Comments
echo • June 29, 2018 4:35 PM
@Now I’m hungry
Pest! I looked too and this may the first squid recipe I like the look of. It’s usually squid as an ingredient on a pizza when visiting semi-vegetarian friends. This makes me desirous of squid. Hot, crunchy, and savoury squid. I could eat a whole bowl of those.
Alyer Babtu • June 29, 2018 5:26 PM
I could eat this too, but of course only because it has turmeric, and that’s really healthy.
PeaceHead • June 29, 2018 5:51 PM
All that flavour is coming from the spices.
I bet human flesh would taste just as good if similarly marianaded in that stuff, turmeric or not. But you can be sure I won’t be pulling an Hannibal Lector on anybody’s parent or kid or on any squid.
SUPER QUANTUM INTERFERENCE DEVICE! (he, had to say that).
I’m on the side of the Cephalopods whom I hope soon quickly alter their own DNA to incorporate cnidaria (jellyfish) stingers. A couple of weeks in the hospital in severe pain might reduce people’s appetite for one of the earth’s most sophisticatedly intelligent non-human beings.
On the topic of attribution of authorship or of behavioral authorship… yes, this is a security thing…
PREMISE:
1) DDoS attacks demonstrate that hundreds or even thousands maybe millions of machines can be taken over and commanded top down to do things they were not originally designed for, whether beneficial (batman style vigilante) or not (typical malicious hackers).
2) DDoS attacks use other people’s systems unbeknownst the them usually in parallal to do the bidding of the controlling interloper and/or usurper.
3) It’s in the interests of those wishing to maintain anonymity to disguise their own identities as people, computer users, and the id’s of their machines and networks.
4) TOR and other similar stuff exists. Cryptology exists. Cryptography exists. Secret-sharing schemes exist. Evasiveness is “a thing”. Stealth Computing is not imaginary, in other words.
5) MOST IMPORTANTLY: A Stealth Computer user (“stealth computerist”) could choose to use a DDoS army of computers IN SERIES instead of IN PARALLEL.
Do you understand the implications of this?
An identity disguised by hundreds or even thousands, maybe millions of machines (+1 or -1), would be VERY DIFFICULT to acquire!!!!!!
6) After the fact, an owner of an army of compromised computers could automate the process of enhancing their capabilities to make them better at acquiring other compromised computers and ALSO to make their nested ID SPOOFING CAPABILITIES stronger and MORE STEALTHFUL en masse, synergisticly!!!!
7) Conclusion: Several million, maybe billions of computers used as bots IN SERIES as proxies for a single controlling hacker “entity” (individual or group) would be theoretically impossible to detect under certain circumstances which I believe are already prevalent enough.
So yeah, “the Russians hacked the elections” = “911 was an inside job” = “that’s just a conspiracy theory” = “the titanic is unsinkable” = “but mine goes to 11” = “he’s a man so he must have raped the lady” = “computers don’t make mistakes” = “we can control the risk” = “read my lips: no new taxes” = […]…
The details matter.
There are no Russians hiding underneath my bed.
No Americans nor Russians were harmed during the production of this post.
Details matter.
Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR
The right to view and delete personal info is here – and you’ll be amazed to hear why the law passed so fast
hhttps://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_privacy_law/
Alejandro • June 29, 2018 6:36 PM
I am writing to offer a sad farewell to an app I consider an old and trusted friend: CCLEANER
You may recall the original program was called “Crap Cleaner” by it’s creator because that just what it did. To make it respectable, of course, the name was changed to CCLEANER. It was one of the best tools ever.
But, time goes on and I found this at PCMAG:
“CCleaner, in both its standard and cloud-based versions, has been revealed to contain malware. The apps have been patched, and the server that contained the malware was shut down, and Piriform has released a guaranteed-clean update, version 5.34. Since the source of the malware hasn’t been identified, however, another attack is conceivable.”
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371155,00.asp
Well OK, they fixed it, now, right?
Answr: Maybe. Maybe not.
I downloaded a fresh copy and found it phoning home all over the place trying to “update” with persistent connections, some overseas. Sigh. It seems it’s highly “integrated” with Avast now and trying to “help” us way, way much. Anyway,
I used tcpview.exe to find the particulars and fire-walled them all. But, alas most people won’t bother.
Sorry to see you go old friend. You used to be the best.
Bummer.
65535 • June 29, 2018 8:47 PM
@ RG
You were on target.
Good going.
“California Has 48 24 Hours to Pass This Privacy Bill or Else”
https://gizmodo.com/california-has-48-hours-to-pass-this-privacy-bill-or-el-1827117016
last week squid post
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/friday_squid_bl_629.html#c6777253
The Register
“…individual is worth mentioning: Mary Stone Ross was a former CIA employee and had been legal counsel for the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and she also lives in Oakland. Mactaggart persuaded her to join the team to craft the actual policy and make sure it could make it through the system” …[But] Of course, Google, Facebook et al are going to spend the next decade doing everything they can trying to unravel it. And as we saw just last week, lawmakers are only too willing to do the bidding of large corporate donors. But it is much harder to put a genie back in the bottle than it is to stop it getting out.”-The register
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_privacy_law/
Has any CA posters tried to see their data that was shared and by who? What are the actually steps of doing so with Facebook and Apple accounts? Who can read you Gmail and which advertisers are doing so? How much control over your data do you really have?
Anybody tested CA new privacy law yet?
Weather • June 29, 2018 9:18 PM
The stuff being done by the, sorry for the hassle, tell your members to forget it, proton mail say they use rsa, and but they don’t have to, will upgrade but, you need to improve
65535 • June 29, 2018 9:21 PM
Hum, the law doesn’t start until 2020 or two years from now.
AB-375 Privacy: personal information: businesses
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB375
AB375 pdf text
“…bill would enact the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. Beginning January 1, 2020, the bill would grant a consumer a right to request a business to disclose the categories and specific pieces of personal information that it collects about the consumer, the categories of sources from which that information is collected, the business purposes for collecting or selling the information, and the categories of 3rd parties with which the information is shared.”-legalinfo.legislature.ca gov
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB375
[we better start tracking the changes now]
Wired:
[Now it is the tech giants turn at molding the actual law]
‘says Soltani: It’s easier to change. “The senate can vote on amendments and the special interests can lobby on these amendments,” he says. “The reason why we haven’t been able to do anything in privacy for 20 years is because the special interests are so powerful.” The tech industry did throw the full weight of its lobbying might—and money—at the fight against the ballot initiative, spending millions of dollars to oppose it through a group called the Committee to Protect California Jobs. They argued that the measure would open them up to liability that would hurt their businesses and their ability to hire. Hertzberg envisioned the bill as a compromise, in part, because it leaves the task of enforcing the law to the attorney general and takes the right to private action by citizens off the table, except in the case of data breaches.’-Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/california-unanimously-passes-historic-privacy-bill/
This is far from the final law.
Weather • June 29, 2018 9:52 PM
There’s a lot of catching in there for the comusure, but I think it’s the right balance, I will need to read it again, but over all it strikes a balance
bttb • June 29, 2018 10:27 PM
Remember that massive data breach at Equifax that exposed Social Security numbers and other personal information of approximately 148 million U.S. customers. From @thegrugq, 28 June:
“Equifax software engineering manager charged with insider trading for shorting stock before announcing the breach. Second SEC prosecution for the Equifax cybersecurity debacle….”
and
“The SEC alleges that Bonthu violated company policy when he traded on the non-public information by purchasing Equifax put options. Less than a week later, after Equifax publicly announced the data breach and its stock declined nearly 14 percent, Bonthu sold the put options and netted more than $75,000, a return of more than 3,500 percent on his initial investment.”
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-115
bttb • June 29, 2018 10:54 PM
A) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/world/europe/russia-britain-brexit-arron-banks.html
B) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-is-trying-to-destabilize-the-european-union/2018/06/28/729cb066-7b10-11e8-aeee-4d04c8ac6158_story.html
C) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/us/politics/roger-stone-andrew-miller-subpoenaed-trump.html
A) “Russians Offered Business Deals to Brexit’s Biggest Backer” emails suggest (Opinion Piece)
B) “During a private meeting at the White House in late April, Trump was discussing trade with French President Emmanuel Macron. At one point, he asked Macron, “Why don’t you leave the E.U.?” and said that if France exited the union, Trump would offer it a bilateral trade deal with better terms than the E.U. as a whole gets from the United States, according to two European officials. The White House did not dispute the officials’ account, but declined to comment….”
C) “A former aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime Trump adviser and self-described “dirty trickster,” was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury hearing evidence in the Russia investigation and to hand over documents, and his lawyer moved on Thursday to quash it in court.
The aide, Andrew Miller, has not been mentioned before publicly in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
Mr. Miller, a registered Libertarian, worked briefly for Mr. Stone around the time of the Republican National Convention in 2016, helping to arrange media interviews and conducting other tasks, according to a person close to Mr. Stone. Mr. Miller was also an aide on the campaign for New York governor in 2010 of Kristin M. Davis, a former madam, whose main adviser was Mr. Stone….”
Ratio • June 30, 2018 12:00 AM
Intercepted Live From Brooklyn With Sy Hersh, Mariame Kaba, Lee Gelernt, and Narcy:
[Seymour Hersh]: […] I assure you that there’s no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC, Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.
Ehm…
(Is “that did not happen” a tell, Your Eminence?)
Weather • June 30, 2018 12:48 AM
He just making a point, EU folds but the second time playing that card might not work.
RockLobster • June 30, 2018 1:01 AM
Here’s a good one, the British hacker Gary McKinnon responsible for what the US Government called the biggest military computer hack of all time claims he found evidence on NASA computers of a fleet of 8 to 10 warships already operational in space, fleet to fleet transfers and a list of non-terrestrial officers that serve on them.
<a href=”https://yournewswire.com/nasa-hacker-usa-warships/>https://yournewswire.com/nasa-hacker-usa-warships/
Zephyr4 • June 30, 2018 1:34 AM
@bttb
Equifax … Bonthu
Does that work out to a ~$2100 flutter (75000/36) ? Seems very cautious.
Matthew • June 30, 2018 2:06 AM
@RockLobster
I think McKinnon is misinterpreting the documents out of context and exaggerating his claims to the media.
The military projects are full of codenames and jargons. One reason is to confuse enemy spies if they get hold of any secret information. What McKinnon thinks is codename for a warship can actually be a spy satellite, a secret module piggy-back on the space shuttle or the mysterious X-plane. The non-terrestrial officers may be just DoD officers stationed in NASA managing the military space program.
I find it hard to believe the US has 8 to 10 space warships (assuming they are size of modern destroyers) and can launch them in secret without anybody noticing.
Firstly, you need big rockets to launch any substantial sized spacecraft. Second there is a group of amateur space watchers observing the sky. If they can spot the Intentional Space Station and other small satellites, they will spot the warship easily.
Without seeing the original files McKinnon accessed, it is hard to judge whether his claims are true. It is possible he may have stumbled upon a honeypot designed to trap hackers like him.
However to pander to my conspiracy mind, another way to think is that the warships are not of terrestrial origin but rather actual alien spaceships and the officers are alien observers stationed on Earth after making a pact with USA.
Wesley Parish • June 30, 2018 2:51 AM
@usual suspects
I just came across a complete start-from-scratch OS OS: Minoca OS. You might like to test your security chops by giving it a security audit.
Have fun!!!
Wesley Parish • June 30, 2018 3:12 AM
Just an illustration of just how powerful meta-data searches can be:
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-everywhere-using-library-science-to-map-child-separation/
Thankfully they’re using it for a praiseworthy humanitarian goal:
The result of their week of frantic research is Torn Apart / Separados, an interactive web site that visualizes the vast apparatus of immigration enforcement in the US, and broadly maps the shelters where children can be housed. The name is meant to evoke not only the families who have been separated, but the way in which this sundering rips the social fabric of our country.
Alyer Babtu • June 30, 2018 3:27 AM
@RockLobster
operational in space
Probably they listen to classics of interplanetary rock music like this on those 8 or 10 ships (grams up)
echo • June 30, 2018 4:25 AM
@bttb
The NY Times is a little behind allegations that Brexits biggest sponser, Aaran Banks, was offered a sweet deal by the Russians. Aaran denied this allegation, of course. Adding the voice of the NY Times is welcome though.
Gunter Königsmann • June 30, 2018 4:58 AM
Ever since I heard about the space troops I want to view Iron Sky again. Having said that: The EU is talking about upload filters against Copyright Infringements.
I personally think they would make it too easy to instate an censorship: First they actually hinder things from ending up in the net and secondly: there will be only a small number of authorities that has enough data about all copyrighted media, texts etc. to be able to decide if a text is copyrighted.
If all data uploade somewhere needs to be sent to a central authority that signs off this data unless the data can be easily linked to a homepage owner – that would make censorship easy.
Clive Robinson • June 30, 2018 4:58 AM
@ Ratio,
- I assure you that there’s no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC, Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.
Have you analysed the Seymour Hershy quote you posted?
Whilst the first sentance –for the public atleast– is true. The absence of such evidence in no way provides “proof” of non occurrence of such events.
It’s one of the major problems with attribution as I point out from time to time.
However due to the very very odd goings on at the DNC there is a month of very wierd behaviour, if what has been reported is true. Thus one has to ask further questions. But it gets worse the supposed joint inteligence report is nothing of the sort. Along with a whole bunch of other oddities says quite clearly that either there is mass incompetence in the US agencies and entities involved or there is some other process going on.
Thus people are going to keep digging to find out what this other process is or they are going to make certain working assumptions and arrive at certain probable conclusions, as any half decent analyst would with “imperfect knowledge”.
It appears that Seymour Hershy is walking the analyst path for now.
Alejandro • June 30, 2018 5:52 AM
<b<“Bitcoin Bloodbath Nears Dot-Com Levels as Many Tokens Go to Zero”
“Down about 70 percent from its December high after sliding for a fourth straight day on Friday,…”
“Bitcoin declined as much as 4.2 percent to $5,791 on Friday…”
Apparently, some of the lesser known systems are now worthless or close.
The technology behind BC is certainly marvelous. But, it’s not money. The block chain was used to create a payment method, like a check or MO, that’s all.
Digital currency has been riddled with crime and corruption since day 1.
A few folks certainly got rich from our modern day tulip mania. A lot got less rich.
Clive Robinson • June 30, 2018 6:16 AM
@ echo,
The NY Times is a little behind allegations that Brexits biggest sponser, Aaran Banks, was offered a sweet deal by the Russians.
There is perhaps an series of “coincidences” that might be of interest.
First see who connects the running of the British Broadcasting Corporation to the running of the New York Times (hint he got out before Savill hit the fan). In the past his attitude towards the EU would have been described at best as cool.
Secondly see who was the richest man in the world but is still the richest man in Mexico and the largest share holder of class B shares in the NYT… He owns much of Mexico’s telecoms industry and has other intetests that would favour Brexit from both a business and political asspect…
As I said could just be coincidences… Speaking of which there is another interesting coincidence between the BBC and pay pal… These odd coincidences are so frequent they make an “evens bet” look impossibly long odds in comparison.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Thompson_(media_executive)
Clive Robinson • June 30, 2018 6:45 AM
@ All,
With regards the recipe, a couple of things not mentioned.
Firstly when cleaning squid there is a membrane problem that you need to remove. It can be quite hard work if you do not have the right tools. One of which you dont get heard mentioned often is a clean wooden broom handle… I kid you not.
Secondly I find that chilly flakes sold in the West are lacking in depth of flavour, one way to get the balance back is Sichuan pepper corns you grind fresh,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuan_pepper
On a similar note if you can get hold of fresh lemon grass you can add it to the hot oil a little befor the garlic for the second fry.
Speaking of which, few people have more than one wok in the west, also they generally don’t have the ability to heat them to the dull red heat that gives the subtle caramelisation you get. Whilst the heat issue I can not solve for you, the two wok problem can be solved with kitchen paper. First a dry wipe to remove the old oil, then a just damp with brine wipe will help remove any other organic components, followed by a dry wipe with a little granulated salt to finish the “quick clean”. All this with a little practice can be done in just a few seconds.
