risk 2

When I put up a picture of the Risk board a couple of days ago, I didn't expect things to escalate quite so quickly, but the world is getting ready for a Nato/US/Russia face-off in the already war-ravaged Syria. My map shows in blue the 90 km road route between the two biggest Syrian air bases.

Syrian ruler Assad and his cohort have much blood on their hands with unlawful attacks by both Syrian government and Russia forces against civilians, with attacks on medical facilities, schools, and mosques. There have been cluster munition attacks by Syrian government forces against opposition-held areas as well as use of thermite incendiary weapons. Add continued use of chemical weapons and organophosphorus nerve agents. Then there's been sarin dropped from a Sukhoi SU-22 plane and helicopters dropping chlorine. All with huge civilian casualties. That's the Human Rights Watch picture, but the UN has been stymied to even write a report on all of this by Russian downvoting.

Now the so-called US leader has jumped in making pronouncements about action. His speeches continue to be full of double-talk. One minute he is saying he wants to withdraw American troops. His soundtrack wasn't about atrocities, more that the sphere of influence is away from US strategic interests. Now he's talking about a military strike.

He did the same around a year ago, when he suddenly attacked Shayrat airfield. I know he's just allocated over half the US budget to military spending, but he's already diverting part of that spending to domestic border control.

Trump continues to act erratically. He has other distractions related to 'alleged' sleaze, corruption, vote rigging, payoffs. Even the Trump Tower fire illustrated that his company built this luxury tower block without any upper floor sprinklers. He issued a duck'n'dive DontheCon tweet about that too.

So now we see him hinting at strong-arm retaliation. I've used a particular version of an ISW map to illustrate some of the lines.

But for Trump it's about symbolism. Gesture politics. He can make some good headlines, even if they are against what he has said only a few days and weeks and months ago about this situation.

Syria has around 20 airforce bases. They've also taken to spreading their planes around the desert to make them harder to hit, when on the ground. My satellite picture over one of their main airstrips indicates the situation. Four decoys in a row and four real planes sprinkled around the sand.

Russia has sold and operationalised its S-400 missile system within Syria too. They are ground to air systems that can supposedly track 35 airborne targets and fire missiles at Mach 3.

So far they've not been deployed but if there's a hint of air traffic from Rammstein or other big US airforce conurbations then I'd expect that to all kick off as well.

The UK is being encouraged to take part in whatever happens. RAF Akrotiri is a few minutes Mach 2 airspace away and has Tornado bombers and Typhoon fighters. But with Trump at the front of all this it is potentially a case of Ready, Fire, Aim.

risk?

I enjoy an occasional board game of Risk. Seems as if the real world versions are back in play.

The U.S. National Guard will deploy up to 4,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border beginning Friday night, according to a the tRump memo from Defense Secretary James Mattis.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 600 points on Friday, a decline of around 2.3 percent. The sell-off came after that man threatened a new round of tariffs against China, upping the ante between the two nations.

Is the so-called president taking his China sanctions from Bob Lighthizer? A “might makes right” believer in the trade world. A brash and successful negotiator, a free trade sceptic who believes in using hard-hitting measures to protect domestic industries.

And what about the Russian angle? Kamchatka and all that? Former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort filed a motion late Friday to suppress evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team found in a storage locker in Virginia. Evidence which could illustrate some of the curious Manafort/Trump dealings prior to Trump's election.

It's better than box sets. Even before the minor sub-plots like the non-climate change believer Pruitt heading the Environmental Protection Agency having a Capitol Hill condo for $50 per night, via an energy lobbyist's wife.

No wonder Instructables have created a nuclear option for the board game.

Just remember, no fighting in the war room.

Topsham gulls tempted by tractor

The tractor was out on the field at the front today, much to the entertainment of the local gulls. Usually they will fly purposefully past here, as a short diversion from the nearby estuary.

But a freshly ploughed field...Too much of a temptation. I think they are mainly herring gulls. Wings tipped black, red spot on the yellow bill and pink legs. Excuse the blurry pictures taken through a window.

drive failure on backup day?

Someone said it was 'backup day' or 'backup week' or something similar. Co-incidentally, I had a drive fail in my backup disk array. The picture shows the disk out of its normal NAS enclosure and being examined in one of those hard drive docking stations.

I've already replaced it with a fresh disk in the Drobo and didn't even need to take the server offline.

The last 6 Terabyte drive failed about a year ago, and was in the same unit, but a different slot.

I decided to look at mean time between failure on these devices. I've quite a few Western Digital RED drives for servers and have a pretty good experience with them. Mine are mainly 3 Terabyte (15T packs) and 6 Terabyte (30T packs). By the time they have a single or dual disk redundancy, the available space diminishes somewhat.

It still seems crazy large compared with my oldest disk computers which had something like 2x32Mb disk drives.

