Tuesday: Allez Vous F

J’adore Stromae. I’m not in the hip hop demographic, but Stromae — whose real name is Paul Van Haver — pulls me in. This multi-talented born to a Rwandan father and a Belgian mother pulls together multiple genres of music laced with compelling au courant lyrics presented with stunning visual effects — how could I not love him?

This particular song, Papatouai, has a strong psychic undertow. This song asks where Papa is; the lyrics and video suggest an emotionally or physically distant father. Van Haver’s own father was killed in the Rwandan genocide when he was not yet ten years old. Is this song about his own father, or about inaccessible fathers in general? The use of older African jazz rhythms emphasizes retrospection suggesting a look backward rather than forward for the missing father figure(s). More than a third of a billion views for this video say something important about its themes.

Much of Stromae’s work is strongly political, but it conveys the difficulty of youth who are multi-racial/multi-ethnic unsatisfied with the binaries and economic injustices forced on them by oldsters. A favorite among kids I know is AVF (Allez Vous Faire):

“Allez vous faire!”
Toujours les mêmes discours, toujours les mêmes airs,
Hollande, Belgique, France austère.
Gauches, ou libéraux, avant-centres ou centristes,
Ça m’est égal, tous aussi démagos que des artistes.

Go fuck yourselves!
Always the same words, always the same airs.
Holland, Belgium, France, austere.
Right or Left? Moderate or Extremist?
They’re all the same to me – the demagogues and the artists.

Remarquable et pertinent, non? I’m also crazy about Tous Les Mêmes, a trans- and cis-feminist song with a marvelous old school Latin beat simmering with frustration. But there’s not much I don’t like by Stromae; I can’t name a song I wouldn’t listen to again and again.

If you’re ready for more Stromae, try his concert recorded in Montreal this past winter. So good.

Expedition to the Cyber Pass

• UK wireless firm O2 customer data breached and sold (BBC) — O2 customers who were gamers at XSplit had their O2 account data stolen. The approach used, credential stuffing, relies on users who employ the same password at multiple sites. Wonder how Verizon’s recent hiring of O2’s CEO Ronan Dunne will play out during the integration of Yahoo into Verizon’s corporate fold, given Verizon’s data breach? Will Dunne insist on mandatory 2FA policy and insure Verizon and Yahoo accounts can’t use the same passwords?
• Speaking of Yahoo: 200 million credentials for sale (Motherboard) — Yahoo’s Tumblr had already been involved in a massive breach, now there’s Yahoo accounts available on the dark web. Given the Verizon breach already mentioned, it’s just a matter of time before these accounts are cross-matched for criminal use.
• Oracle’s not-so-good-very-bad-too-many 276 vulnerabilities patched (Threatpost) — Whew. Two. Hundred. Seventy. Six. That’s a lot of risk. Good they’re all patched, but wow, how did Oracle end up with so many to begin with? Some of them are in products once owned by Sun Microsystems, including Java. Maybe Oracle ought to rethink Java’s licensing and work with the software community to develop a better approach to patching Java?
• F-35 ready, says USAF — kind of (Bloomberg) — Massively expensive combat jet now up for ‘limited combat use’, except…
  

  The initial aircraft won’t have all the electronic combat, data fusion, weapons capacity or automated maintenance and diagnostics capabilities until the most advanced version of its complex software is fielded by 2018.

  Uh, what the hell did we spend a gazillion-plus bucks on if we don’t have aircraft with competitive working electronics?

Light load today, busy here between getting youngest ready for college and primary day in Michigan. YES, YOU, MICHIGANDER, GO VOTE IN THE PRIMARY! Polls close at 8:00 p.m. EDT, you still have time — check your party for write-in candidates. You can check your registration, precinct, ballot at this MI-SOS link.

The rest of you: check your own state’s primary date and registration deadlines. Scoot!

The Stalker Outside Your Window: The NSA and a Belated Horror Story

[photo: Gwen’s River City Images via Flickr]

It’s a shame Halloween has already come and gone. The reaction to Monday’s Washington Post The Switch blogpost reminds of a particularly scary horror story, in which a young woman alone in a home receives vicious, threatening calls.

