There is not, and has never been, any evidence, large or small, connecting Donald Trump to Russia, or linking Russia to the DNC hacking. At all. Ever. In any capacity.
No it is not. You still need a 'service provider'. That is the main problem, the weak link that can cut you off.
Strictly speaking, no you do not. All you need are a routable IP block and access to the network. But that doesn't imply what most people consider an ISP. You could, for example, easily establish a dedicated line to an IXP and buy transit straight from a provider. Or just piggyback on someone else's connection.
I'm not suggesting that it's easy—or even remotely reasonable for grandad—but what I am suggesting is that there are other models open to exploitation besides the hierarchical, centralised model we've got today.
(And to all of Vint Cerf's grandchildren: My sincere apologies for stereotyping.)
Peer devices don't work (eventually), because there are websites that everyone wants to visit. If you are next to one of those websites, then all your bandwidth will get sucked up forwarding pages for them.
Says the geek who's never heard of a content distribution network.
The distinction between being asked to resign and being dismissed is a purely academic one. You're still being fired.
Tell that to William Sessions, who was asked to resign, and did not, requiring Bill Clinton to fire him. Those are two very distinct actions.
But the point is that the people calling for his resignation were not in the same group as the people who ultimately fired him. They didn't have the power to make him step down.
TL;DR, if you think Comey acted inappropriately, you're a butthurt partisan hack and you've never had to make a hard decision in your life.
But he did break the rules, which is the fundamental point here. To claim that a letter to a Congressional Comittee was private and that it never entered Comey's mind that it might be leaked is utterly disingenuous. All he had to do was wait a week or so. His rationale was that there would be a political furore if it came out that he knew this information before the election. That's weak. He made assertions about the emails that were not borne out by the facts, and which took only a few more days to determine. I'm not saying he was lying; I'm saying that he spoke before he knew the facts.
For someone whom you defend as being good at making tough decisions, that's a bit of a rookie error. The most generous conclusion is that part of making tough decisions is living with their consequences, and that breaking precedent about non-interference with elections was an historically momentous decision. In hindsight, there was nothing in the actual emails that justified the decision. So he broke the rules, and he was wrong to do it. Whether he could have known in advance what the impact would be is moot. It's precisely because the results of such actions are unpredictable that Justice Department employees have a policy of simply not making statements about ongoing investigations—such as the Russia probe, for example—during an election campaign.
You can portray it as a partisan issue, but no other FBI director—not even Hoover, who was no wilting lily when it came to political shenanigans—ever actively intervened in a Presidential election. Ever.
There is strong empirical evidence that, had he not spoken up, the election could easily have gone the other way. The FBI are required to be non-partisan and apolitical. That is a fundamental precept of virtually all of the Justice Department's activities. Yes, Lynch made a mistake in allowing Bill Clinton onto the plane that day, but to revisit grammar school ethics for a moment: Two wrongs don't make a right.
I'm not butthurt, by the way. I don't even have a dog in this fight. I'm just deeply saddened that people are willing to play the same stupid fucking political games while your republic's democratic institutions circle the toilet. The point, you may recall, is not only whether Comey did right or wrong, but whether the President was right to fire him for what he did. And my point, as you might recall, is that the President was wrong to do so, even if, as the Justice Department memo claims, he handled the Clinton case in a way that undermined the integrity of the FBI as an apolitical and non-partisan organisation.
If the only way you can conceive of a differing opinion is in terms of butthurt partisanism... then I'm very sorry for you. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The Benghazi hearings went on longer than that and produced nothing but smoke too... Remember Ken Star? Of course you do, how long was Clinton under investigation?
Yep, no argument from me. You're more or less making my point, which is that how long an investigation takes is no indication—one way or the other—of its outcome. I have no opinion on the likelihood of Donald Trump's personal involvement in corrupt collusion with a foreign power. I believe he's stupid enough to do it, but nobody has yet shown any plausible evidence that he actually did.
The fact is that 99% of the people in the media now "defending" Comey would want his head if he were behaving as a good FBI director under Trump after what they blame him for with Clinton.
