Tag: You Can’t Cure Stupid

Another Bang Up Job

Legacy cellular protocols contained numerous gaping security holes, which is why attention was paid to security when Long-Term Evolution (LTE) was being designed. Unfortunately, one can pay attention to something and still ignore it or fuck it up:

The attacks work because of weaknesses built into the LTE standard itself. The most crucial weakness is a form of encryption that doesn’t protect the integrity of the data. The lack of data authentication makes it possible for an attacker to surreptitiously manipulate the IP addresses within an encrypted packet. Dubbed aLTEr, the researchers’ attack causes mobile devices to use a malicious domain name system server that, in turn, redirects the user to a malicious server masquerading as Hotmail. The other two weaknesses involve the way LTE maps users across a cellular network and leaks sensitive information about the data passing between base stations and end users.

Encrypting data is only one part of the puzzle. Once data is encrypted the integrity of the data must be protected as well. This is because encrypted data looks like gibberish until it is decrypted. The only way to know whether the encrypted data you’ve received hasn’t been tampered with is if some kind of cryptographic integrity verification has been implemented and used.

How can you protect yourself form this kind of attack? Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel is probably your best bet. The OpenVPN protocol is used by numerous VPN providers that provide clients for both iOS and Android (as well as other major operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS). OpenVPN, unlike LTE, verifies the integrity of encrypted data and rejects any data that appears to have been tampered with. While using a VPN tunnel may not prevent a malicious attacker from redirecting your LTE traffic, it will ensure that the attacker can’t see your data as a malicious VPN tunnel will fail to provide data that passes your client’s integrity checker and thus your client will cease receiving or transmitting data.

Propaganda is Not Reality

A lot of people make the mistake of believing that the propaganda they’re being fed is truth. But propaganda is not reality. If one wants an example of this point, they need look no further than the propaganda being pumped out to support the drug war:

In the middle of May, a police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio, Chris Green, was responding to a traffic call when he realized that white powder had spilled inside the car he was investigating. He put on gloves to protect himself from what he would later learn was a formulation of fentanyl, a potent prescription opioid, as he handled the situation. Later, when he got back to the station, another officer pointed out some dust on the back of Green’s shirt. Green brushed it off, no gloves, without thinking. Soon after (some accounts state it was mere minutes, others clock it at an hour), he was unconscious.

“I was in total shock,” he told the local paper after the fact. “ ‘No way I’m overdosing,’ I thought.”

He would go on to receive four doses of naloxone, an emergency drug that counteracts an opioid overdose, before waking up.

An overdoes from merely touching fentanyl? That sounds like powerful and extremely dangerous stuff! Except for the fact that the story as told is bullshit:

Each of the medical and toxicology professionals I asked agreed that it’s implausible that one could overdose from brushing powder off a shirt. Skin cannot absorb even the strongest formulations of opioids efficiently or fast enough to exert such an effect. “Fentanyl, applied dry to the skin, will not be absorbed. There is a reason that the fentanyl patches took years [for pharmaceutical companies] to develop,” says my colleague Ed Boyer, M.D., Ph.D., a medical toxicologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

While fentanyl is dangerous due to its concentrated nature, it’s not so dangerous that touching a little bit of it with your skin will cause you to overdoes. Unfortunately, while most publications were happy as can be to publish the officer’s account of the incident, they didn’t bother doing any investigation (thus why the field is seldom referred to as investigative journalism these days) into whether or not the officer’s story was even plausible. Even when journalists aren’t intentionally publish propaganda, they often unintentionally publish it by mindlessly accepting whatever a government official says as fact and publishing it without any investigatory work.

Taking Children to Court

The immigration laws in the United States are asinine but you can’t fully appreciate the absurdity of the entire immigration system until you look at the court system that deals with immigration issues:

As the White House faces court orders to reunite families separated at the border, immigrant children as young as 3 are being ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings, according to attorneys in Texas, California and Washington, D.C.

Requiring unaccompanied minors to go through deportation alone is not a new practice. But in the wake of the Trump administration’s controversial family separation policy, more young children — including toddlers — are being affected than in the past.

