Bayou Renaissance Man

I've seen several claims that large quantities of shares in President Trump's social media network were "shorted" immediately prior to the assassination attempt against him on July 13.  The inference being drawn is that whoever did this must have had prior knowledge of the plot, and was poised to profit from its success.  Here's just one example of what I've been seeing.

However, few if any of those reporting the alleged short sales bothered to do their own research - they just rushed to repeat a rumor.

The Daily Dot reported more responsibly.

Investors in Trump Media ($DJT) believe that they can prove who had inside knowledge of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.

But most of their claims are based on misreading a document filed last week with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC).

. . .

But claims that the puts were placed specifically right before the assassination don’t hold water. The filing is a report for a calendar year or quarter ending on June 30, which is the latest the puts could have been placed.

It’s possible firms shorted DJT on July 12, but reports revealing that are not currently available.

There's more at the link.

This always happens after a major crisis event like Saturday's.  Conspiracy theorists rush out of the woodwork to spread their slimy suspicions all over anything and anyone they can imagine.  They don't wait for the initial "fog" to clear, they don't bother to look for authoritative sources (in fact, they frequently quote each other as being authoritative, when all they are doing is rumor-mongering), and they aren't interested in the truth.

Folks, please be very careful where you get your news.  Far too many "independent" sources aren't worth the electrons it takes to get them to your computer or telephone screen.  At a time when a rumor might spark genuine violence, even murder, against political opponents, their deliberate inaccuracy and refusal to fact-check is criminally negligent, IMHO.

Peter

A journalist and writer ponders what she calls "My last five years of work".

I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it.

I work at a frontier AI company. With every iteration of our model, I am confronted with something more capable and general than before. At this stage, it can competently generate cogent content on a wide range of topics. It can summarize and analyze texts passably well. As someone who at one point made money as a freelance writer and prided myself on my ability to write large amounts of content quickly, a skill which—like cutting blocks of ice from a frozen pond—is arguably obsolete, I find it hard not to notice these advances. Freelance writing was always an oversubscribed skillset, and the introduction of language models has further intensified competition.

The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial. They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level ... The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task.

. . .

Many expect AI to eventually be able to do every economically useful task. I agree. Given the current trajectory of the technology, I expect AI to first excel at any kind of online work. Essentially anything that a remote worker can do, AI will do better. Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, and many other tasks are or will soon be heavily automated. I can see the beginnings in areas like software development and contract law. Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models.

There's more at the link.

Hers is a timely article.  With more and more white-collar workers being displaced by artificial intelligence and expert systems, it's going to be an ongoing and increasingly important debate:  what will we do when there's no longer anything that we're needed to do?

This also calls for a re-examination of the much-derided concept of universal basic income.  If automation reduces the number of available jobs far below the number of workers available to fill them, who's going to provide for the unemployed workers?  They can't be abandoned to starve, so some form of UBI appears to be inevitable.  What form that might take is currently being debated world-wide, but that it will be required seems incontrovertible.

Food for thought - particularly for a wordsmith, blogger and writer like myself.

Peter

In a recent issue of his regular Global Macro Update newsletters, Ed d'Agostino of Mauldin Economics interviewed Karim Hijazi, a cybercrime expert, about the current state of that field and the growing involvement of AI.  It's a long, multipage newsletter, so I won't even try to go into all it says.  Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite.

Ed D'Agostino:  What is AI's role in all of this? Has it impacted effectiveness of bad actors at all?

Karim Hijazi:  It has. I hate to say it. AI has probably been most embraced in terms of its creativity and its use by nefarious actors or threat actors because as usual, unfortunately, because it affords them the ability to force multiply themselves. That's the number one reason. What they would otherwise need a bunch of people to do they can do... one person can do a whole lot of work with an AI tool that generates an incredible amount of not only the narratives for a phishing email that we talked about, but also the malware itself. It'll actually write the code for the malware that is generally pretty well written. And there's a few tweaks here and there, but what would take weeks or months is done in days.

Ed D'Agostino:  Can you talk a little bit, Karim, about what's at stake here? I mean, we talk about me sitting here in my remote solo office, I get a phishing email. I'm not hooked up to a big company network. Maybe I lose a little bit of data. I think that's how people think of it. Really what we're talking about is the country's critical infrastructure is at risk. What does that look like and how is it at risk?