Lastly things to serve with the squid, more mortar and pestle ground sichuan pepper finly sliced spring onions (scalions) and a dip of finly sliced lemon grass in small lime juice with either a little mirin or light soy sauce.
They work realy well as “bar food” so an appropriate light or blond beer suitably iced to wash things down works well as with most food of this type.
Oh and importantly make sure you have more squid preped and ready to go 😉
Weather • June 30, 2018 6:51 AM
TPPPA matched against the EU its norrowing the battle fields, but I’m guessing you asked to much and wouldn’t sacrifice, that area is held off for 100 years if the EU gets in 20 years if there is tomoil, so now what angle are you pushing
echo • June 30, 2018 8:08 AM
@Clive
Yes it’s all very murky isn’t it?
Your recipe sounds wonderful although to accompany it I prefer a none alcholic cool drink or wine. Prodded by your comment on wok burners I did a search just in case a decent indoor wok burner was commercially available. Nothing sparang up but a chef who is also an engineer has built his own 22,200 BTU wok burner. He asked himself the question “Is this safe?” followed by “Probably not”, accompanied by a gallic shrug.
Rock Lobster • June 30, 2018 9:24 AM
@Alya Babtu @Mathew space warships do sound a bit far fetched but I do remember about 20 years ago someone from NASA talking in relation to the stealth aircraft saying something like, we started the stealth project in the 1970s. Obviously what we are working on now is classified but I can say, if you can imagine it, we are doing it. So you just never know lol.
Wetsuit • June 30, 2018 9:52 AM
@PeaceHead : (SUPER QUANTUM INTERFERENCE DEVICE! (he, had to say that).
The best “super quantum interference” device is a pair of cheap welder’s glasses. They can be gotten for $low-bux from safety equip manufacturers or on Amazon in fashionable form factors. Just make sure the IR is shade 5.0 or better – for those nasty little photons. Takes 15 mins for existing quantum to die, so wear well in advance of family outings. Peace out PeaceHead –
Clive Robinson • June 30, 2018 10:14 AM
@ echo,
Nothing sparang up but a chef who is also an engineer has built his own 22,200 BTU wok burner
Been there but for different reasons…
What you need is to use either lump charcoal or a mesquette wood burner with high airflow. Kind of a miniture iron smiths forge.
A few years ago I and a friend needed a way to heat a few iron rivets to orange heat to make repairs to a steam boiler.
What we did was take a barbeque “chimney starter” to turn into a “flu burner”. Everything needs to be stainless steel or better metals and good quality “kiln ceramic”. You take the starter, knock out the inadiquate grate and replace with “piano wire” thats around 2mm or more thick and spaced around 8-10mm. You then build a base with kiln bricks and the “fire putty” used around cast iron fire places. In the base you have your “forced air” channel we used a “space heater blower” to provide the forced air.
Not only did it produce enough heat to get the rivets more than hot enough a couple of tests using a ceramic furnace cup alowed us to melt down quite a lot of “scrap” that was around into “pigs”, thus making it more financially attractive to dealers…
It was fun but some later experiments by my friend using various “cutting gasses” as an “add mixture” to the air flow did make me want to be somewhere else say a good country mile or three… My friend has gone on without accident to make various jet engines with quite considerable output power[1], so he had the “luck of the Irish” along with the “casual shrug of the sholders”.
[1] He has built a “jet powered motor bike” with an unknown top speed for various reasons such as not enough road and it wanting to leave the ground… Also not being “street legal” does kind of hamper the testing 😉
Humdee • June 30, 2018 10:17 AM
An interesting legal case that discusses how Cellebrite technology is used in a child pornography investigation. The relevant discussion is on page three though the entire read up to page 9 is relevant for anyone interested the the intersection of law and technology.
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/17-1672-opinion-below.pdf
Wetsuit • June 30, 2018 10:36 AM
@ all:
The human brain is nothing more than a quantum computer:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/
The next step is obvious:
Quantum brain –>> photons –>> external quantum memory
Effective crypto will be gone before we know it …
echo • June 30, 2018 11:09 AM
@Clive
I did wonder. The first thing I looked for was a charcoal burner. There is a cast iron Foker gas burner (suggested in the video comments) but it says little about its heat output or installation issues. I have wondered whether a plasma furnace could be used for central heating or a kettle. I don’t know if the engineering or maths works though. All this stuff is rather fun to boggle at. I wonder if a decent show could be produced with engineering challenges requiring some imaginative make it up as you go along inventiveness?
@Wetsuit
The “quantum brain” idea does seem to be gaining steam as theory and planned studies what build up. I hope we don’t have another EM drive fiasco.
Volt • June 30, 2018 12:02 PM
Oh that quantum brain stuff is as old as the street.
People who actually understand the very basics of von Neumann’s machine, enriched with qubits or not, together with understanding how biology booted up from geochemistry, understand that brain and computer are still worlds apart. Non-local connection is one fly in the ointment, so elements introducing Bell’s theorem to fast look-up tables at least hint at heading in the right direction. But nevertheless the difference remains as fundamental as running on order versus running on chaos.
Matthew • June 30, 2018 12:10 PM
@Rock Lobster
No need to imagine. Just search for X-37 space plane on your favourite search engine.
Boeing X-37
The Air Force’s secretive spy plane returns after 718 days in space
As I mentioned in the earlier post, it is hard to hide with amateurs and other governments watching the sky but there is little information of its capabilites or what the military is planning to use it for so far.
@Clive
I think the squid membrane you are refering to is the squid’s skin which is removed in step 1 of the recipe.
It is mentioned in the another page of the same news site that the skin adds a bitter taste to the squid when cooked. (Bruce had linked to this URL in an earlier squid post.)
Sichuan pepper is not a good substitute for chilli flakes as both ingredients taste different. (Though the pepper would go nicely with fried squid.)
You can try to make your own chili flakes if you think the supermarket’s product is not to your taste.
Alyer Babtu • June 30, 2018 12:57 PM
@ all quantum brains
It would be interesting to see if Carver Mead has said anything about quantum theory in biological brain systems. I looked a bit but didn’t find anything, beyond his and Fedorico Fagin’s work on neuromorphic computing and analog VLSI, which seems to be quantum in a different, “classical”, sense. But Mead writes in his book Collective Electrodynamics that a lot of physics is more understandable if quantum phenomena are used as starting points.
Hmm • June 30, 2018 1:00 PM
@Alejandro
You should probably disable the auto-update if that’s what’s scaring you.
You chould post the “suspicious” IP’s that CCleaner is trying to update from, if serious.
Whois and see if any of your hand wringing is actually warranted, rather than assuming the worst?
It’s a UK company and they have regional download mirrors like anybody does.
As far as anyone has publicly come forward on this, Ccleaner has not been hacked since the initial incident last year – so if you’re going to break the story of a new incident ongoing you probably want to get your ducks in a row and verify they’re actually ducks.
Right now the 5.35 version doesn’t seem to do what you describe.
Martin • June 30, 2018 1:18 PM
@Alejandro
You comments on CCleaner are a 100% right on target. It has been a valuable & use tool. But, no longer can it be trusted for the reasons you stated. I recently tried to reinstall the Pro version (a licensed program I have paid for) and because I missed seeing an obscure box that needed to be “unchecked” Avast anti-virus was also installed. How can any software company be trusted when they install software through a barely visible backdoor of another software package that has been properly purchased and licensed…if it can’t be trusted then it is clearly a significant security risk.
Wetsuit • June 30, 2018 1:24 PM
@Alyer Babtu
In terms of human intellect, it never really made sense to them, that is in light of the classical, simple chemical explanation of things …
Quantum made it all suddenly fit into place.
Alyer Babtu • June 30, 2018 1:47 PM
Apologies – spelled Federico Faggin’s name badly incorrectly above.
Alejandro • June 30, 2018 3:16 PM
@hmmm
Please use CCleaner if you wish. I have for many years, and still do, with enhanced security.
Like almost everything it’s changed.
I am sincerely disappointed about the changes. Like I said, to me it’s an old friend who has lost his way.
Bat Conley • June 30, 2018 5:32 PM
The CEO of Kairos says the company will not sell facial recognition software to law enforcement, noting that the technology would be abused.
He stated:
Having the privilege of a comprehensive understanding of how the software works gives me a unique perspective that has shaped my positions about its uses. As a result, I (and my company) have come to believe that the use of commercial facial recognition in law enforcement or in government surveillance of any kind is wrong — and that it opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.
To be truly effective, the algorithms powering facial recognition software require a massive amount of information. The more images of people of color it sees, the more likely it is to properly identify them. The problem is, existing software has not been exposed to enough images of people of color to be confidently relied upon to identify them.
And misidentification could lead to wrongful conviction, or far worse.
[…]
There is no place in America for facial recognition that supports false arrests and murder.
Or is there? I’m sure some other company will step up to fill the need.
Clive Robinson • June 30, 2018 7:11 PM
@ echo,
I wonder if a decent show could be produced with engineering challenges requiring some imaginative make it up as you go along inventiveness?
There have been a couple that could be combined, such as the original (UK) “Scrapheap Challenge” with (thr US” “Mythbusters”, but it would be missing the quintisensule third element that would be something new. There was a program on UK TV some years ago that lasted a series or two that had experts from the Open University stranded on an island and without anything modern technology just the sort of junk you might find washed up they had to make modern scientific devices such as a clock, that they had to synchronize to a time signal they had to build a receiver for but first work out both their long and lat… It was quite fascinating to me, but I guess it did not get enough viewer figures.
@Wetsuit
It’s funny you should mention the “quantum brain” theories, I mentioned them on this blog just a few days ago when replying to someone, along with thr quantum effects of photosynthesis, which by the way has recently been discovered to have gone down below the “red limit” with a couple of new chemicals. There is a piece on it on the same website you get the quantum brain article from.
@ Matthew,
Sichuan pepper is not a good substitute for chilli flakes as both ingredients taste different.
I did not intend to convey the idea of the pepper as a substitute for the chilli flakes, but as an addition to them. Not only does the pepper add top notes in fragrance as well as flavour packaged chilli flakes loose in long shelf storage, but it also adds a different effect on your mucosal membranes. Chilli provides heat whilst the pepper adds a mild numbing feeling.
Pepper in it’s various forms is quite interesting for culinary uses. Not only does it work to enhance cut strawberries, it also adds zing to both chocolate and salted caramel. As you probably know like Piri Piri it can also be put in ice creams, custards and other confectionary. For instance it enhances the flavour of both cinnamon and turmeric when used sparingly. I’ve even been pleasently supprised on adding it to things like pine needle tea.
To be honest I’m more worried about running out of good pepper corns than I am of salt be it either table (sodium chloride) or curing (nitrates).
Pepper has medicinal value over and above it’s culinary effects just as cinnamon and other herbs and spices do.
With regards cleaning the squid, it’s both the outer skin and inner membrane you should remove if you want to avoid the side effects.
65535 • June 30, 2018 8:16 PM
@ Bat Conley
“There is no place in America for facial recognition that supports false arrests and murder.”- CEO of kairos
“Or is there? I’m sure some other company will step up to fill the need. -Bat Conley”
A quick internet search turns up this page by Kairos:
“Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook (to name but a few) have put face recognition at the core of their business strategies.”- Ben Virdee-Chapman
Ben is the CDO & Head of Product at Kairos, a Human Analytics platform that radically changes how companies understand people.”-kairos
I am not exactly sure what the company named Kairos does but it keeps tabs on facial recognition companies in a blog. Kairos could be a software company, a investment banker that buys and sells software companies or any combination. There seems to be no shortage of facial recognition software companies.
I am leery of facial recognition companies selling poor quality products with high false positives. And, I am not happy about the amount of CMOS chips and CDDs and other camera’s in cell phones to police cars which could capture a huge number of faces and store them.
There are plenty of image editing systems out there to add to the false positives. It seem like a business ripe for abuse. It is a creepy business. Who knows what is in store of the average Jane/joe in terms of “facial regonition” and databases in the near future.
Flip • June 30, 2018 10:39 PM
DARPA Invests $100 Million In a Silicon Compiler
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333422
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will invest $100 million into two research programs over the next four years to create the equivalent of a silicon compiler aimed at significantly lowering the barriers to design chips. “The two programs are just part of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) expected to receive $1.5 billion over the next five years to drive the U.S. electronics industry forward,” reports EE Times.
Ratio • July 1, 2018 12:00 AM
Seymour Hersh on Syria: “There’s no such thing as a chlorine bomb”:
Presenter: You’ve questioned whether Bashar al-Assad was responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria last year. I know that you like to challenge orthodoxies and you suspect that governments might be covering up, but a UN report concluded it was confident Damascus had used the nerve agent sarin in the most recent attack. Who are you to disagree with those conclusions?
Hersh: Well, you’re not quite quoting it right. There was a story in the New York Times that there was a section of the report that was deleted because of the lack of confidence. There was a story just the other day, again about the Assad regime dropping chemical bombs — chlorine bombs — and there’s no such thing as a chlorine bomb. There’s just so many factual things that people say that aren’t accurate.
Chlorine is just a gas. It’s not a chemical warfare weapon. You smell it, you run away. You can’t drop a bomb on it because it would immediately burn up — it’s a very reactive chemical. And by the way there’s been studies showing … I’m just talking facts.
Ehm…
(ICYMI, a previous episode featuring His Truth-Telling Eminence Seymour Hersh and his Bullshit Brigade Buddies Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Ted Postol.)
65535 • July 1, 2018 1:48 AM
@ Clive Robinson
[2] Carlos Slim rattled around in my memory banks.
Referring you’re your observation of the NYT, Aaran Banks, Brexits, and Carlos Slim [who is quite portly] and is the richest man in Mexico with a string of banks, telecom holding including the burner phone company Tracphone via América Móvil, and other odd things it is quite a soufflé.
The name Carlso Slim rang a bell. He was mentioned in Brian Krebs series Bluetooth enabled credit card skimmers in Mexico.
Tracking a Bluetooth Skimmer Gang in Mexico
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/tracking-a-bluetooth-skimmer-gang-in-mexico/
Tracking Bluetooth Skimmers in Mexico, Part II
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/tracking-bluetooth-skimmers-in-mexico-part-ii/
Who’s Behind Bluetooth Skimming in Mexico?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/whos-behind-bluetooth-skimming-in-mexico/
Although “Carlos Slim” was mentioned tangentially when Brian Krebs bought a cheap cell phone in Mexico and maybe some Mexican hotel properties and the fact that Carlos Slim has vast holdings in telecommunications, banking, real estate and so on and I dismissed it. But, It is nice to own a large cell phone company. Sp I thought more about it and found it odd.
At the end of Krebs series “Who’s behind Bluetooth Skimming in Mexico” a shadowy stand-alone ATM business seems to be the source of infestation. Krebs seems hint to the ATM technicians were bribed to place the ATM Bluetooth skimmer in the ATM machine and possible the whole ATM company was involved.
The comments indicate the infected ATM machines could be just a money laundering service for the drug trade with one exception the new “Intacash” machines with zero ATMs infected grouped closely together.
