Silicon Valley Redneck

Obstacles

That photo of Huckleberry relaxing on my desk Monday?  That's one of the better-case scenarios.

He's being more typical today, i.e., aggressively playful.  Which makes it difficult for me to use the mouse; any hand venturing into the guarded airspace over the mousepad is considered a cat toy.

A gardening glove isn't adequate protection; he has too much reach, and easily gets his claws onto my exposed skin while biting the fingertips of the glove.  Maybe I need a falconer's glove, or a welding gauntlet.

(Ever try to use the scrollwheel while wearing a leather glove?)

Anyway... trying to catch up on some of the odds-n-ends backlog this morning.  Didn't go for regularly-scheduled walkies, because I figure on spending pretty much the entire afternoon on my feet at DesignCon, wearing the now-obligatory Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and Five Fingies.

Information leakage

Just getting around to reading Cryoburn, which so far is up to the expected Bujold standard.

Early on, Miles finds himself with limited access to a single comconsole which, according to the owner, can't be used to make outgoing calls, but only to receive information.

Hmmmm.

Well, from a standard viewpoint, this is a limitation that makes sense.  After all, a conventional TV set can't be used to transmit information, except in the sense that a TV detector van can (at very close range) pick up leakage from the local oscillator and determine that you have a TV set, and what channel you're watching.

But!  If the comconsole is capable of retrieving information-on-demand, rather than merely selecting from some number of broadcast signals, then it necessarily has the ability to transmit requests for the data.

Which will leave footprints.  And, in some cases, can be used to transmit information through an unexpected channel.  (This is exactly the sort of thing Miles ought to come up with, given his history.)

In today's WWW terms, requesting the page at
https://www.kgb.ru/the_dragon_flies_at_midnight
will got you nothing but a 404*, but your ISP may (depending on what logs he keeps) see that you did a DNS query for www.kgb.ru and then established a secure connection on port 443, and the KGB's webmaster will have a record, in the server's error log, of the exact request, code phrase and all.  A script on the server could even pick up on predefined phrases in real time, and flag them for action.

Whatever technology comconsoles use, if they have the ability to request specific data, and allow the user to enter requests at this level of specificity, then this sort of trick can be used to send messages.  Whether and when anyone will get around to seeing them, well, that's a different matter.

* No, I didn't test this.  I didn't even confirm that kgb.ru is an actual domain.  It's an example, OK?

A point regarding constitutional law

To all those Democrats wailing that a federal law banning abortion after 20 weeks of gestation would be unconstitutional:

You're right, of course.  But probably for a reason you don't comprehend, or even actively deny.

Such a law would violate the Tenth Amendment, as it would not be rooted in a power explicitly delegated to the United States by any provision of the Constitution.

But... if you start admitting that there is a Tenth Amendment, and that it means anything at all, you open a can - nay, a vast dumpster - of worms.  For then we might re-examine every federal law, regulation, and extra-legal policy for justification in the delegated powers.

And most of the federal government would have to go bye-bye, because dang near all of it is unconstitutional.

Regarding the cell network, and nationalization thereof

The latest outrage making the rounds is Trump's diabolical plan to nationalize the 5G cellphone network.

A few things occur to me.

First of all, it's Trump.  Assuming such a proposal actually has been put forth, we may safely assume that it's an initial bargaining position, not an actual policy.

Secondly, any such thing would have to go through Congress.  (This is Trump, here, not Obama.)  Good luck with that.

Then... how many of the people spreading outrage over this notion would enthusiastically embrace nationalization of infrastructure if the name "Trump" weren't associated with it?  (Note that this past Sunday's Doonesbury ascribed to Trump a position actually taken, a few years ago, by Thomas Friedman.)

As to the merits?  Actually having the government build, own, and operate it is almost certainly a terrible idea, especially given that wireless-infrastructure buildout by competing (quasi-)private businesses is already a thing, so it's not like only the government can do this.  On the other hand: one of the stated reasons for this idea is security, in that it seems a really bad idea to have critical communications infrastructure (which, after all, will also be used for government communications) built around equipment from China (or from Russia, Israel, or Canada, for that matter).  Especially since we've already seen high-tech gear from China with built-in security back doors.

