noainc
2 hours ago
"The situation might have already sunk Democrats’ chances for victory in 2022 and 2024."
In the pre 2020 elections, competency of administrations and public opinion had direct effects on election outcomes to varying degrees, depending on the level and sophistication of the fraud in each jurisdiction.
The sheer scale and brazen openess of the fraud in 2020 along with both political parties certifying and supporting the outcome has created a new dynamic. Both political parties, the DOJ, DOD and the public passively accept the manipulation of election outcomes on a national scale.
By the fall of 2022 there will undoubtedly be a new Covid strain, terrorist attack or combination of serious events to justify declaring an emergency and shifting the majority of voting to mail in.
The GOP will weed out outlier candidates that oppose Rino leadership in primaries or undermine conservative candidates in purple districts, and the overall control of the House of Representatives will be determined by those who count votes and certify elections, not the majority of voters themselves.
2020 was a watershed event, the ruling class can perpetuate uniparty rule going forward without the need to account for their incompetence, corruption and looting of our nations' industrial, technological and defense wealth.
The continuous outrage voiced by the GOP instead of meaningful action is just their drama queen act, they are impotent like eunuchs when it comes to using their power for rule of law and restoring the Republic.

Why?

What does the Biden administration gain from preventing American civilians and Afghan allies from being rescued by people like Montalvo and Mills? The answer lies in the nature of the entities responsible for extricating these individuals.

The fact of the matter is that these private individuals and organizations working to remove American civilians from danger are only doing so because Biden failed to evacuate them. If the president had done his job properly, there would be no need for private rescue efforts. It is yet another indicator that President Joe Biden has failed to handle this situation effectively.

Moreover, it is important to point out that if and when these private entities can finally get these individuals out of Afghanistan, it will represent quite an embarrassment for the White House. It is a humiliation that Biden’s team would rather avoid if possible.

However, the State Department’s stall tactics cannot work forever. The longer these people remain trapped in Kabul, the more danger they could face.

Der Firmensitz der ehemaligen Crypto AG im zugerischen Steinhausen produzierte jahrzehntelang Chiffriermaschinen. Der deutsche Auslandsnachrichtendienst BND und die US-amerikanische CIA kauften das Unternehmen 1970 heimlich auf. Sie veranlassten, dass vielen Staaten Maschinen mit einer schwächeren Verschlüsselung geliefert wurden, die von BND und CIA entschlüsselt werden konnten. Zuletzt war dort das Nachfolgeunternehmen Crypto International AG ansässig.

Rotor-based cipher machine - wanted item

HX-63 was an electromechanical rotor-based cipher machine, introduced in 1964 by Crypto AG in Zug (Switzerland). It features nine electrically wired permutations wheels, or rotors, that have more contacts than the 26 letters of the alphabet. It was patented by Boris Hagelin, and uses an operating principle that is very similar to that of the – also patented – American AFSAM-7 (KL-7).

The image on the right shows the HX-63, which is housed in a molded plastic enclosure. At the front right is the keyboard. The 9 cipher wheels are visible through a narrow window at the top.

The machine was developed during the 1950s, and is mentioned in reports filed by NSA crypto­grapher William Friedman in 1955 and again in 1957 [2]. It is likely though, that it was not finished before 1963, and that it was first sold in 1964 [A]. The first and only customer was the French Army, who ordered 12 units [4]. It is very likely that no more than 15 init were ever made.

Apart from the TKG-35, a joint development of Boris Hagelin and Dr. Edgar Gretener, the HX-63 was first and only rotor-based cipher machine that was ever built by Crypto AG. Around 1964, Crypto AG made the transition to electronic shift-register-based designs, and moved away from (electro)mechanical cipher machines. In 1970, the HX-63 was succeeded by the electronic H-460.