Krebs notes:
“What follows is a look at a mysterious new ATM company in Mexico that sources say may be tied to the skimming activity.… ATM company operating in the Cancun area whose machines were apparently free from these skimming devices is a relatively new entity called Intacash. This company’s ATMs positively blanketed many of the areas I visited, particularly in the heavy tourist and commercial areas of downtown Cancun and Playa Del Carmen. For example, in a single city block on Boulevard Kukulcan in Zona Hotelera …I counted no fewer than ten Intacash ATMs, most of which were all less than a couple hundred yards from each another…Intacash.com, registered in early 2014, consists of just four Web pages. .. Intacash’s sponsor bank in Mexico… Multiva …also did not respond to messages seeking comment [Instacash clears through Banco Multiva, del Grupo Empresarial Ángeles – ed ]. Intacash may in fact be totally above-board. But beyond the above-mentioned circumstantial oddities, there are other clues that would suggest something is not quite right at Intacash. …in my wanderings around Cancun and elsewhere in the region, I used a low-balance debit card to check out multiple Intacash ATMs — each of which offers customers the option to withdraw Mexican Pesos or U.S. Dollars. Curiously, every time I used one of these machines to make small Peso withdrawals, I received a paper receipt. Each time I took out dollars, I got no receipt (this behavior was the same across multiple Intacash machines). In about one-third of the cases, after entering my PIN, the transactions were canceled without explanation (no receipt was issued in those failed transactions either)…it turns out I was not the only one who noticed this pattern…. Intacash ATMs charge nearly twice as much as virtually any other ATM company in the region for withdrawing funds — often 10 percent to 15 percent of the value of the withdrawal. I would imagine that a large percentage of consumers who put their cards and PINs into an Intacash ATM would cancel the transaction and look for another machine after seeing that withdrawing $100 would cost them $15. I began to wonder whether it was possible that Intacash was a company essentially set up to capture card and PIN data? Phony ATM companies are certainly not unheard of… How much could a fake ATM operation with 70 ATMs pull in each month? Various ATM companies I spoke with in the process of reporting and writing this story said — depending on the location — a typical machine may need between 300-500 customers per month to become profitable… If we take the low end of that, and assume that some customers (let’s say 30 percent for rounding purposes) will be repeat customers using the same card and PIN, that’s conservatively 200 cards per month per machine. Even if the average checking account tied to each ATM card had just $100 in it, that’s $20,000 per machine per month, or — again, very conservatively — about $1.5 million across all 70 machines per month. THE KEY ROLE OF ATM TECHNICIANS Several readers have asked why experts are so certain that ATM company installers …had to have been responsible for installing the Bluetooth card and PIN pad skimmers in the compromised devices I found in Mexico… To protect the security and privacy of the user’s PIN once it is entered into the system, and more importantly to protect the integrity of the PIN pad itself…When ATM makers or banks wish to update software or hardware on their machines, they must subsequently input explanation has to do with the reality that a special cryptographic key. That key — known as the “terminal master key,” is good for that machine and that machine only — and it comes directly from the manufacturer or the bank. Some banks and ATM companies go a step further, requiring all such changes to be approved by two authorized personnel. This dual-authentication approach — the use of two keys, each assigned to different personnel who must approve physical and software changes to the ATM — is designed to short-circuit any attempts by rogue ATM installers to do what’s apparently been done in many Mexican ATMs. And it is likely that the victim ATMs documented in this series were not following this best practice. Also, some readers have asked whether there was anything in particular about Mexico that made ATMs there more likely to be victimized by sophisticated ATM fraudsters who bribe their way into cash machines. I think the answer is yes and no. For one thing, the risks of doing this in the United States are far higher. It seems likely that anyone convicted of hacking cashing machines this way in the United States would be facing federal fraud charges and serious jail time here if convicted. In Mexico, it seems unlikely such a person would ever even be prosecuted, let alone jailed for any length of time. Security experts I spoke with in Mexico said it is exceedingly easy to buy one’s way out of prosecution or jail…”-KoS
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/whos-behind-bluetooth-skimming-in-mexico/
fast forward
Carlos Slim helping Instacash and it parent company Banco Multiva, del Grupo Empresarial Ángeles of the same intachash ATMs?
http://www.sinembargo.mx/20-09-2016/3094653
[machine translated]
A group of banks, among them the richest man in Mexico, Slim, pardoned by the Treasury
[Machine translaton]
Mexico City, September 20 (However) .- The Tax Administration System (SAT) exempted Banco Multiva from paying 2 million 228 thousand 405 pesos. This banking institution is part of the Ángeles Empresarial Group (GEA). It is one of the most diverse consortiums in Mexico. In addition to the bank, the group has companies in the health, hotel, financial, restaurant and multimedia communications sectors. At the end of 2015, Banco Multiva reported that its assets amounted to 69 thousand 231 million pesos. Between May of that year and the same month of 2016, the SAT condoned tax credits for two million 228 thousand 405 pesos. The history of this condonation is within the framework of a massive pardon granted in 2015 by the SAT and that researchers from the Center for Analysis and Research Fundar describe as a process to privilege powerful companies with large debts and not small taxpayers, as indicated by the spirit of these measures governed by the Fiscal Code of the Federation…”- sinembargo
http://www.sinembargo.mx/20-09-2016/3094653
It is nice to own a cell phone company to keep up on the gossip so to speak.
Zephyr4 • July 1, 2018 2:35 AM
@Ratio
Brigade Buddies
it always seems to me that Chomsky really believes what he says, whereas Hersh somehow conveys the impression, by phrasing or tone, that he is offering the hint that you’d be unwise to believe him implicitly.
Prins van de Schemering • July 1, 2018 4:08 AM
The military isn’t saying what the X-37B was doing up there for so long.
Plain as the nose on your face, isn’t it? It was smoking crack. Monkey-Brain, it got your Christmas stash.
I suspect that the US Space Force will soon be seen as a brilliant way to ingest controlled substances uncontrollably while being paid by Uncle Sam to stay out of everyone’s face.
Wetsuit • July 1, 2018 7:26 AM
@volt: “Oh that quantum brain stuff is as old as the street.”
Given what I know about those quaint little storefronts on that street, yours is an incredible pun.
Weather • July 1, 2018 8:14 AM
About the Bluetooth skimmer gang, not being able to get a receipt for US dollars could be access to the banks or lack of auditing, the 10-15% could be what they have to pay the credit card companies for insurance, I wouldn’t think they would take $100 out of everyone’s account, they would probably store the information in a database and then get a group to steal the card, and compare it to the database, using that max out the card, more than $500 limit say $3000,could be why the insurance is so high.
PeaceHead • July 1, 2018 12:19 PM
It’s funny how nobody touched what I last posted with a ten-foot pole.
Really? The silence is deafening.
https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/ec04rump/
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173108-researchers-crack-the-worlds-toughest-encryption-by-listening-to-the-tiny-sounds-made-by-your-computers-cpu
Really, no security/anti-security/security-speculative comments about botnets and nested identities of hackers? Really, no opinions whatsoever, educated or not?
I guess it is a good time for me to leave the site for a while.
Great articles, but interactively feels like a honeypot. Which, by the way, is a concept worthy of discussion in terms of security techniques.
I will still be reading the book when it comes out.
Liars and Outliers was top notch.
Hmm • July 1, 2018 12:55 PM
@Alejandro
“Please use CCleaner if you wish.”
Well it’s not so much about wishing, it’s a question if CCleaner is hacked again and is malware being installed that calls home, OR NOT ACTUALLY SO. Right? You said it was doing that and I asked if you could maybe post some of the IP’s that it’s calling home to as you say, so we can verify that it’s something beyond normal update operations. It would be a pretty big development if what you say is true, which is why we might take it seriously and investigate your claims.
Otherwise if you’re just unhappy with CCleaner for some other reason and it’s not actually hacked again or distributing malware, it would probably be more reasonable to say that instead of the as-yet loose accusations. I like to try to know rumors are true before I act on them. Given this happened to them about a year ago, your accusation carries weight. So in that light can you provide any additional details about what version you were using and any IP’s you saw it sending traffic to?
Clive Robinson • July 1, 2018 1:28 PM
@ PeaceHead,
It’s funny how nobody touched what I last posted with a ten-foot pole.
Really?
First off “where did you post it?” it’s not in this thread, you’ve previous posts hear but not about acoustic side channels.
Secondly, Acoustic Side Channels have been discussed a lot on this blog in the past.
But as with many other papers from that particular part of the Israeli academic institution concerned, we’ve discussed the “work” in depth long before the research at the Uni concerned became a researcher… That is there is a strong indication “They re-boil others old cabbage in a new pot”.
anony • July 1, 2018 2:50 PM
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) allow a verifier to pose a question to a prover, and the prover answers this question, using whatever private data needed to answer it, revealing nothing more than the answer to the question itself.
https://medium.com/qed-it/zero-knowledge-qed-it-sdk-b20a6526e0a6
Alyer Babtu • July 1, 2018 3:49 PM
@Clive @Peacehead
I wonder if Peacehead might have been referring to his suggestion of “serial DDOS” earlier above.
Clive Robinson • July 1, 2018 4:07 PM
@ anony,
What was the point to your posting other than a method to try and push an advertising “puff piece” about a collaberation with a financial institution currently of low repute?
Weather • July 1, 2018 4:30 PM
About the aqustic decoding, I type of get what they mention about mul,fmul,add, they take longer tick counts, but is short and can onto the next instructions quickly, mov?, is it more parts of the CPU being used, longer function would still have a long thin chain, mov, wide short, hlt?
Interesting research I like the part of measure voltage compared to ground, as you could use em waves and messaure the capacitor of change, a charged capacitor blocks more em, you could probably do this over km, if you had a ground return link to the person
MarkH • July 1, 2018 5:40 PM
@various:
For many people, the problem of attribution of interference in the 2016 US election is an “inkblot test” in which the answer comes from within the mind of the observer, not the objective facts.
Skeptics have reminded us … including Clive, with particular energy and tenacity … that attribution of internet attacks is a difficult technical challenge, with many opportunities for “spoofing.” I accept the validity of that judgment.
That being said, the 3-letter agencies of the US “intelligence community” likely have as high a level of technical capabilities as is presently achievable.
And when it comes to tracing internet attacks across international borders, they are perhaps the best in the world.
To my regret, the habitual secrecy of the “spooks” leads them to hide their raw data, and publish only their conclusions.
One example of this habit, is the 2014 destruction of a civil airliner over the territory of Ukraine.
US intelligence said that their satellite data showed that at the time the aircraft was destroyed, a missile was launched from territory then in the control of Kremlin-sponsored “rebels.”
As far as I know, the raw satellite data supporting this was never disclosed. The reported conclusion is consistent with an impressive collection of other evidence that the deadly missile was fired by soldiers fighting against Ukraine’s government, and indeed almost certainly by soldiers then in active service with the Russian army.
However, the concealment of the raw data has given the Kremlin an unending “talking point” in their claims of innocence.
If it were up to me, the secret agencies’ dread of revealing sources and methods would be balanced against the need to inform the public with greater openness.
But the secret guys continue to compulsively keep their secrets.
In Real LifeTM, absolute certainty does not exist, and near-certainty is so elusive that we must learn to live without it.
There are practical ways of using imperfect information, synthesizing a variety of different kinds of evidence, and weighing the balance of probabilities, to make the best available conclusions.
In practice (as I keep saying here), almost every one of us applies this kind of analysis almost every day, because we simply MUST make important decisions without “perfect information” which is never going to be available to us.
For those interested in examples, the history of the second world war offers some brilliant examples of finding truth amidst webs of fragmentary, unreliable, and deceptive information. It CAN be done.
I think that a constructive conversation could be had concerning responsibility for election interference … but not with people who start with their conclusions, and then use confirmation bias to filter all information 🙁
John Henry • July 1, 2018 6:06 PM
when do you think there might be an Intel/AMD CPU that can run Microsoft software that can’t be compromised. Will there ever be such a thing?
Alejandro • July 1, 2018 7:38 PM
@HMMM
On June 29, 2018 PCMAG said,
“We don’t recommend that you use CCleaner until the problem has been located and eliminated. If you do choose to stick with CCleaner, we advise that you immediately update to 5.34, and turn off automatic updates until this situation is resolved. We have removed the rating from our CCleaner review until we’re confident that the situation has been resolved and we’ve had time to retest the software.”
I support that statement completely. Nothing more, nothing less. Please read the PCMAG article. Apparently you haven’t yet:
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371155,00.asp
When I looked closely at CCleaner as a result of the article, I thought it had become way too intrusive and smothering my for personal security tastes and thus fire walled the crap out of it. I agree with the other poster regarding the intense “integration” of Avast AV with CCleaner is disagreeable.
Frankly, in my opinion, CCleaner works fine, if you don’t let it out of the cage. If you don’t know how to use wireshark, tcpview, tracert, a firewall and whois …maybe you shouldn’t post here.
I find your provocative, snarky misrepresentations concerning. However, in the interest of the civility this site promotes I will leave it with:
Have a nice day!
PeaceHead • July 1, 2018 8:00 PM
I was talking about ^^^that type of thing, not the acoustical type of stuff.
Meaning is derived from the continuum of the GREATER CONTEXT.
Assuming that non-Russian intelligence agencies never attack organizations and individuals is just as foolish as assuming that Russian intelligence agencies always attack organizations and individuals.
Creating a scapegoat gossip trend is statistically significant, but not logically sound reasoning. Sure, many others may jump on the bandwagon of blame, but that doesn’t change the reality of baseline true culpability (guilt). An allegation doesn’t alter the reality of causality.
Rampant defamation can result in genuine security instability, however, because people might start to get really angry and eventually get involved where maybe in the past they didn’t. What they chose to do or not do could be just about anything. Sometimes it might only be a lack of response when, say, for example, in the future the CIA/NSA gets blamed incessantly for something they didn’t do and needs Russian/German/Iranian/Korean/Chinese intelligence to stand up for them. It could happen. No organization is constantly unanimous and megalithic.
People who designate enemies out of neutral parties end up on their own island of fools.
For example, people constantly blame the CIA for anything about “mind control”. But they weren’t the only group to unfortunately venture into that dark hell of state-sponsored scientific torture. They were very much a part of a larger group. However, to the average layperson, it’s all CIA/MKULTRA and nobody else (which isn’t historically accurate).
In other words, gossip is a security risk because it rampantly alienates parties who might otherwise be future allies or neutral parties. Badmouth the same group forever even after they quit all bad behaviors and you don’t win brownie points.
Tit for tat, be nice first. Constant grudge forever–waterfall of blame–it’s not a functional modus operandi. Sometimes even people with a bad track record repent. Those who can’t cope with repentance might not be perceived as being worthy of reaping it’s benefits.
Anyways, I’m wondering what up with the DDoS stuff.
https://securelist.com/ddos-report-in-q1-2018/85373/
https://blog.verisign.com/category/security/
And we never know if sometimes the attackers are actually Man-In-The-Middle attacks via service providers themselves. Like I said in the original post about serial botnets used for disguise… think about it. Several million or more machines used in series to hide a single identity… (?!)
echo • July 1, 2018 8:10 PM
This article covering memories and anxiety caught my eye especially how some people react one way and some people react the other way.
There are also studies on how writing a diary can be counterproductiveif done in the wrong way as it can magnify trauma. Behaviour patterns are another topic which is interesting.
The spooky woo woo omg three letter agency paranoia bit about implanting false memories doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/scientists-treat-anxiety-by-implanting-false-memories
Memories have a funny way of changing as time goes by. For many people, the unpleasant memories drop away, leaving behind only remembrances that produce a warm nostalgia. For, others, notably those who suffer from chronic anxiety, the opposite may happen: Painful experiences reach out from the past with such intensity that they ravage the present day, making it impossible to overcome the emotional damage they inflict. We also know memory can be suggestible. Two psychologists at Lomonosov Moscow University have been exploring the potential benefits of implanting false positive memories in anxiety sufferers to see if they can be freed from their difficult pasts. Veronika V. Nourkova and Darya A. Vasilenko have just released a paper that suggests this can indeed work if it’s augmented with hypnosis.
bttb • July 1, 2018 8:12 PM
@Zephyr4
“> Equifax … Bonthu
Does that work out to a ~$2100 flutter (75000/36) ? Seems very cautious.”
For around $2.14 K ($75/35) he appears to have gotten himself into expensive trouble. I wonder how his short position drew attention?
bttb • July 1, 2018 8:25 PM
@echo
“The NY Times is a little behind allegations that Brexits biggest sponser, Aaran Banks, was offered a sweet deal by the Russians. Aaran denied this allegation, of course…..”
Here’s one from the Washington Post:
It appears that Brexit and ConFraudUS share a non-random number of characters.
echo • July 1, 2018 8:26 PM
@John Henry
The EU is creating a strategy for creating exascale computing. Without discissing different systems of governance and priorities and economics of various power blocs aroudn the world the basic idea creates some momentum. While this aryicle criticises the strategy as being unrealistic because the EU currently lacks a capacity in critical areas I am personally more positive.
