Month: January 2021

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I’ve been putting off this little project…

Several months ago I got a nifty server. 5 drives, I configured it in a RAID array with two drive redundancy.

For those of you that think I just spoke Greek. I didn’t. Simply put, I have a server with 5 hard drives that work as a set. Any two of these drives can fail without me losing all the data stored on the server. I can pull the bad drive out, replace it and tell the server to fix the problem. A few hours later the server will be back up to full operating speed and while it’s fixing the problem, I still have access to the data.

Anyhoo, I’ve been meaning to put the thing on the shelf in my wiring closet. It will be protected and I won’t have to worry about the dog bumping into it when he comes in to the office to ask me to play. He doesn’t just ask, he’s a bit aggressive about it. He’s a dog… He doesn’t understand that some electronics are fragile and don’t like being bumped around while they’re running.

So I decided the other day, that the time had come. I’ve been putting it off because 1) nothing with computers is ever as easy as it seems. 2) I knew there was a rats nest of cables I’d have to sort through. 3) The other half had to get a new computer (The second hard drive in 6 months failed and I didn’t really want to mess with it.

I start shutting things down. Then I started pulling unused or un-necessary cables out of the wiring closet. I finally got to the point where I could route power and network cables and encountered a major problem.

The cables I wanted to run were too thick to run them the way I’d done in the past. I’m standing there holding a shelf in my hand thinking, “Well damn, this isn’t going to work.”

Then I remembered my nifty new RYOBI tools in the garage. I knew I had a 1″ hole bit in a bit set I’d recently purchased. I take the shelf downstairs and grab the new drill and the bit set. That’s when I noticed that I’d also gotten with the set, 4 different sized hole saws.

OH Goody! I’d wondered what I’d use those for and now I know and have a good excuse to boot.

I set the 1.4″ hole saw on it’s bit, locked it down and fit the assembly in the chuck of the drill. 10 minutes later I’ve got two beautiful holes in the shelf right where I need them. The drill didn’t even breathe hard.

I was standing there looking at my work, for the briefest instance I considered where else I might need a convenient hole. Thankfully something in my brain hit the emergency stop on that thought process!

I put the tools away without drilling anymore holes. I patted the new drill appreciatively and put it back in it’s case.

I suspect that I’ll be drilling and cutting some things in the near future as I run antenna cables for the HAM rig. (Yeah, that’s another project on the list. I need to get some better antennas and get them installed so I can get out a bit better. HAM is another of those hobbies where getting a new radio just leads to a bunch of supplementary purchases.)

I head back up into the house, shelf in hand and put it back in place. The cables routed easily and I was able to put the power cabling through one hole while putting the data cables through the opposite end of the shelf. That keeps potential interference from power away from my data. As I’m standing there on the ladder I was thinking, “I’m a moron. I should have done this exact thing years ago! I’d have saved myself a lot of aggravation over the years.“

I put the server in place, and powered everything back up. Simple and it’s a nice looking installation.

Well, that chore done… I turned my attention to another round of data recovery. That was 48 hours of pure hell. Thankfully, my computer is fast, my network is fast, and I’m pretty good at this sort of thing. Corrupted backups and a person who has no concept of a data storage plan, not withstanding. Recovering data is just plain tedious in the first place. Not having specific documents stored in logical folders to assist in targeting the important stuff makes it very frustrating.

So to any of you out there who just spatter documents and files anywhere and everywhere on your computer. I’ll give you this advice. If you value your relationship, tell your techie other half what is most important, and keep the booze coming. One other thing, move your files into some kind of logical order to start with!

As it turns out, the backups were corrupted from the previous three hard drive crashes. The other half hadn’t done any organization after any of those crashes. In fact, after me telling them that the backups were corrupted, they kept using them anyway, compounding the problem.

With 10 Terabytes of storage available, the other half had also not copied the important files out to the server for redundancy. Sigh… and I’m the bad guy for being pissed off about it.

Mischief managed. The other half is running on the new computer. The server now has copies of all the files I recovered in a non-backup related directory and there’s a duplicate scanner running on my computer looking at that directory eliminating duplications and preserving edits in chronological order. When that’s done the files will be moved to a directory structure where Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Photos, Music, Musical Scores, and other files will each have their own directory path.

