Just a quickie

I have posted before about my latest (work) gig, putting all these remotely managed cisco boxes in businesses so that they, and the people who sell them their interwebz connection, can all sack in house IT staff and save money.

Yesterday I again had the pleasure of dealing with one of these jobs, and for those of you who ask what could possibly go wrong…

The business methodology is based on three principles;

1. The actual keyboard / coding tech work is outsourced to Mumbai, we may be dialling local numbers but IP telephony and call forwarding means the guy you speak to is half a world away.
2. The actual onsite work is done by people like me, cos remote guys cannot physically touch kit or alter it.
3. The sales and management, you know, the core revenue generating business, is still done here in the UK.

Invariably there is a direct link between how well the Indian national half a world away has been able to absorb the English language and culture, and how well they have been able to absorb the coding language and culture of the box in question, whether it be Cisco, Juniper etc.

Invariably the ones with very heavy accented English that is quite difficult to understand, and it is difficult to understand when you have to ask them to repeat words like “cable” and “switch” etc, are the lowest paid, most script following, and the ones invariably assigned unless it escalates, or the UK company was enlightened enough to not go for the absolute lowest bidder.

Invariably these non native English speakers make just a big a fuckup of work orders as I would if I was trying to tell a Russian coder to go to Acme supermarket in Stolichnaya street zip code 90201, meaning the zip code is often right, but there is no supermarket there when you get there, but there is a home furnishings shop with a completely different name.

So you as the man on the spot eventually resolve this issue, find out the job is in the furnishings shop and sweet fuck all to do with ACME supermarkets, so what are the chances that the OS and configuration you have been given for the replacement router is either correct, or fully functional?

You guessed it, so you sit there for three hours with Mumbai using a remote session via your laptop to try to make the router work, and every 60 seconds they go back to their script and ask if you are sure you have connected the fucking patch leads back in from the old one…

Eventually, the job is done and lo and behold the customers computers can get back on the interwebz, and more importantly to them their chip and pin / till machines can connect to the banks so they can actually make sales via plastic the fast way….

This has only taken a three hour return trip either way for your trusty engineer, three hours onsite, and a three hour return trip either way for the courier delivering the new kit, and a couple of hours of back office staff updating web portal software so job progress can be tracked and your trusty engineer can know he is to go to ACME supermarket H^H^H^H^ Cushy Home Furnishings to swap out a router…. but just think of the money saved by getting some poor fucker in Mumbai to play with the config until the fucking thing actually works… as opposed to, you know, having a fucking working config on file for each customer and each site…

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I see this shit every day, stuff that would literally terminate my business when I wear my self employed hat, and yet this is not just how big business works every day, this is how best of breed big business works every day, with outsourcing world and dog beating a path the the guys who employ me in my day job, which means loadsa work for me.

Any job that has (at least) three different sets of people in three different companies in three different geographical locations is going to be a total fuck up, because the only thing any one of them gives a fuck about is getting their own boxes ticked and their own asses covered.

Course I am an old hand at this shit, and spend maybe 25% of my time on site documenting everything and also photographing everything, so when it comes back down the grapevine that the last guy out the door broke stuff and he was only here for a minute anyway, and that last guy happens to be me, it takes me all of ten minutes to send times and dated and geolocated pictures, pics / scans of forms showing time on site and off site complete with names and signatures of people on site, and so on and so forth, but then I didn’t come down with the rain last week.

I am also an old hand in the sense the any long service guy sat in a trench will relate to, I am a waldo, cos the guy in Mumbai cannot physically do anything on site, the pay is not enough to go over the top and start taking lead, but the (same) pay is pretty good if you have managed to swing a REMF job which doesn’t really involve much of anything, driver for the colonels flunky… so the whole thing washes over me…

I don’t sit there and curse my cheap tools and underspecced and overloaded with bloatware company laptop, I take the GI attitude, if they wanted me to have it they would issue it, and if they don’t issue it they don’t want me to have it, and life is good if you chill and avoid being the bitching squeaky wheel…

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Which brings me to Cyprus and the economy.

I’m the guy who turns up when the business loses net connectivity, and trust me, we do ALL the high street names and blue chip companies, so I see what happens when their net goes dark.

1. Suddenly all the staff start running around like blue assed flies.
2. Suddenly production / output is maybe 50% of what it was when the net was alive and the staff were all cruising.

_I_ personally am as disposable as a used tampon, but my role, well, when my role goes we are back in the stone age technologically.

When 1 and 2 above happen, even fucked up mismanaged too many cooks outsourced shit like the above looks like a good deal / saviour to the company in question.

When 1 and 2 above happen, NOBODY, but NOBODY, has a Plan B, the entire business model rests upon getting Plan A back up and running.

“Back up and running” does not mean what it means when I do work with my self employed hat on, that fucker is FIXED, it means connectivity to fuckbook / intranet / whatever is restored so I can get my piece of paper signed and leave the site, until it goes wrong again, which is just a question of time….

I have computer kit, routers and servers and firewalls, that are over a decade old, and which still work FUCKING FLAWLESSLY, so it is not the case that we cannot make shit that just works….  there is just no PROFIT anymore in making shit that just works.

And so we have local branches of businesses that have six full time employees and turn over considerable sums of money, all hanging on a single DOMESTIC grade ADSL connection, no backup, no failover, no Plan B, and frankly the very expensive and high end Cisco kit that is supposed to make it all work is no more reliable than some 50 quid Netgear crap, which they guys in the shop could buy locally ex stock, navigate to 192.168.0.1 in their browser, type in ADMIN and ADMIN, and enter their ADSL username and password and be back up and on-line before I can even complete my three hour journey to get there… at least that would be an HONEST “crap but cheap” solution.

I shouldn’t complain, and I am not, if any of these people were remotely competent to run a business, I would be out of a job….. the purpose of this is to highlight the fact that in the pursuit of fucking everyone else over to nickel and dime everything to death, we have created a business infrastructure that cannot actually even keep itself going by itself.

