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I would be writing Mac OS X security software. That is, if I get the job.

A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn quite a long time ago. I don't check LinkedIn very much at all. I apologized for my late response then asked her to email me. She and I spoke on the phone a few days ago, then I emailed her my resume this morning.

The manager responded just one hour after she submitted me. She said he was very enthusiastic.

She called to ask when I could interview on-site. I said "anytime". She must now ask the manager when he wants to see me, but she expects it will be late next week.

Happily I just bought a new dress shirt at Nordstrom Rack. It looks really sharp with a tie. I'm going to wear blue jeans with the dress shirt and tie; I used to have a suit, a really nice one that I enjoyed wearing, but I donated it to a thrift store because I got the impression that no one believed I was really a coder.

Real coders don't wear suits, see.

My shoes are thrashed. I'm hoping saddle soap and shoe polish will make it less apparent that I live in poverty.

My new apartment is working out well. Happily it is close to the best bus line in Vancouver. I can stay out late in Portland, then get home at one in the morning.

I've developed a problem with sleeping excessively. I'll be up for one day, sleep round the clock the next day, up for one day then round the clock again. In part it's because I have no commitments of any sort, in part it's because the bus doesn't run during the early morning.

If I go out after waking up, I have no problem staying awake, but if the bus isn't running there's no where to go. Eventually I go back to bed.

A friend is going to lend me a bicycle. That would enable me to go to a 24-hour restaurant if I wake up early in the morning.

I don't know yet but the kind of work I'd be doing, I expect they'd be cool with me working at night. It's uncommon that employers object to that, but sometimes they do.

I have grown weary of eating rice and beans.

Maybe it's just me, but I've been getting this vibe (it's strong here, but I'm feeling it elsewhere too) that there are folks who would like to see our entire society come crashing down.

Perhaps they think we can build something better, and like the Phoenix, emerge from the ashes, strong and vibrant.

And I guess I can see the attraction. Our government has been co-opted by the monied interests, our waking lives seem to be either being tracked by corporations or one government agency or another, the same monied interests seem determined to depress wages to keep us docile and hungry for the resources we need to keep ourselves and our families alive. And on and on. It's as if our society has been taken over by greedy, corrupt and amoral scumbags.

And to an extent, all of this is true. Which begs the question: What can/should we do about it?

There is one thing most of us can agree upon: That those elected to administer our governmental systems aren't acting in the best interests of the greater populace. Rather, they seem to be taking their marching orders from those with the resources to command their attention, their wallets and their votes.

There's quite a bit of agreement about that. The problem is that there are large groups of people on various sides of this question with different prescriptions for solving these problems:

Some think we need to strip the Federal government of most of its power and leave things to the states/counties/municipalities.

Some think we need to reform our existing political systems to reduce the influence of money on our elected officials (at all levels of government).

Some think it's just a lost cause and we need to just tear it all down and start over.

The biggest issue, IMHO, is that those same folks who are controlling our political systems for their own benefit use these differences of opinion to divide us. This keeps us from putting aside our differences so we can work together to create the kind of society of which we can all be proud.

Which brings me to the folks who want to tear our system down. With what shall we replace it?

Destroying one of the bulwarks of our society seems like we're creating change. But what are the consequences of doing so, intended or otherwise?

History (cf. all the infighting and problems with the Articles of Confederation) tells us that a strong central government was necessary back in the late 18th century, and (again, IMHO) is even more important today.

Could government be more distributed than it is? Possibly. Should there be stronger controls on how the central government treats its citizens? Almost certainly.

But if we destroy the "beast in DC" to punish those who have so egregiously abused it, who will pay the price when chaos ensues.

Just some semi-random thoughts.

One of the cruftier parts of Unix is the obtuse format for setting date and time. However, it is a deficiency which be trivially overcome. Rather than refer to the manual *every time* I set date and time, I wrote this:-

echo
echo 'date and time is believed to be' `date -u`
echo
echo 'specify date and time in UTC in format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS'
echo
echo -n '? '
perl -e '$line=<STDIN>;print "\n";if($line=~/([0-9]{4,})[ \t]*[.\-\/:]?[ \t]*([0-9]{1,2})[ \t]*[.\-\/:]?[ \t]*([0-9]{1,2})[ \t]*[.\-\/:]?[ \t]*([0-9]{1,2})[ \t]*[.\-\/:]?[ \t]*([0-9]{1,2})[ \t]*[.\-\/:]?[ \t]*([0-9]{1,2})/){system(sprintf("date -u %02i%02i%02i%02i%04i.%02i",$2,$3,$4,$5,$1,$6));print "\n"}else{print "date and time format not valid.\n\n";exit 2}'

This performs a modicum of validation before invoking the date command. date provides further validation and, rarely for a Unix utility, provides feedback.

