Installment 5.6: The sheep separate from the goats

In retrospect that might be why DeTroy Williams never started for USC.  Holding back that tiny reserve is what separated him from the best.  On the other hand, he was able to walk around at the age of forty without a cane and had never suffered a concussion.

Old habits, especially ones that helped us avoid pain, become hardwired in.  DeTroy mashed the accelerator to the floorboard.

Intellectually he knew it would not make a difference but this is a case where intellect cannot keep pace with emotion and conditioning.

The bus started to accelerate!

DeTroy thought it was a momentary glitch, although he did not lift his foot from the accelerator.

It was not momentary.  The bus continued to accelerate until it reached 100 kilometers per hour (62 mph), the maximum speed allowed by the archaic, mechanical governor that had been installed fifteen years before and never been removed.

As DeTroy started to pull away, the other buses accelerated to keep up.  Their instructions were to “form up” on him until directed to do otherwise.  That was not going to happen as the communications gear and the “controls” gear had been fried by the EMP shells.

The Godzillas also tried to accelerated.  The first thing the crews had done was to remove the mechanical governors that limited their speed to 55 kph.  The motors redlined at 80 kph and the buses slowly pulled ahead of them.  What the Godzilla crews were unaware of was that running at 80 kph was stretching their tracks.  The tracks stayed in place due to centripetal acceleration as long as they remained above 30 kph and traveled in a straight line but would never be able to start again after they came to a stop.

Cruise missiles streamed south from Los Banos.  The missiles had a load-out of cluster munitions and were tasked with suppressing, or destroying, SD—LA artillery sites arrayed along I-5.  The mortar crews manned by Izzo and Lane were a last minute addition to the SD-LA defense and, as such, were ignored by the targeting algorithm.

The cruise missiles streaked above I-5 at 650 klicks per hour.  They fanned out from I-5 at designated points and dropped their munitions in a manner designed to maximize their chances of bouncing into the hardened structures sheltering the artillery.  To a large extent, they were successful.  The only thing that prevented massive casualties was the fact that most of the personnel were still in their sleeping bags.  The few defenders who were in the hardened shelters were doomed as the cluster munitions detonated the ammo that had been staged for the defense of I-5.

Wave-after-wave of newly purchased Cali cruise missiles were launched from Los Banos, a scant 30 minutes from the San Gabriel Mountains.  Artillery sites that were not destroyed outright were taken out of play as the soldiers were pinned down.

DeTroy Williams and the convoy that stretched out behind him flew south down I-5 in an eerie calm. 

The town of Lebec flew by five minutes after losing radio contact.  Then Gorman ten minutes later.  Then the 138 interchange and then twenty-five harrowing minutes to Castiac as the convoy penetrated some of the most defensible terrain on the planet.  The cruise missiles were relentless in their suppression.  The defenders were unable to launch a single artillery round or place a single barrier on I-5.  The vanguard of the invaders rolled through at 100 klicks per hour, unchallenged.

The choke point south of Santa Clarita was monkey hammered by the cruise missiles as were the hills bracketing Glendale.  There is no magic in identifying a good position to site artillery or mortars.  The targeting algorithms hammered all “good” positions without prejudice or bias.

DeTroy kept the pedal to the metal.  His destination was the Cali Federal complex east of the Southern Cal campus.  The old industrial buildings had been condemned and torn down a year after Cal-exit.  The Cali government then erected a “campus” loosely modeled on classical hacienda architecture with courtyards and ample breezeways that aligned with the prevailing breezes.  The breezeways doubled as access roads and were covered to provide shade and to provide surfaces for mounting solar collectors.

DeTroy hooked around the east end of downtown LA and then turned west on I-10, then south on I-110.

In the absence of orders to peel off from the main convoy and proceed to their targets, the entire convoy followed DeTroy like ducklings following Mama Duck.

By then the buses were all ahead of the Godzillas.   DeTroy and his baby ducklings darted into the streets that serviced the Cali campus and shut down.  No sooner had the lead elements parked than garbage trucks blocked the front of the convoys in.

Predictably, the Godzillas started throwing their tracks as they slowed down and attempted to negotiate the freeway exit ramp that led to the Federal complex.  Some spun out.  Most of them rolled. The Godzillas had been the vehicle of choice for the officers.  They regretted that choice as the casually racked, 50 pound artillery shells broke loose and pureed the passengers in the vehicle. None of the Godzillas made it to the Cali complex.

Next Installment

Nut grower, scientist, craftsman, inventor

Photo supplied by Mr Kelsey.  It was WAY prettier than any of the ones I took.

I saw a lot of pretty country while driving down to Charlotte, North Carolina.

