BettyC asked this very good question this afternoon:
One thing in this tawdry tale I’m truly curious about is the origin of that laptop. From what I’ve been able to piece together, it sounds like the FBI really did take possession of a hard drive?
But the MAGA computer store guy’s story isn’t believable. If Russian agents and/or some of Giuliani’s other shady minions planted stuff on a laptop that didn’t belong to H. Biden and contrived this whole tale, I think a forensic investigation would reveal that, but I don’t really know how all of this works…
I think the simple answer is that Hunter Biden’s cellphone was hacked. And it really wouldn’t matter if it was an iPhone or some other type of smart phone. Let me unpack this a bit, but before I do I want to make one very specific point. The tradecraft here, the actual details of how this operation, for lack of a better term, has been conducted, does not negate the fact that the disinformation, misinformation, and agitprop that Giuliani is pushing is the creation of Russian intelligence and that he has been pushing it for almost a year now while working with active Russian intelligence assets as part of Russia’s ongoing political war against the United States.
Let’s stipulate, as I explained in a comment reply earlier today, that:
the structure, if you will, of this type of operation is to hack for actual documents and photos and video and audio files, remove them, doctor some, fabricate others completely, and then dump them all together. This makes it impossible for someone, especially if they didn’t realize they were hacked, to assert that they are all forgeries. Because the forgeries and doctored materials are shuffled in with the legit materials. This was attempted by the Russians against Macron in 2017. This was also done against AG Lynch in 2016, which led to Comey being stupid in the most Comey way ever.
I would add that it is also why it becomes impossible to state that the materials being released are all fakes, because there are some outright fakes, some modified and partial fakes, and some actual real materials all bundled together. And remember, neither Giuliani nor The NY Post has provided anything that isn’t a pdf or a screen grab, so there’s no actual real metadata for you techie types reading this to analyze.
Hacking Hunter Biden’s smartphone – iPhone, Samsung, or what have you aside – as a way to access all this information would not be surprising. The NSO Group developed a smartphone hacking program named Pegasus, which has been sold/licensed to the United Arab Emirates, allegedly in partnership with the Saudis. There are concerns that it was the Pegasus software that was used to gain access to material on Jeff Bezos’s phone, which was then conveniently laundered through the disgruntled and MAGA manic brother of the woman Bezos was having an affair with. The NSO Group is currently under Federal investigation. While the NSO Group is technically now owned by a US investment firm, it is headquartered in Herziliya, Israel, which is also where the Israeli security and intel firm Black Cube is headquartered. Black Cube has done work for NSO Group in an attempt to disrupt, through private intelligence operations, researchers trying to prove that NSO’s Pegasus software was used to target dissidents. Black Cube is the firm responsible for targeting former Obama administration senior national security officials Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl. NSO has also impersonated Facebook to spread their spyware. Pegasus and NSO’s other tools are very, very, very effective. Bezos had to hire one of the top names in personal security services to actually figure out what had happened.
If whomever managed to hack and exfiltrate the data from Hunter Biden, and my professional guesstimate is it was from his smartphone, they would have been able to get access to all of his emails and text messages through the email and text message clients on the phone, as well as pictures, audio, and/or video that were stored on the phone. If it was an iPhone and he had Safari set up to share history and bookmarks across devices, then they would also have access to his entire search history. Once whomever did the hack had all that information, then select items would be altered, other items would be completely fabricated, and then all of them together – the real, the altered, and the completely fabricated – would be bundled together, placed on one or more devices, in this case one or more old MacBooks and/or the external hard drive, and then given to someone to discover this treasure trove and feed it to someone like Giuliani who would then launder it through something approaching a legitimate news source.
Here’s the screen grab of the computer store receipt that Giuliani provided to the New York Post:
There are a couple of things that have my antenna up on this receipt. The first is the date, April 2019. By all reports Hunter Biden was living in Los Angeles throughout 2019 having moved to LA after his divorce in 2018. Is it possible that Hunter Biden went home to visit his father and step-mother in Delaware in April 2019, brought one or more broken, water damaged MacBooks and possibly a brand new external hard drive with him, and decided to take it to a strip mall computer repair place instead of driving 20 minutes to the Apple Store in Newark, DE? It’s possible. Is it possible he did all that rather than take it in for repair in LA? This too is possible. But neither make a lot of geospatial, let alone logical sense. Especially as Hunter Biden had to go to Arkansas in April 2019 to produce a DNA sample pursuant to a court order in a paternity case. The next thing that bothers me is that signature. I spent about an hour yesterday looking for any image of a document with Hunter Biden’s signature and I could not find one. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one on the Internet somewhere, but I couldn’t find one to compare that scribble against. Is it possible that that is Hunter Biden’s signature? Sure it’s possible, but that could be anything. The cell phone number and iCloud email address that supposedly belong to Hunter Biden are in the upper left corner of that receipt. Both of those pieces of information would be available for extraction and to be used to generate a bogus receipt if his smartphone had been hacked.
This is my semi-informed professional estimate/guesstimate, but given the people involved in this insanity – Giuliani and Bannon and Col Allan at the NY Post – using a highly sophisticated phone hacking program like Pegasus to exfiltrate all the information possible from Hunter Biden’s smartphone, then modifying some documents and images and video and fabricating others, dumping them on to a different device and then leaving them all with a credulous individual to be discovered makes both logical sense and sense in terms of how we’ve seen subversion tradecraft change as the technology finally caught up to the concepts and doctrine for undertaking this type of operation. And this leads me to concerns about any alleged video that Rudy plans to leak out. Deep fake technology has increased by leaps and bounds over the past four years. Either modifying existing video that Hunter Biden might have had on his smartphone or modifying video of someone else to look like Hunter Biden can be done with better results in 2020 than they could have been done in 2016. Would a deep fake hold up to proper analysis? Probably not, but it wouldn’t have to. It just has to make it through a news cycle or two on Fox News, Breitbart, The New York Post‘s website, the Epoch Times’ website, The Daily Caller, The Daily Signal, The Gateway Pundit, etc. Especially as none of those outlets will print a correction or retraction if a deep fake modified video is debunked.
