The Realms Of A Lightworker

Posted on May 30, 2024 by bluedepth

Many years ago, when I was twenty years old I experienced a massive and radical awakening through what I later discovered was a Kundalini experience. What I never realized was what this single experience did for me, for the rest of my life. In the intervening years, into my mid-forties, I explored everything. I resolved, in a poetic way, that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living, so I explored as much as I could. I intentionally opened myself up to everything that would come to me, and that’s when the synchronicities began.

At first, they were curiosities, coincidences and happy accidents. I was beset by strange memorable dreams, deja vu, and a whole host of little oddities that I could comfortably ignore. My explorations included a bunch of discoveries, and realizations that not everyone starts their life like I did mine. From eight years old, I knew what my life purpose was, I wrote it out, and I never revised it since, and it’s been with me for forty years of living and I have no reason to change it now. At twelve years of age, I lost what little drabs of organized religion were impressed upon me by everyone else, and I lost it in the most amusing of places, the Church Library at the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, New York, which was my maternal grandmothers church, and the one where I was baptized and grew up frequenting on Sundays. Then zoom forward, seventeen years of age, and I encountered a medium / psychic fellow who helped me remember a previous incarnation. I was an Irish Catholic priest, mid 1800’s, and being inducted into that understanding was at the time just another amusement, but turned out to be fundamental for all the things that came afterwards. All of these events, little accidents, little nudges, all to place me on a certain path, and now that I look back in retrospect, it is hilariously obvious that I was always going to end up here.

Then several years ago, I started knowing things. I would be able to guess, with shocking uncanny success, if I was posed with a problem or question, and in the first heartbeat, that answer, which more and more started just happening all by itself would just land in my lap. After a series of self-exams where I would honestly test myself, test this gift, and after I was rocking nearly 100% accuracy I accepted it and let it become a part of who I am. I don’t use it intentionally, instead my instincts guided me to regard it as just another worthwhile input, pouring all of what the world had for me, all my perceptions, the events that happened in my life, all into a central pool and let everything mingle. I later discovered that this gift has a name, it’s called claircognizance. The ability to acquire knowing, gnosis, immediately without having to expend any sort of mental labor to reach the answer. I still had no idea what was happening to me, but I wanted desperately to follow all these breadcrumbs left for me, like a trail of M&M’s.

Over time, I picked up many more skills, through my young adulthood I picked up Tarot, Runes, and Bibliomancy and started to appreciate the more numinous and subtle shadings of existence. I started asking the big questions, the purpose of life, why we exist, and trying to understand this world that I exist in, what it means and my place within it. Then I had three lifelong lessons to cope with co-dependency. The first lesson was co-dependency in my family, then in my love life, and finally in my public life. Each time I thought I was done with the lessons to learn, only to careen into the next lesson. All of this set me up for my development, but also encouraged me to start addressing all the shadows in my life. Early traumas, sadnesses, and hurts that all goaded me into a kind of compartmentalization. Every interaction with others was jarring and painful, unpleasant and upsetting. Turns out, my nascent empathy was traumatized and as such, I created barricades around this, to protect myself. Everyone who wanted to grab a token and hurt me could line up, get their abuse jollies and I would just sit there and take it, stoically. It was just dissociation, which I came to understand much later in life. You can’t reach me if I’m not here, so I would leave. Leave within myself.

Years of this, of being the black sheep of my family, to being isolated and lonely, a permanent outsider, never once fitting in properly anywhere, never a part of anything, always browsing from outside and looking in on a world that seemed to be really quite wonderful, but also not for me. So I decided that I could just do it all alone, I was isolated and lonely anyways, nobody could understand the vast sweeping ideas that I was having, so I just determined to keep it all inside. That I could explore where I wanted to go, how I wanted to evolve in this lifetime and I would do it as a solitary practitioner. It felt right, I had mile-high barricades built around me, I kept my caring parts, my empathy, close to me, protecting it from a rude and nasty world full of rude and nasty human beings, and I resolved that I would live the rest of my days, cut off and happy. Happy in my separate peace.

