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I mean, really, who didn't see this coming?

Not Danny Sullivan. He is a Founding Editor of Marketing Land and a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Marketing Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

This is not an ad for Danny Sullivan.

I mean, really, who didn't see this coming?

Not Danny Sullivan. He is a Founding Editor of Marketing Land and a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Marketing Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

This is not an ad for Danny Sullivan.

The telcos took billions and billions of dollars of tax money in exchange for upgrades they have no intention of ever providing. Fuck them all. The FCC obviously won't be doing anything now, so it's up to the courts, the only sane branch of government left.

Seriously, if the courts were going to enforce any of this it would have been fifteen years ago. Bless his heart, Bruce Kushnick will not let this go, but the telcos used the government to fleece the "ratepayers" and they have no intention of allowing that government to claw any of it back. Whomever needs to be paid, it's a lot cheaper than building infrastructure.

Meanwhile, regulations prevent any effective competition, so that's as good as you're going to get without an Administrative State revolution.

Unless I'm targeting the developing world or writing games I'm not sure I see the use case.

If you follow @Mozilla on Twitter, you'll get an idea of how Mozilla is "targeting the developing world". See, for example, the Digital Inclusion section of its Internet Health Report.

not an article but here you go. https://twitter.com/FoxNews/st...

I see the only link is a Fox News link- considering the NYT is online this is suspicious. In other words- Fox News invented a fictitious NYT article?

He's not tweeting things like "I hate Taco Tuesday", thereby preventing all Tex-Mex restaurants in the US from offering cheap tacos on Tuesday.

He IS tweeting things that "prevent" all clothes stores from stop carrying his daughter's products.

My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom.

And then he retweets that from @POTUS.

If I want more decimal places, I can google it.

Yeah, the thing about that:

https://twitter.com/Doug_Lemov...

As joepie91 states on Twitter:
Joepie91

Highly suspect that @wikileaks switched from GPG to 7z for releases, and explicitly says to decrypt using `7z`. Suggests an exploit. #Vault7

If I had a 7z vulnerability and I wanted to target/compromise "techie crowd interested in leaks", this is *precisely* what I'd do. #Vault7

7z is not encryption, it is compression. It makes the file smaller, but not protected...

https://twitter.com/i/moments/... Disclosure, it's my first try at making a Moment.

You're in luck: https://twitter.com/StephanTLa... - "We’re planning to ship most C++17 features in VS 2017 updates. No ETAs yet, but we’re working on them as a top priority."

As joepie91 states on Twitter:
Joepie91

Highly suspect that @wikileaks switched from GPG to 7z for releases, and explicitly says to decrypt using `7z`. Suggests an exploit. #Vault7

If I had a 7z vulnerability and I wanted to target/compromise "techie crowd interested in leaks", this is *precisely* what I'd do. #Vault7

Here's Google Home's answer

Maybe the problem is that the incorrect information is free and the peer-reviewed article costs $30 to read.

These days the peer-reviewed article might be even worse bullshit than the grocery aisle rag.

I can easily see the tag "Disputed by Politifact" becoming a source of pride for certain posters. Politifact is already maligned by many people (fairly or not, I don't know), and it would fit easily into people's biases, eg: "if Politifact doesn't like it, then it must be true."

Next up: A bot that tells you if the news is fake. Has someone already done that?

That bot is already in operation. You can see it in action right here.

. . . . more users to Gab, where the only filters on what you see, are the ones **you** set on your own account

The average celebrity has an order of magnitude more twitter followers than Gab has users.(Heck, even a spoof account does ) As much as I'd like there to be an alternative, a service with 0.04% the users doesn't feel like a challenger.

Absolute agreement. Every since the Neanderthals on Wall Street started dictating policy to Fortune 500's (and small firms let it trickle down to them), we've been at a growing war with the 1%. Latest news says there are SIX people who have more wealth than the bottom 50% of population of the WORLD! Their interests are served first. And, yes, Marx predicted that. Now, it's our job to get vocal, get active, and take our Democracy back, including the fundamental Constitutional right to privacy that has been so eroded by lawyers (and politicians, who are mostly made up of the lawyer class) in the past decades. And, not just in the U S of A, but throughout the world. It's pitchforks time, folks, and time to bring the corrupt interests (Exxon, GE, Microsoft, and thousands of others, and their kin in other countries) to heel. We, the masses, need to hone our skills at defeating their self-serving game.

Read George Lakott's take: https://twitter.com/georgelako...
and https://georgelakoff.com/2011/...

