The Saudis have a vested interest in keeping the established power in place in america because they benefit, hence they support Hillary.
The Russians have a vested interest in destabilizing america because they benefit, hence they support Trump.
The choice we have is 4 more years of the established corruption we’ve known most of our lives, or a highly destabilized easy manipulated dangerous crackpot. The evil you know, or f’n batshit crazy could end the world and certainly will crash america headfirst into a wall. I know which one i’m choosing.
It isn’t the change i was hoping for with sanders, but it could be a LOT worse then _Business as Usual_™ …
“dyezinformatsiya” is simply borrowed from “disinformation” - made use of extensively by the Allies in WW2, copied by the Russians. We should surely be complaining, like Apple fanboys, that the Russians are simply copying Western black ops and not inventing their own - it’s OK when we do it because we are the good guys, so it’s not disinformation, it’s just helping the facts along a bit.
Unfortunately this has created the present mode of political combat in which facts are fluid things that can be eased into the narrative where they might seem to be effective.
(The most successful use of disinformation in WW2 was probably the largely successful attempt to persuade the Germans that the D-day landings would be in the Pas de Calais, complete with details up to faked drowned Army officers carrying secret plans and washed ashore in France. Perhaps the most unfortunate was the successful attempt to persuade the Soviet Union that Castle Bravo was a test of a deliverable hydrogen warhead, resulting in the arms race desired by the MIC and the Tsar Bomba test.)
Russia doesn’t like that, so they and Iran and others are opposing us to prop up Assad, bombing our proxies and everyone else into oblivion. I’m not seeing anything very stable in any of this.
Nothing new, I am tired of talking about it. Carry on.
I’m well aware of what is going on in the middle east right now, did my reply indicate otherwise?
I’m not happy about either choice, but I’m also not about to pretend that they are equally distasteful.
It’s depressing to vote for hillary, but it is insane to vote for trump.
At least with hillary we know what we are getting into and hopefully she will do some good as well, like push forward women’s rights issues, health care, the economy, etc.
I did not notice that! Thanks for the tip. It’s totally good enough now that I notice, but I also think more visible flair, or a tiny hat, or a colored post background/font (lighten the text to “soften” it) would be pretty cool. This is not a call for action, just a fantasy.
I DO think it is a fine line between indicating new users and potential astroturf accounts, and alienating new legitimate users. Jeff @codinghorror has struck a pretty reasonable balance, imho. we want to be a welcoming community.
In threads like this or heaven forbid, “ethics in journalism”, i totally get the impulse to call out these new accounts, but it is also important to realize that many people first join or go from passive observer to commenter on an issue they feel strongly about, which is often a polarizing issue.
This is why, users like @JonS sometimes call them out with a wink and nudge by welcoming them and encouraging them to stick around. Legitimate accounts will, the others will never be seen again. aka, you seem astroturfy, if you want our attention show us otherwise.
I like to encourage new users to become active community members before going on a thread rampage, because you don’t have very much cred around these parts unless you’ve show yourself to be a member of our community. We welcome well thought out counter opinions and many of us relish flushing out our own ideas by being challenged by others. Agreement not required to be a happy mutant.
All the talk of astroturfing and puppetry completely distracted from the point that the DNS report is fairly bogus. Almost like it was an intentional distraction. Not saying it was, but I read that report and my first (and only) conclusion was that the alt.left is just as capable as the alt.right in spinning conspiracies out of straw.
Ain’t buying it. I know something about DNS and some little more about digital forensics. The article leaves off a lot of detail and waves its hands in the air about the technology. Yes, Paul Vixie is a foremost expert on DNS. I will agree with that. I would not agree with any of the other conclusions in that Slate article however, unless provided more information to back them up. I have to wonder if Vixie was quoted out of context.
The cognitive dissonance exhibited by both the elephants and the donkeys this cycle is military grade.
As someone who develops these types of systems, the analysis made perfect sense to me and looked very solid. There was most certainly non-spam human email traffic directly between the two systems triggering these lookups, what they contained is completely unknown. When exposed they were shut down and new servers for the same purpose setup, which is a suspicious reaction.
So, was there communication? most certainly.
Was it something we should be concerned about? We have no way of knowing, but the connection is disconcerting in the very least and we aren’t likely to get any honest transparency from trumps camp so speculation about the contents is just that, speculation.
You have a different analysis? Please share and add some meat to the discussion.
