Darrell Root

Retired network engineer. Independent Swift dev. MacOS Apps: “CIDR Trainer”,“Network Mom ACL Analyzer”,“Network Mom Availability”,“Netrek”. CCIE #8302 Emeritus

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

I vaguely remember a 20+ year old commercial (for PAC Bell?)

It shows one person in a suit talking glowingly about the cloud

Cuts to another executive talking glowingly about the information superhighway

Pans to another person talking about the future of information

Then it cuts to a stressed out technician in the basement with a bunch of wires in the background: “if I don’t get this network up in 30 minutes…I’m a DEAD MAN” 😳

That technician in the basement was my role model

I’ll bet there’s a network engineer in Portugal today feeling like that…

[Whole Mars Catalog @wholemars]

Tesla Self-Driving is slowly taking over Europe

[indy reporter @Indy_reporter_]

Let me get this straight:

Purdue is bringing in someone on an H-1B visa to teach........ ENGLISH literature and writing to AMERICAN students?

There are American English PhDs looking for work, but this position is being filled through a foreign-worker visa

[Whole Mars Catalog @wholemars]

Tesla Robotaxi autonomously saves passenger from being hit by a Waymo

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

@BrandonHitzel In New York City we encountered restrictions on large trucks entering Manhattan during business hours.

Also, mandatory Dilbert disaster recovery plan cartoon:

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

@bendesprets In Saberhagen’s Berserker series, the evil robots used atomic disintegrations as a perfect random number generator so their strategies could not be predicted.

eMudhra used…. 4 😂😢

[Wham Baam Teslacam @WhamBaamX]

TESLA FSD SAVES A KID’S LIFE

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

@CupOJoseph @xkcd This is the XKCD for this incident: https://t.co/hiByc2v4R3

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

@cqcqcqdx 9 volts

[Lee (Greater) @shortmagsmle]

Assuming 1 try per second continuously, it would take a human ≈ 3.67 x 10^69 years to guess a SHA-256 hash, unless of course it was coded by an Indian infosec company, in which case it would take 4 tries because the answer would simply be “4”

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

In ~2003-2004, when Cisco IT issued 100% Windows laptops, I made a deal with my boss:

1) I would finish a whitepaper for Marketing use

2) Cisco would buy me a 17” Mac for my primary laptop

Win win!

I didn’t even need to take my laptop home because I kept my work in my 100MB iDisk and could access it on my home “desk lamp” iMac.

The Apple ecosystem was great, even in 2004

[Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 @Bubblebathgirl]

Cleaning up the Social Security records was critical to the program’s longevity, and on Monday the Social Security Administration announced it was finally done. SSA said it’s the largest cleanup of its numbers in the agency’s 91-year history. The work has been underway since the start of the Trump administration.

Parts of the problem have existed for 10 to 40-plus years. Audits by the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General dating back to at least 2015 repeatedly found millions of records in the Numident—the agency’s master database of Social Security Numbers—missing death dates. That included 6.5 million people age 112 or older with no death information. By 2023 the figure for those born in 1920 or earlier with no death dates had reached about 18.9 million. Missing or inaccurate citizenship data also built up over years of incomplete reporting. Individual audits tied subsets of these gaps to hundreds of millions in improper payments. Across the full span of gaps the cumulative cost moving forward would’ve run into the low billions of waste.

SSA corrected nearly 15 percent of all U.S. citizen SSNs, roughly 50 million records out of about 330 million. The changes include adding 17 million dates of death that were previously missing using State Department data, updating 25 million files that lacked citizenship information with help from DHS, and correcting another 8.5 million records that had inaccurate citizenship data. Stronger internal controls were also added to cut future manual-entry errors.

These fixes should prevent future improper payments in the range of $500 million to $2–3 billion over the next several years. That’s meaningfully higher than the ongoing waste rate of the uncorrected records. Past losses from the messy SSN records were in the millions but were growing quickly. That’s why finishing the cleanup now matters for Social Security. The main value is stopping the leakage going forward.

Accurate records are one of the basic requirements for keeping Social Security solvent longer. This cleanup removes a known source of waste that previous administrations left in place. The program is stronger for it.

This kind of work needs to happen across the board in every department of government. That’s how the programs that matter stay funded and functioning as they were intended.

[Social Security @SocialSecurity]

Rooting out fraud starts with accurate records.

Under @POTUS leadership, SSA has corrected nearly 15% of active SSNs, the most comprehensive SSN record clean-up in agency history:
✅ 17M missing dates of death added
✅ 25M records with missing citizenship info updated
🔄 8.5M inaccurate citizenship records being corrected

Find more results here: https://t.co/42cpXcuvhK

[Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig]

This was supposed to be a joke

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

I did not vote any of these ballots. That would be a crime.

The point is to have the state not enable fraudulent voting by not mailing ballots to dead people

Your claim “they pay attention to all those things” is false in my household’s case, since they continue to mail ballots

In fact, CA didn’t even terminate “covered California” despite notification to the department of health services estate recovery office. We sent a second notification to fix that.

Complete incompetence on the part of the CA government here. And your solution is to trust people not to cheat, rather than fix the process.

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

Correct on the ballots. I don’t recall getting voter confirmation cards.

It is a serious vulnerability that California apparently doesn’t pay attention to:

Death certificates
Probate
Lack of active voting
Notification to department of health services estate recovery office

For over two years. If that’s statewide, that would mean approximately 3% of CA ballots are being mailed to deceased individuals

[Nathan Russell @russell_nw]

@otomir23 Sending this again

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

@IceSolst @wholemars Reminds me of the Star Trek destruct code:

[solst/ICE of Astarte @IceSolst]

I don’t understand? How

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: The private keys of 8 certificates from Indian certificate authority eMudhra were compromised, Mozilla says. Firefox blocked them within 3 hours.

Each key should be a 116-digit number, but one was just 4.

Anyone can guess them and forge HTTPS certs for any website.

[Darrell Root @DarrellRoot]

@aaronsibarium Whenever an organization changes their “document retention policy” the goal is never ”retention”