Is This an ISMI-Catcher or What?

Over the last couple years, I have been tracking this oddity amongst the cellular networks. Somewhere around Waltham, Massachusetts, was some sort of rogue cell tower, I knew that much. Unfortunately I accidentally deleted most of the screenshots that I had of this data, but fortunately I have enough circumstantial evidence left to suggest that there is a military or police ran ISMI-Catcher (aka "Stringray") operating out of  Waltham, MA.

I first noticed this when my phone switched from 3G over to LTE when I was on the train to Boston, MA. That immediately made me feel suspicious because my phone should not be able to pick up any LTE bands in the United States, as my  radio firmware locks some of usable LTE bands and only supports certain spectrums used in other parts of the world, primarily Europe and Asia. So, it is very odd for this particular device to pick up any LTE band at all in the United States. As far as I know, there are no LTE bands in use by any legit carrier in the USA that my device picks up; band 1(2100mhz), 3(1800mhz), 5(850mhz), 7(2600mhz), 8(900mhz), and 20(800mhz).

Over the course of a few months I continued tracking the source of this strange signal, which finally lead me to Prospect Hill Park; a little wildlife reservation in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Up on the top of this little hill is what appears to be an ancient radio tower of some sort that has been retrofitted to be an all-in-one cellular surveillance monstrosity. Google seems to think it's an 'observation tower':

The tower is conveniently located in an area such that anyone that rides the T-Line from Fitchburg (possibly other lines) into Boston, or drives through this area on Route 95 will be "tagged" by this device (yes, you should feel quite violated if this the case).

If you don't know what I am talking about, than now is a good time to Google "Stingrays",  "ISMI Catchers", and "ISMI-Catcher-Detector" applications that you can use to  find these things...

Behold, on top of Prospect Hill, the source of the signal.

Note the variety of cellular antennas on top of that thing. Although some follow-up research still needs to be done, it appears that this thing could be an all-in-one, multi-band, stationary Stingray. These devices can remotely eavesdrop on your communications, man-in-the-middle your data, and in some cases, remotely manipulate and/or install malware on your device.

When I got closer to the device, the LTE signal became stronger. You may have heard about the 18 or so rogue towers identified across the United States, could this be the 19th? It's hidden in such an obscure, beautiful location that it's not surprising that nobody has noticed...

Obviously more research needs to be done, and I need to find the actual BTS measurements that I took while I was there before I can confirm this for sure. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted my entire sdcard a couple weeks ago, so it may be a while before I can recover that data.

In the mean time, here is a view of the tower from Google Earth, which oddly, does not appear to have the antennas on it. You may have to scroll in/out a little to see it.



If you think this a little strange, than you are not alone. If you think that this should not be legal, than you are correct. Technically, the use of these devices fall into a legal gray area thanks to the Patriot Act. Basically, the FBI would rather drop a criminal case than discuss the details of ISMI-Catcher usage. Now why would they want to do something like that?

I will update this post when I get more details.

Edit: I acknowledge It's possible that my carrier is simply testing some new technology, or perhaps planning to open up some of those LTE bands in the US, which would actually be pretty cool. So I need your help getting to bottom of it.

Anecdote of a Nighmare

Last night I had a vivid, horrific dream. I recall walking down this dark, damp corridor of this apparently abandoned hospital, or maybe it was a school-- hard to say. I remember long halls, absence of light, and in true Sin City style, a world embellished with dreary, gray-scale tones. Everything was somewhere between ebony and ivory, save the few effulgent objects, like glowing red eyes, and the  EXIT signs hanging at the end of the halls.

Making my way down this interminable corridor, suddenly my chest surged with adrenaline, as this loud theatrical sound interjected the dream, a kind of suspenseful, foreboding,  "ba-dum!", associated with a climactic scene out of a horror film. Standing before me was my sister, just glaring at me, her eyes wide open, contrasting the colorless world with a neon bloodshot, like she was either a zombie, or demon possessed.

I asked her, "What the hell is going on? What are doing here?". In a nullified, uncanny voice, she said, "Don't you know?", as if something horrible and obvious was happening, to which I was oblivious. "What am I supposed to know...?", I replied. I can't remember exactly what happened next, but I decided I'd rather assume she was sleep walking than possessed, so I told her to go back to bed, and lead her back to one of the desolate hospital-esc bedrooms.

