Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton

1958 The first prototype ammonia maser in front of its inventor Charles H. Townes. The ammonia nozzle is at left in the box, the four brass rods at center are the quadrupole state selector, and the resonant cavity is at right. The 24 GHz microwaves exit through the vertical waveguide Townes is adjusting. At bottom are the vacuum pumps.

This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.

I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.

The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.

Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:

"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Algeria
Blue are mentioned in the book. Purple are old fortresses.

I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.

Notes:

• Chapter 1 Page 1 Adrar Algeria
• Chapter 3 

GAZ-69



• Page 13 GAZ 59A Russian four-wheel drive field car does not exist so we have GAZ-69 
• Page 16 Dornier Skyservant

Desert Tour in a VW Bus

• Page 17 bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours
• Chapter 4 
• Page 19 Washington Square New York University

Fats Waller plays Alligator Crawl (piano solo, 1935)
gullivior
• Page 23 Alligator Crawl

Chinoiserie

• Page 23 "it was all chinoiserie and high camp, with lanterns and gold-plated Buddhas"
• Chapter 6 

Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2
The Wicked North

• page 43 Shostakovich. Soviet composer and pianist.

Pulsar P3 - When a Digital Watch cost more than a Rolex - 1970s LEDs
Techmoan

Page 49 Pulsar wrist watch

Blazar CTA 102

• Page 52 Quasar CTA-102, 
• Page 52 1924 Society - There are a bunch of 1924 Societies, but no UFO related ones. However, 1924 is the year Edwin Hubble proved there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way. Gawd, why do we have such a pansy ass name for our galaxy? Shouldn't it be something like 'The God King Galaxy', but in Latin so it's impressive.
• Chapter 12 'No Extradition' graffiti in Ireland. It was frequently used to protest the transfer of Republican prisoners from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland to prisons in the United Kingdom.
• Chapter 14

Perry Point VA Medical Center

• page 127 Commodore Perry US Navy psychiatric hospital

Ilyushin Il-62

• Page 192 Ilyushin airliner

أم كلثوم - فكروني - بعد ما اتعودت بعدك غصب عني [Umm Kulthum – Remind Me – After I Had Grown Accustomed to Your Absence, Against My Will]
Rasha Gamal

• Page 195 Om Kalsum the Ella Fitzgerald of Arab pop
• Page 198 the Atlas Mountains and then the Ouled Nail and then Loghouat
• Page 206 In-Salah, Adrar, Reggane, Timbuktu

AKMS machine pistol

• Page 214 AKMS machine pistol

I'm thinking I need to look into this business of Soviet satellite communications stations and old forts in the Sahara. And MASERs. We shall see.

Bonus. 2nd thing that popped up when I searched for Ouled Nail.

Dance of the Ouled Nail
MosaicDanceTheaterCo

Previous post about this book.

Latex

The little-known tree that revolutionised global communication – BBC REEL
BBC Global

Ask Google Shopping for Gutta Percha and all you get is dental supplies. It comes from trees and sounds a bit like rubber, but it is different. Some notes I collected from Wikipedia articles about Latex, Gutta-Percha and Natural Rubber:

Gutta-percha was difficult to harvest. Only trees that had grown for 35 years or more were economical to harvest. Felling a single tree could yield 12 catties (16 pounds) of gutta-percha; cutting boreholes to harvest gutta-percha from a living tree yielded much less, and often killed the tree anyway due to fungal infection.

Rubber latex is extracted from rubber trees. The economic life of rubber trees in plantations is around 32 years, with up to 7 years being an immature phase and about 25 years of productive phase.

Latex is not to be confused with plant sap; it is a distinct substance, separately produced, and with different functions. The word latex is also used to refer to natural latex rubber, particularly non-vulcanized rubber. Such is the case in products like latex gloves, latex condoms, latex clothing, and balloons.

The latex of many species can be processed to produce many materials.