And then, suddenly and unbidden, I started to channel. I would talk to myself, or more clearly, I would hear my own voice talking to me, and there was both messages and feelings to this exchange. I didn’t think I was losing my faculties, I felt like it was another gift from the Universe, maybe something like a consolation prize for an unhappy childhood, perhaps. And I accepted it, if it was going to be a part of me, then I would welcome it, add it to the chorus that was feeding into the central pool of experience building slowly within my mind. By accepting it, it doesn’t upset me, and some days the channel “pops open” several times a day, and sometimes it doesn’t for weeks at a time, it comes when it comes, it says what it says, and always the messages are advice, suggestions, and above everything else, this pervasive feeling of love and support. I can’t make anyone proud of me out there, but I apparently can for my channel, and whatever is on the other side of the line. For good or ill, I accept it.

Then after a while, with a lifetime of material building up within me, I started feeling this unfocused foreboding sensation. Like I could feel something coming towards us, from the future, something we were all blindly stumbling into, traipsing into. That’s when I tried to reach out, I didn’t know what sort of warning I could give, so I started to try to help people. My gift comes with a curse. The curse of Cassandra is the closest mythological story I can come up with. Gifted with knowledge, the gnosis from the claircognizance, but the curse that I would never be believed. I came to understand that I was still an outsider, but oddly enough, I started to also find people who could actually hear me. I think they would be proud to call themselves neurodivergent, and when I would share with them, they would hear me. It was jarring and shocking. The curse was always with me, making me othered, separated, an outsider with those that surround me, except for the neurodivergent.

Over time, I came to learn that everything that was happening to me was suited to a much greater purpose. Ticking boxes, checking off elements, and slowly evolving my way into becoming a Lightworker. I had this sense of foreboding still, and I carry it to this day, it’s still with me. I then encountered a dear friend who I never considered interested in any of this stuff, but he started helping me by saying the exactly right things, at the right time. The channel kept on telling me that someone would walk into my life, sometime very soon, and that they would help me to grow and open up. So, with my channel telling me it was the best path for me, and nudging me with synchronicities and unexplainable coincidences, I gave up my barricades and let each one of them crumble. This one person, this one very special person, enabled me to share all that I had become, all I had discovered, and everything that I had to say. This person could hear me, they would listen, and they offered kindness and support. I then started to dream again, I wasn’t remembering the dreams like I had, but I felt this irresistible pressure build within me. I wanted desperately to grow, to relax, to unclench. I knew exactly what would be my next step in my personal evolution, and that was that I needed to be Bright. As a Lightworker, I am told that I have a presence and a glow to me, perhaps I do, but I also feel this urge to actually try. Not just to accept what the channel and other sensitives and empaths share with me, but to grab the reins and pursue it. This pursuit has become one of the most exciting and passionate pursuits of my entire lifetime.

I know what I am supposed to do, my role in all of this. As a Lightworker I am supposed to inspire others. I am to follow a path of ever increasing emotional vibratory frequencies. I have to ask at every juncture, what do I prefer? What choice would lead me to where I want to go, this image in my mind of a world that we all want to live in. One built out of kindness, compassion, love, and respect. That’s my path, and as a part of it, I felt this overwhelming revulsion to all my prior low-frequency emotions. Hate, Fear, Anger, Rage. So I actively spurned all of those, at each juncture picking hope, kindness, compassion, and deep feelings of love over all the awful feelings. I was so angry, all the time, and I have come to understand that anger and fear are just messengers from beyond me, helping me to push myself towards the light. More than just abandoning the low frequency feelings, I embraced them, felt them, let them reach expression through me and as I did, they one by one faded out of my life. As it turns out, I was doing shadow-work, without even knowing that it was called that.

For me, in this world, I see the realm we exist in made up of three spheres. The lowest sphere is what my channel has termed “The Tar”, it’s hot, black, sticky, and has a breathtaking undertow that will grab you and pull you under with it. The Tar is a world of hate, fear, risk, suspicion, and scarcity of everything. It’s repugnant to me, and when I feel it, I try to steer away from it if I can. The next sphere is “The Dim”, and that’s our current world. You can see the light, it isn’t bright, but it is visible. You know what you should do, you see the path, you just need courage to walk it. We all live in The Dim, it’s the work-a-day world, the subsistence of living, the endless trudge of Same Shit, Different Day. The last sphere, the sphere I am working to enter, to champion, is “The Bright”. This sphere is one of kindness, compassion, respect, understanding, and is the home of my irrational altruism. That impulse to do something nice, unbidden, without any recompense because to give of myself in this way feels authentically vital.

