An oil company which had an MS access DB and a form configured for it with no checks for formatting that would insert the fields of the form directly into the database, and then if they wanted to make a change, they would export the entire database as csv, open it in excel, make changes and use that to overwrite the entire database.
This had been going on since some time in the 1990's. They finally wanted to move to a modernized databasing/operations solution which is what my company does.
I successfully cleaned 75% of that data, however it took 37 regular expressions and a script that was about 800 lines to account for every possible mis-entry, incorrect format, and merging fields if they were empty from newest records to oldest records until the fields were no longer empty where possible (essentially collapsing the records together to get as much data on each unique object which may have had N records over time through the database).
It is UN-BELIEVABLE what actual businesses get away with.
Haha, I have an ok amount of data tucked away on disks as well, but I have a huge appreciation for people who do collect data as a hobby. In the contemporary, I fully believe that having people who take it upon themselves to do this is more important than ever, even thought it is often a thankless thing to do.
So in this case, I would throw a thank you your way for doing that!
Don't trust uncited information. I am sure we do not have nukes. Look up the nuclear nonproliferation treaty for Canada, we not only don't have any, but haven't stored them for any other country since 1984.
We don't, I don't know where the guy above got his info, but we ratified the nuclear nonproliferation treaty in 1969 and then completed deconstructing/removing them in 1984.
Someone can post citation otherwise, but I have lived here my entire life and remembered the articles from when they were all decommissioned.
As far as I know, we haven't even stored nuclear weapons or relevant systems for other countries since we had some belonging to the US at CFB Goose Bay in Labrador. We had them removed as part of our stance against nuclear arms in 1984 as well.
They will pick whatever group they think will suddenly put as many idiots as possible under their control when they say "GROUP A IS BAD".
Most of them don't care they are trans, they only care that they can take advantage of the oppression of a minority group in order to consolidate control over people so that they can oppress more people.
When everyone alive and dead is either oppressed or under your control, you become god. This is the goal, but they don't care about the process to get there.
I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization, in the form of simply being able to communicate effectively and securely.
I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.
The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:
How to communicate securely using something like Simplex or I2P
How to correctly configure and use a VPN
How to flash a security distribution of Linux such as TailsOS to a flash drive and how to boot to it from a computer
How to securely encrypt data to a device using an encryption software with hidden volume features such as VeraCrypt
A litany of manuals for all kinds of useful information you can use in emergencies, which I will not detail here
Files containing the data required to build potentially useful items in emergencies given access to the correct hardware which I will not detail here
I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to distribute materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.
It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them "If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let's say it is the side of a bank".
One said "tits", one said "flowers", one said "a fox".
Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.
It's not detailed enough to really know what they meant, but for example and if I recall correctly, Android on a phone can get rootkitted in such a way that resetting the phone will not remove what was installed. This is because Android has a "System" partition and a "User" partition. When you "reset" a phone, it only wipes the user partition in most cases, so any malware installed to the system side would be untouched.
This is why you have to be real careful if you should purchase an Android phone second hand from a private seller.
I have had pretty good luck with airvpn, but the ultimate is mullvad as I understand it, though relatively speaking it is much more expensive than airvpn.
It just works for 99.99% of anything a regular user would want it to and is generally very easy to manage and update without a command line. I moved my parents who are non-technical and in their 70's over to it from Windows 10. They like it so much they had me install it on their laptop as well.
They have called the internet a series of tubes which is true to a degree.
Pneumatic tubes are still used in some places to send documents over a distance quickly.
There are a few things that are core to sending and receiving data and it would pay to read up on some computer networking protocols, particularly those that are a part of the TCP/IP Suite of protocols.
You want the data to be sent fast. A higher throughput means that more data can move in a shorter amount of time.
Depending on the type of data, you may or may not want the data to be received in its entirety. TCP was designed for a post-nuclear war scenario in which the lines that carry the data might be spotty, so it insures that all data sent is eventually received even if every other packet of data is lost on the way.
For real-time data, think live streams or video or voice call data, you dont necessarily care if one or two frames of a video get dropped on the way over because it is still good enough to understand what was sent. UDP works this way, basically firing the data down a line fast but not checking if each packet was received.
You want the data to be sent securely. SSL/TLS makes it so that no one can spy on your packets of data when they are in transit.
You want to make each packet of data dense with information. There are many ways this can be achieved, but a comparison would be something like making use of the back of a piece of paper as well as the front when writing a letter. In history, people would sometimes write letters normally, then if they needed more room, they would turn the paper 90 degrees and continue writing in that direction. The words are still readable even though they cross over other words on the page and it doubles the capacity of the data the piece of paper can hold. If you used the front and back of a page and used this method, you have multiplied the amount of data that you can store on the paper by 4.
I might have further ideas for you that might be helpful, and if I think of more I will edit this comment, but because this is a world-building type of topic, I would invite you to post this question to a community I moderate, as I am sure some people there have thought this over.
Yes, to a degree. In my experience a lot of attackers will call phones and wait for you to say something to get a model of your voice.
When I answer a phone number I do not recognize, I don't say "Hello" anymore. Instead I remain quiet for 10 seconds. If its a poorly made bot trying to scrape my voice, usually it hangs up within that time.
I am also more open to letting everything I don't recognize ring through to my voice mail which uses the default response without my voice since these types of attacks started.
For peertube etc, I am unsure what the best solution is, but would be interested in what people here suggest!
Hey! I just got one of these at a thrift store the other day for a couple bucks.
If you want to mess around with pentesting your own devices, there is build based on a specific version of openWRT compatible with it that will let you turn it into a wifi pineapple and it works quite well. Because of the USB ports on the back, you can plug in an additional wifi dongle to add another radio and make it more effective for that.
Here is the repo for the pineapple software based on a specific version of openWRT:
An oil company which had an MS access DB and a form configured for it with no checks for formatting that would insert the fields of the form directly into the database, and then if they wanted to make a change, they would export the entire database as csv, open it in excel, make changes and use that to overwrite the entire database.
This had been going on since some time in the 1990's. They finally wanted to move to a modernized databasing/operations solution which is what my company does.
I successfully cleaned 75% of that data, however it took 37 regular expressions and a script that was about 800 lines to account for every possible mis-entry, incorrect format, and merging fields if they were empty from newest records to oldest records until the fields were no longer empty where possible (essentially collapsing the records together to get as much data on each unique object which may have had N records over time through the database).
It is UN-BELIEVABLE what actual businesses get away with.