@karlauerbach@sfba.social
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

karlauerbach

@karlauerbach@sfba.social

I'm a techie & attorney.

Been on the net a long time.

I have a Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, and I've been a Fellow of Law and Technology at CalTech & Loyola/Marymount Law.

And yes, I am that person who was elected to the ICANN Board of Directors and who ended up suing them to see the financials (I won, hands down.)

Everything there is to know about me is on my personal and company websites:

https://cavebear.com/
https://iwl.com/

searchable

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

aallan, to security
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

By me for @hackster_io, "The End of the Default Password?" #security #iot https://www.hackster.io/news/the-end-of-the-default-password-b915e8a874a5

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@aallan @hackster_io California enacted a similar law several years ago although it is rarely mentioned and perhaps rarely honored. (We had to change the way we initialize and label our products as a consequence.)

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

I find it amusing how stupid some organizations are.

Consider "Tribel" - hoping to be an alternative to Musk & Zuck - it's home page on the web has an unavoidable pop-up demanding assent to a "Policy Update" in which you agree that you have read that policy.

Except that you can not read that policy until you assent.

That website must have been assembled by people who built Tesla's driver interface - clearly they have never attempted to use it.

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

I am increasingly concerned that TFG is going to actually be elected, even without R-party manipulation of the count, this November

mattblaze, to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

31-41 Union Square West, NYC, 2024.

All the pixels, each of which will be famous for 15 minutes, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53731622110

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@mattblaze What is that on the top of the leftmost building - the Bank of the Metropolis? It looks like the bill of a giant trucker cap.

stshank, to science
@stshank@mstdn.social avatar

Wicked smart scientists calculate how long volcanoes on Jupiter moon Io have been active. Measure relative abundance of 2 sulphur isotopes belched into the atmosphere then reprocessed as crust — bias toward heavy sulphur. Compare ratio to early solar system meteorites. https://www.science.org/content/podcast/very-volcanic-moon-and-better-protections-human-study-subjects
#Science #Vulcanism #Jupiter

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@stshank The technique sounds familiar - I worked for Willard Libby (of Carbon 14 dating fame/Nobel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Libby

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

A song for our times ...

(I first heard this performed live by The Weavers [yes, I am that old] but I think PPM do better job.)

https://youtu.be/waAVfCJ59Lk

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@SteveBellovin Yes, I have seen it. (And I saw them perform several times - although I only remember them at the Hollywood Bowl.)

I got deeply immersed, at least in the West Coast folk scene - In the '50s my grandparents would take me to folk music festivals around LA - in Ojai (above Ventura) or Hemet/Idyllwild - or they would have folk musicians over to their house. In the '60s I hung out at LA's folks places - Ash Grove, Troubedour, Canyon Store (Laurel Canyon), MaCabes, ... My father lived out in Malibu and he often had well known folk musicians at his house but I can not remember any names.

A while back we did a Beatnik party at the house - a huge amount of fun (everybody wore a beret), maybe we should do a folk themed gathering especially as we kinda accidentally have built our own outdoor Greek style performance space sloping down the hill behind the house.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@SteveBellovin You are always welcome if you get to the Monterey Bay area.

For the Beatnik party we made it a party of mass destruction - I have a quite large, illuminated, fly-in stage piece that says "The H-Bomb" (the name of a bar in the play.) It added a nice bit of rather overt, in-your-face ambiance. Most people did a Beat style performance (with me on the bongos - I have no sense of rythm - I am a terrible bongo bonger.)

Are you coming to the TCP/IP 50th even this coming Sunday in Palo Alto?

dangillmor, (edited ) to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

EDITED: One of journalism's consistent flaws is ignoring relevant context.

Case in point is this NY Times story about a judge tossing out a new federal regulation limiting extortionate credit card late fees.

Here's the context the Times didn't care to include: The financial companies went forum shopping, and landed one of their favorite Trump-appointed judges, who (to his credit) objected to the process, but then predictably ruled against the administration.

Journalistic malpractice, IMO.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@dangillmor U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth - appointed by TFG.

My proposal to reform the lower Federal courts is looking better and better with each passing day...

https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/rubber-rooms/

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

I just (re)watched the old movie Spartacus.