I want to make one final point and it is a human/humane one. One of the things that isn’t being remarked on is that Hunter Biden was three years old when he, his brother, his baby sister, and his mother were in the car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. While everyone remembers the picture of four year old Beau Biden in his hospital bed with a broken leg being suspended on a pulley, Hunter Biden was also injured. He had a skull fracture. I’m not a medical doctor, I’ve got a PhD, but I’d be willing to wager good money that both Biden boys were given significant pain killers as needed/required during their stays in the hospital. Anyone care to guess the effect that the pain killers that would have been used in the early 1970s would have had on the developing neurotransmitters and receptors of a three year old? Hunter Biden has an addiction. I’m not sure that over 45 years later anyone can definitely say if whatever he was treated with for pain after the accident predisposed him to drug addiction, a preexisting condition if you will, but it really doesn’t or shouldn’t matter. We all know people in our personal lives, as well as online lives, who have addiction problems. It doesn’t matter if they’re for things that are deemed legal, such as food addictions or addictions to alcohol or even gambling, let alone for controlled substances – addiction is a disease. There is a real scandal here and that scandal is that the President, his sons and daughter in law, Giuliani, Bannon, his other surrogates, the Fox News evening talking heads, the chuckleheads at Breitbart, etc have such a basic lack of humanity and are so obsessed with obtaining power or being near those that do, that they’ve decided to exploit someone’s battle with addiction in the hope of increasing the President’s electoral outcomes by a couple of percent. This is both the real scandal and the real tragedy of this entire sordid story. This isn’t just traumatizing Hunter Biden and likely pushing all of his triggers for addictive behavior*, it is doing the same thing for a lot of other people who struggle with addictions. It isn’t just as Adam Serwer says that cruelty is the point. Cruelty is also the ways and the means too!
Open thread!
* I would not be surprised, given Giuliani’s deranged rantings on his and Bannon’s YouTube channel, as well as Fox News, if we ultimately find out that Giuliani is doing this to try to trigger Hunter Biden into relapsing in the hope of a news media feeding frenzy that the Democratic nominee’s son was caught smoking crack just weeks before the election.
On The Road After Dark – way2blue – Emigrant Wilderness, Stanislaus National Forest, High Sierras
Adam L Silverman
We now go to Tom Tomorrow for comment!
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/19/1987361/-Cartoon-Life-in-the-stupidverse
HumboldtBlue
I was in the dark for a few hours today while PG&E replaced equipment on the power pole in front of the apartment and when I logged back on to catch up on news I found this.
That’s copied and pasted from a Reddit thread.
Toss in the madness of the DNI reinforcing the fact the GOP is the single greatest national security to the country and general madness of the Trump campaign and I was ready to live without internet access for the rest of my life.
Then again, the old intertubes bring us stuff like dogs.
Adam L Silverman
@HumboldtBlue: Pretty much.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Adam L Silverman:
That cartoon gives me all the feels.
Adam L Silverman
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: He really captured the ruptured blood vessels in Bannon’s eyes.
piratedan
there are times when living as a nation of laws is something of a hindrance when you would prefer a righteous retribution of sticking these assholes up against a whipping post and running a knife across their carotids because you understand that no matter how much time in prison you sentence them to, they’ll forever NOT GET IT.
apologies for being so graphically angry and bloodthirsty but there are times when we all need to metaphorically act out just how angry we are and this whole process of daily cruelty over the last three plus years makes me want to repay them in kind…. not feeling very forgiving these days I’m afraid.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@HumboldtBlue:
When this shameful period in American history is past, my most fervent wish is that something happens to Bannon and Giuliani involving an angry mob, a baseball bat and a pulped mass of shattered bones and tissue.
Pay per click rights could fund a decent round of infrastructure spending.
geg6
@piratedan:
Come sit by me, masked and properly distanced. I’ll bring my knitting.
Jeffro
@HumboldtBlue: thank you – I think this is the extent of what any of us need to say in regards to this scam. It’s actually the very far absolute maximum. The best response is “Fucking bullshit – next!”
We can always go over it at length during the proceedings of the Truth and Retribution Commission.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@piratedan:
Too fast for proper retribution.
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan: It’s okay. It’s better to not bottle up.
I just wish they’d stop the fuckery for a day or two as I’ve got both real work to do and I want to actually do the post on why I think a Truth & Reconciliation Commission is necessary and how it should be structured. But Giuliani can’t keep his pie hole shut for any amount of time.
Jeffro
@piratedan:
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: will NO ONE sign on to my “bring back tarring and feathering!” campaign?
What if the guilty parties had to walk across America, tarred and feathered, at the point of multiple pitchforks? Good enough?
Fester Addams
Now I’m wondering if the increasingly salacious rumoring about the alleged contents of the alleged hard drives is intended to inoculate Trump against what could yet be revealed about him. Gonna be an ugly few weeks, but we already knew that.
The Moar You Know
One of the things I get paid for in real life is digital forensics. And none of this, not one single bit of it, would hold up in court for several reasons (lack of metadata, a chain of custody that would have any prosecutor running away from this like its radioactive…I could go on and on) but the whole point is that it doesn’t have to. It got published by a news outlet, is getting spread by the social media virus, and that’s all it needs to do.
As a society, we need to figure out how to stop this crap in its tracks or we won’t have a society anymore. Bottom line.
Major Major Major Major
I’ve just been assuming they hacked his iCloud account. All this info would be on it, less fuss. But I have read it’s trickier than it sounds.
scott (the other one)
You know, I’m starting to think Mr Noun + Verb + 9/11 isn’t a very nice guy.
