Something like a personal webpage

Weltschmerz

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 10:03:30 -0400

TIL: Weltschmerz. I suspect that the following observation is also deeply connected to Cartesian Duality:

Miles Groth, an existential therapist, expert on continental European philosophy, and professor emeritus in psychology at Wagner College in New York City, suggests that the idea of Weltschmerz arose at a very specific time: when “religious feelings that suffering is inevitable disappeared from the West.”

Indeed, where people from the devoutly Christian Europe of the Middle Ages are thought to have accepted and found comfort in the fact that everything—including evil—was part of God’s divine plan, those born in later centuries tended to operate according to a different set of expectations. Where faith gave way to science, the evils of pain, suffering, and injustice came to be regarded as avoidable, unnecessary, and by extension intolerable.

Diet Choice

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 10:02:00 -0400

In terms of diet, I suppose I’m a flexitarian. I’m at the point where I guess that I’m eating about 70% vegan, and maybe 90% or higher vegetarian. I still eat small portions of chicken and turkey (not because I’m any less horrified by how those animals are treated, but because it’s just so hard to avoid in our society and the environmental impact of their production is significantly lower than other meat sources) and things containing byproduct animal proteins, but for the most part, I try pretty hard to avoid meat itself. The World Wildlife Fund’s, “Livewell”, matches pretty closely to what I try to practice.

I’d prefer to eat more vegan, but putting this into practice in my daily environment and routines, and for my caloric requirements is more effort than I feel like I want to exert.

I’m not religious about this - if I happen to get a meatball in my pasta or something, whatever. I also don’t force my choices on others in overt ways. But if people ask, I try to explain to them as concisely as possible that my strongest motivation for eating this way is that anything else is simply uneconomical and unsustainable in the most basic physical way. It just doesn’t make any sense to me to waste so much resources and energy to cultivate so few calories. Furthermore, humans simply don’t require as much meat as we’re eating today. The ability to metabolize meat evolved as a backup plan for lean times. My choice is also a response to the fact that most of the people around me appear to feel required to eat meat at every meal. That is to say, if the rest of society was eating meat that wasn’t industrially produced, and far less of it - treating it as a special event or delicacy - I might even find it more acceptable to eat it more often myself.

In one episode of The Great Simplification podcast, guest Will Marshall gave what I thought was a good summary of my diet motivation. Here’s the transcript of the relevant part of that discussion, lightly edited for clarity:

[01:07:21] Humanity has flipped on many issues like smoking and others that we
discussed earlier. It literally in a few years, you can go from "Everyone smoking" to,
"no one's smoking in bars", "in whole regions the world". And it's kind of crazy how fast
humans can change behavior. So, we've gotta change our behavior in a few key areas.
[01:07:44] you know, diet's one of them, I often talk about this, that if an alien came
down to the earth and discovered that we were spending 60% of our agricultural
land - the size of Canada, the United States, and China combined - on one source of
food that gives us less than 5% of our nutritional value that is beef, they would go,
what the heck are you smoking?
[01:08:06] Nate Hagens: Or that 96% of the weight of all the animals on earth are
humans and are farm animals.
[01:08:13] Will Marshall: Yeah. And the rest, the four are now three, unfortunately,
percent is all of the rest of mammals. Yeah. Is insane. Right. It's an incredibly insane
use of resources, especially since it's agriculture that's driving deforestation and,
overfishing that's driving, you know, biodiversity loss, the oceans.
[01:08:35] That's a diet choice. You know, that's a crazy simple choice to
significantly reduce your impact on the environment. Yeah. Like there's a 10 x for
the having there, like, no problem. So okay, let's y you know, and it doesn't mean
even having to stop having meat entirely, just reduce it. It's not that hard. And yet
it can have a 10 x impact on reducing our, driving of biodiversity to destruction.
[01:09:04] That's the dominant source of biodiversity loss.

Degrowth and Academia

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:01:04 -0400

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with, well, pretty much everything, including what I feel is academia’s abdication of what should be its role in addressing our many planetary predicaments. A seemingly blind adherence to the Standard Technological Narrative has culminated in this disappointing display by my home institution.

I just got around to listening to this recent episode of the Overshoot podcast, and this comment from the guest articulates well my feelings:

Samuel Miller McDonald (00:34:21):

I think the academic degrowth community is coming out of this tradition in the social sciences that is very humanist, very anthropocentric. I think academia has kind of always been this ambivalent institution that is the only institution or one of the only ones that’s earnestly trying to understand the world, understand phenomena and get to closer models and frameworks of truth, but has also historically been a servant of the state, of empires and imperial expansion and more recently has been totally captured by neoliberal values and ideology and growthists. I mean that’s every major university that I’m aware of is run by a management team that is primarily interested in growing the endowment, in making institutional investments that will deliver returns so they can increase their land holdings and invest in buying up more and more of the city that they are based in, and less concerned with that mission of expanding knowledge and building upon this kind of humanistic tradition.

