Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Ignoring the fiasco of Friday's Oval Office meeting between the weird old felon, Mascara Lad, and the Honorable President of Ukraine, the Secretary of Trying To Claim He's SoberDefense just gave Putin a lap dance and the cyber keys to the USA.

He ordered the U.S. military Cyber Command to ignore attacks and incursions from Russia. Allegedly the order states that they are to “stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.”

So that's it. With the exception of the NSA, the nation has no cyber defense against Russian attack.

If we ever needed any proof that there are traitors to the nation in the highest echelons of government, you don't have to look any further.

Benedict Arnold, we've got three new names to join you in infamy.

https://gizmodo.com/trumps-defense-secretary-hegseth-orders-cyber-command-to-stand-down-on-all-russia-operations-2000570343

There's a lot going on here.

Teslas have never had AM radio in their cars. Recently, Ford announced that they were eliminating AM from their 2024 Mustang and probably from future models. WELL, Congresscritters can't have that! So they've stepped in and eleven of them have co-sponsored a bill to REQUIRE car manufacturers to include AM radio at no cost to the buyers!

There's a few issues at play here.

The bill's originators say the government needs a medium that ensures emergency broadcasts can be received by everyone.

Contrary point: for a broadcast to be received, the radio must be turned on and tuned to the correct frequency. And an awful lot of people carry portable radios in their pockets most of the time these days that can receive emergency broadcast messages. This was demonstrated with people receiving government broadcast messages during the pandemic.

Additional point: AM radio - and FM - are rapidly declining markets due to streaming. Is this an effort to prop up a buggy whip market?

For the car makers, there is a very, verymajor technical issue here: EMI. Electro-magnetic interference. You might have noticed EMI first-hand if you've ever listened to Bluetooth headphones while making microwave popcorn: it's not uncommon for there to be a little bit of EMI leakage from the microwave, and Bluetooth is a very weak signal, so your headphones are frequently a little staticky while making your popcorn.

Guess what?

Electric cars - I'm not sure whether hybrids also have this problem - generate HUGE amounts of EMI! It is extremely hard to get a clean AM radio signal inside an electric car.

THIS is probably the biggest reason why car makers don't want to bother with AM radios in future cars - they know it's going to be one giant humongoid PITA! They don't want to have to repeatedly try to explain to the average customer why the AM signal, which is never of that great of quality, is even worse in their brand-new car.

I'm not going to get into the details of what the differences are between AM and FM radio types. But if you've spent any significant time listening to AM during the summer, you've probably heard the *pop* with nearby lightning strikes and such. AM is very sensitive to EMI. FM is not. AM has the advantage of the signal carrying a lot further than FM, but with much poorer signal quality. each mode has its trade-offs, but each is also losing market share to the internet and streaming. For me, the only time I listen to the radio is when I'm in Phoenix and I'm frequently listening to NPR or the local classical station. Otherwise, I'm streaming music or podcasts from my iPhone. And I've been doing that for 20+ years now.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/ev-advocates-join-tech-groups-and-automakers-to-oppose-am-radio-mandate/

Thank you, non-big government that can be drowned in a bathtub! They've made $77,000,000 doing this, I do not know over what timespan. It was exposed when two sisters moved to FL from Idaho. One has been disabled her entire life, the other is her caregiver. Because of her disabilities, she has a digital footprint of zero. They went to DMV to get her an ID for Medicare, and within days she started getting junk mail, phone calls, and even had salesmen turning up at her door!

According to the article: "A state spokesperson said there's no way for drivers to opt-out if they don't want their personal information sold.

"The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles provides public records as legally required, in accordance with federal and state law, and as a necessary function in order for customers to efficiently conduct everyday business. The department has successfully instituted proactive security measures to ensure customer information is protected and any misuse of customer information will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law."

There's a HUGE EFFING DIFFERENCE between providing public records as required AND SELLING EVERYONE OUT TO MARKETING SLIME! That IS NOT providing public records AS LEGALLY REQUIRED! That spokesman and the head of MVD and probably most of the executives in that division should be strung up by their thumbs. Then again, so should Rick Scott and most of his cronies.

NEVER give the government your phone number unless you absolutely have to! This is especially true for voter registration, though with as much data being bought and sold, I don't know that it makes any difference. And if you have a PO Box, use that for any official correspondence.

As an example of voter registration data, last election cycle we started getting calls on our home line for ME for political surveys. I'm registered independent, and they were making big efforts to sway NM independents. We didn't have a home line when I registered to vote 14 years ago! So some data aggregator put my voter ID street address together with another record that had that phone number tied to this address, and *POOF* I start getting phone calls. We've since unplugged that phone because of the number of calls we've been getting.

https://www.wxyz.com/news/national/florida-is-selling-drivers-personal-information-to-private-companies-and-marketing-firms

He's right, the United States was not founded as, and never really was, a true democracy. We were founded as a Republic, governed by laws passed by elected legislators, and as a Federation, a collection of states. So maybe describing ourselves as a Democratic Republic would be a better practice. Adams points out that the Founding Fathers thought that wealthy land owners would be the ones appointed/elected to govern as they were the best educated. Now that education is roughly democratized, that equation has changed a bit, but still mostly holds true.