If you think the above example, by the way, was a “bad one”, you are sadly mistaken.. at least these guys had the old PSTN phones so they could ring up another branch to get the web price of a mattress, or to manually authorise a credit card payment.

I have been to sites where, in a bid to save money, all the phone lines but one are VOIP, so when the system goes dark it ALL goes dark… the plan is I go there and using the wonders of a laptop tethered to 3/4G networks, the reseller can remote in and fix things up, except there is no mobile signal in the faraday cage that is the comms/server room, oh, the one single emergency PSTN phone line, blocked by the provider from local rate 0845 numbers, which just happens to be the ONLY support number for the reseller, in the laborious fallback strategy of they tell me what to type by voice, I type it and tell them what just happened… so even that doesn’t fucking work.

Looks like I am going to be employed for quite some time yet…lol

Network Attached Storage

I’ve gotten to that place again where all my bloody hard disks were filling up, and it was time to add to the NAS…

…and that’s where it got bloody, since it has been a while I went on a trawl of the major online vendors, and the answers were not nice.

I could buy a shitty and cheap unpopulated 2 bay NAS box from the likes of Dlink, or the next option is an equally shitty but not cheap 2 bay NAS box from Qnap, and as soon as you look at a 4 bay box, or god forbid a 5 bay box to run raid-5 it gets bloody expensive bloody fast…

So the stopgap was go out locally and buy a 3 terabyte seagate go flex jobbie, for it has to be said not a lot more than the cost of the 3 TB disk inside it.

Down sides is the bastard is fairly slow, but freefilesync and walk away means I don’t care too much and it is the initial big wad that takes the time, not daily use, so lets run some numbers.

MB = megabyte which disks are measured in, mb = megabit which transfer speeds are measured in, and there are 8 bits to a byte.

USB2 can pull a consistent 10 MB/sec on decently sized files

100 mb Ethernet is theoretically able to do 100/8 = 12.5 MB/sec, but again you’ll see nearer 8/10 in reality.

10 MB/sec is piss slow compared to even what a spinning SATA2 hard disk can handle, a good SSD SATA3 should give you 250 MB/sec easily, gigabit Ethernet will give you a theoretical 125 MB/sec, but there it is, so how long does it take to fill up a 3 TB NAS drive at say 8 MB/sec?

8 MB/sec = 480 MB / min, which equals 28.8 GB / hour

3,000 / 28.8 = 104 hours, or around 4 days, and this is ideal speeds, in reality you can add 50% easily.

Just as a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, data transfer is only as fast as the slowest link, so there isn’t a whole lot of point having a high end NAS on a 100 mb network, if you are looking at speeds alone.

In day to day use 8 MB/sec is enough, it will transfer a 700 MB CD in one and a half minutes, or a 4.5 GB DVD in about nine and a half minutes.

8 MB/sec is not enough if you are imaging hard disks for example.

A quick way around this is the NAS box we discuss below with gig-e and a crossover cable, or use one of the hot-plug bays.. >;*) 100 MB/sec here we come…

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So what my “price of the bare disk inside it plus a 10% premium” 3 TB goflex is buying me is neither speed, nor reliability / quality, what it is buying me is some breathing room at a reasonable price…. it will do in the interim, but the fact is I need to do something about an upgraded NAS box.

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WD do a red label disk WD30EFRX especially for NAS boxes, the bare 3 TB disk runs about 120 UK pounds a pop, one of the things you have to take in to account is your NAS disks dying or suffering data loss, RAID is not a backup, but a good RAID/ZFS setup spanned over enough disks can help you avoid using your backup.

If I build a 5 bay box with hot plug SATA drives, I could get 6 TB of useful storage (no point striping because a single modern SATA3 HD will push between 50% and >100% of gigabit Ethernet capacity depending on if it is doing sequential or random reads) mirrored with a “ready hot” spare in place….. I could start with just two disks, for 3 TB of useful storage and no hot spare, and add the other 3 disks later…

So we are looking at a copy of NAS4free, which is free, two disks which is 250 notes or thereabouts, and my “box”

The box itself doesn’t have to be much horsepower wise, in fact it shouldn’t be because we want low electrical power consumption, so an Atom based system will do nicely, another 100 or so, Icy Box do a nice 5 bay back plane IB-555SSK for another 100 or so, and add another 100 for a case and incidentals.

The basic bare box thus works out at about 300 quid, populate it with two disks and it takes you to 550, populate it with all 5 drives and it takes you to around 925.

The cheapest bare 5 bay NAS box I can find is the Qnap 569 @ £570

That’s (our 925)  a lot of dough, but, the closest to a 15 TB or greater commercial until (and the commercial units always count capacity by adding up individual disks) I can find is the WD sentinel @ £1,422, and the closest to a 5 bay or greater is the netgear 6620 @ £1,950.

Neither of the commercial offerings have the virtue of you just being able to go out to any PC hardware store and buy some generic replacement part WHEN something dies, plus the interface is open source.

Frankly the “value added” bundled software with all these commercial things, from the lowly goflex I just bought, up to the thecus / syntology / qnap kit, is a load of bollocks… it is not the fucking job of a NAS to stream your fucking itunes shite to your ipad via VPN  while you are sat on a beach somewhere..

It is the fucking job of a NAS to look after the hard disks inside it, and look after the data being read / written to those disks, one way of aiding this is a fucking dust filter and a couple of nice but silent 120 mm fans, which none of the commercial offerings will give you, but which you can do yourself.

Nor will any of the commercial offerings allow you to add another 5 drive bays for 100 quid, swap out the main-board for something more powerful, add some extra gig-e ports etc etc.

Nor will any of the commercial rigs do anything other than lock you in to that vendor.

Perhaps the biggest limitation of the commercial rigs is however that you have to buy them with one big wad of cash, but the home built solution can be purchased in 100 quid lumps over a few weeks or more.

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Certainly the goflex has bought me some breathing space, and will allow me to tidy up some of the nested directories and file structures, preparatory to starting the next NAS build, and I won’t wake up tomorrow as I did today to find two overnight  “add to archive and delete” operations stalled out because of lack of spare disk space on the last added mini NAS..

