Curtis Houck
@CurtisHouck
.@RichardEngel: "This was a humbling day for the United States, a day of humility for a world superpower. Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires...The [U.S.] fought [there] for 20 yrs and is now...withdrawing...in defeat. This is a difficult moment for the military"

.@RichardEngel: "The world's greatest military couldn't hold on and ultimately, handed the country back to the same extremists that they had toppled just a few weeks after 9/11...The next Osama bin Laden might be watching what is happening right now[.]" //

“But if you’d step back and look at what is going on, this is the United States, after 20 years. This war used to be called Operation Enduring Freedom, and it’s turned out not to be enduring and they’re not leaving a society that is free,” he said in the below clip. “It is only free according to what the Taliban says will be free, the Taliban promises that it will be free.”

“You could also look at this as a tremendously humiliating – moment of American humiliation leaving, forced to leave on the Taliban’s clock and with the Taliban’s good graces,” Engel continued. “So tactically, it makes sense, but I’m not sure how history – I think history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States.” //

As Engel noted in his reports, we toppled the Taliban in a matter of weeks after 9/11. And now, after 20 years, in a matter of weeks, the Taliban has control again and it’s because of the way the exit was done.

Hurricane Ida will go down as one of the most powerful storms to make landfall in the United States. On the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans was struck by this storm and left broken yet again. //

Bobby Jindal came in and, to his credit, it appears he did fight to get the levee systems of New Orleans in working order, and some improvements were made. But the city itself had made very few changes to allow for the residents to be ready to move in the event of another disaster. Even after sixteen years, it appears the only thing that changed was the levee systems. Everything else failed again.

But the biggest failure of all seems to be a lack of an evacuation plan. //

Gabe Hoffman
@GabeHoff
Contraflow = both sides of major highways in same direction, for storm evacuations

Louisiana 2021:

didn't implement contraflow before Hurricane Ida, many people are stuck in traffic jams trying to evacuate RN

20 years ago in Florida:

@JebBush pioneered a contraflow system
5:59 PM · Aug 28, 2021

As events unfold in Afghanistan with thousands of Americans and allies tragically needing rescue, 245 years ago this week, an American general successfully executed an extraordinary rescue–an “American Dunkirk”—that saved the Revolution. Washington’s army faced potential annihilation–all could have been lost. However, leadership, daring, and initiative transformed that critical moment into one of the greatest evacuations in history. //

The extraordinary story of how a small unit of men from Marblehead, Massachusetts transported Washington’s men and matériel across the East River under the cover of darkness is now told in the new bestselling book, The Indispensables: Marblehead’s Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware. The book is a Band of Brothers-style treatment of this unique regiment, a largely unknown group of Americans who changed the course of history.

Q:

I've written a script to wipe all disks on any machine that netboots. It works fairly well, but I'd like to add verification of the final "zeroing" pass, and only shutdown the machines if the drive reads all zeros successfully, and otherwise show the error. I'm also trying to both minimize dependencies on ports if possible (currently only using pv(1) to show status), and make the final "read" pass perform quickly (the write passes are already fast).

However, I can't figure out what the best way to do this is. It seems the easiest way is to use another port, security/bcwipe, and run it with bcwipe -bfmz /dev/adaX, which both zeros the disks and verifies the write, but this requires another port. I've looked at other, simpler ways of doing using basic system utilities, like od(1), but then the disks read slowly (about 1/3rd of the speed dd(1) will do with bs=1m). I suspect this is because you can't specify a buffer size for od, and it's reading small chunks. //

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adaX bs=1m

A:

In this particular case I would write a tiny C program for this purpose. The C compiler is in the base system, so you don't need to install additional ports.

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define BLOCKSIZE (128 * 1024)
uint64_t data[(BLOCKSIZE + 7) / 8];

int
main (void)
{
int inbytes, i;

    while ((inbytes = read(STDIN_FILENO, data, BLOCKSIZE)) > 0)
            for (i = 0; i < (inbytes + 7) / 8; i++)
                    if (data[i])
                            exit (1);
    if (inbytes < 0) {
            perror (NULL);
            exit (2);
    }
    return 0;

}

Save that source code as “testzero.c”.

