Alkahest

The plumbers finally got out late Monday, in time to find out that the well pump needed replacing, and no they don’t keep a 3/4 hp pump on hand… why do you ask?  After the supply store opened back up, they came by around 9:30 this morning and replaced the pump.  The bad news?  Ouch, replacing a well pump is expensive.   The good news?  It was $800 less than I was dreading.  :-/

Laundry and dishes are done, next up… showers for everyone!

It started off as a good weekend.  I swear it did.  I was up late Friday (technically, early Saturday) talking to a friend from high school, catching up on this and that.  Woke up late, played a bit with the dogs and went out to Celebrity Dairy’s open house.  I got to pet the baby goats [note: need to add pictures here] and look around the inn.  When I left, I had 3 logs of goat cheese, a pint of blueberry preserves and a half pint of hot pepper jelly.  After leaving the dairy, I went to pick K up from the airport.  We got home, took the dogs out for a long while, then had a nice simple spaghetti dinner.

Sunday I (finally) put some seeds in the garden beds for spring veggies.  The usually: spinach, arugula, mesclun, peas, onions and swiss chard.  That’s when things started to go wrong.  I turned the sprinkler on the plants and things looked fine.  I went back into the house to clean up and noticed the water pressure dropping.  Yep.  It seemed like the water pump was off again.  The breaker this time.  I checked the easy places – no obvious signs of a short, so the problem is likely underground.  Hopefully the plumber can fix it this afternoon when he comes by.  He’ll probably have to replace the whole wire set… all 300′ of it.

So we didn’t get to clean up dinner dishes.  Getting the polenta off of the pot is not going to be fun.  Then I couldn’t sleep last night.  When I did fall asleep, I was troubled by some very disturbing dreams that, uncharacteristically, I remembered when I woke up.  Then to top it all off… no shower this morning.  *bleh*

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left.  It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC.  Two examples:

1. One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill.  Maybe for his work on voodoo tinkle on trickle down economics?  Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use.  Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe.  Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots.  Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill.  What about Madison?  The dude practically wrote the Constitution.  Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him?
2. And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity.  Sure, I was bussed in elementary school.  It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school.  Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students.  That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus.

<sigh> Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances.  They seem to capture the mood.

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left.  The latest?  Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia.  No really.  It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according to the sheriff’s press release is an allusion to the biblical Book of Exodus.  I’m not certain if that worries me or makes me happy that it’s not a reference to secession.  I think I’ll go with worry since it’s a biblical reference to secession.

Now, in fairness, the sheriff claims that the program is not a militia, but:

will provide for self-sufficiency in the event of a manmade or natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Exodus will take local volunteers, train them and use them in response to a catastrophic disaster in the area. These volunteers will work in conjunction with the Bossier Sheriff’s Office to secure and protect viable resources in such an event.

For the record, this is B.S.  The sheriff wants the operation to sound like an adult version of the Boy Scouts where his parish will “always be prepared.”  But I was a cub scout, I’m pretty certain that I would have stayed on for the Boy Scouts if we were going to have access to “the war wagon”  with a .50 caliber  machine gun mounted on top.

Apparently, the militia concerned citizens are mostly past middle age [no!] white [really?!] men [shocked!!].  Women will be given the support roles and apparently, the five black members of the militia operation will be in charge of stepping and fetching [okay, i made that last one up].

The sad part is that things seem worse in Louisiana than they were 16+ years ago when I left.  But maybe I just hear the worst of it from here.  Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the social and political environment until after I left.  That last option has a lot of support: hell, I voted for Ross Perot in ‘92

K’s out of town this week.  IIRC, this is the first week since we’ve been married that she’s out of town and I’m still at the house.  I figure that’s gotta give me a good sense of what I’m actually like without her, um,  civilizing  influences.  Helpfully summarized in the table below:

No real observation here, certainly nothing that’s statistically significant (let’s see you construct a double blind study of a man’s activities when his wife is a thousand miles away).  Just amusing myself really.  Next up… the amazing idiocy of George Bush photos captioned with “Miss me yet?”  But right now, it’s Ghetto Pop Life… go ahead, I’ll wait while you cue it up.

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store!

Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow.  FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected.  The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town.  So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning.

