Buckle Up, Buttercup
Q3 feels like nearing the top of the rollercoaster ...
I have come back here repeatedly with various advice on securing your hardware, software, and wetware. This first week of July has felt like nearing the apex of a big roller coaster … it’s a long way down, stuff is rocking back and forth, and you can just feel something is about to change dramatically. It’s time to level up.
Approaching this less elliptically, there is an oversight function among the people I work with - one can get good counsel in advance, or serve as a source of comic relief when limping home from some entirely avoidable misadventure. Leading from right in front, twice this last week I’ve had to convene groups and … explain myself. No serious harm done, but my character defects of hastiness and a tendency to unilateral action earned me some well deserved laughter.
Each of us has our own set of capabilities and concerns, so I’m just going to mumble a bit about mine here, in hopes it’ll trigger some introspection for you, constant reader.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Last week’s gunplay left me with a pair of ragged, smoking peep toe sandals, which is just not a good look on a guy pushing sixty. If you’re already checked out, move on, but if you’re worried in general come right on in …
Adversary Resistant Computing:
The beginning of 2024 saw me wishing aloud for a Xeon workstation replacement grade laptop and a Google Pixel 8 so I could run Qubes and GrapheneOS. Life said “lol nah”, so here I sit on my porch in the Bay Area night breeze, pecking away on the MacAir I’ve dubbed Pinky, while an unanticipated (but quite nice) iPhone XR is sitting on the table next to me. They will be joined some time in the next few days by an iPad Pro that also has the same A12 Bionic chipset as the iPhone. I am told this particular generation of chipset has never been jailbroke - which means even if I do get nipped, it’s not going to be a persistent problem.
Apple offers a form of protection for your whole environment called Lockdown Mode. I enabled it for a bit, just out of curiosity, but I quickly had issues with it, as it tries to apply itself to everything connected to your iCloud account. So now among my ToolTime activity for Q3 I am going to pair Pinky with the XR, and Brain with the older iPhone 8, in two unrelated environments, and then I’m going Lockdown Mode on both.
I haven’t taken a census, but I think Apple products are the choice of perhaps two thirds of all the journalists using Disinfodrome. It seems the world is pushing me towards being ready to assist them. OK, so be it.
Adversary Resistant Networking:
The big news on the network front is that Tailscale Changes Everything. While trying to keep cool on a BART platform on the 4th I messed around with Tailscale and an ssh client for the iPhone, managing to log in to my desktop at home. I’ve fumbled with other stuff, and it came down to needing to add the Carrier Grade NAT address space 10.64.0.0/10 to the addresses in /etc/hosts.allow and in the firewall.
The arrival of Tailscale is not the same as the enormous convulsions in the late nineties when LANtastic and Netware IPX/SPX on ARCnet and Token Ring gave way to everything TCP/IP on Ethernet and WiFi. I exited the enterprise world just as Netware 4.0 and Windows NT 4.0 were arriving, so I don’t have much enterprise directory management experience, what I did see was from the perspective of the guy responsible for the lower four layers of the OSI protocol stack. That being said, Tailscale orchestrating a WireGuard encrypted overlay seems … like the network guy equivalent of the advent of those directory services.
I had Novell certs back when, then I maintained the Cisco Certified Network & Design Professional ratings from 2000 until I grew too sick to pass a single exam in a three year period. I’ve was grinding on Google Analytics and Rushing Into Semrush, but I don’t know that I need any sort of vendor approval to market myself in this area. I also don’t think that fellow practitioners have any trouble recognizing what I’m good at in terms of technical networks, but there are a class of individuals with who I interact where a vendor cert would make a difference.
So … where’s the three to six college credits worth of structured study that lets me append something Tailscale related to my title?
Adversary Resistant Antisocializing:
There are an irregular flow of articles here that are best grouped under the neologism of Social Engineering Special Olympics. Wikipedia has this to say regarding “social engineering”.
In the context of information security, social engineering is the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.
I’ve applied the phrase “social network engineering” to describe some of the stuff I do, meaning to avoid the deceptive/manipulative connotation of the root phrase. My ex-wife had an organizational development practice when she worked for Drake Beam Morin , I got to assist her with projects, then later a couple of my startups went through formal OD exercises. So I guess calling what I do “social network engineering” is similar to how any mildly clever application of common sense is now described as a “hack”.
That irregular flow of articles are limited to the compulsive clown end of the playing field, the people with delusions of adequacy, whose only real capability is being a tool for a more capable player. There are a couple that deserve to be mocked in a simple, direct fashion.
Probable Pissposting - James McGibney is a Vulnerable Dark Triad Psychopath, and one vulnerability he has is that he gets some sort of ASMR grade thrill out of lying to people. But he’s so compulsive about it he’ll lie, you’ll know he’s lying, he’ll know you’ll know, but he will still proceed as if he’s been 100% successful in his deception. His entire shtick is based on this - he’s long sought a reality TV show related to countering bullying, but he will never miss a chance to do that very thing against someone he perceives as vulnerable. So … act vulnerable, appear to buy into some lie he tells, and then you’ve got a good chance of creating an object lesson outcome for him. But he’s a slow learner, at best, so he’ll horse around like he’s some sort of ninja, and end up with a pile of legal bills for it.
