I really enjoyed this video, which shows us how CCI 22 rimfire ammo is made in CCI’s factory.

To begin, circles are punched out of sheet brass and cold-formed into small brass cups. Then to relieve the stress of the cold forming process, they are annealed. After a wash and dry, a drawing process reduces diameter and increases length.

Next comes another wash & dry before hitting the header. The header is so named because it forms the case head — the part with the rim. It also adds the head stamp, which in this case is the C for CCI.

A surprisingly non-automated step comes next, in which the brass cases are placed into plates so they can be primed.

In rimfire ammo, priming compound is placed into the inside of the case head and made to flow into the rim from the inside. Then a firing pin strike can pinch the brass rim to ignite the priming mix and thus ignite the powder charge.

After priming, the case is of course charged with powder and a bullet is seated into it. Next comes the crimp, which tightens the case mouth so that it will hold onto the bullet properly. After that, the ammo can be sorted into trays and the bullets waxed, then it’s boxed (and presumably sent to Wal-Mart where one person will buy it all and cram it into a dank corner of his basement until the world ends).

Next, we see how they make their bullets. The amount of lead the factory consumes in a day is tremendous, and the process of turning it into bullets is interesting. It’s molten and cast into large cylindrical six-inch-diameter 300-pound billets, which are then shoved through a press to form wire, which is then cut into slugs.

Each slug can then be formed into an actual bullet.

Bullets are then coated with black lead or plated with copper before being loaded into ammo.

I like it.

The post Watch: How is 22 Rimfire Ammo Made? appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.

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Watch: How is 22 Rimfire Ammo Made?

HTTPS is a must for every website nowadays: Users are looking for the padlock when providing their details; Chrome and Firefox explicitly mark websites that provide forms on pages without HTTPS as being non-secure; it is an SEO ranking factor; and it has a serious impact on privacy in general.

Additionally, there is now more than one option to get an HTTPS certificate for free, so switching to HTTPS is only a matter of will.

The post A Complete Guide To Switching From HTTP To HTTPS appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

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A Complete Guide To Switching From HTTP To HTTPS

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Learn how to colorize black and white photos in only 4 minutes

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This Chrome Extension Makes Gmail Insanely Productive

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CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 3 dock with eSATA, dual-4K display support starts shipping

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He’s been chasing storms for eight years, but filmmaker Mike Olbinski called this event—a sunset that blasted a rare display of rolling undulatus asperatus clouds with an amazing lightshow of colors—“one of the most incredible scenes [he’s] witnessed.” The resulting 4K timelapse is one you’re going to want to watch in fullscreen.

GIF

Were you to lay on your back and watch these clouds—captured in land-locked North Dakota—upside down (or just flip the footage) you’d be hard pressed to distinguish them from the swelling waves of the ocean during a storm. We recommend firing up the biggest monitor you can find, putting on some trippy music, and letting the cloud-waves roll over you.

[Vimeo]

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Stunning Timelapse of Rolling Clouds Looks Like Someone Flipped the Ocean Upside Down

In this first of a series of blog posts, we’ll look at MySQL encryption at rest.

At Percona, we work with a number of clients that require strong security measures for PCI, HIPPA and PHI compliance, where data managed by MySQL needs to be encrypted “at rest.” As with all things open source, there several options for meeting the MySQL encryption at rest requirement. In this three-part series, we cover several popular options of encrypting data and present the various pros and cons to each solution. You may want to evaluate which parts of these tutorials work best for your situation before using them in production.

Part one of this series is implementing disk-level encryption using crypt+LUKS.

In MySQL 5.7, InnoDB has built-in encryption features. This solution has some cons, however. Specifically, InnoDB tablespace encryption doesn’t cover undo logs, redo logs or the main ibdata1 tablespace. Additionally, binary-logs and slow-query-logs are not covered under InnoDB encryption.

Using crypt+LUKS, we can encrypt everything (data + logs) under one umbrella – provided that all files reside on the same disk. If you separate the various logs on to different partitions, you will have to repeat the tutorial below for each partition.

