Nuffing.com

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An Old-School Voltron Set Is Officially Coming to Lego

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Gun Review: Savage B22 FV-SR .22LR Rifle

The mindfulness craze has already been tapped for a huge variety of benefits—improved sleep, increased productivity, cutting out mindless snacking, etc. And we now may be able to add another upside to the list: researchers with the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of California, Davis, have found that mindfulness practice can be channeled to increase compassion, which can in turn, help us all deal with irritating (or downright) difficult people we encounter in our day-to-day.

In a new study published online last month by the journal Mindfulness, researchers analyzed day-to-day trajectories of 51 adult participants in Stanford’s 9-week Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT). An educational program developed by a team of clinical psychologists and contemplative scholars including the Dalai Lama’s principal English translator Thupten Jinpa, CCT trains individuals how to choose more compassionate thoughts and actions and build relational skills.

While taking the course, participants used an app to record twice-daily ratings of four emotional states — anxiety, calm, fatigue and alertness — along with their capability and desire to manage how they were feeling. They also provided week-to-week feedback about the strategies they employed — including techniques such as modifying their reaction to a situation to simply accepting a situation.

The results? Researchers found that actively practicing compassion — the capability to recognize another’s suffering and be motivated to relieve that suffering — not only decreases anxiety, but it also increases an overall state of calm.

And, more importantly, they found that it is indeed possible to teach people to be more compassionate.

Want to do some training of your brain at home with a few CCT concepts? Try tips like these suggested by the Wall Street Journal:

• Notice and pay attention: Notice how you’re feeling in a situation and how your body is reacting. Figure out what you need. You might just need a few deep breaths to settle your mind and those sweaty hands.
• Put yourself in the other person’s shoes: Take time to consider life from her perspective. Recognize that just like you, she has family and friends, goals and dreams … and baggage.
• Let it go: Acknowledge that you’re anxious about a person or situation and let that thought move on to allow the flight-or-fight part of your brain to relax instead of obsess. (Meditating daily, in particular, can help train your brain to let go.)
• Practice makes perfect: Start where it’s easier. Practice compassion with yourself and with a loved one. Then ease into those more difficult relationships.

And if you want to take it further, Stanford’s CCT program, now in its eighth year, is open to the public, and you don’t have to be in California to take the classes. More than 100 certified teachers offer sessions year-round across the U.S. and in 10 other countries. Through meditation and mindfulness practices, lectures and interactive communication exercises (and homework), participants learn to develop resilience, strength and courage in the face of suffering, both others’ and their own.

via Lifehacker
Use These Mental Tricks to Prepare for Dealing with Unpleasant People

via The Truth About Guns
NRA Bringing Members, Guns and $50 Million Back To Louisville in ’22

via The Truth About Guns
Trailblazer Firearms’ New .22LR Single Shot LifeCard®

A SaaS product needs to use security measures you might not ordinarily use in an on-premises solution. In particular, it’s important that all sensitive data be secured. Encryption plays an important role in information security. At VividCortex, we encrypt data in-flight and at-rest, so your sensitive data is never exposed.

We use Go and MySQL extensively at VividCortex and thought other Go programmers might be interested to see how we’ve integrated encryption into our services layer (APIs). (And if you’d like to learn more about programming with Go in general, please take a look at our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Building Database-Driven Apps with Go.)

Image Source

Encryption Techniques

At a high level, you can think of two kinds of data encryption inside of MySQL or any similar data store. I’ll oversimplify for purposes of illustration. You can:

1. Store the data in MySQL as normal, but encrypt the container that holds MySQL. Usually this means storing MySQL’s data on an encrypted disk volume. The protection? Broadly speaking, if someone gains access to a backup disk, they can’t see your data.
2. Encrypt the data before sending it to MySQL. In this case the security boundary is pushed out further: even if someone gets access to the server, and can run SQL commands, they can’t see your data.

Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. These include ease of use, programmer overhead, ability to inspect (e.g. recovering from backups), searchability and indexability, and so on. There are a lot of things to consider here. Just a few:

• Will data be exposed if backups are unencrypted? (Our backups are encrypted, by the way.)
• Are sensitive values possibly in cleartext in query logs?
• Will sensitive values be visible in status commands like SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST?

At VividCortex we err on the side of safety and security, rather than favoring convenience. There’s a fairly simple question that does a pretty good job of illustrating our goal: if someone succeeds in a SQL injection attack against our databases, will they see any sensitive data in cleartext? The answer needs to be “no.” This is a higher standard than on-disk encryption. It means that someone has to get access to the keys for the particular data they’re trying to decrypt, in order to see anything other than garbage. And those keys are not present or accessible on the database servers in any form, not even in-memory.

