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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
According to the Obama administration, between 2009 and 2015, 473 drone strikes killed about 2500 combatants and about 100 non combatants.
Last week, the Dallas Police department used a robot to kill the police shooter.
As far as I know, all of these events have had human operators, supposedly exercising human judgement.
The thing is, many reports about drones and robots leave one with the impression that these are autonomous devices, without a human in the loop. It isn’t like that.
I do not think there is a real difference between a sniper on a hilltop killing from a mile away and a drone operator killing from 10,000 miles away. Both have a human pulling the trigger. We can and should talk about ways to further reduce non-combatant deaths, but sniper rifles and drones are much safer for our guys than bayonets and hand grenades.
The real discussion ought to be about autonomous vs human-in-the-loop.
The unfortunate fact is, we already have lots of truly autonomous devices killing people on their own initiative. They are called land mines.
About two weeks a year, it gets hot enough and humid enough here in Massachusetts to push us into turning on the air conditioning.
For the first few years of the century, after the house was built and we moved in, everything was fine, but in recent years not so much. We have different AC zones, and separate systems for each. Each year, typically, one or two of the units don’t work. Not work as in blow hot air instead of cold. I then go outside around back and discover that the fan in the outside unit isn’t spinning. Until last year, I’ve always been able to fix this problem by reaching through the grill and unsticking the fan with a screwdriver, or in the worst case, by taking the fan and motor off and whaling on it with a hammer. Evidently, enough moisture gets into the motor bearings over the winter to seize them beyond the motor’s starting torque’s ability to spin.
Brief Digression on AC
Air conditioners work by expanding a high pressure gas or fluid like freon through a nozzle into a low pressure gas. As a consequence of the ideal gas law, the expanding gas gets cold. It is then run through a heat exchanger inside the house, where the cold gas absorbs heat from the room air. (There is usually a fan to push the room air through the radiator fins of the heat exchanger. The expanded gas is then piped outside to a compressor. The compressor squeezes the working fluid, which according to the gas law, heats it up. Because heat was absorbed from the room, the compressed gas is now hotter than it was originally. It is then run through the outside heat exchanger, when a fan blows warm outside air past it to absorb the heat from the (hot) compressed gas. (I am using “gas” and “working fluid” interchangeably here. In fact, I think freon is one of those things that turns into a liquid at high pressure, so there is a phase change involved as well.) if the outside fan doesn’t work, then the there is nothing to cool off the compressed gas, and the whole outside unit eventually gets so hot that the thermal overload switch in the compressor shuts it off. This is why fixing the outside fan fixes the whole AC.
End digression
Well last year, one unit’s fan wasn’t spinning, but wasn’t stuck either. There are only three reasons why that could be: no power, bad motor, or bad capacitor. I was able to measure that the power was present, and it was cheaper to replace the capacitor, and that fixed it. Except that my measurements seemed to indicate there was nothing wrong with the old capacitor. I had fixed a loose push-on connector, so I wrote off the experience.
This year, same problem, same unit. The motor was not stuck, but wasn’t spinning either.
Brief digression about induction motors
Electric motors work by having a spinning magnet (the rotor) driven by a stationary magnet (the field). Now the magnets are going to want to line up north pole opposite south pole, and stay that way, so there also has to be something that makes “north” spin. Some motors have the rotor or the field be a permanent magnets with the other being an electromagnet, while other motors have electromagnets for both field and rotor. If the rotor is an electromagnet, there will often be brushes to supply power to the rotor. An induction motor is kind of strange, in that both the field and the rotor are electromagnets, but the power for the rotor is supplied by induction, with no physical connection.
A three phase induction motor is fairly easy to understand. The field has three windings, fed by the three phases. They are rotated with respect to on another by 120 degrees. As the current in phase “A” dies down, the current in phase “B” is picking up, and as a consequence the direction of North in the field windings rotates by 120 degrees. With three phases, you get a nice rotating field, and the rotor follows it, with just enough lag to generate an induced current in the rotor to create the rotor magnetic field. A single phase induction motor is different, the field merely reverses 120 times a second. If the rotor is spinning, then it will keep spinning, but there is nothing to get it started! To solve this problem, single phase induction motors have a capacitor. The capacitor is connected in series with another field winding that is rotated with respect to the main winding. Due to the properties of capacitors, the current in this starting winding will be advanced with respect to the current in the main winding. This gives enough of a rotating field to get the rotor started spinning. In fact, if you have an open circuit starting capacitor, you can sometimes start the motor by hand by giving it a spin yourself.
End digression
Because it seemed really unlikely that the new capacitor failed over the winter, I resolved to replace the motor. The problem was that I could not get the fan off the motor shaft!. The steel shaft was pretty well rusted together with the steel fan hub into a single glob. Repeated application of WD40 and hammers and so forth did nothing. By suitable pounding, I could move the fan axially towards the motor. By supporting the fan and pounding on the shaft, I could move it back, but hammering on the shaft was mushrooming the end of the shaft, so there would be no way to get the fan off. The usual tool for this problem is a gear puller, but a two-fingered gear puller won’t work with a three bladed fan. I have some nice pipe wrenches with which to twist the shaft against the hub, but the fan was too close to the motor for the wrench to fit, and the motor shaft didn’t come out the other end of the motor.
My solution to this is somewhat destructive! I used my angle grinder with a metal cutting wheel to take the motor apart. By grinding off six rivets I was able to get the back of the motor off, but there was nothing to grab with the wrench. I then used the cutting wheel to cut all the way around the fan end of the motor housing, at which point the field assembly came off, revealing the rotor. I could then grab the rotor with one wrench and the fan hub with the other and twist them apart. Taking apart the fan motor
This whole exercise was destructive and messy, and no doubt a new fan would be less trouble overall, but it sure was fun.
Fifteen years ago when we built our house, we had a home security system installed. It has the usual alarm panel with a keypad inside the door. When you come in the house, you have 30 seconds to key in your password to stop the alarm from going off.
If the alarm does go off, the monitoring company will call you to find out if it was a mistake or a real alarm. Each authorized user has a passcode to authenticate themselves to the monitoring company. You can’t have the burglar answering the phone “No problem here! False alarm…”
In fact, there are two passcodes, one authenticates you, and the other is a duress password. If the burglar is there with you, you use the duress password, and the monitoring company behaves exactly the same way, but they also call the local police for you. It is important that the burglar cannot tell the difference.
It seems to me that ATM cards should have duress PINs as well as real ones. If a criminal says “type in your ATM pin or else” then fine, you enter the duress PIN. The ATM behaves exactly the same way, but the bank alerts the police and sends them the surveillance video.
Duress passwords have a lot of other potential uses. If your school principal demands your facebook password, you give up your duress password. What happens next could depend on which password you give. At the extreme, your whole account could be deleted. It could be archived on servers out of legal jurisdiction, your stuff visible only to friends could seem not to exist for a week. Whatever. Options that appear not to do anything are best, because then the school admins can’t tell you have disobeyed them and suspend you.
While I am riffing, there should be a phrase you can say, like “I do not consent to this search” or a similar account setting, that makes the administrator’s access an automatic CFAA violation. (I think the CFAA should be junked, but if not, it should be used to user’s benefit, not just the man’s.)
Finally, regarding authentication, there should also be two-factor authentication for everything, and single-use passwords for everything. Why not? Everyone has a nice computing device with them at all times. Of course your phone and the authentication app should have a duress unlock code.
So next time you are building an authentication structure, build in support for one-time passwords, two factor authentication, and a flexible set of duress passwords.