I figured, as my journey started to take me down many unusual and out-of-the-way avenues, which I term my “woo woo” landscape, that really all of this, how I got here, what it all means, can all be reduced down to me simply wanting to have the Bright feelings, kindness, compassion, love, hope… the things that gain and generate and produce without working for it. A balm to the scarcity of The Tar, I suppose now that I have laid it all out for the first time from thoughts to words. My Lightworker nature just gives me a kind of vector, not only do I want to be more in The Bright, but I want to bring more of The Bright to everyone around me. All the advice that I get from my channel and all the sensitives and empaths that I have gotten to know on a personal level all give me little nudges. At first I wanted to scoop up everyone that I cared for, like a kind of shepherd of my flock as it were, and try to literally drag them into The Bright with me, because I didn’t want to lose any of them to The Tar. I could help them rise above The Dim, if I could just be strong enough, and convincing enough, to try hard enough. Once I had started trying, the channel and my sensitive friends all started to beat the drum to correct my path, another nudge. My place wasn’t to force or cajole or even prompt people, but instead to understand that what really matters in everything isn’t hard power, but soft power. Hard power is slapped down by Karma, where soft power is supported by Karma. So I shifted my approach and now I am concentrating all my energies on picking the right options in each juncture, and flowing from trying to make people hear me, to trying to inspire people. I can’t inspire without actually sharing myself with others, and so, this blog post was born in my mind and I write it out in an effort to be Bright and to shine.

The foreboding of what is coming is still with me. The world has sputtered and coughed in recent years, and there is this sense of something on the horizon that we are witlessly marching into, all of us. I don’t know what it is, nor when it is supposed to be, but I do know that I am right where I need to be. I need to tell people who I am, what I can do, and to simply inspire and shine as best that I can, being as damaged as I have been – and to rise above that trauma, all the reasons deep inside me that are screaming at me to not write any of this, to not share it, to not shine. If I don’t shine, I won’t be noticed, and I’ll be safe. If I ignore all of that, if I chase this Bright down and embody it myself, then I will shine, I will be noticed, and there might be risk. Then I smile and recall that I am to pick whichever choice is brighter at every juncture, and so, it’s brighter for me to share this with you all, knowing that an act of deep disclosure of a personal vulnerability is a monumental act of grace and trust, fills me with such joy and happiness. It’s scary, it’s frightening, and it’s also incredibly liberating! As with many things, when you are up close to a thing, all you can see is that thing, so this feels huge and monumental, but over time, and perspective that develops, this is just a blip, a pebble on the path, not a mountain.

The time for me to inspire, to learn to shine in time to reach my loved ones, if not more people, is running out. I don’t want to convince anyone of anything. I want to only share ideas, not beliefs. Ideas are fluid things, they can be endlessly revised and they don’t pick up the kind of baggage that comes with belief. Soon the foreboding event will happen, and I, and the other sparsely distributed Lightworkers will be standing alone again, but instead of being alone and separate from the rest of everyone, we are supposed to stand and guide. To be independent and strong, and to show the way.

That’s what occupies my time now, all my thoughts, every motive is bent to pursuit of this Brightness, and right now my channel is open, and whatever lies on the other side has this to share here, “The thing that scares you the most is quite often your next step. Be brave. Do your best.”

And that’s what all this comes down to. Do my best. My gift to give is giving itself. I am to give my shine to everyone, in hopes that they understand what it is that I want of the world. To leave the Tar and the Dim behind, to be Bright.

Walk in the Light.

Secure Channels

Posted on January 23, 2020 by bluedepth

I explored the challenge of establishing a secure channel in a business-to-business use case a few days ago. Between the company I work for and another company, where the information was very sensitive, the risk of it being compromised was unacceptable, and the requirement that I share the information with the other party undeniable.

The goal was to get a secret string of text from my system into the system of another party. I have explored cryptography for a long while and so I was confident that all the tools I had could do the job very well. The real challenge was in establishing a communications protocol and a secure channel. Amongst my explorations, I had the entire suite of OpenSSL library ciphers at hand, I had GPG, and the answer which I sort of knew already even before I started this foray into cybersecurity, that Signal would eventually be my answer.

