Tag: internet

Another Kamala Harris Failure: After Three Years and Billions of Dollars, Rural High Speed Internet Plan Has Connected ZERO People

Border Czar Kamala Harris, who failed miserably protecting our borders, was tapped to lead another component of the Biden-Harris agenda, connecting rural Americans to high-speed internet.

The program was launched in 2021 at a cost of $42 billion to American taxpayers.

President Biden put VP Harris in charge of the effort, and after 985 days under her leadership, NOT ONE person has been connected, and zero Americans have benefitted from this boondoggle.

Brendan Carr, who serves as Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, shared the abject failure of the Biden-Harris plan, which broadband infrastructure builders have said is “wired to fail.”

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The coincidences inside IT historical crash

Well, as most of you are aware, since I repeat myself occasionally, I try very hard to stick to quality, over quantity but reserve the right to publish different types of articles/e-mails. But also to increase the frequency if the necessity arises, not the case so far, but here this is a reminder of that. Also, the fog of “war” applies here.


In the rare case you live under Linux-based life or use Linux in your enterprise/workplace, or macOS, earlier today we the world suffered what is easily the biggest IT crash in history. You can grasp an idea of the extension by looking at the graph below.

Ironically enough the culprit is also in the image. CrowStrike, a cyber-security company. In fact one of the largest, and biggest single points of failure, cybersec companies on the entire planet. So what happened ?

In simple words, CrowdStrike sent an automated update to all its clients, and its client list is absurdly large. Airports, hospitals, chain stores, banks, innumerable tech companies, automation companies, automotive companies, and other fields of modern human activity in many countries – odds are they may use CrowdStrike.

Their software acts very “deep” into any system that uses it, thus this faulty software update created a loop in any system or server using Windows. Until a few hours ago, this could only be fixed physically, by an IT tech or a knowledgeable person either the faulty archive. This event will billions of dollars in economic damage, and second and third-order effects none of us can predict.

If this was just a fuck up, that is fine, disastrous of course, but “fine”, but I will assume malice. And I messaged a few experts, and read a few hundred messages from InfoSec Twitter, and the sentiment was the same. If this was done maliciously by a threat actor, this leaves us with only two options, given the absurd level of sophistication to pull this off.

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CROWDSTRIKE GLOBAL OUTAGE: No accident

A technical breakdown of the root cause of the world’s biggest IT fuck up is out. If it’s correct, we believe no one should consider this an accident.

Here’s a short, non technical explanation.

Windows contains fundamental programs called drivers that are required for the operating system to work. They are pretty low level software that load in the boot sequence and whenever needed. Users don’t directly interact with them and they don’t appear in Task Manager’s easy view. The user is kept away from them. Drivers have powerful system privileges and access. If essential drivers don’t load, work or are corrupt, Windows can completely crash. That can look like the blue screen of death BSOD.

CrowdStrike make a security software product, Falcon, that is a Windows driver that loads during boot up. The update mechanism for Falcon is within Windows. Users don’t get a direct say. CrowdStrike released an update to the globe that contained a direct, guaranteed fatal coding error.

The coding error in C++ language is fatal because it makes the program try to access a non existent part of the machine’s memory. No machine anywhere will have this memory address. When this access attempt happens, a fatal error results that causes the program to crash. When that program crashes, Windows crashes.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon was intrinsic to Windows boot up, so once a crash happened the machine could never be booted up again until Falcon was literally deleted from the machine’s boot sequence. This requires manual access to the machine in many, many cases. Remote fixing isn’t possible, so “the fix” is very high labour and access. That’s an insanely expensive fix. Literally dudes going to each machine and manually doing the fix over and over.

The above is absolutely fucking insane.

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FTC Opens a Backdoor Route to Age Verification on Social Media

I hadn’t heard of the app NGL until recently. But that’s not surprising. The anonymous questions app seems to be largely popular among teens.

Bark, the maker of parental content-monitoring software, calls NGL “a recipe for drama” and cyberbullying. But it seems like a fairly standard social media offering, allowing users to post questions or prompts and receive anonymous responses.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered NGL to ban users under age 18.

The FTC and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office say NGL “unfairly” marketed the app to minors. “NGL marketed its app to kids and teens despite knowing that it was exposing them to cyberbullying and harassment,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said.

To settle the lawsuit, the agency is not only making NGL pay $5 million, it’s also requiring the app to ban those under age 18 from using it.

This seems to me like a worrying development.

An administrative agency ordering a social media app to ban minors is effectively a backdoor way to accomplish what Congress has been failing to mandate legislatively and what courts have been rejecting when state lawmakers do it.

Granted, the FTC does not seem to be requiring NGL to check IDs. It’s merely “required to implement a neutral age gate that prevents new and current users from accessing the app if they indicate that they are under 18,” per the FTC’s press release.