If I think about upgrading my main PC, currently a core 2 quad q6600, for a nice socket 2011 / i7 3820 build, then I am already looking at everything except the Icy box 5 bay backplane and WD red disks, a saving of 200+ notes… again options that do not present themselves once you have tied yourself into proprietary devices…. it wouldn’t kill me to break open the goflex and pull out the 3 TB SATA HD inside, or to break open the 2 TB WD elements and pull out the 2 TB WD green SATA HD inside, they are essentially not much more than caddies…

Living in a virtualised world

I’ve been busy of late, hence the dearth of new posts..

My current gig is basically summed up thus, world + dog are chasing economies wherever they can find them (a good example is regional offices that years ago would have been on leased lines now being connected by xDSL) and so ACME corp’s 447 regional offices get new Cisco 887 adsl routers and all that, and the IT management can then be outsourced and offshored…. 447 expensive leased lines dropped, the in house 500 strong IT department sacked en masse, loadsa money saved, trebles all around at the bean-counters offices.

But some cunt has to turn up with the box and physically plug in the patch cables and so on, and when, not if, when that shit breaks, some cunt has to turn up and physically reset or repair the thing that cannot be fixed remotely…. even if that someone is just a remote pair of hands for a resellers resellers resellers reseller….

Don’t get me wrong, this shit is slick, but it is a basic engineering principle that the more layers of complexity you build up, the more there is to go wrong… which is why twice in the last week alone the NatWest Bank customers have seen all the ATM‘s simply stop working and no on-line banking either, and this is being repeated across the nation in all things IT.

Like the song says, Do your fucking job till the end

Till your job ends that is…. meanwhile back at the gig the crowd I work for are all gung ho, gangbusters and corporate image, which is fucking great while it lasts, which is by definition going to be a finite amount of time, we are hyenas feeding on corpses, for the moment it is a banquet…

I smile sweetly at them all, and friday rolls around and I think to myself that is another week’s money grabbed, wonder what next week will bring, because you see I am old enough and cynical enough to know that in this solyent green world, the crowd I work for can disappear with as little warning as the jobs of those we are replacing with little Cisco boxes (themselves now made in the Czech republic, oh the irony) went down the swannee…

They tell me about all the valuable skills and qualifications I can earn while working for them, and there is an element of truth in that, but I had valuable skills and qualifications in my previous trade of marine engineering, and they don’t put food on the table today, but my survivalist attitudes to life do, so what is more useful to me?

Never take a job you aren’t prepared to walk away from on a moment’s notice is a good motto, because already in this young and dynamic company I can see signs of the rot setting in, and the infection is spreading a lot faster than it did 20 years ago… I see this all over now, they will give some guy a £25k car to turn up at the customers premises in, because it looks good, but no 5 dollar uniform sweatshirt, just wear something of your own, and if you are given any tools they came from walmart, it is utter fucking madness…. exactly the same brand of utter fucking madness that created the jobs in do in the first place… by sacking all the IT staff and sticking in a remotely managed router and some switches.

Of course VOIP is all the rage, so when the cute little cabinet goes down the ACME corp regional office does not just disappear from the HQ WAN, all the fucking phone lines go down too… how many of these sites have all this shit running on a UPS, even a cheap and nasty will only keep it running for ten minutes SOHO job from APC or similar?

You got it, haven’t seen a single fucking one yet….

It is fucking dreadfully incompetent and amateurish, I don’t give a flying fuck how swish and fancy and cute all this remotely managed Cisco kit is, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care how impressive the tricks are that you can do, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care with what ease you can do quite complex tasks, WHEN IT IS WORKING, all I see is a system that studiously ignores the 9,000lb gorilla in the room, what the fuck do you do when it stops working, and their answer to that is to point at dudes like me…. whoooosh…

So anyway I’m chilling after a job yesterday with another of the field engineers, who is of a similar age to me, and we are discussing this, and the one thing my extensive experience has taught me…. and this is from the year dot of web servers on…

1. The least likely person to bork such a box is the field engineer sat there physically in front of it, in true CYA mode he covers his ass at every step, when I am asked to type in console commands for a box that has lost connectivity to a remote IT management centre I read and spell everything back phoenetically, and then ask them, do you want me to press return now? No matter how simple the command.
2. The MOST likely person to bork such a box is the remotely connected tech telnetting in or whatever, they don’t give a fuck, and this is before they get confused between the three other field techs they are talking to simultaneously to me.
3. The MORE of a wizard the remote tech is, the WORSE they will bork the box…

All of which means that instead of us field guys being remote waldoes for the megamind remote admin guys, which is how all this shit is marketed by the bean-counters, we are just another point of failure, for exactly the same reasons that someone playing Call of Duty will have a different approach to a crunchie on the ground in Afdiggastan with actual bullets flying around…

Now these people, if you push them, will admit that there are things like the graphic above, a “cascade failure”, but these same cunts have never had to RECOVER from one, because the fact is they have never been in one, of if they have, they were but one node…

I can distinctly remember being in a large hydroelectric turbine hall when a (local) cascade failure hit, because one of the turbines was tripped out by a vibration sensor, which they think was caused by a log getting down into the vent, so one goes down, and it takes aaaaaages to spin down, but the SOUND is indescribably different when it is not under load, and then the next one went because it was overloaded thanks to the first one going down, and then then remaining three went almost together…. and everyone is stood there looking at each other and the hall lighting goes out, and emergency DC lighting flicks on and the turbines continue to spool down… it is the most eerie motherfucking experience… and it took on the onsite diesel gen set and four hours or work before they could start spooling up again, another two hours to get the first two turbines synced to the grid, and another four hours for the remaining three.

But they had ENGINEERS on site, not fucking remote wizards and the only thing on-site some field techs told on a phone press this button now, now press this one, now type this in, now move that cable from here to there, OK I’m in, you can go to the next job ta….

