Alternatives

Censorship reminds me that there are a few things really worth buying into for your online peace of mind. The first is a VPN. You should not connect to the Internet without a VPN. There are many great options to choose from, there is NordVPN and Private Internet Access, or PIA. I strongly suggest that people buy a year’s worth of service from a VPN provider and then connect to it every time you use the network.

I also can strongly suggest that people download the Signal application on your Smartphone or Tablet. Signal uses End-to-End Encryption so that whatever you want to talk about is secured from your device to the other device, preventing anyone on the network who may be snooping in, from reading your private conversations.

Since Twitter censored one of my tweets, which resulted in me losing faith in their service, I downloaded the entire Twitter archive for my account and then I set virtual fire to it, burning it to the ground. I then (mostly) left Facebook and found a different community in the Federated Universe or Fediverse based on ActivityPub technology, specifically the Mastodon system. Mastodon is a lot like Twitter, only with better filters and controls and a generally better group of people. After Facebook slapped their gag on me, I went right over to my Mastodon instances and laughed it up.

It goes without saying that everyone should get at least some rudimentary apps for your privacy downloaded into your phone and set up. If you install Signal, it will offer to show you people on the system who are registered, and I will pop right up!

Another Smartphone app that is worth your while is Bridgefy. It allows you to use Bluetooth as a short-range communications radio, about 30 feet. The neat part of Bridgefy is that it creates a Bluetooth Mesh, allowing messages to spread across Bluetooth from participant to participant, so if you are in close proximity with others, and everyone has Bridgefy, you can have an ad-hoc mesh network where you can communicate with your phones without the need of the Internet. This is really important if the government or the Internet providers try to control the flow of information by active denial of service. While the Internet provider can simply just turn off their data services, they cannot touch Bluetooth radio. The Bridgefy app really leverages large populations of people, enabling long-range communications over the mesh network. It is really something everyone should have, just in case.

Apple iOS 13 or How To Kill An App

Apple released iOS 13.0 a few days ago, and then a series of iterative updates from there. The last I checked, we are now up to iOS 13.1.2. They have updated the Reminders app, and in doing so, and making the updates non-functional across their entire platform across the version barrier of iOS 12 and 13, iOS on iPad and iPadOS, and Mojave/Catalina they have, with a single stroke, killed their Reminders app for me. I was looking forward to the update to Reminders, maybe replacing the rather dull Toodledo app on my devices, and then they did it. Reminders only works if you “Convert” and if you do, it’s a one way deal. So now there is little to no point in actually using Reminders since it doesn’t work everywhere I am any longer, but it does push me further into using Toodledo and reinforces my purchase of another year of premium service with Toodledo.

I have just fielded a question about Exchange and sent items in iOS 13. It appears that iOS may not be successfully chaining Exchange emails into conversations. I will have to look into that today.

Circling The Drain

Endless solicitations for donations and requests for money for political campaigns make up 75% of my email junk folder.

The absolute meaninglessness and crassness arrives every single day, multiple times a day. Everyone is doing it, and so they all feel like this is the best way to spend their time and what they should be doing.

“If you aren’t doing your job, you should be fundraising.”

But lets stab the pause button on all of it. What is your job? These people all are part of a great machine known as representative democracy here in the United States of America. But since the primary form of political power and political speech is actually money, we can dispense with vast sections of what used to be political reality. Senators no longer need to deliberate, Representatives no longer need to represent. Political animals no longer need to do anything other than raise and spend money. That’s all there is to it. The money is the fuel and the Machiavellianism is the toolbox that the fuel is channeled through.  The dark triad runs politics: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psycopathy.

So I get messages from Jon Hoadley, from Gary Peters, and a rogues gallery of other political animals all seeking just one solitary thing. Money. The toolbox has only one tool in it, the sopping paint-roller of fear. Money to buy writing about fear, and to instill it into the population. To squeeze us all using fear, appeals to fear, declarations of fear, condemnations using fear, it’s all the same message. We need money to terrorize you all, so that you will all give us more money, so we can ramp up the terror. More fear, more money, more fear, more money.

This is why politics is broken. This is why all of the norms are shattered. This is why the world is slowly and inexorably circling the drain. There is nothing else, no other messaging. No other communication. They don’t represent us, they simply solicit for money and vomit forth giant sopping loads of fear.

Fuck fear, fuck money, and fuck politics. This is why they fail, this is why it’s all crap.

This all came to a head with my US Senator, Gary Peters. I honestly don’t know who he is or what he stands for. The only time I ever got any communication from him, or I should say, is copy machine and letter folder, and envelope printer, and postal meter, was yesterday in a solicitation for money. I didn’t read anything in the actual letter. I just folded it up and slipped it in the recycling bag at home. It’s the same thing I do with the mental image of whoever Gary Peters is, I fold him up, and slip him into the recycling bag in my head. Right along with Gary Peters is Jon Hoadley. Whoever he is, whatever he stands for, the only time I hear from him is when he wants money. Again, I don’t care about him or what he represents, because it is all meaningless. It’s money, it’s fear, it’s politics.