It was at first exploration of the challenge of it. How could I get a secret alphanumeric string to another party that had none of the tools or the experience of cryptography that I had in my library? All of it was fated before I even started, but I at least wanted to go through the motions and explore this problem as if I was sitting in the middle of it without any view of the win condition at the end. The first stab was GPG, so I searched for any public keys related to the other company, and there were none. That was worth a smirk, and I nodded because I would have been shocked if there was a hit at all, so GPG was a dead end. The next effort was thinking about what sort of cipher could be used. This selection of a cipher was symmetric cryptography. I would need to encode the message so that it would be suitable for email transmission, and encrypt the data using some standard cipher that I knew would be possible for both parties, and then I spent a while trying to figure out the password for the cipher. I knew that base64 would be great for encoding and decoding the message, and I still have faith in AES-256-CTR, but that left me having to select a password that I could use that both sides knew. Any effort to share that password in any other non-secure channel would render all my efforts for nothing because then the cipher would be a mathematical contrivance because the security of the password then became equivalent to the security of the payload. If the password was passed in clear text, then the entire endeavor was meaningless.

So this entry becomes a love letter to Signal. It covered everything I needed. It used encryption end-to-end and it was vetted and secure, it didn’t require public keys, or specifically, the user wasn’t involved with that part of the process, and I could trust that the inbound mobile number matched the intended recipient. I didn’t need to exchange passwords or agree on a cipher or a protocol. The application and service are free as well, so there wasn’t even a cost barrier to this solution! It checks off every box on my list. I was able to copy and paste the secure string of data over Signal to the other person and conclude the task that I set for myself at the beginning of all of this. There is more to Signal than just this use case and I encourage everyone I know to download it, sign in, and start using it.

Pete Buttigieg Donation

Posted on March 31, 2019 by bluedepth

Everytime I see Pete Buttigieg or hear him speak I am overwhelmed with awe and respect. He isn’t spending time listening for reply, there is no wool gathering, and he isn’t lying.

He may be a longshot, but so was Obama, and he won. So I plunked down $25 for Pete Buttigieg through actblue.com. I have also decided who I want to win the Democratic primary and the presidency of the United States.

Who does he pick for VP? Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, or even Joseph Biden. That’s his decision in the end, but anyone in that set would do very well.

Strategy to Inbox Zero

Posted on March 28, 2019 by bluedepth

Earlier in the week I had talked to a friend about my unmanageable email pile in my Inbox, about 78 pieces of email just sitting there, dwelling on the edge of my consciousness and weighing on me. Is there something there that I should take care of? Did I miss something important? So I started to chat and to do some research.

There are many strategies out there, and I adapted them for my own use, and so far it has worked out marvelously well. Here’s how I process my email:

Create sorting folders. I created a host of new subfolders in my work email account which runs under a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. Because folders sort alphabetically, I forced the sort using number indexes and dashes.
1. 1-Email Management
  1. 1-Today
  2. 2-This Week
  3. 3-This Quarter
  4. 4-FYI
  5. 5-Toodledo
  6. 6-Done/Sort
2. 2-Help Desk
3. 3-To Evernote
4. 4-Barracuda
5. 5-Syslog Alerts
6. 6-ATP
Then I sort the Inbox into the “Email Management” folder structure. If something has to be done today, it goes to 1-Today, and so on and so forth. My first consideration is the due-date for the item in my Inbox. If the item is purely informational, it goes into the 4-FYI box.
I have rules set up in my email application, which happens to be Apple Mail. If I get email from Toodledo, my favorite To-Do system, they are moved into that folder. Anything from my Spiceworks Ticket sytem ends up in the 2-Help Desk folder. The messages from my Barracuda backup appliance end up in the 4-Barracuda folder, all my incoming Kiwi Syslog alerts end up in 5-Syslog Alerts, and finally the Advanced Threat Protection from Hosted Exchange reports get filed in 6-ATP. Rules are a huge part of keeping your neck above water when it comes to emails. There are a lot of purely informational emails that have zero urgency and very low importance, you want to keep them to go through them, but they don’t need to clog up your Inbox. Rules can help you sweep a lot of these away automatically. Always flag your junk mail, review that occaisonally to drag it for any false-positives.
If an item is a request for help from work, and it didn’t come in as a ticket originally, those need to be pushed into the ticketing system. Thankfully Spiceworks allows you to forward emails into the ticket system by sending forwarded mail to whatever mailbox you’ve configured for the Spiceworks system. There are a litany of hashtag controls you can place in the email body to configure how tickets are arranged. My Cisco CUCM system is configured to also kick voicemails to me as attached MP3 emails, if they are requests for help, they likewise end up being forwarded with some extra flavor text to stomp down on confusion.
If an item isn’t help, is urgent, is rather important, and has a clear date and time I will forward the email to my Toodledo using the configured email address on that system. Toodledo has a flag system that works on the Subject line. My preferred method is to alert people to events, include Toodledo as a BCC addressee, and then add at the end of the Subject line this text fragment: @work :1 day #{duedate} where the field duedate is whatever the date is that is relevant. Send it, forget it, it’s in the Toodledo list.
The next step is to cycle through folders in Email Management, starting with Today and then reviewing all the rest. The Today folder is the action items that can be done today, or are due today. After completion, simple things are thrown away, but anything more elaborate or anything that touches on CYA gets sorted into the 3-To Evernote Folder.
Evernote is a bottomless notekeeping system that I also use, and I leverage Evernote as a destination for all my CYA emails, and each quarter the extracted Sent Items from my Exchange account. I don’t trust Microsoft at all, I’d rather keep things in Evernote. Microsoft has a 50GB quota, Evernote does not have a quota. At the end of each week, I have a “Sharpen The Saw” task in Toodledo that I run, and a part of that is running along the structure in the 3-To Evernote folder, which includes all the emails across the branches of the company I work for, and all the vendors I have relationships with. Every Quarter, I search for all the emails for the previous block of time, soon Q1-2019 will be over so I search for all Q1-2019 emails and also move them into Evernote.
1. The Evernote move is accomplished in two steps. The first step is to extract all the attachments out of the emails in my Exchange account, I use Mac Automator for that purpose, and here’s how it’s configured:
  1. Get Selected Mail Messages – Get selected messages.
  2. Get Attachments from Mail Messages – Save attachments in: “Attachments”
2. I then run the Automator workflow, and all the attachments are put in a folder on my Desktop called Attachments. I then bulk rename them with their folder, a date such as 20190301 (YYYYMMDD), and then select them all and drag them into the right notebook in Evernote.
3. Then I highlight all the relevant emails in my Mail App that I intend to send to Evernote, and I have created a General Service in my Mac called “Send To Evernote” which is actually another Automator Workflow, called “Send To Evernote.workflow”, that has this content:
  1. Run AppleScript:
    1. ```
    on run {input, parameters}
     -- Slightly modified version of Efficient Computing's AppleScript: http://efficientcomputing.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/03/17/copy-email-message-in-mail-app-to-evernote-applescript/
     tell application "Mail"
      --get selected messages
      set theSelection to selection
      --loop through all selected messages
      repeat with theMessage in theSelection
       --get information from message
       set theMessageDate to the date received of theMessage
       set theMessageSender to sender of theMessage
       set theMessageSubject to the subject of the theMessage
       set theMessageContent to the content of theMessage
       set theMessageURL to "message://%3c" & theMessage's message id & "%3e"
       --make a short header
       set theHeader to the all headers of theMessage
       set theShortHeader to (paragraph 1 of theHeader & return & paragraph 2 of theHeader & return & paragraph 3 of theHeader & return & paragraph 4 of theHeader & return & return)
       --import message to Evernote
       tell application "Evernote"
        set theNewNote to (create note with text (theShortHeader & theMessageContent))
        set the title of theNewNote to theMessageSubject