Now to create a scheduled process that updates those directories once a week from the other half’s computer. As things stand right now, I burned 4 Terabytes on the server in recovery. I’ve got the other half sorting through tons of their own shit to figure out what is important and relevant to keep.

Just punishment, I think.

When they’re done with the space, I’ll be able to delete the corrupted backups (Hanging on to them for the moment in case I have to dive in to find some super important thing I missed. Then the recovered directories (except the one I’m processing) will be gone. I’m not going to be surprised to see about 2.5 – 3.5 Terabytes suddenly be available again on the server.

While I’m at it, I may go out and access one of my really old archival backups to consolidate more storage. I can move the files and documents to the main server in my home folder and then delete the old archive backup too. Then I’ll keep only the important stuff that provides history back to 2008 when everything was destroyed.

This has been my week, I hope your’s was better and in the midst of all of this I’ve managed to apply for jobs… Not that anyone is responding to my inquiries.

But I’ll keep at it.

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So Sirius & I are done.

I’ve had  Sirius for more than a decade.

Originally, they were pretty cool and the variety of programming was a delight to listen to.

Then slowly things changed. The “News” Stations got more and more left and I just stopped enjoying the spin that was on everything.

I tried the conservative stations, and they were mostly people screaming all the time.

I settled on the Spa Channel and enjoyed it. It was pretty much the only channel I listened to. LA Freeway traffic is stressful and that channel seemed to be mellow all the time.  Except when Sirius decided to stop playing Spa and play something they thought was important. A George Michael week? Ugh!

As to many of their other stations, I simply wasn’t interested. I don’t like RAP. I couldn’t stand their ideas of a nice Rock & Roll set. Talk radio was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, and many of their other “Themed” stations were either annoying or completely mis-named.  No matter what, I always ended up on the Spa channel, and after a while, I stopped even checking out the other stations.

I’d purchased a lifetime subscription for my 1 Series and enjoyed never having to think about the Spa channel being on if I wanted it.

When the car was totaled in 2017 Sirius told me that I couldn’t have the subscription transferred to another car. (More on that later.) 

I went ahead and activated Sirius in the new car, and when I changed to the 440 I transferred that subscription. 

That transfer process was a nightmare and I really thought about pulling the plug more than once during that call.

Late in December 2020, I got an email saying that there was a class action lawsuit regarding Sirius and their lifetime subscriptions. With all the chaos around the election, my life, being unemployed, and oh yeah, my health insurance being cancelled. I never got back to the Sirius email. There is, after all only so much time you can spend on the damn phone before you’re over it!

What I didn’t notice was that the deadline to respond was Jan 12th 2021. Somehow I thought it as the end of January… I missed the deadline of Jan 12th. DAMNIT!

But I got to thinking about the Sirius subscription. 

With fingers crossed, I went to their site and OMG! My id and password actually worked. 

(This was surprising since the last few times I’d tried to log on, I was met with password and user ID issues.  These issues persisted even after multiple password resets. This is part of what made my last phone call to Sirius such a pain in the butt. Well, that and the fact that like so many companies they’ve put their call center in the Philippines so with a static filled connection and sing song English. Having a conversation is a challenge.)

Once I was logged into the page I saw the last bill which looked normal. Then I happened to notice that Sirius had changed the billing cycle from 1 year to quarterly. 

They were clever… They kept the amount the same but increased their profit X 3 with the quarterly billing. Great way to rip off your customers Sirius! 

Obviously, they were counting on the amount being familiar, and people’s short term memory being completely overloaded to hide what they’d done.

Now I’m very interested!

I call their customer service number, (conveniently hidden 3 menu items deep, with a warning popup that said, “Beware of Tiger!”) 

I waited on hold after dealing with the genuine people emulator call routing AI.  After a time, I was connected to a cheerful lady in the Philippines and asked her what gives?

I’m told that I was on some kind of promotion and that this reflected the end of the promotion. Uh Huh… When did the billing cycle change?  No answer. Uh Huh. 

