You can't even trust a connecting cable

As reported by Vice:

But this cable was hiding a secret. A short while later, a hacker remotely opened a terminal on my Mac's screen, letting them run commands on my computer as they saw fit. This is because this wasn't a regular cable. Instead, it had been modified to include an implant; extra components placed inside the cable letting the hacker remotely connect to the computer.

"It looks like a legitimate cable and works just like one. Not even your computer will notice a
difference. Until I, as an attacker, wirelessly take control of the cable," the security researcher known as MG who made these cables told Motherboard after he showed me how it works at the annual Def Con hacking conference.

One idea is to take this malicious tool, dubbed O.MG Cable, and swap it for a target's legitimate one. MG suggested you may even give the malicious version as a gift to the target—the cables even come with some of the correct little pieces of packaging holding them together.

MG typed in the IP address of the fake cable on his own phone's browser, and was presented with a list of options, such as opening a terminal on my Mac. From here, a hacker can run all sorts of tools on the victim's computer.

More at the link.

Word for the day: ecofascism

I encountered the word in an extremely interesting Gizmodo article about the El Paso shooter:

This weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has re-opened the festering debates over gun control, immigration, and the president’s penchant for racist hate speech. But the manifesto believed to have been authored by the suspected shooter also reveals another horrific idea edging its way toward the mainstream from the primordial sludge of racist message boards...

Included among its racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric are ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement. “[O]ur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources,” it reads.

Where Crusius’ views violently diverge is the solution to these real issues. The manifesto suggests Americans overconsumption will never stop, so the only option is “get rid of enough people” to make the American lifestyle “more sustainable.” Horrific, disgusting, and absurd, this so-called ecofascist ideology uses legitimate environmental concerns to justify racist policies and, sometimes, mass murder...

The El Paso shooter manifesto itself echoes that of the gunman who killed 51 in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year. Brenton Tarrant, the accused shooter in that massacre, identified as an ecofascist and defined it as “ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on preservation of nature and the natural order.” The El Paso manifesto is in the same vein, going further in some ways by noting that the goal of the murders was to preserve Americans’ unique position as one of the world’s biggest per-capita carbon polluters on Earth...

Deploying racialized fears of overpopulation destroying the environment, members of the Tanton network even tried to take over the Sierra Club in the late 1990s and turn it into an anti-immigrant organization. Fortunately, they were defeated. What we are facing now is the greening of hate, stage two. Old ideas, but with some new actors and manifestations. While ties exist between the Tanton network and the white nationalist movement, the lethal embrace of these ideas by violent, armed white nationalists is another order of magnitude...

But we can’t ignore how Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and the environment are taught in high schools all over the United States. They are an important part of many environmental studies curricula. There’s a deep racial undercurrent with poor people of color are presented as having too many children and destroying the environment. Unfortunately, Malthusianism has achieved the status of conventional wisdom in the U.S. It’s not surprising that white nationalists are influenced by it and deploy it for their own hateful aims.

Now, there’s also a powerful apocalyptic discourse that links climate change, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and scarcity. White nationalism is already steeped in violent apocalypticism—fears about the white race coming to an end feed the impetus to mount an Armageddon-style bloody-but-cleansing race war. The manifestos of the shooters in both New Zealand and El Paso in a sense represent a coming together of a green apocalypse and a brown fascist one. This toxic mix serves as a rationale for saving nature and the white race. ..

I don’t want to deny that there may be climate conflicts or climate-related migration. But there is a deeply problematic, apocalyptic discourse about climate and conflict and climate refugees that is quite common in liberal policy circles and even documentaries. It draws on highly racialized depictions of poor people—especially in Africa—as more prone to violence in times of resource scarcity as if they’re savages not capable of cooperation. And these narratives also simplify the migration process with the claim that climate change is going to cause scarcity, scarcity’s going to cause conflict, and that’s going to cause migration. Most climate migration researchers believe a lot of migration that is likely to occur will be within countries not across borders. But to the extent that it is across borders, why are negative images fomented of these poor people coming to get us? That’s not on the far right, that’s in some liberal foreign policy and military scenarios around climate change...

This past fall, Matthew Phelan wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on ecofascism. He talks about how sustainability discourse is becoming popular in Europe among right-wing populists, especially in Italy with the Five Star Movement. Sustainability could become a mantra of these people, but their kind of sustainability excludes. It’s sustainability for white people and for their particular nativist vision of the nation-state. So sustainability needs to be clearly delineated in terms of whose interests are being served. The same with climate policy. Green comes in many shades. We need to understand the differences between them.

And for the TL;DR reader, here's the briefer Wikipedia entry.

To me it is absolutely fascinating (and unexpected) to learn that environmentalists who trumpet scenarios of rising oceans and crippling droughts/floods are unintentionally (and unknowingly) fuelling the end-times fantasies of radical extremists.