There’s a sense of security vested in the idea that the caller is outside the house and the woman is tucked safely in the bosom of her home. Phew, she’s safe; nothing to see here, move along…

In reality the caller is camped directly outside the woman’s window, watching every move she makes even as she assures herself that everything is fine.

After a tepid reaction to the initial reporting last week, most media and their audience took very little notice of the Washington Post’s followup piece — what a pity, as it was the singular voice confirming the threat sits immediately outside the window.

Your window, as it were, if you have an account with either Yahoo or Google and use their products. The National Security Agency has access to users’ content inside the corporate fenceline for each of these social media firms, greasy nose pressed to glass while peering in the users’ windows.

There’s more to story, one might suspect, which has yet to be reported. The disclosure that the NSA’s slides reflected Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) unique to Google and Yahoo internal systems is only part of the picture, though this should be quite frightening as it is.

Access to proprietary RPCs means — at a minimum — that the NSA has:

1) Access to content and commands moving in and out of Google’s and Yahoo’s servers, between their own servers — the closest thing to actually being inside these corporations’ servers.

2) With these RPCs, the NSA has the ability to construct remote login access to the servers without the businesses’ awareness. RPCs by their nature require remote access login permissions.

3) Construction through reverse engineering of proprietary RPCs could be performed without any other governmental bodies’ awareness, assuming the committees responsible for oversight did not explicitly authorize access to and use of RPCs during engineering of the MUSCULAR/SERENDIPITY/MARINA and other related tapping/monitoring/collection applications.

4) All users’ login requests are a form of RPC — every single account holder’s login may have been gathered. This includes government employees and elected officials as well as journalists who may have alternate accounts in either Gmail or Yahoo mail that they use as a backup in case their primary government/business account fails, or in the case of journalists, as a backchannel for handling news tips.

5) The public may not understand, nor may they ever receive adequate clarification with regard to the breadth of NSA’s access over time to Google’s and Yahoo’s content, given the rolling application of masking methodology which ostensibly protected non-targets’ data. In 2006, Google researchers disclosed that as many as 60 applications used “Bigtable” [PDF] — a proprietary distributed storage system for structured data. That number is likely larger today, but some applications have come and gone since then. What Google applications don’t use Bigtable, and are otherwise not included in the “defeat” list believed to be the applications excluded from tapping/monitoring/collection applications? We don’t know on the face of it; Google engineers do, of course, though they may not be able to communicate this publicly for proprietary and security reasons. Further, what content was monitored and collected from the initial tap to today’s partially masked state? There was a slow ramp up of the defeat list over time; the applications on the list to be masked off from NSA’s screening/collection were not present initially. We can only assume that the same challenges exist with Yahoo’s content and applications — or worse, given the business’s somewhat disorganized approach to its application portfolio up until 2012.

6) The data screened/collected including the RPCs may also include metadata — it may indicate users’ location by IP address, which in some cases is the same as a physical address. It’s not at all clear this was masked out for any user.

7) To bypass the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)  employed to secure transmissions between users and the social media businesses’ servers, the NSA tapped either private and/or leased lines directly between servers, not the public transmission lines between users and servers, in order to access Google’s and Yahoo’s content as it moved between servers. This is yet another example of the NSA ignoring property rights, though they may claim that because the taps were located outside the US they were not limited by US law.

In spite of these challenges, the media and the public continue on blithely as if there were no new problems revealed this last week with regard to the NSA’s behavior.

What should truly shake them up is not merely the threats revealed so far, or the initial angry reaction of Google engineers shared by the Washington Post in the 30-OCT revelatory article.

It’s the persistent and increasing anger of Google engineers who are now going public, though speaking not for Google but as individuals about the breach of Google’s systems by the NSA. The degree of anger suggests there is far more to this story than appears on the surface. What would torque off engineers enough to be so deeply angry, so very openly?

As @Public_Archive tweeted earlier this week,

We’ve reached a point in history where the writings of JG Ballard & Philip K Dick have clattered into the quotidian realm of realism.

Be afraid; the horror is no longer a mere story. Happy much-belated Halloween.

The Shell Game the Government Played During Yahoo’s Protect America Act Challenge

In his opinion finding Protect America Act constitutional, Judge Reggie Walton let his frustration with the way the government kept secretly changing the program at issue.

