xpda

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Satellite Internet

Spacex submitted an application with the FCC to launch some communications satellites. This doesn't seem too unusual, since satellite launching is the primary business of SpaceX.

SpaceX even lands rockets occasionally.

SpaceX's application for satellites is unusual, though, because they aren't planning to launch just a couple of satellites. They're planning to launch 4,425 satellites into low earth orbits, for global internet service. The satellites will go into 4 orbital distances between 715 and 823 miles. This will solve the latency problem of internet from Hughes geostationary satellites.

If things go right, these should be operational in about 5 years after a $10 billion investment.

Boeing is also planning a 1,000 satellite constellation for internet service.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/s...

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/boeing-battle-broadband-in...

Rocket Science

Don't forget! 32,767 is the largest 16-bit signed integer (two's complement). It may not be rocket science, but it should be.

In June, 1996 the Ariane 5 rocket was launched for the first time. It went out of control due to an integer overflow and was blown up.

https://hownot2code.com/2016/09/02/a-space-error-370-mi...

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5accidentreport.html

The Hottest Place in the World

Libya used to hold the record for the world's hottest recorded temperature (136°F, September 13, 1922 in El Azizia), but it was declared invalid in 2012.

      https://asunow.asu.edu/content/worlds-hottest-temperatu...

That leaves Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley, California as the record holder, with 134°F in 1913.

      https://wmo.asu.edu/content/world-highest-temperature

However, that record may also be invalid.

      https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/comm...

Next in line? It could be Kebili, Tunisia, July 1931, but the place with the hottest accurately recorded temperature is still Death Valley at 129°F, recorded on July 7, 2007, July 20, 2005, July 18, 1998, and July 20, 1960.

Death Valley, June 8, 2016. The temperature hit 120°F.

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/comm...

Incidentally, weather does not equal climate. The temperature at a particular location is a weather event, not climate change. A single hurricane or a season full of hurricanes does not necessarily indicate global warming. The hurricanes cover a very small percentage of the earth's surface. These changes in max recorded temperature provide zero evidence of climate change, one way or the other.

However, 20 of the globally warmest years on record have occurred in the past 35 years, and 10 of those were in the last 12 years. This, together with a 6.7" average sea level rise, Arctic sea ice decline, Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet decline, and widespread glacial retreats provide definite evidence of significant global warming. You can ignore the facts, and you can hide the facts, but if you change the facts they are no longer facts. (Hint: Don't get your facts from Facebook. Or your advertising data , for that matter.)

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

The Hackers of Madison County

Madison County, Indiana is northeast of Indianapolis, with a population of around 130,001 humans and a couple of Martians. Anderson is the county seat.

Someone slipped some malware into the county's computer system a few weeks ago. Around the first week of November, the county woke up to a whole bunch of computers that were not computing. The malware encrypted the hard drives of just about every system except voting and emergency services.

The hackers were nice enough to offer to decrypt the county's data, for the low, low price of $28,000. The insurance company offered to reimburse the county for the ransom (less deductable) and recommended that they pay up. So Madison County paid the hackers around $28,000, thereby encouraging more ransomware hacks.

      http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/11/indiana-county-...

Lisa, the head of the county's IT department was apologetic and offered to resign. Just kidding! She actually said this happened because her department needs more money and more employees, and is paying $17,500 to a computer support group to rid the county computers of malware. Maybe someone should explain to Lisa the fun and benefits of remote backups. Then she might not need all those additional employees.

      http://www.heraldbulletin.com/news/it-department-asks-f...

In fairness to Lisa, other organizations around the world as well as in the U.S. enjoy the intangible benefits of ransomware. Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid $17,000 for a ransomware encryption key, and Methodist Hospital in Henderson, Kentucky paid off ransomware hackers. In addition, Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore managed to run some ransomware.

One study claims that more than half the companies in the U.K. have been hit by ransomware demands. This study was commissioned by Malwarebytes, so it could be a little biased. Even so, Malwarebytes is pretty good security software.

You, too, can get into the ransomware business! Just buy a kit on an underground forum and follow directions. You might want to move to Russia or Spavinaw or somewhere with lax law enforcement, because the U.S. has some pretty stiff penalties for hacking.

      http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/new-and-improve...

Our legislators do not like what they don't understand.

For example, a programmer named Eric faces more jail time than the rapists he exposed. A guy named Justin, who exposed false encryption claims by Dentrix dental software, was arrested in a raid on his home by 12-15 FBI agents at 6:30 am. The arrest isn't so bad, but getting the poor guy up at 6:30 in the morning borders on cruel and inhuman punishment!

      https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/ransomware/

      https://blog.malwarebytes.com/101/2016/03/how-to-beat-r...