The UK government has thrown the UK under the bus so many times with Brexit being the latest big example they can hardly criticise the EU for creating this scheme.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/european_exascale_system/
This is all very well but it ignores a few basic and salient facts. The EU is the weakest of the exascale competitors because it is not a country, but an inadequately integrated set of countries.
It has no indigenous world-class server or supercomputer system supplier, nor globally significant CPU or accelerator vendor; suffers a funding gap compared to China, Japan and the US; and has no ecosystem for the general commercial use of publicly owned supercomputers.
Yet it wants to build exascale computing capability in the same time frame as China, Japan and the US, despite these countries being two or three years ahead in their planning and project work, and without having any plans for plugging an $870m funding gap.
The described characteristics of this project are unreal.
echo • July 1, 2018 8:35 PM
@bttb
Thanks for the read. The mindsets of these people do worry me. While I don’t endorse aspects of the editorial slant thisarticle from The Atlantic contains some interesting comment on Russian disinformation (as well as RT claiming to be more honest because it doesn’t claim to be honest!) and “schizo-fascism” which is an interesting discussion in psychology and marketing and all manner of horrible things I am sure!
65535 • July 1, 2018 8:57 PM
@ Weather
If you read the entire 3 part series and the comments, Krebs was hinting at the lack of USD receipts and just electronic records to Carlos Slim’s Banco Multiva-Intacash ATMS could be a method of laundering USD from the Mexican drug trade if I am reading the piece correctly. No paper receipts to American dollar transactions would make the money harder to trace [But the bills could be marked and traced with some work].
There is a YouTube video of an ATM not giveing out a paper receipt when it should have by a random YouTube poster as a warning to travelers to Mexico.
The lack of Bluetooth skimmers on Slim’s ATMs maybe his powerful position in the banking chain. It also could be a method of kicking the knee caps of his competitor’s ATMs.
But, Krebs did not really come to any conclusion in the end of his series. Slim’s ATMs may just be paperless for USD transactions and environmentally friendly. They could be real ATMS and not credit card skimmers disguised as ATMs. I will say the hidden owners of the ATMs are a bit unusual.
In the comments a guy says he maintains the ATMs and the owners are shy of public view because of gangs extorting executives in Mexico. Further the poster says the entire ATM company is legitimate.
PeaceHead • July 1, 2018 9:38 PM
Hmm, some more interesting stuff that’s too juicy to not mention…
TOP USA WASHINGTON LOBBYISTS (2017-2018;current)
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYear=2018
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000504&year=2018
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/incdec.php
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=l&showYear=2018
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php
This has strong direct bearing upon who is pushing which types of modern and continued trends of all types.
P.S.-To the fellow advocating brain damage. You can keep your amnesia. I prefer consciousness and awareness. Resilience trumps trauma. Yet another aspect of the Cold War we do NOT need is a rejuvenation of people getting brain-damaged against their will and our psychiatrists/militaries/pharmaceuticals telling us that we needed/wanted it but just didn’t know it. Eff that. This is not 1968 all over again. No nostalgia for the Cuban Missile Crisis either. No nostalgia for losing Kennedy. No nostalgia for lynchings. No nostalgia for Vietnam war/korean war. No nostalgia for hippies getting knocked off topic into LSD la-la-land and STD cesspools.
Meanwhile, intellectualism is still alive, despite the drug companies trying to push LSD all over again this year… yeah, look it up. It’s sickening. They also claim they can give people methamphetamines to cure depression even though it’s known to cause chemical brain damage causing permanent depressive symptoms.
A Very Nice Human Being • July 1, 2018 10:11 PM
MarkH
thankyou. From what I could see, there was never any conclusive proof a civil airline was indeed shot down over Ukraine.
The footage looked like a a toy or model in a studio. Or a high school science project
Very Nice Human Being • July 1, 2018 10:22 PM
Protonmail has been getting hammered by what they consider a fairly sophisticated dDOS
Weather • July 1, 2018 11:34 PM
Received a email by ProtonMail explaining the stationery, remembered about using iptables, when it didn’t like something it changed the dst ip and incremented the TTL and sent them to India, it should have gone over 30 hops and got dropped, also use sedcat ithink to change high Linux port numbers to low windows port numbers, I should have looked up nmaps database if I carried on with that.
they said they were working with F5 and radnad, but F5 should be able to farther up the chain to do above.
Weather • July 2, 2018 12:28 AM
Is there a program that can with a small set sample generate a signature for Cisco and juniper nids and automatically updates routers in a ISP network?
Katrine • July 2, 2018 5:14 AM
RE: CCLEANER posts
This message is from a private archive. The archive may be private but the message is clear:
• Version 5.32 •
“Beginning with version 5.33, ccleaner now belongs to another company. While it still exists at it’s original location on the web, it should be noted that it may be crippled or modified in such a way where it is not worth using/trusted. It has also been reported that the install silently collects sensitive system information and sends it to Google.
Now whether or not previous versions did this or not, is another story.
Version 5.32 is retained here in a separate subdirectory just for the heck of it and just in case development ceases or becomes poisoned for some reason. While version 5.32 is the last version released before a company took control over the project, it still may collect sensitive system info to send to Google, I don’t know. Version 5.32 was a July 2017 release.”
Also – please remember that CCLEANER is PROPRIETARY.
You may wish to try BleachBit, which is open source, as well as some solid *nix command line tools. For the CLI tools you’ll probably have to use/find some scripts if you want advanced usage.
65535 • July 2, 2018 5:20 AM
Re: “Carlos Slim’s Banco Multiva”
Oh, sure.
Slim has no ties with Banco Multiva owned by Grupo Financiero Multiva [In 2006, Grupo Financiero Multiva was acquired by Grupo Empresarial Ángeles, a group of Mexican companies of great recognition worldwide and nationally; property of Olegario Vázquez Raña.], Grupo Empresarial Ángeles who list as a subidary Servicios Financieros > Grupo Financiero Multiva, a nice circle of friendly millionaires… one big happy group who vacations together and drinks together. Sure, no cross collateral at all… Oh, sure thing…
“It is the third visit that Slim makes to the native town of the businessman of Galician origin. His last stay in the mansion that the Vázquez Raña family owns in Plane was three years ago and also coincided in August. Since he arrived, Carlos Slim walked through this small town in the interior of Galicia as a fellow citizen, next to Mr. Olegario,.. he then commented that his intention was to buy a villa in this town. Vazquez Raña himself told the press… Vázquez Raña, intimate friend of Slim, spends long stays in Plane with his wife María de los Ángeles Aldir with whom he has three children. One of them, Olegario, who is already on the lists of the richest men in Mexico, runs some societies of the family holding company such as Grupo Empresarial Ángeles, a conglomerate with interests in the hotel sector, media or banking. The municipality of Avión and its neighbor Beariz, with little more than half of the inhabitants, are the two Galician towns with their hearts divided between this side of the Atlantic and Latin America. Large numbers of residents had to emigrate, especially to Mexico, and a large part of the native population lives outside most of the year. A few made a huge fortune and built here, for holidays or retirement, luxurious homes that except in summer remain closed. But the paradigm, above all of them, is the Vázquez Raña family.”-elpais
https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/08/01/gente/1501613081_347325.html
[wikipedia links to corporate holdings of a close group of mulimillioniares]:
“Grupo Empresarial Ángeles
"Grupo Real Turismo
"Hoteles Camino Real: 29 Destinos en la República Mexicana, 1 en el extranjero.
"Hoteles Real Inn: 12 destinos en la república y próximamente varios hoteles en las principales ciudades de México.
"Hoteles Quinta Real: 10 destinos turísticos en la república.
“Servicios Financieros
"Grupo Financiero Multiva
"Seguros Multiva
"Casa de Bolsa
"Operadora de Sociedad de Inversión
"Arrendadora
[and]:
“Grupo Empresarial Ángeles es una empresa mexicana que pertenece a Olegario Vázquez Raña, Grupo Empresarial Ángeles is a Mexican company that belongs to Olegario Vázquez Raña, owner of Hospitals Angeles, Hoteles Camino Real, Grupo Financiero Multiva and Grupo Imagen; multimedia company that operates Imagen Radio, RMX, Excelsior, Excelsior Television and Television Image. They have more than 14 companies dispersed in sectors of tourism, health, finance and communications. Grupo Empresarial Ángeles operates in the areas of communications, health, tourism and finance.”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Empresarial_%C3%81ngeles
“Grupo Financiero Multiva
“Grupo Multiva is a financial group that has more than 30 years in the Mexican market without mergers with foreign banks. Multivalores Grupo Financiero provides its clients with banking services and information regarding the management and search of the best returns on their investments, offering a range of alternatives on solutions and services in the financial environment. In 2006, Grupo Financiero Multiva was acquired by Grupo Empresarial Ángeles, a group of Mexican companies of great recognition worldwide and nationally; property of Olegario Vázquez Raña.”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Financiero_Multiva
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olegario_V%C3%A1zquez_Ra%C3%B1a
@65535 • July 2, 2018 6:04 AM
Vázquez Raña’s Grupo Carso. They are friends, you know? El experto eres tú, claro.
Alejandro • July 2, 2018 6:18 AM
@Katrine
One of my concerns with the current iteration of CCleaner is it’s persistent deployment of google analytics, also.
Conversely, I agree Bleachbit is a good alternative to CCLeaner. It is what it is, and does what it says. I am pretty sure Bruce has mentioned Bleachbit favorably in this blog.
echo • July 2, 2018 8:44 AM
When the solution becomes the problem the time arrives to either redefine the problem or find another solution.
Avasts track record with product acquisitions hasn’t been amazing so I was circumspect when CCleaner was acquired. This latest news made me delete CCleaner. I don’t use other Avast products either and avoid them and avoid mentioning their name.
Alejandro • July 2, 2018 9:47 AM
@ echo
Absolutely right.
I had CC fire walled up the kazoo and so am pretty sure it was ‘safe’.
But, as a matter of principle, have now deleted it entirely based on your comment regarding when a solution becomes the problem.
I will use Bleachbit, although it seems a bit less thorough than the now disrespected CC.
I feel pretty bad about this actually.
albert • July 2, 2018 2:32 PM
@Matthew, @et.al.,
I agree that it’s highly unlikely that McKinnon found information about a US space fleet. For ‘local’ activities, robotic craft are the way to go. It make no sense to put humans out there. And don’t forget, there is a US Space Force in the works right now. We don’t know exactly what he found. There may have been really serious things that could have been a major problem for the USMIL. Maybe McKinnon doctored up his revelations to make himself look crazy. Not a bad idea, if you might have the full force of the USG after you.
@Clive,
Those ‘jet engines’ wouldn’t be ram jets perchance?
. .. . .. — ….
SockMonkey • July 2, 2018 3:33 PM
To those who do not care for CCleaner’s update system.
I use the portable version and did not like getting what seemed like constant reminders to update. At first I deleted any reference to updates in the .ini file, but somehow they would eventually remind me to update. Finally I was like …duh… “read only”. Since I’ve set the ini file to read only without update references, NO More Harassment! In the past I used Avast but became disgruntled with it, when I found out they bought CC I was ugh.. I tested some other similar tools, including bleach bit, but for my needs CC still does it best.
echo • July 2, 2018 4:26 PM
I have been daydreaming about buying a dog. I am considering a King Charles Spaniel (or Cavalier King Charles Spaniel). As part of my due research I discovered they like being friends with everyone so make atrocious guard dogs. As one pet website put things the dog barks at the doorbell not because they want to warn somebody off but because they want to meet them. (A friend had an Alsation just like this who wore the trousers in the house and hogged the fire in winter which dropped the room temperature more than a poltergiest outbreak but was amazingly agreeable with guests.) As and when it seems baby cactus will need to work overtime.
Rachel • July 2, 2018 9:19 PM
Albert
“Maybe McKinnon doctored up his revelations to make himself look crazy. Not a bad idea..”
My brain presented this to me as ‘Maybe McKinnon
doctorow-ed up his revelations..’ Ha!
CCleaner. Always depressing to see seemingly quality software get shafted and in turn shaft the users. It had some good utilities. It would seem, all those data being cleansed was a valuable commodity. Why clean it when you can transfer it to someone elses computer? Significant motherlode to harvest there.
All:
In case it was opaque previously –
http://www.locklab.com is the most exemplary source of all things lockpicking. Quite masterful and comprehensive in all ways.
Love xo
MarkH • July 2, 2018 11:54 PM
@Clive:
I just read your account, of helping to repair a boiler …
I was shocked to see that it had rivets! Is this one of those wonderful British antiques from the industrial revolution?
I hope that it operates at low (or better, near atmospheric) pressure. I don’t know the relevant rules, but my guess would be that it’s practically illegal to use a riveted pressure vessel here in the US of A.
When the industrial age dawned here, deadly explosions of riveted cast-iron boilers were a ghastly commonplace, which I believe were the main motivation for the imposition of Engineering license requirements.
ClockworkZombie • July 3, 2018 12:24 AM
Personal details of Australian Republican Movement stolen
The Australian 11:39AM July 3, 2018
PAIGE TAYLOR WA Bureau ChiefPerth
@paigeataylor
The personal details of Australian Republican Movement supporters have been stolen, the organisation’s national director Michael Cooney has revealed in an email.
“We found out today that some information you shared with us for our campaign has been released without our permission,” Mr Cooney wrote in the email sent to supporters.
Answers given in the ARM’s annual supporter survey were stolen, Mr Cooney wrote, along with the personal details of the people who took part.
Mr Cooney wrote that the ARM had used Typeform, an online form service used by companies like Apple, Nike, Uber, AirBnb, Trello, the Tasmanian Electoral Commission and campaigns right across Australia, to conduct its annual supporter survey for 2017.
“Basically, Typeform was “hacked” and so someone has your answers to the survey, including your name, age bracket, gender, employment status and email. No further data was compromised,” Mr Cooney wrote.
“I’m very sorry this has happened.
“Please be assured that the information released does not include any financial information, credit card details, or passwords. The ARM’s own data stores are held separately and have not been compromised.”
In a statement to The Australian today, the ARM confirmed it was informed yesterday, July 2, 2018, by Typeform that “we are among their clients whose data was partially compromised as part of a recent breach. Some ARM supporters were among those affected by this breach”.
“The same day we informed affected ARM supporters, gave them advice on measures they can take to protect themselves from any consequences. We are very sorry this has occurred,” the ARM spokesman said.
“We also announced that like many of their clients around the world we are reviewing the future use of Typeform in our campaign activities.
“We chose a leading provider for the form service and the breach that’s occurred is not acceptable to us.
“The information released does not include any financial information, credit card details, or passwords.
“The ARM’s own data stores are held separately and have not been compromised.”
my goodness! • July 3, 2018 5:51 AM
“DEDA is a new tool for Linux that researchers have created to read and decode the forensic information, and to anonymize information to protect against tracking.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered in 2008 that nearly all major color laser printer manufacturers added tracking dots to any printed document. The yellow tracking dots were invisible to the eye and apparently added to printouts on request of the U.S. government.”
Earlier discussion of this and more sophisticated printer tracking codes. [src]
Alyer Babtu • July 3, 2018 9:28 AM
Perhaps discussed previously and well known here, but, if not, offered as looking worth reading in the never-ending router wars:
Prohias • July 3, 2018 10:18 AM
This turmeric squid recipe closely resembles an Indo-Chinese recipe for “Gobi Manchurian”. Some Indian restaurants carry it and it is an Indian dish inspired by Chinese cuisine, hence the Manchurian reference. Gobi refers to cauliflower florets, and the same Gobi Manchurian recipe is sometimes used with baby corn instead. This recipe seems like a squid equivalent.
Clive Robinson • July 3, 2018 3:59 PM
@ Mark H,
I was shocked to see that it had rivets! Is this one of those wonderful British antiques from the industrial revolution?
