Author Archives: Jeff Porten

Psst… yes, the last 22 months have been a debacle but this is the extinction of humans stuff Bolton pushes Trump administration to withdraw from landmark arms treaty

Dunning and Kruger both just called to say that even they can’t even. Trump: My ‘Natural Instinct for Science’ Tells Me Climate Science Is Wrong

Soooooo much wrong with this story. In general, just ignore everything you see about cybersecurity in the general press until you find a tech journalist on it.

Increasing number of attacks is not news; it’s to be expected. The question is, is it the number of attackers or the size of the attacks? Size doesn’t matter; you can attack any network 1 billion times for around $1,000, but those methods are worthless for data extraction.

“All potential attacks were stopped or mitigated.” Both halves of this sentence are wrong. It’s not all potential attacks, it’s all *detected* attacks and no expert would want to warrant 100%.

Also, mitigated? If you attack Facebook intending to steal all accounts, and they lock you out after 800 million, that’s a mitigation. That word is terrifying. And what it means is: some attacks HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL. You don’t mitigate the ones that aren’t.

The Vermont governor saying that all’s well because of yesterday’s backups is merely standard level ignorant. Have they tried restoring them? Have they tested whether the backups are secure?

Here’s the deal: any computer scientist can tell you, and some have been since the 1990s, that the electronic infrastructure supporting voting is a raging trash fire. If our financial systems worked like this, we’d be trading beads and pelts. Announcements like this one are generally intended to point you to where they want you to look (possibly later claiming a Democratic win is illegitimate), so you’re distracted from everything we’ve known for 20 years. DHS finds increasing attempts to hack U.S. election systems ahead of midterms

?Attention everyone who thought discussion of American Brownshirts was hyperbole: it’s fact now.? Shay Horse on Twitter

Ladies and gentlemen, all the memes you’ll need for 2019. These are the finalists of 2018 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, and they’re hilarious – DIY Photography

Hope they announce the location so I know where I’ll be living in two years. Starbucks is opening a ‘community store’ in West Philly

I’ve seen this article shared three times in the last 30 minutes, so my initial thoughts: the tech details described here are VERY VERY weird. The purported methods of gathering this data are not possible according to my knowledge… but the guy who *invented* the system is quoted and does not say it’s impossible, so I conclude my knowledge is inaccurate.

Likewise, I can’t think of anything you could do with these methods that wouldn’t be easier and better in other ways.

That said, as someone performing forensics on a system, the *human* factors would jump out at me. When they say, “this looks like human rather than automated activity,” that’s likely factual. When anomalous behavior traces only to a Russian bank and a DeVos company, I’d *immediately* assume it was not coincidental.

The only additional hypothesis I can add that’s not in the story: a connection to DeVos is a connection to Blackwater, which to me is a possible answer to “why would someone do it this bizarre way when there are far better methods known to government spy agencies?” Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?

Oh, for fuck’s sake. How is it possible to work for the New York Times and write such a blisteringly obvious column as if it’s insightful? “We must all come together” bullshit bullshit bullshit.

That requires both sides to seek reconciliation, and its precisely the Democratic urge to work together as Americans, and to follow the norms and rules, that allowed the Republicans to dominate. Why would they stop? It’s a winning strategy. It’s not the division that might topple them, it’s the overreach and abuse of power.

You want historical analogues to this moment, you’ll find them, but mostly not in American history. It ends with some catastrophic political failure that ends one of the parties; a new one arises and new politics result. Or the catastrophic failure is of the country: probably not dissolution (as our divisions aren’t geographically continuous) but likely our economy, resulting from a failure of our education and science, and likely our power, resulting from our eschewing soft power and abusing military power.

Or our democracy, because a war or terror attack will drive us straight to fascism; look at America October 2001 and tell me I’m wrong. It’s not like we’re starting from a particularly solid base, because subverting democratic institutions is also how Republicans win.

There’s no correcting force or moderating influence left. We ride this until one side, the other, or the country is crushed. Opinion | The American Civil War, Part II

Dude, unless you come up with a strategy to pack the Court, your agenda is now irrelevant for 20 years.

Tom Perez on Twitter

On this horrible, awful, very bad day, I’m am slightly cheered by the unrelated news that quite possibly the greatest story for a TV series has been cast impeccably and is arriving next year:

Good Omens on Twitter

This. The original Sokal paper made its point by stating that there is no such thing as objective physical reality; i.e., that claim is so obviously false that it should have overridden all other concerns. But as was pointed out at the time, an academic editor may refer a submission for peer review if there are individual points they consider potentially worthy, but they’re not qualified to judge. And a reviewer is going to assume a submission is in good faith as a professional courtesy.

I’ll freely admit that there are any number of academic fields that seem to have their heads up their own asses, but the whole point is that you have to be an expert to judge. In my field, I’m fascinated by “prank” programming languages such as one that is entirely whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, carriage returns); of course any outsider would view this as ridiculous, and likely dismiss as ridiculous the central concept of a Turing machine.

The Sokal Squared affair immediately seemed to me like the equivalent of when a mathematician or physicist dismisses all social sciences and humanities, but happening at an obfuscated level. The “Grievance Studies” Hoax Does Not Reveal the Academic Scandal That It Claims

This is insane. Everyone’s saying how the Senate is not allowed to talk about the FBI report. It’s in a SCIF, so I assumed that doing so would be a felony, akin to lying under oath or something really horrible like that.

Nope. It’s just an agreement made in 2009 between the Senate and White House. Sticking to it is just a norm.

Senate Democrats, you’re about to lose every political battle you wage for the next 30 years regardless of future electoral success. This might be the time to take the fucking knives out. Opinion | Elizabeth Warren’s new, tantalizing claim about Kavanaugh shows what utter madness this is