For another, the government filed a classified appendix with the Court in December 2007, which contained the certifications and procedures underlying the directives, but the government then inexplicably modified and added to those certifications and procedures without appropriately informing the Court or supplementing the record in this matter until ordered to do so. These changes and missteps by the government have greatly delayed the resolution of its motion, and, among other things, required this Court to order additional briefing and consider additional statutory issues, such as whether the P AA authorizes the government to amend certifications after they are issued, and whether the government can rely on directives to Yahoo that were issued prior to the amendments.

The unsealed classified appendix released today (the earlier released documents are here) provides a lot more details on the shell game the government played during the Yahoo litigation, even with Walton. (It also shows how the government repeatedly asked the court to unseal documents so it could share them with Congressional Intelligence Committees or other providers it wanted to cooperate with PAA).

I mean, we expected the government to demand that Yahoo litigate blind, as it did in this February 26, 2008 brief arguing Yahoo shouldn’t be able to see any classified information as it tried to represent the interests of its American customers. (PDF 179)

In the approximately thirty years since the adoption of FISA, no court has held that disclosure of such documents is necessary to determine the legality of electronic surveillance and physical search. Similarly, there is of course a long history of ex parte and in camera proceedings before this Court. For almost three decades, this Court has determined, ex parte and in camera, the lawfulness of electronic surveillance and physical search under FISA. See 50 U.S.C. § 1805(a) (“the judge shall enter an ex parte order as requested or as modified approving the electronic surveillance” upon making certain findings); 50 U.S.C. § 1824(a) (same with respect to physical search).

Under the Protect America Act, then, the government has an unqualified right to have the Court review a classified submission ex parte and in camera which, of course, includes the unqualified right to keep that submission from being disclosed to any party in an adversarial proceeding before this Court.

But we shouldn’t expect a FISC judge presiding over a key constitutional challenge to have to beg to learn what he was really reviewing, as Walton had to do here. (PDF 159-160)

The Court is issuing this ex parte order to the Government requiring it to provide clarification concerning the impact on this case of various government filings that have been made to the FISC under separate docket.

[snip]

lt is HEREBY ORDERED that the government shall file a brief no later than February 20. 2008, addressing the following questions: 1. Whether the classified appendix that was provided to the Court in December 2007 constitutes the complete and up-to-date set of certifications and supporting documents (to include affidavits, procedures concerning the location of targets, and minimization procedures) that are applicable to the directives at issue in this proceeding. If the answer to this question is .. yes,'” the government” s brief may be filed ex parte. If the government chooses to serve Yahoo with a cop) of the brief~ it shall serve a copy of this Order upon Yahoo as well: .

2. If the answer to question number one is “no,” the Government shall state what additional documents it believes are currently in effect and applicable to the directives to Yahoo that are at issue in this proceeding. The government shall file copies of any such documents with the Court concurrent with filing its brief. The government shall serve copies of this Order, its brief, and any additional documents upon Yahoo, unless the government moves this Court for leave to file its submission ex parte, either in whole or in part. If the government files such a motion with the Court, it shall serve a copy of its motion upon Yahoo. The government shall also serve a copy of this Order upon Yahoo, unless the government establishes good cause for not doing so within the submission it seeks to file ex parte.

This is what elicited the government’s indignant brief about actually telling Yahoo what it was arguing about.

As a result of the government’s successful argument Yahoo had to argue blind, it did not learn — among other things — that CIA would get all the data Yahoo was turning over to the government, or that the government had basically totally restructured the program after the original expiration date of the program, additional issues on which Yahoo might have challenged the program.

Perhaps more interesting is that it wasn’t until Walton ruled on March 5 that he would not force the government to share any of these materials with Yahoo that the government finally provided the last relevant document to Judge Walton, the Special Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis. (PDF 219)

On January 3, 2008, the Attorney General signed the “Department of Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” which purported to supplement the DoD Procedures (“Supplement to DoD Procedures”), a copy of which is attached hereto as Exhibit A. The Supplement to DoD Procedures concerns the analysis of communications metadata that has already been lawfully acquired by DoD components, including the National Security Agency (NSA). Specifically, the Supplement to DoD Procedures clarifies that NSA may analyze communications metadata associated with U.S. persons and persons believed to be in the United States. The Supplement to DoD Procedures does not relate to the findings the Attorney General must make to authorize acquisition against a U.S. person overseas

This is particularly suspect given that one of the changes implemented after the original certification was to share data with CIA, something directly addressed in the memo justifying SPCMA to the Attorney General’s office (and a detail the government is still trying to officially hide).

