06.13.13
It’ll all blow over by next shift
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The damaged cred of cyberwar shoeshine
Edward Snowden said he was releasing the information to demonstrate “the hypocrisy of the US government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries”.
Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department in Washington, said it was not aware of the hacking claims and could not comment directly, but she rejected the idea that such an incident would represent double standards given recent US criticism of Chinese cyber attacks.
You would hate to be the officials having to respond to queries on US double-standards re the rules of proper cyberwar and cyber-spying. But it comes with the job now and they are all well compensated.
The US acts as if it is the exceptional nation in cyberspace. It reserves the right to criticize and lecture others on what constitutes proper conduct but reserves the right to do what it pleases because of its allegedly exceptional nature.
The US, you see, only wages cyberwar, or cyber-espionage, campaigns in defense of freedom and to keep Americans safe. No other nations do similar things. They only cyber-spy on us and probe the net infrastructure to cause damage and steal our wealth.
The country has been in a terrible position to talk terms in cyberspace ever since it started up a hot clandestine war on the Iranian nuclear program and subsequent related malware spilled over into other nations.
The Edward Snowden affair only underlines it.
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As The Bean Turns
White trash, stupidity, castor beans and the recipe for ricin as soap opera, granting first shot at book deal, movie or tv tie-ins and fifteen minutes of fame to nobodies only in the news for dumb perversity.
From the wire (taken with no backlink, network news infinite load page):
The husband of a pregnant actress, accused of sending poison-laced letters to President Obama and then trying to frame him for the crime, says it’s “heartbreaking” to think that his spouse implicated him, but he harbors no anger and hopes to move on with his life.
“The way I look at it, being angry is a waste of energy,” Nathaniel Richardson told ABC News. “She has done this to herself. She has destroyed my reputation and my life but there’s a way up from this and if I sit here and focus on anger, I can’t focus on getting on with my life.”
“I’m sitting there thinking I don’t even know what ricin is,” Nathaniel Richardson said. “I wasn’t even saying it right at first. I was calling it licin. Really, everything I’ve learned about it I’ve learned from [the FBI].”
Meanwhile, Nathaniel Richardson says there’s nothing left in his marriage to love.
“The person she was wasn’t real,” he said. “Just couldn’t believe it. Heartbreaking.”
Shannon Richardson’s attorney said overnight in a statement to ABC News, “I have seen no evidence to even suggest that my client desired to hurt the president or any of the other individuals involved. She is incarcerated for the first time in her life. Her primary concern remains her children and the trauma they are experiencing.”
First baby to come from ricin family, ever.
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06.12.13
Shoeshine Cult of Cyberwar put on hold
One good thing about the Edward Snowden affair: It has quieted NSA director Keith Alexander on cyber-espionage against the US being the greatest transfer of wealth in history. At least for a moment.
In fact, it’s blown the Cult of Cyberwar and its army of shoeshine completely off the pages of the dailies.
In turnabout, we have Congressmen who just a couple weeks ago were warning about the perfidy of the Chinese, now trying to make themselves look good in grilling Keith Alexander.
Edward Snowden, make no mistake, was part of the big corporate shoeshine army of cybersecurity, the well-paid servants of the upper class, with the privilege of work in the national security megaplex.
That he left the fold is rather remarkable, considering the sheer size of the shoeshine army. Paid employment in the US does buy loyalty for most.
Anyway, today from the Guardian, what one would expect:
[NSA director Keith Alexander] said that “dozens” of terrorist attacks had been thwarted in part because of the domestic surveillance dragnet. But he did not give specific details …
Alexander said he struggled with how much detail to provide in public about the surveillance. “I would rather take a public beating, and let people think I’m hiding something, than jeopardize the security of this country,” Alexander testified. He said he would aim to declassify specific cases in which the two surveillance programs described by the Guardian had contributed to government efforts at thwarting terrorist attacks.
It’s reasonable to be a cynic, even healthy. Two months from now it will be business as usual. You wait and see.
The national security powers know it as does everyone else paying attention. One just has to be patient and the bad notices eventually blow away like dry dog excrement before the wind.
Too late now in the national security state. Always too late.