Adam L Silverman
@Fester Addams: No, the salacious rumormongering by Giuliani and Fox News personalities like Bartiromo are to signal to the Qanon nuts. Possibly to signal to them to do something about it.
zhena gogolia
@Fester Addams:
“yet be revealed”?
The 13-year-old was revealed well before the 2016 election.
The Moar You Know
@HumboldtBlue: That’s one cure. There aren’t any others I’m aware of, but I keep trying to think of alternatives. And failing.
Adam L Silverman
@The Moar You Know: I’m glad to see my analysis has passed muster.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Apple makes a HUGE FUCKING DEAL about how secure iCloud is. I went with my mom back at the end of 2018 to get her battery replaced in her iPhone 6 and the tech at the genius bar was on and on and on about how secure iCloud was. I said I have no doubt that Apple has made it secure, but I work in the defense and intel sector and if it’s in a cloud and it isn’t air gapped from the Internet on a secured, classified network, then it may be more secure than every competitor’s, but it isn’t secure. Which is why I don’t keep anything in my iCloud account.
Mary G
I don’t remember if it was here or on Twitter, but in one discussion I saw, somebody semi-famous in LA said that people like Hunter Biden don’t take computers to strip malls, they call someone that’ll come to their house to fix them. That’s what I’ve done, and I’m not a wealthy lawyer. LA is rife with private Geek Squads. Everybody has a guy.
Adam L Silverman
@scott (the other one): He never was.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Jeffro:
Time moves on, I’m afraid. The idea of tar and feathers is too busy, and gave way to the simple elegance of clubbing someone to death with a bat – you start low, then move up the body.
piratedan
@geg6: ty and I’ll try to make sure that the blood from the knife is kept well away from the yarn….. :-)
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: That too.
egorelick
@Jeffro: The good news is that tarring and feathering would have likely run afoul of the 8th amendment prior to the new, exciting MAGA originalist construction of all laws. Now, there will be no problem since it certainly would not have been considered “cruel and unusual” in 1787.
HumboldtBlue
@The Moar You Know:
And that was the plan as I learned from those who have reported this over and over. They pointed out Bannon figured out that trying to go through legitimate journalism fact-checking was a waste of time.
Find a sop to print and then run with it. And some in the media ran with it despite the baseless bullshit. It’s an effective strategy when social media platforms allow for the fastest dissemination of whatever gets sent into the ether by hitting “send”.
Also, this what I envision ‘undecided voters’ look like.
Jeffro
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: but…but…if you start low, how are they going to keep doing the “walk of shame” ( no not that one the other kind) as we pour the tar and dump the feathers and then occasionally jab with the pitchfork?
I’m confused. I thought the bats were for when the guilty party peters out somewhere near the Cumberland Gap?
Brachiator
I didn’t know much about Hunter Biden, and I can see that Trump and his stooges might have just wanted to hurt Biden by hurting his son, in addition to trying to indirectly portray Biden as corrupt with the ridiculous Ukraine nonsense.
But Trump and his minions are not only cruel, but they are clumsy and stupid. The Hunter corruption crap only ever resonated with Trump’s base. And with some fools in the media who obligingly went looking for dirt just on the basis of ignorant ranting by Rudy G.
There’s nothing here. There has never been anything here. It suggests that Trump really is out of gas since he continues to try to get some mileage out of this nonsense.
Jeffro
@egorelick: ACB’s head explodes: “well…technically…ORIGINALIST-LY…I guess we must proceed with the tarring…”
You know she’d be semi-ok with it. Not as good as the stocks, or dunking, but still probably ok with it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Patricia Kayden
sdhays
@Adam L Silverman: As you probably are aware, it was recently reported that white-hat hackers pretty much gained the keys to the kingdom in iCloud through some cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and then a number of misconfigurations. Apple said it had no reason to believe that they had been maliciously hacked through these vulnerabilities, but…these were hair-raising vulnerabilities.
There’s no guarantee that there aren’t others, and IT security is a real crapshoot and unending job. One insignificant mistake can ruin everything.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I know former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Fingar. He tried to directly hire me at ODNI in 2007, but the Langley folks prevented it because ODNI isn’t supposed to do direct or even directed hires. I also know Stephen Hall.
Adam L Silverman
@sdhays: I had not seen that, but I am not surprised.
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: This!
My iCloud is mostly for monitoring the nefarious activities of WarriorTeen (actually to shut down access at 8:30pm and let her read all of the Rick Riordan books I’ve purchased) and to keep my tweetmarker so I can pick up on Tweetbot where I left off, regardless of which device I use.
I’m trying to teach WarriorTeen proper account security; she has 2 Google accounts (School, Afterschool), and needs to log out-n-in from each as she switches activities. So that she’s not confusing her school stuff with her Suzuki or Minecraft. Teaching a kid not to be an easy target is HARD.
Adam L Silverman
MAGAdeath.
sdhays
@Adam L Silverman: Apple pays $288,000 to white-hat hackers who had run of company’s network
sdhays
@FlyingToaster: IT security is exhausting for everyone. It sucks for service providers and it sucks for users. All these attackers just make life awful for everyone.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adam L Silverman: going just by the mug on that lady I don’t recognize:
The Constipations?
danielx
@piratedan:
Nor am I…and it’s only going to get worse in the next two weeks, because there is literally nothing that Trump and his minions will hesitate to do. These fucking swine, supporting this tangerine hued oaf…just infuriate me to the point of endangering my health, both mental and physical. I hate them for it, I want some of the same suffering they have inflicted on others to be visited on them, and I don’t like it at all. I don’t glory in hating people, and I don’t really like the idea of enjoying watching them suffer.
But I like what they have done, are doing and will do a great deal less. They’ve got to go.
