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.

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B.L.U.F.

The Attorney General of New Jersey has filed a brief (100 pages!!!!) explaining why New Jersey’s de facto carry ban is actually constitutional.
(1900 words)

Analysis and Rant

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I am old enough that I started school before the Federal Department of Education came into existence. My father was in the U.S. Navy. We traveled around the country as he was posted to different bases.

Sometimes those locations were in “The South” and sometimes they were in The North.

I am an American, first, last and always.

Years ago, in a motorcycle group I belonged to, I made a statement about the Civil War. One of the respected members replied with a question, “How many slaves did Lincoln free?”

The answer is surprising to most. Lincoln freed zero slaves. His proclamation only applied to the states that were in revolt. It did not apply to the states that remained a part of the Union.

This gentleman taught me to look a bit deeper at the history.

That is why I sometime choose to use terms I learned in school. At the time, my teachers taught both sides. Later I learned still more, yet my teachers still treated the south with respect.

If you took offense at my choice in terms in today’s tunes, please ask yourself “Why?” and if you have a good answer as to why I was out of line, feel free to let me know.

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.
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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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B.L.U.F.
Mr. Fraser is the lead plaintiff in a challenge to 18 U.S.C. §922(b)1. Normally, we are concerned about the different parts of §922(g), prohibited persons. §922(b)1 is the probation on those under 21 purchasing handguns or handgun ammunition.

We won. The case is held pending appeal to the Fourth Circuit court.
(1500 words)

Case History

The Plaintiffs (good guys) filed this case on June 1st, 2022. Just a few days before Bruen. The original complaint says §922(b)(1) “violates the fundamental rights of millions of responsible, law-abiding American citizens …”—ECF No.1

Nearly a half year later, the state responds with:

1. You can just get your mommy or daddy to buy a gun for you
2. We’ve always had the ability to deny the sale of firearms to people under the age of 21
3. At the founding, those under 21 were infants and minors
4. Their claim of Fifth Amendment violation fails because your age isn’t protected data.
5. Besides, the court can offer any relief to the plaintiffs, so there.

That bit about the Fifth is saying that you can’t incriminate yourself by giving your age. Therefore, it is not protected information. They, of course, fail to mention that it is incriminating when you would be inviolate of regulation by your conduct at a particular age.

As for “History and Tradition” they have 20 some pages of regulations, the earliest in 1856, the rest 1876 or later. Not really a history nor a tradition, but this is one of the early cases post Bruen where the state was still feeling out just how underhanded they could be.

And like a bad penny, we see Giffords, Brady, Everytown jump into to agree 100% that the plaintiffs don’t have standing.

In an interesting turn, they are suing Garland and Dettelbach in both their official capacity and as individuals.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of these state actors were actually held responsible for what they do?

Commercial Sales And Purchase of Firearms That Are Not Unusually Dangerous Constitute Conduct Within The Scope of The Second Amendment. … ECF No. 28. Double emphasis added. This is horrible phrasing and every lawyer who uses it should be taken out behind the woodshed and given 50 lashes.

The correct phrasing is dangerous and unusual. “Unusually dangerous” is a subjective opinion. “Unusual” is an objective measurement, as stated in [xCite item=”ACUPYBTA” pos=0]

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There were a few big wins in the 2A world this week. We have a case out of Western Virginia, a class action suit, which found that all members of the class of 18,19, and 20-year-olds are allowed to purchase handguns, at a federal level.

This is a district court ruling, and the Judge made it a nationwide injunction. It doesn’t apply to two districts that are also hearing 18,19, and 20 year-olds are part of The People.

We had the District of Columbia surrender and agree to pay millions of dollars in a class action suit for denial of civil rights regarding handgun possession in the District.

The Feds are making pretzel makers look linear as they argue for that The People didn’t include this group or that group at the founding, based on racist laws. Their argument’s would be perfectly reasonable to deny Second Amendment protect rights to people of color.

In other words, the arguments they are making could just as easily be made to justify new racist regulations.

We had an outage earlier this week. We did lose some data. I lost all of my citations and WordFence tables.

Fortunately, those are trivial to rebuild, which we have.

There will be some downtime coming up as I move a boatload of data around. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Meanwhile, the comments are open. Please let us know what you are thinking about, what you are interested in, what you’ve heard around the water cooler that might be of interest to us all.