Category Archives: Finance

August 27, 2021 · 20:55

And the mystery is?


It is one of those ‘I told you so moments’. I am not happy or proud, but the profound sadness that hits me when I see the way it is reported on is just staggering. A few are reporting on it, but the larger stage is likely to be found in places like the Verge soon enough. The people who get it will soon understand that it will be worse and that my 90% of cloud transgressions was no joke. Yet to see part of that nightmare, you need to realise that the Microsoft Azure cloud has been in existence since October 2008, almost 13 years. Now it took the business to grow its customer base. Yet consider that the article at Reuters ‘Microsoft warns thousands of cloud customers of exposed databases’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-microsoft-warns-thousands-cloud-customers-exposed-databases-emails-2021-08-26/) gives us “A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies” Now we can only speculate how long that flaw was there, or perhaps that design error. Yet the damage is enormous. With “Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz” we might think it is trivial because it only costed $40,000, but it is not. Thousands of firms with BILLIONS in IP values and other values have been in danger for years, at the most 3 years, yet the article does not really reflect on that (which is not the fault of the BBC or Reuters). And when we are told “We fixed this issue immediately to keep our customers safe and protected. We thank the security researchers for working under coordinated vulnerability disclosure”, I wonder just how bad it is. Now, I get it, it might be fixed but if that was an easy fix, it might equally mean that it could have been easily prevented. 

So when we get to “This is the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine. It is a long-lasting secret. This is the central database of Azure, and we were able to get access to any customer database that we wanted.” We get to see that Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak (a former Microsoft employee) now working at Adallom LTD and Wiz. Now we get it bugs happen, yet one would think that proper testing would be done and this bug whilst not proven to be transgressed upon went undetected for no one nows how long until an external group decided to test Microsoft access (optionally on Microsoft orders). So whilst some might think that “Microsoft only told customers whose keys were visible this month, when Wiz was working on the issue” passes the mustard, but it does not, mainly because the length of the transgression enabled time is still unknown, and that is not all. When we consider “The company was breached by the same suspected Russian government hackers that infiltrated SolarWinds”, as well as “a wide number of hackers broke into Exchange email servers while a patch was being developed” with the cherry on top of “A recent fix for a printer flaw that allowed computer takeovers had to be redone repeatedly” a well as “Another Exchange flaw last week prompted an urgent U.S. government warning that customers need to install patches issued months ago because ransomware gangs are now exploiting it”, as such one might speculate that they need to adjust their marketing vision, with the first optional change being “We advertise the most powerful console because the other stuff is buggered” and it seems that Microsoft has all kinds of testing and investigation flaws, that is merely my speculated view, yet for the customers who feel threatened by this, consider looking at Open office (at https://www.openoffice.org), I cannot guarantee it is more secure, but it is free and you are now paying for all the transgressions in a multitude of ways (including an annual fee) so you can at least negate one factor. 

So whilst some feel sorry for that multibillion company and how sad things are, consider that Azure is an issue, especially when you realise “Microsoft and outside security experts have been pushing companies to abandon most of their own infrastructure and rely on the cloud for more security”, when that comes to the surface, we see that Microsoft seemingly embraces ‘sharing is caring’ and with everything people have in that cloud sharing everything with EVERYONE, we might see Microsoft as the most caring behemoth in the universe, but I reckon the customers who pay a pretty penny for that ‘privilege’ will see this differently. But there is light at the end of the tunnel (well not really). Compare the logos of Microsoft and the olympics, now consider that only the black elements (the hackers) were not yet represented, but it seems that Microsoft gave them an internal challenge and so far the hackers are leading three to nil, which is the larger danger. 

And that larger danger is given to us at the very end with “But though cloud attacks are more rare, they can be more devastating when they occur. What’s more, some are never publicised. A federally contracted research lab tracks all known security flaws in software and rates them by severity. But there is no equivalent system for holes in cloud architecture, so many critical vulnerabilities remain undisclosed to users, Luttwak said”. 

So it is here that some might realise that 

  1. Some cloud transgressions are never shown the light of day.
  2. Many critical vulnerabilities remain undisclosed.
  3. (Speculated) The makers might not even be aware of some vulnerabilities.

That is the stage that cloud customers are exposing themselves to and in this, with too many corporations reducing their IT security staff and relying on the security of the cloud, how much is this costing the Fortune 500 who created that erroneous overly simple mindset? It was never a mystery to me, I have written about these kind of dangers since 2017, so if people are just now waking up, good morning and enjoy the coffee you have, you’ll need it.

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August 26, 2021 · 22:12

As credibility moves to the arctic

Yes, today is another day to look at the media BS and in this case the BBC. Now, let’s be clear, in this specific case they are optionally not deceiving you, but they are part of the problem and not part of the solution (as I personally see it). The article ‘Climate change: Consumer ‘confusion’ threatens net zero homes plan’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58306288) sounds nice but they are painting with one brush, a massively large one and they are tinkering towards what I personally expect to be the needs of stakeholders. 

You see, I gave you a few parts (again) in ‘Ignored by media’ a week ago (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/08/19/ignored-by-media/). That pesky European Environment Agency gave a report a little over 6 months ago that showed us clearly (in their way) that 50% of ALL pollution came from 147 facilities, I even added their graphics. Did any of these media courtesans give us that? Did they clearly oppose it with reasons? No, they did none of that. No, they are giving us “efforts to curb emissions from millions of homes in the UK will be at risk”, so whilst we see the BS arrangement to give us “they need the right information and tools, particularly when it comes to adapting their home. “By getting things right now, the government can give people the confidence to make changes and play their part in getting to net zero.”” Which sounds nice and I get that part, but in all this we see the spending by millions of households whilst 50% of the problem is given to us by 147 facilities, so 147 facilities against millions of households, in addition the media to the largest extent has not now, NOT EVER, dug into that lit of 147 facilities and gave us the lit of 147 players and started their name and shame game (I reckon that involved stakeholders will not allow for that). So whilst the BBC is reporting “offers financial support such as grants, low-cost loans and financing”, and I apologise so pardon my French, so where the fuck is that list of 147 facilities, the amounts of taxation paid by the people behind these 147 facilities and how much non taxable funds they are making? Now, we should understand that these facilities might not (most likely are not) be in the UK or Europe, but in the age of the media giving us ‘the people have a right to know’ I reckon that the people should be allowed that part of the equation too, or not?

So whilst the BBC gives us boldly “Government plans to decarbonise homes are too complicated and confusing, according to a coalition of consumer and industry groups”, why are they not going over that list of 147 facilities and make sure that those facilities are fined so that we all get time and funds to do our side? So when we are given “The carbon generated by home heating amounts to about 20% of all UK emissions”, all whilst we see that several media players are ignoring “50% of ALL pollution comes from 147 facilities” are you not equally wondering why environmental reporters are largely ignoring the EEA report? 