Karim Hijazi:  Exactly. The everyday person doesn't feel like it can affect them. A lot of where individuals are worried about when it comes to hackers and threats is their identities, maybe their credit card information, their social security number, back to identity. But what's interesting is that in the world we're in now, the interconnectivity between even your computer and mine, by definition, there is one, right? You're looking into your screen and I'm looking into my screen, my camera's picking up my image and sending it to you. There's effectively a link between us. So if you want to think of it from that perspective, right now we're connected. And so if there is, in theory, something on my machine, God forbid, and it wanted to sort of figure out, "Who's Ed?," and it goes into my email and it lurks around and it goes, "Ooh, Ed's got a lot of connections on LinkedIn," or, "He's got a really great follower base on YouTube. He's a good target for me to proliferate myself even further to his audience." So you think about it, that's the first step in terms of its reconnaissance risk. When you start thinking about yourself as a non-player when it comes to why you'd be interesting to a threat actor, you'd be surprised.

The second thing that's really interesting is this is just a micro version of the macro problem, which is supply chain. Supply-chain and third-party ecosystems are the number one challenge that we're having today because a small company leads to bigger company. A bigger company leads to government or critical infrastructure. The pathway, the daisy chain, if you will, is small company, bigger company, critical infrastructure. And from that small company… it could be a work-from-home individual that never left home after COVID because that was the policy of the company but because there's no security protocols at home, they're the easiest targets in the world to get into. The VPN is simply a hypodermic needle into the corporation. The corporation is now access to many other organizations and so on. That's just the super small taxonomy or treeing out of essentially the connections out all the way from the individual to government or critical infrastructure, unfortunately.

Ed D'Agostino:  I think you'd mentioned that some really big cutting-edge technology has been bled out of corporations through this sort of process. Quantuum was one that we talked about yesterday. I thought that we were... I was sitting here looking at IBM thinking, "If IBM gets Quantuum right, this stock is going to go into the moon, maybe we should be looking at it. They seem to be the leaders." And then I spoke with you and you're like, "Well, China's already got all that."

Karim Hijazi:  Unfortunately, China as a nation-state actor has focused heavily on intellectual property theft for years. That's definitely not a new agenda of theirs. It's been their focus for a very long time. I think we all know that from headline news. The problem is they've done it in a multipronged approach. They did it with implants of people, long-term "coverts" through academia that they've had planted for very long periods of time. They've augmented it with things like software and access to environments, through harvesting information electronically. And they've conned people into sharing information as well. That's the other part of this is that they've done a really good job with that. The other thing that's interesting is what people fail to recognize is that nation-state adversaries aren't islands unto themselves. They tend to cooperate. If a Russian or North Korean or Iranian nation-state actor has an initial access into something, they'll broker it to another country for a price. There may be one group in a nationstate adversary that has much better access to something than the other group does, but the other group can pay them for it, and they'll get in.

Unfortunately, there's been an onslaught onto our country in such a way that makes it very difficult for us to sort of manage all those beachheads. And so the asymmetry is very challenging, and it ties back to your AI conversation, which is how has that added to it? Just that, it's added this extra level of pressurization onto the systems that we believe were protecting us, and they are indeed failing. Sorry to be doom and gloom, but...

There's much more at the link.  The entire newsletter is well worth reading if you're interested in computer and information systems security.

It's startling to realize how widespread and prevalent cybercrime has become.  It's far more than just "phishing" e-mails or attempts to listen in on communications channels.  It's now become an exercise in how to kinetically affect an entire nation or sector of a national economy.  In another part of the interview, Karim Hijazi notes:

There's things like water treatment facilities that can have water levels… the pH change or the potability change just ever so slightly that'll cause a mass dysentery effect. Then you've got a flood onto the pressurization of a hospital environment in a specific location. And then as we've seen over the course of the pandemic, you conduct a ransomware attack and put the hospitals in a pressurization state where they can't function unless they pay a ransom, and you can really cause a cascading effect. And that's the doom and gloom scenario, of course. But you're completely right, the big concern is if there's that much access to these environments, what can they effectively do? And how much have we given to technology to take over?

