Schneier on Security

JG4 • September 16, 2017 7:43 AM

I’m with everyone who likes Ben A.’s links, but rules are rules. maybe the links can come back if/when filters are settable. the good side of the refocus is higher SNR and better discussions. the downside is the Procrustean bent. there was a hint of how long is too long, which I won’t have time to hit today. btw, my suggestion of viewing toggles doesn’t have to reside on the server side. I may not have said that it easily could be a browser plug-in that is open source. Nick P.’s excellent discussion of how to download and filter is spot on, even if it isn’t done in a browser. @Nick P. – have you considered open-sourcing any aspect of your filtering tools?

it’s not my living room and I feel bad that I pushed the limits, even if I was trying to illuminate why the quest for security on your planet is never-ending. living on scraping slabs of rock on a melted ball of iron circling a nuclear fireball may not be the best starting point for security, but there is no current access to Planet B, which does have a frozen core. and there is no Plan B. in a nutshell, your security always can be taken to further increase someone else’s security, irrespective of whether it is computer security, energy security, financial security, economic security, health security, water security, food security, or shelter security that is taken to grind out more money and power. one aspect of security is the power to be free from retribution, which is an element of full-spectrum dominance. if full-spectrum dominance were held by enlightened rulers, it might be the best thing that ever happened on your planet, because democracy and trust have very serious scaling problems. unfortunately, the politicians that people crave have the big six personality defects.

further, neurons, brains, people, groups, companies, agencies and governments are adaptive systems, so they always and everywhere are getting better at repurposing your security. enlightenment is realizing there are better approaches that increase everyone’s security. these are not necessarily zero-sum games, and that there often are win-win scenarios. in the absence of enlightened rulers, you have to get better at keeping what little data security, money, skills, health, water, food and shelter you have as the rules are changed bit by bit (no pun intended) to tilt the game to the state-sponsored winners. endarkenment is making things worse than zero-sum, moving into lose-lose more propositions, especially when there are better alternatives. because most governments and corporations have utterly failed to manage conflicts of interest, they have, perhaps unwittingly, put at risk the entire human population on the planet. enlightened robots and AI will find win-win scenarios. endarkened robots and AI will find lose-lose more scenarios.

@Clive – one pair of terms of art are blue-water operations and brown-water operations. the PT boats may have been the leading edge, besides being the naval equivalent of Boyd’s blitz fighter planes. river patrols in Vietnam were memorialized in Apocalypse Now. I remember reading about a couple of seals who swam n miles up a river in North Vietnam to blow up a petrochemical facility, quite successfully. I think that they spent much of the day laying underwater in the weeds breathing through pieces of hollow reeds or bamboo, while the leeches slowly ate them. unfortunately, the river was an open sewer, as they were in Roman times and in the US as recently as the 1960’s. if swimming in an Asian sewer doesn’t convince you that big pharma is part of the MIC, maybe it would start with an epidemic of malaria in your canal digging team. during my time in the imperial forces, there were legends of an incurable venereal disease (STD) in Asia that would get you sent to a quarantine camp without hope of ever going home. that could have been a clever application of game theory to the problem of keeping the J-bars out of trouble.

can’t recall seeing this mentioned for quite some time

Silent Circle | Secure Enterprise Communication Solutions Firm
Silent Circle offers private and encrypted mobile devices, software applications, and communication management services for enterprise.
https://www.silentcircle.com
…[who else had a white paper with an awesome framework?]
Nothing seen. Nothing heard.
Nothing disclosed.
…
https://www.silentcircle.com/enterprise-cybersecurity-white-paper/

