Category Archives: Science

March 30, 2021 · 22:39

An almost funny thing

I saw an article at the BBC and I will get to that in a moment, but it reminded me of a situation that happened in 2010. I needed a new laptop and I was looking in a shop at their Collection of laptops. A man came to me and was trying to convince me just how amazing this laptop was. My inner demon was grinning, I get it, the man was enthusiastic, he was giving the numbers, but in all this, did he realise what he was saying? I am not doubting the man’s skills, he was doing a good job, I was however in IT and had been there for 30 years, so I have pretty much seen it all, and there it was, my little demon, on my right shoulder calling me ‘pussy’. So as the man stated ‘this laptop has a one terabyte hard-drive, can you even imagine ho much that is?’, I could not resist and my response was ‘Yup, that would fit roughly 10% of my porn collection’, his jaw dropped to the ground, his eyes almost popped, the demon inside me stated ‘Nice!’ Actually, it was not quite true, it would only fit a rough 0.32114%. It was the impact of the shock factor. You see, there is a hidden agenda there, when you (appropriately) use the technique, you get to see the real salesperson and that was what I needed. He was thrown, but he recomposed and continued giving me the goods on the laptop, I bought that laptop roughly 132 seconds later.

So today I saw ‘The Rise of extortionware’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56570862), here I notice “where hackers embarrass victims into paying a ransom”, it is not new, it is not even novel. I will also give you the second game after the people involved get arrested, they will demand anonymity and any bleeding heart judge will comply. I state that these people will be handed the limelight so that the people that faced ransomware attacks can take their frustration out of these people. But that remains wishful thinking. So next we get “Experts say the trend towards ransoming sensitive private information could affect companies not just operationally but through reputation damage. It comes as hackers bragged after discovering an IT Director’s secret porn collection.” I have the question was it a private or a company computer? You see, sone focus on the boobies, just what the advertisers on Twitter hope for, they want the click bitches, it makes them money. It is time that we set the larger stage, you see the entire mess would be smaller if Cisco and Microsoft had done a proper job. OK, I apologise, Cisco does a proper job, but some things slip through and in combination with Microsoft exchange servers it is not slipping through, it is a cyber hole the size an iceberg created on the Titanic and we need to set a much larger stage. So when we see “Thanks God for [named IT Director]. While he was [masturbating] we downloaded several hundred gigabytes of private information about his company’s customers. God bless his hairy palms, Amen!”, it seemingly answers that he might keep it on a corporate computer, or he uses his private computer for company stuff. Yet in that same light the hacker should not be allowed any anonymity, we all get to see who the hacker is. If there is something to be learned it is see with “Hackers are now actually searching the data for information that can be weaponised. If they find anything that is incriminating or embarrassing, they’ll use it to leverage a larger pay-out. These incidents are no longer simply cyber-attacks about data, they are full-out extortion attempts” There are two sides

  1. The station of ALWAYS ONLINE needs to change, there needs to be an evolving gateway of anti hack procedures and a stage of evolving anti hack routers and monitoring software. You think that Zoom is an option?
    Tom’s Guide gave us less than 2 weeks ago “More than a dozen security and privacy problems have been found in Zoom”, as well as “Zoom’s ease of use has made it easy for troublemakers to “bomb” open Zoom meetings. Information-security professionals say Zoom’s security has had a lot of holes, although most have been fixed over the past few year”, so whilst you contemplate ‘most have been fixed’, consider that not all are fixed and that is where the problem goes from somewhat to enormous. Well over 20% of the workforce works at home, has zoom meetings and that is how cyber criminals get the upper hand (as well as through disgruntled employees), a change in mindset is only a first station.
  2. Remember that Australian? (Julian Assange) We were told that soon there would be some leaks on issues on banks (Wall Street) then it suddenly became silent, now some will say that it is a bluff, but in light of the meltdown in 2008, I am not so certain, I reckon that some have ways to show the hackers who they are and they profit by not doing that. Can I prove this? Absolutely not. It is speculation, but when you look at the timeline, my speculation makes sense. 
  3. The third side is optionally the second side as the second side might not be a real side. When we see “Hackers are now actually searching the data for information that can be weaponised. If they find anything that is incriminating or embarrassing, they’ll use it to leverage a larger pay-out. These incidents are no longer simply cyber-attacks about data, they are full-out extortion attempts”, the underlying station is ‘information that can be weaponised’ and the IT sector is helping them.

How did I get there? The cloud is not as secure as some state, and the salespeople need to take notice. Business Insider gave us about 6 months ago “70% of Companies Storing Data With Cloud Companies Hacked or Breached”, see the link we are now slowly getting presented? 

