The Daily Parker

We have gloomy, misty weather today, keeping us mostly inside. Cassie has let me know how bored she is, so in the next few minutes we'll brave the spitting fog and see if anyone else has made it to the dog park.

Meanwhile:

• As today is May the Fourth (be with you), NPR reminded us of the time they produced a radio drama based on "A New Hope."
• It turns out, the FBI never actually got around to warning Rudy Giuliani that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign.
• The US Trustee, the Department of Justice official charged with enforcing bankruptcy laws, has told the court overseeing the National Rifle Administration's bankruptcy that the US Government opposes the organization's petition, instead arguing that NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre's mismanagement brought the NRA to its current state of affairs.
• Via Bruce Schneier, German security researchers successfully took over the infotainment system in a parked Tesla using a drone.
• David Frum says that "China is a paper dragon."

All right, off to the damp dog park.

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth:

• The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet.
• Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100.
• Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA "the Met") to provide HPE Cray EX supercomputers capable of 60 petaflops and storing 4 exabytes of data.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has begun running brand-new, Chicago-built rail cars on the Blue Line, which runs from O'Hare Airport through the Loop and out to Oak Park.
• Guthries Tavern, a Chicago institution since the 1930s that closed because of the pandemic, will reopen under new ownership.
• Are you feeling blah in the late-stage pandemic? You could be languishing.
• Via Bruce Schneier, the New Yorker explains how North Korea has created an army of cyber thieves.

Finally, it looks like I'll have some really cool news to share about my own software in just a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

The United States Postal Service has a surveillance program that tracks social media posts for law enforcement, and no one can say why:

The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”

When contacted by Yahoo News, civil liberties experts expressed alarm at the post office’s surveillance program. “It’s a mystery,” said University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, whom President Barack Obama appointed to review the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks. “I don’t understand why the government would go to the Postal Service for examining the internet for security issues.”

I mean, scraping social media takes only a modicum of technical skills. In the last year I've written software that can scan Twitter and run detailed sentiment analysis on keyword-based searches. But I'm not a government agency with arrest powers. Or, you know, a constitutional mandate to deliver the mail.

Weird.

Today's end-of-workweek stories:

• National Geographic details who needs to wear a mask outside, and who doesn't.
• New Yorker reviews a documentary on WeWork and the "decade of delusion" around it.
• Someone broke into the PHP master Git server and tried to put a backdoor in the most ubiquitous Web platform out there.

Finally, today is the 157th anniversary of the surrender of the traitors and the end of the white rebellion in America. (Sounds different these days, doesn't it?)

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud:

Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline.

The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the website DownDetector which showed that reports began flooding in at around 5 p.m. ET. It says it received thousands of notices from Xbox Live, Teams and Office users.

Microsoft 365’s Twitter status account posted another update at 6.35 p.m. ET saying that traffic was being rerouted to resilient DNS capabilities and that it was already “seeing an improvement in service availability.”

Today, Microsoft reported as a preliminary root cause "We are continuing to investigate the underlying cause for the DNS outage but we have observed that Microsoft DNS servers saw a spike in DNS traffic." In other words, it looks like they suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on their internal name servers. The final analysis will come out next Thursday.

This outage was like the familiar "collective amnesia" trope in sci-fi where suddenly none of the characters recognizes any of the others, though they retain their normal personalities and abilities. (See, e.g., Dollhouse and Buffy. Joss Whedon lurves this trope.) For example, The Daily Parker was still running, but no one could get to it because the mapping from www.thedailparker.com to the Microsoft App Service hosting it has to go through Microsoft's internal name servers.

I wonder if this was a DDOS attack from inside the house?

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter:

• US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate.
• Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy.
• Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake Michigan have gotten warmer over the past few decades, which is probably a bad thing.
• Oh, and summers have gotten longer too, and the rate of them getting longer is accelerating. 
• Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich takes us inside an Azure Data Center.
• The last-ever Airbus A380—one of only 251 built since the first one in 2007—has rolled off the assembly line in Toulouse, France.
• Software defects and $1,100-an-hour consulting fees may be keeping prisoners in Arizona from release on time.
• Usability expert Jakob Nielsen reviews how the NN Group created their iconic usability heuristics posters 26 years ago.
• Author John Scalzi reviews Zack Snyder's Justice League, a movie I watched over two days this week with about the same reactions as Scalzi's.