It makes me wonder who Matt McGrath is catering too, do you not agree to this? In all this Matt is not completely wrong with his article, but the setting is not that small, it has not be that small for well over a decade and when we see the links to ‘Climate change: Europe’s extreme rains made more likely by humans’ and ‘Nature crisis: Talks resume on global plan to protect biodiversity’ you might notice something, I did. You see in these two articles the word ‘pollution’ is seen once. It is seen in the second article in the quote “the nations of the world failed to fully meet any of the 20 targets which included protecting coral reefs and tackling pollution”, all this whilst the EEA report does not get mentioned, not once. In a day and age where the headlines are about ‘biodiversity’ and ‘extreme rains’, yet pollution and the 147 facilities are out of range (read out of expected bounds). 

So what alleged stakeholder is making a speculated fortune by allegedly arranging the media not to take a deep and informative look at the EEA report?
Which so called journalist dug into the data the EEA has, where the 147 facilities were and which of the remaining 14178 could get its pollution damage smothered (by a lot)? 

These are questions that are out in the open and yes, that is not up to the BBC to fix, yet the utter silence of that part is up to the BBC and they need to be starting to ask the difficult questions. Yes they cannot give all the answers, but in this stage no one is asking the questions that matter, I will let you figure out which is worse. 

So enjoy the polluted air and remember, Amazon sells gas masks ranging from $30 to $150, be weary you might need one in the near future and if you see the BS people attacking others on their freedom of choice for not wearing a face mask, I wonder how they will react to the choice between gas mask and breathing (no more). That is in the end the second option, if we let the 35% of all stupid people of the population die, pollution and carbon emissions will be reduced as well, the scales of balance will not care and if one solution will not work, the other one remains. Life can at times be that simple.

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July 20, 2021 · 15:29

Powers that were

Consider the stage we are in now and the stage we were in once. We were driven by stories, stories with a centre of truth, but what that truth was, we might never know. Even now as we try to set the new stage to the current state we know about, we are almost desperate to see ourselves better than we are. So what if we go back?

In the age of Ancient times there were the gods, the Greek gods for one. They once made weapons of immense power, Devine weapons. Not because they were simply better to anything we hd then, but because they had an element that is not available now, it never was. The tinkerer (smith) in that company was Hephaestus, he had enough for 5 weapons, 5 choices imbued with that one element making the weapon  hundred times more powerful than anything available at that time. One already existed, the hammer of Hephaestus. It is the weakest of them all, but it already existed. A hammer that can hit any object in exact precision in angle and power. It could also hit another person with the strength of a thousand sledgehammers, it allowed Hephaestus to do what needed to be done. The five weapons were tremendous and Christianity borrowed from these ideas, but they were never theirs and whatever they claimed was nowhere near as powerful. So when we hear speak people about weapons of power, do they know what they mean? The third most powerful weapon is supposed to be the trident of Poseidon, the most powerful one is the bolt of Zeus and the stories seem to collaborate that, but why? Because he is king of the gods? The second most powerful one is the one you might not expect, it is the bident of Hades. Yet why are these weapons so powerful? A man named Erich von Daniken looked into this for years and wrote a massive amount of books on the subject. He started in 1968, I became aware on his books somewhere in the 70’s, in total he sold well over 60 million books spanning over 30 languages. Even as some people (to some degree me too) thinks he goes over the deep end, there is something to be said on this and my book (still writing it) touches on that part. So when the Ancient Greek gods came here (after they made a mess in Persia, now Iran), they had technological advantages, for reasons not that much, but they did. 

They brought the secrets of Celestrium, and more important, they allegedly had access to terahertz radiation devices , a substance we are only now considering to have medical implications. In 2019 Joo-Hiuk Son, Seung Jae Oh, and  Hwayeong Cheon found that ”Terahertz radiation has significant potential in medical diagnosis and treatment because its frequency range corresponds to the characteristic energy of bio molecular motion. Advantageously, terahertz-specific low energy does not cause the ionisation of biomolecules” We can speculate on how healing that source is, but it would seem that. Person in those days could not be hurt by arrows, spears and swords. Yes, this is off the deep end, but we are finally looking at the stories and that is not the only part, the same application on observation and identity safety goes on a much longer road, and we have not even scratched the surface. 

It is George Alexander Gazis who wrote “Homer and the Poetics of Hades”, he gives us Hades as a place of darkness, where even the gods cannot see, and from this he concludes that “Hades remains impenetrable even to the omnipresent Muses”, a point never made in the poem. “In this sense,” he adds, “life and death are equated with seeing and been seen or not seeing and been invisible”; hence, the negative epithets characterising Hades. But this is a common conceptual metaphor, and death is also presented as a journey.” Hades has a landscape as well, and it is shut in by gates, features Gazis does not explore and why would he? Yet now we know that the application of TeraHertz technology would have setbacks, It was not bout the dark, it was about what non-TeraHertz technology would not be able to see at that point, not for 4000 years. 

Is this all speculation? Yes it is, but so are the writings of Homer and Aristotle, we merely accept them as they are old, I wonder what they never considered because no one would in those days, and until recently no one had reason to, yet the clues were always n front of everyone, and I am merely speculating, yet if someone looked at specific maps of what is now Iran, if they were able to look at rock pressures, someone might notice an almost perfect square with sides that were about 3500 metres each side. Did anyone make any connection to the this sizeable amount of pressure and the Ancient Greeks? So what is this about?

As I stated, it is all speculation, but I am taking another gander at the classical writings and the paths no one walked on, because we only now start to get access to the technology that alters the view we now have and that is also a setting we need to have for all new IP, games, movies and TV series. Most of the writings point towards Hades and how he is the weakest of the brothers. Now we see an optional path where he is the loner, the most secretive and optionally right behind Zeus in strength. Does that not alter the perception of a lot of writings? And when we see that some of these speculations do have an acceptable setting of alleged truth, what happens after that? In a factual life we need to get evidence, but the creative IP has a few additional paths at their convenience and they merely need to be original. 

The powers that were can imbue the powers that want to be, they only need to grasp what is readily available out there. 

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July 9, 2021 · 07:30

Greed and Law helping each other

I have written about it before, it is my point of view and my conviction. It is my setting that gives rise to what you could see, and gives rise to what you could know, you already did, but you seemingly decided to ignore it, you decided to enable the greed driven and all parties are smitten by greed, they call it different, yet as I see it, it is mere greed.