It can be perfectly consistent to say that someone should resign and then to object when someone fires them. If you can't imagine a scenario in which that makes sense, then we're not having a conversation; we're just talking at each other.
Look, just because someone is an asshole who doesn't play by the rules doesn't mean that the rules don't apply equally to them. That includes the protections they offer as well as the penalties they impose. James Comey broke the rules by circulating what turned out to be false news about a candidate during an election cycle. He shouldn't have done that. But the President was wrong to fire him, too, because Comey was actively investigating him for alleged corrupt ties to Russia.
So people in the media called foul in the first instance and called foul in the second. They're not defending the man; they're defending the notion that the FBI should be apolitical and independent. It would be inconsistent not to decry both abuses.
FBI Directors are traditionally non-partisan, and serve a 10 year term that is not at the pleasure of the president, unlike political appointees. This isn't to say that the President doesn't have the power to fire the Director, but it hasn't been done before....
Yes it has. Clinton fired the FBI Director for abusing the corporate jet to visit friends. That was the first and only time that I'm aware of, however.
Well, the next director cannot do any worse for you... Comey has found NOTHING after over a year of trying to prove a link between Trump and the Russians.
The Watergate scandal took 26 months from the day the burglars were arrested to the President's resignation. Just because you watched it all in 140 minutes doesn't mean that's how it actually played out.
The media agreed with you all day, writing about how he mislead Congress about the Abedin/Weiner emails. Right up until he got fired, that is. Now they're all about how this is a repeat of the "Saturday Night Massacre," firing a fine upstanding law enforcement officer for doing his job.
OH. EM. GEE. A contradiction!!!
My head! My poor poor head!! Someone said something to defend someone they don't like?!? I can't even
It's almost as if their morality isn't just for themselves and their friends! How could anyone defend someone they just called an asshole? What kind of a world would we be living in if there were some sort of... GAH!... objective morality that applies to everyone equally?!?
Oh the humanity! Next thing you know they'll be calling it justice!!
... ... ...
This FBI Director has sought for years to jail me on account of my political activities. If I can oppose his firing, so can you.
Same people who wanted FCC to "treat the internet like a public utility" are aghast that there's an FCC investigation into Stephen Colbert.
Somewhere on the internet, someone is crowing over their world class wit, not realising even for an instant that they have just made exactly the opposite point from the one they intended.
The best part is, no matter how many times they read this reply, they're still not going to see the problem. But they'll spend the rest of the day vaguely anxious that maybe they really are the idiot that everyone knows them to be.
If memory serves, the initial attitude towards Ubuntu was positive. It was an easy to install and use distro for non-systems type users and newbs. I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd.
Actually, I believe it began with Unity. That was when Canonical began pushing unripe features faster than they themselves could manage them, and the number of downstream bugs gave rise to what Shuttleworth calls the 'hate'. It wasn't hate. It was a bunch of us who just got tired of being rejected out of hand, and who couldn't get mission-critical bugs fixed through normal channels:
Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.
Full disclosure: I was completely wrong in my estimation that this behaviour was going to kill the company quickly. I was not completely wrong that it rendered them irrelevant to a lot of us.
You do know there are streaming sites out there which remove all the commercials, offer closed captioning, and a selectable quality from 360p-1080p.
I would be totally cool with a working Netflix plugin for my linux-based Kodi installation. I have no problem handing Netflix a tenner every month just to get reliable access to the content they host.
There's no law against using an email alias. Why is anyone even talking about this?
Er, because the NY Attorney General is accusing Exxon of contempt of court (though it's up to the judge to rule) because they were using deliberate tactics to obscure official emails from legal discovery.
But yeah, why would anyone want to make a big deal about someone sending and receiving official emails through unofficial channels? I mean, it's not like they should be locked up for it or anything.
...there is nothing un-American about weighing such evidence as we have and leading chants of "Prosecute Her"....
Again, I would agree. If that's what they'd chanted. But it wasn't. The chanters are the people I have no truck with. I applaud anyone with a healthy scepticism toward the application of the law in America... as long as they're focused on fixing the system rather than bringing its injustice and inequity to bear on a different (class of) victim.
EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. I. KNOW. has commented on Vault#7
It is simply not being reported.
That's empirically false, as others have noted.
I think the explanation is vastly simpler than that: Hark back to the Last Week Tonight show when John Oliver warned the world that the NSA could see their dick pics. It was a magisterial take down.
What he didn't count on, though, was that the majority of the population is actually okay with total strangers seeing their dick pics. The thing that makes them nervous, uncomfortable and afraid is when their family and friends see their dick pics. The NSA so far has largely avoided that scenario, and so, apparently, have the CIA.
I'm not excusing this gross legal and constitutional overreach. I'm just saying people care, but not in the abstract. They care in the particular.
If you have nothing to hide, why should it matter either way?
Because the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly makes this kind of fishing expedition illegal for Federal agencies, and the FBI is arguably breaking the very laws it's sworn to uphold and enforce.
But... aside from deliberate and willful lawlessness which circumvents legal protections the Founders saw fit to write into the foundational law of country... yeah, what's the problem?
Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're presumed to be innocent (in the eyes of the law). There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
NOT THE SAME as saying you ARE innocent in reality, only that as far as the law goes, you have the benefit of any doubt (and various legal protections against others acting on their own as if you were guilty).
I take your point. My problem, however, is with people leaping to the conclusion that a person is guilty and therefore that respect for the rule of law requires a conviction.
The implication, of course, is that maybe it's not conducive to civil discourse to lead chants of 'Lock Her Up' at political rallies. Because that's un-American, in the sense that it deliberately and maliciously subverts the fundamental precepts of Common Law. And I'll remind you that respect for the rule of law was the jumping off point for these rants.
But you're welcome to your niggle about other interpretations of guilt.:-)
Regarding OJ, by the way: I have my suspicions about his guilt. But I will not entertain them in my newspaper. Nor should a political leader use such speculation as a rallying cry that has the effect of casting aspersions on him—or on black men in general.
... and the conclusion was that 'No reasonable prosecutor would take the case.'
You're assuming that the only reason no reasonable prosecutor would take the case is her innocence.
No, for fuck sakes, I'm saying that you can't defend the rule of law, and then jump straight to a guilty verdict without passing through these interim steps.
My entire point is that it's perfectly fair to complain about the lack of consistency in prosecutorial decision-making. It's perfectly fair to question the FBI's investigative techniques. It's perfectly fair to discuss at length and in detail all of the countless deficiencies that exist in the American criminal justice system. People spend lifetimes doing just that.
But you do NOT get to say, 'That bitch is guilty' when she's never even gone to trial. Not if you stand for the rule of law.
Say, she should be prosecuted, she should be re-investigated, say that what she's doing is dodgy as fuck. I'm right beside you there. Say that she and her husband are conscience-free, calculating sociopaths. Say that she's insincere. Say whatever the fuck you want. But you still don't get to say she's guilty until she's convicted. Not if, as the poster did, you claim to support the rule of law.
Too many people think presumption of innocence is a trivial thing, that it only applies when trials run right. That's not true. Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're innocent of the crime. There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
This matters to me because, as a journalist, I regularly see people accused of horrible crimes, and I see the human toll of people who are put through the ringer of social opprobrium. I've seen what happens when vigilante justice prevails, and trust me, you don't ever want to see it happen.
We have the rule of law because we as a society agree to play by the rules. That means that you stop making exceptions when someone that you don't like benefits from those rules. It sucks sometimes, but there it is.
Slashdot Mirror
There is not, and has never been, any evidence, large or small, connecting Donald Trump to Russia, or linking Russia to the DNC hacking. At all. Ever. In any capacity.
Never, ever get on the wrong side of the argument with Bruce Schneier. At all. Ever. In any capacity.
No it is not. You still need a 'service provider'. That is the main problem, the weak link that can cut you off.
Strictly speaking, no you do not. All you need are a routable IP block and access to the network. But that doesn't imply what most people consider an ISP. You could, for example, easily establish a dedicated line to an IXP and buy transit straight from a provider. Or just piggyback on someone else's connection.