• Balatá and gutta percha latex contain an inelastic polymer related to rubber.
• Chicle and jelutong tree latex was used in chewing gum.

Gutta-percha . . . is a polymer of isoprene which forms a rubber-like elastomer.

Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, caucho, or caoutchouc, as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds.

Bluetooth

Haraldr Blátǫnn Gormsson

Stolen entire from The Village Hemorrhoid:

The Origin Of The Term "Bluetooth"

Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson (Old Norse: Haraldr Blátǫnn Gormsson; Danish: Harald Blåtand Gormsen, died c. 985/86) was a king of Denmark and Norway.

The first documented appearance of Harald's nickname "Bluetooth" is in the Chronicon Roskildense (written c. 1140).

The Bluetooth wireless specification design was named after the king in 1997, based on an analogy that the technology would unite devices the way Harald Bluetooth united the tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom. The Bluetooth logo consists of a Younger Futhark bind rune for his initials, H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ).

Ethernet Color Code

Ethernet A & B
Chris Boden

Didn't catch what he was trying to say the first time so I restarted it. There are eight wires in an ethernet cable but only four of them get used and half of those are grounds. I think. In any case I only use four and it seems to work fine. There's probably a good reason for all the extra wires, but I just learned enough to get my computers hooked up and working. The reason I'm posting this is because of this comment from Reman1975:

I worked in IT for over 20 years, and the coolest thing about IT standards for me is how you can buy a motherboard from China, a graphics card that was made in America, Memory sticks that came from a factory in Japan, a CPU that was fabricated in Malaysia, and a SSD that started out in Korean, chuck it all together like Lego bricks, slap some OS install media in it that was based on work by a guy in Finland, and dispite these manufacturers/programmers never being in contact with each other, or even speaking in a common language, folks STILL manage to be surprised if everything doesn't just work straight from the first boot up.

This situations only possible because there's many hundreds of standards that cover every aspect of every single component that goes into a PC. These standards have been refined over decades to get to the point where it's not totally inconceivable that you could talk a non tech savy person through building a PC from a kit of parts OVER THE PHONE, and still have better than even odds of the finished result working as expected.

This remarkable situation is something that's never lost that sense of amazement for me.

Communication Channels

My Wiring 'Closet'

I finally got around to replacing the across-the-floor ethernet cable with one routed across the ceiling and inside the wall. When we started the big remodeling project over a year ago, we moved into the basement and we took our TV with us. The remodeling project was only supposed to last a few months, so it's okay to have a cord running across the floor. I mean, we're in the basement. Actually the only place it ran across the floor was at the bottom of the stairs and we covered it with a rug, so it was practically invisible. But it's been a while, and the TV is still in the basement, so I ran a new cable in a more secure and permanent manner.

The Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon's NBA team, have been having a rough time since all their star players have moved to greener pastures. They're getting better, slowly. They beat the Atlanta Hawks Tuesday night in a nail-biter. Since they are rebuilding the team, they are also trying to rebuild their fan base, which has been decimated since the all-star team they had is no more. To that end, they are now broadcasting all of their games on commercial TV - Charge! 2.2. We have an antennae in the attic, let's see if we can pick it up. Plug the upstairs TV into the coax and bingo! NBA basketball clear as a bell. The antennae is a big old thing that I probably set up 30 years ago. It's not one of these miniature things they are using for their ridiculously high frequency, but it works fine.

Since I was running a new ethernet cable, and since we discovered a new use for coax, I figured I might as well run a new coax cable as well. Plug in the basement TV and run setup to scan for broadcast channels. It found, I dunno, a couple of dozen including the one channel we care about. 

But then I remember that new stuff has been showing up on the ROKU, so I go take a look. One of the new things is TV channels, and there are a bunch of them. ROKU displays a list and I spent a couple of minutes scrolling through it looking for Charge! 2.2. I must have scrolled through a hundred channels. I did not find Charge! 2.2 and I did not find the end. It might be there. Seems as though everybody and their mother that has a broadcast license is making the content available over the internet. I noticed half a dozen news channels from around the country.