How it ends
The end is shown by the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57770557) with “It marks the first step towards the OxyContin painkillers maker paying out $4.3bn (£3.1bn) to settle cases related to the opioid crisis”, it was always about the money. There is an old saying “μυστήριον, Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη, ἡ μήτηρ τῶν πορνῶν καὶ τῶν βδελυγμάτων τῆς γῆς;” The book of revelations 17:5. Did anyone consider it could optionally reflect on Attorney General Letitia James from the state of New York? We might see and take notice of “While no amount of money will ever compensate for the thousands who lost their lives or became addicted to opioids across our state or provide solace to the countless families torn apart by this crisis, these funds will be used to prevent any future devastation”, will it though?

The method
We see ‘OxyContin is one of the most commonly abused prescription drugs’, and we see that it belongs to the Sackler family, the members who own Purdue Pharma, privately held. They are not guilty, yet they are also not innocent, greed drove them towards their billions, yet they are not the demons we all paint them to be, to not be innocent and to be a demon is to be a different cattle of fish and any Attorney General could tell you that, but they have the money and they all wanted the money, the real demon.

Culprits
Yes, there are culprits in this story. You see some sources give us that in 1996 316,000 prescriptions were dispensed, it grew to an impressive amount topping over 14 million prescriptions with an estimated value of $3,000,000,000. The issue we see everyone painting over is ‘prescriptions dispensed’, this is not something that a person can get, it needs a doctor and it needs a pharmacist. The top 5 are Walgreens Company, CVS Health, Walmart, Rite Aid Corp and Krogers company. They own a little over 25,000 stores and around 113,000 pharmacists. There are ere players in the game. Yet how many Oxycontin did they hand out? How many doctors did these prescriptions?
You see, the interesting side is not what we see, but what we saw on TV in 1978, it was an episode of Lou Grant and that episode (season 2 episode 1 “Pills”) shows us the larger station that plays here and THEY gave the people (government also) the goods 20 years earlier. We all want one demon, but there was not one, there were a truckload of them, but the US government cannot fill their pockets there.

Innocence
It is the first fatality in any war, there is no exception and this is not different. The Sackler family is not innocent, but they are not the guilty demons that the media and the flaming screamers claim them to be. It was simple and it was out there. 14,000,000 prescriptions and only doctors can make them. Yes, we see “lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs” yet it is given out by doctors and it is handed out by pharmacies. Yet the New Yorker in 2020 gives us “Purdue Pharma played a “special role” in the opioid crisis because the company “was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown”, I get that and we should understand that, yet in this (at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/opioid-manufacturer-purdue-pharma-pleads-guilty-fraud-and-kickback-conspiracies) we also get “Purdue also paid kickbacks to providers to encourage them to prescribe even more of its products”, so who were those providers? Who received these kickbacks? We are not likely to see those are we, we will merely see words like ‘settlement’ and ‘undisclosed parties’, innocence was the first victim to fall, none of the players were innocent. And the government is equally guilty. The NPR (at https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949309266/doj-sues-walmart-over-unlawful-distribution-of-controlled-substances) gave us in December 2020 “The Justice Department is suing Walmart. In a civil suit filed today, the Justice Department alleges that the company’s pharmacies and warehouses helped fuel the opioid crisis. Walmart’s pharmacy chain dispensed billions of opioid pills, including OxyContin and other highly addictive medications. And this lawsuit claims that the company broke the law hundreds of thousands of times”, so that took a decade? And when we consider ‘broke the law hundreds of thousands of times’, how come that store is still open? And it is Brian Mann who gives us “according to the DOJ, Walmart did exactly the opposite, filling huge numbers of unsafe and illegal prescriptions, allegedly doing so for years without alerting the government”, and there we have it, the crux of the Lou Grant episode, the evidence that set the caper in motion in 1978, but that is not all, the article also gives us “NPR has been looking into this. And we found that some of the company’s own former pharmacists tried for years to raise the alarm about allegedly illegal activity. Ashwani Sheerin (ph) is a pharmacist who worked for Walmart in rural Michigan. He told NPR he saw real red flags”, not all pharmacists are evil, but we see the stage of revenue pushing, it is greed in action and when we see ‘tried for years to raise the alarm’ we see that the Justice department is not innocent either and the media is not innocent either. A stage where they all love revenue, circulation and ringing the bell loudly was apparently not an option. So whilst we see “had reached an agreement with Purdue that would see its owners, the wealthy Sackler family, pay an additional $50m”, I wonder where Walmart is in this and with them a whole range of pharmacies. Because it was never Walmart alone, not with an annual 14,000,000 prescriptions.

Solution
There might not be one, but us all recognising that Justice reacted well over a decade too late, that is as I personally see it, the FDA dropped the ball, likely more than once, especially as this has been going on for years, optionally well over a decade. And it is Attorney General Letitia James with “prevent any future devastation” who has the ball now, I wonder if she drops it, or hands it over to someone else, as NPR gives us pointing the finger at Walmart, but they are not alone and the records of the FDA are also in question. When I look into ‘Federal Regulations for Clinical Investigators’, I wonder if it helps investigations, or slows them down.
You see Oxycontin is a schedule 8 drug and we get “Doctors must follow state and territory laws when prescribing oxycodone and must notify, or receive approval from, the appropriate health authority”, you see this matters as pharmacies need a doctors prescription, so which doctors were behind the 14,000,000 annual prescriptions? 

So there you have it, I made no claim that the Sackler family was innocent, they are not, but they are not the demons we see them to be, this is a much larger problem and it was left unchecked for well over a decade, or there was at the very least a decade of inaction and too many filled their pockets and yes the Sackler benefitted, but they were not alone, Walmart was part, but there too they were not alone and the doctors who prescribed these pills, what is their price for a prescription? As I personally see it, the law enabled greed to continue for too long, the law and greed enabled each other, and the end is still not in sight, no matter what Attorney General Letitia James and in this she is not alone either, doesn’t San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia not have any Attorney Generals? Where were they in the 2000-2021?

