Just another Rant.

Our View: We have not nearly earned the right to quibble about gun control

Narrow and tendentious arguments against gun laws say they don’t - or won’t - make any difference. Pass the laws, find out.

According to multiple sources, the law is a codification of the core values of the people. The Ten Commandments are a codification of the major laws of Christianity. The Constitution is a set of limits on government. It does not bind The People.

Using the law to morph behavior is not always a good choice. Most leftist approve of such laws when it morphs behavior in ways they approve, and they melt down if the law moves behavior in ways they disapprove of.

Passing a law making it a crime to “out” a trans student to anybody, including the student’s parents? “Yes!” the left screams. Passing a law making it a crime to hide gender dysphoria and mental distress from parents? “Hell no!” the same people scream.

The Press Harald can’t write without manipulation. (Who am I to talk?) Hellbent on protecting its financial interests … Interesting how everybody that disagrees with them is a paid shill, or just working for the “gun lobby”. I wish The Gun Lobby was paying us as much as the infringers claim they do.

… unwilling to make even the most modest of administrative concessions … Why should we give you even a “modest” concession? You have not shown yourself to be trustworthy.

You claim that the gun rights community shows no qualms about using desperately sad stories into political bargaining chips. Have you seen the blood sucking ghouls that show up after every horrific shooting, attempting to punish me for the actions of another? Have you seen the activists waving the Red Badge of Courage they bought on Etsy at 10 for a $1? Rags dripping with the blood of victims.

All the time, yelling that I should shut up. That my “thoughts and prayers” mean nothing unless I give up my right to armed self-defense.

We say enforce the laws already on the books. Put the criminals in prison and keep them there. Prosecute those that do evil, leave us alone.

I hear your suggestion and offer in return: Take a long walk off a short pier.

That “run-of-the-mill” measure you talk about doesn’t do anything except make it more difficult for the law-abiding. It gives the government information it should not have.

My preferred local gun store is an hour from here. I invest 2 to 6 hours in drive time to pick out a firearm. I invested multiple hours of my labor to purchase the firearm. You want me to have to make the trip at least once more.

And what does that waiting period or background check actually do? Nothing. The Remington 700 BDL in 30-06 I’m looking at doesn’t need to come home with me. I already have a M1 in 30-06. You’re delaying me from purchasing a firearm doesn’t stop me from possessing a firearm. I already have them.

It is unfair that you have printing presses and many people sending you money to write your wrong – minded opinions. Fair doesn’t mean you have to give up your printing press.

My right to armed self-defense comes from my creator. Not you. You can’t take the right away. It always exists. You will infringe to your heart’s content. That doesn’t make it right.

Sen. Anne Carney want’s to make it a crime to sell to a prohibited person, a designation that is being challenged at the Supreme Court. Here’s the thing, it is already illegal to knowingly sell to a prohibited person. What Anne, please her heart, wants to do is remove the word “knowingly” so that if you make a mistake, you go to jail.

Of course, the good people of the Press Herald won’t tell you that.

But the really juicy part of that statement is “very piece of legislation that becomes law does some real good. It helps build a framework for even more protective legislation. She is flat out telling us that she has no intention of stopping here.

This is what you are arguing for. The mouse eating just one crumb, until you find that you have nothing but an empty plate.

As always, you suggest that we “just try it” and see what happens. We can predict with confidence what will happen. It solves any of the issues you say it will solve. So you will come back to the well for another drink. You will continue until I stop you, or I have nothing left.

The big one out front…

We are shutting down our subscription-based services. The original goal was to generate enough recurring income per month to pay the costs of the site. We don’t like asking for donations, and I thought this was a good model.

We considered other models, moving to a pay for views, something like Substack. The other option was to shut the site down completely.

It costs money to run this site. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it all adds up. We have a few things that we pay for, along with the resources.

We aren’t going away.

