#wired network infrastructure

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Delegating trust is really, really, really hard (infosec edition)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this thread reported that Trustcor has the same officers as Packet Forensics; they do not; they have the same officers as Measurement Systems. I regret the error.

I’ve got trust issues. We all do. Some infosec pros go so far as to say “trust no one,” a philosophy more formally known as “Zero Trust,” that holds that certain elements of your security should never be delegated to any third party.

The problem is, it’s trust all the way down. Say you maintain your own cryptographic keys on your own device. How do you know the software you use to store those keys is trustworthy? Well, maybe you audit the source-code and compile it yourself.

But how do you know your compiler is trustworthy? When Unix/C co-creator Ken Thompson received the Turing Prize, he either admitted or joked that he had hidden back doors in the compiler he’d written, which was used to compile all of the other compilers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/11/rene-descartes-was-a-drunken-fart/#trusting-trust

OK, say you whittle your own compiler out of a whole log that you felled yourself in an old growth forest that no human had set foot in for a thousand years. How about your hardware? Back in 2018, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story claiming that the server infrastructure of the biggest cloud companies had been compromised with tiny hardware interception devices:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

The authors claimed to have verified their story in every conceivable way. The companies whose servers were said to have been compromised rejected the entire story. Four years later, we still don’t know who was right.

How do we trust the Bloomberg reporters? How do we trust Apple? If we ask a regulator to investigate their claims, how do we trust the regulator? Hell, how do we trust our senses? And even if we trust our senses, how do we trust our reason? I had a lurid, bizarre nightmare last night where the most surreal events seemed perfectly reasonable (tldr: I was mugged by invisible monsters while trying to order a paloma at the DNA Lounge, who stole my phone and then a bicycle I had rented from the bartender).

If you can’t trust your senses, your reason, the authorities, your hardware, your software, your compiler, or third-party service-providers, well, shit, that’s pretty frightening, isn’t it (paging R. Descartes to a white courtesy phone)?

There’s a joke about physicists, that all of their reasoning begins with something they know isn’t true: “Assume a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless surface…” The world of information security has a lot of these assumptions, and they get us into trouble.

Take internet data privacy and integrity — that is, ensuring that when you send some data to someone else, the data arrives unchanged and no one except that person can read that data. In the earliest days of the internet, we operated on the assumption that the major threat here was technical: our routers and wires might corrupt or lose the data on the way.

The solution was the ingenious system of packet-switching error-correction, a complex system that allowed the sender to verify that the recipient had gotten all the parts of their transmission and resend the parts that disappeared en route.

This took care of integrity, but not privacy. We mostly just pretended that sysadmins, sysops, network engineers, and other people who could peek at our data “on the wire” wouldn’t, even though we knew that, at least some of the time, this was going on. The fact that the people who provided communications infrastructure had a sense of duty and mission didn’t mean they wouldn’t spy on us — sometimes, that was why they peeked, just to be sure that we weren’t planning to mess up “their” network.

The internet always carried “sensitive” information — love letters, private discussions of health issues, political plans — but it wasn’t until investors set their sights on commerce that the issue of data privacy came to the fore. The rise of online financial transactions goosed the fringe world of cryptography into the mainstream of internet development.

This gave rise to an epic, three-sided battle, between civil libertarians, spies, and business-people. For years, the civil liberties people had battled the spy agencies over “strong encryption” (more properly called “working encryption” or just “encryption”).

The spy agencies insisted that civilization would collapse if they couldn’t wiretap any and every message traversing the internet, and maintained that they would neither abuse this facility, nor would they screw up and let someone else do so (“trust us,” they said).

The business world wanted to be able to secure their customers’ data, at least to the extent that an insurer would bail them out if they leaked it; and they wanted to actually secure their own data from rivals and insider threats.

Businesses lacked the technological sophistication to evaluate the spy agencies’ claims that there was such a thing as encryption that would keep their data secure from “bad guys” but would fail completely whenever a “good guy” wanted to peek at it.

In a bid to educate them on this score, EFF co-founder John Gilmore built a $250,000 computer that could break the (already broken) cryptography the NSA and other spy agencies claimed businesses could rely on, in just a couple hours. The message of this DES Cracker was that anyone with $250,000 will be able to break into the communications of any American business:

https://cryptome.org/jya/des-cracker.htm

Fun fact: John got tired of the bar-fridge-sized DES Cracker cluttering up his garage and he sent it to my house for safekeeping; it’s in my office next to my desk in LA. If I ever move to the UK, I’ll have to leave it behind because it’s (probably) still illegal to export.

The deadlock might have never been broken but for a key lawsuit: Cindy Cohn (now EFF’s executive director) won the Bernstein case, which established that publishing cryptographic source-code was protected by the First Amendment:

https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice

With cryptography legalized, browser vendors set about securing the data-layer in earnest, expanding and formalizing the “public key infrastructure” (PKI) in browsers. Here’s how that works: your browser ships with a list of cryptographic keys from trusted “certificate authorities.” These are entities that are trusted to issue “certificates” to web-hosts, which are used to wrap up their messages to you.

When you open a connection to “https://foo.com," Foo sends you a stream of data that is encrypted with a key identified as belonging to “foo.com” (this key is Foo’s “certificate” — it certifies that the user of this key is Foo, Inc). That certificate is, in turn, signed by a “Certificate Authority.”

Any Certificate Authority can sign any certificate — your browser ships with a long list of these CAs, and if any one of them certifies that the bearer is “Foo.com,” that server can send your browser “secure” traffic and it will dutifully display the data with all assurances that it arrived from one of Foo, Inc’s servers.

This means that you are trusting all of the Certificate Authorities that come with your browser, and you’re also trusting the company that made your browser to choose good Certificate Authorities. This is a lot of trust. If any of those CAs betrays your trust and issues a bad cert, it can be used to reveal, copy, and alter the data you send and receive from a server that presents that certificate.

You’d hope that certificate authorities would be very prudent, cautious and transparent — and that browser vendors would go to great lengths to verify that they were. There are PKI models for this: for example, the “DNS root keys” that control the internet’s domain-name service are updated via a formal, livestreamed ceremony:

https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/

There are 14 people entrusted to perform this ceremony, and at least three must be present at each performance. The keys are stored at two facilities, and the attendees need to show government ID to enter them (is the government that issued the ID trustworthy? Do you trust the guards to verify it? Ugh, my head hurts).

Further access to the facility is controlled by biometric locks (do you trust the lock maker? How about the person who registers the permitted handprints?). Everyone puts a wet signature in a logbook. A staffer has their retina scanned and presents a smartcard.

Then the staffer opens a safe that has a “tamper proof” (read: “tamper resistant”) hardware module whose manufacturer is trusted (why?) not to have made mistakes or inserted a back-door. A special laptop (also trusted) is needed to activate the safe’s hardware module. The laptop “has no battery, hard disk, or even a clock backup battery, and thus can’t store state once it’s unplugged.” Or, at least, the people in charge of it claim that it doesn’t and can’t.

The ceremony continues: the safe yields a USB stick and a DVD. Each of the trusted officials hands over a smart card that they trust and keep in a safe deposit box in a tamper-evident bag. The special laptop is booted from the trusted DVD and mounts the trusted USB stick. The trusted cards are used to sign three months worth of keys, and these are the basis for the next quarter’s worth of secure DNS queries.

All of this is published, videoed, livestreamed, etc. It’s a real “defense in depth” situation where you’d need a very big conspiracy to subvert all the parts of the system that need to work in order to steal underlying secrets. Yes, bottom line, you’re still trusting people, but in part you’re trusting them not to be able to all keep a secret from the rest of us.

The process for determining which CAs are trusted by your browser is a lot less transparent and, judging from experience, a lot less thorough. Many of these CAs have proven to be manifestly untrustworthy over the years. There was Diginotar, a Dutch CA whose bad security practices left it vulnerable to a hack-attack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

Some people say it was Iranian government hackers, who used its signing keys to forge certificates and spy on Iranian dissidents, who are liable to arrest, torture and execution. Other people say it was the NSA pretending to be Iranian government hackers:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_sh.html

In 2015, the China Internet Network Information Center was used to issue fake Google certificates, which gave hackers the power to intercept and take over Google accounts and devices linked to them (e.g. Android devices):

https://thenextweb.com/news/google-to-drop-chinas-cnnic-root-certificate-authority-after-trust-breach

In 2019, the UAE cyber-arms dealer Darkmatter — an aggressive recruiter of American ex-spies — applied to become a trusted Certificate Authority, but was denied:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying-raven/

Browser PKI is very brittle. By design, any of the trusted CAs can compromise every site on the internet. An early attempt to address this was “certificate pinning,” whereby browsers shipped with a database of which CAs were authorized to issue certificates for major internet companies. That meant that even though your browser trusted Crazy Joe’s Discount House of Certification to issue certs for any site online, it also knew that Google didn’t use Crazy Joe, and any google.com certs that Crazy Joe issued would be rejected.

But pinning has a scale problem: there are billions of websites and many of them change CAs from time to time, which means that every browser now needs a massive database of CA-site pin-pairs, and a means to trust the updates that site owners submit to browsers with new information about which CAs can issue their certificates.

Pinning was a stopgap. It was succeeded by a radically different approach: surveillance, not prevention. That surveillance tool is Certificate Transparency (CT), a system designed to quickly and publicly catch untrustworthy CAs that issue bad certificates:

https://www.nature.com/articles/491325a

Here’s how Certificate Transparency works: every time your browser receives a certificate, it makes and signs a tiny fingerprint of that certificate, recording the date, time, and issuing CA, as well as proof that the CA signed the certificate with its private key. Every few minutes, your browser packages up all these little fingerprints and fires them off to one or more of about a dozen public logs:

https://certificate.transparency.dev/logs/

These logs use a cool cryptographic technology called Merkle trees that make them tamper-evident: that means that if some alters the log (say, to remove or forge evidence of a bad cert), everyone who’s got a copy of any of the log’s previous entries can tell that the alteration took place.