There is only one coax cable running to the upstairs TV and no easy way to run ethernet, so now I'm wondering if I can send ethernet signals over the sane wire as the antennae signal. I mean, what frequency domains are we talking about here? Are they even in the same ballpark, or are they in different leagues, playing in different cities, on opposite sides of the country? I have no idea. 

Turns out you can run both broadcast and ethernet signals over the same coax and both signals come through loud and clear. Previous post about the Hitron adapters I used. I am only using one set of signals at a time, so it's possible if you were using both sets of signals simultaneously there might be some interference.

Those stupid screw-type coax connectors are a royal pain. If you hold the cable at the correct angle, the nut screws on easily, but get just a little off center and it jams up. You make or break half a dozen of these connections and your fingertips start complaining. It's basically ridiculous, but it's what I've got. There used to be quick connect coax connectors that just plugged in, no nut screwing required. I think those came with video games, but I don't have any of those connectors and all my coax cables have threaded connectors.

Our country has a zillion video channels all being broadcast simultaneously. YouTube has like a zillion channels, but each of those YouTube channels only put up new stuff intermittently, like once a week. But there are a zillion people watching those channels. How many channels are active at one time? Channels where we have someone broadcasting and somewhat actually watching? Is it a zillion times a zillion times a zillion? Or maybe the cube root of a zillion? If you had access to YouTube statistics you might be able to come up with a number. Of course, YouTube is only one player in the great social media landscape, and all of the traffic that involves an actual person is no doubt dwarfed by the tsunami of bits flowing between machines.

Meanwhile, over in Finland, somebody cut one of their undersea communications cables:

Undersea data cable between two NATO countries breaks 

Excerpt: 

“Disturbances occur from time to time and there can be various reasons,” Bergstrom added. “For example, they are susceptible to the weather and damage caused by shipping.”

Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (SUPO) told Yle that it was too early to assess the cause of the cable break, noting that around 200 undersea cable breaks happen around the world every year.

“The most common cause of cable breakage is human activity, such as fishing or anchoring,” a SUPO spokesperson said.

Two days later we get this report:

Danish Navy Hunts Down Chinese Ship Suspected Of 'Sabotaging' Baltic Sea Cables

From Michael Every:

So, if you want to worry, look at less glamorous but arguably more significant headlines that don't point to world war, per se, but to world disruption, and major world market volatility.

Official allegations of sabotage were made in the EU as: two of Finland's five nuclear plants had to be shut down; a key Norwegian oilfield was shut by a power outage; the support cable on a Finnish suspension bridge broke; and two key Baltic EU data cables were severed. The Chinese vessel Yi Peng has been flagged as a possible cable culprit and at time of writing was forcibly moored in Denmark. This is likely to prompt a strong Chinese diplomatic response; and perhaps an EU one if it proves a Chinese ship damaged key seafloor infrastructure (again: this also happened to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia in October 2023).

Broadcast Tower Strobe Lights

Broadcast Towers on Mt. Suappoa, Phoenix, Arizona

RobertaX tells an entertaining story about strobe lights and acorns.

Via Tam

TV & Internet

Repost: Corrected the garbled data in table of speed test results.

Samsung Frame TV

To put the finishing touch on our big remodeling project, we got a Frame TV. We hung it on the wall upstairs. It can be used to display artworks using very little power, at least that's my impression. It can also be used as a regular TV. My wife uses it to watch sporting events.

Ever since we started using it, games were constantly getting interrupted by the spinning dots which indicate that there has been some interruption in the signal. Very annoying, especially when it happens in the middle of a play.

I've been meaning to look into it, but it took a while to get all my ducks in a row. Today I got all the quackers lined up and ran my test.

Frame TV Driver

The Frame TV is funny. It has a separate control box that is connected to the display by a very thin cable, I think it might have a fiber optic component. It allows you to hide this box somewhere remote from the display, but it means running the cable through the wall. That's okay, major remodel entails tearing holes in walls, so another hole was no big deal. The box has a dozen different connection points. The only one we are interested in is the ethernet jack.

