As an Internet Security professional, I have heard some folks expressing dismay over various security issues in the Zoom video conferencing package and the MatterMost chat services. I may do a piece on MatterMost at a later date, but for now I want to focus on Zoom because Zoom is what Meetup is suggesting as one of their preferred video conferencing platforms. (The other, Google Hangouts, is limited to ten people and thus isn’t practical for a number of the meetups I run.)
Most of the issues covered have already been patched, such as UNC password theft under MicrosoftWindows. This was a rather insidious security flaw but fortunately the folks at Zoom stepped up to the plate and patched.
iOS profiling also seems to be fixed. Since I do a lot of my Zoom conferencing, with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact grassroots coalition, on the iPhone, this has been a great relief. Now, though, I do most of my meetup Zoom conferences on my laptop.
The decrypting of streams at the Zoom servers and re-encrypting them as they go out to the far-end client is at first blush worrisome, but that in part is necessary for folks recording their zoom sessions and though it puts a vulnerability at the level of Zoom staff, one hopes Zoom is careful with whom it employs. But it must be said, nothing I do on Zoom is something I would be embarrassed about were it to leak. I nonetheless want to do everything in my power to make sure it stays secure and I’m happy to hear Zoom is looking into closing this security flaw.
The auto-download for Macintosh is worrisome but again I am happy to say this practice is also ending as it is a backdoor that Zoom can use to allow third party software onto ones Mac. Zoom also has ceased allowing team profiles to share email addresses, though this is not a feature I’m using for any of my Zoom conferences.
As for recording leaking onto the Internet or folks joining your conference uninvited (Zoom Bombing) or war drive scanning Zoom to find your conference, all of these can be solved by user diligence. It’s important to be mindful of who you let into a conference, and don’t let just anyone have access to your recordings. For my Writing Groups, only myself, the account owner, and the persons being reviewed will ever have access to the recordings, and if the reviewed doesn’t need the recordings, we will delete them.
Also, as of this morning, 5 April 2020, at 0:00 UTC, Zoom now requires passwords on all new Zoom events. Thus, even with a Zoom ID scan, you won’t be able to get into the meeting without the password and although the URL can encode the password in an obfuscated way, simply scanning Zoom IDs will not get you into the conferences. And even if you did, I’d still have to approve you. I won’t.
The Zoom Logo
Overall, I’m quite happy with Zoom and hope to use it all through Covidapolis. Overall, I give it this Security Engineers line of approval. And please note, I am available for hire if you like what you see!
From about 2020-03-23T14:30:00Z (10:30 am, Monday) to about 2020-03-23T23:30:00Z (7:30 pm, Monday), Google was redirecting all my email and either bouncing it or deleting it.
Too angry for words!
Let me repeat, google deleted or bounced my email for Nine Hours, as a part of the setup of my setup for a paid Google Apps account. The setup for these accounts are a bit weird. They require you to create a new google entity with your own company URL. Fortunately, I have multiple domains I own and maintain, including this one, TimeHorse.com.
I probably should have used my writing group domain, RestonWriters.org. After all, the whole reason I wanted to get a paid Google account is because Meetup was moving to Online-Only meetings, following the outbreak of SARS-COV-2, and I needed a tool that allowed for video conferencing.
Skype was a non-starter. For one thing, it’s great for person-to-person communications, but for group chats, it has this annoying habit of muting everyone except the current speaker and you have to wait until that speaker stops to get a word in edgewise. My understanding is WhatsApp has the same problem.
Meetup actually suggested using Google Hangouts or Zoom. I happen to like Zoom. I use it for my regular NPVIC Grassroots strategy meetings and for Toastmasters and it’s always worked great. Zoom does support up to a hundred participants, both free and Pro. The only problem is, each of those Zoom sessions are either limited to the free forty-minute block or are using an up-to-24-hour Zoom Pro Account. Since most of my Meetups are at least an hour, breaking meeting up into forty-minute chunks would be tedious. And, at $14.99 a month, the professional account is well out of my price range.
Just before the first week of Virtual meetings began, my writing colleagues and I, including Elizabeth Hayes, who runs The Hourlings, tested both free Zoom and Google Hangout. Despite being limited to ten people, we decided on Google Hangout and I mapped it to our official Virtual Meeting URL.