J.Kb. has hit on the idea of selling swag. His first offering will be a moral patch. It has been designed, it looks good, we’ll be setting up an option to purchase them on the site shortly.

We are also going to be selling “Supporting Person”. I’m not sure exactly what yet. This will allow you to donate money directly to the running of the site.

For those that have already paid for the upcoming year. Thank you very much. I hope that you will consider that membership a “donation”. If you feel strongly, please contact me at awa (at) troglodite.com.

I intend to continue the Friday Feedback articles. Multiple reasons, one is that it is a day when I don’t have to research and invest time to write. The second is that it gives you a place to comment without being off-topic.

If you can think of swag you’d like us to consider, please let us know.

Thank you for staying with us. We are glad to have you with us.

One of the dirty facts about technology is that it will always be used to abuse people.

Those wonderful field telephones? Yeah, they work just fine as a torture device.

The first photographs were interesting, but photography really took off when they started taking “pornographic” images.

The story is that the first really popular recordings were of women “talking dirty” or making “those sounds”.

The Internet is not really different, and before the internet, all the other methods used for transmitting data from computer to computer. As soon as the techies were able to actually visualize the data, they used it to send pornographic texts and images.

Unfortunately, one of the nasty types of filthy is child pornography. It exists on the Internet, and the good guys have been working to shut it down from day one.

I once owned an Internet Service Provider. A dial-up service. You would tell your computer to connect to the internet. It would call a modem at my service, and we would give you a temporary IP address for the duration of your call. Shortly after you disconnected, somebody else would dial in and get the same IP address.

When you connect to a remote computer over the internet, your computer has a unique, at that moment, IP address. That is how the remote computer knows where to send the responses.

When using certain security tools, you connect to a node. Your computer is now known to have connected to that particular node. That node then encrypts your incoming messages and sends it to another node in the secure network. At some point, your packet pops out of the secure network and goes to its final destination.

The remote computer then responds to your node by sending it back to the secure network, never knowing your IP address.

VPNs work similarly, but have other issues. The biggest of which is that there is a one-to-one mapping from your computer’s IP address to the address you are assigned while using the VPN. That mapping can be captured in logs.

How does this all relate to Subpoenas?

We got a couple from law-enforcement for records.

We did keep logs. I’m good at keeping logs. I use them to figure out who is doing things on my equipment and how that relates to over all services.

One of the cases was from Customs. The first thing it said was that we could not tell the target that we were going to be providing data. They then asked for all of our logs for an extended time period.

We told them, “No. You will provide enough information for us to do a targeted data retrieval.”

They then told us, “We are tracking child pornography.” I was all for that. I finally got them to give us specific time periods.

They wanted all the data for those periods. That is IP addresses to people.

We did our own analysis of those time periods, identified the one commonality, extracted that data, provided it to law enforcement.

We got back a “Thank You”. It made us feel good.

As a good service provider, I want to protect your data as much as possible. I do not allow law enforcement to go on fishing expeditions.

We also got a subpoena from the FBI. Again, they wanted all the records for an extended period. We contacted them and got nowhere. Our lawyers told us, “Give them what they asked for or go to jail.”

So we did. They had told us to “fax the logs” to them and gave us a toll-free fax number.

We pulled the data they were requesting. We randomized the order, so it was no longer in sequential order. This was then turned into PDFs. We applied a noise pattern to the PDFs, randomly flipped pages upside down, then hit the send button.

One of our modems called their fax and started talking FAX at it. Our software then proceeded to attempt to send 11,000+ pages of logs.

We got disconnected after about 200 pages. I reached out to the people at the FBI that were requesting the information and asked them what they wanted to do. They refused to answer.

So we told our computer to resend if it failed.

Five days later, they told us they no longer needed our logs.

In both cases, we went out of our way to:

1. Make sure that the “request” we got from law enforcement was legit
2. Make sure that the “request” was actually an order
3. That the order legally required us to comply
4. That the order was as limited in scope as it could be.
5. That we did our utmost to protect our clients.