The quickest and easiest way to connect it was to run a 100 foot ethernet cable across the basement floor. That mostly works, but we keep getting the hiccups. So I thought I would try these ethernet-over-powerline adapators.

TP-Link Powerline Ethernet Adapter

They worked, but not any better than the cable. They only work with outlets that are connected to the same circuit breaker. Don't know what's up with that other than maybe their signal just isn't that strong.

Hitron Ethernet over Coax Adaptors

I had coax run all over the house when we built it, so I had coax near the Frame TV control box, but all the coax runs to one cupboard. There were labels on the cables at one time, but the few that are left are near illegible.

Sperry Wire Tracker

I borrowed this one from Osmany and I was quickly able to identify the coax I wanted. 

Now all I need is a computer to run the speed test. An earlier test using long (100 foot) cables was not encouraging, so I wanted to be closer to the control box. A laptop would be great, if it had an ethernet port, but none of our laptops have one, they're all wifi. I could have drug my Chromebox out there, but it had half a dozen cables tying it in place, but now I've replaced the Chromebox, so I can set it up out by the control box and run Google's speed test, so I did. Here's the results:

Cable	Upload	Download	Speedtest Rating
Internet over Powerline	24.6	39.7	Fast
50' Cable	91.7	91.1	Very Fast
Internet over Coax	149.5	244.2	Very Fast

Internet Speed Test - Megabits Per Second

The numbers are averages of three tests. The differences between successive tests were neglible. The coax adaptor is connected directly to the router. The other two were connected to a switch.

Will the coax cure the hiccups? We shall see, I've done enough for now.

New Samsung Galaxy Phone

Samsung Galaxy A03s
Showing both back and front

My phone died last week. I thought it was the battery so I bought a new one from Amazon for ten bucks. Then it really died. So I ordered a refurbished phone from Tracphone. I think it cost me $40. What a joyful experience.

USB Connectors
Click to embiggenate

Unlike Amazon they want $5 for overnight shipping but me being a cheapskate I told myself I can live for three days without my phone. Showed up yesterday and it needs to be activated and charged. Charging is going to take a while so let's get that started. Old charging cable doesn't work. New charging cable uses USB-c connectors on both ends. Root through my box of USB cables and they are all the old style, no new ones. Do I have anything that uses this new style connector? Hmm, how about the DOSS speaker? Ah ha! It does! Plug it in and it starts charging. Cool. Took like 12 hours to fully charge it up, but at least it works.

USB cable with C connector on one end and an A connector on the other

Check with my wife, she has all kinds of new fangled do-dads, does she have an extra cable? She does, but not of the correct flavor, so off to Amazon. I find a cable for $5. There goes the $5 I saved on shipping. I'm not going to get fast charging, but that's okay. I turn my phone off when I go to bed and plug in the charger cable, and since I'm not on my phone all friggin' day long like some people are, I should be fine.

Now for the activation. What fun. I dial up the website on my computer and click on Activate and it wants to send me a text message. That's not going to work, my old phone is dead as a doornail. No other option but the chat line, so I spend 10 or 15 minutes chatting (send a line, go play solitaire while waiting for a response, repeat) and eventually he tells me I have to find another phone and call some number. Borrow my wife's phone and call and I get a robocop who offers me options, none of which are helpful. So I start asking for an operator.

What word do you use to refer to a human? Real person? Operator? My wife says I should use 'representative', but I persisted in using 'operator' and eventually the robocop connected me to a real person. Makes me wonder how many words the robocop is able to recognize, or maybe it just gives up after a certain number of failed repetitions.

Anyway, I get connected to a real person who seems to have a handle on English, not perfect, but workable and we're going through the rigamarole of me proving I am me and he asks me for my phone's email. This flummoxed me. My phone is dead, and my phone doesn't have an email address, it has a phone number. What is he talking about? Eventually I realized he was asking about the email address connected to my Tracfone account. He sent me an email and I was able to confirm my existence and he turned on my phone.

