gmj/home.public.blog: The source to my blog @ 94be98dea87d8e8323de9e88156c6e65390bf01a

Ideas and drafts for future posts

Ideas and drafts for future posts

DONE g/re/p

State "DONE" from "TODO" [2020-09-19 Sat 15:17]
/bin/ed post

Did you know that grep(1) evolved out of /bin/ed? What's /bin/ed you say? /bin/ed is THE standard Unix text editor. Ken Thompson wrote ed. Ken Thompson wrote Unix (and a lot of it with ed). Ed has been creating Unix source, C-compilers, troff documents, man pages etc. since 1969.

ed as the source of grep

Back to grep.


# Create a file, foo.txt, with some strings

gmj@ed tmp $ cat < foo.txt
> grep
> finds
> regular
> expressions
> END

# use /bin/ed to do a global (g) search for the regular expresson
"re" and print (p) the matching lines.  grep:

gmj@ed tmp $ ed foo.txt
31
g/re/p
grep
regular
expressions
w
q

There you have it. The origins of ed.

Some really basic ed editing

gmj@ed tmp $ ed foo.txt
30
1
grep
s/grep/search/
p
search
1,$p
search
finds
regular
expresions
$a
and you can append text
and more text
.
1,$p
search
finds
regular
expresions
and you can append text
and more text
w
70
q

For less information

Really, there's not much to ed. There's no configuration file. You don't need to know more than a few commands to edit files and call it a day.

If you really need more …. CITE

An for fun @edconf on twitter

twitter @edconf

TODO Keeping my blood pressure down, keeping politics personal

Intro - me and politics

I quit Facebook in the run up to the 2016 election to keep my blood pressure down. I have very definite political opinions. Most them revolve around letting people make their own decisions and looking for solutions to life's problems at a personal level.

My experiences during corona virus

That said, I'm going to share some of my personal experiences during the coronavirus outbreak.

Dawn's wedding

drive-in shower. Neighbors called police.

Fly-over

Military jets. Crowds.

Strong bias for personal choice

Neighbors dogs bark. I don't like it. That's their choice.

TODO Thinking on paper

TODO Publish thoughts from my journal

TODO Hiking stories

TODO Write a blog/linked-in entry about cogita, fac, dic

See Cogita, fac, dic
Illustrate with learning, applying some new thing. A language? A new AWS product?

TODO Keeping up with the Claudii: From wax tablets to paper to the Internet

Changes in resources for learning Latin from the days of Wheelock to DuoLingo. Journal 8/23/30.

TODO Twitter Declaration Of Independence

[2020-08-25 Tue]

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one Person (me) to dissolve the User Agreement which has connected him with a Social Media Corporation (Twitter), and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle him, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that he should declare the causes which impel him to the Separation. He holds these Truths to be self-evident,

…

TODO Mountaintop Experiences

[2020-08-25 Tue] Some important things happened on Mountaintops:

sermon on the mount
transfiguration
cleansing the temple
curcifixion [2020-08-25 Tue]

TODO Casting the first stone?

[2020-08-25 Tue] A song by some Liberty University students:

What if I stumble What if I fall? What if I lose my step And I make fools of us all?

Will the love continue When my walk becomes a crawl? What if I stumble And what if I fall?

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/dctalk/whatifistumble.html

TODO My morning routine/journaling

[2020-08-25 Tue]

Journaling

yesterday
today
in
out
up

TODO This is not your fathers /etc/resolv.conf - understanding modern DNS resolution

How things used to work

In 1987 the staff at the Ohio State University Computer and Information Science were periodically logging in to SRI-NIC via FTP and downloading "the hosts file", that would be /etc/hosts on today's Unix systems.

No DNS? No problem. Just look up the hosts IP address in the local database (flatfile) and off you go. DNS was new then and still rolling out. Updates? No problem. We'll pull the file once a week or so….

Then along came DNS the resolver library. Just configure /etc/resolv.conf on your VAX780 running BSD4.2 and let it go ask the new-fangled Root Name Servers who was authoritative for .edu and where to find the SOA for red.rutgers.edu. Poof. Life is good for few years on the academic/military/industrial not-so-complex Internet.