Nowadays, I should probably be storing all of that data in the cloud (it's not like I need it all at once), although I'm still somewhat nervous about the way various services just come to an end. A recent example is the termination of the Amazon cloud storage of personal music libraries, which isn't allowing any new things to be uploaded after the end of 2018.

I like the stats that backblaze keep on disk failure rates, from their server farms, as a quick way to get a sense of relative failure rates, from a population of about 90,000 drives.

Pig and Whistle

An expedition to the Pig & Whistle, out in the Essex countryside. I know there's a lot of Pig 'n Whistle bars in America, but the pictures of pigs with whistles is a somewhat more literal translation than what I think of as Pig and Whistle, which is more or less a piggen wassail. That's a bowl or jug of beer which gets dunked/poured with individual beer mugs.

It used to be a thing in London, around some part of the City. Draft bitter sometimes gravity-fed from the barrel into a jug/pitcher and then distributed around the table.

Mainly just 4 and 8 pints, but nowadays it has almost completely disappeared except for the buckets of beer, which is simply iced (usually foreign lager) bottled beers bought in units of around 5. Those sawdust floored real ale pubs, underneath railway arches and lit by candles have been progressively replaced with Weatherspoons or expensive cocktail bars.

But back to the country pub in Essex. It serves a lovely Sunday carvery. Oh yes.

saddled with it

A chance for some family catch up, although there were several comments about my apparent hole-digging cycling performance. I sometimes forget how far and wide the Garmin statistics get spread via tapiriik and other systems.

When I use turbo mode then it does look as if I'm prospecting for oil. I know I sometimes come back thinly covered in it, but I think that's the chain fighting back.

Bookish magical realism

A stop off in Piccadilly at the Edward Lutyens designed Maison Assouline, partly to look at the rather expensive books, and partly to tipple one of the rather expensive cocktails. The sign outside might say books, gifts and cafe, but it is a rather understated indication of the model Ferraris, coffee table Andy Warhols and afternoon teas on offer.

I decided to try the tequila based Frida Kahlo, which somehow matched the book on display just in front of me. Or maybe it was subliminal advertising? Magical realism?

CDs vs digital - a listener's licence?

Before we moved I did a rationalisation of vinyl music. Around an 80% cull. We do still have a record player, but it is somewhat decorative nowadays, akin to those vintage typewriters that are making a comeback. A few special albums and ones with extra memories survived, but the rest (often duplicated as CDs) are doing the rounds of charity shops.

The next set of items to follow my old bright orange Olympia Traveller de Luxe out of the door, could be my CDs.

Ages ago I started removing CDs from jewel cases, to get around a 5:1 space reduction. They spent some time in plastic binders, but then as we went digital, the CDs started to migrate into crates. Never a good sign.

Currently the crates are in the garage, awaiting the next set of decisions.

Do I build some shelving to bring them back indoors? My artistic recreation of shelving suggests not. And if I did, would they ever be browsed and would individual CDs get played the way they were when there were far fewer and they had a dedicated Hi-Fi system?

I somehow doubt it. I know all about the higher quality of the CDs compared with .mp3 and FLAC encoding. More dynamic range. On headphones with some I can even tell the type of tape used on old analogue to digital conversions of albums.

Would that it were so simple.

Convenience will win out. Being able to think of an album and just play it still wins over rummaging around through racks of CDs in most cases. Even playlists for those Chilled Afternoon Coffee Moments Where Even Stereo Is Unimportant.

I guess there will be exceptions. Some CDs with elaborate cases that are still akin to artwork. A few with extra special memories, but the bulk are really a way to be able to prove that I have the licence for a particular set of music.

I haven't started the physical process yet.

fedora hat man

That new movie Unsane with Claire Foy as the leading character is a sort of stalker take on a Gaslight movie. Whilst with some sunny outdoor moments, it's set largely within a hospital and oft-times inside the head.

Close quarters and dimly lit, it was entirely made on iPhones. It makes me wonder how the techniques for iPhone and very small camera based movies will develop. Some of the static well-lit scenes have incredible detail, other major story-telling parts go somewhat murky and dare I say blurry.

For monochrome movies there developed all kinds of back-light/rim light techniques to set the right noir tones. You almost can't have a noir without one of those shutters/blinds scenes and some of that cigarette smoke...For Canon/Lumix/RED style big lens digital there's a chance to show off creamy blurry depth of field.

Now with the tiny cameras, away from Top Gear style saturation and magic bullet post-processing, there'll presumably be a whole new set of techniques? I suppose this movie is something of a trailblazer. All the way from selfies to wide-screen?

Here's a trailer for the movie, although, by way of a warning, it is one of those that partially summarises the plot.

now with added alligators - the $1.3T omnibus snow job doesn't drain the swamp

That $1.3 trillion omnibus bill was passed in the USA, partly using a ticket to avert a further US government shutdown.

