and I’m not talking about the can or its contents:
Cops
Only Ones
Here are a couple of cops who were arrested for billing a neighborhood for security service they didn’t perform. One of the officers ripped them off for over $15k. I’ve long had a problem with cops working as security.
They wear their department issued uniform, carry a department issued firearm and radio while driving a department issued patrol car. They reimburse the agency they work for for the use of those items, then are free to rent themselves out. Depending on the situation, they are considered to be security guards or police.
If they want to search you but don’t have a warrant or probable cause, they are security guards. If they ask you a question and you lie, they are then cops and you have broken the law. If you resist them in any way, they are cops. They get to have things however it works out best for them. As this great grandmother found out, when Disney security searched her bags as a part of a security check and she was arrested for having CBD oil. The charges were later dropped, but this illustrates the problem I have with cops as security. They can search you, and you have no constitutional protections. But let them find something illegal, and they instantly can use the fruits of what would otherwise be an unconstitutional search and arrest you.
Oh, and should that cop have to use any sort of force, you can bet your ass that they will be fully covered by magic police immunity.
This entire practice is also a clear conflict of interest. There are quite a few Orlando Police who work for Universal Studios. I once watched a famous singer use a shit load of drugs while backstage at a concert at Universal Studios, right in front of uniformed OPD officers working off duty security. Those cops didn’t do shit, because they know that pissing off their employer (the Studios) by arresting performers will ensure that their cushy and lucrative off duty gig will go away. In some cases, they make more working as security than they do as police officers. They aren’t going to let anything like the oath they took to the law and the constitution get in the way of that.
I don’t think the general practice of off duty security should be legal.
Account and INFO Security
There Is No Hiding Your Thoughts
I have people who comment that they don’t allow devices in their home to track them because their devices aren’t connected to the Internet. Obviously, if you are reading this, you are connected to the Internet in some way. That means you are being tracked. There is no avoiding it.
The internet many people imagine is a collection of websites. The internet that actually exists is a collection of websites layered on top of a hidden surveillance infrastructure.
When you visit a page, you are not just interacting with the site you intended to visit. You are also interacting with dozens of advertising, analytics, marketing, and data collection companies operating behind the scenes. Most users never see them, never consent to them in any meaningful way, yet those companies know far more about us than we realize.
Most people understand that websites collect data. If you shop on an online store, it’s reasonable to assume that store knows what products you viewed, what you purchased, and perhaps even what ads convinced you to buy.
What you may not realize is that some of the largest advertising companies on the internet may be tracking you even when you never visit those companies’ websites. The modern advertising industry is built on a vast network of invisible tracking technologies that follow users from site to site, quietly collecting information about their interests, habits, and behavior.
Imagine you’re reading a blog about home improvement. You never visit Amazon. You don’t click any ads. You simply read an article. What you don’t see is that the blog may contain a tiny piece of code provided by Amazon’s advertising network. (This blog does not permit advertising of any kind, so that isn’t an issue here, unless it’s being somehow done without my knowledge or consent.) As soon as the page loads, your browser contacts Amazon’s servers and sends information about your visit. This technology is commonly called a tracking pixel, web beacon, or advertising tag.
The pixel is often invisible. It may be a 1×1 transparent image or a script that runs silently in the background. Yet it can tell advertising companies:
- Which website you visited
- Which page you viewed
- When you visited
- Your IP address
- Your device type
- Your browser version
- Whether you’ve been seen before
The result is that companies can learn about your online behavior without you ever intentionally interacting with them.
The Myth of “I Never Gave Them My Information”
Many people assume that if they never create an account with a company, that company cannot build a profile about them. Unfortunately, that’s not how modern tracking works, advertisers don’t necessarily need your name to identify you. Instead, they assign identifiers to your browser or device. These identifiers may include:
- Cookie IDs
- Mobile advertising IDs
- Browser fingerprints
- Device fingerprints
- IP-based identifiers
Over time, these identifiers become associated with patterns of behavior. A profile begins to emerge:
- You read articles about hiking.
- You browse reviews of pickup trucks.
- You compare mortgage rates.
- You visit travel websites.
Even if your name isn’t attached immediately, the behavioral profile becomes increasingly detailed. Over time, the advertiser gets a pretty accurate picture of who you are and what you are interested in. Cookies get most of the attention because they’re visible and users occasionally receive cookie consent popups.