Then I asked about putting my lifetime membership back in place which is what the lawsuit provides for. 

I get a bullshit line about that. In 2017 they claim they weren’t allowing lifetime subscriptions to be moved. I told the little lady I knew that, but that the lawsuit says they will now.  She doesn’t know about that.

She offered to give me a promotional special for a year on the two radios (Portable & Car) of $200. I tell her that since I only listen to one channel it’s still not worth it. And that Apple CarPlay works just fine in my car meaning I don’t have to have Sirius and that I have greater control over the music I want to hear.

She asked if I’d let her check another promotion.  I say sure why not?  She comes back and tells me that I have have both radios for $120 a year.

I think about it, and decide that I just want to not have a subscription at all. I tell her that and that I want the subscription to terminate as of the March 1st billing cycle. She fiddles around a bit more and tells me that she’s sorry she couldn’t keep a valued customer like me. I’m Like Whatever… I obviously wasn’t all that valued a customer.

So come March 1 2021 for the first time in many many years I won’t have Sirius.  Unless of course the court decides I can have my lifetime membership transferred. In that case, I’m calling them back with the case docket number in hand and demanding they re-instate the account.

In reality, I’d pay $60 a year for Sirius in the car. But now it’s a matter of principal.

I’ve said it before, If companies would just provide the service they’ve contracted to provide at a fair price, and not screw around with the billing because they think they can get away with it, they’d have a lot more customers and those customers would be a lot more loyal and happy.

On the plus side, It’s one less online account for me to fart around with.

Update 1/22/2020

I got one of those little “How did we do” surveys fromSiriusXM

When I answered that I was not satisfied, the survey opened a tex block where I could freely type. I do hope that someone who reads this is able to understand the words written on the page. I’m not hopeful. There’s that old adage, if you don’t want to know the truth… Don’t ask the question.

I never got an answer as to who authorized or when they authorized a change to quarterly billing. 

I was told that I couldn’t reactivate that lifetime subscription on my new vehicle because the transfer wasn’t available in 2017,  regardless of the fact that I had a lifetime subscription, and there is currently a class action lawsuit pending about not allowing people transfer those subscriptions to new vehicles. 

Then when I said that for the 2 stations that I listen to (1 in my car and the other on a portable radio in the house) wasn’t worth $423 a year and that I wanted to cancel the account, I’m told that suddenly there’s a discount of 50% and when that wasn’t good enough the yearly cost was reduced again. 

Frankly, if you’d offered your service for a fair price in the first place and been upfront about your billing practices I’d still be a customer. 

However, given that you won’t let me transfer my former lifetime subscription and apparently have no trouble charging outrageous fees for your service it makes me question your business model.

I have Apple CarPlay in my vehicle which works just fine. I have Apple music and can use it throughout my home on all my devices. This ability makes your service redundant and excessively expensive.

For many years now, the few times I’ve called your customer service department it is difficult to understand the representative. In part due to the accent but the greatest part of the problem is static on the line or background noise in the call center’s environment.

The young lady I spoke with, to her credit tried to do the best she could and aside from the noise she was well spoken. My dissatisfaction is in NO WAY with her. 

My dissatisfaction is with SiriusXM’s corporate policies and practices. 

My feeling now is that I will not be purchasing a vehicle where I pay for the SiriusXM option installed. I will also not be turning on the SiriusXM option if it is supplied with a vehicle.

I will continue to seek out Apple CarPlay or some similar option.

I can only imagine that as your satellites age, and you continue to alienate customers that you will find it harder and harder to maintain service. Perhaps that is a good thing and your company will go the way of the dodo.

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Enough Already!

That’s it! Let’s take all social media platforms down! Yeah I said it!

All podcasts, Twitter, FaceBook, Gab, and all the rest!

I’m sick of seeing yet another self righteous pundit, news organization, or whoever the hell else, BITCHING about people espousing views that they don’t agree with. We’re supposed to be a free country, we’re supposed to have freedom of speech, we’re supposed to respect people whose views are different from our own. RIGHT?

Apparently NOT!