In the OSI model, we see layers 3-7 (layer 8 is the user). So as some have seen the issues from Cisco, Microsoft and optionally Zoom, we see a link of issues from layer 3 through to layer 7 ALL setting a dangerous stage. Individually there is no real blame and their lawyers will happily confirm that, but when we see security flaw upon security flaw, there is a larger stage of dangers and we need to take notice. And here the dangers become a lot more interesting when we consider the Guardian yesterday when we saw “Intelligence value of SolarWinds hacking of then acting secretary Chad Wolf is not publicly known”, what else is not publicly known? How many media outlets ignored the Cisco matter, how come ZDNet is one of the few giving us “it’s not releasing patches for some of the affected devices that reached end of life” less than 8 weeks ago. Again I say Cisco did the right thing by informing its customers close to immediately, yet when we see “More than 247,000 Microsoft Exchange servers are yet to be patched against the CVE-2020-0688 post-auth remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability impacting all Exchange Server versions under support” (source: bleepingcomputers.com) as far as I can see, a lot of the media ignored it, but they will shout and repeat the dangers of Huawei, without being shown actual evidence, and I state here, that unless we make larger changes, the extortion path will evolve and become a lot larger. With 70% of cloud systems getting hacked or breached, a large chunk of the Fortune 500 will pay too much to keep quiet and who gets to pay for that? There is a rough 99.867765% chance that its board members will not, it might be speculatively, so please prove me wrong.

A stage where the needs of the consumers changes in a stage where the corporations are not ready to adjust and all whilst the IT salespeople have that golden calf that does everything and make you coffee as well. Adjustments are needed, massive adjustments are needed and we need to make them now before the cybercriminals are in control of our IT needs and that is not mere speculation, when you see flaw after flaw and too little is done as too many are the victim of its impact is a serious breach and it has been going on for some time, but now it is seemingly out in the light and too many are doing too little and as we laugh at “God bless his hairy palms, Amen!” Consider that stage, and now consider that they invade a financial institution, these are clever criminals, they do not empty your account, they merely take $1, perhaps $1 every other month, this implies that they are looking at a $16,000,000 every two months. And this is merely one bank, one in a thousand banks, some a lot bigger than the Australian Commonwealth bank and lets face it, the fact that layer 3 to layer 7 is leaky in hundreds of thousands of customers, do you really think that banks are off-limits? Do you really think that this is a simple hick-up or that the scenery is changing this quickly by people claiming that it will be fixed in no-time? 

We need massive changes and we need them a lot sooner than we think.

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March 20, 2021 · 09:02

I need medication!

Yup, that is how I felt this morning. I am still reeling from the dream I had. Everything was OK when I went to bed last night, I was myself, I was working out new directions from the RPG I discussed in the last few articles, to coin a phrase ‘I was happy as a clam’, but then something happened, the dream changed, I was suddenly a co-pilot in an helicopter, nothing wrong with that, it had always been a dream to pilot a helicopter, something that happened after I saw Skippy, a fishbowl with a piece of fence at its tail and it could fly, it was almost magic (well, I was younger than 10, so that made sense). Yet, this was different, I have no idea what kind of helicopter I was in but the chopper was not the issue, my visor was. As we were flying low over canals and greens, I saw that the boats on the water became directional markers, like they were telling us in what direction to fly. If I focussed on a boat I could pick up the radio station and the information it was bringing. Crazy isn’t it?

To make sense, I need to take you back to the 80’s. There was a fab in those days, radio’s had a sort of enhanced METAdata part, so when a song was playing, you saw the band and the title in your display. It is almost like someone took that idea and put it on steroids, I cannot think of another explanation, what is more, I have no idea what my brain was working out. It is like someone figured out to hide more than a FoF (Friend or Foe) message in the radios broadcasting, with some cypher that gave the relevant information to any visor it faced. Yup, quite the ride and it went on for some time in my dream, the arrows had numbers, but the numbers made no sense to me, but to the co-pilot they made a lot of sense. They were following along the path of a canal with several branches, and the arrows were pointing along the canals they were on, several (not all) pointing in some sort of flight guidance setting. And then I woke up.

Yup, quite the ride, I had hoped to get a new chapter on the RPG written, my mind is still working on the 5 arcane quests, yet the other quests are now in another stage, one that is facilitating for the generation part of the game, like a multilevel dungeon with more than one boss, the idea is that the chests are markers in their own right, not merely a container holding loot, they are in part the loot too, consider the RPG games you played. All the times you see a lovely boss chest and you empty it, you go home and you put all that stuff in your kitchen drawer? Did no one wonder why you did not take the chest home? What if you can take any chest home, but you can only carry one chest? The chest becomes a focal point, a focal point that might have another clue, optionally one that only your son or daughter can solve.

It takes gaming to a new chapter, it takes RPG and treasure hunting to another leap of faith and treasure hunting, it seems to be something that Lara Croft might have overlooked, but with my knowledge of the VoC and their need for locked chest, one might consider that some locks (in more than one case, the key too) had their own purpose, a side some tend to forget, but the game doesn’t, the gamer thinks out of the box, some gamers are even wondering what a box is and that is where my thoughts come in handy, so as I am contemplating new ideas in how the chest becomes the clue, how the chest goes from cave container to a lovely piece of furniture in your virtual house, we consider what else can be altered, all things that some RPG makers did not stop to think of. A stage my brain is happy to dwindle on, especially after the weird dream I had, but I digress, you see a ‘Friend or Foe’ is more than that signal, we merely see it as some electronic thingamajig in a plane, but what happens, if we add functionality to it? What if the FoF becomes an individual cypher? I wonder if the boffins at DARPA had taken that thought and put it on a train, sometimes it is the game that gives premise to the larger stage. We know that some caterpillars become butterflies and some become moths, but what if we add the signal to a butterfly to increase its wingspan? It takes me back to secondary school where we were introduced in what would later be ‘radio ecology’, it was around the time that the old Hulk TV series had an episode on metamorphosis, the setting where Bruce Banner set a solution to turn a plague and made the devastating larva prematurely change into a butterfly, yet what happens when we take that premise and not make change, but to make it carry a marker, a marker we can read and the marker adds the counter where we can see when the pest becomes the harmless butterfly. 