I remember when it was filmed. We often had to drive from Studio City (where my grandparents lived) to Hollywood - past the Universal back lot. I remember the big Spartacus sign on the hillside and the Roman temple at the top of the hill. When I watched tonight I noticed that that temple is present in many scenes in the movie.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@shuttersparks My grandparents were a hop-skip-and-jump from Republic studios, home of many a B movie. Their house was designed by a Disney artist. My high school (Van Nuys) was the site for a couple of movies, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. We used to have picnics at the Spahn Ranch in its pre-Manson days.

Movies and TV stuff was everywhere in The Valley and everything in LA west of Hollywood. (We used to amuse ourselves by going to the Joe Pine show and yelling "go take a hop" at Pine.)

In LA it was easy to notice that movies were artificial - sets were obviously sets. It was a lot different up at the Lucas Ranch - it was impressive how much detail they put into their Craftsman/Victorian village - even to fireplaces in the offices.

One one play I worked on we had a letter prop - it was so detailed that had a proper stamp canceled in the country where they play was set. The audience could not see that detail.

dannotdaniel, to random
@dannotdaniel@mastodon.social avatar

that's my REP 🤩

watch every minute of this
"finger painting on the Constitution" is priceless

in this video clip from the house floor, Raskin eviscerates the shallow bullshit of the GOP with a compendium of facts, history, and trivia perfectly flipping their subject matter on it's head and revealing them for the fools they are

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@dannotdaniel Did Raskin compose this well articulated statement on the fly? If so, that is impressive.

mattblaze, (edited ) to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Shortwave "Discone" Antenna, Former AT&T High Seas Radio Site, Ocean Gate, NJ, 2009.

All the somewhat staticy pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4141766569

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@mattblaze A few years back (actually a couple of decades back) we worked with the FAA with regard to communications by commercial pilots out over the Pacific. The radios of that era, except for legacy VHS ones, did not have the range to reach shore. So they depended on satellites or were experimenting with inter-airplane relay (each aircraft was an IP router.)

It was an interesting project, particularly as pilot-controller English is a limited subset amenable to encoding as textual words rather than voice - thus vastly reduced bandwidth - and able to withstand significant ask/answer response latency.

(We participated because we (iwl.com) build gear that can, among other things, introduce lots of issues into communications channels, including many kinds of latency patterns.)

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

A lot of fairly important notice/response traffic - such as e-bills, legal notices, etc - travels by e-mail.

Yet email has become notoriously unreliable as an ever increasing number of defenses are erected against an ever increasing number of spammers and phishers.

Email has achieved a legal status somewhat below that of US Postal Service first class mail (which is, under deJoy, pretty awful itself).

I am wondering whether that legal recognition of e-mail ought to collapse further given today's hit-and-miss nature of email.

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

TCP/IP 50th anniversary event…

This ought to be interesting (I will be attending). There will also be an online presence.

https://engage.ieee.org/celebrate-i50

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

The EV charging problem is enormous. So many people can't charge at home. And even if they find public chargers that are available and actually working, and have the time to wait around while they're charging, the COST at those chargers is usually far higher than home charging would have been. Just doesn't make sense.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@lauren On many older homes the house wiring or the utility feed itself are inadequate to support more than perhaps 3.5kw charging (rather than the more typical 6kw+ level 2 charging). This is fine for plug-in hybrids, but is marginal for full battery powered EVs.

(People need to be careful about charging from plug-in wall sockets - often the electrical contacts in those, especially on outdoor sockets, are somewhat corroded and can get really hot if run above 8Amps.)

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@Brendan @lauren Our Tesla takes up to 21 hours to charge at home (built 1987). (However, we have two Supercharger centers within five minutes of the house.)

I was going to buy a Polestar but the house wiring would not sustain simultaneous charging with the Tesla.

We had to downgrade our home charger because of inadequacies of the internal house wiring. We've fixed that for about half the house, but fixing it for the rest (including garage) will cost some serious $$.

I'm nervous about not overloading things - I tried to charge my old Chevy Volt at my mother's house, built around 1950, and smoked a couple of the outlets, even at 8A. It was sad - and dangerous.