Anya
One of the worst aspects about this saga is how the rightwing tv personalities and other characters are delighting in destroying Hunter Biden. His only crime is that his father chose to run for president. I don’t know how these people sleep at night.
Jeffro
Catherine Rampell has up an interesting op-ed for tomorrow’s paper, but for once I think she has really missed the point.
She’s saying that trumpov has “shifted the country Left, or at least away from his views“.
I say that he never had any real views (other than ‘Donald is great!‘) to begin with, but instead bought into the unholy troika of Randian/racist/religious buffoonery that would get him into power (and now, he hopes, will keep him there).
Properly titled, this column would say something like “trumpov has gotten the majority to stand up, loudly, for its centrist/left-of-center views”. He didn’t shift anyone left…he bought into the worst and most radical of the right, and the majority of the country isn’t having any of it.
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster:
Have you considered Colonel Oats military academy in Alaska?
danielx
@Adam L Silverman:
The Flaming Shitheels
Jay
Text thread I read the other day, pointed out the date errors, but most importantly, that MacBook Pro’s, don’t have a “hard drive”,
They have an IC memory, and if you can’t boot the MacBook Pro, you can’t copy or save the memory.
So, the whole “computer shop” bs, a a “McGuffin”, a red herring to conceal the source of the “real” contents.
So yeah, an illegal hack of somekind, phone, Cloud.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Anya: Shannon Pettypiece, a pretty reliable unfiltered voice for team trump, just said on MSNBC they’re looking forward to the debate because of their confidence in Operation Hunter.
Makes me wonder who her sources are, but as someone observed, the only ones left are his children and the Kool-Ade drinkers
Adam L Silverman
@sdhays: I believed you.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think that’s LTG Flynn’s attorney.
Adam L Silverman
@Anya: Very soundly. And in undeserved affluence.
The Moar You Know
@Adam L Silverman: I have a cultural/warfare question for you. How would one go about mitigating the deleterious effects of social media/the internet (they are one and the same now) on a society? I have been working this in my brain for years now and barely have the question formulated (like an alcoholic, first you have to admit there’s a problem) much less any answers.
Anya
@Adam L Silverman: Apparently, Bartiromo was a big financial analysts. I wonder if she made the pivot toward conspiratorial and Qanon crazy because she’s losing her appeal? .
sdhays
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks. I Just added a link in case you or anyone else was interested in the details.
Stuart Frasier
@Adam L Silverman: The Loud Obbs Four
Anya
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I wonder if this is coming from the same genius who told them Trump would win the support of the liberals if he fires Comey?
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: For a kid born in Cambridge, MA? A natural musician, attending a tiny arts-oriented private school so that she doesn’t go through the “getting the living hell beat out of her for playing [insert instrument here]”? The seventh-grade Math ace?
Thanks, but we’ll have to trust the Internet Security dad and former education software programming mom to do their job.
dopey-o
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I have done this for a living. Working people want their computer fixed NOW! and I have had them stand over my shoulder waiting to get their work and financial data back in service.
When the laptop is water-damaged, the solution is to pull the hard drive and image it in a new laptop. Can be done in 2 hours. Can you say “Clonezilla”? Google it and be enlightened.
Giuliani really needs a better class of GRU consultants.
sdhays
@Adam L Silverman: “Crimey, Stupid, Trash, and Dumb”
HumboldtBlue
I’m not linking, but Giuliani actually tweeted this.
We’re in a bad place that this is our public political discourse.
Jay
The Moar You Know
@Jay: This is incorrect.
sdhays
@HumboldtBlue: I take this as a confession that Don Jr. (“addicted son”) has been Dump’s “bagman” and Dump requires him to pay him 50%…no, that’s not believable. Dump would never agree to 50/50, especially with a disappointment like Don Jr.
ETA: IANAL, but this seems like pretty much textbook libel. It should be reasonable to sue Giuliani out of his coffin-bed for this shit.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
I agree. I’ve come around recently. I don’t think this is going to resonate with anybody outside the MAGA/QAnon cult
Grover Gardner
I have to reiterate a point made above. $85 for data recovery? Last I checked, that’s a $300-400 job. You *only* take an HD to a shop for data recovery as a last resort because of the insanely high fees they charge.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman:
I look forward to the post. I agree that we need truth and reconciliation, but I suspect we need multiples of them. Perhaps one commission to collect results from the others.
I have mostly given up longish intellectual activity until after November 3, if things work out. If they don’t, it won’t matter. I am working with our county Democratic Party texting operation instead.
I will have a less demanding post tomorrow. Two weeks
ETA: Going to bed now. Take care.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@HumboldtBlue:
I mean, Mr. Noun-Verb-9/11 is a clown that nobody is taking seriously atm. I’m not sure he counts
Adam L Silverman
@The Moar You Know: Give this a read:
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/19/why-new-zealand-rejected-populist-ideas-other-nations-have-embraced?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&__twitter_impression=true
Here’s the important bit as a pull quote:
One of the most important things is to make sure that you don’t have an oligarch own significant portions of your news media so that he can use what he owns to drive the information ecosystem in order to attain more power, entrench it, and then exploit it for personal gain.
sdhays
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): At least as long as he’s “the President’s personal lawyer”, he “counts”. Unfortunately.
Adam L Silverman
@Anya: The Money Honey? She was promoted as and styled herself as a major financial analyst. When you look behind the curtain what you see is someone who slept with senior corporate officials to get scoops. Then leveraged that into a series of more senior news positions in the financial/business news media world.
HumboldtBlue
This makes me miss my mom more than I already do.
Women forcing change.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@sdhays:
Does he count if virtually nobody outside the president’s personality cult takes him seriously? This story fell apart within a day
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: You missed the joke. The military school that Ted’s father kept threatening to send him to in the first two Bill and Ted movies was in Alaska and run by Ted’s father’s good friend Colonel Oats.