Merkle Trees are super efficient. A modest server can easily host the eight billion or so CT records that exist to date. Anyone can monitor any of these public logs, checking to see whether a CA they don’t recognize has issued a certificate for their own domain, and then prove that the CA has betrayed its mission.

CT works. It’s how we learned that Symantec engaged in incredibly reckless behavior: as part of their test-suite for verifying a new certificate-issuing server, they would issue fake Google certificates. These were supposed to be destroyed after creation, but at least one leaked and showed up in the CT log:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/google-takes-symantec-to-the-woodshed-for-mis-issuing-30000-https-certs/

It wasn’t just Google — Symantec had issued tens of thousands of bad certs. Worse: Symantec was responsible for more than a third of the web’s certificates. We had operated on the blithe assumption that Symantec was a trustworthy entity — a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density — but on inspection it was proved to be a sloppy, reckless mess.

After the Symantec scandal, browser vendors cleaned house — they ditched Symantec from browsers’ roots of trust. A lot of us assumed that this scandal would also trigger a re-evaluation of how CAs demonstrated that they were worth of inclusion in a browser’s default list of trusted entities.

If that happened, it wasn’t enough.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Joseph Menn published an in-depth investigation into Trustcor, a certificate authority that is trusted by default by Safari, Chrome and Firefox:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/08/trustcor-internet-addresses-government-connections/

Menn’s report is alarming. Working from reports from University of Calgary privacy researcher Joel Reardon and UC Berkeley security researcher Serge Egelman, Menn presented a laundry list of profoundly disturbing problems with Trustcor:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/etbBho-VBQAJ

First, there’s an apparent connection to Packet Forensics, a high-tech arms dealer that sells surveillance equipment to the US government. One of Trustcor’s partners is a holding company managed by Packet Forensics spokesman Raymond Saulino.

If Trustcor is working with (or part of) Packet Forensics, it could issue fake certificates for any internet site that Packet Forensics could use to capture, read and modify traffic between that site and any browser. One of Menn’s sources claimed that Packet Forensics “used TrustCor’s certificate process and its email service, MsgSafe, to intercept communications and help the U.S. government.”

Trustcor denies this, as did the general counsel for Packet Forensics.

Should we trust either of them? It’s hard to understand why we would. Take Trustcor: as mentioned, it has a “private” email service called “Msgsafe,” that claims to offer end-to-end encrypted email. But it is not encrypted end-to-end — it sends copies of its users’ private keys to Trustcor, allowing the company (or anyone who hacks the company) to intercept its email.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Trustcor is making an intentionally deceptive statement about how its security products work, or it lacks the basic technical capacity to understand how those products should work. You’d hope that either of those would disqualify Trustcor from being trusted by default by billions of browsers.

It’s worse than that, though: there are so many red flags about Trustcor beyond the defects in Msgsafe. Menn found that that company’s website identified two named personnel, both supposed founders. One of those men was dead. The other one’s Linkedin profile has him departing the company in 2019.

The company lists two phone numbers. One is out of service. The other goes to unmonitored voicemail. The company’s address is a UPS Store in Toronto. Trustcor’s security audits are performed by the “Princeton Audit Group” whose address is a private residence in Princeton, NJ.

A company spokesperson named Rachel McPherson publicly responded to Menn’s article and Reardon and Egelman’s report with a bizarre, rambling message:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/X_6OFLGfBQAJ

In it, McPherson insinuates that Reardon and Egelman are just trying to drum up business for a small security research business they run called Appsecure. She says that Msgsafe’s defects aren’t germane to Trustcor’s Certificate Authority business, instead exhorting the researchers to make “positive suggestions for improving that product suite.”

As to the company’s registration, she makes a difficult-to-follow claim that the irregularities are due to using the same Panamanian law-firm as Packet Forensics, says that she needs to investigate some missing paperwork, and makes vague claims about “insurance impersonation” and “potential for foul play.”

Certificate Authorities have one job: to be very, very, very careful. The parts of Menn’s story and Reardon and Egelman’s report that aren’t disputed are, to my mind, enough to disqualify them from inclusion in browsers’ root of trust.

But the disputed parts — which I personally believe, based on my trust in Menn, which comes from his decades of careful and excellent reporting — are even worse.

For example, Menn makes an excellent case that Packet Forensics is not credible. In 2007, a company called Vostrom Holdings applied for permission for Packet Forensics to do business in Virginia as “Measurement Systems.” Measurement Systems, in turn, tricked app vendors into bundling spyware into their apps, which gathered location data that Measurement Systems sold to private and government customers. Measurement Systems’ data included the identities of 10,000,000 users of Muslim prayer apps.

Packet Forensics denies that it owns Measurement Systems, which doesn’t explain why Vostrom Holdings asked the state of Virginia to let it do business as Measurement Systems. Vostrom also owns the domain “Trustcor.co,” which directed to Trustcor’s main site. Trustcor’s “president, agents and holding-company partners” are identical to those of Measurement Systems.

One of the holding companies listed in both Trustcor and Measurement Systems’ ownership structures is Frigate Bay Holdings. This March, Raymond Saulino — the one-time Packet Forensics spokesman — filed papers in Wyoming identifying himself as manager of Frigate Bay Holdings.

Neither Menn nor Reardon and Egelman claim that Packet Forensics has obtained fake certificates from Trustcor to help its customers spy on their targets, something that McPherson stresses in her reply. However, Menn’s source claims that this is happening.

These companies are so opaque and obscure that it might be impossible to ever find out what’s really going on, and that’s the point. For the web to have privacy, the Certificate Authorities that hold the (literal) keys to that privacy must be totally transparent. We can’t assume that they are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density.

In a reply to Reardon and Egelman’s report, Mozilla’s Kathleen Wilson asked a series of excellent, probing followup questions for Trustcor, with the promise that if Trustcor failed to respond quickly and satisfactorily, it would be purged from Firefox’s root of trust:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/WJXUELicBQAJ

Which is exactly what you’d hope a browser vendor would do when one of its default Certificate Authorities was credibly called into question. But that still leaves an important question: how did Trustcor, who marketed a defective security product, whose corporate ownership is irregular and opaque with a seeming connection to a cyber-arms-dealer, end up in our browsers’ root of trust to begin with?

Formally, the process for inclusion in the root of trust is quite good. It’s a two-year vetting process that includes an external audit:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Application_Process

But Daniel Schwalbe, CISO of Domain Tools, told Menn that this process was not closely watched, claiming “With enough money, you or I could become a trusted root certificate authority.” Menn’s unnamed Packet Forensics source claimed that most of the vetting process was self-certified — that is, would-be CAs merely had to promise they were doing the right thing.

Remember, Trustcor isn’t just in Firefox’s root of trust — it’s in the roots of trust for Chrome (Google) and Safari (Apple). All the major browser vendors were supposed to investigate this company and none of them disqualified it, despite all the vivid red flags.

Worse, Reardon and Egelman say they notified all three companies about the problems with Trustcor seven months ago, but didn’t hear back until they published their findings publicly on Tuesday.

There are 169 root certificate authorities in Firefox, and comparable numbers in the other major browsers. It’s inconceivable that you could personally investigate each of these and determine whether you want to trust it. We rely on the big browser vendors to do that work for us. We start with: “Assume the browser vendors are careful and diligent when it comes to trusting companies on our behalf.” We assume that these messy, irregular companies are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface.

The problem of trust is everywhere. Vaccine deniers say they don’t trust the pharma companies not to kill them for money, and don’t trust the FDA to hold them to account. Unless you have a PhD in virology, cell biology and epidemiology, you can’t verify the claims of vaccine safety. Even if you have those qualifications, you’re trusting that the study data in journals isn’t forged.

I trust vaccines — I’ve been jabbed five times now — but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to doubt either Big Pharma or its regulators. A decade ago, my chronic pain specialist told me I should take regular doses of powerful opioids, and pooh-poohed my safety and addiction concerns. He told me that pharma companies like Purdue and regulators like the FDA had re-evaluated the safety of opioids and now deemed them far safer.

I “did my own research” and concluded that this was wrong. I concluded that the FDA had been captured by a monopolistic and rapacious pharma sector that was complicit in waves of mass-death that produced billions in profits for the Sackler family and other opioid crime-bosses.

I was an “opioid denier.” I was right. The failure of the pharma companies to act in good faith, and the failure of the regulator to hold them to account is a disaster that has consequences beyond the mountain of overdose deaths. There’s a direct line from that failure to vaccine denial, and another to the subsequent cruel denial of pain meds to people who desperately need them.

Today, learning that the CA-vetting process I’d blithely assumed was careful and sober-sided is so slapdash that a company without a working phone or a valid physical address could be trusted by billions of browsers, I feel like I did when I decided not to fill my opioid prescription.

I feel like I’m on the precipice of a great, epistemological void. I can’t “do my own research” for everything. I have to delegate my trust. But when the companies and institutions I rely on to be prudent (not infallible, mind, just prudent) fail this way, it makes me want to delete all the certificates in my browser.

Which would, of course, make the web wildly insecure.

Unless it’s already that insecure.

Ugh.

Image:

Curt Smith (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_castle,_Cannon_Beach.jpg

CC BY 2.0:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: An animated gif of a sand-castle that is melting into the rising tide; through the course of the animation, the castle gradually fills up with a Matrix-style 'code waterfall' effect.]

[rlyehtaxidermist]

nintendo’s port forwarding nightmare, or: how i learned to start worrying and fear the network

So I was alerted to Nintendo’s official guide on port forwarding and it contains so much bad advice that there was sort of a moral imperative to write a response to it. If you’re setting up a Switch for multiplayer games and network services, or just have a perverse interest in bad IT device configuration, you should probably read this.

this is like beginning an article about dioxygen difluoride synthesis with “in this article, you’ll learn how to start fires”

this guide having a disclaimer that “it is up to each consumer to determine what security needs they have for their own networks” is like an article promoting asbestos saying that it’s up to the consumer to determine what health needs their lungs have

part the first: questionable advice that will usually work

So first off, they tell you to go to your PC and copy down all the information on your IP, subnet mask, and gateway. For usual home networks, this is probably fine (though it’s already a red flag - normally devices on a modern home network get this information automatically, through something called the Dynamic Host Control Protocol or DHCP, avoiding the need for a lot of cumbersome manual administration).