[…]

The children being detained under the new “zero tolerance” policy, though, are facing immigration proceedings without mom or dad by their side.

“The parent might be the only one who knows why they fled from the home country, and the child is in a disadvantageous position to defend themselves,” Toczylowski said.

This is a perfect example of bureaucracy run amuck. There is no logical reason to have a three-year-old child appear in a courtroom. They likely have no idea why they were dragged into this country. Mom and dad probably just told them one morning that they were moving. But the letter of the law says that that child has to appear in court so they are dutifully dragged into court by the government goons who are just following orders.

Bureaucracies may be the worst invention humanity ever developed. Through the system of bureaucracy personal accountability is disposed of entirely. Whenever you’re tasked with doing something stupid or illogical in a bureaucracy you just need to respond with, “Those are the rules. I’m just doing my job.” If you find yourself questioning the morality of what you’ve been tasked with doing in a bureaucracy, you can just tell yourself that the rules were written by really smart people who know better than you. The invention of bureaucracies enabled far too many people to act as mindless automatons.

Judging the Past by Modern Standards

A minor controversy that has recently been making the rounds on the Internet is Laura Ingalls Wilder being removed from the Children’s Literature Legacy Award:

The author of the “Little House on the Prairie” series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, had her name removed from a prestigious children’s book award because of “dated cultural attitudes” contained in her books, the association that issues the award said Monday.

In a joint statement, the American Library Association and the Association for Library Service to Children said the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award was changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award during a weekend conference in New Orleans.

While the decision itself is irrelevant to me since I couldn’t care less who receives what awards, it is another example of a particular pet peeve of mine: the tendency to judge people from the past by modern standards.

A good example of this Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan is usually seen as a violent marauder, which is true. Due to that view of him, he’s commonly declared an entirely evil person because by today’s standards he is. However, in this time armies going from city to city and offering their inhabitants either subjugation or annihilation was the status quo. By the standards of his day Genghis Khan was quite progressive. For example, he allowed the people of subjected cities to continue worshiping their gods and even had people of many different faiths in his inner circle. He also took measure to improve the efficiency of travel and trade along the Silk Road, which benefited societies all along it.

People cannot perceive the future. There was no way for Laura Ingalls Wilder to know that the attitude in the United States regarding Native Americans would change so drastically from her time. Moreover, whatever views she held (and since she was a writer, going by her fiction isn’t a good way of knowing her personal views) were more likely than not the common views of her time. People tend to pick up predominant memes (not the fun Internet kind but the idea transfer between individuals kind). If you living in a heavily Christian area, you will likely be Christian, at least for the early part of your life. If you’re a white person living in a society where most white people hold negative views about Native Americans, you will likely hold negative views about Native Americans. Judging people of the past by modern standards is, in my opinion, foolish outside of thought exercises.

I imagine that people living a century from now will look back at us as barbaric and backwards (although I hope they overcome the tendency to judge people of the past by modern standards) because the generally accepted moral framework will have changed significantly. That’s something to consider when you’re judging a person from the past.

Living in an Idiocracy

Sometimes I consider renaming my blog to Living in an Idiocracy. I continue to be amazed, or really dismayed, at the lack of basic intelligence held by my fellow Americans. The problem is that the idiocy doens’t stop at inconsequential matters, it involves matters of significant consequence as well:

The most important safety feature on your car isn’t its airbag or even the seat belts—it’s the tires. This should be obvious; those four round black things are the only part of the vehicle to actually touch the road, after all. Sadly, most American drivers fail to take care of their tires, with 35 percent of drivers not able to tell if their tires are bald. When you consider that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that vehicles with worn out tires were three times more likely to end up in a crash, you can see the problem.

Checking to see if your tires have a safe amount of tread on them isn’t difficult. Tires include a convenient built-in mechanism to determining your tires’ tread depth. Tread depth gauges can also be acquired for a song and if even that is too expensive for you, you can use something like a coin to determine if your tires need to be replaced.

