Mike Pelley's Musings

You’d have to be living in the middle of nowhere (e.g. central Siberia) and totally off the grid to have missed the news stories on the NSA data interception. Anyone in the data security world really just had their suspicions confirmed. Why else would the NSA be building bigger-and-bigger data centres?  The NSA had to be collecting the data somewhere, didn’t they? Not surprisingly by collecting, note that I don’t say analysing!, the NSA is being overwhelmed by spam. 🙂 The NSA (and the CIA, and the DIA, and the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), and the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), and SIS/MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service), etc. not to mention Canada’s own CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) are probably simply drowning in data. Not information since information is useful.

However, an article on CBC.ca’s news site, NSA spying on Merkel phone could get diplomats expelled, may put things in context – at least in the world of espionage:

Still, parties on all sides acknowledge that spy-versus-spy eavesdropping is widespread even among allies.

“The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us,” former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview.

“Let’s be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don’t have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous.”

That is probably the greatest truth to the story…

…or as the Israeli’s might say “…so long as you don’t get caught…”

This is a great tweet from NASA’s Voyager 2 probe. Someone at NASA has a great sense of humour… But did I hear “Open the pod bay door, HAL”???

NASAVoyager2‏@NASAVoyager2

Due to government shutdown, we will not be posting or responding from this account. Farewell, humans. Sort it out yourselves

On Saturday afternoon (September 28th) I installed the new Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2  (VP2) weather station with the IP-based WeatherLink IP data logger. I installed the Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS – Davis-speak for the combined rainfall and temperate sensor with the transmitter) and the anemometer (which is separate from the ISS and linked by cable) on the same rooftop pole the old Oregon Scientific WMR200 is still mounted. I left the WMN200 in place because I wanted to see the delta – there are difference between the VP2 and the WMN200 in all areas – I’m not sure about the rainfall: we haven’t had any rain since the installation, of course.

The change-over in the Cumulus weather station software was seamless. Of course I thought it would be – I have a VMware Workstation image of the weather station to do the initial testing. And given that that OS is a virtual machine running on VMware ESXi 5.1 I cloned the virtual machine – nice to have a good solid backup – and then changed the station type and communications mode to VP2 and IP. Actually, I initially forgot to change the communications mode to IP and was confused for a few minutes.

(ESXi is free as in free beer and if you are doing any development or simply want to consolidate your compute instances this is the way to go. You should have certified hardware but I have colleagues who what done it on non-certified hardware – network cards can be difficult but there are cheap cards that are supported.)

Everything is up-and-running just fine. Cumulus (Sandaysoft) recommends going to the beta 1.9.4 but I don’t see any problems yet. I don’t like running beat software on production systems. If there is a problem I guess that it is backup-and-upgrade.

Funny things happen when you are searching the Internet… You find funny things – and old things. I found this at the Internet Achive Wayback Machine; an old web page describing my computing environment. Back in the days when you did that 🙂

Dig those huge 9 GB SCSI drives!

Being a hard-core believer in Newfoundland and Labrador I was very much unimpressed with the article in the online version of the Financial Post entitled Northern Promise: Mining projects spark much-needed Sept-Îles port expansion where the author, Mr. Nicolas Van Praet states that “North America’s biggest primary aluminum smelter — Alouette, its hill-perched electrolytic pots powered by transmission wires stretching from Hydro Quebec’s massive Churchill Falls hydroelectric facility.” Where did he get the idea that Hydro Quebec owns Churchill Falls. Not being very impressed with this statement – which no one in the comments pickup up on – I sent the following email to Mr. Van Praet:

Mr. Van Praet:

In reference to your article Northern Promise: Mining projects spark much-needed Sept-Îles port expansion you state: “…powered by transmission wires stretching from Hydro Quebec’s massive Churchill Falls hydroelectric facility”.

This is factually incorrect. The Churchill Falls hydro facility is owned by the Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation (CF(L)Co) which is a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro. While Hydro-Quebec has a 34.2% ownership in the Corporation it is not their facility. Although one may argue that they feel that they own it.

Maybe you should consider correcting your article.

Sincerely,

Mike Pelley

I look forward to his response on the issue. Hopefully I will actually get a response.

I was reading today an article on ZDNet about how the state of how Maryland state security sloppiness exposes personal data. The article by Larry Selzer shows how, to quote him:

“Mustering all necessary resources” in this case means “cutting corners.”

This shows the dangers of lack of resources – time, expertise, money – that can point you in the direction of danger if you are not careful. One would think that if you are collecting drivers’ license numbers, social security numbers, addresses and other personally identifiable information you would carefully think about the implications of not having the information secure.

At first I was thinking that – hopefully – someone writing the solution was security-minded enough to raise the risk to management but then I realized that if this was indeed the case the problem is actually much worse: Either senior people did not recognize the issue or, worse yet again, they did not care about it. (I always think about these issues as “ignorance versus incompetence”.) Hopefully, there will be more digging into the issue to find out where the problem actually exists. Being an IT professional with security being one of my hats I find this troubling…

Here is a screen capture – the site is no longer publicly-accessible, thankfully, from ZDNet:

Screen capture of log of HTTP traffic from State of Maryland’s gun permit application site

From: The Washington Post 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_296w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/08/23/Editorial-Opinion/Graphics/handelsman08242013.jpg

My first weather station was an old National Geographic-branded station. I was okay – it provided the temperature, wind direction and speed, and rainfall information. But then I thought wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see this on a computer? Of course, the inexpensive weather station didn’t have any data output capabilities. So, what to do….

After checking out various weather sites around the ‘Net two companies stood out: Oregon Scientific and Davis Instruments. Of course, Davis Instruments was the Mercedes-Benz and I had a Volkswagon Golf budget. Oregon Scientific it was and the WMR-928. This was a nice little weather station: wireless to the base station, individual sensors (mostly) with solar, rechargeable and backup batteries. This system lasted about six years before the sensors started failing and, of course, you could not really replace them without spending what was adding up to a whole new station.

The hunt was on again for a weather station. Of course, Davis Instruments was the choice but I was still stuck on a Volkswagon – albeit a Jetta instead of a Golf – budget. Since Oregon Scientific worked well the first time I decided to go back to them. I bought a  WMR-200. I have to say I was a little disappointed with the WMR-928’s replacement – the base station didn’t seem to be up to the quality of the 928’s, the sensors now only had one solar panel with the rain sensor using only batteries. The 200 had USB which was nice as I had a USB-to-Ethernet adapter (and since the weather station workstation was by now a VMware vSphere virtual machine using the serial port wouldn’t work – but that is another story). Unfortunately my Jetta is falling apart after only two-and-a-half years – the anemometer is squeaking and reading low and the rain sensor just up-and-died.

This time I am going for the Mercedes-Benz. I think that it will be the Vantage Pro2 as some it has some features of the Vantage Vue don’t have. Plus, the Pro2’s base station seems a little higher quality. The only thing that I do not like with Davis is the need to purchase an additional – and relatively costly – adapter to connect to the computer. The choices are nice – USB or IP or serial – but you have to buy their WeatherLink software – and I’m not going to use it. Sandaysoft Cumulus is my choice.

I heard this on the radio this morning and it made me smile being Friday the 13th. There is a scheduled flight from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Helsinki, Finland, operated by Finnair. The three-letter designation for Helsinki is HEL. The Finnair flight number is… Wait for it… 666.

So, on this Friday the 13th a lucky few will be able to take flight 666 to HEL(L).