Continuing my way down this endless corridor, next I ran into my mom. At least, she looked like my mom. But she too had the same bloodshot, nefarious, if not unearthly look in her eyes. I began to say "Mom..?" The words barely left my mouth before she lunged at me, knocking me to the ground, and began to strangle the life out of me. I began screaming "What the fuck Mom!", as it occurred to me that none of this was passing the reality test, and than I suddenly found myself transported somewhere else entirely.

With the inexplicable change of environment, I realized, 'Okay, this is certainly a nightmare, and I need to wake the f--- up'. The moment I became aware that I was dreaming, I was stricken with sleep paralysis. Terrorized, it became clear that I wasn't going to just 'snap out' of this one. (If you've ever experienced sleep paralysis, than you know it can be quite horrifying).

Decisively I tried to take control of the nightmare, hoping I could salvage the experience and turn into a lucid, perhaps even pleasant dream. That, as it usually happens, was a no-go. Words cannot explain what was occuring around me, but it was as if the Earth itself was crumbling back into the stardust from which it originated, unknown millenniums ago.

After what seemed like ten agonizing minutes in this dubious abstract, I finally managed to move my leg just enough to turn my body over and wake myself up. Aware of how quickly dreams fade from memory, I jumped out of bed, grabbed a pen and notepad, and began to document whatever had just occurred. But I'd badly burned my hand on a hot glass pipe last night, and it was too difficult to write. So I grabbed my cell phone, fired up an audio recorder, and instead, narrated the dream to disc. From those two memorabilia, I later composed this anecdote.

I thought this a great illustration of just how comically creative our minds can be while we sleep. Unfortunately, I can't consciously make this shit up.

Overlooking the Obvious: The Search for Better Health

Lately I've been experiencing some rather debilitating health issues. Suffering from brain fog, nausea, weakness, low energy, and endless symptoms associated with allergies has forced me on a journey to find the cause. These health problems have steadily taken their toll on  my creativity and ability to contribute to society in a meaningful and valuable way. For a while I attributed it to aging, prescription drugs, or cat allergies. Despite keeping the cats off of the entire floor that I live on, reducing my exposure, the problem has been getting worse.

When one feels like total shit all of the time, one tends to self medicate. Legal or not, prescription drugs take their toll, and society needs to understand that there is little  difference between illegal and prescription drug addiction. Just because my pills come in tamper proof bottle with my name on them does not mean that it's actually in my best interest to take that stuff. Legal drugs actually kill more people per year than illicit drugs, and that says something about our society's medical practices.

While I admit that prescription drugs are definitely a contributing factor to my health issues, I don't believe that they are responsible for all of them. I am not denying that Big Pharma is putting profit in front of health to keep us sick and sell us cures, in fact I strongly agree-- but I'll save that for another post.

If it's not the meds, than what is it? Perhaps the answer is the most simple, and obvious one. We've all heard that saying "you are what you eat". It's a scientifically accurate notion, and I don't think anyone could raise a logical argument that claims we are not compromised of the matter that we consume. We are products of our environment, and that environment is perpetually growing ever more toxic. In the time it will have taken you to read this blog, approximately 666 acres of rain forest will have been demolished or degraded. You may be wondering how I arrived at that figure: Simple math, using estimates from credible sources in my bookmarks:

anon@sketchbox:~$ curl https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-daily-destruction/|grep "acres"
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--     0<p>Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day&mdash;or some 50,000 species a year&mdash;as the forests fall.<br />
100 78408    0 78408    0     0  31646      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:-- 31641
anon@sketchbox:~$ # Scientific American estimates we lose 80,000 acres per day while degrading another 80,000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 80000 + 80000
160000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 160000 / 24 / 10 

666

Six-hundred and sixty six acres every six minutes sound devilish indeed. The next logical question is why are we doing that? We know that the rain forest and oceans create the majority of the oxygen that we breath, so it would appear to be in our best interests (if survival really is the point of life) to conserve and protect these precious ecosystems. So why are we doing the opposite? The surprising answer is that 70% of all deforestation is the result of the global animal agriculture culture. Most of that land is used to either graze cattle or grow grain to feed cattle. The majority of crops that are grown on this planet are fed to cattle, not humans.

Deforestation is not the only negative impact that our meat obsessed lifestyles have on Mother Earth. Agricultural pollution is an increasingly problematic phenomenon that only gets worse as the human populations grows. Pesticides and fertilizer tend to seep into our groundwater, or run off into the ocean. This both changes the pH of and pollutes freshwater aquatic ecosystems, drinking water, and the oceans.