It was not really a sidestep, what happens when we give added markers to any carrier, smartphone, radio, TV or whatever and we have a way of reading it? Let’s not forget that our devices are only used to a minimal degree, for the rest of the time they can do whatever it pleases. So what happens when we adjust the electronics to do just that? A population of millions, all carrying their numbers, and at times even more, as devices that have a multitude of options, at times it is not about who they work for, at times it can be to give the build in GPS and the ability to set a signal into a multitude of directions. So you might wonder when I take my medication, but when did you ponder the question on what else a mobile phone, a MP3 player or a radio could do? Jut like the chests in an RPG, what if we adjust that premise to facilitate the quest or the storyline? I might have flown about in a virtual helicopter, but I stopped wondering where I was going and contemplated where I could be going, not merely where I should go. A stage in gaming that too many players forgot about. 

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March 17, 2021 · 06:59

Somniare atque in posterum

It was a weird dream, even as nothing really weird seem to happen, the dream was weird. It was my first day at Sony, I was given a cubicle. A man spoke to me ‘We liked how you responded to your previous boss’, even as I have no idea who or what response they were talking about. There was a start package on what seemed to be my desk. There was a new watch in 4 parts. It seemed an almost identical fit to the Apple watch, but it was something we had to put together. There was the housing, the band, the battery and the electronics. It was an employee watch. The electronics were specific Sony, the rest generic. The watch kept us informed, seems to keep the company informed of our every action and it was the lifeline of the employee. A future I predicted in 2013, but not to this degree. Patents fuelled to generalisation, to set parts into a stage of some sort of jigsaw combining and partial usage made no difference, the patents caught it all. From mass produced straps (mine seemed like a transparent cheap looking plastic, but tough and resilient. The housing was a generic product, like it was made to fit a million users and the electronics were specific, it gave the Sony display, time, messages, internal (departmental) information. It is a future we are heading for, instant access and companies having instant access to us, it is not a Sony thing, it will be a global corporate thing. The question is not how it will happen, because it will, when it will happen is also not the question, the issue will son become, how complete will this digital transformation be? The introduction will be clear, the stage will be set, but I wonder how it reflects on us. I see generic housing’s to become almost a fashion statement, some will be smooth metallic, some will be titanium, some will be silver, or even gold but they will all house the generic watch given to us on day one. The corporate mobile tether that can reach us from 4G and beyond. 

A stage where managers can be contacted at home, a zoom conference from their Sony Bravia, all as the need of their global bosses require. A sort of time management per cycle, every cycle. 

I didn’t see much beyond that, but the setting threw me, not what was shown to me, but how casual I looked at the watch, like it was in use everywhere, a technology in a stage where it is the one corporate-employee link that all larger corporations rely on. A new stage of technology that we all accept, those who do not will not remain in any workforce for long. A set service that most corporations will rely on, the larger have their own solution, the others use a cloud based SAAS setting and in this day, with cloud transgressions set to 90%, the larger stage is not where we work, but how secure we can work. In all this, some technologies, the law and politics are running behind all the matter that is being hurdled against us. So whilst we are shown on how ‘New German IT law raises hurdles for Huawei’ to set the hurdle for one, but not the other we see “A key question with any cloud computing service is: “where is the data stored or processed?” It is a key question because location is not fixed in the cloud. Unlike a fixed server in your office or at a data centre in Australia, data in the cloud could potentially be located anywhere in the World and even in multiple data centres in multiple copies worldwide. In fact, a cloud service provider may not even know where the data is residing”, with a reference to “Some exceptions to this rule are provided, for instance, when the controller itself can guarantee that the recipient will comply with the data protection rules” and that is a larger stage where we see personal data in clouds where organised crime uses a system like their personal highway to information and the law doesn’t have a clue what to do to protect people, although they had time to figure out how to stop Huawei. Thi stage is about to explode in all our faces. Whilst we see marketing give the clarion call to ‘AI’, a stage that at present does not exist. The marketeers are feeding the legal minds in a stage that is disjointed. As I personally see it, the law is steered by the greed driven to stop some and clear their way to more profit, all whilst the changes will impact billions and no one is looking into the flaw that we ourselves create.And it is happening in a stage where Times Daily reports ‘Nokia to cut up to 10,000 jobs to ramp up R&D in 5G race’, an article (at https://www.timesdaily.com/business/nokia-to-cut-up-to-10-000-jobs-to-ramp-up-r-d-in-5g/article_5c02981a-a87e-5a02-8bcd-3efac378852f.html) that gives a larger premise. If you have to fire 10% of staff (10.000 jobs) to ramp up Research and development in 5G, how far behind are you?