I had to set Unix time quite frequently when evaluating a Raspberry Pi. Due to the extreme and counter-productive cost-cutting of this design, it has no clock. Superficially, it seems to have a source of montonic time. However, /etc/init.d/fake-hwclock, /etc/fake-hwclock.data and, most notably, /etc/cron.hourly/fake-hwclock indicate that attempt to maintain monotonic time has been bodged. On Debian derivatives, it is typical for an hourly system cronjob to run at 17 minutes past each hour - or, in this case, what a system *thinks* is 17 minutes past each hour. This is because Raspberry Pis which incur unexpected loss of power generally gain the impression that the time is about 17 minutes past an hour shortly after booting.

I've mentioned this to a few people and the reaction is usually revulsion. Even writing the *next* hour would be preferable to the current configuration because this would ensure no slippage, no time loops and no locally ambiguous timestamps. But, no.

Actually, I've just edited the script /sbin/fake-hwclock and changed one line from:-

date -u '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' > $FILE

to:-

TZ=UTC-1 date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' > $FILE

C'mon. You've gotta be cringing now. I'm abusing a locale setting because it is the laziest method to specify one hour ahead of the current time.

Thankfully, more accurate time can be sourced from a variety of places. NTP [Network Time Protocol] is the favorite. However, this assumes that a network exists (and that a secure system can be presented to a network). Time can be sourced via I2C but you'll have hard-code the I2C device ID and poke around two parts of the privileged memory map because the wiring changed between revisions. And it would be fair to assume that any solution which covers current variations will fail to work with future revisions.

It is also possible to obtain time via GPS via USB. In some regards, this reduces the task to a previously solved problem.

Anyhow, if you want something portable, memorize and mentally juggle:-

MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]

or use a Perl one-liner.

Chris Evans has announced he is leaving his role as a presenter on BBC Two's Top Gear after one series.

He tweeted: "Stepping down from Top Gear. Gave it my best shot but sometimes that's not enough.

"I feel like my standing aside is the single best thing I can now do to help the cause."

His resignation comes after falling ratings for the show - which hit a series low on Sunday night, with an average of 1.9 million viewers.

Source: BBC

It is just over a year since Evans was given the job of reinventing Top Gear for the post-Clarkson era, an appointment that was controversial from the start after he had repeatedly denied he had been approached to host the show.

The then BBC2 controller, Kim Shillinglaw, said Evans’s “knowledge of and passion for cars are well-known and combined with his sheer inventiveness and cheeky unpredictability he is the perfect choice to take our much-loved show into the future”. But Shillinglaw lost her BBC2 job before the show went on air, one of a string of senior departures to hit the show, also including that of its executive producer Lisa Clark.

Source: The Guardian

To make matters worse for Hillary, it recently emerged that at least one of the emails she handed over to investigators under subpoena in fact did contain classified information that was marked as such. The April 2012 email chain discusses an impending phone call with Malawi’s new president. The important part is an email from Monica Hanley, an aide, to Clinton, including the “call sheet” for the secretary. In layman’s terms, this was a note for Secretary Clinton telling her what she needed to discuss during her scheduled phone conversation with a foreign head of state.

We don’t know what that was, however, since most of that email has been redacted as classified at the Confidential level, the lowest classification level in the U.S. Government. The smoking gun here is that the call sheet begins with the line: “(C) Purpose of Call: To offer condolences on the passing pf President Mutharika and congratulate President Banda on her recent swearing in.”

