John Kozubik - john@kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com

On the morning of September 11, I was awakened by my alarm clock telling me of an airplane flying into one of the towers of the world trade center. Although I had been to New York City many times, I had never visited those twin towers, but I had an idea of what they looked like. I imagined the scene of a private plane - some propellor driven machine whose pilot had suffered a heart attack. Perhaps a publicity stunt gone horribly wrong.
I thought to myself what a mess it would be, and pondered the nightmare of looking up from the sidewalk and seeing fallen wreckage falling onto the New York City streets.

As I finished dressing I heard the words "commercial jet liner". Then the crash of the second plane into the other tower was reported. I ate a small breakfast as the president addressed the nation from a public school he was speaking at. I had to get to work.

We'd heard of SwissDisk here at rsync.net, but they rarely showed up on our radar screen.  We were reminded of their existence a few days ago when their entire infrastructure failed.  It's unclear how much data, if any, was eventually lost ... but my reading of their announcement makes me think "a lot".
I'm commenting on this because I believe their failure was due to an unnecessarily complex infrastructure. Of course, this requires a lot of conjecture on my part about an organization I know little about ... but I'm pretty comfortable making some guesses.

It's en vogue these days to build filesystems across a SAN and build an application layer on top of that SAN platform that deals with data as "objects" in a database, or something resembling a database. All kinds of advantages are then presented by this infrastructure, from survivability and fault tolerance to speed and latency. And cost. That is, when you look out to the great green future and the billions of transactions you handle every day from your millions of customers are all realized, the per unit cost is strikingly low.

It is my contention that, in the context of offsite storage, these models are too complex, and present risks that the end user is incapable of evaluating. I can say this with some certainty, since we have seen that the model presented risks that even the people running it were incapable of evaluating.

This is indeed an indictment of "cloud storage", which may seem odd coming from the proprietor of what seems to be "cloud storage". It makes sense, however, when you consider the very broad range of infrastructure that can be used to deliver "online backup". When you don't have stars in your eyes, and aren't preparing for your IPO filing and the "hockey sticking" of your business model, you can do sensible things like keep regular files on UFS2 filesystems on standalone FreeBSD systems.

This is, of course, laughable in the "real world". You couldn't possibly support thousands and thousands of customers around the globe, for nearly a decade, using such an infrastructure. Certainly not without regular interruption and failure.

Except when you can, I guess:

 # uptime
 12:48PM  up 350 days, 21:34, 2 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.14, 0.16

(a live storage system, with about a thousand users, that I picked at random)

 # uptime
  2:02PM  up 922 days, 18:38, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

(another system on the same network)

One of the most common pre-sales questions we get at rsync.net is:

"Why should I pay a per gigabyte rate for storage when these other providers are offering unlimited storage for a low flat rate?"

The short answer is: paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions.

Now for the long answer...

JCI now offers FreeBSD 11 Cloud Servers that provide significant enhancements over previous versions of FreeBSD. Under FreeBSD 11 you will be running a true virtual cloud server and not the more limited "jail" VPS. This allows complete independent server instances with on-the fly expandability, secure root access and custom backup capability.

Choose the server from our standard FreeBSD server plans below with the memory, disk, IPs, bandwidth and backup required to support your application.

At long last, git is supported at rsync.net.
We wrestled with the decision to add it for some time, as we place a very, very high value on the simplicity of our systems. We have no intention of turning rsync.net into a development platform, running a single additional network service, or opening a single additional TCP port.

At the same time, there are a number of very straightforward synchronization and archival functions inherent to subversion and git that lend themselves very well to our offsite filesystem.

John Kozubik - john@kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com

In the very recent past, the world has crossed a threshold, beyond which anonymous free speech can only be limited by completely removing the basic infrastructure of commerce.

The union of cryptography, ubiquitous portable computers and low-cost-standards-based wireless networking does not guarantee free speech, but it does guarantee that such restrictions imply an inability to conduct modern business and a dramatically lowered standard of living.