You do retain the freedom to shop, of course.
Keith Alexander and the Cult of Cyberwar — from the archives.
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The plutocrat’s artisan rifle
Life in the US is increasingly impoverished and desperate for tens, even hundreds, of millions of people. The economy is shifting rapidly to one that caters to plutocracy. Plus the low level mass business where people still need food and life necessary sundries that can be bought by government subsidy. And, of course, economical pay-as-you-go smartphone plans.
You retain the freedom to high-end shop. This is guaranteed. And so one would expect premier goods to become increasingly bizarre and alienating.
And so it is with today’s “innovation,” behold the 27k smart rifle with vanity social networking included (no link, an “endless load” site):
AUSTIN, Texas — A new company in Texas is selling a precision rifle with a unique technology that allows even an inexperienced shooter to hit a target 10 football fields away. The price tag is a staggering $27,500 …
The TrackingPoint rifles, which are Wi-Fi enabled and have a color display so users can post videos of their shots on Facebook or YouTube, started shipping in May. Schauble said his company is on track to sell as many as 500 of them this year, to clients that he describes as “high net worth hunters” who want to kill big game at long range.
It is said to have set the world record for taking down a “wildebeast” ten football fields away.
For that special wealthy total dickhead in WhiteManistan.
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Crowd-sourcing is not fault tolerant
As you’ve found DD blog was royally bricked for the past two days.
And it renewed my jaundiced view of WordPress and troubleshooting of errors by crowd-sourcing.
Adding a plugin on WordPress is always fraught with problems. They can crash the blog in an instant, making everything unreadable, the control panel impossible to reach. WordPress users have grown used to it, sort of like the citizenry of the US getting used to a life that guarantees nothing in a surveillance state.
When a plugin or add-on crashes the system you have to manually edit WordPress’s sql database and delete the hooks active plugins have put into the system.
That was done and the blog came back. But in the next hour or so it became impossible to get past the front page. Readers were presented with an error called “too many redirects.”
A quick Google search reveals how common it is and how people in the WordPress forums have very little idea about the cause, precisely, or how to get around it except by trial and error.
And the WordPress programmers have never seen fit to comment upon it. Crowd-sourcing technical help consigns people who need it to endless sifting of Google results, direction to pages and pages and pages of contributions by people who can neither write nor read well. And who are also often not even particularly capable of accurately describing the fault and what subsequent steps were taken.
Conversely, tech web-hosting solutions at my provider are entirely dependent on who you get on the telephone. If you get someone who knows WordPress, as I did on my first call after the blog crashed, they can fix it quickly. Indeed, two years ago when a serious problem crashed the entire thing two people at the company restored it from the provider’s server back-up, something they must have, but which the mega-firm likes to keep hidden from its users.
On a second call, a different person mumbled at me for about an hour, showed no knowledge of a WordPress install — which the ISP offers as a business enticement — and then recited a script that WP troubleshooting “was outside the boundary of our support.”
When told it had not been outside the boundary of support 24 hours earlier, the script was modified slightly to inform “that person was operating outside the boundary of our support.”
There’s really nothing to be said. I’ve covered tech support issues with Blogger, and also with WordPress, most famously here:
As for aid in WordPress support forums, one is dependent upon the pure milk of human kindness dispensed by others. If one is inexperienced, the help forums can be combed for clues which, on balance, tend not to accurately describe the fault and its implications. In two questions I posted, the general solution offered was to update [9] to the newest version of WordPress, which is not a fix at all, but a catch-all recommendation many people receive from the volunteer squad as a pro forma band-aid. Some people, naturally, resent it.
As with Blogger help, one not so infrequently sees the passive-aggressive treatment handed out. If there has been a fault, it’s because the user was not diligent. The software can do no wrong.
“Code is poetry,” is the WP motto. Here’s some poetry, ala Ogden Nash:
I once had a blog that was fit
But one day a server got hit
My site went upside down
And I floundered around
WordPress had dumped upon me a s—
The song isn’t quite the same but the rhymes were.
In any case, the fault lies somewhere in the implementation of the WP “permalinks” structure. I had what are called “pretty links,” set to conform roughly to post titles.