The fact that motorists can get a license without learning that their tires need to be replaced periodically is astounding to me. How can somebody get through 16 years of their life without having known somebody who got the tires on their vehicle replaced and at least developed the curiosity to ask why they replaced their tires? The level of ignorance seems to require a willful commitment.

Honestly, if advocates of mass transit want a catchphrase for their campaigns they could do worse than, “Mass transit. Because you’re too stupid to be trusted with your own vehicle.”

Civitates Foederatae Americae Delendae Sunt

Since I’m on the topic of perspective, let’s take a moment to consider the current crisis, immigrant children being held in concentration camps:

Reporters and Democratic lawmakers have been allowed inside a detention centre that lies at the heart of a growing storm over a new US policy separating migrant children from their parents.

Authorities did not allow photos or videos to be taken inside the centre, but US Customs and Border Protection later released several images. Former First Lady Laura Bush has compared it to the internment camps used for Japanese-Americans during World War Two. A Democratic congressman who visited the site said it was “nothing short of a prison”.

If you listen to many partisans, you may be lead to believe that Trump is personally kidnapping these children to put them in concentration camps. The first red flag in this article should be that photos were not allowed. Why should that be a read flag? Because it raises an awkward question, from where have all of the pictures of these concentration camps come? Awkward questions often have awkward answers:

There’s also precedent for warehousing immigrant children at military bases. In 2014, Obama temporarily held kids at an emergency shelter at Lackland AFB in San Antonio — a development that Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott were appalled by at the time. The photo at the top of this story — of Central American kids at a Border Patrol processing center — has been repeatedly mistaken as a recent, Trump-era image. In fact, it’s from 2014, during the Central American refugee surge.

Many of the pictures being passed around supposedly from current concentration camps full of children are actually from concentration camps full of children that existed under the previous president. Yes, you read correctly, concentration camps that existed under Obama.

If it wasn’t for humanity’s wonderful feature referred to as cognitive dissonance, this news might shake some partisain’s political faith in their party. Fortunately for them, cognitive dissonance will guard most of them from having to accept this difficult information. However, all of us should keep in mind that human rights abuse is nothing new for the United States of America.

From kidnapping Native American children and forcing them to abandon their heritage and language under the guide of civilizing and educating them to interring Japanese Americans during World War II for no other reason than their descent to the continuous abuse of black individuals from slavery to Jim Crow laws to the drug war, there hasn’t been a single instance in the United States’ history where the federal government wasn’t abusing large swaths of people.

None of the human rights abuses being perpetrated under Trump are new or without precedence. Moreover, if voting could fix this, as most partisans either outright claim or imply, this issue would have been fixed already.

If you’re actually looking for a solution to the human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States government, there is only one solution.

Civitates Foederatae Americae delendae sunt!

Perspective

I’m of the opinion that you can despise somebody but not despise everything single thing that they do. For example, I despise Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler drank water. Does that mean I despise drinking water? Of course not. Likewise, I despise Donald Trump. Donald Trump is making inroads with North Korea that could lead to a reduction in hostilities if not outright peace. Does that mean I despise peace? Of course not.

Unfortunately, this attitude, albeit quite simple, still qualifies as rather nuanced by modern standards. Many people, especially those who have given themselves over entirely to a binary political spectrum, are unable to deal with even minor nuances so even some former peaceniks have begun screaming about the evils of making peace with North Korea for the sole reason of who is making that peace. This has lead to some rather unexpected propaganda. Case in point, Engadget, a website that posts articles almost exclusively about technology products, felt the need to pen an article that can be summed up as, “North Korea is evil! It cannot be trusted! We can’t make peace with it!” The argument put forward by the article, like the attitude that lead to the writing of the article, is built on the lack of being able to understand nuance.

The first part I’m going to pick out isn’t an argument but an attempt to frame North Korea as an evil nation who did terrible things to Americans. What it fails to do is take perspective into account:

North and South Korea have been divided since 1945; for a short period Russia occupied the North while the US occupied the south; during the war, China aided the north and the US aided the south (we lost 54,246 lives, and 7,704 American soldiers are still unaccounted for). The Korean War ended with an armistice agreement but no peace settlement, so technically the war has never ended. American military remains in the south as part of a mutual defense treaty.