In this environment freedom of speech is atomic - it cannot be partially limited. It can be both global and instantaneous. Most importantly, it is not dependent on centralized public networks like the Internet.

It will be shown that tools available to anyone in a society that takes part in modern commerce are all that is required for anonymous free speech. It will further be shown that such tools must be available for such a society to continue participating in modern commerce, and that their availability is an all or nothing proposition. Finally, it will be shown that a high value should be placed on open standards and interoperability as well as peer-centric attitudes towards communication and networks.

Taken as a whole, the FSOSA concept should be used to encourage free speech and to discourage policymakers from pursuing policies that are destined either to fail, or to relegate them to the "stone age".

Once we engineered a selective shutdown switch into the Internet, and implemented a way to do what Internet engineers have spent decades making sure never happens, we would have created an enormous security vulnerability. We would make the job of any would-be terrorist intent on bringing down the Internet much easier.

Computer and network security is hard, and every Internet system we’ve ever created has security vulnerabilities. It would be folly to think this one wouldn’t as well. And given how unlikely the risk is, any actual shutdown would be far more likely to be a result of an unfortunate error or a malicious hacker than of a presidential order.

But the main problem with an Internet kill switch is that it’s too coarse a hammer.

Yes, the bad guys use the Internet to communicate, and they can use it to attack us. But the good guys use it, too, and the good guys far outnumber the bad guys.

Shutting the Internet down, either the whole thing or just a part of it, even in the face of a foreign military attack would do far more damage than it could possibly prevent. And it would hurt others whom we don’t want to hurt.

For years we’ve been bombarded with scare stories about terrorists wanting to shut the Internet down. They’re mostly fairy tales, but they’re scary precisely because the Internet is so critical to so many things.

Why would we want to terrorize our own population by doing exactly what we don’t want anyone else to do? And a national emergency is precisely the worst time to do it.

Just implementing the capability would be very expensive; I would rather see that money going toward securing our nation’s critical infrastructure from attack.

In Windows Vista or later, you can create a "junction folder"/"Symbolic link" to redirect the contents of one to another.

Simply type:

 mklink /d "c:\data\network docs" "\\server\shareddata\"

You must have Admin privileges when you run CMD.

Bash let is a built-in command in Linux systems used for evaluating arithmetic expressions. Unlike other arithmetic evaluation and expansion commands, let is a simple command with its own environment. The let command also allows for arithmetic expansion.

rocket bodies, satellites, space debris in earth orbit

Q: What is the highest apogee of a satellite in Earth orbit they need to avoid? Ignore any satellites in Solar or lunar orbit.

A: There are over a hundred satellites in Molniya orbit, a few tens in Tundra orbit and a handful in really high earth orbits. The first two of those go above geostationary orbit; there are examples of the last with perigee of at least 375,000km. //

James Webb Space Telescope, at the Earth-Sun L2 point, is roundly a million miles from Earth, but still gravitationally bound to the Earth-Moon system.

Other than that, there are very few if any permanent satellites beyond the "graveyard orbits" used to park expired geostationary satellites. These are typically only a few hundred kilometers higher than geosynchronous, however, so roundly if they're well beyond the 24 hour orbital period, they'd be well clear of anything we put up intentionally and left there. //

Then there is stuff, mostly debris, that is more critical, because by nature those pieces are very fast, the orbit is not stable, so it changes a little every round and the kinetic energy would be able to penetrate any hull that is not specifically designed to withstand such impacts. For example, this debris of an Iridium satellite - at the time of writing at altitude ~366,000km and counting, spiralling outwards at 1km/s (the map does not mention a size or weight though. But it is big enough to be trackable obviously).