The pretty links option had to be reset to default and a spontaneous category change made in a post to force changes in what was in the database. With material rewritten to default links, which are given an ID number, things seem to be working again.
However, one cannot revert to the old style without causing the ‘too many redirects’ error to recur.
There were a lot of options I could have followed, none of them particularly palatable. At one point I seriously contemplating tossing the entire thing.
I’m certain the database error — it’s not really one, as the db passes checks — could be edited out. And while I’m not afraid to work on the sql database directly, I don’t have intimate knowledge of everything in the control section.
Another possibility is that the hosting provider changed something at the server level. I have found that inquiring about such things is never particularly fruitful.
That’s the story so far. So reset whatever you have to reset. I’m sorry, it couldn’t be helped.
Additional note: Links to old pieces with the long format produce the redirect error. That means most of the internal old links are busticated. I’ll change some of them, as time allows.
However, since tens of thousands do not use this blog, most will stay ruptured unless I can restore “pretty links” at some future point.
Yes, it’s an ache.
Comments also will stay moderated for the time being. Akismet plugin failure started the cycle that led to collapse. When I reactivated it in one last attempt to get it going, it worked once again. Shortly after which the real problems began.
06.10.13
Meta — ghosts in machine
An installation of a substitute for Akismet crashed the blog for about an hour in a php incompatibility. Turning off all plugins through the database restored access.
And, upon reactivating Akismet for one last try, I found it working again. Coincidence, maybe, maybe not.
Whatever.
Thanks for the help and suggestions, anyway, folks.
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Bean Pounding: Hubby made me do it
Not a good look.
From the wire:
Despite the fact that a Texas woman admitted to sending ricin laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week, the woman is now apparently trying to pin the crime on her husband.
[An] FBI affidavit says Richardson failed a polygraph test and investigators found inconsistencies in her story. No charges have been filed against her husband. His attorney says the couple is divorcing and the letters were a setup.
And this isn’t the thing to say, either:
Richardson’s court-appointed attorney, Tonda Curry, said there was no intention to harm anyone and noted that it’s common knowledge that mail is checked before it reaches the person to whom these letters were addressed.
“From what I can say, based on what evidence I’ve seen, whoever did this crime never intended for ricin to reach the people to which the letters were addressed,” Curry said.
What? Someone thinks there’s mitigation because everyone knows the President doesn’t read his mail? Pathetic.
What about the poor sods who do actually have to deal with the greasy powder falling out of the letters?
This is going in a video.
Procedural note: I don’t know about you but I’ve come to hate news websites that pull the endless load routine. It’s an increasingly grasping tactic employed by corporate America to tie up eyeballs.
When I run into them the scripting overhead becomes a burden on the machine. And, henceforth, upon encountering such sites, material will be taken without attribution other than “from the wire” and will not contain backlinks.
What are your thoughts on websites that practice the never-ending load?
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06.09.13
Meta
Still haven’t come up with a replacement for the malfunctioning Akismet spam filter, so comments are still under moderation.
Suggestions compatible with WordPress welcome.
Defector from the Shoeshine Corps of Cyberwar
The source of the intelligence leaks that revealed the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance program last week was identified on Sunday by the Guardian as Edward Snowden, a soft-spoken 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of NSA defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton …
“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things,” Snowden said. “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under … I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”
Snowden said he decided to leave his family, girlfriend and a comfortable, $200,000-a-year salary behind, and flew to Hong Kong on May 20. He said he chose China because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.”
The paradox of the leaker seeking refuge in China and spilling the beans at the very moment the Obama administration was mounting an unsubtle press campaign over the matter of Chinese cyber-espionage is noticeable.
As an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden would have certainly been in the middle of things.
The head of that firm’s cybersecurity contracting arm, Michael McConnell, is and was one of the leading salesmen of cyberwar hype. The firm has a very large interest in expansion of its cybersecurity and cyberwar contracting business to the Department of Defense.
The lengthy and original profile of Snowden, at the Guardian.
Top cyberwar rent-seeker, Michael McConnell and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Michael McConnell and Booz Allen — from the archives.
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