A quick note on the bill.  Put me in the camp with folks who wanted something better, but regard the senate bill as a significant step forward.  Specifically, I would love to see something like a single payer system.  People seem pretty happy with Medicare (wasn’t a common teabagger cry: “keep the government out of my Medicare!”?), so gradually expanding Medicare eligibility to younger people, eventually allowing a person of any age to buy into Medicare seems like a good idea.   We would still need to fix the republican Medicare Part D prohibition on negotiation with drug companies, but that’s minor.

Failing single payer, what I really would like to see are controls on how hard the insurance companies can screw you (currently hard enough to make you want to scream “green balloons“), and then provide subsidies to allow more people to buy insurance.  Well, that’s what we got.  Sure, there’s a purchasing mandate – you must buy insurance, but that’s pretty reasonable.

So, it’s not a perfect bill, but it’s a good start and will help literally millions of people and will literally save tens of thousands of lives each year.  That’s a good first step.  There’s nothing that says that we can’t improve the bill over the next decade.  That’s what has happened with every other expansion of the social safety net for the past 60+ years, from social security to medicare.  There is no progressive rapture.  We won’t pass a bill and then be taken up to liberal heaven or achieve social nirvana.  There aren’t 72 hippie virgins waiting for us at the signing of any piece of legislation.  And neither mankind nor its societies are perfectible.  But both mankind and society is subject to continuous improvement.  We can make things better and this bill is another step in that process.

Just a reminder of that it’s the 23rd. Bring on the feast and the airing of grievances! After dinner, all of the pets in the house will have to try to pin me in the feats of strength

Now I want to be professor Claus when I grow up. I wonder where you can find Nietzsche sweaters?

42 ° and sunny, perfect for turning:

into:

into:

and then:

This just makes me sad.  Two articles, one in the WSJ, the other on CNN, describing how insurgents in Iraq are hacking predator drones and receiving the video feeds that the drones are sending back to U.S. ground stations.   First things first, let’s fix the headlines.  Both are running something like “Iraqi insurgents hacked Predator drone feeds.”  That should more clearly read:  “Iraqi insurgents watching the videos that the Predator drone sends out unencrypted.”  Or maybe “Iraqi insurgents watch Predator drone feeds on TV.”

If you look into the article, you find that insurgents are apparently using a $26 piece of software that let takes satellite data and saves parts of it that might not be intended for your computer.  Essentially, it monitors the data that is sent and when it sees a file transferred will save it to your hard drive, regardless of whether or not your computer was the intended destination.

Now, I’ve been doing computer security work for over a decade.  I was the first person at my university to implement anti-virus in email, I was the first to require a department to use all-encrypted communication for transmitting passwords.  I discovered one of the earliest IRC-based botnets.  I’ve found vulnerabilities in financial systems.  I’ve seen … [a]ttack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.  Er, wait, some of that last bit may have been someone else, but you get the idea.

This stuff isn’t that hard.  SSL is over 15 years old, we know how to do encryption.  Hell, back in the 90s when we were developing the Predator, the U.S. was treating encryption as a munition – you had to get the government’s blessing to use decent encryption.  Is it too much to ask that an actual weapon include the munition that was encryption?  And this from the WSJ article strikes me as BS:

Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren’t readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

In an email, a spokeswoman said that for security reasons, the company couldn’t comment on “specific data link capabilities and limitations.”

Or more  to the point, entirely irrelevant.  First, the communication system can’t be *that* proprietary, since the commercial (if somewhat sketchy) SkyGrabber software can read the transmissions.  Second, you developed a proprietary communication system in the mid to late 90s and didn’t include encryption?  That’s the sort of thing that makes the baby Bruce Schneier cry.

On the other hand, this from CNN seems far more likely:

A senior defense official who was not authorized to speak about the security breach said, “This was an old issue for us and it has been taken care of,” but he would not elaborate on what specifically had been taken care of.

The official said that many of the UAV feeds need to be sent out live to numerous people at one time, and encryption was found to slow the real-time link. The encryption therefore was removed from many feeds.

Removing the encryption, however, allowed outsiders with the correct tools to gain unauthorized access to these feeds.

I’ll buy that.   There are certainly a few encryption schemes that will send encrypted data to multiple parties, hell at the very least, you could use symmetric encryption with shared keys.  But that kinda sucks.  Most commercial communication encryption technology assumes point to point transfers.  If you wanted to send the same data to many people… you send it multiple times.

Regardless, this is just embarrassing.  These days I’m doing security modelling work and if this is the sort of thing that we’ll have to consider, I’m going to sink into a very deep depression.