Monday, December 21, 2015

Why don't fair coin tosses “add up”? Or… is “gambler's fallacy” really valid?

I am posting this answer here because I just joined the Philosophy website on StackExchange even though I have posting and comment privileges on other StackExchange sites. The question is quoted below:

I have always been perplexed by a seeming paradox in probability that I'm sure has some simple, well-known explanation. We say that a "fair coin" or whatever has "no memory."
At each toss the odds are once again reset at 50:50. Hence the "gambler's fallacy." After 10 heads, the odds of another head are still said to be 50:50. The same after 20, 40, 80... heads.
Yet we also know that the series will converge upon an equilibrium of heads:tails. And indeed this is countable in fairly short order. The convergence appears pretty quickly.
How can both be true? Isn't there something in the physical series of tosses that "remembers"? Isn't there necessarily some slightly better chance of a tails after 10 heads?
How does logic resolve this absolute randomness in the particular events with a general law of convergence? I imagine this must be a well-known issue. I suppose it raises the larger issue of what sort of "causality" probability is.
Note that I do not know symbolic logic so, embarrassingly, formal demonstrations are beyond my ken.

There's a very simple answer that Marilyn Vos Savant wrote in her Parade Magazine column years ago. The answer is that each individual toss of a coin has a 50/50 probability, but these odds do not apply in aggregate!

Who'd 'ave Thunk it?

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Is There A Way To Keep Very Noisy Mailing Lists Out Of Your Gmail Inbox And Still Participate In Them?

I am trying to keep a noisy mailing list out of my Gmail inbox (and I don't want to switch to https://Inbox.google.com just yet). It's not a noisy list per-se; there's a lot of signal (good information) but I'd prefer to keep it out of my inbox, except for the few posts that I participate in. I don't see a way to do this, which has convinced me to use Google's Inbox app.

Google Inbox combines many similar emails into bundles, either from a mailing list but also by the type of message, for example, groupon deals) into a single item in your inbox. It's basically a way of creating email filter rules but at the same time, alert you when there's a new message (new mailing list post, new groupon) without crowding your Inbox with each new message.

By the way, does anyone else have a huge Gmail inbox? Mine has 300,000 unread messages, going all the way back to 2005 when I first created it. Thank you to the poster from alt.games.mame who sent me that precious invited, back when Gmail was invitation only! It just got out of control and unmanageable. I do skim over all of the subject lines and read emails directly but I don't open reach one.

Clintonemail.com Server Port Scans, DiG DNS Lookups, Nmap Scan


I did these scans on March 23, 2015. I've had this saved in my blogger drafts for awhile, but I thought I would go ahead and release it. Note that there's no RDP port open, as was reported. It was probably closed soon after clintonemail.com reached the news. All ports were closed, apparently.




C:\Documents and Settings\newadmin>dig clintonemail.com any

; <<>> DiG 9.9.5 <<>> clintonemail.com any
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- 61432="" id:="" noerror="" opcode:="" p="" query="" status:="">;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;clintonemail.com.              IN      ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
clintonemail.com.       7199    IN      NS      ns16.worldnic.com.
clintonemail.com.       7199    IN      NS      ns15.worldnic.com.
clintonemail.com.       7199    IN      MX      10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net.
clintonemail.com.       7199    IN      SOA     ns15.worldnic.com. namehost.worldnic.com. 114021113 10800 3600 604800 3600

clintonemail.com.       7199    IN      MX      10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net.
clintonemail.com.       7199    IN      A       208.91.197.27

;; Query time: 78 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 23 12:31:50 Eastern Daylight Time 2015
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 260






C:\Documents and Settings\newadmin>nslookup -type=mx clintonemail.com
Server:  google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address:  8.8.8.8

Non-authoritative answer:
clintonemail.com        MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net
clintonemail.com        MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net

C:\Documents and Settings\newadmin>nmap -sT clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.ne
t -vv -p 443,110,25,2525,465,587,993,995