Ten people worked fine for Reston Writers and for the Saturday Morning Review. The Saturday Morning Review actually worked out quite well because Meetup, despite suggesting we move to a virtual platform, still won’t let you delete the venue from your event and mark it as virtual, which, when editing events can cause some confusion. But when the Library cancelled all our events, I just deleted them all from the Meetup Calendar, and recreated them with no Venue and just announced them as occurring in Cyberspace.
Stay with me folks, I’m getting to the email…
As Sunday approached, I new ten participants wouldn’t be enough. Google Hangout would be fine for Bewie Bevy of Brainy Books and Saturday Morning Review, and likely The Science Book Club, as they all usually have fewer than ten participants for each meeting. The Hourlings, on the other hand, often had twelve, and sometimes as many as sixteen!
I new Zoom was $14.99 a month, but I read that Google App accounts could up the number of participants to twenty-five. Unfortunately my 2TB Google Drive account didn’t qualify. I had to get a Google Apps account.
And that’s where my troubles began.
At first, I could only sign up for the $12 per month account, even though I’d read it could be had for $6. Since the setup has a fortnight trial period, I didn’t worry about the financial discrepancy. I set up the account with my business email address for TimeHorse, LLC. I associated it with with that email, it connected to my Gandi Registrar, and my account was ready to go. I created a Google Hangout and assigned it to the Virtual Meeting URL, hoping it would allow twenty-five. The plan was to use it with the Hourlings to verify that fact.
It failed! We still could only get ten people into the meetup despite it being a paid account.
Unfortunately, since Monday I’ve been on Weather and Safety Leave from work because my Telework agreement was revoked, but that’s a story for another day as this post is long as it is! However, it did allow me to speak to Google and they suggested I try Google Meet. Meet was included with all Google App paid accounts, and it would allow for up to a hundred people and could be as long as I needed. Also, I could downgrade to the $6 per month account and I would still be able to use it. I thus downgraded.
We tried it with Reston Writers Review and it worked wonderfully. We had up to twelve connections simultaneously! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At around 10:30 am, that Monday, after chatting with Google, I was examining my Google Apps account more closely. It was telling me I had one last step I needed to complete: integrate me email with Gmail.
Stop, do not pass Go. You’re done!
That’s when my troubles began. You see, what this innocuous, turn-key step says it does is it says it sets up GMail for your company. What it actually does is obliterate all the MX Records (email routing information) of your DNS (Internet routing information) Zone File (routing configuration file) on Gandi and replace it with MX Records that point to Google. The setup wizard doesn’t actually tell you this and I’m totally oblivious.
At current writing, I have 188 forwarded email addresses set up on Gandi with their MX Servers. One of those is my business email, the one Google took over and is my Google Apps login. That’s the email google set up as the official email address used in GMail. Once the GMail setup goes through and I send an email from the GMail interface to my personal email address on the timehorse.com domain.
It never arrives. All day long, I watch my email and, strangely, nothing arrives after 10:30 in the morning. I refresh and refresh, and it’s still nothing. Where have all my emails gone?
It’s not until I’m setting up for Reston Writers that I decide to contact Google about this. I’m crazy-busy setting up the Google Meet, opening up the pieces we’d be reviewing on my computer, and, simultaneously, chatting with Google, trying to figure out why I’m not receiving any email.
Eventually, Google Tech Support starts talking about MX Records and a chill runs down my spine. As you probably gathered by now, I am well versed in DNS records and Zone File manipulation. I even have a Python script which updates my DNS A Record when the IP Address for this server changes.
With trepidation, I logged into my Gandi account and saw the damage. Google had modified my Zone file and added a bunch of strange new MX Records pointing to Google. They had nuked all my Gandi Email forward since they’d redirected all email traffic to google. As google only had one account registered on the domain, timehorse.com, namely my business email address, every other email address I possessed was either being deleted or bounced by google!
Fortunately, Gandi’s Email Forwarding page provides a warning when the Zone file doesn’t point to their email server, listing the correct MX Record settings to use Gandi as the mail hosting server. I quickly commented out the Google MX Records and pasted in the Gandi MX Records around 7:30 pm, in the middle of my Reston Writers meeting.
