Divemedic

After the Parkland school shooting, the school district where I teach passed a new rule, requiring teachers to wear ID at all times. I am not sure how that will prevent school shootings, since shooters are almost never adults. They are almost always students or former students.

So sure enough, the next year a rule came out requiring students to do the same. Teachers were instructed to write a discipline referral for any student seen without a visible ID. So we began writing the referrals. One student told me “They can’t suspend all of us.” What eventually happened was the rule was no longer enforced, so that, after about a month, there were no IDs visible on a single student, and about a quarter of the staff stopped wearing them as well.

Now I see that schools are going to require all teachers and staff to wear a mask at all times when they return to school in the fall.

Good luck with that.

How can you know who to trust when the so-called good guys are scammers as well?

So it isn’t looking good. The software that got me was ech0raix. It is a ransomware attack that encrypts Linux based NAS drives made by QNAP. The infection was caught by the Malware AP, which told me to submit a help ticket to QNAP with the subject line “ransomware.”

I got a reply about an hour ago. The software uses a 173 character password to encrypt the files using a 256 bit algorithm. (If I am screwing up the terminology, bear with me. I was up all night trying to retrieve anything I can. I have been up for 32 hours) They say that the key is not entirely random, so there is a chance that someday it will be cracked. For that reason, I will lock the drives away, and maybe I can recover my stuff then.

They claim that it infects your system by brute forcing the password. QNAP accused me of having a weak password. I didn’t think I did- It was 11 characters long, upper case, lower case, punctuation, and numbers. I am not sure I believe that, because if all it is, is a brute force attack, then why does it only affect certain QNAP model numbers?

I used to backup data every six months by burning backups onto CD ROM, but I started using all QNAP software for backup, so we stopped doing backups. The last backup I have is from November of 2016. Almost everything since then is gone: Financial data, tax data, pictures, and everything else. I may have some of the pictures, but most are gone, including wedding pictures.

I don’t yet know what I have and don’t have. We are going through everything to see what we can find saved in various places that the malware may have missed. I will still continue to try and find a way to recover those files, but at this point, I don’t see much hope.

We will be getting rid of our NAS and returning to the old ways- backup to CD ROM once a quarter. Not as convenient day to day, but this is the first virus I have ever been hit with, and I have been online and computing since the days of BBS boards. (1980s)

I have been beating myself up for becoming complacent and not backing up all of the time, but I dropped the ball. I just know that I never want to see my wife that upset again. It wounds me to know that a good number (half or more) of her wedding pictures, our Europe vacation, our Alaska trip, and many pictures of the grandkids and me are gone for good, and the effect it has on her.

I am the victim of a ransomware attack. The ech0raix malware has encrypted all of the files on my computer. They are demanding $650 worth of bitcoin. My wife is in tears. The QNAP raid was our backup and I thought we were protected. All of our photos, including of our wedding, my entire life, and my dead father are on there. 1TB of files in all. It is irreplaceable.

The malware didn’t touch music or movie files. It only encrypted pictures, Office files, and PDFs.

I am looking for help in fixing this. I found a file on bleepingcomputers.com that claims to fix it, but none of the computers in the house will run it because they claim it is a virus itself.

I don’t know what to do. I considered paying the ransom, but people online are saying that paying doesn’t get you the decryption key.

The way that a survey’s questions are worded is frequently intended to get a certain result. The one I took today is no exception to that. Today on CensorshipBook, I was asked a two question survey:

1 Do you feel that we censor Too many posts, the right amount of posts, or not enough posts.

My answer: too many.

2 Have you been notified by CensorshipBook that one of your posts has been deleted within the past 7 days?

The answer was a highly misleading ‘no’.

For the past year, I have been placed in FB jail no less than 6 times. Two of those bans were 30 day bans, the others were from 24 hours on up. I was notified at least a dozen other times that my posts were being deleted because they were not in keeping with FB community standards. I was notified that I was a “racist” because I posted that “Not everyone you disagree with is Hitler.”

Recently, they stopped notifying me when my posts were deleted. Instead, the posts that they don’t like are just being quietly removed, and unless you go back and look for them, you would never know.

and that is why the second question was so misleading.

Reading the two posts on mothers attacking children over at GFZ, I was reminded of a book that was required reading for a child abuse recognition class that I took a decade or so ago. This book details the last week of the life of Ursula Sunshine, a little girl who was abused, beaten, and killed by her mother and mother’s boyfriend.

When I read this book, it was so intense that I had to set it down a few times. When I finished, I was in tears. It is incredibly hard to read, but if you are a person who regularly works around children, it is important to recognize the signs that all of the teachers, doctors, and other caregivers missed.

Just went to Home Depot. Half the customers were wearing masks. Of those, about half either had their nose out or were wearing it as a chinstrap, with the nose and mouth uncovered. It’s as if they think a mask is a magic talisman to ward off evil spirits.

Of those who actually attempted to wear it correctly, most had gaps so large that you could stick a finger in the gap. A few of the men were wearing them over beards.

The COVID virus is 80 nanometers in diameter. That is 80 billionths of a meter. Even worn correctly, a surgical mask has pores that are up to 500 nanometers in diameter- more than 7 times larger than the virus. Cloth masks are even worse. The human hair is about 1,000 times wider than this virus. If you can fit a hair between your mask and skin, it isn’t doing you any good.

What the powers that be aren’t telling you is that the order to wear masks isn’t there to keep you from catching it. They just don’t work for that. What they are for is to keep you from coughing and sneezing particles over longer distances. When you cough or sneeze, you eject large droplets that fly as far as 2 meters away, which is why the social distance rule is 6 feet. The smaller droplets, called aerosols are the ones most likely to squeeze past a mask, stay suspended in the air for much larger periods.

There is little that can be done to filter out aerosols. The secret here is that the Wuhan virus is fairly fragile and is destroyed by sunlight. So while the aerosol is suspended, any Wuhan V that are in it will be destroyed fairly quickly if exposed to daylight. Your best defense is to be outdoors and at least six feet from others, or be in a building with an HVAC system that exchanges the air frequently. Believe it or not, newer gun ranges have air systems that do just that.

The healthiest thing is to go outdoors or to an indoor range.

Drugs kill people. That is a fact whether they are legally prescribed or not. In the case of street drugs, the people that die from them are largely self inflicted deaths. They take them knowing the risks, roll the dice, and sometimes lose.

Not so with the war on drugs. Take for example Breona Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.

Picture this: You are a law abiding, gun owning citizen in Louisville, KY. Your EMT girlfriend is sleeping beside you, tired after working her shift at a local hospital. There is a loud noise at 1 am on a Thursday night. A group of men enter your home without announcing who they are and open fire, shooting more than 20 times, striking your girlfriend with 8 bullets.

What do you do? Shoot back, of course.

When the dust settles, it turns out the men were police officers who were executing a “no knock” warrant, looking for a suspect who lived miles away and was already in their jail at the time of the raid. One of the cops was wounded in the leg.

Police claim that they knocked on the door before forcing their way inside. They say they were immediately met with gunfire.

Police have said it’s unclear what Taylor’s involvement was or how she died. The coroner says that she died of bullets to the torso.

Kenneth Walker was charged with attempted murder of a police officer.

When cops execute a warrant on the wrong house, fail to identify themselves, and then begin shooting how is the homeowner supposed to know the difference between them and a gang of criminal home invaders? Answer: you aren’t, because there *is* no difference.