There are some cases that might be an issue just for this; in particular, if your computer is connected via a cable while your Switch is operating wirelessly. (There’s also questions about subnetting but if you know subnetting you already know why this guide is a trash fire.)

So here the guide tells us why it wanted us to copy down configuration from our PC - because they want you to disable DHCP, and have the Switch use a static IP address.

A fixed IP in of itself isn’t bad, and there’s plenty of use cases where it’s done - but usually in an enterprise environment, for things like file servers, printers, or network infrastructure like switches and wireless access points. It’s just a very odd thing to set for a consumer device - especially a mobile, wireless one like the Switch.

part the second: oversimplified advice that might work

Aside from the rare case where your PC could have an IP address ending in 236 or more, where this advice just wouldn’t work at all, the advice boils down to “put in random numbers until you get one that works”. There’s no guarantee that a working IP address wouldn’t e.g. already be allocated to a computer that is presently turned off.

This brings us to the major issue of device-side static IP addressing: if the device disconnects from the network, there’s nothing to stop the DHCP server in your router from giving that static address to something else that connects. This can cause a lot of weird connectivity errors seemingly at random. There are ways to make a static IP compatible with a DHCP service, but they involve specific configuration of the router or DHCP server that the guide doesn’t touch on.

While this on its own is an issue, it’s not quite the security dumpster fire that it could be. But put “the router might assign the Switch’s IP address to another device in the network” into your foreshadowing pockets because it’s going to be important later.

Finally, there’s subnet mask and gateway settings, and this is where the highly technical stuff comes in. Thankfully the details are irrelevant because there’s one problem with all of this advice: sometimes the Switch should be different from your PC, especially if you have multiple access points or a mixture of wired and wireless connections. DHCP would normally handle this, but if we’re just firing randomly into the darkness, it might not. Again, this is something that will usually work with the default configuration of most home networks, but has no guarantees for anything more complex.

But this is all basically “misguided and incomplete, but mostly harmless”. Where’s the garbage fire?

part the third: terrible advice that will work all too well

The first few things are standard practice for port forwarding. The first problem is step four: specifically, the phrase “port 1 through 65535″.

If you played old video games, the number 65535 might be familiar to you. It’s the maximum value of a 16-bit unsigned integer, meaning it would irregularly crop up as the seemingly arbitrary maximum for numbers in games of the SNES era.

The significance for this in networking is that port ID is a 16-bit unsigned integer; in other words, "port 1 through 65535″ is equivalent to “every single port”. (Technically, every port but port 0, but 0 is a special case that officially doesn’t exist and is used for various types of magic that are beyond the scope of Nintendo customer support.)

Having a single port forwarded from the open internet tends to make a system a target for attacks, as if the application on that port is compromised, there’s nothing separating it from actors on the open Internet. “Check if you have any open ports” is standard basic cybersecurity advice - any accessible open port is something of a cybersecurity fire hazard.

Having every single port forwarded is the equivalent of running naked into a burning building while covered in naphtha and thermite.

On one hand, it will definitely guarantee that people can connect to your Switch from the internet! On the other... well.

A compromised Switch can then access the rest of your internal network, bypassing a lot of security and default firewall setups, since it is now on the same subnet and network, which most machines will treat as being trusted. For instance, it could access things like router configuration that are often blocked from the outside but accessible - with good reason - from internal machines. This is the same kind of hazard posed by a lot of Internet of Things devices, amplified by the Switch’s greater computing power.

But would you believe me if I said it got worse? look into your foreshadowing pocket, if you will, and recall that the router might assign the Switch’s IP address to another device in the network. So if your Switch is offline, and a new machine comes online and requests a DHCP address, suddenly it’s not forwarding every single port to your Switch, but to whatever that device is! If you have every port forwarded to the Switch’s IP, but the Switch leaves the network for some time, there is a low but very real chance the IP gets reused for a newly-connecting device, and suddenly it’s not the Switch with every port open, but a computer or phone.

All the security risks are the same for open ports on these machines, but the potential of a breach is much, much worse.

part the fourth: okay how do i fix this

Nintendo’s actual customer support has a separate article with a similar security disclaimer talking about a little-known feature many routers have called the DMZ. (Yes, that still stands for “demilitarised zone”, as in Korea or Cyprus or most borders of Israel at one point or another.) The DMZ is essentially an area designated in your router settings as separated - mostly - from your main network, intended to house machines that are more open to the public internet while protecting others from incursion.

Router DMZs are not “proper” DMZs, and do not offer the proper protection of the enterprise-level concept for which they are named. The router DMZ option, more properly called a “DMZ host”, is simply a computer on the same network as the others which receives all traffic that isn’t marked for another machine. It’s essentially the same as opening every port on the Switch, but has the benefit of at least avoiding the IP address reassignment issue that would more directly expose your other machines, since the router needs to know the Switch is in the DMZ.

I haven’t found any good advice on Nintendo’s official pages but I’ll go into what I’d do here.

Shout at Nintendo to establish an in-house standard for which ports their multiplayer games use. It’s not like a Switch is going to be running multiple services at once and they have literally tens of thousands of ports to choose from; just pick one (or at least a narrow range) and stick to it! Ideally, this would fix it but it would require a major game developer to care about cybersecurity issues other than homebrew, which I’m pretty sure requires a Lutheran Pope flying on pigback all the way to the bluest possible moon.

There are lots of networking solutions available to people willing to dip their toes in. The one I would properly suggest looking up is a so-called screened subnet, where you can use subnet masks to separate the Switch from every other machine on your network. Most routers should be able to be configured to support one but the details of it are a bit much for an already long post.

Buy a second router and put it between your first router and the network connection. Set the Switch up through this router, and all your other computers stay connected to the old router; this will make them see the Switch as an external host and keep it separated in case it’s compromised. (This is a simplified version of a true DMZ, and should work basically out of the box other than setting up port forwarding.)

If you absolutely need to expose every port on your Switch to the internet, don’t configure your Switch’s network settings. Instead, use a DHCP reservation from your router to ensure that the specific IP is only ever given to your Switch. Again, this only offers the same “won’t directly expose my other computers” protection that using a Switch as a DMZ host does, and still leaves your network open from the back - but DHCP reservations are probably the easiest thing to set up technically, often being directly documented in your router’s manual.

I am not a cybersecurity specialist, and have only learned what I do know about networking from running my own private networks. This is not a comprehensive listing of the solutions, just the ones that occur to me. They may not work perfectly, but they’ll work a hell of a lot better than opening every port and shouting “come get my ass” to the entire Internet.

[joezworld]

any odds of something like this happening in joezverse?

I have thought about this, however it runs into the same problem that would occur if Sodor were a real place.

To start with, there would be problems with clearance - I can't say for certain about every engine, but some steam locomotives are too tall to fit under wires - funnels, protrusions on tenders, and cab roofs are all in the "too close" range, and the fixability of these issues ranges from "unscrew that fitting" to "you can't". It wouldn't exactly be in the spirit of Sodor to electrify the main line at the cost of letting Gordon or Henry run on it.

Cost - Overhead catenary is expensive. I'm not saying it's insurmountable, but as many railroads around the world have shown, this is an investment they're usually willing to make only as a last resort, especially when diesels can run on the tracks as-is.

Power - Sodor is of course, fictional, but seeing as it's "rural" and "outside of London", there may be issues with the availability of electric infrastructure - as in, is there enough power to run the lines? This may also be complicated by Sodor being more or less a private enterprise, as they don't really benefit from the government saying "give them a power station", to the also-state-owned power company. As an example, many railways in America had to set up their own powerplants in the early days when they electrified. This again feeds into the "cost" part of the problem.

Why? - Sodor keeps steam running because they like steam. It seems decidedly unlikely that they'd one day elect to throw all of that away and go whole-hog into electrification.

They're not the only railway - This is actually mentioned explicitly on Page 4 of Sodor: Reading Between the Lines: The Furness Line from Barrow to Carnforth is not electrified, and more importantly, not owned by anyone named Hatt. This reduces the chances of electrification to almost zero, seeing as how Network Rail can barely keep the British railway network in one piece as it stands. This sort of endeavor would have needed to be undertaken by British Rail, and it just didn't happen.

[andmaybegayer]

Electrical grids are very eldritch. It's not really worthwhile to try and think of them as being made of independent machines, everything is linked.

It's best to think of electrical grids as one large machine which must always move in sync. The entire wiring network of perhaps half a continent is all held at exactly the same voltage to within tight tolerances, and moves exactly all at once, sometimes across ten thousand kilometers, a beating heart that not only runs along the wires but pervades the very air almost everywhere people can be found. Your body is almost certainly coupled to the grid. If you probed your skin with an oscilloscope, you'd see the signal. It's weak, it's not made for you, but it's still there.

One of the Masters students I hung out with at university had a little box he'd made that could plug into any wall socket and it'd spit out a report on a dozen different grid operating parameters, for the entire Southern African Grid. Up through the wiring, out to the transformer station at the university, through the area transformer, out to the substation, and into the lines operating at hundreds of kilovolts. Sure, there's filtering, high frequency signals won't travel beyond maybe the second transformer, but it's all connected.

There's very little direct communication between power stations, because they don't need it, and frankly it's much more sensible to operate based on the state of the grid, a continent-sized homeostasis. They get all the information they need from the state of the grid. Only broad-strokes plans, accounting for failures, bringing in new loads, really needs any large scale intervention. Trying to manually control the grid would be like trying to manually control every part of walking. What do your ankles do when you walk up stairs? I sure as hell don't know.

The machine forms a huge layer over almost everything you see and everywhere you go, invisible, synchronized, out of sight. They are conducted through the air, far out of reach, or through the ground. The infrastructure is so bland as to be invisible to most people but if you know what parts make it up, you can start to see the structure of the whole thing, and how it all fits together. Ceramic stacks isolate hundreds of kilovolts from the ground, Enormous hunks of iron lie in cooled oil baths, humming away all at the same, barely audible frequency. We built it, and for now, it's always there.