One of the surprises was a nut orchard in West Virginia.  I had no premonition that I would see what I saw.  It was totally unexpected. It was like getting a surprise birthday party on a day that is not your birthday.

Part of what contributed to the shock was the nature of the road.  I was driving south on U.S. 35 which alternates between a limited access expressway and a common, two lane, paved road.

The Kanawha river valley has it all:  Water, deep, fertile soil, sheltered topography, wood resources.

The nut orchard was on the portion that was two lane, paved road.  The road was running up the Kanawha river valley heading southeast out of Henderson, West Virginia.  The Kanawha river valley is broad, and flat and very, very fertile.  The highway runs along the west side of the valley where surface starts to roll upward like the sides of a soup bowl.

Rounding a bend....BAM!  There it was.

I did not have time to stop on the way down because of the pup I was delivering, but I made a point of stopping on the way back.

The box beneath the tree has a bottom made of hardware cloth.  Filberts are generally propagated by "layering".  Mr Kelsey is playing around with finding a low-labor way of utilizing the sprouts that spontaneously erupt at the base of the trunk.  The hardware cloth is intended to girdle the stems while the box will be filled with potting soil to encourage rooting.

The owner of the estate was in his garden checking his green beans when I pulled into the drive.  I wagged my puppy-dog tail and he agreed to talk to me.

Mr John Kelsey is currently growing about 300 filbert trees and, at the moment, has 36 varieties on trial.  Mr Kelsey said the number of varieties varies from year-to-year.  "I get mad at a tree and yank it out.  Then I plant a different variety to see if it will do any better."

I asked Mr Kelsey if he had any recommendations for new planters.  He told me he did.  He even had it typed up.  This is a "snip" taken from the document he gave me.  Click on it to embiggen.

He has yet to find a variety that he considers "commercial" in the Eastern United States.

He took a shine to me even after I misidentified an elm tree for a heartnut tree.

He showed me his work shop.

Mr Kelsey makes fine, bent-wood rocking chairs.

Same chair shown without flash to show the pattern in the wood, Black Cherry in this case.

Numbered editions, no less.

I was so struck by the depth of the finish on these chairs that I tried to capture how the light played on the wood grain.  It was an uphill effort because of the muddy light coming through the north window.

Then Mr Kelsey showed me some picture frames he was "banging together out of some salt-and-pepper walnut" he had cut on the property.

Photo showing detail of corner and how he matched up the sapwood-heartwood line.

The reason he started numbering his chairs is because he is trying to ease out of the furniture manufacturing business.  He tried raising prices to tamp down demand, but that did not work.  Doubling the price quadrupled the demand as folks decided they better get their John Kelsey originals before he doubled the price again, or worse yet, stopped making them.

He sounded a little bit disgusted by that turn of events.

He is trying to shift customers over to his son who is no slouch as a woodworker.

John's son is making a guitar from scratch.  Look at the color and grain on the piece of maple he is using for the neck!  Picture taken with flash to give readers a sense of the color.

The mirrors in the neck turn on-and-off like LEDs as you tip it relative to the light source.  Picture taken without flash to highlight the grain.  Mr Kelsey uses his greenhouse to dry lumber in the off-season.  His son found this piece in the pile.

The knobs are laminated from wood.  The knob on the left is not for the guitar, it is for a stove.

 

Inventor
Everywhere you walk around Mr Kelsey's place you see experiments in progress and clever, one-of tools.

Mr Kelsey takes great delight in "automating" processes.  It is what he did back when he was a working stiff and I bet he was very, very good at it.

The video shows a prototype of a tool he fabricated for sorting nuts by size.  The rollers are closer together at the top where the nuts feed in and are further apart at the bottom. You need to have the nuts sorted for size before you can automate a nut cracker.

He informed me that the drive for this unit was salvaged from a piece of furniture, a "massage chair".

Industrial sabotage, terrorism or merely a disgruntled employee?

Recent news reports tell us that the Tesla Model 3 performed abysmally in braking and sub-sub-par for handling.

Specifically, the test results were very much "an anomaly".  The first full-power braking test was within the cloud of data of competing vehicles.  The next twenty tests were way out in the weeds.

Elon Musk distracted critics by pointing out that Tesla has the "...ability to deploy software updates to its vehicles over the air."

Let's look at Mr Musk's statement for a second.

Your Tesla vehicle can be hacked.  Suppose an engineer had the foresight to leave a back-door.  Further, suppose Mr Musk made a marketing decision to go to market before the engineer signed off that the system was ready.  Do you suppose that could have happened?

Now suppose the engineer, who may no longer even be employed by the company decided to "...deploy software updates...".  I will make the assumption that the engineer is conscientious and simply wants to make a point without needlessly endangering innocent people.  He/she might sneak a wee bit of code into the black box. 