North Korea killed 54,246 Americans! See how evil it is! What’s missing is the other side of the equation. You see, the Korean War was, as the name implies, a war. In war soldiers on both sides tend to die. As it turns out, a lot of North Koreans died:

In a 1984 interview, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, claimed U.S. bombs “killed off 20 percent of the population” and “targeted everything that moved in North Korea.” These acts, largely ignored by the U.S. collective memory, have deeply contributed to Pyongyang’s contempt for the U.S. and especially its ongoing military presence on the Korean Peninsula.

If an estimated 20 percent of the North Korean population wasn’t enough, many North Korean cities, including Pyongyang, ceased to exist.

I don’t say this to give North Korea a pass on the regime’s abuses. The North Korean government is an absolutely brutal one. However, to only give one side of the story is propaganda, not accurate history. Understanding the conflict requires analyzing all sides of the war, not just the American side.

Now that the outright propaganda of the article has been addressed, let’s consider the argument against making peace with North Korea:

Fast forward to 1963, and the world finds out that the North has begun building a nuclear reactor. Then a nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. The first time North Korea committed to denuclearization was 1992’s Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula — though historically, nuclear inspectors have been barred from surveying North Korean facilities.

North Korea entered the Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization and failed to abide by the agreement! How can we trust a regime that has broken its promises in the past? But why did North Korea fail to abide by its side of the agreement? Fortunately, I’ve read The Dead Hand by David Hoffman. Part of it touched on the history of nuclear weapons in North Korea and the agreement that was made between it and the United States. As with any agreement, this agreement involved concessions from both sides. One of the concessions made by the United Stats was a commitment to provide North Korea with two light water nuclear reactors. However, after the agreement was made, as is so often the case in the United States, the rules changed:

Soon after the agreement was signed, U.S. Congress control changed to the Republican Party, who did not support the agreement.[19][20] Some Republican Senators were strongly against the agreement, regarding it as appeasement.[21][22] Initially, U.S. Department of Defense emergency funds not under Congress’ control were used to fund the transitional oil supplies under the agreement,[23] together with international funding. From 1996 Congress provided funding, though not always sufficient amounts.

The United States didn’t abide by its part of the agreement. Normally when one side fails to uphold its end of an agreement, the other side is not expected to uphold its part. Apparently North Korea was supposed to uphold its end even though it didn’t receive what was promised to it.

Once again the issue wasn’t the upstanding United States being snuffed by wicked North Korea. The issue was two belligerents continuing to be belligerent. This is not to say that North Korea was the good guy or an innocent victim, it’s to point out that the United States wasn’t an angel.

The Science is Settled… Until It’s Not

I’m a skeptical man by nature but I tend to be more skeptical of what are traditionally labeled soft sciences such as psychology and sociology. My stronger than average skepticism stems from several factors.

First, and probably most importantly, experiments in these fields can’t isolate variables. When you’re experimenting on humans, one variable is the life experiences of the subjects of your experiment. Different people have different life experiences, which can lead them to act differently under the same circumstances.

Second, the subject of experiments in fields like psychology tend to act differently when they’re the subject of an experiment. This tendency isn’t unique to humans. Ravens and chimpanzees act differently when they know that they’re being watched.

Third, most experiments involving human subjects suffer from selection bias. Professors have a ready pool of humans to experiment on, western undergrads, and utilize them for most experiments. Anybody with even the most basic observation skills will notice that undergrad students tend to behave differently than, say, elderly individuals.

Now I have a fourth reason for my skepticism. It turns out that the findings of many psychological experiments are, to put it nicely, rather dubious:

The Zimbardo prison experiment is not the only classic study that has been recently scrutinized, reevaluated, or outright exposed as a fraud. Recently, science journalist Gina Perry found that the infamous “Robbers Cave“ experiment in the 1950s — in which young boys at summer camp were essentially manipulated into joining warring factions — was a do-over from a failed previous version of an experiment, which the scientists never mentioned in an academic paper. That’s a glaring omission. It’s wrong to throw out data that refutes your hypothesis and only publicize data that supports it.