The latest two examples of violation of free speech is this article in Breitbart. Followed by this little gem from The Washington Post.

The Breitbart piece talks about the AP, yeah, you read that right… The Associated Press making the case that Podcasts should be de-platformed due to “incitement” on these podcasts.

The Washington Post article describes Apple being sued in federal court to force Apple to de-platform Telegram. Telegram, don’t ya know is where all the Parler users went after finding out that Parler was going to be screwed over by Amazon Web Services.

Here’s a idea. Shut it all down. Our phone batteries would last longer.

That would have the benefit of keeping all the village idiots in their own villages. If you stop them from talking to each other, you’ll prevent them from gathering steam. You might also have a side benefit that if they never meet, we don’t have to worry about an every increasing number of idiots that we’ll have to put up with and take care of.

Then we have this brilliant Senior News analyst from CNN (Communist News Network) who’s trying to float a balloon about censoring OAN & Newsmax.

Both of which appear to be conservative oriented news broadcasters. I’ve not watched either of them, because by the time I learned about them, I was too disgusted by the way the country was heading after the 2020 election to give a rancid fuck.

This is so similar to the way that the NAZI party came to power I can’t stand it. If they actually taught history in schools today and didn’t sanitize the brutality of various regimes people would know this.

First control the narrative, then control the media, then censor anyone with differing beliefs, cast everyone who doesn’t agree with you as anti-(insert the noun de jour) BLM, ANTIFA, Left, Progressive, Equality, Woman, blah, blah, blah. Then take over the country. Next build the camps, then try the re-education, and finally kill EVERYONE!

But… humanity appears doomed to repeat the horrors of the past.

A couple thousand years from now, in a barren wasteland some guy will find a TESLA buried in the sand. People will oooh and ahhh and decide it’s from Aliens. One curious person in the group will recognize that it was made by humans, be curious about how we fell so far, and the whole process of a civilization crawling out of the muck will start over.

Maybe they’ll get it right the next time.

The fall of America to communism or socialism won’t destroy all civilization. But the pervasive backwards thinking cult of leftism in the world just might.

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And the hits just keep on coming.

There was this lovely article yesterday on Breitbart. The original article is linked here. I’ve copied the article below.

I submit that this data breach is a direct result of Amazon Web Services negligence. This data wouldn’t have been exposed if they 1) Hadn’t de-platformed Parler. 2) Had provided reasonable notification and time to Parler to remove their data from AWS servers.

I won’t be surprised if the leaked user data ended up on one of The Lincoln Projects communistic hit lists.

Now, I as one of the class of individuals potentially affected by AWS and Twilio’s negligence DEMAND restitution.

I’d like to see a class action lawsuit against AWS and Twilio on the part of the verified members of Parler.

Parler said they verified members for security. Part of the Terms of Service, If I recall correctly, was that if you engaged in unlawful behavior as a verified user, that Parler could and would provide your information to appropriate law enforcement. I personally had no problem with that. It seemed reasonable and correct.

I do have a major problem with my data being scraped and distributed across the internet. It’s one thing to provide information as a law abiding citizen in exchange for access and posting privileges on a site. It’s quite another thing to have my data made public in an age of cancel culture and rabidly communistic behavior on the part of a specific party within our own government.

Parler Suffers Massive Data leak

Recent reports claim that 70 terabytes of user data from social media network Parler have been leaked online.

CyberNews reports that self-drscribed security researchers performed a massive data scrape of the social media network Parler before it was taken offline by Amazon Web Services. The data scrape captured user profile data, user information, and other private and administrative information.

A Twitter user going by @donk_enby announced the scrape, claiming that over a million video URLs had been collected. Twitter itself suffered a massive hack of prominent accounts in 2020.

I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total: https://t.co/YUl8CtoeEA

This may include things from deleted/private posts.

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 10, 2021

The Twitter account claims that the posts are linked to accounts that posted them and some of the video and images contain location information. It’s also said to include data from Parler’s “Verified Citizens,” which are users of the network who have verified their identity by uploading photographs of government-issued IDs such as a driver’s license or passport.