Suppose the rungs of the ladder logic only apply when the vehicle's GPS confirms that the vehicle is within a GEO fence that contains the Consumers Reports test facility in East Haddom.  Further, suppose the ladder logic is triggered by a max braking event from 60mph +/- 5mph.  And further suppose that the degraded response will only be applied to those max braking events that occur within ten minutes of the previous max braking event.

Viola!!!  The Tesla Model 3 would shit-the-bed for the Consumers Reports testing without endangering anybodies' lives.

Too far fetched?  One US automobile company was caught with two sets of calibrations.  One set ran when the hood was up (and the hood light was on) which is how the Feds ran the emissions testing.  More recently a European company was caught with two sets of calibrations, one which was activated when the Power/Time trace tracked the emissions testing protocol and another...much more power and better fuel economy...when the Power/Time trace significantly deviated from the emissions testing protocols.

THAT IS THE BEST CASE SCENARIO

And even if that is what happened, a disgruntled employee, consider the fact that a malicious person could "...deploy software updates..." to screw with anybody's or everybody's vehicle. 

The malevolent code could be slaved to a particular cell phone or WIFI device.  The vehicles would lurk until the target carrying that device entered the vehicle.  As soon as it shook hands with the vehicle's computer the vehicle would launch into max acceleration and cancel all braking.  Heck, it is software.  A programmer could make it do anything.

Musk touts "...deploy software updates..." as an advantage.  Me, I am not so sure.

Passwords, part two

So what do secure passwords look like and how might one conveniently create them?


Examples:
Suppose that during your first year of college you shared a dorm room with three guys named Rick Harris, Steve Thurston and Javed Ghaffari. These are names and spellings that are etched into your memory until death but they are not easily connected with you.

They can be represented by the consonant strings rck hrrs, stv thrstn, jvd ghffri. Remember that we are trying to avoid vowels.

They lack length, Cap letters, numbers and special characters to be strong passowords.

Let me suggest some ways to fix that.

Rick's girlfriend lived in 270 Winchester Hall. Steve's was in 223 Remington Hall and Javed hung-out with his buddies in 338 Lapua Hall.

Rick Harris becomes 2"RcK7'hRrS0 (every other letter capitalized). 12 characters long.

Steve becomes 2/STV2:ThRSTn3; (letters after "O" in the alphabet capitalized). 14 characters long.

Javed becomes 3<jvd3>GHFFR8[ (first block of letters lower case, second block caps). 14 characters long.

Different strategies for capitalization were shown just to illustrate some possibilities. You would probably pick one strategy and use it for all of your passwords.

You would, of course, pick names from your own past as the basis for your secure passwords.

Passwords, part one

Lets talk about passwords.
The Daily Mail ran a recent article on computer security. Lack of computer security changed the course of history via Wikileaks and the Clinton campaign's amateurish approach to security.

According to the Daily Mail, the five most common failings are:

Failure to enable two-factor authentication (2FA). Most major online services, from Amazon to Apple, today support 2FA.

Failure to encrypt your internet traffic. A virtual private network (VPN) service encrypts digital communications, making it hard for hackers to intercept them.

Failure to tighten up your password security. This is easier than it sounds, and the danger is real: Hackers often steal a login and password from one site and try to use it on others.

Failure to monitor your devices' behind-the-scenes activities. Many computer programs and mobile apps keep running even when they are not actively in use.

Opening any hyperlinks or attachments in emails that are suspicious.

So, what is a "strong" password...a really strong one?

Length
It is long. The majority (about two-thirds) of passwords are at the minimum length. Another 20% are only one character longer.

Assuming 26 commonly used characters (lower case letters) eight characters poses 2e11 combinations. Adding two more characters increases the number of combinations that must be tried by a factor of 676. Adding three more characters increases it by a factor of 17,576. That is, it will take a computer program 17 thousand times longer to solve it.

Avoid vowels
There are five vowels and twenty-one consonances. People typically choose words or names and vowels will be grossly over-represented. Take those phrases/names/addresses and remove the vowels. It will be just as memorable and tougher to break.

Capital letters
Use some capital letters but don't use them in the lead position.

Most people are conditioned to use cap letters to start sentences or at the start of a proper noun. Programmers trying to break passwords know this. Use at least three cap letters and make none of them the first character.

Using the lead character as a capital letter only increases the number of tries from 2.0e11 to 2.2e11...hardly worth the effort. "Sprinkling" several cap letters through the password increases an eight character password from 2.2e11 to 5.3e13, a 256 fold increase.

Numbers
Use some numbers. Avoid strings of 4 sequential digits or strings of two because many people use dates (eg, I was married in '87 or 1987). Use at least two numbers and sprinkle them in the password.


