LOCUS DEMENTIA

The 2024 Presidential election has brought out a topic of interest that seems to have been perverted. There is this "Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains" [1] movement that is being falsely attributed to Vice President Harris. Clearly, this is a change in the revenue code that was designed by someone in office long before VP Harris was in office. My money is on Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. What is this change in the revenue code though? For that you have to understand what Silicon Valley zillionaires are doing with their stock options. Many of these people in this special economic area have huge discounts on stock prices for companies that are not public yet, or are public and can not be sold [2]. To be fair to these holders of equity, banks allow them to finance debt using leverage against those options. If you hold an option that is worth $5M then a bank might lend you a share of that value, thus realizing a debt against the option [3]. This is a fair debt instrument and...

Artificial Intelligence, a noun that has become a household term. Most refer to it as AI, which is less of a mouthful. Where and when did this term become real? [1] Apparently John McCarthy coined this phrase in 1956 at a conference.  Vannevar Bush and Alan Turing both mused about computers being intelligence and being able to enhance human intelligence or even simulate human-like thinking. Is this thinking really "artificial" though? To suggest it being artificial would imply that there is a non-artificial type of intelligence. Otherwise, there is just intelligence, or thinking, or cognition.  The famous Turing Test may be the source of this "artificial" notion. If there is an intelligent series of responses to a human interaction, and those responses are created using a computer program, then that is considered artificial.  On a philosophical note, though, the programs are written by humans. Those programs, using rules given by humans, are creating responses that ...

The IRS published the tax brackets for 2022 here [1]. The tax brackets are important because they tell you how tax burden is calculated. If you've never calculated your taxes, then understand that you are taxed on a marginal bracket schedule. If you are married and a joint filer, then the schedule starts with $20,550, and has steps at $83,550, $178,150, $340,100, $431,900, and $647,850. Each bracket is a bucket of burden where the tax rate changes from 12%, to 22%, to 24%, then 32%, 35%, and finally 37%. As you fill buckets your marginal tax rate changes. This complexity is why tax accountants make bank throughout the year. Or not ... Inline is an image that is the graph of the marginal rate by income. It's the gray line that is scaled according to the right hand side axis. It's also the only line always increasing. Your taxes are always increasing, no matter how much you make. That's the start of the misery. The hyperbolic-like lines are the relative changes of income ...

The SARS-COV-2 [1] virus pandemic that started in late 2019 and took over the planet in 2020 has been the big news of late. I don't think there is anyone on the planet who does not know about the virus and its impact on the world. XPrize [2] held a competition in 2020 called the XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge [3]. I competed in this challenge and made it to the final. The competition concerned itself with creating two kinds of models, one to predict mortality and morbidity, and another to predict intervention policy. The first round was the prediction portion where my model performed quite well. The model I wrote used some anecdotal knowledge about prevention and risk as well as some research topics that were emerging in 2020.  Out of this competition there were some interesting anecdotal observations about virus transmission. Masks could be ineffective . When you respirate through a mask in an area that has elevated concentrations of the Covid-19 virus, the particles hosting t...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control .  The phrase "dictatorial control" is important for the case that I am going to make about fascism in social media. The word "dictatorial" means "of or relating to a dictator," and a dictator is "one ruling in an absolute and often oppressive way." In 2020, social media has seen a rise in the number of autocratic events of censorship. The two social media outlets that I am going to focus on are Facebook and Twitter.  Background Facebook is a semi-private curated blogging platform where you, the user, share information at your leisure. The public part of Facebook is in Facebook Groups. With a group, outside people who are not privy to your "Facebook Wall" will join your group and establish a communal discourse. This can be private, by invitation only, or public. The Facebook is auth-walled so that you must ...