Peregrino

Check out Jairus McDonald's music (Terre and Mark's toddler). He said, "Somebody let me and my dudes muck about with instruments in a beautiful late 1500's Mexican convent." They're good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33LhS6TMzdw

Obligatory xkcd

http://xkcd.com/1744/

http://xkcd.com/1738/

http://xkcd.com/1704/

It's a small, small world

Some good macro photos:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/a-sense-of-scale...

In a slightly less small world, this alien invader was on the back porch in October. It's about 4.5 feet tall and 8 feet long. (Or maybe it was a fly called "Delphinia picta" and about 7 mm long.)

How the DNC was hacked

The short version is that hillaryclinton.com used gmail, and hackers sent a bunch of emails to DNC staffers, supposedly from gmail, with a link to a fake Google login site. This generated about 20 clicks on the fake links, and most likely several login attempts (in which the gmail password is disclosed to the hackers). Similar emails were also sent to DNC personal gmail accounts, generating about 40 clicks to the fake links.

https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-...

Pictures of Today!

Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine USS Henry M. Jackson in Puget Sound, February 2016

20160128_PCAMR-C-012_SCI_N_20140113191151_0008_A_2C_stitch.jpg

The moon, taken by the Chinese Chang'e 3 lander in 2013. This is a hi-res image.

Apollo 15 launch

The Apollo 15 Command/Service Module as viewed from the Lunar Module

Jim Irwin with the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Apollo 15 mission

This image is at the eastern edge of a very large deposit of wind-blown dust that occupies Ganges Chasma, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's pretty high resolution.

A true color photo of Mars lander Curiosity, taken by Curiosity. (They used stitching to get rid of the arm in the photo.) It's pretty high resolution.

This is a really funny screen shot, at least to me, which inevitably means it's funny to very few other humans. This is a news article about how news sites are becoming worthless, having nothing but click bait articles. The funny part is the click bait link next to the article: "How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code."

Lightning flashes per year, across the globe.

GOES-R, the next generation weather satellite, launched Saturday.

Ride share, from my back porch -- a phantom midge on top of an earwig.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Junkmail from Bob, #232

Rocket Science

In August 2011, NASA launched the spacecraft Juno toward Jupiter.

Actually, they launched it out beyond the orbit of Mars. In 2013 it returned to within 5,400 miles of earth and accelerated from 78,000 mph to 93,000 mph with the gravity assist from Earth. Then it headed out toward Jupiter.

Today, Juno is about 57,000,000 miles from Jupiter. That's around 60 percent of the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Juno should arrive in Jupiter orbit on July 4 of this year, and will have traveled 540 million miles at that point.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/where

Juno is powered by three solar panels, each 29.5 feet by 8.7 feet.

It weighs about 3,500 lbs and carries another 4,500 lbs in fuel.

Juno should discover a lot of new things about Jupiter, such as its mass, details on Jupiter's gravitational and magnetic fields, details on Jupiter's atmosphere, and a bunch of other stuff.

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/with-one-year-to-jupiter...

The company SpaceX didn't launch Juno, but it has been launching a lot of rockets into low earth orbit and geostationary transfer orbit.

They even sent the Deep Space Climate Observatory to Lagrangian point L1, a point for a reasonably stable orbit between the earth and the sun. The spacecraft observes space weather, not earth weather.

SpaceX is competing successfully with the established space companies, such as Orbital Sciences, which still uses Russian rocket engines. Sometimes they don't work.

But then, sometimes SpaceX rockets have trouble, too.

Japan has been launching rockets, too. Here's the launch of the Akatsuki, which had a few problems getting to Venus orbit:

Several countries have launched satellites into orbit: Soviet Union, U.S., France, Japan, China, U.K., E.S.A., India, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This means that Iran and North Korea can launch missiles to targets anywhere on earth. The other nations can, too, but they're less likely to nuke someone just for sport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_orbital...

In a somewhat unrelated photo, here's Apollo 12 commander Charles Conrad in 1969, standing next to the unmanned moon lander Surveyor 3, launched a couple of years earlier. I like this picture.

Autonomy

For a few hundred dollars, you can get a drone that will fly a predetermined route and take pictures at specific locations, without human intervention.

(my house)

What if you use the drone to shoot paintballs or depleted uranium projectiles or cow patties instead of photos? Then you have an autonomous weapon.

Of course, you could build an autonomous weapon out of a golf cart or a car or a tank or a boat or an airplane. The fact is, it's getting easy to do, with fast computers providing almost immediate image recognition, GPS and inertial navigation, and efficient propulsion.

Oddly enough, some people don't like the idea of autonomous weapon systems that might make errors and, worse, that take the human fun out of killing people. If killing people isn't personal, what good is it?

      http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/20...

      http://www.nature.com/news/robotics-ethics-of-artificia...

