Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

Watch A Certain YouTube Video? Google Just Turned All Your Personal Info Over To The Feds

Wednesday, March 27th, 2024

Chalk up another win for conspiracy theorists:

  • “If you watch certain YouTube videos, investigators demanded your data from Google.”
  • “Investigators have approached Google and said ‘We want to know who watched certain videos, give that information up.’ So as Chase [DiBenedetto] writes, if you’ve ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to put you on some kind of watch list, your concern may be more than warranted.”
  • “Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity of YouTube accounts and IP addresses that watched certain YouTube videos, which was part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.”
  • It turns out the feds had sent a link to this video to a single “suspected cryptocurrency launderer,” but was able to get a warrant for personal details on everyone who watched it.
  • Also, it wasn’t some sort of illegal video, either. They were “public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software. Forbes says the videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated the case.” But the government now has their personal data. And the past five years has shown that if the deep state gets your data, they won’t hesitate to abuse it to advance their interests.
  • Google says they “push back” against overbroad demands. But given how woke Google has become, how hard do you think they’re going to push aback against data demands targeting the right?
  • “This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets.”
  • “It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying, and it’s happening every day.”
  • “When you’re on the internet, your actions are being tracked by all kinds of entities.”
  • “The scary part is they’ve got this information on you to begin with, but we’ve known that for a while.”
  • “Your car is snitching on you, and so on so is your smartphone, and now so is Google, on occasion.”
  • “‘We want the information on tens of thousands of people,’ and suddenly you realize ‘OK, this is an extremely broad search. Couldn’t you narrow it a little better than that?'”
  • Asking for such information in a search warrant is an overly-broad abuse of power and violation of privacy rights, and also suggests sloppy investigative technique on the part of the feds.

    Here’s hoping the courts quash such requests in he future.

    “The Internet Is Unusable Without Ad Block”

    Monday, March 18th, 2024

    Here’s a rant from Charles White, AKA Cr1TiKaL, AKA penguinz0, about the pain of using the web without an ad-blocker.

    I have dialed in my ad-blocker so that the only time I see the damn things is when using my iPhone, when they make some sites unusable.

  • “There’s a few things that everyone knows human beings can’t live without water, air, a nice smile. But there’s actually something that’s often overlooked that’s a necessity for life on this planet, and it’s an ad blocker when using the worldwide web.”
  • He made the mistake of turning off adblock to look at something…and unleashed an unspeakable horror!
  • “It’s just a massive headache, just this visual nuisance, all this clutter with an inundation of ads that seems like it’s some kind of scene from a 90s movie where you get hacked, where it just has, like, ‘Virus Detected!'”
  • “If you try and watch a video on some of these mainstream media sites, you get an ad every 2 or 3 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating. I don’t mean you get a banner ad, I mean you get a full 20 to 30 second video ad that pauses your video to play that ad. So a 2-minute video that I was trying to watch about a bobblehead heist ended up taking over 10 minutes, and I still didn’t even finish the video.”
  • “It is absurd, it’s unusable.”
  • “I would argue it’s like a basic human right at this point to have an ad blocker when using the internet. It is that fucking atrocious.”
  • He then demonstrates, and it’s every bit as horrifying as described. “This can’t be legal.”
  • He mentions YouTube’s war on ad-blockers, which I seem to have defeated with a combination of scripts.
  • Which sites do you particularly find unusable without adblock?

    Firefox Bungles Windows List In Update

    Saturday, December 31st, 2022

    I use Firefox as my browser, and the latest version (108.0.1 (64-bit) for MacOS) has managed to screw up the windows list system. (I use windows for individual web pages when hooked up to my large monitor, but tabs when I’m using my MacBook Pro by itself.) Firefox has managed to screw up two different things with this release:

    1. For just about every version back to the dawn of time, Firefox lists windows in the order you open them. For the way I work, I usually have Gmail as my first opened window, my Books Wanted List in the second, and Bookfinder in the third, then a whole bunch of other windows, depending on what I’m working on. Well, now Firefox lists them alphabetically. Worse still, I see no way to change this behavior in preferences.
    2. Before, when you accessed the window list, it was the same no matter which Firefox window you opened it from, and it showed all your windows. Now, Firefox only shows you the windows that were open when you opened this window. That means older windows will only bring up a much smaller windows list that excludes the windows opened subsequently. And honestly, I’m not 100% it works that way for every window, as there seem to be exceptions. So they only way to see a list of all your open browser windows is to find the most recently opened window. Which is no longer listed at the bottom of the list. (You can also get a list of all open Firefox windows in the Firefox Task Manager, which I always have open,as its useful for tracking down memory hog windows.)