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July 7, 2021 · 19:04

Choices by media

We all have them, we all have choices, believes and convictions. The media has them as well and they are entitled to them. I never objected to their choices, I merely want them to have accountability towards their actions. To kick this off, I need to confess. I had difficulties believing Bill Cosby was guilty. I went with what TV fed me, his character, his demeanour and I will admit, I was taken in by all of it. I saw the jokes, I saw the accusations and when we got ‘Bill Cosby released from prison after sex conviction overturned’ my mind went to different locations. I am unsure. Yes, I accept “The court ruled that the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor’s agreement not to charge Cosby”, it does not make him innocent, yet why would any prosecutor come with an “agreement not to charge Cosby”? From a legal point of view it strongly implies that the prosecutor had no evidence to begin with. If the evidence was there, that promise would never be voiced by any prosecutor. And this got me thinking on Kevin Spacey. When we see “Kevin Spacey accuser who tried to sue anonymously is dismissed from case” (source: ABC) and we are given “A US judge has dismissed all claims by one of two men suing actor Kevin Spacey over alleged sexual misconduct in the 1980s, after the plaintiff refused to identify himself publicly” that is a voiced 50% loss, 50% went out the window just like that. And that is merely the beginning. The media is now in a much larger stage, a stage of denial and a stage of their big mouths that could land them an 8 figure settlement, optionally 9 figure, but that is a stretch. You see, at the height of the ‘House of Cards’ he was cast out, thrown away and that show was the talk of the town. Now we see the impact of the media and their need for a pound of flesh. So when we consider ABC giving us “The other plaintiff, actor Anthony Rapp, said he was 14 in 1986 when Spacey engaged in an unwanted sexual advance with him during a party at the actor’s home. Spacey, 61, has denied CD’s and Rapp’s sexual misconduct accusations. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment”. Did it happen?  I do not know, but in legal settings evidence matters, flaming opinions do not. Yet for an issue to wait 20 years until Kevin Spacey has his golden moment sounds off by a lot. And is no one asking what a 14 year old person is doing at a party? There might be a valid reason, there might not be, yet the lack of information in the media makes me wonder. A media that is too much about flaming and too little about informing. So I am not upset with Netflix when we see “Spacey starred in Netflix’s House of Cards before Netflix severed its ties with him after sexual misconduct accusations surfaced in 2017”, Netflix had to protect what was theirs, and there was damage, but in all this the media flamed that damage and when we see “the man known in court papers as “CD” said revealing his identity would cause “sudden unwanted attention” and be “simply too much for him to bear””, I have an issue, this could be a blackmailer hoping to cash in, ‘could be’ being the operative part. More important when we consider ‘10.83 The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him’, a simple foundation and when I see “Peter Saghir, a lawyer for CD, declined to comment on Thursday” I wonder what had gotten into Peter Saghir. It is speculative of me to think that the case with just Anthony Rapp was too thin to proceed. Yet the media is not looking at that picture or any picture that has the shown image as a picture in picture. And it is Reuters who gives us “Peter Saghir, a lawyer for C.D. and Rapp, declined to comment on Thursday. He has suggested that C.D. might pursue an appeal if his case were severed from Rapp’s”, so he is willing not to be ‘anonymous’ when Rapp is off the charter? It gives us a larger stage that the Rapp case is thin, optionally too thin. And that is when Kevin Spacey will made the 8 or 9 figure claim, he lost that much and that is the ball game and when the media gets that much of a claim, the game changes, the wolves become crying chihuahua’s trying to hold on as much of that money as possible, in a stage where every penny counts, losing over a billion if not well over ten times that much pennies will make them suffer, and with all the BS I have watched over the last decade, the media could do with a little suffering. 

Some people are all about Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey, I am on the fence because we are lands of law, evidence is part of that and when the media is all about emotional flames, it tends to be the setting for a lack of evidence. Yes, this is speculative, but in that I have been proven right a lot more often than I was proven wrong. 

So what is next? 
When you see the flamed accusations against Spacey and Cosby, all whilst the media is going with excuse after excuse against Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of dead media mogul Robert Maxwell. It seems that the media seems to be a protective shield for anyone with strong ties to media. So when you see the slams against these two gentlemen and we see ‘SHAMED Ghislaine Maxwell was left “broken” by her “horrendous childhood”’, ‘Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison cell flooding with raw sewage’ and more, yes she is so sad and so broken, but these people cannot afford a ‘$1 million home paid for in cash’, can they? When you have enough money to get a “4,300-square-foot house sits on 156 acres of land, at the top of a half-mile driveway” (source: NBC News), things do not add up. Especially as her daddy forfeited (read: default) on £50,000,000 in loans and went yachting. Yes, poor, poor little Ghislaine. 

Do you see the problem? The media has two measures and none are holding evidence too high and in all this we become the flock that relies on flamed materials, too often devoid of evidence.

So when you see this and we reconsider the hack (Kaseya) and now we add Government Security Info (at https://www.govinfosecurity.com/kaseya-ransomware-attack-this-dramatic-escalation-a-16996), I wonder what is true (I really do wonder) they give us “There’s one big question that hasn’t been answered, says Tom Kellermann, head of cybersecurity strategy at VMware Carbon Black. “Who gave REvil the zero-day?””, yet Fortune dot com gives us “The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure said it had alerted Kaseya to multiple vulnerabilities in its software that were then used in the attacks, and that it was working with the company on fixes when the ransomware was deployed”. So one side gives us ‘zero-day’ the other gives us ‘multiple vulnerabilities’, as well as ‘it had alerted Kaseya’. Yet no one will give us how long this was known by Kaseya, how long the issue was out there and for how long Kaseya did too little in protecting their customers? The media is on both slots and the lack of voiced investigations are staggering, so when will we get the real deal, the state of matters drowning in facts and evidence? 

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July 6, 2021 · 21:38

Dream number three

I am trying to remember something. Yesterday I came up with short story number three, I dreamt the story and the big lines were done, but now I forgot the dream, only fragments remain. A stage where it is about one thing leading to another, I see the ending but I can no longer see the beginning. It is a shared setting that eludes me, and every time I my mind moves back to the story, it is overwhelmed with other facts. It takes me back to yesterday as I was writing the Kaseya story. The BBC is giving us “Researchers from the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure found the problem and were helping Kaseya plug the hole long before the hackers found it”, yet if we are to believe ‘long before the hackers found it’ I wonder why Kaseya was continuing on the path they were. More important, if that was really true, why was Kaseya not monitoring the situation 24:7? In my case the story is not completed, I am creating it (almost) on the go. Kaseya is seemingly in a stage where they are in denial. First a few, then up to a 1,000 and now, after other sources give us a stage that sets the premise to up to 100,000, some sources give us ‘Between 800 and 1,500 companies potentially affected by Kaseya ransomware attack’, I get it, it is optional a seesaw that is balancing between optionally managing bad news and the speculative media on the other end of the seesaw. Neither side is overly reliable in my personal view. Yet the BBC gives us “the way the cyber-security world has pulled together to reduce the impact of the attack has been incredible”, you see, I have been involved in IT work since 1982, I have never seen competitors pull together, so the story of ‘the cyber-security world has pulled together’ remains debatable. They are all scared, they wanted solutions faster, automated and cheaper, it is like the house where you can choose 2 out of three, now the choice is nil, because the underlying factors are haywire. In this setting, and yes, this is all speculative. We have a solution that is faster/slower, automated/manual and cheap/expensive. They wanted it fast, but that requires matching hardware and software. This is where ‘plugging the hole’ is a problem, as such there was never a cheap solution. Then there was the automated setting, that is the one that they could pull off, but in a stage where there is too little security, and if ‘long before the hackers found it’ is to be believed, I speculate that the need was manual when the wrong parties opted for automated. And in the third we have cheap and expensive. They needed a solution that was cheap, but they needed a lot more expensive elements. This is ALL speculation, but the setting where we see system after system fail, in my personal opinion is all a setting towards shortcuts and that led to the weakness we now see exploited. I personally believe that players like Kaseya are too plenty and when we see ‘the cyber-security world has pulled together’, we see a stage where they all have a seemingly fat meal, they all get to set a field of limitations for all others and that will have long term repercussions. Microsoft, Solarwinds, Kaseya are examples that how us that the hackers are gaining more and more advantage and that is the larger stage. In this setup hell will get one happy resident and it is not the ruler of hell, I will let you consider who I am talking about and it is not a player that is mentioned in this article, neither is REvil, they seemingly found a gap that they exploited hoping to bank $70,000,000 but the stage is out there and the snippet “were helping Kaseya plug the hole long before the hackers found it” is merely a factor, so how long did the plugging take and why was it not successful? The words ‘long before’ should be an indication. So why are we (clearly) seeing several facts and the hack was still successful? The article is (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57719820) merely one factor, the amount of MSP’s are another and the lack of alarms is a third part. A dangerous setting of cheap, seemingly fast and proclaimed automated systems in a stage where no one was the wiser. Consider a fast automated system without proper alarms and without logs, and that is merely one player using (or claiming to have) cloud solutions. A stage that is no solution (ask COOP in Sweden if you doubt me) and one that hands over cash to organised crime. How much risk are you willing to take with your business?

