Has a moment like this a few months back. But I don’t smoke weed and everyone just got to watch me eat granola.

Nova Scotia is not a US state.

Official act.

I don’t dare express the opinion to my wife, who is Irish, but I actually do enjoy both. They both have distinct flavors and are worth trying.

On the last of the three, he did do some good in getting them housed during the height of COVID. But, he’s also sabotaged efforts to break up convicted killer PG&E and declared that he would never sign a wealth tax. He’s corpo to the core with a little occasional softness.

Lyon’s, the superior Irish tea.

I’m also a fan of Yunnan teas. Especially pu ehr (shou, sheng, compressed, loose, it’s all good) and Yunnan Noir.

Takes all kinds.

All good. I’m going to likely have bursts between the holiday, house guests, and other projects (ex. converting a “dumb” digital bbq thermometer into a Prometheus endpoint).

I agree with you there. The ballots and irrational voters are still my greatest concern. There were attempts to block Biden from the ballot in swing states because of the DNC convention being later than the state deadline. Look to any avenue open to electoral fraud being taken advantage of.

I’ve got a few things that I need to get done in the next few days (hopefully mostly sorted today) but you’ve got me rather intrigued with this as a puzzle. I’ll see if I can get some time to sketch some thoughts out and maybe some high-level implementation of some bits in Python (it’s faster to POC things).

A few quick thoughts:

• I think that an existing or novel protocol built on top of the Internet Protocol is likely the way to go. Following the OSI model, you can target Layer 4, with some simple stuff for higher layers. Client/Server (possibly the same binary) and associated automation should handle Layers 1-3 (translating between different carriers for Layers 1 and 2, and handling routing of data packets in Layer 3).

• Message routing strategies and their impact on OpSec is worth consideration. By this I mean: broadcast-only vs targeted-only vs both vs hybrid. All three have trade-offs.

Broadcast-only: Makes it harder to know the intended destination of the message. Conversely, by being routed to either all known addresses or all approved addresses, it can be more vulnerable to interception by a compromised endpoint.

Targeted-only: May be harder to intercept as the path that a packet takes should result in it hitting fewer potential endpoints. Conversely, some form of addressing is necessary to know, at the least, the next hop in transit. This makes tracing the intended endpoint, as well as network hops much easier (ex. running a traceroute).

Both: Gains the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, depending on the which mode the data is transmitted in. Ensuring that data is transmitted correctly becomes important and has implications on the requirement of maintaining known good versions of the client/server software to avoid unintentional or malicious improper routing.

Hybrid: Could take many forms but the one that comes to my mind is a multilevel hub and spoke architecture (I’ll draw this out). Basically, you end up having 2-3 “modes” for a client/server: hub, spoke, and endpoint. One or more client/servers operating in a hub “mode” act like traditional servers, kinda like a bulletin board, holding packets for local delivery or transmission to another hub. Client/servers in the spoke mode act as hops between hubs. Client/servers in the endpoint mode are the actual intended destination (this could be combined with the spoke mode). To protect endpoint identity, the destination could be part of the encrypted data packet allowing an endpoint to attempt to decrypt packets received from a hub locally, making it harder to know which endpoint a message is intended for. This does still require greater visibility of hub addresses for routing.

• Encryption of packets is vital. Supporting some modularity might be of value so as to allow use of simpler cryptography for PoC but, the protocol should ensure that it is possible to break reverse compatibility (normally NOT what you want to do for networking protocols but avoiding an “it’s an old code but still checks out” situation would be more important).

• Amateur radio should be avoided both in PoC and hypothetical “production” use cases. The ban on encryption is insurmountable there and illegal use of encryption could lead to hightened visibility because the FCC, historically, does not fuck around with illegal radio signals. This means all wireless should be below 1W in the US, in bands that are legal for unlicensed use.

• Any physical layer that supports arbitrary data transfers should be possible. The implementation to support it would be part of the client/server. So, Bluetooth, 802.11, LORA, sneakernet, and many others could be hypothetically supported. Again, though, this relies on the protocol’s stack to be and to understand it, either directly, or translated by another component.

• A web of trust may be a good approach for authentication and identity.

I’m a pacifist and don’t want to glorify violence at all but, the 'RA also was very effective at dealing with collaborators and informers. Minority rule cannot sustain itself in the long-term.

Hey now, don’t besmirch the name Redneck with those sad sods. The Rednecks fought the good fight at the Battle of Blair Mountain, only to be put down by the US military backing robber barons.

weird that the constitution says nothing about “immunity” but the courts keep creating various forms of it.

Also weird that it explicitly prohibits warrantless search and seizure of personal property and documents as well as due process, but, the courts have allowed personal property to be stolen via civil asset forfeiture (somehow, it’s considered legal to accuse non-sentient objects of crimes, for which there is little to no recourse because they have no consciousness) and >=90% of the country which is within 100miles of a border (international airports are considered borders) are vulnerable to detention without charge by the Border Patrol.

Thank you for clarifying!

Visual critique (if that was the ask): BSD is somewhat hard to make out in the her hair.

As I get more of her story, and see interesting IRL developments, I wonder about the computer systems of her world. Do they have the same ISAs as ours? If so, did RISC beat CISC? If not, do they use inputs and outputs not possible in our world?

Based on Unix and GNU?

My dev VM is almost entirely disposable. Could be up and running again, fresh in 30-60min, not counting time to pull the repo. Why use a local db server? Seems weird to me but, I came to development through SysAdmin and support stuff, so, was used to not owning the machine that I was on. That probably has heavily influenced my workflow.

Out of curiosity, would you mind sharing a bit any the languages/frameworks and workflows that you are using? I’m mainly using Go, C++, Python, and a few others and just having trouble figuring out how I’d arrive at a situation like that. No CI/CD and test systems?

That sounds like a dream. I use an MBP for work because the alternative is Windows. It really just ends up being a glorified ssh terminal to get to my Linux VM. I felt bad enough at one point that I switched to kitty to make better use of the M2 capabilities.

Whoa, whoa, whoa… Who said anything about third-party?

Oh thank fuck.

I thought Biden was too old and too right-wing in 2020.

… And let’s acknowledge that we need to take a chance at an open convention or face a guaranteed loss.

The only problems that I see with an open convention are candidate name recognition for those who pay no attention and the fact that GOP states have already been trying fuckery with the ballots.

Indeed. I’d really suggest going for something based upon Internet Protocol, with any software that you need at endpoints to read and/or transmit. I might poke about at some ideas on the weekend (long holiday). What languages are you thinking to use?