We Are All Connected

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:16:37 -0500

I love the following anecdote contained in this story:

Then one day there was a terrible storm. As high winds and torrential rain swept through the village, some of us huddled together in the meeting house, trying to keep the fire going. People began to tell stories about tropical storms, and someone mentioned the time that a cyclone hit Australia, to the south of us.

Stories about Australians whose houses had been destroyed had traveled far and wide. To my astonishment, I learned that the people in the community and hundreds of others like it throughout the rainforest had been so appalled to hear of the suffering of their “brothers and sisters” in Australia that they decided to donate much of the money they had collected in their temples to help victims of the storm.

Nobody seemed to realize that their rich neighbors in Australia were mostly well insured or that their emergency services were well equipped to help them get through the disaster. Or maybe it didn’t matter. The way they spoke about it, the Australians were like family to them. And when family is in need, you do what you can. That’s what family is for.

I find it fascinating that such a “poor” tribe in Papua New Guinea would feel such a connection with people in Australia that they had never met.

It served as a good reminder for me that we are all connected whether we recognize it or not.

Charities

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:01:18 -0500

Here are some charities that I approve of. I’d appreciate it very much if you made donations to them, and I’d be honored if you did so in my name. I believe that most, if not all of them have ways to donate online. There are a variety of different organizations grouped by type here, so hopefully you’ll find at least one that you’re comfortable with.

Some of my top favorites

The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future - ISEOF is committed to helping society both steer away from fantasy and avoid catastrophe.
Doctors Without Borders (also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) - An international humanitarian aid organization that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in danger in more than 70 countries. The group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.
International Campaign to Ban Landmines - These brutal devices do not deserve a place anywhere in a civilized world.
Wikimedia Foundation - The organization responsible for Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and tons of other valuable resources for the entire human race.
The Internet Archive - Home of the Wayback Machine and unique and obscure media of all types. A precious Internet resource.
The Union of Concerned Scientists - A national nonprofit organization founded by scientists to use rigorous, independent science to solve our planet’s most pressing problems.
Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank
Animal Friends
Cultural Survival - I highly recommend reading Daniel Quinn’s novel, Ishmael. In an author’s note to that book, he recommends that readers donate to this charity, and so do I.
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund - Ensuring that scientists can conduct, publish, and discuss their research and advocate for science without the threat of political harassment, censorship, or legal intimidation.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) - Preserving civil liberties
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International
The Smile Train - Providing free cleft lip and palate surgery for needy children worldwide.
UNICEF
CARE
Dementia Society of America
The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration
Eluna Network - Running Camp Mariposa, a free mentoring and addiction prevention camp and program for children affected by a family member’s substance abuse. See this NPR story that is simultaneously heartbreaking and encouraging.

Environmental

PennEnvironment - Protecting Pennsylvania’s natural resources.
- also Environment America, which is also part of the Public Interest Network
Arbor Day Foundation
Tree Pittsburgh - Tree Pittsburgh is an environmental non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening and building community vitality by restoring and protecting the urban forest through tree planting and care, education, advocacy, and land conservation
World Wildlife Fund - Their mission is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on Earth
Greenpeace
Sierra Club
Natural Resources Defense Council
Center for Land Use Interpretation - Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the world’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.
Clean Water Action

Social/Legal/Political/Lobby

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - The EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people - lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries - working to protect your digital rights.
Public Citizen - A national non-profit public interest organization focused on protecting health, safety, and democracy.
PennPIRG - Consumer advocacy, also part of the Public Interest Network
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) - Working for Democratic Values in a Digital Age
MoveOn.org

News/Media/Information/Education

WQED and WESA - Public TV and radio for Pittsburgh
Northland Public Library - My local public library. You can also donate to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to support the broader library services in the Pittsburgh area.
Freedom of the Press Foundation - Defending press freedom for the next generation
Propublica - an outstanding nonprofit, independent newsroom with one job: to hold the powerful to account
Cryptome - Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance – open, secret and classified documents – but not limited to those.
Bellingcat - an incredible independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has put courseware for hundreds of their courses online and FREE for everyone.
WFMU - The best independent, listener-sponsored, freeform radio station in the world.
Prometheus Radio Project - Promoting Low Power FM and microradio
Pacifica Radio
Democracy Now!
Inter Press Service News Agency - Independent news from around the globe
Common Dreams Newscenter
t r u t h o u t - News and Politics
Project Gutenberg
Alternet.org
A-infos Radio Project
The Saturday Light Brigade - Great family radio.
The National Security Archive at the George Washington University. One of the highest quality resources on the Internet.
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

The scum always rises to the top

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 18:22:39 -0500

Working with old SSH versions

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 10:57:44 -0500

Here’s a quick post about something that I had been meaning to work out for a while now. It’s one of those posts that’s really meant as a note to myself, but it might be useful to someone else too.