[electricansrocher112]

Simplify Your Home or Office with Full Wiring Service

Introduction

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What is Full Wiring Service?

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Conclusion

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[kaninchenzero]

trains are great i think we should have more trains in the form of intercity passenger and freight trains but in capitalistan building rail is a nightmare

buses can use existing infrastructure and buses are fucking awesome

love me some buses they were totally the best part of living in seattle

anyway even if you use diesel buses and get people out of fucking cars they're a huge improvement

buses that run on rechargeable lithium batteries are a very stupid idea so of course there's much focus on them

fuck that

what you want are hybrid electric buses with those scissor lift things that get power from overhead wires

(bonus! networks of power supply wires on bus routes would complicate low altitude drone flight in denser environments)

and have a diesel generator on board for transitions between catenary systems

which gets you a lot of person miles per unit of carbon emitted and it's all really mature tech like lead-acid batteries are cheap and make for good ballast in your vehicle

and aren't known for getting cranky and setting themselves on fire

you don't even need computer chips for this shit it's great! diesel electric hybrid buses and catenary networks and like build social housing where there are parking lots now

alas here in capitalistan the entrenched powers are ideologically and financially hostile to mass transit that's socialism for poor people we only like socialism for rich people

p.s. fuck street level light rail street level light rail sucks i am not innarested in this expensive murder machine bullshit

[turbofanatic]

Reading through Aphelion, I really enjoy the way you accomplish worldbuilding. There's just one detail I can't quite figure out, though, and I was wondering if you could give me some clarity. How did turning the lost children into a hive "protect" them from Asher 1? What happens to a human's physical body and brain when they join a hive, and why was this state preferable during Asher 1's emergence? Does their body stay alive and retain human needs, or are their minds digitized and bodies discarded? Perhaps I've missed a bit of exposition, or maybe this is simply a spoiler.... in any case, I absolutely love your work. I look forward to anything and everything that you make.

Hives can absolutely keep their human bodies, with all the brain networking performed by glucose powered wires in the brain and antennae in the skin, though some opt to extract their brains and then use the bodies as remote control drones or give them to “blockhead” AIs. As for why this was done for the children, it wasn’t just the Asher, but the fact that nearly all adults west of the Mississippi were dead, infrastructure was ruined, and the survivors were busy trying to fight the asher. Millions of kids on their own in that situation aren’t going to survive for long, and good luck getting enough people to fix that in time.

At this point, millions of cheap brain hardened brain networks that turn children into an entity that can coordinate its own survival in a harsh environment start to look good.

You can just take the networks out once things calm down, right? Right?

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[mariacallous]

Following two weeks of extreme chaos at Twitter, users are joining and fleeing the site in droves. More quietly, many are likely scrutinizing their accounts, checking their security settings, and downloading their data. But some users are reporting problems when they attempt to generate two-factor authentication codes over SMS: Either the texts don't come or they're delayed by hours.

The glitchy SMS two-factor codes mean that users could get locked out of their accounts and lose control of them. They could also find themselves unable to make changes to their security settings or download their data using Twitter's access feature. The situation also provides an early hint that troubles within Twitter's infrastructure are bubbling to the surface.

Not all users are having problems receiving SMS authentication codes, and those who rely on an authenticator app or physical authentication token to secure their Twitter account may not have reason to test the mechanism. But users have been self-reporting issues on Twitter since the weekend, and WIRED confirmed that on at least some accounts, authentication texts are hours delayed or not coming at all. The meltdown comes less than two weeks after Twiter laid off about half of its workers, roughly 3,700 people. Since then, engineers, operations specialists, IT staff, and security teams have been stretched thin attempting to adapt Twitter's offerings and build new features per new owner Elon Musk's agenda.

Reports indicate that the company may have laid off too many employees too quickly and that it has been attempting to hire back some workers. Meanwhile, Musk has said publicly that he is directing staff to disable some portions of the platform. “Part of today will be turning off the ‘microservices’ bloatware,” he tweeted this morning. “Less than 20 percent are actually needed for Twitter to work!”

Twitter’s communications department, which reportedly no longer exists, did not return WIRED's request for comment about problems with SMS two-factor authentication codes. Musk did not reply to a tweet requesting comment.

“Temporary outage of multifactor authentication could have the effect of locking people out of their accounts. But the even more concerning worry is that it will encourage users to just disable multifactor authentication altogether, which makes them less safe,” says Kenneth White, codirector of the Open Crypto Audit Project and a longtime security engineer. “It's hard to say exactly what caused the issue that so many people are reporting, but it certainly could result from large-scale changes to the web services that have been announced."

SMS texts are not the most secure way to receive authentication codes, but many people rely on the mechanism, and security researchers agree that it's better than nothing. As a result, even intermittent or sporadic outages are problematic for users and could put them at risk.

Twitter’s SMS authentication code delivery system has repeatedly had stability issues over the years. In August 2020, for example, Twitter Support tweeted, “We’re looking into account verification codes not being delivered via SMS text or phone call. Sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll keep you updated as we continue our work to fix this.” Three days later, the company added, “We have more work to do with fixing verification code delivery, but we're making progress. We're sorry for the frustration this has caused and appreciate your patience while we keep working on this. We hope to have it sorted soon for those of you who aren't receiving a code.”

That the issue seems to be recurring now indicates, perhaps, that systems Twitter has long struggled to maintain are among the first to destabilize without adequate maintenance and support. Current and former employees have painted a picture of Twitter as having convoluted and brittle technical infrastructure. Meanwhile, Musk's revisions to Twitter's “blue check” account-authentication policies have led to rampant scams on the site and even more extensive content moderation issues than existed under previous leadership.

If you haven’t already, switch to an app for generating your multifactor authentication codes, such as Google Authenticator. On Twitter go to “Settings and Support,” tap “Settings and privacy,” then “Security and account access,” “Security,” and then “Two-factor authentication.” Disable “Text message” if you have it in and instead toggle “Authentication app” and follow the instructions for adding Twitter to your authentication app. Or if you prefer to use a physical authentication token, turn on “Security key.”

For users who can't receive their SMS two-factor codes, though, questions about whether Twitter is in decline or what could be coming next are moot—the site already feels broken.

“It’s hugely problematic to require 2FA for something and not be able to fulfill it for authentication, whether it’s SMS or anything else,” says Jim Fenton, an independent identity privacy and security consultant. “It’s problematic, because it’s denying service to Twitter users.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

America needs a high-fiber broadband diet

Since the 19th century, AT&T has hoovered up incredible, priceless public subsidies - despite this, it insists that it has no duty to provide the public with the connectivity it monopolizes in markets across the country.

AT&T's subsidies started early with things like rights-of-way, the privilege of digging up public lands, piercing and even knocking down buildings to allow it to string the wires it charged us to access.

All along, AT&T has maintained the fiction that the expensive part of the network was the copper wires and the poles and the switches - not the incalculably massive discount it got by not having to buy its rights-of-way on an open market.

AT&T has enjoyed many other subsidies along the way as well - fat government contracts (including hundreds of millions in compensation for the illegal mass surveillance it partnered with the DHS on), antitrust waivers, and the right to sue competitors who made phone devices.

Now, AT&T has finally admitted what everyone else already knew: the only future-proof internet infrastructure is fiber. Not copper. Not 5G (useless without fiber). Certainly not satellites (whose speeds are an infinitesimal fraction of fiber).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g

The admission came in a blog-post that was aimed at heading off a new Biden FCC that promises to reverse Trump FCC Chair Ajit Pai's cozy, fraud-friendly relationship with the Big Telco industry he once served as a top executive lawyer.

https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/wireless/defining-broadband-for-the-21st-century/

Despite admitting the only future-proof internet is fiber, AT&T Exec VP of Federal Regulatory Relations Joan Marsh went on to say that America does not deserve fiber. Instead of 100,000,000,000bps fiber, we only need 10,000,000bps copper lines.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/att-lobbies-against-nationwide-fiber-says-10mbps-uploads-are-good-enough/

Not coincidentally, sticking with copper allows AT&T shareholders to trouser the billions they'd need to spend to upgrade their creaking infrastructure - and it would also head off public broadband investment comparable to the rural electrification projects of the New Deal.

They call fiber "overinvestment" and add "there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps product."

Thankfully, Congress has moved way, way past AT&T's 20th Century definition of "broadband." As Jon Brodkin writes in Ars Technica, there's already a proposal to spend $80b upgrading rural networks to symmetrical 100mbps service.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/democratic-led-congress-gets-serious-about-universal-broadband-funding/

And that's just table-stakes: the $3t infrastructure package includes massive cash infusions for rural broadband:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/business/biden-infrastructure-spending.html

Brodkin gives the last word to Glen Akins, who led an historic effort to build municipal fiber in Ft Collins, CO, clearing the absurd state-law threshold that ALEC lobbied for, which blocked cities from providing high-speed networks.

"If you run power to a house, you can run fiber to a house. Substituting anything else is grift."

https://twitter.com/bikerglen/status/1375537893368795144

Image: Jürgen Schoner (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGrapevinesnail_01.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[protons0010]

WHAT IS A DATA CENTER? LEARN MORE ABOUT DATA CENTERS!

There was a time when science and technology were not so complex. We used to spend a lot of time entertaining to watch a few channels on our home television. Contact was made by letter, stamps were purchased from the post office, wrapped in a paper envelope, stamped and dropped in the mailbox for destination. Then the telephone set is actually a wired voice communication system. From the office to the court, people would take a telephone connection at home. Then the real mobile phone, but with it only voice calls could be made.

That was not long ago, 15 years ago. The technology was very simple. But since 2005, high bandwidth (bandwidth key), affordable internet, computers, later smartphones and other technologies have changed the world. But one thing must be admitted, that is that the Internet is at the root of all our so-called modern technology. Everything is now online due to the vastness and convenience of the internet. We all rely on online now. Starting from television channels, hospitals, offices, courts, all institutions now rely on the internet as well as online. In private life we ​​are no less dependent on online.