All this, whilst Huawei is already far beyond that point, how desperate have people become? You need not accept my words, but the numbers by Statista shows that Saudi Arabia (one player that embraced the Huawei solution) is at present over 700% faster than the US, it is the number one 5G place to be, so how far behind will we all be in 2022? If the watches are seemingly the place to be, how many developers will divert to a place like Saudi Arabia to make that part a reality much quicker, all that whilst the EU and the US are nowhere near ready, so how long until others realise the bag of goods we are offered by those not able to deliver, will we hold THEM to account any day soon?

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March 15, 2021 · 16:38

Then the bite

In support of the previous article, I add a little more. We were talking about the creation (on Sony) of new RPG games, I gave part of that setting in that article but the largest station is not merely the game, it will be the story. A stage where we game away generations, we need the setting of a larger stage, a larger story. The story needs to be bigger than us, or bigger than any person could fit. Not exactly Disney’s ‘Once upon a time’ but you get the idea. It is there that we need to set the storyline.

  1. The drive. Bethesda was pretty good in starting with the prisoner part (Oblivion, Skyrim) and even as that seems appealing, I needed a larger stage (and avoid copying Bethesda). I wanted more than a steeplechase of serving (or servicing) others. In this upcoming poverty tends to be a decent stage, we all avoid that and we tend to van more or less ethical constraints. In addition there is the need to be more than one’s expected self, I tried it, it is mesmerising. In the age when too many people stated that I would never amount to anything, I ended up with a Master degree, the first in my entire family tree, so trust me, it is mesmerising, and that is also the push. If you can relate to a push, the story becomes a lot easier to write.
  2. The Narration. On some early Monday in my youth I actually worked (freelance) for Playboy for a short time and the editor gave me the biggest wisdom in writing that any person had given me in decades. ‘Write like you are talking to a friend’, I have taken that to heart for training manuals, for articles and for other writings and I believe I became a better writer because of it. The narration is more important then the dialogue, the narration sets the foundation, the atmosphere and the chase.
  3. Bullet Points. Yes, I do hate them when they are in some memo, but to get the story train rolling setting up 1-2 dozen bullet points of what you need to cover in a chapter tends to be a decent golden rule, it keeps you on track, it keeps you focussed. For me, whilst pondering the concept TV series ‘keno diastima’, it helped me focus on what was important (at that moment and that part of the story), and if it works there, it will work in a RPG game as well.
  4. Realistic. Yes it is an odd word to find in an RPG, but the realistic approach still matters, sometimes when the bridge is out, it ends, swimming across the stream seems nice, but the rules of thermodynamic are no joke and that is before you get introduced to Mr. Salty, he tends to be where you do not expect him and you never expect him in the first place. In other news, realism also applies when you try to kill an enemy the size of a main battle tank with a dagger, Daniel Boone is the only one who actually pulled it off, if the stories are true. That is one in thousands over the last 200 years, the odds are not good my friends, they are not good indeed.

In previous stories I gave something towards that storyline, but in the end, you are the best storyteller, you need to be, because you are making an RPG, and that is one play-style that cannot survive without narration. In this there are two ways, keep the stories separate (always good) and try not make them intertwining too soon, when you have enough of a narration, you can start to see if they can be combined or intertwined. It is a lot easier to have 12 small stories (300-400 words each) and after that see if and how they can connect, than trying to be clever and make one story of 5000 words that goes nowhere (i tried this earlier in life and failed dismally). 

And there you have a decent winning combination into the storyline for an RPG. Have fun Playstation programmers!

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March 11, 2021 · 19:10

In your face space

It happens, something is staring me right in the face and I lay it beside me. It happens, it happens to us all. This trip started in 1992 (I believe), at a consumer electronic show in Amsterdam (RAI) we got to see the first Mini Disc, the first thought I had that it would be a great digital system for computers, it was roughly 4% of a Bernoulli disk whilst being able to store 600% of what a Bernoulli could store. The idea was rejected by Sony, too incompatible they claimed, nowadays we know more, it would have been a great option, it would have pushed players like Apple to the limit 5 years ahead of the curve. Yesterday I was confronted with that thought as my DVD was acting up (the disc, not the player). Now consider the new players, the new way to watch TV. All whilst the telecom companies want you to use more and more bandwidth, the more they can harvest, the more dependent you get to become.

