Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The revolution will be supervised.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Let’s finish the job.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

I was promised a recession.

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62Comments

  3. 3.

    muddy

    @beltane: WCAX at noon said it might rain on Sunday briefly, before the temp bottoms out again. Oh sweet! I don’t plan to leave the house tomorrow or Monday.

  7. 7.

    Karen in GA

    Iggy, confused.

    Might have more winter weather headed into north Georgia, so I just signed up for an Adobe Lightroom introduction class taking place on Saturday morning in Gainesville. Optimistic, ain’t I?

  9. 9.

    BethanyAnne

    If you have a recent Lenovo machine, odds are high that its security has been compromised. See here for a roundup: http://www.metafilter.com/147168/Superfish-superinsecure

    Short, geeky version: Lenovo installed their own root certificate and adware that takes advantage of it. This root cert has been cracked, and https is not secure on those machines. Just removing the adware isn’t enough; it leaves the cracked cert in place.

  10. 10.

    muddy

    @beltane: Oh thanks, it’s probably your fault then! I hope we don’t get an ice crust, safety/electric aside it might let my dogs step right over the fence the snow is so damned high.

    It’s been so cold this year there were times the propane wouldn’t flow. I don’t guess it’s any worse than how it used to be in the 80’s but I am just not used to it anymore.

  12. 12.

    Yatsuno

    Other than processing a $350K cheque and basically telling a guy he’s ungestuppt? Not too much. I do wish it was Friday though…

  13. 13.

    FlyingToaster

    It’s snowing again in the Hub. I just got back from Party City in Brighton, and there’s a 12 foot plow wall in front of the shopping area (Staples, Party City, California Closets, Starbucks), with two narrow driveways and it’s taking your life into your hands to turn left out of either of them onto Soldier’s Field Extension. Or you can take the unplowed back driveway to go west, which was plenty exciting. All of this in the blowing snow.

    We’re supposed to go to a birthday party in Burlington on Sunday, during the Snow/Mix/Freezing Rain/Rain/Freezing Rain/Mix/Snow event. And it’s supposed to drop from ~40° to about 0° on Monday. Our school is doing make-up PT meetings that day, so there’s a reasonable chance that by Tuesday start of classes the parking lot and driveway and roof will be cleared off.

    When I put my minivan into the shop the third week of May, I’m renting a car for a week. Mine’s gonna need a lot of work.

  15. 15.

    Pee Cee

    @BethanyAnne:

    I love my Thinkpads, but I’ve hated the preinstalled software back since the IBM days. I’ve gotten into the habit of installing a clean OS whenever I get a new laptop, even if it is time-consuming.

    This is a pretty good justification for the effort of installing a clean OS …

  17. 17.

    Tree With Water

    @Yatsuno: There are a lot of places in America where calling someone an ungashtupt will get a person punched in the mouth (a Catskills resort, for example). Great word, though.

  18. 18.

    Amir Khalid

    @BethanyAnne:
    There’s an update at that link says Lenovo only installed Superfish between October and December 2014. If so, then my Lenovo laptop, purchased in 2012, is safe. And so is my Lenovo smartphone.

  19. 19.

    kindness

    Shit. I’d been pulling up the same page for Pierce since Tuesday. After I post the above I go over and see a whole bunch of stuff I hadn’t gotten. WTF? Damn intertubes and I can’t even blame Lenovo.

  20. 20.

    FlyingToaster

    @kindness: He posted at 1:40 pm.

    And his office is in Watertown Square. Where the front loaders finally started taking the 10′ snow mountains off the sidewalks last night.

  21. 21.

    trollhattan

    LGM has been having fun with some Cato Institute butthurt that Tigerbeat on the Potomac published a Cato email solicitation (target=Obamacare!) . For one thing, they object to the “right-leaning” description. Uh, guys, if your right ear is pressed against carpet you’re no longer merely “leaning.”

  22. 22.

    BethanyAnne

    @Amir Khalid: Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

    Is there a way to tell by model if your computer is likely affected?