I work in a computing environment with a significant number of ancient systems that I still need to access via ssh. The software on these systems cannot be updated for a variety of reasons. I want to keep my client system(s) updated with ssh software and crypto policies, but doing so often breaks my access to these old systems due to the deprecation and removal of various features, protocols, ciphers, methods, etc.

Over time, I’ve wrestled with several approaches to deal with this:

maintaining the necessary legacy options for each host or groups of hosts in your .ssh/config file. This might work for a while until your ssh client software eventually removes those legacy options entirely. It’s also a minor nuisance to regularly keep that config file updated.
maintaining a full-size trusted intermediary environment (e.g., a jumphost VM) that has a slightly less ancient version of ssh that can still negotiate with your truly ancient systems. Likewise, this will also work for a while until your client software can no longer even negotiate with the ssh server on the jumphost. At this point, you might be tempted to just update the ssh on the jumphost, but then you can’t be guaranteed that its updated ssh client will still negotiate with the truly ancient systems that you’re interested in anymore. Similar results can be achieved with a full-blown chrooted distribution directory (e.g., debootstrap), but in either case this approach still feels clumsy and bloated to me.
compiling your own personal copy of an old ssh version from source. This one can be difficult since ssh is a complicated software system with lots of dependencies that also need to be accounted for. It’s also not very portable as you’d have to do it for each client system that you want to maintain access from (and hopefully you don’t have many…) On the plus side, once you have this working in one specific client environment, it should continue to work in that environment for a long time.

I was never really happy with any of these solutions. I found that a simple way to maintain an old ssh version is to create a tiny container with an correspondingly ancient version of ssh in it:

$ podman run --name oldssh -it alpine:3.1
/ # apk update; apk add openssh
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.1/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
v3.1.4-336-gba3dc3d [http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.1/main]
OK: 4861 distinct packages available
(1/2) Installing openssh-client (6.7_p1-r6)
(2/2) Installing openssh (6.7_p1-r6)
Executing busybox-1.22.1-r15.trigger
OK: 9 MiB in 17 packages
/ # exit
$ podman commit oldssh oldssh
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob d4c261b2e248 skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 4b3ef764ab00 done   | 
Copying config 01a7e11544 done   | 
Writing manifest to image destination
01a7e115443af74f2b219e264da51289df1e75cecd099e28a9911712c7f8a71d

then:

$ cat ~/bin/oldssh 
podman run --rm -it -v $HOME/.ssh:/root/.ssh:Z,ro -v $HOME/.ssh/oldssh-config:/root/.ssh/config:Z,ro oldssh ssh $@
$ oldssh root@10.19.146.7 # a destination host that I can no longer connect to directly from my host's native ssh environment
Enter passphrase for key '/root/.ssh/id_rsa': 
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-95-generic x86_64)
...

My .ssh/config file in my host environment contains many configuration options that are unknown to the old client version in the container, so I moved those offending options to a separate legacy config file, .ssh/oldssh-config, and bound that to the default config in the container. Also, note that this solution does not attempt to connect to the ssh-agent running on the host system because that program has dependencies on that ssh environment.

The advantages to this method are:

portablity and reproducibility - you should be able to reproduce this on any client system with a container engine
reliability - this environment should not be brittle to native software changes in the client host
size - the resulting oldssh container image was only 9.74MB

CRISPR, Methane, Jevons

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 13:09:52 -0500

Yesterday I learned that Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her groundbreaking work developing CRISPR genome editing, is leading a research project through her Innovative Genomics Institute to use CRISPR to genetically alter the microbiome of cows to produce less methane, among other things:

Less methane sounds great. Unfortunately, the methane emitted by cows is only part of the problem with our current cattle farming practices. Cows require a lot of land, water, and food (food which could potentially be used directly by humans in the first place, by the way…). Raising beef can use up to ten times more resources than poultry, dairy, eggs or pork.

In fact, if this project is successful, it will likely only lead to more cows being raised and increasing the commensurate harms to the environment that that entails, cf. Jevons Paradox.

Who am I to question a Nobel laureate, but wouldn’t it be better to just drastically slash the number of cattle that we’re raising?

Snake Steak

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:20:08 -0400

PYTHON. It’s What’s for Dinner.

Dirty Dozen 2021

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 22:48:09 -0500

I did the Dirty Dozen ride in 2021. It was a very hard ride, but also very rewarding to complete it. I’ve had a bunch of images and notes about it that I’ve been meaning to compile as a post, so here goes…

Here’s my ride log: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/77517443

The list of hills and their order has seen minor change in some years, but in 2021 the list was:

57th St./Christopher St.
Center Ave./Guyasuta Rd. in Aspinwall
Ravine St./Midway Dr. in Sharpsburg
Berryhill Rd. between Saxonburg Blvd. and Middle Rd.
High St./Seavy Rd. in Etna
Logan St. in Millvale
Suffolk/Hazelton/Burgess Streets on Northside
Sycamore St. on Mt Washington
Canton Ave in Beechview
Boustead St. in Beechview
Welsh Way on the Southside
Barry/Holt/Eleanor Streets on the Southside
Flowers Ave./Kilbourne St./Tesla St. in Hazelwood

I successfully completed all the hills, although I did fall on Canton on my first attempt. I had a horribly wrong approach and wound up getting pushed off to the left side. Canton is definitely steep, but it’s also relatively short, so it’s actually not too bad if you hit it right at the start, which I did on my second attempt.