For example, along the US Southern coastline, there is a "dead zone" that's been growing for decades now. The farm runoff enters the ocean, increasing the acidity and introducing toxins into the water. This stuff is so toxic that it kills practically everything that it comes in contact with. Even before BP blew up the Deepwater Horizon rig and essentially murdered the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, which used to be the most productive ecosystem in the world, aquatic life was suffering along the coastline.

Off topic, but worth mentioning is that the Deepwater Horizon spill was handled extremely poorly. Rather than actually clean up the oil using effective, natural methods like spreading hay bails over the water to soak up and remove the oil, BP chose the "out of site, out of mind" approach. It's actually worse than it sounds. A chemical dispersant that has been banned in Great Britain for over a decade called "CoreExit" was dumped into the ocean, to dissolve the oil into the ocean.

Typically, oil and water do not mix, which makes it (relatively) easy to clean these spills up. Somewhere along the line, BP decided it was more economically convenient to disperse, rather than actually remove the oil. The toxic chemical dispersant was sprayed from airplanes, and dumped deep under the ocean, near the leaking well. The people of Louisiana suffered terrible health effects as their environment became more toxic than ever. CoreExit rained down upon the Southern coastline, and possibly traveled much farther than that. The long term effects have been devastating. Shrimp born without eyes, fish born with lesions on their skin, dolphins with lung disease... it goes on and on.

This is just another of the countless horrors that stem from corporate greed, which brings me back to cattle agriculture. When I was very young, I was diagnosed with an allergy to milk. From age 3-10 I did not consume dairy products. I would eat pizza without cheese, drink soy milk, and use dairy products like butter very sparingly. One day when I was 9 or 10 years old, I got tired of being allergic to milk, and ate some pizza during school lunch. I didn't notice any allergic reaction, so I figured I'd outgrown the allergy and could now consume dairy again. I was always a skinny, scrawny kid, and due to the false notion that drinking milk is vital to producing strong bones, I started drinking a whole lot more of it, to make up for all the years I went without it.

In retrospect, when I began drinking milk is when I started to develop some problems. I was actually getting fat for a couple years, and this is something that I didn't think was possible because I had always been underweight. I had anxiety by the time I was 12, and depression by age 13. Coming from an upper middle class family, we always bought organic food. Most of the milk I drank back than was "organic" milk from grass fed cows. While this milk certainly tastes better and appears more humanely produced than milk from factory farms, the reality is that it's actually less sustainable and worse for the environment than grain fed, factory farmed milk. This is because grass fed cows require a hell of a lot more land to graze than their caged counterparts at the slaughter houses. With population growing rapidly, and with 70% of our farm lands growing food for cattle, it makes me wonder... is there any sustainable, humane way to raise enough meat to support a population expected to hit 9 billion by 2050?

If the environmental toll is not enough to dis-way you from eating dairy, than perhaps the effects that cow's milk has on our own bodies will. Despite relentless campaigns to promote the health benefits of milk (Got Milk, anyone?) , science is beginning to tell us that milk is actually bad for your health.

"A large observational cohort study^[1] in Sweden found that women consuming more than 3 glasses of milk a day had almost twice the mortality over 20 years compared to those women consuming less than one glass a day. In addition, the high milk-drinkers did not have improved bone health. In fact, they had more fractures, particularly hip fractures." 

1. In observational studies both across countries and within single populations, higher dairy intake has been linked to increased risk of prostate cancer (cited in ^[2]).
2. Observational cohort studies have shown higher dairy intake is linked to higher ovarian cancer risk (cited in ^[2]).
3. Cow’s milk protein may play a role in triggering type 1 diabetes through a process called molecular mimicry^[3].
4. Across countries, populations that consume more dairy have higher rates of multiple sclerosis^[4].
5. In interventional animal experiments and human studies, dairy protein has been shown to increase IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor-1) levels. Increased levels of IGF-1 has now been implicated in several cancers^[5].
6. In interventional animal experiments^[6] and human experiments^[7], dairy protein has been shown to promote increased cholesterol levels (in the human studies and animal studies) and atherosclerosis (in the animal studies).
7. The primary milk protein (casein) promotes cancer initiated by a carcinogen in experimental animal studies^[8].
8. D-galactose has been found to be pro-inflammatory and actually is given to create animal models of aging^[1].
9. Higher milk intake is linked to acne^[9].
10. Milk intake has been implicated in constipation^[10] and ear infections (cited in ^[2]).
11. Milk is perhaps the most common self-reported food allergen in the world^[11].
12. Much of the world’s population cannot adequately digest milk due to lactose intolerance.