What if we take that away? Consider this Compact Flash, one card, not 26 discs, merely one card and it is not even the start, in a time and place where collections are complete book cases and we can replace it in almost all cases with one card per TV series. The fans have a perfect copy per card and there is still the option to upgrade over time, in the age where 4K will define new boundaries, the retail side also needs to adhere, a setting where we can drive innovation, not merely follow it. Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Babylon 5, Teen Wolf, Games of Thrones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, Dexter, Midsomer Murders, the Star Wars saga and so on, one card per setting and the technology is already here to set the stage to a much larger degree to meet the customer beyond halfway, a customer that can watch their series in perfection, one card that can last a lifetime. I reckon that players will have larger settings, they have the space, open up any blue-ray or 4K player, most of it is space and adding a CF, or SD card reader (optionally both) is the easiest thing to do. Not walking back and forth to the player getting the next disc, merely one card and all seasons are there. Yes, newer series will likely go per season, but at present there are hundreds of series all well above a dozen discs, and the fans have needs, they want that card on their mobile, on the road and the card can take a lot more than any disc could, so what stopped a player like Sony? Another ‘too incompatible’ mention, or the fear of piracy? Piracy is already there, the disc allows for newer protection and even in store upgrades. Go to any store where you buy movies or TV-series, now consider a box (like GoT) and that box will be able to contain a dozen of your favourite series, now consider the space it is taking up and consider that one card could have all seasons and you keep it in your placer at all time, to be able to play it at your hearts content. So why is that solution not here now? Consider all the telecom players trying to be clever with their 5G, all whilst it is just not ready and do you really want your bandwidth to depend on your 5G router? Consider that IT Pro gave us a week ago “as they promote Kubernetes as the secret ingredient for closing the gap between 5G’s promises and 5G problems. Kubernetes does indeed have some potential to make 5G actually work well. That said, it’s not necessarily the holy grail of edge computing and telco networking that it is sometimes made out to be” (at https://www.itprotoday.com/hybrid-cloud/can-kubernetes-solve-5g-problems-partly-not-soon), there we are told “They make promises like “5G networks will one day offer peak data rates of up to 10 Gbps” and “5G’s hyper-fast speeds will revolutionise the way we live.” If you read statements like those carefully, you’ll notice that they’re predicated on theoretical future developments, not what 5G is actually delivering to the typical user today. That’s because, to date, 5G network implementations haven’t been all that impressive. They turn out to be slower than 4G in many cases, not to mention less reliable. 5G, in other words, has become “a bad joke.”” A setting I have been mentioning for close to two years and the joke gets to be worse, at present Saudi Arabia has a 5G network that is well over 700% faster than anything the US can offer, their BS marketing drive is that bad and it will get worse, as such do we want to rely on congestion, or do we want an option where we can watch what we love unhindered, optionally in a better setting than now? So whilst we take notice of “it won’t address all 5G problems, and it will take a long time–several years, most likely–before Kubernetes is a full-fledged 5G solution”, which I predicted a few times in the last two years, I made no mention of Kubernetes, I merely observed the greed driven stupidity of some and watch these ships wreck left right and center. So whilst American politicians are blaming China for their own lack of innovation, I created the setting of a 7th device that can push innovation and change. And when we consider that innovation drives creativity, I wonder what someone else can come up with tomorrow, I already set the design of a new device for IOS and Android, that is how I roll. All whilst Microsoft is pushing Forza on your mobile, I came up with two new pieces of hardware, yup, I feel decently good, especially as we see Microsoft falter again and again and now it get to pull the wool over the eyes of Apple and Sony too (life can be satisfying). Did I figure out everything? No, I did not, but if I had done so I would make life for 1,000 researchers at Microsoft impossible and that is not fair either, oh wait, I really do not care about that, sorry!

All this in a day, so what is stoping these moguls of achieving true innovation? #JustAsking

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March 9, 2021 · 00:24

Egg timer anyone?

It was a mere 12 hours ago when I gave the previous story, where the AP gave us “Attackers are finding it harder and harder to gain access via traditional methods, as vendors like Microsoft and Apple have hardened the security of the operating systems considerably over the last years”, yet less then an hour ago we see the BBC give us ‘European Banking Authority hit by Microsoft Exchange hack’, I am guessing that the AP was looking out for the needs of Microsoft, the timeline is too weird. Even as we see “The EU body said personal data may have been accessed from its servers. And it had pulled its entire email system offline while it assessed the damage. “The EBA is working to identify what, if any, data was accessed,” it said”, I wonder what and for how long was in the mix. You see, we might look at ““Everyone running these servers – government, private sector, academia – needs to act now to patch them,” White House press secretary Jan Psaki said. Microsoft believes a Chinese state-sponsored attacker called Hafnium is behind the hack.” No matter what or who Hafnium is, no one is looking towards Microsoft, no one is looking how the weakness was there in the first place. And if we accept ‘Microsoft believes a Chinese state-sponsored attacker called Hafnium is behind the hack’, the setting of time changes, it takes time to ascertain who did this, that is logical. Yet 12 hours after the AP story? This is direction, this is intent, the coincidences are too weird and I never give credence to coincidence. It is another setting of filtered information. First the Washington Post, then several others and now Associated Press, the stage is changing and some players are speculatively raking it in before it all implodes on itself. 

Yes, I admit and I agree that this is very ‘conspiracy theory’ yet consider the timeline, it is the one true linear path they cannot change, the directors can merely arrange their story according to the timeline, that is as good as they can make it. So when we look at the tweet from the NSC, we see “Patching and mitigation is not remediation if the servers have already been compromised”, yet there is a lack of investigation how for so long servers could be compromised, when one patch creates a new problem it is not a patch, but service level agreements and marketing need to report a patch and the problem remains, or optionally gets to be worse. Can we also optionally agree that if the Microsoft engineers can be circumvented Microsoft has a much larger problem and that is where you want to keep your data? When we see patch after patch, but no real solution, where can you put your faith?