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July 2, 2021 · 21:03

Mercy on stupid people?

In this age when we have 8,000,000,000 people walking around, should we show mercy on stupid people? I am not talking about people with some mental disorder, I am not talking about people with a speech impediment or people with a physical disorder. No, I am talking about people with a  greed disorder, a mental stage of everything is for free. Should we allow them to be alive? It is a serious question. You see, the BBC gives us ‘How hackers are using gamers to become crypto-rich’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57601631) and the BBC adds to the stupidity to put a picture of a nice girl there, although these transgressions are most likely done by well over 90% males. The list “Versions of Grand Theft Auto V, NBA 2K19, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 are being given away free in forums” implies that. You see NOTHING is for free, and nowadays, the sun might be (for now) the only thing that comes for free, but air is close to no longer free. In the last decades we wasted air quality to such a degree that more and more need oxygen and that stuff is not free and not cheap. So when I see “hidden inside the code of these games is a piece of crypto-mining malware called Crackonosh, which secretly generates digital money once the game has been downloaded. Criminals have made more than $2m (£1.4m) with the scam, researchers say.” I reckon that this goes far beyond the UK borders and as such the revenue will be a lot higher, in addition, the stupid person thinking that they are getting a free game are using electricity like there is no tomorrow. So any gamer having anything from a 750W Corsair to a 1200W Asus Thor will be donating $0.50 – $0.75 a day per PC to that criminal group. And that is the best news theory, if they leave the computer on and unattended the price could go up by 200%-400% a day, which means that this free game is costing you a lot more, optionally buying that game in the story will cost you $48 at Amazon, implying that you will pay for the game more than once after 15 days, if you are lucky after 20 days. So how free was that game? You might not pay for the electricity yourself but it will reflect in the bill and mom and dad will hold your PC up for ransom if you do not pay the electricity bill. 

So far two places out of a lot more gives us: 

United States: 11,856 victims
United Kingdom: 8,946 victims

As such the $2m is delusionally optimistic, the damage is more than likely a lot higher, especially when we see 

When Crackonosh is installed, it takes actions to protect itself including:

disabling Windows Updates
uninstalling all security software

And that was merely the better news, when you consider elements like

computer slowing down
wearing out components through overuse

You end up with the short end of the stick, and you better believe that it is a lot shorter than you hope it is. So should I feel mercy when a stupid act degrades a persons PC, sets the cost of living a lot higher per week, but that does not matter, does it? You got a free game out of it!

There is one side that bothers me, it is the quote “Tracking the hackers’ digital wallets has revealed the scam has yielded over $2m in the cryptocurrency Monero, Avast says”, it is the part ‘hackers’ digital wallets’, wallets is plural, as such there is every chance not everything has been found and there is even a much larger chance that they will find one group and have several groups walk away, because they were never spotted, and they were optionally a little more clever than the other players. The damage I a lot worse, yet when it comes to stupid people, I do not mind, more game time, more original game time for me. And this is merely the first setting, you see, I took notice because it flushes the one element out into the open. I touched on this with “I believe that it is a first step in the overly effective phishing attacks we face, Facebook might not be part to that, but I reckon the phishing industry got access to data that is not normally collected and I personally believe that Facebook is part of that problem, I also believe that this will turn from bad to worse with all the ‘via browser gaming apps’ we are currently being offered. I believe that these dedicated non console gaming ‘solutions’ will make things worse, it might be about money for players like Epic (Fortnite), but the data collected in this will cater to a much larger and optionally fairly darker player in this, I just haven’t found any direct evidence proving this, in my defence, I had no way of seeing the weakness that SolarWinds introduced. It does not surprise me, because there is always someone smarter and any firm that has a revenue and a cost issue will find a cheaper way, opening the door for all the nefarious characters surfing the life of IoT, there was never any doubt in this.” I wrote it in ‘Not for minors’ in December 2020 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/18/not-for-minors/) and anyone (read: Epic) with claims that they will stop this, would be lying to you. Criminals are massively intelligent and their opponents (police and FBI) are not equipped to deal with this, that is beside the manpower shortage they would face. So when you get to slide between stupid kids and greed driven short sighted IT solutions, the people are about to lose a bundle, for the tech criminals it will be Christmas for them 340 days a year (with 25 very well paid holidays).

And that was just the beginning, how long until these easy virtue characters offer games with even more powerful ways to mine? A version of some merge 3 game but now utilising 95% of your processor 100% of the time? It will not interfere with receiving calls, it will not interfere with laptop, tablet and other device, but you become the pawn in a need to mine and it will cost you a lot more than you think. How long until someone combines screensavers and locked screens with the old SETI program and let devices mine the truckloads out of massive data files and we all contribute for every downtime minute every day? That was the danger that greed driven Epic contributed to (as I personally see it), that is the danger that we all face, and it gets worse. You see Yahoo told us ‘Epic is deliberately keeping ‘Fortnite’ off Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Game service’, isn’t that interesting? The cloud is their competitor, so they want to open up all the markets for THEM, but they are not that eager to hand their game to a streamer where they cannot collect as much. As I personally see it, it is about their margins, it always was and as such I personally consider their case to be a bogus one, but they opened a door, a door criminals will be eager to use, so how long until they offer Fortnite cheats, Fortnite chests with weekly prices, hardware and skins? It will be the gateway to more systems and the law is not ready and the makers of games will find out too late that the floodgates had been opened. That is how these events usually go, but in the end it will not cost them anything, because they will cover all third party solutions and it will be up to the gamer (and their parents) to pay that price. 

