Author: stewart

Body Cameras

Well what a surprise. The Lousiville officers who broke down the door to Briana Taylor’s apartment and killed her while shooting at someone else did not have body cams.

Other Lousiville officers who killed a restaurant owner David McAtee for the crime of serving barbeque did not have their cameras turned on.

I think it is time we started treating police like airline pilots. The cockpit voice recorder and the digital flight data recorder are required pieces of equipment. The body cam should also be required equipment.

  • You cannot start a shift without one, in working order.
  • It stays on all the time.
  • If it stops working, you go back to the station.

Police argue that they can’t leave the cameras on because otherwise people won’t talk to them. You know what? Killing unarmed civilians also makes them reluctant to talk to you.

The Republican Party

I think it is now time to shut down the Republican Party. I am sorry to say that everyone who is a member of the Republican Party must be held responsible for the abomination that is Donald Trump.

If there are any members of the party who are actually conservatives and who loath what Trump is doing to the country, it is their duty to turn in their cards and hopefully start a new party which will hold to actual conservative principles. We need such a group, but the current bunch are just grifters

I will not vote for a Republican ever again. I kind of like my governor Charlie Baker, but so far he hasn’t quit the party and therefore I will hold him personally responsible for the actions and failures to act of the national party.

I call on all citizens to vote in November to remove every Republican from every office nationwide. They have lead the nation to ruin and are responsible for what has happened. They failed to hold their man to account at any point and now it is simply too late. Over 100,000 americans are dead from Covid-19 and it happened on their watch.

It’s like Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

George Floyd, and too many others

George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by police in Minneapolis last week.

The officer who killed him, and the three others who stood by and let it happen, were summarily fired, but in spite of video, none were arrested or charged until protests turned to riot.

The killer, officer Derik Chauvin had at least 17 misconduct complaints, mostly for excessive force, yet nothing was done.

The government, which records much data, somehow fails to record how many civilians are killed by police each year, but independent groups do keep track and the number is typically over 1000. The police kill black people at a rate almost three times the rate at which they kill white people. See for example https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

I have some modest suggestions.

  • Cancel and renegotiate all police union contracts so that bad officers can be successfully removed from the force.
  • Write legislation to fix 42 USC section 1983, which permits people to sue the government for civil rights violations. The courts have pretty well eviscerated this law, so that it is nearly impossible to successfully sue in spite of the most egregious violations. Search for “qualified immunity”.
  • Require that all police killings be investigated and if appropriate, prosecuted by arms length teams who have no relationships with the local force. It is clearly obvious that local prosecutors will not do their jobs. All investigations must be made public. It is too important for anyone to hide behind privacy.
  • Any officer who kills a civilian should be placed in a desk job for at least a year. Every police killing <must> be tried by a jury of the public. Maybe it was justified, maybe not, but you don’t get a second chance to kill the people you are supposed to protect. All proceding must be made public.
  • All police discipline records must be public. Doctors have this, are they killing unarmed black men?
  • Terminated officers must not be rehired by any other police force.

I really don’t condone rioting, looting, or burning down cities as forms of protest, but since nothing less seems to work, I do understand the impulse.

Authentication

TLDR – when someone calls you and then asks you to authenticate yourself, they are doing it wrong. DO NOT ANSWER.

A while ago, I got a call from a brokerage house I use (Hello Vanguard!). The caller asked me for the answer for one of my challenge questions, to make sure I was actually me.

I burst out laughing.

This a surprisingly subtle issue, and to have a major brokerage get it wrong is both sad and scary.

The caller is the unknown party. The called person is not, at least with the current way the phone system works. Caller ID is easily spoofable. You cannot trust that a caller is who they claim to be.

As long as the phone system is ringing the correct phone, the recipient should be, if not the exact person you want, then someone nearby. There are certainly exceptions to this, such as SIM card hijacking, which is sadly easy as well, but for the most part, if you call 1-800-BIG-CORP from a phone, you are going to get the right people.

The reverse is not true. If 1-800-BIG-CORP calls you, you have no reason to believe it is really them. You must not give away ANY secret information. You must call back, using a number you find out by yourself, NOT one given to you over the phone.

Why is this important? If the caller is actually a scammer trying to break into your account, when they come to the “secret question”, they just call you pretending to be the bank and ask you for the answer! Don’t give it out.

The caller can be quite inventive about trying to convince you they are legitimate. Krebs on Security reports on recent cases in which callers knew details of recent transactions, for example, (see https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/would-you-have-fallen-for-this-phone-scam/) Krebs gives the right advice, look up the number from public sources and call back, but he doesn’t explain the general principle.

The caller must authenticate themselves, not the callee.

This is also the reason why you should never click a link in an email message. There is no reason to trust such a thing. You must look up the link yourself, from public sources.

Ukraine Whistleblower

Mr. Trump says the whistleblower should be ignored because he reports second hand information.

The law does not require first hand knowledge. The report must only be urgent and credible, which it was found to be by the IG, who is a Trump appointee.

Mr. Trump says the whistleblower claims facts that are incorrect.

Mr. Trump himself released the transcript of the call, which confirms the representations made in the whistleblower report. The White House confirmed the movement of call records to the code-word server. The whistleblower noted Mr. Giuliani’s travels, and those have been confirmed on TV by Giuliani himself. The remaining mystery is who ordered the halt to Ukraine aid, which will be properly investigated by Congress.

Mr. Trump says the whistleblower has a political agenda.