2020 is the year of the pandemic. The SARS-Cov-2 (Covid19) virus has rampaged across the planet infecting 4,893,136 [1] people by May 20, 2020. At this time, of those 4.8M people, 323,256 people have perished from complications that arise from the infection. Arising out of this pandemic has been a narrative about non-white ethnic groups being disproportionately affected by the infection [6,7,8]. A narrative that conditions people to believe that they are perpetually victims only creates a "collective victimhood" [4,5] in that group. This "collective victimhood" costs its members millions in unrealized potential, sends them cowering from social interactions that would otherwise benefit them, and ultimately creates an environment that perpetuates itself. Let's try to dispel that false narrative and deal just with data. I pulled my data from the CDC [9] looking at mortality only. The mortality data from CDC contains per-state mortality rates on a per-infectio...

Anderson's Theorem (a) The number of primes in [1,n] is no more than 2+floor(n/2). The probability of n being prime when n is not prime is 1/2 - see Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani "Algorithms" page 26. Therefore, the E(pi(n)) is n/2. (b) There does not exist another set of adjacent primes other than {1,2,3} 5: 2 + floor(5/2) = 2 + 2 = 4:=> {1,2,3,5} : 4 <= 4 7: 2 + floor(7/2) = 2 + 3 = 5 => {1,2,3,5,7} : 5 <= 5 11: 2 + floor(11/2) = 2 + 5 = 7 => {1,2,3,5,7,11} 6 <= 7 26: 2 + floor(26/2) = 15 => {1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23} : 10 <= 15 Lagrange's Theorem is Inaccurate Lagrange's theorem about primes states that pi(x) is the number of primes <= x. The pi(x) is approximately x/ln(x). He postulated that the lim of pi(x)/(x/lnx) as x-> infinity was 1. This is incorrect. if the number of primes is bounded by n/2 then refactoring and reducing Lagrange's Theorem results in the lim of ln(x) as x approaches infinity. This is alwa...

Computer scientists like to talk about the number of atoms in the universe when talking about computational complexity. If you have 10**100 nodes to evaluate, and there are only 10**86 atoms in the universe, then there is no way to compute your node tree. 10**86 atoms? Where does that number come from? Who made this up. In [1] the claim is that there are 10**86 hydrogen atoms out there. That seems like alot, right? Remember Avogadro? He came up with a number too [2]. His number is 6.022 x 10**23 atoms per mole. That's alot of atoms too, right? Hmm. If you had one cubic mole of something, how many atoms are in there? Well, that's (10**23)**3, or about 10**69. That's not 10**86, but it's close. How many cubic moles are 10**86 atoms then? Well, about 86/69, or about 1.25 cubic moles. So the total sum of all atoms in the universe is just 1.25 cubic moles? Or rather, let's topsy turvy this. There are more atoms in 1.3 cubic moles of water than the universe. Ah ...

It's time for HTML of the future to give us the ability to obfuscate data in-memory. If password fields were stored as obfuscated values, then there would be a very low chance of a password recovery by any person or any exemplary skill. Plus, we wouldn't have to rely upon client-side JS to do hash obfuscation. I suggest a simple extension to the input form element: [ input type='password' obfuscator='sha512;salt=FooFooFoo' ] We would define our own salt, or no salt, to keep the hash consistent (homomorphic) across creation and challenge. This can be done with JS but it doesn't prevent malicious adware JS from exploring the DOM and getting the "value()" property of an input element that is named "password". Pretty please?

The HP site for buying stuff on their Labor Day Sale is broken. I tried it on other computers and each had the same result. Not sure if HP was able to sell anything on their big sale weekend, but I couldn't buy anything. Funny part was the feedback widget that didn't work. Not only could I not buy anything from HP but I couldn't report the problem I was having. Maybe someone at HP could run this through QA again.

So my 3rd grade daughter writes a note at the beginning of the year (last year). It says "I am coming to get you," and it's just a joke note as a group of the kids are doing this. They're young, 2nd graders, and they do dumb things. Zero tolerance is the policy at the school so she has to write an apology and go visit the principal's office and I had to pick her up from school. She's scared and crying. Another kid also writes a note, a boy, and he gets the third degree too. I looked at her cohort and he was mortified. He was 8. Today, Alfonso Nevarez a Democrat legislator from Texas [1] makes a similar verbal claim that he is going to "get you" to a fellow legislator. What happens? He gets on CNN and denies it [2]. Apparently we hold our grade school children to a higher standard of behavior? Maybe the standards of behavior are lower in Texas. I won't speak for Texans, but if he were a California rep we'd be asking for his removal. [1] ...

