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“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

He really is that stupid.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Republicans do not trust women.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

When I was faster i was always behind.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

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Cybersecurity

You are here: Home / Archives for Cybersecurity

Open Thread: Catering to ‘Fox Nation’ Snowflakes’ Sensibilities…

by Anne Laurie|  December 3, 20189:12 pm| 178 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, All Too Normal, Clown car, Cybersecurity, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!

so at what point does tumblr realize their new porn-blocking algorithm is confusing all cartoon eyeballs for tits? https://t.co/a7CMweLPNj

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) December 3, 2018


 
But wait, there’s more!… Almost forgot I’d been saving this gem for a quiet patch. From Vanity Fair, “Hannityflix for Snowflakes: Fox Nation, the Murdoch’s New Streaming Service”:

The animating spirit of Fox Nation, the Trump-friendly network’s new video-streaming offering, is inadvertently revealed in the fifth episode Brian Kilmeade’s travelogue show, What Made America Great. Dressed in a sharp blue-checked shirt, the Fox & Friends host strolls through Andrew Jackson’s former plantation, absorbing the majesty of America’s seventh president. “Walking around, you get the sense that Andrew Jackson just left,” he marvels, admiring the poplar-wood columns and military portraits lining the Hermitage.

Like many programs on the so-called “Netflix for conservatives,” the pastoral scene—Kilmeade in gingham, colonnades, portraiture—is unnervingly familiar. In fact, much of the footage from What Made America Great is recycled from Andrew Jackson: Hero Under Fire, overlaid with new narration, graphics, and calming piano music. The same promotional image and footage appears again in America: Great from the Start, Kilmeade’s live lecture series wherein he summarizes historical events covered in his nonfiction books (in this case, 2017’s Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans).

Recycled content appears to be part of the Fox Nation business model. If Fox News exists to serve red meat, Fox Nation is its mechanically separated byproduct—extra bits scraped off the carcasses of more profitable franchises, puréed, and shaped into spongy content nuggets. It is unapologetically a platform of B-sides. The impetus behind Fox Nation’s launch is fairly obvious; the brand appears to be a naturally recurring retirement community trying to keep apace in a dynamic media ecosystem. The network’s average viewer is 64 years old, 21st Century Fox has sold the majority of its entertainment assets to Disney, and the next generation of viewers is cutting the cord. (“It’s scary, right?” Kilmeade told The New York Times, recalling a conversation with his son: “He’s like, ‘Dad, nobody’s watching cable anymore.’”) For $5.99 a month, the subscription platform promises to deliver extra-special content from its deep bench of talent, and to provide an exclusive entre into their world. The sign-up-screen video shows Kilmeade and Co. at a party, popping the corks off champagne bottles and playing pool. Below, a tantalizing promise: “More of the content you love from the people you trust.”…

Fox Nation, for when chewing your own oatmeal is too much of a mental chore…

$5.99 a month people. pic.twitter.com/LTFQcPn1iX

— Schooley (@Rschooley) November 29, 2018

The voices you trust. The ones in your head. pic.twitter.com/spVjzSQJs5

— Schooley (@Rschooley) November 29, 2018

Open Thread: Catering to ‘Fox Nation’ Snowflakes’ Sensibilities…Post + Comments (178)

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg Are Having a Very Bad, No Good, Horrible Day: British Parliamentary and International Grand Committee on Disinformation Edition

by Adam L Silverman|  November 27, 201812:54 pm| 281 Comments

This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election 2018, Election 2020, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Cybersecurity, Not Normal

Carole Cadwalladr’s relentless pursuit of the bad acts committed by a host of bad actors around Brexit and the 2016 US presidential elections has some news for us from the British parliamentary inquiry, also attended by representatives from Canada, Germany, Belgium, and other countries, into Facebook. From the 4:30 PM GMT session:

Straight in: ‘Lord Allan’s answer this morning was false’ (About apps access to user data)

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

‘In short Facebook allowed developers to access users’ data time & time again.’

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

Charlie Angus (Canada): ‘You are testifying under oath that Facebook misrepresented themselves to this committee?’ ‘Correct.’
‘That is contempt of this committee’

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

Soltani: ‘I’ve worked on this issue for a decade. I was literally listening to the hearing this morning. And when companies make deliberately deceptive statements it gets under my skin’

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

Soltani: ‘643 docs likely critical to current FTC investigation’ (BIG deal. FTC has TEETH. Investigation live & ongoing)

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

This is in addition to this morning’s (Greenwich Mean Time) bombshells:

Explosive news from parliament today. Colins reveals Facebook knew in 2014 that Russia hacked users' data. Mueller's indictments show this was exactly when the Kremlin set up troll factory to target US voters. Why wasn't this disclosed to congress?? What else isn't it telling us? https://t.co/x2yzsb1fPo

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

On this, Facebook tells me, "the engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity."

Company didn't answer my question about whether a breach actually occurred. https://t.co/Mq6ibCL9O2

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) November 27, 2018

Is Zuckerberg about to have a very, very bad several weeks? Why yes, yes he is!