The BBC article gives a nice list (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56321567) on ‘Who has been attacked?’, yet the larger question on why Microsoft are leaking as a sieve is not dealt with, and even as we would like to guess, the fact is that there are too many patches, the setting is slowly becoming that Microsoft products are too unsecured to be considered for corporate needs and a shift to Unix/Linux might be essential to consider over time. Feel free to do it after you lost all your IP, but that is up to you. And in al this, how long has this be known? I cannot counter the accusations of that person named Hafnium, but it does imply that the situation was out there for a lot longer than we can be comfortable with. I leave that thought up to you.

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March 8, 2021 · 12:00

The wide net

We all have the idea to go phishing, we want trout, we want salmon and we use the biggest net possible to get at least one. So when AP gave us ‘Casting a wide intrusion net: Dozens burned with single hack’ (at https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-politics-europe-eastern-europe-new-zealand-f318ba1ffc971eb17371456b015206a5), not only was I not surprised, I had been warning people about this for a few years, that setting is apparently upon us now (or at least some are admitting it now). There we see “Nimble, highly skilled criminal hackers believed to operate out of Eastern Europe hacked dozens of companies and government agencies on at least four continents by breaking into a single product they all used” this does not surprise me, this happened in the late 80’s as well when someone used Aston Tate’s DB3 to introduce a virus, it is simple find something they all use and hamper its function, a basic strategy that an Italian (Julius Caesar) introduced 2000 years ago, there he hampered the roads and not servers but you get the idea, the classics still work.

When we are given “The Accellion casualties have kept piling up, meanwhile, with many being extorted by the Russian-speaking Clop cybercriminal gang, which threat researchers believe may have bought pilfered data from the hackers. Their threat: Pay up or we leak your sensitive data online, be it proprietary documents from Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier or lawyer-client communications from Jones Day.” It might seem rash but the people relied on others to keep their data safe and whilst we see more and more that they cannot contain the bacon the clients are suffering, this is not a simple station and we get it, but package solutions tend to come with flaws and that has been a truth for 20 years, so why are you all crying now? It is the final part that has more bearing “Members of Congress are already dismayed by the supply-chain hack of the Texas network management software company SolarWinds that allowed suspected Russian state-backed hackers to tiptoe unnoticed — apparently intent solely on intelligence-gathering — for more than half a year through the networks of at least nine government agencies and more than 100 companies and think tanks. Only in December was the SolarWinds hacking campaign discovered by the cybersecurity firm FireEye. France suffered a similar hack, blamed by its cybersecurity agency on Russian military operatives, that also gamed the supply chain. They slipped malware into an update of network management software from a firm called Centreon, letting them quietly root around victim networks from 2017 to 2020.” This is important because of what happened in the last two years, remember how ‘stupid’ American people started to blame Huawei for all the bad whilst offering absolutely no supporting evidence? Huawei does not need to bother to aid whichever government there was, silly software developers are doing that for them, we see an abundance of intrusion problems that include SolarWinds, Accellion and Cisco. A stage where thousands of systems are at risk, but no, the ‘silly’ people kept on blaming Huawei. Even I knew better and as Sony gave me the idea for an intrusion method called ‘Plus One’ (a viable way to drive the Pentagon nuts) with an alternative direction that I call ‘Vee One’, but that one has a few hiccups I reckon. Then I got creative and saw a new parameter in play. One that is based on a little part I read in a Cisco manual, the text “When You Add A Hard Disk To A Virtual Machine(VM), you can create a new virtual disk, add an existing virtual disk, or add a mapped Storage Area Network (SAN) Logical UnitNumber (LUN). In most cases, you can accept the default device node. For a hard-disk, a non default device node is useful to control the boot order or have different Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) controller types. For example, you might want to boot from an LSI Logic controller and use a Bus-logic Controller With bus sharing turned onto share a data disk with another VM.” You see that small text indicates that there is a nice workaround in Cisco CMX and it opens up a lot more than they bargained for, that in conjunction with the share issues thy were already facing gives out a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Copy me I want to travel’, n’est pas? (for the French victims)