But some tracking techniques don’t rely on cookies at all. For example, browser fingerprinting collects characteristics about your device and browser, including:
- Screen resolution
- Installed fonts
- Operating system
- Browser version
- Language settings
- Time zone
- Graphics hardware
Individually, these details seem harmless, but combined, they create a surprisingly unique identifier. Think of it like recognizing a person from dozens of small clues rather than a single name tag. Even if you delete or refuse cookies, fingerprinting can sometimes recognize the same user each time they return. It’s becoming more and more sophisticated, and there is nothing that you can do about it except stay off the internet completely, and that may not even be a solution.
The real power comes from scale. You see, a single website knows what you do on that site but an advertising network embedded on thousands or millions of websites can observe behavior across the internet. If the same advertising company appears on multiple websites, it can potentially see that:
You visited a health website on Monday.
A car review website on Tuesday.
A financial planning website on Wednesday.
A travel booking site on Thursday.
Viewed separately, these visits seem insignificant. Viewed together, they reveal a great deal about your life, which is why people often feel like advertisements “know” what they’re thinking about. In reality, the advertising ecosystem may have observed enough behavior to make highly accurate predictions. That leads us to the reality of data brokers.
Tracking doesn’t stop with advertising platforms, because there are entire industries that exist to collect, aggregate, analyze, and sell consumer data. These companies, called data brokers, gather information from:
- Websites
- Mobile apps
- Loyalty programs
- Public records
- Commercial databases
- Marketing partnerships
The information can then be used to predict your buying habits, health concerns, and tons of other information. Most consumers have never heard of the companies creating these profiles, yet those profiles influence which ads they see, what offers they receive, and how businesses evaluate them as potential customers. It’s a huge business, and it’s what the new AI systems are being optimized for.
Constant surveillance has become the default business model of the internet. The problem isn’t merely that companies know what products you like, the problem is that detailed behavioral data can reveal:
- Political interests
- Religious beliefs
- Health concerns
- Financial circumstances
- Personal relationships
- Life events
Information that feels private can often be inferred from seemingly ordinary browsing activity, and that’s the uncomfortable reality of the modern advertising economy: some of the companies collecting information about you are companies you’ve never even met.
Your stuff doesn’t even have to be connected to the internet. Television broadcasts, radio shows, advertisements, and streaming content can contain embedded audio watermarks that are difficult for humans to notice. A smartphone app with microphone permission can detect these watermarks and determine:
- Which show you’re watching
- Which advertisement played
- When it played
Then report back to the “mother ship” and this exact method has been used for advertising attribution and audience measurement. You have just added to the file on yourself without even knowing it. The phone and TV aren’t directly communicating in a conventional sense; rather, the TV emits an encoded signal and the phone recognizes it.
The most famous air-gap compromise is probably the Stuxnet operation. That particular piece of malware reportedly spread through infected USB drives to reach systems that were intentionally disconnected from the internet. Once inside, the malware manipulated industrial equipment while concealing its actions. That attack demonstrated a crucial lesson: an air gap dramatically improves security, but it is not an absolute barrier.
Communication across air gaps including ultrasonic and near-subaudible signaling has been demonstrated by researchers, and some commercial tracking systems have used similar concepts for cross-device identification. Now that you know what advertisers are doing, what do you think the NSA is capable of?
My feeling on this? You can’t think about taking a crap without someone expecting you to reach for toilet paper.
Crime
Wanna Get Shot?
Because faking like you have a gun in order to intimidate people is a great way to do that:
Race baiting
Juneteenth
Welcome to Juneteenth. Celebrate this holiday like a black man.
- Go out for cigarettes and never return
- steal someone’s bike
- don’t have a job
- commit a violent crime
Security
Done Stamp
The closet organizer is done. I secured 3 pieces of 3/4 inch plywood to the wall, spanning 6 studs. They are attached with 52 two and a half inch screws- one screw every 16 inches whenever the plywood crosses a stud.
This is a rail mounted closet organizer. There is a screw through the rail whenever it crosses a stud, and a 1/4×20 elevator screw in between those screws, so that no section of rail is unsupported for more than a foot. Then the system is hung on the rail. I’m fairly certain that will hold it. I painted the plywood to match the wall, and now it looks great. One project complete. Including waiting for parts, it took just over a week.
The camera system should be done tomorrow. That project took 4 days of solid work during the day.
For those asking what cameras I chose, there are two types.
For fixed cameras, I bought five Lorex E842CD cameras. They are 8mp cameras that I placed in the central room of the house, the pool, the rear lanai, over the driveway, and at the front door. I am moving away from smart doorbells because it would have to connect via WiFi, and I want a wired setup.
I also added a PTZ camera. I wanted one with a good optical zoom, so I can see things at distance with clarity. I chose the Amcrest IP8M-2899EW. Like the fixed cameras, it’s also 8mp. It has a full 25x optical and 16x digital zoom. Using this camera, I can read license plates at 200 yards and the expiration sticker on them at 100 yards. It has built in AI that performs facial recognition. Don’t ask me how that works, because I haven’t played with it yet.
