Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@social.cleverlibre.org

Russian tactics seem clear - they stockpiled missiles for months, then started campaign once aid deliveries started to slow. They probably hope to exhaust UA's interceptor missile stocks before they can be replaced. From #Kyiv, actions of US Republicans and Putin seem coordinated.

Republicans are effectively helping wanted war criminal Putin.

Republicans MUST urgently unblock military aid to 🇺🇦 #Ukraine, or Putin will be able to unleash the full force of his arsenal.

Russia will 1) retain Ukrainian territories, showing West is too weak to stop land-grabs by authoritarians, 2) rebuild its military to attack Ukraine in future, 3) leave millions of Ukrainians under the power fascist dictatorship Russia.

Putin will be emboldened by success, and might feel he can test NATO.

Then the world really might face the threat of nuclear war.

Meanwhile, on the propaganda front, Russian trolls want to amplify the false impression that Russia is going to defeat Ukraine, with the goal of undermining Western support.

@RustyBertrand @xs4me2 @Snowshadow

all people suck
but not all the time
and some much more than others

The hardest part about refuting Y2K disinfo is how many problems were fixed quietly, in part to mitigate risk of ligitation (negligence, etc.). People have stories they can't tell.

At this point, I think enough years have passed that a formal amnesty - to encourage companies to disclose just how bad some of the problems were - would be in our historical best interest.

Rudy Giuliani Suggests 14th Amendment Cases Could Make Trumpers Violent https://crooksandliars.com/2024/01/rudy-giuliani-suggests-14th-amendment?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Russia surpasses the "terror state" label. History will remember them as murderers 😢

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/02/ukraine-war-live-updates-latest-news-on-russia-and-the-war-in-ukraine.html

#politics #news #Putin #russia #Ukraine

Hey all... happy new year and all that good stuff!

Welp, we've got a couple of months before things really ramp up for the election. There is however, the Iowa caucus happening in a couple of weeks, then New Hampshire a week later.

Things are gonna get ugly. The disinformation machine of the GOP, Russian bots and general ignorance coupled w/ the 8th grade intelligence of conservatives is gonna make things a challenge.

Let's make sure we get as many people to #VoteBlue as we can.

#USPol

We did this.

@robertatcara As someone who personally discovered and fixed bugs that would have had significant real world impact, it is disturbing to hear someone propagate this myth. And it is a myth.

https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/

The testing methodology insured that these impacts were not hypothetical. At my company, the testing was performed by "actually rolling the clock forward* on test. systems to see what would happen. For example, I discovered that every ATM in the state of Alaska operated by my company would have locked up until a chip was swapped. Someone had to fly all over the state to proactively swap the chip beforehand, to avoid significant customer impact.

And that was just one story. I personally oversaw investigation and fixes for other hardware and software at that company that would have failed.

And that was just my company. I spoke with others in IT at that time with similar stories. And that was just the people I knew.

So no, it wasn't "a big fuss about nothing" - and saying so is both dangerously revisionist, and disrespectful of the work it took to prevent real impacts.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Trump White House and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn (a former Vice Chair of Trump’s 2016 transition team) blocked Democratic efforts to improve the security of U.S. voting machines, while Russia prepared to help re-elect Trump. 

This is the mostly forgotten context in which Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime advisor, relaunched “Stop the Steal,” a campaign of deflection, physical intimidation, and propaganda, which baselessly accused Trump’s foes of election fraud. 

Stone and his cohorts—including Alex Jones, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne—deployed a Russian propaganda technique called the “firehose of falsehood.”
As soon as one claim is debunked, another replaces it, creating a 24/7 tsunami of information warfare that is disseminated through as many different channels of communication as possible.  

Stone had first test-driven “Stop the Steal” during the 2016 presidential election.
It was an audacious move given the contemporaneous attack on America’s election infrastructure by Russia, whose president (Vladimir Putin) wanted Trump to win the race.

While Stone baselessly accused Trump’s 2016 detractors of fraud, Paul Manafort (Stone’s former lobbying partner who served as Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman) shared detailed campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian operative who had worked for Manafort’s firm in Ukraine. 

Manafort reportedly expected Kilimnik to share the data with, among others, Serhiy Lyovochkin, a pro-Putin Ukrainian politician who, per the New York Times, had participated in a scheme to electronically alter election data during Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election. 