Yup, if you obay the rules it’s actually safe. Back when boiler making was still a true engineering skill in the UK you’ld leave the boiler outside to rust for a year or two just to ensure those rivets were steam tight.
The boiler concerned was not “cast iron” but “banded steel”, but it still had to go through the “proofing” process and passed first time B-) Which at the time was a good excuse “To make head way on a crate of Newcastle’s finest”.
It’s funny you should mention boiler explosions. As I’ve mentioned in the past that they gave rise to the first industrial regulation legislation. And in the process moved “Wheel wrights and their patens to become engineers with their books of mathmatical tables”.
For some reason we don’t celebrate the date which is a shame, because it might remind a few people what a responsability comes with being called to the proffession.
But it was not just the proffession of being an engineer it called into being. It also set in stone the demise of the “Gentleman Researcher” and gave us in turn the proffesion of “science” as a result.
However speaking of “artisans and their patens” passed down secretly from master to apprentice. It’s at that level of sophistication “programmers” –especially MFC programmers of old– appear to have got stuck upon much like a ship on the Goodwin sands in a winter gale.
I know it’s going to produce howlsof disagreement, but I think the term “Software Engineer” is not one that should be used as it cheapens the coin of other engineers.
…
Alyer Babtu • July 3, 2018 4:15 PM
@Clive Robinson
what a responsability comes with being called
In Canada, not a special day but at least a special ceremony, that of the Iron Ring
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
Signed, Skule (honorary member)
MarkH • July 3, 2018 6:14 PM
@Clive:
For me, the authentic engineers are the ones who build bridges and design aircraft, among other achievements.
The US “space shuttle” was an awful white elephant, but I remember watching the first drop test of its glide landing on TV, and thinking “those folks had to get right the FIRST time.”
Genuine engineers don’t sit there all the time running “debuggers,” saying “oh cocked it up again, got to change the design for the 193rd time…”
They must form a comprehensive understanding of their subjects, and get most of their work correct by knowledge, analysis and expertise, not by brute trial-and-error.
And when a new bridge collapses, the public won’t accept them whining: “our bridge was fine, it’s the fault of you stupid motorists drove across it in the wrong rhythm.”
Hmm • July 4, 2018 1:30 AM
@Alejandro
” If you don’t know how to use wireshark, tcpview, tracert, a firewall and whois …maybe you shouldn’t post here”
Gee, who said I didn’t use all of those?
The onus was on you, the person who said it was connecting to random IP’s, to make your case.
To be upset because someone asked you for details is clearly not on the up and up.
Hmm • July 4, 2018 1:31 AM
And yes, using the latest version and turning off auto-update is best practices for most software.
YMMV, but don’t just throw out “it’s hacked” unless you do know that’s the case.
Otherwise it’s just more chaff.
Clive Robinson • July 4, 2018 3:17 AM
@ Albert,
Sorry missed your comment on going through the 100 comments page the first time. But I’ve caught it now,
Those ‘jet engines’ wouldn’t be ram jets perchance?
No the fuel is injected from a pressurised tank, and the compressor was from a turbo charger that had been further machined. Due to the fact it’s a “plumbers delight” of mostly off the shelf components, as a demonstrator.
So it can not run for to long without over heating. Even the best of stainless steels will only take you so far in the inferno that’s a jets internals.
It’s funny but when I was younger I wished there was some way you could “get in there” to actually see things working, but the environment is just to hostile to all but the most rugged and expensive of instrumments, and they tend not to last to long if put in the wrong place.
Like many such “infernal contraptions” jets can make an engrossing hobby. I remember his “favourite squeeze” refering to it as “the other woman”. But… Engineers never realy grow up, not only do their toys get better and bigger, they just get their children to share in the fun to justify their hobbies 😉
@ Mark H,
I think you know why I call them “code cutters” not “software engineers”.
Personally I blaim a certain small handfull of people and the “Out the door today, fix in the next paid for release” mentality of the Big Iron days of IBM etc. The same mentality made sales men salivate at the potential. Hence the Personal Computer world became infected with the same malignancies and here we are today… The only reason we get patches is that the “distribution costs” are minimal.
The electronics industry learned the hard way in the 60’s and 70’s that “return and rework rates” can kill a company dead faster than an infectious disease. A big part of the problem was actually down to increasing complexity making fundemental changes necessary. Thus “tag board” construction gave way to PCBs and in turn with transistors replacing valves/tubes the size shrank even further and rework and repair was not realy possible economically or often physically. What we now call “Quality Assurance” is what in effect saved the electronics industry.
Unfortunatly every time the software industry got close to the current technology limits the hardware designers would move them. Thus the software industry never had to face the problems of “sloppy work” both in actuall design and worse the methodologies that carry forward baggage that realy should have been killed off years ago.
When you get attack vectors that work across around a couple of decades of core OS releases you would think it should act as a “wake up call”. It was after all globe spanning in it’s reach, and almost certainly was responsible for peoples deaths… Unfortunatly this time around the politicians and MSM were to closely involved and public out cry muted or deflected / defussed…
Something tells me that the software industry with poor practices and methodologies is now “to big to fail” thus will not change… Look at it the way the motor vehicle industry did. It’s cheaper to just producing crud with new bells and whistles than it is to fix underlying issues. Thus with a “no liability” policy in place with most EULAs there is no financial incentive to change the way things are currently done, from that asspect either.
Worse the Internet has removed the “Distance Costs Metric” which was one of the major economic assumptions that free/open markets could happen. Thus the reason the software industry is now only in a handful of major players hands that even Gov Regulators who are supposed to protect against monopolies and cartels are now more or less powerless against.
Alyer Babtu • July 4, 2018 4:34 AM
Big G left API that lets 3rd party devs scrape your gmail
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/gmail_api_access/
I love the justification offered by one, that without “personalization” the web would feel “oddly generic”
But isn’t an unbiased view called “reality” ?
Clive Robinson • July 4, 2018 5:09 AM
@ echo,
I have been daydreaming about buying a dog.
Unless you’ve owned one in the past “Don’t go there” unless your eyes are realy wide open.
Importantly contrary to what many think dogs are realy not that good security wise without the necessary investment in the right form of training. Worse those that have been trained are “all ways on” night and day which has significant social implications. That is the reality is few people come to your home with ill intent thus having a dog that behaves as though all people are a threat is not what visitors, neighbours and the householders want.
But if you do venture into canine waters get a “bitzer” not a recognised “breed”[1]. But if you do go for a pedigree or near pedigree look at “working dogs” not “hunting dogs” and stear away from “lap dogs” and “fighting dog” breeds. A friend that earns their living helping people train their dogs has pointed out to me that “herding dogs” like collies used for actual sheep hearding tend to be the best all round, but they do require not just a lot of excercise to be both happy and healthy but mental and social stimulation as well (and are best when there are two or more together).
In the UK people have “health care” and usually dental care from cradle to grave and thus the cost of “Vets Bills” or the various insurance “scams” for pets comes as quite a shock to the bank balance.
There is also the “age” question some breeds are short lived others are long lived thus something else that needs to be thought about carefully.
Then there is “travel” or the lack there of, most hotels don’t alow pets. Public transport busses/trains in general do not like pets, and as for airlines, best not to ask… Which means “dog sitters” and “kennels” are something you need to arrange unless you have friends prepared to “borrow” your dog. Some breeds are inappropriate for this sort of thing and can exhibit “seperation anxiety” or worse such as depression and undesirable behaviours.
Then there is what dogs do to your home… They are mobile muck magnets at the best of times, and shed hair, saliva and worse seemingly constantly… They also have teeth and claws which need to be used, and to be honest they smell especially when damp. All of which means more house work, repair and maintenance, as well as changes in your life style. Like “humans” they do need to have a bath from time to time, and this can be a very big battle of wills, as well as blocking the drain etc etc.
Dogs are also social animals that want to share in “pack” activities such as eating sleeping and relaxation with the rest of the pack which means the humans in the house. There is something quite disconcerting about a wet nose working it’s way up under the duvet and making “first contact” in the middle of the night, and the other annoying habits of keeping them off the furniture and away from your plate etc. More than a few dogs know how to open doors, get up on kitchen surfaces and into fridges and cupboards which can be messy messy messy…
Before I sound to much like I’ve got a downer on dogs, let me assure you that I have always wanted one. But having kept other animals when young I know what a responsability they are. Thus I know my life style moddest as it is is inappropriate for having a dog or these days any other pet either.
[1] For pedigree and near pedigree dogs the breeding process is “closed stud” which basically means “inbreeding” and all the ills and sins that go with it. But worse many breeders quite happily kill puppies etc that don’t come upto the “breed book” standard. In some cases like the “ridge back” breeds the desired feature is actually a degenerate mutation more politely called a “congenital defect” such as Spina bifida. Thus the breeder is looking to maintain the looks of the “defect” whilst killing off those pups that either don’t have the “look” or are suffering to badly from the “effects” of the congenital defect. Other large dog breeds like German Sheppards suffer from “hip dysplasia”, which came about due to “scored hips”. Hip dysplasia is another debilitating defect you get with the poor DNA you get with pedigree dogs.
JG4 • July 4, 2018 7:28 AM
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/07/links-7-4-18.html
…
New Cold War
Former US Envoy to Moscow Calls Intelligence Report on Alleged Russian Interference ‘Politically Motivated’ Consortium News
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Gmail messages ‘read by human third parties’ BBC (David L)
Europe is using smartphone data as a weapon to deport refugees Wired
Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition The Outline
…
echo • July 4, 2018 8:08 AM
@clive
I’m taking things slow. Baby cactus is a step up from artifical. Once I have acquired sufficent empirical evidence I am not lethal to plants I plan to expand then escalate to a fishtank (possibly) and onwards from there. For now my multi-purpose combat therapy cactus has to carry all the work.
As for the software industry (not to mention other professionals who are equally cavalier) oh well…
echo • July 4, 2018 8:44 AM
Sonic attack is mass hysteria?
After reading Rosenfarb’s statement, I am convinced that we are dealing with an episode of mass psychogenic illness and mass suggestion triggered by lingering Cold War paranoia. If these same symptoms were reported among a group of factory workers in New York or London, I think you would get a very different diagnosis, and there would be no consideration to a sonic weapon hypothesis. The initial assumption is key in driving the diagnosis. You also may have another factor at work here: government officials trying to defend their initial diagnosis.
albert • July 4, 2018 9:34 AM
@Clive,
There are quite a few folks out there who are building ramjets (actually ‘pulsejets’). They are quite simple to build, and especially to ‘scale up’. Some folks might remember the German V-1 ‘buzzbomb’ from WWII. They could fly to England with a bomb of weight 850 kg (1,870 lb), and a total weight of 2,150 kg (4,740 lb). Besides the limited life time of the pulse mechanism, the major problem is noise. ‘Loud’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Proper ear protection is mandatory, for ‘pilot’ and spectators alike. Some engineers have proposed using ramjets on commercial aircraft for added thrust at high altitudes.
@Rachel,
“…doctorow-ed…”
Ouch!
. .. . .. — ….
Alyer Babtu • July 4, 2018 12:56 PM
@echo
Obligatory
If you do get a dog, be sure to not let it near the computer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog
(required) • July 4, 2018 1:42 PM
@echo
Your conclusions are rebuffed by concrete evidence of physical brain trauma in white matter.
You can’t fake that, and mass hysteria has been definitively ruled out several times over.
bttb • July 4, 2018 4:25 PM
Regarding the Fourth of July:
“Hello, summer holiday! Time once again to head for the park or the beach or wherever children and pets run loose, barbecues scent the air, and fireworks burst spectacularly. For some of us it’s a time to gather with friends and family; for others it’s a quiet time for relaxation and reflection.
No matter what you choose to do this holiday, please consider re-reading the Declaration of Independence and recall the reason why we Americans celebrate this day. Our founders laid out in this final draft a list of offenses driving them to throw off monarchic rule….”
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/04/happy-fourth-of-july-remembering-the-why/
bttb • July 4, 2018 4:55 PM
Actions have consequences, of course. I wonder who will be on DemocracyNow.org tomorrow morning (8 am et). From emptywheel.net:
“I’d like to put a human face — my own — to the risk posed by GOP gamesmanship on the Mueller investigation.
Sometime last year, I went to the FBI and provided information on a person whom I had come to believe had played a significant role in the Russian election attack on the US. Since that time, a number of public events have made it clear I was correct.
I never in my life imagined I would share information with the FBI, especially not on someone I had a journalistic relationship with. I did so for many reasons. Some, but not all, of the reasons are:”
[…]
“I think the public deserves to see the text he sent me at 3:15 PM on November 9, 2016.
‘Off the Record
You likely don’t want to hear this anymore than I did, I have it on very good intel (A 1 if you know humint ratings) that Flynn is speaking to Team Al-Assad in the next 48 hours.
Obviously that in of itself is disconcerting on a number of levels. You can probably figure out lot more than I can'”
8 November 2016 was the USA Presidential election. More recently, last week, Ignatius, more or less, afaik, corroborated parts of that OTR message. Ignatius:
“The catastrophic war in Syria is nearing what could be a diplomatic endgame, as the United States , Russia and Israel shape a deal that would preserve power for Syrian President Bashar al -Assad in exchange for Russian pledges to restrain Iranian influence.
Checking Iranian power has become the only major Trump administration goal in Syria, now that the Islamic State is nearly vanquished. President Trump appears ready to embrace a policy that will validate Assad, an authoritarian leader who has gassed his own people, and abandon a Syrian opposition that was partly trained and supplied by the United States.”
[…]
Trump’s willingness to accede to Russian power in Syria — and to give up hard-won U.S. gains — troubles many Pentagon officials, but they seem to be losing the argument.
As Putin makes his way toward the summit stage, it’s worth pausing a moment to appreciate how deftly he has played his hand. Russia is becoming the indispensable regional balancer, playing a role once proudly claimed by the United States. Russia somehow maintains good relations with both Iran and Israel; it has growing ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; it talks with Syrian Kurds and their bitter rivals in Turkey.
Putin has a reputation as an ex-KGB thug. But his Syrian strategy evokes the subtler Chinese precept of subduing the enemy without fighting. Putin has taken a decisive position in Syria at minimal cost — with a deferential Trump now seeming ready to confirm his victory.”
And from another thread at emptywheel.net:
“I want to thank those who said kind things and even donated money to this post laying out how I ended up going to the FBI on the Russian election attack. I expected far more criticism, so I’m profoundly grateful for the support. The support has really validated my decision to come forward.”
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/04/there-are-no-heroes-in-this-story/
Everybody • July 4, 2018 6:16 PM
Trump is a Putin tool. Everyone knows that by now.
Weather • July 4, 2018 7:09 PM
Yeah I know, just a way to pass on information
echo • July 4, 2018 7:36 PM
@Alyer Babtu @(required)
Whoops. The article I linked to is over six months old. I am so embarassed. The public humliation!
PeaceHead • July 4, 2018 7:40 PM
Something very disconcerting but important to consider in the wider context of Russian allegations…
During/after the fall of the Soviet Union (CCCP), some nuclear munitions became lost and/or stolen… in other words… missing. Their locations could not be fully accounted for.
Working together to deal with the implied threat of such materials have been Russians and Americans and other nationalities working together to attempt to prevent such military munitions from ending up in the arsenals of known international terrorist organizations.
It’s important to remember this for more than 2 reasons:
1) Allegations that “The Russians” poisoned somebody is too wide of a sweeping generalisation, even for an allegation. Which ones? Even if supposedly “state-sponsored”, governments are not unanimous groups in terms of training, qualification, opinion, activity, specialty, geographic location, nor awareness.
2) Just like missing nuclear munitions, chemical incapacitating agents (poisons) can and have been stolen in the past as well. Blaming modern-day Russia for what might be use of a substance stolen from a fallen regime is not logically sound nor forensically sophisticated. Like any crime anywhere, a weapon can be borrowed, stolen, built, copied, or faked (in some circumstances).
3) All major governments have and use secretive intelligence organizations, some of which are infamous for circumventing human rights concerns to accomplish abduction, rendition, interrogation, torture, subjugation, blackmail, persuation, undermining, recruitment, or rescue.
