As I went to bed last night, I decided to check #CO2Fre to see if there were any Tesla Operating System Updates. TeslaFi sends me emails when a new TeslaOS is found in the wild, so I had a feeling I might be due for another update. I was not disappointed. Just before bed, I set #CO2Fre to update. After the update finished, I had Tesla OS 2020.12.11.1, and the 01:00 charge began.
I was eager to see what the new TeslaOS would bring. Alas, technically, it was nothing new. I’m guessing it may be internal improvements to Stop at Stop Signs, but since I can’t test that—or the DashCam viewer, it’s kind of moot. Nonetheless, pretty cool to get a new TeslaOS.
Overall, I was happy with the update and I want to share a screen capture of the release notes, even if they’re unchanged. I then wanted to share version number page just to confirm I was upgraded. I didn’t think much of it but then I was startled by a field I hadn’t noticed.
I never noticed before that I also had the Premium Connectivity package. I was unsure what that was, so I looked it up. And that’s when I was astounded.
You see, I purchased #CO2Fre in Bergen, Norway. I was on holiday and was checking my email as I was waiting for the Cable Car to the top of the Ulriken. I had delayed ordering #CO2Fre despite getting the option in April, because I wanted all-wheel drive. So, that morning, I spotted an email from 01:48:06 local time, which was 16:48:06 Pacific Daylight Time, and, nine hours later, I was seeing it.
I didn’t hesitate. I clicked the button to order and elected every premium option. I waited this long, I wanted #CO2Fre to be fully loaded. When I was finished, it was 10:59:16 local time, or 01:59.16 Pacific Daylight, Thursday, 24 May. Ironically, I ordered the car, in a sense, minutes after receiving it when adjusted for time zone.
In any case, the point is I ordered #CO2Fre before 30 June, 2018, meaning, it seems, I qualify for Lifetime Premium Connectivity.
In this era of lockdowns, thanks to SARS-CoV-2, it feels like we can get a little stir crazy. Try to stay sane my friends and maybe go for a walk. But if you do go out, do it in style. It is, after all, May the Fourth and you know what that means?
One of the most important issues in the age of SARS-CoV-2 is voting access when polling places are such potential vectors for disease. Last week, I was past of a phone town hall with State Senator Barbara Favola. I was very happy to learn that Governor Ralph Northam is considering holding a special session of the General Assembly this September to ask the them to vote on universal vote-by-mail. This is something Virginia needs! After all, it already works very well in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, and Hawaii.
Delegate Price agrees. She has stood with me on a number of other important non-partisan voting rights bills, such as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and two bills to develop a non-partisan way of generating legislative districts. Another bill would have set up a nonpartisan redistricting commission. The committee would have begun as soon as one July, to start the process of determining the 2021 districts. Unfortunately, that bill failed. However, she was able to pass legislation which made most forms of packing and cracking illegal while still protecting the spirit of the Voting Rights Act.
Now it remains to see if we can give Virginia a more streamlined vote-by-mail process. The main issue is to remove the onerous signature requirement. Also, as Tran points out, we need to make sure folks who are visually impaired can vote. If people change residences without informing the Commonwealth, they shouldn’t be dropped from the voting rolls. We also need to consider people who are just used to voting in person on election day. One solution is to maintain opened polling locations on election day, but by default allow everyone to vote-by-mail with no signature nor an excuse, and not dropping anyone because the voting invitation mail bounces.
Or, if we do still need a signature, I suppose I could ask my voting buddy Rachel to take care of mine, as I take care of hers.
I’m live right now with Delegate Cia Price and Tram Nguyen, Co-executive Director of New Virginia Majority, to talk…
Today, I attended two, virtual Electric Car events. First, my friend Mark Czajka hosted the first MDVolt virtual meetup. We met Tom Moloughney from InsideEVs. Unfortunately, I was multitasking though this meeting as I also host the Loudoun County Writers Group (LCWG) on Saturday mornings. Normally, I would skip my writing group on Saturdays for one of Mark’s MDVolt events, but this time, I could cheat and attend both, because they were both virtual.