A mix of lower case, upper case and numbers yields an eight character "strength" of 2.2e14...slightly stronger than a 10 character password.

Special characters
The most commonly used "special" characters are used almost as much as a typical consonant. Hardly a bulletproof security measure. Avoid "!", ".", "@", and "#", "-", "$", "*" and "+". What is left?

“ % & ‘ ( ) , / : ; < > [ \ ] ^ ` { | } ~ I took the liberty of "graying out" the other special characters that appear behind numbers and are thus most likely to be high runners.

According to this article, most passwords only use a single, special character. Those that use a double typically use the same character twice and have them back-to-back. Use at least two different special characters and separate them.

So, how much does it help to use special characters?

If you use at least two more characters than the minimum, at least three upper case sprinkled through the password, three numbers, and two "low-runner" special characters...it will take a hacker a minimum of 94 million times longer to break your password. The thing is that hackers use smart programs that concentrate their search using patterns that most people use....patterns that you will now avoid. Your passwords will be lurking in the last corner they look.

Firewalling
As a final note, use different passwords for different sites. Yes, I know it is a pain in the butt. All of your effort can fail if a hacker drills into an unsecured site and steals your one, perfect, universal password.

Write them on a 3X5 card and lock it in your safe or put it in your Bible next to your favorite verse.

Installment 5.5: A small reserve of speed

DeTroy Williams sat in the driver’s seat of his bus.  His guts were growling but no worse than they had growled the day before.

He was lined up behind the last of the decoys that were to head west toward Maricopa, hopefully to pull defenders in that direction. The decoys were running with their lights on while the actual convoy was running "dark", except when they applied their brakes...like when they were waiting.

His bus was at the vanguard of the 4000 odd vehicles that were to penetrate into downtown Los Angeles and to hook up with Cali troops that were holding the Federal buildings.  There, they would replenish ammo and receive medical attention.

As the first vehicle in the convoy he was the most likely to be targeted and killed.  He had come to accept that fact.  Bona-Brown was a spiteful man and had left DeTroy an “officer” so every person entering and leaving his bus would have to stop and salute him.  And he, in turn, would have to salute back.

 The buses were staged in four columns.  Each bus had approximately forty soldiers and an officer sitting immediately behind the driver whose job it was to hand out weapons upon disbarkment.  DeTroy’s officer was tipping into shock due to dehydration and would not survive the morning.

The convoy turned onto I-5.  At that point I-5 is a divided highway with three northbound and three southbound lanes.  The convoy drove down both the north and southbound lanes.  The center lanes were reserved for the Godzillas.  The Godzillas took the precaution of bracketing themselves between two buses to provide some shielding from the expected artillery.

Visibility was poor but adequate.  The moon was nearly full and was just starting to descend.  The pale rock was bare of vegetation and reflected the moonlight onto the pavement.

The California Central Valley is alluvial in origin.  It is the bottom of ancient lake beds and is notable for its flatness.  As one heads south on I-5, the landscape changes from flat to folded.

Flatlands are ideal for armored movement.  Defenders are not able to predict enemy movement and cannot concentrate their fire.  Flatlands favor the offensive.

Hills favor the defender.  The steep slopes and the valleys that fold back on themselves funnel invaders.  The multiply wrinkled landscape provides a multitude of firing positions that are shielded from direct counterbattery.

DeTroy knew that the shit was going to hit the fan as soon as I-5 left the flatlands.

He had a panoramic view through his windshield.  Time passed in slow motion for him.  His bus was slaved to the convoy via WIFI and the convoy was traveling at a precise 80 klicks per hour.  He could see the twinkle of shells detonating above I-5 as they approached the cut south of Grapevine.  Clearly, the crews were tuning in their positions.  And then the twinkling stopped.

DeTroy thought he had escaped unscathed when nothing had happened for the first ten minutes.  But then, six klicks south of Grapevine, just after rounding a bend that prevented the rest of the convoy from seeing him, the sky lit up with aerial mortar bursts.  One of the shells detonated 150 feet above his bus and slightly in front of it such that he could see it through his windshield.

Lest you forget, DeTroy’s formative years had been shaped by the game of football.  DeTroy was a wide receiver which is one of the most exposed positions in the violent game of football.

A skilled quarterback will throw the ball so the receiver must stretch out and catch the ball with just his fingertips.  Stretched out, the receiver is vulnerable to injuries due to violent tackles.  Even after catching the ball the receiver is vulnerable as every defender in the backfield vectors toward him.

DeTroy learned early on that the best defense was to not be there when the tackler intended to impact.  He held back a small reserve of speed for that very situation.  The difference between getting slammed to the ground and a glancing tackle and a possible first down was a matter of six inches.

Next Installment