Perry has also revealed inconsistencies in another major early work in psychology: the Milgram electroshock test, in which participants were told by an authority figure to deliver seemingly lethal doses of electricity to an unseen hapless soul. Her investigations show some evidence of researchers going off the study script and possibly coercing participants to deliver the desired results. (Somewhat ironically, the new revelations about the prison experiment also show the power an authority figure — in this case Zimbardo himself and his “warden” — has in manipulating others to be cruel.)

The problem of manipulation isn’t unique amongst so-called soft sciences. The scientific method generally assumes that the experimenter is unbiased but what happens when the experimenter wants a specific outcome? Oftentimes, they can setup the experiment or manipulate the results in such a way that they can create their desired outcome. This is especially easily to do when the subjects of an experiment are manipulable humans. A little coercion can result in desired behavior.

I’m happy that these issues are finally being scrutinized more thoroughly. But I’m curious what the fallout will be. Science has become a religion to many people. People tend to react negatively when they learn that their priests have been lying to them and that their gods are not actually gods. Part of my worries that the backlash of this scrutiny could be a reflexive opposition to science by the masses but then the other part of me remembers that most fans of science aren’t actually scientifically minded anyways.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

Remember the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agent who became separated from his weapon while dancing and ended up shooting somebody he attempted to retrieve his weapon in a panic? In a surprise twist, he has been arrested:

An off-duty FBI agent whose gun accidentally fired after it dropped out of its holster while he was doing a backflip at a Denver nightclub was taken into custody on Tuesday, jail records showed.

Chase Bishop, 29, turned himself in to the Denver County Sheriff’s Department Tuesday morning and was being held in a detention center in downtown Denver. He was charged Tuesday with one count of second-degree assault, the Denver County District Attorney’s Office said.

I feel the need to point out the verbiage used here. Notice how the report says that the FBI agent “accidentally” fired his firearm. While his actions were almost certainly accidental, it would have been better to use the word “negligently” since his negligence lead to the gun being fired. But negligence is when nongovernmental individuals unintentionally shoot somebody. When government agents unintentionally shoot somebody, it’s accidental.

As far as the charges go, I’d put money on the agent not being convicted. Law enforcers tend to enjoy a great deal of leeway when it comes to shooting bystanders, whether intentionally or accidentally. But it is nice to see that charges were actually filed and an arrest was made.

Defining Evil

Anybody who has identified as a libertarian for any length of time has likely been accused of being a paid Koch brothers shill. The Koch brothers are evil incarnate who want nothing more than to kill every poor person on the planet. At least that’s what my self-proclaimed progressive friends continue to tell me. Those same friends also tell me that anybody who is working to topple Trump is doing God’s work. So now I’m left to wonder, are the Koch brothers still evil incarnate:

Powerful US billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are funding a multi-million dollar campaign against President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.

Three political groups backed by the brothers say they will use advertising, lobbying and grassroots campaigns to push the benefits of free trade.

This is an excellent illustration of the trap most politicos fall into eventually fall into. They tend to define other politicos on a binary scale. Either you’re on “their” side and therefore good or you’re on the “other” side and therefor evil. But people are complex creatures and seldom fit nicely onto a binary political spectrum. Two good examples of this are pro-gun progressives and pro-choice conservatives. Even if every other political belief an individual in either group holds agrees with their respective political label, they are considered heretics by both sides.

I honestly don’t know much about the Koch brothers other than the check they’re supposed to send me for being a libertarian shill has yet to arrive (if this is due to an address mishap, would a representative of the Koch brothers please contact me so it can be corrected). I’m sure if I dug into their beliefs I would find things that I agree with and disagree with. This is probably true for every person on the planet. If you spend the time to get to know somebody, you’ll inevitable find that there are things on which you two agree and things on which you two disagree. Needless to say, having only a binary spectrum is insufficient for judging human beings.