The fact is that autonomous weapon systems are coming in one form or another. Even if the major countries ban them, they are easy enough to develop with current technology that they'll be "available soon at an arms dealer near you." The initial ones won't be very sophisticated, but technology marches on, ready or not.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ready-t...

It's a little like surveillance and eavesdropping, which are so cheap and easy they have become ubiquitous, legal or not.

Migration

Some animals navigate using the earth's magnetic field to navigate, orientate, or postulate. People are not among them. We need a compass, or maybe a GPS. But monarch butterflies, salmon, lobsters, bats, mole rats, and even some termites can sense and use magnetic fields.

Nobody has been able to figure out exactly how they do this. I have personally asked several monarch butterflies what their secret is, but every last one of them refused to answer.

Siying Qin and some other researchers in China may have figured this out. They call it a magnetic protein biocompass.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/magnetic-protein...

Here's the original paper.

T-Shirts

A T-shirt shrinks because of the dryer, not the washer.

http://www.threadbase.com/unravelled

Internet of Stuff

It's easy now to hook up household devices to the internet. For example, I have a magic light bulb in my garage that comes on whenever a door opens, stays on 5 minutes, and then goes out. It's not really too exciting, but if I happen to be visiting Kodiak, Alaska I can use my cell phone to turn that bulb on and off over the internet. That's pretty exciting, if not overly useful. (I live a sheltered life.)

There are several controllers available for this kind of thing, such as the Samsung Smart Hub. They can connect to any outlet, many appliances, and lots of sensors. You can view cameras (and your neighbors' cameras, if they're not careful), use timers, control heat and air, lock and unlock doors, and a lot more.

For example, you can buzz your phone when the doorbell rings, then unlock it after you view the camera and make sure it's not one of your children, or turn on the front porch electric fence if it is. There are sensors for motion, temperature, doors, windows, light, and sound. All this is easily programmable.

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SmartThings-Hub-2nd-Gener...

Encryption

It would be really stupid to ban encryption or force people to include back doors for law enforcement in their encryption. Even the NSA agrees with me on this topic. If the federal government gets access to encrypted files, then everybody else in the world will either figure it out or borrow it from the government. The U.S. government seems to be better at offense rather than defense in digital security.

      http://www.infoworld.com/article/3006877/encryption/sto...

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/yet-another-...

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/bill-aims-to...

      http://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-req...

Global Climate Data

Global climate data is not being altered for political purposes, at least not until after the research is published. At that point, lobbyists, politicians, and paid "experts" take over, unbound by reality or truth, and fabricate tales to fit the party line.

The idiot politicians who are demanding emails from researchers are, well, idiots. They want to take a few emails out of context and use it to "prove" that there is no such thing as global warming.

      http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-tho...

It's clear to anybody who looks at the data that the earth has gotten warmer of the past 50, 100, or 150 years. Just look at Washington, DC! Incidentally, weather does not equal climate.

      http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/congressman-doub...

      http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/american-meteoro...

Skullduggery also takes place in the pro-global-warming arena, where sea-level rise is consistently exaggerated with photos of ordinary beach erosion, local weather anomalies are attributed to climate change, and anti-corporate regulations are frequently demanded without regard to cost or effectiveness.

Bad Passwords Are Good

You regularly see articles about how stupid people continue to use simple, easy-to-break passwords for various things.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3024252/security/these-a...

But there is a good reason to use bad passwords. You can remember the passwords and type them quickly.

There are a lot of web sites that I visit occasionally. Some of these require a password. For many of these sites, I don't care whether anybody else uses my account. I would prefer not to have a password at all. So I use the same, simple password for most of the unimportant sites I visit. (A few of them quite rudely require numbers, capital letters, or special characters. I try to avoid those sites, because I never remember my password.)

My accounts and accounts of other people who don't care about the security on unimportant web sites undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the bad password list.

If you do follow this insecure security habit, it's a good idea to remember which sites are really unimportant and which are not. Assume someone, sometime will grab your bad password and username, and try to use them on every site on the internet.

https://xkcd.com/792/

Antibiotics, Colds, and Sinus Infections

There are some new guidelines for using antibiotic prescriptions for respiratory tract infections. Since most of these infections are viral and go away without antibiotics, you may be able to save a trip to the doctor and suffer in solitude.

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2481815#t1-1840

Do Headlines Need to Ask a Question?

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

Furthermore, any internet link that advertises a list ("Top 6..." or "8 Ways You Can..."), has roughly a 98.237 percent chance of being a lousy clickbait article generated either by a bot or a content mill.

