Silicon Valley Redneck

Life imitates Gary McGath!

OK, so maybe that's not altogether new.  This particular example just came to my attention.

Alarming headline: This stimulant can kill, yet you can legally buy it online. Why? Fear! Fire! Foes!

Yes, you can buy caffeine online!  In pure form!

He would concentrate and reduce it to caffeine powder,
and then sell it to ghetto kids to wreck their brains.

Alas, the lyrics aren't online, or at least not anywhere indexed.  Here's a performance (words vary from what I remember from some long-ago convention tape).

You can buy pure DHMO even more easily, and that has a far deadlier record, even when not taken internally.

Drone attack at White House! ZOMG panic!!!!

Seems some diabolical thingy landed on the White House lawn.

Possibly a drone.  Or a toy airplane.  Or a frisbee.  Or a model rocket carrying a frog in a silver suit.

The reaction, naturally, is total panic.  Because it could have been a hostile act!

Uh, right.

Yes, there are certain chemicals and pathogens which could be nasty when delivered by itty-bitty toy aircraft.  They're not that easy to come by, and effective delivery is another question entirely.

But the allergic reaction to this sort of thing - that is to say, an overreaction, by the immune system, which does far more damage than the outside threat ever could have - points up the ease of using the security state itself as a tool of disruptive terrorism.

I'm reminded of an incident in the Bay Area back in the 1990s, before the emergence of the Homeland Security monstrosity.  One of the bridges, if memory serves, was shut down for several hours after someone spotted an unidentified white powder on the bridge.  Turned out to be flour, but doctrine dictated a full-on HAZMAT response.

And if some group of uncouth smelly hippies decides to shut down capitalism with a coordinated flurry of "unidentified chemical dispersal" strikes in the world's financial districts?  Or "drone attacks" with COTS toy airplanes at high-profile events and sensitive facilities?

Yup.  Totally overload the emergency services, and get streets and airports shut down, at very little cost to the attackers.

Only they won't do that, of course.  Two reasons.  One, the smelly hippies are a lot less smart than they fancy themselves to be.  Two, their strings are pulled by the Establishment, to provide a channeled outlet for outrage and to make the Establishment look good by comparison.  So they won't do anything effectively disruptive, nor will they show up Homeland Security for a bunch of hysterical clowns.

Permissive action links

Once again, some team of super-geniuses has come up with a grand plan for smart guns, while having no idea of how guns work and why.

The latest, it seems, it that guns shall have embedded electronics that enable firing only if they receive a correctly-coded authorization signal via WiFi.

The code would have to match the uses for which the gun is authorized: personal defense, hunting, Secret Service only, and so on.

This is meant to prevent mass shootings or some such.

How many ways can this go wrong?  I mean, apart from dead batteries, and the possibility that someone who's actually seen the innards of a gun will figure out how to bypass the whole electronic mess?

Well, let's take hunting, for example.  How's the WiFi coverage for the entire state of Montana?

Or personal defense.  Applies at home, right?  So your home has to have the WiFi beacon to authorize your gun to fire there.

So what's to keep someone from sniffing the authorization packets for his home-defense gun, and broadcasting a counterfeit edition from his cellphone's WiFi?  Or just carrying his home beacon with him?

Or consider a special secure only-government-guns-work-here zone.  What's to keep someone from jamming the beacon, so none of the authorized guns work anymore, strapping on a brace of 1875-vintage revolvers and a couple of bandoleers of .45LC, and going on a shooting spree?

The whole thing makes so much negative sense... well, this is what happens when Smart People inhabit a total bubble and believe that everything they need to know is contained within that bubble.

I'm reminded of my days at a small business-software company, and the copy-protection schemes we came up with.  Many of them would have worked most excellently, if only we'd been able to install special hardware on all the unauthorized computers.

Insuperable barriers to commerce

Argh.

Comes time once again to renew my update subscription for a CAD package I use for work.  Actually, it lapsed over a month ago, but there's a discount on offer, ending today, so it seems like a good time.

The usual routine is: try charging it to my business credit card, have it declined, try again with one of the personal credit cards on another bank, have it go through, get a call a minute or two later from a human at the fraud-detection department asking whether it was legitimate.  Well, I'm trying to make a payment to a company in a Central European country via an international payment processor somewhere in Western Europe, so it does look rather suspicious, even if it is something I do almost every year about this time.

This year, though: first one declined, second one also declined, then I get the call, from a robot, I confirm that the charge was legitimate... and the robot tells me to wait 10 minutes before resuming use of my card, then hangs up.

Eep?

So, now that I confirmed that the charge was legitimate, will it now be retroactively authorized?  Does that result in money disappearing into the payment-processing system and the software not knowing how to route it to the actual vendor?  Or what?

Will international commerce become so safe you can't do it at all?

Update: Per vendor suggestion, I tried again but used InternetSecure instead of WorldPay.  Worked first time, with the business credit card (the one that usually doesn't work for such international transactions).  Guess the banks have some problem with WorldPay.

But... but... ya GOTTA have a license!

As Google shows off the latest and goofiest iteration of its Kroton-headed self-driving car, the world asks the single most important question:

What sort of license should be required to ride in the left* front seat?

Really, now: what kind of license is required to ride in a taxi?  Or a chauffeured limousine?  Or to take the bus?

If the car is actually self-driving, why should the occupant(s) need any license at all?

 

* Or right, according to national preference.

Department of DUH

This morning's Murky, front page, above the fold:

Famed race in crisis mode

Sailor's death leaves officials reeling as the investigate why boat capsized on mild day

...

The America's Cup found itself in crisis on Friday, with questions about safety - and even the storied event's future - swirling a day after a celebrated sailor was killed when the Swedish team capsized its 72-foot catamaran during practice on a mild day in the bay.

Er.

Highly competitive event.  High-performance, experimental boats.  Teams pushing the boats, and themselves, to the limit.

And you expect this to be perfectly safe?

What color is the rubber in your cell?