#BREAK Damian Collins MP says he is hopeful he will be able to publish the secret internal Facebook documents in the next week

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) November 27, 2018

Canadian Bob Zimmer: We represent 400 million. Let that sink in. We need to hear from the CEO. He made the decisions. There were so many questions that were not answered."

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

Paul Farrelly: "Has Facebook ever taken advice on possible RICO offences?"
Lord Allan: "Not that I'm aware of"

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

He's now got out the full flamethrower. "Does it occur to you that Facebook might have become of these bad actors?"
"No," said Lord Allan. "I don't believe we are." Even he doesn't sound quite sure any ore…

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

Lord Allan: "We can't turn the internet off."@DamianCollins: "The internet is not Facebook."
Final words. Hearing over. Pretty much sums it up.

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

 

For those who want to see her entire live tweetstorm of this morning’s hearings, you can start here:

Magnificent shade being thrown by parliament.
MP to Facebook's lobbyist, Lord Allan:
"Lord Allan you are a member of parliament. How do you think it looks that Mark Zuckerberg didn't turn up to to answer questions to parliament today?"
Lord Allan: "Not great." pic.twitter.com/mSwRHtmVm2

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) November 27, 2018

Jason Kint’s starts here:

“Facebook still has questions to answer” link to unprecedented global committee hearing starting shortly. Facebook sent its lobbyist. We know questions will be precise at this point but we don’t know whether Facebook will come to answer. ICO certainly will. I’ll thread here. https://t.co/IK83wqEj1D

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) November 27, 2018

While the current administration may not care to do anything about this, especially given how much it has benefited the President, and the GOP majorities in the House and the Senate aren’t really interested either, the British, the Canadians, the Germans, the Belgians, the French, and the European Union are. And they will conduct the inquiries, criminal investigations, prosecutions, and ultimately create the regulation that will bring Zuckerberg and Sandberg and a whole host of other bad actors that have leveraged what Zuckerberg and Sandberg created to heel.

Do you know who in the US is paying close attention to the inquiries today in Parliament? Special Counsel Mueller and Congressman Adam Schiff.

Open thread!

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg Are Having a Very Bad, No Good, Horrible Day: British Parliamentary and International Grand Committee on Disinformation EditionPost + Comments (281)

That NYTimes Facebook Bombshell: “Delay, Deny, Deflect..”

by Anne Laurie|  November 15, 201810:34 pm| 119 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Information Warfare, Tech News and Issues, Cybersecurity

A gentle reminder that you’ve handed sensitive data to Facebook, a profoundly unethical company. Everything we know about Facebook suggests you should delete your account as matter of self-defense. https://t.co/PORbAHywxe

— Franklin Foer (@FranklinFoer) November 15, 2018

Much as I hate to endorse any opinion of Franklin Foer’s, I have to admit I’m glad I never joined Facebook. (Not being on Facebook has sometimes felt like a minor luxury, because I don’t have an employer who demands it, or social networks that I can’t access via alternate routes. And, yes, I realize they’ve probably mined all my personal information anyways.) Props to the NYTimes reporters:

… In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.…

…[T]rust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook’s conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a yearslong struggle over the future of Facebook’s data-hungry business model…

show full post on front page

That <em>NYTimes</em> Facebook Bombshell: “Delay, Deny, Deflect..”Post + Comments (119)

This Morning’s Big Hacking Stories

by Cheryl Rofer|  October 4, 20184:19 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: Election 2018, Information Warfare, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Cybersecurity

The stories actually go beyond hacking, but that’s an adequate title for a placeholder post until Adam or Major Major Major Major can weigh in.

There are two stories, one about China and one about Russia’s GRU, their military intelligence agency.

Bloomberg has, for reasons I can’t imagine, gone with a white typeface on black background, which I find painful to read, so I’ll work from the Washington Post’s summary.

Bloomberg has just published an explosive article claiming that a secret unit in the Chinese military has compromised the motherboards (the systems of chips and electronics that allow computers to work) of servers used by Apple, a bank and various government contractors.

China’s exploit was discovered when Amazon did due diligence on a company that it was acquiring, which used servers with the compromised motherboards. Both Apple and Amazon have issued statements denying the Bloomberg claims, but Bloomberg seems confident that it’s correct, saying it has multiple sources inside Amazon and the intelligence community. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

We have long depended on China for essential electronic components. That’s seemed dangerous to me, but nobody listens to me on such things.

Also this morning, Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the rightwing Hudson Institute and said that China was the biggest threat to the United States. It’s hard not to see these events as being coordinated. Pence claimed, as did President Donald Trump at the United Nations, that China was trying to hack the US elections. Which probably means that they will call any Democratic wins a Chinese plot. Also, too, when you are making googly eyes at Vladimir Putin, you have to have an enemy to gin up support at home.

