The Daily Parker

The Post has more details about the pagers that the Mossad blew up, injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists:

As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light.

The idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, according to the Israeli, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials familiar with the events. Parts of the plan began falling into place more than a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that put the region on a path to war. It was a time of relative quiet on Israel’s war-scarred northern border with Lebanon.

Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants. Over time, Hezbollah leaders learned to worry about the group’s vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and hacking, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into Israeli-controlled eavesdropping and tracking devices.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, was not informed of the booby-trapped pagers or the internal debate over whether to trigger them, U.S. officials said.

Via Bruce Schneier, security researcher Bunnie Huang does not think this was a good idea in the long run:

The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it. The current discourse around the potential reach of such explosive devices is clouded by the assumption that it’s technically difficult to implement and thus unlikely to find its way to our front door.

I would posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable: no visual inspection can see it, and no surface analytical method can detect it. I don’t know off-hand of a low-cost, high-throughput X-ray method that could detect it. A high-end CT machine could pick out the PETN layer, but it’d cost around a million dollars for one machine and scan times are around a half hour – not practical for i.e. airport security or high throughput customs screening.

now that I’ve seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this – a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs, to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday (if chemical suppliers can moonlight in illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?). Bottom line is: we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime, as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.

I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.

Excuse me while I shove my phone across the desk...just a bit farther away...

The extreme-right-wing US Supreme Court begins a new term today, which we can all expect to continue the trends they have been on for the last 30 years. All we need is a razor-thin margin in one or two swing states on the 5th, and then, as George HW Bush said once, "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Now it's off to the races!"

Meanwhile:

• A new book argues that the "originalism" practiced by many Republican judges, like Justices Alito and Thomas, has absolutely no basis in historical fact. But we knew that already.
• Josh Marshall wants everyone to calm down about the Harris campaign: "[Y]ou thinking she’s screwing up or stalling or whatever, if you are, is probably your angst talking more than some real analysis of what’s happening in the campaign."
• Republican-leaning columnist Matt Bai thinks Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) made a strategic error by choosing to run for the US Senate as a Republican instead of as an independent.
• Consumer DNA analysis company 23andMe doesn't seem to have a plan for what to do with my personal data if they get into trouble or shut down.
• Kate Kaplan of the Nielsen-Norman Group has some excellent advice about iconography in software.

Finally, Cloudflare announced late last week that it blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history. The attack, whose packets came mainly from Russia, peaked at 3.8 Tbps, beating the previous record of 3.47 Tbps against a Microsoft Azure customer.

Because I had a busy weekend, I had quite a full inbox this morning. After deleting the 85% of it that came from the Democratic Party and the Harris-Walz campaign (guys, you've already got my vote, FFS), I still had quite a few items of interest:

• Michael Tomasky reminds everyone: the XPOTUS is an evil buffoon, not an evil genius.
• Yesterday that same evil buffoon mooted a "Purge"-like day for the police to rough everyone up a bit.
• Contra most New York Times articles this election cycle, the Post's Jennifer Rubin lays out Kamala Harris's actual policy proposals.
• The Tribune's Laura Washington asks the same question I've asked several times: why is Dorval Carter still the CTA president?
• Chicago will elect half its school board for the first time in November, but other than a few articles in Block Club, no one seems to care.
• Over 100,000 Verizon customers lost service across the country today; no one knows why yet.
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology has finally proposed common-sense password recommendations that I hope someone in my company's Global Corporate Services IT department actually reads.
• Because of climate change, Switzerland and Italy have to redraw part of their shared border in the Alps.

Finally, astronomers have found a rocky, Earth-sized planet orbiting a dying main-sequence white dwarf star, seemingly having survived the star's expansion during its red-giant phase. This suggests that our planet may last until the end of time itself. Life on Earth probably won't last more than a billion more years, but that's someone else's problem.

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T.

I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may even read that before turning my Surface off.

Next stop: Chicago, home, and dog.

A few weeks ago I planned a PTO day to take a 25 km walk tomorrow along the North Branch Trail with pizza at the end. (I'll do my annual marathon walk in October.) Sadly, the weather forecast bodes against it, with scattered thunderstorms and dewpoints over 22°C. But, since I've already got tomorrow off, and I have a solid PTO bank right now, I'll still take the day away from the office. And autumn begins Sunday.