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July 2, 2021 · 06:22

Fictive journey of speculation

This is not about the news, not about the anger against the Catholic Church that decided to see the Indigenous Canadian people “The visit of the delegation of Indigenous people is scheduled between 17 and 20 December 2021”, a setting orchestrated to manage bad news and more is coming. It has nothing to do with that, but orchestrations, yes, that part might apply.

You see, the biggest fear that the corrupt have is the feeling of loss, overwhelming loss, so kill a few of THEIR children and family members and the stage changes, there is an option that this especially applies to the corrupt in police and political fields, because the media does love its exploitation of grieving members that are in the limelight for corruption, and the victims merely need to be willing to spill blood (there are other options to achieve rigor mortis). And I have seen that impact before, these people will suddenly scream as loud as possible that the innocent have rights, but they were never willing to give it to their victims, as it forwarded their cause. Such is life.

No, today is about something else. I found my second short story to add to the bundle. What happens when the abusers get the tables turned on them? Not in any normal sense, not in any degree of realism, what if they vanish of the face of the earth (quite literally) and they are driven into hard labour for their crimes (they will refer to that as slave labour) in a place with a different chronographic stage? Hard labour there for one year will amount to 24 hour here. Welcome to Tartarus, a place of never ending torture, but that place Neds to be kept clean as well and as the abusers of social media and spotlights through specific media sources are grabbed and are added to the Tartarus cleaning staff, what happens as they vanish for days? More important when after a month an old man (or woman) is found and the records show that person to be none other than the 35 year old person a lot of ‘people’ had been looking for? Fingerprints, comparative DNA, they all match up and in their hospital beds they realise that their lives are over, more important, they are about to face their actions by becoming the stuff they cleaned up for what seems to have been a lifetime? The waves of fear it must give, especially them, they were watching in the corridors they were cleaning only to learn in the end that that is where they are about to end. I will not give away too much or there will be no reason to read that short story if it ever gets printed (or published in a place like iBooks). Yet should you not wonder not merely what the upside of one thing is and forget about the downside of the other? You might flip a coin again and again, yet you forget the other side remains in darkness, at times someone will wonder what happened to the other side of that coin, but no one ever considered the darkness it got itself exposed to (unless the toss happens on a glass table). 

You see some will give us “If someone asks for forgiveness over and over, then it is the duty of an individual to forgive them” and “Catholics must forgive the sins of others in order for God to forgive them their sins”, yet what happens when a mother loses her child? Do you really think that forgiveness is in her heart, or is it pitch black with pain and grief? So what happens when the darkness of 1,000 mothers unite? So whilst wonder about “Saskatoon Catholics raised $28.5 million to build this cathedral in 2012, while a written promise to compensate residential school survivors was largely ignored, critics say” (source: CBC), I see no action by Canadian government at present to seize ALL Catholic land in Canada and had that land to the First Nations. As it seems to me, it is all about ‘saving’ the rights and property of the Vatican and we have seen more than enough of that. When we see things like ‘stopping short of’ and “The $25 million — part of the sweeping Indian Residential School Survivor Agreement (IRSSA) — was supposed to help survivors, and also provide counselling and support for their families”, as such what should happen with any organisation that keeps on caressing (read: hand job) themselves and shirk their responsibilities? So what does it take for the Canadian government (other governments too) to set the stage for the Catholic church to actually pay up? I see the need to show the Catholic Church what loss looks like, to lose all lands and catholic locations handed to First Nation, when they see that such actions are possible in the western world, Canadian Catholics can raise money to buy new lands, become protestant, or Anglican, or move to the US (I reckon First Nations would have no problems with that part either). Oh sorry, it was still a bit about the Catholic Church, please forgive me! (forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, nyuk nyuk nyuk)

A sense of real loss is the best wake up call anyone can get, and for the Vatican to lose a nation the size of Canada where almost 40% is Catholic, it gives the Vatican a message, one that has been overdue for well over a decade.  

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July 1, 2021 · 00:21

Big Oil in the family

We all have moments where we look at the sky and roll our eyes. Today was my moment when I was treated (by the Guardian) to ‘Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price’, in this I start with “Was it really a secret?” You see, we all want to blame someone else for the problems we helped create. And  when the (what I reverently call) the stupid people are bringing about “An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way”. You see that is is merely one element of stupid. I gave light to ‘Uniform Nameless Entitlement Perforation’ on December 10th 2020 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/10/uniform-nameless-entitlement-perforation/), I emphasised on a report by European Environmental Agency (EEA) where. We see that 147 industrial plants create 50% of the pollution, the media seemingly ignored the report I have not see the media go out and bash the nations for these 147 plants, we even had a joke (read: BBC article) by Tim McGrath on how the “Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles”, so how stupid do people need to get?

In case you forgot

This reflects on the now when we see (at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment) “Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels”, just when you think that Americans can no longer become any more stupid, we get the next iteration of ‘stupid is as stupid does’. Statista shows us that in 1975 the US requires 1.747 BILLION kilowatt hours a year, this went up again and again until that number was well over doubled in 2005 (3.8B KwH), then it roughly stays the same. There was one spike in 2018, yet one source gives us “From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled”, I personally believe it is not all weather related. I believe that energy delivery hit a saturation point around 2005. This is why the last decade has so many of these failings and outages. Consider that it was not merely oil and gas, it was energy, the underlying need that drives this. If you doubt this you need but to read the entire ENRON scandal papers to get a clue on how it has always about greed and not about big oil and gas. When I see ‘Big Oil and gas’ I personally think it tends to be a hidden jab towards the Middle East. There have been carbon neutral solutions for almost two decades. Yes, they were expensive in the beginning, but how much effort was made to push this? It is about profit margins, it is about cheap and it is about exploitation. Oil and gas check most marks, but are they to blame? We can ignore settings like “In the early 1990s, Kenneth Lay helped to initiate the selling of electricity at market prices and, soon after, Congress approved legislation deregulating the sale of natural gas” that was almost 30 years ago, so how was electricity created? How do we get energy? And why is Congress not in the same accusation dock? Until the late 80’s the idea of Electricity at market prices was a lull and instead of protecting that part, it was left to the needy and the greedy.