Making It Convenient

Convenience is important. If it’s too hard to do encryption, there’s an increased risk that it won’t be done. Fortunately, Go’s elegant interfaces for the database/sql package make the burden transparent to the programmer!

We learned how to do this from Jason Moiron’s excellent blog post on the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. Please read that if you haven’t yet.

To implement transparent encryption and decryption, we created a custom data type that implements the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. The implementation is straightforward and quite similar to Jason’s example of compressing and decompressing, except that we used encryption libraries instead.

Now our code is incredibly simple to use with encrypted values. All we do is define a variable of our custom type. For example, instead of

var password string
err = rows.Scan(&password)

We simply use

var password EncryptedValue
err = rows.Scan(&password)

It’s similarly simple to insert values encrypted into the database. Magic! This is why I often say that Go’s design, although it seems minimalistic at first, is actually very advanced and powerful.

"Go feels under-engineered because it only solves real problems." Exactly. http://t.co/18LhLT0ALB #golang

— VividCortex (@VividCortex) September 18, 2014

Nuts And Bolts

The code is small. The exact details of all the code are not all that important for this blog post; much of it is about things that are out of scope here. The gist of it, though, is that we store values as byte arrays:

• The first byte is an indicator of the version of our encryption algorithm used, so there’s a clear migration path for changes.
• The next four bytes indicate which key we used to encrypt this value, so we have 4 billion possible keys.
• The rest is the encrypted payload.

We can even change this in the future. For example, we can switch on the first byte’s value, if we want, to determine whether the key ID is in the next 4 bytes, or if it’s something more, such as the next 8 bytes. So we can easily expand the number of keys we can indicate. We can also, if we ever hit version 255, use that to indicate that the version number continues in the next byte. This is a standard trick used, among other places, by the MySQL wire protocol.

The result is that we have a simple and future-proof way to encrypt values.

Alternative Approaches

In addition to the approaches we’ve mentioned, there are several others. There are commercial projects designed to help ease the encryption and decryption techniques you might otherwise wrap around MySQL and perhaps fumble in some ways. There are encryption functions inside of MySQL—but educate yourself about those before using them. There are others, too, but you should be able to find all you need with a search.

Conclusions

By using Go’s built-in interfaces, we created a solution for transparently encrypting values in our database so that it’s never in the database in cleartext, either on-disk or in-memory. The code is easy for programmers to use, which improves our security posture automatically. All sensitive data gets encrypted in-flight and at-rest, and an attacker would have to have extensive access to our systems (an SQL injection wouldn’t suffice) to be able to decrypt the data.

We highly recommend that you use the standard Go interfaces for the power they give you. And please, ask your SaaS providers, including us, hard questions about security and how it’s implemented. Every service needs to be secure to make the Internet a safer place.

If you liked this and want to learn more about Go, you might also like our webinar about developing database-driven apps with Go and MySQL. Click below to watch a recording.

Post Updated 7/31/2017

via Planet MySQL
How We Encrypt Data In MySQL With Go

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Here’s What Everyone Says About How The Tesla Model 3 Drives

It’s a slow Saturday, so I figured I’d share some “shower thoughts” with you on a topic I’ve been pondering lately. The topic is pretty controversial and highly unpleasant, and this is mainly just me thinking out loud. But if it gets you thinking as well, then it was worth sharing.

I’ve been around pro-2A circles all my life, and whenever men meet and talk guns, there’s always a really large thing hanging in the air between them, and 99% of the time that thing goes unstated. But if it were to be stated, it might go something like this: “We may be talking ‘self defense’ or ‘home defense,’ but we all know the real reason we have these is ‘just in case.’”

And by “just in case,” I’m talking a Paul Revere, Minutemen-type situation. We take it as a given that we — our tribe, the people who are pro-gun and pro-liberty — will prevail in any armed confrontation, because after all, we’re the ones with the guns.

But what if we’re wrong? What if guns aren’t even close to being enough? What if the right tries to rise up for free speech and liberty, guns blazin’, and gets smacked right back down?

Yeah, I know — but don’t close this browser tab just yet!

Before you dismiss me and my musings, consider this question that’ll tell you all you need to know about where I’m really headed with this:

If you turned on the news tomorrow and realized that, holy crap, it really is time to grab your musket, can you name three people in your life right now who fit the following description: 1) you’ve talked to them recently about what the “red line” is, and you know that they’ll 100% agree with you that it has been crossed, and 2) you’ve trained with them in some sort of tactical-ish scenario (anything from 3-gun to paintball counts for our purposes), so you have some sort of reasonable expectation that you can depend on them to have your back in a gunfight?

