The Hunt for Dark Breakfast

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-...

I give away the software which does the following. I get this (and a lot more) for every host on my network, and I know what every host is.

    # peers upstairs-roku.m3047 +addr +serv
    dns.google [8.8.4.4]                                              domain [53]     
    dns.google [8.8.8.8]                                              domain [53]     
    athena.m3047 [10.0.0.220]                                         domain [53]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.133]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.134]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.135]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.137]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.138]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.139]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.140]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.142]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.143]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.144]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.46.228.145]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.169]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.176]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.178]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.185]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.186]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.187]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.188]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.193]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.196]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.201]                       https [443]     
    mediaservices.cdn-apple.com [23.213.34.203]                       https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [35.81.198.46]                         www [80]        
    ec2-35-86-100-253.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com [35.86.100.253] psbserver [2350]
    austin.logs.roku.com [35.212.27.142]                              https [443]     
    scribe.logs.roku.com [35.212.34.174]                              https [443]     
    austin.logs.roku.com [35.212.72.105]                              https [443]     
    austin.logs.roku.com [35.212.119.44]                              https [443]     
    display.ravm.tv [35.212.178.254]                                  https [443]     
    logs.netflix.com [44.226.179.188]                                 https [443]     
    logs.netflix.com [44.228.67.58]                                   https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [44.229.50.4]                          www [80]        
    logs.netflix.com [44.229.122.169]                                 https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [44.232.75.216]                        www [80]        
    api.roku.com [44.249.213.211]                                     https [443]     
    nrdp.prod.ftl.netflix.com [45.57.40.1]                            https [443]     
    nrdp.prod.ftl.netflix.com [45.57.41.1]                            https [443]     
    nrdp.push.prod.netflix.com [52.24.26.117]                         www [80]        
    logs.netflix.com [52.33.247.19]                                   https [443]     
    themes-service.sr.roku.com [54.200.214.141]                       https [443]     
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.135]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.144]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.145]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.165]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.169]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.170]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.172]                     www [80]        
    occ-0-1009-1007.1.nflxso.net [198.38.112.178]                     www [80]        
    mdns.mcast.net [224.0.0.251]                                      mdns [5353]     
    239.255.255.250 [239.255.255.250]                                 ssdp [1900]

But I have my neighbors to thank for really showing me where their priorities lie: the plague of rabbits which was ignored for three months until it was so bad that they collected over 30 rabbits, the person who threw burnt moulding from inside his house over the fence into my yard before he finally set the house on fire for real but the police didn't want to see the moulding or take a police report and wanted me to go talk to them. Just a couple of highlights.

In this case I called public health and building inspection agencies and asked them what sort of ongoing inspections there were for clinics and other medical facilities. That turned up databases online, and keywords which turned up other databases.

What was the germ (pun intended) of this inquiry? Several years earlier, sitting in the waiting room of a different clinic, and the linen supply company pushes a cart through (gets buzzed through to the back) to collect the dirty linen, wearing gloves. Like they did this every day. Many years ago, the memo taped to the doors to a lab wing at a biotech: "gloves must be removed when greeting visitors". Various reports over the years concerning improperly sterilized dental instruments.

Couple of years ago the latest doctor who I fired started talking colonoscopies. I asked some basic questions like how do they get paid? How much do they get paid? Who inspects their facilities?

He took great umbrage at the notion that the doctors were getting "bounties" for nipping pieces of tissue for lab review, refused to discuss that. (Tell me you know something without telling me you know something.) He also took umbrage at the notion that his clinic wasn't "clean" and that it was inspected regularly... didn't say by whom.

So here's the deal. Here in Washington State, USA his clinic gets a "wet work" inspection, just like a slaughterhouse or restaurant, as part of the occupancy / doing business license. But there is no ongoing inspection, and fuck no there is no "safe to eat here" poster in the window of his clinic.

It gets more interesting when you start looking at the datasets an inquiry like that turns up. Like: how many deaths / hospitalizations are there per 1K procedures? Actuarily we have a number. Now clinics, at least the ones doing things on a regular basis, have to report adverse events leading to hospitalization: the reporting rate is impossibly lower than the actuarial rate, complications leading to hospitalization are not being reported. But.. there's more! The State collects "foreign contamination" stats from pathologists; you can look at this by pathologist, if they do enough of them. The majority of pathologists scoring colonoscopy samples report ZERO foreign contamination; among the pathologists actually reporting, the rate for presence of foreign contamination is around 25%.

Maybe there should be a WebDevice which you can buy which plugs into a USB port and does all the things (for the things plugged into it) and exposes a "webdev(ice)" to the browser? There's an overengineered solution. Nonetheless in an industrial situation the things are exposed to the controller, not to the machines on the floor. [Edit: Not strictly true, they may be published as visible "tags" through various mechanisms.]

