1619 Claims that the Revolution was fought...

To preserve slavery in America.  1619 says that King George was planning to free all the slaves in America.  This is malarkey.  The Revolution was fought over taxes.  The Boston Tea Party was about a British tax on tea.  "No taxation without representation".  Following the French and Indian Wars, the crown made several attempts to raise money in America thru taxation to pay off their war debts.  The Stamp act was one attempt.  There were others all totally unpopular in America. Attempts to negotiate with the crown were unsuccessful, leading to Lexington and Concord in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  There were black soldiers in the Continental Army.

Leaf day

 At last, the tree leaves are out in the Notch.  Spring is here! 

Taking care of business. Keeping the hackers out.

Colonial Pipeline has just shown us all how bad things can get for a company that doesn’t take care of its computer security.  Colonial has just admitted to paying the hacker[s] $5 mil to get their files back.  They didn’t say if they had recovered their files, the hackers may have just kept the $5 mil and split.

This is aimed at suits, those fairly clueless senior business people. 

   First off, your company has valuable information on its computers.  Information that will do you great harm if it falls into the hands of competitors.  Things like your payroll, your sales contacts, the plans, schematics, parts lists, and source code for your product[s].   If you don’t believe me, have a chat with the Colonial Pipeline people.  They will tell you.

   Know that Windows computers are totally insecure.  High school kids can break into them.  Windows is like Swiss cheese, hole of holes.  Connect a Windows computer to the public internet, and you have exposed every thing on that computer to every passing internet hacker.  You should not use Windows computers to monitor or control generators, pumps, pipelines, or anything that controls physical product.  Use Apple, use Linux, use a workstation, anything but Windows. 

   Important and confidential paperwork can be kept on Windows machines if and only if, that machine is not connected to the public internet.  Keep these machines in a locked room.  Snip off all their USB ports.  Windows computers will silently load and execute any code, malware, they find on flash drives inserted in the USB ports.  That is how we spread Stuxnet on the Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges.  Back them up weekly to DVD disks.  Store the backup disks off site, in case of fire or flood in your office.  In 40 years in the business I never had a fire.  I did have a flood once, right in the computer room, made an awful mess. 

   Separate the stuff that makes the business run, the generators spin, the pipelines pump, the trucks get dispatched, the product to come off your production line, from your paper work.  If the hackers get to your paper work it should not shut down your business.  You ought to be able to operate with out your paper work for a few days.  Billing may be delayed a bit but you can survive that.

   Make sure every computer in the company needs a password to access.  Use strong passwords, some upper case, some lower case, some numbers, and some punctuation.  Change the passwords every 90 days.  Take care to close out the computer accounts of departing employees.  Do it on the day they leave.

Congress is coming down on the F35 program this year.

 Complaints from Congress are about large numbers of F-35s out of commission Awaiting Parts (AWP we used to call it).  One troublesome part is called the “F135 Power Module”.   I am not quire sure just what this part does, it sounds like it does something for the F35 engine driven generators.  Average time to repair an F135 power module was 207 days back in October last year.  Design goal for Mean Time to Repair was only 122 days.  Back when I was a flight line maintenance officer in USAF we could repair anything we took off the aircraft, in our on-base shops, inside of 1 or 2 days.  122 days or worse, 207 days, is ridiculous.  “We” (my people) was Avionics, radios, radars, IFF, TACAN, compass, anything electronic except gyros.  The engine shop (not my people) could overhaul an engine in 4 or 5 days.   F-35 program has 20 aircraft grounded for lack of engines. 

    They are changing out the maintenance support software from Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) to a cloud based system Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN).  Apparently both systems run on hardware on board the F35.  Dunno why they did this, you only do maintenance on the ground, the pilots don’t do maintenance while airborne.  Why add weigh by carrying stuff you don’t need to carry?  Needless to say, the changeover is slowing all sorts of things down. 

   Anyhow the US is committed to the F35 as our fighter for the future. 

 

Free up 2 Gig of disk space.

 

Piece of cake.  In Win 10 type “Disk Cleanup into the search box  on the task bar.  The heavy duty stuff only shows after you hit “Clean Up System Files”.   On my computer it took a while but it freed up a gig of disk. 

   For the next gig of disk I started Firefox and on the toolbar select “Options” Then select “Privacy and Security”.  Look at “Cookies and site data”  Firefox allows any website to store as much as it pleases on your hard drive.  I hit “Remove All” and freed up another gig of disk. 

Took it a while. One downside, this erases all the pass words to sites and you will have to type your password in to use the site.  I have all my passwords filed for me so this is not a problem.

  I don’t know why I bother.  My medium speed Dell Optiplex 990 has 1.75 TERA bytes of disk so a couple of Gig is nothing.  I suppose it has something to do with starting out programming many years ago on a DEC PDP-11 with a mighty 5 megabyte RK05 disk pack. 

Big Tech Censorship

Facebook and Twitter and probably a bunch more are censoring people that I want to hear from, Trump in particular.  Chris Wallace had a Facebook censor on Fox this afternoon.  Said censor was very firm that Facebook had every right to post who they felt like posting and censor who ever they pleased.  Kinda like a newspaper, you get to publish on the op-ed page only if the editor thinks you are good for circulation and not too offensive.  

  The best fix for this problem is to use the old Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the big sites.  They are clearly monopolies.  Once Facebook or Twitter is broken up into two or three piece, the pieces will have to compete with each other for advertisers and members.  One piece or the other piece will decide that giving guys like Trump access is good for business.  That’s the proper fix.  Unfortunately it won’t happen as long as Biden is president.  He and his like the solid leftwing spin that Facebook and Twitter are doing right now and will simply tell the anti-trust division at the Justice Department to lay off.  Keep things the way they are.  By now, Facebook and Twitter are so big and cover so much of the market that a new startup doesn’t have much chance of getting starting going up against them.  Trump might have the money to do a startup, he has talked about it, but that is a very long shot.

   The Facebook guy Wallace had on TV suggested that Congress might pass something like a fairness doctrine for Facebook and Twitter.  Same objection applies, Biden would veto it. 

   So until the voters vote in a solid Republican Congress and a Republican president, we are stuck with Facebook’s censorship. 

Mother's Day.

 On the top is a picture I took of Mother, Janet K. Starr, back in the winter of 56-57 at Cannon. She lived til 91. Her health kept up right to the very end when a stroke carried her off. She died back in 2010. She was a great Mom and I still miss her. She raised her three boys right, and she did a lot of raising of her six grandchildren. On bottom is the last good photo I have of her from 2009.