17D_guy

Started retirement in Mar during the first wave of shutdown. Couldn't agree with this statement more. You do not want to be figuring this shit out, TAP'ing, job hunting and dealing with whatever relationship issues you may/may-not have in the mean time.

showed my wife the Senna documentary last night, then this happened today. It's amazing how far they've come to protect drivers. A wonderfully engineered miracle.

SD? MI? WA? I guess not WA...they had the first round.

Oh, we're going with the Hugo Chavez voting system thing still even though it's backed-up with paper ballots? K.

Man, if they could only have presented competent cases in court where evidence is actually required.

The merc engine...it's so...whew.

Here's Cody Garbrandt's update on why he hasn't been in a fight this late in the year. Meh, healthy young prize fighter, brick for right hand, healthy. Shouldn't have a problem.

Is 12% the national average? Where are you getting this number? For UT the last number we have for positivity is 23.6%. Which means, according to the experts, there's a lot of people that aren't getting tested that are positive. Our hospitalization rate is high, also: Percent of all non-ICU Bed Occupied - 53.7% Percent of all ICU Beds Occupied - 87.9% Percent of Referral Center ICU Beds Occupied - 91.9% So I guess the question, for us locally at least, is when do we want to get serious about burning out our healthcare workers and not having to ration care? Of course we've got people trying to break into hospitals to show it's a hoax, and saying germ-theory is a lie while protesting the mask "mandate" also...so. This is exactly what happened to us. Ex-wife is a school teacher, she needs that check (she didn't get any of my retirement..woo) and had to go back to school. Daughter goes over before Ex has symptoms. Boom, 8 days later daughter has COVID. Ex's husband had to do a few days in hospital, and a week later is still on O2 looking really rough and she's had to go back to work but is exhausted at the end of the day. Ex's symptoms were done last week. Are we counting people in their 50's as elderly? That's the median and average age for hospitalizations in our State. Yes, avg deaths is prob the same as everywhere else - 70's. Our state is extremely healthy, and extremely white (minorities are having much worse outcomes). The gov't here, in ND and Republican Gov's across the midwest have been suggesting wearing masks for months. Doc's sure weren't making the policies here because the Gov's ignored their pleas for months for a mask mandate. But the gov's damn near begged people to do it, and asking businesses to enforce it. Why would the Governors change that now to a mandate? Do they suddenly hate common sense, and got a case of the "COVID fear." Might be because North Dakota had 9 ICU beds left in the whole state. UT's had exponential growth and an extremely stressed healthcare system. Plus people throwing Halloween parties in warehouses because "they engaged in plenty of high risk activities that are more likely to cause harm than COVID. Life is to short for us to hide in the house for something that most likely a non factor." But they're young people, they'll not be hit to hard and prob go out with a slight cough. Get someone sick in line at Starbucks who's in Healthcare who just wants a coffee before another long shift at work, or a teacher, or a nursing home worker, or a grocery store worker. Advising doesn't work for the majority of the population, ever. Didn't work for seat belts, smoking indoors, drunk driving, and other "personal liberties" that were eventually legislated against. Which is really too bad. This could have been a moment where we can together as Americans to fight a common foe like many other countries. I'm pretty sure I posted this when it kicked off, but this whole thing is a giant, "It's not about you" test.