And unfortunately, I know I said AI for the third time in this conversation, but here again is where our reliance on it and our over-excitedness to deliver the responsibility over to it, may be a little foolhardy at this point because once it's in the hands of something that really doesn't have any kind of emotionality or ability to identify... For example, in my company, I do employ a lot of automation and AI, but I also use human intuition and experience and talent to identify these problems that simply, at this point, can't be done through technology. And unfortunately for cost savings and a variety of other reasons, people are choosing to go in the direction where it's all automated. And automation's fantastic when there's nothing coming at it to use it maliciously, but when it can be leveraged against you, you’ve got an issue.

Worrying thoughts.  Again, if you want to learn more about this field and how it might affect any or all of us, I highly recommend reading the full interview for yourself.  I also suggest you subscribe to the newsletter (it's free).  Mr. d'Agostino comes up with some very interesting and useful insights.

Peter

Following our post about the deliberate cutting of Internet cables near Sacramento International Airport in California, disrupting operations there, I came across this article dealing with Internet cables globally, and how fragile they are.  It's frightening and disturbing to read about how fragile this infrastructure really is.

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

There's much more at the link, including many graphics and illustrations.  I'd say it's essential reading for anyone who relies on the Internet to do their job(s) every day.  Fascinating, revealing, and worrying all at the same time.

Peter

An incident in California demonstrates just how vulnerable much of our critical infrastructure really is.

An internet outage that caused massive delays, some hours long, for flights at the Sacramento International Airport (SMF) started after AT&T wires were intentionally cut, officials said.

. . .

"It looks like someone who knew what they were doing," [Sergeant] Gandhi said. "So this wasn't just a couple of teenagers ... ripping some wires out as a prank. [It] looks very deliberate ... like they knew what they were doing."

There's more at the link.

I hate to think what proportion of our critical infrastructure (airports, sewage and water plants, power stations, dams, factories, refineries, rail interchanges, etc.) are dependent on Internet connections for part or all of their operations.  I suspect it's most of them.  Those Internet connections mostly run over cables, or via satellite.  Given how easy it is to take out a major fiber-optic cable (dig down to it, set off explosives, and Bob's your uncle) or use a local EMP weapon (as already possessed by many hostile powers and nations) to interrupt satellite communications in a given area, and all those critical points are suddenly offline.  How long will it take to reconnect them all?  Will it even be possible, if it can't be done in a hurry?  Many of them can't take too much of an interruption before they have to shut down their plant, and once that's done it can take a heck of a lot of maintenance and preparation before machines can be turned on again.  (Just as one example, if you shut down a crucible in a metal plant, the metal still inside it will solidify.  Getting that back to a liquid, and decanting it, can take weeks or months - if it's possible at all.  Another example:  re-energizing an electrical grid.  That takes a lot of power just to restart everything, but if generating plants have all been shut down, where's it to come from?  What about transformers that blow during the process?  Are spares on hand?)

Emergencies aren't just caused by storms or earthquakes.  Determined enemies can create emergencies that take weeks, if not months (and perhaps years) to sort out.  Hence, emergency preparations need to take such elements into account.  If you live near or are dependent on (e.g. for employment) any of those critical infrastructure elements, your emergency preparations should take that reality into account.  Being thrown out of work due to your employer having to shut down operations is just as much of an emergency, in its own way, as having water or power cut off to your house.

Also, consider how much of our daily lives now depend on the Internet.  Home security systems, banking, shopping, entertainment . . . if we lose the Internet, how will we do all those things?  Have you checked where the nearest physical branch of your bank is, and its hours of operation, and how to get there?  It might surprise you to see how difficult it will be to conduct your financial affairs if you have to go there in person, rather than tap at your keyboard.  (That's one reason why keeping a reasonable stash of cash at home, just in case, is anything but overkill.  It may be essential.)

Peter

Today's award goes to all the criminals who trusted the other criminals who ran a darknet narcotics site.  Their trust has just backfired on them.

Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000. The bold mass extortion attempt comes just days after Incognito Market administrators reportedly pulled an “exit scam” that left users unable to withdraw millions of dollars worth of funds from the platform.

. . .

Incognito Market deals primarily in narcotics, so it’s likely many users are now worried about being outed as drug dealers.

. . .

The past is replete with examples of similar darknet market exit scams ... “Shadowcrew was the precursor to today’s Darknet Markets and laid the foundation for the way modern cybercrime channels still operate today,” Johnson said. “The Truth of Darknet Markets? ALL of them are Exit Scams. The only question is whether law enforcement can shut down the market and arrest its operators before the exit scam takes place.”

There's more at the link.