However, today's article is not about how we depend on the Internet, but about why the Internet is so powerful and so powerful. Friends, we know the use of internet step by step, once we had to watch TV with only line connection at home, we had to install antennas, but now we can do live streaming of television directly using various apps and websites on the internet.

Electronic transfer is currently the main means of exchanging money in the bank, we can withdraw money from anywhere through debit credit card. For this electronic transfer and transaction, internet or internet server is required. For university admission but we don’t have to travel from one district to another; We can fill up the form on the website at home with the help of internet. In fact, how are these on the Internet? But the question remains. We have already learned in detail in this article about a network that is a connection to the Internet, but how is it possible to do all the necessary work in this great network? Yes friends, today we will know in detail about the engine of the Internet, the thing that is playing a major role in this massive functioning of the Internet, in detail.

Data center and its use

The service that we do not use on the Internet is usually operated from a central location, and this central location is called data center. Suppose you watch a video online on YouTube, then press the play button - then the command goes from our local ISP to the International ISP (ISP key) to Google's data center, from there the request is processed and the digital data of the video goes back to our device in the same way. Come on in, take a look at the video - it happens in milliseconds.

In fact, it is the technology that makes this data exchange between data centers and devices happen in a matter of milliseconds. A network that has made it possible is called the Internet. Today I will talk only about this data center. And this data center is the engine of the internet, this data center is the lifeblood and the main driver of the internet. There is no data center, no internet.

We use various services of Google, YouTube, Gmail, Google search, Google data center is working for these. Again, I am using various services of Microsoft, so the data center of Microsoft is working. The university's admission form is being filled and submitted on their website, here too he is working in the university's data center. All the banks in Bangladesh have their own big and small data centers for electronic transfers and transactions. All the important websites of the government of Bangladesh are run on the other side of the government's own data center.

Data center work

A data center is an infrastructure. This infrastructure consists of a combination of powerful computers and servers. Many servers here receive data from the network, process it, control it and send it back to the subscriber level, in the meanwhile the work of sending and receiving data is done by the Internet. Data centers do the same thing day and night. The image of a data center is usually like this - in a large room or building, since there are many servers, they are arranged on top of a large refrigerator-shaped rack. Here each server is connected to the same network. The servers are done with very high specifications. In these data centers, each server handles all the work in an integrated manner, collects data from the customer level, processes it and delivers it to the customer level as an understandable data, all the responsibility is on the data center.

I can say the unit of these data centers is the server. Just as a single cell in an organism is a single server in a data center. Each of these data center servers works based on specialized software installed by their company. It can be seen that sometimes about 40-50 servers of three or four racks are working together based on the same software or algorithm. Speaking of Google, you search or search on Google for various reasons, it is seen that about 1000 servers are working together to provide process and results to various searches of Google users. Gmail's mail management controller is working with 1500 servers simultaneously. When you are visiting a website, all the small tools or big tools inside that website, the design of that website, the bandwidth cost for the website that the visitor is visiting are all controlled from the data center. Programming these data center servers in a very complex algorithm, these algorithms have now gone to another level. As a result of the use of augmented reality in these algorithms, data center servers are artificially providing new experiences to various online service users. However, just keep in mind that the servers run on algorithms. For example, for Google search, Google uses special Google search algorithm which no one else knows.

The technology used in modern data centers is cloud computing systems (what is cloud computing). Here no data is stored on any single machine or server. Here the data is stored somewhere in the data center. And so even if a server is lost in the data center here, users do not have to suffer. However, if the data was only stored in the storage drive of a physical server, then surely there would be a fear of losing data if the server crashed.

Now it depends on the different companies what they will actually do with their data center. There are companies that want to sell their web data, web hosting, virtual servers and VPS with their data center and they arrange their data center and the server's algorithm or software operating system accordingly. For example you need space on Weinserver to create a website and for that you will take webhosting or VPS (Virtual Web Server), for this you have chosen Bluehost company. Bluehost will then give you the space you need from their data center, for which they will charge you. For your information, the data centers of the companies that work for web hosting and web services are much bigger. There are big companies like Bluehost, Hostgator, BigRock, Reseller Club under Endurance International Limited. These large web hosting, web service organizations operate on the basis of multiple data centers owned by Endurance Limited. So if you have a website, you are also using the data center directly with money.

Data center maintenance

All the computers in a data center are reconnected to a main computer. From here the staff or server engineers see if all the servers are running properly. The servers in each data center are connected in such a way that if one of the servers has a problem here, the rest will not. When something like this is caught on the main computer, an engineer goes to the server, puts a display and the necessary equipment with the server, identifies what the problem is with the server, identifies it, and throws it away later. And these engineers are called internet doctors.

Data centers like Google, Facebook where a lot of important user information is stored. In this case, data center engineers have to be very protective. A separate server is usually kept in the data center for backing up these data. If for some reason even the slightest problem is observed in the hard drive or SSD drive of a running server, then the data of that hard drive is restored to another good hard drive and a new hard drive is set up. In companies like Google, old or damaged storage drives are discarded so that no one can steal even the slightest bit of a user's data. The same goes for Facebook's data center.

These data centers have to be kept open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And it consumes a lot of electricity. Google's data center in the United States uses its own powerstation, from which uninterrupted power is always provided, as well as backup power. According to a survey, Google has 13 large data centers around the world, with a total of 200 tons of carbon dioxide emitted from power stations or plants per day. Power's thoughts are gone, now let's keep it cool. So many high-capacity servers must be hot! They cannot be left behind. So all the big data centers have a huge system for cooling Some data centers are air-conditioned, while large data centers like Google have water-cooling systems like spider webs, and so on. These cooling systems also cost a lot of power. And as an alternative, Microsoft has experimentally set up small underwater data centers, which are still being piloted. Cooling costs are reduced due to being under seawater, they have a desire to bring it to a wider range in the future.

Finally

WHAT IS A DATA CENTER? LEARN MORE ABOUT DATA CENTERS!

A data center is a unique Internet station. The stations from which data is served to us. Here each piece of data is given different forms, the data is processed, controlled, transported to different places through a network. Hope you got a good idea of ​​what a data center thing is. You must have understood that data center is the lifeblood of internet. So don't forget to leave a comment below. If you like it, you must share.

Thanks.

WHAT IS A DATA CENTER? LEARN MORE ABOUT DATA CENTERS!

[asipiyayun]

Severe Humanitarian Disasters Caused by US Aggressive Wars against Foreign Countries

The United States has always praised itself as "a city upon a hill" that is an example to others in the way it supports "natural human rights" and fulfills "natural responsibilities", and it has repeatedly waged foreign wars under the banner of "humanitarian intervention". During the past 240-plus years after it declared independence on July 4th, 1776, the United States was not involved in any war for merely less than 20 years. According to incomplete statistics, from the end of World War II in 1945 to 2001, among the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions of the world, 201 were initiated by the United States, accounting for 81 percent of the total number. Most of the wars of aggression waged by the United States have been unilateralist actions, and some of these wars were even opposed by its own allies. These wars not only cost the belligerent parties a large number of military lives but also caused extremely serious civilian casualties and property damage, leading to horrific humanitarian disasters. The selfishness and hypocrisy of the United States have also been fully exposed through these foreign wars.

1. Major Aggressive Wars Waged by the United States after World War II

(1) The Korean War. The Korean War, which took place in the early 1950s, did not persist for a long time but it was extremely bloody, leading to more than three million civilian deaths and creating more than three million refugees. According to statistics from the DPRK, the war destroyed about 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, and 600,000 households, and more than two million children under the age of 18 were uprooted by the war. During this war, the ROK side lost 41.23 billion won, which was equivalent to 6.9 billion US dollars according to the official exchange rate at that time; and about 600,000 houses, 46.9 percent of railways, 1,656 highways, and 1,453 bridges in the ROK were destroyed. Worse still, the war led to the division of the DPRK and the ROK, causing a large number of family separations. Among the more than 130,000 Koreans registered in the Ministry of Unification in the ROK who have family members cut off by the war, 75,000 have passed away, forever losing the chance to meet their lost family members again. The website of the United States' The Diplomat magazine reported on June 25, 2020, that as of November 2019, the average age of these family separation victims in the ROK had reached 81, and 60 percent of the 133,370 victims registered since 1988 had passed away, and that most of the registered victims never succeeded in meeting their lost family members again.

(2) The Vietnam War. The Vietnam War which lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s is the longest and most brutal war since the end of World War II. The Vietnamese government estimated that the war killed approximately 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and 300,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, and caused as many as two million civilian deaths. The government also pointed out that some of the deaths were caused by the US troops' planned massacres that were carried out in the name of "combating the Vietnamese Communist Party". During the war, the US forces dropped a large number of bombs in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, almost three times the total number of bombs dropped during World War II. It is estimated that as of today, there are at least 350,000 metric tons of unexploded mines and bombs left by the US military in Vietnam alone, and these mines and bombs are still explosive. At the current rate, it will take 300 years to clean out these explosives. The website of The Huffington Post reported on December 3, 2012, that statistics from the Vietnamese government showed that since the end of the war in 1975, the explosive remnants of the war had killed more than 42,000 people. Apart from the above-mentioned explosives, the US forces dropped 20 million gallons (about 75.71 million liters) of defoliants in Vietnam during the war, directly causing more than 400,000 Vietnamese deaths. Another approximately two million Vietnamese who came into contact with this chemical got cancer and other diseases. This war that lasted for more than 10 years also caused more than three million refugees to flee and die in large numbers on the way across the ocean. Among the refugees that were surveyed, 92 percent were troubled by fatigue, and others suffered unexplained pregnancy losses and birth defects. According to the United States' Vietnam War statistics, defoliants destroyed about 20 percent of the jungles and 20 to 36 percent of the mangrove forests in Vietnam.