How this gadget figured in the shady Rubicon spy case //

In 1976, during a visit to the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, I saw an Enigma, the famous German World War II cipher machine. I was fascinated. Some years later, I had the good fortune of visiting the huge headquarters of the cipher machine company Crypto AG (CAG), in Steinhausen, Switzerland, and befriending a high-level cryptographer there. My friend gave me an internal history of the company written by its founder, Boris Hagelin. It mentioned a 1963 cipher machine, the HX-63.

Like the Enigma, the HX-63 was an electromechanical cipher system known as a rotor machine. It was the only electromechanical rotor machine ever built by CAG, and it was much more advanced and secure than even the famous Enigmas. In fact, it was arguably the most secure rotor machine ever built. I longed to get my hands on one, but I doubted I ever would. //

Most professional cryptographers have never heard of it. Yet it was so secure that its invention alarmed William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptanalysts ever and, in the early 1950s, the first chief cryptologist of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). After reading a 1957 Hagelin patent (more on that later), Friedman realized that the HX-63, then under development, was, if anything, more secure than the NSA's own KL-7, then considered unbreakable. During the Cold War, the NSA built thousands of KL-7s, which were used by every U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence agency from 1952 to 1968.

The reasons for Friedman's anxiety are easy enough to understand. The HX-63 had about 10^600 possible key combinations; in modern terms, that's equivalent to a 2,000-bit binary key. For comparison, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is used today to protect sensitive information in government, banking, and many other sectors, typically uses a 128- or a 256-bit key.

Boris Casear Wilhelm Hagelin (2 July 1892 - 7 September 1983) was a Russia-born Swedish engineer, inventor of cipher machines and businessman. He developed his first cipher machine in 1925, as a colleague of Arvid Gerhard Damm at A.B. Cryptograph in Stockholm (Sweden), of which his father, Karl Wilhelm Hagelin, and the Nobel family were investors. Hagelin eventually founded one of the largest and most successful manufacturers of cipher machines — Crypto AG.

Airbus is to implement a software update for its A330 aircraft following an incident in 2020 where all three primary flight computers failed during landing.

The result was a loss of thrust reversers and autobrake systems and the pilots having to use manual braking to bring the aircraft, a China Airlines A330-302, to a halt just 30 feet before the end of the runway. The incident happened at Taipei Songshan Airport on 14 June 2020. //

COM (Command) and MON (Monitor) is a standard protocol for Airbus Fly By Wire aircraft, with the monitor watchdog switching to another computer (command) in the event inputs diverge outside of acceptability. As our Airbus pilot put it: "Stick monkey (or autopilot) puts in command and clever Franco-German computer monitors input for correctness."

In this instance, the aircraft was shifting from flight to ground law as the pilot was applying the rudder (not particularly unusual, especially if there is crosswind on landing). Since the rudder deflects differently between ground and flight law a conflict occurred and the system was flagged as faulty. Then the same thing cascaded through the second and third FCPCs.

Airbus noted that it was the first triple fault at touchdown since the A330/A340 aircraft had entered service (and the electrical rudder-fitted family had put in 44.3m flight hours up to April 2020).

The immediate action taken was to remind operators of what to do in the event of such a triple failure. Longer term, however, is a software enhancement "to address the root cause."

According to the report, Airbus's modification, which is targeted to arrive by Q3 2022 for the A330-200 and A330-800, Q3 2023 for the A330-300, and mid 2024 for the A330-900, will include:

Decrease of the COM/MON asynchronism level for the flight/ground information treatment
Improvement of the COM/MON rudder order monitoring robustness in case of ground to flight and flight to ground transitions
Higher unitary monitoring robustness during such transitions
Avoid cascading/"domino's" effect that leads to several PRIM fault
The Register asked Airbus for its response to the report, but the aviation giant has yet to comment.

In a world of increasing automation, the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of keeping a human backup in the loop. ®

The impacted facility went online in December 2020 and features lithium-ion batteries from LG Energy Solution. Fire crews found scorched battery racks and melted wires.

