72 karma · joined December 17, 2021
The reasons for that can be myriad. Actual or false scientific success of the last 30 years is not necessarily it.
Also, don't you feel the ship has kind of been slowly going down during the last 10 years, wealth-wise ?
Don't forget the retrospective updates made during the following year, particularly concerning later hospitalisations and mortality.
Duly noted.
They have litterally made the rules, and are sometimes delegated to adjudicate on specific cases.
Checking that would have taken you exactly 5 seconds. It's litterally on their web page header, but in their statutes as well.
Then, based on that, the Australian embassy delivered a visa for his entry on Australian territory. That visa was then rescinded by a deputy assistant directly under the Minister of Foreign affairs after his plane from Dubai took off.
So "the government" all the way, no Tennis Australia in sight.
Let's look at the affiliations of the authors : save for an economist in India, two thirds of the team are from a Canadian think tank, the rest work for a big data company in Washington, almost none have published anything ever, and if they did, it was not medecine...
IMHO : A lot of doubt, if only due to the data source.
This smell like a lobbyist's made to order report. To me, it's strange it's been allowed by the Science editorial board.
For him Atlantis was the daughter of the titan Atlas. A small fragment of Hellanicus’s opus about her survives with the following line: "Poseidon coupled with Celaeno, and their son Lycus was settled by Poseidon in the Isles of the Blessed and made immortal.". "The Isles of the Blessed" would become Atlantis the geographical location in Plato's writing. The fragment was found in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri 11, 1359.
Certainly not a lot or a bullseye, but there you go.
If you permit me, I'd like to make a suggestion to you : always applying the (IMHO) fallacious rule "apparent absence of evidence is evidence of absence" makes life very drab. Letting oneself dream of utopias past or future improves creativity, and gives hope and a nice escape from the rat race. Don't spoil other people's fun with cynicism.
You are playing into Crowdstrike's own Motte and Baily argument in restricting the words "proof" and "evidence" by substitting their meaning to what amounts to a recording of the attack. That is an impossibly high threshold, but it can more easily defended if you do. They kind of had to considering their actual technical arguments were weak.
"We did not have a sensor in place", as said by Shawn Henry. Yes, Crowdstrike didn't have them, and said they relied on "circumstential evidence", but it seems the DNC did have "sensors" in place, and Crowdstrike had access to them:
From the Mueller report, p. 40 [1], "On April 25, 2016, the GRU collected and compressed PDF and Microsoft documents from folders on the DCCC’s shared file server that pertained to the 2016 election. The GRU appears to have compressed and exfiltrated over 70 gigabytes of data from this file server (See SM-2589105-GJ, serial 649. As part of its investigation, the FBI later received images of DNC servers and copies of relevant traffic logs)" - btw all of this info originally comes from Crowdstrike.
While not pcaps per se, most varieties of such logs would show a different profile for downloading 70Gb "thousands of emails", zip/compressed files, etc, than much shorter instrumentation data for their Malware.
You can't have caught one but not having had the other, X-Tunnel + VPN or not. I mean, there are ways for that to be, but you'd have to have been inept on purpose. I have some trouble believing the DNC IT would considering the general environment back then.
So it followed concerning these point that S. Henry, when pressed for what the circumstantial evidence was for 70Gb to have been exfiltrated, S. Henry said "And there might not be evidence of it being exfiltrated, but they would have knowledge of what was in the email. … There would be ways to copy it. You could take screenshots.".
I mean, c'mon man... "screenshots" ??? You basically got VNC but you "sceenshot" ??? Either Mr. Henry is a fool or takes his House Commitee for one - which the latter may very well be.
IMHO, either of us would have to look at the source code for X-Agent (available) or the Sea Daddy implant (no idea) to see if
1. not having logs of large transfers makes sense in this context, at least in its known variant and
2. are the Crowdstrike declarations coherent in that regard.
Until we do, we're kind of stuck to see whose stretching the argument between you and me.