Here’s a view of the bad start on Canton:

Waaay off to the left… (When I say “left”, I mean when looking up the street; I’m the rightmost rider in this picture.)

This photographer caught me just milliseconds before I fell over on my first attempt (I’m dead center with the black jacket on.):

You can see me on the edge in this one turning around to go back down:

Here’s me on my successful Canton run! What a rush!

Someone asked me what I thought the hardest climb was, and I’d say either Logan or Eleanor, but for different reasons. On Logan, my tires spun in a couple places because they were wet and the road surface at that time was absolutely awful. There were potholes and deep cracks all over it. I thought I was going to fall on Logan. On Eleanor, my legs started to cramp up while I was seated but luckily they eased up when I stood up and I was able to do it without stopping. Eleanor Street was also pretty rough because of my arm fatigue at that point in the ride.

I thought Welsh Way was difficult because it is so narrow and you have to ensure that you didn’t hit or get hit by other riders. So it was difficult in a more technical sense.

Someone else asked me what I thought the easiest climb was, and I’d say probably Sycamore. Sycamore is also probably a good one to train on if you want to do that on a genuine DD hill.

It was a really hard ride. Towards the end, my arms were cramping up even more than my legs, partially because of the climbing and partially because of all the braking involved on the steep downhills. I had done a fair amount of training, but only on long slog hills that were not as steep as the Dirty Dozen hills, the Deer Run hill in Aleppo Township being a good example. As a result, I feel like my arm strength wasn’t as high as it could’ve been.

Overall, it was actually a more technical ride than I anticipated, not just on Canton. There was a pretty wide variety of skill levels and gearing in my bunch. Some of those people with lower gears than me started to block me even when we were both still making forward progress up a hill.

I was also surprised how long it took. We waited at the top of each climb for everyone in the group (or at least as many people that didn’t drop back into the following groups) and the stops seems to get longer and longer as the day went on. There were also a couple mechanicals and stuff slowing things down.

It was a very rewarding experience, and a real rush to be able finish the ride. There were several hills with lots of cheering fans. Canton is especially exciting because there are so many people cheering you on.

My tips to people who want to do this ride would be:

be sure to train your upper body muscles on training climbs as much as your lower body muscles. I’ve been told that mountain biking is a good training regimen for the Dirty Dozen, and although I don’t have a mountain bike, that sounds plausible to me.
make sure your brakes are in good working order. You are going to be descending many of the same, or similarly steep hills as the ones you are climbing.
even if you don’t normally use electrolyte supplements, you might want to use them for this ride to combat the cramping. I know I wish I had.
consider dropping your tire pressure a little lower than you’d normally keep it. You’ll want the extra traction on the rougher roads.
don’t hesitate, do it. do it right now.

Herman Daly's World Bank story

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 10:51:54 -0500

I listen to a podcast called The Great Simplification. It is one of the most profoundly enlightening sources of information and ideas I’ve ever experienced, and I highly recommend it to anyone who might somehow be reading this post.

The show is consistently great, but one of several episodes that really stands out for me is the episode with ecological economist Herman Daly (RIP). In fact, if I had to recommend just one episode of the show to people, it would probably be this one.

My favorite part of this conversation is Herman’s story of how he tried to fix a diagram in a 1992 World Bank publication on sustainable development. The full transcript of the show is available, but I’ve reproduced the relevant story here (without permission) with only minor reformatting:

Nate Hagens (00:55:04):
So does everyone Herman. Any interesting stories about your experience at the World Bank?
Herman Daly (00:55:12):
Well, yeah. There are a number. But a story that I think is very instructive in the World Bank... As you probably know, the World Bank comes out with a World Development Report every year or sometimes two years.
(00:55:26):
Back in 1992, a couple years after I had just gone to the World Bank, they were going to do one on sustainable development, which at that time was the big new concept that had just come down from the UN and they had to deal with it. I was not on the team, which was going to write the report, because I was too low in the hierarchy. But because I was environmentalist in the environment department, I was on the review panel to comment on successive drafts of the report.
(00:56:01):
And I thought that was very important. Here's something really, the World Bank comes out and says... Okay, first draft comes. I eagerly start reading it. In the first chapter, there's a diagram, which is titled The Relation of the Economy to the Environment.
And it consisted of a rectangle labeled economy, and an arrow coming in from the left labeled inputs, and an arrow exiting to the right labeled outputs. Nothing else. That was the relationship of the economy to the environment.
(00:56:37):
So I said, "Okay." So I wrote a comment. I said, "This is a really good beginning here.  We've got a picture of the economy. It depends on inputs, and it generates these outputs. But the caption says Relation of Economy to the Environment. Where's the environment? These inputs are coming from nowhere. The outputs are going nowhere. So let's draw a big circle around the rectangle and label that environment, and then we'll see that the inputs are coming from the environment. We could talk then about depletion. The outputs are going back to the environment as waste. We can talk about pollution. We can talk about the capacity of the environment to regenerate the waste, so that some might be reusable again. We can talk about the balance between the two, inputs and outputs in terms of the loss of thermodynamics and the size of the subsystem relative to the total system. How big can the subsystem be relative to the total system? We can talk about the entropic nature of this throughput of matter, energy, etc., etc. We can really develop this picture into something important." And so I sent that back in as my comment.
(00:58:01):
Here comes the second draft of the thing. I look at the diagram again. There's the same diagram, but this time with a great big rectangle drawn around the original rectangle as basically a picture frame. You just took the same picture and put it in a frame. No labeling, no change in the text, no discussion of anything.
(00:58:26):
So I said, "Well okay." I said, "This is really the same thing." I repeated the things I'd said before, tried to be more diplomatic, sent it back in. Here comes the third draft.
(00:58:42):
The third draft, I look. No more diagram. Completely abandoned any attempt to draw a diagram of the relation of economy to the environment. Now, that's something, isn't it? That's not hard to do. I mean, this is kindergarten. You got a large system, and a smaller system inside it, and a relation of dependence. Why won't they look at it that way? Why do they not want to do it?
(00:59:13):
Well, I realized slowly the reason is that picture threatens you with questions to which you cannot give a good answer within the context of the World Bank, because it immediately says if the economy is a subsystem of a larger system, the larger system is finite, non-growing, and materially closed. How big can the subsystem be relative to the total system, before it disrupts it? Limits to growth. Holy cow. We can't talk about that.
(00:59:49):
Entropic relation to pollution, laws of thermodynamics. Hell, nobody understands that.  Nobody's going to listen to that. We don't understand it either. It's going to limit growth, we understand that much. And we can't do that, because the World Bank is in the business of growth. So better to abandon it.

Isn’t it simply AMAZING? This was 1992, and World Bank economists were still thinking in such simplistic terms?!?!

I wonder if any copies of those drafts containing the actual flawed diagrams survived. I would love to see them. Based on Daly’s descriptions, I imagine they would’ve looked something like this:

The Relation of the Economy to the Environment, first draft

(Notice how the outputs arrow is bigger than the inputs because GROWTH, you dummy.)

The Relation of the Economy to the Environment, second draft (FIXED TO INCLUDE THE ENVIRONMENT, PER FEEDBACK FROM HERMAN DALY, LOL)

I feel like these flawed diagrams almost single-handedly sum up our entire current predicaments!

BEEF RICE

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 14:09:20 -0500

BEEF-RICE. It’s What’s for Dinner.

My Ishmael Story

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 10:18:22 -0500

In late July or early August 2023, I read Daniel Quinn’s 1992 novel, Ishmael, for the first time. I strongly encourage everyone to read this book. It is profoundly thought-provoking, and if my own thoughts hadn’t already been heading in this direction, I’m pretty sure I would say it changed my life. I agree completely with what Tom Murphy wrote about the book:

I think I was particularly struck by the resonance with many of the conclusions I had reached on my own, as was sketched in the last post. But the novel framed these realizations in an elegant way that I never could have done, added a healthy dose of ideas I had not considered, and on the whole brought me to a state of newfound clarity.

Anyway, I happened to read an online copy of the book donated to the Internet Archive by Claremont School of Theology Library. Shortly after I finished the book, a ruling in the disastrous Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive case forced the Internet Archive to remove the title from circulation, meaning it was no longer available to read online.

Not long after that, I was talking to a neighbor, and we got on the subject of books we were reading. I recommended Ishmael to her, and explained that I’d give her a copy if I had one, but that I had read it online. We chatted a bit more and then said goodbye. Our conversation reminded me that I had a few paperbacks that I wanted to deposit in our neighborhood Little Free Library. I gathered them up and walked them across the street. As I opened the door, a book that was resting against it fell forward, almost out of the box and into my face.

Do you want to guess which book that was?

In an amazing and uncanny coincidence, there, right in front of my very eyes was a copy of Ishmael not even 30 minutes after I’d recommended it! I picked up the book, dropped off the others that I was depositing, walked it straight down to my neighbor’s house, and left it in her front door.