Big business

As reported by CNN:

German authorities say they have seized nearly 5 tons of cocaine worth over $1 billion, the largest cocaine seizure in the country's history.

Image trimmed for size, credit German customs.

And, one day laterf 400 kg of heroin seized in the U.K. -

Car driver has stroke. Arriving police taser him in the face and pepper-spray him.

YouTube link

"The Fredericksburg [Virginia] Police Department released this body camera video of Officer Shaun Jurgens. Jurgens used a stun gun and pepper sprayed a man who was having a medical emergency May 4. Some audio was redacted to protect personal information of the driver."

Here's the local newspaper's report of the settlement of the case:

Washington was unarmed, but police considered him a hit-and-run suspect after his car allegedly struck another vehicle and knocked down a road sign before coming to a stop at the intersection of Cowan Boulevard and Powhatan Street. ..

Washington’s lawsuit claimed he was in “obvious and critical need of emergency medical care” and never gave police a reason to believe he posed a threat. It lists the city, Jurgens, and Officers Matt Deschenes and Crystal Hill as defendants.

The suit claimed Deschenes and Hill held Washington at gunpoint for several minutes as he sat unresponsive in the driver’s seat of his stopped car. The officers asked him to show his hands and exit the car, but Washington could not do so because he had suffered from a stroke while driving.

According to the lawsuit, Jurgens arrived several minutes later and fired a Taser at Washington with no verbal warning, striking him in the face. Deschenes then holstered his firearm and opened the driver’s side door of Washington’s car, “further confirming” the suspect had no weapons. The suit said Jurgens sprayed a can of pepper spray into Washington’s face, drew his gun and shouted: “Get out the car or I’m going to [expletive] smoke you!”

The lawsuit says after Deschenes pulled Washington from the vehicle, the car rolled backward and a tire struck Washington in the foot as he lay handcuffed on the road. Hill then drove the vehicle off Washington’s foot, the suit said.

Discussion thread at the Bad Cop No Donut subreddit.  The YouTube discussion thread is even more critical.

Trigger warning: animal abuse

YouTube link.

I couldn't watch all the way through.

Summary from The Guardian:

Undercover footage showing young dairy calves being kicked, violently thrown, having their heads stamped into the ground and suffering from heat exposure at a US farm known as the “Disneyland of agricultural tourism” was published this week.

Every year, more than 600,000 tourists visit the Fair Oaks Farms Dairy Adventure, a working dairy farm of 15,000 cows a few hours south of Chicago, Illinois. The farm, with its museum, restaurant and hotel – deemed the “Disneyland of agricultural tourism” this year by Food & Wine – sells a vision of quaint rural life: “It’s where families can view pastures dotted with dairy cattle” and “watch as a piglet is born” before they “top off this idyllic country day with a scoop of ice cream or a pork chop from Fair Oaks Farms’ restaurant”.

The farm is independently owned by veterinarian Mike McCloskey, but it is an affiliate of the Coca-Cola company, with which it produces a nutrient-dense milk product called “Fairlife” and other popular dairy products including Core Power Protein shakes. McCloskey, who co-founded the business with his wife, Sue, has stated that their farm provides in-depth training on humane care of animals.

ARM’s undercover investigator got a job at Fair Oaks as a calf care employee in 2018. The investigator reported that they received no training other than where to put the calves’ dead bodies. Furthermore, violence towards the animals appeared to be commonplace, typically stemming from frustration over the calves’ unwillingness to feed from artificial nipples.

Video footage captured between August and November of 2018 appears to show workers beating, kicking, and throwing the bloodied and emaciated baby animals as their mothers go hoarse calling to them from separated barns.

Primary source material here, with an extensive photo gallery.


Sort of related:

"I AM NOT A COW. I AM PROFESSOR DUNBAR. 

PLEASE DO NOT KILL ME."

The title is one of the penultimate lines from The Court of Tartary, a fantasy by T.P. Caravan first published in 1963. In the story, a professor of English literature "awakens" to find his mind is entrapped in the body of a cow, and the herd seems to be destined to the slaughterhouse.

"Edward Harrison Dunbar, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D., member of the Modern Language Association and authority on eighteenth century literature, was not prepared for the situation in which he found himself: it had never been mentioned by any of the writers of the Age of Reason....

And even as he ran he wondered if he couldn't prove that Edward Young was the true author of the third book of Gulliver's Travels, because he knew that if he stopped thinking scholarly thoughts about the eighteenth century he would have to admit that he had turned into an animal. So as he ran he considered the evidence turned up by the publication of the Tickell papers and the discovery of Swift's old laundry lists and Night Thoughts and the graveyard poets and Gray's Elegy and the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and he had to admit that he was an animal....

There was no point in approaching his difficulty through the scientific method: he knew no science. There was no help for him in metaphysics: he had cleared his mind of Kant. Nor could the classics aid him: he had read Ovid, of course, and the Golden Ass, but he didn't see how they bore on his problem. And — he hated to admit it — nobody in the eighteenth century seemed to have wondered what would happen to a scholar who woke up and found himself a cow. All right. That left only his own experience to fall back on. But, being a professor, he had never had any experiences..."

