Month: February 2021

Social Media Services Assume You’re an Idiot

Last year I finally gave up entirely on social media (if you came here due to a Twitter link, those posts are automated and I haven’t logged into the account in some years). I won’t bore you with every reason, but I would like to take a moment to highlight one in particular.

I don’t care if somebody assumes I’m an idiot. I don’t care if somebody calls me an idiot. But if somebody assumes I’m an idiot or calls me one, I’m not going to contribute to their welfare. When you post content to a social media service, you contribute to its welfare. Without user generated content a social media service is a barren wastelands. It has nothing with which to entice people to sign up. Social media services by and large rely on having large numbers of users since user interactions are their product. No users, no user interactions. No user interactions, no income.

This brings me to the reason I want to highlight. Every mainstream social media service assumes that its users are idiots. Not only do they assume that their users are idiots, they call their users idiots. Every time a social media service “fact checks” a post or comment it’s saying that its users are too stupid and gullible to discern fact from fiction.

Rather than contribute to the welfare of services that assume I’m an idiot, I’m contributing to the welfare of services that don’t insult my intelligence.

Ignorance of the Law Should Be an Excuse

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse” and “I’m a law abiding citizen” rank towards the top on my list of hated phrases. Law enforcers and prosecutors like to claim that ignorance of the law is no excuse when they’re arresting and taking you to court respectively. Judges are even in on the game. They tell jurors, while wearing a straight face no less, that their verdict must be based on the letter of the law. Then there’s the defendant. Up until he found himself in court he very well may have said that he was a law abiding citizen. He might even compound his ignorance by saying he looked forward to his day in court so he could prove his innocence. The lawyers, prosecutors, and judges are demanding that people be held to an impossible standard. The person who calls himself a law abiding citizen is a fool.

I’m sure there’s at least one person who considers themselves a law abiding citizen scoffing at my previous sentence. If that person is you, there’s an exercise that you can perform to prove me wrong. The only thing you need for this exercise is a pen and paper. Without looking any up write down every law for the municipality, county, and state in which you live. Then write down every federal law. When you’ve finished writing down all of the laws you know, look up all of the laws you missed.

You’ll find that you missed most of them. I know this for certain because if you did start writing down every law under which you live, you would die of old age before you finished. Maybe you think you could do so if you had enough time. If you believe that, begin reading through the laws under which you live and only write down the ones you didn’t know. Since legal professionals like lawmakers, judges, and lawyers don’t know the entirely of the law, I have my doubts that you do.

The bottom line is the everybody is ignorant of the law. Since everybody is ignorant of the law, it’s impossible for anybody to know that they’re a law abiding citizen.

This situation is even more dire when you stop to consider that the body of law is in a constant state of change. City council members, senators, congressmen, and other lawmakers are constantly tweaking existing laws and creating new ones. Even if you did manage to learn every law under which you live, your knowledge would quickly be outdated. Then you have to take into account the rulings made by various judges. Their rulings ultimately decide what the letter of the law actually means. And they frequently invalidate each others’ rulings so their rulings too are in a constant state of flux.

I’m left with a question that should seem obvious at this point. Why isn’t ignorance of the law an excuse? If legal professionals who attend specialized schooling can’t comprehend the entirety of the law, why are laymen expected to do so? Why is a system built on a practically uncountable number of laws that are frequently conflicting and always changing considered just?

I call bullshit on the entire concept. Ignorance of the laws should be an excuse.

Subzero Temperatures Are Fun

You have two options when living in the Upper Midwest: become friend with winter or at least come to terms with it. I fall into the latter category. Winter is my favorite season. Perhaps by necessity I have developed a fascination with cold weather and the effects it has on everyday thing.

Consider the electronics we take for granted every day. Do you know what the lowest temperature at which your mobile phone or laptop will function? Such information often doesn’t make it into consumer product specifications. I did some digging and it seems most laptops are designed to function in temperatures as low as 50 °F. That’s adequate for environments where the climate is usually controlled such as a home or office. It’s not adequate for the -30 °F temperature to which I work up yesterday morning.

This topic becomes much more interesting on a large scale. Take Texas for example. The state is experiencing a typical Upper Midwestern winter right now. That’s a problem because a typical Upper Midwestern winter there extremely rare so nothing is designed with such conditions in mind. Many people in the state are experiencing blackouts. A lot of people, myself included, have asked why the power grid was so severely impacted by this weather since the same power generation technology is used in environments that get just as cold. Why would a wind turbine in Texas freeze when one in Minnesota that regularly experiences even colder temperatures doesn’t? There are many possibilities. The first that comes to mind is lubricant. It’s quite possible that the lubricants being using in wind turbines in Texas turn into a gel at subzero temperatures. Since Texas so seldomly experiencing subzero temperatures nobody likely stopped to consider the possibility.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) event notification report for today notes that a nuclear reactor in Texas was taken offline because two of its feedwater pumps failed. Could cold weather interfere with a feedwater pump? Quite possibly. Depending on the design of the pump, the source of the water, and other factors it’s quite feasibly that a feedwater pump could fail if the water source or intake froze. Water freezing inside of a pump is even feasible (although flowing water doesn’t freeze as easily as standing water).

Backup diesel generators could also be troublesome in Texas at the moment. There are two types of diesel. #1 diesel tends to work better at lower temperatures whereas #2 diesel tends to work better at higher temperatures. Because #2 diesel tends to turn into gel at cold temperatures, here in the Upper Midwest during winter months we mix #1 and #2 diesel or include additives in our diesel to prevent it from gelling up. I’m guessing the same isn’t done in Texas since there normally isn’t a need. That means backup diesel generators, which are needed now because mains power is unreliable, could also be unavailable.