The penultimate Boeing 747 from El Al’s scheduled passenger service to be retired and had been awaiting recycling in Tel Aviv ever since. “Tel Aviv-Jaffa” is our first official cooperation with El Al and we are thrilled to welcome the carrier to our Aviationtags family as exclusive license partner!

Go, get yours now!

The Independent System Operator for the New England power grid (ISO-NE) has produced a summary brief describing the challenges associated with Arctic Outbreak 2017-2018, a period of substantially below normal temperatures that lasted from Dec.25, 2017 until Jan. 8, 2018.

After describing the intensity of the cold wave with a number of graphs, charts, images and words, the brief made the following sobering statements about the fuel mix used to supply power demand.

Overall, there was significantly higher than normal use of oil
– Coal use also increased over normal use
Gas and Oil fuel price inversion led to oil being in economic merit and base loaded
As gas became uneconomic, the entire season’s oil supply rapidly depleted

If you use the ls -li command (the -i option shows the inode number), you’ll see that its link count is 2. The link count is after the file permission field. //

You should not create a hard link to a directory

You can create a soft link to a directory but when you try to create a hard link to a directory, you’ll see an error like this:

ln: newdir/test_dir: hard link not allowed for directory

Why are hard links not allowed for directory? It’s because using hard links for directory may break the filesystem. Theoretically, you can create hard link to directories using -d or -F option. But most Linux distributions won’t allow that even if you are root user.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/210741/why-are-hard-links-not-allowed-for-directories
//

Bonus Tip: How to find all hard links to a given file

If you see that a file has more than one link count, you may get curious about the other hard links associated with it.

One way to find that is using the inode number of the file. You can use the ls -i command or the stat command to get the inode number.

Once you have the inode number, you can see all the links associated with it using the find command.

find . -inum inode_number

An Italian pilot has set a world record by becoming the first to fly an aircraft through a tunnel. Dario Costa actually flew through two tunnels on a freeway in Turkey on Saturday to claim five Guinness records. Costa took off in the first tunnel and flew its length in an Extra 300 at about five feet AGL. He had about 15 feet of clearance on the wingtips and flew at about 140 knots.

Things got a little interesting when he broke out into the early morning sunshine to line up with the second tunnel, about 400 yards ahead. “Everything seemed to be happening so fast, but when I got out of the first tunnel, the plane started to move to the right because of the crosswinds and in my head, everything slowed down in that moment,” he said in a Red Bull-produced story. “I reacted and just focused on getting the plane back on the right path to enter the other tunnel.” He covered about 1.5 miles in 44 seconds. //

Brian Lloyd
September 6, 2021 at 12:23 pm
I guess it is a risk/reward thing. Sometimes you just want to shoot-the-moon. If you REALLY want to do it and the people affected agree, why not? It’s your life.

That being said, my father told me of the time he flew an SNJ through Hangar 1 at Moffett field. It was not long after WW-II and there were lots of young pilots with nothing to do and lots of avgas to do it with. Needless to say, many questionable things happened back then. (He looped the Golden Gate in an F8F too.) I liked best the end of his story which went, “As soon as I entered the hangar I realized this was a REALLY BAD idea. Unfortunately I was committed.”

I had a similar kind of decision to make. After flying around the world following Amelia Earhart’s route I had an airplane with which to fly Lindbergh’s route and set the speed record from NY to Paris. I would just have to fly over the N Atlantic in February to take advantage of a positive phase of the N Atlantic oscillation and get the winds that would let me shatter the old record. I had to consider the threats, i.e., engine failure and icing, consider the risk of possibly dying in the cold water of the Atlantic, and then balance that with the reward — a plaque on my wall that said I had the speed record.

I didn’t go.

COVID has revealed a lot over the last year and a half, but no country has been exposed more for its underlying culture of tyranny than Australia. Formerly a beacon of freedom, community, and beautiful landscapes, the land down under has morphed into a dystopian hellscape where the government blesses its residents with an hour of free time a day. The former prison colony has reverted to its roots.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the COVID internment camps now operating in Australia. Travelers, both foreign and domestic are forced into one of the various metal buildings to serve out their 14-day sentence. There, they remain “quarantined,” only to be delivered food by faceless operatives in full protective gear.

