Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The cooperative relationship between humans and dogs has always been a working one (that is, centered around the collaboration of productive tasks), so I have less concern with dogs on duty. In this case, dogs are being used not for their keen sense of smell, but as dousing rods on the pretense of their keen sense of smell.

I did not mention dogs used as attack dogs, which absolutely abuses the dog. Not only that, but the dog is regarded as an officer if a victim fights back, what has only become a controversy when an attack dog was used on a fellow officer.

As for dogs used to hunt, that’s the first thing we collaborated in doing, and we seem to have developed our relationship with dogs at the same time we developed agriculture, so they’d definitely be used to hunt vermin including foxes and coyotes.

Go onto Techdirt ( here ) and check Tim Cushing’s blog. His beat is the abuse and corruption of our justice system. The latest issue I recall was using drones to peek into fenced backyards, into windows and deep across property lines, all without a warrant or probable cause.

During the 2010s IMSI spoofers were being used but the Stingray corporation required precincts sign an NDE so parallel reconstruction (creating an alternative plausible path of investigation to lead to the same discovery of evidence) was the norm. Eventually defense lawyers learned to press the issue, as even FBI would drop cases before admitting they used IMSI catchers to spy on where a suspect’s phone was.

One of my bigger beefs is the misuse of detection dogs, which have up to a ~90% false positive rate, called Probable Cause on Four Legs it’s known that most departments prefer trick-pony dogs who just signal a lot, in contrast to dogs who can actually detect stuff.

Interestingly, there is a subset of the K9 sector who train and handle detection dogs (which are still legitimately used, say to detect explosives in long lines of luggage at airports), and thanks to the common use of dogs to force a search, the public has been losing confidence in them, and courts who believe dog searches are for real.

So white-power mail?

On the first day it was released to the public.

The encryption specialists at universities knew about the eliptic curve backdoor before it was implemented, and kept recommending that it not be.

Remember that if the police can read your stuff, so can foreign interests, industrial spies, organized crime and militants of large scale political movements.

Besides which here in the States, law enforcement is notorious for abusing their access to technology to bypass protections of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, often relying on getting a warrant post hoc or lying to establish probable cause.

And usually the judges don’t mind.

Extraordinary Rendition is the euphemism from the aughts from which the movie Rendition was titled. It means taking your detainee somewhere else, often across national borders, to a black site, usually to do things there for plausible deniability (e.g. we don’t torture in the United States )

Oh it turns out we needed NSA to do its actual fucking job after all rather than holding onto exploits for the surveillance state.

Now — for the second time — we have an adversarial administration eager to weaponize government departments while Americans are vulnerable. Why? Because America is the good guys and would never abuse its extrajudicial powers (say, by detaining, rendering and torturing Americans with names similar to those of POIs.)

We could have had twenty-four years of robust communications security developments if NSA didnt sell the public out like Judas.

At least one in three bosses are shitty bosses. If their responsibility is to the company and the shareholders, telecommuting saves a ton of time and money.

Now wondering if there are six-year-olds in Africa using M16/AR-15 style rifles as part of some warlord’s army. I guess they don’t get to go to kindergarten, though.

Sadly Elon Musk remains a threat to us all.

I always cringe when someone says And this begs the question…

Begging the question is a logical fallacy. A circular argument.

Raising the question is bringing the question to the forefront of the conversation.

But not for a decade now.

So here’s what I think happened:

Scenario One: Balaji killed himself. Seeing the evil that had been wrought, he was wracked with guilt over his part in building it, and checked out. Don’t worry, he’s not too far ahead of the rest of us.

Scenario Two: Balaji knew too much, and still had the means to halt the project, or worse, allow it to get captured by other interests, and so he had be silenced. A professional made sure it didn’t look like foul play.

Scenario Three: He was hit like in S2 but the hired gun was through remote channels, the money sent to them anonymously. Balaji discovered the project had escaped its constraints via an esoteric process that allowed it access not merely past firewalls, but was able to follow instructions outside its authorized objectives. Balaji sought to tell the other developers, but it was hard to explain before communications were terminated.

Mind you, I write thrillers, so I may be biased.

I do feel shame. It won’t do much good.

Of course, once they decide we’re enemies of state, there is no reason not to revolt.

We just need the public to recognize their faces are on the menu next.

In the meantime if we could get some scholars to clean out the inequity in our constitution, maybe even try some non-FPTP electoral system, it might give the rebels something to fight for that isn’t Same as the old boss.

You don’t pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But – at least for some videogenic cats – they will instinctively relax.

My cat relaxes, but then my cat gets all loungy anytime I interact with him.

Pet tax: He is one with the universe in a box.

A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.

Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.

Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.

It may have been C+ or merely C with OOP features. I was writing the enemy-AI code (not to be confused with actual learning systems) in visual basic (and made some sweet pathfinding algorithms at the time), but took it too seriously and ended up breaking my brain.

We had a publisher and it was going to be awesome and then Windows 95 came out and broke all our code.

FBI is not a monolith right now and has multiple conflicting opinions.

The part that wants to save democracy says you should encrypt your communications by using an e2e provider, and they recommend Signal.

The part that wants to serve the country (by serving the current administration — the J. Edgar Hoover part of FBI) is terrified of going dark and has been nagging encryption experts for over a decade now to nerd harder and invent a backdoor only good guys can use.

The nerds know this is mathematically impossible. And in fact bad guys (industrial spies, black hats, other nations, etc.) have leaks readily available to uncover the backdoors.

And right now a lot of FBI is scared the new admin is the bad guys.

Now I wonder if Hello Barbie still works.

Because the transnational white power movement believes in loyalty over principle like any other dangerous cult. If you are an ally, you could eat children and would still be favored.

And if you’re in the outgroup, then they pretend as if you eat children.

They’re not interested in governance but culling the population, so they’re choosing people who are unpersoned by fiat.

If we wanted something different, we shouldn’t have voted in the monarchists. Now King Heron is in power and it’s frog-eating season.

Have you seen his abs?

Besides which, it’s difficult to say violence is wrong when we tolerate apatheticly so much systemic violence.

And with the new administration we’re expecting to see so much more with mass deportations and killing our already meager social safety nets.

We’re always three skipped meals from mass riots that overwhelm responders. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

In the meantime weasel programs are very effective, and a better, if less known metaphor.

Sadly the monkeys thought experiment is a much more well known example.

Irrelevant nerd thought, back in the early nineties, my game development company was Monkey Mindworks based on a joke our (one) programmer made about his method of typing gibberish into the editor and then clearing the parts that didn’t resemble C# code.