They're using Signal to circumvent the Presidential Records act - the US government nowadays has ample ways to officially and quickly communicate with each other, while being in compliance with recordkeeping and national secrets requirements.
Use of Signal has been rife in Washington DC since COVID times.
During COVID they closed many of the secure facilities indefinitely. Building access was on a rotation, so many people couldn’t see or communicate with their counterparts for weeks or months unless their rotation intersected. The government had no plan for how to conduct classified business with their facilities closed for extended periods. It is in this milieu that Signal became established as an alternative way to communicate.
They required almost everyone to work at home without a plan for how that is supposed to work when most people don’t have a SCIF[0] in their house. As bad as it is that the US DoD converged on using Signal, there is an identical issue in many European countries with the pervasive use of WhatsApp for sensitive communication. It is a classic case of shadow IT taking over.
It is first-hand knowledge, I was doing quite a bit of government work in Washington DC during COVID. Everything ground to a halt because it was so difficult to connect with people. I use Signal today primarily because of working in Washington DC.
That is what I assumed as well. In both the current and previous admins.
But as more details come out about the current admins use of signal, this appears to not be the case.
They are using a shitty third party patched version of signal specifically designed to archive messages.
Leaving aside the security issues with the version they are using and the lack of public facing policy, the use of a Signal variant that archives chats is a reasonable compromise.
Instead of walling off users, creating a barrier to use and therefore extensive bypassing of the security standards, they have met users where they are and provided them with what the user cannot distinguish from official signal. This allows them to interface internally and externally through signal, preserving records and maintaining a much better level of security than the other options.
This represents a huge breach of trust between external parties and government signal users, but most of the government signal users are probably completely unaware that it's being logged.
My issue is not that they are using Signal. I think it's one of the better options. My issue is that they use a shitty version of it when there should be an in house maintained version for government use.
Am I remembering it wrong or did Microsoft use an undocumented call in excel to grant it more memory than was possible for early competitors who didn't also write the OS?
they did. later during the Netscape antitrust case it was shown in court that Microsoft gave Internet Explorer internal Windows hooks that Netscape couldn't have known about because they weren't documented.
A set of four castors. Like the bottom of a shopping trolley. Yours for $699
Tell your friends! "Each castor costs one hundred and seventy five dollars. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to run this computer... for twelve seconds. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!" (https://youtu.be/jHgZh4GV9G0?t=19)
We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
The fact that US gdp and population has grown while energy inputs have stayed flat is an important measure of both the energy efficiency of an economy and the mix of sources of gdp. "Energy intensity" is a measure of PPP gdp per capita per kg of oil. If you want to grow your economy then you either improve energy intensity (get more gdp for the same or less energy) or find new energy sources. China wants to reduce their energy intensity. Yet the author is showing a "graph goes up" to mean "better" with all the confidence of an engineer outside their circle of competence. The US energy intensity has halved since the 1980s - less oil and more IT.
> The US energy intensity has halved since the 1980s - less oil and more IT.
Part of their argument, and arguably also quite apparent fact, is that this is not efficiency improvement - it's just outsourcing the energy-intensive parts of the process abroad. This makes treating energy intensity as a measurement of efficiency just an accounting trick.
It's the same kind of trick as e.g. Germany shutting down its clean power plants, covering the energy deficit by buying electricity produced in coal plants abroad, and then claiming, "look ma, no emissions, no nuclear, so green".
Supply and demand goes both ways. You don't get to outsource the important parts and then claim they don't count because you're just buying - it's not like manufacturing or electricity production are natural phenomena you're just tapping into. The buying is what makes them exist, whether or not it's within or outside your borders.
>and two “scanners.” The purpose of the scanners was to stand by the B-17’s rear doors and keep lookout for other aircraft
I spoke to one of the CAF "scanners" when the B29 "FiFi" visited nearby and he said one of their roles was to watch for smoke in case one of the engines caught fire. The engines are "upgrades" from just after the war.
When my american kids are slagging my Belgian half brother he shuts them down by offering a visit to the school he went to, you know, through the unlocked non bulletproof front door. Their schools have vestibules with intercoms and such.
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