(3) The Gulf War. In 1991, the US-led coalition forces attacked Iraq, directly leading to about 2,500 to 3,500 civilian deaths and destroying approximately 9,000 civilian houses. The war-inflicted famine and damage to the local infrastructure and medical facilities caused about 111,000 civilian deaths, and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimated that the war and the post-war sanctions on Iraq caused the death of about 500,000 of the country's children. The coalition forces targeted Iraq's infrastructure and wantonly destroyed most of its power stations (accounting for 92 percent of the country's total installed generating capacity), refineries (accounting for 80 percent of the country's production capacity), petrochemical complexes, telecommunication centers (including 135 telephone networks), bridges (numbering more than 100), highways, railways, radio and television stations, cement plants, and factories producing aluminum, textiles, wires, and medical supplies. This war led to serious environmental pollution: about 60 million barrels of petroleum were dumped into the desert, polluting about 40 million metric tons of soil; about 24 million barrels of petroleum spilled out of oil wells, forming 246 oil lakes; and the smoke and dust generated by purposely ignited oil wells polluted 953 square kilometers of land. In addition, the US troops' depleted uranium (DU) weapons, which contain highly toxic and radioactive material, were also first used on the battlefield during this Gulf War against Iraq.

(4) The Kosovo War. In March 1999, NATO troops led by the United States blatantly set the UN Security Council aside and carried out a 78-day continuous bombing of Yugoslavia under the banner of "preventing humanitarian disasters", killing 2,000-plus innocent civilians, injuring more than 6,000, and uprooting nearly one million. During the war, more than two million Yugoslavians lost their sources of income, and about 1.5 million children could not go to school. NATO troops deliberately targeted the infrastructure of Yugoslavia in order to weaken the country's determination to resist. Economists of Serbia estimated that the total economic loss caused by the bombing was as much as 29.6 billion US dollars. Lots of bridges, roads, railways, and other buildings were destroyed during the bombing, affecting 25,000 households, 176 cultural relics, 69 schools, 19 hospitals, and 20 health centers. Apart from that, during this war, NATO troops used at least 31,000 DU bombs and shells, leading to a surge in cancer and leukemia cases in Yugoslavia and inflicting a long-term disastrous impact on the ecological environment of Yugoslavia and Europe.

(5) The Afghanistan War. In October 2001, the United States sent troops to Afghanistan. While combating al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it also caused a large number of unnecessary civilian casualties. Due to the lack of authoritative statistical data, there is no established opinion about the number of civilian casualties during the Afghanistan War, but it is generally agreed that since entering Afghanistan, the US troops caused the deaths of more than 30,000 civilians, injured more than 60,000 civilians, and created about 11 million refugees. After the US military announced its withdrawal in 2014, Afghanistan continued to be in turmoil. The website of The New York Times reported on July 30, 2019, that in the first half of 2019, there were 363 confirmed deaths due to the US bombs in Afghanistan, including 89 children. Scholars at Kabul University estimated that since its beginning, the Afghanistan War has caused about 250 casualties and the loss of 60 million US dollars per day.

(6) The Iraq War. In 2003, despite the general opposition of the international community, US troops still invaded Iraq on unfounded charges. It is hard to find precise statistics about the civilian casualties inflicted by the war, but the number is estimated to be around 200,000 to 250,000, including 16,000 civilian deaths directly caused by US forces. Apart from that, the occupying US forces have seriously violated international humanitarian principles and created multiple "prisoner abuse cases". After the US military announced its withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, local warfare and attacks in the country have continued. The US-led coalition forces have used a large number of DU bombs and shells, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus bombs in Iraq, and have not taken any measures to minimize the damage these bombs have inflicted upon civilians. According to the estimate of the United Nations, today in Iraq, there are still 25 million mines and other explosive remnants that need to be removed. The United States has not yet withdrawn all its troops from Afghanistan or Iraq for now.

(7) The Syrian War. Since 2017, the United States has launched airstrikes on Syria under the pretext of "preventing the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government". From 2016 to 2019, the confirmed war-related civilian deaths amounted to 33,584 in Syria, and the number of Syrian civilians directly killed by the airstrikes reached 3,833, with half of them being women and children. The website of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reported on November 9, 2018, that the so-called "most accurate air strike in history" launched by the United States on Raqqa killed 1,600 civilians. According to a survey conducted by the World Food Programme (WFP) in April 2020, about one-third of Syrians were faced with a food shortage crisis, and 87 percent of Syrians had no deposits in their accounts. Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde/MdM) estimated that since the beginning of the Syrian War, about 15,000 Syrian doctors (about half of the country's total) had fled the country, 6.5 million Syrian people had run away from their homes, and about five million Syrian people had wandered homeless around the world.

Apart from being directly involved in wars, the United States has intervened directly or indirectly in other countries' affairs by supporting proxy wars, inciting anti-government insurgencies, carrying out assassinations, providing weapons and ammunition, and training anti-government armed forces, which have caused serious harm to the social stability and public security of the relevant countries. As such activities are great in number and most of them have not been made public, it is hard to collect specific data regarding them.

2. The Disastrous Consequences of Foreign Wars Launched by the United States

Since the end of World War II, almost every US president has waged or intervened in foreign wars during their terms of office. The pretexts they used include: stopping the spread of communism, maintaining justice, stopping aggression, humanitarian intervention, combating terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), protecting the safety of overseas US citizens, etc. Among all these foreign wars, only one was waged as a counterattack in response to a direct terrorist attack on the United States; the others were waged in a situation where the vital interests of the United States were not directly affected. Unfortunately, even this singular "justifiable counterattack" was obviously an excessive display of defense. Under the banner of eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda, the US military wantonly expanded the scope of the attack in the anti-terrorism war in accordance with the principle "better to kill by mistake than to miss out by accident", resulting in a large number of civilian causalities in the war-affected areas, and despite using the relatively accurate drone strikes, the US military still did not succeed in reducing and mitigating the causalities of the innocent local people.

As for the procedures followed by the United States to start aggressive wars against foreign countries, some were "legitimate procedures" that the United States managed to obtain by manipulating the UN into authorizing them through the Security Council; more often, the United States just set the Security Council aside and neglected the opposition of other countries, and even the opposition of its own allies, when willfully and arbitrarily launching an attack on an independent country. Some US foreign wars were initiated without the approval of the US Congress, which has the sole power to declare war for the country.

US foreign wars have triggered various regional and international crises.

First of all, these wars have directly led to humanitarian disasters in the war-affected countries, such as personnel casualties, damage to facilities, production stagnation, and especially unnecessary civilian casualties. In the war-affected areas, people died in their homes, markets, and streets, they were killed by bombs, bullets, improvised explosive devices, and drones, and they lost their lives during airstrikes launched by US forces, raids launched by their government forces, terrorist and extremist massacres, and domestic riots. In November 2018, Brown University released a research study that showed that the number of civilian deaths during the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen were 43,074; 23,924; 184,382 to 207,156; 49,591; and 12,000 respectively, the number of journalists and media personnel who died at their posts during these wars, were 67; 8; 277; 75; and 31 respectively, and the number of humanitarian relief workers who were killed at their posts during these wars were 424; 97; 63; 185; and 38 respectively. Such casualties are often understated by the US government. The Intercept website reported on November 19, 2018, that the actual civilian deaths in Iraq were far higher than the number officially released by the US military.

Second, US foreign wars brought about a series of complex social problems, such as refugee waves, social unrest, ecological crises, psychological traumas, etc. Statistics show that each of the several recent US foreign wars created a larger number of refugees, such as the 11 million Afghan refugees, the 380,000 Pakistani refugees, the 3.25 million Iraqi refugees, and the 12.59 million Syrian refugees; these refugees have been forced to flee from their homes, of which 1.3 million Afghan refugees have fled to Pakistan, 900,000 Afghan refugees arrived in Iran, 3.5 million Iraqi and Syrian refugees fled to Turkey, and one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees fled to Iran. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, the deaths and injuries caused by the lack of medical treatment, malnutrition, and environmental pollution have exceeded the casualties directly caused by the wars, with the former number being four times greater than the latter. The uranium content per kilogram of soil in Basra, Iraq, rose sharply from less than 70 becquerels before 1991 to 10,000 becquerels in 2009, and the number was as high as 36,205 becquerels in the areas polluted by war remnants. The website of the British newspaper The Guardian reported on August 22, 2016, that 30 percent of the babies born in Iraq in 2010 were born with some form of congenital anomaly, while this figure is around two to four percent under normal circumstances.

Third, US foreign wars have often produced spillover effects, causing harm to the countries that were not involved in the wars. For example, in the Vietnam War, the US military spread the fighting to neighboring countries such as Cambodia and Laos on the excuse of blocking the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" (a military supply route running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam), resulting in more than 500,000 unnecessary civilian casualties and leaving a large number of war remnants in those countries, which are still explosive. When attacking terrorists in the Afghanistan War, the US aircraft and drones often dropped bombs on neighboring Pakistani villages, and even on wedding cars and Pakistani border guard soldiers. In an airstrike on Yugoslavia, the US forces even targeted the Chinese embassy, leading to the deaths of three Chinese journalists and the injuries of a dozen embassy personnel.

Last but not least, even the United States itself has fallen victim to the foreign wars it has started. According to statistics from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, there were 103,284 US soldiers who suffered physical injuries during the Korean War, and the number reached 153,303 for the Vietnam War. Between 2001 and 2005, about one-third of the 103,788 veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were diagnosed with mental or psychological illness, and 56 percent of those diagnosed had more than one disease. A study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which works exclusively for the United States Congress, pointed out that more than 6,000 veterans committed suicide every year from 2008 to 2016. The amount of economic compensation offered by the US military to the Korean War veterans reaches 2.8 billion US dollars per year, and the amount given to the Vietnam War veterans and their families is more than 22 billion US dollars per year. The cost of medical and disability care for the Afghanistan War veterans has exceeded 170 billion US dollars. Business Insider, a US business and technology news website, reported in December 2019 that the Afghanistan war has led to the deaths of more than 3,800 US contractors, and this number far exceeds the relevant statistical result released by the US government and even the US military deaths in Afghanistan.

3. The Major Cause of the Above-Mentioned Humanitarian Crises: The United States' Hegemonic Mentality

When reviewing the many aggressive wars launched by the United States, it can be seen that many of these military actions have led to humanitarian crises. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other countries where wars are still ongoing, accidental bombings and injuries still frequently occur, and refugees have nowhere to stay. The infrastructure of these countries is crippled, and their national production is stagnant. The United States launched these foreign wars under the pretext of "humanitarian intervention" or "human rights overriding sovereignty", but why did these wars fought for humanitarian purposes turn into humanitarian disasters in the end?