LUKS Tutorial

The Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) is the current standard for disk encryption. In the examples below, the block device /dev/sda4 on CentOS 7 is encrypted using a generated key, and then mounted as the default MySQL data directory at /var/lib/mysql.

WARNING! Loss of the key means complete loss of data! Be sure to have a backup of the key.

Install the necessary utilities:

# yum install cryptsetup

Creating, Formatting and Mounting an Encrypted Disk

The cryptsetup command initializes the volume and sets an initial key/passphrase. Please note that the key is not recoverable, so do not forget it. Take the time now to decide where you will securely store a copy of this key. LastPass Secure Notes are a good option, as they allow file attachments. This enhances our backup later on.

Create a passphrase for encryption. Choose something with high entropy (i.e., lots of randomness). Here are two options (pick one):

# openssl rand -base64 32
# date | md5 | rev | head -c 24 | md5 | tail -c 32

Next, we need to initialize and format our partition for use with LUKS. Any mounted points using this block device must be unmounted beforehand.

WARNING! This command will delete ALL DATA ON THE DEVICE! BE SURE TO COMPLETE ANY BACKUPS BEFORE YOU RUN THIS!

# cryptsetup -c aes-xts-plain -v luksFormat /dev/sda4

You will be prompted for a passphrase. Provide the phrase you generated above. After you provide a passphrase, you now need to “open” the encrypted disk and provide a device mapper name (i.e., an alias). It can be anything, but for our purposes, we will call it “mysqldata”:

# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda4 mysqldata

You will be prompted for the passphrase you used above. On success, you should see the device show up:

# ls /dev/mapper/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root      7 Jun  2 11:50 mysqldata -> ../dm-0

You can now format this encrypted block device and create a filesystem:

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/mysqldata

Now you can mount the encrypted block device you just formatted:

# mount /dev/mapper/mysqldata /var/lib/mysql

Unfortunately you cannot add this to /etc/fstab to automount on a server reboot, since the key is needed to “open” the device. Please keep this in mind that if your server ever reboots MySQL will not start since the data directory is unavailable until opened and mounted (we will look at how to make this work using scripts in Part Two of this series).

Creating a Backup of Encryption Information

The header of a LUKS block device contains information regarding the current encryption key(s). Should this ever get damaged, or if you need to recover because you forgot the new passphrase, you can restore this header information:

# cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup --header-backup-file ${HOSTNAME}_`date +%Y%m%d`_header.dat /dev/sda4

Go ahead and make a SHA1 of this file now to verify that it doesn’t get corrupted later on in storage:

# sha1sum ${HOSTNAME}_`date +%Y%m%d`_header.dat

GZip the header file. Store the SHA1 and the .gz file in a secure location (for example, attach it to the secure note created above). Now you have a backup of the key you used and a backup of the header which uses that key.

Unmounting and Closing a Disk

If you know you will be storing a disk, or just want to make sure the contents are not visible (i.e., mounted), you can unmount and “close” the encrypted device:

# umount /var/lib/mysql/
# cryptsetup luksClose mysqldata

In order to mount this device again, you must “open” it and provide one of the keys.

Rotating Keys (Adding / Removing Keys)

Various compliance and enforcement rules dictate how often you need to rotate keys. You cannot rotate or change a key directly. LUKS supports up to eight keys per device. You must first add a new key to any slot (other than the slot currently occupying the key you are trying to remove), and then remove the older key.

