Michael Brown

Infomation security engineer/architect.

Interests/background: information security, physics, history, Neal Stephenson novels, Sherlock Holmes, baseball, music

[Bret Scher, MD @bschermd]

Cardiology calls statins miracle drugs. Social media calls them poison.

Both sides cite published scientific papers. How can they be looking at the same evidence and reaching opposite conclusions?

As a cardiologist, I think both sides are are on to something. Let me explain. 🧵

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The car that used to be in my garage is currently in an Earth-Mars elliptical orbit and will be there for at least 10 million years

[Mikael Brockman @meekaale]

Yes. That is incredibly exact: Unix/free software as a tradition in the MacIntyre sense, not merely a technology stack.
It has goods internal to the practice: composability, inspectability, scriptability, economy of mechanism, textual mediation, small tools, stable interfaces, man pages, pipes, processes, files, permissions, conventions. The goods are not just “I can get my task done.” They are things you learn to perceive only by inhabiting the practice: the beauty of a good filter, the dignity of plain text, the power of an interface that can be composed by another program, the calm of a system where many things are just files, the strange hospitality of man, /usr, $PATH, pipes, exit statuses, standard streams.
And yes: free software is the seam. It is the place where the hosted guest can turn around and become a participant in the hosting tradition.
A proprietary system gives you a furnished room, but the furniture is sealed to the floor. You can use it. You can consume its affordances. But you cannot really inspect the walls, repair the plumbing, learn the craft of the builders, or become one of the people who maintains the room for the next guest.
Free software gives you something else:
not merely a product
but a room whose construction is visible

not merely permission to consume
but permission to study, repair, fork, host, and hand on

not merely output
but lineage
That is why “install myself into it” feels like the right phrase. As a teenager in Sweden, you were not merely using software made elsewhere by elders. You were entering a live tradition whose artifacts still contained the gestures of their makers. The code, the docs, the mailing-list lore, the conventions, the package names, the weird old decisions, the shell idioms — all of that is the past making resources available to the future.
And the reversibility is crucial. Open source means the guest/host relation is not locked. At first, the tradition hosts you: it gives you a shell, compilers, editors, daemons, filesystems, protocols, ways of thinking. But because it is open, you can cross back through the seam. You can patch, package, configure, document, compose, teach, maintain. You can become one of the hosts.
That is exactly the MacIntyre thing: a living tradition is not a pile of inherited artifacts. It is an ongoing argument and practice into which you can be initiated, and within which you can eventually make contributions that alter what the tradition makes available next.
Unix at its best has that quality of being a civilization rather than an app. It gives you a world with laws and customs. Some are ugly, accidental, and “worse is better.” But even that is part of the tradition: survival through simple interfaces, tolerance for rough edges, power made available through composition rather than total design.
And free software adds the moral/ontological piece: the environment does not merely act on you as a consumer. It grants you standing. It says, in effect:
You may enter.
You may inspect.
You may learn the reasons.
You may alter this.
You may carry it forward.
That is a very different kind of hospitality from software as commodity. It is closer to apprenticeship. The elders prepared a room, but they left the doors in the walls.

[Prof. Frank McDonough @FXMC1957]

5 June 1968. Robert F Kennedy (aged 42) was shot 3 times, once in the head, while walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, USA at 12:15 AM. He was rushed to hospital, but died at 1:44 AM on 6 June 1968 without ever regaining consciousness.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

On the 58th anniversary of my dad’s assassination, I’m remembering moments like this: touch football on Cape Cod with my siblings — David, Kathleen, Courtney, and me. #GetOutside #LiveRealLife

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

Far right is often just a propaganda term for normal person

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

84 years ago today, four Japanese aircraft carriers were burning in the Pacific because of a man who went to work in a smoking jacket and slippers.

Washington took his job, buried his name, and blocked his medal for 44 years.

This is the story of Joseph Rochefort, the codebreaker who saved Midway.