SLA’s, well SLA’s are fulfilled if the resellers reseller can get a warm body on site within 4 hours, that warm body doesn’t have to actually DO anything, or FIX anything, he is just there so the SLA penalties can’t be invoked.

What the people I am currently working for do not know, that I do, is this.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE, IS GREATER IN PRACTICE THAN IN THEORY.

So what happens in extreme cases, well someone ships a new box down, and it gets swapped out and we see if that fixes the problem, the only thing rarer than a UPS is the proverbial “smoking gun” when responding to an error call, nobody know what went wrong or what the causes were, and nobody gives a fuck, this job has had a 2 hour slot allocated to it, and that’s all there is.

Various three letter government agencies are waffling on about the threat of cyber terrorism, and hackers are getting sent to gitmo for 999 years of waterboarding pre trial, but the fact is that the real terrorists are all the fucking beancounters putting these bastard systems in place in the first fucking place, it isn’t IF it falls over, it is WHEN it falls over.

Currently these failures ain’t that bad, wossname bank goes down for 6 hours, wossname ISP goes down for 8 hours, wossname supermarket goes down for 4 hours, but no measures are being put in place to improve on this, on the contrary…. the opposite is what is happening.

Currently, cascade failures in IT have been confined to so called fucked up countries where fucked up stuff like the so called arab spring uprisings were going on, and again shit was blamed of guvvmint shutting shit down, hasn’t YET happened to a western country on the scale of the seventies east coast USA power grid cascade failure, which was ultimately caused by ONE part dying…  hasn’t happened YET.

But it’s gonna, why else is everyone getting the pre – emptive bullshit excuses in place about digital pearl harbours.

And it is not just ACME corp and your local supermarket and your local mobile phone shop doing this shit, it is also your local Court of law, your local Police station, your local lawyers, your local bank, your local hospital, and the technology is spreading in all these places.

Sure, they may well have a diesel genny out back that can be fired up to keep the lights on, but what fucking use is that when packets carrying everything from data to voice suddenly find no routes outside the LAN?

Which reminds me, next week’s money I need to buy myself a new NAS box and a couple of WD Red 3tb disks… lol

 

Do Androids dream of eclectic sheeple

I have banged on loads, and with reason, in the right sidebar about the vast benefits of equipping yourself with a smart-phone and a google account and tracking everything.

In response to *many* emails and messages, this is my 101.

As previously discussed;

1. Get an Android smartphone
2. Sign up for a google gmail account
3. Set the gmail account in the smart-phone and set everything to sync

Now, the details.

Android is great, but it is the apps that bring it all alive.

I have already discussed Google Latitude providing you with a historical record of WHERE you were at any given time or day, now let’s boost it.

Once you have done steps 1 to 3 above, you can sit down at any computer with a web browser and point it at https://play.google.com/ and login with your gmail address and password, it will log you in to the play store, and identify the phone you created the account on in step 3 above.

Now you can use the search function to search for apps, and even install them to the phone automagically from this browser window, get all these and install them.

1. SMS Backup +

   Jan Berkel

   This app creates two new folder in your gmail account, “call log” and “sms” (you can rename them) and will either manually or automatically back up all call logs and sms / mms messages to these folders, it will also restore if required… in addition, it will also add the call log records (incoming and outgoing) to your google calendar.

2. Barcode Scanner

   ZXing Team

   This is a barcode reader that reads all sorts of barcodes, including QR codes, you can do all sorts of neat stuff like share phone numbers, full contact info, map locations, wifi accounts, it is “just” a utility app, but so useful you should grab it and use it.

3. AirDroid

   SAND STUDIO
   
   AirDroid starts a service on the phone, over wifi, that allows any computer to type a URL such as 192.169.0.10:8888 into a web browser and see an interface to the phone… this URL, along with the required password, is displayed on the phone screen. From the computer browser you can then send and receive SMS, up / download photos, browse files, listen to music, etc etc etc… very handy tool
   

4. Dropbox

   Dropbox, Inc.

   Cloud storage, if you grab an app called Sandisk Memory Zone it will do an online backup to cloud storage of selected directories on your phone, eg DCIM / camera.
   

5. Titanium Backup PRO Key ★ root

   Titanium Track

   Titanium is pretty much the Android backup tool for backing up installed apps and user data, but it is pretty pointless unless you back it up to a removeable miniSD card in the phone, and NOT to the phone internal memory, because anything that wipes the phones internal memory will wipe your backups too, and many tools like Odin etc are capable of wiping and moving partition tables on your phone’s internal memory.

6. Cheetah Sync for Files/Folders

   JRTStudio
   
   Wifi File Explorer is the tool to use if you want to browse the file structure of your phone from a web browser on your computer, and while it is good for moving single files to and fro, it doesn’t work for quantities of files, enter Cheetah sync, which can sync from phone to PC, or PC to phone, or both ways, just select the folder on the phone, the folder on the PC, give that sync job a name (you can store many different sync jobs) and whenever you feel like it, run it… I have one job that syncs my entire 32 GB miniSD card in the phone to a directory in my laptop

There are others, SeekDroid is handy for locating a lost phone, or remotely wiping it, Qik is an app that uploads a photo to a web-server as soon as you take it (handy to defeat po-lice instructions to wipe / delete), WhatsApp is a handy way to send pictures without incurring a charge as you would as MMS, Magnify turns your phone into a handy magnifying glass, Brightest Flashlight is self explanatory, there is a WordPress app to allow you to post to blogs like this, and one for Drupal if you host yourself, the beat goes on …

The point is, you are walking around with a technological marvel in your pocket that would have utterly blown away not only the entire moon landing effort, but also anything that ran the first “modern” version of Windows, 95a, aka Chicago, WITH ALL THE PERIPHERALS INCLUDED.

Most people only use 1% of the functionality.

All I suggest you do is use 5% of the functionality, you are getting tracked and traced and recorded anyway, this way you and your legal representatives get access to that data too.

There is NO EXCUSE for a man to get convicted of a false accusation of DV or sexual abuse.