I wish I had more to offer than observations that I find interesting, but truth be told there likely isn’t anything anybody can do for Texas until the temperature goes up. The fixes necessary to make a state like Texas capable of weathering (pun intentional) these conditions require redesigning almost everything, which is likely too tall of a task for anybody to undertake and too costly for how rare these conditions do occur.

Dissoi Logio

Greek rhetoricians had a practice called Dissoi Logio. The practice involved arguing both sides of an issue in order to obtain a deeper understanding of it. I enjoy practicing this because it not only helps develop a deeper understanding of an issue, but it also helps demonstrate that truth isn’t as absolute as commonly assumed.

One of the best tools available to assist in this practice is statistics. If you follow any online argument long enough, you get to the point where both sides are throwing statistics at each other. A good example of this is the debate around gun restrictions. Those in favor of gun restrictions will toss around comparisons of violent crime statistics between countries with strict and loose gun control laws. People opposed to gun restrictions will then rebut by throwing around statistics involving defensive uses of guns and point out that since the definition of violent crimes differ from country to country, comparing said statistics isn’t an apples to apples comparison. Your perception of which side is telling the truth is usually decided by your personal biases.

This is also common with economic arguments. For example, any argument about minimum wage laws inevitably involves supporters citing statistics that predict economic benefits from doing so and opponents citing statistics that predict economic problems from doing so. Which set of statistics you decide to cite as truth will likely depend on your economic biases.

Statistics aren’t the only tools available to assist you with this exercise, but I cite them because they are becoming one of the most common foundations upon which arguments are built. Starting this exercise by wielding statistics provides a lot of bang for your buck. Once you’ve done that, you can start looking at other argumentative foundations and master their uses too.

Even if you don’t decide to start with using statistics, I urge you to practice Dissoi Logio. Your initial attempts will likely be half hearted because most people aren’t taught the practice and the act of successfully arguing against your own position can be disturbing. However, practice makes perfect. The more you practice it, the better you will become. Eventually you should be able to make very strong arguments for and against any position. This will give you a leg up when debating because you will likely enjoy a better understanding of both your position and your opponent’s position than they do. It will also hopefully help you realize that truth and lies aren’t as black and white as most people mistakenly believe, which should make you far less susceptible to propaganda.

Maybe Connecting Everything to the Internet Isn’t a Great Idea

I’ve made my feelings about the so-called Internet of things (IoT) abundantly clear over the years. While I won’t dismiss the advantages that come with making devices Internet accessible, I’m put off by industry’s general apathy towards security. This is especially true when critical infrastructure is connected to the Internet. Doing so can leads to stories like this:

Someone broke into the computer system of a water treatment plant in Florida and tried to poison drinking water for a Florida municipality’s roughly 15,000 residents, officials said on Monday.

The intrusion occurred on Friday evening, when an unknown person remotely accessed the computer interface used to adjust the chemicals that treat drinking water for Oldsmar, a small city that’s about 16 miles northwest of Tampa. The intruder changed the level of sodium hydroxide to 11,100 parts per million, a significant increase from the normal amount of 100 ppm, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in a Monday morning press conference.

The individuals involved with the water treatment plant have been surprisingly dismissive about this. They’ve pointed out that there was never any danger to the people of Oldsmar because treated water doesn’t hit the supply system for 24 to 36 hours and there procedures in place that would have caught the dangerous levels of sodium hydroxide in the water before it could be release. I believe both claims. I’m certain there are a number of water quality sensors involved in verifying that treated water is safe before it is released into the supply system. However, they’re not mentioning other dangers.

Poisoning isn’t the only danger of this kind of attack. What happens when treated water can’t be released into the supply system? If an attacker poisons some of the treated water, is there isolated surplus that can be released into the supply system instead? If not, this kind of attack is can work as a denial of service against the city’s water supply. What can be done with poisoned water? It can’t be released into the supply system and I doubt environmental regulations will allow it to be dumped into the ground. Even if it could be dumped into the ground, doing so would risk poisoning groundwater supplies. It’s possible that a percentage of the plant’s treatment capacity becomes unavailable for an extended period of time while the poisoned water is purified.

What’s even more concerning is that this attack wasn’t detected by an intrusion detection system. It was detected by dumb luck:

Then, around 1:30 that same day, the operator watched as someone remotely accessed the system again. The operator could see the mouse on his screen being moved to open various functions that controlled the treatment process. The unknown person then opened the function that controls the input of sodium hydroxide and increased it by 111-fold. The intrusion lasted from three to five minutes.

This indicates that the plant’s network security isn’t adequate for the task at hand. Had the operator not been at the console at the time, it’s quite possible that the attacker would have been able to poison the water. There is also a valid question about the user interface. Why does it apparently allow raising the levels of sodium hydroxide to a dangerous amount? If there are valid reasons for doing so (which there absolutely could be), why doesn’t doing so at least require some kind of supervisory approval?

It’s not uncommon for people involved in industries to cite the lack of budget necessary to address the issues I’ve raised. But if there isn’t a sufficient budget to address important security concerns when connecting critical infrastructure to the Internet, I will argue that it shouldn’t be done at all. The risks of introducing remote access to a system aren’t insignificant and the probability of an attack occurring are extremely high.

Whenever somebody discussing connecting a device to the Internet, I immediately ask what benefits doing so will provide. I then ask which of those benefits can be realized with a local automation system. For example, a Nest thermostat offers some convenient features, but many of those features can be realized with a local Home Assistant controller.