But this is still the FTC setting minimum age requirements for some social media use, circumventing both parental and legislative authority.

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House Report Reveals GARM’s Role in Stifling Online Discourse

A new report from the House Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday, and confirming our previous reporting, casts the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) under scrutiny, suggesting potential violations of federal antitrust laws due to its outsized influence in the advertising sector.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

Established in 2019 by Rob Rakowitz and the World Federation of Advertisers, GARM has been accused of leveraging this influence to systematically restrict certain viewpoints online and sideline platforms advocating divergent views.

The organization, initially conceived to manage the surge of free speech online, is reported to coordinate with major industry players including Proctor & Gamble, Mars, Unilever, Diageo, GroupM, and others. The collaboration appears to stretch across the largest ad agency holding companies worldwide, known collectively as the Big Six. Such collaboration raises concerns about a concerted effort to police content, especially content that challenges mainstream narratives.

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Federal Judge, ICE Agents Linked to Compromised Spyware Use

Sometimes the government spies on you. And sometimes they hire a poorly secured Eastern European firm to do it for them.

Last week, hacktivists published the customer support database for Brainstack, a Ukrainian company that runs a phone tracking service called mSpy. (It was the third mSpy security breach in a decade.) The database includes messages from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, active-duty troops, and a U.S. circuit court judge interested in using mSpy to conduct surveillance.

Employees at the U.S. State Department, the Nebraska National Guard, and two federal auditing offices reached out to mSpy about using the service in official investigations. Many more low-level officials and service members seemed to be using mSpy to monitor people in their private lives, but signed up through their government emails. In some cases, it was unclear whether government employees were using mSpy for official or personal business. 

Even if the private spying was for a legitimate purpose—such as parents monitoring their children’s internet usage—it was probably not the best idea to sign up for foreign spyware with known security issues from a government email account.

Judge Kevin Newsom, the circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, used his government email address to log into an mSpy customer service chat in February 2019. “You can’t reliably monitor Snapchat, which is the only reason I got it,” he complained. He sent mSpy a follow-up email asking for a refund, signed with his official title as a judge.

“Judge Newsom’s use was entirely in his personal capacity to address a family matter,” says Kate Adams, director of workplace relations at the 11th Circuit.

MSpy has previously suffered serious security problems over the past decade. In May 2015, hackers stole data on mSpy’s targets and offered it for sale on the dark web. When cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs broke the story, mSpy tried to claim the data was fake, then eventually admitted to the breach. In September 2018, mSpy accidentally left that same type of data on a public-facing server, then removed it when Krebs noticed.

In early June 2024, the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, who had previously leaked the FBI’s No Fly List, claimed that an “anonymous source” had sent her 150 gigabytes of data from mSpy’s customer service branch. “From all the past stalkerware leaks, usually what leaks is victim data,” crimew tells Reason via encrypted voice chat. But this leak was about mSpy’s clients—essentially turning the surveillance back against the surveilers.

Last week, the leaked client data was published on DDoSecrets, a website widely considered to be WikiLeaks’ successor. (DDoSecrets is also famous for hosting BlueLeaks, a massive 2020 leak of police files.) The mSpy media team did not respond to an email asking for comment on the leak.

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Former FBI and Twitter Lawyer Jim Baker Joins Election Task Force Advocating for Social Media Censorship

From presidential election to another election, to Covid – to another election. That is how members of particular, mostly flying-under-the-radar power centers in the US have been moving over the last decades.

From time to time, however, circumstances demand that they show their faces: one is James “Jim” Baker, a former FBI lawyer whose “censorship portfolio” includes the infamous case of endorsing the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression – while he was on Twitter’s payroll.

And while there – Baker also wanted to know how come President Trump was not censored for a post saying – “Don’t fear Covid.”

Well, Baker also seems to be staying true to himself – unfortunately, his “truth” appears to be to never miss the chance to support the wrong thing (the “RussiaGate” saga happens to be among them). Right now, he has joined something called “the National Task Force on Election Crises.”

It’s a crisis, alright. A crisis of online censorship that can, and does, produce multiple “election” crises and a rapid erosion of trust in legacy media and political institutions.

The group’s parent operation is the Protect Democracy Project.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about the group’s lobbying talking points: remove or downgrade “election misinformation” and make sure removing and labeling content (as false) is done ASAP by social and news media (time is clearly of the essence, at this point…)

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Advertiser Alliance Members Are Called To Testify After Allegations of Efforts To “Demonetize, and Censor Disfavored Viewpoints”

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) is back in the headlines big time – what with the recent decision of X to rejoin the group, and now, as anticipated, the US Congress is stepping up its attempts to shed more light on what GARM actually does, censorship-wise.

Once again it is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan who is trying to hold Big Tech – and in this case, “the advertising industrial complex” as it were – accountable.