I haven’t spoken much about the Mini-E — so far only in my EVSE installation post — but this car has been on my mind a long, long time. When the leases were announced for 2009, I jumped on the chance to get one of the 500 East Coast orders. But alas, my region wasn’t one of the privileged ones, so there was no Mini-E for me. On the bright side, at least I saved over $800 per month for the last 2 years!
I’m so jealous Tom got one of those Mini-Es. I was very desperate to get one back in 2011, when I wrote about it on the Affordable Electric Car Now site, as you can see from the quote above. Tom and I have both been writing about electric cars since 2009 so it’s nice to hear from a kindred spirit. One of these days, I hope he invites me to one of his barbeques.
It was also wonderful seeing my friend dear friend Vanessa Thomas at Mark’s event. She was nice enough to come to my virtual demonstration of #CO2Fre and it was wonderful seeing her here, even if it was hard to see anyone on my tiny phone—LCWG got the computer. Fortunately, Mark uploaded to YouTube, so I could finally the event and focus fully on the content. Check me out in the Pinball video.
Thank you both for a great conversation! Every vote equal, one person, one vote, it’s for conservatives, it’s for progressives, it’s for every American!
The folks at CyberArk uncovered a new vulnerability in Microsoft Teams. In Beware of the GIF: Account Takeover Vulnerability in Microsoft Teams, they investigate a serious security hole in Teams that could threaten your organization and provide access to confidential information. Fortunately, Microsoft has, in theory, patched this vulnerability thanks to locking down any vulnerable Microsoft Teams servers.
This is a startling development considering how I’ve had to defendZoom with respect to its long-ago patched UNC Path vulnerability. Now, we find out that by intercepting the traffic during the sending of images like a Gif, an attacker can subvert a computer’s security, intercept a victims access tokens, and impersonate the victim to begin a social engineering attack.
The basic process is the attacker can use Fiddler to intercept a benign image being transmitted. Since the image is transmitted via its URI, the attacker can modify the packet that transmits the benign URI and change the source domain to come from a compromised Microsoft Teams server.
Next, the attacker needs to intercept traffic to the compromised Microsoft Teams servers. Once the victim loads the image in his Teams viewer, the victim’s computer transmits his authentication tokens to the compromised server and thus the attacker has the users credentials.
The main solution is to lock down any vulnerable servers in the Microsoft Teams subnet. However, it is interesting that Teams uses a REST API with JWT. This is a very common authentication method and one used by OAuth Authentication. I have developed a number of software components that use JWT from OAuth and use those tokens to make connections to various web services I typically use, like meetup and Google Drive.
Microsoft Teams uses two JWT. First, the user gets an authentication token, and with that, the user can get the session token called skypetoken_asm. Both tokens are required by the Microsoft REST API to communicate with the server. The interesting thing, though, is that the second token is called Skype Token. A few years ago Microsoft bought Skype. At the time, people speculated why and of course with Microsoft Teams, I thought it might be leverage Microsoft with its own video conferencing platform. The question was, was Microsoft Teams based on Skype? It looks like at least in part, the answer is yes.
Below, you can watch a video of how this attack might actually work.
So, be careful what video conferencing system you use. Clearly, Zoom isn’t perfect, but neither is Microsoft, and neither is Google likely to be. There is no reason to pick on any of them. All three are working hard to patch vulnerabilities as soon as they’re found. Just, try to keep your software up to date. And that’s my latest deep dive into Video Conferencing security. If you like what you’ve read, I’m available and eager for hire.
I started this book the day I finished A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, and again it’s another book finished just in time. I can’t keep this up, though, as the next one is pretty long, I’m worried I wont finish it in time. Especially since I have an interview today and starting a new job will severely cut back on my reading time, especially if the commute is shorter.
The story of Koch is an interesting one. He’s a medical doctor who came out of nowhere to revolutionize the scientific method and usher in the age of the microbe. While most Americans know who Charles and the late David Koch are, Robert Koch is no relation and should not be seen in the same light, though ironically, as the chemist Louis Pasteur was Robert Koch’s greatest rival, it’s somewhat ironic the American Kochs of Dutch ancestry also got their start as chemists.