Liberty Safes done fucked up. They should have waited for a subpoena. Having gotten that subpoena, they should have responded and kept their mouths shut.

None of my safes or lock boxes have original combinations. For mechanical locks, this is good enough. The mechanical locks don’t have magic by passes. You can observe that yourself.

For keyed lock boxes, the locks have been replaced. The circular keys are fairly standard. I went to a locksmith in a different county and purchased replacement locks with cash.

That wasn’t paranoia. That was stupid on my part. I had lost the keys to my big lock boxes in a move and needed to get into them. I drilled the lock out, then was able to open them, since I destroyed the lock, I needed to replace them. Oh, the boxes were empty because we were moving them.

The locksmith I contacted was working out of a work truck that was close to me that day, he didn’t take credit cards, so I paid in cash.

I refuse to get biometric locks nor locks with electronic keypads. If they have biometric locks, then the courts can forcibly unlock them with you. Did you lock your phone with facial recognition? No problem, two burly cops hold you up, and they point your phone at you and “bing” it unlocks.

Did you use a fingerprint to lock your phone? Same thing, they just have to run your finger of the reader and they are in.

If it is electronic, then I have reliability concerns. And it suggests that there can be multiple allowed combinations. Many of the electronic pads come from the factory with an option for you to have multiple codes to unlock.

Now, this is a bit different from the High-end electronic locks. I’ve seen one where you spin the dial to generate enough electricity for you to then rotate the dial to enter the combination. The location of the numbers on the dial changes after each charge spin. Each time you enter a combination, it discharges.

This means that the owner can attempt to unlock it as many times as they need/want. The bad guy can’t use mechanical assistance.

We have turned off the restriction on who comments. It is now back to the old method. If you have an account, and you are logged in, that will work. If you are not logged in, then it will ask for your email, name and optional website.

More info tomorrow.

Normally in one of these articles, I would be quoting their words, pointing out how horribly wrong the state is, how the state is cheating, lying or otherwise attempting to put their thumb on the scales of justice.

Not so today. The attorneys representing the Senate President and General Assembly Speaker do a good job of presenting their position.

The form of these briefs is pretty set, a cover page that fully identifies the case and any cases that have been absorbed into this case, identification of the lawyers who are responsible for the document, theses are not always the person who wrote the brief, the person being represented, Table of Contents, Table of Citations/Authorities, introduction and optionally a summary of the argument, the arguments. That’s followed by other stuff, a conclusion and such.

In many of these briefs, the author uses the introduction and summary to make unsupported arguments and to attempt to set the stage for later misrepresentations.

This is the place where they attempt to put the ear bugs in place. The place where they give the judge(s) a limb to grab onto when they want to rule in a particular direction.

We saw all of that in the state’s official response. This brief doesn’t go down that path. It is very clean.

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B.L.U.F.

The Attorney General of New Jersey has filed a brief (100 pages!!!!) explaining why New Jersey’s de facto carry ban is actually constitutional.
(1900 words)

Analysis and Rant

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I am old enough that I started school before the Federal Department of Education came into existence. My father was in the U.S. Navy. We traveled around the country as he was posted to different bases.

Sometimes those locations were in “The South” and sometimes they were in The North.

I am an American, first, last and always.

Years ago, in a motorcycle group I belonged to, I made a statement about the Civil War. One of the respected members replied with a question, “How many slaves did Lincoln free?”

The answer is surprising to most. Lincoln freed zero slaves. His proclamation only applied to the states that were in revolt. It did not apply to the states that remained a part of the Union.

This gentleman taught me to look a bit deeper at the history.

That is why I sometime choose to use terms I learned in school. At the time, my teachers taught both sides. Later I learned still more, yet my teachers still treated the south with respect.

If you took offense at my choice in terms in today’s tunes, please ask yourself “Why?” and if you have a good answer as to why I was out of line, feel free to let me know.