You’re absolutely right when it comes to the work of @codinghorror, and in general Discourse is the best discussion software I’ve ever used. I hope it was clear by my “tiny hat” comment that I was mostly poking fun at my own inability to take simple, accessible visual cues from the layout.
I know that weakening the power of a new user just raises a barrier to entry that is already difficult to balance, and high to begin with. Thank you for the even, clear response and reasoning though.
You may be thinking of Operation Mincemeat, where a dead body was dressed in a Royal Marines officer’s uniform and floated off the coast of Spain with fake plans for an invasion of Sardinia and Greece, to throw the Germans off the scent of the impending invasion of Sicily. But other than that you’re quite correct
Did they have access to either system. I have to expect not. Exactly where did they intercept the queries and how? Further, if I was going to setup a private link as insinuated by the “researchers” I would not broadcast my DNS lookups to the world. I’d use IP addresses.
Obviously, you wouldn’t need access to either to intercept DNS queries, that isn’t how the internet works.
questions are good, especially when they happen before assumptions.
The DNS logging system that captured these queries was originally setup to track malware and was created by several of the top internet security firms in the world in cooperation with the national and international ISPs. The wishing to remain anonymous “TeaLeaves” is an employee at one of these top security firms. The initial logs were just the impetus for a slew of well known and non anonymous security researchers to dig into the logs further, connect to the servers, and fully assess the situation. Based on their secondary investigation most of this came to light, not the initial findings. Then the group of very reputable and respected security researchers alerted both end parties and the servers were shut down and a second pair of servers setup, but those were detected almost immediately since the security researchers were keeping an eye on things.
“I asked nine computer scientists, if the DNS logs that Tea Leaves and his collaborators discovered could be forged or manipulated. They considered it nearly impossible.”
BUT what lead you to the immediate conclusion that this was bogus? Did the world’s leading expert on DNS, Paul Vixie, saying “No reasonable person would come to a conclusion other than the one I’ve come to.” not give you pause before declaring it bogus based on WHAT again?
Well, retrospect seems easy. “I wouldn’t have been caught because I’d do X differently” is an easy claim, but very few people were aware that such complete databases of DNS queries were even being compiled, it was a closely guarded secret.
Using dynamically allocated ip addresses means you can shift IPs and better mask your activities under most circumstances. no one would have guessed the DNS lookups would have been logged. Your plan has a higher risk exposure without that crucial piece of hindsight knowledge.
Can you please clarify on what basis you deemed them to be bogus?
Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept debunked this so why is it being posted? In this election, it’s important to realize that the candidates of the two major parties are are looking to muddy the waters as much as possible for the electorate, so it’s important not to just regurgitate information.
I understand how DNS works. The question was where and how? DNS queries don’t go to malware researchers just because. Where are a Trump server and a Russian bank server creating logs on a malware researchers computer? They’re doing lookups there, why? He’s got a tap on all DNS lookups everywhere like the NSA, is that what you’re saying? And why would anyone assume DNS lookups are NOT being logged? Of course they are.
It’s bogus because there is evidence lacking to back up the claim, and the conclusion drawn is the most extreme and conspiratorial of all the possible choices.
of course they typically don’t, but that is fully explained above, and in the linked article. what is the continued confusion?
did you not read my reply or any of the articles? the ISPs were providing the security firms with all the DNS record queries which were being compiled into a database for tracking malware.
well fair, you have to read the evidence in order for it to not be lacking in your own eyes. just because you aren’t aware of the evidence doesn’t mean that it is lacking and isn’t a basis to make an assumption of being bogus based on non-evidence. can you not see the irony in that?
the conclusion drawn was that two servers were setup to exclusively communicate with only each other, but that we have no idea why or what any communications might have been, only that the traffic pattern matchs human originated traffic not automated spam. which conclusion did you find to be the “most extreme and conspiratorial of all the possible choices.”?
The article doesn’t debunk it, it points out potential flaws in making any premature conclusions and current gaps in the information we know. most of which are acknowledged in the original article itself. several of which have since been clarified. There isn’t anything to debunk, no one is claiming to know what was sent or why, only that a suspicious server configuration, and a pattern of lookups, seems very disconcerting, which is why they reached out to both parties for an explanation.
No one is claiming to know what was sent or why, only that two servers were configured to communicate only with each other, and that the pattern of lookups suggests human generated message traffic.
The intercept article concludes, there is no way to prove or disprove back channel communication, same as the slate article concludes. That isn’t a debunk, rather a reminder that this might be nothing, there is no smoking gun so to speak, just a suspicious configuration worth looking into.
we want to be a welcoming community.