The only downside is other extreme laws, and this article would not be complete without mentioning them, this especially applies to all you men out there with kids who have a smartphone.

1. In many places, such as the UK, extreme and child pornography is an “absolute” offence, and the “absolute” means that in Law, no defence can be made. You ARE guilty.
2. In many places, such as the UK, “possession” is defined as being in a position of responsibility, if your kid comes to visit on your one weekend in the month, and this kid has illegal shit on their phone, it is in your house, they are a minor, you are the responsible legal adult, you will be deemed to be in “possession” in Law.
3. In many places, such as the UK, “making” is defined as what your web browser already did when it displayed the image above.

To sum up, if that image above was of a girl who was, or WHO APPEARED TO BE, less than 16 years old, it WOULD be classed as child pornography, to which no legal defence is possible, you own the device it is displayed on, or the property in which the device it is displayed on is sat, so it WOULD be classed as possession, and of course as per point three you WOULD in Law have been making that image.

Making and possession of child pornography, no defence possible, guilty, sex offenders register, probably prison time too.

These are not possible or probable outcomes, they are absolutely guaranteed as certain as death cancer and taxes outcomes.

Being in the company of a child is now far less dangerous legally than being in the company of the smart-phone in the child’s pocket.

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Encryption.

It is one option, you can encrypt your phone, and your PC, and sooner or later the word privacy will be mentioned, but you don’t have any privacy, all this data I am talking about making available to yourself above is already being collected anyway, that is how the technology works, so there is no privacy, and once you realise that then encryption ceases to be a tool to protect your privacy, and starts to be a tool that law enforcement see as a sign of guilt…

Sure, the fuckers have access to all that data anyway, they just tell your cell provider to pony up and grab your computers and smartphone, but the key phrase with law enforcement is the thing they say to you when they arrest you.

“Anything you say may me taken down and used in evidence against you.”

Doesn’t say shit about anything you say may be taken down and used as evidence to exculpate you and eliminate you from enquiries.

Standard procedure is in fact to simply ignore anything that might show your innocence, all they are looking for is stuff that makes you look guilty… encryption makes you look guilty, and doesn’t prevent them getting cell data anyway.

A citizen under arrest and caution is the last motherfucker on the planet who should be arguing about civil liberties.

 

The rise of the internet.

I was an early adopter, fidonet / bbs’s and all that good shit.

Back then we knew the MSM (main stream media) was all “push” bullshit, and we thought we were at the cutting edge of the revolution and the new way forward.

Then all the “me too” AOL‘ers came online and fucked everything up for everyone, and what followed was useful evils like google and pernicious evils like facebook and linkedin, the dream was dead.

And then… well… then a funny thing happened, the sheer mass of people online exceeded the ability of the corporates to steer and control it.

It is a literal truth to state that certain news items come to my attention via discussions on swinging sites long before I ever encounter them on a MSM news site.

Then, as stated here, (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-28/what-america-really-thinks) there is the growing awareness that it doesn’t really matter who “they” are, “we” the great unwashed public, just don’t believe anything “they” say, or try to tell us, or try to inform us of, or try to educate us about, or try to sell us etc.

It’s not how we early adopters predicted things would turn out, not by any means, but this mass jaded apathy and cynicism is no bad thing.

“They” can no longer run any kind of article about divorce or the family courts or domestic violence and have a comment section that is not over-run with men saying it is all bollocks.

In typical bolting the stable door weeks after the horse has bolted fashion, the powers that be are trying to impose curbs and filters and controls on the bits of this new network that so far remain in their control, to whit, the internet connection from your house to the backbone and back.

But they watch what happened in north Africa and shit themselves, nearly three years ago now I bought a Samsung Galaxy S1 smartphone, I didn’t need no stinking internet, I didn’t even need no stinking 2/3g connection.

I didn’t need those things because I was carrying around a device the size of a packet of cigarettes with Star Trek capabilities, that would charge from any USB source, that would on demand operate as its own wifi hotspot and share files between similar devices, no need for swapping SD cards or bluetooth transfers, any fucking thing with wifi.

Three years later I have the third iteration of that device.

What I have, basically, is what we used to call sneakernet.

It was an old saying, never under estimate the bandwidth of a holdall full of backup tapes, and in actual fact it is as true today as it was in the dawn of the digital age.

Never under estimate the bandwidth of millions of people walking around with hand held devices that can exchange files trivially between themselves once they are within a few metres of each other…. sure, the latency and ping times are a bastard, but latency and ping times don’t mean a fucking thing when it comes to text based discussion and information sharing.

We knew that back in the fidonet / BBS days.

I was reminded of this by something my mother said a couple of days ago, my bro is literally on the other side of the planet, so he sends me an SMS message, and it gets to me in a couple of minutes.

When I was a lad a letter used to take two weeks to do that journey, par avion, (fuck it, it used to take three days to fly from London to Singapore, and we thought that was fast… it took 28 days by fast liner) and if that wasn’t good enough you could send a very similar message to an SMS, but it was called a telegram, and it cost a lot of money, and it still often took a day or two, or sometimes even more…. I was in Africa when a family member died, it was this time of year, by the time I got the telegram the family member had already been buried.

The last big fuckup we had in Europe was Yugoslavia, but as recent as it was, it was before the smartphone revolution, before Windows95, before “the internet” as the AOL’ers knew it.

Fast forwards to Egypt and Libya and even those populations with minimal smartphone market penetration and the revolution is utterly transformed by the ability of these devices to form ad hoc mesh sneakernet networks…

The gap between Yugoslavia and Libya is far far far smaller, technologically, than the gap between Libya and your average western school-yard today.

The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, you could literally pull the plug on ALL internet and 3G systems in the UK and while it would cause uproar, data would still flow, and while ping and latency would be atrocious, I’d say 8 hours tops for anything meme-worthy to transit from one end of the country to the other.

You can’t un-ring a bell, and you can’t put this technology away again once Pandora opens her box.