Then compile it like this: cc -O2 -o testzero testzero.c

That'll give you a binary named “testzero”. Put it somewhere in your $PATH so your shell can find it, or type “./testzero” to run it from the current directory. The program reads a file (or device) from standard input and exits with code 0 if the file is all zeros, so you can use it in a shell script like this:

Code:

if testzero < /dev/ada0; then
echo "allright, disk is zero"
shutdown -p now
else
echo "something went wrong!"
yes | tr -c x '\a' # call attention
fi

Note that I have set the block size to 128 KB, not 1 MB. In my (limited) testing it was faster with 128 KB (actually, as fast as the speed of the physical disk). This may depend on your kernel settings, CPU cache or file system parameters, though. YMMV, so you might want to test different values. If you change it in the source code, don't forget to recompile the program. //

For simplicity, the program reads the file or device from standard input, so there is no reason to parse the argument vector, so I just specified it as “void” instead of the usual “int argc, char *argv[]”. Besides, the compiler issues a warning if you specify argc and argv without actually using them. Note that you could omit the formal parameter completely (i.e. “()” instead of “(void)”), but I think it's a good habit to specify “void” for documentation purposes, so the author's intention is clear. For similar reasons the return type is specified as “int” – actually that wouldn't be necessary because int is the default return type (not void!). In other words: You can just write “main ()” instead of “int main (void)” if you want – both mean exactly the same, but I adhere to the Python motto “explicit is better than implicit”.

Just in case someone wonders: There is no difference (performance-wise) between using standard input vs. opening a file specified on the command line. Just make sure that the shell opens the file directly and passes it to the program (using redirection syntax with “<”). Do not use something like “cat /dev/foo | testzero” because this will create an additional process for the cat command and connect it with a pipe to the testzero command – the pipe may reduce the performance considerably. (NB: The cat command is often abused; I guess that 99% of uses of cat in shell scripts are superfluous, sometimes even harmful.) //

I made a few modifications to his code to report where the error lies if it finds one, but otherwise this does appear to read at the maximum disk speed. Thanks!

Edit: If anyone is interested here's the code after the changes I made. It's also a bit more verbose.
C:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define BLOCKSIZE (128 * 1024)
uint64_t data[(BLOCKSIZE + 7) / 8];

int main(void) {
int inbytes;
uint64_t intotal = 0;

while((inbytes = read(STDIN_FILENO, data, BLOCKSIZE)) > 0) {
    inbytes = (inbytes + 7) >> 3;

    for(int i = 0; i < inbytes; i++) {
        if(data[i]) {
            intotal = (intotal + i) << 3;    // Convert back to byte offset
            printf("Non-zero byte detected at offset range: %lu to %lu\n", intotal, intotal + 7);
            exit(1);
        }
    }

    intotal += inbytes;
}

if(inbytes < 0) {
    perror(NULL);
    exit(2);
}

printf("Disk is fully zeroed.\n");
return 0;

}

smartctl - Control and Monitor Utility for SMART Disks

SYNOPSIS
smartctl [options] device

DESCRIPTION
smartctl controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into most ATA/SATA and SCSI/SAS hard drives and solid-state drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests. smartctl also supports some features not related to SMART. This version of smartctl is compatible with ACS-3, ACS-2, ATA8-ACS, ATA/ATAPI-7 and earlier standards (see REFERENCES below).

IO CREST SI-PEX40138 Internal 4 Port Non-Raid SATA III 6GB/S with M.2 B-Key 22x42 Pci-E X4 Controller Card for Desktop PC Support SSD and HDD with Low Profile Bracket. JMB585 Chipset

$55

• Connect four SATA drives and ONE M.2 B-Key SSD to any free PCI-E x4 Slot, providing up to 1700 MB/s Speed.
• Plug and play supported, No additional software installation or setting required.
• Can support port Multiplier that is not in a RAID configuration.
• Complies with PCI Express base Specification Revision 3.1a. Compatible with SATA hard drives & Solid state drives and computer systems with SATA controllers.
• This card is only design for storage Use only, can not Boot any OS/ system drives. Backed by syba 3 Year hassle-free warranty and lifetime customer service.
• Important Note: only work with PCI-E slot, not for PCI slot.

He's a tall, lanky Southerner with a penchant for cars, and, of all things, lizards. He has a polite face and an eager-to-please demeanor. His teaches Sunday school with his wife. Ed Bolian is the kind of guy you might meet on an airplane and forget before you picked up your bags – with one exception: he just became the fastest man ever to drive across the United States.

That's right: Alex Roy's familiar cross-country driving record, set in his now-famous LeMans Blue 2000 BMW M5 during the fall of 2006, no longer stands. It was allegedly broken by a three-man team consisting of Ed, a co-driver, and a passenger, in a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG.