JG4 • September 16, 2017 9:01 AM

following up Clives, Ben A.’s and comments on the possible sonic weapon. I had a couple of ideas as I read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/14/mystery-of-sonic-weapon-attacks-at-us-embassy-in-cuba-deepens

there is a very clever way to produce high-intensity localized sound, which is to focus a pulse laser to a small enough spot in air that the electric field intensity exceeds breakdown. the result is a loud snap and bright flash. I had a dream in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that I was witnessing the test of a high-power military laser on a stone wall. I was expecting the sound from all of the lasers seen in movies, some sort of squealing noise. when the rock vaporized, there was a deafening concussion from the shock wave. that is a different acoustic effect and also would be accompanied by light, but can easily transit glass and could be devastating. if that were patterned on a wall, the resulting shock wave could be focused at a point in the room, e.g., at the targets ear drum, resulting in a painful rupture and bleeding.

the observations don’t seem to include bright lights, which would accompany a laser spark or plasma production from a surface. I didn’t seen any mention of the visual effects that would accompany Clive’s suggestion of a focused microwave beam inside the skull – a shock wave intense enough to produce TBI would almost certainly produce flashing lights that I saw too many times. I raised the issue of numerical aperture, wavelength and spot size around that time, and it still is relevant to the possibilities of a microwave attack. the limitations can be partially defeated in the near-field, but again it is unlikely. the observations could match a new energy delivery system that either produces sound as a side effect, e.g., thermal expansion of brain tissue from high power microwave pulses or production of high amplitude sound waves by heating ambient water vapor fast enough with microwaves.

JG4 • September 18, 2017 6:37 AM

@Wael – Thanks for the logic puzzle. I’ve always thought that there is a boolean matrix approach to this type of word problem and the related word problems with scheduling. like the test problems that begin, “A 7th-grade class rafting trip will have three rafts with 21 students. No more than nine students can ride in each raft, but never less than six are in each raft. Bob and John always travel in the same raft. Suzy and Kim hate each others guts so always will be in different rafts. And end with a hard question like, “Will Suzy and John be in the same raft?” can anyone provide a keyword or pointer to the appropriate mathematical technique or techniques?

@Thy God, Profits – you raise some topics that I have been wanting to explore in biochemical security. is your name a reference to “They Live?” you may enjoy this trifecta of unintended consequences that cost the US seven IQ points, a portion of the crime wave in the 1970’s and world-wide ecological damage:

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/

a very nice data visualization. unfortunate that Hans Rosling is no longer with us. not only is Switzerland very high on the list, which implies a high standard of living, they also have the best civil defense infrastructure on your planet, including an EMP-resilient electric grid, which MarkH may note.

Which Countries Have the Most Economic Complexity?
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-economic-complexity/
Jeff Desjardins on September 14, 2017 at 12:18 pm
…
Topping the list are the economies of Japan (1st), Switzerland (2nd), Germany (3rd), and South Korea (4th). The United States sits in 9th place, and Canada is further down at 33rd.

I’ve been meaning to introduce this website that doesn’t suffer from conspiracy rot:

https://www.damninteresting.com/nugget/starfish-prime/

the North Koreans probably can’t deliver this sort of attack on the US yet, and the missile defense system may be able to stop a single rocket/weapon. the asymmetry between North and South Korea means that they could destroy the South Korean electric grid without hurting themselves much. I am amazed that the US media blithely talk about military solutions without mentioning the collateral damage that would devastate South Korea, a US-client state with a world-class economy. there is a lot more to say on the overlap between EMP and microwave attacks. there is an analogy to the chemical attacks too, because non-state actors have ready access to the key components of directed energy systems and consumer chemicals.

OODA loops don’t execute linearly, so are not well-matched to a von Neumann architecture when fast execution is a priority. breaking the opponent’s OODA loop requires extra speed in your own. the struggle for full-spectrum dominance will include computing hardware, as it always has. I don’t see how the US is going to keep up with China for very long. especially if US policy forces a collaboration with the Russians.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/can-us-military-re-invent-microchip-ai-era/141065/
…
One, Software Defined Hardware, seeks “a hardware/software system that allows data-intensive algorithms to run at near ASIC efficiency without the cost, development time or single application limitations associated with ASIC development.”