    Maybe some people asked for the ability to alphabetize windows in the list, but I doubt anyone wanted that as an unchangeable default, and I’m pretty sure no one asked for the inconsistent listing.

    If anyone know how to revert this behavior to the previous default settings, let me know…

    Log4J and Internet Castles Made of Sand

    Thursday, December 16th, 2021

    If you work outside of a tech company, chances are you’ve spent this week primarily concerned with getting ready for Christmas. If you work inside a tech company, there’s a significant chance your company spent much of this week patching a critical vulnerability in an open source Java logging library called Log4J.

    Here’s a non-technical explanation of the problem:

    It’s a vulnerability that was discovered in a piece of free, open source software called log4j. This software is used by thousands of websites and applications, to perform mundane functions most people don’t think about, such as logging information for use by that website’s developers, for debugging and other purposes.

    Every web application needs functionality like this, and as a result, the use of log4j is ubiquitous worldwide. Unfortunately, it turns out log4j has a previously undiscovered security vulnerability where data sent to it through that website — if it contains a special sequence of characters — results in log4j automatically fetching additional software from an external website and running it. If a cyberattacker exploits this, they can make the server that is running log4j run any software they want — including software that can completely take over that server. This is known as a Remote Code Execution (RCE) attack.

    To use a technical phrase, this is Really Bad.

    The net result is that, left unaddressed, cyberattackers right now can completely take over thousands of websites and online applications, allowing them to steal money, data, and access. The security community has been completely focused on this vulnerability for the past two days, and updating servers running log4j as quickly as possible to protect against this vulnerability.

    The good news is that mitigations are relatively easy to implement. The bad news is that left unmitigated, the vulnerability is extremely easy to exploit. iCloud, Minecraft, Baidu, and many other sites have been confirmed to be vulnerable so far, and you’ll likely hear more about many other sites being vulnerable in the coming days.

    And those companies are just the tip of the iceberg. LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) are used as the technological underpinnings for a wide variety of web applications of all sizes. (It’s not universal, as NGINX has taken over as a market leader from Apache, and there are still a few all-Microsoft houses that use IIS, and neither of them have the vulnerability.)

    Open Source has been a revolutionary invention because it provides rapid development by armies of distributed developers, and Linus’s Law states that “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” But there are tens of thousands of Open Source components out there running critical infrastructure that haven’t had nearly as many eyes on the code as the Linux kernel. It’s simply the nature of the beast. XKCD had a cartoon for this occasion:

    Internet applications gain usefulness from widespread adoption and the number of other components they tie into and support. You know what creates new vulnerabilities? A larger user base and the number of other components they tie into and support, which creates more attack surfaces for malicious actors to exploit.

    The flaw isn’t the fault of Random Guy in Nebraska, the fault is the company adopting software that they can’t possibly test for all the use-cases they’re going to use it for. Surprise! Just about every high tech company in the world is in the same boat. Pretty much everyone uses a wide panoply of open source tools for their Internet applications, and no one can test all the permutations of how each component might be put to use.

    You can’t eliminate the risk, you can only minimize and mitigate it. You can use containerization strategies (Docker, Kubernetes, Container D, etc.) to minimize attack surfaces and limit contagion. You can run all your code through security scanning tools on your CI/CD platform of choice. You can do constant testing and keep rolling backups of everything to limit risk and speed recovery. (You can also train your employees not to click on random email links without verifying the sender is who they say they are, and not to give any any account information or passwords over the phone, and train them enough so that the lessons stick, even though phising and human engineering weren’t factors in the Log4J vulnerability.)

    But there still a good chance that the platform you’re using today is different than the platform you’ll be using ten years from now, and you’ll have to go through the same learning lessons discovering new vulnerabilities for the new platform all over again.

    Castles made of sand all fall into the sea eventually…

    A Big Chunk Of The Internet Went Down This Morning

    Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

    While you were asleep this morning, a big chunk of the Internet briefly went down:

    Among those affected are Amazon, Twitch, Reddit, The Verge, The Guardian, ZDnet, The New York Times, Freetrade, The Financial Times, Pinterest, Kickstarter, Ebay, The Telegraph, CNN, and Imgur. Google searches are also partially impacted, as is the Google Cloud Platform. While Twitter is up, its emoji platform is offline.