It doesn't drain the swamp, it just adds more alligators, mud, live oak, gumbo limbo, royal palm and sharp saw palmettos.

Firstly, check it out (here). The 2,232 pages are almost unreadable. It's built by weight. I expect they work out the consultant fee at so many thousand dollars per page. And the need for it to have the thud factor because its for $1.3 trillion.

There's no embedded tables, it uses arbitrarily split sentences, spaced on around 8 word numbered lines.

There's no headers and footers so you have to guess where a section starts. There's no proper summary. It has all the hallmarks of a snow job and a shopping list for vested interests. Just send your requests to our consultants and we'll put them through the obfuscation mill. Here's an example from the tax simplification area - the so-called General Deadwood Related Provisions:

Yikes.

Already the media headlines are about bike sheds New Jersey tunnels and the wall, although the really big money seems to go to the military. The Pentagon gets around $656 billion of the $1,300 billion. Some 50.4% of the total, but its buried away in Section C. The new ultra-hawkish John Bolton as national security advisor has previous form for wanting to bomb places, so watch out.

I decided to take a look at a simple area: the new warplanes being acquired as part of the defence upgrade. Here's my table:

I casually picked the first item to examine in more detail. F-35 planes. Lockheed had agreed to deliver them for 'less than $100m each'. Not so here, with a per unit cost of $113 million. Maybe it's somebody's handling fees? A kind of swamp tax.

that elusive facebook delete button

A lot of people talk about deleting Facebook, but I doubt whether many will. It's also incredibly difficult to find the delete button. I've decided to put a copy here, in case I ever need it. My summary shows there's only so many categories they can track, after all:

And here's a link to a fuller infographic of all of the Facebook marketing/targeting capabilities. What's all the fuss about? They still think I live in a place called Chelsea, Newham, London and have self-generated fictitious home moves. A recent example of their marketing was this irrelevant stuff about prayer candles and a curiously named toilet seat.

Maybe they thought it looked a similar shape to a recent art exhibit I visited called not everyone will be taken into the future? Maybe I should name their combo "Not every social media site will be taken into the future"?

Cambridge Analytica : the dice were loaded from the start?

Above is Wired's postulation of Mark Zuckerberg's current appearance and the Damian Collins MP letter to him at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park. Since the news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (CA), he has yet to comment. Whoever is managing facebook's reputational damage needs to step it up a notch.

The absent Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are presumably being schooled in media answers, whilst Facebook lawyers such as Paul Grewal advise staff on how to remain silent. It looks as if each organisation implicated is selecting a scapegoat to try to minimise damage. Kogan and Nix so far.

Facebook's security model goes back to something called IETF RFC 6749/OAuth 2.0, which is a multi-tier way to seek permissions and which in turn allow access to friend data.

Facebook third party developers were encouraged to use these friends permission protocols to monetise and to extend their own networks.

It means that although a subcontractor to Cambridge Analytica is having the finger pointed at the moment, there could be plenty of other examples of similar albeit less voluminous accesses from other app developers.

Of course, Cambridge Analytica took it to a further level. Their website boasts about the 5000 data points on every person. Here's today's screen shot from their site:

Although it's not quite as obvious as the teaser they inserted onto their website crowing after Trump's victory.

Check their site today and there is still a slew of PR from around the time of Trump's victory. Although, I can't help wondering if some of these stories may melt away a bit like the protonmail.com emails which can be set to self destruct after a user-specified interval. Who wouldn't have a Swiss crypto email system for those special moments?

I checked the Trump campaign payments to Cambridge Analytica by using the Federal Elections Commission records of the Trump campaign. Just shy of $6m dollars paid from Trump's people to CA, a drop in the ocean of his $348m campaign total. I also noticed around $4m of payments back to entities featuring the name Trump.

So when the currently suspended Mr Nix from Cambridge Analytica was interviewed last year by the FT about the Trump victory he commented that CA worked on 50 Republican campaigns in 2016. Then there's the Jarad Kushner commissioned work with his Trump San Antonio data science team. Nix has gone on to say that his organisation uses data to identify flippable voters and where to target voters to stay at home. Behavioural micro targeting. Just like that done by Strategic Communication Laboratories which is the parent company of CA, although their work has previously been within developing countries.

A not altogether legal aspect of this during an election is that it uses manual curation of the messaging streams, including suppression and injection. The Channel 4 television investigation illustrated that CA routinely uses third parties to insulate their actions. These seem to be both upstream (towards the data) midstream (during acting of influence strategies) and downstream (to insulate the client/candidate).

So we know about some of the upstream activity, but I wonder where CA would get the people to action the influence strategy itself? All those microtargeted adverts (often on Facebook) must have originated somewhere? Surely not the same place as the ones use in Kenya/Mexico/Italy?

Oh yes, and the same FT source mentions that the UK Brexit Leave campaign also used Cambridge Analytica. Oops.