So... in this case, it seems that a certain amount of central planning is in order, beyond the usual spectrum allocation.  Enforcing security standards is a good thing for everyone - assuming our own government doesn't get its own back doors included! - and having the privately-operated / publicly-used network properly secure could reduce the need for government comms networks run in parallel with it (hence less overall spending).

Afterthought:  For a reason we don't want untrusted network equipment in our cellular infrastructure, consider the potential for some unwelcome party or parties to harvest metadata - you know, that stuff that our esteemed "intelligence community" so loves to collect in bulk, and then lie to Congress about having collected it.  Try this on for size: Oh, look!  Here's a list of 2,347 IMEI numbers corresponding to phones that exchange encrypted data with k13.cia.gov.  Shall we track their locations in real time?

Yeah, I'd rather our own government not have that capability either.  But it's inherent to the system, and letting foreign powers potentially sneak in their own back doors adds a whole new layer of threat.

Well, foo.

At a trade show, about a year ago if memory serves, I picked up the business card of someone who'd just relocated from Fremont to Knoxville, on account of his company just having opened a facility there.

I put the card where I definitely wouldn't lose it... and, in the chaos that was 2017 around here, didn't get around to getting in touch.

Now it seems that the card in question has gone missing, possibly misappropriated as a cat toy.

Oh, well.  I did find the cards of several other people I'd meant to get back in touch with the past couple of years, if only I'd had their contact information handy.  And I guess there are a couple of other places I can look for that card.  One of which would be the bag-o'-literature from the show in question, only now I can't find that.  C'mon, it's big enough to be easily found... right?

... I also found a cryptic note, which might date to the founding of Humball, or more likely to that time several years ago that JCM was looking to relocate to slightly larger, and more northerly, premises.  Or... maybe it's from early 2014, when JCM was being decommissioned?  In any event, that's one scrap of paper that can be safely discarded.

 

And, speaking of cards: I'd been in a bit of a tizzy, as my on-line bankery showed my business credit-card account having been switched over to the new card number, while the card itself had not yet put in an appearance.  The card showed up in today's mail, with the clarification that I have until the end of April to update vendor accounts to use the new card.  So I guess that's sorted.

Monday morning awww

This would be much more endearing if his claws weren't so sharp.

Pling!

On the way home from family dinner.  Master Warning, Check Engine, Excited Car.  Stuff that happens, I guess, when you're creeping up on the quarter-million-mile mark on what was once a bleeding-edge vehicle (in terms of the technology involved).

Not P3006 this time.  It's P3015, which I think is supposed to happen in combination with P3006?

Anyway, it's apparently complaining that battery block #5 is weak.  Didn't seem to affect handling, the last half-mile of the trip, after the pling hit.

Having come in and looked it up, I guess I'll go back out and clear the code.  Then see what happens tomorrow morning.

Update:  All normal on the Monday morning drive.

Update 2:  Monday evening, on the other hand... pling on the way to family dinner, and pling on the way home from family dinner.  All these are happening on the freeway, while more or less cruising at freeway speed (the previous pattern of P3006 plings involved a specific stretch of freeway in stop-and-creep conditions during the post-walkies drive homeward).  Seems an odd time to be noticing a battery problem, unless it's detected during charging.

So... maybe the ol' Prius is going to need expensive repairs soon (apart from the battery, it needs the engine pulled for replacement of a gasket that's started seeping oil).  And maybe it's time to look at the combined costs of those things (plus the windshield, which has been cracked for a few years now, and various wear & tear), and ponder whether I should instead be shopping for a replacement car.

And, while I'm wearing my IT-department hat...

... and as long as I have my laptop at home...

Last summer, I replaced the low-performance hard drive in my laptop with a budget-model Toshiba SSD.

It made booting (and a surprising number of other things) vastly faster.  Thing is, though: the SATA III interface on the SSD wasn't altogether compatible with the SATA I interface in the laptop (which is several years old, and was in the bargain bin - hey, a Core i3 laptop of decent quality for a bit under $400 was not to be sneezed at back then, even if I did promptly put additional money into more RAM and a higher-capacity hard drive - I was looking for something in the Core i3 class because I needed hardware virtualization support so's I could run Windows and legacy build environments in VMs).

