Radio nerditry: Yes, I've heard that KrakenRF pulled their passive radar code, and no, I'm not looking forward to revisiting ITAR after all these years. There isn't, as far as I can tell, enough publicly-known information about the facts here to even speculate about whether this is an easily-resolved misunderstanding, over-caution, or a serious concern. I can imagine ways it could be any of the three. Hopefully not the latter.

Unpopular and uncomfortable election integrity reality: While BS about "hacked elections" has been most loudly amplified by the Right in the US, they have no monopoly on it. This nonsense was mostly started by (and continues to be spread by) marginal activists on the Left. Two difficult-to-reconcile truths about US election integrity. Any serious discussion of the subject must acknowledge both of them:

- There genuinely are some real vulnerabilities in some of our election infrastructure

- There's no evidence an election outcome has been hacked.

Even if it taxes your patience, being careful and following procedures in tallying votes is not evidence of fraud. In fact, it's the opposite of that. "Isn't it suspicious that it's only tight races that are undecided?"

No. That's exactly what we'd expect.

Any "winners" reported so far are media projections from partial tallies released so far. The closer the race, the higher the % of votes cast they need to project a winner.

Remember that Twitter's main asset is us users and our data, and the three people responsible for protecting it all quit simultaneously this morning.

Twitter may not even be around long enough to buy us all a year of free credit monitoring at this rate.

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1590724257608134657

Any Twitter engineer being asked to certify compliance to a regulatory agency (such as the FTC) should seek independent (their own) legal advice before signing anything or making any statement to regulators.

This is a bus you do NOT want to be thrown under.

As election results start to come in this week, some losing candidates and supporters may claim that their election was "rigged" or "hacked". To sort fact from fiction, you have to understand how elections actually work. Here's a great reference: nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/… A large fraction of “stop the steal” mis- and disinformation was OBVIOUS BS to those who understood the basics of election logistics, and tech. But it could sound convincing to the uninitiated. Learn how your local elections work, especially how ballots are handled and counted.

I've been using Mastodon for a couple days now. A couple (nonexpert) observations

The system as a whole functions. The major servers (that you're likely to sign up for) federate with each other, which means you can, in principle, follow and be followed just about anywhere. 1/ However, the system is clearly (and unsurprisingly) also straining under the newfound load right.

Many servers are closed to new signups, so you have to look for one that will take you, which may not be where most of your friends are. That's OK (see above), except that... 2/

Mastodon isn't perfect, but it's starting to attract what could be a critical mass. And engaging as an actual scientist/expert on Twitter gets more unpleasant every day.

Mastodon servers aimed at known scientists/experts who engage with the public would be attractive.

https://twitter.com/kakape/status/1588912392766951426

The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is the friction and learning curve involved with setting up an account and navigating the system. But Twitter is making it increasingly worth paying that cost to move to an alternative.

Even the gratuitous insult doesn’t make sense. If I were “pretending to be this stupid”, that would mean by definition that my stupidity is an act. Probably he meant to ask whether I’m actually as stupid as I seem or merely pretending. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Anyway, I won't interact further with this person until he posts his long-form birth certificate.

This "drop box watching" is obviously intended simply to intimidate voters, nothing more, nothing less.

But even if we take them at face value, observing ballot drop boxes makes absolutely no sense as a way to detect or discourage fraud.

https://twitter.com/JenAFifield/status/1586043063696117760

Mail-in/drop-box ballots are authenticated when they are received and processed at the election office, not simply by virtue of having been placed in a drop box. The process typically involves verifying the identifying information and voter signature on the ballot envelope.

Radio nerditry: Both of the NOAA weather radio stations that serve the DC metro area (162.45 from NW DC and 162.55 from Manassas) are completely off the air. Rare opportunity for some VHF DX, though the troposphere is being uncooperative at the moment. Yes, I reported the outages; the didn't have either listed on the outages page. weather.gov/nwr/outages

Nevada is only one example of the consequences of the baseless, relentless (and often terroristic) harassment of career election workers.

The swirl of disinformation is inviting chaos in November, which in turn will invite more disinformation and chaos.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… It's hard to overstate how dangerous this is. It goes well beyond advancing individual candidates or even the most dirty politics. It undermines our ability to conduct democracy itself, today and in the future, with a point of no return increasingly in view.

Hi from the Russian Ambassador’s Residence

How long before one of these decides to reenact the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin?

https://twitter.com/axios/status/1578766562915672064

OK, that was obscure.

The Odessa Steps sequence ( ) from Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin is renowned in cinema for its inventive use of editing to create a tense narrative. It culminates with a stroller careening down the long staircase.

Shades of the 1987 "Max Headroom" transmitter hijacking in Chicago, but with a much more serious purpose.

Though this doesn't look like it was done by taking over an OTA STL; the transitions are too clean and immediate. Likely done by hacking into a networked content server.

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1578815359897198592

Would an over-the-air STL-based Max Headroom hack still be possible today? Maybe, but it would require some modifications. The transition to digital TV meant that TV stations had to upgrade their transmitter links to digital, which are often encrypted/authenticated.

Very much looking forward to playing with this. A cheap phase coherent array of five SDRs in a box. Interesting DF and other possibilities, potentially replacing much bigger and spendier gear. Update: took a few hours of hacker playtime today to configure a Raspberry Pi with the KrakenSDR software, arranged the five magmount antennas in a pentagram on a cookie sheet, and took it all plus a laptop up to the roof to test out.

Another cleared (former) USG employee who thought he was selling classified docs to a foreign embassy (unspecified which one), but was actually dealing with the FBI. Echos of the recent Brazil nuclear sub case.

https://twitter.com/FBIWFO/status/1575564846644568065

A remarkable thing in the affidavit (linked in the press release) is how quickly he was caught. Only a couple month from initial contact to arrest.

I bought a couple of these to use as travel chargers; maybe you did, too. Be warned.

https://twitter.com/uscpsc/status/1575503484199337984

Also notable that this "recall" is pretty weak. It requires filling out a separate form for each unit purchased, waiting several weeks for a "return kit", and then getting a credit useful only for purchases from the same company. Not great for a fire hazard. cc @USCPSC

NASA doing the ritual post-mission group hug. DART before impact:

Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

Loaded the release version of iOS 16 earlier today and have been running with full lockdown mode on, so far without difficulty or anything disrupting my normal usage.

You can turn it off for specific apps, but I've not needed to. Basically, lockdown mode seems to just give me the ability to turn off features I've never been comfortable having on in the first place.

This article, for all its detail, doesn't actually tell us very much, and suggests that the nuclear weapons docs (describing with a foreign country's nuclear defenses) might have actually been among the LESS sensitive material found.

washingtonpost.com/national-secur… Nuclear weapons have a parallel classification system under the Atomic Energy act, with two major categories: "Restricted Data (RD)" and the incomprehensibly named "Formerly Restricted Data (FRD)".

There are known security vulnerabilities in many parts of our election infrastructure; that’s incontrovertibly true. But that is not the same as evidence that any election outcome was “rigged” by hacking (and in fact, there’s no evidence any actual US election has been). Dishonest activists (left, right, and center) have long been conflating these two things to claim that some election outcomes they dislike was stolen. The difference is that before now, they didn’t have a presidential candidate amplifying them.