Then the Web happened. Then Window boxes all started getting TCP/IP stacks. And the marketers, hackers, AOL-me-too crowd and the unwashed masses all arrived. And the stress on the nice friendly system coordinate by Jon Postel and friends started to show.

Spoofed records? No problem. With a "quick" IETF DNS standard to permit (require?) people to digitally sign their zones and replies, everything will be fine, right?

What's in a name?

People seems to have caught on that to be able to name something is to have power over it, so now evreybody wants to mess with name resolution for all kinds of reasons, ranging from

Load balancing
Advertising
Tracking user behavior
Blocking unwanted content
Key distribution
Security reconnaissance/mapping

Ubuntu - How does it today?

This is an article/post all of its own. I broke my DNS. The attempts to fix it reveal an odyssey in the discovery of the complexity that has acreeted around DNS in the past 30 years.

Android - How does it today?

Windows - How does it today?

Chromebook - How does it today?

What about - VPNs

Protonvpn

What about - DoH

Around the edges - The dark web

Around the edges - Alternate roots

Back to sticks and stones

DNS and the routing infrastructure represent two of the biggest potential points of failure for the modern Internet.

Take DNS down and most everything does not work…Amazon, Apple, Netflix, online shopping, zoom.

Of course, it would be possible to go back to the world before DNS. As long as you have a fixed IP address and don't mind working with network addresses such as 192.168.8.230 or fe90::5e3d:4bd8:7e40:3078 instead of amazon.com

Looks like you don't have to ftp to sri-nic anymore, you can get get it from github.com https://github.com/PDP-10/sri-nic

Wait, no DNS?

     host github.com | head -1
     github.com has address 140.82.113.4

Make that

     https://140.82.113.4/PDP-10/sri-nic

TODO DoH - understanding, experimenting, wireshark, personal options

TODO Post a cybersecurity topic on linkedin

SCHEDULED: <2022-11-23 Wed .+1m/3m>

State "DONE" from "IN-PROGRESS" [2022-10-23 Sun 05:00]
State "IN-PROGRESS" from "TODO" [2022-09-15 Thu 07:48]
State "DONE" from "TODO" [2022-06-07 Tue 05:54]
State "DONE" from "TODO" [2022-03-30 Wed 06:38]
State "DONE" from "TODO" [2022-03-30 Wed 06:38]
State "DONE" from "IN-PROGRESS" [2022-03-23 Wed 06:42]
State "IN-PROGRESS" from "TODO" [2022-03-10 Thu 06:50]
Note taken on [2022-03-10 Thu 06:49]
In progress Security is not the only thing

DONE Write next "40 years of walled garden & open platforms" article

SCHEDULED: <2022-10-29 Sat>

State "DONE" from "TODO" [2022-03-03 Thu 05:16]

TODO Cybersecurity: Fire-drills or Calm Classification

Hook

Stallman's password sendmail back doors.. clear-text passwords un-encrypted web traffic (HTTP)

If you found one of these today, would it be a fire-drill or a calm, deliberate process of identifying the problem, assessing the risk and fixing things?

Security as a classification problem

What is?
How do I know?
How certain am I?
Is it "bad"?
- depends on who you are
- depends on time
What can I do about it?

These issues need to be decoupled and thought of separately.

A few examples

Unencrypted HTTP

Old trick … telnet to the HTTP port….

$ telnet localhost 80
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 349
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2020 11:47:35 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.45

Connection closed by foreign host.

What is?
How do I know?
How certain am I?
Is it "bad"?
- depends on who you are
- depends on time
What can I do about it?

Clear Text Password

SNMPv1

https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A161

Shodan … ?snmpv1?

TODO TLS 1.3, China blocking infosec

See Paul Vixie Tweet 2020-08-09 + my android brave reading bookmarks (cloudflare blog, etc.)

TODO Privacy: An attainable end state? A lost cause?

What is privacy?

Privacy in history

long history in law https://constitution.laws.com/right-to-privacy
Panopticon
Brave new world, 1984

Central to being human?