Good thing, too, because the articles piled up this morning, and I haven't had time to finish yesterday's:

• Ruth Marcus indicts the Roberts court for its idiotic presidential immunity ruling, and how that required prosecutor Jack Smith to contort the new charges against the XPOTUS.
• Oh, goody: Mayor Brandon Johnson's 2025 budget for the City of Chicago will have nearly a $1 billion deficit.
• Despite having spent billions of euro to upgrade the scanners at major European airports, the EU will (temporarily) go back to a 100-mL limit for carry-on liquids on Sunday.
• Timothy Noah celebrates the mediocrity of late August.

Finally, Washington Post reporter Christine Mi spent 80 hours crossing the US on Amtrak this summer. I am envious. Also sad, because the equivalent trip in Europe would have taken less than half the time on newer rolling stock, and not burned a quarter of the Diesel.

The forecast still predicts today will be the hottest day of the year. Last night at IDTWHQ the temperature got all the way down to 26.2°C right before sunrise. We have a heat advisory until 10pm, by which time the thunderstorms should have arrived. Good thing Cassie and I got a bit of extra time on our walk to day camp this morning.

Elsewhere in the world:

• The Fifth Circuit has ruled that broad, geofenced searches violate the 4th Amendment, contradicting the Fourth Circuit, and setting up a likely Supreme Court ruling next session.
• A cyberattack shut down multiple computer systems at Sea-Tac Airport shortly after I left on Saturday.
• New DNA and fossil evidence has answered some questions about how wolves evolved into dogs.
• We can all thank Michael Reese Hutchinson for patenting the first electric car horn 110 years ago, ushering in a new era of unwanted street noise in cities that continues to this day.

Finally, Garmin has released its latest fitness watch that doubles as a freaking Dick Tracy wrist phone. I mean, first, how cool is that? And second, how come it took 90 years after Dick Tracy got one?

The US election is 98 days away, and August starts Thursday. Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future...

And yet, the ever-present Now keeps us here:

• Both Paul Krugman and Molly White are baffled that the XPOTUS is making cryptocurrency a campaign issue, when almost none of their voters understands the first thing about it. (Hint: their biggest tech-bro donors care about it a lot.)
• James Fallows introduces us to Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D).
• Chuck Marohn shakes his head sadly at the installation of an ice machine on a lot previously occupied by a restaurant in Brainerd, Minn. It's an example of how the suburban car-oriented development pattern has made it impossible for kids to be kids.
• New research finds there are six different kinds of depression rooted in which parts of the brain are disrupted. Great.

Finally, Bruce Schneier warns that automobile companies and their suppliers have many disincentives to providing software updates for the entire lifetime of their products. Microsoft stops supporting Windows versions after just a few years, while cars live for decades.

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.)
• Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris.
• John Scalzi received a press release from the Harris campaign that he says demonstrates how "it's harder to stab when you're being punched in the face."
• David Frum sees President Biden's retirement as making himself "a modern Cincinnatus."
• Alex Shephard wonders if "JD Vance [is] the worst Vice Presidential pick ever?" (Vance "is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics.")
• Dana Milbank suggests (tongue in cheek) that the XPOTUS just "needs a mulligan:" "Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion."
• George Will, not tongue-in-cheek, warned that if Democrats re-take the Senate, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, oh dearie dearie me! Because chucking something that gives 20% of the US population a veto over the other 80% would mean Republicans would have to drum up a majority of the states to do something instead of just a coalition of the small ones.
• If you have a computer built before 2024 by one of the major manufacturers, your Secure Boot might not be secure. If you want to find out whether your system is secure, open up PowerShell and run this command: [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI PK).bytes) -match "DO NOT TRUST|DO NOT SHIP")

Finally, Journalist Lewis H Lapham has died, aged 89. He edited Harper's during the time that I read it regularly, and no coincidence that I dropped it shortly after he did. I found his work engaging and sometimes enraging, but always smart. He will be missed.

Network security company CrowdStrike pushed a minor update to its Falcon Sensor product around 11pm Chicago time yesterday that managed to take down almost every virtual machine in Microsoft's Azure cloud:

Cascading technology errors stranded airline passengers around the world, halted hospital surgeries and crippled office workers’ computers on Friday in one of the most disruptive computer outages in years, highlighting how much of the world relies on potentially error-prone software from a handful of companies.

Technology experts said the meltdowns appeared to stem mostly from an error in a software update from CrowdStrike, whose technology is commonly used by businesses to defend against cyberattacks.

That defect affected computers that use Microsoft’s Windows, which powers hundreds of millions of personal computers and many back-end systems for airlines, digital payment, emergency services call centers and much more.