So when they have another go at ‘Big Oil’ (to be honest, I have no idea what they are talking about), consider that the drive to have your own car started in the 50’s. Forbes gave us in 2020 ‘Traffic Congestion Costs U.S. Cities Billions Of Dollars Every Year’, which is fine, but that too relies on fuel, so when they gave us “New York had the highest economic losses out of any major U.S. city with congesting costing it $11 billion last year. Los Angeles lost $8.2 billion while Chicago suffered the third-worst impact at $7.6 billion.” And how much fuel is wasted in that setting? Do you want to blame ‘big oil’ for that too? This is a case that will go nowhere, the only thing it enforces is something I will touch on a little later. You see, when we saw the messages on how companies had enough of California, they vacated and left, Texas is such a much better place (it actually might be), and Forbes again gave us in February ‘Texas Energy Crisis Is An Epic Resilience And Leadership Failure’, yet how much consideration are we seeing when we get sources feeding us “There are several reasons tech companies shave been moving to Texas – lower housing costs, lower tax rates, less regulations have made it easier for companies to operate in Texas. There is already an abundance of technical talent all over Texas. Any company moving here can tap into a well-experienced talent pool. There is also a well-educated stream of new talent graduating from top schools like Texas, Rice, University of Houston, and Texas A&M.” I am not debating the act, I am fine with the action taken, but when you consider that the following companies moved to Texas, how much of a drain on energy in other places will that give you and when you see the sudden spike in some places requiring a lot more energy, all whilst the other places are not diminishing their offer, because people will always need power, how is ‘Big Oil’ to blame? So lets take a loot at that list and most names moved less then 2 year ago (or are about to move)
Guideline, Contango, Done, Carbon Neutral Energy, Tailift Material Handling, Estrada Hinojosa,  GBS Enterprises, Wedgewood, Verdant Chemical, Ranchland Food, Drive Shack, Invzbl,Markaaz, XR Masters, Elevate Brands, Harmonate, Einride, Green Dot, NRG Energy, Caterpillar,Flex Logix, Leaf Telecommunications, Katapult, Wayfair, Ribbon Communications, BSU Inc, Avetta, First Foundation, 5G LLC, TaskUs, BlockCap, Element Critical, City Shoppe, CrowdStreet, Lalamove, NinjaRMM, Gilad & Gilad, MDC Vacuum, FERA Diagnostics, Roboze, Leadr, SupplyHouse.com, Eleiko, Firehawk Aerospace, International Trademark Association, ZP Better Together, Precision Global Consulting, Loop Insurance, QSAM Biosciences, AHV, Dominion Aesthetics, Sage Integration, Quali, Samsung, Truelytics, Alpha Paw, Sentry Kiosk, ProtectAll, Optimal Elite Management, Ametrine, Digital Realty, Amazing Magnets, Lion Real Estate Group, NeuraLink, Maddox Defense, DZS Inc, The Boring Company, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,Tesla, Optym, Longevity Partners, Iron Ox, Palantir, 8VC, Bonchon, Titans of CNC, Saleen Performance Parts, CBRE, Slync.io, Baronte Securities, Omnigo Software, Incora, Vio Security, JDR Cable Systems, FileTrail, Sonim Technologies, Murphy Oil Corp, Buff City Soap, Origin Clear, QuestionPro, SignEasy, Sense, Astura, Charles Schwab, Splunk,  Bill.com, Chip 1 Exchange, McKesson, and Lonza. This is not a complete list and I am not considering (at present) which ones are doing it for all kinds of tax hypes. Now consider how many people will move as well. I get it, California is expensive, but how will this change that represents the population of more than one large city impact the power needs in Texas that is already has it fair share of brownouts, and that is just for starters, how many gas and oil energy producing plants will Texas get? Is ‘Big oil’ to blame, or do they merely offer a commodity that EVERYONE needs? Consider that a powerful computer required a 200 Watt power unit in 1997, today it is 600Watt or even higher. There were roughly 51 million units sold last year alone. I cannot state how the division on laptop and desktop is, but the need for energy is unrelentingly large, how large? Consider all the staff moving to Texas and consider how many more energy issues Texas has in the next two years, that is your marker and ‘Big Oil’ had nothing to do with this. 

So when we reconsider “wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US”, how many of these claimants voted against wind farms, against solar power and against nuclear power? They did it for all kinds of reasons and we get it, some are expensive and you do not want your children to go to school glowing in the dark (yet in winter that is a case for less accidents), but in all this blaming ‘Big Oil’ is just too ludicrous to mention. So as for a promise earlier in this article. When the US goes on with silly and stupid court cases, how long until the owners of IP and Patents will consider the US to be too dangerous to remain in? Consider that the US has an IP value of $21,000,000,000,000 (trillion), it represents almost 90% of the S&P 500 value, so what do you think happens when a massive slice of that moves to Asia or the Middle East, optionally to Europe? I reckon that over 70% of Wall Street executives are on a floor above the 30th and there is every chance that well over 40% of them will do a (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEpKcBkkVMY); now consider the stage of blaming the wrong  party. I am not stating that any of the energy delivering components are innocent, yet we are all guilty, in almost every nation. We remained silent when energy prices remained the same (somehow), we have known about alternatives and most people never pushed their politicians, we have known about the dangers of erosion for decades and we see pollution report after report, yet nothing is done. We are all to blame and putting ‘Big Oil and Gas’ in the dock will never ever go anywhere, I reckon that Kenneth Lay set the charter for that. When we realise that we allowed a utility to become profit driven which we clearly get from ‘the selling of electricity at market prices’, we changed a whole range of processes and now that we see the impact we should not cry, we should look into the mirror for blame.