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/oh_my_god_i_live_in_an_oligarchy/

"We're not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."
—Republican Congressman Marlin Stutzman, on the government shutdown

WHAT DO WE WANT? I DON'T KNOW! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW! Wash, rinse, repeat.

Sorry, but you have totally disrespected the President of the United States and your Democratic Party colleagues and all of the people in this country. And you want respect? If you have to ask for respect rather than doing something that earns respect, you've already lost the game.

My wife read something interesting yesterday, it was written as a dialog with a Congressman: "Can I burn down your house? No. Can I burn down your garage? No. Can I burn down your shed? No."

I learned something interesting the other day, actually, a few interesting things. First, and I hadn't previously heard about this, a lot of Republicans are referring to the Affordable Care Act as a bill, not as a law. As if it hadn't been voted in to law, been challenged at the Supreme Court and survived, and then gone on to survive a presidential election as one of the key points. It's a law, get over it. They're totally oblivious that they're setting a horrible precedent for when the next Republican becomes president and the Democrats control the House. Of course, with the way that districts have been gerrymandered, they're largely invulnerable.

Another is that Fox and other conservative pundits are calling it the 'Government Slimdown', not shutdown. And this includes Fox reporting on news from other sources. Rather than quoting the information accurately, they're reframing it.

We're having a little family reunion this weekend, my dad's sister is turning 90. Saturday we were going to White Sands National Park. But it's closed because of the shutdown. Now the House is proposing little selective "let's fund this program: we need cancer treatments for children" without trying to fund the entire government. A documentary filmmaker went to a Tea Party rally in New Jersey after Sandy hit, asking people "Cut funding of the military? No. Cut funding on education? No. Veteran's benefits? No. Social Security? No. Then what should we cut?" No answer or suggestion was forthcoming.

And yet another new thing to me was when I was looking up Stutzman to see if he was a freshman (he is, but he had previous experience in the Indiana house and senate), and he's definitely linked to the Tea Baggers. But the interesting thing was multiple references to RNC/TP: "nihilism".


What it all boils down to is the House is trying to control legislation, already approved by Congress and signed in to law, through blackmail. They have not offered up a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, they claim it is a job-killer, yet they forced through the sequester which is killing jobs. So they kill jobs while bemoaning a program that has created jobs through the insurance exchanges and is providing health care to the unserved portions of our country.

They must have one heck of a mirror that they look at every morning.

"The Obama administration has approved guidelines that allow counterterrorism officials to lengthen the period of time they retain information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism. The changes allow the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence community's clearinghouse for terrorism data, to keep information for up to five years. Previously, the center was required to promptly destroy — generally within 180 days — any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism was evident."

I'm sure that before the five years are up that it will be extended, and ultimately the data (regardless of accuracy) will be retained indefinitely.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/23/1521215/us-govt-to-keep-data-on-non-terrorist-citizens-for-5-years


Meanwhile, the NSA is building an insanely huge data center in Utah. $2 billion, heavily fortified, 60,000 tons of air-conditioning required, power consumption will require a 65 megawatt substation. A man who worked for the NSA for 40 years before he retired due to their going far beyond their mandate and constitutional limits: ...(held his thumb and forefinger close together). “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1


And the Japanese have developed a camera that can perform facial recognition at the rate of 36 MILLION faces a second, which means any crowd scenes scanned by the panopticon will never be deleted since they can decide to backtrack someone's life.

"A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it. Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second. The technology raises the spectre of governments – or other organisations – being able to 'find' anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile. The 'trick' is that the camera 'processes' faces as it records, so that all faces which pass in front of it are recorded and stored instantly. Faces are stored as a searchable 'biometric' record, placing the unique mathematical 'faceprint' of anyone who has ever walked past the camera in a database."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/24/1937238/japanese-cctv-camera-can-scan-36-million-facessecond


Saint Orwell thought too small apparently.

They have a much more clever plan than simply seizing the domain name, which only works for .com and a couple others. Those crafty pirates simply registered a non-US domain and they were back in business!

No, this time they're going to pass a law with which they can order ISP's to remove DNS resolution for said sites!

W00t! Total win!

I guess the morons have never heard that DNS resolves a name to a number, and that web sites can be accessed by directly entering the IP address. Of course, that becomes somewhat more complicated under IPv6.

And if they try to block the IP address, you can use a foreign proxy service to get at the site.

So how long before a Firefox add-on buffers the IP address?

Morons.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/protect-act/

Once again, Department of Homeland Security gets another F in computer security. Incidently, that's the same grade for the third straight year. The government overall is maintaining a D+, sort of like the GPA of a certain Commander in Chief. :-)

I love the irony in the fact that they are passing all these laws on cybercrime, some were proposed that make the entity upon whom the crime was perpetrated liable for not adequately defending themselves, and they get such horrible scores.

The Fine Article.

The Fine Slashdot Thread.