GARM is a World Economic Forum (WEF)-affiliated initiative, launched by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA); the latter by its own admission represents more than 150 biggest brands and over 60 advertiser associations around the world.

“Brand safety” is what the group says it is offering to these clients. But Jordan, and many conservatives and media outlets and businesses – allied or perceived to be allied with them – have strong suspicions that GARM can and is being used as yet another avenue of censorship and suppression – this time via actions that result in demonetization or boycott of those who hold “disfavored views.”

Concerning GARM, Jordan started fighting what supporters must see as “the good fight” last year (first by requesting information and then by issuing a subpoena once that was ignored).

Then, this March, the Committee sent letters to five members of the GARM Steering Team including Unilever and GroupM (a media investment group) asking for access to documents and communications that might prove the overall anti-conservative bias executed by the imitative.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

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The Supreme Court Just Opened the Door to a New Orwellian Censorship Regime

The Supreme Court’s decision in a recent case challenging the Biden administration’s censorship efforts unleashed renewed threats to Americans’ ability to speak and listen freely online while effectively putting a legal remedy out of reach ahead of the 2024 election, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Last year on Independence Day, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty issued the initial injunction blocking a range of government agencies from communicating with social media companies to suppress speech, calling the government’s actions “Orwellian.” But one year later, with the Fifth Circuit’s narrower injunction now lifted by the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, officials have free rein to again employ the same tactics.

“It’s basically a roadmap for government actors, not just the federal government, but also state and local government actors, to reach out to social media companies and pressure them into censoring this disfavored speech,” Center for American Liberty associate counsel Eric Sell told the DCNF.

The Supreme Court held that plaintiffs in the case, who included two states and five individuals, did not have standing to seek an injunction against the government.

In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the plaintiffs failed “to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications with the platforms.” She also noted that platforms had “independent incentives to moderate content,” making it difficult for the plaintiffs to establish they were harmed directly as a result of the government’s requests.

Justice Samuel Alito worried in his dissent that the Supreme Court’s ruling, though it did not reach the merits of the issue, would send the message that coercive government campaigns against certain speech can run unchecked if “carried out with enough sophistication.”

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Oxford Nanopore: The Internet of Living Things is closer than you think

The Internet of Living Things (“IoLT”) is a concept that connects living organisms, such as humans, animals and plants, to the Internet, enabling the exchange of data and information. This concept is an extension of the Internet of Things (“IoT”), which focuses on connecting devices and objects.

In short, the IoLT enables real-time monitoring of biological functions, such as vital signs, genetic data and environmental factors.  The collected data is analysed to provide insights into the biological state of the organism, enabling early detection of diseases and personalised healthcare. The data is transmitted to the cloud, where it can be accessed and analysed by healthcare professionals, researchers and other people. The biological state of an organism becomes an extension of the internet, enabling the creation of new intelligence about natural systems.

Examples of how the IoLT will collect data are:

  • Wearable sensors, such as fitness trackers, which can monitor vital signs and transmit data to the cloud for analysis.
  • Smart contact lenses, contact lenses with embedded sensors that can monitor glucose levels and transmit data to the cloud for diabetes management.
  • Portable genomic sequencers, portable devices that can sequence DNA and transmit data to the cloud for genetic analysis.
  • Internet-enabled biocyber interfaces, biocyber interfaces which can connect living insects to the internet, enabling control of their behaviour and communication with the environment.

The topic of this article is portable genomic sequencers; in particular Oxford Nanopore Technology devices.

In 2015, 9 years ago, when Clive Brown, Chief Technology Officer of Oxford Nanopore Technology was asked what the likelihood was of portable DNA sequencers becoming reality, he answered: “It is already a reality. The technology is now in the optimisation phase and will only get better. If you are asking how long before it reaches a clinic – then I think that is a different question, but it will be in many other non-clinical environments first.”

The DNA sequencer he was referring to was Oxford Nanopore’s MinION.  Any living thing, or system of living things, can be connected to the internet via the MinION or by any similar real-time DNA sensing devices, Brown said.

“Healthcare is just one application [ ]; equally, water sources, food supplies, hospital air and many other systems can be frequently sampled and sequenced – also allowing their state to be trended, tracked and predicted,” Brown said.

A few years later, in 2019, an article published by International Defence, Security and Technology (“IDST”) described MinION as small as a USB stick and easy to use. “Oxford Nanopore has designed an intelligent cloud lab, Metrichor, to be used for genomics data storage in conjunction with smartphone apps that interpret the meaning of DNA sequences. Researchers around the world now use pocket-size genomic sequencers to rapidly detect resistant pathogenic strains in hospitals, and diagnose infectious agents in food supply and aboard spaceships,” IDST wrote.

In early 2020, Oxford Nanopore’s technology was put to use in the surveillance of the coronavirus outbreak. 

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