The data scrape also appeared to include deleted posts which would mean that Parler kept user data after users attempted to delete it.

a sample of what’s in there pic.twitter.com/5o8CBRrmgc

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 9, 2021

Parler has previously claimed to have over 10 million users but was shut down after google and Apple removed the website’s smartphone apps from their app stores. A short time later, Amazon Web Services announced they would be removing the site’s hosting services, alleging that Parler failed to properly moderate its platform.

Some Reddit users allege that the user data scrape was made possible due to Twilio, an American cloud communications platform that provided Parelr with a phone number verification service and has since cut ties with the company.

In a press release announcing plans to cut ties with the platform, Twilio revealed which services Parler was using which allowed hackers to determine that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without actual verification.

Once the was discovered, they were allegedly able to get behind the login box API that is used for content delivery, allowing them to see which user shad moderator rights and in turn allowing them to reset passwords of existing users. As Twilio was no longer authenticating emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts easily.

Breitbart News has reached out to Parler for comment on this story.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

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Right on schedule

This is what you get if you try to access Parler today.

For those who don’t know about the why… Let me summarize.

Twitter, Facebook, and Google, have been blocking people that they deem undesirable. They’ve been doing this for years if they decided that what you said was controversial or to borrow Orwell’s term “Wrongthink”.

I myself have been in Twitter and Facebook Jail for asking questions or stating my opinion about events in politics such as, my opposition to the Russian uranium deal, or speaking out against Sharia law in America, and once for questioning why we were having all the discussion about bathrooms, I was also lamenting the loss of urinals.

This according to Twitter & Facebook is “Hate Speech“. Though I said nothing hateful in my posts. I used no derogatory language, or foul language. I simply posted my opinion and as we all know opinions are like assholes, we all have one. (Although I’m sure Twitter would ban even that statement as it might be offensive to those who are literally asshole challenged.)

Twitter and Facebook consistently banned conservative voices, they banned any voices that questioned the dominant politically correct narrative or liberal Democratic policies and these companies were blatant about it.

An Islamic American could say that a raped woman deserved what she got and should be stoned to death, An Average American could not say that those who thought the woman should be stoned had missed the point of being in America and perhaps they’d be happier in their countries of origin.

Eventually Twitter and Facebook started banning a ever increasing number of conservative politicians, then they started banning politicians who were running for office. That got the attention of Congress and the various companies executives were called to the Capitol to answer questions.

In those hearings, Twitter and Facebook told Congress that anyone could create a competitive service. Everyone shook hands and across the country several entrepreneurs did exactly that. Parler and Gab being among the two most prominent.

Gab was never allowed on the Apple App store. They existed as a web site only because Apple found fault with the basics of the Gab philosophy. Parler on the other hand was able to get Apple approval and has existed on the Apple and Google Play store until Saturday 1/9/2021. When Apple announced that they were removing Parler. Google Play beat Apple to the punch removing Parler from their app store about 24 hours ahead of Apple.

There are many articles about the reasons for Apple’s move. I’ve randomly linked one of them here. The articles all read pretty much the same. One consistent phrase seen in almost every article is “Popular with Trump Supporters”.

A.K.A. Conservatives.

I was on Parler, I guess technically I still am on Parler while the site reconfigures. There are a lot of good people there. They have values similar to my own, they are generally patriotic and at least once a day if someone’s rage about the election boiled over there were numerous kind and supportive people who would say things like, “I know you’re angry, but this is why we have the courts.”

In all cases I witnessed, having someone kindly listen and remind the angry individual about the rule of law and that conservatives peacefully protest, that our Constitution provided protections etc. would calm the angry person back to reason.

I’ve followed several threads wherein Veterans cut off from counseling services for PTSD (due to COVID lockdowns) found solace because someone would engage with them not with hateful rhetoric but with kindness. Sometimes it was Vets helping other Vets and in many cases Professional therapists freely gave of their time using direct messaging to help a Vet or anybody get through a rough patch.

This was a markedly different experience than what I witnessed on Twitter. Twitter in the last few years has become a place of pretty vile vitriol being spewed at anyone who was different. Don’t be a conservative leaning Gay person on Twitter. You’ll be canceled and labeled a pariah. Think of it as walking into the DNC and declaring you’re a Republican.