So, then:

1. Incognito Market is admittedly a criminal organization, selling an illegal product.
2. Notwithstanding this, its customers do business there - thereby effectively admitting that they're also criminals.
3. Yet, customers are upset that the criminals from whom they've been buying are now extorting the criminals to whom they were selling?

WHAT ELSE DID THEY EXPECT???

Criminals gonna criminal.  It's the way they are.  You trust them at your peril, do business with them at your peril, and pay the price if (or, rather, when) things go wrong.  That's just the way it is.  I somehow doubt the prosecuting authorities and the courts are going to be very sympathetic when they catch up with those whose criminal tendencies and dealings are about to be revealed.

Peter

Friends, most of you know that the reason I instituted moderation of all comments on this blog was because spammers were becoming a bigger and bigger problem.  I couldn't rely on Blogger to catch them all, so I have to do it myself.  I'd rather not - it takes effort to do so, and time I'd rather devote to other things - but it was the only way I could stay on top of the problem.  (I've moderated 28 spam comments in the last five days alone.)

However, it looks like it was a worthwhile policy even without the spam problem, thanks to the increasing polarization of our society and the weirdness that's being reinforced by online echo chambers.  Too many commenters appear to be listening only to their own thoughts and those of people who see the world as they do, whether or not that perspective has anything to do with reality.  Trouble is, they insist on exporting those thoughts and that weirdness to everybody else, including forums such as the Comment sections on this blog.  This morning, when I woke up and sat down at the computer to moderate overnight comments, I had to discard several proclaiming that all the problems of the world are caused by the Jews, or the whites, or the blacks, or Democrats, or Communists, or women who refuse to be "traditional wives", or . . . you get the idea.

Folks, I try to allow most people to comment freely on what they think.  They, as we, have the right to speak their minds.  However, they do not have the right to use my blog as a propaganda outlet to beat me (and the rest of us) over the head with their particular schtick.  Therefore, I deleted all such comments, and I'll continue to do so.  The same applies to disjointed comments that make no logical sense, or have nothing to do with the topic under discussion.  Why inflict them on my readers?  We have better things to do with our time.

(Some comments don't make it to my inbox at all.  Every now and again I get complaints from people who allege that I've deleted their comment, only for me to check the files and find it didn't arrive at all.  Blogger does that sometimes - it's been a known problem for years.  I have no idea how to fix it.)

Rational, reasonable comments and discussion from people who've clearly thought about the subject under discussion are more than welcome, even if their viewpoint or perspective is the opposite of my own.  I can be wrong too, you know!  However, I won't allow this blog to become a forum for extremism in any form, or an echo chamber for way-out-there muck and murk that might stick to our metaphorical walls.  We don't need that here - and as the online janitor, I flush it away whenever I come across it.

That may offend some readers, particularly those with a particular ideological axe to grind:  but that's the way it is here.  If you want to do things differently, please start your own blog and have at it.

Peter

There are fewer and fewer of us who remember when privacy was something important, and tried to allow other people their space while insisting on our own.  Sadly, the intrusion of technology into every part of our lives has all but destroyed the concept of personal privacy.  Certainly, anything and everything one says over any electronic medium must be assumed to be unsafe/not secure.

Facebook is a perfect example of a company that doesn't give a damn about your privacy.

Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.  The Markup helped Consumer Reports recruit participants for the study. Participants downloaded an archive of the previous three years of their data from their Facebook settings, then provided it to Consumer Reports.

By collecting data this way, the study was able to examine a form of tracking that is normally hidden: so-called server-to-server tracking, in which personal data goes from a company’s servers to Meta’s servers. Another form of tracking, in which Meta tracking pixels are placed on company websites, is visible to users’ browsers. 

. . .

Despite its limitations, the study offers a rare look, using data directly from Meta, on how personal information is collected and aggregated online.

Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez defended the company’s practices. “We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used,” Vazquez wrote in an emailed statement to The Markup.

While Meta does provide transparency tools like the one that enabled the study, Consumer Reports identified problems with them, including that the identity of many data providers is unclear from the names disclosed to users and that companies that provide services to advertisers are often allowed to ignore opt-out requests.

One company appeared in 96 percent of participants’ data: LiveRamp, a data broker based in San Francisco. But the companies sharing your online activity to Facebook aren’t just little-known data brokers. Retailers like Home Depot, Macy’s, and Walmart, all were in the top 100 most frequently seen companies in the study. Credit reporting and consumer data companies such as Experian and TransUnion’s Neustar also made the list, as did Amazon, Etsy, and PayPal.