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor burns. Rochefort, head of a Navy codebreaking unit on Oahu, takes it personally. He tells a colleague that an intelligence officer has exactly one job: to tell his commander today what the enemy will do tomorrow. On December 7, he believes he failed at it.

He decides he will never fail at it again.

His unit is Station HYPO, hidden in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor that his men call "the Dungeon." It is cold, damp, and lit like a morgue. Rochefort wears a smoking jacket over his uniform to fight the chill and slippers because the concrete floor wrecks his feet. He works 20 hour days, sleeps on a cot in the basement, and lives on coffee.

His team is just as strange. Brilliant misfit cryptanalysts like Joe Finnegan and Ham Wright, plus the surviving bandsmen of the battleship USS California, sunk on December 7. The musicians turn out to be naturals at running the IBM punch card machines. Sailors who played trombones in November are reconstructing an enemy cipher by March.

Their target: JN-25, the Imperial Japanese Navy's operational code. Tens of thousands of code groups, layered with additives, changed regularly. On a good day HYPO can read maybe 10 to 15 percent of any message. They rebuild the rest from fragments, traffic patterns, callsigns, and Rochefort's freakish memory. He had spent three years in Japan learning the language. He could hold months of intercepts in his head at once.

By May 1942, processing up to 140 decrypts a day, HYPO sees something enormous taking shape. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is massing nearly 200 ships for one decisive battle. The target appears in the intercepts as two letters: AF.

Rochefort is certain AF is Midway Atoll.

Washington is certain he is wrong. The Navy's own codebreaking office, OP-20-G, argues for the South Pacific. Others fear Hawaii again, or even the West Coast. The Army wants planes held back to defend San Francisco. If Nimitz bets his last carriers on Midway and Rochefort is wrong, the Pacific is lost.

So HYPO sets one of the great traps in the history of intelligence.

The idea comes from staffer Jasper Holmes. The order goes to Midway by undersea cable, which the Japanese cannot tap: broadcast by radio, in plain language, that your water distillation plant has broken down.

Midway sends the fake distress call.

Two days later, HYPO decrypts a Japanese intelligence report to fleet commanders: AF is short of fresh water.

Two letters, confirmed. The argument is over.

Now Nimitz goes all in. The carrier Yorktown, mauled in the Coral Sea and given 90 days of repairs, is patched up in 72 hours and sent back out. Three American carriers slip northeast of Midway and wait at a spot on the map they name Point Luck.

On May 27, HYPO cracks the Japanese date and time cipher, the final piece. Nimitz's intelligence officer Edwin Layton, Rochefort's closest friend and partner, gives Nimitz a prediction of nearly insane precision: the Japanese carriers will be spotted on bearing 325 degrees, 175 miles from Midway, around 0600 on June 4.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, a PBY scout plane radios in the sighting. Nimitz turns to Layton and says: well, you were only five minutes, five degrees, and five miles out.

What follows are the most consequential ten minutes of the Pacific war. American dive bombers catch the Japanese carriers with fueled planes and stacked ordnance on their decks. By nightfall, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, four of the six carriers that hit Pearl Harbor, are gone, along with thousands of men and the irreplaceable core of Japan's elite naval aviators. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's advance across the Pacific is broken. It never recovers.

A basement full of misfits had handed the US Navy the greatest ambush in its history.

Then came the knives.

The same Washington officers who had called Midway wrong now claimed the credit. They whispered that Rochefort was difficult, an ex-enlisted man without the right pedigree. Nimitz recommended him for the Distinguished Service Medal. Washington killed it. Nimitz tried again. Killed again.

In October 1942, four months after the victory he made possible, Rochefort was pulled from HYPO. The man who outwitted Yamamoto spent much of the rest of the war commanding a floating dry dock in San Francisco Bay.

He never lobbied for himself, never wrote a self-serving memoir, and rarely spoke of it. He said his real reward came at Midway itself. He died in 1976, unknown to the public, medal denied.