Everything after that has been redacted. But that “(C)” is what is termed a “portion marking,” a tip-off to the reader that the paragraph following is classified. (For how this all works in practice, see this explainer.) In other words, Hanley knew she was sending classified information in an unclassified email to Hillary Clinton’s personal email account, an unambiguous violation of Federal law.

and

Last week the Associated Press broke a big story about how Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included the true names of CIA personnel serving overseas under cover. This was hardly news, in fact I broke the same story four months ago in this column. However, the AP account adds detail to what Clinton and her staff did, actions that placed the lives of CIA clandestine personnel at risk. It also may be a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a 1982 law that featured prominently in the mid-aughts scandal surrounding CIA officer Valerie Plame, which so captivated the mainstream media. More recently, former CIA officer John Kiriakou spent two years in Federal prison for violating this law.

To make matters worse for Team Clinton, last week it emerged that several of the classified emails under investigation involved discussions of impending CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Clinton aides were careful to avoid hot-button words like “CIA” and “drone” in these “unclassified” emails, engaging in a practice that spies term “talking around” an issue.

However, the salient fact is that the CIA—which has the say here—considers this information to be Top Secret, as well as enormously sensitive. It had no business being in anybody’s unclassified emails. As the secretary of state, Ms. Clinton and her top staff had access to classified communications systems 24 hours a day. They chose not to use them here—a choice that clearly violated Federal law. Moreover, this new report demonstrates that a previous Clintonian EmailGate talking point, that discussions of drones in emails were no more than pasting press pieces, and therefore innocuous, was yet another bald-faced lie.

You can read the original article to view embedded links in the quotes above.

It makes little sense, except perhaps to further some false flag operation, to continue to make the argument that Clinton didn't break serious laws here.

Aristarchus was right. Angry and stupid won the world.

Oh, and before I go any further, if you want any citations you can use google.

Society has become a reflection of the worst features of Internet social media. Memes, sloganeering, doublespeak, the willful and proud ignorance of facts, bigotry, hatred, irrationality, and general meanness have become the order of the day.

The latest manifestation of this is the recent UK referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union, i.e. the "Brexit."

As you know, the Leave side won by a narrow margin. The campaign on one side (Vote Leave) was worthy of an Eastern Bloc dictatorship or a banana republic while the Remain campaign was half-hearted.

The UK is a union of four countries (plus various other bits and pieces), but most significantly England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. We have lived in relative peace and harmony for a few hundred years.

A global financial meltdown and years of right-wing austerity government with no credible alternative have left the UK (as many other modern countries) in a miserable state. Along comes Nigel Farage, a far-right nationalist, who got himself elected to the European Parliament, who openly denigrates foreigners in the course of his official duties (those he's supposed to be working with in order to represent the UK's interests and to get deals done) and offers the disengaged populace that age-old chestnut of being able to blame foreigners for all of their problems.

The right-wing of the Tory Party (the natural party of government in the whole of the UK, pretty right-wing itself) defects in part to Farage's party, UKIP ("the Kippers") and all the slimy bigotry oozes out of the woodwork. The best one was blaming gay marriage for the 2014 floods.

Next thing you know, we're having a referendum (free public vote on a single issue) on the UKs continued membership of the EU.

Farage's henchmen in all this, the official Vote Leave campaigners (even Farage was too extreme to be allowed on the official team) are Iain Duncan Smith, presider over some of the most draconian cuts and changes to the benefits system (for the disabled, sick, old, unemployed, homeless etc.) ever and Michael Gove who was Education Secretary and harboured some paranoid delusional fantasy that professional English state education teachers were Marxists out to deliberately brainwash and ruin the education of the young.

So the gist of their argument was as follows: "This is Great Britain. We are admired the world over. Everyone loves us and wants to do business with us. Only, we have to leave the EU first. The EU will still want to do business with us because we are so great. By the way, if we leave the EU we can keep foreigners out. Foreigners keep taking your jobs. We can also have a bonfire of red tape. The EU gives us lots of red tape. We can get rid of inconvenient laws that make things expensive but limit pollution and protect workers. And we can get rid of Human Rights legislation. You're British, we invented Human Rights, so we don't need them written down."

There was no plan. Just platitudes, slogans, repeated inverted logic worthy of Goebbels, national pride, "Take Back Control" (we already had control), "Take our country back" (we already had it).

The public lapped this up, or at least the more motivated ones did. The Internet is still alight with it. (Hi guys! Keep at it, providing your "balance." Beat those green blood-drinking lizards with your super powers of logic and reason.)