You can improve the quality of your ingested web content dramatically if you skip headlines with lists or questions.

em Client

I recently started using the email client "em Client". Over the past several years I have used Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook, and Gmail. "em Client" is the best email client at the moment, for me, despite its bad name.

Gmail is also pretty good, but I prefer more control over spam filtering and other email options, and would rather miss out on the ads, so I use my own mail server.

Oklahoma's War on Public Education

Oklahoma funding cuts to education continue, leading the nation in the war on public education.

Oklahoma has a budget shortfall in the neighborhood of a billion dollars in 2016. By coincidence, Oklahoma has cut the top income tax bracket from 6.65 percent to 5 percent in recent years, costing the state about a billion dollars annually.

The cuts in education are roughly equivalent to the tax breaks Oklahoma offers for horizontally drilling:

The Oklahoma state legislature, well known as the most technically and scientifically advanced individuals in the nation, has introduced laws to ban the teaching of global warming, evolution, and the sun-centered model of the solar system. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating. But the new law will allow public teachers to teach that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth, without fear of discipline or reprisal. Any scientific theory can be ignored or refuted in class, such as notorious theories of gravity and relativity.

The intention of the new law is to prevent the teaching of evolution, global warming, and any other science that does not strictly adhere to the conservative party line. This should help public education as much as the current funding levels do.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/this-years-first...

Galileo would be proud.

Go Climb a Rock

DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, Inc. has been the concessionaire at Yosemite since 1933. That means they manage the hotels, restaurants, stores, etc. Beginning March 1, Yosemite concessionaire will be Aramark, under a new 15-year contract. Aramark has similar contracts at Denali, Glacier Bay, Mesa Verde, Olympic National Park, Glen Canyon, and Lake Mead.

DNC is apparently not happy about this change. Before 1998, the law gave preferential rights of renewal to incumbent concessioners. Last year, the contract was subject to fair competitive bidding, with no preferential rights. Aramark won the contract.

"Go Climb a Rock" is a trademark owned by DNC. Don't ever say that without paying them a royalty, under penalty of 5-years indentured servitude. They also have trademarks to "Ahwahnee Hotel", "Curry Village", and "Wawona Hotel", even though these establishments are owned by the National Park Service and were in business long before DNC took over their management in 1993.

DNC was a gracious loser in the new contract award, demanding $51 million from the National Park Service for the use of the names of Yosemite establishments established in the early 1900's. But the park service did something sensible, which is very uncommon for a government institution. They decided to change the names rather than pay extortion to a former concessionaire and a mob of lawyers.

The Ahwahnee Hotel will become The Majestic Yosemite Hotel. Curry Village will be Half Dome Village, and the Wawona Hotel will be the Big Trees Lodge. Naturally, after DNC's $51 lawsuit was deflated by the impending name changes, DNC was "shocked" and proceeded with legal action to prevent any name changes. Never mind that DNC has no involvement in those businesses after the contract changeover.

In fact, DNC didn't even apply for these trademarks until 2002 or 2003, more than 100 years after some of them were first used in commerce. Of course, the letter of the law, let alone common sense, rarely deters the USPTO from approving a stupid patent or trademark. Even more ridiculous, DNC applied for a trademark on the word "Yosemite" after they lost the contract bidding and after they filed the lawsuit against the National Park Service.

Remind me to avoid DNC businesses in the future.

http://www.sierrastar.com/2016/01/20/76874/public-outcr...

Bright Star

There's a star that's pretty bright. It's exploding. It's a supernova. It's about 570 billion times brighter than the sun. It's brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, combined. It's probably the brightest star ever observed.

Luckily, this exploding star is far enough away that it won't cause radiation poisoning, or even sunburn. It's located 22,338,300,000,000,000,000,001 miles (3.8 billion light years) southwest of Adair, Oklahoma. That's too far away to see with your eyes, or even with a back yard telescope. It's hard to believe people can detect and recognize it!

https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/01/14/brightlight/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160120-super...

PCs, CPUs, and the PCIe SSD

2015 U.S. PC sales were down 2-3 percent and down around 8 percent worldwide, according to Gartner and IDC.

There are a few reasons for this. First, cell phones and smart pads are taking the place of PCs for many people. Second, Windows 8 and 10 did not inspire as many new PC purchases as did previous Windows releases. (Apple PC shipments were up 6 percent last year.)

Third, PCs have not gotten a lot faster. Advances in desktop CPU speed have been minimal over the past few years. If I could get a reasonably priced PC that's 50% faster than my two-year-old system, I'd buy it today. Instead, the best performance gain for me is a PCIe SSD.

Solid state drives, or SSDs, are much smaller, faster, and efficient than the traditional hard drives with rotating magnetic media. A solid state drive is essentially some non-volatile memory with a hard drive interface.

