The Daily Parker

Tom Scott explains why Denmark's cell phones do not display the legal time in the country:

In an earlier video, he explains the hell of writing time zone software. (I've already done this, and it works pretty well.)

I dropped off my completed ballot this afternoon, so if Joe Biden turns out to be the devil made flesh, I can't change my vote.

Tonight, the president and Joe Biden will have competing, concurrent town halls instead of debating each other, mainly because the president is an infant. The Daily Parker will not live-blog either one. Instead, I'll whip up a stir-fry and read something.

In other news:

• Chris Christie continues the tradition of Republican politicians not understanding something until it happens to them directly by imploring people to wear masks now that he's out of a week-long stint in the ICU.
• Former White House Counsel Bob Bauer and Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith suggest six ways to protect the rule of law once the president leaves office. Separately, University of Chicago law professor Ryan Doerfler explains how to "make the Supreme Court safe for democracy."
• TNR's David Daley takes us through the "Republican plot for permanent minority rule."
• Illinois hit a record number (4,015) of confirmed Covid-19 cases today.
• We don't actually have to have a surge of Covid-19 cases; we can stop it.
• Google explains how their popular times and live busyness information feature works.
• Metra has sued Union Pacific for lost ticket revenue as their contract lurches toward an end.

Finally, a pie-wedge-shaped house in Deerfield, Ill., is now on Airbnb for $113 a night. Enjoy.

From Andrew Marantz at The New Yorker:

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In [former UK Liberal Democratic Party leader Nick] Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.

“It’s an open secret,” Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist for the company, recently wrote, “that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.” Zhang left Facebook in September. Before she did, she posted a scathing memo on Workplace. In the memo, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, she alleged that she had witnessed “multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales”; in some cases, however, “we simply didn’t care enough to stop them.” She suggested that this was because the abuses were occurring in countries that American news outlets were unlikely to cover.

Nothing surprising in the article, but Marantz adds a lot more detail than most people have realized.

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it:

• Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this.
• Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer."
• Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures.
• Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"
• Ross Douthat wonders "how many lives would a more normal president have saved?"
• A pro-president boat parade on Lake Travis, Texas, caused so much wake that several of the boats sank.
• Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois and therefore the one most likely to lose some money that he can never possibly spend, has donated $20 million to defeating the graduated income tax proposal in the state.
• Los Angeles has selected a new streetlight design, which is pretty cool.
• A bunch of 12-year-olds have discovered that the Edgenuity learning platform has easily-defeated grading algorithms.
• David Benioff and DB Weiss will adapt Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem for Netflix.

Finally, The Smithsonian describes how Greg Priore managed to steal priceless documents from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because he was in charge of security for those items.

This is my 55th post this month, and the fifth month in a row in which I've posted over 50 times. That brings my 12-month total to 581, the third record in a row and the fifth record this year. I guess Covid-19 has been good for something.

Here's what I'm reading today:

• Authorities in Tampa have charged 17-year-old Graham Clark with masterminding last month's massive Twitter hack.
• The Atlantic's David Graham says the president is trying to destroy the election's legitimacy.
• George Will points to the relationship between authoritarianism and emotion.
• Two large restaurant groups in Chicago and 40 smaller restaurants have sued 19 insurance companies for not paying claims related to state-ordered closings.
• The New Yorker's Masha Gessen believes "Homeland Security was destined to become a secret police force."
• New Republic's Jake Bittle bemoans "the Right's increasingly unhinged fight against Black Lives Matter."

I'm excited to add a notch on the Brews and Choos project in a few hours. Check back tomorrow.

First: the difference between how Garmin handled a global outage that lasted 5 days, and how SendGrid managed one that lasted 5 hours. SendGrid handles billions of emails per day, including for Microsoft and other massive companies. So SendGrid going down didn't inconvenience a few athletes and pilots; it crippled Fortune-500 companies' marketing departments. (And it delayed a scheduled release on my own team.)

Within about an hour of their outage, SendGrid created an incident response page to which they posted updates every half-hour. They clearly stated what was going on and how they were trying to fix it, even as they were discovering for themselves what had happened:

Contrast that with Garmin, who still haven't really explained what happened or why it took so long to resolve the outage. (They finally declared their remediation "complete" yesterday, almost 6 days after the outage started.)

Second: the difference between how Germany (and other rich countries) have handled Covid-19 and how we have. Josh Marshall looked into the numbers:

The head of Germany’s equivalent of the CDC told reporters today that he’s “very concerned” about the rising case numbers in the country and accuses Germans of becoming “negligent” in their adherence to mitigation measures. He has good reason to be concerned.

Today Germany reported 638 new cases of COVID. That comes out to .76 cases per 100,000 residents. Let’s round that up to 1 new case per 100,000 for good measure. (The need for round numbers will become clear.)

Today New York State had 3 cases per 100,000. So Germany is concerned by 1/3 the number of cases as we have in New York state, a state which is probably controlling the disease as well as any other state in the country.

Florida today had 43 cases per 100,000. Florida’s outbreak is more than forty-three times the size relative to population.

To state the point baldly, Germany is very concerned about a rise in cases that would still be dramatically better than any other part of the United States. They’re ramping up border restrictions to get things back under control and chiding the population to redouble its collective efforts.

[S]eeing this as, "well, look, everyone’s having problems." Or "we’re not the only ones having new outbreaks" or "we can’t go back to shutdowns…" ... only captures how Americans are having a hard time grappling with just how many universes away we are from what is happening in other countries which are comparably affluent, industrialized and able to mount an effective response.