My thoughts are mine.
Des Carte … I think [my own thoughts], therefore I AM
Lock … identity sum total of experiences
Creepy part at ML is that they know you better than you know yourself ..
Gov surveillance programs are a move towards omniscience.
Would there be a problem if we new that the entity seeking omniscience really, truly did have our best interest at heart? Would we need privacy in a world where everything and everybody where perfectly good and benevolent, where there were no scarcities, no competition? We strive for community, connection, union, but do we place limits on it due to corruption in people and the world?
1 Cor 15 "…now we know in part, then we shall know fully, just as we shall be fully know" … is complete

So, back to privacy proper. Can we achieve privacy? "Check. Done. I'm private now. Next problem. …"

Like security, can we be "secure"?
if not an attainable end state, why do we engage? existential experience?

TODO Privacy: A path to making a living via bureaucracy?

"Consulting, if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem"

privacy notifications (dad, dead over a year)
lawyers
- long history in law https://constitution.laws.com/right-to-privacy
policy makers
keynote speakers
CISSPs
Chief Privacy Officers
standards committees

TODO Privacy: Something to rant about … with words.

Careers have been made on it….EFF…SOUPS…Lori Cranor, etc. journalists slashdot Wired

TODO Privacy: Rage against the machine … with code?

VPNs,GPG,TOR,Adblockers,…delta chat, keybase…

TODO Privacy: Hiding out on the digital frontier?

So, I've recently started hanging out on mastodon, a free, open source, federated, decentralized, twitter-like service as one way to escape the surveillance capitalism of twitter, facebook, google and friends. no ads. no algorithm messing with your timeline. it's refreshing. give it a try.

in the past, i've registered my own domain names, run my own servers (mail, irc). i could return to my sysadmin roots and do it all again: VPNs, hosing my own domain, running my own web servers, running my own mail servers, etc. There are many more resources today (AWS, Digital Ocean, etc) then when I was running a Bell 3B2 with System V in my basement on a dialup line. But this all takes time. One has to balance privacy with actually, you know, living (family….)

In addition to Mastadon for social media, here is a sampling of some encouraging and useful technologies out there (shiny objects never cease !): tor, VPNs (ProtonVPN), private email, private messaging (signal), personal "cloud" services like NextCloud, private-end-to-end chat over email: https://delta.chat/en/ and individual-not-corporate focused tec like https://sitejs.org/

It is possible to have a digital presence today that does not revolve round centralized servers, mass surveillance, corporations, governments and advertising.

TODO Privacy: A process, an ideal, one part of life?

The journey is the destination.

TODO Privacy: Conclusion

TODO Constantine: Love your enemies…and kill them?

I've been listening to "The History of Rome" podcast, which is filling in a lot gaps in my knowledge of, well, the history of Rome. I've just gotten through the episodes on Diocletian, the tetrarchy, and Constantine. What. A. Mess. What a pile of contractions.

There is an old (Viet Nam war era) slogan:

Join the Army, travel the world, meet interesting people…and kill them

That's kind of what Constantine did. He fought civil wars to gain sole control of the Roman empire, in the process forcing his father-in-law (former co-Augustus with Diocletian) to commit suicide and fighting his final battle for control against his brother-in-law's army.

All we are sayin', is give peace a chance"

John Lennon

Maybe not.

He attained (through force) control of Rome, the very definition of worldly power, yet supported a religion that commanded its followers to "Love your enemies". Tell that to his father-in-law and brother-in-law. Actually, he fought two battles against different brother-in-laws, including the battle of the Milvian bridge. "In hoc signo vinces". Killing in the name of Jesus? The cross (chi-rho) a talisman?

My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting…

Jesus. John 18:36

Even his "Edict of Milan", legalizing Christianity in the Roman empire was in a backhanded attempt to incite yet another war with the eastern emperor Maximinus Daia who had renewed Galerius' (and Diocletian's) persecution of Christians. It worked.

War. Good God. What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing.

Norman Whitfield/Barret Strong/The Temptations

That he was not baptized until his death-bed may be one indication that he saw the contraction and took seriously the implications of actually joining the church and its call to holy living (like, you know, not killing your wife, son, brothers-in-law, fellow emperors, starting wars…). The demands of worldly power and the demands of the Church don't mix.

TODO "Love[ing] your enemies" and killing them are not the same thing

History of Rome

Listing to podcats
Always interested in Rome, Greece
Initial interest driven as background for New Testament and the church. Still the case. But also fascinating lessons in human nature.

