California Wanted to Protect Uber Drivers. Now It May Hurt Freelancers. – The New York Times

Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation, which advised lawmakers on A.B. 5, conceded that the law was somewhat ambiguous in this area and that the State Legislature should clarify issues like this in the coming years. “There are going to be unintended consequences with a law like this,” he said. “We want to do everything we can to make sure we’re addressing the right problems and not having any adverse effects on workers.”

Source: California Wanted to Protect Uber Drivers. Now It May Hurt Freelancers. – The New York Times

It seems to me that there should be a probationary period for new policies like this. These kinds of big-shift laws need to have a statement of the actual, boots-on-the-ground effect the change is intended to have, and a timeframe for when we should be able to judge whether or not it is succeeding by that measure. At the end of this period, there should be an automatic default: either the law becomes permanent, or it gets scrapped, depending. If it’s succeeding, and not burdened by excessive unintended consequences, then let it stand. But if it’s hurting more people than it’s helping, then let it automatically lapse, and allow things go back to the way they were. This just seems sensible to me. Why is this not a thing?

Biden on Programming

So apparently throwing coal in a furnace is the same thing as actually mining coal, and the only difference between this and programming is a little bit of training. Biden has been in Congress for FORTY-SIX years, since before the Atari 2600 was created, and the home-computer revolution started. The last computer he was familiar with was probably a mainframe sitting alone in a big, cold room. This is the kind of policy thinking we get when we elect people to federal office for so long that they become institutionalized by the system, isolated in the Beltway bubble, completely losing touch with reality, except for what their handlers tell them.

Congress Spends More Time Dialing for Dollars Than on Legislative Work – U.S. Term Limits

Congress spends more time on re-election fundraising than on the legislative duties they were hired to do. Party bosses expect as many as 6 hours daily.

“This problem cannot be fixed by voting incumbents out,” he continues. “This proves, what we have been saying all along. Incumbents have an overwhelming political advantage because we pay them to raise money for their re-elections. Challengers don’t stand a chance.”

Source: Congress Spends More Time Dialing for Dollars Than on Legislative Work – U.S. Term Limits

If Trump is impeachable for a “quid pro quo” regarding help in an election, then what are we supposed to do about the 538 people in Congress who spend over half of their time on the phone with donors, selling their votes on various bills for campaign contributions? I suppose you can tell me it’s because it involved a foreign country, but I’m absolutely certain that many of the prominent members in Congress have similar dealings with foreign countries as well. I’m still gobsmacked at the hypocrisy of the whole thing. “Quid pro quo” is literally how anything gets done in politics, or business in general, for that matter. Does anyone think that the US has handed over billions in aid to a foreign country for all these years, for absolutely no consideration in return, until Trump came along, and asked for some inside information on a political rival?! I’m not saying anything specific to Trump here. This whole complaint wouldn’t make sense to me, even if Bill Clinton did it. (And I’m sure he did.) It just doesn’t seem to me to rise to the level of “high crimes,” or even misdemeanors. This IS politics.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Will Walk Away With Millions – Barron’s

What’s more, upon termination Muilenburg can walk away with another $30 to $40 million. And his supplementary executive pension is worth another $11 million, according to these statements.

Source: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Will Walk Away With Millions – Barron’s

Welcome to the corporatocracy of America, where you can fail badly enough as CEO to get fired — but not be held legally culpable — and then be handed tens of millions of dollars to get lost.

Then you get to go sit on the boards of several other public companies, and get millions a year from each one to show up to a few meetings and rubber stamp corporate documents.

It truly is a good-old-boy’s club. Hey, it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

The Continuing Saga of Gigabit Internet Service

So I already wrote about trying to get my old router to support my new internet speed, with no success. What I didn’t write about was that, in my frustration, I had placed an order for another, different new router (than I wrote about), which I was sure would be capable of gigabit speeds. It arrived today, and even though I had ordered an upgrade of my old router’s hardware, I couldn’t help myself, but to try it out.

Based on the enormous success I’ve had with using quite a bit of Ubiquity gear at my church, I bought an EdgeRouter Lite. I am already familiar with using these things. We had a similar model for awhile, powering our wifi, until the big upgrade with the new building. Also, I was used to running Vyatta-based routers back in my DataCave, coho-admin days. So I was sure I could get it working.

I ordered it from Amazon, with the “free, 2-day shipping” available with Prime. Except that, even though it was “Prime,” it was coming from some goofy 3rd-party, and took 3 days to arrive. Not only that, but when I got it powered up and logged into it, I saw that the firmware was six years out of date. I’m making a mental note here.

NEVER EVER ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON THAT’S NOT FULFILLED BY AMAZON, OR BEING SOLD DIRECTLY BY THE MANUFACTURER!

I should have just bought it directly from Ubiquity. I can almost guarantee that a unit bought straight from their site wouldn’t be 6 years old. It’s not that the new firmware doesn’t work. (And I really admire Ubiquity for the support.) But there may or may not have been hardware bump I’ve missed out on because of this, and it’s not worth the hassle to send back and reorder.

Besides, it’s the principle of the thing. I’m trying to not buy anything from Amazon if I don’t have to. I was there, and saw “Prime,” and if I don’t do my homework, it always bites me in the rear end. ALWAYS. Why should I have to work so hard to make sure I’m getting something in the 2 days I’m paying for? I’m just going to start spending that energy creating an account with the manufacturer’s storefront from now on.