Anyway, performance with the Toshiba SSD was generally impressive, but I was getting bursts of SATA PHY errors, occasionally leading to crashes (and this was after I applied various tweaks to make other errors go away).

A few weeks ago, I took advantage of a deal on a Samsung SSD of similar capacity, and this morning ended up being time for the drive swap.

So!  Connect the new drive to a USB-to-SATA bridge, and thence to the laptop.  Look up instructions on the 'Net: pretty simple, or so it seems.  Use gparted to create an ext4 partition and a swap partition on the new drive.  Then, er.  Boot a live CD, and mount /dev/sda1 as /mnt/old and /dev/sdb1 as /mnt/new; do yer basic cd /mnt/old; cp -a * /mnt/new; wait for that to finish; install grub on /dev/sdb; swap the new drive into the laptop...

... oops.  I lost one of the four little screws that hold the drive into the little frame.  Oh, well; it should work OK with three, right?  I mean, unless there's a pathological seek pattern that makes the drive go walkabout?

... and reboot...

... oops.  Can't find the root filesystem.  Because, duh, /etc/fstab is identifying the root and swap partitions the modern way, by UUID, and of course they're different on the new drive.  So boot the live CD again, update the filesystem info, reboot again...

... aaaand, it works!  So far, so good: no errors showing up in dmesg.  Maybe I should hunt down and comment out the tweaks I'd put in before, and see if they're not needed for this drive.

Update:  Yup, the Samsung 850 EVO plays nice with the aging laptop, no tweaks required.  This leaves me with a half-terabyte Toshiba OCZ TR-150 that doesn't work well in the laptop, but presumably would be fine in a newer machine.  Maybe it'd be good in one of the lab machines?  Turnipseed (Linux) has a 750GB hard drive, only a few percent used.  Bursar (Windows) has a 250GB drive, about 90% full, and I've recently cleaned off pretty much everything nonessential.  Sounds like a candidate.  Maybe I should try plugging the Toshiba in as a second drive first, and run some sort of diagnostics on it, just to make sure it'll work right?  It's not like Bursar is exactly new.  (If memory serves, I paid -$1 for the hardware: the machine with Windows 7 Pro cost a dollar less than Windows 7 Pro by itself.)

Protectionism. Hmm.

I was rather alarmed, a few days ago, to hear that the Trump Administration was introducing new trade-protectionist measures.

That's one of the down sides of populism: trade restrictions sound like such a good idea, on so many levels.  Economists may explain all day the many ways in which they're actually, in the big picture, bad; one may contemplate the inefficiencies implied by subsidized exports (whereby the Chinese taxpayers subsidize our consumer goods); but to the working stiff who's seeing the jobs dry up, none of these arguments will be persuasive.

But then I thought: this is Trump.  Maybe these new measures represent a bargaining position?

It appears so.  Trump at Davros Davos*:

We support free trade but it needs to be fair and it needs to be reciprocal because in the end unfair trade undermines us all. The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning.

Now, mind: industrial subsidies and state-led planning actually make China's economy less efficient, not more, though they can facilitate an effort** to drive, e.g., our rare-earth mining and refining operations out of business.  But the IP theft is a legitimate gripe, and a complete absence of enforced environmental and labor standards on one side creates an extremely tilted playing field.

(Now, there's a pretty strong case that our regulatory compliance costs are far too high.  It should be possible to reduce the costs substantially without significantly lowering standards... and a slight reduction in standards might both dramatically lower compliance costs and increase actual compliance, giving a net improvement.  And!  If we lower our environmental standards a little, and the Chinese raise their standards a lot, the result is a huge improvement overall.  Time for some environmental-protection treaties, embedded in trade agreements?)

So... yeah, the trade restrictions sound like bad news.  But it also sounds like they're not meant to become permanent policies.