Adam L Silverman
@sdhays: Better run it past Popehat.
The Moar You Know
@Adam L Silverman: read that today. It’s a start.
Redshift
In my campaign work, I’ve heard a few stories from other people about talking to Democratic voters worried about the Hunter story, but only in the first couple of days after it started circulating. Since then, the only ones are clearly trolling Republicans pretending to be Dems. I had one of those today.
I think a lot of their ratfucking has been undermined by four years of Trump lying about everything, so anything he tries to push goes nowhere.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Could Fox News be outright bought and deliberately run into the ground?
sdhays
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): Do you think he’s going to be persona-non-grata on all major news media from now on? I don’t. They may treat him more harshly than before, be he still has a platform from which to spew shit and damage the discourse be seeding doubt and disgust.
I mean, I agree that this is pretty much nothing, but it is awful for the national discourse, and it’s just cruel and nasty in how it’s treating someone who’s only flaw (that anyone really cares about) is being the son a guy running for President.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Redshift:
None of them have any credibility. Comey, working under a Democratic administration, had credibility. Barr? Certainly not Rudy G
Jay
@The Moar You Know:
https://mobile.twitter.com/spdustin/status/1316621229751762945
Patricia Kayden
MisterForkbeard
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think this is the plan:
I think they’re hoping that Biden gets angry (they’ll call it ‘defensive’ and ‘guilty’l, but mostly they just want to say Biden is a criminal in a setting where Biden wont have time to properly debunk it. And if they can push the lie that Russia is actually helping Hillary or whatever it’s just gravy.
Mallard Filmore
@The Moar You Know:
Change the law. Privacy law. All data about me is MINE, and may not be shared or sold without my explicit permission. A click-through where I have to abandon all rights to use the site is not enough
ETA: this will cripple their funding source.
Kent
Wouldn’t do any good. Someone with deep pockets would just replace it with a new network to fill the vacuum and the desire for the 20% of this country to fill their brains with that sort of filth and propaganda. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Eventually they will mostly die off and we will move on to some new form of online propaganda.
mrmoshpotato
@Adam L Silverman: The Trash (apologies to Joe Strummer)
Adam L Silverman
@The Moar You Know: It is. The problem is not an easy one to describe, let alone try to explain countering at midnight. Remind me to do a post on it later this week or next.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MisterForkbeard: I’m sure that’s their plan, I’m just wondering who’s telling trump, and Shannon Pettypiece, it’s a good one. It even seems too dumb for the Boy Geenyuss Jared. It sounds like something the Two Fredos would think was great, but they could never get a meeting with trump.
Roger Moore
@HumboldtBlue:
I don’t believe that, because there are indications they shopped it to legitimate media- or at least more legitimate- before settling on the NY Post. For example, apparently Fox News refused to touch it because they thought it wasn’t legitimate enough. This was probably a tactical mistake. If they had started it in the kind of third rate publication that wouldn’t bother to verify the facts first, they might have been able to get the legitimate media to publish it without verifying the facts in a rush not to fall behind the 24 hour news cycle. By showing it to the legitimate media first, they gave them a chance to investigate and figure out how bogus it was, so they had the knowledge to dismiss it as fake.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): Potentially. But I don’t know how you’d force the Murdochs to sell their controlling shares. Or the next largest shareholder after them who is a Saudi prince. Frankly, it could be bought outright and just turned off. But only if you could get the Murdochs to sell their controlling shares.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@sdhays:
It is terrible. I do feel most sorry for Hunter. These people are pure evil
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: You’re arguing with a person who actually does this for a living. You may just want to do the discretion is the better part of valor thing on this one.
Jay
@MisterForkbeard:
Ideally, the IC/DOJ takes action against a Russian Op and those involved,
LMAO, I crack myself up sometimes,……….
Adam L Silverman
@MisterForkbeard: The only move here for Biden is the one Jeb! failed to take when the President went after his mother, which is to walk right up to him and just punch him right in the mouth. Nothing else will have any impact.
MisterForkbeard
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I don’t know. Our press is terrible, and if they can get Joe angry or have him misspeak (this was the explicit plan for the 1st debate) then they’ll get a significant pushbtiwards their narrative.
The media is already halfassing the debunking of this whole thing – put a few cracks in it and it might genuinely become the new butter emails, you know?
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
@Kent:
Damn
MisterForkbeard
@Jay: That would be ideal, though it looms like they’ve held onto this for 8 months and done precisely dick with it.
And you know DOJ policy: never do anything that might affect the election unless it screws democrats. :)
And yes, I know you’re joking.
The Moar You Know
@Jay: Look, I agree the story is shit, but to maintain that you can’t image or recover data from a post 2018 Mac with the soldered chips is ludicrous. I could do it right now with what I have in my house, never mind in my lab at work. If it’s pre-2018 they put a fucking port in the thing specifically to do that, for God’s sake. Best part, so long as the motherboard is intact, it will decrypt for you automatically. On any Mac.
I read that guy you linked to. He’s not a forensics guy. Knows hardware but not everything. And in this case he is right about the circumstances – there’s no way THAT particular shop could pull it off – but any competent forensics outfit certainly could.
His assertion that you cannot recover data from a damaged NVME drive is flat out wrong. Every forensics company in the world would be out of business were that the case.
Ivan X
@Mary G: Yep. In NYC, I’m one of those guys.
MisterForkbeard
@Adam L Silverman: I honestly hope Joe calmly states why he’s going to do it first. “This man is a repeated and shameless liar, and that’s been well documented. He benefits from and cooperates with illegal russian activities to help his campaign. He also doesn’t learn anything unless it has direct negative consequences for him, and he’s managed to pass on all his failures as President to the American people. With that in mind, I’m going to do something to give him a very small, real consequence.”