We’re failing that badly.

Anthony Fauci was on BBC just now, struggling not to call the president out on his criminal negligence. Only 98 days until we can vote the bastard out.

Even as Garmin picks up the pieces from what they now admit was a massive ransomware attack, bulk email provider SendGrid has gone down spectacularly.

I use SendGrid, as does my company, for status emails and such.

Here's my problem, though: I have a code update to put out that specifically targets a bug in SendGrid's .NET library that they claim to have fixed. My automated build pipelines won't release new code unless all the unit tests pass. Right now, the SendGrid tests fail sporadically, and at least one fails every time the tests run.

Ah, technology.

Today I finally solved a problem that has nagged me for months: Given a .NET Core 3.1 Web API, NLog, and a custom log target for NLog, how could I pass secrets into the log target using Azure Key Vault?

The last bit required me to add Azure Key Vault support to the InnerDrive.Logging NuGet package, which I did back in February. The KeyVaultSecretProvider class allows you to retrieve secrets from a specified Azure Key Vault. (I'm in the process of updating it to handle keys as well.) Before that, you'd have to put your secrets in configuration files, which anyone on your development team or who has access to your Git repository can see. For example, to use our SendGridTarget class, you would have to put this in your nLog.config file:

<extensions>
	<add assembly="NLog.Web.AspNetCore"/>
	<add assembly="InnerDrive.Logging"/>
</extensions>

<targets async="false">
	<target xsi:type="SendGridTarget"
	        name="sendgrid"
		apiKey="{supposedly secret key}"
		applicationName="My Cool App"
	        from="service@contoso.org"
	        to="admin@contoso.org"
	/>
</targets>

That is...suboptimal. Instead, you want to use a class that implements ISecretProvider and inject it into the SendGridTarget class through this constructor:

/// <summary>
/// Creates a new instance of <see cref="SendGridTarget"/> with
/// a specified <see cref="ISendGridSender"/> implementation.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="sender">The <see cref="ISendGridSender"/> to use</param>
/// <param name="secretProvider">The <see cref="IConfiguration"/> to use</param>
/// <param name="apiKey">The API key to use</param>
public SendGridTarget(
	ISendGridSender sender, 
	ISecretProvider secretProvider = null, 
	string apiKey = null)
{
	IncludeEventProperties = true;
	if (null != secretProvider) Configuration = secretProvider;
	if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(apiKey)) ApiKey = apiKey;
	_sender = sender;
}

And now I'm going to save you about 30 hours of research and frustration. To get NLog to inject the secret provider into the target, I added this method to Startup.cs:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env, IComponentContext container)
{
	// Setup code elided
	ConfigureLogging(container);
}

public static void ConfigureLogging(IComponentContext container)
{
	var defaultConstructor = ConfigurationItemFactory.Default.CreateInstance;
	var secretProvider = container.Resolve<ISecretProvider>();
	ConfigurationItemFactory.Default.CreateInstance = type =>
	{
		if (type == typeof(SendGridTarget))
		{
			var sendGridSender = container.Resolve<ISendGridSender>();
			return new SendGridTarget(sendGridSender, secretProvider);
		}

		return defaultConstructor(type);
	};
	LogManager.Configuration = LogManager.Configuration.Reload();
	NLogBuilder.ConfigureNLog(LogManager.Configuration);
}

(Note that the ISecretProvider and ISendGridSender classes need to be registered with your dependency-injection framework.)

Today was a good day.

Four days after I switched from Fitbit to Garmin, all of Garmin's online services have gone offline:

The problems with those services also mean that a range of features can't be used on Garmin's own devices: it is not possible to create new routes to go running or cycling, for instance, or to share those activities on services like Strava once they are completed.

The devices themselves continue to work as normal with the data they do have, however, meaning that any data collected during the outage will be safe.

Garmin wrote on its official Twitter pages that the problems were also affecting its call centres, leaving users unable to get in touch through calls or online messages.

"We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect, and as a result, the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are down at this time," it wrote.

"This outage also affects our call centres, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologise for this inconvenience."

This is not what Garmin customers want to see:

The error message on the Garmin Connect website suggests the problem is with their Cloudflare equipment:

Update: Based on Garmin employee's social-media posts, ZDNet now reports that the company experienced a catastrophic ransomware attack, most likely a new strain of WastedLocker. Fortunately, my Venu can hold 200 hours of data. So as long as they get it back up within a week or so, I shouldn't lose anything—unless the ransomware attack already destroyed my data from this past week.

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows.

It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news:

• Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.)
• Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start rethinking 'normal'."
• Consistent with the way authoritarian governments have always worked, Attorney General Bill Barr wants to send his own personal history down the memory hole.
• Speaking of populist lies, McSweeney's has the new New York Times style guide on how to avoid saying "the president lied."
• Scientific American explains "death awareness" and how it makes people respond to, say, pandemics.
• Metra, Chicago's heavy-rail commuter agency, will break ground on a new station in Edgewater this month.

Earlier, I mentioned that the state's unemployment office accidentally revealed thousands of records in an own goal. Turns out, Deloitte Consulting did the work, so I am no longer surprised. Note to anyone who needs software written: don't hire a big consulting firm. They don't attract the best developers because they use manager-driven development patterns that irritate the hell out of anyone with talent.