We asked for additional PGE service but they want to dig up street & sidewalk to do it - with us paying roughly $50K to $100K to do the upgrade - and that was only to the power meter, not the house main panel.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@Brendan @lauren It doesn't help that different cars brands have different locations for the plug-in socket on the vehicle. That tends to force parking/charger layouts that have long, heavy charge cables (that attract copper thieves.)

I've seen recent condo designs that have NEMA 14-50 "dryer" outlet in the parking areas. I have not seen many apartments with this. How apartment owners will recoup charge costs will be interesting to watch.

I only recently learned that plug-in level 2 chargers - the ones that plug into those NEMA 14-50 outlets - downgrade their draw by something like 10% (as compared to hard wiring of the charger) in order to provide a safety margin.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@lauren @Brendan I totally and absolute agree with you. One decision that Tesla got right was to install a network of high power, high availability, super chargers.

It is said that buying and EV is really buying into a charging technology. CCS kinda sucks both in its "camel is a racehorse designed by a committee" engineering and its poor reliability as deployed. Tesla's is much better. But adapters have been slow in coming and are far from being trivially priced.

We recently drove to Texas (from California) to view the eclipse (it was cloudy, grrrr) and we were able to travel much further each day in our gasoline Honda than we would have been able to do in our Tesla. Even with superchargers, charging is too slow as compared to filling with gasoline. (Plus there aren't a lot of superchargers where we were in west Texas.)

karlauerbach, to random
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

Back in law school my first year contracts prof had many fun phrases, one of which is "If you can't get 'em on the merry-go-round you can get 'em on the swings."

Which (for reasons known only to the cosmic consciousness) reminded me of a cool way to leak data from a computer.

Fairly few people these days dig into the art of the Ethernet frame. For many of us the lowest turtle on the stack that we think of is the IPv4/v6 packet, not the Ethernet frame in which the IP packet is wrapped.

Well, Ethernet frames have a minimum length that is longer than the minimum length of an IP packet. That leaves some unused space.

But it need to remain unused - that space is a nice place to hide interesting data that gets carried through ethernet switches (but not IP routers).

FTP Software use to carry license keys in that usually overlooked space at the between the end of of ARP packets.and the end of the enclosing Ethernet frame.

glynmoody, to random
@glynmoody@mastodon.social avatar

Man allegedly pours bleach into Oregon hatchery tank and kills 18,000 salmon - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/30/oregon-salmon-bleach some people are sick

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@glynmoody Ah, but according to Dr. D.J. trump that bleach protected those fish - and those sick people - from Covid.

chriswho, to random
@chriswho@mstdn.social avatar
karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@chriswho People (especially people who own trademarks) tend to forget that the express purpose of trademark law (it's written into the words of the US trademark law itself) that trademarks are to benefit the consumer by making it easier for a consumer to clearly identify the source and identity of a product.

Trademarks are not intended to be a boon for the trademark owner, rather trademarks are there for the protection of consumers.

ai6yr, to random

T-shirt seen today at our radio club.

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@ai6yr My network timestamp is sometime in 1968 when I worked in the room next to IMP #1 at UCLA or 1972 when I began working on network (and OS) security at SDC in Santa Monica, as seen on this map...

http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/jpg/ARPANet/G70Jun.jpg

heidilifeldman, (edited ) to random
@heidilifeldman@mastodon.social avatar

Am lamenting anew the refusal by Biden to support Supreme Court reform when Democrats controlled the House and Senate and could have expanded the Court, neutralizing the power of demonstrably corrupt Justice Thomas and the justices appointed after Mitch McConnell illegitimately refused to advance Obama’s nominee to the seat that went eventually to Gorsuch. Elected Democrats must take foundational measures if we are to preserve any sort of meaningful democracy in America. 1/

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@heidilifeldman I kinda remember Biden voting to confirm C. Thomas despite it being quite obvious from the confirmation hearings that Thomas knows not a whit about Constitutional law, said he would make things up (via "natural law"), and that he sexually assaulted Anita Hill.

mattblaze, to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

United Nations Secretariat Building, NYC 2021.

All the pixels of the world, each with one vote at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51381729335

karlauerbach,
@karlauerbach@sfba.social avatar

@mattblaze I may have mentioned it before: The first glass curtain building was done by Willis Polk when he did the (still existing) Hallidie building in San Francisco in 1918. (I would walk by it every day on my way to work.)

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