<Crunch>
“Now, can you repeat the question? Thank you.”
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Yeah, I don’t think Biden is going to do that tbh. All of the previous debates have only damaged Trump because his behavior has turned off viewers. He even thought the NBC news townhall was a good idea (“hey, it’s a free hour of tv, why not”). Guthrie skewered him, shockingly
MobiusKlein
I can’t get my oven checked out for under 100.
85 buck for data recovery means you are the one getting ripped off.
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
funny thing is, I’m not arguing.
I said what I read,
got nothing more than a nursh back,
Provided a link.
they are free to debunk what was written by another techie.
I’m not a techie. I use computers, that’s it. If they don’t turn on or kack, I make sure they are plugged in, then try turning them off, then on again.
Anything beyond that, I call tech support. Or Steve, or David.
Gretchen
@Anya: Yes! One thing Hunter said in his texts to his dad while he was in rehab was the fear that his problems would hamper his dad if he ran for president. So those soulless creeps use that fear, that vulnerability, that self-loathing, that love for his father and desire to help him or at least not hurt him, to use him to hurt his dad. This couldn’t be more loathsome, or more dangerous for a vulnerable person to feel that his existence is making the lives of the people he loves worse. I’m afraid for him.
Jay
@The Moar You Know:
thanks,
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: or when you take control of the government again, you have your FEC commissioners and staff actually start to enforce licensing and broadcast laws. Sure, maybe they’ll comply and if they don’t, you yank them off the air.
Adam L Silverman
@MisterForkbeard: Works for me.
Keith P.
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): Also, given that phone call Trump had this morning, two things jump out at me 1) he’s in a *really* foul mood these days, and 2) his voice is not improving.
craigie
@Major Major Major Major:
Apparently it’s not that hard.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): Apparently this is the latest complaint about the NBC Townhall.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: It’s late, here at least it’s late. Everyone’s on edge. Let’s just all keep it dialed below 11.
Ivan X
@Adam L Silverman: As someone who knows the Appleverse intimately from the POV of its users, I can also tell you that there are plenty of iCloud accounts from people who’ve had them a long time that still do not have two-factor authentication enabled. Those accounts often have easily guessed passwords, and when they don’t, the security questions are often answerable with a little research. I believe this is how Jennifer Lawrence got hacked.
Even for accounts that have 2FA, it’s usually possible to send a text message code as a fallback, and phone numbers can be stolen with a little social engineering at the cell carrier, if precautions are not taken (and they rarely are, and they’re not always effective).
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan: Fox News is a cable broadcaster. They are also incorporated as, and have argued in court included in filings, that they are not a news organization, they are an entertainment organization.
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
I was at a 1,
still am.
Adam L Silverman
@Ivan X: I’ve been solely an Apple user since I got back from Iraq in 2008. And I am about as careful as one can be within the systems and processes they’ve set up.
The Moar You Know
@Adam L Silverman: It’s not, and I feel bad for even asking because it’s kinda asking you to work for free, but it is your area of expertise and you’re the only person I know who has anywhere near the kind of education and training to even describe the problem properly. I have a 30-year old degree in social psychology and a work history that has two skills; playing bass and comprehensive IT security. Which equips me just enough to know there’s a massive problem that, if not addressed, will have horrific consequences for most of what we consider “civilized society”. And not much else. So I’ll take you up on that offer and nag you next week.
Calouste
@MisterForkbeard: Two problems:
1) Early voting. Those votes can no longer be changed. Yes, most of them will be from hardcore Democrats, but a small percentage will be from people who might have changed their mind or not voted at all.
2) People hate the shitgibbon and know he’s a fucking liar. They are not going to change their mind no matter what. In the approval/disapproval polls, “strongly disapprove” has consistently outpolled “somewhat disapprove” by a significant margin.
Most of this is just to make the shitgibbon cult feel good about themselves.
Roger Moore
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
If you have the money to buy it, why not turn it into a legitimate news source, possibly with a slight left wing slant?
Ivan X
@Adam L Silverman: I have absolutely no doubt of that whatsoever. You seem like a man who takes his data security…seriously.
Jay
@Ivan X:
cell phone spoofing?
like spammers do?
do a search, then use the cell phone number as an authentication factor?
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
LMAO! You can’t make this shit up. Speaking of the town halls, did you see the SNL skit for them? As soon as the mock host for ABC started with, “We’ll be taking questions from pro-Biden and anti-Trump voters”, I changed the channel. Why does SNL have to suck so bad? Why did the writers feel the need to essentially handicap Biden like that? To provide some sense of false balance so they couldn’t be accused of being biased? (Good) satire is supposed to have some semblance to reality, not be “fair and balanced” BS
In the real ABC townhall, several of the questions from the audience clearly had right-wing framing to them
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: understand that, but if they are not a News Organization, then shouldn’t they be sued for Fraud since they are advertising as one? Sorry to be naïve about this, but if I call my Product a floor wax, wouldn’t I be in trouble for saying it can also be used as a carburetor cleaner without certain ramifications…
Adam L Silverman
Captain C
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, but it’s the nostalgia version with only the bass player from the original band that tours county fairs and plays the occasional oldies station festival.
BR
Anyone know a site to sign up to call / text PA voters to ask them to submit their ballots right away?
This whole situation seems like a mess:
https://twitter.com/maddow/status/1318396650008825857
The Moar You Know
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): It’s a 45+ year old show that peaked in its third season and was irrelevant to anything by its fifth. And they are simply not equipped, as any random viewing of the show proves over and over again, to deal with the 21st century. Lorne is still stuck in 1978. He always will be.
Adam L Silverman
@The Moar You Know: Just gently remind me later in the week, barring breaking news getting in the way.
Adam L Silverman
@Ivan X: As much as is possible given that the law doesn’t seem to care and everything is set up to steal my information and then monetize it as an extension of myself.