And if you still haven't seen our spring concert, you still can. Don't miss it!

I'm shaking my head at email service provider Postmark, who four weeks ago announced they would be phasing out support for TLS 1.0 (a network security protocol). I understood this when they announced it in February, 60 days ahead of their cutover to TLS 1.2, but didn't think it applied to anything of mine. This morning they sent a more focused email saying, "you're getting this email because we can see that this applies to you." Panic ensues.

Why panic? Because almost everything I've developed in the last 12 years depends on Postmark for email messaging, and the way they worded their notice, it seemed like all of those apps will fail on April 20th. And the only documentation they supplied relevant to me (and anyone else in the Microsoft universe) was a set of instructions on how to test TLS 1.2 support, not whether this would be a breaking change.

I immediately contacted their support group and said, as nicely as I can, "WTF dudes?" To which they replied, "oh yeah, bummer, dude." So I sent a lengthier reply just now and started digging into their source code. It turns out they're using an out-of-the-box Microsoft component that should transparently switch from TLS 1.0 to TLS 1.2 if asked to do so. I believe, therefore, the affected applications will be fine. In fact, fixing the problem may only require a simple, non-invasive change to Microsoft Azure settings for the affected applications. But I don't know that for sure. And I'm hoping their actual development team will respond with "yeah, no probs, dude, you're cool."

My other headache is literal, from staring at too many screens. So I'll do something else in a moment.

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955.

In other news:

• One chart shows the difference between the XPOTUS's 2017 tax cut for rich people and President Biden's pandemic-relief bill, which he will sign into law tomorrow.
• Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette tape, died at the age of 94.
• A survey of Windows computers found that 26% of them have not applied the WannaCry patch after four years of knowing about it.
• Nicholas Weaver explains the "Great Email Robbery" that will probably happen later this week. Great.

And now that I've finally gotten a .NET 5 application to deploy onto a Microsoft Azure Functions App, I will take a well-earned walk.

These are just some of the things I read at lunch today:

• Ezra Klein looks at how a $1.9 trillion proposal got through the US Senate and concludes the body has become "a Dadaist nightmare."
• Several groups of ice fishermen, 66 in total, found themselves drifting into Green Bay (the bay, not the city) yesterday, when the ice floe they were fishing on broke away from the shore ice. Given that Lake Michigan has one of the smallest ice covers in years right now, this seems predictable and tragic.
• Writing in the Washington Post, Bruce Schneier laments that government security agencies have to customize President Biden's Peloton stationary bicycle to make it safe to use in the White House—not because of the effort involved to keep the president safe, but because very few people will have a Peloton with that level of security.
• The resident Orca population in the Salish Sea between British Columbia and Washington has immigration issues and declining standards of living. (So far, none of them has joined the Proud Whales.)

Finally, McSweeney's translates US Representative Marjorie Green's (R-GA) non-apology for being a racist whacko into simpler terms.

Aditya Singh never left O'Hare after arriving on October 19th:

Singh, 36, lived in the secure area with access to terminals, shops and food at O’Hare International Airport until his arrest Saturday after two United Airlines employees asked to see his identification, prosecutors said. He showed them an airport ID badge that an operations manager had reported missing on Oct. 26.

Police said Singh told them that the coronavirus pandemic left him too afraid to fly and so he instead remained in the airport, often relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food.

Singh completed a master’s program at Oklahoma State University and had been living since summer 2019 in Orange, California, southeast of Los Angeles, in the home of Carl Jones, who said he offered Singh a place to live in exchange for helping him care for his elderly father and other odd jobs.

Jones told the Tribune that Singh’s visa was expiring, so he planned in October to return to India, where his mother lives. Jones described Singh as a “very gentle soul” who often volunteered helping the homeless. The two last spoke Oct. 19 when, Jones said, Singh confirmed he had arrived safely in Chicago and was on his way to India.

Singh faces two felony charges, but I can't imagine a jury sending him to jail.