. . .

“This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Markup in an interview. Fitzgerald said that while users are likely aware that Meta knows what they are doing while they are on Facebook and Instagram, “they don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”

There's more at the link.

I've never used Facebook, because I've been aware for a long time of its electronic intrusiveness and deliberate policy of nullifying efforts at personal privacy.  Reading that report merely confirms that only those who literally don't care about keeping anything private should be using it.

If our spouses tried to spy on us the way Facebook and its corporate customers do, it would probably be grounds for divorce:  yet we ignore or even invite such intrusion every time we use such services.  What's wrong with us, and with our society, that we've been conditioned to not just allow, but welcome that? - because if we continue to use Facebook and similar "social media" services after learning about such anti-privacy policies, that's exactly what we're doing.

Peter

For the past few weeks, when one tries to look at a story on Fox News, one increasingly gets this pop-up at the link:

That pretty much eliminates Fox News as a usable source, in my opinion.

Remember, businesses do things that make money for them.  If something doesn't make money for them, why should they do it?  When Fox News - or Epoch Times, or any other news source (or any other Web site, for that matter) - demands that you allow them to invade your privacy by giving them your e-mail address and/or other contact information in order to use their services, you can be sure they're not offering anything for your benefit.  No, it's for their benefit.  They expect to make money off of you, or send you advertisements or propaganda or whatever, or track your online activities so they can make money out of selling that information to data aggregators.

Therefore, when you come across any Web site or online business demanding that you sign up in some way to use their services, just remember - it's for their benefit, not yours.  If it weren't, they wouldn't be asking for it.

Therefore, Fox News has now been added to my list of Web sites that are untrustworthy and/or never to be used.  That's no loss, of course.  One can get news almost anywhere, courtesy of a quick Internet search on the subject, much of it free of paywalls, registration and other intrusions into one's privacy.  I'll find what I need that way.

Peter

I note that the Pentagon is looking to develop an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon to disable drone swarms.

Faced with the reality that drones are reshaping the modern battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, the Pentagon has been tasked with finding a budget-friendly solution to eliminate these 'flying IEDs.' While missiles are too expensive, and laser beams are a distant dream, the next best cost-effective weapon US military officials are eyeing up could be electromagnetic pulse weapons to counter drone swarms.

. . .

The service outlined the drone-killing features of the new EMP weapon it is seeking:

"The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI) is conducting market research to seek information from industry on the landscape of research and development (R&D) for available Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) solutions towards countering multiple Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). EMP solutions could be ground and/or aerial based that provide effective mitigation against Department of Defense (DoD) UAS groups 1, 2, and smaller group 3 aircraft." 

. . .

The proposed EMP weapon would be able to neutralize drones with a directed EMP blast to damage the electronic parts - this is a much cheaper solution than missiles that cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, a piece.

There's more at the link.

This sounds like a very good idea from a military perspective, just as an anti-aircraft defense using laser beams or other directed energy weapons would be much more economical than one firing missiles (see, for example, Israel's "Iron Beam" system).  So far, so good . . . but EMP weapons are no respecters of persons or property.  What if your home, or your vehicle, is caught in the spread of such a weapon when it discharges?  Say goodbye to every microchip and integrated circuit you own.  Your car dies, your fridge, your washing-machine, probably your switchboard and everything electrical in your home as well - and none of them will come back on once the pulse dissipates.  The damage will be permanent.  The only fix will be to replace every affected component, appliance and vehicle.

You may say, "Well, I live far from every likely combat area, so that won't affect me."  Think again.  If it affects, say, 5% or 10% of those people in a country, the demand from those areas for replacement parts and equipment will be sudden and overwhelming.  It'll suck in everything available everywhere, and then some.  That means the rest of us will no longer be able to get the parts and services we need in lesser quantities to repair normal damage (e.g. power surges, lightning strikes, and so on).  The orders we place for those parts will be added to those needed for the EMP-affected areas, and will probably be given a lower priority.  Sucks to be us, I guess.