Those variables are shell variables. To expand them as parameters to another program (ie expr), you need to use the $ prefix:

 expr $x / $y

The reason it complained is because it thought you were trying to operate on alphabetic characters (ie non-integer)

If you are using the Bash shell, you can achieve the same result using expression syntax:

echo $((x / y))

Or:

z=$((x / y))
echo $z

Why not use let; I find it much easier. Here's an example you may find useful:

start=`date +%s`
# ... do something that takes a while ...
sleep 71

end=`date +%s`
let deltatime=end-start
let hours=deltatime/3600
let minutes=(deltatime/60)%60
let seconds=deltatime%60
printf "Time spent: %d:%02d:%02d\n" $hours $minutes $seconds

Another simple example - calculate number of days since 1970:

 let days=$(date +%s)/86400

There is actually a pattern developing here.

Every time the Harris campaign exposes their candidate to the public, the public reacts negatively. It happened after the DNC as well.

You can also see the reduction in Harris's popularity in other places too. The betting website, Polymarket, also saw Trump pull away from Harris after the interview aired.

Former President Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, as August 26 marked three years since President Joe Biden’s absolutely disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that left 13 American servicemen dead.

Unlike Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who were nowhere to be found, Trump’s visited the important site in-person — but the media still found a way to court controversy.

Many in the establishment media took turns criticizing Trump’s team for photographing and videoing the occasion at Section 60 — the eastern part of the cemetery — old footage of Biden has resurfaced of him doing the same thing. //

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1264936762570407936

Joe Biden @JoeBiden
·
To all the members of our military and our military families, especially those who have lost their service member, thank you. We owe you. We can never lessen the magnitude of your loss, but this I can promise you: we will never forget. #MemorialDay
[embedded video]
11:10 AM · May 25, 2020 //

At the one-minute mark, the ad shows Biden at Arlington Cemetery as he was photographed there on May 31, 2010, while vice president to former President Barack Obama.

This is all to say, the very thing the Trump is being bashed for, the Biden campaign did in 2020.

It is undeniable this is a campaign ad.

The clip ends with a message saying, “Text Joe to 30330” while “PAID FOR BY BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” runs across the bottom of the screen. //

To note, the Gold Star families issued an official statement expressing their support for Trump and stating their approval for filming and photography on Monday.

What should be angering to the public, and what should be covered by the media, is Biden’s and Harris’ complete no-show.

They are responsible for the catastrophe that took place three years ago that saw American lives lost and billions of dollars in military hardware left behind for the Taliban.

Whatever feelings there are about Trump and his upcoming election bid, the Gold Star families wanted him there and he showed up.

That’s far more than the current White House occupants can say.

Elon Musk has picked a day for X to move out of San Francisco, and it is a day that his superstitious employees will appreciate. //

In leaving San Francisco in his dust, Elon Musk is throwing superstition to the winds.

Employees of San Francisco-based X were told in a memo sent around on Thursday that the date has been set for leaving their offices, according to Fortune, which based its account on a source it did not name.

The date is Sept. 13, which this year arrives on a Friday.

For those of us who have criticized Facebook for years for its role in the massive censorship system, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It had all of the genuine regret of a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim.

Zuckerberg’s sudden regret only came after his company fought for years to conceal the evidence of its work with the government to censor opposing views. Zuckerberg was finally compelled to release the documents by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the House Judiciary Committee.

Now forced to admit what many of us have long alleged, Zuckerberg is really, really sorry.

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss Facebook’s record at length as a critical player in the anti-free speech alliance of government, corporate, academic, and media forces.

In prior testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and other congressional committees, I noted that Zuckerberg continued to refuse to release this information after Elon Musk exposed this system in his release of the “Twitter Files.”

Zuckerberg stayed silent as Musk was viciously attacked by anti-free speech figures in Congress and the media. He was fully aware of his own company’s similar conduct but stayed silent.

When the White House and President Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, Facebook continued to withhold evidence that they too were pressured to suppress the story before the election.

Viewers now get a steady diet of figures like MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal who called the U.S. Constitution “trash” and argued that we should simply just dump it.