A typical SSD may be 50 or 100 times faster than a magnetic hard drive (HDD). One of the newer PCIe SSDs is several times faster than that.

One reasonably reliable source says that the arrival of SSDs and other storage class memories "is likely the most significant architectural change that datacenter and software designers will face in the foreseeable future."

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2874238

If you want speed, the Samsung 950 Pro is a good bet. It's better if you have a spare PCI Express 3.0 x4 slot.

Nothing to Hide

If you have nothing to hide, why do you care whether the government records your phone calls, texts, and internet use?

http://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html

Sulfur Dioxide

There's usually a little sulfur in coal, more in some regions than other. When you burn coal, the sulfur is burned along with it and the gas sulfur dioxide is formed. That's where the horizontal yellow clouds near some power plants come from on a calm day.

When sulfur dioxide dissolves in water, SO₂ becomes H₂SO₄, or sulfuric acid. When it rains, the sulfur dioxide in the air is typically changed to sulfuric acid, and comes down with the rain. If there's enough, it can affect the acidity of surface water. This is called acid rain.

Exhaust scrubbers in power plants and low sulfur diesel have reduced sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S. to levels near those of 1900. In China, that's not quite the case.

Even in the last 10 years the sulfur dioxide levels in the U.S. have dropped significantly.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87182

Science Breakthrough of the Year

CRISPR, a genome-editing technology that has been progressing rapidly in the last three years, was named Science’s Breakthrough of the Year. CRISPR is a technique that can be used to edit and manipulate the DNA of any organism-crops, livestock, and even humans. It can allow scientists to control gene expression and selectively turn genes on or off.

Two striking examples-the creation of a long-sought “gene drive” that could eliminate pests or the diseases they carry, and the first deliberate editing of the DNA of human embryos-debuted to headlines and concern. Each announcement roiled the science policy world. The embryo work (done in China with nonviable embryos from a fertility clinic) even prompted an international summit to discuss human gene editing.

Crash Test

Newer cars are much safer! This test compares a 1959 Chevy with a 2009 Chevy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

Pictures of Today!

Quandary Peak (upper right), 11/28/15
(Josh, Gill, and Kiran)

Quandary from the Top, 1/12/16

Colorado Flower, 7/27/15
(more pictures)

Tricia's Laptop, 11/14/15

Snowplows, 11/25/15

Roosters, 12/12/15

Water, 12/28/15

Water and Snow, 12/27/15

Little House on the Prairie, 1/10/16

Windy, 1/11/16

Alien Giants, 1/14/16

Giant Footprints, 1/14/16

Strang Bridge, 9/12/15

Lindsey Mayes Bridge, 1/18/16

Step carefully.

Something's missing...

It fell into the river!

Accomplishment!

The End

Saturday, April 04, 2015

More Junkmail from Bob, #231

SpaceX Pictures

SpaceX is a is a relatively new rocket company, founded in 2002 and carrying payloads into space since 2009. They've been competing successfully with Boeing, Lockheed, Ariane, and Russia. The SpaceX launch vehicles have been privately developed from the ground up, and do not rely on cold war missile technology.

      http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/spacex-preparing...

SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently announced that their launch and space photos would be freely available to the public, and put them on Flickr. However, the Creative Commons license on Flickr had some restrictions on commercial use. After some back and forth, Flickr and Creative Commons added a Public Domain license, and SpaceX now has their photos on Flickr under the public domain. Just like this Junkmail, you can copy the heck out of them!

      https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacexphotos

      https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Air Travel

Airless travel, too. Barry Wilmore, Alexander Samokutyaev, Elena Serova flew into Kazakhstan a few weeks ago. They came from space. They were on the Space Station almost six months.

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/revel-in-the-be...

Adware, Malware, Viruses, and Trojans

The definitions are of these terms nebulous, ill-defined, and changing, so I'll skip that part. They all refer to software inadvertently installed on your computer that does things you don't want it to.

You can acquire malware from a browser, email, or, occasionally, directly from the source:

      http://rubicite.com

      http://microgsd.com/RoadArchitect.aspx

Actually, these are the websites of a couple of my toddlers. They're probably clean. But what about gmail? A few days ago an Egyptian company called MCS Holdings issued some invalid electronic security certificates that allowed people to set up fake web sites for several Google domains. This, in turn, allows people to intercept traffic meant for the Google sites and grab usernames, passwords, and other information.

      http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/google-warns-of...

Google responded by removing the Chinese certificate authority (who MCS used to get the bogus certificates) from its list of trusted certificate issuers in Chrome and other Google products. Firefox will be following suit when version 37 is released. This is actually a pretty big deal, because a lot of banks e-commerce sites will not be accessible by their customers.

      http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/google-chrome-w...