    From Lenovo:

    Superfish may have appeared on these models on products shipped between September and December of 2014:

    G Series: G410, G510, G710, G40-70, G50-70, G40-30, G50-30, G40-45, G50-45
    U Series: U330P, U430P, U330Touch, U430Touch, U530Touch
    Y Series: Y430P, Y40-70, Y50-70
    Z Series: Z40-75, Z50-75, Z40-70, Z50-70
    S Series: S310, S410, S40-70, S415, S415Touch, S20-30, S20-30Touch
    Flex Series: Flex2 14D, Flex2 15D, Flex2 14, Flex2 15, Flex2 14(BTM), Flex2 15(BTM), Flex 10
    MIIX Series: MIIX2-8, MIIX2-10, MIIX2-11
    YOGA Series: YOGA2Pro-13, YOGA2-13, YOGA2-11BTM, YOGA2-11HSW
    E Series: E10-30

    This is what they are currently claiming, YMMV. And it looks like Firefox isn’t affected.
    Bethany

  23. 23.

    Roger Moore

    @BethanyAnne:

    This root cert has been cracked

    Which apparently wasn’t hard, because the harebrained scheme they used involved putting the private key on every computer. The whole thing was obviously designed by somebody with no knowledge of, or respect for, security.

  24. 24.

    trollhattan

    Test, the 2nding.

    Okay, now looks like I’ve blasted many comments into moderation for some FYWP reason or other.

    My apologies to the BJ cleaning staff.

  25. 25.

    BethanyAnne

    @Roger Moore: And I should say that my own security knowledge is … patchy. I do user experience and information architecture, not security or networking. So, on lots of this stuff, I just have to find sources I trust, and try to link to them.

  26. 26.

    jl

    @kindness:

    ” Where’s Charles Pierce been? ”

    Besides the snow, maybe he is having trouble keeping up with the rightwing crazy.
    Multiple memos seem to have gone out to commit maximum crazy on all fronts.

    Man, that leftwing PC is a the really big problem, ain’t it?
    I can’t keep track of all the intricate linguistic rules I am supposed to follow in discussing current events in order to know, be sure, that I really love America and am Patriotic in my heart.

    I read a piece with documentary evidence that bin Laden was worried that the quisling Obama and American Hating DemocRAT approach was very damaging to violent Islamic extremist movements, and wondering how to get his bunch of murderous wackos to simultaniously both lay off killing too many innocent Muslims and ramp up aggressive religious war talk from US and other Great Satans.

    Edit: Did bin Laden ever read the tale about the mice trying to bell the cat. From what I read, the answer would be no.

    I’ll have to go look for the link. Anyway, refutations of current reactionary (and to be honest, viciously partisan) hate/crazy is always nearby and soon.

  27. 27.

    Steve in the ATL

    @trollhattan: you mentioned Shiva Rea the other day. Apparently she’s famous in the yoga world these days. She and I were friends in middle school and both took tae Kwan do from Kang Rhee. You always knew when he was in the building because the pink Cadillac that Elvis gave him was parked out front. Things my friends in east memphis never experienced!

  28. 28.

    ThresherK

    @ranchandsyrup: I was always an SCTV geek while my friends were about the more famous show.

    Didn’t SCTV have “Hi Q” with Eugene Levy as “Alex Treble”?

    Waiting for someone to top “Battle of the PBS Stars”.

  31. 31.

    PlanetPundit (used to be Sir Laffs-a-Lot)

    Since it was so long between threads, we should have had a Max Open Thread (hint, hint)

  34. 34.

    ThresherK

    @ranchandsyrup: …and that’s because a boxing match between Julia Child and Fred Rogers was only about two millimeters sillier than the actual program on ABC.

    PS As a self-professed “comedy nerd” I love Norm MacDonald, and one find is this “genius at work” items I’ve assembled from his Twitter feed:

    Celebrity Jeopardy was never about impressions. Celebrity Jeopardy was about hope. It was about the hope of one man, Alex Trebek, the hope that never died (in spite of) the outright hostility of (Sean) Connery, the faraway uninterest of Burt (Reynolds), …The audacious hope that never let the facts of the past interfere. It was a rhythm piece, as each disaster was signaled by the sound of a buzzer, and each new category signified more, new, hope.

    (Thanks for the link. I hardly ever read Twitter otherwise.

  35. 35.