Now, to be fair, in the original release, it was not clear that the government offered this much explanation for SPCMA, making it clear that the procedural change involved making American metadata visible. But the government very clearly suggested — falsely — that SPCMA had no Fourth Amendment implications because they didn’t make Americans overseas more likely to be targeted (which the government already knew was the key thrust of Yahoo’s challenge).

The opposite is true: by making US person metadata visible, it ensured the government would be more likely to focus on communications of those with whom Americans were communicating. These procedures — which were approved more than two months, one document dump, and one court order agreeing to keep everything secret from Yahoo earlier — were and remain the key to the Fourth Amendment exposure for Americans, as was argued just last year. And they weren’t given to even the judge in this case until he asked nicely a few times.

This was the basis for the dragnet that still exposes tens of thousands of Americans to warrantless surveillance. And it got briefed as an afterthought, well after the government could be sure it’d get no adversarial challenge.

Monday Morning: Tectonic Shift

Last week after the artist Prince Rogers Nelson died, a segment of the population were mystified by the reaction to his passing. They’d missed impact this artist had had on music which happened concurrent with a paradigm shift in the entertainment industry. Prince rose in sync with music videos in the 1980s when musical artists became more than sound alone.

Music television has since collapsed as anyone who watched MTV and VH-1 since 2000 can tell you. Programming once dedicated to music videos became a mess of unscripted reality programs and oddments, punctuated occasionally by music specials, chasing an audience which increasingly found and consumed music on the internet.

This weekend, though, marked another shift. R&B pop artist Beyoncé released a ‘visual album’ on HBO on Saturday evening entitled ‘Lemonade’. The work was available exclusively through Tidal after its HBO premiere until midnight last night when it was released on Apple iTunes. This is the first music collection released in this manner, using a cable network not previously dedicated to music in tandem with internet streaming and download sales.

I won’t offer any analysis here about the album; you’re not looking if you do not see at least a fraction of the deluge of reaction and think pieces responding to Beyoncé’s latest work. I will say, though, that like Prince’s Purple Rain in 1984, this collection of work will have long-term impact across not only music but the entire entertainment industry.

Let’s launch this week’s roundup…

The Dutch pull a Lavabit-plus
Encrypted communications network Ennetcom was shut down on Friday and its owner arrested. Dutch law enforcement claimed Ennetcom was used by organized crime; its owner is accused of money laundering and illegal weapons possession. The network relied on servers located in Canada, where law enforcement has cooperated with the Netherlands by copying the information on the servers. Unlike the former secure email provider Lavabit in the U.S., it’s not clear there was any advance request for information by way of warrant served on Ennetcom in either the Netherlands or in Canada. Given the mention of illegal weapons, one might wonder if this seizure is related to the recent prosecution of gun smugglers in the UK.

Time for ‘Spring Cleaning’ — get rid of digital dust bunnies
Seems like a surprising source for a nudge on this topic, but the Better Business Bureau is right to encourage cleaning and maintenance. If you read Marcy’s post this morning, you know failing to use adequate passwords and firewalls can be costly. It’s time to go through your electronic devices and make sure you’re using two-factor authentication where possible, freshly reset strong passwords, and on your network equipment as well as your desktop and mobile devices.

Planning for your funeral – on Facebook?
A BBC piece this past week noted that Facebook will eventually have more dead users than live ones. Which brings up an interesting question: how do you want your digital presence handled after you die? Do you have instructions in place? Keep in mind, too, that your social media could be mined to recreate an online personality — your personality. Do you want to live forever in teh toobz?

Investigation into Flint’s water crisis continues
A Michigan legislative panel appointed by Governor Rick Snyder will hear from more state and local officials today in its fifth such meeting to investigate the Flint water crisis. Snyder is conveniently out of the country trying to drum up business in Europe — and conveniently not drinking Flint’s water.