JG4 • September 18, 2017 6:21 PM

@Sancho_P – You may have missed the most logical meaning of the No here:

Moderator • September 16, 2017 7:17 PM
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/friday_squid_bl_592.html#c6760555
No

I read it to refer to this question:

security.txt • September 16, 2017 6:33 PM
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/friday_squid_bl_592.html#c6760555
Do long aggregated links exclude Nick P?

I think that Nick P. gets a pass, as do all others acting in good faith, when they write an excellent technical document that refers to the scientific literature at multiple points.

JG4 • September 20, 2017 7:11 AM

whose data is it anyway? who’s phone is it? their code’s not good enough for me. worse, their hardware’s not good enough for me. Thanks Nick P for the brilliant system analysis of how to get to a secure system.

the Deep State started as the security wing of the Eastern Establishment, which was the old money and Ivy league schools. the power center of the US was pulled toward Texas with the oil boom. the technology epicenter of the Deep State has moved west in the past five to ten decades, with the draw of California weather and California petroleum for aviation, and the investments in JPL, Stanford, Caltech and other intellectual powerhouses that spawned the likes of HP, Intel, Google and others too numerous to catalog. in the time before the rise of Silicon Valley, the national security infrastructure was roughly located between Delaware (starting with propellants manufactured from animal urine) to NJ (glass and electron tubes, AT&T/Bell Labs) to Boston (MIT, Harvard, Brown, …) to the Connective River Valley (the machine tool industry and every major gun manufacturer of the time). the rise of the Pentagon pulled the epicenter south and spawned the rise of the Beltway Bandits. it was oil that propelled Howard Hughes to fame, but his work on various patches of the national security blanket was impressive. as much as anything, it was California petroleum that broke the Rockefeller cartel. the Eastern Establishment does not like to hold itself or its members accountable for mistakes, but they will crucify you on a moment’s notice if you threaten their status quo. their tribes of knuckledraggers (aka guard labor) also are unaccountable. from the establishment newspaper of record, some compelling evidence for biological effects from cell phone radiation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17cellphones-t.html
…
A recent study by Nora Volkow, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and reported in this newspaper on March 30, has raised this unusual possibility. Volkow is an innovative brain researcher who is director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md. She recruited 47 people and placed an “active” phone next to one ear (the phone was on — generating radiation, but silent, so that Volkow could eliminate the effects of sound and conversation). She then used a specialized brain scanner capable of detecting alterations in glucose. Glucose — a sugar — is the metabolic fuel for the brain. When parts of the brain are activated, brain cells begin to metabolize glucose at an increased rate. Volkow’s scanner was equipped to detect even marginal changes in glucose metabolism.
When Volkow compared subjects with phones turned on with subjects who had their phones turned off, she found a striking pattern: there was a telltale sign of increased brain-glucose activity in the area of the brain immediately adjacent to the antenna of the phone.

not sure if this is credible or not, but the writing is fairly good and it ties to the scientific literature. there is an endless supply of misinformation and disinformation out there.

Rationale for Biologically-based Exposure Standards for Low-Intensity Electromagnetic Radiation
http://www.bioinitiative.org/conclusions/
BIOINITIATIVE 2012 – CONCLUSIONS Table 1-1
Overall, these 1800 or so new studies report abnormal gene transcription (Section 5); genotoxicity and single-and double-strand DNA damage (Section 6); stress proteins because of the fractal RF-antenna like nature of DNA (Section 7); chromatin condensation and loss of DNA repair capacity in human stem cells (Sections 6 and 15); reduction in free-radical scavengers – particularly melatonin (Sections 5, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17); neurotoxicity in humans and animals (Section 9), carcinogenicity in humans (Sections 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17); serious impacts on human and animal sperm morphology and function (Section 18); effects on offspring behavior (Section 18, 19 and 20); and effects on brain and cranial bone development in the offspring of animals that are exposed to cell phone radiation during pregnancy (Sections 5 and 18). This is only a snapshot of the evidence presented in the BioInitiative 2012 updated report.
BIOEFFECTS ARE CLEARLY ESTABLISHED
Bioeffects are clearly established and occur at very low levels of exposure to electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation. Bioeffects can occur in the first few minutes at levels associated with cell and cordless phone use. Bioeffects can also occur from just minutes of exposure to mobile phone masts (cell towers), WI-FI, and wireless utility ‘smart’ meters that produce whole-body exposure. Chronic base station level exposures can result in illness.