First, we should address the term "broken". When I think of a record that's been "broken," I imagine beating something by a second, or a minute, or maybe a few RBIs. If what Ed says is true, the record wasn't broken: it was shattered. In 2006, Alex and company completed the transcontinental journey in 31 hours and 4 minutes. Two weeks ago, Ed and his crew say they managed to do the deed in 28 hours and 50 minutes. Google says it takes 40 and a half. //

All of this started in 1933 when a crazy man from Indiana named Edwin "Cannonball" Baker drove from New York to Los Angeles in 53 hours and 30 minutes in some car called the Blue Streak. No one knows Baker's motivation for the run, but his 50 mph average was highly impressive, considering the interstate system was not yet built. The record went unbeaten for 40 years.

In the 1970s, noted auto racer and Car and Driver contributor Brock Yates conceived the "Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash" – also called the Cannonball Run – to protest highway speed limits. I won't bore you with the details, but the record was slowly whittled down over the next decade until Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough teamed up in 1979 to make the trek in 32 hours and 51 minutes behind the wheel of a Jaguar XJS.

A new pre-print Israeli study has found that people with natural immunity to COVID-19 could be 13 times less likely to contract the respiratory virus than those who were solely vaccinated against the disease.

Conducted by researchers at Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University, the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study found that when comparing individuals previously infected with the virus and those that received two jabs of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, those with natural infection saw greater protection against the delta variant and breakthrough infection.

“SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021,” the study read. “The increased risk was significant for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold increased risk for symptomatic disease.”

The analysis also found that solely vaccinated individuals “were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.”

The study ultimately concluded that “natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity” and that “individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.”

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1

Psaki was asked Friday about members of the Marine Corps criticizing top generals on social media.

Al Jazeera English correspondent Kimberly Halkett asked, “Does [the president] believe he was given bad advice? And will he ask for any resignations of his generals given the high cost of American and Afghan lives?”

“No to both of those questions,” Psaki responded.

So that means he’s endorsing all the actions, refusing to cashier anyone. He’s explicitly endorsed the decisions. It’s all on him now //

As I pointed out previously, this mess of this withdrawal was intentional by Biden. He always intended to just pull everything out and absorb whatever the consequences were, because he didn’t think there would be a lot of consequences. “F**k that,” he said about obligations to allies, others “got away with it” when it came to Vietnam. Indeed, he’s so old, he was one of the people responsible for the Saigon failure, as well. He had no moral compass then either.

That’s been the whole problem here. The “empathetic” old “unifier” is and always has been a mean old guy who doesn’t really care about anyone other than himself.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/08/17/bidens-afghanistan-debacle-may-have-been-intentional-n428183

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/08/17/youll-never-guess-who-was-also-involved-in-the-1975-debacle-in-saigon-n428530

Accumulating evidence supports ending isolation and precautions for adults with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 using a symptom-based strategy. This update incorporates recent evidence to inform the duration of isolation and precautions recommended to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to others, while limiting unnecessary prolonged isolation and unnecessary use of laboratory testing resources. This interim guidance is based upon information available to date and will be updated as new information becomes available. //

Summary of Key Findings

1. Concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in upper respiratory specimens decline after onset of symptoms. (39,56,61,63,64,66)
2. The likelihood of recovering replication-competent virus also declines after onset of symptoms. For patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, replication-competent virus has not been recovered after 10 days following symptom onset. (1,8,31,36,42,61,66) Recovery of replication-competent virus between 10 and 20 days after symptom onset has been reported in some adults with severe COVID-19; some of these cases were immunocompromised. (56) However, in this series of patients, it was estimated that 88% and 95% of their specimens no longer yielded replication-competent virus after 10 and 15 days, respectively, following symptom onset. Detection of sub-genomic SARS-CoV-2 RNA or recovery of replication-competent virus has been reported in severely immunocompromised patients (e.g., patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and acquired hypogammaglobulinemia, lymphoma and immunochemotherapy, hematopoietic stem-cell transplant, chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or AIDS) beyond 20 days, and as long as 143 days after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result. (2,6,7,14,74)
3. In a large contact tracing study, no contacts at high risk of exposure developed infection if their exposure to a case patient started 6 days or more after the case patient’s infection onset. (12)
   Recovered patients can continue to have SARS-CoV-2 RNA detected in their upper respiratory specimens for up to 12 weeks after symptom onset. (31,33,34) Investigation of 285 “persistently positive” adults, which included 126 adults who had developed recurrent symptoms, found no secondary infections among 790 contacts to these case patients. Efforts to isolate replication-competent virus from 108 of these 285 case patients were unsuccessful. (31)

A little-discussed but transformative patient protection policy put into place by the Trump administration is proving to be an extremely effective tool in unwinding the tangled mess of American medical pricing. Under the orders, hospitals must provide the federal government with records on all the prices they negotiate with private insurers.