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On a related note, but not directly involving Crowdstrike, the Dutch cyberdefense org and the NSA seemingly did have such real-time evidence from 2015-2018.
As far as is publicly known, those particular intercepts weren't shared with the Mueller team, nor the House Commitee inquiry.
It would be interesting to know why if it was not on natsec "ways and means" grounds. If it wasn't, the FBI wouldn't have had to rely on Crowdstrike.
> games with meanings of words.
I don't believe I am.
The context I'm using in both my references above is what is understandable by the layman, not mixing technical "in-knowledge" and what said layman reading the NYT can understand :
- D.A. said to the NYT "the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes. Once they got into the D.N.C., they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation". I understand "the operation" is refering to "phishing, exfiltrating, stockpiling".
- Later D.A. says to the commission "We did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC". That implies no traffic logs, at all.
But then, we're back, again, to the technical problem outlined earlier.
IMHO, a correct and honest wording to the NYT would have been "We have strong indications Russian hackers may have entered DNC servers, but nothing in logs we do have indicates they did anything with it.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
[2] https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dutch-agencies-provide-... and https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence-...
- I linked the New York articles interviewing Crowdstrike :
"The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, [...] It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer.[...] Whenever someone clicked on a phishing message, the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes. Once they got into the D.N.C., they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation,” said Mr. Alperovitch, [...]"
There are similar claims elsewhere. You can also find their management in TV interviews or being in TV expert panels.
- The Mate link is only interesting here because of the handy scans of the House Comitee minutes where they answered a direct question by "We did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC". You can also go to the original source, if you want.
There are several scanned pages inlined in the middle of that article.
Used to be in the industry, 10+ years ago. Friends tell me goods things about it too.
And anyways, I'm pro-neither party. Both are corrupt to the core. I just hate it when propaganda and lies at this scale works too well.
Wholly untrue and easily disproven.
RFE used to be one of the more important propaganda tool of the US against the Soviets. It was directly managed by the CIA until 1973.
If you look at their wikipedia page [1], you'll even see several references to it that used to be in their own "history" page. Strangely enough, all Wayback machine version now point to the current version since last year.
Nevertheless, at this point it's even been the subject of academic works [2].
RFE is now nominally financed by the US Congress, and overseen by a governmental agency called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who are all directly named by the US president. The organisation it belongs to used to be called the United States Information Agency [3] until the 90's, and were the explicit international propaganda arm of the US. Trump changed the name and internal organistaion to the US Agency for Global Media [5].
It might not be an outright CIA shop anymore, but it is still following the editorial line of the US government at least as late as 2016 [6].
They also "coincidentally" often open subsidiary offices generally in the year before a conflict in the country next to said conflict (Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002). Same for anti-communist revolutions, where RFE was instrumental for example in spreading the Romanian orphan story which led to the fall of Ceaucescu [7].
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43134017
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen...
[4] https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0620/062048.html
Sorry about my tone earlier. It was uncalled for. I edited my comment.
> Wikipedia page also mentions it:
The "talk" section of the page shows vigorous exchanges, as various editors are constantly fighting to erase or put back that part of the story. As the whole case was central to the fight around Trump being an orange but also Russian menace for 4 years, you can easily divine the editors are probably operatives of both parties.
> NYT article you quote is all about Russian involvement in that case.
Yes, that was the first time they publicly lied about it.
> I doubt he'd put their name in jeopardy with misinformation.
His company's top officers lied to the public during the campaign in 2016 (and ever since) that the DNC servers was hacked by the Russian Government [1], but then, when asked about it in a court of law in 2017, retractied themselves that any data trace even existed [2]. However the testimony was kept classified. Nevertheless, they continued to tell the same false story in public when asked until the testimony was unclassified in 2020 [3].
This was outright disinformation, and lies, not misinformation. As the saying goes, the first victim in war is truth. And this war is being prepared since 2014.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-e...
[2] https://mate.substack.com/p/indicted-clinton-lawyer-hired-cr..., see trial transcripts in the middle of the article
[3] https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/05/13/...