Now we have to make sure my new phone works, so he asks me to make a phone call. That's a problem because I don't know anybody's phone numbers. So off to Google Contacts on my computer and look up some numbers, but all I get is voice mail. Everybody's busy. A couple minutes later somebody calls back, wants to know why I'm bothering them while they are at work. Tell him I'm testing my new phone. So I can make and receive phone calls. At least to one person.

Now the operator / representative / real person wants to know if I can get data. That means either audio or video, so let's pull up YouTube. Of course, everything on this phone is slightly different. It's got all the same stuff, but it's all in new places and everything works slightly differently, but eventually I get there and I've got a video playing so I think we're good.

My main uses for my phone are phone calls, text messages, and Google Maps, and those all seem to work. Since I have started using a smartphone I have found a couple other things that are useful:

• YouTube Music
• Bluetooth
• Voice to text
• Wifi

YouTube Music is not something you just use, seems you have to install the program (app in newspeak). Wandered around for a while looking for it but eventually found it and it and we're good. I haven't tried Bluetooth or Wifi yet. I'll get to it.

Voice to text works, though there is a new feature that evidently allows you to send voice recordings via the text messaging system. Some people thrive on noise, I ain't one of 'em. To get to Voice to text you have to tap on the OTHER microphone icon. It works, but when I say 'question mark' it puts in the the words 'question mark' in the message. My old phone but the question mark symbol (?). Bah, double bah and humbug. Now I gotta figure out how to change that.

Poking around on the net (using MY COMPUTER, I don't use my phone for anything except the bare essentials) I found this page:

Voice-to-text service selection

Bigger versions of the last two screens:

Changed to Google Voice Typing and now I can insert punctuation by naming the character.

Still haven't tried the camera.

Exploding Pagers

Not much new in the news this morning. Oh wait, what's this? Exploding pagers:

• AlJazeera: Hezbollah members among hundreds wounded as pagers explode in Lebanon
• ZeroHedge: Hezbollah's '9/11': Iranian Ambassador Among 1,000+ Wounded After Israel Remotely Detonates Pagers

No real information on how it was done. Did someone insert an explosive into all these pagers? Or did some whiz kid figure out how to put a pager in melt down mode that somehow caused the lithium battery to explode? I'm not sure you can make a battery explode simply by messing with the controlling program, but they do pack a lot of energy in a small package, and lithium batteries can be dangerous. So, maybe.

The news reports imply that someone (Israel) managed to infiltrate the pager distribution channel, and went in and loaded explosives in a bunch of pagers. The bad guys switched to pagers only recently, and this was only done when they figured out that someone (Israel) was listening to their phone calls. I wouldn't wonder if Israel had all those pagers prepped and were just waiting for the bad guy's leader to order the switch to pagers. The trigger? Israel leaked the idea that they were listening to Hamas' and Hezbollah's phone calls.

Adventures in Satellite Communications

Downloading Images From US Military Satellites
saveitforparts

Satellite stuff seems to use an inordinate number of acronyms but once you have become familiar with them they are just like the jargon mechanics or electricians or any technical occupation uses. Some of the equipment is very fancy, but some of it is unbelievably simple and crude. Funny business all around.

Via a comment by Tactius on an earlier post.

Soviet Era Communications Satellites

The Massive Molniya Satellites - How The Soviet Union Solved Satellite Communications Their Own Way.
Scott Manley

It's always interesting to see what the Russians are, or were, doing. Previous post about Russian spy satellites.