One lesson of Roman History: Power Corrupts

From Romulus and the 7 kings, through Marius, Caesar, … Constantine
Endless wars, mostly for personal power.
Rule of the empire was a prize. Every few years it was up for grabs. Millions died, year after year, century after century supporting the egotistic power grabs of a few men.

Constantine: wars, murder

Constantine: embrace of the church

Edit of Milan, causus belli
Council of Nicea -
It seems to me that the embrace of Christianity had a lot to do with the fact that Constantine thought that a single church within the Roman empire was something he could shape and control more than, say, 100s of different de-centralized cults each with long history and seen, in many cases, as superior to the state (c.f. the taking of auspices). Also, the church was growing it was weak, poor, had recently gone through persecution
I can not judge another mans heart. We are all full of contradictions
death bed baptism

And the band played on

Constantine did well. The system he set up in the east continued for another thousand years. To put it in perspective, when Columbus discovered America in 1492 it was accurate to say that it had only been 39 years since the final fall of the Roman (Byzantine) empire.
The fall of the west, chaos, feudalism, kingdoms

Circles of Hell

Church picked up some of the pieces
Secular power
Dante: popes so corrupt that he pictured them as being punished for eternity in the lower circles of hell. Dante not popular with the popes and the Catholic hierarchy, but believable enough that his work became popular and the foundation of western Literature.
The mixing of the power of Church and state also brought us the crusades and the Inquisition, wherein people sworn to "Love your Enemies" instead killed both their enemies and their brothers.

Nothing but the blood

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We saw that in Rome from Romulus to Constantine. We saw it in the secularized church from the fall of the west to the corrupt church of the middle ages.
To this day there are Christians who look hopefully to secular power, who pine for the election of the "right" people or the passage of the "right" laws. The result in Europe has been loss of moral authority, decline and marginalization.
My personal conclusion is clear. Oil and water don't mix. The Church should follow Jesus, not pine for the corrupting power of Caesar.

A few words from our sponsor

I will close with a few words directly from Jesus (and his brother James). Long after anything I have to say is forgotten, these words will be remembered. I don't think these are out of context.

So Jesus, perceiving that they were intending to come and take Him by force to make Him king, withdrew again to the mountain by Himself alone. John 6:15, NASB

This contrasts directly the ascension of many Roman emperors. The forces under their command got fed up with something or someone (the old emperor) and proclaimed a new ruler, often, literally at the point of spear. "Lead us or die". Jesus took a 3rd way when faced with this situation.

And behold, one of those who were with Jesus [m]reached and drew out his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus *said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword. Matthew 26:51-52, NASB

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” John 18:36

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” Matthew 5:43-44

By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” Jesus, John 13:35

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. James 1:27

Disclaimers

I am a life-long amateur historian, philosophy-dabbler and arm-chair theologian. There piles of PhD dissertations, mountains of books, sermons, entire fields of study and branches of the Church dedicated to one of the other issues I touch on above. I'm sure I got some things wrong, glossed over important distinctions, made un-warranted generalizations and most certainly rankled the feather of those who have a different view. My aim is to piece things together, to understand as best I can, and figure out how to live the life I've been given.

I am rabidly a-political. When I fail to be a-political, I tend towards libertarianism. Go read the Fountianhead and Atlas Shrugged. You will NEVER look at government as a force for good again. I have considered myself a Mennonite for 30 years. Go read the Martyrs Mirror for stories of toleration and brotherly love [NOT] shown by the early Protestant "Magisterial" reformers to their brothers who did not look to the state as the foundation of the Church.