    Roger Moore

    @BethanyAnne:
    I saw something about it on Slashdot and LWN. As I understand it, the software is supposed to let them insert ads into web pages. To enable them to continue that even for secure pages, they installed a fake root certificate, i.e. one that claims to be a high-level security authority that can sign any security certificate. The program can then do a man-in-the-middle attack, where it intercepts and modifies the web pages without you realizing it, since your browser believes that the pages have been encrypted by the site you connected to.

    For that to work for any site, though, they have to be able to fake the security certificates on the fly. That means they need to include the signing key in the program, and the jackasses who wrote it used the same signing key for every computer. That means anyone who can extract the signing key from the program can pull the same trick on every computer that has the fake certificate installed. Since somebody has successfully extracted the key and posted it online, those computers now have completely hosed security. I assume some clever person will use it to create fake Windows Updates that will completely take over the computers. It’s a security hole so big you can drive a truck through it.

  37. 37.

    trollhattan

    @Steve in the ATL:
    Daggonit, that’s some interesting crossed paths.

    Playing three-degrees of Elvis, a friend who worked at Harrah’s Tahoe in the ’70s got to meet numerous celebrities, including the rat pack and Elvis himself. Played pool with him once and couldn’t help but notice the derringer under his coat sleeve.

    His favorite celeb was Sammy Davis, who would throw parties for the staff and hang out with them.

  38. 38.

    Tommy

    @trollhattan: Generally speaking I don’t like rich and/or famous people. But Sammy. I think I could spend an afternoon with the man. If I could get Miles Davis in the same room, we might have a party going on :).

  39. 39.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Karen in GA: I’m really starting to wonder if the Ally Bank people I’ve been dealing with for the last hour are having the same problem as Iggy.

  41. 41.

    ? Martin

    If you guys think the Lenovo story is bad, keep an eye on this one.

    AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

    Remember when the SecurID keys were stolen?

    The detail in this story is a little bit too incredible, but it might also explain why the feds have been giving Apple a bit more of a hard time with their end-to-end encryption. They may not rely on 3rd party encryption hardware since they design their own silicon, and they don’t rely on the secure element in the SIM for encryption, they have their own designed secure element inside the Ax chips themselves.

  42. 42.

    Tommy

    @ThresherK: I am not much of a Twitter guy. But followed your link to his feed. His last Tweet is this:

    Eddie Murphy is the coolest, a rockstar even in a room with actual rockstars.

    That is a good.

  44. 44.

    Suzanne

    So Luna seems to be doing better today, and she is putting some weight on that right rear foot. She’s still limping a bit, but she definitely has improved. I wonder if she sprained her ankle or something. I still am planning to get her in to the vet, but at least now it’s not an emergency.

  45. 45.

    lamh36

    alright, so of you old foagies here at BJ watch my new favorite show, and the ratings. defying juggaurnaut that is Empire on Fox, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P Henson as Lucious and “Cookie” Lyons?

    the show is killing the ratings like gangbusters. I know all my peeps are watching it, and now, apparently, Rush Limpaballs has talked about liking it on his radio show, I’ve noticed a much more RWNJ crowd of commenters on the Entertainment blogs coming out of the woodwork. And of course, where RWNJ come, more racism and bigotry follows…ugh. it’s like a bat signal I guess.

  46. 46.

    Calouste

    @Roger Moore:

    Which apparently wasn’t hard, because the harebrained scheme they used involved putting the private key on every computer. The whole thing was obviously designed by somebody with no knowledge of, or respect for, security.

    And approved of by people with no knowledge of, or respect for, security. Which for a company that gets a large part of its sales from enterprise contracts is a pretty big PR disaster.

  47. 47.

    bemused

    I may be the only fan of Downton Abbey to miss this but I just learned that Elizabeth McGovern has a band, Sadie and the Hotheads which toured last fall. Another DA connection is that Michelle Dockery sang on one album.

    PBS made a smart move putting on more Masterpiece Theatre series. I got hooked on Doc Martin due to that. The problem is that I stumbled into these series middle of first seasons and had to get the dvds to catch up.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    @? Martin:
    I find that surprising, because the security on GSM is supposed to be so miserable it might as well not even be there. If private hackers have already cracked the security, I would assume that serious spy agencies must have broken it long before that.

    As far as Apple and its encryption, that appears to be about encryption of the phone contents, not of the transmissions. That shouldn’t have anything to do with the SIM, since the phone still needs to work even if the SIM is replaced.