It is a much larger stage, most laws aren’t ready for this, prosecuting the guilty parties is close to impossible and any quick fix they make will only make things harder, the setting was and has for always been the makers of software, time constraints and lack of deep testing makes for a lousy solution and in most cases these players have a pushy marketing department (example: Ubisoft), and yes ‘You be soft!’ because the small tidbit that AP gives us with “Attackers are finding it harder and harder to gain access via traditional methods, as vendors like Microsoft and Apple have hardened the security of the operating systems considerably over the last years” yet it is a small stage and not a correct one. Weaknesses in Azure, issues with advertising in apps and a larger stage of programming, we see it clearest in .NET, but it goes way beyond that, for example “The problem of memory leaks is not uncommon in any technology. Simply put, the framework doesn’t release the memory that it no longer needs. .NET is frequently criticised for memory leaks and memory-related issues. Although .NET has a garbage collector for this sort of problem, engineers still have to invest additional efforts into proper resource management. And the leaks keep on growing as the application scales.” (source: Altexsoft) and it shows the smallest part, if there is a leak in one place, there will be in other places too and the leaks are not the real problem, getting it to semi-crash and taking over its right on a network are a quick way into any system, I saw the example with an accounting program (censored name), I got the program to crash (took about 20 seconds) and I ended up with the administrator rights to the entire mainframe from ANY location running that software. I get it, there will always be a bug in any place and the makers were quick to fix it, but for a few weeks there was an entrance point that took minimum efforts and that setting is only increasing with routers and cloud systems, these companies rely on marketeers that are ready to push for the investors sake and leave the client swimming in a swamp, I have seen it more than once and it will happen again, and this setting has been going on since 1989 and over the next 3-4 years it will grow to 150%, the push to billions and to quickly get to billions will be overwhelming for too many players all whilst the law will not be able to protect the victims, they will merely point at torts law, even though that you are the victim, most contracts are offered as an ‘as is’ solution and for the most software makers can avoid prosecution for the longest time, long enough for the hackers to get away with your data and sell it, what a lovely system you bought. Oh and before I forget, organised crime is way ahead of me, so for some it will already be too late.

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March 7, 2021 · 02:00

Science in art, deception through science

Just as I got past the first female night-horse (read: nightmare) I got into another one. I am not sure why, but for some reason it matters, in this there is a CIA wet work operative played by Graham McTavish, there is a spotter with him, he minds the listening system. They are watching a man seemingly talking to himself, but it is too much of a one sided conversation, the sniper (McTavish) changes the scope to thermal, now he sees a shimmer, one he had seen before, it was digital cloaking. He signals the spotter, who starts changing the dials on a small box and after several seconds he nods, he listens. He says ‘the other person is whispering Greek’, and he listens, they are looking at an almost surreal setting, it is almost 30 seconds until the spotter states ‘I cannot be here’ McTavish looks around, the man is absolutely pale with fear “I cannot be here” he states again, puts his sidearms in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The sniper gets out fast, they were both using suppressors, as such there was too little sound to set the alarm off. He grabs all the gear and he gets out as quickly a possible, all whilst sending the alert signal.

The scene was weird, I do not remember seeing it on TV or in the movies, but it got me thinking on communication, and soon thereafter encryption, do not ask why, I have no idea, but the slithers of one, connected to the idea of another. To show this here is an image

As you can see, it is in foundation a sudoku setting, an 81 figure number (nine times nine), yet the stage is to some degree predictable, every number used once, per square and no number the same in a row or column, even as there are only nine combinations, there is a larger stage for encryption systems to work on, but what if we look at killer sudoku?

As you see in the image, the stage becomes a little different, we get a combination of puzzles and it is that combination that could give reality to a new encryption method. A stage where the sudoku itself is merely part of the puzzle, it is the other part that gets us the encryption. Is it a 2H box, a 2V box and so on, but in that stage it becomes a lot harder to figure out the numbers. The shapes can be anything, a letter, numbers, any combination. The numbers are numbers but there are ways to encrypting that too, and as every level is larger the computer undoing the cypher will take more and more time, all whilst there is an optional setting to reset that setting, a solution in apps that makes any high end encrypted system a much larger option for diplomatic staff to keep encrypted data with them, without them knowing what they are carrying, or anyone for that matter. If they are not part of it, they are merely the vessel that the channel carries.

Or in humorous terms (an ode to Danny Kaye) “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!”, as such the issue is not the servant, that person has no idea what they are carrying, a new stage where 2-3 apps set a larger stage and with the security out of the way (thanks to Microsoft and Epic) anyone can be a courier. Yes, when you (optionally) saw ‘Microsoft sides with Epic in its fight with Apple, promises a more open MS Store’ with the text “Microsoft filed a declaration in support of Epic’s request for an injunction against Apple’s plan to remove its access to iOS development tools. The company said in the filing that the Unreal Engine is “critical technology for numerous game creators,” and that taking away Epic’s ability to support it on iOS and MacOS devices “will harm game creators and gamers.”” Most people do not see the larger picture, all this was merely a way for Epic to shun its duties, duties that allow smaller players to avoid larger costs, yet once greed sets in there is a larger stage and they paved the way for organised crime to take much larger steps for people to be tempted to quick cash only to learn at a much larger stage that they became mules. It is that stage that also allows for a new encryption systems, with people having 1-2 apps, that the person with the third app will be able to capture what they need, sometimes it will be with the persons consent, but not always, and that is where we are at. The rich taking what they want and not wanting to be held responsible, no matter what damage they are at the head of, what a world we live in, it seems that my nightmares are a much more pleasant place to be soon enough.