Some books clearly demand to be read…

Bitlocker Disaster

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 16:56:08 +0000

[UPDATE: 2022-10-06]

It turns out that this was most likely the result of a genuine Lenovo BIOS bug. This day, Lenovo published a BIOS update that contained the following in the change log:

[Problem fixes]
 - Fixed an issue where BitLocker Recovery key prompt after BIOS Update.

[Original article]

Microsoft developed a form of full disk encryption for the Windows operating system called BitLocker. In my experience, BitLocker is well-designed and, in fact, it’s one of the features that keeps me begrudgingly using Windows as my daily driver laptop operating system.

Last night, however, I encountered a disastrous situation with BitLocker that caused full data loss of the encrypted drive - BitLocker ruined my son’s laptop, requiring a reinstall of Windows from scratch.

Apparently Windows has been opportunistically enabling BitLocker on a lot of newer systems but leaving it in a “waiting for activation” state as described here: https://superuser.com/questions/1299600/is-a-volume-with-bitlocker-waiting-for-activation-encrypted-or-not

The problem with this is that it can leave the user in a situation where they are forced into BitLocker recovery for a recovery key that they never had the chance to save in the first place! In the case of my son’s computer, his account was configured as an “offline account” and he never signed in to a Microsoft account where the recovery key could’ve been automatically backed up. He used his system in this state for quite some time without any problems, as I expect that most users in this state do based on the apparent sparsity of internet posts similar to this one :-).

A Lenovo BIOS update for his system later made BitLocker think that the secure boot options had changed. I don’t know precisely what the change was, but it was probably related to

Upgrading critical early startup components, such as a BIOS or UEFI firmware upgrade, causing the related boot measurements to change.

as described in the BitLocker recovery link above. In any case, the system rebooted into BitLocker recovery asking for a recovery key that I simply did not possess. As described in the BitLocker recovery key FAQ:

Important: If your device is asking you for your BitLocker recovery key, there is no “back door,” there are no workarounds, and Microsoft support can’t provide you with the missing key or create a new one for you. You will need that 48-digit key to unlock your device.

I quickly lost hope of any recovery method other than reinstalling the operating system.

I was astonished that Microsoft would allow BitLocker to operate in such a precarious state. Like many other technical professionals, I help family members and friends who are not technically savvy. Here’s my succinct advice to avoid this same precarious situation if you are helping a nontechnical Windows user.

Using the methods described in the superuser.com post I referred to above, check if the boot drive (almost certainly C:\) is in a “BitLocker waiting for activation” state. If it is in this state, take one of the following actions:

if this particular user has a good reason to have BitLocker enabled on this particular system, make sure to back up the recovery key in some reliable method that satisfies BitLocker activation. Cases where this might be a good choice are: if the system will hold sensitive personal information; if it uses a solid state drive such as an SSD or NVMe drive that is resistant to systematic erasure prior to disposal; if the system is a laptop that will be carried around and is at greater risk of being lost or stolen. Most modern computers meet all of these criteria which is certainly why Microsoft has chosen to enable BitLocker by default.
if this particular user has no good reason to have BitLocker enabled on this particular system, then be sure to TURN IT OFF EXPLICITLY! Cases where this might be a good choice are: if the user can’t be trusted to maintain a BitLocker recovery key backup; absolutely no personal data is ever entered into the system; if the system uses a traditional spinning hard drive that can be reliably erased before the hardware is disposed of. (Actually, I suspect BitLocker would not be automatically enabled on such a system, but it can’t hurt to check…)

This is my takeaway from this disaster, and hopefully it helps someone else avoid similar misery. If you don’t take one of the steps above, I think you are courting disaster and the risk of data loss is very high. The next time you help that nontechnical user again, it might be to install Windows from scratch!

"F for Fake", by way of a missed Jeopardy! clue

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 13:26:06 +0000

Game #1 of this past week’s Jeopardy! All-Star Games wildcard match (show #7939 - Thursday, February 28, 2019), featured the following clue in the Jeopardy! round:

Paul Schrader has said this French director’s “The Rules of the Game” represents all that film can be

I absolutely love that film and considering myself somewhat of a French cinema fan, smugly blurted out “Jean-Luc Godard”. Well, when contestant Roger then correctly answered, “Renoir”, I felt sufficiently embarrassed to go off and refresh my memory.

Consulting Renoir’s Wikipedia page reminded me that I have yet to see another of his highly acclaimed films, “La Grande Illusion”. That Wikipedia entry contains the following quote:

Orson Welles named La Grande Illusion as one of the two movies he would take with him “on the ark.”

Now I was really motivated to see it based on such high praise.

Curious about what other film one of history’s greatest directors might take with him on the ark, I followed the citation for Welles’s quote and watched the corresponding YouTube clip of a Dick Cavett interview with him. Naturally, I didn’t learn the name of the other movie but even more attractive now was YouTube’s suggestion on the right of the screen of, “The Most Profound Moment in Movie History”. I watched this mesmerizing clip and then immediately proceeded to watch the entire film that it was excerpted from, “F for Fake”. It’s enjoyable and funny and documents the lives of some truly incredible characters. I recommend it.