Take a look at the existing header information:

# cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda4
LUKS header information for /dev/sda4
Version: 1
Cipher name: aes
Cipher mode: cbc-essiv:sha256
Hash spec: sha1
Payload offset: 4096
MK bits: 256
MK digest: 81 37 51 6c d5 c8 32 f1 7a 2d 47 7c 83 62 70 d9 f7 ce 5a 6e
MK salt: ae 4b e8 09 c8 7a 5d 89 b0 f0 da 85 7e ce 7b 7f
47 c7 ed 51 c1 71 bb b5 77 18 0d 9d e2 95 98 bf
MK iterations: 44500
UUID: 92ed3e8e-a9ac-4e59-afc3-39cc7c63e7f6
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Iterations: 181059
Salt: 9c a9 f6 12 d2 a4 2a 3d a4 08 b2 32 b0 b4 20 3b
69 13 8d 36 99 47 42 9c d5 41 35 8c b3 d0 ff 0e
Key material offset: 8
AF stripes: 4000
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Here we can see a key is currently occupying “Key Slot 0”. We can add a key to any DISABLED key slot. Let’s use slot #1:

# cryptsetup luksAddKey --key-slot 1 -v /dev/sda4
Enter any passphrase:
Key slot 0 unlocked.
Enter new passphrase for key slot:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

LUKS asks for “any” passphrase to authenticate us. Had there been keys in other slots, we could have used any one of them. As only one is currently saved, we have to use it. We can then add a new passphrase for slot 1.

Now that we have saved the new key in slot 1, we can remove the key in slot 0.

# cryptsetup luksKillSlot /dev/sda4 0
Enter any remaining LUKS passphrase:
No key available with this passphrase.

In the example above, the existing passphrase stored in slot 0 was used. This is not allowed. You cannot provide the passphrase for the same slot you are attempting to remove.

Repeat this command and provide the passphrase for slot 1, which was added above. We are now able to remove the passphrase stored in slot 0:

# cryptsetup luksKillSlot /dev/sda4 0
Enter any remaining LUKS passphrase:
# cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda4
LUKS header information for /dev/sda4
Version: 1
Cipher name: aes
Cipher mode: cbc-essiv:sha256
Hash spec: sha1
Payload offset: 4096
MK bits: 256
MK digest: 81 37 51 6c d5 c8 32 f1 7a 2d 47 7c 83 62 70 d9 f7 ce 5a 6e
MK salt: ae 4b e8 09 c8 7a 5d 89 b0 f0 da 85 7e ce 7b 7f
47 c7 ed 51 c1 71 bb b5 77 18 0d 9d e2 95 98 bf
MK iterations: 44500
UUID: 92ed3e8e-a9ac-4e59-afc3-39cc7c63e7f6
Key Slot 0: DISABLED
Key Slot 1: ENABLED
Iterations: 229712
Salt: 5d 71 b2 3a 58 d7 f8 6a 36 4f 32 d1 23 1a df df
cd 2b 68 ee 18 f7 90 cf 58 32 37 b9 02 e1 42 d6
Key material offset: 264
AF stripes: 4000
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

After you change the passphrase, it’s a good idea to repeat the header dump steps we performed above and store the new passphrase in your vault.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have now learned how to encrypt and mount a partition using LUKS! You can now use this mounted device just like any other. You can also restore a backup and start MySQL.

In Part Two, we will cover using InnoDB tablespace encryption.

via Planet MySQL
MySQL Encryption at Rest – Part 1 (LUKS)

Something big happened last week in the world of music and copyright: a case about a music sample was won on fair use grounds. This basically never happens for a variety of problematic historical reasons. And yet, it did. The hip hop artist Drake was found not to be infringing on a Jimmy Smith composition due to fair use. And that’s a big deal — though the case also highlights the ongoing madness of today’s copyright licensing laws (even beyond sampling). But we’ll get there eventually. Let’s start with the issue of copyright and sampling.

For years, we’ve talked about the pure madness of copyright law and music sampling. If you’ve never seen it, the documentary Copyright Criminals, is worth your time — as it demonstrates how a bunch of stuffed shirt lawyers and clueless judges basically killed off an entire art form by demanding money for every tiny sample, no matter how much musicians transformed that sample. Album’s like De La Soul’s "3 Feet High and Rising" or the Beastie Boy’s "Paul’s Boutique" simply could not be made today — which is just crazy. And the absolute worst court ruling regarding sampling was Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. from 1991 in which Gilbert O’Sullivan sued Biz Markie for making what was effectively a hip hop parody of his one big hit. The judge in that case — Kevin Duffy — never seemed to have any grasp of music, art, culture or even copyright law. His ruling in that case starts off with a total confusion about the difference between "stealing" and "copyright infringement."