Roger Moore
@Mallard Filmore:
That won’t do much to any of the internet behemoths. They don’t want to sell your information; they want to sell your attention. The key point is that the real money is not in selling your information. Once they sell your information, the person they sell it to can aggregate it and sell it on themselves, so every customer becomes a competitor. That’s not the route to big profits. The real profits come by selling access to you based on their knowledge of your interests but not sharing anything about how they made that determination. Keeping everything about you secret from the advertiser who’s paying to access you lets them keep charging for every ad, and that’s where the big profits are.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): I don’t watch SNL.
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan: I don’t think it works that way. As a cable channel they are outside the oversight of the FCC.
Jay
@piratedan:
Faux NotNews has already successfully argued in Court, that they are not “news”,
as a cable network, they are not covered by FCC Regulations,
as part of a “bundle” Faux get’s usury revenues from basic cable subscribers.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@The Moar You Know:
Mostly agree, but Chris Farley was hilarious and he was on SNL in the 90s
Adam L Silverman
@Captain C: True.
Ivan X
@Jay: well, it’s harder than that — being able to spoof an outgoing number doesn’t mean you can receive calls or messages to it. But if you want to individually target someone, consider that every single rep at their cell phone company has the power to transfer their service to a different SIM card, and this would be a normal thing to do when buying a new phone or for other reasons. A skilled operator could get your number transferred to their own SIM card, and then all hell breaks loose when two factor codes and password reset codes are sent via text message. This is called spearfishing, and it happened to a tech savvy friend of mine who had something (a two letter Instagram name, highly valuable on dark web markets) bad actors wanted. It also happened to a high net worth client of mine. He was locked out of all his significant accounts in 5-10 minutes. He was eventually able to regain access to most of them, but not without a lot of pain, and with no guarantees, given the appalling customer support most web sites have, especially if you’re not formally paying for it.
I now recommend asking your cell carrier to enable a port out/transfer lock on your account (don’t lose the PIN!), and using Google Voice attached to a dummy, non identifying Gmail account with a very strong password to receive text messages since there’s no one to call and engineer at Google. And enable 2FA on any social media, email, domain, or finance account, with an authenticator app. Use computer generated strong passwords, not ones you can remember. I also recommend password manager software — I like 1Password, which also builds in an authenticator app. Or at least those built into browsers, with the browser’s password suggestions.
Adam L Silverman
Time for me to rack out. You all have a good night and I’ll catch you on the flip.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
I suppose it’s too early to say, but do you think this Biden emails story will gain any traction?
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): SNL’s job is to try to be funny, not to have a political point of view. Sometimes, they succeed. Other times, they do not.
Adam L Silverman
@Ivan X: Would you shoot me a test message at the contact a front pager address for me when you get a chance? I have some questions about 1Password.
Thanks!
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
Maybe he would have fit if he had a normal sized ass instead of gigantic lard ass.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): I think the news media, outside of the usual suspects, has been very responsible so far. Provided they continue to be, I think it won’t have much traction.
dimmsdale
@Adam L Silverman: My favorite Maria Bartiromo story (which I witnessed, by the way) is the time she was interviewing a youngish congressman on the show during Bush’s push to privatize Social Security. The congressman was explaining why SS needed to be maintained as-is, and at some point Bartiromo asked him (with a ‘so there!’ tone): “If social security is so great, how come you’re not on it?” Nope, she was not being ironic. Yep, she’s that much of an ignoramus.
MisterForkbeard
@Adam L Silverman: Truly, I did not anticipate them going the route of “Our candidate is too fucking fat to fit his ass on a normal sized chair.”
The mind, it boggles.
lofgren
@FlyingToaster: I have the opposite problem. By the time I’m back to the firing line, the kid’s run off, and she’s eating the apple that was supposed to be on her head. Kids!
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay: The FCC regulates cable as well as broadcast TV. The degree of regulation is different.
piratedan
@Jay: ty to everyone who answered, I guess I’ll have to go back to the drone strike on their LA offices approach….
Amir Khalid
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
Yes it will, with everyone who believes Rudy G is credible.
Roger Moore
@Ivan X:
One of the things I like about Firefox is the way they handle your personal information, including your stored passwords. They save your information on their servers, but everything is encrypted by your browser before it’s sent to them. You can recover it with your email address and password, but they can’t reveal it to anyone because they aren’t the ones who encrypted it. The only downside is you’re SOL if you forget your master password. They can’t provide your unencrypted data to anyone, even you.
Ivan X
@Adam L Silverman: done!
Ivan X
@Roger Moore: agreed. Of the built in password managers, Firefox is the best by a long shot.
Jay
@Ivan X:
I use 2 factor, but I generate my own passwords. They all rate “strong”, and I have so many of them across devices and platforms, that I have them stored, (not saved), using a 5 offset code. E=A, 5 =0, all 71 of them.
L85NJGT
@dimmsdale:
https://youtu.be/Y6z–N_D4Tg
RIP Joey Ramone.
Jay
@L85NJGT:
fuck 2020
Ivan X
@Jay: I’m not a security expert, but if you use 2FA and they’re all different from one another and encoded, that sounds reasonably tight.
L85NJGT
@Jay:
He died back in 2001, and took the piss out of Bartiromo on his last album.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
And the 70s was height of better living threw chemicals.
Guilania has a video, so what? It’s obvious it’s BS.
Jay
@Ivan X:
I have pages, on all my devices, full of gibberish.
the first entry is the “account”, less 5 letters, 5 numbers or 5 symbols.
The second, is the account name, same,
third, is the password, same.
I would much rather have preferred a random 26 word line of Vogon poetry, but that isn’t an option.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
They were making jokes about Trump Escorts as the one stop dating option well before the election too.
Kent
Even a legitimate news source with a conservative slant. That would be fine too.