        set the source URL of theNewNote to theMessageURL
        set the creation date of theNewNote to theMessageDate
       end tell
       -- move the email message to archive and make it bloody obvious
       set background color of theMessage to blue
       set acc to account of mailbox of theMessage
       move theMessage to mailbox "Archive" of acc
      end repeat
     end tell
     return input
    end run
```
2. It takes some time, but it efficiently moves the text parts of the emails selected into Evernote, using my default Notebook, called IN BOX.
3. I select everything in the Evernote notebook IN BOX and move it to where it has to go, the destination notebook within Evernote itself. The messages all end up in the Archive folder, so then after that I hunt them down and delete them out of Exchange. Then empty the trash out of Exchange.
In the end, I have a very slim Exchange account, a well fleshed out Evernote data store where I can search for all my email CYA details that I might need later on, and it also works on the web and over mobile apps as well. It’s very handy.
It only took me a little while, maybe an hour tops to sort my Inbox and get to Inbox Zero. Then the cycling through the subfolders helped give me a handle on both urgency and importance, and I have a far better sense that I am actually on-top of my emails.

C2E2: Will I Be On Camera?

Posted on March 23, 2019 by bluedepth

Spotted this gem this morning. There’s something in the tall grass here at C2E2:

The paragraph covering “Will I Be On Camera?” has us scratching our noggins. What does it mean? It could mean facial tracking technology and data sales between customer flow in the exhibitors hall and their subsequent selections on the app for their fandoms. And since all our demographic data is online with ReedPOP, the managing company, they’d have to be dullards to not take advantage of this in all the ways I can think of. So, pinnacle of corruption and deep-cut privacy violations galore! But hey, we all accepted it and frankly my dear, nobody cares or even is worried over it. So I am going to be, in perpetuity (heh heh) the only Watchman shaking his canary cage.

It’s all good. I expect nothing less. Companies are corrupt, all the way to the core. That’s what they are. That is their basic nature. Paging Marcus Aurelius, and Dr. Lecter.

Moo goes the cow. Baa goes the sheep.

Boeing as Microsoft

Posted on March 23, 2019 by bluedepth

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boeing-sold-safety-feature-that-could-have-prevented-737-max-crashes-as-an-option/

Ars wrote an article about the 737 Max aircrafts safety system gap. Boeing made a key function for safety an expensive add-on. God, that smells like a Microsoft joint, doesn’t it? Hahahahahaha. Make your flight choices clear when you buy tickets: I don’t want to fly on Boeing aircraft.

And then, in related news, a touch of quid pro quo between Nikki Hayley and Boeing, too. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nikki-haley-nominated-for-board-seat-at-boeing/

Hilarious.

Goodbye Twitter

Posted on March 2, 2019 by bluedepth

Today in my email I received this from Twitter Support:

So if you click on the link, the only option is to self-censor, basically a specially crafted button to blow up whatever the offensive tweet was. In my case, my heartfelt wish that our current human stain in the White House has a stroke or heart attack. I don’t want to do anything to him, I want him to simply sieze up and die all by himself. Fly into a rage, then grab his chest and drop over stone dead.

So, Twitter took it upon themselves to force me to censor myself. Right after I got this message, I most certainly did click the “Remove” button, which blew up the Tweet. Then I downloaded my Twitter archive, once that was safe, I then deactivated my Twitter account. I would much rather it all get blown up to kingdom come than self-censor myself against the pile of waste sitting behind the Resolute desk.

I don’t really care to discuss the First Amendment ramifications, as I’m absolutely positive that Twitter will hide in the tall grass of their TOS. And that’s actually quite fine. I haven’t used Twitter in years, only logging in to lob gems like this one at the pile of fecal matter with a spray tan. I deleted Facebook, I can delete Twitteriffic too.

What am I missing out on? Nah, nothing lost. Peace of mind gained. Goodbye Twitter.

Cisco SmartInstall Vulnerability Mitigation

Posted on April 11, 2018 by bluedepth

At work, I use Cisco gear everywhere. Recently the SmartInstall Hack has become a security concern. There is a vulnerability in the SmartInstall system that allows bad actors to send arbitrary commands to your network infrastructure.

So I started out knowing how my network is shaped, that I customarily keep the 10-net IP space organized by state, then by city, and then finally by kind of equipment. Out of the four octets, the first one has to be 10, the second one is the state, and the next is the city in that state, and finally, I prefer to keep all my infrastructure gear between 250 and 254.

I started with nmap because I wanted a memory refresher so that I wouldn’t miss a device.

nmap 10.1-10.1-10.250-254

This command provides me a handy report of all the places on the inside of my network where ssh or telnet (depending on the age of the gear) reside. I print off the list, and it becomes an authoritative checklist for all my infrastructure gear.

Then one at a time, either ssh or telnet into the infrastructure devices and issue these commands in one paste command:

conf t
no vstack
end
wr mem

I don’t care if the command fails, it’ll write NVRAM to Flash either way which suits me fine. Once I was sure I got all the equipment that could be affected, I know that at least for this vulnerability, we’re all done. There won’t be anything, at least for this, at work for me to worry over.