Don’t ask us for money. Don’t make that ALL that you do. Engage with us, reach out to us, there are a lot of us but isn’t that a part of your actual job? And so, we return to the previous line above for a point: “If you aren’t doing your job, you should be fundraising.” And the answer is written as plain as day, you just aren’t doing your job. So all you are doing is fundraising and thinking that that is your job. That is why we are so very tired of all of you. You don’t know us, you don’t talk to us, you don’t represent us. You spend no time actually interested in your constituents and think that this is all a game of celebrity political whack-a-mole.

There is no love lost. It’s all lazy, mendacious, and corrupt. You wear a bright blue vest with the word DEMOCRAT written on it, and so we vote for you. Not because of who you are, but because we have reduced everything down to two colors. We vote and we elect you into office and we know that nothing will be accomplished, that the very best any of us have to hope for is a kind of silent trudging through the maintenance of the status quo. Life has a ritual, a pattern, a routine. As long as the routine is not affected, all the rest of it is just inconsequential political theater.

So, trot about on the political stage and waste your lives doing nothing for nobody. We aren’t watching, we don’t really care, you are all completely out of touch with the rest of us, that all of this is just an immense comedy. It’s a sham and we all know it. But none of us care to fight it out because there is no hope of change. There is nobody who will listen, there is nobody who actually cares, there is just another meaningless fear-driven solicitation for money.

 

 

Derailing Robocalls

If you have an iPhone as your mobile device, you can set up a foolproof filter for pretty much all Robocalls, unwanted solicitations, or anything else that bothers you with multiple calls on your mobile phone.

The first step is to create a Voicemail Greeting that lets people know that they have to introduce themselves with their numbers first, and then once they exist in your Contact List, then your phone will ring and you might answer it. If your callers don’t know, then they will never get through.

The second step is to make sure your Contact List in your iPhone is as up-to-date as you can make it. Trim out any junk, do your best to de-dupe the list, get it so it is nice and tidy.

Third step is to go into Settings, then to Do Not Disturb settings, Turn Do Not Disturb ON, set Schedule if you want it off, although I just leave my phone on DND permanently. Silence Always, and in the Phone section, “Allow Calls From” and set that to “All Contacts”. Turn Repeated Calls off, and any other setting is your personal preference.

When inbound calls arrive, they will be checked via their Caller ID presentation with your Contact List. If they don’t know which number will match in your Contact List, then your phone will never ring. It will obviously ring for the caller, until they arrive in Voicemail, and then they leave a message introducing themselves, which is after all, a civilized way of using these devices. If you met someone IRL, then you’d have to create a contact for them in order for them to ring your iPhone.

If you have any other iOS device, like an iPad, you should configure that the same way as your iPhone so when it is connected over Wifi it doesn’t ring the way you don’t want it to.

After that, you won’t get any more inbound calls unless they are from your Contact List. No fuss, no muss.

Cisco AMP for Endpoints

Several months ago we bought into Cisco AMP for Endpoints. There was a lot of work right after that, so we set up the management account and put it aside. Months later, I felt a little awkward about it, so I thought I would devote my April to Cisco AMP for Endpoints.

I just uncorked my AMP for Endpoints account, for this post and going forward, when I write AMP, I mean Cisco AMP for Endpoints, because it’s a mouthful. AMP itself seemed forbidding and difficult, but then once I started working with the site, configuration wasn’t that bad. I decided to test AMP in my environment by starting a “Factory Fresh” copy of Windows 7 32-bit in VirtualBox on my Mac, with 4GB of RAM assigned to it. A standard humdrum little workstation model.

I downloaded a bunch of starter packs, including the “Audit” model, the weakest of them all. I installed it on the workstation and the site responded well enough, noticing the install. As I was working with the system, I noticed that AMP complained that the definitions were out of date on the client, so I went hunting for a “definition update” function. There isn’t anything the user can trigger, you have to wait for it. Oh, that’s not good.

So then I had AMP on the test machine and I thought I would try to infect it. So I found a copy of EICAR, which is a sample file that all these technologies are supposed to detect and find hazardous. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) sees EICAR well enough, and really gets upset by it, immediately stuffing it into Quarantine and sending an alert. AMP also detected EICAR and because it was in Audit mode, just sat on its hands. Which I expected.

So then I found a bunch of sample malware files on a testing website, because while EICAR is useful for basic testing, it’s as relevatory as a knee-jerk reflex. It’s nice to know there is a reflex, but it’s not the same as an actual malware infection. I opened the ZIP file, typed in the password and all these malware samples came spilling out into the downloads directory. So, a workstation that is quickly becoming filthy. That’s my use-case for AMP.