What’s most astounding, though, is how much hubris Koch built up and his animosity toward Pasteur. Was it pure one upmanship, or something deeper? It’s clear Koch resented the French given his upbringing in Prussia and the Franco-Prussian War. I can only speculate that had something to do with it.
It’s a pity because, after all, they were both adherents to germ theory. They both had their detractors in the Anti-Vaccine League and the groups opposed to animal cruelty. Even Florence Nightingale was allied against him and all of science. It’s a pity even today people have trouble understanding vaccines train the body so something worse doesn’t befall them because the body is prepared. They didn’t understand immunology then, or herd immunity, but today, what’s the excuse?
One other sad fact is, it seems, Tuberculin is the perfect vaccine against Consumption. It is, after all, the same basic substance that Pasteur and company used for his Anthrax and Rabies vaccines. There’s no reason Tuberculin shouldn’t have worked unless, Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a bacterium which defeats the immune system? Is it more like AIDS in that respect? Still, his trying to profit from it made the fact it didn’t work all the more disgraceful.
If one disgrace wasn’t bad enough, when Koch doubled down on the bovine tuberculosis not being the same as the human form, he only dug himself into a hole further. Surely, as he and his lab investigated Bacillus anthracis, they knew the same bacteria could have different forms throughout its productive cycle. Why couldn’t he see that the different shapes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in cattle was the same as the form in humans and thus was a vector for transmission?
The book also gives the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, MD. How the two are connected in a pantomime of try-fail in trying to meet Koch only to write a scathing piece about the failed cure Tuberculin. Beyond that, the two had very little to do with each other and thus the book really stretched its mandate when it included Doyle with Koch.
Nonetheless, It was fascinating reading about Doyle and his caring for Touie while still maintaining another woman in the wings, always under chaperone. One wonders how Touie got Consumption but as it was common back then I don’t think its connection to the main theme of the book is sustained. Still, kind of interesting how Doyle prepared for Touie’s demise in the most pragmatically masculine way. I don’t know if I approve even with the maternal and sibling supervision.
It’s also interesting that Doyle gave up the rights to the first Sherlock Holmes story. And yet, he hated Holmes so much he had to kill him off after the second series of serials in The Strand. Also interesting that he only wrote four novels and that one was inspired as a competition between Doyle and Oscar Wylde. It’s wonderful, though, we got both and The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Hound of the Baskervilles for that bet.
It’s sad, though, that Doyle was so into spiritualism. And it’s also a pity that despite his belief in the Cottingley Fairies, the author never once mentions Harry Houdini‘s attempts to debunk the rampant fraud of the day.
One thing that was great to see was how William Gillette inspired Doyle to resurrect Holmes and give us more tales from 221B Baker Street. And it’s amazing how Gillette’s role gave us the deerstalker hat now so iconic and the “Elementary, dear Watson”, even though that never appears in Doyle’s writing. Gillette was indeed a fascinating man and it’s a pity he only rarely appeared in moving pictures. He did leave a fascinating legacy. Near where I grew up, in East Haddam, Connecticut, rests the castle that Gillette built. I’ve been there many times and it’s quite fun to see in person.
One last point I’d like to make is how cool it is that Koch’s colleagues and their families invented Agar Plates and Petri Dishes to grow bacteria. And, most of all, Koch was a microscopist in the tradition of Sir Frankie Crisp and was a pioneer of Microphotography. Even Sherlock Holmes, as conceived by Doyle, was a microscopist.
The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis
Although, yet again, I was not able to attend this wonderful conversation about how close we are passing the Equal Rights Amendment and what we can do to cross the threshold, I did think the video was inspiring and though there were too many wonderful folks for me to name all of them, I wanted to thank our next Governor, Jennifer Carroll Foy, for being a part of it.
As Alyssa Milano points out so eloquently, we’re all in this together and every voice counts. Alyssa is amazing and I grew up watching her on Who’s the Boss (as a fellow thespian I hope she knows I don’t pigeonhole her that one role given her expanse of other work) and am so delighted to see her working so hard to extend equal rights to women. I have been a supporter in my heart since before the show premiered, although I’ve only been actively lobbying in Richmond since Delegate Carroll Foy came to office.