Now if you use vstack or SmartInstall, your mileage may vary, but I certainly don’t use it. The default is to leave it on, so the smart money is in forcing it off. Why leave it open as a vulnerability if you don’t have any chance of bad actors on your LAN? Because it is one less thing to worry over.

Crocodile Apologies

Posted on March 23, 2018 by bluedepth

The media is starting to process the Cambridge Analytica misuse of Facebook data, and the story is only just getting some legs underneath it now. I see this as a reflective surface of the panic that we all felt back in November 2016, digging all that psychic turbulence back up again.

I want to focus more on Facebook itself. There have been several instances where Facebook has declared innocence publicly up until proof found, usually by journalists or investigators, and then when the truth comes out, Facebook stops, pauses, and issues an apology for their transgressions or mistakes. This reactivity is for me what lies at the core of my misgivings about the Facebook platform, and Facebook as a company.

In my opinion, it appears that Facebook is only chastened and contrite when caught red-handed doing something improper. I cannot trust a platform or a company that behaves this way. I honestly admit that I never really expected Facebook even to want to try to be upright and wholesome, I wanted them to, but all of this is similar to the feeling that I had when Google walked away from its mission statement “Do No Evil.” Facebook cannot be trusted.

There is no shock or surprise that Facebook has no tapeworm function available, only two options exist, leave everything alone or blow it all to kingdom come. I know there is a third path, the manual deletion of everything in the Activity Stream, but over ten years and quite a regular amount of use that is utterly impractical. Plus, I expect Facebook to be both capable and invested in retaining my data even if I think I’ve deleted it. Just because it no longer exists on the interface to me doesn’t mean that it is gone. I doubt thoroughly that even deleted accounts get deleted. I would bet money that they get hidden from view. It would not be in Facebook’s self-interest to lose any data they can get their hands on. I would also not put it past Facebook to also log every keystroke that goes into the text boxes on their site, so even if you don’t post anything, I would bet that Facebook has a record of what you did type and that you abandoned it. That they could record and store your unshared thoughts, indexing, and selling them even if you didn’t share. Logging into the Facebook site itself is a personal hazard to privacy. I have no proof of this last part, but I would fully expect a company like Facebook to do this very thing.

There is little that quitting Facebook will accomplish, since human personalities are quite fixed and constant constructs. We maintain that iron grip of control and Facebook has monetized it, and now, since Cambridge Analytica, they have lost it. Pandoras Box is open.

So why stop using Facebook then? Facebook must be caught being evil, which means that the intent is a stain that runs right to the core. I’ve abandoned Facebook itself because continued use is tacit approval of their offensive behavior, and if it makes them money through advertising revenue, and I’m a part of that? That’s personally unacceptable.

Going West With Facebook

Posted on March 22, 2018 by bluedepth

Much like the elves in Tolkiens tales, sometimes the time is right to board the boats and head west. In this particular case, what to do with Facebook.

I’ve been using Facebook since July 2nd 2008. In the beginning it was wonderful, sharing and everyone seemed kinder, more conscientious, I suppose the world was better back then. Many people were looking for a new platform once LiveJournal collapsed, which if we are really serious about it, came when SixApart was sold to the Russians. Americans fled pretty much after that. And so, Facebook was a thing.

Mostly friends, it hadn’t taken off yet. Many of the later iterations that make Facebook the way it is today weren’t even thought up of back then, and in a lot of ways, it was better in the past. But then everyone started to join the service and we started to learn about the ramifications and consequences of using Facebook. I can remember that feeling of betrayal as Facebook posts were printed out and handed to my workplace management. That really was the first lesson in privacy and the beginning of the end of my involvement with Facebook.

Facebook has been on-again-off-again for a while. In time I realized that I was addicted to the service and the sharing. With enough time I realized that Facebook was actually fit more as a mental illness than an addiction. I had to stop it, because in a very big way, it was the service or my mental health.

So fleeing Facebook is the name of the game. First I downloaded all my content from the service, then I started to move the saved links from Facebook to Pocket for safekeeping. Then I went through and started hacking away at groups, pages, and apps. All of these tasks will be long-tailed, they’ll take a while for me to polish off because Facebooks tentacles run very deep, and in a rather surprising way, just how deep they actually go is remarkable.

So now I’m looking at writing more and sharing more from my Blog. This post is kind of a waypoint to this end. I installed a new theme with some new images featured, and the next step is to figure out a “Members Only” area where I can separate out the public from my friends. There are some items that I intend to write about that use specific names and I don’t want to play the pronoun game with my readers. I also don’t want hurt feelings or C&D notices, both of which some of my writing has created in the past.

I will detail my journey with disposing of Facebook here on this blog. I have eliminated publicity to Twitter and Facebook, but I left G+ on, because G+ is a desert.

So, here we go!

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