(Source: http://nutritionstudies.org/12-frightening-facts-milk/)


With all of this new evidence emerging that shows milk is actually terrible for your health, perhaps it is time for humanity to phase out dairy completely. I've been drinking almond milk and trying to avoid meat for a couple weeks now, and I can honestly say that I feel much better. I felt like so much shit that I no longer felt like writing, and it had been a while since I wrote a blog post. My cognitive functionality seems to be getting better, as have my allergies. Last week I scored 130 on an IQ test, which is ten points higher than I scored a couple years ago. I am writing better code and learning new things faster, and this is only after a couple weeks of cutting down my dairy and meat intake. Science is beginning to show that people that eat plant based diets are much healthier all around than people that eat animal based diets. It's not your fault either! We were simply following bad advice, and that doesn't make us stupid.

I'd encourage anyone that feels sick to try to eat less meat and dairy before resigning to prescription drugs. It's worth a shot. Voting with your wallet is the only effective way to send a message to the food industry, because all they care about is money. That isn't to say that they are evil, it's just the way that business works. Supply will meet demand, and if we all demand more plant based foods, than that is what we will get. It seems rather unnecessary to continue to cause massive suffering amongst farm animals when scientists are saying that everything we need to survive can be found in the plant kingdom. If we used that land to grow more fresh fruits and vegetables instead of feeding and graze cows, than perhaps we could knock out both world hunger and the largest contributer of environmental damage simultaneously.

Polluted water is the cause of about half of all human disease. As we enter a world where it's becoming harder to trust tap-water, we must ask ourselves, what can we do to reverse this destruction? With cattle causing more damage to the Earth than fracking, and with a president in office that does not seem to care about scientific facts, the world's fate is in the hands of the people. It seems overwhelming, but the truth is that there are simple things you can do to make a difference.

Sadly some things are beyond our control. There is one more issue that I want to shed some light on, because frankly it is very disturbing. Scientific evidence is confirming something that ecologists have known for years-- much of the prescription drugs that we take are impossible for municipal water treatment centers to filter out. Traces of anti-depressants, opiates, and most concerning, birth control, can be found in US lakes, rivers, aquifers, and tap water, in alarming concentrations. Hormones are potent chemicals, and it doesn't take very much exposure to these chemicals to cause damage to human and animal life alike. Premature puberty and increased testicular cancer has been observed in humans, and studies have discovered an increase of hermaphrodite fish in aquatic ecosystems. Essentially, we are seeing mass sterility as a result of second hand hormone exposure.

This happens because enough people have been passing prescription drugs through their bodies to cause an accumulation of these substances in our water supplies. I am no expert, and thus am not sure why water treatment facilities cannot filter these chemicals out of the water. I can only guess that it's because these drugs are water soluble. Treatment facilities typically utilize the natural filtration of the Earth to treat the water, so it makes sense to me that anything soluble will remain.

There you have it, anything smaller than thirteen micro-grams cannot be filtered out of waste water this way. The put this in perspective, medical grade micron filters used to prep water for injection use 0.02 micro-gram membranes, which is sufficient to remove just about everything but the water itself. Pharmaceutical chemicals will indeed pass right through a 13mm filter.

It's not realistic to ask people to stop taking medications, so we need to find another way to deal with this. Perhaps it's time to seriously rethink our waste treatment and disposal methods. According to the EPA, municipal waste water wells are Class V injection wells, which are supposed to be for treating non-toxic waste. This has appeared to work well for a long time, but it is becoming apparent that it's simply not enough, and that our sewage waste is more toxic than we thought. We need to protect our environment and the ecosystems that we are so interdependent on at all costs. Methods of treating water vary depending on the problem that the water in question has. For example, water with high levels of iron is treated with charcoal filtration, and bottled water is purified using reverse osmosis membrane. The problem is that none of the conventional methods of treatment can remove all of the contaminants-- except for properly implemented distillation.

The standard for producing medical grade water has always been distillation. It used to be a very expensive procedure that required very high amounts of energy, but that's changed thanks to the modern vapor compression distiller, invented by Dean Kamen (the segway dude from Manchester, NH). These units recycle the input energy as they operate so effectively that they consume just 1 kw per hour, and are able to produce ~ 40 liters of clean water per hour. Incredibly, these devices can turn just about any source of water into water that's not only safe to drink, but also is suitable for injection! They cost less than $ 2,000, which is amazing. Could vapor compression distillation help solve our water crisis? Would this be a reasonable replacement for the methods used by traditional water treatment plants? I don't know, but it's worth looking into, and a better approach than what we are doing now, which is basically pretending that we don't have a problem. With all of our insane tech, surely humanity can figure this out.

