Category Archives: Uncategorized

Breach, Baby

A little-known Florida company may have exposed the personal data of nearly every American adult, according to a new report.

Wired reported Wednesday that Exactis, a Palm Coast, Fla.-based marketing and data-aggregation company, had exposed a database containing almost 2 terabytes of data, containing nearly 340 million individual records, on a public server. That included records of 230 million consumers and 110 million businesses.

“It seems like this is a database with pretty much every U.S. citizen in it,” security researcher Vinny Troia, who discovered the breach earlier this month, told Wired. “I don’t know where the data is coming from, but it’s one of the most comprehensive collections I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Bring on the European-style privacy laws.

A brief (fascist) history of ‘I don’t care’

This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’.

The echoes of which someone ought to have been aware, especially in an administration that includes – to put it mildly – several far-right sympathisers. And also to show that the attitude, the theatrical ‘not caring’, was an explicit character trait of Fascism.

Which, at the very least, seems a troubling coincidence.

So Much "Whaaa?"

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime confidant and former personal attorney, has resigned from his post as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee's Finance Committee, sources close to the RNC told ABC News.

...

"As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching,” Cohen wrote. “While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips."

The Trump Show

Trump is indeed a skilled salesman, and his presentation of the new U.S.–North Korean denuclearization agreement is a fine sales job. But the target of that sales job isn’t Kim. It’s you. Trump and Kim are working together to pass off their toothless pact as a milestone. It’s a con, and you’re the mark.

MNKGA

North Korea Airs Video Footage Showing President Trump Saluting An Officer | TIME

North Korean state television aired a 42-minute documentary on Thursday that offered a different view of Kim Jong Un's meeting with President Trump in Singapore.

Notably, the documentary appears to have captured several scenes that international news organizations missed — including one awkward moment when Trump was saluted by a North Korean military leader. The U.S. president then salutes in return.

Though only a brief interaction, it was telling that the salute was included in the documentary, according to Jean H. Lee, a North Korea scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

“This is a moment that will be used over and over in North Korea’s propaganda as 'proof' that the American president defers to the North Korean military,” Lee said. “It will be treated as a military victory by the North Koreans.”

Bitscam

Bitcoin soared to enormous heights late last year to over $19,000 for a single digital coin. Researchers now say that the digital currency Tether was used to inflate the value of bitcoin late last year. Indeed, a blockchain analysis showed that a tiny number of Tether-backed transactions caused about half of bitcoin's massive surge in value from March 2017 through March 2018.

Moral Relativity

When asked how he feels about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s many murders and human rights abuses, President Donald Trump merely shrugged.

“He’s a tough guy, it’s a tough country,” he told Fox News host Bret Baier. He went on to praise Kim for taking over the country at such a young age calling him a “very smart guy” and a “great negotiator.” “I think we understand each other,” Trump added.

When Baier pressed him, protesting that Kim has done many “bad things,” Trump was unmoved. “So have a lot of other people,” he said, before moving on to praise himself for his performance at the United States-North Korea summit this week.

I'm liking how Trump is putting the lie to all of the things the GOP has ever claimed to believe in.

Total Victory

The familiar posture of victory — raising the arms, tilting the head back, and expanding the chest — appears to be hard-wired into the human brain, probably because it was a universal sign of dominance in our ape ancestors.

In 2008, psychologists Jessica Tracy and David Matsumoto compared the expressions and body language of sighted, blind, and congenitally blind judo competitors representing more than 30 countries in the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games. They found that the blind athletes used the same gestures as their sighted peers, even though they’d never seen anyone else use them.