Starting Nmap 6.01 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2015-03-23 12:38 Eastern Daylight Time
Warning: Hostname clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net resolves to 2 IPs. Using 208.65.145.2.
Warning: Hostname clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net resolves to 4 IPs. Using 208.65.144.3.
Initiating Ping Scan at 12:38
Scanning 2 hosts [4 ports/host]
Completed Ping Scan at 12:38, 0.27s elapsed (2 total hosts)
Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 2 hosts. at 12:38
Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 2 hosts. at 12:39, 11.09s elapsed
Initiating Connect Scan at 12:39
Scanning 2 hosts [8 ports/host]
Completed Connect Scan at 12:39, 3.00s elapsed (16 total ports)
Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net (208.65.145.2)
Host is up (0.047s latency).
Other addresses for clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net (not scanned): 208.65.144.2
rDNS record for 208.65.145.2: mxl145v2.mxlogic.net
Scanned at 2015-03-23 12:38:54 Eastern Daylight Time for 15s
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
25/tcp   filtered smtp
110/tcp  filtered pop3
443/tcp  filtered https
465/tcp  filtered smtps
587/tcp  filtered submission
993/tcp  filtered imaps
995/tcp  filtered pop3s
2525/tcp filtered ms-v-worlds

Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net (208.65.144.3)
Host is up (0.047s latency).
Other addresses for clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net (not scanned): 208.65.145.3 208.65.145.2 208.65.144.2
rDNS record for 208.65.144.3: mxl144v3.mxlogic.net
Scanned at 2015-03-23 12:38:54 Eastern Daylight Time for 14s
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
25/tcp   filtered smtp
110/tcp  filtered pop3
443/tcp  filtered https
465/tcp  filtered smtps
587/tcp  filtered submission
993/tcp  filtered imaps
995/tcp  filtered pop3s
2525/tcp filtered ms-v-worlds

Read data files from: C:\Program Files\Nmap
Nmap done: 2 IP addresses (2 hosts up) scanned in 14.80 seconds
           Raw packets sent: 8 (304B) | Rcvd: 2 (72B)


How To Tell Which Version Your Windows 10 DVD/ISO Is

There are a few different ways that I've found in my time testing, remotely deploying (and uninstalling accidental installs, gulp!) in my time at Atlanta I.T. Service in Lawrenceville, Georgia (which is a great company to work for, by the way) to be able to determine which release your build of the Windows 10 DVD or the ISO 9660/UDF image is. Since we only have two major RTM and post-RTM builds, one of the below methods should work and make things simple.

Open the ISO9660/UDF file in 7Zip. Extract the file located at sources/Setup.exe and run Grep/Strings on it: This seems to show the most accurate release number, including an internal build number. I have yet to install this ISO, so I am not sure if the 151029 number is indicative of it being a 10.0.10586.29 build number. The command below uses Sysinternals' strings program, in case you work in a high security environment that only allows signed/whitelisted executables:
> strings setup.exe | findstr -i 10\.
10.0.10586.0 (th2_release.151029-1700)

DLL Method: Once you've extracted the files from your Windows 10 ISO file, find at any DLL file in the Sources folder. Right-click it and choose Properties. Then click the Details tab. Under Product Version or File Version, it will show the build number:




Sources/Ws.dat: This file is in the sources folder. This file is in the .inf format. Open it in Notepad and it will show the build in the ClientVersion field. Note that in the 10240 build this file was empty, but going forward it might be used in the future.
ClientVersion=10.0.10586.0

Sources/Idwbinfo.txt: This file is in the sources folder. Open it in notepad and it will show the major release. th1_release is for 10240 and th2_release is 10586. The TH(N) naming scheme refers to Threshold, eg. TH2 is Threshold 2:
BuildBranch=th2_release
Sources/schema.dat: This file is in the sources folder. It's a binary file, but you can still open it in notepad. Search it for the string version and you'll see the full build number

Sources/sxs/microsoft-windows-netfx3-ondemand-package.cab: This file is in the sources/sxs folder. Open the file with 7-zip, and the file names will show the Windows build number:

amd64_addinprocess32_b77a5c561934e089_10.0.10586.0_none_0d954895973e1712

Here's my copy of the Media Creation Tool, version 10586, which as of December 17, 2015, will still download a build 10586 ISO. If you have the original July 10240 Media Creation Tool, it will download the RTM build 10240 ISO.