 

A little later in the linked article:

After Trump says of Davos “It’s been really successful...” I asked him how he can be America First if he’s rubbing elbows with big wigs. He did not respond.
        - Jim Acosta

Which shows a complete lack of basic comprehension.  The businessman's "America First" is not (despite the unfortunate similarity of words) the 1930s isolationist's "America First".  "First" does not mean, nor imply, "Only"; it's entirely proper for a head of state to put the interests of his own nation ahead of those of other nations (which have their own heads of state, and diplomats, to speak for their interests).  When you're negotiating a Deal, you always put your (your company's, your boss's, your shareholders') interests first, but you hope, sooner or later, to negotiate an arrangement that benefits the interests of all parties; if you can't arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement, it's time to stop wasting time on that Deal and work on something else.

Expect this last observation to have some bearing on a certain decades-long "peace process".

 

* "I always get those two dudes confused." - The Cat  (or was it Lister?)

** Not a very successful one, as I understand it; when they jacked prices back up to exploit their new monopoly, the domestic mines were re-opened.

Wrong word of the day: "pre-imminent"

I think it means "not yet about to happen".

Which is probably not what the person who used it ("... pre-imminent biographer...") intended.

As usual, the spelling checker offers some wonderfully absurd corrections, none of which is anything like pre-eminent.

The Memo

• I haven't read it.
• It's all lies.
• The information contained in it is so sensitive that revealing it to the American public would cause irreparable harm to National Security.

Funny how some people seem to be making all three assertions.

Aieeeee!

I rebooted my workstation today.

It was kind of overdue for a reboot, on general principles, having been running continuously for... hmmm... not all that long; after all, I had everything turned off for the Grand Reconfiguration of just about a month ago.

Also, there was a new kernel version installed, and the update manager was nagging me for a reboot.

It did not go smoothly.

In fact, the reboot wouldn't complete.  It got smpboot errors about not being able to wake up any of the CPUs, and then it rebooted.

Oh.  Crap.

That's the affects-some-processors bug in the Intel microcode update that's meant to help with the Meltdown/Spectre thing isn't it?

As it turns out, probably not.  It looked remarkably like the BIOS settings were getting corrupted (like, completely garbling the mapping for my US-English USB keyboard).  And sometimes I could persuade the machine to boot a rescue CD, which would then proceed to work, at least somewhat.

Off to family dinner with the problem still not solved.  Possible solution, if it turns out to be something in the Linux boot process: copy everything off the SSD to a USB drive, re-install everything, and copy stuff back.  Oog.

Back from dinner.  Consider the possibility that it's a hardware problem.  Swap around the RAM modules, and wiggle various connections.  Re-apply power, and...

... Oops.

Now it doesn't manage to power back up.  It turns on a few lights, the CPU and video-card fans spin up, but then it shuts off for a few seconds, then tries again.

Well, maybe it's just a failing power supply...?

I guess in the morning I'll try something radical, like disconnecting everything that can be disconnected and seeing if it powers up.  If not, off to - wait - I have a decent-sized ATX power supply around here, I think.  Practically new.  I can try that.  If all else fails, I may be heading off to Central Computers for a new MB/CPU set.  Preferably something that's compatible with the 16GB of RAM I have in that thing.

And, while I'm at it, one of the case fans does need replacing.

Update 1: This laptop is not really an acceptable substitute, what with its miserable little 15" screen and low-profile, compact keyboard.  Also, while all the important stuff is accessible on, or from, the laptop, my  morning-funnies links are on the workstation.  I suppose I could retrieve them from the backup, but maybe I'll just find something else to prop against the milk carton this morning.

Also, I'm noticing that some sites render very differently in Chrome-on-the-laptop this morning than they did in Chrome-on-the-workstation yesterday.  But, then, Chrome-on-the-phone reconfigured its default start page, again, within the last couple of days, so who knows what's going on?  Google gaslighting, or site redesigns?

Update 2:  Just after 0630 Pacific, and Chipzilla is up over three bucks from yesterday's close.  Apparently yesterday afternoon's earnings report was better than expected.  However, my contingency plan from 2 years back for INTC-at-$50 is no longer applicable, for various reasons.  Probably.  Maybe it could be adapted, though.