I gave it a listen. He's very right about what the pandemic has caused. Now, there's a couple of caveats moving forward to remember when thinking about cyber. I also think that we're going to see big change on this within 5 years. 1) Cyber is not currently a "utility" in the US. It's not treated like water or power for individual consumers, or even small/med businesses. It's not a necessity or right. That mindset allows it to be almost an afterthought. There's no big push to get fiber everywhere, to make us competitive across the US like some of our peers are (Japan, SK, Europe). Our costs are expensive in comparison with less to show for it. This is mostly a political and commercial discussion. But this framing is important because we (USA), as a people, don't really think it's that important. (Counter to my point above is mobile access...but you can't do everything on phones, and they're just as susceptible to hackers, if not more in some respects.) 2) Cyber operations, as levied by nation states or very advanced hackers, move in a larger spectrum than just the internet. It's literally across the electromagnetic domain, and that's all I'm comfortable saying on here. There are little/no norms, and the norms we have are poorly formed and based mostly on leadership personalities. Trump's cyber engagement was VERY different that Obama's. I'm not saying here whether one was better than the other, but that for the most part our other norms of military engagement don't change too much from one Pres to the other. So, on one had we have a domain we're actively fighting...kinda. And at the same time it is the baseline for modern society to function, but it's "nerd shit" that doesn't need a second thought until you gotta call the geek squad. Everything is digital now: TV, voice lines; nothing comes to your house that isn't wrapped in a IP packet. Many leaders are of the mindset to either pay it lip service and not fund an adequate amount, or do a checklist approach with a "jobs done" when they meet the bare minimum. There's also a lack of skilled workers, which is a whole other discussion. The pandemic is pushing it forward faster, but I'm worried it's going to take a lot more. We're already seeing the creep and what I believe is a failure to engage correctly. For example, I talked about red lines for voting machine/infrastructure, is crypto-locking up hospitals a red line? I think it should be. I think the Pres should be able to say that is a clear-and-present danger to the US and our way of life and vector the DoD to fix that problem for us. So this dude is right, we all have to figure out the fix together. But we're all fighting across it, and there's no norms. On top of that, as Americans we actively resist the idea of centralized control, which is what is needed in the setup/build phase. I need a fully redundant and resilient power grid -- well the power companies, and states, are going to tell the Fed to pound sand because a myriad of reasons. The Fed, prob DHS, is the exact cross nation organization to lead that effort. I'm rambling, I apologize. I'm still going to post this, but let me know if it made/didn't make sense. I'm very tired.

I'm invoking Goodwin's law.

How about one about seat belts or drunk driving?

I don't know, would the leader of the free world have called it a hoax of the opposition, not a big deal and under control while s/he encouraged people to disregard their local leaders while suggesting injecting "disinfectant" and internal sunlight until it's gone this summer, winter, next year when there's a vaccine? Salk said he wouldn't patent the vaccine because it would be like "patenting the Sun." That's how much fear polio caused. We've been coddled in our lifetimes with no serious epidemics in our country.

Before I got out we were all hands on deck for protecting this election in case DHS called for federal help. We did some prelim research into the voting system and figured out it was a fools errand, because each state does it their own way, and we literally couldn't prepare for 50 eventualities with our resources. We could focus on the top 3 producers of voting machines, but they, like state gov'ts, do not want any "help" as is evidenced in the video. So, I don't really have any idea about what types of machines they had in particular. But again we get back to the breadth of the term hackable - everything is. There is a port somewhere on those machines, even if it's just the power cable, the CPU fans, the hard drives spinning up. Ben Gurion University in Israel has been doing amazing research on it. The question is: is this hacking plausible knowing that cyber is a finite resource that can cost a lot of treasure to be done at a professional level? Here is a report from a hacker group attacking a professional malware development company that goes through a lot of what is required. It's getting older now, but a good read. Note, it reads like 1 person did this, but it was probably at least 3, maybe more. I've seen the NBC video before. The work they do at DEFCON its great, it's why we send folks there on the regular. I think at the last one they did some of our satellites and found some of the exact same problems. But this just dropped a few hours ago about hacking the Dominion machines, Steel is the PR dude: "Well, it's physically impossible," Steel said of vote switching. "Look, when a voter votes on a Dominion machine, they fill out a ballot on a touch screen. They are given a printed copy which they then give to a local election official for safekeeping. If any electronic interference had taken place, the tally reported electronically would not match the printed ballots. and in every case where we've looked at -- in Georgia, all across the country -- the printed ballot, the gold standard in election security, has matched the electronic tally." EDIT - Actually, you need to read the article, I think it address all the lies "soon to come evidence" that is being thrown around. But I could be wrong, I'll wait for the evidence that's "Going to explode Georgia." So there is a physical audit for at least the Dominion machines. I'm 99.99999% positive there were also instructions for voters to check their paper ballot to make sure it actually reflected what they wanted. Sidney Powell's claims are just...absurd. I give it a 0% chance that "communist countries" got together to share in the spoils of a hack on the voting infrastructure of the US. Who... Cuba, Venezuela and China? Did I miss anyone? Oh wait, NK - technically communist. I guess Vietnam as well. These renowned "cyber powerhouses" that are so secret and quiet we'd never catch them until after the election was over? I phrased it that way because China is very loud on the wire traditionally. These countries have not been after these types of systems in the past. You can check online for what APT's come out of these countries and see what they target, but TL;DR - Banks, economic espionage, casinos, etc. CN tries to steal for their economic benefit to industry (J-20 anyone) and everyone else is trying to make Bitcoin through various frauds/cryptolockers. Could they have shifted their TTP's to target something else...I mean, technically anything is possible. But I'd think it very, very unlikely. Tooling up for these things takes awhile. Also, they're not culturally aligned for it. It has been amazing to see just how much the culture of each one of these nations (and our own) impact the way we all operate in cyberspace. I don't know if that's reflected in how they fly either. Is it? For the rest of the twitter thread, they disabled the computer and there was security guards doing the rounds. Looks like the report slipped in when they walked away. Humans doing human things.