(The scheme was uncovered via telephone intercepts, igniting Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.)

Stone nonetheless claimed that the 2016 U.S. election would be rigged against Trump who instead defied almost every poll to take the presidency. 

Stone and another associate, Ali Alexander, next used “Stop the Steal” after the 2018 Florida midterm election, deflecting from reports that Russian hackers had successfully breached voter registration systems in at least two Florida counties.

Stone resurrected the “Stop the Steal” campaign during the 2020 election, deflecting from the Trump White House’s obfuscation of voting machine security legislation, reports that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) had hand delivered a letter from Trump to Putin’s administration, and reports that Russia planned to help re-elect Trump in 2020. 

https://buckscountybeacon.com/2023/10/trump-and-the-gop-blocked-election-security-bills-but-stop-the-steal-made-everyone-forget/

New Year’s Eve: Musings on Y2K
At 3pm PST on 31 December, 1999, I sat down at the computer in my home office in Yakima, Washington. I logged remotely into the network at HQ and started monitoring our systems. The most critical moment would come at 4pm local time. We were in Pacific Standard Time (PST), -0800 UTC. In other words, at 4pm in Yakima, it would be midnight in Greenwich, England, where the time zone aligns with Coordinated Universal Time. (Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated as UTC, not CUT, because there are actually other languages in the world besides English, and… never mind. Look it up if that story interests you).

Anyway.

The GPS satellites run on UTC, and our entire multi-state operation depended on GPS timing. My first hint of system failure because of a Y2K bug would occur at midnight, UTC.

Beginning at 3:55pm I began testing the major system once a minute. At 4:05pm I sent out the notice to corporate management that all was well.

I tested hourly, then, but the next critical moment wasn’t until 9pm PST, which was when midnight occurred on the US East Coast. Our equipment was all in MST and PST, but some of our many telecom providers might have systems with local time coordination in some other US time zone. (They’d all be using GPS now, but – this was 1999, and US telecommunications had plenty of legacy systems with other clocking methods).

In the end, nothing failed. Our entire system worked.

This wasn’t because Y2K was overblown.

It was because we replaced our billing system, which wasn’t able to generate an invoice after the date flip.

It was because we did software updates on several proprietary systems that would have failed.

It was because we did firmware updates, too.

Equipment inventories.
Application inventories.
Operating system inventories.
Software version inventories.
Firmware version inventories.

The reason January 1, 2000 seemed like such an ordinary day is because of the MASSIVE amount of work and money spent to make it ordinary. There are unsung heroes around the world who put in the work to update or replace systems that would’ve failed otherwise.

If you’re one of those people, I would love to hear your story.

#newyear #y2k #informationsecurity #gps

"Their final objective (is)... using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Thinking to myself this morning “Threads can’t be as bad as I recall…”

First post in my feed: Instagram influencer with a cup of coffee watching the sunrise from her balcony in a $1000/night hotel built with slave labor in a country where women can’t drive, telling me about how she has discovered that the secret to life is learning to savor the little things.

No, apparently the secret to life is to be born rich, white, and beautiful.

Anyway, that’s enough Threads for 2024.

Mass Surveillance -> Mass Spying. Yikes. (I had never distinguished these)

"The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. A.I. Will Enable Mass Spying.

Spying has always been limited by the need for human labor. A.I. is going to change that."

Surveillance reports what you do, Spying what you say. Tech made mass surveillance cost effective. AI summarization makes mass spying possible. Gov's and Corp'es will dive in according to

expert Bruce Schneier

https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/ai-mass-spying-internet-surveillance.html

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false claims are Politifact’s Lie of the Year

“Kennedy’s political following is built on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories.”

Think about how bad he has to be to beat out Trump for “Lie of the Year“!

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/politifact/article/robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-false-claims-18580112.php

#RFKjr #Antivax #conspiracy #Politics #USPolitics

America is doing great, & Republicans want you to think it’s being destroyed.

They also want you to think America was doing great during the Trump presidency, when it was actually being destroyed.

Their levels of gaslighting, projection, propaganda, fake news, & lies are nuts.

@lovelylovely

If one cannot take pride in something as innate as one's race, and is willing to discard it for expediency, one will not hesitate to discard anything else either, including the political interests of one's constituents.

#NikkiHaley is #FakeWhite #Fake

I’m George Takei and I support this message.