  49. 49.

    lurker dean

    @lamh36: love empire! cookie, among others (like jamal), is killing it. i was lmao at her “fake ass lena horne” comment. so glad taraji landed on her feet after person of interest, we hated that she got killed off. i’ve read various recaps but i’m afraid to wade into the cesspool of comments, i don’t want to ruin a good experience. it’s taken a few weeks but drip drop has finally faded as an ear worm, lol.

  50. 50.

    trollhattan

    ABC [A is for Australia, a country AND a continent…] sends people inside Fukushima so you don’t have to go yourself. One of the four reactors has had its fuel rods removed. The other three, well…”Entry to closed areas would lead to instant death”

    We can do this with robots! First, we have to invent the robots.

    Reactors 1, 2 and 3 were strictly off limits, and looking from about 500 metres away the area was clearly deserted, with cars and equipment abandoned. Removing the molten fuel from these reactors will be an enormous challenge as workers cannot enter because it would lead to instant death.

    Mr Matsui admitted they did not know the extent of the problems. “We do not know [the] exact situation in detail,” he said. “Fuel has been melted down but nobody has seen it … We need to develop robotic technology with help from around the world to know the real situation.”

    The only way TEPCO can control the meltdowns in 1, 2 and 3 is to pump water in to cool them, but the water becomes highly radioactive and mixes with the massive amount of groundwater that flows into the reactors from the surrounding hills. This is TEPCO’s most urgent problem – every day it has to deal with more than 500,000 litres of radioactive water. Standing in a high position, the whole 3.5-kilometre site could be seen filling up with massive storage tanks.

    The looming crisis is lack of space and where to put the water, and TEPCO is scrambling for solutions.

    Four years have passed. Not only will they be dealing this the rest of our collective lives, those of our kids and grandkids.

  51. 51.

    Mike in NC

    @lamh36: Empire is one of our favorite new shows, starring the always outstanding Terrence Howard. I missed last week’s episode and my wife deleted it from our DVR before I could watch it. When is somebody going to invent a DVR with unlimited storage capacity?

  52. 52.

    trollhattan

    @Mike in NC:
    If I thought I could get away with it, I’d stuff a 4TB drive in that thing. Never. Enough. Room.

    Confess I was one who mocked TIVO when it was introduced. “Why would anybody want that?!?” Little did I realize….

  53. 53.

    Calouste

    @trollhattan: If the radiation levels are so high that they lead to “instant death”, chips inside robots are not going to survive that long either. Building a robot that can withstand that kind of environment is going to be… interesting, considering that testing to those levels is going to be impossible.

  54. 54.

    Jerzy Russian

    I just noticed that I have a “Jesus” and a “Mary” in each of my classes, but no “Joseph”. Now I will have to go back to see if I ever had all three of them together at once.

  55. 55.

    trollhattan

    @Calouste:
    Kind of what I was imagining (if way beyond my technical understanding). I know the military wants EMP-resistant electronics but I don’t think their stuff has to perform in unrelenting massive radiation. Hardware designed for space is probably a better model.

    Maybe they can have tethered devices that keep the key electronics outside the exclusion zone? Dragging a cable behind would create its own problems. How about steampunk robots? “Sir, your drone needs more coal.”

  60. 60.

    lurker dean

    @Mike in NC: unlimited capacity would be nice. we had to add an external hard drive to our dvr to expand the capacity, we were always right at the limit. the external doubled the capacity so i think we’re good for awhile. yeah, we watch too much tv, lol.

  62. 62.

    Roger Moore

    @? Martin:
    Even there, it’s as much that they don’t have control over the strength of the encryption algorithm as anything. The reason I’m surprised they’ve bothered stealing the SIM information is because the European governments basically insisted on crippled encryption when the standard was set so they wouldn’t have to worry about stealing people’s keys. If somebody like Apple designs their own software, they’re much harder to influence than a big international standards body.

    That said, trying to lean on Apple is a losing strategy. Yes, Apple’s software is going to be widely used, but there’s nothing to stop people who care deeply about encryption from writing their own apps, and good encryption libraries are available easily enough that those apps should be using good algorithms. There are even cryptosystems that have been designed without NSA input for the people who are paranoid about backdoors in AES.

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