Some hospitals banded together to sue the administration (they lost…twice), and the insurers’ trade association wrote a 57-page letter to the government calling the Transparency Rule “unconstitutional” and insinuating that too much transparency would not be helpful to the average health consumer. //

When The New York Times decided to take a deep dive into just what compliance with the policy was revealing, they discovered there may be good reason for medical power brokers to keep their pricing systems hidden from the public eye.

But data from the hospitals that have complied hints at why the powerful industries wanted this information to remain hidden.

It shows hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services: procedures as simple as an X-ray or a pregnancy test.

And it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world’s largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers. In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all.

As an example, NYT went on to list the comparative costs of a standard colonoscopy at the Mississippi Medical Center: $1463 with a Cigna plan, $2144 with Aetna, and a stunning $782 with no insurance at all.

Naturally, those who follow the logic of free markets understand that subsidies always increase cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/22/upshot/hospital-prices.html?smid=tw-share

DoNotPay is excellent at fighting back against robocalls with a great feature called RoboRevenge. The idea is to hit the fraudsters where it hurts the most—their wallets. With the help of DoNotPay, you can get up to $3000 from the annoying spam callers.

You will need to engage with the caller, though. If you get a robocall that hangs up, you can expect another call to come your way within days, if not hours. That’s the opportunity for some sweet robocall revenge.

The process is easy because DoNotPay does all the hard work for you. All you need to do is:

1. Log on to DoNotPay via your web browser when you get the call
2. Choose the RoboRevenge option
3. Create a free virtual credit card
4. Provide the card details to the caller (rest assured that they will ask for it)
5. Wait for DoNotPay to obtain the caller’s details (it will happen as soon as they try to make a transaction)
6. Follow the instructions provided by DoNotPay to start a robocall lawsuit and get up to $3000

There is nothing dangerous or illegal about RoboRevenge. The DoNotPay virtual credit card is just a card number that is not tied to your bank account or any other funding source. It only appears like a real card to the caller.

Since calling you is illegal without written consent, the caller is already breaking the law. Even if your number is not on the Do Not Call List, the app will register you automatically. The Do Not Call List registration cannot expire, so if you are registered, your number will stay there until you request otherwise. The only issue is that lawsuits can only be made against callers and companies that are calling from the States.

Bill Hemmer asked what the former S.O.S. thought of how Biden laid out the deal he inherited from the Trump team. Pompeo laid it out in clear terms…

Bill, as for the deal we were very clear from the beginning with the Taliban we were negotiating with the Afghan government also we had to deal with them too, we weren’t just talking to the Taliban. We were clear with the Taliban, we had this understanding that you’re going to live up to it and we had a conditions-based withdrawal plan and we executed that. We whittled down from 15,000 to a little over 2500 troops and the last 13 months of our administration and we didn’t have a single American attack or an American killed and it wasn’t because of a piece of paper that was a set of understandings but it was because the Taliban understood that if they acted against Americans and took actions that were inconsistent with what they promised when they pushed on us in the Trump administration we responded with American power and American might. We made clear to the Taliban that deterrence was going to be maintained and the difference is with the Biden administration is that when the Taliban pushed they withdrew and showed weakness.

So how many Americans was that again? And she never answered if there was a plan past August 31. Assuming the numbers she’s saying today are correct, that means of the 105,000 people they claim to have evacuated, only 5400 were Americans, a little over five percent of the evacuees.

After numbers ranging from over 10,000 to up to 40,000 estimated Americans, the Biden team seemed to settle on the number of 6,000 Americans, claiming that’s the number they need to get out. That way they can claim they were actually successful. Except there will still be thousands stuck in Afghanistan. All their prior suggestions indicated that there were far more people.

So how many of the 105,000 people were SIV holders — the people who were also supposed to be getting high priority? The State Department can’t even say.

"I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, I demand accountability."

A reckoning will come for this catastrophe; military and political. For those of us who fought, it’s too much. //

Unfortunately, my colleague Streiff’s prediction came true — they just fired LTC. Scheller for what he said, and he likely knew he was risking his career to make that statement.

Scheller posted on Facebook, “I have been relieved for cause based on a lack of trust and confidence.”