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February 20, 2021 · 20:53

Contemplation and consideration

This is not part 4, but it is linked to yesterday’s article. As I was contemplating a few things, more precisely looking at 5G parameters, I started considering a new media format. You see YouTube became great by being better at compressed video viewing, over time the became the one and nearly only expert. Yet 5G offers a lot more and it offers a new stage, a stage where the advertisement will be completely downloaded in a second, so what happens with the rest of the time? What happens when the video offers a click to a brochure, a leaflet, the website and other matters? You see information is given, but in 5G the offered information can be a lot more and as I see it there is not too much manoeuvring in that area. A stage where some might go for ‘Yes, we are working on it’, yet I am now offering the idea in the open, as such it becomes public domain. In this I believe there is a lot more directions opening, as soon as the bandwidth becomes available we will see an explosion of ideas and they are all directed towards gaining the attention of an audience, a situation we might call ‘the choice of a new congregation’. There is no real insight whether it will be an option for good or for bad. In the 50’s advertisements were seen as a power of good, a power of information giving. In the last 10 years it became a power towards harassment. This does not mean that we should stop the direction, but perhaps when we hand the power back to the consumer we can revert to a better stage, one that is information bringing.

Consider the image of the book (one I am eagerly awaiting), what happens when we click on it that it will take us directly to OUR local bookshop, or our PERSONAL choice in online place? 5G makes this possible and a lot more. Yet the centralised data hoarders want you to go a THEIR specific place, it is time for that to change. I wonder if Amazon or Google will champion such a solution? It becomes a lot more demanding when it is a trailer, or a car advertisement, yet 5G will enable larger solutions whilst still ending up being faster than before.

I created my 5G IP to set aside centralisation, a place like Neom City requires this and they are only the beginning. The EU has a direct need and even as they still have nationalised central points, that too will become a thing of the past, the larger data centres will not care where its origin was, it merely crunches and as I was considering the stages that will unfold, I created the second 5G IP. The third was part of that but it was a longer trail, so I made it public domain, and in this we now have an optional part 4, a side I only considered and contemplated tonight, actually I was watching Downton Abbey when this happened. Something clicked and I reckon part 5 is not far away, all whilst those claiming to be on top are not producing anything. I (on the other hand) created the setup for two movies, a TV series and half a dozen games. The autumn of my life is quite the creationary delight. 

Who would have thunk it?

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February 19, 2021 · 21:31

We start with part 3

This is the first part (the third actually) that I am putting on the internet, as such this part of the IP can no longer be sold, be constraint or managed. This now becomes public domain, in a hope for some of the less intelligent people to take a larger stand pushing innovation, instead of hiding behind iteration. Those who want innovation are silenced, it is against the greed driven needs of board directors. So as I make it public domain the innovative driven players are getting a push to a larger stage where they can freely incorporate and innovate.

5G+ or 6G?
Yes, it is soon, perhaps even too soon, but the solution is not meant for mere 5G, it is a push that is a larger stage and to open that stage to all players, we get the driven need and that need tends to be positive and good. To set that stage I need to make a small diversion to the era 1840-1845, several players were on a stag where there was a new way to communicate, it would result in morse code that is used even today. 180 years and that system could be part of the new era. 

To see the new system we need to make a small change

Dot – e
Dot dot – i
Dot dot dot – s
Dot dot dot dot – h
Dot dot dash – u
Dash dot dot dot – b

You see, time is now a factor, so to limit to the dot founded symbols will be faster, we need 17 (16 and the 0), the setting is on every window in every shop. A simple blue circle illuminating a message for everyone to pick up, day or night, a hexadecimal package that contains whatever the transmitter likes, a setting where our devices can pick it up. A JPG, a PDF, a business card, a leaflet. The new digital foundry is not centralisation, it is decentralisation. If there is one clarity in light of Saudi Arabia and their 2030 vision they call Neom City, that is the one clear part given. When that city, staged to be 20 times the size of New York becomes reality, the digital stage changes, so far all the stages are the opposite, they all want control, they all want some version of data as a currency, but the power to give back to the shopkeeper becomes more powerful and the excuse that they do not want to deal with it no longer applies. A shop that has no digital comprehension loses their business, we need to set the stage that enables them to choose and having marketing run from the safety of their shop matters, especially when it is in front of their shop, the stage matters, but the stage of a ‘megacity’ like Neom City is new, no one has ever dealt with issues of that nature and setting a larger stage that is localised will matter, as such I came up with a few ideas, this was one. It is also the one furthest away and in a Corona lockdown the shopkeepers would still remain enabled. It was not on my mind, but the corona issues and lockdowns brought it to the forefront and top of my mind. I saw how shops could not deliver because the people who did their marketing were not in. A stage that is nice to have until you need it. 

A setting where we transmit at the speed of light is not new and it is out there but not to the larger degree and it might come with the next 5G, but I doubt it, full 5G is not ready for 3-4 years, and as such a 5G+ or 6G stage makes more sense, a stage where we can directly receive at the speed of light, a laser ring giving us a hexadecimal package, in the 2 seconds we are in front of the shop we can receive the new Pandora catalogue, the new Mercedes booklet in 24 bit colours, the supermarket specials or the offerings that a place like Sachs of fifth has, no paper wasted. The times are changing and it goes well beyond that. 

Have fun using the idea and have fun seeing how the big players missed all this.

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