More No Shovel

How we change out an electric utility pole
Coastal Electric Cooperative

Uniberp reports from central Michigan:

They had to replace the power pole at this end of my private drive. It was loose and ready to fall.
The power company showed up with 2 huge trucks and 6-7 guys.
They augured a hole about 10 feet away from the old pole after marking the gas line, nowhere near it.
I talked to the guy for a minute about the unused cable tv line but didn't think to mention the underground phone/DSL line.
They didn't check.
Again, 6-7 guys.
Dropped in the pole, moved all the service, left.
No internet.
ATT came out and discovered Comed had cut the old line, ran a 300 foot temporary line on the surface with orange markers every 15 feet.
It stayed that way for about 2 weeks.
A guy shows up with a ditchwitch with a cable plow, did that in about 1 hour.
3-4 days later ATT shows up again and does the connect.
That must have cost Com-ed $1000. 

Ditch Witch RT115 Plowing Fiber Optic Cable
DitchWitchCarolinas

Starship Reentry

Wow! Watch SpaceX Starship re-enter Earth's atmosphere in these incredible views
VideoFromSpace

This is from the last test flight of the SpaceX Starship which happened two months ago. Visible signs of heating don't show up until after the three minute mark. Up till then we just see the upper surfaces of clouds flying by a hundred miles below us. Once the heating starts we get another two minutes of it getting more intense until the signal is lost. After that we just get noise and filler.

I was blown away when I saw this the first time - it's like the first time this has every been recorded by a camera. Before this it was all just theoretical. Oh, there were the rocket scientists mathematical explanations and evidence of extreme heating after the fact, but for all we know it could have been dragons roasting what they thought were dragon sized marshmallows. I know, not likely, but you know, photos or it didn't happen. So now we have photos and I don't see any dragons.

Besides getting video of reentry heating we were getting it live because of the Starlink Satellites. Because they launch them is box lot quantities I was thinking they were itty bitty little things, but they aren't. Each one weighs like 600 pounds and carries a solar panel array that expands to 100 feet. I'm going to take a closer look at these things one of these days.

The Silicon Graybeard tells us SpaceX is getting ready to make another test flight real soon now. So far they seem to be making progress, no catastrophic failures that have made them think they need to go back and rethink their plan.

I find jibber jabber annoying, but YouTube has a mute button. The last couple of minutes of the video they display a couple heat shield tiles. These are the same kind of things that fell off of the Space Shuttle Columbia and caused it to disintegrate on reentry back in 2003. Hopefully the glue guys have got a better glue now.

Previous posts about reentry here.

Dial Up Modem

Dial Up Modem Handshake Sound - Spectrogram
Scotty H

2600.network

2600.network is a public service for dial-up users. It's purpose is to allow users of old, vintage, and outdated hardware to dial in with real modems to real systems.

Via Detroit Steve

 

Starlink

Starlink Satellites

Go Elon, go:

SpaceX Starlink

Starlink is the world’s most advanced satellite internet constellation, beaming terabytes per second to the most remote parts of Earth. Made possible by the advent of reusable rocketry, Starlink marks the beginning of a new age of orbital technology.

In the Starlink constellation, there are 5,601 orbiting satellites.

The links go to a page that shows the satellites in motion. With so many satellites in orbit, it's hard to believe that they are not colliding with each other all the time. Of course, space is a big place. Even if all of the starlink satellites were all following the same orbital path, they would still be four miles apart.

Rotary Cellphone

A Rotary Cellphone Story
Justine Haupt

This is just nuts. It's great, but it's nuts.

DSOC - Deep Space Optical Communication

Testing Space Lasers for Deep Space Optical Communications (Mission Overview)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Silicon Graybeard reports on the Psyche mission. Laser communications are a staple of Science Fiction stories (sometimes referred to as tight beam communications). Radios broadcast, which means those signals can be picked up by anyone with a receiver. Microwaves are a little better, but the beam tends to spread out a bit as it goes. Laser beams spread out more slowly meaning the enemy has less chance of intercepting your communications. Lasers also give you higher data rates, as evidenced by a zillion people all connected to the same fiber optic cable, all watching different Netflix movies.