Even some of the most reputably respected organizations have had experiences and/or members who have violated lives and laws, whether internacionally or locally on site.
4) Retaliation, even against a known guilty aggressor is often not practical nor winnable. Revenge and vengefulness begets revenge and vengefulness. Collateral damages sometimes occur. Innocent people end up harmed. Wars of propaganda damage the legacies of recorded history and journalistic integrity as well as diplomatic relations stillwithstanding.
5) Withdrawing diplomats and closing communication channels is not a way to accomplish more effective and in-depth communication, whether bidirectional or not.
6) It is not against U.S law for the U.S. federal government to publish lies and/or to disseminate misinformation via public media outlets. It’s allowed by federal law–the government is allowed to lie to it’s own people. Look it up, it’s true, and it has been occasionally documented as well.
7) Provaction can spill out of control just like chemical weaponry. Those who own weapons run the risk of them being turned against themselves via accident or usurption or depreciation.
8) The number of victims of the previous Cold War was vast. The potential number of victims of any Cold War is the total number of lives on Earth. Triggering World War III due to geopolitical instability and ending all life on Earth would be a pathetic end to yet another totally unnecessary act of war.
9) Wars of words sometimes turn into real wars. It is an act of safety-enhancement and thus a security concept to de-escallate and prevent warfare whenever the opportunity arises.
10) Every act of hostility or vengefulness has unintended consequences both technical and social.
11) Signals intelligence specialists have a right to be taken seriously when dealing with estimated threat potentials. The FBI and it’s allies is such an entity.
12) On a personal note, when I was a kid growing up during the 1980s Cold War, my friends and I didn’t think live to be adults. The Cold War was pushed incessantly via major media and the social zeitgeist. We thought for sure the world would end and we’d die before becoming old enough to prevent any of it.
We were wrong. The Cold War ended, and most of us lived to be adults. This is why I take geopolitically destabilizing allegations so seriously, especially when allegations are not 100% substantiated and are even partially rebutted by more in-depth forensic-style data.
Anyways,
May Peacefulness Prevail Within All Realms of Existence.
Weather • July 4, 2018 8:32 PM
I’m taking a risk you might be able to tr
But it isn’t sarrria, just informing that information spread, please stop the spread, but you don’t need to do that, if it is saria I will go there
PeaceHead • July 4, 2018 8:55 PM
Apparently even Google sometimes takes a step forward instead of backwards… approx 1 month ago: (Mass Surveillance / Privacy / MilSec)
‘“Google is already battling with privacy issues when it comes to AI and data; I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she added.’
Interesting read.
Monitoring whole gestalt cities automagically.
The type of stuff some claim is imaginary is behind the scenes being pushed for.
Maybe the Defense industry is who is pushing the IoT (Internet of Things) so they can have enough “inputs” for their gargantuan miltechbaby pet project.
I can only imagine what type of bizarre weird bad possible scenarios could play out if, after the fact of being built, something went wrong with such system(s).
Interoperability issues are a b****. (“breach” 🙂 )
What are your thoughts on this?
Paulo Eduardo Neves • July 4, 2018 9:16 PM
Now I understand USA bit to host the World Cup.
It will give them a hell of information
Hmm • July 5, 2018 2:28 AM
@Peacehead
If you really think the US or other actor even needs to make things up to sully Russia’s reputation as despotic gangster-oligarch oil barons writ nationale, you probably haven’t been paying much attention to the plethora of widely disseminated publicly verifiable details at each individual point along the way. Somehow.
For a current example Putin to this day denies that he meddled in any US election – at all.
We do have in fact 100% surety that it’s a lie. He also claims he didn’t annex Crimea, had nothing to do with Litvinenko or anyone else being murdered, etc. There’s actually quite a long list of things we do know and can prove that he denies anything to do with stridently.
These are called baldfaced lies. There’s a single person making them, over and over.
He trained in disinformation in one of the greater militaries to study it in history.
Literally speaking without exaggeration, and Trump is not his equal in any respect.
Of course he’s had some success. But overall his efforts have broadly failed worldwide.
Russia has earned their deserved reputation much as the US or any other nation has also.
You can either contrast the mountains of evidence in (each and every single instance of, in serial) credible accusations made against the regime against their half-baked troll factory photoshop propaganda denials, or I suppose you can pretend each as plausibly as good as the other and at some sort of logical impasse like a tenure track philosophy professor.
At the end of the day however, “someone” DID order the sophisticated poisonings of spies Litvinenko and the Scripals, and subsequently Putin and state TV both went back and forth immediately about how “traitors could expect such deaths” and that was perfectly defensible despite the usual public denials and pretense of insult at the notion.
“Someone” did annex Crimea with separatist mercenaries trucked in from “somewhere” and somehow “someone” did shoot down a civilian passenger plane with a BUK missile that independently verified evidence has determined came from a Russian separatist position where such a launcher was photographed, “somehow”…
“Someone” did in fact meddle in the 2016 US election from Russia using high level state contacts.
Several “someones” are already in jail over it with several more in the wings.
Believe what you want. Hear it from the source if you like.
Alejandro • July 5, 2018 6:35 AM
“Emergency Updater is a new feature of CCleaner that comes with its own executable file — CCUpdate.exe — and a new scheduled task called CCleaner Updater.
The integration of the Emergency Updater component in CCleaner is likely a response to the recent hack of the company’s infrastructure. Attackers managed to plant malicious code in CCleaner which was distributed for about a month from the official company website.
…..
This means that Piriform may push out updates to the program to user machines even if only the free version of CCleaner is installed on these machines.
Probably the biggest change in this regard is that CCleaner won’t delete browsing session data anymore by default. Users of the program who did not pay attention to the cleaning rules have had their browsing session deleted when they ran CCleaner.
…….
Emergency Updater is a useful feature, provided that attackers won’t exploit it successfully to push malicious code to user systems.
CCleaner users who install the program on their Windows PCs may want to disable the task to avoid this from happening.
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/25/ccleaner-5-36-emergency-updater/
I had to use AVG_Remover.exe to get it to shut up AFTER I uninstalled CCLeaner.
You be the judge.
bttb • July 5, 2018 7:20 AM
@echo, Ratio
From an @echo link above at 8:35 PM, The Atlantic and Snyder:
“In a recent talk in Washington, the historian Timothy Snyder observed that Russia’s annual budget for cyberwarfare is less than the price of a single American F-35 jet. Snyder challenged his audience to consider: Which weapon has done more to shape world events?
Snyder is an unusual historian-activist, both a great scholar of the terrible cost of 20th-century totalitarianism and also a passionate champion of endangered democracy in Ukraine and Eastern Europe—and now, the United States. Increasingly, he sees his concerns fusing into one great narrative, as methods of manipulation and deception pioneered inside Russia are deployed against Russia’s chosen targets.”
otoh, following up on a Ratio link, above at @ 12:00, from The Intercept, Scahill and Hersch:
“JS [Jeremy Scahill]: […] “And I’m wondering, a year ago, a year and a half ago when we spoke, you were very critical of the way that the broader news media was reporting on the so-called Trump-Russia affair. Has your assessment changed at all and is that a legit story?
SH [Seymour Hersch]: Wow, you go right to it, don’t you? [Audience laughs.]
Let’s just start with this premise: After 9/11, before he invaded Iraq, we were told by the American intelligence community that they had high confidence, that phrase was said again and again, that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. They’re saying now the same thing about Russia.
I have been reporting something, I’ve been watching something since 2011 in Libya, when we had a secretary of state that later ran for president, and I will tell you: Some stories take a long time. And I don’t know quite how to package it. I don’t know how much to say about it. I assure you that there’s no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC, Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.
I can also say Russia learned other things about what was going on in Libya with us and instead of blowing — oh God, this is too tantalizing. Why are you asking me these questions?
We deal with Russia a lot. We deal with Russia much more than you know. We coordinate with Russia even in the worst of times. They say deconfliction. Deconfliction, I’m going to digress, but deconfliction is the notion that we, when we’re flying, any American pilot wants to know where the Russian planes are, where the Syrian planes are, when the Iranian planes are during the war there. That war’s pretty much over. The Kurds have made a big concession. And whether you like it or not, a lot of people hate Bashar al-Assad, and they certainly, he’s despicable, but you name me a guy in the Middle East that isn’t. You know? This, the Saudis. They’re better? I mean, you tell me.
Anyway the beginning of deconfliction, it was a small group of very, very secret offices in America and our allies, the French particularly, the Brits, all of our allies after World War II, and during the Cold War, if we were going to kill somebody — and this is, I hate to say it, America does do these things — if we’re going to kill somebody, we had to set up a form to make sure the person we were going to kill, overseas maybe, wasn’t an asset one of our allies. And that’s how deconfliction started. There was just a back channel.
And so Russia deals on a very sophisticated level with the United States, with people in Israel, people in Iran, people — I mean, it’s just amazing. There is a background of cooperation and military cooperation, because despite all the feelings about Russia, they have one thing in common with us. It’s nothing to do whether you like Putin or don’t like Putin or whether you don’t like the government there or you like the government: They’re against the kind of terrorism we’re similarly against. And there was a lot of pressure on Bush and Cheney after 9/11 by the rational people in the government. The first stop should have been not to declare a war on an idea, which everybody knows how stupid that was. I mean, how are we doing? 18 years in Afghanistan, how’s it going? You know, I guess the Taliban wished they’d do the bombing against us.
Anyway, I’m trying to parse words here.
JS: I realize I’ve put you in a difficult position.
SH: The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I’m being very fuzzy about it, it wasn’t about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us.
And this is a real difficulty because it’s a story, I obviously, I did this memoir in between. I couldn’t do my Cheney book because of a source issue, and I did this memoir during that time and all that stuff, but basically I’m still doing it because it’s a great fuckin’ story. [Audience laughs.] But I can’t tell you more about it. You know, Jesus, Jeremy. Now I’m being coy — I don’t want to be coy. [Audience laughs.]
JS: There’s been 22 indictments. A lot of it is has nothing to do with the direct allegation that’s being made around the clock. There are some interesting questions about meetings in Trump Tower, particular the role of Don, Jr., Jared Kushner and others. They seem to be all somehow gravitating toward calling Russians connected to the Kremlin meeting with them, setting up meetings. General Flynn is on the phone, not so much to collude with Russia but to collude with Israel and to try to get Russia to advocate the Trump position at the U.N. while the Obama administration was still in power. It’s like Iran-Contra for dummies in some ways. Everything that we know about all of the circumstantial evidence there, are you saying that that is just that, that it’s circumstantial and they happen to be constantly having these meetings, on the phone, doing things to subvert the Obama administration before they took office?
SH: I’ll tell you what somebody told me who actually knows something —
JS: [Laughs.]…”
security • July 5, 2018 9:34 AM
@bttb
What you say sounds very reasobale and fits with what I have read consitently from a range of public sources.
The Atlantic is doubling down on exposing equality issues. A new article specifically highlights how wealth has shifted from the bottom 90% to the top 1% with a 9% “enabler” middle-class being largely untouched.
The other articles caught my eye. One Atlantic article propels the narrative how Putin has won the Middle-East. This is painted as a bad thing with Middle-Eastern politicians “warning” (or threatening?) extremist driven attacks if they don’t get what they want. An article in seperate media makes a slightly different argument that “deconflicting” and “negotiating” among Middle-Eastern players has the promise of normalising more familiar to Western audiences ideas of dispute resolutions thus placing the Middle-East more on the road to peace than jihadist driven war and terrorist attacks against the West.
I glanced at the newspapers for the first serious time after returnign from holiday. Politicians refusing to acknowledge they lied to parliament while people areharmed, ineffective electoral law, and police downgrading “rape” to “assualt”. This is the UK. A third world country in all but name.
JG4 • July 5, 2018 10:05 AM
Thanks for the great discussion. I think that someone recently mentioned printer patterns (watermarking) as tracking devices for documents. It occurred to me that any digital radio could have unique watermarks built-in. We’ve touched on low-bandwidth radio (HF, VHF) as an alternative to cell phones and the cell phone network. This may be cut from similar cloth. I’d like to know what the underlying technology is. It looks like the second link is premised on cell technology.
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https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/07/links-7-5-18.html
…
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Firefox and Chrome Pull Popular Browser Extension Stylish From Their Stores After Report Claimed It Logs and Shares Browsing History, Credentials Slashdot
Germany’s top telecoms regulator has US tech groups in its sights Financial Times
…
(required) • July 5, 2018 10:34 AM
@Alejandro
“Piriform released a new version of the program with a new digital signature, but could not distribute it to free users due to a lack of automatic update functionality.”
Basically they included an auto-update checker in their new version that wasn’t there before.
Yes, pure evil incarnate, it checks at runtime whether there are updates at specific places.
In theory you’re right, attackers could take over the update locations and push malware.
(Just like with any program that has autoupdate.)
That hasn’t happened, and you can also easily disable the update and/or monitoring.
Notice your link is from about a year ago when the original event occurred.
No malware detected since the original hack, and zero reports of new attacks AFAIK.
This is why I wanted to see which IP’s you were claiming it was looking for.
Anyway if you’re afraid of this tool containing malware and don’t need it, you’re absolutely right not to use it on that basis alone without further explanation, but so far since the original event those concerns aren’t seeming to prove substantive.
You be the judge.
Thoth • July 5, 2018 11:08 AM
@all, Clive Robinson
Making your own home-made IC chips seems to become closer to reality as someone actually took a step out to do so and even had the processes documented.
The chip looks rather basic but it’s a very good first step in the right directions.
The next step is to port a simple CPU archutecture to a home-grown chip and see how it fairs.
echo • July 5, 2018 4:52 PM
@Thoth
Wow. Just wow. This must have some of you guys thrilled to bits. Mind you, I suppose this might things into the reach of lower echolon criminals too. Would this kind of thing also open possibilities for the general enthusiast or fixer or what they call the maker community today?
Thoth • July 5, 2018 6:43 PM
@echo
I am not too worried of the minor crims and likes having access to these technologies.
What I am more worried is the major crims which we know are thr big corps, world warhawk govts, multinationals and the likes whom seek to limit our freedom and by that, when they see that someone could successfully fab chips in their backyard, they will equate it to a lost on their precious positions as “Guardians & Custodians” of such important technology and their precious vantage points of being able to choke supply, force political diplomacy, hide backdoors and force unpopular features (i.e. Intel ME/AMT) on the populace is now lost.
They will try to recover it by bribing the bigger crims to legislate into law to outlaw manufacturing in backyards and they are the only legitimate makers if important technologies or they may also use underhanded means to kill off any capable makers before they become a threat to “National and Industrial Security”.
The next step is to protect the maker community from these bigger nastier and more powerful crims that have already undermined almost all our rights.
Look at what happened to 3D printing and how the lousy excuse of gun control is used to limit “damage made by 3D printers”.
Rachel • July 5, 2018 10:02 PM
Echo
On home security. With all due respect to your desire for a furry friend. Your comment on ‘need to be safe= must get dog’ reminds me of instutionalised knee jerk thinking by FBI, Microsoft, amongst many others. Absolutely not a reflection of my opinion of you
Home security can be approached strategically, with assessment and modelling. I know you have the aptitude for this.
Clive Robinson rightly pointed out the low likelihood of criminal egress for a home property (excusing the wide sweeping nature of that statement. One can guess based on your posts, you are in England, and you’re not a high profile target, or hopefully not any kind of target – whether criminal or otherwise)
What about an infrared beam tripping a random selection from say 15 assorted growling, scuffling and barking noises. Enable it only between say 2100 and 0700 to prevent neighbours or the postman detecting the fact of it. Coupled with a motion activated flood light for night time, and a few stickers proclaiming an alarm activating a call-out security service – you’d be rather high up the fruit tree –
Persue locklabs.com for the types of door locks most infallible to picking
Create an indoor ‘moat’ that is view able from ingress points like doors or windows. Something you could easily roll in and out but is not avoidable for someone making a crash entrance.