Can you believe that,with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf.

-- Donald Trump

I have to answer, Bush was just the same loved his golf, they made a bigger deal of it with Obama.

Now if someone would just give Trump a cue card.

Can you believe that,with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf.

-- Donald Trump

My beloved Monte https://monte.rtfd.org/ beat PHP to this by a wide stretch. While it's true that PHP is a big established language, that doesn't mean that they get to claim sudden leaps in innovation which didn't happen. I've tweeted at the author of the blog post https://twitter.com/corbinsimpson/status/834175224736157696 with timestamped commits from the Monte codebase.

While Mozilla isn't the only one who develops it, Mozilla is in the process of requiring the Thunderbird project to be spun out and rely on its own infrastructure and funding. I know because I interviewed with Magnus and Jörg for the consulting project to setup the infrastructure.

Twitter post announcing the position: https://twitter.com/pascalchev...

Actual job posting: http://www.garysguide.com/jobs... (mirror, Mozilla has already removed it from their site)

Mailing list post from Gervase announcing the split: https://lwn.net/Articles/68506...

Just remember: The Wall Street Journal is now known as the White Supremacist Journal(by their own standards). The suggestion that started it all. The end result. Meme magic is real...

I am sure he can learn more than you in 24 hours about launching satellites.

His attention span is about 10 seconds. The idea of him spending 24 hours learning something is laughable.

PS: Check his Twitter sometime. The idiot has over 34000 (thirty four thousand) tweets to his name. How is that even possible?

https://twitter.com/realdonald...

It would make Trump an accomplice in the crime.

But there literally is no crime. Flynn could have said "tell my very best friend Vlad that the sanctions will be lifted as soon as Trump's in office" and that's not a crime. To what crime would Trump be an accomplice?

Perhaps a different metaphor would help then. Think of Trump as an escort. At any given moment he is doing whatever he is doing to please whoever is currently paying him. He doesn't have just one client, he doesn't even have just one regular.

I saw a list made up the other day by anti-Semites of "proof" that Trump is a puppet of the Jews. Married his kids off to Jews, says nice things about Israel, Israel says nice things about him, tweets stuff like this pair (say, isn't that an even bigger smoking gun for "telling foreign nations you'll do stuff for them after inauguration" than the Flynn calls?), why even today he's meeting with the Chief Jew. So do you also agree Trump is a puppet of the Jews?

Can we get the shorter list? Is there anyone Trump is not a puppet of?

Alternative hypothesis...and bear with me...this sounds crazy...maybe Trump is not a puppet, his platform is genuinely what he and American conservative voters want and think is best for the country, and he's been carrying out said agenda (killed TPP, restructuring H1-Bs, building wall, ICE is rounding up illegal Mexican rapists and booting them over the border, appointing originalist Supreme Court justice, etc)? Do you think there's any chance of that, or is that just too far out in left field?

It would make Trump an accomplice in the crime.

But there literally is no crime. Flynn could have said "tell my very best friend Vlad that the sanctions will be lifted as soon as Trump's in office" and that's not a crime. To what crime would Trump be an accomplice?

Perhaps a different metaphor would help then. Think of Trump as an escort. At any given moment he is doing whatever he is doing to please whoever is currently paying him. He doesn't have just one client, he doesn't even have just one regular.

I saw a list made up the other day by anti-Semites of "proof" that Trump is a puppet of the Jews. Married his kids off to Jews, says nice things about Israel, Israel says nice things about him, tweets stuff like this pair (say, isn't that an even bigger smoking gun for "telling foreign nations you'll do stuff for them after inauguration" than the Flynn calls?), why even today he's meeting with the Chief Jew. So do you also agree Trump is a puppet of the Jews?

Can we get the shorter list? Is there anyone Trump is not a puppet of?

Alternative hypothesis...and bear with me...this sounds crazy...maybe Trump is not a puppet, his platform is genuinely what he and American conservative voters want and think is best for the country, and he's been carrying out said agenda (killed TPP, restructuring H1-Bs, building wall, ICE is rounding up illegal Mexican rapists and booting them over the border, appointing originalist Supreme Court justice, etc)? Do you think there's any chance of that, or is that just too far out in left field?

Except for every administration, during the transition, appointees involved in foreign policy speak to lots of foreigners about lots of things, particularly about how relations might change with them under the new administration. Even if he said "tell my best friend Vlad to hold on, those sanctions will be lifted soon" that's not a crime.

Here you go, here's a smoking gun of Trump telling a foreign nation he's going to do them favors after he takes office. Impeachment when?!