You can also get malware by installing an application.

When you get an new application for your computer, you might pay money for it. If it's a free application such as Photo Mud or Chrome, it might be just fine. Or, instead of the user, you might be the product.

Many free applications track your usage and sell the data to marketers. That's how they make their money to fund product development (or, more often, product acquisition). This usually isn't such a big deal, because the marketing companies promise never to sell or release any personally identifiable data to third parties.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/despite-priv...

Sometimes the applications serve advertisements. This is distracting, and can bog down your internet connection. If you want to kill the ads from an application that does this, you can cut it off from the internet using the Windows Firewall (or another firewall, if you prefer).

Sometimes a legitimate application has adware or malware included in its installation file. It can be originally packaged that way, but often a download site will repackage the installation to include malware with the legitimate installation. It may be possible, but not obvious, how to opt out of these additional "free tools".

They do this to make money on your clicks. The majority of malware installed this way is used to get you to click on a link and go to a web site. The target site may legit, it may be a "click farm", or it may be a less friendly site that uses a Windows (or iOS or Android) vulnerability to add your computer to its botnet.

Once in a while, a computer manufacturer is kind enough to install malware for you at no additional charge.

These uninvited guests to your computer can be difficult to remove. Here's a process for Windows:

1. Press the Windows key and enter "Uninstall a Program", sort by installation date, and uninstall the ones you don't like that were installed the same time as your application. This will usually do the job, but not always.

1a. (You can skip this step if you want. It's a good shortcut if you're familiar with the Windows Task Manager and processes.) Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc and look at processes. Get rid of the bad ones. You can Google any questionable processes.

2. Adware frequently uses browser add-ons and extensions. To uninstall these, you can go to Settings, Extensions (Chrome), or Tools, Add-Ons, Extensions (Firefox) and get rid of what you don't like. You can just disable them if you're not sure. Google has recently banned about 200 adware Chrome extensions that they considered to be ill-behaved.

3. You can scan your computer with MalwareBytes (the free version) to get rid of any leftover malware. Malwarebytes occasionally gets a false positive, so just Quarantine (instead of deleting) the offending files until you're sure.

4. If nothing else works, you can use Combofix. I've never had it fail. It has a lot of warnings about making backups before you start, and requires some system restarts, but I've never had it kill a computer. It will get rid of persistent viruses, too, with the possible exception of some of the NSA's jewels. Reformatting the hard drive won't even remove these, unless you do a low-level format.

In the 1980's, before the Internet and Windows, we used to sell PC hardware. Once we got in a batch of hard drives infected with a variant of the Jerusalem Virus. It took a while to figure out where that was coming from! They required a low-level format, although that was not such a big deal at the time.

Occasionally you read about a site that has been "compromised", with their user names and other information stolen. You might wonder how many people have your email address or user information from these occurences. I might, too.

Luckily, we can go to haveibeenpwned.com to find out. They collect "harvested" illicit data, and you can their site search the database for your information. It will even tell you which sites you information was taken from, if any.

      https://haveibeenpwned.com/

If you're on the list, you might need to change a password.

Formula E

The Tesla P85D is a fast electric car. It can go 0-60 in 3.2 seconds. That's fast!

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/09/tesla-d-awd-driver-a...

Tesla now has a charging station at Arby's in Limon, Colorado. I saw this one night and couldn't figure out what it was for a while.

You can now race electric cars, in the Formula E series.

They're quiet! Check the video at the bottom of this link.

      arstechnica.com/cars/2015/03/racing-goes-electric...

      http://www.fiaformulae.com/

The batteries in Formula E cars are restricted in size and power. The cars are allowed to use significantly higher power in qualifying runs.

The batteries currently last only half the race. The race car standards make it impractical to change batteries, and charging a batter that big in a few seconds is not really practical (yet). Since it takes two batteries to finish the race, each driver changes cars in the middle of the race. That seems a little strange.

There's an electric car entered in this year's Pike's Peak race, too:

      http://www.electricautosport.com/2015/04/worlds-first-1...

I think electric cars are pretty cool. I might have to get one when they go farther and charge faster.

April Fool?

After years of NSA hacking and eavesdropping across the globe, the U.S. has threatened anybody else who does the same. On April Fool's Day.

      https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/04/01/our-latest-t...

Don't worry. The NSA is going on the offensive.

      http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/21/ns...

It's actually a little more serious that I'm letting on. According to the new rules, Wikileaks may be considered a terrorist organization because they published information on the TPP trade agreement.

The U.S. Government has kept the trade agreement secret during negotiations for "reasons of national security." Even so, the government calls the TPP a transparent and open agreement. In fact, it will infringe on free internet and should not be implemented, in my opinion.