This per The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/australia/howard-springs-quarantine.html

Mills and his rescue team tried to get her out first through the Kabul airport, but the Taliban turned her back. They then considered the Mazar-i-Sharif route but then the planes weren’t cleared. So Mills and his team got her out through an overland route, through multiple attempts and sleight of hand like a “shell game” he said, just before the Taliban closed the checkpoint they went through.

The State Department’s ultimate role? They helped get them tourist visas after they had already gotten out across the border into another country. Big help. Both Rep. Markwayne Mullin and Rep. Ronny Jackson said the State Department’s claims were false, Mullin calling it a “flat out lie.”

So after creating this mess and putting people in this position, how offensive is this that they try to also steal claim for things they didn’t even do? These people have no shame.

Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software's NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub "creates absolutely useless garbage merges." //

First, he said the pull request should have been signed. "In a perfect world, it would be a PGP signature that I can trace directly to you through the chain of trust, but I've never actually required that," he said.

Second, he noted that the code in the pull request included merge commits done with the GitHub web user interface. "That's another of those things that I really don't want to see – github creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the github interfaces to merge anything," he said.

He added: "[G]ithub is a perfectly fine hosting site, and it does a number of other things well too, but merges is not one of those things."

Torvalds has complained about aspects of GitHub before, saying in 2012: "I don't do github pull requests. github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is also deficient and useless."

Note that the git request-pull command is different from the GitHub pull request feature. The ensuing forthright thread has more information on the subject.

There are quite a few Internet services today advertising absolute privacy from both hackers and government agencies, such as Signal for messaging. After Lavabit’s controversial shutdown, ProtonMail rose up to become the advertised email service of choice for privacy-minded users, especially those with secrets to keep. Sometimes, however, those secrets may run afoul of certain countries’ laws, which often leads to email service providers handing over data to identify users under investigation. While ProtonMail advertised privacy and security against such actions, it was apparently forced to cave in to such legal demands, leading to the arrest of climate change activists in France. //

Etienne - Tek
@tenacioustek
So @ProtonMail received a legal request from Europol through Swiss authorities to provide information about Youth for Climate action in Paris, they provided the IP address and information on the type of device used to the police //

Of course, ProtonMail was legally forced to hand over that data, but it didn’t get away without incurring the wrath of the Web. It was questioned why it possessed users’ IP addresses in the first place when it advertises that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default. ProtonMail founder and CEO Andy Yen explains that it only started logging the specific users’ IP addresses after it was legally forced to do so by Swiss authorities.

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners. //

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years. //

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly. //

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.

Primitive Technology
A SURVIVALIST'S GUIDE TO BUILDING TOOLS, SHELTERS, AND MORE IN THE WILD
By John Plant

From the craftsman behind the popular YouTube channel Primitive Technology comes a practical guide to building huts and tools using only natural materials from the wild.

John Plant, the man behind the channel, Primitive Technology, is a bonafide YouTube star. With almost 10 million subscribers and an average of 5 million views per video, John’s channel is beloved by a wide-ranging fan base, from campers and preppers to hipster woodworkers and craftsmen. Now for the first time, fans will get a detailed, behind-the-scenes look into John’s process. Featuring 50 projects with step-by-step instructions on how to make tools, weapons, shelters, pottery, clothing, and more, Primitive Technology is the ultimate guide to the craft. Each project is accompanied by illustrations as well as mini-sidebars with the history behind each item, plus helpful tips for building, material sourcing, and so forth. Whether you’re a wilderness aficionado or just eager to spend more time outdoors, Primitive Technology has something for everyone’s inner nature lover.

USS Almaack (AKA-10)

(Gareth Wiederkehr)

Approach 1: Using a cronjob to manually copy the certificate