As you may know, the payment card industry is moving quickly to adopt TLS 1.2 and get rid of less secure protocols.[1] To this end, Authorizet.Net has turned off TLS.1.2 on its sandbox environment as of April 30, 2017. [2] The curious part about this change is how it impacts the developer world. We have some older projects built using VS2010 (msbuild) and old web deploy projects. Up until April 30, we could build those with .NET 4 and VS2010. So we happily and blindly did that, until May 1. Starting May 1 we started to see those pesky communication disconnection errors. Darn, what is that? Well, that's the TLS 1.2 requirement in sandbox. So we apply the fix and discover that .NET 4 does not have the TLS 1.2 enum SecurityProtocolType. Well, double bummer. When we move on to .NET 4.5.1 to get that SecurityProtocolType.Tls12 we discover that we can no longer use VS2010 msbuild. Why? Because that old VisualStudios can't build .NET 4.5.1. [3] How fun is that? With one change...

Looking at a picture of my mother laying in her hospital chair taking her chemo medication makes me think about cyber. Our bodies are a network of connected computers. Blood and lymph are the communication channels that relay information between these computers. The mainframe, of course, is your brain, which is another highly connected network of computers. When cancer invades it starts by infiltrating a system. The system is homomophic usually, which makes it easier for the cancer (cyber infiltrator) to gain its foothold. Sometimes the infiltrator moves fast and runs through multiple systems wrecking havoc. Yet there are those infiltrators who move slow, learning each system as it goes slowly through the entire system. Nonhodgkins Lymphoma is that slow hacker. That's what my mother has. She's had this for a very long time. Mostly ignored by her "doctors" 8, 12, maybe 30 years ago, finally they see the infiltration and recognize the need to respond. Once the cance...

Looking to extract the EzLynx app and quote IDs from those referrer URLs in splunk? Use this regex: ^.+(app\.ezlynx\.com).+[qQ]uote[dD]etails\.aspx\?[aA]pp[qQ]uote[iI]d=(?P \d+)(&[aA]pp[iI]d=(?P \d+))?\".*$ I still take coffee as payment.

I tried to change my password today on a contractors portal. My password is 20 characters long. It's pretty strong as far as I am concerned. So I enter a new one and what do I get? The password does not meet the minimum requirements: password length cannot be less than 15 characters and greater than 50 characters and password must have 1 character of each of the following character types: upper case letter, lower case letter, number, symbol. In addition, your new password must be different than the previous 10 passwords, must have at least 4 characters different than your most recent password and cannot be changed more than once in 24 hour period. That's a long message saying my password is not secure. What is particularly interesting? must have at least 4 characters different than your most recent password  Yup, that's the fun statement that says all passwords on this system are reversible. Maybe they use CryptDB [1]? I don't really know, but I highly do...

Today is one of those Whiskey Tango Foxtrot kind of days. I've been tracking a real November Sierra since December, and even reported it. I figured it was a bug, so I submitted it to the security folks. Their response? "We're not the team for this problem." ok. Now today I see two data points, one weird-o one-timer kind of probe. Yup, for real, a solo IP in the gigabytes of logs that my splunk eats. Yet this IP correlates with another IP that has been on my radar. So I get out my splunk and pull a "deny" query on this IP. Not only does it generate IPS hits from my desktop, outbound to destination, but I see inbound activity from this IP (also denied, of course). ( 2017 - 03 - 29T17 : 56 : 44 ) firewall : msg _ id = " 3000 - 0150 " Deny 1 - Trusted 0 - External 9840 tcp 20 64 [desktop_ip] 184 . 86 . 92 . 71 12766 80 offset 5 A 2936268642 win 342 signature _ name = " WEB - CLIENT WScript . Shell Remote Code Execution...