Last year, a pipeline carrying compressed carbon dioxide mixed with hydrogen sulfide ruptured, engulfing the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, in a green haze, leaving many residents convulsing, confused, or unconscious. That explosion serves as a vivid warning about the risks posed by what could be the next generation of pipelines to crisscross the US, in a new investigation by HuffPost and the Climate Investigations Center. //

The story is a scathing investigation of the company, Denbury, that operates the pipeline, which did little to nothing to warn local officials and residents about the danger they faced, according to Zegart’s reporting. It’s also probably the closest thing to a PSA on the risks other communities could face if proposals to build out tens of thousands of miles of CO2 pipelines come to fruition.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gassing-satartia-mississippi-co2-pipeline_n_60ddea9fe4b0ddef8b0ddc8f

CDC initiated national surveillance of pregnancy-related deaths in 1986 because more clinical information was needed to fill data gaps about causes of maternal death. The first year of data reporting was 1987. //

In PMSS, a pregnancy-related death is defined as the death of a woman while pregnant or within 1 year of the end of pregnancy regardless of the outcome, duration, or site of the pregnancy — from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management. Pregnancy-related deaths as defined in PMSS generally do not include deaths due to injury. //

CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) reports the national maternal mortality rate: the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. A maternal death is defined as a death while pregnant or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes. This definition and timeframe are consistent with that used by the World Health Organization for reporting on maternal mortality rates. NVSS uses two pieces of information on the death record to identify maternal deaths — the pregnancy checkbox and the certified recording of the cause of death to assign maternal mortality ICD-10 codes. Identification of maternal deaths using automated processing of death records alone relies upon the death certifier accurately reporting causes of death related to pregnancy and pregnancy status. More information on NVSS maternal mortality coding is available.

Like NVSS, PMSS uses vital records for identification of deaths, including descriptions of causes of death and pregnancy status information on death records. Different from NVSS, PMSS further uses linkages of death records of women of reproductive age to birth and fetal death records within 1 year of the death, media searches, and reporting from public health agencies, health care providers and the public in the identification process. PMSS uses a time frame that includes deaths during pregnancy through 1 year after the end of pregnancy; this timeline allows evaluation of all deaths which might be pregnancy-related. In PMSS, deaths are reviewed by medical epidemiologists who perform an in-depth review of vital records and other data as available (e.g., medical records, autopsy reports) for each death to determine the pregnancy-related mortality ratio. These linkage and review processes by PMSS result in slower reporting than NVSS, but a more rigorous identification of deaths related to pregnancy.

Q:

The Mormon church claims to be the true church and yet there have been billions of people that have become Christian in the last 2,000 years based on what Jesus Christ did on that cross.

The Apostle Paul put it this way at 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, "Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, vs2, BY WHICH YOU ARE SAVED if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you have believed in vain, vs3, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, vs4, and that He was buried and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures."

So why do we need "Another Testament of Jesus Christ" when the first testament, i.e the Bible, (specifically the New Testament) has proven sufficient to save one's soul?

In fact, Jude 3 says, "Beloved while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints/holy ones."

Jude is urging Christians to struggle to defend the Faith. The Greek word "Epagonizesthai" comes from the fierce competition of the athletic field. Believers must fight with all their strength to preserve "the faith" which was handed down to them. "Hapax" means "once for all." The gospel is fixed, not to be revised or have somebody else with another "gospel/testament" show up.(Galatians 1:8-9).

A:

Mormonism teaches that salvation comes through Jesus Christ, like any Christian faith.

A:

What does Mormonism have to offer in regards to salvation that Jesus Christ had not already accomplished?

In some sense, nothing. The atonement of Jesus Christ is what saves us. Faith in Jesus Christ is what saves us. The scriptures, however many they may be, can only lead us to Christ but never save. An illiterate person can be saved. But in this sense you have to question what any denomination has to offer, or what the visible church had to offer that made it a good idea to establish one in the New Testament. Or even what 98% of the Bible "has to offer".

However, Jesus has also said that we need to be baptized (John 3:5). In his time, he gave his apostles authority to baptize in his name. Without this authority, a baptism is just going through the motions. We believe this authority was lost early in the church history and restored by angels who conferred this authority to Joseph Smith. So in that sense, the true church should have authority to perform ordinances that Christ described as necessary for salvation.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claims to be a restoration of the original church Christ founded. Literally the church of Jesus Christ. Whatever it was that having a church in the first place offered, is what "Mormonism offers".

In the end, you want something like this:

for i in {1..100}; do cp test.ogg "test$i.ogg"; done

Or, as an alternative

i=0
while (( i++ < 100 )); do
    cp test.ogg "test$i.ogg"
done

openssl rand -out sample.txt -base64 805306368

Alternatively, you could use /dev/urandom, but it would be a little slower than OpenSSL:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=sample.txt bs=1G count=1

Personally, I would use bs=64M count=16 or similar:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=sample.txt bs=64M count=16

//

Since, your goal is to create a 1GB file with random content, you could also use yes command instead of dd:

yes [text or string] | head -c [size of file] > [name of file]

Sample usage:

yes 'this is test file' | head -c 100KB > test.file