Month: October 2017

Random Trivia

Anya randomly asked how many footballers it would take to make the weight of the Earth. Well, that’s quick enough to calculate. Average footballer is just under 80 kg … rounded up because the number is going to be so huge anyway.

That would be just over 74 sextillion footballers.  74,650,000,000,000,000,000,000! Which is a lot of people. To get an idea of order of magnitude, I divided by the population of Earth. We’re talking ten trillion times more people that we’ve got today.

The moon, on the other hand, is a mere 123 billion times more people than we’ve got today.

Alternative Fact: Compassion

Alternative Fact: Courtesy of Trump at some meeting with military sorts and discussing North Korea: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm”

Real Fact: It is literally after the storm in several devastated areas of the country. Trump’s comment was irresponsible viewed from a military or diplomatic perspective. But from the perspective of a compassionate person whose memory spans two news cycles? Probably better not to mention storms at all.

Setting Up DNSSEC

Last time I played around with the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), the root and .com zones were not signed. Which meant you had to manually establish trusts before there was any sort of validation happening. Since the corporate standard image didn’t support DNSSEC anyway … wasn’t much point on either the server or client side. I saw ICANN postponed a key rollover for root a few days ago, and realized hey, root is signed now. D’oh, way to keep up, huh?

So we’re going to sign the company zones and make sure our clients are actually looking at zone signatures when they exist. Step #1 – signing our test zone. I do this in a screen session because it can take a long time to generate a key. If the process gets interrupted for whatever reason, you get to start ALL OVER. I am using ISC Bind – how to do this on any other platform, well LMGTFY 🙂

# Start a screen session
screen -S LJR-DNSSEC-KeyGen
# Use dnssec-keygen to create a zone signing key (ZSK) – bit value is personal preference
dnssec-keygen -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 2048 -n ZONE rushworth.us
# Then use dnssec-keygen to create a key signing key (KSK) – bit value is still personal preference
dnssec-keygen -f KSK -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 4096 -n ZONE rushworth.us

Grab the content of the *.key files and append them to your zone

Apache HTTP Sandbox With Docker

I set up a quick Apache HTTPD sandbox — primarily to test authentication configurations — in Docker today. It was an amazingly quick process.

Install an image that has an Apache HTTPD server:    docker pull httpd
Create a local file system for Apache config files (c:\docker\httpd\httpd.conf for main config, c:\docker\httpd\conf.d for all of the extras like ssl.conf and php.conf, plus web sites), and c:\docker\httpd\vhtml for the web site content)
Launch the container: docker run -detach –publish 80:80 –publish 443:443 –name ApacheWebServer –restart always -v /c/docker/httpd/httpd.conf:/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:ro -v /c/docker/httpd/conf.d/:/etc/httpd/conf.d/:ro -v /c/docker/httpd/vhtml/:/var/www/vhtml/:ro httpd

Shell into it (docker exec -it ApacheWebServer bash) to look around, or just access http://localhost from the Docker host.

On The NRA

I read an astute assessment of the NRA from Esquire tonight:

“the NRA’s agenda is not your own. The NRA is the lobbying arm of the armaments industry. It has that industry’s interests at heart and not your own.”

If it’s too soon to discuss gun control or not, it would behoove us to stop acting like industry lobbyists of any sort are there to defend public opinion, civil liberties, or constitutional rights. No one thinks industry-affiliated advertising agencies are there to promote public health or well-being. Sure, a marketing campaign may say a particular food needs to be consumed daily for your health. But marketing campaigns are about making money. It is purely happenstance if using the product actually enhances your life in some way.

Industry lobbyists are there to force a regulatory / legal environment where their industry can make more money. Objecting to a waiting period and background checks makes purchasing their products convenient (i.e. they make money). Selling a wide array of weapons provides repeat sales opportunities (they make more money) and allows the product to appeal to a wide variety of customers (hey, look … they make more money). If making money happens to speak to your interpretation of the second amendment … awesome. But lets be honest about their intentions.

There are plenty of weapon magazines I can read. I’m sure there are even citizen-based second amendment associations I could join. But why are American citizens even partially funding the armament industry’s lobbyists?

Statistics

Well, here’s some good news (theoretically) — from Benjamin J Newman and Todd K Harman:

“Drawing upon multiple data sources on mass public shootings paired with large-N survey data, it demonstrates that increased proximity to a mass shooting is associated with heightened public support for stricter gun control. Importantly, the results show that this effect does not vary by partisanship, but does vary as a function of salience-related event factors, such as repetition, magnitude and recency”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/mass-shootings-and-public-support-for-gun-control/8F38356AF4DB22B8B7DF28052234FA09

Soooo, statistically … as more and more mass shootings occur, public support for gun control may reach a point where all the political lobbyists in the world won’t be able to counteract public demands. Sad way to go about it, though.

Right to keep and bear Arms

Let’s all take a second and realize (sadly) that we still won’t see limitations on something like how many guns a single person can own. But how about we limit individuals to half a dozen or so bullets. At a shooting range? No big – shoot all you want. They can ring them up by the half dozen. But off of the range, you get six. And when you want to buy more? Trade in the shells. Sure someone could be out trying to police brass at crime scenes to get a couple of extra bullets. But the dedication required to get a hundred bullets would be staggering.

Manufactured Offense

I haven’t watched football in a few years. We’ll put on the SuperBowl, which is essentially the sports viewing version of a ChrEaster. As I think about the NFL protests and a small portion of the public’s distress at how disrespectful they feel the protests to be … I am remembering that the only time the anthem was broadcast on the telly was the SuperBowl game. The broadcasters are in it to make money – you get announcer chatter, COMMERCIALS, and then the kick off. How is that less offensive than taking a knee?