"Thou shalt not steal." has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world of business this admonition is not always followed. Indeed, the defendants in this action for copyright infringement would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the music business and, for that reason, their conduct here should be excused. The conduct of the defendants herein, however, violates not only the Seventh Commandment, but also the copyright laws of this country.

That’s… a bad way to open things. And, that case changed sampling. The other big case in this genre of bad sampling rulings is Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films in which Judge Ralph Guy, bizarrely summarized things as follows:

Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.

Notice the lack of any consideration of fair use or transformative works or anything of that nature.

And, tragically, few cases have really challenged this view since. While lots of lawsuits are filed over sampling, most settle. It’s rare for anyone to make a fair use argument. To some extent, it’s really seemed like the record labels themselves haven’t wanted any of these cases to go to trial, because they’d hate to have a ruling that says sampling is fair use. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a few cases pop up where we hoped we’d get a court to recognize fair use in sampling — and yet they all seem to settle before the cases get that far. Getting such a judgment on the books would be a big, big deal and might (once again) revolutionize culture and unleash tremendous creativity.

And so now we have the Drake case, which is, undoubtedly, a good ruling. But it’s not clear it’s going to make as big a difference as some might hope. The details here are… rather specific. Drake’s song Pound Cake / Paris Morton Music 2 opens with a slightly altered, but clear "sample" of famed jazz artist Jimmy Smith’s Jimmy Smith Rap. You might think that the Jimmy Smith Rap is a rap song, but it’s just Jimmy Smith talking (it appears extemporaneously) about the fun he and some others had making the album Off the Top. But the recording got included on the album as a separate track. It’s not a song. It’s just Jimmy Smith talking. The Drake song uses a large chunk of the Jimmy Smith Rap unchanged… but does make a few small edits, including changing Smith from saying "Jazz is the only real music that’s gonna last. All the other bullshit is here today and gone tomorrow" to just saying "Only real music’s gonna last. All that other bullshit is here today and gone tomorrow." Apparently the Jimmy Smith estate wasn’t too happy with the changed meaning.

But here’s the oddity: Drake’s label licensed that track. So everything should be fine, right? Wrong. You forgot: music licensing is a swampy mess of insanity and patched together weirdness. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, when using a song, there are multiple different licenses you might need to get. You have to do one thing to license the sound recording, but something else entirely to license the "composition." The theory there is that one license pays the musicians and another pays the songwriters (though, in reality, it’s often middlemen who get the money). Here, it seems that Drake’s label didn’t license the "composition" to pay the "songwriter." And your first reaction might damn well be "what songwriter? there’s no damn song!" And you’d be right. Hell, even Jimmy Smith never registered the copyright as a composition. It was only his estate that registered the copyright 31 years after the not-really-a-song was released and only after they heard the Drake song and decided they didn’t like it at all.

So, then, after registering the copyright on the composition (and even though the sound recording was properly licensed), the Jimmy Smith Estate sued Drake. And it’s this that’s found to be fair use. The judge, William Pauley, goes through the four factors. The first one, discussing whether or not the work is transformative may be the most interesting. The judge looks at a few different ways that Drake’s lawyers argued the use was transformative — and actually rejects two of the three arguments. He’s not impressed by the argument that because Drake doesn’t reference Jimmy Smith’s album, he’s using the words to refer to the process of making his own album (which is… a very weak argument). Similarly, he doesn’t buy the fact that the addition of some quiet background music and general shifting of the words around is transformative. That… seems like a valid fair use analysis.

