A Playbook for 2017
James Delingpole urges right thinking people to not rest on their laurels, comparing what happened in 2016 to merely the first few hours of the D-Day invasion. He argues that anyone who thinks the Leftist elite and their SJW stormtroopers are merely going to lie down and allow anything to be changed are in great denial.
As the great, now sadly-retired Thomas Sowell says, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” Its malign influence is still with us today. Innocent boys being accused of rape on college campuses; genuine rapes committed by gangs of Muslim taxi drivers in northern England and by gangs of Muslim immigrants in German cities like Cologne; hundreds of thousands driven into fuel poverty, landscapes ravaged, avian fauna sliced and diced as a result of crazy renewable energy policies; a Nobel-prize-winning scientist driven out of his job because a feminist loser misreported something he said about women at a conference; generations of kids denied a rigorous, disciplined, useful education; the needless violence and tension engendered by #blacklivesmatter: we should never concede the moral high ground to the kind of people who make all this sort of stuff possible, no matter how many times they tell us how evil and selfish and uncaring we are.
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
“…They bought everything — the wood, the burlap to wrap around the wood, the diesel and kerosene for my cross lighting. They even brought all the food for everyone.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Charles Darwin ushered in a new era of thinking where change was expected and necessary. Our species as are all others, is the product of ongoing environmental change and adaption to varying conditions; the constancy of change. In the last 15 years or so however, we have seemingly reverted to a pre-Darwinian mode of a fixed ‘immutable Earth’ where any change beyond some sort of ‘norm’ is seen in some quarters as unnatural, threatening and due to our activities, usually with the proviso of needing ‘to act now to save the planet.’ Honest scientific discourse and debate is often rendered impossible in the face of the ‘new catastrophism.’
A great read, and worthy of sharing.
Happy New Year!
Not Exactly “Flying Off of the Shelves”
A few days ago I was at a Target in suburban San Francisco, looking for a book for a nephew of mine. Suddenly my eyes discovered this book:
I fully agree that “some girls” are born to lead. Margaret Thatcher, Kate McMillian, Rona Ambrose, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali come to mind. As for the former U.S. President’s wife, HRC, she doesn’t really fit the bill. I wonder what a better subtitle might be for this book?!
Time In A Bottle
What Our New Years Resolution Should Be
“The truth is Polly Dunning is the epitome of the third form of fake news – “The Failed Millennial Leftist Diary.” Merely one of millions of failed leftist millennials who cannot accept that, even with their precious liberal arts degrees, they are common, boring, and offer nothing of value to the world. Since they cannot accept this and their ego must be satiated, they go to the internet to journal about their “heroic journey” or “struggle” where they find other sympathetic, self-commiserating failed millennial leftists. But mere commiseration is not enough, so they resort to increasing levels of sensationalism, brown journalism, and radical story telling to get validation in the form of traffic and likes. Some, like Polly, get lucky and have one article go viral for 15 minutes of internet fame. Some get REALLY lucky and get an unpaid job at the Huffington Post. But they never get more followers, subscribers, or notoriety than a Bernard Chapin, a Stacy McCain, or even myself because their stories and they themselves are unmentionably common.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
He believes that simple explanations for causes of obesity are inadequate and novel approaches are required for its effective management. He coined the term “Infectobesity” to describe obesity of infectious origin. Dr. Dhurandhar et al were the first to identify adipogenic effects of an avian adenovirus (SMAM-1) and a human adenovirus (Ad36) that cause obesity in animals including rodents and monkeys, and are associated with obesity in humans and non-human primates.
Reader Tips
Since nobody seems to have died today, you’re on your own. Tips open.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
To a befuddled Rolling Stone reporter.
(Ed: Please pardon me for the wall of text, but that last entry annoyed the heck out of me.)
You know how in your teenage and college fantasy where you played Dustin Hoffman in All The Presidents Men? Remember when you dreamed of getting that one little lead and following breadcrumbs from point A to Pulitzer Prize? Yeah, network security and audits are a lot like that. Your problem is that you’ve had eight years of getting used to reading gov’t reports and taking for granted that they tell the story. Stenographers ‘R Us, in a nutshell.
When you talk about IT or whether to ‘believe’ intelligence reports about it, do better than read a 13pp PDF directed to network admins. You should really look at the data supplied too.
This page released by CERT (that’s important) is the Joint Analysis Report released by the FBI and DHS. At the bottom is the link to the 13 page PDF that they released. What the author of the Rolling Stone article linked to in the last entry failed to do is look at the other file on that page. It’s available in a handy CSV file format if you don’t grok STIX XML. The CSV is utterly redundant. CERT only needs to distribute the STIX format as that’s what admins will use to harden their networks. The CSV is there for reporters.
Back to CERT, which is one of the most trusted of information disseminating entities in the world of IT. For the most part, they send out weekly bulletins about security related patches for firmware, OS’s, services, and applications. Occasionally they’ll send out flashes of things, but that is rare and a big deal when they do.