Update 3:  This update is brought to you by the phrase Have you tried unplugging all the internal cables and modules and plugging them back in again? and by the number 137.036-j42.

Ol' workstation is back up.  I solved the problem by the Socratic method, i.e., I started asking questions systematically, and persisted until the problem solved itself.  Or is that the Columbic method?  Ask increasingly irritating questions until the suspect confesses?  Only I didn't get a confession, just obedience.

I think maybe I should find some sort of bootable diagnostics thingy to try on this, and maybe run an overnight RAM test or something.  But, for now, 'tis working.  I should still round up a replacement for the worn-out case fan before I button it back up.

Meanwhile, Chipzilla's share price, oblivious both to my plight and to the revelation that I wouldn't have to run out and buy a new CPU this week, is up even more.  Just a couple of days ago, the pundits were proclaiming gloom, doom, and a $43 price target.  Hmmm.

Update 4:  Failure to boot.  Keyboard behavior erratic.  Could this have been a Gate A20 issue?  (Oops.  My age is showing.  Maybe I need a nap, now that the machine is working again and the panic is over.)

Update 5:  Friday night, I left memtest86 running for 7¾ hours.  No errors.  So where does that leave us?

Well, clearly I can't blame Intel nor Debian for the initial string of smpboot failures, given that, eventually, things returned to normal with no changes to the software configuration.  The cause of the motherboard/CPU frotzment remains a mystery.

The keyboard weirdness also remains a mystery, but it may be a separate one; I'm developing a suspicion that it's something to do with the new KVM switch - perhaps some curious interaction between it and the BIOS.

Whatever.  The machine is running again.  I have a vague urge to tweak the BIOS settings for CPU speed, to take advantage once again of the unlocked CPU, but I don't think that's really necessary, as I haven't been doing lengthy, CPU-intensive things lately, and speeding up 5-second compiles by a few percent isn't that big a deal.

This leaves a couple of nagging annoyances: KDE tends, on reboot, to forget where some of the more recently added icons belong on my desktop and what size they should be (they end up tiny, and placed randomly, often in a cluttered area), and if I leave the apt entry for Google Earth Pro intact I get frequent pop-ups informing me that the Packages file for the i386 architecture is missing (I'm on amd64, of course, but have multiarch turned on in support of some legacy software that's 32-bit-only).

Oh, here we go.  Second irritation solved; sticking [arch=amd64] into the APT source line makes it not look for other architectures.

Wrong word of the day: "pyrokinetic"

Used in today's Monty comic.

Apparently this term was coined by Stephen King.  As Wikipedia notes, it comes from entirely the wrong roots to mean what King used it for, i.e., pertaining to the power to start fires with one's mind - psychoconflagratory or whatever.

Pyrokinesis is what steam engines do.  And, come to think of it, internal-combustion engines too: turning fire into motion.

And kinetopyrosis is a known ability of Boy Scouts (turning motion into fire).

False Statements question

We already know that it's just peachy for an FBI investigator to lie to a member of the public, or even (in many cases) to a judge.  But...

Is it a crime for an FBI investigator to lie to the President?

(Trick question.  Regardless of the False Statements law, surely it's a crime for a government employee to lie to the Boss.  Right?)

Eclipse of the Blue SuperMoon!

Yeah, apparently that's a thing, coming soon.  A blue moon, supermoon, and lunar eclipse all in one.

What kind of special glasses do we need to view it safely?

(Too bad I didn't think of this a couple of months ago.  I could maybe have gotten a "lunar eclipse glasses" meme going.)

Shadow government, shadow foreign policy

Rumor has it that Shadow Secretary of State John Kerry has been meeting with Palestinian officials and assuring them that they shouldn't worry about the sudden pro-Israel turn in U.S. policy, because Trump will be gone soon enough and all will return to normal.

Hello, Logan Act?

Added:  Yes, I realize the Logan Act, per se, is unenforceable and likely unconstitutional.  But... cast your mind back a couple of years.  Remember when it was practically treason for a Republican to talk to any representative of a foreign power?  Remember the hyperventilation over revelations that members of Trump's transition team had communicated with the Russian ambassador, among others, between the election and the inauguration?  Well, now there's (allegedly) a prominent member of the party that lost the last election out there actively undermining the foreign policy of the party that won.  This is not how the game is played.