Scientology’s Dullest Tool - Ron Brynaert had recently lost his role as the executive editor of Raw Story due to psychiatric problems when I first encountered him in the late spring of 2011. He’s never admitted any particular diagnosis, but he certainly seems manic for long periods of time, and he was a mentally disorganized phone screamer that one time I spoke to him. So this might be schizo(something), lots of delusions of persecution and of reference, and his crazy person LARPing as a journalist skill set has seen him weaponized against me and several others. I mostly ignore him, but the last two weeks I’ve privately feigned a manic episode of my own, and he’s been the sole recipient of this. Having him as a point source for that and seeing where it comes out has been instructive. Review the parts of the preceding section about appearing vulnerable for the sake of teaching lessons …
There are several more that I will characterize (and mock) without name checking.
Incredible Intel is about another tool, similar to Ron in some ways, that made a really funny operational error that disclosed something big. Individual None is going to some lengths to assume the identify of a schizotypal cyberstalker, but I think the original natural born fuckup has moved on, and instead it’s some bargain basement thing like what I described in Informantspotting. And lastly, there’s a thing that could be just about any of the Crack Babies of Kiwi Farms, but there’s been this steady stream of stuff that looks like the operator of the “Jack Waterloo” persona coming back with another ham handed approach. Could be three porg in a trench coat, but they show just enough knowledge that maybe it’s a woman with borderline personality disorder in early middle age who’s experiencing delusions of adequacy.
I joke about being a juvenile delinquent with an AARP card and that ain’t entirely wrong, but there are a couple menopausal hags in Florida whose entire existence is best represented as a pair of high school sophomore mean girls with cramps fighting over the last Midol at a sleepover. No name checks here, if they want to get up on stage and bite the head off a chicken, that’s their business. I don’t even look at their doings, I just hear occasional reports of things that make me feel embarrassed on their behalf.
The only social network account I admit to using these days is Neal Rauhauser on LinkedIn. There is some value in being a real person, in an overall professional context that supports one’s claims of past work and capability. I do talk about personas, for those of you in need of observation posts, but if any of whatever I had got attributed to me I’d just delete it. A sensor that gets crapflooded is of no value whatsoever.
General Direction:
I’ve got a number of technology projects before me:
Split Apple gear into two groups, then Lockdown Mode.
Brain just sitting behind me, not doing anything AI yet.
Tailscale everywhere.
Headscale may be useful in some situations, needs testing.
That looks like enough to soak up the rest of the month of July.
It’s quite pleasing to me that, after thirteen years of endless paranoid, delusional whinging, I actually DID intentionally hoax Ron Brynaert. He was the point source on my feigned manic episode and now I’ve got 39 date/time stamped entries to review. Only a quarter of those are Ron, the rest are … perhaps related.
Part of the fun has been getting him to publicly complain about the Conspiracy Brokers. Like bringing up “he who must not be named”, that’s just never a good idea. Ron may experience the Kookpocalypse process directly, instead of just observing from a safe distance, as he did during the first one back in 2012. I don’t think he’s ever managed to publish The Kookpocalypse Survival Guide. Maybe he’ll take better notes this time around.
Aforementioned timestamps:
2024-06-XX-1229 2024-06-XX-1434 2024-06-XX-1509
2024-06-XX-2308 2024-06-XX-0513 2024-06-XX-1921
2024-06-XX-2255 2024-06-XX-1105 2024-06-XX-1817
2024-06-XX-1845 2024-06-XX-1725 2024-06-XX-2223
2024-06-XX-1054 2024-06-XX-1113 2024-06-XX-1244
2024-06-XX-1717 2024-06-XX-2312 2024-07-XX-0706
2024-07-XX-0935 2024-07-XX-1800 2024-07-XX-1800
2024-07-XX-1800 2024-07-XX-0935 2024-07-XX-1100
2024-07-XX-1329 2024-07-XX-1959 2024-07-XX-2125
2024-07-XX-0936 2024-07-XX-0632 2024-07-XX-1035
2024-07-XX-0225 2024-07-XX-0321 2024-07-XX-0321
2024-07-XX-0321 2024-07-XX-0237 2024-07-XX-0256
2024-07-XX-2130 2024-07-XX-0517 2024-07-XX-1604
There is, of course, a serious side to things. I kinda did put my thumb in the IRGC’s eye with MIOS: Iran’s PressTV, and I am in the habit of roughly handling All Enemies, Both Foreign and Domestic. There are things in those timestamps that are certainly of a more serious nature than the random Fuckmuppets trying to operationalize their delusions of adequacy. There’s at least one for which Apple’s Lockdown Mode is just the start of an appropriate response.
Conclusion:
Sounds of Silence came after a ten day break, then another commenced in Silent Lucidity. It’s starting to look like my duty cycle is ten days on followed by three weeks of quiet. I can just sit here for the rest of the month, play with my new toys, and enjoy the sounds of ankle biters leaping, then taking a tumble, because they can’t jump high enough to actually earn my attention. Professionals, deprived of cover, tend to hunker down and wait for opportunities; I know that’s what I’d do in this situation.
During this new period of relative silence I will say that none of the Disinfodrome Proffers 2024-07-03 have been claimed. I did have an exchange earlier with the journalist who took an interest in MIOS: Russpublicans, and it’s the same problem that story has had all along - it’s missing something, but it’s not clear what to do to make it weighty enough to get past an editor.
The one year anniversary of Infowar Irregulars Bulletin v2.0 is 2024-08-31. I certainly won’t make it that far without finding something to say about our brewing Snivel War, but for the moment we’re going to enjoy some well deserved peace and quiet.