All of the cameras are attached to a RAID comprised of three 10tb HDDs inside of a Synology RS1221+ running the Surveillance Station software. That RAID gives me at least 60 days’ recording capacity.
At this point, I will be making minor adjustments to settings and things like that. I also need to learn to use the software, so I will be playing with that some. All in all, I have a good system that allows me to control my data and I won’t have to pay subscription fees to anyone.
The firewall keeps the cameras from connecting to the Internet. The VLAN rules only permit the cameras to talk to the disk station. That protects me from cameras that can be hacked or used to spy on my data.
Installing it required a couple of network changes, but I will lay out my final network in a post coming soon.
People
There It Is
The dumbest thing I have read on the Internet today.
because that’s safe for all of the bystanders- driving a car while firing a pistol out the window trying to hit another car’s tires. Dumbass
Cancel Culture
Buzz
The latest viral video is of a man who takes his young daughters into an Alabama gas station restroom. After ensuring that there are no women inside, he takes them into the women’s restroom. A man then comes in to the bathroom, causing a scene and calls the police. The woman in the background is an employee of the gas station, who doesn’t seem to care that the man and his daughters are in there and is just trying to smooth things over.
It seems that everyone is falling into one of two camps:
- The dad has no business being in the women’s restroom for any reason. Bring your young daughters into the men’s restroom.
- The daughters shouldn’t be exposed to the men’s restroom. It’s fine for the dad to bring them in there.
Me? I don’t care which. His daughters, his parenting style. What I think everyone is missing here is this:
Why in the hell is the male Karen (Darren?) even worried about this to the point of calling the cops and causing a scene? The store employees don’t care, so why does it matter so much to him? He raises such a commotion that the poor little girls are scared and crying. He attempts to gain police sympathy by claiming his wife is waiting to use the restroom with her mother, who is ill and on oxygen.
Guess what? The police have other things to do than deal with Darren’s meltdown. They aren’t going to do shit because no laws have been broken. Why does it matter that his mother in law is on oxygen? Is there some life saving equipment in that restroom that will improve her respiration? Or is Darren an ass who needs a good ass kicking? I’m guess the latter, and he will get what he’s looking for if he keeps getting in people’s faces and pushing them like he does at 1:50 in the video.
The man stayed for police, who confirmed that no law had been broken.
Honestly, the police should respond to find a man that had just received a face full of pepper spray and me with that video demanding charges against him for assault.
When the police did arrive, they pointed out to the dad that it could be perceived as a man trying to perve in the women’s restroom. This is totally different than men wearing dresses hanging out in the women’s restroom because they want everyone else to play along with their delusion. Anyone who says they can’t see the difference is either lying or a complete retard.
Watch the videos and ask which of the two men above would YOU rather have for a neighbor?
Glory Days
Blocking Traffic
One of the things you learn when driving fire trucks is called “protecting the scene.” As the driver of a large piece of fire apparatus, you park it at an angle across the lane of the road where your crew is working and the one adjacent to it. You angle the front tires in such a way that, should the rig get struck, it won’t be pushed into your crew. A Fort Worth fire crew recently demonstrated why this idea is so important. The driver of this fire truck likely saved multiple lives when he did this.
Blog News
Ad Hominems
There are not many rules for posting here that will get your post deleted, for the most part. The biggest thing is “no personal attacks.” I believe in honest discourse, and once a discussion has devolved to ad hominem attacks, the discussion is over. There can be no dialog once people begin attacking one another, rather than their ideas. It’s one of the things that the Internet is really bad at. Someone begins losing on their idea, and so they attack the person instead.
Periodically, someone will do that to me. It’s one of the reasons why I endeavor to keep my name out of things as much as I can. About twice a year, some leftist who gets his panties in a bunch because I disagreed with him on Twitter will come to this site, then begin attacking me. Nothing shows that the discussion is over and you have lost like engaging in attacking the person rather than their ideas. All that can be done at that point is block the person and move on. Nothing further is to be gained by continuing to engage with them.
That happened just this past week. A guy on Twitter that was the subject of a recent post here saw that post and used it as a springboard to attack me personally because he couldn’t defend his own point on its merits. Dialog at that point is over. There is no point in continuing. Just block him and move on. People like that will say “See? He blocked me, I won!” then they will move on, completely missing any self awareness.
It’s one of the reasons why I moderate comments here. Defend your ideas, attack someone else’s ideas. That’s how we learn and grow as humans. Attack the person, and you have just admitted that your ideas are not worthy of defending.