I’m not really interested in seeing your answer in the comments below, because I’ve been around the block and know exactly how internet operators, keyboard commandos, and mall ninjas love to answer such questions on gun forums. No, those questions are for you to think hard about in your own mind, and to answer honestly for yourself.

You may be one of the few who can truly answer “yes” to the above; if you are, you have a good sense of how rare that is in pro-gun gun circles, and how totally unprepared the “just in case” crowd really is to form up into anything that looks even sort of like a unit, much less to operate their firearms under even moderate pressure outside of a controlled environment.

The beauty of the gun-owning civil liberties crowd is that it prizes the individual’s liberty and capabilities over all else, and the weakness of that same crowd is its emphasis on rugged individualism which discounts the power of institutions, organization, communication, and well-maintained networks.

It’s like this: Right-wingers are lone wolves, but left-wingers are pack animals. Anyone who’s watched a nature show knows that a lone wolf can pick off a few straggling members of a pack, but when the pack turns on that lone predator it’s all over with.

The Power of Activism and Organizing

I don’t really know who David Hines is, but he has recently produced a good series of tweets and an article about how and why the right will lose a domestic armed conflict. Here’s the gist of his argument, from the article:

The organizational capacity required to build a new world is the same organizational capacity have Lefties [sic] built to pressure government. So who’s in a better position to shape the big moment when it comes? Hell, if tomorrow civilization goes completely Mad Max: who’s got existing local networks of people who they’re used to turning out and doing stuff with on a regular basis? Answer to both questions: not the Right.

Passivists say activism accomplishes nothing. What it actually accomplishes is practice. Practice for networking, practice for turnout, practice for speed, practice working as a team. Anybody who’s ever tried to get five people together for dinner knows it’s a pain, but look at the airport protests after the travel ban, and see how many people the hard Left can turn out on next to no notice. Say the balloon were to suddenly go up: forget having a detailed and specific plan; in that first five minutes, do you — not some veterans’ network you’re hoping will salvage things, not some imaginary Great Man; *specifically you* — even know who you’re going to call?

The Lefties do. And that’s why righties who say the Right has nothing to learn from the Left are wrong. That’s because righties don’t read lefty books. I read lefty books and organizational manuals, and I can tell you: they’re smart.

In both the tweetstorm and the article, Hines goes on to describe how the organized (and newly energized and radicalized) left has spent its time in the trenches building networks that can be mobilized at a moment’s notice for marches and protests.

Cast your mind back to the distant past of six months ago, with the Trump inauguration protests. They were massive and historic, and not only were the numbers that turned out far in excess of what anyone can imagine the right pulling off, but the “pink pussy hat” protests had the full and open backing of our most powerful societal institutions: the media, tech giants, and the three-letter agencies that make up the Deep State.

I’m sure you’re thinking these protests accomplished nothing, but you’re wrong. As Hines points out, what they accomplished was the construction of a vibrant, energized left-wing network that’s still growing and operating and organizing and which knows it has the blessing of every large, mainstream institution in American society for what it’s doing.

None of those marchers may have held a gun before, but ask yourself this: who would you put your money on in an armed conflict, the group with guns but no organization, or the group with no guns but plenty of organization?

I know I’d pick the latter, because getting a large group together and organizing it for real-world action is massively harder than just acquiring a gun and learning how to do a bare minimum of soldiering with it. With some organization and logistics and institutional support, you can pretty quickly train up a group of grunts, equip them, and point them all in the same direction.

So the left is starting with an organized group of activists who know each other and have worked together in the streets, and all that remains is for them to equip and train them. The right, by contrast, is starting with a collection of strangers who happen to have some guns but who’ve never once taken to the streets in a group to try to change the world.

And when it kicks off, who will the establishment line up behind? Which side will find sympathy and support and cover for their activities (free legal advice and medical care and publicity for crowdfunding campaigns)? It sure as heck won’t be those who are maligned as Russian stooges and “literal Nazis” and fascists.

As Hines points out, the last time the Left resorted to organized violence, it had the explicit support of prominent institutions like the American Lawyers Association. The folks who bombed and shot and killed for the Left in the 60’s and 70’s later went on to garner accolades and professorships and, more recently, free Hamilton tickets.

