Notices by Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)

@mekkaokereke In our Tesla people have trouble finding the electric door open buttons.

And even people who know that they are there can not often find the mechanical opener levers.

But if you are in the back seat you can kiss the world goodbye because there are no mechanical door opener levers, only the electronic buttons. (Oh yeah, there is a rear door release if you have a pry bar to open up one of the door panels.)

@glynmoody Uh, an ad giant *is* in control of a lot of TVs already - Google TV software runs on many brands and models of TVs, including one in our house.

(I have come to dislike Google TV - seems like glorified YouTube - and instead drive the TV from an external Roku to an HDMI port.)

@glynmoody OK, someone has to be the one to say it:

This is shocking!

@evacide I grew up in a family where the ethos was distinctly communist, of the kind where if someone was unfairly evicted and their furniture thrown on the street it became right and proper to help move that person and furniture right back in and tell the landlord to back off.

The maga ax is going to land soonest and heaviest on immigrants of all kinds, particularly those from Mexico and further south. I do not have a good sense of concrete acts that individuals or small groups can take to protect these people and families.

The ax is also landing on non-wealthy women. Are we going to have to create a new underground railroad to help them? We could try.

Well, I see that TFG is going to put Adolph Eichmann (oops, Steven Miller) into a position of great authority.

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

@glynmoody Check out "The Roads Must Roll"

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

@glynmoody Reminds me of a book by a guy named Heinlein.

I am here in Las Vegas helping my mother and it is as if she is under electronic assault with all of the text messages, phone calls, TV ads, and other election advocacy materials.

(Back home, in California, it is hard to tell that there is a national election in progress - one can only hear the silence of electronic crickets.)

@mcc My first interaction with Oracle happened around 1980. I was at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company, in Santa Monica). We had a Unix layer on top of VAX/VMS and Oracle sent a sales team to us to make sure that their database worked on that foundation. However, the Oracle people insisted that we modify and tune our OS code to make Oracle run better and faster than their competition. They wanted us to cheat for them.

Yet another sign that the R-party is going to actively overthrow the election:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/05/fake-electors-republicans

Wow, US medical insurance is so bad that today I discovered that my Medicare coverage was cancelled. How is that even possible?

It had everyone at the doctor's office wondering.

The answer is that I was on a Medicare Advantage plan - which I now know is something that every person should avoid. And they simply change me to a new medical provider - at a new location with new doctors and no records - without ever telling me.

You know who created the Medicare Advantage program - Republicans.

That's the same people who created various "health savings plans" in which those savings vanish at midnight each December 31.

I will be getting out of that "Advantage" plan at the next registration period, but that means that I'll be going the rest of the year without medical insurance, even though I am paying monthly for it.

Sheesh, the R-party really knows how to screw the public pooch.

@blogdiva Would they say that Clarence Thomas got his seat on SCOTUS via DEI or would they say he got it via an act of Senatorial affirmative action?

@GottaLaff One might thus wonder which Biden, the one Newsom met or the one the rest of us saw at the "debate, will be answering that 3am phone call made famous in that Hillary C. ad from 2008.

@msbellows Quite independent of the new found claims of immunity even from state criminal laws by El Presidente if I were in Marchan's shoes I would go for the maximum sentence of incarceration because it is well deserved, indeed even inadequate.

And yes, I'd ignore the SCOTUS decision because it that is a Federal court and this conviction is in a state court. As a judge in that state court I want my instructions to come from a higher-than-me court of my own state. Absent that, I'd follow NY state law.

Did TFG just call Biden "Brandon"?

I wonder if Biden is going to directly remind everyone that TFG killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with his Covid stupidity.

First words spoken to us when we arrived (by car, from New Mexico) in Texas this afternoon:

"Are you US citizens?"

@SteveBellovin @mattblaze Orders? Orders?! We don't need no stinkin' orders!!

By-the-way, I have an interesting book from the Union Signal Company about the history of railroad signals. It's really a book about Murphy's law - pretty much everything that could have possibly gone wrong with signals has. at one time or another, gone wrong.

@mattblaze @SteveBellovin It's "the Search for Safety - A History of Railroad Signals and the People Who Made Them"

by the Union Switch & Signal Division, American Standard Inc. 1981

No ISBN number.

@SteveBellovin @mattblaze Thanks for the pointer to that article.

I've long considered the electrical telegraph system to be the first electrical packet switching network. Telegrams are an analog to IP packets - and often several telegrams had to be assembled to form a more complete message - and telegrams were relayed, store-and-forward style. I do not know how the telegraph systems figured out telegram routing.

@SteveBellovin @chris_bloke @glent @mattblaze I have long considered SIP based VoIP to be vulnerable to the same kind of "route it through my country rather than yours" attack.

SIP is built to use proxies and it tends to use SRV records to find those proxies. If one gets hold of DNS in a way to forge those SRV responses, one can send the SIP data stream (typically RTP) via a spying proxy. Usually any encryption to the actual media stream is piecemeal source=>proxy=>proxy=>destination.

And watching the SIP headers, which also tend to be visible at proxies, opens the door to traffic analysis.

I wrote about this long ago...

What Could You Do With Your Own Root Server?

https://www.cavebear.com/old_cbblog/000232.html