JG4 • September 20, 2017 8:09 PM

the Shannon book came today, so I’m going to keep this rant short, at least by my standards. segue to the other book that I ordered at the same time. to track a target requires one integrator. if the target is moving, two integrators. if the target is accelerating, three integrators. if there is jerk (an acceleration of acceleration), then four integrators are required in the tracking loop. I’ve probably said before that control sytems are a simple form of OODA. did I mention the cold war gems that I got this summer in Boston? in the good old days, the textbooks were written by Nobel laureates. you can smell history when you open the pages. a surprisingly detailed view of what happened at the national labs forty years to fifty ago is trapped in the paper of these time machines.

@Bob Paddock, Rachel, albert and Clive – I actually remember seeing the bit about yeast communicating between test tubes on late-night television in the late 1970’s. the demonstration used some kind of electrical meter to (purportedly) measure electrical activity. they made a nice show of how adding food to one tube spiked electrical activity in the other. the bad news is, the proponent and guest on the late-night show was none other than Uri Geller. which is a convenient spring-board to Mr. Rife’s work. I’m sure that there have been many conspiracies to suppress good research, but the first thing that springs to mind when I hear about resonances of pathogens and bent spoons is 8u115h1t. not to say that there can’t be positive effects from electrical stimulation, just that the whole space is just as poorly understood as the effects of cell phone radiation. if the yeast communications were robust and reproducible, someone would have figured out how to make money with them.

the bit about bone-healing effects of small currents is very real. I’ve suspected for decades that bones are piezoelectric and lifting heavy weights generates signals that strengthen bones. electrical muscle stimulation also is very real, as is electro-shock therapy and the conventional practice of electroporation to install new plasmids into e. coli. Clive received a mild case of electroporation. glad that the recovery went well. some people who get electroporated never fully recover from organ damage, like the fireman who ran through a puddle of acrylonitrile to save someone’s life. evolution is extremely gnarly and very likely to pick up and use electromagnetic effects for communication. it is even plausible that bacterial structures emit particular frequencies when excited with food, but I haven’t seen a peep on the topic since Uri Geller in the 1970’s until today. I can’t think of any examples of RF, microwave, IR or THz communication between bacteria even suggested in any seminar or presentation that I’ve seen. I’m not saying it isn’t possible, just that I’m surprised someone didn’t make tehir career on it more recently and more visibly. the EM transmission seen thus far in nature are nerve transmission, various predators that sense electrical activity in prey, maybe platypus, sharks, and eels, as well as plants and animals that emit photons. and my suspicions about sting rays targeting heart muscle with cardiotoxins also might use electrical activity as a guide to where to sting, but that is idle speculation. already implicitly pooh-poohed by the biologists.

@the usual suspects – I am shocked by how little we know about the cascading sequences of unintended consequences that lie in the future. when I was a kid, it was believed that antioxidants would reduce the rate of aging, and there are plausible reasons some of that is true. if only people took their vitamin e and vitamin c, they’d soon be free of cancer. it turns out that some antioxidants result in more and more aggressive cancers, which is completely at odds with the original theory. until we bring into play the fact that the body is an adaptive system, then things start to make more sense. exercise, alcohol, air pollution, electrical stimulation, hypoxia, antioxidants and countless other environmental effects are injurious. because they turn on some genes and turn off others, they can actually reduce overall damage because of induced protective mechanisms, not unlike innoculation. antioxidants surpress free radicials, which otherwise would induce antioxidant enzyme production, as does exercise and moderate alcohol consumption. with reduced free radical production, the response to exercise is muted. it is plausible that RF currents, and various other things that we might do to our bodies with electricity, will induce protective effects, but I would proceed with extreme caution. as I have noted before, some of the environmental effects on gene expression are transmissible. cell phone radiation and therapeutic RF may affect future generations via epigenetics. we have just established that cell phone radiation is harmful in at least some instances. we know that hypoxia causes permanent cognitive deficits in all climbers tested who have been above 8000 meters without oxygen. we further know that under some circumstances, alcohol causes permanent cognitive deficits. Feynman quit drinking, because he didn’t want to risk what he knew to be a unique brain. we know that insulin injections can cause permanent cognitive deficiencies, up to and including persistent vegetative states and the big sleep. I believe that it is a bad idea to experiment with critical infrastructure when we don’t have a solid picture of how it works. Thorp and Buffett tried to teach us to gamble when the odds are in our favor. first we have to measure the odds, then roll the dice. we don’t know what we are doing or where it leads, but everything is a roll of the dice.