[B]ecause CrowdStrike’s digital protections are considered essential, its technology is given priority access on many computer systems. If something goes wrong with CrowdStrike software, that privileged access can grind computers to a halt.

CrowdStrike admitted that their software caused the problem:

• Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.
• Windows hosts which have not been impacted do not require any action as the problematic channel file has been reverted.
• Windows hosts which are brought online after 0527 UTC will also not be impacted
• Hosts running Windows 7/2008 R2 are not impacted
• This issue is not impacting Mac- or Linux-based hosts
• Channel file "C-00000291*.sys" with timestamp of 0527 UTC or later is the reverted (good) version.
• Channel file "C-00000291*.sys" with timestamp of 0409 UTC is the problematic version.

Don't worry, you probably don't have CrowdStrike software on your PC at home; but you probably do log into your Windows PC through Microsoft Active Directory, which runs on virtual machines in the Azure cloud that depend on Falcon Sensor.

This time, the random person in Nebraska turned out to be a multimillion-dollar corporation in Austin, Texas. Though, I suspect, several random people in Texas are now looking for new jobs.

Time for another reminder. If you see something on social media that:

• seems to confirm something you already believed about the "other side,"
• comes from someone claiming to have inside knowledge, and
• makes you angry

...then it's almost certainly fake*.

The Economist prominently featured a story on the onslaught of conspiracy theories today, as did NPR. Will those stories help? Probably not. After all, "men willingly believe what they want," as Julius Caesar once (may have) said. But let's review anyway.

The FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police aren't going to leak information about Saturday's shooting on Facebook. They're going to make sure they have it right, then hold a press conference, where journalists from real news organizations will ask them questions and report what they said. I can't believe people have trouble understanding this. "Officer Krupke" was posting bullshit to TikTok from an industrial park outside Minsk on Sunday morning, not hearing the latest secrets about the investigation from his higher-ups at the incident response center outside Pittsburgh. And you almost certainly know that, but you reposted the meme anyway.

What we do know about Saturday makes the event no less horrible but a lot less surprising. All of the public evidence points to a pathetic post-teen white incel with too-easy access to near-military-grade weapons deciding to become famous in the worst possible way. It was similar to almost every other time someone has shot at a US president throughout history. This pathetic boy will be remembered in the long list of similar nutters that includes Hinckley, Fromme, Schrank, Oswald, Guiteau, Booth, Czolgosz, Zangara, and the dozens who never got the chance because the USSS or their local cops got to them in time.

The worst part about Saturday isn't its effect on the election or that the convicted-felon XPOTUS got nicked in the ear; it's that two people died, and absent the immediate actions of the best-equipped, best-trained armed guards in the history of the world, many more would have. Two more Americans are dead because a trade group has convinced a huge swath of the country—and an overwhelming percentage of those at Saturday's rally—that buying their member-organizations' products is a God-given right.

Because of those policies, promoted by the Republican Party and enshrined in Pennsylvania law, this postpubescent hobgoblin obtained a military-style rifle, loaded it, and got it to within 150 meters of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, all completely legally. Until he pointed the rifle at the XPOTUS, he hadn't committed a crime.

In fact, as Josh Marshall laments, this wasn't much different than a school shooting. He makes good points, including that it doesn't really matter what flavor of mass shooting it was. He also notices that Republicans office-holders were the first to politicize the event. Well, of course they were, because otherwise someone might connect their rhetoric and their policies with the increased frequency of shootings.

I don't think this event will move the needle on the election, not one little bit. We're too entrenched in our candidates. That said, I fully expect the next four days in Milwaukee to showcase exactly how deranged the rapist XPOTUS is—but no one will change his mind because of it. Tonight, in fact, we get to find out who he's picked to be his panegyrist running mate, and we can all feel a little sorry for that person when he or she gets kicked to the curb in a year or two. (Update: it's US Senator JD Vance (R-OH), one of the only people in US politics who is possibly less genuine than the XPOTUS.)

The next 113 days will suck. Probably the two months after that will suck, too. And there's a real possibility that the XPOTUS could win, making the next few years after suck as well, at least until 78 years of Big Macs and rapidly-advancing frontotemporal dementia catch up to him.

But enough with the misinformation. Seriously.

* Unless it's the New York Times telling you that a corrupt Federal judge dismissed a criminal case against an unrepentant felon on a theory so batshit crazy that not even Sam Alito signed on to it when he had the chance. That actually happened this morning.