Odds and sods

• Waiting for word on Yahoo’s final bidders list (Bloomberg) — No word yet on who will remain among the 10 first-round bidders offering between $4-$8 billion.
• German regulators won’t approve recall and fix of VW’s 2.0-liter diesel-powered Passat (Bloomberg) — And yet the U.S. is going forward with VW’s proposed fix for 2.0l vehicles? Odd, given Germany’s less-stringent approach to automotive emissions compared to U.S. and California in particular.
• A UK-based inquiry found widespread emissions controls failure (Phys.org) — By widespread, I mean “not a single car among the 37 models involved in the study met an EU lab limit for nitrogen oxide emissions under normal driving conditions.” VW’s emissions controls defeat was just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s your Monday. Have at it!

UPDATE — 5:25 P.M. EDT — Oops, the auto-publish feature failed me today. I wasn’t able to come back and check the egg timer on this post and it got stuck in the queue. Oh well, better luck tomorrow morning!

Monday Morning: The Urge to Merge

In my eyes, indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face, lies the snake
The sun in my disgrace

— excerpt, Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

Looks like this week is all about mergers. Enjoy this simulation on replay several times while listening to Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun while we dig in.

Roll Call

• Yahoo’s vulnerability brings all the nasty suitors to the yard (MarketWatch) — If Daily Mail wins, Yahoo will be one massive tabloid, and Tumblr will become a cesspool. Bidding’s open until next Monday; what other potential buyers may emerge this week?
• Big names in hotels to join after shareholders approve Marriott offer for Starwood Hotels (UPI) — The vote came last Friday after Chinese insurance holding group Anbang withdrew from bidding.
• Merger of beer producers SABMiller and A-B InBev still in holding pattern (Milwaukee Business Journal) — The deal is languishing for approval by South Africa’s Competition Commission. Part of SABMiller was once South African Brewing.
• UK balks at Hutchins and Telefonica tie up (Reuters) — Cousins across the pond better watch out; this proposed merger, even if shot down by regulators, portends another telecom marriage ahead. With UK’s Competition and Markets Authority recommending a spin-off of either Three Mobile or O2 mobile network business in order to approve the deal, a divestment of one of these may happen anyhow.

The Yahoo and Hutchins-Telefonica deals bear scrutiny for their potential for mass surveillance depending on how the proposals play out. Yahoo could end up operating under UK laws, and some part(s) of either Hutchins or Telefonica could end up with a non-UK or non-EU partner.

All of these proposed mergers were in the works before the Panama Papers were released; none them appear to be motivated solely by tax reduction, but instead by economies of scale and weak market conditions. It’d be nice if executives of all companies raking in profits realized that failing to pay their hourly workers well has a direct impact on overall market demand. Their businesses could retain autonomy instead of spending time and money on M&A they could spend on employees’ wages.

Speaking of Panama Papers: revelations still shaping policy and politics

• U.S. Treasury still working on tax rules to reduce tax avoidance and evasion by offshoring (Bloomberg) — Many large holding company structures use intra-group loans to move money out of the U.S. The new rules which may limit these moves may affect not only U.S. corporations but foreign corporations with subsidiaries in the U.S.
• UK’s PM David Cameron facing heat about tax avoidance strategies used by his family (Scotsman) — Strategies included a tax-free gift of 200,000 pounds to Cameron from his mother. He is supposed to appear before Parliament for questioning.
• Mossack Fonseca still getting hacked due to poor security response (The Register) — At what point do we ask if MossFon is really just a honeypot, given continued insufficient security?

Just for fun: Rockets!
If you didn’t watch SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch on Friday, you really ought to make some time to do so for entertainment purposes. The first stage of the rocket returned successfully for reused, nailing a landing on a drone ship — a DRONE SHIP AT SEA. I missed the fact the landing pad was a drone vessel when I watched the first attempts. It’s a really narrow thing, landing on a speck of a pad in the ocean which is pushed around a bit by ocean currents in spite of the drone ship’s programming and/or remote control. (I would love to know who named the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ and why…)

What’s similarly remarkable is the SpaceX team — their excitement is off the map, rather like watching a K-12 FIRST LEGO robotics competition than an aeronautics business at work. Note in the video the team’s reaction just seconds (about 27:30) to the first stage return landing; it’s as if they KNEW they had it nailed before it happened. Wouldn’t you love to know just how they knew?