JG4 • September 21, 2017 7:03 AM

@all – I hope that we are playing nicely enough now that Dirk, Thoth, TM and other good citizens will re-engage.

@Rachel and MarkH – one of the Jet Blue crashes was a pallet of oxygen candles, the other name for the widgets in the drop-down panel. “when breathing security is in conflict with fire security” when you pull the mask down, a striker ignites the perchlorate. if you light off a pallet of candles in the forward cargo compartment, the pilots’ feet will get hot and the cockpit will get smoky. the contents of the pallet shifted on takeoff and entropy got maximized quickly. I’ll fill in the details later on the only time that I’ve used a perchlorate candle, but it involved a puddle of jet fuel 20 to 30 feet across. water mist is your friend when heat output is well into the megawatts. pure oxygen rapidly accelerates damage to lung tissue via free radical oxidation, as does heavy exercise, like dragging a heavy hose up four flights of stairs. they blinded a lot of preemies back in the day, because pure oxyen is particularly destructive to the retina. the only thing worse than pure oxygen is hyperbaric oxygen. we could guess that the survivors eventually had memory problems, diabetes and hearing loss, as does everyone who lives long enough. hypoxia must be far less serious at 8,000 to 15,000 feet than it is at 27,000 feet, so mild hypoxia may not produce permanent cognitive deficits. many edge cases have genetic adaptations, as noted previously, to low iron soils, to endemic malaria and also to low oxygen partial pressure.

@Clive – nice essay. I’ve seen the claim that echoes of a previous universe may have transited the big bang, perhaps fossilized gravity waves or EM waves that were amplified by fast expansion. explosive growth of tech companies amplifies the quirks of the founders, in much the same way that government amplifies the tendencies (the good, the bad and the ugly) of Congress. I think of railroad spikes and tie plates as fossils from the railroad era, not that the era is anywhere near done. they were manufactured in vast quantities, as were insulators for the power and telecom industries of that era. our landfills will fossilize vast numbers of silicon crystal and rust-covered disks. I am optimistic that the robot excavators will dig them up and liquify the contents with chlorine to recover all of the elements as purified feedstocks. I was slow to connect fossils to information, and the extreme case is DNA good enough to sequence and clone. I am optimistic about the solar-electric future of railroads. Szilard and Yockey both recognized the importance of information in DNA. that information has been tuned by the interplay of two major forces, which I call the death tensor and the mate selection tensor, which really is just the mirror image of the death tensor.

the probability of some ordered state surviving in the fossil record is proportional to the number of individuals of that species ever having lived times the very low probability of any piece being preserved. railroad spikes and glass/ceramic insulators are particularly survivable. innovations like body segmentation produced vast numbers of individuals in the Cambrian explosion (entropy maximization) and their life in/on/near sediment preserved many specimens, which can be found in Utah, Montana and Colorado, as well as the Smithsonian. Dinosaur National Monument is worth the trip. a catastrophic flood packed a large number of individuals into mud. special conditions of geochemistry are required to preserve fossil specimens. particularly extreme preservation is seen in the Atacama desert and in ice, but anoxic muds carry bone information quite nicely. as a general rule, anything seen in the fossil record was a wildly successful species to have lived in numbers large enough to see, or lived in/near an extreme environment where preservation was enough more likely to offset lower numbers. anything can happen, but some things are more likely than others. I haven’t said often enough that I really like first principles derivations. Feynman said that if you can’t explain it using freshman calculus, you don’t understand it.