    The issue has been traced back to content delivery network Fastly, which is down. The company runs an Edge cloud between companies’ data centers and the end user, reducing latency, protecting from DDoS attacks, and helping them handle traffic spikes.

    Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN), an intermediary that brings data closer to Internet end users so their interactions don’t need to go all the way back to the company’s central servers. This is the market Akamai pioneered, and other companies in the space include CDNetwork and Cloudflare. “Edge computing” is a sort of catch-all term for intermediary cloud services that became one of those buzzwords that VC companies threw money at about two years ago.

    With Amazon down, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that AWS, Amazon’s 800 pound cloud service gorilla, was experience an outage, but it turned out to be Fastly, who evidently fixed the problem at 10:57 UTC (5:57 AM CDT):

    “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” On Twitter, the company added: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”

    The modern Internet is decentralized, widely distributed and pretty efficient, but its very decentralized nature means that there are more moving parts to break, and also more attack surfaces for hackers to exploit. Delivering rich content over the Internet (be it text, images, video or shopping) usually involves dozens, if not hundred of software pieces, protocols, companies, etc. for every web page served up. Any of them can go down. Network engineers design in as much redundancy as possible, but there’s only so much you can do. I worked for a company in 2020 whose computer testing lab went down because antifa rioters in Minneapolis physically destroyed a fiber optic cable.

    All I can tell you is to keep multiple rotating backups of your most valuable data, because anything that can go wrong eventually will…

    LinkSwarm for June 5, 2020

    Friday, June 5th, 2020

    Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:

  • The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
  • Stating the obvious: “Democrats Are Using Antifa to Foment Revolution.”

    To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.

    Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.

    With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.

    Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.

    When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.

    And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.

    This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.

  • Night falls:

    Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.

    This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.

    Snip.

    The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.

    It cannot.

    It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.

    (Hat tip: Powerline.)

  • “The Minneapolis Disaster has Democrat Fingerprints All Over It“:

    The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.

    Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”

    That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.

    Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.

    Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.

    “I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.

    That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.

    This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.

    George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
  • Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
  • Antifa Loots Austin Target Store in Coordinated Effort, DPS Confirms Special Agents Embedded in the Organization.”

    Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.

    McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.

    He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”

    Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.

    This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.

    I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • DeBlasio’s handling of the Antifa riots was so horrible that even #BlackLivesMatters slammed him.
  • Nothing says you’re dedicated to ending racism like destroying a statue dedicated to black soldiers who fought for the Union during he Civil War. Good job, Boston rioters!
  • “Spontaneous anger”:

  • Rioters try to track police officers to their homes and set their police cars on fire. It doesn’t go well for. Also, judging from their mugshots, I’m guessing they’re not the “white supremacists” we hear so much about…
  • On the other hand:

  • Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
  • Devore also had a piece three years ago recounting his time in the LA riots.
  • Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
  • UK PM Boris Johnson invites three million Hong Kong residents to come to the UK. Smart move.
  • “As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
  • “Federal Appeals Court Blocks Texas Democrats’ Vote-by-Mail Mandate.” Good.
  • Fredo’s Failo.
  • “The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
  • Nature wants to kill you:

  • Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
  • Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
  • “Nike Releases Commemorative Shoe To Honor Looters.”
  • Flashback: “Portland Police: ‘We Wish There Were Some Kind Of Organized, Armed Force That Could Fight Back Against Antifa'”
  • I smiled:

  • LinkSwarm for August 30, 2019

    Friday, August 30th, 2019

    I hope you’re ready for the Labor Day Weekend. I certainly am…

  • At the G7, President Donald Trump is the popular one. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Three documents President Trump should declassify. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Obama’s Social Justice Warrior dictates harmed American military readiness.
  • Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
  • Boris Johnson has outflanked remainers by proroguing Parliament for a Queen’s speech.

    For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.

    Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.

    Following this maneuver, Johnson’s Tories have surged in the polls.

  • How President Trump started a war between the UN and Hamas:

    While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.

    Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”

    The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.

    The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.

    Snip.

    “I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.

    Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.

    The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.

    But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.

    Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.

    Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.

    The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.

    Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.

    But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.

    The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.

    But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.

    Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.

  • Feminists just couldn’t accept their victory:

    In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.

    Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.

    Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.

    As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!

    Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?

    So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.

  • Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:

    You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.

    Monsters!

    Fascists!

    Meanies!

    Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.

    Drink in their pain.

    Drink it all in.

    Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.

    Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).

    This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.

    Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.

  • Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:

    After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:

    Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.

    No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.