How about wifi?

There's a nasty shear layer / fault here. Don't build a house right on top of it.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/some-notes-on-palantir/

I will take a certain level of incompetence over outsourcing adjudication (and the priors for that, data) to private industry. Outsourcing isn't going to eliminate incompetence it just moves it beyond petitioning for redress as a citizen. And a few other things.

  FILL IN THE BLANKS:
  ___-XXX-XX09 [don't know]
  XXX-_X_-3X4X [don't know]
  XXX-XXX-01__ [don't know]
  2XX-___-XX8X [don't know]

If a competent professional sets it up blind (no information whatsoever disclosed to the challengee) to capture the entire entered telephone number that is because there is an explicit desire to capture all of the entered data.

Do they have morals, and are those morals aligned with patriotic allegiance to the USA? Asking for a friend.

This started because there was an option to do [black box process] with a phone. "But you can always show up in person (snerk snerk)." (it's a web site, it doesn't really talk in the first person or say "snerk") "Fine, I'll show up in person." "Alright, you'll need to print a document first... hang on a moment... give us your phone number. Oh sorry [black box process] says to tell you we don't recognize your phone, and we can't give you the doc." That's the gist of it. The black box process has been jacked into the process at the very beginning of the kill chain.

I've got to renew my drivers license in the next two months, we'll see how things go at the DMV.

[0] The Post Office is where I've gone to renew my passport.

Oh wow. Except for those secrets.

This post has been condensed due to character limitations on HN posts.

[...]

What's happening is that private entities are curating the databases and operating automated adjudication services which the government contracts to utilize. "But it's little things, administrative things." Yeah maybe, but look where they are in the kill chain. During approximately the week surrounding 15-May-2026 I was denied the "privilege" of scheduling an appointment at the United States Post Office by one of these "administrative things" and there is no particular reason to think that the government runs this service themselves, relying entirely on compute and data which they control. So THIS is how the woodpecker destroys civilization; or at least our representative democracy. There is no appeal. There is no overt denial at the time of service either.

Here's how it works in real life:

The United States federal government operates Login.Gov, a single signon service for federal agencies and their customers. I went to Login.Gov to associate an additional federal agency's web service with my existing account. This agency wanted to reverify my identity, so there were instructions to supply the identification code on a picture ID and some other information and then they'd send me a document to print out with a barcode on it and then I was instructed to take that to the Post Office where it would be adjudicated, and underpants or something. Oh but one more thing. Before we give you that document to print out, can you give us a phone number? It has to be one we know about... but we're not going to tell you anything about the one we want you to tell us about. This occurs AFTER all personally identifying information required to populate the form has been collected. I entered the three phone numbers which I use or pay for, and none of them matched. "Try again!"

No phone number match, therefore no ability to complete the work to make an appointment at the Post Office for the actual adjudication of my id.

I have been disenfranchised, severed from my government.

Is there anyone on the planet who hasn't received a spam at some point saying "You have won $100, you just need to complete this survey to receive it." If you're foolish enough to take the survey, it never ends it just keeps asking questions. Forever. (And uses your computer to do other things in the background. If it suckas you deep enough into sunk cost fallacy, it'll probably ask you to tell it the phone number it's thinking about, your dog's name, your grandma's gay biker name...) I'd like to say "you've had your fun, it's time to come clean" but there's nobody to say it to. Oh well, I said it.

Normally if consumer information is utilized to deny some contract or authorization with financial implications, the law requires the entity which issued the denial to provide the identity of the service they relied on. Furthermore the law requires the service provider to allow you to review the information concerning you which they have on file. But there was no denial; and whether the decision has financial impact is debatable. Unsurprisingly and disappointingly Login.Gov does not provide this information. Lacking the ability to review the information, I can only say that the phone numbers are ALLEGEDLY unrecognized. The truth is, based on several interactions, that Login.Gov customer support doesn't know who the data provider(s) or processors are (but they'll eagerly make up plausible sounding things).

There is no appeal or redress.

[...]

I would be happy to discuss this further with somebody at Login.Gov or GSAIG who has actual authority.

Canonical full original version is here: http://consulting.m3047.net/dubai-letters/voter-id-industry-capture.html I've posted it here as completely as possible because I welcome discussion / questions and I don't want it to "disappear".

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238426

Points: 2

# Comments: 8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202894

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I've got a legacy tag cloud curation tool for random collections (each collection gets its own id) of URLs. It IFRAMEs each URL to present it; no whining. I've used it for classifying technical docs, photo libraries (then I used the tags to train an image classifier), and to present an analysis of a customer's web site.

It's written in Perl, and (still) runs on modern Perl. Make friends and maybe I'll toss the code your way and help you with your project.