Guardian’s publication of contractors’ involvement in NSA hacking could also define the news organization as a terrorist organization, subject to NSA hacking, water boarding, and free flights under the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

      https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150401/17284130517/...

Software Updates

Most people agree that it's a good idea to keep Windows or other operating systems up to date. Some applications should also be regularly updated, such as web browsers. Other applications provide updates in order to facilitate user data collection and advertising. These are not so important to update.

Many applications try to do automatic updates, whether you want them to or not. Some give you the option during installation, but others sneak it in, mentioning only in the EULA. I do not like this. If I want an application to update itself on my computer, I'll tell it when and how to do it.

It slows my computer down significantly when a bunch of applications are trying to update at once, particularly whenever I have a slow internet connection. I regularly disable the auto update features of most of my PC software. I say regularly, because some applications reverse my option settings and begin their auto-updates without my permission, a behavior I consider highly rude.

On March 13 German minor-league pro basketball team ran into a problem with Windows updates (and probable some others) slowing their computer's boot time. It took almost 2 hours to finish the updates. This computer happened to be the laptop that handled the scoreboard. This happened to be just before a game. The game was delayed 25 minutes. The opponents protested, resulting in the home team being demoted into a lower division of the minor leagues.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/03/german-pro-bask...

You can check which applications run automatically on your Windows computer by running msconfig (hit the Windows key and enter msconfig), and look at the startup tab. On mine, I have disabled automatic updaters from Adobe, Apple, Installshield, iTunes, Quicktime, and Spotify, among others. Some auto updaters are also activated in the Windows Task Scheduler. Others, such as Adobe Acrobat Updater, run as services and are a little harder to figure out.

Cell Phone Encryption

The FBI wants you to encrypt your cell phone, except when the encryption is secure. The FBI web site recommends that consumers encrypt and password protect cell phones.

Well, I'm exaggerating a bit. They used to recommend that. The FBI recently announced the end of civilization as we know it if Apple and Google don't provide a "back door" that the government can use to access encrypted cell phones. The FBI unsurprisingly referred to the traditional three evils commonly used to generate public outrage and drum up support for the next infringement of personal freedom: child pornography, drug dealers, and terrorists. (I could go for it if they'd promise to get rid of spammers and patent trolls.)

The FBI has also, mysteriously, removed that part of their web site recommending consumer encryption of cell phones. Maybe the FBI boss doesn't realize that things on the web are generally available forever. He should read up on the Streisand effect.

The FBI boss also must not realize that if there is a backdoor in any security system, it will inevitably be used by the same people the security is there to block in the first place. Any back door is a security breach waiting to happen.

The former head of Homeland Security had never used email. Apparently the present FBI director has similar technical experience and acumen.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/28/th...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2014/...

Drones

"Drone" is a stupid name, in my opinion, unless you're referring to male social insects. It's a name for an unmanned aerial vehicle, including remote-control and autonomous airplanes, helicopters, quadcopters, and other aircraft sans humans.

That includes things like the large Global Hawk, Predator, Reaper, and other military unmanned aircraft, ...

...as well as small quadcopters and airplanes:

The small "drones" or UAVs differ from regular RC models in that they are autonomous. You can program them and tell them where to go before the flight. And they're cheap! A few hundred dollars...

      http://www.troybuiltmodels.com/category/UAVF/Fixed-Wing...

      http://www.aeromao.com/

... or a thousand or five for a top-of-the-line "aerial imaging platform":

      http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1089995-REG/dji_c...

      http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1106908-REG/3d_ro...

However, if you work for federal security agencies such as the FBI (the FBI's primary function is no longer law enforcement), you might spend $2.1 million on a couple dozen non-functional UAVs. But if you ignore the fact that they don't work, it's only 100 times more than the market rate.

A few weeks ago I competed in a triathlon in Florida. I saw a quadcopter flying around. Here's the video. It's impressive. A few years ago this would have required a helicopter and been cost prohibitive for an amateur triathlon like this.

Before long, someone will figure out that they can put a small pistol on one of these and shoot into a crowd. The press and government over-reaction will be mind-blowing. We should enjoy the UAVs while we can.

Making Money

With modern technology, it is possible to print your own money. High quality counterfeit dollars have been in wide circulation since 1990. The U.S. and other countries have been changing currency to stay ahead of the counterfeiting technology, with plastic strips, magnetic ink, and 3D visualizations. The $100 bills issued in 2013 are pretty hard to duplicate.

      http://www.newmoney.gov/uscurrency/100.htm

If I decide to get into the counterfeiting business, where will I sell my fake money? On the internet, of course!  Internet crime forums ("darknet" forums) that market stolen credit cards, botnets, and malware kits have recently seen a lot of activity in counterfeit money.

      http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/08/counterfeit-u-s-cash...