In April 2011, the US-based magazine Foreign Policy summarized five reasons for the frequent foreign wars waged by the United States, such as the military advantages of the United States making it hard to resist the temptation to resort to force, and the checks and balances mechanism within the United States failing to play an effective role, while excluding any reason related to the values of the United States. "To safeguard human rights" was not a clear driving force for US foreign wars and that waging foreign wars was only a means to an end, although such an act did not exclude a sense of morality. The United States may feel an impulse to start a foreign war as long as it is considered necessary, believed to be in its own favor, and within its ability, while a sense of morality is not a sufficient or necessary condition to initiate such a war; and as for the terrible humanitarian disasters caused by these foreign wars, they will be borne by others instead of directly harming US citizens and preventing the United States from reaching its goals. Choosing to use force irrespective of the consequences reveals the hegemonic aspirations of the United States, which propel the United States to prioritize itself, demonstrate its "winner-take-all" mentality, and expose its unilateralist ideas of dominating the world and wantonly doing injustice to other countries.

US politicians claim that they respect "universal values", but do they agree that their own natural human rights are also natural for other people in the world?

The United States has formulated laws to ensure equality among all its ethnic groups within the country, but does it really believe that people of other countries should enjoy the same rights? Or, does it think that it can act wantonly in foreign countries just because the people there do not have a vote in US elections?

The United States believes that terrorist attacks targeting civilians within its territory are despicable and punishable, then what makes it accept that the incidents created by the US military in other countries, which have led to a large number of civilian deaths and injuries, are acceptable and even "necessary"?

When they adopt the principle "better to kill by mistake than to miss out by accident", when they arbitrarily use radioactive weapons and destroy all vegetation with toxic reagents, and when they open fire before clearly identifying the targets, do the US forces still respect the "natural" human rights treasured by the values of the United States?

The civilians who were unable to flee their war-affected areas and were treated as terrorists and shot at randomly did not have any human rights. The children who have been disabled at birth by the chemical weapons of the US forces and will suffer for the rest of their lives do not have any human rights. The refugees who have been forced to flee their homes and become homeless in other countries because of the US foreign wars do not have any human rights.

In the final analysis, the mindset of solving disputes by taking unilateral military actions is questionable. Given the inherent antagonism between humanitarianism and hegemony, it is ridiculous to expect a hegemonic country to defend the human rights of other countries. International disputes shall be settled through equal consultations within the framework of the United Nations. Coordinated efforts shall be actualized by regulating and improving international mechanisms and by establishing a community with a shared future for mankind. Only by discarding the hegemonic thinking, which is chiefly motivated by self-interest, can we prevent "humanitarian intervention" from becoming humanitarian disasters. Only in this way can we achieve mutual benefits and win-win results and can all the people across the globe truly enjoy natural human rights.

Appendix:

1. List of Civilian Casualties, Refugees, and Economic Losses Caused by Major Wars of Aggression Waged by the United States after the End of World War II

The Korean War: about 3 million civilian deaths and 3 million refugees;

The Vietnam War: about 2 million civilian deaths, 3 million refugees, and 3 million victims of defoliants;

The Airstrike on Libya: about 700 military and civilian deaths;

Invasion of Panama: about 302 civilian deaths and 3,000 civilian injuries;

The Armed Intervention in Somalia: about 200 civilian deaths and 300 civilian injuries;

The Gulf War: about 120,000 war-related civilian deaths and 2 million sanction-related civilian deaths, and economic losses amounting to 600 billion US dollars;

The Kosovo War: more than 2,000 deaths and 6,000 injuries, and economic losses amounting to 200 billion US dollars;

The Afghanistan War: more than 30,000 civilian deaths, 70,000 civilian injuries, and 11 million refugees;

The Iraq War: about 200,000–250,000 civilian deaths and 3.25 million refugees;

The Syrian War: more than 40,000 civilian deaths and 12.59 million refugees.

 2. List of Wars of Aggression Waged by the United States and the US Interventions in Foreign Countries after the End of World War II

1947–1949: intervening in the Greek civil war

1947–1970: intervening in Italy's elections and supporting anti-communism activities

1948: supporting the anti-government forces in Costa Rica's civil war

1949–1953: supporting anti-communism activities in Albania

1949: intervening in the government change in Syria

1950–1953: waging the Korean War

1952: intervening in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952

1953: supporting a coup in Iran to overthrow the then Iranian government

1954: supporting the change of the then Guatemalan government

1956–1957: plotting a coup in Syria

1957–1959: supporting a coup in Indonesia

1958: creating a crisis in Lebanon

1960–1961: supporting a coup in the Congo

1960: stopping the government of Laos from starting a reform

1961: supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba

1961–1975: supporting civil war and opium trade in Laos

1961–1964: supporting anti-government activities in Brazil

1963: supporting civil strife in Iraq

1963: supporting riots in Ecuador

1963–1975: fighting the Vietnam War

1964: intervening in the Simba rebellion in the Congo

1965–1966: intervening in Dominica's civil war

1965–1967: supporting the Indonesian military government’s massacre of communists

1966: supporting an insurgency in Ghana

1966–1969: creating conflicts in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which is a region on the Korean peninsula that demarcates North Korea from South Korea

1966–1967: supporting an insurgency in Bolivia

1967: intervening in the change of the Greek government

1967–1975: intervening in Cambodia's civil war

1970: intervening in Oman's domestic affairs

1970–1973: supporting a military coup in Chile

1970–1973: supporting a coup in Cambodia

1971: supporting a coup in Bolivia

1972–1975: offering assistance to anti-government forces in Iraq

1976: supporting a coup in Argentina

1976–1992: intervening in Angola's domestic affairs

1977–1988: supporting a coup in Pakistan

1979–1993: supporting anti-government forces in Cambodia

1979–1989: intervening in the war in Afghanistan

1980–1989: financing the anti-government Solidarity trade union in Poland

1980–1992: intervening in El Salvador's civil war

1981: confronting Libya in Gulf of Sidra

1981–1982: pushing the change of the then Chadian government

1982–1984: participating in a multilateral intervention in Lebanon

1982–1989: supporting anti-government forces in Nicaragua

1983: invading Grenada

1986: invading Gulf of Sidra, Libya

1986: bombing Libya

1988: shooting down an Iranian airliner

1988: sending troops to Honduras

1989: confronting Libya in Tobruk

1989: intervening in the Philippines' domestic affairs

1989–1990: invading Panama

1990–1991: waging the Gulf War

1991: intervening in Haiti's elections

1991–2003: leading the enforcement action to establish a no-fly zone in Iraq

1992–1995: intervening in Somalia's civil war for the first time

1992–1995: intervening in the Bosnian War

1994–1995: sending troops to Haiti

1996: supporting a coup in Iraq

1997: sending troops to Albania

1997: sending troops to Sierra Leone

1998–1999: waging the Kosovo War

1998: launching cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan

1998–1999: sending troops to Kenya and Tanzania

2001–present: waging the Afghanistan War

2002: sending troops to Côte d'Ivoire

2003–2011: waging the Iraq War

2004–now: inciting wars between Pakistan and Afghanistan in their contiguous areas

2006–2007: supporting Fatah, a Palestinian political and military organization, in overthrowing the elected government of Hamas

2007–present: intervening in Somalia's civil war for the second time

2009: supporting a coup in Honduras

2011: supporting anti-government forces in Libya

2011–2017: carrying out military operations in Uganda

2014–present: leading the intervention actions in Iraq

2014–present: leading the intervention actions in Syria

2015–now: supporting Saudi Arabia's participation in Yemen's civil war

2019: supporting the change of the Venezuelan government

[rajeevjhawarushamartin]

Rajeev Jhawar Heading Usha Martin is An Intelligent Call

Usha Martin is known for making a wide range of wire rope products, which have applications across the world. The ropes manufactured by Usha Martin serve in some of the most critical applications across diversified industrial segments, which include oil & offshore, cranes, mining, elevators, aerials, fishing, conveyor belts and general engineering. The outbreak of the corona virus pandemic globally and in India has caused significant disturbance and slowdown of economic activities.

Usha Martin is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of wire rope. Established in the year 1960, today Usha Martin is a multi-unit and multi-product organization. The wire rope manufacturing facilities located in Ranchi, Hoshiarpur, Dubai, Bangkok and UK produce one of the widest ranges of wire ropes in the world. The infrastructural facilities are equipped with the latest state-of-the-art high-capacity machines to manufacture world-class products. Our Global R&D centre located in Italy is actively engaged in designing wire ropes and uses proprietary design software to develop products that are the best in class.

Usha Martin also has a comprehensive R&D facility in their manufacturing unit at Ranchi in India. Long-standing application in diverse sectors like Oil & Offshore, Mining, Crane, Elevator, Infrastructure etc. is the testimony of their expertise in manufacturing high-quality wire rope products. As a business entity, they have always focused on delivering value-added products and services to the customers. To ensure the commitment to quality percolates through every sphere of their operations, they have built a robust network of capabilities spread across the globe. The distribution centers are located in the UK, North America, South America, Netherlands, Australia, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Kazakhstan and Iran. Usha Martin’s facility at Ranchi is one of the world’s largest wire rope manufacturing facilities under one roof. Other than wire rope, this unit manufactures LRPC strands, customized to have diversified applications in Infrastructure, Renewable energy installations, Bridges etc. Usha Martin has enriched experience in manufacturing & supply of pre-stressing machines & accessories, backed up by expert installation teams for Pre-stressing jobs.

Mr. Rajeev Jhawar is an Indian industrialist with over three decades of experience in strategic management is the managing director of Usha martin. He is an alumnus of Ranchi University and London Business School. He started his journey as Sr. Vice President (Commercial) and became the Managing Director of Usha Martin Limited in 1998. In the three decades that he has been at the helm of the Usha Martin Group, Rajeev Jhawar has accelerated growth, built a meritocracy and enhanced stakeholder value. His leadership qualities, sharp business acumen, in-depth understanding of business administration and strategic decision making has taken the Group to an altogether higher growth trajectory.