Parler provides a place of free thought, free expression, and since freedom of speech is the rule, a healthy adult outlet where people can legitimately question almost anything and generally speaking get healthy feedback, not hate filled condemnation.

The last thing someone who’s suicidal needs to hear is, “Sack up pussy!” which happens all too often on Twitter, with absolutely no pushback from anyone.

But Parler has been painted by the media as a place of hateful insurrectionists. Funny, I’ve seen calls for protests, I’ve seen Proud Boys delineating rules for attending protests. “No weapons, no aggression, no hate, no yelling at protestors counter to your views.” The adult an unspoken understanding, which is accepted in all cultures is, “defend yourself if you must.” Apparently this is what now passes for hate.

Pulling Parler off the app stores wasn’t enough for the rabid mob. Amazon Web Services which if I recall correctly is a service companies PAY for decided that Parler had to go.

So they denied their contracted services as of Midnight Sunday 1/10/2021. Effectively booting Parler from the internet. They provided Parler zero time to move the operation to alternate hosting providers.

This is nothing less than Draconian censorship and flies in the face of the Big Technology companies saying “If you don’t like our way of doing things build your own service.”

Well Parler did build a very popular alternative service which was growing rapidly, and the big tech companies Apple, Google, and Amazon colluded to take the alternative away. Surely this would be prosecuted under the rico act if we had a fair and impartial court system.

Gab is still up, but due to the shear volume of now disenfranchised users (750% uptick in new users last I read) they’re struggling mightily to bring new servers online to handle the volume. Kudos to them!

I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before they’re under siege from the technology companies.

Google will be the first I suspect to attempt to make Gab unfindable on the web. Other internet service providers will follow suit because Google will intimidate them by threatening to make them unfindable as well.

If you can’t be found on the web, you’ll have a tough time signing up new customers. So Google will be directly impacting the web hosting sites income.

The common theme here is that conservatives, and supporters of President Trump, or the Constitutional right to free speech, are in fact being targeted.

As I’ve said before in this blog, I didn’t particularly like Donald Trump when he was elected. But even then I respected the Man, and the Office of the President. As time progressed I actually came to like Trump because he was exactly what he appeared to be, for good or bad, he was consistent.

Contrary to the media, he was not a dictator. (As an aside, Dictators don’t get Censored.) He garnered support from millions of average Americans because he was straight talking and more like them, than the other politicians in Washington D.C. That’s his appeal.

He’s not asking you to like him, he didn’t overly pander to anyone and was a businessman running the largest corporation on the planet, The United States Government. Sure he made some questionable decisions, who hasn’t? We all make questionable decisions from time to time. I’d submit that even his obvious mistakes endeared him to 70 million average “work a day” Americans.

Americans who by the way would have accepted Trumps defeat in the election if their concerns about that election had been treated with seriousness instead of dismissed out of hand, like the concerns of an unruly child.

The FBI is arresting with breathtaking speed the folks who breached the Capitol. But where are the arrests of the perpetrators in Portland, Seattle, or Minneapolis? Where are the prosecutions for incitement of violence? Why have Twitter and Facebook remained beyond censorship when groups freely use their services to coordinate the violence seen in these cities?

What happened to Hunter Biden’s laptop, have we seen an investigation there? For four solid years, we heard nothing but Russia collusion over a single phone call, and a false dossier. It was Joe Biden who bragged on camera about withholding aid to the Ukraine resulting in the termination of a prosecutor looking into illegalities with Burisma.

These things are not conspiracy theories. They are facts, supported by video evidence, and congressional testimony and witnesses.

In this light, can you see how average Americans might feel that the scales of justice aren’t level anymore?

We are indeed in a dark Winter, as Joe Biden said. But that Winter is not the Fault of Trump, his followers, or conservatives.

That dark Winter is arguably the result of socialism, cancel culture, censorship, and our Constitutional rights being assaulted not from an outside force but from within.

“When all government …in little as in great things… shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”

Thomas Jefferson