Michael Gove got tired of struggling to answer questions and declared that he was "sick of experts." The experts warned of the great economic dangers that lay ahead. This was hand-waved away as a conspiracy, of the Elite and the Establishment protecting themselves: Project Fear.

The official Vote Leave election literature (flyers, leaflets, posters) contained outright lies. In fact some companies who warned of the dangers to their on-going UK business due to the uncertainty caused by a Brexit decision were mis-quoted. There was also a very dubious claim about £350M per week that we give to the EU that "could be used to fund the NHS - a new hospital a week."

So along comes the referendum which, incidentally, is not legally binding. Members of Parliament must vote laws through. The results of a referendum may be used to influence their decision. More of that in a minute.

So Vote Leave won 52% to 48%. Gibraltar voted by about 94% to remain. 95% of Gibraltarians work in Spain. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Two years ago Scotland had a referendum on independence from the UK and voted to remain by 60% to 40% on the premise that it would have to remain in the UK to be in the EU. Wales and England voted to leave the EU.

Since the result (which is not legally binding) the value of Sterling has fallen to its lowest in 31 years. Billions (trillions?) have been wiped off of stock markets. Large numbers of workers in the City of London are facing redundancy or being relocated to the continent (i.e. EU countries) to continue their business.

Very worryingly, racism is now overt on the streets of England. The first targets are the Polish, who came over in large numbers to work in the last 20 or so years, and, of course, everyone's favourite ne'er-do-well, the Muslim. Poles have had "Polish Vermin Go Home" cards put through their letter boxes. People have been verbally abused and threatened in the street, even by sweet little old ladies as well as skinheads with swastika tatoos and St George's Cross flags and T-shirs. There are "immigrants out" banners in the streets.

You see, many of the salt-of-the-earth Vote Leave people thought they were voting to kick out the foreigners, and straight away.

Other people from the other nations in the UK are no longer welcome in England by some, it would seem. They want "their" country back. The problem is, this is still the UK. The referendum wasn't about English independence, it was about the UK leaving the EU.

If you listen to the Kippers and Brexiters, the financial downturn is a conspiracy by the Elite and the Establishment to punish the common man for daring to vote. It's not due to uncertainty. Oh no, that would be too simple. It's another manifestation of the Project Fear conspiracy.

England has shot itself firmly in the foot here. Now Scotland is demanding a second independence referendum as soon as possible, because Scotland doesn't want to leave the EU.

Northern Ireland wants to remain in the EU as well and has a number of options, one of which is reunification with Eire. It is very important for the Peace Process (before the Muslim bogeyman we had Irish Republican Terrorism here) for there to be an open border between the two countries. It could choose independence within the EU or maybe an alliance with Scotland.

Vote Leave are currently being sued by some of the companies whose views on the Brexit they misrepresented (they said the opposite, essentially).

The £350M for the NHS was just pure fiction.

Remember that the turmoil in the financial markets is just a conspiracy by the Elite to keep the common man down.

The UK is highly likely to disintegrate. England and Wales (and many of the "take our country back" people don't want Wales) will be on their own.

Meanwhile, millions of EU citizens living and working in the (soon to disintegrate UK) don't know if and when they're going to have to leave and find new jobs etc. Millions of UK citizens who work in the EU are in the same situation, including many retirees who settled in sunny climes such as Spain.

Farage, Gove and Duncan Smith were cock-sure that the EU would be desperate to trade with us if we left, but the EU has basically returned Nigel Farages compliments by saying "No, get lost. If that's what you think of us, we'll manage fine without you." There is a possibility that they'll let us trade with them under similar terms as today (i.e, with all that pesky commie red-tape and free movement of goods, capital and labour) but without any democratic representation, i.e. no Members of the European Parliament.

You know, what? This time I'm in favour of Scottish independence and we'll move there in a year or two and laugh as the Little Englanders spend the next two or three decades clearing up the mess that they made for themselves.

Sick of experts, indeed. "Take back control" "Take our country back."

So, in summary, the UK will disintegrate, England has made enemies of its trading partners, the Weimar Republic has come to town and it looks like they're going to end up still over-run with filthy foreigners from the EU and elsewhere but with no say in how the EU is run!

"That's democracy!!!" Well, if you say so.

Nice one England! Own goal!

