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Linux Forcibly Installed On Congressman's Computer In Act of Terrorism
fermion writes with news of Windows computers being forcefully liberated: "The campaign headquarters of Michael Grimm, a U.S. House of Representatives member from New York, were vandalized. What has not been reported everywhere is that Linux was installed on one of his computers, erasing data in the process. Is this a new attack on democracy by the open source radicals, or it is just a random occurrence?"
From the article: "'In fact, one officer said to me today they see this as a crime against the government, because I am a sitting United States congressman and they take it very seriously. You know, especially in light of what happened with Gabby Giffords, we're not in the world today where we can shrug things off,' Grimm said. ... [GNU/]Linux, an open-source operating system, was installed on Grimm's computers, erasing the hard drive contents, which included polling and voter identification data. But staff had backed up the hard drive contents hours beforehand. Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers."
I see this as a radical open source movement. Some people hated to see that government was using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X on their computers and decided to take the matter in to their own hands. Linux was forcibly installed on the computers and the suspect was caught seen masturbating in a dark corner as the progress meter went further and further.
Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.
I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.
because I am a sitting United States congressman
Does anyone else get an air of elitism when people say things like this? "I work for the government, I'm better than you, and these things should only happen to you plebs." I feel that as long as our politicians think like this, we're doomed as a democracy.
And then selected the wrong keyboard and language settings, and then chose the wrong partitions to format and then selected the wrong packages to install...
In light of a the attempted assassination of a congresswoman, throwing a lump of concrete through a window and flattening a computer definitely should be the highest priority for the police.
Was he satisfied with his new Linux desktop? And did they install KDE or Gnome?
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Tin Hat Linux by the looks of it.
You'd be amazed how clever some idiots are.
Oh no... it's the future.
...does that mean that you can install Linux in the time it takes for a cement block to go through a Windows(tm) ? Guerrilla advertisement is getting worse and worse.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I'd say this was consensual install. Had it been legitimate non-consensual install, the computer has a way to prevent itself being impregnated with an open source operating system if the install was not consensual.
This congressman is currently under investigation for misappropriation of funds. Here's a much more convincing story:
...
1. Congressman misappropriates campaign funds
2. Congressman comes under investigation
3. Congressman slips IT guy $50 to ransack the office at night and make some key financial data "disappear"
4. Congressman acts shocked and appalled, decries this act of "terrorism" and labels himself as a helpless victim.
5. Media gobbles it up because it contains the word "terrorism"
6.
7. Profit! (from misappropriating campaign funds)
They left distinctive footprints walking across the yard in front of the office:
Actual Forensic Photo From Evidence File
Don't see shoes like that every day in New York
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Your link doesn't mention anything about illegal funds, I was going to call you out for trying to mislead but then I Google'd it:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/04/michael-grimm_n_1853232.html
Wow, pretty murkey Eric Cantor (Republican head of the House!) in there too receiving the monies, so you can bet this one will be buried quick.
Do you have any idea how long it would take or how much it would cost to retrieve the data from a zero-wiped magnetic storage platter? Scanning tunnelling microscopy of a current generation ultra-high density, high capacity, perpendicular recorded magnetic storage platters to pick up the difference between 1>0 and 0>0 is unfeasible. Yes, it makes a great techno-voodoo for CSI and the like, but as a reality it's just not a reasonable suggestion.
By the way, recovery of a data by this process has never even been attempted, let alone succeeded. There are images of HDD platter surfaces on the MFM Wikipedia page, but then again those aren't zero'd drives, and the current gen drives are approx 80x more densely packed.
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