That's fucking cool, sign me up. Also, I had a post here that I guess didn't actually post. But where I'm at, currently our numbers are: Percent of all non-ICU Bed Occupied - 58.2% Percent of all ICU Beds Occupied - 90.8% Percent of Referral Center ICU Beds Occupied - 94.3% So...not good. Articles have already started about rationing care, and not allowing anymore transfers in from outlying hospitals AKA where people say it's not bad because their hospital isn't full. This one stuck out to me though for all the "co-morbidity" folks, for our hospitalizations the percentage with at least 1 pre-existing condition - 49.7%. 4K cases everyday through the weekend so far. Only thing helping us in Utah is the fact that we're a rather young population state, mostly white, and mostly healthy. According to our gov't roll-out plan I won't get the vaccine until about next Jul.

Typical non-leader shit. Correct question is, "What am I going to do." I hate it when the GO's came to PME, or anywhere for that matter, and pulled the "what are you going to do to fix the USAF?" Nothing Sir, even if I gave you the answer you wouldn't advocate for it, wouldn't do it, wouldn't give it an honest wag. The only time I saw shit fixed was when the GO's put their foot down on the Col's/Lower-GO's necks and said what was going to happen. Then the Capt/Maj that advocated for that thing got burned in promotion/assignment unless the GO also followed their career. Guess how I know. 🙄 I really enjoyed how he laid out these organizations that changed the standards, not the leaders that put it into effect. Funny, I don't think AETC's LOM said, "AETC lead x, y, z in UPT 2.0 development." I'm pretty sure they used his name. Like this, "Gen Shelton, former AF Space Commander, FUCKED cyber development for years due to petty squabbles with other GO's and an inability to grasp how the world was changing with the new domain of warfare." Edit to say - Thanks for you guys letting me peak into your world and for doing the dangerous jobs.

here's another reason ratings are down - https://nflbite.com/ Free football. That's your cyber (or pirate) tip of today. Also, have an add blocker installed. You can do it on mobile as well if you're using Firefox.

You do this while flying?

People think you're a troll, in this thread, because you get obtuse when it seems to suit you, and demand that others use extremely clear communication when you've not done so in the past. Your statement didn't say, "I don't get your analogy, please explain." You went straight to, "This has no application to the discussion at hand" when it did make sense as a comparison tool, which if I may remind you: Analogy - a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect

Sim, Seadogs and some others have been posting them. I think Guardian was, but his might have been more YT videos. I'm not going to lay the bar for evidence, that's what we have courts for and I trust the system our Founders put in place. If you have a chance to read the decision that came out of PA that I posted, it goes into detail about the tests that are used in these instances, remedy sought and allowed, and procedures. To me, it really showed the shallowness of the actual claims, and the (struggling for words here) chaos of the Trump Campaign's legal process. For the Russian "hacking" we won't know that until some historians look back and can get a feel for where we're at in 20/40/60 years. I think it had a strong effect, I could be wrong. I don't remember the details of what they released and if it impacted the FBI investigations. There's a lot of stuff to read about information operations, and of course the Russians have been doing it for a LONG time, and are really good at it. .5 - I wouldn't quote me on twitter, I'm not expert - just got a little learning and experience. 1) Possible, depends on the model. I imagine they have to have some kind of way to move data around, and it's easier to get thing certified that don't have wireless. The ones in TX didn't appear to have a USB plug, it looked like a proprietary connector. So YMMV. If it is proprietary, there's a lot more work (read - $$) that goes into a physical hack. 2) I agree in premise, however this is going to be wrapped up in the legal agreements for the machines themselves. It's why I didn't like voting in TX - no paper trail, it was all digital. Which...no one seems to have a problem with Texas' voting right now 🤔. For ballots, again that's something of a legal discussion. Our mail in ballots had the signature on the envelope, which was cast aside when our ballot was counted. I think this was the same in GA. So...yea. 3) I think you're conflating 2 things here - the conspiracy, the hacking systems. You're going to need the conspiracy first. That conspiracy is going to need to find a way to hack the machines, which might be the "same." I put same in quotes, because even our "same" systems across the USAF aren't. There's minor upgrades, hardware differences, software updates/patches. This became a serious issues when the Spectre bug came to light. I couldn't tell you if the machines in PA and GA are the same. They could be the same model, but run different firmware, or have different processors...which would impact the ability to "hack" them. I don't know if Dominion is simply a vote counting machine, of if people are voting on the machine and it's doing everything (like in TX - which didn't use dominion as I remember). I don't know if I'm explaining this well, please let me know. 4) This is to be decided by the leaders of a government and if the juice is worth the squeeze. I don't think any country (RU, CN, IR) would think that it was today. That calculus could change. Imagine the blow back when they would get caught, because they would with how close this is with the audits and recounts. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but you've got to do the Intel gain/loss, weapon gain/loss...all of that. I don't think it would be worth it. Biden is historically harder on RU than he is on CN...so, I would surmise RU wouldn't want to mess with it. Something to remember, every time you use a "cyber weapon" that iteration is gone. 5) I agree on the first part, I think the second part is up for discussion based on the country in question. Sounds like quibbling, but again, that's for our elected leaders to determine during their time in office. Now, the question is...where is the red line. Is it the voting machines only, the canvass boards computer systems, the voter rolls (which have been hacked, linked to RU), or is it all of it? Our current gov't is "ok" with some of that being "hacked." I'll add - I'm retired, I have a clearance but am not currently affiliated with USCYBERCOM or its activities. Everything I post is open source and I try to provide reputable links for my claims/thoughts.

Exactly. Doubly so since, historically, the party in the White House loses seats in the mid-terms. But nope, it's big brain chess to not make sure that doesn't happen so it seems "legit" and not ensure their leftist policies can get through. Ok.

How many "fraudulent votes" does it take to overturn the election in an area? 1? 2? 5?