He literally promised them favors by the President, if they stay cool about sanctions they were given for attacking USA.

No he didn't, unless saying they can review it later = "literally promised favors."

A reward for attacking USA.

There is no proof Putin was behind the DNC leaks. It's far more likely Obama was the one playing politics here to fuck with the incoming Trump administration rather than that Trump's administration was playing politics to fuck with Obama.

And if telling a foreign nation to hang on because you're going to do nice things for them once you take office, here's your smoking guns.

He literally promised them favors by the President, if they stay cool about sanctions they were given for attacking USA.

No he didn't, unless saying they can review it later = "literally promised favors."

A reward for attacking USA.

There is no proof Putin was behind the DNC leaks. It's far more likely Obama was the one playing politics here to fuck with the incoming Trump administration rather than that Trump's administration was playing politics to fuck with Obama.

And if telling a foreign nation to hang on because you're going to do nice things for them once you take office, here's your smoking guns.

In response to these events, WikiLeaks has tweeted "Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns after destabilization campaign by US spies, Democrats, press."

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/...

Wow. WikiLeaks has become a completely, utterly, totally different animal from what they were when they started out.

Like this one that may not be following the new Trump line?

Given that outside of the major publishers, Steam is treated as the de-facto marketplace for PC games, at first I wasn't happy with this move. But after giving it some thought, I think this is going to be for the better.

Right now Steam is suffering from two major problems that, as a casual buyer, make the store unpleasant to use.

• Straight up garbage games. These are games thrown together using stock or stolen assets, with no real development effort, all in the name of making a quick buck. It's the noise in the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the store.
• An extreme case of overchoice/analysis paralysis. There's too many small cap games, exacerbated by the garbage game problem listed above. 38% of all Steam games were released in 2016 despite the fact that Steam has operated as an open storefront now for several years. The number of games being introduced each year is growing, and consumers are having a hard time keeping up.

To paraphrase from Ye' Olde Wikipedia: "Having too many approximately equally good options is mentally draining because each option must be weighed against alternatives to select the best one". Which really, is kind of a horrific concept because it implies that choice (and competition) is bad. But outside of AAA titles with large marketing budgets and immense brand recognition, most of the games in the Steam store are unknowns, so customers are coming in and facing too many choices without nearly enough information to choose between them. Which isn't a problem if you already know exactly what you want (Call of Duty) and are just coming to the store to buy it. But it is a problem if you only know what kind of thing you want (a first-person shooter) and want to see what's available.

Essentially requiring a deposit on sales is going to lock out a lot of low budget developers, which taken at face-value is anti-egalitarian. But from a consumer perspective it's going to improve the store by cutting down on the noise. Games from developers who were likely never going to become successful in the first place now won't be cluttering up the storefront. It may keep the next ARK from being discovered, but it will also prevent the next The District from clogging up the store's search results. Developers lose, but arguably it's a win for consumers.

Which really goes back to a central argument about Steam and app stores in general: what should they be, a free-for-all or a curated store? The former allows everyone to participate, while the latter allows for a more structured experience. And judging from the consumer discontent, it seems that people would rather have the latter. Which at least for the PC is fine; the PC is an open platform, so it doesn't limit choice. It just makes it harder for a no-name developer to get noticed.

On a side note, I hope this also helps to curtail Early Access shenanigans. There are too many games that are being sold badly incomplete, and of those Early Access games, too many of them will never get finished. There's a dirty secret that I think everyone in the industry has had to re-learn the hard way: publishers suck, but having a middle-man funding game development means that at least games are more-or-less done before they are sold to consumers.

"The review of APHIS' website has been ongoing, and the agency is striving to balance the need for transparency with rules protecting individual privacy.
In 2016, well before the change of Administration, APHIS decided to make adjustments to the posting of regulatory records.
In addition, APHIS is currently involved in litigation concerning, among other issues, information posted on the agency's website.
While the agency is vigorously defending against this litigation, in an abundance of caution, the agency is taking additional measures to protect individual privacy.
These decisions are not final. Adjustments may be made regarding information appropriate for release and posting."

A blatant and stupid lie.
Trump administration forgets that people from the Obama administration are still alive and around.

Matt Herrick, director of Communications of USDA under Obama, tweeted this regarding the disappearing of animal abuse reports:

Decision by @usda 2 remove animal abuse reports not required.
Totally subjective. Same option given 2 past admin. We refused. #transparency

And it's not the first (and probably not the last) time that Trump administration, once caught doing something they shouldn't be doing, tries to blame it on Obama.
Like the Muslim ban, Yemen raid fiasco (BTW, that was "winning"), Trump's disastrous calls to Mexican and Australian heads of state... and now this.
More here.