To say yesterdays publication via CERT is unprecedented may be accurate, but to question the make up of a document that is light on ‘facts’ misreads the purpose of the document. It was aimed at security and network professionals on the front-lines. It wasn’t written for reporters. If every administrator of machines and networks followed the recommended security setups and procedures in that document no one would ever be talking about hacking.
Now, rather than write an article complaining how not enough data was spoon-fed to you, you could look at the actual data files, contact some of the owners of the IP addresses and maybe figure out why the intelligence services are confident in their claim.
Email spam is already well-known. Targeted email is a different beast. If the target is a hunter then the crafted email they get looks like an email from Cabela’s. The hit ratio goes way up. Most people would just think that google sold their search info instead of them being the target of a malicious attack. In actuality the website the email links to goes to one of the domains below and hosts a malicious website made to look like Cabela’s site. It has javascript in it that infects your computer. Even worse, the link in the email is a shortened form link. ‘bty.com/276dfgr, ‘tco.com/erfgh’ or ‘ln.com/badlink’ so the target can’t verify the end point by looking at it. Anyone can make these.
These domains were used in targeted email spoofs.
www.cderlearn.com – 209.236.67.159 – WestHost, Inc. – Providence UT, USA
ritsoperrol.ru – dead domain name
littjohnwilhap.ru – dead domain name
wilcarobbe.com – dead domain name
one2shoppee.com – dead domain name
insta.reduct.ru – 146.185.161.126 – Digital Ocean, Inc., New York, NY
editprod.waterfilter.in.ua – 176.114.0.120 – FOP Sedinkin Olexandr Valeriyovuch – Boyarka, Ukraine
mymodule.waterfilter.in.ua – dead domain name
efax.pfdregistry.net – dead domain name
Of the 249 identified IP addresses, these are Canadian: (Any CDN reporters wanna call McGill? For kicks, maybe?)
167.114.35.70 – OVH Hosting – Montreal – McGill College
198.50.177.202 – OVH Hosting – Montreal – McGill College
142.10.38.212 – Ontario Hydro
69.70.199.50 – Videotron Ltee – Montreal
207.176.226.8 – Rigstar Communications Inc – Calgary
66.158.142.2 – MORGAN SCHAFFER INC. – Lasalle, Quebec
See below the fold for a numerical count of IP’s by country.
A Riddle Wrapped In A Mystery Inside An Enigma
Reported by fools.
You can see awkwardness reflected in the headlines that flew around the Internet Thursday. Some news agencies seemed split on whether to unequivocally declare that Russian hacking took place, or whether to hedge bets and put it all on the government to make that declaration, using “Obama says” formulations.
The New York Times was more aggressive, writing flatly, “Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking.” It backed up its story with a link to a joint FBI/Homeland Security report that details how Russian civilian and military intelligence services (termed “RIS” in the report) twice breached the defenses of “a U.S. political party,” presumably the Democrats.
This report is long on jargon but short on specifics. More than half of it is just a list of suggestions for preventive measures.
At one point we learn that the code name the U.S. intelligence community has given to Russian cyber shenanigans is GRIZZLY STEPPE, a sexy enough detail.
But we don’t learn much at all about what led our government to determine a) that these hacks were directed by the Russian government, or b) they were undertaken with the aim of influencing the election, and in particular to help elect Donald Trump.
The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up.
And then, there’s this discomforting question — who hacked Rolling Stone?
The Neverending Battle Against the Left: End of Year Wrap Up
Here’s a fascinating discussion between social media titans Paul Joseph Watson and Stefan Molyneux:
Update: Here’s the discussion with Scott Adams that some commenters found quite interesting.
#Occupy White House
Chant a bunch of slogans, get people angry, then go home to collect your welfare cheque while leaving your garbage for others to pick up.
Am I close?
And in the end, Obama remains largely impotent.
Which he did on Friday morning, when in a stunning reversal, the Russian leader took the high road, rejected the Lavrov proposal, and in a statement posted by the Kremlin said that Russia won’t expel any Americans in retaliation to US moves, in a brutal demonstration of just how irrelevant Obama’s 11th hour decision is for US-Russian relations.
Via Drudge
George Soros
Rhymes with sorrows.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Reader Tips
Goodbye, Robert Hulseman. We raise a cup to you.
Tips open.
Heh
Obama expels 35 Russian diplomats, closes NYC compound & gives them 72 hours to leave. Fortunately for Russians, NYC is a sanctuary city.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) December 29, 2016
Are We Still A Member Of This Thing?
All the right people are beginning to ask:
Congress is already setting the stage to cut off U.S. funding to the United Nations in the wake of a contested vote last week in which the Obama administration permitted an anti-Israel resolution to win overwhelming approval, according to congressional leaders, who told the Washington Free Beacon that the current administration is already plotting to take further action against the Jewish state before vacating office.
Other punitive actions by Congress could include expelling Palestinian diplomats from U.S. soil and scaling back ties with foreign nations that voted in favor of the controversial measure, according to multiple sources who spoke to the Free Beacon about the situation both on and off the record.
More.