There's also the factor that such attacks will likely be more widespread than typical "front-line" warfare.  Drones can be sent anywhere at any time.  An enemy might smuggle drones into the USA, then launch a sudden, unexpected drone swarm attack on a major city (Washington D.C., anyone?), or a major economic target (a nuclear power plant, a series of transportation hubs, or whatever).  That would expose many "behind-the-lines" areas to EMP damage, with all the consequences I mentioned above.  Let that happen in more than one or two places and the attackers will have struck a crippling blow against any modern economy.  To take just one example, what if the Internet goes down?  I don't believe our current economy and system of government could function in its absence.  Administration, banking, shopping . . . all would be interrupted.  Chaos would ensue.

It's worth thinking beyond the obvious when one reads snippets of news like that.  It might be a very effective weapon.  It might also disrupt the very society it's intended to defend.

Peter

Headline of the day:

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Peter

... it may be a security risk.  By that, I mean an email address like "Firstname.Lastname@ISP.com", with a period in the prefix before the @ sign.  Friend and fellow author John Van Stry reports:

I have the gmail address for my last name. Just me. I have it.

Now there aren't a lot of people with my last name in the world (less than a hundred) and SOME OF THEM use: FirstName.LastName for their gmail address.

Guess who ALL of their emails go to? 

NOT JUST THEM.

I have access to ALL of their toll pass accounts, their APARTMENT COMPLEX CODES, their MEDICAL INFORMATION, you ****ing name it and sooner or later I end up with it. Because they put a ****ing dot in their name and MOST mail software is bought at the cut rate version of buymart and guess what? It can't handle that DOT.

So if YOU have a dot in YOUR email name, understand that there is someone else out there, who has the email that caused you to get the dot who is getting ALL OF YOUR PRIVATE ****.

There's more at the link.

This affects me, because I have several email accounts with a split prefix, that I use for different purposes.  I'm going to have to look into that, and probably change them - which is a lot of work, and a massive time sink, but I guess will have to be done for security reasons.

Technology.  Grrrrr!!!  (Also known as "Why won't the computer do what I want it to do, instead of what I tell it to do?")

Peter

This folk wisdom has been circulating on the Internet for years.  I was reminded about it via e-mail the other day, and enjoyed re-reading it:  so I thought some of my readers might feel likewise.

Advice from An Old Hillbilly:

• Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong.
• Keep skunks, bankers, and politicians at a distance.
• Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
• A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.
• Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.
• The best sermons are lived, not preached.
• Forgive your enemies; its what GOD says to do.
• If you don't take the time to do it right, you'll find the time to do it twice.
• Don't corner something that is meaner than you.
• Don’t pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he’ll just kill you.
• It don’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.
• You cannot unsay a cruel word.
• Every path has a few puddles.
• When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.
• Don't be banging your shin on a stool that's not in the way.
• Borrowing trouble from the future doesn't deplete the supply.
• Most of the stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen anyway.
• Don’t judge folks by their relatives.
• Silence is sometimes the best answer.
• Don‘t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t botherin' you none.
• Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
• If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin’.
• Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.
• The biggest troublemaker you’ll ever have to deal with watches you from the mirror every mornin’.
• Always drink upstream from the herd.
• Good judgment comes from experience, and most of that comes from bad judgment.
• Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.
• If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.
• Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll enjoy it a second time.
• Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.
• Most times, it just gets down to common sense.

Advice for the ages, and most of it good, IMHO.

Peter

Google seems to have implemented a number of artificial intelligence bots on its Blogger service, and they apparently have no idea what they're doing.  I found this morning that over 250 comments, dating all the way back to 2008, had been deleted as spam - notwithstanding the fact that many of them came from regulars here, some with their own Blogger accounts as well.  Most of the comments were no more than a few words, too;  nothing controversial at all.

I can't for the life of me figure out why Blogger is getting its knickers in a twist like this, but if you find one or more of your older comments - or something you've tried to post over the past couple of weeks - have vanished into the ether, it's not me and it wasn't my fault!

Sorry about that.

Peter

I find the whole Twitter situation ridiculous.  I have no idea whether there's a commercial justification for Elon Musk's lockdown of the platform, restricting viewership to logged-in accounts and cutting back on the number of tweets they can view at any one time.  It seems more to me like deliberate censorship.  I can't help wondering whether it's part of a Deep State effort to prevent people listening to voices such as Tucker Carlson's, who's been relentless in his unmasking of the nonsense perpetrated by the current Administration and its allies in the mainstream media.