Also for grins: compare SpaceX’s landing on Friday (start at 23:48 into video) to competitor Blue Origin’s recent rocket return. Blue Origin is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; the return is so smooth and slick, but it’s in the west Texas desert where potential disruption of the landing has been minimized. Important to keep in mind that SpaceX actually delivered a payload after reaching orbit, where Blue Origin is still limited to sub-orbit elevation.

With that our week’s been launched — let’s go!

Friday Morning: Far Over Yonder

It was rough road this week, but we made it to Friday again for more jazz. Today’s genre is ska jazz, which will feel like an old friend to many of you.

The artist Tommy McCook was one of the earliest artists in this genre. Just listen to his work and you’ll understand why he has had such a deep and long-lasting influence on contemporary Jamaican music.

Let’s get cooking.

Apple pan dowdy

• Need a hashtag for NotAlliPhones after FBI says hack only works on “narrow slice” (Reuters) — The method offered by a third party to open San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c won’t work on later phones like the iPhone 5s in the Brooklyn case, according to FBI director Jim Comey. While it may be assumed newer technology is the barrier, this could be a simple line in the sand drawn by the FBI so as to limit potential risk.
• Yet another pearl-clutching essay asking us if Apple went too far protecting privacy (MIT Technology Review) — This is the second such POS in this outlet in the last couple of months. Oh, by all means, let’s risk exposing hundreds of millions of iOS users to any surveillance because law enforcement needs access to information they didn’t have 20 years ago.
• Apple has complied with government requests to crack iPhones 70 times, beginning in 2008 (Mac Rumors) — The first request, believed to have occurred while George Bush was stil in office, arose from a child abuse and pornography case. In a case like this where children may have been endangered, one can understand the impetus for the request. But maybe, just maybe, Apple was so firm about the San Bernardino iPhone 5c is that Apple knows the government has gone too far after nearly eight years of compliance.
• And for a change of pace, a recipe for Apple Pan Dowdy. Don’t fret over the pastry flour; just use all-purpose and not bread flour.

Leftovers

• Yahoo up for bids, Verizon interested (Reuters) — The same telecom once in trouble for using persistent cookies is interested in a search engine-portal business which may offer them access to non-Verizon customers. Plan ahead for the next level of consumer tracking if Verizon’s bid wins. Bidding deadline has been extended from April 11 to the 18th.
• Households at bottom income levels can’t afford food, housing (Vox) — Can’t understand why the rise of angry white man candidates? This is one big reason — things are getting much worse for those who can afford it least. And nobody working in Capitol Hill or the White House seems to give a rat’s whisker.
• Banksters blame Hollywood for lack of interest in dodgy subprime automotive bonds (Indiewire) — Investment banking firm Morgan Stanley credits the film The Big Short, based on Michael Lewis’ book about the 2000s housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis, with spooking investors away from subprime automotive bonds. By all means, let’s not look in the mirror, banksters, or at the inability of working poor to make ends meet, increasing likely uptick in automotive loan defaults.
• Venezuela makes every Friday a holiday (Bloomberg) — The deep El Nino cycle caused drought conditions, substantively lowering reservoir levels. President Maduro is asking large customers to make their electricity in addition to declaring every Friday for the next two months a work holiday to conserve energy. Clearly Venezuela needed investment in solar energy before this El Nino began.
• Researchers found people do stupid stuff when they find a flash drive (Naked Security) — After sprinkling a campus with prepared USB flash drives, a study found nearly half the people who found them plugged them into a computer, ostensibly to find the owner. DON’T DO IT. If you find one, destroy it. If you lost one, consider it a lost cause — and before you lose one, make sure you’ve encrypted it just in case somebody is stupid enough to try and find the owner/look at the contents.

HIGHLY EDITORIAL COMMENT: Bill, STFU.
Just because a single African American author called you “The First Black President” doesn’t mean you are literally a black man (and the label wasn’t meant as a compliment). Your massive white/male/former-elected privilege is getting in the way of listening to people you helped marginalize. You cannot fake feeling their pain or triangulate this away. Just shut up and listen, if for no other reason than you’re hurting your wife yet again. (Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. This opinion may differ from those of other contributors at this site. YMMV.)

Phew. Hope you have a quiet, calm weekend planned. We could use one. See you Monday morning!