Needless to say, I was miffed that I could not give my full attention to my writers during our weekly writing gettogether. But it’s good I finally did figure out the disastrous actions committed by Google after only nine hours, and not a day or more.
I may never know what was contained in those nine hours of lost emails. I suppose there is one blessing, though. I get too much email already and still have dozens of unread messages I’m desperately trying to catch up on. One Covidapolis, novel-length email after another from every business under the sun. STFU companies, you’re all doing the same thing and I don’t like reading the same message again, and again, and again! You have a plan, that’s all I need to know!
Maybe Google was doing me a favor?
In the end, I was able to solve the problem because I got skills and I’m available for hire!
It’s that time of year again. Time for the world’s second largest Democracy by population, and richest Democracy by overall GDP to vote to select who is the best to represent their party on the Presidential stage.
Voting through most of American history has been difficult. Our nation, like almost every Democracy, has political parties and every election it always comes down to just two choices: Conservatism or Progressivism. Progressives believe in progress, a government that is strong and protects its citizens from business. Conservatives believe in small government, state’s rights, and traditional values.
In 2020, Americans call Conservatives Republicans, and call Progressives Democrats. In 1888, Americans called Conservatives Democrats, and Progressives Republicans. In 1860, we called Progressive Abolitionists Republicans and Progressives who weren’t were Whigs, and Conservatives were Democrats. In 1796, Progressives were Federalists and Conservatives were Democratic-Republicans.
While all these elections were interesting, there’s one even more interesting. One more interesting than the 1888 election, where Grover Cleveland the Conservative won the Popular Vote but lost the Electoral College to Progressive Benjamin Harrison. One more interesting than the election of 1860, where Abolitionist Progressive Abraham Lincoln won the election with only 40% of the Popular Vote in a Three-Party Race. One even more interesting than the election of 1796, where the electoral college appointed the highest ballot winner to the Progressive John Adams, thus making him President, while the Conservative Thomas Jefferson had the second most votes, making him Vice President.
That last arrangement was so untenable that the Twelfth Amendment was passed. This amendment entrenching the party ticket system with our nation for the past 220 years. It give us the modern interpretation of Article II, Section 1, which in turn grants sole power to state legislatures to determine how that state’s electors are chosen.
But even that election isn’t the one I want to talk about.
The election of 1824 was a cantankerous one. That year, the Federalist Party had dissolved and the nation became a single party state where everyone claimed to be a member of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. Under that backdrop, in the first election for which we have popular voting data, there were a slate of four candidates: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William H. Cranford.
Candidate
Electoral Votes
Andrew Jackson
99
John Quincy Adams
84
William H. Crawford
41
Henry Clay
37
With four candidates running, for what was so far the only time in history, no-one received a majority of electoral votes, 131. As such, under the Twelfth Amendment (as amended by the Twentieth Amendment), the election is decided by taking the top three or less candidates and having each state’s Representatives voting on which of the candidates they prefer, with the state going to whomever the most Representative for that state voted for. Each state gets one vote, and whoever gets a majority of states becomes President. If no candidate receives that state majority, then the vote is recast until a majority is decided.
In 1824, this is exactly what happened. Of the twenty-four states at the time, thirteen were needed to decide the election. Fortunately, since Henry Clay, having been eliminated as not being in the top three, backed John Quincy Adams, meaning that only a single ballot was required in the House of Representative to elect John Quincy Adams as President.
Candidate
State Votes
John Quincy Adams
13
Andrew Jackson
7
William H. Crawford
4
If this were to happen in 2020 thanks to a third party candidate making it impossible for either the President or the Democratic Challenger to receive at least 270 Electoral Votes, then I personally feel the nation would be aghast. Most Americans don’t know about the Electoral College Voting Majority requirement or the state-based Congressional voting system, and would indeed by shocked to know that’s just what their Constitution says.
Like the election of 1824, the modern Primary system seeks to choose a winner by strict majority among a list of party-faithful Presidential Candidates. If no candidate receives a majority of votes on the first ballot, SuperDelegates in the Democratic Party (Republicans don’t have SuperDelegates) are used to put their fingers on the scale and the required majority changes to reflect this.
Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just pic the majority on the first ballot? If people in 1824 could just say without Clay and Crawford they wanted Jackson?
All these problems could be solved with Ranked Choice Voting. With Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV. Under RCV, you can say you prefer Crawford, but if your second choice is Jackson, then Adams, and finally Clay. Or you could say, like me, your first choice is Elizabeth Warren, because, among other things she supports the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, but my second, third, fourth, and fifth choices would be among the various other candidates.
What you do with that is a whole other question. Clearly, you could just ignore all but the first choice and see if anyone gets a majority. But that’s what we have now, and clearly a majority isn’t guaranteed.
Another possibility, very possible is Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where, instantaneously, a mock election is conducted with all the first-place candidates, and if no-one receives a majority, the candidate receiving the least amount of votes is eliminated and anyone voting for him or her will instead vote for their next choice. This algorithm is continued until one candidate receives a pure majority.
The problem with IRV is that it doesn’t guarantee a Condorcet Winner. The reason is easy to see if you have a series of ballots where, in aggregate, a majority prefer A over B, a majority B over C, and a third, unique majority C over A. In the vaguest case, this could produce C as winner even though a majority prefer A over C.
Another alternative, one I prefer, is the Schulze method. It is Condorcet and will match IRV when IRV doesn’t contain, for instance cycles like above. However, Schulze is a rather complicated, geometric voting system. Were it up to tabulations by hand of hundreds of millions of RCV Ballots, this would be impossible. But with modern computers, it’s facile.
Whatever voting system we use, it’s better than the system we have now with throwing the election to the House of Representatives or using SuperDelegates to ensure majorities.
And whoever you vote for this coming Super Tuesday or beyond, vote wisely, be informed, and vote with a free hand because the decision is yours. Just make sure you go out and vote!
Did you know that as of today I have officially been writing about electric cars for 11 years. Over a decade of Electric Car knowledge dispensed, that’s three times longer than I’ve advocated for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and four times longer than I’ve been lobbying in Richmond for the Equal Rights Amendment!
I started writing about electric cars with the Affordable Electric Car NOW! page. While I still write to that page from time to time, I find it hard to keep up with all the EV news these days, especially with so much going on (just look at my site header). And of course, #CO2Fre isn’t at all an affordable electric car, it’s a Tesla #P三D and believe me I still owe a lot of money on her! I love her and highly recommend her, but she’s by no means affordable.
That said, I never stopped advocating for affordable electric cars like the Nissan LEAF or Chevy Bolt and have lobbied for electric car changing access at apartments and condos #RightToCharge (VA SB630) and new and used electric car rebates (VA HB717) many times just this year.
I began my page with that simple question. Truth is, I’m not rich. Eleven years of writing about electric cars has not made me by any means famous. I’m no PlugInSites or Transport Evolved. I doubt many, even electric car folks, know who I am. I am, by any stretch, neither famous nor sought after.
But today, I can safely answer No to that initial question! Not only are there a number of consumer level Electrics, including the many Nissan LEAFs [proper plural] I drove. You can even get a used LEAF for under $10,000, and maybe even under $5,000, if you’re lucky. I’m still waiting for the Electric Car under $1,000, but it will happen…
The other thing that I didn’t get to talk about Yesterday as I was finishing summarizing the events from Tuesday is that I got a call yesterday seeing if I’d like the Tesla Hardware Version 3.0 upgrade.
I currently have the NVIDIA 2.5 hardware chip in my Tesla. That chip is nice, but it currently can’t see traffic cones or stop signs. Tesla’s own HW3 is supposed to add that support.
I dropped #CO2Fre off this morning at the Tesla Service Center, Tyco Rd. and hope to have the new hardware installed when I pick it up in a few days. I do plan to vote this weekend, so I hope it’s back by then. I also hope it will fix the problem I’ve been having recently with autopilot fails in the rain. Oh, the anticipation!
Tis another somber day in Richmond today. But please know, hope is far but all lost. We fought, we spoke, and the esteemed Chariman Deeds was very kind to us all (he would have made a most excellent—and lawabiding—Governor!)