Also this morning, the United States, UK, and the Netherlands announced indictments against Russian members of the GRU for hacking a great many agencies, including the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and anti-doping organizations. Russia, of course, denies everything. I am also seeing bits and pieces coming across my Twitter feed from open-source investigators pointing to obvious tells from Russian agents, like using consecutively numbered passports and US $100 bills.

It looks like the GRU has gotten sloppy in their spycraft, or that Russia would like the world to know it operates with impunity.

It is the US that is bringing the indictments. It looks like parts of our government have not signed on to the googly eyes strategy and are continuing to prosecute conspiracies against our country. That’s an interesting development. Its implications for Trump are not clear, although one might think that this investigation has shared information with Robert Mueller’s staff.

Both these stories are developing.

This Morning’s Big Hacking StoriesPost + Comments (94)

AP News Open Thread: Julian Assange, the Biter Bit?

by Anne Laurie|  September 17, 20186:33 pm| 135 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Russiagate, Assholes, Cybersecurity

The petard hoisting of GRU asset Julian Assange by a leak is never going to get old. https://t.co/kdFBWUDEkg

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) September 17, 2018

This is the AP, not some blog with a history of overreaction, so… cui bono, at this particular moment?

LONDON (AP) — Julian Assange had just pulled off one of the biggest scoops in journalistic history, splaying the innards of American diplomacy across the web. But technology firms were cutting ties to his WikiLeaks website, cable news pundits were calling for his head and a Swedish sex crime case was threatening to put him behind bars.

Caught in a vise, the silver-haired Australian wrote to the Russian Consulate in London.

“I, Julian Assange, hereby grant full authority to my friend, Israel Shamir, to both drop off and collect my passport, in order to get a visa,” said the letter, which was obtained exclusively by The Associated Press.

The Nov. 30, 2010, missive is part of a much larger trove of WikiLeaks emails, chat logs, financial records, secretly recorded footage and other documents leaked to the AP. The files provide both an intimate look at the radical transparency organization and an early hint of Assange’s budding relationship with Moscow.…

WikiLeaks has repeatedly been hit by unauthorized disclosures, but the tens of thousands of files obtained by the AP may be the biggest leak yet.

The AP has confirmed the authenticity of many of the documents by running them by five former WikiLeaks associates or by verifying non-public details such as bank accounts, telephone numbers or airline tickets.

One of the former associates, an ex-employee, identified two of the names that frequently appeared in the documents’ metadata, “Jessica Longley” and “Jim Evans Mowing,” as pseudonyms assigned to two WikiLeaks laptops.

All five former associates spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, in some cases because they didn’t want their past association with WikiLeaks to become public, and in others because they feared legal retaliation or harassment from the group’s supporters…

Metadata suggests that it was on Nov. 29, the day after the release of the first batch of U.S. State Department files, that the letter to the Russian Consulate was drafted on the Jessica Longley computer…

AP News Open Thread: Julian Assange, the Biter Bit?Post + Comments (135)

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York Strikes Again

by Adam L Silverman|  September 11, 20189:21 pm| 44 Comments

This post is in: America, Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Cybersecurity

They got him! They finally got him!!!!

You guys. They got him. THE FEDS GOT HIM. pic.twitter.com/eOTjnpfhtw

— Phil Ewing (@philewing) September 11, 2018

I guess I’m not getting that $25 dollar electronic funds transfer though…

Open thread.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York Strikes AgainPost + Comments (44)

Info Ops – Staying Alert

by Cheryl Rofer|  August 30, 20186:57 pm| 9 Comments

This post is in: Election 2018, Election 2020, Excellent Links, Information Warfare, Cybersecurity

I said in a post last week that I’m going to try to keep you all current on what we know about information operations, as we approach November’s elections and the 2020 presidential election. I’ll post short summaries or longer commentaries if they are warranted. We’ve all got to stay alert for malign influencers.

The FBI has launched two websites, Protected Voices and Combating Foreign Influence.  Protected Voices offers advice on cyberhygiene – they have a set of short videos on things like passwords, browser safety, wi-fi, and router hardening. Looks like they might be useful for internal corporation training or just anyone who has questions about the various topics. Combating Foreign Influence is newer and intends “to educate the public about the threats faced from disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, and the overall impact of foreign influence on society.”

I’m a little dubious about government initiatives of this sort, but it was the FBI and others who went to President Obama in summer 2016 to tell him that the Russians were doing damage. So I’ll keep an eye on these sites. I also hope that the jackal computer nerds will chime in too.

BuzzFeed has a big article on Russian propaganda operations in the Baltic states. Three news outlets set up in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to spread the Russian point of view without saying that’s what they were doing.

The websites presented themselves as independent news outlets, but in fact, editorial lines were dictated directly by Moscow.

The purpose was to turn Russian speakers in those three countries toward Russia and away from the countries they live in. The article is very detailed, working from Skype calls among the managers of the news outlets. I kept thinking about Fox News as something of an analogy in the United States.

 

 

Info Ops – Staying AlertPost + Comments (9)

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