Samsung, for example, may have intended “bump to share” as a fun little feature to drive sales by allowing people at a social event to take and share pictures etc on the spot, but then again the internet was intended to route around damage in traditional switched networks in the event of a nuclear war, and we see how that turned out.

Giving a fuck.

Tis the season of goodwill and all that bollocks.

So naturally enough I start talking about relationshits and how people aren’t haaapy… I sometimes pull out the android smartphone and treat them to a rendition of It’ll be lonely this Christmas by Mud, fuck it, here you go.

Thing is, 2012 is a very different planet from as recently as 2002, a mere ten years ago.

In 2002 you could pretty much guarantee than no average 13 year old on up had 24/7 access to mobile comms, hell in 2002 not that many people had “broadband” at home, for values of broadband that meant 512/128 kbit ADSL, but they did have landline phones and post addresses for snail mail, that was pretty ubiquitious.

Fast forwards to late 2012 and I can get 5 mbit up and down on my android smartphone, uncapped, for less than 30 quid a month, and in addition to SMS and MMS messaging it monitors 5 separate email accounts and whatsapp and a couple of sex/dating accounts/sites.

I am accessible 24/7, and every wimminz of fuckable age in this country is accessible 24/7 because they are also carrying around smartphones.

If anyone wants anything, from train times to the weather to the car breakdown guy, they whip out the smartphone and 60 seconds later they are in contact.

It really is as simple as that, anyone can contact anyone else they want within 60 seconds.

Which means if you haven’t been contacted by that person, it’s because they don’t want to contact you right now… if they haven’t contacted you for 24 hours, then they haven’t wanted to contact you for 24 hours, if they haven’t contacted you for a week, then they haven’t wanted to contact you for a week…

The ONLY exceptions to this are those where you are given an advance warning, as in I’m going on holiday for two weeks starting tomorrow.

So this guy’s girlfriend has an iphone with his number on it, a crackberry with his number on it, a laptop with his personal on it, and she has stayed over at his place and has a car so she knows where he is, in addition she knows who he works for and what his employers website is and that he can be contacted via this company website.

It don’t matter what she says when he is with her, if he don’t hear from her, not a peep, for 48 hours straight the only possible explanations are that she is dead, or she hasn’t wanted to contact him for 48 hours.

He’s rubbing his head with the palm of his hand, and asks me does this happen to me, do wimminz not contact me for hours or days at a time?

Fuck yeah, of COURSE they do, it is in their nature, which is why I don’t plan my life around the bitches, and more importantly, why I always keep a background search on for jane48, jane49, jane50 etc while I am “with” jane47, because sure as god made little green apples, jane47 is going to have periods where she doesn’t contact me, and the only possible reasons are I AM NOT A FUCKING PRIORITY TO HER.

Bitch can SAY anything she wants to deny that, the FACT is she probably looked at her smartphone at least once an hour, but did not take 15 seconds to send you an SMS saying “Hi babes missin’ u xxxxx“… that’s a fucking FACT Jack.

Fuck what she says or claims, what she DOES or DOES NOT DO trumps words and claims every fucking time.

But, he blubbers, she is supposed to be my GIRLFRIEND….

Fuck that, she is a fucking fuckbuddy, no strings attached.

Girlfriend is the conjunction of two words, Girl + Friend.

Neither of these words implies 24/7 joined at the hip ping pong “luv u hunni” texting, and while it is nice to think that while she does not have your cock in her, she is thinking about your cock and you, that ain’t the way wimminz work…..

“out of sight, out of mind“ is a phrase that is tailor made to describe how wimminz minds work.

When the bitch wants something, she will be in touch, bet your ass on that one.

Which means you gotta be like the car breakdown guy, you can’t sit there 24/7 hoping your one potential customer will call…. you got to have a fucking customer base….

If the bitch phones the car breakdown guy, and he is already out on a call, well she can fucking join the queue…

No sheeeeit sherlock

There is a blog post here http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/saturday-essay/

The salient and interesting paragraph is this;

“There is a connection here. None of my chums would do business with Mobile Phone Pushy Token Memememeee Woman if they could help it: their view in two out of three cases is that life’s too short for arseholes, and if people want more than they offer, they’re politely invited to look for it elsewhere. The third person (a woman, as it happens) takes a more pragmatic view: she simply charges them more – which, she argues, is perfectly fair. I’m inclined to agree. We not only get what we pay for in this life, quite often we pay for what we think we ought to get. Assumed entitlement comes expensive – as indeed it should.“

I have highlighted in red text the real red pill nugget at the heart of this.

Jon, the blogger, was talking about three friends who are running small self employed businesses and making a living by the simple tactic of being honest.

To MY mind, #3, the wimminz, is just being a wimminz, and is being anything but honest.

When in the same situation myself, I have always said the following to the MPPTM wimminz, niggerz and other assorted assholes who wanted to give me shit;

“My job is to do x, for this I charge x per hour. My rate for eating shit is 50x per hour. Now, you choose which it is to be“

Which of course always ends up with me walking out within 5 minutes, which is exactly what I knew would happen when I say it.

THAT, is being honest.

Not saying anything and charging them extra for being a cunt is valid in many ways, but it is not honest.

Honesty is when you tell them UP FRONT that you are going to charge them extra for being a cunt.

I have my own small self employed business, I am in hours worked terms radically under employed… to be strictly honest, I should be doing another 5 hours a week in financial terms, but that does not stop me turning down two to three jobs for every one I take, and the jobs I turn down I do so with honesty and candour.

“You won’t want to pay me what I will have to charge you in order to do a good job, and I am not prepared to do a bodge job for what you would want to pay me, but in any event here is some free and good advice about what I would do if I were in your situation.“

It means I only ever worry about being a bit short of dough, I never worry about getting a bad name or a bad job coming back to haunt me and cost me money.

I’ll give an analogy that anyone reading this can relate to.

Desktop computers and servers are a lot easier to fix properly than laptop computers.