I met Eileen Reavey at the Senate Committee Meeting Room 3 as the Senate was still in Virginia Session. Pam, Nancy, and all my fellow NPVIC: Virginia advocates were there and we watched with anticipation for the Committee Meeting to begin.
I was shocked, though, to see a number of luddite Anti-Vaccine women who have clearly been watching porn-star videos and disbarred British researchers far too much to understand the basics concepts of Herd Immunity and Correlation does not mean Causation. They were apparently there to taunt us NPVIC folks but we would not be intimidated. We knew we had right and logic on our side.
Eventually, the Senate Floor session the Senators started assembling. My dear friend Sen. Jennifer Barton Boysko was one of the first to appear and of course we waved at each other. Finally, my good friend Delegate Mark Levine showed up, and we supporters all gathered around to take a photo together.
Supporters of the NPVIC gather in the Virginia Senate Committee Room 3 right before the vote on HB177. Pictured, among others, is Mark Levine, Eileen Reavey, Pam Berg, Nancy Kolb, and of course, myself.
Senator Deeds moved the committee along and as promised HB177: the NPVIC, was second on the docket. Mark, the chief patron, spoke first, and then Senator Janet Howell (Reston) made a motion to pass the committee. Senator Deeds stopped the motion, though, as he knew members of the public wanted to speak. The order was somewhat random but I got to deliver my years speech, which Deeds already knew, then went into my comparison of Bristol VA, vs. Bristol TN, and how although at the state and legislative level these two communities were divided, at the national level, they are a common interest gerrymandered and the solution is the NPVIC.
Senator Deeds then asked me what happens in the case of a tie, and I explained to him that only those states which were close would be required to recount. Any state that wasn’t close would not recount. And in the case of an absolute tie, say 65,321,865 to 65,321,865, then what happens is the NPVIC is dissolved for that election and each state goes back to its old way of choosing electors—typically winner take all.
One of the speakers was from Falls Church and she and her husband came to troll the hearing. They both sat in seats reserved for delegates which demonstrated them clearly as having no sense of decorum or decency. Add to that, they had the temerity to take some of the things I have said, on the NPVIC Page on Facebook, as chief moderator, completely out of context.
For instance, when I call the NPVIC a Beta Test, I do not mean it is a questionable movement that is merely a joke or that it indicates some weakness. On the contrary, when I say that what I mean is, we are very certain of our goals and the expected results, but if we’re wrong, it’s easy to repeal, while repealing a Constitutional Amendment is hard.
I could not defend my statements but Eileen helpfully was able to clarify that neither her organization, nor the official organization, was associated with them. The Grassroots Page I run, as well as our Twitter feed, @NPVGrassroots are personal interest resources used to recruit, defend, and explain the NPVIC in a friendly, rapid-response way. I hone my skills there in being able to think quickly to defend against any argument to the NPVIC and have become quite adept at addressing every concern for it, having even amicably sparred with @TaraRoss, famous anti-NPVIC debater, herself.
In the end, Mark wanted a chance to address all the detractors, but Jennifer Boysko had a quiet word with him and in the end, though Senator Jill Vogel tried to get the bill tabled, Jennifer, realizing they didn’t have the votes, made a motion to pass by until the 2021 session. Jennifer was nice enough to message me on Facebook that she was doing that but Eileen and I had already discussed the possibility so it wasn’t a surprise. But it was very nice for Jennifer to come down and tell me herself in person.
Overall, the NPVIC in Virginia may be dead in 2020, but we have a better chance in 2021, after the election is over, and we still hold out hope for Florida!
Though Eileen, Pam, Nancy, and Mark left after the vote, I was in Richmond for two more bills. Namely, Delegate Cia Price‘s HB1255 (proper Gerrymandering protections which are tragically absent from the Virginia Constitutional Amendment) and HB1256 (sets up a commission similar to the Amendment). HB1255 was sent to the Finance Committee without Amendment.
Finally, it was HB1256’s turn. Unfortunately, Senator Jennifer McClellen had spoken with legal staff and raised the issue that, if the flawed Redistricting Amendment didn’t pass, HB1256 would be null and void. Cia didn’t like this but McClellen insisted the bill be amended to work with the Amendment before it went to Finance. Cia was not happy, and neither was I.
