When our 3-year-old daughter told us that grandpa redacted had her touch him inappropriately, we took it seriously. A licensed therapist that specialized in young children did the evaluation.
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There are a few more deer that come around this spot.

These pictures were taken from 12.5 yards away.

I hope they make it through the year and I see them again next year, when they have put on a little weight.

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.