TODO Maintaining Public Image - The King Has No Cloths

White Castle - "Ratburgers" - Dave Crone

I have a friend who has White Castle as a client
He shared some news story about White Castle on linked in
A few friends chimed in, discussing in the comments
The "product" has a LONG (100 year) history in Columbus, it's HQ, where Dave lies/works, where I used to live and where most of the commenters in the thread lived
The product is lower-end, cheep fast food that is, arguably, marginal as food, but has managed to last 100 years, so some people like it (or at least buy enough to keep them in business)
That said, over 100 years, people have developed an attitude toward the company. Many people hate it and wont touch it. Some (like me) keep coming back every so often (months…years) to remind ourselves why we don't eat the stuff regularly.
A terminology has grown up around it over the years. The polite name for White Castle Hamburgers is "sliders". The less polite term is "ratburgers" or just "rats" (as in "let's go get some rats").
This term has been widely used (at least in my circles around Columbus) for over half the companies life.
Nobody believes the burgers are made from rats
But when I used the term in the discussion thread, Dave deleted it (and politely messaged me to let me know)

CompuServe Web server

I first met Dave when we first worked at CompuServe. Early in the history of the web, I was webmaster@compuserve.com. I ran the apache (or was it NCSA httpd ?) web server. Will Cowman did the content. There was a site re-design and "relaunch" (the logo looked like a black whirlpool sucking everything down – which in the end was prophetic for CompuServe…but I digress)

There was a party to celebrate the "launch". I was there. I ran the web server. Will was there. He did the content. 100 other people where there. They had done nothing. But they were at the party.

This was one of the early events where I learned how the world works.

James Taggert

I apparently am far from the first person to notice this tendency.

[Find quotes from Atlas Shrugged about parties and celebrating things you did not do]

People celebrating things they can't do themselves or understand
No personal achievement, no reason for pride
- aside, I see a similar problem in taking pride in achievement of professional athletes. You can form a tribe of people who paint their faces a certain way (literally, look at footage of college football crowds), engage in shared rituals (e.g. tailgate parties), but you can NOT take pride in on-the-field achievements that are not yours. Maybe you can take the same pride an investor takes in having picked a portfolio of winning stocks (without the direct benefit of you actually getting richer your team wins)…

Dilbert - "In 10 years, there will only be two kinds of jobs: technology jobs, and lying to the public"

Politicians, Advertisers, Public Relations, Marketing, Religious Leaders (?), Customer Service, Project Managers, Lawyers…

Lying - to yourself
Lying - to those you work for
Lying - to "the public""

Treating people as members of a group, not individuals
Manipulating people

Marketing as tribalism? Group rituals, markers, colletivism?

the MBA, the large rim glasses and pink shirts, the language/vocabulary that marks you as "in" and only communicates to your "peer", the golf outings, the disdain for (and/or condescension) outsiders, group-think,

There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn, how to smile as you kill, if you want to be, like the folks on the hill

—John Lennon

Probitas lauditur, et aliget

IN-PROGRESS 40 years of walled gardens & open platforms: Part III history:computing:social:USENET:Facebook:Twitter:100DaysToOffload:

State "IN-PROGRESS" from [2020-10-10 Sat 06:17]

On the life and death of online communities

I've seen 'em come, and I've seen 'em die and long ago, I stopped askin' "why?"

Johnny Cash, "San Quentin"

I've been hanging around (and in some cases helping to create) online communities for years. This post is a reflection on the birth, life and death of some that I've been involved with.

Let's start with Rome

Because, in the end, there is nothing new in the world and learning about ancient Rome is one of my hobbies. Of course, there were no "Online" communities in Rome because phones, computers, networks, the Internet, the Web and smart phones were all 2000 to 2700 years in the future. But Rome did have The Forum (a word CompuServe would co-opt for it's online discussion groups, it did have the Senate (SPQR anyone?), it did have courts, it did have the Rostra and rhetoric was one of the foun
- rostra
  - physical place
  - had to be created
  - people have to come there
  - someone has to have something to say
  - people have to want to listen
  - speaker needs access to the rostra
  - feedback?
  - reposts: the greeks
Let's talk about the problem of the commons
- Cows on Boston Common, overgrazing
Generalized creation, life, death

You need:
- people
- desire to communicate/a reason to talk
- a place to meet: physical, onlne
- access/exclusion
- protocols (who gets to speak, how long)
And maybe:
- archives
- external exchange/commuicaton

My experiences

TOPS20 email and BB
VAX VMS email
My VAX BB
Usenet
CompuServe
- Forums
- Email
- Chat
CompusServe Gateways
- email
- news
AOL - "Eternal September"

As they relate to creation, life, death

older-drafts.org 36 KB History Raw