JG4 • September 22, 2017 8:07 AM

Bruce has given clear indications, e.g., by posting “Murder is a recent evolutionary strategy”, that origins of the need for computer security are within the bounds of acceptable discourse. it’s a short step from murder to why we need trust, whether it is in hardware, firmware, software, systems, people, courts, legislation, etc. if it can be shown that trust is misplaced, the entire structure is in danger of collapse. a point well made by John Boyd and the reason that I am moving to Switzerland. the gateway drug for John Boyd literature is the movie The Pentagon Wars. today we are going to see some early national security infrastructure in the mold of neoliberal scavenging of human waste. humans always are at war, against one kind of entropy, in pursuit of maximization of another kind. money and power are proxies for the second kind. the types of entropy are defined in The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. it is the replicators that are driving this bus, but they are using epigenetics and various other mechanisms that have unintended and perverse effects in carrying out the mission. the replicators need Gibbs free energy in the form of food and petroleum to maintain homeostasis. the age of petroleum is drawing to a close, but the timeline is unclear.

@Clive – Thanks for the springboard. for some reason that escapes me, I was all but speechless this morning until I read your stack model. I’d like my derivation of the in-built tribal feature of humans to fit neatly into your stack model. to the extent that my derivation is correct, humans are pre-wired to fit into a hierarchical structure (‘society’) in a cooperative way, and to be able toggle into ‘berserker’ mode when it is necessary and/or useful to chop up the members of offending neighboring tribes. or more neatly, humans have a natural predisposition to violence, which is regulated genetically, epigenetically and culturally. the predisposition to violence was an essential feature of tribal life, not a bug. in civilized countries, it can be largely turned off, e.g., Japan. in the US we were brainwashed with incantations that began, “I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces that guard our country and our way of life…” with the aim of turning on the mindset that Fred Reed captured beautifully. add some testosterone and you’ve got a volatile mixture. back in the day, it was a pretty good country, but it has gone downhill in recent years as a result of rampant greed and ethical decay. the blue tribe use propellants to destroy anyone who won’t listen to their instructions fast enough, or who try to run away. human rights always have taken a back seat to money and power. Empire is a machine with gears made of guns and words.

http://www.krbe.com/news/police-fatally-shoot-man-who-ignored-orders-he-was-deaf/

it should be clear that a system that routinely shoots blacks and deaf people isn’t worth defending. as Jim Kunstler puts it, even our architecture isn’t worth defending. the liars, thieves and murderers who run this asylum lately aren’t any better than the ones running any other asylums. my take is that the problem is unaccountable power, which is why I was rabidly anti-Marxist for many years. if it weren’t for Putin’s statemanship, I might be more rabid today. the lies from Clapper et al are just an attempt to maintain the status quo, but have breached trust at scale. Stalin and Mao practiced genocide on the scale of Ghengis Khan, but they didn’t do it the hard way with swords and horses. not that pooping blood on the Long March was easy work, but killing 50 million people with guns is a lot easier than doing it with swords. I am not at all pro-Marxist, but I realize that capitalism can create unaccountable powers just as dangerous as the Marxists. Congress has created unaccountable powers that may now control Congress. we have touched previously on how the US empire killed 20 million Asians in pursuit of resources and containment. napalm, carpet bombs and turbine engines make for much easier work than either swords and horses or guns and bullets. not sure how many millions were lost in the middle East genocides in pursuit of oil and arms sales, but Empire is a machine driven by greed, fear, hubris and amorality that crushes bodies and souls to make money and power.