There is, fundamentally, one reason and one reason only that this is true, desktop computers and servers are built to STANDARDS, such as ATX, PCI, AGP, RGB/VGA, USB, etc.

Laptops on the other hand are custom, I cannot open up a Dell and a Vaio and simply swap the motherboards over, there is no standard such as ATX, they are all unique.

Thing is, there is NO VALID ENGINEERING REASON FOR THIS TO BE SO.

Most of you are probably familiar with ATX, and perhaps mATX, but these are just two mainboard standards out of many, PC104 anyone?

Similarly a 12.1″ 4:3 aspect ratio laptop screen, it could EASILY be made a standard, both in physical dimensions as well as mounting points and electrical connections, irrespective of resolution or refresh rate or anything else.

What DROVE the revolution in personal computing was the foresight of IBM and others in defining these first physical standards.

What has STAGNATED and is KILLING the revolution in personal computing is the abandonment of this and embracing of the bad old days.

In the real bad old days before the industrial revolution there was no such thing as a standard screw thread, each bolt and nut was unique, and if there was any interchangeability it stopped at the factory level.

After the industrial revolution things got better, but there were still issues, yank kit turning up in Europe with JIC pipe fittings where the local shops only had BSP or maybe NPT fittings in stock was always fun, and extra work… and it produced some real howlers… for a few years in spain and italy you could buy bolts with BSF or Whitworth threads and shanks, and nearest Metric millimeter size heads for use with metric spanners and socket sets….

Of course when you come across these things fitted and all you can see is the head, you start swearing and asking what cunt put a 12mm metric bolt in a fucking Gardner engine….

And yet, this is what we are going back to (and this incidentally is the real reason I hate Apple, their engineering is all DELIBERATELY proprietary, and therefore by definition atrocious) a world in which nothing is standard any more.

You see, when you go to a real engineer, and you ask them to do something foolish, they will tell you to go somewhere else, but when you go to one of these wimminz and niggerz that call themselves engineers, they will just charge you more and give you what you asked for, with no thought as to the future consequences for the industry.

By using a standard port such as mini USB, there is almost nowhere that I can go with my Samsung Galaxy S3 ***** and not be able to charge the fucker up, even without carrying my own mini to full USB lead.

By using a proprietary port like crapple does, there is almost nowhere you can go with an iphone and charge it up, and I know personally of at least three wimminz with iphones who have found themselves in hospital with a severely ill child and a dead iphone, and no way to recall various contact numbers.

I know several “road warriors” who carry a plethora of charging and DC supply devices, all with different voltages, OR the same voltage but different proprietary plugs.

A STANDARD is the engineering term for HONEST, and it only applies to the things explicitly defined by the standard in question, so any ATX mobo will fit in any ATX computer, but chances are the 50 buck MSI board isn’t a patch on the 300 buck Supermicro board, and as referred to by the explicity of the standard, which does NOT mention CPU sockets, there is no guarantee to you swap ALL the components over from one ATX board to another.

Honesty is of course always the enemy of those who want as big a slice of the cake as possible, for the least effort possible.

Which brings us right back to the quote at the top from Jon Ward’s blog, what is interesting is that Mr Ward spent his working life in marketing, so as we see that explains his congenital inability to spot that the wimminz in his trio of “honest tradespeople” does not belong in the same company or group as the two honest tradesmen.

Laptops are not a pain in the ass to repair because Johnny Ive is a style guru or because they HAVE to be that way to be those dimensions and weight and have those outside appearances and layouts, laptops are a pain in the ass to repair because they are explicitly NOT based on standards, and as such they are not honest in engineering terms, and are a regressive step.

The other thing about standards is you have to choose APPROPRIATE ones…

There is no valid reason on this planet for there to be at last count some 50,000 proprietary and unique wheel sizes for automobiles, and for there to be no basic set of common standards…. I don’t know about now, but for many years all the trucks Henry Ford made in Europe were all metric fasteners, except for the wheel nuts, which were BSF, because they kept the fucking wheels on where the metric thread did not, BSF being a far superior thread.

A LOT of the economic pain we are suffering is a direct result of this avoidance of standards.

Indeed, the whole concept of a fiat monetary system is avoidance of a standard.

It’s going to get worse.

======================================

*****Disclaimer, while I admire and like my SGS3, and while the common mini USB interface is great, I would no rather repair it than an iphone or ipad, the internals are all devoid of standards, except for the SIM card and mini SD card sockets.

Related articles

• Ain’t fattening no more frogs for snakes. (wimminz.wordpress.com)
• Red pill pizza (wimminz.wordpress.com)
• Do anything you wanna do… (wimminz.wordpress.com)

 

When the crazy makes sense

I give you http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/photos/

If that doesn’t float your boat, here is a complete, unedited, copied and pasted quote from Zerohedge

“I have a friend who is a department manager at Walmart.  He and the other two department managers for that department have no employees. 80% of the employees are cashiers.  I point you to JCPenney and their decision to go to RFID chips, and reassigned all of their cashiers.  

In five years Walmart will not be the biggest private employer in the U.S., but they will be doing just fine.  I’ll let you figure out why.“

The guy is right, this is what the world has come to, a store department with three managers and zero employees, and it takes me straight back to documentaries made in 1976 about computerisation and the word processor wiping out the thing known as the typing pool….  buggy whip manufacturers indeed.

You also have to remember that all three “managers” are in fact in reality no more than the most menial of clerks with no discretion or authority, just a job title, Orlando style.

You can go to my local supermarket and there is an analogy to the proper turner in the shop replaced by one guy manning six CNC tools, there is one chick manning 8 self service tills, every time a customer tries to scan both bags of sugar before putting the first one into the weighed tray, or when central programming gets the weight of an item wrong so when you do scan and put it in the bag in the weighed tray it throws up an error.

If you stick with standardised and bar-coded items, coffee, milk, sugar, washing up liquid, it works well, hell it beats the fucking tills with queues of obese wimminz, plus it has the advantage that if the system fucks with you or falls over, just walk away and leave that shit there, that’s the bit the programmers always forget, a human can walk away from a robot mid-sentence… of course the bit the human’s always forget is that machines and computers can be programmed to be sociopathic towards you.