That is unknown but irrelevant. It was the whistleblower’s clear duty to report his observations to the inspector general, through proper channels. After that, the IG and the DNI and the Congress are responsible for what follows. The IG and the DNI are Trump appointees.

Mr. Trump claims the whistleblower is a spy and public speech by Congressman Schiff is treason. Neither is true or possibly even legal. I certainly would like to see such statements clearly rejected by every American. Perhaps Twitter should close his access for inciting violence. Perhaps Mr. Trump can be sued for creating a hostile work environment/

In short, this isn’t about the whistleblower. It is about abuse of power and the, at this point, fairly obvious violations of his oath of the president. If Mr. Trump feels that the published whistleblower complaint and published (but incomplete) transcript of the call are incorrect, then his best course of action should be complete transparency, to get these “mistakes” cleared up quickly.

I read the whistleblower report. I recommend you do t0o. See https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20190812_-_whistleblower_complaint_unclass.pdf

My own opinion is that this man or woman is both an excellent analyst and an excellent writer. I’ve heard a rumor that our local high school AP Government class may use this as an example of both.

How long does it take to boot a supercomputer?

I answered this question on Quora, but moderation deleted it, I guess because it references SiCortex, which has been shut down since 2009.

I am afraid I may be guilty of a little bit of pride here.

My information is also dated.

In 2007, the 5832 core 972 node SiCortex SC5832 could boot and be ready to run jobs in 7 minutes if the system support processor linux server was already running. From power off it would take about 9 or 10 minutes, with the extra time taken for the SSP to boot.

At the time, we had heard horror stories about clusters taking “hours” to boot, such that sysadmins were very reluctant to update software because it would take so long.

Earlier, in 2004 when we started the company, John Mucci asked me and the software team how long it was going to take to boot, and we said “5 minutes” to considerable eyebrow raising from people with more experience. Honestly we were guessing, but we couldn’t think of reasons why it should take longer.

Fast forward two years and we had to deliver. The machine was 36 boards, each with 27 6-core nodes and a little embedded Coldfire processor called the module support processor. The 972 nodes had no storage at all, so we had to boot over JTAG and load small ramdisk images. Then we had to initialize the high speed network, NFS mount the real root filesystem, and bring up the job control system. After a couple months of heroic efforts, we got it down to 7 minutes.

This was extraordinary in the industry, but we still got a lot of good natured razzing from the rest of the company for missing our 5 minute estimate.

To the software team, the most amusing part of the whole affair was that the hardware and software proved so reliable that we had several systems in the field with uptime over a year. With uptime like that it doesn’t really matter whether it takes 5 minutes to boot or 7 minutes or an hour for that matter.

Installation generally was a one-day affair. Here’s a video: SiCortex @ Argonne

Are iPhones expensive?

The most expensive iPhone is now $1449, for the 512 GB iPhone XS Max.  That is crazy … right?
I looked around and found some other interesting numbers.

  • The average replacement cycle for cell phones in the US in 2017 was 32 months.
  • The average cell phone bill in the US is now over $80/month.

I dusted off my multiplication skilz:  32 times 80 is $2560. $1449 divided by 32 is $45.
So who is making money on phones?  The answer is Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile, Sprint…
iPhones are expensive compared to many perfectly serviceable phones, but they are not expensive compared to the service providers.
Phones are a competitive market.  I’ve owned both Apple and Android phones  They are fine.  If you think iPhones are too expensive, don’t buy them.
My own solution to the “Apple products are too expensive” was to buy some Apple stock.  It has worked out well.

Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh’s confirmation is using the wrong standards.
Brett Kavanaugh is up for confirmation to the Supreme Court.  There is a fair amount of evidence that he was essentially a drunken frat boy in high school and at Yale.  There are at least three accusations of sexual misconduct against him from those days.

 
The democrats, if I may paraphrase, are saying they don’t think a drunken rapist should be on the court. Or a conservative, but let’s set that aside.  The republicans are saying, well it isn’t true, and anyway, it was a long time ago, and boys will be boys.  Besides, it is unfair that these issues weren’t raised 30 years ago or at least two months ago.

You know what?  Fair is the wrong question. There are plenty of qualified people who could be appointed.  There are plenty of people who would likely support the president’s agenda when on the court.  There are plenty of people who have not even the suggestion they spent high school and college in a predatory haze.  I think it is good that Kavanaugh pulled his life together, if he did, but redemption is not qualification. Let the president propose someone equally or better qualified who does not have this baggage.
I keep thinking about the early astronauts.  There were plenty of applicants, but only a few spots.  The least taint of weakness would wash out a candidate even one unrelated to flying.  The process was manifestly not fair but fair was not the point.

Stop using Straws

There’s a movement to save the environment by having people stop using straws.
It is true that non-biodegradable straws will hurt the environment, but probably a lot less than those newspaper plastic bags.
A boba straw weighs about 2 grams.  A drinking straw is less.  As far as I know you need about a gram of oil to make a gram of plastic, so a gallon of oil or gasoline will make about 1700 straws.
According to the Be Straw Free Campaign, https://www.nps.gov/commercialservices/greenline_straw_free.htm
Americans use about 500 million straws a day  (I’m not using my share!).  This takes about a quarter million gallons of fuel.  That is less than 0.1% of fuel usage for cars and trucks.
Let’s work on this, after we cut down on poor insulation and excessive driving, after we put up solar panels and wind farms.  After we restore the EPA and stop using coal.
Work on the big stuff first.  We have limited mind share for silly stuff.