You make a ton of assumptions. The top line was not about you specifically, but about a few other people who put twitter and videos on here like it's the same as an article from the WSJ, or WaPo. I posted a tool to help people figure out if they're following bots. You posted it, assumed that all the reactions were negative digs at you...k. Actually, you did with "Perhaps it's a hoax." Disagree, and it was a question not a statement. There are a lot of my friends, and other people on this board, sharing this type of "information" about why the election was stolen en masse from Trump. These same ideas are being floated by his legal counsel outside of a courtroom. The President is lining up behind these outlandish theories. It's not a stretch at all to wonder if this is really what the Republicans are going to line up behind. I compared two groups citing poor/no-research to draw outlandish and possibly damaging conclusions. Of course, and having a President call it into question, and asking legislatures to overturn the Peoples vote is more damaging than the minuscule amount of voter fraud than has been perpetrated. This is impossible with human beings, and it is not only idealistic but naive. No system has 100% security that is worth using. Oh, look another false assumption. I've dismissed no allegations of fraud, where it is found it needs to be punished. I've asked for evidence for the mountain of fraud the plaintiff's (and the President) is suggesting, and they've produced zero. Flipping/fixing 100 votes where Biden is ahead by 40K is not indicative of massive fraud. Flipping a swing state - not fraud. Yea, I do. Like all things, the breadth of the word "hacked' is lost on some people as words evolve. Hacked covers everything from rooting a box halfway around the world, to social engineering getting a large fry from the local Carl's Jr these days. The definition changed from the 90's-00's. They did "hack" our election in the sense they used the information they "hacked by technical means" from the DNC to "hack by influence ops" the election. Depends on a lot of things. I have no exp w/ Philly's voting setup. I have a small amount of exp w/ TX's setup. If they're similar then I think it's highly unlikely a foreign actor did anything to the voting machines themselves. In Tx the devices were not networked together, or on the internet during voting. I also don't think they're plugged into the WWW except for maybe updates, but a competent security person would not do that, and instead pull the updates to load off a gaped network. So instead, you're talking about a voter walking in and plugging something in to modify the machine and vote totals...sure, could happen. It would also be caught by the audits the election folks have when they start seeing issues with the voting as happened a couple times in the election. We keep a human in the loop for important things: autonomous weapons, nuclear reactors, voting. Additionally, believe that Philly has paper records of the votes as well, so you'd just audit that. Otherwise you're talking about a massive conspiracy across counties and states to modify the vote for only 1 candidate on the ticket. Having taken quite a few statistics courses on my way to my illustrious masters degree - that's 9/11-Truther levels of whackadoodle. Finally, cyber isn't something that states are going to just throw around. Everyone gets caught at some point. Some more or less than others. Cyber costs a lot to develop, professionalize and use. Burning it sucks, a lot. You're not going to throw it after a single voting machine in Philly, you're going to target something better. It's easier to think of strategically as kinda nuclear weapons. This is a imperfect analogy. We've all got cyber (ex. in ours/adversary utility structure - like missiles in tubes), it's ready to go, but we're not doing a "massive attack" with them because that would be "crossing a red line" and threaten our own way of life (ex. destroying utility infrastructure.") Nukes also had the stipulation if you attacked the detection/launch capabilities, it was considered an attack. I'm not politician...but I'd consider the bedrock of the democratic experience, voting, to be a big red line.

Not sure why educated people here are still taking TikTok videos shared on anonymous twitter handles over what the President's own lawyers are putting forward in court. We had 4 years of the admin screaming fake news, but this is what the Republicans are going to line up behind? 🤨 It's like arguing with anti-vaxers. "Here's all the evidence showing it doesn't cause autism, poison you, etc." "We'll, @real_doc_189432 on Twitter said there's mercury and live virus in the MMR vaccine! Plus my FaceBook group, "Mom's who actually care about Vax" just had a post about someone's who's twins died due to the flu shot." Also, here's a pretty good bot detector for twitter. It's not perfect, nothing is (including voting machines, or F22's), but it'll provide you with more information about where some of you might be getting informed. https://botometer.osome.iu.edu/ Ben Shapiro's podcast goes over the latest lawsuit nonsense. Dude is right with the facts as usual...and guess what, Trump's latest nonsense lawsuit - tossed out (here's the ruling). Of course the failure that is Guiliani goes right to "Obama appointed judge" not have any facts that Judge Brann - "He also spent years as a Republican Party official in Pennsylvania and was active in the Federalist Society and National Rifle Association." Welcome Pres-Elect Biden? We'll see what happens in the Senate in GA, I'm guessing they're both elected as Republicans because that's how the election has gone everywhere else: reject the chaos that is Trump, reject the Democrats as a party.

I'm going to watch this every time it's posted.

You cross the border, you cross the border