Computer Security

U.S. Cyber Trust Mark

Borepatch has a post up about some new government standards for the Internet-Of-Things (IOT). His post inspired Landroll to comment:

Ah yes! Excellent. Just had a valuable lesson on the Internet of Things. Decided to quit HP Instant Ink program. Printer is now locked up with ink cartridge carrier in home position. Can not get old ink cartridge out to install new HP cartridge. PO'd much? why yes. Glad you asked.

Also bestirred me enough to comment: 

Typical. Industry charges on with their haphazard methods of building new widgets, blindly oblivious to the side-effects their new whiz bang gizmos create. This goes on until enough people get fed up and start making a fuss. Eventually the government gets involved and we get a new bureaucracy and a big fricking pile of new regulations. Well, what you gonna do? That's modern life in the USA.

I've had an idea kicking around for awhile that maybe what we need are some sealed modules for communication, modules that were tested and 'certified' to be secure. Problem is that people are very good at counterfeiting, so how would you know whether the module you hold in your hand is legit or not? Well, where did you get it? And do you trust them? It all comes down to personal trust.

Paying Bills

Gold

I get my internet connection from Ziply Fiber. I consider the price to be fairly reasonable - forty odd dollars a month. I got a notice this week that if I sign up for paperless billing they would knock $10 off my monthly bill. Cool, I can go for that. Normally I am adverse to having people suck money out of my checking account, but that's how I pay all my utility bills, so what's more piglet at the trough?

Got signed up for that, now I need to cancel the automatic payments I have set up at my bank. Point and click and scroll. I can find everything except how to cancel this automatic payment. I finally call my daughter and she points and clicks and in two seconds she has found it and boom! It's canceled.

I suspect businesses that run active websites keep changing things because they need to have people on hand to keep an eye on things, and if they don't have something for them to do they are liable to get bored and they might start looking for trouble, and that's the last thing we want. So every six weeks they revise the web site and anybody who was used to the old way gets to spend time finding their way around the new website.

I also got a refund check from my insurance company for $1.25. That's one dollar and twenty-five cents. I almost threw it in the trash, but then I realized that it probably cost the insurance company ten dollars to mail that check to me, so now I feel obligated to deposit it and close the circle. So I photographed the check using the camera in my phone, pressed the Share button, selected upload to Google Photos. Go to my computer, open Google Photos, open the images and crop them. Check the image size, they are like four mega pixels. Check with my bank, maximum image size is two MP. Cannot rescale them using Photos, but I can using the Chromebox imaged editor, so I download them, rescale them and upload them to the bank. The amount of time I spent doing this probably matches the ten dollars the insurance company spent so the scales are balanced and karma is preserved. 

I probably could have done all this from my phone, but there are only a few things I am comfortable doing with my phone, and anything having to do with money is not one of them. I also like having buttons that I can push. Touchscreens are amazing, but half the time it gets it wrong and then I have to spend extra time and concentration correcting it. Give me a $10 keyboard and a 20 inch display any day.

Cyber Warfare

East Asia Undersea Communication Cables

Zerohedge reports on what could be a more physical kind of Cyber Warfare:

According to Taiwanese authorities, on Feb. 2, a Chinese fishing boat damaged an undersea communications cable that connects Taiwan's main island to Matsu Islands. About one week later, a Chinese cargo ship severed another cable. 

Located approximately 30 miles off the coast of China, the tiny island of Dongyin has quickly established a backup communication system, as reported by the WSJ. The new system uses a high-powered microwave radio to transmit data to Taipei. WSJ described the disruption as a "wartime scenario" and "in a potential preview of a Chinese attack." 

Matsu Islands

Dogyin is one of the Matsu islands. The Matsu islands are tiny and are five to ten miles from the coast of Red China. Taiwan is more like 100 miles from the coast of the mainland.

Here is another post about the proximity of the two Chinas and air attacks.

Submarine Cables:

• Telegeography Submarine Cable Map
• Surfacing
• Post: Cocos Islands
• Post: Surfacing