  • “Young Turks Host Hasan Piker Mocks Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s War Injuries, Declares America Deserved 9/11.” Thought about noting this for the Joe Rogan interview with Dan Crenshaw post, but decided the little shit just wasn’t worth mentioning there.
  • You can see the progress on the border wall here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow.”
  • “NAACP President to Reporter: ‘I don’t talk to fucking Jews.'” That’s president of the Passiac NAACP, not the national organization. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Iranian rocket blows up on pad.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Karachi, Pakistan suffers through a plague of flies:

    First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.

    And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.

    Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.

    “There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”

    The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.

    Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Guy does the opposite of what I do every day, going out on the Internet without any blockers of any kind to see what sorts of tracking cookies he picks up. He picked up hundreds. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Homeowner in Round Rock? The city council is going to be taking more of your money.
  • Lying about lobsters.
  • Stationary bicycle maker Peloton is preparing an IPO despite never having been profitable, having no realistic plans to be profitable, and a CEO who makes more than the CEOs of Ford, Home Depot and Cisco. “So, Peloton, while pretending to be a technology company, lost $195 million last year, yet paid its top three executives more than $50 million (up from $17.9 million in Fiscal Year 2018).”
  • “Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
  • Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
  • “Liberals Clarify They Only Want Black Voices To Be Heard When They’re Saying Liberal Things.”

    “When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”

  • A heh for the weekend:

  • Texas Towns Hit By Ransomware Attack

    Tuesday, August 20th, 2019

    This isn’t good:

    Early on August 16, a total of 23 local government organizations in Texas were hit by a coordinated ransomware attack. The type of ransomware has not been revealed, and Texas officials asserted that no state networks were compromised in the attack.

    A spokesman for the Texas Department of Information Resources (TDIR) told Ars that authorities are not ready to reveal the names of the entities affected, nor other details of the attack. State and federal agencies are in the midst of a response, and TDIR did not have information on whether any of the affected governmental organizations had chosen to pay the ransom.

    But the TDIR did reveal that the ransomware came from a single source. “At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor,” a spokesperson said. “Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.”

    Texas Department of Information Resources has more information:

  • On the morning of August 16, 2019, more than 20 entities in Texas reported a ransomware attack. The majority of these entities were smaller local governments.
  • Later that morning, the State Operations Center (SOC) was activated with a day and night shift.
  • At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor.
  • Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.
  • It appears all entities that were actually or potentially impacted have been identified and notified.
  • Twenty-three entities have been confirmed as impacted.
  • Responders are actively working with these entities to bring their systems back online.
  • The State of Texas systems and networks have not been impacted.
  • The following agencies are supporting this incident:
    • Texas Department of Information Resources
    • Texas Division of Emergency Management
    • Texas Military Department
    • The Texas A&M University System’s Security Operations Center/Critical Incident Response Team
    • Texas Department of Public Safety
    • Computer Information Technology and Electronic Crime (CITEC) Unit
      Cybersecurity

    • Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
    • Texas Public Utility Commission
    • Department of Homeland Security
    • Federal Bureau of Investigation – Cyber
    • Federal Emergency Management Agency
    • Other Federal cybersecurity partners
  • And in convenient retweetable form:

    Consider this yet another reminder to use strong passwords you can remember, to backup all your files (especially all your important files) regularly, update your virus definitions and security patches regularly (between starting and publishing this piece, I updated both Firefox and macOS), and to never open an email attachment or click on a link unless you’re absolutely sure you know who it’s from.

    Free Speech and Its Discontents

    Thursday, March 7th, 2019

    Two stories related to Internet free speech crossed popped up as worth of interest.

    First, the blogger behind Star Slate Codex (to which I’ve linked the occasional piece) posted a story about the death of the Star Slate Codex Culture War thread on Reddit, of which I was unaware:

    Several years ago, an SSC reader made an r/slatestarcodex subreddit for discussion of blog posts here and related topics. As per the usual process, the topics that generated the strongest emotions – Trump, gender, race, the communist menace, the fascist menace, etc – started taking over. The moderators (and I had been added as an honorary mod at the time) decreed that all discussion of these topics should be corralled into one thread so that nobody had to read them unless they really wanted to. This achieved its desired goal: most of the subreddit went back to being about cognitive science and medicine and other less-polarizing stuff.

    Unexpectedly, the restriction to one thread kick-started the culture war discussions rather than toning them down. The thread started getting thousands of comments per week, some from people who had never even heard of this blog and had just wandered in from elsewhere on Reddit. It became its own community, with different norms and different members from the rest of the board.