Finally, while on the quest for better health, I realized that the environment is not limited to the outdoors. I am kind of a slob by nature, and until recently was not good about keeping my place clean. Vacuuming up about ten pounds of dust, cleaning the hell out of my bedroom, and finally throwing away a moldy pumpkin that I'd pretty much forgotten about seems to have worked wonders for my allergies overnight! It doesn't matter what you eat when your house is becoming toxic. It took me 27 years to figure out how important this is. I can even think more clearly now that my house is clean again. I mention this because it seems people have a habbit of overlooking the most obvious solutions to a given problem.

That's all for today. Remember, there is nothing more valuable than good health.

Goodbye, Oracle. Hello, KVM!

In this age of incessant cyber-security threats, virtual machines have become a popular first line of defense. In thoery, properly implemented virtualization will protect the host operating system in the event of a guest compromise. Our computer systems are getting so powerful that lately it seems overkill to dedicate all of a system's resources to one particular task. For example, my CPU load seldom goes above twenty percent since upgrading to an i7-6700k. Virtual machines allow me to get more bang for my buck, in terms of how many simultaneous tasks my computer can run at a given moment. They also provide a priceless layer of security by keeping potential compromises localized to the virtual machine that they may or may not have occurred in.

Over the years I've found that reinstalling your operating system is never a bad move. If you suspect, but are not sure if a system compromise has occurred, than the safest thing to do is to reflash-- just in case. The only issue is that it takes a decent amount of time and energy to reinstall an operating system. You've got to back everything up, save all of your configurations, perform the installation, reinstall all of your software, reconfigure your preferences, files, and so on. Of course, much of this process can be automated with some simple shell scripting, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to reinstall a VM than it is a physical machine.

Having a separate VM for every task greatly minimizes the damage that a program compromise can do. I have a VM for just about everything. A VM for watching Netflix, another for watching porn. A VM for development, another for hacking. A VM for social media, and another for personal finances. This way, if Netflix or Facebook tries to deliver an evil payload to my system via say, javascript, than the attacker will not be able to get my bank details.

As great as this sounds, until recently, one problem remained with this philosophy-- I was dependent on Oracle's closed source software, Virtualbox, to make all of this work. If you know me, than you know that I believe that there few things on this Earth as evil as proprietary software. If you can't audit the source code yourself, than how can you trust the software? It's fundamentally impossible to completely reverse compile a complex program such as vbox. Sure, you can successfully reverse engineer some software, but you're rarely going to get the whole picture. It's also a huge pain in the ass. And since there happens to be other software that can drive virtual machines out there, that has no closed source parts, it makes more sense to use that instead. Thus, I decided it was time to ditch vbox and switch over to KVM.

Making the switch was a hell of a lot easier than I expected. Virt-manger has come a long way over the last couple years, which I imagine helps people like me that are used to Virtualbox's nice GUI to feel like they can safely make the switch. It's also quite easy to convert your current vbox virtual machines (OVA's and VDMK's) into KVM's format (qcow2), using qemu-img. I've also found that KVM is actually much more stable than Virtualbox. No more random crashes, or seemingly random corrupted disc images, unexplainable data loss, or stupid error messages like "Cannot add this disc because it's already attached to this machine". I really hated that shit.

Libvirt is a hundred times smoother, more featured, and cleaner than vbox. Even being able to close the window that the VM is running in without having to shut the whole damn thing down (without having to start the machine as 'detachable' ... give me a break!) feels absolutely liberating. My CPU load is now averaging about half what it was before I switched over, so KVM, with it's type 1 hypervisor, is clearly better about resource management. Full screen, high resolution graphics are now working just fine, and in my opinion, graphics and user friendliness were perhaps the only advantages vbox had over KVM. This is not the case anymore. There's so many great reasons to switch.

Now that I have ditched Virtualbox, I can proudly say that I am running a system with absolutely no proprietary software or drivers whatsoever (except the bios, of course. We've got much reverse engineering to do yet). Hell, I even sleep better knowing that Oracle no longer (may) have a backdoor to my systems! I'd encourage any and all Virtualbox users to switch to KVM today. Virtualbox may be a decent program, but KVM is awesome.