Meanwhile, in other stupidity

Headline:

This Breakthrough in Tractor Beam Tech Could Pave The Way to Levitating Humans

The story, which contains repeated references to "tractor beams", is about acoustic levitation, whereby small objects can be pushed upward by sound waves emanating from an array of transducers below.

Excuse me.  Tractors (from the Latin, trahere) pull.  What you have there is a pusher beam, or a repeller ray.  Or just call it what it is, an acoustic levitation device.

(And what's so great about levitating humans, anyway?)

Isn't this kind of a stupid issue?

Headline at PJ Media:

Trump HHS Takes Vital Step to Protect Doctors From Being Forced to Perform Transgender Surgeries

Um.

Isn't gender-reassignment surgery kind of specialized?  As in, if you want such a procedure, you really, really want to go to a surgeon who's gone out of his way to train in that particular operation?  And get ongoing care from another specialist?

And not try to coerce a simple country doctor who's never ventured beyond setting a broken arm into doing it?

Has anyone really been suggesting that any random doctor (or even any random surgeon, even if he's specialized in neurosurgery the past thirty years) should be obligated to do gender reassignment?

Not that I'd put it past the totalitarian lunatic crowd to try, but don't the normal rules of training and qualification for medical specialties kind of preclude that anyway?

Tokenism

Or a token-passing network protocol, or one of those things.

Seems a Senator brought a "talking stick" to work, and tried to use it to enforce taking-turns-speaking.

(And here I thought a speaking token had to include a stone the weight of a small child.  Silly me.)

Anyway, 'tis reported that one of the other Senators threw the talking-stick at yet a third Senator, apparently mistaking it for a talk-mahawk.  Which isn't that bad an idea, come to think of it; a good axe-catching contest could really thin out the Senate population.

Or, if culling the herd isn't the idea, maybe next time they can try poker-chip bardic or something.  Or get someone from the IWW to come in and give them a refresher course on Robert's Rules of Order.

Ah, sloganization.

Some years ago, there was serious discussion of net neutrality, and of what policies might be appropriate.

It soon became clear that, as with the anthropic principle, it had taken on multiple, fundamentally different, meanings.

Eventually the Obama Administration (in the face of inaction by Congress, hence a lack of actual legal authority) assigned it an altogether new meaning: regulation of last-mile retail internet service providers under a 1930s-era law dealing with telephone companies back in the days of land lines and human telephone operators, at the behest of a few hugely influential internet content- and advertising-distribution companies.

Which is almost exactly the opposite of what the words in the slogan mean.  Kind of like summarizing a 2000-plus-page bill locking everyone into the broken third-party healthcare-payment system as "health care".

A particularly stupid take on this was put forth a couple of weeks back by a spokescritter for one of the on-line porn sites, the name of which escapes me.  He claimed that returning to the regulatory regime of year-before-last would enable your ISP to impose ideological filtering so you could only watch cisheteronormative porn.

Which, no.  Not at all.

Not only does this rest on the assumption that the megacorp oligopoly of Comcast / AT&T / Charter and a few others is controlled by religious fundamentalists bent on imposing their taste in porn on the public at large, but it disregards the fiddly detail that, by filtering content on such a basis, the ISPs would be giving up their "safe harbor" protection.  Suddenly they'd be legally responsible for all the content they failed to block.  Assuming their legal departments are even a little bit competent, and they aren't confident that they own the government, this is a complete non-starter.  (Considering the actions of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, though, this may not be such a good assumption; they're still acting like their lizard won and they can act with impunity.)

What the ISPs might very well do, though, is engage in traffic shaping.  Which might, during times of heavy usage, result in throttling traffic from porn sites and/or their advertising servers.  (I've had the thought that perhaps I should spin up a sacrificial Windows VM, launch IE with no filters or adblockers configured, identify the site whose huckster made the claim mentioned above, point IE at it, and see what happens to my bandwidth.  And then securely erase the VM, because you never know what malware it might have picked up.)