I’m a bit vague on this but I was thinking a
wooden tray on wheels, covered in venus fly traps, xenomorph embryos or ..use some hinky thinking.
In a similar vein. Personal security is a fun topic to brain storm. While I do know martial arts, I’m not necessarily an advocate. For example, when the heat is on: someone with no martial experience has, lets say, 10 options for
responding. Someone with martial experience, has 1 or 2. Note: I’m not in the US.
There’s oft times discussion about the pros and cons of personal protection devices like pepperspray. See my comment above. The best idea I’ve seen that’s a hell of a lot more versatile and doesn’t light up problematic neural pathways for the bearer in the same way – a slim handbag hairspray. tacky sticky!
May love be with you.
Trust No. 1 • July 5, 2018 10:08 PM
@Bat Conley + @65535
Was going to save this for the next Squid(tm) but from some discussion of biometrics I just couldn’t hold it back.
From the latest in proven security methods:
https://www.biometricupdate.com/201806/biometrics-are-they-becoming-the-nirvana-of-personal-security
I’m so glad that biometrics will finally solve all of my problems.
(In reality, we call such breathless pandering “a total w@nk” ehem).
There was an apt quote from a documentary to the effect of:
“When robots rule the world, I only need to fool the robots”.
So, I can only advise to try to fool the robots now before enrolment is compulsory or de-facto compulsory to interact with government and society. For a glimpse of 5-10 years from now we only need to look to elements of India, China and Estonia.
@Bruce
Not sure if it’s been asked before, but I’m curious as to the origin of the Squid Friday. I have navigated to the first post but do not have a good grasp of the intention. I hope it was just a form of silliness to brighten the world. Please enlighten 🙂 Thanks for the public forum.
PeaceHead • July 5, 2018 10:14 PM
1) Names? (Who?)
2) Dates? (When?)
3) Physical Evidence? (What?)
4) Locations? (Where?)
5) Thoroughly detailed explanation (How?)
6) Motivation? (Why?)
Unless those questions are thoroughly answered completely with actual facts, there’s still no proof, just allegations, which are GOSSIP.
INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY IN A COURT OF LAW.
(and hopefully not a kangaroo court)
(and hopefully bolstered by non-planted DNA evidence)
Pushing the masses into enough hysteria to rekindle the Cold War isn’t fact-based science. It’s scapegoating and sensationalism and inciting fervor.
Just because somebody has committed something bad in the past doesn’t make them guilty of the next thing, no matter what.
This is just basic common sense.
Take a visit to the local prison. There are plenty of presumably guilty people there as well as some falsely accused people who were trashed by dirty cops, dirty judges, and cruel accusers. Maybe the DNA evidence that would’ve exhonerated them wasn’t admitted due to discrimination.
But the thing is, no matter who is guilty,
EACH PERSON IS ONLY GUILTY OF THEIR OWN CRIMES, NOT THE CRIMES OF OTHERS.
Constantly blaming the same group over and over without producing exacting and explicit and scientifically verifyable proof wreaks of not just a lack of forensic rigor, it wreaks of bigotry, discrimination, and a type of overzealousness reminiscent of the foolish Joseph McCarthyism.
I would rather not risk geopolitical stability for some type of pie in the sky US milint bravado while they sell the masses of us down the river, treating us like GPS goats.
Anybody can be falsely accused. Anybody can be framed. Even if somebody has done wrong in the past doesn’t mean they are guilty of what somebody framed them as doing.
People who frame others are not trustworthy.
Framing people and skipping forensic rigor is not scientifically valid nor ethically strong.
Misusing people’s emotions with propaganda is kind of a form of Civic Hacking, Social Engineering, etc.
Blind faith allegiance doesn’t solve problems, it exaccerbates them.
We need DIPLOMACY now more than ever.
Mass Deception and leading people into false narratives does not enhance security.
Even if, say for example, an accused party is actually guilty. Planting or presenting fake evidence can get the charges thrown out of court and the the guilty might go free to offend again.
And if the accused are innocent, fake and planted evidence shields the actually guilty perpetraitors who can then continue to offend and cause harms.
Or, it sets a precedent for others to mimick.
I would rather have a government and military that has valid reasons to do what is done, and then to do it well.
Xenophobia is not good policy nor valid sciencea.
gordo • July 5, 2018 11:47 PM
[Sorry for the long post; please take it as a whole]
There are no good answers and it’s not all FUD. . . . but we already knew that.
The Cybersecurity 202: We surveyed 100 experts. A majority rejected the FBI’s push for encryption back doors.
By Derek Hawkins June 11
Dan Geer, chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA, said the spread of encryption made Americans “considerably less safe” from sophisticated actors and “marginally less safe” from unsophisticated actors.
“The degree to which both the hard left and the hard right unite in ‘don’t trust this or any government,’ we are poorer,” Geer said. “Of course, that is not the fault of the cryptographers, but when someone steps up on the soapbox to say ‘I don’t want this or any government to be able to read my XYZ,’ then it would be appropriate to finish the sentence with ‘nor do I expect this or any government to protect me from digital thugs of any stripe.'”
Mr. Geer, back in 2004:
Shared Risk at the National Scale
• Traffic analysis recapitulates cryptography
• Perimeter defense moves to data
• Security & Privacy have their long-overdue
head-on collision
• Meritocracy begins yielding to governmentNo discussion of national level threat can look at the current point in time; it must instead lead its target just as a
hunter must his. In that sense, the next ten years (or less) will have the commercial sector catching up to the military in
traffic analysis just as the last ten years had that catch-up in cryptography. At the same time, increasing threat will, as
it must, lead to shrinking perimeters thus away from a focus on enterprise-scale perimeters and more toward
perimeters at the level of individual data objects. Security and privacy are, indeed, interlocking but, much as with twins
in the womb, the neoplastic growth of the one will be to the detriment of the other hence the bland happy talk of there
being no conflict between the two will be soon shown to be merely that. Finally, the Internet as a creature built by, of,
and for the technical and ethical elite being no longer consistent with the facts on the ground, its meritocratic
governance will yield to the anti-meritocratic tendencies of government(s).
https://web.stanford.edu/class/msande91si/www-spr04/slides/geer.pdf [slide 12]
https://web.stanford.edu/class/msande91si/www-spr04/
Not from Mr. Geer…
No middle ground: Moving on from the crypto wars
European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)
Policy Brief Stefan Soesanto 05th July, 2018
First, the US and European governments will lose the encryption debate – because of the absence of a viable technical and feasible political solution – and will inevitably resort to treating tech companies as non-cooperative actors that undermine national security. Second, in the short term, government agencies will increasingly turn inward while purchasing exploit kits from third party companies to circumvent encryption. In the long term, government agencies will, on a technical level, cooperate more closely domestically (namely, through convergence between law enforcement and intelligence agencies) and across national borders (by partnering with government agencies abroad). Third, the vulnerability market will increasingly be distorted, with governments paying handsomely for vulnerabilities and exploit kits, pricing out traditional bug-bounty programmes, and changing the dynamics for responsible vulnerability disclosure. Fourth, the natural alliance between privacy advocates and security researchers will shatter: privacy advocates will endorse the government’s targeted approach to circumventing encryption to combat crime, while security researchers will rail against government agencies exploiting and withholding knowledge of vulnerabilities in common software and hardware. And it remains unclear what might happen if government agencies lose their exploit kits to a hostile nation state or cyber criminal group. And, fifth, users will be the biggest losers. They will feel obliged to purchase ever more secure and expensive devices while government agencies devote more and more resources – taxpayer money – to breaking into them.
As outlined at the beginning of this paper, the encryption debate is, at its core, largely about either strengthening encryption or weakening encryption – and, so far, strengthening encryption has won every argument. However, if contrasted to the scenario outlined above, the cost-benefit analysis for continuously strengthening encryption is no longer clear-cut. It might even have the opposite effect, by making the world much less secure than allowing encryption to weaken. In sum, the current public discourse has largely focused on the mostly positive outcomes of the first crypto war, but ignores the dangers and substantial costs if governments take an alternative approach to solve the going dark/going spotty problem.
http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/no_middle_ground_moving_on_from_the_crypto_wars
Bob Paddock • July 6, 2018 6:53 AM
@Echo, @Rachel, @Clive Robinson
“Your comment on ‘need to be safe= must get dog’ reminds me of institutionalized knee jerk thinking… low likelihood of criminal egress for a home …”
Our house was saved from being robbed by our Australian Shepard, Nick.
This bread of dog is known to be EXTERNALLY protective of its pack, including the human members. My late wife Karen raised him from a puppy. I have no dought Nick would have killed anyone attacking Karen. Anyone else he might lick to death.
Houses on both sides of us were robbed, ours was left alone. Perhaps because of the eight-foot high kennel fence, made form prison grade fabric (Karen had issues with obsessiveness), with signs like “I can get to the gate in three seconds. Can you?” on each side.
Something Karen learned in her studies is never put up a “Beware of Dog” sign as that opens you up to more liabilities; “foreknowledge of possessing dangerous animal”. The more humerus [love auto-correct] signs get the point across, without the legal baggage.
Australian Shepard’s are one of Clive’s Working Class dog breads. They have boundless energy. We got Nick a Treadmill in the hopes of burning off some of his energy. We discovered what we were actually doing, was building up his endurance. :-/
As others have pointed out Dogs are a lot of responsibility and expense. They must be looked at as an other member of the family. If you are not going to treat them as such, don’t get one. If you are not going to put effort in to some Puppy and Dog Training classes, don’t get one.
If you can’t handle them when they turn teenagers (one to two years old) and forget all their training for a while, don’t get one.
Only if you want a new family member, that you can support properly, that will always greet you with love, get one.
JG4 • July 6, 2018 8:22 AM
I may have speculated on a US pivot to India when I posted the RealVision content some months ago.
https://thewire.in/diplomacy/wuhan-summit-modi-xi-india-china
…
The Wuhan understanding has created a catch-22 situation for India: It can neither afford another Doklam nor partner with China on connectivity projects for two reasons. One, the worldviews and, hence, foreign policy objectives of India and China are at sharp variance.
…
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/07/links-7-6-18.html
…
Einstein’s theory of relativity passes its toughest test yet NBC News (furzy)
Big Brother IS Watching You Watch
How Smart TVs in Millions of U.S. Homes Track More Than What’s on Tonight NYT
Only in America
San Francisco hospital treated Korean tourists’ baby with a nap and a bottle of milk formula. The bill was US$18,000 SCMP
…
echo • July 6, 2018 8:51 AM
@Rachel
I’m not getting a dog for ages because of the responsibility and expense and I obviously need to be organised with this. I never said I was buying a dog to be safe. This was likely a combination of my sense of humour confusing things and Clive jumping the gun although his observations about having a dog as part of the family versus a guard are very true.
Your general observations and suggestions are mostly where things are at. My place is a passive fortress of sorts with a reasonably well shaped benevolent environment which gives some degree of perimeter defence. I’m not super serious because this is a choice I made but it is fun.
Clive Robinson • July 6, 2018 9:02 AM
@ JG4,
It occurred to me that any digital radio could have unique watermarks built-in.
Not just digital but Any Radio can be enumerated / characterized by subtle differences.
Oh and “Any Radio” includes thos RFIDs used in ID cards, Drivers Licences, Passports and many others you would not realy want this to exist…
Using RFIDs as an example it is easy to see that their “start up” characteristics are multi level. Worse that these levels individually identify many things such as “nation” through to “individual”.
So a digital pasport contains both a chip and a tuned circuit/antenna. The characteristics of the tuned circuit/antenna are defined by the physical properties of the passport and it’s local environment. Which whilst insufficient to clearly say nation X can be used as part of weighted evidence of the nation. Which in combination with the charging circuit on the chip get things much closer. Then there are “stepping differences” in effect each revision of chip has slightly different characteristics that identify it. But also each chip has random but fixed characteristics from the manufacturing process that are enough to make “repeat matching” more than possible.
All of which means that when your passport etc is read it’s fingerprint can also be read. This is meta-data that acts as a side channel. Because it does not require the encryption key for the passport to be re-identified, just a copy of the fingerprint to compare against.
Which kind of makes “Find Fix and Finish” devices a lot more covert if people design them to be.
By the way none of this is realy “news” the TEMPEST / EmSec community has known it for atleast fourty years. But scientists have known about it for over a century.
To see why you have to go back a couple or three centuries to the idea of “Lamping” where a lamp is used at night to find game in bush or undergrowth. The light from lamp goes into the preys eyes being focused by the lense onto the retina, where it gets 180degree reflected back through the lense getting even further focused and being visable by anyone very close to the lamp. You see the same with “red eye” in photographs, “cats eyes” in roads and even “bug hunting” equipment that finds hidden CCTV cameras.
What is less well known is that an experienced hunter can tell fairly well what type of “game” the eyes are in and even the games age and sometimes sex due to “meta-information”.
Likewise all 180degree reflection systems impress meta-information on the reflected signal. This meta information is what can be used to not just identify a radio but the various modes it might be in and in some cases what signal it is receiving. This enabled the German Army Radio Service during WWII to “Find” SOE and other clandestine radio sets, “Fix” their position and send in a squad of soldiers etc to “Finish” them. Likewise the “tone” of a transmitter would to an experienced operator in another country identify the particular transmitter set, and the “fist” of the person keying the transmitter identify to the remote experienced operator who they were and in some cases a sense of the transmit operators state of mind, which could indicate if they were under duress excetra from having been captured and forced to send false information.
Post WWII technology had developed to the point where such things could be more automated and extended thus one of the more secret TEMPEST tricks was the enumeration / identification of equipment and operators that then got used as another input to “Traffic Analysis”.
Whilst this is still probably regarded as “highly classified” still in a number of countries, it is increasingly “common knowledge” to anyone who understands the science they are taught at school sufficiently to apply it to what they observe and be a little curious about. Even those who lacked the curiosity at school can pick up just about any book on Electromagnetic Compatability (EMC) or Ham / Amateur Radio equipment construction published by the likes of the RSGB or ARRL and have all the information available to them not just to “know” as theory but to “use” as practice.
echo • July 6, 2018 11:15 AM
What Clive says is also followed by “D Notice” (or whatever its modern “voluntary” equivalent is called). I forget the exact law or whether it holds water but the basic idea is that bans would be extended to the media for specific information or a scattering of information which could be “classified” or of use to “terrorists” or the “enemy”.
For a few years it was noticable that early morning Radio 5 news gave the real news and a few hours later the mainstream news was more sanitised. (I also became addicted to browsing Teletext before it went the way of all things as 1-2 pages of Teletext news in boring type gave the meat of the story without being encumbered by dad dancing journalists and emotionalism.) There was also a period of time where UK police were extremely adept at revealing their operational methods before a few days had passed or the next sanitised bulletin if they were quick off the mark.
In a previous generation childrens books and general encyclopeadias contained plenty of information including how to make nitroglycerine and compasses as well as treehouses and first aid. Today these books are absent from the shelves but we now have the internet which much more besides. The value, of course, is in “curated” information. Not everyone is an expert nor has all day to connect the dots and, of course, how material is presented is important as this can be aimed at encouraging curiosity and good things or civil strife and terrorism which is perhaps where some of the latest legislation banning materials can tip from enhancing security to becoming censorious and undermining legitimate learning and discussion which in its own way can become counterproductive as various authoritarian states tend to prove.
Clive Robinson • July 6, 2018 3:14 PM
@ gordo,
There are no good answers and it’s not all FUD. . . . but we already knew that.
Actually it kind of is all FUD in the quotes.
The reason is the old “squirrels in your head” repurposing of words. Sprcifically in this case “Privacy” and “Security”.
Privacy is generally regarded as about “individuals” not artificial legal entities such as groups, companies, corporations or regional or national governments and their component entities. To these legal not natural entities we more generally talk not of privacy but “secrecy”.
That is “privacy” is in effect a form of “secrecy” it is a “defencive measure” in the majority of cases, even though lawyers for the likes of the US DoJ want to confuse people as do those in the quotes you give.