In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

Georgetown University Law School Professor Rosa Brooks went on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” to lash out at Americans becoming “slaves” to the U.S. Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.

I was recently called for a response to Robinson’s call. Yet, it is not clear if Robinson is speaking about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution as that “little piece of paper.” However, she insists that “[i]n this moment, we’ve got to reimagine it with people that look and love like us at the center.”

Taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio shouldn’t be a starting place for aggressively biased coverage against either Democrats or Republicans. But you can ask Clarence Thomas how the machine works.

On Aug. 27, NPR veterans affairs reporter Quil Lawrence lit into former President Donald Trump for bringing cameras to a section of Arlington National Cemetery with some families of soldiers killed during President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The entire manufactured controversy is perverse. It’s obvious NPR is exploiting the cemetery for a political goal, and it then spread to the rest of the national media. Trump is showing support for grieving Gold Star families, while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would not appear. They were MIA. But Trump was singled out as the one with grotesque political optics, not the no-shows whose negligence cost American lives.

They weren’t seriously considering the Biden-Harris disaster on “All Things Considered.” They could call it “All Democrats Defended.” Conservatives quickly found snapshots from private photographers of Biden in the same sacred section of the Arlington cemetery. That thing cannot be “considered.”

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver stated:

[Idaho] Gov. Brad Little must ensure that the Idaho Army National Guard upholds federal and state law and protects the free speech of enlisted personnel. This discrimination against an officer based on a frivolous complaint must be addressed and his record cleared and career restored.

To provide further detail, Liberty Counsel’s Associate Vice President of Legal Affairs Daniel Schmid joined Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” According to Schmid, “[I]mmediately upon receiving the complaint, some of the superiors in [the officer’s] chain of command brought him in and said, ‘You will resign, or we’ll make this ugly.’ Those were the words to him. They forced him to resign without counsel, without the presence of counsel, and without advice of counsel.”

Schmid went on to explain how “the complaint was not based on anything he did as a commanding officer.” It was about “a speech that he made outside of the military context, in the context of a political campaign. … He was making statements on various issues in the culture today, from a religious perspective, [and] the First Amendment affords him that right.” And yet, his statements are now “the subject of an investigation that’s ongoing even to this day.”

According to Schmid, this case is about making “sure that the individuals who sign up to defend our liberties, our constitutional rights, are [also] entitled to those same rights”—specifically, he clarified, the First Amendment. “You don’t surrender your constitutional rights or your statutory rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and others just because you sign up for military service.”

In the case of this officer, Schmid contended that he “was entitled to political speech.”

FlyCASS essentially offers FAR121 and FAR135 airlines a way to manage KCM and CASS requests without having to develop their own infrastructure. It pitches itself as a service requiring zero upfront cost to airlines that can be fully set up in 24 hours, with no technical staff required.

The researchers note that each airline has its own login page, which is exposed to the internet. According to the research, these login pages could be bypassed using a simple SQL injection.

"With only a login page exposed, we thought we had hit a dead end," Carroll said in his writeup. "Just to be sure though, we tried a single quote in the username as a SQL injection test, and immediately received a MySQL error.

"This was a very bad sign, as it seemed the username was directly interpolated into the login SQL query. Sure enough, we had discovered SQL injection and were able to use sqlmap to confirm the issue. Using the username of ' or '1'='1 and password of ') OR MD5('1')=MD5('1, we were able to login to FlyCASS as an administrator of Air Transport International!" //

When it came to disclosing the findings, it seems the US authorities didn't want this coming out, if the researchers' account is anything to go by. Carroll says the DHS completely ignored all attempts to disclose the findings in a coordinated way.

He also claimed the TSA "issued dangerously incorrect statements about the vulnerability, denying what we had discovered." //

"After we informed the TSA of this, they deleted the section of their website that mentions manually entering an employee ID, and did not respond to our correction. We have confirmed that the interface used by TSOs still allows manual input of employee IDs."