    I expected this to go badly. It kind of did; no politics discussion area ever goes really well. There were some of the usual flame wars, point-scoring, and fanatics. I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself.

    But in between all of that, there was some really impressive analysis, some good discussion, and even a few changed minds. Some testimonials from participants:

    For all its awfulness there really is something special about the CW thread. There are conversations that have happened there that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Someone mentioned its accidental brilliance and I think that’s right—it catches a wonderful conversational quality I’ve never seen on the Internet, and I’ve been on the Internet since the 90s – werttrew

    I feel that, while practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true, it is still the best and most civil culture war-related forum for conversation I have seen. And I find the best-of roundup an absolute must-read every week – yrrosimyarin

    The Culture War Roundup threads were blessedly neutral ground for people to test their premises and moral intuitions against a gauntlet of (sometimes-forced!) kindness and charity. There was no guarantee that your opinion would carry the day, but if you put in the effort, you could be assured a fair reading and cracking debate. Very little was solved, but I’m not sure that was really the point. The CWRs were a place to broaden your understanding of a given topic by an iterative process of “Yes, but…” and for a place that boasted more than 15,000 participants, shockingly little drama ensued. That was the /r/slatestarcodex CWRs at their best, and that’s the way we hope they will be remembered by the majority of people who participated in them. – rwkasten

    What happened was the same thing that happens any time unfettered free speech shows up on the Internet: Social Justice Warriors showed up to ruin it:

    This post is called “RIP Culture War Thread”, so you may have already guessed things went south. What happened? The short version is: a bunch of people harassed and threatened me for my role in hosting it, I had a nervous breakdown, and I asked the moderators to get rid of it.

    Snip.

    So let me tell you about my experience hosting the Culture War thread.

    (“hosting” isn’t entirely accurate. The Culture War thread was hosted on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit, which I did not create and do not own. I am an honorary moderator of that subreddit, but aside from the very occasional quick action against spam nobody else caught, I do not actively play a part in its moderation. Still, people correctly determined that I was probably the weakest link, and chose me as the target.)

    People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. I freely admit there were people who were against homosexuality in the thread (according to my survey, 13%), people who opposed using trans people’s preferred pronouns (according to my survey, 9%), people who identified as alt-right (7%), and a single person who identified as a neo-Nazi (who as far as I know never posted about it). Less outrageous ideas were proportionally more popular: people who were mostly feminists but thought there were differences between male and female brains, people who supported the fight against racial discrimination but thought could be genetic differences between races. All these people definitely existed, some of them in droves. All of them had the right to speak; sometimes I sympathized with some of their points. If this had been the complaint, I would have admitted to it right away. If the New York Times can’t avoid attracting these people to its comment section, no way r/ssc is going to manage it.

    But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.

    People would message me on Twitter to shame me for my Nazism. People who linked my blog on social media would get replies from people “educating” them that they were supporting Nazism, or asking them to justify why they thought it was appropriate to share Nazi sites. I wrote a silly blog post about mathematics and corn-eating. It reached the front page of a math subreddit and got a lot of upvotes. Somebody found it, asked if people knew that the blog post about corn was from a pro-alt-right neo-Nazi site that tolerated racists and sexists. There was a big argument in the comments about whether it should ever be acceptable to link to or read my website. Any further conversation about math and corn was abandoned. This kept happening, to the point where I wouldn’t even read Reddit discussions of my work anymore. The New York Times already has a reputation, but for some people this was all they’d heard about me.

    Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.

    Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.

    Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.

    One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.

    Read the whole thing.

    Speaking of free speech, Gab has unveiled Dissenter, an online forum dedication to free debate. I’m not sure they’ve figure out the format yet, but you might want to take a look.

    Akismet Free Ride Ends

    Tuesday, January 8th, 2019

    For almost as long as I was using this blog, I’ve been using the free Akismet spam filter. Well, the free ride has finally ended, as they actually want $5 a month to use it now. I’m not complaining, as a man’s got to eat. But this is why I had several hundred WordPress moderate comment emails today.

    Since my blog is currently a slightly-money-losing proposition, I have no desire to deepen my losses, so I just moved to the free Antispam Bee for this blog and Futuramen. Dwight is evidently paying the $5 a month for Akismet for his blog, so we can compare after a month or so and see if there’s a noticeable difference between the two.

    Anyway, on the off-chance you submitted a blog comment after, say, 11:58 AM today, you might have to repost it.

    And maybe somebody can explain why most of my comment spam seemed to come from an Omaha injury lawyer…