I'm not suggesting that it's easy—or even remotely reasonable for grandad—but what I am suggesting is that there are other models open to exploitation besides the hierarchical, centralised model we've got today.
(And to all of Vint Cerf's grandchildren: My sincere apologies for stereotyping.)
Peer devices don't work (eventually), because there are websites that everyone wants to visit. If you are next to one of those websites, then all your bandwidth will get sucked up forwarding pages for them.
Says the geek who's never heard of a content distribution network.
The distinction between being asked to resign and being dismissed is a purely academic one. You're still being fired.
Tell that to William Sessions, who was asked to resign, and did not, requiring Bill Clinton to fire him. Those are two very distinct actions.
But the point is that the people calling for his resignation were not in the same group as the people who ultimately fired him. They didn't have the power to make him step down.
TL;DR, if you think Comey acted inappropriately, you're a butthurt partisan hack and you've never had to make a hard decision in your life.
But he did break the rules, which is the fundamental point here. To claim that a letter to a Congressional Comittee was private and that it never entered Comey's mind that it might be leaked is utterly disingenuous. All he had to do was wait a week or so. His rationale was that there would be a political furore if it came out that he knew this information before the election. That's weak. He made assertions about the emails that were not borne out by the facts, and which took only a few more days to determine. I'm not saying he was lying; I'm saying that he spoke before he knew the facts.
For someone whom you defend as being good at making tough decisions, that's a bit of a rookie error. The most generous conclusion is that part of making tough decisions is living with their consequences, and that breaking precedent about non-interference with elections was an historically momentous decision. In hindsight, there was nothing in the actual emails that justified the decision. So he broke the rules, and he was wrong to do it. Whether he could have known in advance what the impact would be is moot. It's precisely because the results of such actions are unpredictable that Justice Department employees have a policy of simply not making statements about ongoing investigations—such as the Russia probe, for example—during an election campaign.
You can portray it as a partisan issue, but no other FBI director—not even Hoover, who was no wilting lily when it came to political shenanigans—ever actively intervened in a Presidential election. Ever.
There is strong empirical evidence that, had he not spoken up, the election could easily have gone the other way. The FBI are required to be non-partisan and apolitical. That is a fundamental precept of virtually all of the Justice Department's activities. Yes, Lynch made a mistake in allowing Bill Clinton onto the plane that day, but to revisit grammar school ethics for a moment: Two wrongs don't make a right.
I'm not butthurt, by the way. I don't even have a dog in this fight. I'm just deeply saddened that people are willing to play the same stupid fucking political games while your republic's democratic institutions circle the toilet. The point, you may recall, is not only whether Comey did right or wrong, but whether the President was right to fire him for what he did. And my point, as you might recall, is that the President was wrong to do so, even if, as the Justice Department memo claims, he handled the Clinton case in a way that undermined the integrity of the FBI as an apolitical and non-partisan organisation.
If the only way you can conceive of a differing opinion is in terms of butthurt partisanism... then I'm very sorry for you. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The Benghazi hearings went on longer than that and produced nothing but smoke too... Remember Ken Star? Of course you do, how long was Clinton under investigation?
Yep, no argument from me. You're more or less making my point, which is that how long an investigation takes is no indication—one way or the other—of its outcome. I have no opinion on the likelihood of Donald Trump's personal involvement in corrupt collusion with a foreign power. I believe he's stupid enough to do it, but nobody has yet shown any plausible evidence that he actually did.
The fact is that 99% of the people in the media now "defending" Comey would want his head if he were behaving as a good FBI director under Trump after what they blame him for with Clinton.
It can be perfectly consistent to say that someone should resign and then to object when someone fires them. If you can't imagine a scenario in which that makes sense, then we're not having a conversation; we're just talking at each other.
Look, just because someone is an asshole who doesn't play by the rules doesn't mean that the rules don't apply equally to them. That includes the protections they offer as well as the penalties they impose. James Comey broke the rules by circulating what turned out to be false news about a candidate during an election cycle. He shouldn't have done that. But the President was wrong to fire him, too, because Comey was actively investigating him for alleged corrupt ties to Russia.