But the argument Judge Pauley finds convincing is interesting. He accepts the idea that by changing the meaning of the words, by cutting out the "jazz is the" from the "only real music that’s gonna last," Drake may have created a transformative work:

Defendants’ first argument, on the other hand, strikes on a compelling reason to
find this use transformative. There can be no reasonable dispute that the key phrase of JSR—
“Jazz is the only real music that’s gonna last. All that other bullshit is here today and gone
tomorrow. But jazz was, is and always will be.”—is an unequivocal statement on the primacy of
jazz over all other forms of popular music. Defendants’ use of JSR, by contrast, transforms
Jimmy Smith’s brazen dismissal of all non-jazz music into a statement that “real music,” with no
qualifiers, is “the only thing that’s gonna last.” Thus, Defendants’ “purposes in using [the
original work] are sharply different from [the original artist’s] goals in creating it.” Blanch v.
Koons, 467 F.3d 244, 252 (2d Cir. 2006). This is precisely the type of use that “adds something
new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first [work] with new expression,
meaning, or message.”

I’ll admit I’m surprised (pleasantly so…) by this part of the ruling. If followed by other courts (and this is a non-precedential district court ruling, so don’t get too excited…) that alone could be pretty big. Though, again, it’s focused on changing the meaning of the composition and not the music… so not that useful for other music sampling cases.

As for the other factors, the judge argues that the second factor (the nature of the work) weighs against fair use. I’d actually argue that this one should have gone the other way, especially seeing as the "composition" wasn’t actually a "composition" but just someone talking about his experience… but, that’s not what happened here. On the third factor, on the amount used — again, the court surprises me. Many courts tend to just look at the overall amount used and if it’s a lot they say "no fair use" — with a few importance exceptions. And, Drake used most of the Jimmy Smith Rap, even if it’s rearranged. But relying on the important ruling in the Google Books case, Judge Pauley notes that the question here is whether or not the amount of copying was "reasonable in relation to the purpose of the copying" rather than at an absolute level. And here, it weighs towards fair use:

Here, the Court finds the amount taken by Defendants to be reasonable in
proportion to the needs of the intended transformative use. Far from being extraneous to Pound
Cake’s statement on the importance of “real” music, Defendants’ use of the lines describing the
recording of Off the Top serve to drive the point home. The full extent of the commentary is, in
this Court’s view, that many musicians make records in similar ways (e.g. with the help of A&R
experts or the stimulating effects of champagne), but that only “real” music—regardless of
creative process or genre—will stand the test of time. Accordingly, this factor favors a finding
of fair use.

Finally, on factor four — the impact on the market — the court again finds in favor of fair use:

There is no evidence in the record to suggest that Pound Cake usurps any
potential market for JSR or its derivatives. JSR, a spoken-word criticism of non-jazz music at
the end of an improvisational jazz album, targets a sharply different primary market than Pound
Cake, a hip-hop track. Further, Plaintiffs never attempted to establish a market for licensed
derivative uses of the JSR composition copyright until Defendants used the recording on the
Album. See Campbell, 510 U.S. at 592 (“The market for potential derivative uses includes only
those that the creators of original works would in general develop or license others to develop.”).
These considerations, coupled with the finding that Defendants’ use is highly transformative,
forestalls the conclusion that Defendants took such “sufficiently significant portions of the
original as to make available a significantly competing substitute.” Authors Guild, 804 F.3d at
223. Thus, the fourth factor favors the Defendants.

That seems pretty straightforward and correct.

Thus, with three of the four factors — including the big first one — pushing towards fair use, the use is declared to be fair, and thus not infringing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the case appealed — but the 2nd Circuit Appeals court has a history of being pretty good on fair use, so hopefully… it would hold up. Still, given the specifics of this case, and mostly the fact that it’s about the composition, rather than the sound recording, I’m not sure that any ruling here would have that big an impact on sampling. We still need a better sampling case to hit the courts where fair use might be a useful tool.

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Drake Winning Sampling Case Over Fair Use Is Big News… But Still Demonstrates The Madness Of Music Licensing

Sturm, Ruger & Co. announced a new version of the American Rimfire rifle. Called the American Rimfire Stainless, the new bolt action gun features several changes including a satin stainless finish. The new guns use 416 stainless steel for the barrel instead of an alloy steel used on the original American Rimfire rifles. The barrels […]

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Ruger’s New American Rimfire Stainless Rifle

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