This is fake news. There was a completely unsubstantiated claim by an NY Times reporter, which seems like a bizarre false flag op:

That's not a bizarre false flag op, that's cognitive dissonance on your part.

So at best we have a rumour

No, an eyewitness account from a reporter that matches other violence at the event that's been caught on film, such as this flag pole attack, or this woman being pepper sprayed while giving an interview, or this college Republican being attacked wearing a suit and Trump hat the morning after.

based on a story that clearly makes no sense (why would an anti-hate, anti-discrimination protester identify as Syrian as a Nazi?)

Probably because the left has been throwing around the term "Nazi" like it was confetti, and he was wearing a suit, as the reporter mentioned, something you'd associate with the right, establishment, and conservatism at a lefty protest where hate-filled thugs are violently attacking people and property to shut down another person's free speech. Also, maybe he was wearing a Trump hat that was knocked off before the reporter saw the attack.

If anything it suggests that the protest was sabotaged by Milo supporters.

You truly have your head up your ass. And I suppose the 200+ people arrested and charged as part of a gang committing violence during Trump's inauguration were Trump supporters?

What you don't want to admit is that the left has become the party of violence, openly condoning it in many cases.

This somehow became a factual report when repeated on alt-right websites. And you either didn't bother to investigate it, or didn't want to, or are too incompetent to make a sensible judgement.

*snort* Yes, because you've done such a good job investigating it yourself with your baseless claims of false flag attacks and "fake news".

@AbbyMartin
NYT spreads fake news while defending comical intelligence report, claims I quit RT during live broadcast. Issue a correction now @nytimes

And after NYT's "correction"

Abby Martin @AbbyMartin Jan 8
.@nytimes correction still insinuates I quit RT over Ukraine but I had my show for 1yr after denouncing Putin—disproving the article's point

Please, focus on the bold text!

The baseline is a constant offset, so nothing was "adjusted to fit" anything, just translated down. Look, animated gif. If you did it the other way around the lower graph would just move up. Here's more detail on the baselines, and more graphs.

No, it was proposed and voted in January, before David Rose's nonsense was published.

Twitter has much more serious problems then this right now. Like remaining profitable in the face of censoring users, and revenue, engagement and ad revenue following through the floor.

Funny that twitters decline started around the time they decided to start censoring users, and deciding who gets to see what. And since facebook is doing the same thing, as well as being complicit in open censorship in western democracies(France, Germany, etc). This is likely going to be the least of their problems. It looks like politicians(and gov bodies) will be behind the technical and social curve as usual.

@CrispinSartwell clearly many forms of speech ("pay me 10% of your profits or I'll burn your store down") are not & should not be protected

That's an obvious example, but makes the point. Discussion can be robust without being vulgar too, I actually feel sorry for people whose sole means of expression of **** ****$! (OK when hitting thumb with hammer, of course) etc., they probably have quite unhappy and emotionally poor lives.

As to remedies, I think it's clear from the simple example about that some forms of speech are not protected, so I am in favour of channel 'kicks', timeouts, invisibility markers and other suppression tools used judiciously by moderators. I also believe that, as part of school, we should be taught about debate as a core subject, it's the thing that keeps us from braining each other with rocks when we disagree.

I'll also add that I agree with Mike Pence that a ban on Muslims entering the country is both offensive and unconstitutional, although I'm not looking forward to 4 years of having judges explain why things that Trump does aren't actually unconstitutional even if they're un-American.

First they came for the Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, poor people, intellectuals and scientists and then it was Wednesday.

You vastly over-estimate Clinton's influence and power.

The press was by and large in the tank for Clinton. Whether it was newspaper owners holding fundraisers for her (Washington Post), or sending her releases of stories about her in advance for approval (Politico/New York Times), or sending her debate questions (CNN), the press in this country has demonstrated that they are not trustworthy to deliver unbiased news. These are only a few examples I can think off the top of my head. I'm sure the same shenanigans would have gone on even if Trump wasn't the GOP nominee.

Obama 'keeping a promise': "Well guys, I tried to do something with gun control but then John Boehner called me a tyrant again so I had no choice but to cave in. Sorry, not my fault."

Trump keeping a promise: "Fuck your giant foam vagina costumes, this shit's happening today. Oh, Schumer's crying on TV? Hang on a sec, I gotta tweet something real fast..."