I spoke to Cia afterwards to try and assure her that as long as McClellen’s amendment addressed the Redistricting Amendment, should that pass, but preserved HB1256 in its entirety should it not pass, that we should still support it and keep fighting that troublesome Redistricting Amendment. Senator Howell is chair of Senate Finance and as many of my friend are her constituents, I will be asking all of them to insist she make sure McClellen’s Amendment leaves HB1256 unchanged with no Amendment and works with the Amendment if it does, unfortunately pass.
The good news is that none of these bills are dead. We will have a chance on Thursday to see if we can get as pure an HB1256 as possible and get HB1255 out of committee as well, and next year, we will be adding Virginia to the NPVIC!
The game was rather fun and I played for the Conservative side just because often times when I am debating the NPVIC I debate it from the Conservative perspective to better explain it to folks who lean that way.
The reason we were playing was to introduce the issues with Virginia HJ71, which allows a party line vote to veto the committee maps for districts and send it to the Virginia Supreme Court with no constitutional protections against Gerrymandering. Mark’s bills to give us a better options were merged into Delegate Cia Price‘s bills HB1256 and HB1255, which set up a citizen’s committee and also provide Gerrymandering protections. Both bills will be before the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee tomorrow. I would have liked to attend that meeting, especially as HB177 is on the Docket as well, which is the NPVIC bill, but it’s unlikely HB177 will be heard tomorrow and I have some work things I need to take care of.
In any case, I very much enjoy the game I played with Mark moderating and am considering buying the game for myself.
Delegate Mark Levine coaches me on playing Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game
The NPVIC bill in Virginia has been read for its third and final time and passed House of Delegates (51-Y 46-N), with 3 Delegates not present. We hope Delegate Convirs-Fowler is well as we don’t know who voted yet but hope the Legislative Information Service will update soon with the list of who voted for and against. But the important news is, the NPVIC has finally passed one of the Chambers of the Virginia General Assembly! Let’s Celebrate!
It’s been a long run to get us here. I testified for Delegate Mark Levine’s HB177 on Monday, 27 January for the Constitutional Subcommittee helping to get it sent to the Privileges and Elections Committee for a Committee Vote scheduled for Friday.
I couldn’t attend the Committee Hearing on 31 January but was able to watch it on my computer to my extreme melancholy as three Delegates we expected to vote for the bill actually both voted against and one of them even testified against.
The HB177 fails on the House Privileges and Elections Committee in Virginia. 31 January 2020.
I reported this on the official Facebook page on Wednesday, 5 February 2020, which you can read in full here: https://www.facebook.com/1883850291834231/photos/a.1883851011834159/2694997057386213/
That said, we still held out hope that Delegates Krizek could be convinced. We had one more House of Delegates Privileges and Elections on their last meeting before the official Crossover day when no new bills can be considered. Today was make or break.
Under House Rule 70, any member who voted on the prevailing (nay) side is permitted to move to reexamine. And as any Delegate can second, that’s exactly what Delegate Krizek did, seconded by Delegate Levine. We were back on the board!
After a vigorous debate on House Rule 70 and whether the motion to reconsider HB177 was debated, Delegate M. L. Cole made a motion to do with the NPVIC what he did to it in 2019, and 2018, and 2017, … a motion to Table!
Delegate Mark L. Cole votes to table HB177 on Friday, 7 February, 2020.
Fortunately, we had Delegate Krizek and Delegate Askew back on our side (Delegate Kelly Convirs-Fowler was sick that day; we wish her well), we easily defeated the measure with Chairman Lindsey abstaining. It was then on to the final vote…
HB177 Passes the House Privalages and Elections Subcommittee, just in time, 7 February, 2020.
This time, we made it! For the first time in the 4 years I’ve been fighting for the NPVIC, my home state of Virginia had voted the bill onto the floor of one of its houses. And as Crossover is in just 5 days, Monday and Tuesday will be Votarama, as the House of Delegates rushes to pass every bill still pending before Crossover on 11 February.
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