Alas, we didn’t get the ERA in 2018 despite my friends and my lobbying. But when I heard the bill was passing through the IllinoisGeneral Assembly, I immediately started posting, messaging, and tweeting to my friends in Illinois to get the bill passed, even if it meant Virginia couldn’t be 37. No shame in 38. And no shame in 39 either, as I always tell my dear friend Triana Arnold James in Georgia. I’m just delighted Illinois has a wonderful RepublicanState RepresentativeSteve Andersson was behind us there and made sure the Illinois made it to 37. I was so proud to shake his hand when HJ79 passed.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t thank NevadaState SenatorPat Spearman. Without Spearman’s push in Nevada, I don’t think I’d have been aware that we still had hope for passage despite the arbitrary and unconstitutional deadline. Thank you Pat. You rock and I hope someday to shake your hand too!
There were so many wonderful people at the event, but most inspiring of all were the student organizers. They inspire me to see the next generation as passionate about this issue as I have been.
It took forever, figuratively speaking, of course, to finish it, but I finally have my updated Résumé available. It took a lot of work combining the last eighteen years of work experience into concise bullet points and I admit even when I restrict my work experience to only the last twenty years, I still have about 5 pages worth of content. I used to be able to fit it in two, so I’m a bit unhappy about that. Still, it is shorter than the full CV.
Unfortunately, updating my job history wasn’t the end of the updates. For one thing, the Xmplify fix to get it to understand my DTD broke my XSLT. Although part of the reason is I took a shortcut when writing the XSLT, assuming all elements were in the global namespace, with the new xmlns attributes to the root element, I had to promote all the matches in the XSLT to identify tags within the r: namespace. That’s what took me so long to get the Résumé ready for release, but now it’s done and ready for release
Update 1 May 2020: I updated the executive summary to reflect the most recent work I’ve done and updated my interests to match my modern personal activities. I also created an embedded output for the XSLT which outputs div instead of html, head, and body tags, allowing it to be more easily be embedded in existing web pages. I also added a feature which cuts off the work experience before a certain year. I chose to only include the last twenty years of experience in my formal Résumé, but included it all in the formal Curriculum Vitae.
Finally, I made my current Security Clearance level hidden by default. I wish to keep that information on a need-to-know basis and not allow it to be broadcast publicly. This, however, can be overridden with an XSLT parameter.
I still need to update my LinkedIn, but now that I have my summarized work experience, I should just be able to copy-paste all that I’ve done. I also would like to reduce the number of items I list in my set of expertises. Right now, it occupies about a third of a page. However, making the list of expertises more concise isn’t a high priority at the moment.
Anyway, you have my Résumé and I’m more available than ever!
The third time’s the charm. After over a week of trying to get the TeslaDashCam to work, a USB Stick arrived yesterday. After again formatting with a GUID Partition Table, a FAT32 file system, and adding the /TeslaCam directory, I plugged it into #CO2Fre.
But that wasn’t all! Turns out I also got the 2020.12.6 TeslaOS. Eager to install, I hit the install now button because I knew this update would be adding auto-stop at stop signs and stop lights. The quirk with the update is that it will even stop at green lights, so if you want it to keep going you need to keep your foot on the accelerator to get it to run the green light. It’s probably okay, though, to let it stop on yellow or red. Also, it won’t turn for you; to do that, you need to take control of the wheel.
Finally, once that was installed and Stop at Traffic Lights was activated, I decided to have another go with my 2TB SanDisk Extreme SSD. Because it was also formatted properly and had the same directory structure as the USB Stick, I had a hunch it was because the drive was a whopping 2TB that the Tesla couldn’t recognize it.
With a little work, I re-formatted the drive as GUID, with one FAT32 partition with 996GB and another 1TB of free space. After adding the /TeslaCam directory, it worked like a charm!
In conclusion, although the 2TB SanDisk Extreme SSD drive works with Tesla, Tesla cannot understand drives above at least 1TB. This seems like a failing of the TeslaOS, but one I can live with. After all, my long-term plan is to have a Raspberry Pi Zero W installed and use the 2TB drive for portable backups.
Now that I have my DashCam back, and have the automatic stopping at stop signs, I can’t wait to take #CO2Fre for a spin. I hope to be cruising on a cloud soon!
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