We all have expectations of privacy by social convention. That is we do not expect people to come and look in our windows either directly with their nose pressed up against the glass with hands cupped around their eyes, or more distantly using the assistance of technology, some of which can now “see through walls”.
Our general world view and thus social convention is ‘windows are for letting light in and looking out of’. We might add lace/net curtains to make the job of those looking in harder, but they are imperfect as in general our desire for light is why we have windows in walls. We thus might and frequently do have heavier curtains for keeping light out of a room such as a bedroom or to keep light spilling out in the evenings when it is dark outside to maintain a degree of privacy.
Yes there are other reasons such as environmental issues for heavy curtains but in general the reason for curtains is “privacy” not “security”. In times past we used heavy or stout shutters for security. Shutters were in effect a physical barricade put up against the window held in place by bolts and bars. Thus a burglar or other home invader would not have the minimal impediment of windows that could be cut fairly silently or have the sound of them breaking dulled with “treacle and newspaper”, but half inch or more thick oak or similar strong wood barrier that would take time and considerable effort to break through.
Thus a difference in original intent between curtains and shutters can be seen, even though they have much in common. It is the differences that are important, and it is these that the likes of the US IC, LEOs and DoJ want you not to see when they twist the meaning of words. Worse they even want to use them to make you appear to be guilty. That is if you have shutters not flimsy curtains then you must be a criminal, deviant or someone not normal to society. In short your behaviour is used to condemn you for being “different” the dictionary has a word for such treatment it is “discrimination” and it is one of the more undesirable forms of tribalism. Think of it like blaiming an old spinster living on her own for your cold or other illness and decrying her as a witch to be killed. We see it clearly today as “being guilty of bring Muslim” or black or in earlier timrs communist or protestant or an unbeliver…
Thus whilst privacy is a form of secrecy it is a defencive measure not an offensive mesasure. Security however is both offensive and defencive, but in reality mainly offensive. It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between offencive and defencive, but a usefull rule is defensive is almost always “passive” in nature and once in place it stands doing it’s job continuously. Offence on the other hand is far from passive, it is active and generally only deployed in the face of an attacking enemy or to bring war to a perceived enemy. Importantly to this is the use of weapons. As a rough rule of thumb if you have intentions of taking offensive actions you employ “force multipliers” to increase your advantage over those you seek to attack, in general we call them weapons or say someone is “going armed with xxxx”.
What the quotes you give are trying to do is conflate a persons inoffencive social need for “privacy” with a “National Security” need to very offensively bring death and destruction to others.
That is why Dan Geer’s comments you quote above are particularly dangerous not just disingenuous.
I will not say “the man is a fool” but it is clear he has other motives that he is trying to keep hidden, and his reasons for doing so are at best questionable. Especially as he is asking for everyone other than criminals and a chosen few to give up their very important social need for “Privacy” and thus render themselves almost entirely defencless. In short his view will cause the destruction of society as we currently know it and not for the betterment of mankind in general.
So whilst it is likely Dan Geer will get to know of what I’ve said I very much doubt he will come here to reveal his hidden motives.
Hmm • July 6, 2018 5:52 PM
@Peacehead
“Anybody can be falsely accused. Anybody can be framed.”
Putin as Harrison Ford in “the Fugitive” – lol, honestly… let’s get real shall we not?
Believe what you want! Truly. Putin is hardworking friend of America’s working class!
Putin is the victim, he tells the truth because he’s “Just people” – Putin’s fine!
“People say Putin’s this and that, Putin’s KGB! Putin’s fine! He’s FINE!” -VERBATIM, US POTUS.
We’ve never been as gaslit as now. We’ve never had lower standards than now.
But let’s hold court, shall we? You desire to preserve the evidentiary record, let’s do so.
Do ANY here admit to believing that Vladimir Putin is some maligned well-meaning actor?
Put yourself on the record at your defacto assumptive logical starting position.
Let’s quibble about what’s provable. You start. Prove something wrong in the current consensus.
Begin anytime. Make your case that the consensus is wrong on any single issue and let’s entertain it.
I’ve got an open mind, but it sure seems like Vlad Putin is guilty of a series of provable things.
Trump saying “hes fine” is kind of a massive cop out and treason in one.
But you decide.
bttb • July 7, 2018 10:40 AM
Live on C-Span Radio, from Georgetown Law, 2 July, regarding Carpenter v U.S., or at the website https://www.c-span.org/networks/?channel=radio :
NOW ON RADIO, Cell Phone Data, Law Enforcement and Privacy, Part 1, STARTED 10:00 ET
“Georgetown’s Privacy Center today hosted a half-day forum on the Supreme Court’s landmark privacy ruling in Carpenter v. United States. The forum, which was broadcast on C-SPAN, brought together leading privacy experts and practitioners, including Nathan Freed Wessler, attorney for Mr. Carpenter, and Georgetown Law Professor Laura Donohue, whose Fourth Amendment scholarship was heavily cited in the Court’s dissenting opinion.
The day began with a technical primer on cell site location technology by Professor Sibren Isaacman. It followed with a policy discussion between Mr. Wessler, Professor Donohue and Professor Stephanie Pell, a former Hill staffer; and location privacy expert at West Point’s Army Cyber Institute. The forum ended with a discussion about the practical implications of the Carpenter decision featuring Matt Mitchell, a digital safety and privacy expert, Jason Downs, a criminal litigation expert, and Maryland prosecutor Todd Hesel, moderated by Jumana Musa of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Georgetown’s faculty have been deeply engaged in discussions around the Carpenter case, both before and after the decision came down. One of our Faculty Directors, Prof. Paul Ohm, wrote an excellent analysis of the decision here. You can view Professor Donohue’s brief on the history of the Fourth Amendment, cited five times by Justice Gorsuch in his dissent, here. And for a great read about cell site location technology, read this blog post by the Privacy Center’s Deputy Director Laura Moy, who worked as an analyst before becoming a privacy lawyer.
You can view the video of yesterday’s event here.”
Video Links:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?447770-3/cell-phone-data-law-enforcement-privacy-part-1
bttb • July 15, 2018 4:04 PM
@security
“I glanced at the newspapers for the first serious time after returnign from holiday. Politicians refusing to acknowledge they lied to parliament while people areharmed, ineffective electoral law, and police downgrading “rape” to “assualt”. This is the UK. A third world country in all but name.”
From this side of the pond, part jokingly and with eyes to the present and to the future, think of the phrase “proud to be a banana republican” set to appropriate music.
Anyway, one non mainstream media (MSM) source I like is DemocracyNow. For example, on 12 July, regarding USA, Russia, NATO, elections, and so on:
“AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is now flying to Britain, where he faces mass protests, and then will then go to Scotland and meet on Monday in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
To talk more about all of this, about President Trump, NATO and Russia, we’re joined by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, also co-signer of a new open letter published Wednesday in The Nation headlined “Common Ground: For Secure Elections and True National Security.” The letter is also signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, Governor Bill Richardson, the Reverend Dr. William Barber, Michael Moore, among others.
Katrina, welcome back to Democracy Now!
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL:Thank you, Amy. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you’re calling for. And then we’ll talk about your assessment of this NATO meeting.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: So, in this toxic political and media environment, our open letter is calling for secure elections and an end to the spiraling escalation of conflict with Russia. We believe you can have secure elections and avoid nuclear catastrophe. U.S.-Russian relations, Amy—and this relates to the NATO discussion—are at their lowest point perhaps in 30 years. And I think, in this country, the talk of Russia as a hostile power, as declaring war on us, I find this hyperbolic. I think we are a resilient nation, and I think some of the gravest dangers to our election system have come from the pollution of dark money, voter suppression, gerrymandering. So we need to focus on securing our elections. Let us have cyber treaties that both deal with that and, as well, with command and control.
But I also think that we need—and this is neither pro-Trump nor pro-Putin, it is simply common sense—that we need a working relationship with Russia, to dial down nuclear peril, to resolve the Ukrainian crisis, to try and bring some humanitarian assistance to Syria. There are a whole set of issues, but the nuclear issue, I think, has been forgotten by many as a truly perilous one. Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine, speaks to that. Former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry has said this is the most perilous nuclear moment he’s ever seen. And The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, as you may know, moved the Doomsday Clock—I think it was earlier this year—to suggest this is the most dangerous nuclear moment between the two superpowers, nuclear superpowers. So I think our letter is an intervention by those who don’t necessarily agree on all but understand that there is a perilous moment we need to address.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, some might be surprised that you’re saying that the U.S. is at an all-time low—well, 30-year low—with relations with Russia—
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —that what you’re describing as seeing him then as the enemy is much more what the Democrats are doing, and that what President Trump has done now, you know, saying he is not the enemy, Putin, he perhaps is a competitor, has made the NATO allies the enemy.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: So, it’s a complicated moment, as you well know. We need to keep our bearings, it seems to me, as progressives, as people of the left, as people opposed to militarism as a response to threats or challenges. And I think what Trump has done—and you see it with NATO—it is a false—his impulsive belligerence is to be, you know, kind of—I mean, he looks like America’s arms salesman as he speaks in Brussels….”
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/12/katrina_vanden_heuvel_on_nato_military
later in that show things turned to Great Britain and Trump’s visit:
“AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Brexit negotiations have been upended by a string of resignations from top officials, including former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. Johnson wrote in his resignation letter earlier this week, “Brexit dream was dying,” and “We are truly headed for the status of a colony.”
Well, for more, we go to the U.K. In London, Sheila Menon joins us, social justice activist, one of the organizers behind the Trump baby blimp. And in Oxford, George Monbiot is with us, British journalist and author, columnist with The Guardian, his latest book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. And still with us in New York, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.
George Monbiot, talk about what’s happening in Britain right now. What the American people know, we hear about the resignations, for example, of the foreign minister, Boris Johnson, and President Trump attacking the Conservative prime minister, May.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes, well, we’ve got a government in total meltdown. We’ve got Brexit chaos. We’ve got a World Cup defeat. We’ve got drought. We’ve got wildfires. We’ve got Novichok poisonings. The only thing we’re missing at the moment is a crazed orange demagogue. So, hey, thanks, guys, for sending him over. We have completed the set. It is all beginning to look a bit apocalyptic here.
I mean, the one thing that the British ruling class has been really good at is continuity. They might disparage democracy. They might make all these horrible shortcuts in terms of preventing us from having an elected second chamber, allowing dark money to govern the electoral process, but they manage to hold it together. They’ve kind of held it together since 1066.
But they are completely falling apart in front of our eyes. It’s just an amazing thing. And there have been leaked memos over the last couple of days, talking—showing that the government is making preparations for stockpiling processed food, for sticking barges in the Irish Sea covered in generators to supply our electricity. The arrangements they’ve got for creating smooth customs, once we get out of the European Union, rely on vaporware. They haven’t got any of the technology they say that they’re going to have to deploy to allow the borders to remain functional and goods to be able to pass one way or the other. The whole thing is just melting down into total confusion and apparent catastrophe. So, we’re in a very weird place. This was meant to be a very stable nation. You know, they sort of kept it running through thick and thin. Now it is literally falling apart in front of our eyes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, George Monbiot, what do you think the impact will be? I mean, earlier, Trump, yesterday, said that he always liked Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, who just resigned earlier this week. He said Britain is in turmoil. And today, the government, the British government, is expected to release its white paper setting out what Theresa May’s plan is for Britain’s relationship with the EU following Brexit.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Yeah. Well, Trump and Boris Johnson are birds of a feather. They’re both duplicitous. They are untrustworthy. They’re entirely self-interested. They’ve got no national interest in view at all. It’s entirely about what they can extract from a particular situation. And Johnson just changes his views and changes his approach according to how he thinks he can game the system. I think he might have overreached himself this time. He is probably dead, but these people do have a zombie-like quality of continually returning into politics after you think you’ve finished them off.
The government is going to publish this white paper, which is supposed to be the rational form of Brexit. But it’s already clear that it simply cannot work. It doesn’t resolve the Irish question: What do you do about the fact that there’s going to be a European border across Ireland, potentially destroying the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Ireland. You’ve got the republic to the south. You’ve got Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, to the north. There are huge sectarian divides. Those were kind of sorted out by the Good Friday Agreement. That is now in serious jeopardy. We simply don’t know what we’re going to do about customs. What we had was a massive campaign in which none of the detail was discussed, in which people were induced to vote leave through a few trigger words, a few symbols and sensations and slogans. But the really important stuff is in the detail, how are you going to do this. And no one has a flying clue about how they’re going to do it—not Theresa May, not Boris Johnson, not the soft Brexiters, not the hard Brexiters. They are like a ship without a rudder.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Nigel Farage? When Donald Trump was elected president but still in New York, before he became president, one of the first people to visit him, if not the first foreign leader to visit him, if you can call Nigel Farage that, was Farage, the former leader of the right-wing populist party UKIP,…”
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/12/tens_of_thousands_of_protesters_to
Clive Robinson • July 16, 2018 12:58 AM
@ bttb,
One of the fun things about Brexit, as a “British male” is I find myself in need of buying “a handbag”. Not having ever purchased one befor, it’s a new experience. Especiall with regards to the size…
After all it needs plenty of room if I’m to travel “To hell in a handbag” with the rest of the UK.
Oh as for Nigel Farage MEP it appears he has done very nicely on selling short on futures or some such over Brexit. But… Apparently his name is now a verb…
“To Farage” : To perform an unnatural and unspeakable act in a public place such as a pub car park…
I’ll let the readers here fill in the rest with their own imaginations.
As for Boris “the BoJo” Johnson MP, he has been caught any number of times on camera in highly unnatural acts… One involved a frolick in the mud and detritus in Lewisham South East London on the edge of a housing estate, that I had the misfortune to see him. And yes it involved his nether regions and was unspeakable so please don’t ask for a blow by blow account. Heaven alone knows what the children present thought…
That said it’s noticable that BoJo preferes doing such things in the rundown East, I’m guessing that does take him a little closer to Russia as that’s the next such stop after the EU unless you consider Turkey…
Speaking of Turkey, the old joke about Xmas comes to mind when spraking of Brexit and the lead protagonist Mrs May PM. It appears she is just the woman for a good crisis, after all she’s been a leading light in them for much of her political career, they just magically appear where ever she is usually shortly after she arives. So don’t invite her to your party unless of course it’s the sort of thing you want…
bttb • July 17, 2018 8:33 AM
@Clive Robinson
I don’t know much about UK politics.
Katrina Vanden Heuvel was on DemocracyNow.org again today. Link and transcript will probably be up shortly; also a movie was discussed, during the show.
I enjoyed a book “On Tyranny”, by Timothy Snyder, a relatively quick, powerful, and informative read.
One problem with current events, information, disinformation, propaganda and its’ techniques, spin, etc., is trying to make a professional skeptical opinion while sipping from a fire hose of information and noise. All the while trying to subjectively control things like confirmation bias.
Recently you mentioned Thiel and Cambridge Analytica somewhere, on this blog, iirc. From https://www.tomshardware.com/news/palantir-cambridge-analytica-facebook-data,36762.html :
“A Palantir Employee Taught Cambridge Analytica How To Harvest Facebook Data
by Lucian Armasu March 28, 2018 at 9:00 AM – Source: New York Times
[…]
According to a recent New York Times report, a London-based Palantir Technologies employee named Alfredas Chmieliauskas worked closely with the data scientists building psychometric or psychological profiling technology for Cambridge Analytica that would later be used to target electoral voters.
Palantir’s Connection With Cambridge Analytica
Palantir is a Silicon Valley company that specializes in providing surveillance tools to intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. The company recently won a $876 million contract with the U.S. Army.
Its co-founder, Peter Thiel, is also a Facebook board member who was outspoken about supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and was even invited to speak at the Republican National Convention. Thiel was later considered to chair the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), whose role would is to oversee the intelligence community’s compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws…”
A straightforward keyword search ( palantir cambridge analytica thiel )yielded these,and other, links:
https://digg.com/2018/palantir-cambridge-analytica
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Now I'm hungry • June 29, 2018 4:24 PM
Mmm, it really looks yummy. 🙂