Anyway. It took me longer to get the configuration going than I had hoped, but I think it’s finally up and running. I’m finally at a point where I can test it. Drum roll…

So far, so good. Guess I’ll try to cancel the order of the upgraded single-board computer hardware.

Christmas Day, 2019

Here’s how my Christmas Day went, after a lovely morning of opening presents with the family.

I just upgraded to Comcast — I mean, Xfiniti — gigabit internet service, and got rid of all TV service. (I’m going to try streaming everything now, and I’m sure that will be fodder for another post in the future.) Unfortunately, I discovered that my nifty, little, fanless, single-board-computer router, running Linux, can’t seem to push any more than about 300 mbps on its ethernet ports, no matter what I try. So I fell back to using my Linksys Velop mesh wifi as my router, and then continued to try to figure out if I could get gigabit speeds out of my little computer’s NIC’s.

I had already looked at several things in Linux. All the basics checked out. Yes, before I even got the service activated, I upgraded to a DOCSIS 3.1-compliant cable modem. Yes, the kernel thinks it should be running at 1000 mpbs. Yes, it’s set to full-duplex. So I started to get serious, and I…

  • turned off everything.
  • cleared the kernel iptables rules
  • turned off the firewall completely
  • upgraded the NIC driver using a supplemental driver in the Ubuntu repos
  • upgraded Ubuntu from LTS to current

After all of this produced no change, I noticed that the board had a firmware update available. In for a penny, right? So I…

  • failed at using their utility to create a bootable firmware update USB stick on my Mac
  • did it on my work PC
  • used it to boot the SBC, but found I couldn’t get a console
  • tried different baud rates and serial programs, to no avail
  • tried and failed to create a new bootable image, using a different program on my Mac
  • tried to create new bootable image on Windows using the different program
  • noticed that my work laptop automatically deleted the firmware image as soon as I copied it over
  • tried to create the new bootable image on Windows under Parallels
  • hassled with which “machine” has control over the USB stick
  • found I couldn’t copy-and-paste between host and guest
  • upgraded all of Parallels, and Parallels Toolbox, on both guess and host
  • finally created new bootable image, which also did not boot
  • finally tried a different USB stick, which worked the first time

I finally, finally, finally got the router’s firmware updated, and, of course, there is literally no difference in the throughput. I’ll leave it to the reader to take a guess at how long this took me.

I also discovered tuned, which I was really hopeful for, but it also does not do anything for me.

So, like a sucker, I’ve now ordered the upgraded version of this board, which should fit in the same case I already have. I’m holding my breath…

Far Cry 4 Humor

I’ve been playing through Far Cry 4 again, just because it’s one of my favorite games ever, and I need a break from RDR2 and Witcher 3. I had to stop and note how funny it can be.

In one of the convoy escort missions, you’re supposedly protecting a truck full of books, bound for a library. When you accept the mission, Ajay says, “The pen is mightier than the sword, right?” And the person giving you the mission says, “Sure, but not as mighty as a rocket launcher. Now…” Then, when you meet the truck and driver, she says, “Hurry up, we have places to be, and people to shoot.” She also asks Ajay if he’s read Sun Tzu’s Art of War, among other books, and then concludes that it’s fine, as long as he’s reading. Along the route, she keeps saying things, like, “Knowledge is power, and knowing is half the battle.” The whole thing had me cracking up.

Also, right before this, I opened a loot chest, and got a “user manual” as the treasure, so I was already laughing.

And don’t even get me started about Hurk in Far Cry 5.

Carl Miller on Twitter: “Here’s a fake news merchant telling me how it actually works.”

This is a clip from a report by the BBC that creating, boosting, and then selling fake content has become a real job in other countries. This particular report has an interview with a man from Kosovo, and (thanks to the last election) the work in Russia is now well understood, but I remain convinced there’s an entire industry for it in China. The US is the fake-news chew toy for the rest of the world, and Facebook is ground zero. The election next year is going to be a mess.

Can end-to-end encrypted systems detect child sexual abuse imagery?

A few weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined his counterparts from the U.K. and Australia to publish an open letter addressed to Facebook. The Barr letter represents the latest salvo …
Source: Can end-to-end encrypted systems detect child sexual abuse imagery? I’ve argued that FAANG companies can continuously scan their networks for garbage, but won’t because it’s expensive. Meanwhile, they’re sitting on figurative mountains of cash. A well-respected cryptologist dove into the details of whether or not you could do automatic image recognition in the face of end-to-end cryptology. While that’s an intriguing complication that I’m glad to see people working out, I don’t care about that part. What I do care about is how expensive of a computer process it is. He summarizes thus:
Despite the relatively small size of these problem instances, the overhead of using MPC turns out to be pretty spectacular. Each classification requires several seconds to minutes of actual computation time on a reasonably powerful machine — not a trivial cost, when you consider how many images most providers transmit every second.
So, yes, this can be done. Heck, Facebook does facial recognition all the time on uploaded phots, and suggests peoples’ names to you to check their work, and this is just a subset of the larger problem. Admittedly, the memory sizes to convolute the image into a digital fingerprint surprises me, but, again, it’s simply not beyond the wit of man to do it; it’s a lack of will to spend the money. So they continue to use a small army of meat-space computers to do this, subjecting them to the absolute utter depravity of man, and catching only a fraction of the illegal filth.