I guess I’m glad I botched that Jeopardy! clue after all…

Escape from my own personal video capture hell

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 19:27:01 +0000

Several years ago, I got concerned about the preservation of some home movies we still had on 8mm and VHS tapes. The formats were already practically obsolete and I wasn’t sure how much longer the playback devices would survive anyway. The 8mm Sony HandyCam had developed problems with some of the control and volume keys, for example. Also, no one wants to fast-forward through a 2-hour VHS tape to find that one short clip of the first day getting on the school bus.

I purchased a fairly cheap KWorld DVD Maker USB 2.0 (VS- USB2800D) capture device from Newegg that came bundled with a copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 7 and I started converting some of our 8mm tapes into digital format. PowerDirector did a really nice job converting these tapes into MPEG-2 videos with well- synchronized audio. I was pretty happy, especially given the low cost of the setup. I captured several full tapes and trimmed them down into separate videos of the various events they contained.

There was one extremely annoying bug, however. Some of the videos I was working on had gaps or noise at various points in the tape and when PowerDirector reached these spots in the tape, it would stop recording and pop up a message saying, “This movie is copyright-protected. Recording is prohibited.”

Symptom of the bug

How utterly insulting. My guess was that the software was confusing the noise for the presence of an old analog copy protection system called Macrovision ACP (Analog Copy Protection). Or more likely, the USB capture device’s hardware implementation of the check for ACP was. Although I wasn’t allowed to digitize my home videos, at least some filthy video pirate couldn’t rip their VHS copy of Weekend at Bernie’s II and post it on the internet. Crisis averted! In any case, I got sufficiently annoyed and set aside the remainder of the shoebox full of tapes to digitize another day. I did not want to babysit the capture process and intervene every time it suddenly decided I was trying to record copyright-protected material. A few weeks ago, we cleaned out the hallway closet and found some more 8mm and VHS home movies that I had not yet digitized. I remembered the remaining tapes from the first batch as well.

In the intervening time since I digitized the first batch, the crappy laptop computer running Windows Vista that I had been using to work on the videos died. I plugged the KWorld USB video capture device into the replacement computer, a desktop running Windows 10, and reinstalled the PowerDirector 7 software. No dice. Although the latest driver for the capture device was installed correctly (e.g., VLC and VirtualDub could capture from the device), PowerDirector couldn’t initialize it correctly in order to use it. At that point, I could have tried to capture the rest of the tapes with VLC or VirtualDub but I really liked the quality of the output from PowerDirector. I also had persistent audio synchronization problems with VirtualDub that I did not feel like trying to tune away. I had paid for PowerDirector, after all, so I decided to reconstruct the working setup I had before. I used a spare hard drive to install and boot the desktop into 32-bit Windows 7, installed PowerDirector, and was back in business - PowerDirector 7 could read from the capture device again.

I was quickly reminded how annoying the copyright protection bug is. The few tapes I started on contained lots of short scenes with video noise in between and the ACP check was tripping frequently. As the copyright holder for these videos I’m trying to digitize, I hereby grant myself explicit permission to copy them. I decided to fix this bug once and for all using Immunity Debugger. The following is a summary of what I did. I’m sure there are more efficient and precise methods and there may be other more powerful tools but hopefully someone finds this information useful.

After starting PowerDirector under Immunity Debugger and navigating to the PowerDirector “Capture” tab, I searched through the process memory map for instances of the string “macrovision”.

Searching for a suspect string in the process memory map

One module in particular, PDRecord, has a large number of occurrences in its .data section so I looked at the code in its .text section.

Open the code for the interesting module in the disassembler

Next, I searched for “All referenced text strings” in this module and then searched that result for “macrovision” again.

Search for “all referenced text strings” in the module

Search the referenced text strings

There were a lot of matches and I decided to go ahead and set breakpoints on almost all of them. I skipped a number of addresses that had strings with clear references to hardware that did not match my own and some other fairly obvious conditions. Immunity Debugger allows one to simply disable breakpoints instead of unsetting them entirely so I could come back to interesting code later if I needed to.

Breakpoint mania

Based on what I had seen in the code, it looked like the general operation was for PowerDirector to set a filter in the capture device for the ACP check, periodically check for the triggering of that filter, and set a flag based on that check. My goal was to start looking for return values that appeared to be a simple flag. If I could modify the return value, I could bypass the check for the presence of what the capture device and software misinterpreted as ACP.

It took a bit of trial and error and a few false starts but I made my way to the code shown below. Notice how the return value from the callee is set to 1? I went back and confirmed that if the offending video signal is not present at this execution point, the value of EAX is 0. Let’s make sure it’s 0 all the time. We can do that by simply changing the MOV to XOR EAX,EAX.