Jay
@L85NJGT:
still, fuck 2020, fuck cancer, fuck the ReThugs, fuck Dumph, fuck Covid.
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Tutti Frutti Rudy Noun Verb 9-11 says he has a video,
like Dumph has a healthcare plan,……..
joel hanes
@Adam L Silverman:
I don’t keep anything in my iCloud account
I worked for Apple for 12 years.
I keep absolutely nothing on iCloud, and disable or de-install iCloud when feasible.
MisterForkbeard
@Jay: I’m sure he DOES have a video. A deep faked video of Hunter Biden doing… something.
Jay
@MisterForkbeard:
Pretty sure there is no vid, and if there is, it’s not Hunter, it’s a down load from Russian Porn Hub,……
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s not just that, 20% wants their brain filled with BS so they will go looking for a Fox substituent if Fox News goes away.
MisterForkbeard
@Jay: Did he tweet about it or something? Or is this just being reported on?
I don’t know why anyone takes Giuliani seriously. Even HE says it’s maybe a 50/50 shot as to whether or not the whole thing is faked by Russians.
Donna in Seattle
@Adam L Silverman: I remember seeing MsBarterbrain on a celebrity version of Jeopardy. She’s dumb! Not one right answer to any question in any category.
Jay
@MisterForkbeard:
Johnson’s claiming childporn,…..-Actually, just alledging.
shit weasels,
going full QAnon
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: There’s a limit what can be done at someone’s house, but the “personal geek squad” would take it back to their shop and deliver back to the client once they are finished working on it.
MisterForkbeard
@Jay: And I suppose we’re just supposed to believe that the FBI sat on that for 8 months and did nothing?
Yeah, no. Fuck that shit.
joel hanes
@Adam L Silverman:
To counter the reach of Fox “News”, I’d like to see legislation or an FCC ruling that cable companies must open their channel offering packages, and apply cafeteria selection and pricing.
Background: Fox “News” is no longer profitable from advertising revenue. Fox charges a very large fee to the cable companies to carry it. The cable companies hide that by putting Fox “News” in every cable package, which in effect forces every cable customer to pay a portion of the price. So in the current situation, non-FN watchers subsidize FN via their cable bill, and keep FN profitable.
If the cost was paid only by those willing to pony up to watch Fox “News” , the audience for FN would be smaller, and Fox would be under pressure to reduce the carriage fee, which would make it less profitable.
Jay
@MisterForkbeard:
what ever they did, if real, they have done nothing publically.
a rerun of Emailz. Russian ratfucking, Wikileaks,
a repeat of keeping Pearl Harbour secret until 1946.
so much for the “Derp State”,…….
joel hanes
@The Moar You Know:
I have no forensic skills.
The NVME system drive in my whitebox Windows 10 machine went on the fritz, repeated crashes, finally refused to boot.
I replaced the system NVME, reinstalled everything, atttached the damaged old NVME as a non-system drive, and successfully extracted about 80% of the data using that esoteric hacker technique, the Windows copy/paste commands. I guess I coulda gone really otaku and opened a command prompt.
Jay
@joel hanes:
yurp.
Jay
Ruckus
@scott (the other one):
Just a little hint – I think he’s also a touch insane and demented. Now he could be acting this way for effect but he does not seem to have that level of whatever it takes to play this reasonably.
Jay
Mary G
I have yard sign envy:
Jay
@Ruckus:
Rudy’s always been a Riechwing shit head.
He killed more First Responders than al-Quida.
He worked the “Middle American’s “ ignorance about cause and effect.
I work with the unhoused. Most have jobs. That’s not enough to get a house. At best, you can eat.
Welfare here pays $640 a month. A Batchelor apartment goes for $1200.
Jay
Jay
Slipped, yeah, right,……..
Jay
Jay
sukabi
The most unbelievable part of the receipt is the cost for the data retrieval / recovery….$85.00 …..it costs more to get a simple part replaced… data recovery is time consuming and the folks that do it charge handsomely for it.
Betty Cracker
Thank you, Adam!
Anya
@Adam L Silverman: Haha. They went with ass was too big for the stool NBC gave him?
cmorenc
One of the prime objectives of Trump operatives relentlessly pushing the Hunter Biden HD story, despite how preposterous it is against even slight examination, is to at least partly distract the media’s focus on Trump’s failed handling of the pandemic. The story inevitably shifts some of the focus on Biden and away from Trump, even if the media’s coverage of the Hunter story outside the Fox bubble is skeptical, it still succeeds as a distraction from damaging coverage of Trump.
cleek
Metadata is spoofable, too.
Any minimally competent programmer can write EXIF tags to JPEGs, or add info chunks to PNGs.
Ian
@Jeffro: Fun fact- my junior high teacher had us make “tar”- not the traditional bubbling stuff you think of in medieval sieges, but what they used it tarring and feathering. It is essentially 100 degree sticky molasses. You have to use industrial strength nail polish to get it off. It is a punishment that involves everyone getting really sticky, and U.S. history has plenty of examples of people messing us the process.
Not that chickens have a lot of rights in this country, but a form of punishment that involves removing the carcass of an animal to attach it to a persons skin probably violates cruel and unusual punishment and certainly violates our standards of animal rights.
Not that chickens
UncleEbeneezer
@Adam L Silverman: Glad you are still planning on doing a post on this!
UncleEbeneezer
Raise your hand if you’re old enough to remember Kitty Dukakis!
KenK
@Adam L Silverman: @#11. I believe that’s their plan Adam – flood you with so much b.s. that you can’t get any real work done. ;)
wenchacha
@The Moar You Know: but that is just like COVID. You may do all you can to avoid it. Unless you become a hermit, you will be in contact with people who do use the interwebs.
Disgrundled
“Whoever” is a perfectly fine word that should have been used twice in paragraph 4-ish.