(I'm not saying Elon Musk would personally do that, but he's already found a number of "hangover" employees at Twitter who are interfering with his efforts to promote free speech on that platform.  To his credit, he appears to be getting rid of them as fast as he notices them.)

Fortunately, Tucker Carlson's episodes can still be found all over the Web, because his fans are re-publishing his videos on multiple platforms.  Here, for example, are his Twitter videos on Rumble.  You'll find multiple copies of each.  The same is being made available on Instagram, Bitchute and elsewhere (although not, obviously, YouTube - Big Tech regards him as a threat, and they're not about to let upstart viewers bypass their censorship there).

I guess this is just one more aspect of the eternal struggle between free and restricted speech;  between making money out of content up front, versus letting the content attract reader funds through its quality;  and between Big Tech and the Deep State versus free, independent Americans who want to listen to and/or watch whomever they please, without anyone setting limits on their access.  It won't be the last time this plays out.

Peter

I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that software such as ProtonMail, or Signal, or Telegram, are protected from "snooping", and that anything posted there is private and won't be revealed to anyone, even law enforcement.

Oh, yeah?

On May 10, Stephan Walder, a public prosecutor and head of the Cybercrime Competence Center in Switzerland’s Canton of Zurich, had a presentation on cybercrime at an event. Martin Steiger, a Swiss lawyer who had been live-tweeting from the event, claims Walder incidentally mentioned ProtonMail as a service provider that voluntarily offers assistance to law enforcement for real-time surveillance, without requiring an order from a federal court.

Steiger has published a blog post on ProtonMail’s alleged practices — the blog post is available in both German and English — and summarized the obligations of such service providers for cooperating with authorities under Swiss laws.

While ProtonMail provides end-to-end encryption, which prevents the company from reading the actual content of emails, it does have access to metadata. Citing the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Steiger pointed out that metadata can be highly valuable to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Steiger has highlighted that while ProtonMail uses the fact that it’s based in Switzerland as a marketing advantage, citing strict Swiss privacy laws, the company is actually subject to local surveillance laws, and while it’s not subject to more extensive surveillance obligations, it does voluntarily help law enforcement surveillance operations, based on what Walder allegedly said.

Steiger has pointed to ProtonMail’s transparency report, where the company mentions one case where it conducted real-time surveillance of a user at the request of authorities.

“Every user of ProtonMail (or ProtonVPN) must decide for himself whether the email service is trustworthy,” Steiger said. “The difference between advertising and reality at least speaks against too much trust for ProtonMail.”

There's more at the link.

ProtonMail has (of course) denied the allegations.  (What else would one expect?)  However, I believe them.  I don't think the Swiss authorities would allow ProtonMail to continue operating unless it cooperated with their security needs and concerns.  I don't think any national government would do so.  They're too paranoid, too obsessed with being able to gain access to whatever information they decide they need - and to hell with individual privacy, legislated or otherwise.  While ProtonMail may claim that they have no access to the contents of our e-mails, I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that more than one government has figured out back-door ways to examine those contents anytime they wish.  That's the way they operate.

The same goes double for US government security agencies, of course.  They're not just paranoid, they're manic.  As Sundance has pointed out several times, the "national security state" (what he calls the Fourth Branch of Government) is the true "Deep State", and they won't tolerate anything that impedes their snooping.

Former Obama era intelligence officials, those who helped construct, organize and assemble the public-private partnership between intelligence data networks and supported social media companies, have written a letter to congress warning that any effort to break up Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Microsoft, etc.) would be catastrophic for the national security system they have created.

Citing the information control mechanisms they assembled, vis-a-vis the ability of social media networks to control and approve what is available for the public to read and review, the intelligence officials declare that any effort to break up the private side of the intel/tech partnership will only result in less ability of the intelligence apparatus to control public opinion.

They willfully admit that open and uncensored information is adverse to the interests of the intelligence state and therefore too dangerous to permit.   They specifically argue, if the modern system created by the partnership between the U.S. government and Big Tech is not retained, the national security of the United States is compromised.

. . .

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Google itself, are financially and operationally dependent on the scale of the data processing system that is run by the U.S. government.  The capacity of each of the big social media companies to exist, operate and be financially viable, is dependent on the backbone of interconnected data networking, and massive data processing.