PS That nice Mr Putin is a great friend of Nigel Farage (and Marine Le Pen, of France) and has donated money to UKIP (and the Front National). Just so you know.

[Updated to fix some typos.]

So by rights today should be a really shitty day: The Brexit morons have condemned us to a national atmosphere of poverty, oppression, overt racism and, worst of all, Nigel "the mollusc" Farage's supremely kickable smug excuse for a face all over the TV for the next month. But at least I got a nice chance to vent today.

I sometimes do online marketing & academic research surveys in order to pick up a little extra cash. It's worth about £50-60 a month, which is really handy. Often it's boring grind work, but other times it can be interesting. Sometimes you get to see previews of new films & products, and sometimes, just sometimes, something more serendipitous.

Half way through a marketing survey about newspapers I realised it had been commissioned by the Daily Mail. In the wake of today's news I really wanted to give those hate-stirring shits a piece of my mind. I completed the survey honestly (which wasn't hard) and at the end of it there was a lovely free-text field for me to give any comments and feedback about the Mail brand. I let them have it. I told them about the lies and the hypocrisy, about the profiteering fearmongering. I told them they are a laughing stock online, mocked them for the Clickbait Sidebar of Shame and suggested they all give up their jobs and go live in the wilderness. I only wish I'd had the presence of mind to copy-paste it all before hitting submit, but I feel soooooo much better now. So thanks Daily Mail, for letting me vent my spleen upon you, it goes some tiny, insignificant way towards redeeming for all the damage you done over the years.

If you're interested in the survey websites I use BTW:
Swagbucks - earn money & vouchers from surveys and other online tasks My Swagbucks referral link, sign up here and I get commission
Prolific.ac - et paid to take part in academic research

There are currently 32 stories in the submissions queue: i think the Poll for : "On average, how many stories do you submit to Soylentnews each month?" has made many of us up our submissions rate, lol.

Biggest submission queue i've ever seen.
(That's what she said.)

Just had an automatic email from Paypal in response to a withdrawal request I made today. It contains this nugget of enlightenment:

Funds will take up to 2 hours to appear in your bank account, but may take longer, depending on your bank.

Right, so it will take less than 2 hours, unless it takes more than two hours, in which case it will take longer. Thanks for that.

Who the fuck is writing this? I mean is someone actually getting paid to spout this non-information? It might be a trivial thing, but I think it points to a serious dumbing-down of society, when a massive worldwide organisation worth billions can't even hire someone capable of putting together a meaningful sentence, or someone else capable of checking it. How do they allow something that makes them look so STUPID out in front of actual users?

Geez.

On January 9, 2011, the non-Departmental advisor to President Clinton who provided technical support to the Clinton email system notified the Secretary’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations that he had to shut down the server because he believed “someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to.” Later that day, the advisor again wrote to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, “We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.” On January 10, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations emailed the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Planning and instructed them not to email the Secretary “anything sensitive” and stated that she could “explain more in person.”

Or some CYA discussions by the firm which ended up handling backups of the server at the end before it was seized:

In the letter, Johnson quotes from emails sent by and to employees at Platte River Networks, which indicate there was discussion about how the duration of data backups could be reduced, apparently at the direction of the Clinton Executive Service Corp.

Then this past August, a Platte River Networks employee wrote to a coworker that he was, “Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy (sic) s**t.”

“I just think if we have it in writing that they told us to cut the backups, and that we can go public with our statement saying we have backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30days (sic), it would make us look a WHOLE LOT better,” the unnamed employee continued.

And now the various responsible parties are coordinating their defense:

Four central figures in the FBI’s criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices are all using the same lawyer, a move described as a “red flag” by a former U.S. attorney who now runs a government watchdog group.

Lawyer Beth Wilkinson is representing: Clinton former chief of staff Cheryl Mills; policy adviser Jake Sullivan; media gatekeeper Philippe Reines; and former aide Heather Samuelson, who helped decide which Clinton emails were destroyed before turning over the remaining 30,000 records to the State Department.

“I think it would be a real red flag,” Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, told Fox News, in reference to the legal defense. He suggested having a single lawyer would help the four Clinton aides align their stories for FBI interviews.

It continues to amaze me how Clinton supporters can continue to ignore rather brazen signs of corruption and criminal activity.