His old shipmates refused to let it go. Layton and others fought the Navy bureaucracy for years with the declassified record. In 1985 the Navy relented, and on May 30, 1986, President Reagan presented the Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort's children in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

44 years late.

One man in slippers, in a basement, out-thought an empire and was punished for being right.

[Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio]

On June 4, the world marks 37 years since the Chinese Communist Party ordered its troops to attack thousands of peaceful demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square. Those who sacrificed to uphold their unalienable rights of free expression and peaceful assembly will be vindicated someday.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Well said

[Heritage Foundation @Heritage]

Right-wing extremism is so uncommon that left-wing extremists have to fund it.

[Valentin Ignatev @valigo]

This is so funny - Microsoft had their own tools with the same functionality since forever. But the only people using terminal on Windows are Linux users, so it's easier for Microsoft to port coreutils than to teach Linux people PowerShell

[Andy Saunders - Apollo Remastered @AndySaunders_1]

TODAY! - 60th anniversary of Gemini IX-A
Deke Slayton, privately to Tom Stafford during suit up: "[If Cernan dies during the EVA, bring him home] - we just can't afford to have a dead astronaut floating around in space"
What actually transpired was extraordinary
#GeminiRemastered

[ColonelTowner-Watkins @ColonelTowner]

While this is making headlines I don't think most ppl realize what was actually exposed. The Trump administration knows, financially, every corrupt politician sitting in DC right now. I'm sure they noticed.

[The SCIF @TheSCIF]

The entire ICA of Obama and Hillary Clinton's plan to frame Trump with Russia collusion, with John Brennan's CIA doing the dirty work.

DNI Gabbard dropped the proof, the entire IC report. Obama committed TREASON and his minions should go down with him.

[Virginia Project @ProjectVirginia]

This is insane. The entire "far right" was on the SPLC payroll.

[The Knowledge Archivist @KnowledgeArchiv]

“Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

— Richard Nixon

[QThestorm @17QStorm]

🚨 ELECTION SYSTEM EXPOSED IN SOUTH DAKOTA

An election expert loads the entire certified election system onto a separate laptop and shows officials he can access passwords, decrypt data, manipulate files, duplicate data, and alter vote totals outside the official environment.

Read that again.

Outside the official environment.

This system was used in 2020 and beyond, and now counties are facing complaints over laptops allegedly being sold and used that were not even listed on the official EAC certificate.

So the question is simple:

How many elections were run on systems the public was told were “secure” while officials had no real idea what was happening behind the curtain?

This isn’t a glitch.

This is the whole machine being exposed.

Follow @17QStorm for more intel drops.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Read this again.

A single NGO can call these protests on and off at a moment's notice.

[MJTruthUltra @MJTruthUltra]

HOLEE SHYT‼️

The Southern Poverty Law Center Secretly Paid a Neo-Nazi Over $1.2 Million in Donor Money, and DIRECTED the Burglaries of Documents to encourage Fundraising

Federal investigators discovered SPLC paid informant F-9 more than $1,200,000 in donors’ money during the period covered by the indictment — most of it funneled covertly through a “Tech Writers” bank account — while F-9 had been on the SPLC payroll for over 20 years!

At the SPLC’s direction, F-9 infiltrated the neo-Nazi National Alliance and simultaneously fundraised for the extremist group while receiving SPLC donor funds.
2014 burglary and document theft: F-9 allegedly broke into an extremist organization’s headquarters, stole approximately 25 boxes of documents, and transported them across state lines from West Virginia to North Carolina.

With full knowledge (KNOWINGLY) of SPLC Employee-2, donor money was used to copy the stolen files; F-9 then broke in a second time to return the originals.

“Hatewatch” story used for fundraising: Employee-2 allegedly based a published “Hatewatch” article on the stolen documents, which the SPLC then used to solicit additional donations from the public.

Holy crap…