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June 22, 2021 · 22:46

Conjecture

To understand this piece, we need to consider the meaning, when we use conjecture we imply and mean “an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information”, the media tens to be in this state well over 90% of the time. They call it something else, something like ‘from sources who revealed this under condition of anonymity’, or perhaps you have heard the statement ‘people close to the matter revealed to us’, yet it remains conjecture, the information was not complete, it almost never is. So when the Middle East Eye handed its readers the headline ‘Can Saudi Arabia develop a major domestic arms industry by 2030?’ Early this morning (18 hours ago), I had to think this through. I saw the setting last year, or the year before and I shrugged at it. You see ‘a major domestic arms industry’ is generic, too generic. Yet the setting is interesting as it will remove billions in revenue from the EU and the US. This after all the BS the US and the European nations gave them is actually refreshing. But the generic side remains. It is hand weapons, armoured vehicles, naval vessels, airforce crates (an old term for airplanes) the list goes on and they cannot have it all, but a nation like Saudi Arabia could set in motion armoured vehicles and hand weapons. I want to continue, yet lets take a look the article (at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-develop-national-arms-industry-vision-2030) first. We get to see “Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) – a state-owned defence company – set up a joint venture with the US aerospace and defence giant Lockheed Martin, which, according to a SAMI statement, “will develop localised capabilities by transferring technology and knowledge, and by training a Saudi workforce in manufacturing products for, and providing services to, the Saudi armed forces”” is point number one. Then we get “Riyadh has successfully been able to divert some money formerly earmarked for imports to developing domestic alternatives and has reaped the benefit in terms of Saudis employed, but the goal of going from two percent domestic spending in 2018 to 50 percent domestic spending by 2030 is unrealistic if Riyadh wants to maintain its capabilities and maintain an arsenal of the best equipment,” she said” which they get from Emily Hawthorne, Stratfor’s Middle East and North Africa analyst. Yet I am not entirely convinced. I agree that 50% will be a tall order, I am not sure if 50% can be reached by 2030, too much needs to happen. Yet 2035? Is that out of reach? I am not convinced. You see, we all focus on one side, but this entire enterprise has two sides and we seemingly forget that. You see point one gives us ‘training a Saudi workforce in manufacturing products’,  my issue is that this is a focal point not a destination. You see, the military is a destination, The focal point of that workforce needs to grow beyond that. To see this we need to look back at WW1, yes that long back! You see no matter how amazing the Sopwith Camel was (I think the New Zealand Airforce still might have a few), it came from the Sopwith Pup. A plane that was introduced by Sopwith Aviation Company in 1916, during the war, yet the company was founded  on 15 December 1913 before WW1, implying that the design was altered for war, which makes perfect sense. That timeline shows that there is a larger stage to any plane, often used for war later on, that premise changed as the arms industry saw the massive benefits of wealth during WW2. It changed nearly everything. The arms industryu continued, but came from something else and it also came from a direct need. For the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (as my personal conjecture goes), it is in one part to strengthen national defence and it needs to diminish import in this area. A stage the others never had, they were always about the export. I tried to hide that clue in an earlier story named ‘The impact of insanity’ on January 20th 2019 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/01/20/the-impact-of-insanity/), the clue was “The idea came from a famous Dutch bank robber named Aage M (70’s)”, it was a clue, because outside of the Netherlands this man and his book would be widely unknown. I used an engineering solution and made it into a stealth weapon (we all have a bit of Alfred Nobel in us). The secondary clue is seen now (which was unintended), but in the original story I did write “Yet, the brain needs nourishment, in my case it is music, I found out that different scores, will set my mind in different directions and it is not set in the style of music, Whilst one album gave me the brain jump to get me to find the Zumwalt pounder (initially merely a solution to take down the Iranian navy), it was David Bowie, and his album ‘the Next day’ that pushed me to make an initial design of the Elder Scrolls X (formerly known as ES6). I never figured out why it happened, merely that it does”, the underlying part I that other elements drive us to push other areas forward, the Military push is NEVER from the military, it comes from somewhere else, and in this case it is most often civilian needs. We look at the internet and decentralised computing (as DARPA brought it), but the stage is almost never in that direction. It is a business need that fuels a consumer drive and it then becomes a military option. That is more often the case. So look and consider Saudi Arabia, or as the fat cats say, a lovely large sandbox. This sandbox has it own approach, its own needs, elements and drives. We in the west think we know, but there is too much we do not and cannot know. 

So I give you an alternative, we tend to seek an understanding of what is available, yet what is the stage of observation? We look at planes, we look at drones, but what if we take this in another direction? What if we redesign a much older concept?

So consider the previous image and consider the Battle of Fleurus (1794) where they were used first. In those days they had to be big, but today, with what we have in electronics, we could suffice with something that could be found at Toys-R-Us. Did SAMI ever consider (perhaps they did) to use a whole range of stealth kites? We tend to look at it as something like 

Yet that was then, that was civilian, so who considered redesigning that kite in dark colours, make it more stealth like and give it its lightweight electronics that allow for a 25 mile observation with a 5G connection to its base station? No fuel, a silent observer in the night and one most ground forces will not see until it is too late. The Middle East is a different stage, its theatre of war is on grounds seldom seen in the west, as such different solutions will work. A thought that I have not seen explored by DARPA (speculatively) and Raytheon/Northrop Grumman (less speculatively). We all need to consider that the offered information comes from conjecture (even mine) as such I have n clear image of what actually is, but I can see where others did not look (which gave me my 5G IP) and now SAMI has another venue for investigations on what could be done to spend less in other nations (feel free to financially support this poor poor blogger) and consider what else no one has been looking at, because in one of the other stories I left another link, which involves two valves that apparently do not yet exist and that opens up other venues of export. It even gave me a third idea just now. It reflects on an old premise that started the origin of Ceramic glaze, it had different functions, now consider the two-part epoxy adhesive, consider that if it is in two parts, it is an adhesive, yet what if the container it holds has two liquids as well, separate innocent, but if you remove the separation you get a secondary reaction, a chemical reaction that does something else, we now have a nice little chemical detonator, no danger there, until it changes the compound it reacts too, we now have a different setting. All elements that have been abandoned for larger and more accurate electronics. Yet what happens when we change the need of electronics? They need batteries and they tend to have their own flaws, chemicals do not, we are all about relying on the latest ‘electronic’ solutions all whilst the people forgot to look at the other solutions. You see “It has some disadvantages too, e.g. higher cost per detonator and the need for intensive training for users”, when timing is not essential, chemical detonators have their own benefits and in mass production they are cheaper and the need for a larger trained workforce and assembly environment becomes less so, all elements that are not what the seller wants to give you, but the buyer can rejoice when it is faced that way. It does not apply all over the place, but the question becomes, what allows for a different curve that allows for a real application of reducing the investment a cost of developing an arms industry that is applicable to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by 2030, there were two elements, the first is ‘develop a major domestic arms industry by 2030’, the second is ‘spending around 50 percent of its military budget on local sources’, yet that could be seen in two parts as well, spend 50% less of its budget and spend amount X on local sources. If $10B is spend in the US and you can reduce it by Spending $7B less and $2B on local sources the trip is near complete. Consider in that the cost of a US drone (like the MQ-1 Predators) all whilst a refurbishes Kite might cost no more than $15,000. So we get $40,000,000 versus $15,000. Yes the MQ-1 Predators can do a lot more, but how effective is that in Saudi Arabia? Most look at how cool you can fly for $40,000,000, all whilst 15 kites can cover a lot more ground and these groups merely have to observe and guide the MQ-1 Predators to its destination. It is conjecture that we know what is out there, all whilst the term conjecture implies we never knew. Be honest, how many of you considered the deployment of a stealth Kite? A device that uses no fuel, makes no sound and in the dark desert is seemingly as invisible as the night. 

All this whilst we need to consider that as SAMI becomes more successful, the US and the EU will miss out on billions each year, a station that they themselves had a hand in creating. In that time I came up with two additional novel ideas (that might not work). Have a great day!

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