Education isn’t.

Teachers spent hours this past quarter trying to teach long distance. All of it was a waste of time. This is what the school districts of Florida are doing. Students who did nothing but go to the beach for the last three months are not paying any sort of price. They missed a quarter of the school year, but their diploma will look just like the students who actually worked. So students who spend the lockdown driving around the county doing drive by shootings will get the same grades as the ones who actually did what they were supposed to do.

Grantham said Alex Cole, an Informational Technology employee, created a program that will inspect each student’s grades. The program will replace the fourth nine weeks grade with the third nine weeks grade, if it dropped, automatically. The program will also recalculate the overall grade after grades were changed.

Education in this country is nothing but babysitting because that is what the parents want. Grades are supposed to reflect whether or not a student learned what they were supposed to learn. Giving them free grades, schools might as well close and just mail diplomas to everyone.

Future

So when BLM gets their wish nationwide and there are no more police, what happens? Of course crime will skyrocket. Do you think that Americans will just sit there and do nothing? With no cops, there is nothing stopping me from making machine guns.

My gated community will look like a firebase in Vietnam.

Runner: “Sir, there is movement in the wire in sector 3. NODS show that it is more of those BLM scouts.”

Neighborhood watch commander: “Blow claymore set 3A. Alert the QRF. Better yet, see if the duty sniper can get a shot without giving away his position. Does the OP on the south side see anything?”

Runner: “Nothing. Do you want to call the city safety patrol?”

Everyone: laughs

Ballot initiative for AWB in Florida struck down by State Supreme Court

Florida has a means of amending its Constitution through ballot initiatives. A special interest group hires some people to collect signatures in favor of a new amendment, and once enough people have signed, it is placed on the ballot. Should 60 percent of the voters on election day favor that amendment, it becomes part of the constitution.

This process was famously used to outlaw keeping pregnant pigs in pens, even though it later turned out that the small pens were needed to keep pregnant sows from trampling their young. The law only affected two farmers, who sued the state and at least one was awarded half a million dollars in damages.

Thanks to tricky wording, many voters in 2016 thought they were voting to approve casino gambling in Florida when they voted for an amendment backed by Disney and the Indian tribes, but instead voted to guarantee that we would never see casino gambling outside of an Indian reservation in this state, because any casino to be opened will now require approval of voters in a statewide referendum.

So there was an interest group that attempted to put an assault weapons ban on the ballot. Today, the state Supreme Court removed that initiative from the ballot. (pdf alert). The ban would have amended the state Constitution to add the following language:

 The possession of an assault weapon, as that term is defined in this
subsection, is prohibited in Florida except as provided in this
subsection. This subsection shall be construed in conformity with the
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution as interpreted
by the United States Supreme Court.
1) Definitions –
 a) Assault Weapons – For purposes of this subsection,
any semiautomatic rifle or shotgun capable of holding
more than ten (10) rounds of ammunition at once, either
in a fixed or detachable magazine, or any other
ammunition-feeding device. This subsection does not
apply to handguns.
b) Semiautomatic – For purposes of this subsection, any
weapon which fires a single projectile or a number of ball
shots through a rifled or smooth bore for each single
function of the trigger without further manual action
required.
c) Ammunition-feeding device – For purposes of this
subsection, any magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or
similar device for a firearm.
2) Limitations –
a) This subsection shall not apply to military or law
enforcement use, or use by federal personnel, in conduct
of their duties, or to an assault weapon being imported
for sale and delivery to a federal, state or local
governmental agency for use by employees of such
agencies to perform official duties.
b) This subsection does not apply to any firearm that is
not semiautomatic, as defined in this subsection.
c) This subsection does not apply to handguns, as defined
in Article I, Section 8(b), Florida Constitution.
d) If a person had lawful possession of an assault weapon
prior to the effective date of this subsection, the person’s
possession of that assault weapon is not unlawful
            (1)
during the first year after the effective date of this
subsection, or
            (2) after the person has registered with the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement or a successor
agency, within one year of the effective date of this
subsection, by providing a sworn or attested statement,
that the weapon was lawfully in his or her possession
prior to the effective date of this subsection and by
identifying the weapon by make, model, and serial
number. The agency must provide and the person must
retain proof of registration in order for possession to
remain lawful under this subsection.
Registration records shall be available on a permanent basis to local, state and
federal law enforcement agencies for valid law
enforcement purposes but shall otherwise be confidential.
3) Criminal Penalties – Violation of this subsection is a thirddegree felony. The legislature may designate greater but not
lesser, penalties for violations.
4) Self-executing – This provision shall be self-executing except
where legislative action is authorized in subsection (3) to
designate a more severe penalty for violation of this subsection.
No legislative or administrative action may conflict with,
diminish or delay the requirements of this subsection.
5) Severability – The provisions of this subsection are
severable. If any clause, sentence, paragraph, section or
subsection of this measure, or an application thereof, is
adjudged invalid by any court of competent jurisdiction, other
provisions shall continue to be in effect to the fullest extent
possible.
6) Effective date – The effective date of this amendment shall
be thirty days after its passage by the voters.