Take the example of petrol pumps, the law states that when they say they have dispensed a gallon of fuel, they can not under read by more than a fixed amount.

Say for example that the law says a pump cannot under dispense by more than 1.5%

Say for example (I’ll use metric cos it is easier) the tanker delivers 10,000 litres of fuel to the filling station, that means that the pumps are allowed to dispense a displayed volume of 10,150 litres, given that it is child’s play to make a pump that meters accurately to 0.1% this means they can deliberately set every pump in the land to under dispense by 1.4%, on every fill up, for every vehicle.

This is a simple example of a simple mechanical machine that has been set up to steal 1.4% of your billed amount, every single transaction.

Back in the day you could use a CB “burner”, which might make the pump money display freeze, or scream through to 99.99

Your domestic electric and gas meters are the same deal BTW

By the time you get to advanced electronic self service POS, and more importantly the supermarket full of products designed to be compatible with same, you get screwed left right and centre, by design, by the programmed to screw you sociopathic machine.

Suddenly things like apples and oranges and cucumbers get sold by quantity, not weight, and it is only when you get back home that you realise that back when you used to buy by weight from that same supermarket a bucks worth of apples used to full the fruit bowl on the dining table, and now you are buying individually the 8 apples it takes to fill the bowl are now a buck and a quarter, or local currency equivalent.

Suddenly, you’re buying the barcode, and getting for free the product attached to the barcode, and next thing you know you are being eased into the so called “multiple micro-transaction” model, which isn’t so micro… a minimum of 10% of shoppers at my local mart have already been programed to;

1. Pay for their groceries with the plastic at 14:04 hrs
2. Pay for their smokes with the plastic on the way out to the car at 14:10 hrs
3. Pay for their fuel for the car with the plastic (pumps set 1.4% under) at 14:19 hrs

Three transactions in 15 minutes at the same store in the same visit on the same plastic, and of course you are getting nickel and dimed at every step, and that is BEFORE you get talked into any of the options such as “cash back” at the till and so on.

Of course, as the IQ required by the customers drops, so does the IQ required by the staff.

IN shades of the Stainless Steel Rat, it is an ill wind that blows no good… I found myself wanting some 15″ diameter analogue wall clocks, the store had some on offer, seriously cheap, but the advantage is you go on with a good AA battery and a nearly flat AA battery which you palm, cos a nearly flat AA battery makes a clock mechanism / second hand jerk, but not advance, and you buy one “good” clock for 5.99 and get two “broken” ones for free after showing the department “manager” (see above) the broken stock… three clocks at 2.00 a pop.

It would be illegal to swap bar-codes on items, or to not swipe items, you could do both these things and get away with it, with some finesse, but they are both illegal and it just isn’t worth it, especially not for some product that costs 3.99…

But it is not illegal to game the system, by doing things the programmers never expected you to do, it is not illegal to take the 1 Kg bag of sugar and place it FIRMLY in the weight tray / bag after scanning, say 2 Kg firmly for a second or two… it is not illegal to wear a relatively large rare earth magnet in a wrist strap… it is not illegal to not know the difference between one variety of apple and another, and constantly ask the assistant for help… nor is it illegal to, as I saw on my last visit, wear a bracelet with a pendant with a bar-code enamelled onto it, which they only spotted when the security guard noticed that the “Error, call assistant” only came up when the customer tried to scan stuff with her left hand, the arm with the pendant.

RFID / NFC / NFC+bump etc is the appropriate technology to move us from where we are, to a real multiple micro transaction scenario where we can REALLY get nickel and dimed.

Which is great, until “Fred” comes along, Fred is as crazy as batshit, Fred was so convinced that all the RF pollution was fucking up his brain waves that he went out and bought a pocket size jammer from Asia, now he says he is much better, while being bathed in his own RF pollution…. I saw Fred this morning, buying his smokes (yeah, go figure) and the usual passer by looking at their phone quizzically and shouting HELLO!!!! ARE YOU THERE? at it, seems Fred decided to buy a new pair of trainers / sneakers, apparently he had a hell of a time, because the room temperature IQ staff were unable to just wave the RFID tagged product at the POS unit, and had to type in a 16 digit number by hand, which took about three attempts.

Fred didn’t make the connection, beyond “All this fuckin’ technology man….“

Related articles

• Automatic car parking system (slideshare.net)
• ASAP Systems Introduces Mobile RFID Technology for its Passport Assets Application Enabling Increase Asset Management Flexibility (prweb.com)
• The aim is to reduce medical errors (lfpress.com)
• Silicon Valley Executive Arraigned In Bar Code Scam (smartsign.com)
• Walmart Workers Are Threatening To Strike On Black Friday (businessinsider.com)
• JC Penney bets on Oracle, RFID checkouts (zdnet.com)

Fucking listen

When I talk, it is never bullshit, sometimes I might be slightly wrong, but never completely off target.

Here is a fucking classic example, click for full size. Of course in the actual ad each thumbnail is a link to a full sized pic.

A profile with 6 photos of the bitch, all blurred / soft focus / ‘shopped so you can’t actually see what she fucking looks like, no wrinkles to hide there then bitch, and a 7th photo of something she actually gives a shit that you see, her ever so trendy fucking car.

WHEN are you guys going to get the message, ALL of these bitches are walking around with RECENT smartphones with megapixel autofocus cameras (http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-6452_7-10009623-7.html?s=0&o=10009623) it just isn’t possible to GET these blurred / soft focus / messed up gamma photos any other way than by DELIBERATELY FUCKING SHOPPING THEM.

The one pic this bitch wants to impress you with FACT, the cool and trendy car she owns, as opposed the FICTION, the way she actually fucking looks now vs the impression she is trying to give, is a picture in clear and perfect autofocus / autoexposure / autoshutter and it is a very reasonable and representative picture, and look how she gets ALL the car in…..

Wake the fuck up with these dating pics.