Patch the return value

The result with NOPs added automatically by Immunity Debugger

Returning to PowerDirector, I observed that I could now hit the Record button and save a file without getting the copy-protection message.

Recording no longer gives an error message

This is how I felt.

~~Proto~~Macrovision, I have you now.

Now that things appeared to work correctly, I saved my changes back out to the file so that I could later run PowerDirector outside the debugger.

I can now record my home videos without the copy protection bug!

My sincere thanks to Immunity for releasing such a powerful and intuitive tool.

Hacking the Skylanders Portal of Power to run on USB power

crd@sdf.org (Chad Dougherty) — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 18:39:46 +0000

(Originally posted 2012-01-28 on my now-deleted Comcast blog)

My kids received the Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure Starter Pack for Nintendo Wii for Christmas. This game incorporates the use of character figurines that interface with a “Portal of Power” to represent in-game players. The figurines each contain their own chip so that players can retain their status, upgrades, level, skills, etc. even if they take their figurines over to a friend’s house to play. The Portal of Power is essentially an RFID reader/writer with some cool multicolor LED lighting effects. It adds a neat dimension to the game and we all enjoy playing it.

The Portal for the Nintendo Wii supports only wireless operation through a small USB wireless adapter included with the kit. The Portal itself operates on 3 AA batteries. While this design makes for less clutter and more convenience (you often have to swap players frequently when battling bosses, for example), the Portal mows through batteries like Joey Chestnut mows through hot dogs (or Takeru Kobayashi, if you prefer). We went through several sets of batteries just in the days between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It bothers me a lot to throw away so many batteries. Since the Wii has two USB ports, I decided that I would try to hack the Portal to operate on the USB power from the other port. USB power is 5V and 3 AA cells yield 4.5V so I did not see a problem doing so.

WARNING!!! WARNING!!! WARNING!!!

THERE IS A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY THAT YOU COULD PERMANENTLY DAMAGE YOUR PORTAL OF POWER BY ATTEMPTING THIS MODIFICATION! THIS WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY VOID ANY WARRANTY ON THE DEVICE! YOU SHOULD PROBABLY NOT ATTEMPT THIS IF YOU DO NOT HAVE BASIC SOLDERING SKILLS.

Despite that genuine warning, the procedure really is easy if you have basic soldering skills. Here’s what I did:

First, I took a spare mini-USB cable that I had lying around and cut off the mini end. I chose one with a fairly thin cable to avoid making the Portal unlevel when I was finished. I’ll explain more about this later.
Next, I stripped about 1.5" of the outermost insulation from the USB cabled and clipped the white and green wires all the way back to the hilt of the cable. The white and green cables are for USB data, and we only want to use the red and black cables so it makes sense to get the other two out of the way.
One of my goals was to make as few permanent modifications to the Portal as possible so I wanted to avoid soldering the wires to any of the conductors in the battery compartment even though that approach would have been cleaner. I wanted something with solder tabs and the exact dimensions of a AA cell so that I could just drop them into the compartment. Fortunately, I had some old, dead Ni-Cd cells lying around from a cordless phone battery. These even had metal tabs soldered to them already for the connection to the charging station. I stripped the red and black wires on the USB cable and soldered them to the tabs.

USB cable soldered to old NiCd cells

You need to be careful of the polarity. Make sure to solder the black wire to the tab that will ultimately touch the negative side ("-") of the input to the Portal, and the red wire to the positive ("+"). Keep in mind that since we’re only inserting two cells, there is no current flowing through them. This condition is what makes it relatively safe to use these old cells as placeholders.

Cells in place in the Portal

One minor kludge I had to do: since the NiCds were originally contained in their own little pack, the cells didn’t have the typical nub on the anode that you’re accustomed to seeing on AA batteries. I added a little solder blob on the anode so that it would make good electrical contact in the battery compartment. If you’re using a different surrogate cell than I did, you may not have to do this step.

Solder blob on anode

At this point, I was nearly done. I plugged the cable into the other USB port, measured the voltage with my meter. After checking that it was right, I inserted the cells into the Portal and powered it up. It worked without any problems.
This last step is the only one which caused any permanent change to the Portal. I wanted the cable to run smoothly under the Portal even when the battery compartment cover was on. I had to drill a small hole at the edge of the battery cover for the cable to exit. I also shaved a small amount of plastic away from the housing on the contacting surface to smooth out the transition a little more. Even if you’re successful at this step, the Portal may still rest on the cable a bit and wobble slightly when resting on a tabletop. If this is a problem, you can try getting a pack of rubber feet from a craft store and sticking them to the original feet of the Portal as you can see in the images below.

Small hole drilled in the battery cover

Reassembled with cable running through battery cover; rubber feet added

After doing this modification, our Portal has been running perfectly on USB power with no need to keep changing batteries! Good luck if you attempt to do this on your own! Feel free to leave a comment letting me know how it went for you.