Obama 'keeping a promise': "Well guys, I tried to do something with gun control but then John Boehner called me a tyrant again so I had no choice but to cave in. Sorry, not my fault."

Trump keeping a promise: "Fuck your giant foam vagina costumes, this shit's happening today. Oh, Schumer's crying on TV? Hang on a sec, I gotta tweet something real fast..."

Yeah, I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when they ran this past their lawyers. If they did run it past them, because I can't imagine a lawyer who would turn apoplectic at a client doing something with so much risk.

All it'd take is one false negative -- or even a credible-ish sounding report of a false negative -- and they could be on the hook for a lifetime of nursing home bills.

As the Lawrence KS police department tweeted: If you have to blow into a Tostitos bag to know if you're intoxicated, for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT DRIVE.

https://twitter.com/realDonald...

I meant without singling out just the facts they don't like, they are going after everything

No, they're only going after the stuff they don't like. The DoD public-facing website has been left alone.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the DoD official twitter account has been throwing some serious shade on Trump, too. They tweeted this article:

https://twitter.com/DeptofDefe...

Now we can tell an asteroid to shut up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Unless Will hears about it and gets triggered. https://www.reddit.com/r/Dayst...

Then he'll block you. https://twitter.com/wilw/statu...

At the nation state level, I don't think it operates the same way. That is, I don't think they rely on a few dumb operators. Looking at what the NSA does, they're able to attack the supply lines and send you pre-compromised hardware. They have advanced exfiltration systems that don't need to touch your network at all. They have malware that cannot be decrypted by any machine other than the target that makes you think there's nothing wrong. It's also custom, just for you, so AV programs aren't going to see it.

Those statements are mostly true, but only to a certain extent.

The APT teams aren't operating at a nation-state level. They are nation-state funded, but they're still operating more like an experiment, mostly due to the lack of available expertise in the field. Think more along the lines of the Manhattan Project. A very small number of people are doing the real work, and a lot of people figuring out how to apply this new weapon strategically.

Yes, the intelligence agencies have lots of fancy tools, and they're shared among the APT teams as needed, but usually the attacks are boring script-kiddy stuff. Most of the time, pass-the-hash and Word macros will get the job done, so there's no reason to risk exposing the elite tools and zero-day vulnerabilities.

I know they labeled the DNC hack as an APT, but it appears to be an ordinary criminal gang. It simply doesn't match the profile of nation state level attacks. They want long-term access without getting caught. Sending an email like the one to Podesta got someone ~2 days of access, as best we can tell. Enough to download a few emails, only to end up locked out. When nation states do spear phishing, they have a custom written piece of malware disguised as a legitimate attachment. It won't be noticed by any AV programs. They will use that to make sure they have long-term access to your systems.

The Podesta hack and the DNC hacks were separate events, by related teams. They used different tactics, but shared some (but not all) infrastructure. Both teams were involved in the DNC hack, but apparently weren't aware of each other's presence, since they'd attack servers that the other team had already penetrated.

In the DNC hack, they did have long-term access. One group had been active on the network for over a year, and the other was sloppier, and was detected after only a month of activity.

The Podesta attack wasn't particularly specialized. It was a wide attack using automated tools. There was no attachment, just a link to a bit.ly-shortened URL that wouldn't be caught by the spam filter. There was nothing downloaded from the phishing site, either. It just decrypted the Base64-encoded parameter in the emailed URL, and displayed that. Again, don't fall into the mental trap that nation-state attacks must be highly-sophisticated next-generation hacks. In hacking, if it's stupid and it works, then it isn't stupid.

They just don't operate the same way because they don't have the same goals. It's not like Russia is the only possible culprit here, either.

Russia isn't the only possible culprit, but they are the only likely culprit. Their same infrastructure (bit.ly account, phishing site host, and mail-sending botnet) had previously been used to attack 1800 accounts in 2015. Those accounts were overwhelmingly non-Russian military personnel. There's a great analysis of the hack by pwnallthethings on Twitter. I highly recommend expanding the thread and reading.

As for goals, the goal is simple: Gather any useful access. Hacking Podesta's email was probably a lucky stroke for the attackers, but they were more likely looking for anything useful. If not Podesta, then someone else might have made a good victim. If they got someone's account, but it wasn't particularly useful at the time, they don't care. The automated tool is

LOL, just how many people did /pol/ scam on that one?

It does some interesting things to your (or Julian Assange's) selfies.