So after “infecting” the computer with the files, and the tamest model, which is just to have them in a folder, I went to AMP and told it to switch the model on the test machine from Audit to Triage. That took almost twenty minutes! Are you for real on this, Cisco? Twenty minutes!!!

So I knew what I had on this workstation, but I pretended that I was the admin on the other side, with an unknown workstation connected, reclassified with Triage and waiting. I knew that the computer was infected, and as the admin, “not knowing what is going on” with the endpoint, I sent a scan command. This is the worst case scenario.

On the AMP side, I didn’t see anything at all. I panicked around looking for any hint that the AMP system recognized my scan request, and so I sent five more scan requests. Obviously, one scan request should have done it, but I wanted to make sure that I worked around even an imaginary screw-up in Cisco over scanning. Nothing. Workstation just plotzing along, infected files just sitting right there in the Downloads folder, just waiting for double-clicking end-user to make a tame infection a wild one.

Obviously this is the worlds worst scenario, one were SEP somehow is gone, not installed, or somehow lost its marbles, leaving AMP on its own to run defense. Scan! Scan! Scan! — Nothing at all. AMP just sits there just merrily SITTING THERE. Like shaking a coma patient, is very much what it felt like.

So then I started with the Help feature, request help, okay, I knew how this would go. This would lead to TAC. God help me. Cisco’s system didn’t know what AMP was, hahahahaha of course not. But there was a chat system in a teeny tiny little button, so I tried that. Someone! Hallelujah! They found my contract and linked it up, and started a case for me. When I went back to the test system, AMP had done it’s work. FINALLY. It only took twenty minutes! A lot can happen in twenty minutes. How many files could have been ransomware-encrypted in those twenty minutes?

So now I await a response from Cisco TAC. During the chat I declined the entire phone call angle since Cisco TAC people cannot speak English, or at least, I cannot understand their speech. So I told them that I would only communicate over email. So lets see what TAC has to say. We spent a lot of money on this, so obviously I’ll likely deploy it, but man, I am sorely disappointed in a system where every second counts. On reflection, Cisco AMP for Endpoints was probably a mistake.

C2E2: Will I Be On Camera?

Spotted this gem this morning. There’s something in the tall grass here at C2E2:

The paragraph covering “Will I Be On Camera?” has us scratching our noggins. What does it mean? It could mean facial tracking technology and data sales between customer flow in the exhibitors hall and their subsequent selections on the app for their fandoms. And since all our demographic data is online with ReedPOP, the managing company, they’d have to be dullards to not take advantage of this in all the ways I can think of. So, pinnacle of corruption and deep-cut privacy violations galore! But hey, we all accepted it and frankly my dear, nobody cares or even is worried over it. So I am going to be, in perpetuity (heh heh) the only Watchman shaking his canary cage.

It’s all good. I expect nothing less. Companies are corrupt, all the way to the core. That’s what they are. That is their basic nature. Paging Marcus Aurelius, and Dr. Lecter.

Moo goes the cow. Baa goes the sheep.

Boeing as Microsoft

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boeing-sold-safety-feature-that-could-have-prevented-737-max-crashes-as-an-option/

Ars wrote an article about the 737 Max aircrafts safety system gap. Boeing made a key function for safety an expensive add-on. God, that smells like a Microsoft joint, doesn’t it? Hahahahahaha. Make your flight choices clear when you buy tickets: I don’t want to fly on Boeing aircraft.

And then, in related news, a touch of quid pro quo between Nikki Hayley and Boeing, too. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nikki-haley-nominated-for-board-seat-at-boeing/

Hilarious.

Interlude: Social Justice Warriors

The end of the Doctor Who panel had a thick conversational thread strongly tied to classic social justice warrior monologue. I did write about it, but then I self-censored my writing because it is not a topic that is open for discussion. It is violently dangerous and maximally hazardous. Right up there with abortion. It is flight worthy.

So there won’t be a post, or any writing about SJW. There is nothing to say. It is too dangerous, too hazardous for even any commentary. It makes jihad look disneyesque. There is no room in that magic kingdom for anything but blood and bloody ashes.

So, no comment. Nothing. Just stand up and run away. As fast as you can.

Facebook Security

I haven’t logged into Facebook in quite a while and I’ve been doing bits and bloops around the network, like connecting MOD Pizza to my FB account and vastly lower interaction metrics. The Facebook security watchdog noticed!

So they locked me out. I could get back in if I could identify my friends in a quiz format. Fine. Took the quiz, passed. Account password changed and updated.

Hilarious. Facebook is like herpes. I hardly miss the cold sores.