So people in the media called foul in the first instance and called foul in the second. They're not defending the man; they're defending the notion that the FBI should be apolitical and independent. It would be inconsistent not to decry both abuses.
Who made Snowden the Pope?
I'm so burned I might just have to gently place my coffee cup back in its holder and say, 'ow'.
Or not. Probably not.
FBI Directors are traditionally non-partisan, and serve a 10 year term that is not at the pleasure of the president, unlike political appointees. This isn't to say that the President doesn't have the power to fire the Director, but it hasn't been done before....
Yes it has. Clinton fired the FBI Director for abusing the corporate jet to visit friends. That was the first and only time that I'm aware of, however.
Well, the next director cannot do any worse for you... Comey has found NOTHING after over a year of trying to prove a link between Trump and the Russians.
The Watergate scandal took 26 months from the day the burglars were arrested to the President's resignation. Just because you watched it all in 140 minutes doesn't mean that's how it actually played out.
"Comey is a real piece of shit"
The media agreed with you all day, writing about how he mislead Congress about the Abedin/Weiner emails. Right up until he got fired, that is. Now they're all about how this is a repeat of the "Saturday Night Massacre," firing a fine upstanding law enforcement officer for doing his job.
OH. EM. GEE. A contradiction!!!
My head! My poor poor head!! Someone said something to defend someone they don't like?!? I can't even
It's almost as if their morality isn't just for themselves and their friends! How could anyone defend someone they just called an asshole? What kind of a world would we be living in if there were some sort of... GAH!... objective morality that applies to everyone equally?!?
Oh the humanity! Next thing you know they'll be calling it justice!!
...
...
...
This FBI Director has sought for years to jail me on account of my political activities. If I can oppose his firing, so can you.
-- Edward Snowden
Same people who wanted FCC to "treat the internet like a public utility" are aghast that there's an FCC investigation into Stephen Colbert.
Somewhere on the internet, someone is crowing over their world class wit, not realising even for an instant that they have just made exactly the opposite point from the one they intended.
The best part is, no matter how many times they read this reply, they're still not going to see the problem. But they'll spend the rest of the day vaguely anxious that maybe they really are the idiot that everyone knows them to be.
Russian flaunted the artic military base treaty, Trump said nothing.
Flouted. The word you want is flouted. It means to defy unashamedly.
To flaunt something is to brandish it about. You could use it in a sentence like this:
Putin flaunted his cock to the world before holstering it triumphantly in Trump's gaping mouth.
If memory serves, the initial attitude towards Ubuntu was positive. It was an easy to install and use distro for non-systems type users and newbs. I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd.
Actually, I believe it began with Unity. That was when Canonical began pushing unripe features faster than they themselves could manage them, and the number of downstream bugs gave rise to what Shuttleworth calls the 'hate'. It wasn't hate. It was a bunch of us who just got tired of being rejected out of hand, and who couldn't get mission-critical bugs fixed through normal channels:
Full disclosure: I was completely wrong in my estimation that this behaviour was going to kill the company quickly. I was not completely wrong that it rendered them irrelevant to a lot of us.
People still pay for that stuff? Why?
You do know there are streaming sites out there which remove all the commercials, offer closed captioning, and a selectable quality from 360p-1080p.
I would be totally cool with a working Netflix plugin for my linux-based Kodi installation. I have no problem handing Netflix a tenner every month just to get reliable access to the content they host.
Mirrors
Ballistic Disco Balls — A Tactical Threat Model
Baker S and Modesta R; RAND Corporation
Total, utter morons.
THANKS, Trump voters.
After all, this, do you STILL have no fucking clue how important email management is to us?!?
(This is so-ooo going to fail the Poe's Law test, but it was worth it.)
our new president was elected to repeal. We're going to make America Cool again!
We're tired of being cool.
signed,
The Dakotas.
There's no law against using an email alias. Why is anyone even talking about this?
Er, because the NY Attorney General is accusing Exxon of contempt of court (though it's up to the judge to rule) because they were using deliberate tactics to obscure official emails from legal discovery.