The Real Problem with “Just in Case”

All of this brings me to the main shortcoming of the “just in case” mentality that pervades the 2A community, and is prevalent even (or especially) among those who actively train with firearms and actually maintain a network of like-minded folks who will have their back when it’s “go time”: a backup plan is great as far as it goes, but a positive, forward-looking action plan is even better.

If you look at the armed leftist groups that have arisen recently, like Antifa and the self-styled Redneck Revolt (i.e. Antifa with a spray-on farmer tan), you’ll notice a crucial difference between how they approach gun ownership and how the NRA crowd has traditionally approached it. Redneck Revolt in particular is not tooling up “just in case” — they’re tooling up because they full well plan on doing something physical, and they’re open about it.

In some ways, this is the difference in outlook between the conservative and the liberal. The conservative is always glancing back at the original American Revolution for spiritual inspiration while hoping he won’t see the day when we as a nation must revisit that bloody past, while the left looks ever-forward to the coming socialist revolution that hasn’t yet happened but for which they actively hope and work.

My ultimate point is that the real problem with “just in case” is deep and fundamental, in that it sets the right up for failure on a structural level. The “just in case” crowd has a backup plan they truly hope they won’t have to employ, while the armed left has an action plan for which they regularly train in anticipation of the opportunity to execute.

Conclusion: Forget about the Violence

I want to wrap this up with an exhortation to all sides, right and left, to swear off violence because really, neither side “wins” if it gets ugly. I’m certainly not advocating for civil libertarians and self-identified right-wingers to organize along the lines of Antifa so they can actively plan for a domestic conflict. Indeed, history and studies bear out that violent groups like Antifa do far more damage to their cause than good.

The majority of the country is sensible enough to understand that Americans assaulting other Americans over ideology is really bad, and they want none of it. We’re becoming ever-more-polarized by the day, but let’s hope this anti-violence attitude continues to hold, broadly.

No, I mostly just present the above as food for thought for anyone who thinks they bought a gun “just in case things get ugly,” and that they are therefore somehow “prepared” or that they have done something for some cause. They aren’t and they haven’t.

Really doing something involves a lot more than just buying some stuff and learning to operate it. And once you actually step outside and connect with other people in real life to begin working toward a common goal, you’ll realize that political organizing is a lot more rewarding and effective than silently prepping for war.

I may change my mind about any or all of the above, tomorrow. But for now, this is just my two cents, on a slow Saturday.

The post Saturday Random Musings: Why the Left Would Win the Next Civil War appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.

via All Outdoor
Saturday Random Musings: Why the Left Would Win the Next Civil War

A college student in Columbia, South Carolina was kidnapped by three men at gunpoint. Fearing the worst, she used some Jason Bourne level problem solving and her manual transmission car to get away safely.

According to The State, 20-year-old Jordan Dinsmore found herself in one of the worst situations possible when three men approached her, pushed her to the ground and put a gun to her head. The publication reports that they forced her to drive her car and withdraw money from an ATM and then told her that she was going to be taken to a location to be raped.

But Dinsmore had one advantage, The Slate reports—when the men first put her into the car they couldn’t drive it because it had a manual transmission, so they made her take the driver’s seat. That is when she concocted a plan to escape. After she withdrew $300 out of the ATM, she got back into the car and left her seatbelt off, she hoped her kidnappers didn’t notice the seatbelt alarm chiming.

One of the men instructed her to drive to his relatives’ house so one of his friends could have sex with her. From The State:

“I was thinking somehow I have to get out of this,” Dinsmore said. “Can I crash the car? No, because it might knock me out and not them. Can I pull over or something? I have to get away from them.”

The Slate reports that she purposefully missed the turn and rolled her car into the intersection, threw her car in neutral, then she opened the door and jumped out, while the vehicle was moving at 35 mph.

Once she landed she screamed for help, a woman came to her and called 911. Dinsmore suffered only minor scrapes and bruises from her escape and her 2009 Scion even managed to be in pretty decent shape after the attackers crashed it, The Slate reports.

Dinsmore is a criminal justice major who hopes to someday be in the FBI knew that in these situations you have to do whatever you can to get away. From The State:

“If they get you out of the public eye, they’re going to do something worse to you and shoot you anyway,” Dinsmore recalled her mother saying.

Even though she managed to escape she still has trouble sleeping, but is thankful her attackers didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission car.

“I’m going to be driving a manual for the rest of my life,” The State quoted her as saying.

via Gizmodo
Badass Woman Escapes Kidnappers Using A Manual Transmission And Nerves Of Steel

via Ars Technica
Ever wondered why US Special Forces love the Chevy Suburban so much?