In fact, counterfeit money was even advertised on Reddit for a little while. The guy advertising didn't last long.

A 27-year-old guy from Texas named Ryan was arrested a few days ago in Uganda for counterfeiting millions of U.S. dollars. Apparently, the U.S. government isn't worried about getting custody of Ryan. They're happy to see him enjoy the hospitality of a Ugandan prison, and will prosecute him when and if he's released. It's an interesting story.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/how-a-3-85-l...

Ryan was identified using facial recognition against his Texas driver's license. Only a few years ago, facial recognition technology didn't work well enough to be practical, and I was known to poo-poo its use. Technology marches on!

A guy from Florida named Jose faked his death in 2013, but was arrested on March 21. When you apply for a passport, your photo gets run through a database of photos to make sure you're who you claim to be. Jose, going by the name Ernest, had applied for a passport and the computer matched the new passport photo to his original face.

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/florida-man-...

Speaking of money, the Secret Service interrogation of Steve Wozniak is pretty funny. It took place sometime around 2000.

      http://archive.woz.org/letters/general/78.html

Newegg and Patents

I do a considerable amount of whining and complaining about patent trolls. Newegg does more than complain. I should give them more of my business.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-c...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/shopping-car...

Computer Programs

A computer program is a set of logical instructions for a computer to execute, or run. Software is a name for computer programs, as opposed to hardware, which is the name for the chips, wires, circuit boards, and other parts of a computer that you can touch.

System software refers to programs that manage a computer system, and application software refer to programs that end-users use to do end-user work. Application software has been shortened over the years to "applications" or just "apps".

Now there are telephones with more computing power than mainframe computers of the 1970s. They also run computer programs. Application software on a phone or tablet is now called an app. Application software on a desktop or laptop computer is now called an application.

Of course, there are lots of variations on these ill-defined terms and they'll probably change in the future. It makes it hard for software developers to explain what they're selling, and hard for users to understand what they're buying.

Microsoft has gone a little off the deep end of the software naming precipice, at least when Mr. Balmer was in charge (until February 2014).

Microsoft decreed that, with Windows 8, their modern applications than run on pads and phones would hereafter be referred to as Metro. When that style was not appreciated by the masses, they decided to rename it rather than fix it. So Metro became Windows-8 Style. When they realized Windows 8 was getting a less than warm reception, they changed the name of their applications from Window-8 Style to Modern. And then to Windows Store. And then to Universal.

Under the new Microsoft boss, Mr. Nadella, Windows software for desktops and laptops is called Windows desktop applications, while tablet and phone software is called Windows apps. These names are recognizable and make a sense, so you can expect them to change soon.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/d...

Microsoft under Balmer seemed intent on doing what Balmer wanted, regardless of customer wants, needs, and expectations. This could be why Microsoft has such a small piece of the phone and tablet market. Windows still runs on about 90% of all desktops and laptops, although there has been some decline in their market share.

Microsoft has recently been making inroads in the tablet market with the new Surface tablets. They've improved a lot over the past year.

Turing Award

There have been several recent books and a few movies about Alan Turing, the guy who led the team that broke the German Enigma encryption in World War II. He's pretty popular at the moment.

The Associate for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. Despite "Machinery" in the name, the ACM is actually more involved in software and computer science than in hardware and computer engineering.

The ACM began offering the Turing Award in 1966 for outstanding achievements in Computer Science. With Google's financial assistance, this year the cash prize of the Turing Award went up from $250,000 to $1,000,000. The award went to Michael Stonebreaker for his work in database systems.

http://amturing.acm.org/

http://amturing.acm.org/byyear.cfm

Pictures of Today!

There are plenty of photos and videos on the internet that are better than these, but these are here because a few people like them. Mostly, my mom. But she's important.

As usual, you're free to copy these for anything you want. Except for the music I pirated on one of the videos. While it was recorded in 1966, and as a sound recording doesn't fall under federal copyright protection, you will have to deal with the ghost of George Szell if you abuse his performance.

Giant Sequoyah, Queenstown, NZ

Kiwi Bee

New Zealand Hiker

On top of Sharks Tooth

The north end of New Zealand

The yacht "Black Magic" won the America's Cup for New Zealand in 1995.

Lots of NZ photos: http://xpda.com/nz2015/

Gill and Melinda cross country skiing in Colorado. Gill is hiding behind a tree.

More Colorado photos at http://xpda.com/co30/ and http://xpda.com/co31/

Mount Katahdin, high point of Maine. Six of us climbed in late February.

More photos from Katahdin: http://xpda.com/katahdin2015/

I drove home by way of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.