But yeah, why would anyone want to make a big deal about someone sending and receiving official emails through unofficial channels? I mean, it's not like they should be locked up for it or anything.
...there is nothing un-American about weighing such evidence as we have and leading chants of "Prosecute Her"....
Again, I would agree. If that's what they'd chanted. But it wasn't. The chanters are the people I have no truck with. I applaud anyone with a healthy scepticism toward the application of the law in America... as long as they're focused on fixing the system rather than bringing its injustice and inequity to bear on a different (class of) victim.
EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. I. KNOW. has commented on Vault#7
It is simply not being reported.
That's empirically false, as others have noted.
I think the explanation is vastly simpler than that: Hark back to the Last Week Tonight show when John Oliver warned the world that the NSA could see their dick pics. It was a magisterial take down.
What he didn't count on, though, was that the majority of the population is actually okay with total strangers seeing their dick pics. The thing that makes them nervous, uncomfortable and afraid is when their family and friends see their dick pics. The NSA so far has largely avoided that scenario, and so, apparently, have the CIA.
I'm not excusing this gross legal and constitutional overreach. I'm just saying people care, but not in the abstract. They care in the particular.
If you have nothing to hide, why should it matter either way?
Because the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly makes this kind of fishing expedition illegal for Federal agencies, and the FBI is arguably breaking the very laws it's sworn to uphold and enforce.
But... aside from deliberate and willful lawlessness which circumvents legal protections the Founders saw fit to write into the foundational law of country... yeah, what's the problem?
Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're presumed to be innocent (in the eyes of the law). There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
NOT THE SAME as saying you ARE innocent in reality, only that as far as the law goes, you have the benefit of any doubt (and various legal protections against others acting on their own as if you were guilty).
I take your point. My problem, however, is with people leaping to the conclusion that a person is guilty and therefore that respect for the rule of law requires a conviction.
The implication, of course, is that maybe it's not conducive to civil discourse to lead chants of 'Lock Her Up' at political rallies. Because that's un-American, in the sense that it deliberately and maliciously subverts the fundamental precepts of Common Law. And I'll remind you that respect for the rule of law was the jumping off point for these rants.
But you're welcome to your niggle about other interpretations of guilt. :-)
Regarding OJ, by the way: I have my suspicions about his guilt. But I will not entertain them in my newspaper. Nor should a political leader use such speculation as a rallying cry that has the effect of casting aspersions on him—or on black men in general.
... innocence is not a legal concept.
Presumption of Innocence is a formal concept in Common Law.
... and the conclusion was that 'No reasonable prosecutor would take the case.'
You're assuming that the only reason no reasonable prosecutor would take the case is her innocence.
No, for fuck sakes, I'm saying that you can't defend the rule of law, and then jump straight to a guilty verdict without passing through these interim steps.
My entire point is that it's perfectly fair to complain about the lack of consistency in prosecutorial decision-making. It's perfectly fair to question the FBI's investigative techniques. It's perfectly fair to discuss at length and in detail all of the countless deficiencies that exist in the American criminal justice system. People spend lifetimes doing just that.
But you do NOT get to say, 'That bitch is guilty' when she's never even gone to trial. Not if you stand for the rule of law.
Say, she should be prosecuted, she should be re-investigated, say that what she's doing is dodgy as fuck. I'm right beside you there. Say that she and her husband are conscience-free, calculating sociopaths. Say that she's insincere. Say whatever the fuck you want. But you still don't get to say she's guilty until she's convicted. Not if, as the poster did, you claim to support the rule of law.
Too many people think presumption of innocence is a trivial thing, that it only applies when trials run right. That's not true. Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're innocent of the crime. There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
This matters to me because, as a journalist, I regularly see people accused of horrible crimes, and I see the human toll of people who are put through the ringer of social opprobrium. I've seen what happens when vigilante justice prevails, and trust me, you don't ever want to see it happen.
We have the rule of law because we as a society agree to play by the rules. That means that you stop making exceptions when someone that you don't like benefits from those rules. It sucks sometimes, but there it is.