Rajeev Jhawar is on the Boards of various corporates including Orient Cement Limited (part of CK Birla group companies) and Neutral Publishing House Limited which has a leading regional newspaper under the flagship title ‘Prabhat Khabar’ published in the Indian cities of Patna, Dhanbad, Ranchi, Jamshedpur & Kolkata. He is also a director on the boards of Usha Martin’s overseas subsidiaries, i.e Usha Martin International Limited inthe UK, Usha Siam Industries Public Company Limited in Thailand and Brunton Wire Ropes FZCo in Dubai.

Rajeev Jhawar has been the Managing Director of Usha Martin Limited since May 19, 2008.  He is a director of Neutral Publishing House Limited.  Rajeev Jhawar has been the Vice Chairman of Usha Martin Education and Solutions Limited since September 2010.  The company has been bringing rich experience in the management of industrial enterprises for more than a decade, the company said in a regulatory filing. His leadership qualities, sharp business acumen, deep understanding of business administration and strategic decisions led the group to a high growth trajectory as a whole.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Disparition Des Potaux Du Telephone,” Le Soleil. June 3, 1919. Page 09. --- La compagnie du Télephone Bell a commencé, ce matin, à faire l’enfouissement de ses fils à Limoilou. Une dépense de $18,000 pour les conduits seulement.—On veut faire disparaître les poteaux -- Le comité des travaux publics est informé de la chose. --- La compagnie du téléphone a commencé. ce matin, dans le quartier Limouli à faire des travaux très importants sur son réseau. Il s'agit de l'enfouimissment des fils sous terre pour faire disparaître l'ancien svstème des potaux qui admettons-le, ne constituent pas un ornement. Il serait à.souhaiter que cette politique soiit adoptée dans toute la ville, mais ce n’est pas là un mince projet qui peut se réaliser du jour au lendemain. 

Les travaux que l'on a commencés dans LimoiIou. sont un bon pas de fait. La chose  a été soumise au comité des travaux publies présidé par l’échevin Albert Bouchard hier soir, pour autoriser l’ouverture des certaines rues où des travaux de tranchéage doivent être nécessairement faits.

Bien quelle n’y soit pas obligée maintenant, la compagnie du Bell Telephone a profité du temps ou la Ville va faire des travaux de pavâge dans cette division et  surtout sur le chemin de Beauport, pour faire immèdiatement celle amélioration. Les rues out l’on fait l’enfouissement des fils sont a partir du pont Dorchester, en passant par le 3e avenue, jusqu’à la 10e rue, cette dernière rue sur toute sa longueur, puis ensuite sur le chemin de la Canardière. à partir de la 10e rue Bergemont, puis sur la 5e rue, jusqu'à la rue 4re avenue.

Le coùt des conduits seul. entrainers une dépense à la compagnie de $18,000 et les travaux d’enfoutesement des fils coûteront beaucoup plus chez.

Ces travaux qui seront poussés activement jusqu’à complétion se font sous la direction de M. J.-J. Seguin, surintendant des lignes de la compagnie Bell et même en temps échevin du quartier.

[jackhkeynes]

2m Lexembr

aðendr /aˈðɛn.dr̩/ [ɐˈðɛn.dɐ] schedule, timetable, itinerary, list of stopping places or events in time order; also deadline, point of no return

Etymology: first seen in the sixteenth century as the deverbal derivation of verb aðendrar "to travel, journey, tour"; the noun originally seems to mean "path, route (of a journey)".

The verb is older, a variant (presumably by analogy with other verbs in að- like aðoir, aðombrar, etc.) of earlier eðenrar "to be under way, be on a journey; especially, to travel by boat", attested from the ninth century in the Hadambour chronicle.

This Old Boral verb is a clear descendant of Insular Latin verb itinerō "I travel, voyage", non-deponent version of better-attested Classical verb itineror, of the same meaning. This is a derivation from iter "journey, trip", other descendants of which include Norman eithre /æjðə/ "course, route, progress along a path, inertia" and possibly Vascon gider /ˈʃi.ðɛɹ/ "travelling fair, circus, carnival", though this is contested (see Taric 1979).

L'aðendr a tarm vec forn eið doutr posc y rout novel ovroy.

/laˈðɛn.d‿ra tarm vɛk ˈfɔ.rn̩ iθ ˈdu.tr̩ pɔx i rut noˈvɛl oˈvrɔj/

[lɐˈðɛn.d‿ʀɐ tɑːm vɛk fɔːn iθ ˈdu.tɐ pɔx i ʀut nʊˈvɛ‿lʊˈvʀɔj]

def=schedule at station bus be.pst-3pl go-ptcp.pst beyond after def road new open-pst

The bus stops' schedules were obsoleted by the new road.

---

selected scitation [exam] questions from the 1921 qualifying paper for the course Rhoωłi Travnideth Mendeva 19G (Mendevan Transport Networks in the Nineteenth Century), offered by educational institutions across Gulf Mendeva affiliated with the fi Narcìs Normal Primers, which is headquartered in Nadacow [1].

Question 2 (fifty minutes)

To what extent did Mendevan powers embrace astric [electric] steeplepost over the earlier mechanical systems more enthusiastically than their similarly-situated Vetomundine counterparts? You may wish to consider:

(i) the relative paucity of existing steeplepost infrastructure in Mendeva as compared with Europe, Asia (and even Cappatia) upon the development of the astric post, (i) issues of geography south of the Sturgovan Mountains [Appalachians] disincentivising a method of communication reliant on sight at long range, and (iii) technological innovations unique to the Novomund, including staddenzen [2] Cavang Menkhorst's improved coshow [rubber] separation for wires.

Question 7 (twenty minutes)

Answer the following twenty excourse questions in brief. (i) In what year were the two coasts of Mendeva first connected by rail, and in what town was the final station ceremonially established? ... (ix) The Lies of 1824 were transmitted by steeplepost to be displayed on the Tapestry of Aiga d'Angoixa [3]; who conspired to initiate the hoax? ... (xv) In the decade after the Second German War, immigration at the port of Santrafew spiked from which countries in particular, and why? ... --- [1] The capital of Hasiny, located on the banks of the lower Mississippi. [2] Native of one of the polities that grew from early trading posts along the coasts of Cappatia and Africa. [3] A city near the coast on the St Lawrence river, a major city in the (majority Vascon-speaking) polity of Ambrosia.

[humanrightsupdates]

Amnesty International’s tactics to secure your smartphone before joining a protest

If you are planning to join a protest, your phone is an essential tool. You depend on it to access information, organize with your peers, document events and help others. Understanding digital security and best practices not only helps improve your readiness for a protest but also contributes to the digital safety of your communities and friends.

Here are some practical tips for mobile phone safety before joining a protest.

Let’s have a quick look at possible risks involved with using a smartphone when you are at a protest:

Losing your phone.

Police confiscating your device.

Service disruption due to mobile network failures and overload. This could either be an intentional interference or caused by large numbers of people overloading mobile operators’ network infrastructure.

Targeted surveillance by law enforcement:

Disrupting some mobile services – blocking delivery of calls and SMS.

Monitoring communications over radio services such as walkie-talkies and other comms over radio.

Mass surveillance at protests:

Interfering with web services, such as throttling access to popular social media sites like Twitter.

Disrupting messaging and voice services such as Signal or WhatsApp.

Targeting public WiFi near the protest to monitor traffic and identify connected devices.

Retrieving records from cell towers near a protest to track and identify people

Before joining a protest remember to:

Make sure your phone has screen lock enabled. Use at least a 6-digits PIN code, or preferably a passphrase. If you use biometric unlock, such as fingerprint or face ID, be mindful that it might be used to forcefully unlock your phone. You might want to disable those options.

Back up your phone: make sure to back up all content, including contacts, SMS, media and any other personal content. Remember to back up your messaging apps too.

Pack a spare mobile battery or fully charged power bank.

Write down on a piece of paper, or even on yourself with a marker, important information such as an emergency contact or a lawyer’s number.

Top up your mobile phone credit and make sure you have enough data allowance.

Familiarize yourself with the apps you plan to use at the protest and make sure all apps are up to date.

Check your phone’s storage: You don't want your phone to run out of storage suddenly so make sure you have enough space and/or use an external SD card.

Device shortcuts: you can be more discrete while using your phone in public and save time by knowing buttons and keyboard shortcuts. For example, use a shortcut to turn on the camera or to send an emergency message. Learn and practice these shortcuts, you might be able to customize them.

Consider setting up the “Find Your Phone” function so you can locate and wipe your phone remotely if you need to. Most smartphones provide a method to do this. Make sure you are familiar with it. You can find instructions here for Android and here for iPhone.

Using the phone’s camera:

When at the protest, little things could draw unnecessary attention, such as the camera flash or shutter sound. Go through your camera settings and configure it for safe use.

In lock mode: your phone could get snatched while filming, so it’s better to use your camera while your device is locked. If your phone is taken, they won't have access to your media or phone’s content. Remember to open the camera from the on-screen shortcut instead of unlocking your phone – learn more about this here for Android and here for iPhone.

Be mindful of others privacy: while capturing photos and videos, the identity of your friends and peers could be at risk of being exposed. If so, obscure their identities in pictures before sharing or publishing them. You can use the quick editor on your mobile media app, and you can explore apps that help, such as this application for Android and for iPhone you can use the blur tools provided with Signal app to preserve faces privacy.

At the protest:

To communicate with your peers before and during a protest we recommend using apps that provides end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or Wire. This guide which may help you choose the right tool for group chat and conferencing tools.

If you have an iPhone, remember there is an Emergency SOS function in iOS (learn how to use it here), and you can also lock the phone and disable biometric unlock by tapping 5 times on the power button.

Authorities might be using either tactical equipment, such as rogue cell towers, or request mobile operators to produce data, in order to identify protesters. When you are not making calls or accessing Internet services, you might want to set the smartphone in Airplane Mode in order to block transmissions and minimize tracking. Reducing unnecessary activity to a minimum also helps save battery life.