we touched yesterday on how perchlorate can be used as a source of oxygen to maintain brain function at low atmospheric pressure. it could be chlorate in the candles, but that is made by the same process. the history of perchlorate is part of the DNA of Morton Thiokol, which had an impressive accident in the Utah desert. perchlorate and aluminum were the key ingredients of the solid boosters in the space shuttle program. it figures prominently in the acquisition of ATK Orbital by Northrop Grumman. Empire is a machine with gears made of elements, which provide the energetics and bioenergetics of carrots and sticks. the sticks have a lot of diversity, depending on the scale of entropy maximization. for killing individual deaf people, bullets are preferred. for killing 8 or 9 million North Koreans, carpet bombs are preferred. napalm and atom bombs are good for numbers in the range of 100,000 to 500,00 civilians. another day we will look at omega-3 oils as an essential input for maintaining cognitive abilities. your computer security won’t do much good if your human gears managed by gun gears and word gears can’t function.

file under “all your nitrogen are belong to us” and “human urine, excrement and bodies as national security infrastructure” it doesn’t come out in the article that I link here, but the colonists were able to use church infrastructure in the US to reprovision their forces in the escape from British empire. the graveyard soil could be dug up and extracted with hot water to get saltpetre. the worms had scattered the nitrogen more or less within the bounds of the stone walls, so the graves didn’t have to be desecrated to get the saltpetre. the wooden pews could be made into charcoal. if sulphur candles were used to manage the church mice, they would provide the third ingredient for propellant. I have no idea where the colonists got their sulphur, or the Europeans for that matter, but it still is a key cog in the national security infrastructure. today, sulphur comes from wells in Texas, where it probably is a byproduct of fossil fuel formation or volcanism. it is used at a staggering scale to make phosphate fertilizer, as well as for pickling steel and numerous other critical infrastructure functions. the fourth element is lead, from the melted organ pipes. it was the Germans who brought schutzenfest to the US, which led to catastrophic British losses at New Orleans, when they engaged the squirrel hunters led by Colonel Jackson.

Same old warfare?
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/same-old-warfare/
…
Given that human nature is unchanging, new weapons are merely accelerants of the same old, same old fighting. In this timeless debate, three very different books on the interplay between technology and war assume that contemporary high-tech computerized weapons, the introduction of napalm during the Second World War, and the widespread production of saltpeter have all done their part to reinvent the theories of warfare of their respective ages.
Saltpetre was certainly felt to be mysterious (best used in a ratio of six parts sulphur, and one part charcoal). Early scientists were not sure whether it was organic and sprouted from the soil, or a mineral to be mined. They agreed only that it seemed to turn up most plentifully in soils rich in urine and dung. The result was that the British crown for four centuries gave a veritable blank cheque for freelancing saltpetre hunters to scour the countryside at a breakneck pace for this strategic national asset. And dig around they did, especially in toppling private stables, overturning outhouses, and tunnelling through refuse piles of both the rich (with some difficulty) and the poor, as well as in caves and burrows where naturally occurring manure and guano were plentiful.
Try as the British might to organize society to save their saltpetre systematically (something akin to the modern idea of putting your daily waste in the proper coloured plastic container), the crown was never quite able to turn a scavenging art into a science of systematized production. Haphazard collection persisted in Britain – unlike the more sophisticated processes in Switzerland and France – until the onset of the Industrial Revolution, mass importation of cheap saltpetre from India, and, later the replacement of gunpowder altogether by cordite-based ammunition.
Cressy captures well the tensions over near-lawless collectors who toppled barns and tore up gardens to get their hands on the treasure, without which, the crown continually lectured its British subjects, the growing empire would dissolve.
…

Copyright 2017 JG4 All rights reserved Published here by permission

—moderator snip here if four is too many—

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/links-92217.html
…
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

Dear Apple, The IPhoneX and FaceID are Orwellian and Creepy Hacker Noon

Distrustful US Allies Force Spy Agency to Back Down in Encryption Fight Reuters

SEC Hacked: Information From Breach May Have Been Used in Trading International Business Times

Beijing’s Battle to Control Its Homegrown Tech Giants FT