Great news, and advice needed

Last week, we were devastated with a Ransomware attack. Because of some key errors on my part, as well as the QNAP’s Linux operating system requiring more expensive options for cloud backup, we didn’t have a robust backup and lost nearly everything.

QNAP’s malware cleaner identified the problem as the ech0raix ransomware. A second lab that I sent files to identified it as QNAP.encrypter ransomware. The ransomware explicitly targets QNAP products, so I contacted QNAP, and they were no help at all. I contacted several data recovery companies, and they all told me that there was nothing we could do.

 I did research on the ransomware and discovered what I suspected was a key flaw in how the ransomware operates. It encrypts the file and saves a copy with the “.encrypt” extension appended to the end of the file name, and then it deletes the unencrypted original file. Everything that I had read stated that the decrypting the encrypted files was impossible, but I once had software that allowed me to undelete Windows files even after a disk format, so why wouldn’t the same be possible on a Linux system? Why try to decrypt a strongly encrypted file when you have an unencrypted file there just waiting to be recovered?

Since the two NAS servers (primary and backup) were RAID1 arrays, we had 4 copies of the entire system. We decided to see what could be done. We put three of the disks in the safe, and sent the other off to a friend that works in IT for a large company. He made a bit for bit copy, and then took that copy and tried to recover the deleted, unencrypted files.

He successfully recovered over 12,000 files. He recovered pictures, videos, Microsoft Office files, and PDFs. There were a few files that were infected and had to be destroyed. Some were damaged by being overwritten. He recovered more than 90% of what was on there.

The hard drives. He says that there is no guarantee that the malware isn’t hidden somewhere on the drives to the point where even formatting won’t get rid of it, and with the low cost of HDD now, we are going to replace all of them with new, out of the box drives. The NAS is probably going as well. QNAP’s products are being targeted, and apathetic is the kindest thing I can say about them.

Everyone I talked to said it couldn’t be done. Our friend didn’t want payment, but we are giving him $500 for what work he did, even if I have to break into his car to hide it in the glovebox. We sent him a passport drive so he can put our recovered files on it. The directories were all lost, so we have some sorting and filing to do.

Now I do need advice from my readers. I am changing our file storage system here. I want to use a NAS for file storage but also backup. We are going to keep offline copies of everything through the use of periodic backups on disks that we will keep in the safe AND cloud backups. I want something that is easier to understand than having to do all of the workarounds that Linux requires and allows cloud backups at a lower cost than Linux. So here are my requirements:

1 Network drive with RAID capability,
2 Capable of periodic updates for security
3 Capable of running Antivirus software that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg
4 Capable of automated cloud backups of either the entire drive, or selected directories
5 Cost less than $400 without hard drives

Does anyone know of such an animal?

FB Jail again

This morning, I went to comment on a page that was calling Trump a coward for heading to the bunker while rioters were trying to enter the White House. The comment would not post. It said “something went wrong. We are unable to process your request.”

Then I tried other posts. I can’t even comment on my own posts. I have received no notice from FB on why, or even if, I am banned, so I have no idea. 

BLM to be armed against cops.

BLM declares they will up the ante in the war that they have declared against police. Will this be like the last few elections, with the violence stopping after election day? Or is this the beginning?

EDITED TO ADD:
For some reason, every time I link to the article about BLM declaring war on police, the link works for about an hour, and then begins getting a 403 error. Here is the link to cut and paste into your browser:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-plans-war-on-police-ny-leader-says