The scale of simultaneous user data-processing is not financially viable without the U.S government subsidizing it.  That’s the free coffee that cannot be duplicated in the private sector by any competing social media company.  That’s the cost and scale system behind the partnership that permits Big Tech to operate.   Ultimately, this is what the intelligence apparatus needs to keep hidden from the American (and global) public.

. . .

Essentially, the U.S. government is in control of our social media networking.

Again, more at the link.

There is no privacy on the Internet.  Period.  That's the way it is.  Big Brother is watching us, and won't permit or tolerate any attempt by anybody to get around that.  If you don't believe that, try encoding or encrypting the text in a normal e-mail sent via any service you wish, and see whether it gets through or not.  I've heard more than a few reports, from people who've tried it, that the recipients didn't receive it, or it arrived "garbled" and unreadable, or that a critical attachment was missing.  Same goes for images you send.  Steganography is well-known, and there are filters that specifically examine images to see whether anything about them suggests that it's being used.  If those filters are tripped, you can bet your bottom dollar that your image will be copied and sent to people and agencies with no sense of humor at all, and you'll come under some pretty intensive scrutiny.

Every single electron or pixel that goes from our computers to others, or arrives on our computers, has been and is being scanned multiple times as it passes through various intermediate servers.  We have no electronic privacy whatsoever, whether we like it or not.  If you want to keep something private, talk about it or communicate through non-electronic media:  and even then, unless your communication is hand-carried from source to destination, don't assume it'll remain private.  Why else do you think the US Postal Service copies the address of every single item of post it handles, and keeps that information on hand?  There's no good operational reason to do so, except to snoop on what people are sending to whom.

Our government and its security services operate in a permanent persecution complex fueled by distrust and paranoia.  Any attempt to avoid or evade their scrutiny is, from their perspective, anomalous and therefore suspicious conduct.  That's the bottom line.  The only solution I can see comes, again, from Sundance:

The United States federal police force, the FBI, is politically weaponized against American citizens.

The United States intelligence community is politically weaponized against American citizens.

The United States justice department, the DOJ, is politically weaponized against American citizens.

We need to take down the four pillars that support the Fourth Branch of Government.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS), the Dept of Justice National Security Division (DOJ-NSD), and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), all need to be dissolved.

After those four pillars are removed, the Patriot Act needs to be abolished and the FBI placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Marshals service.

Agreed!

Peter

Sorry about the lack of posting today.  Our Internet service has been out since yesterday evening.  They're working on it, and promise to get it back by later today.

I may not put up blog posts today, but God willing, I'll be able to do so tomorrow.

Peter

I'll be working on the layout and structure of my new blog site this weekend.  For that reason, I won't post my usual "Saturday Snippet" or "Sunday Morning Music" blog articles this weekend.  Please amuse yourselves with the bloggers in the sidebar.

Things should return to normal on Monday with the next "Memes That Made Me Laugh" post.  By then I hope to give you the new URL for the blog, and fine-tune the handover during the next couple of days.  By this time next week, if all goes well, we'll be live on the new site.

Peter

The hard work of transferring over 17,000 posts from here to my new server has been completed.  At present they're simply copied over, and the blog format/layout hasn't been set up;  but the transfer was a biggie, so I'm glad it's done.  The layout and other setup work will be tackled over the next week or so.

In the meantime, I'll continue to post new blog articles here.  I'll make sure to post each one on the new server, too, so that when the switch finally happens, they'll all be there.  Thanks for your patience while I get all this organized.

I know how to use the Wordpress editor for blogging, but I have no experience whatsoever in formatting and laying out a blog under that software.  Ideally, I'd like something similar to this one, with books, old posts, etc. listed in the sidebar, but I'm not sure how to get there from here.  If any reader can offer suggestions for good resources to help with that, please let me know in Comments.

I'll do my best to make the transition as seamless and easy as possible.  Thanks for your patience.

Peter

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm in the process of setting up an alternate blog site, thanks to the growing threat of censorship and/or deletion on Big Tech blogging sites and facilities.  To that end, the contents of this blog (including all the archives) are scheduled to be backed up and copied over to a new server tomorrow, Wednesday, October 26th.

As a result, I won't be putting up any new blog articles until Thursday morning, to allow the copying process to proceed uninterrupted.  Anything I posted in the middle of that process wouldn't be copied, anyway, so there's not much point in trying!  Please enjoy yourselves with the bloggers listed in the sidebar until then.

Thanks.

Peter