He decides to use his hoof to draw a triangle in the dust.  Then... if I've piqued your curiosity, you can read the full story in ten minutes fulltext online at Scribd.

Exonerated after being falsely imprisoned for 27 years.

"He's the third Ohio man exonerated after being wrongly accused of the 1975 murder. Imprisoned after the testimony of a 13 year old witness who recanted his testimony last year, saying he was coerced by detectives at the time."

"Kwame Ajamu, 56, was the last of three men exonerated in the 1975 robbery and murder of a Cleveland-area money order salesman. Ajamu was originally sentenced to death, but it was vacated because of a paperwork error. He later earned parole in 2003." Only now being exonerated of all charges.

"The two other accused, Ajamu's brother, Wiley Bridgeman, 60, and Ricky Jackson, 57, were released from prison last month after 39 years."

"Defense attorney Terry Gilbert said that Cuyahoga County prosecutors took a courageous stand not to fight the dismissal of charges against the men. Prosecutors also said they won't stop the trio from seeking more than $4.1 million in compensation from their wrongful imprisonments, reported Cleveland.com. "

"“We were robbed,” Ajamu said. “There will be no offspring when I die. When my brother passes away, that is it. We don’t have children. There will never be another Ronnie Bridgeman."

Photo, and text via (emphasis added).  Photo Tony Dejak/AP.   More information at Wikipedia and Witness to Innocence.

Judge accepts eyewitness testimony from a legally blind person

Dexter Saffold took the witness stand more than five years ago and described the chaos he saw at a South Side gas station in 2011. Saffold told Cook County Circuit Judge Nicholas Ford that he watched a man shoot and kill one man there and badly wound another.

And he pointed out who did it — the defendant, Darien Harris, the man in the courtroom wearing the jail jumpsuit.

There was no physical evidence linking Harris to the shooting that left Rondell Moore dead and Quincy Woulard badly hurt.

Still, the judge, hearing the case without a jury, found Saffold persuasive. Ford called him an “honest witness” and said he’d given “unblemished” testimony. Largely based on that testimony, he found Harris guilty and sent him to prison for 76 years for murder.

But what the judge — and the accused — didn’t know was that Saffold had been deemed legally blind years earlier by his doctors and the U.S. government, the result of advanced glaucoma.

Now, Harris, 26, is trying to get his conviction overturned, citing the eyewitness’s previously unrevealed vision problems and also that, when asked about his vision, Saffold testified he had no problem seeing.

More at the Chicago Sun-Times.

List of school shootings in the United States

There are people like this

Speeding, no license, no insurance, soft drinks in the child safety seat.  I'll defer comment except to note that this was posted in the iamtotalpieceofshit subreddit.

New Zealand bans assault and military-style weapons

Excerpts from an article in New Zealand's Stuff:

The banning of a range of rifles will become law less than a month after the massacre that prompted the swift change.

In parliament on Wednesday night MPs of all political persuasions overwhelmingly voted in favour of The Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines and parts) Amendment Bill after its crucial third reading.

The law, which needs Royal Assent, will become law by the end of the week. It will mean there will be a ban on all semi-automatic and military-style weapons, such as those used during the Christchurch terrorist attack that killed 50 and injured dozens...

"There are good people in all of our communities who will find themselves in possession of banned firearms, parts and magazines.

"This is because we are changing the law, not because these people have done anything wrong."..

She told the House the weapons used in the Christchurch terror attack were designed to kill. When she visited the hospital, not one victim had just one gunshot wound, she said.

"I struggle to recall any single gunshot wounds. In every case they spoke of multiple injuries, multiple debilitating injuries that deemed it impossible for them to recover in days, let alone weeks. They will carry disabilities for a lifetime and that's before you consider the psychological impact. We are here for them."

"I could not fathom how weapons that could cause such destruction and large scale death, could be obtained legally in this country."

She also acknowledged the buyback scheme for compensation, which would be worked up over the next few weeks.

"We will operate fairly."

Ransomware erases medical records

A computer virus recently injected itself into the electronic medical record system of Brookside ENT & Hearing Services and ruined the business.

The two-doctor medical practice in Michigan has apparently become the first health care provider in the nation to shut its doors for good because of a ransomware attack, according to half a dozen cybersecurity experts contacted in the past week. Hackers are targeting Minnesota hospitals and clinics at an escalating pace, including four breaches involving patient files already reported in 2019, though any interruptions of work have been temporary...

At Brookside ENT in Battle Creek, Mich., the ransomware virus started by deleting and overwriting every medical record, bill and appointment, including the backups. The virus left behind a duplicate of the deleted files, which could be unlocked with a password that the attacker promised to provide for $6,500 in U.S. currency wired to an account, doctors at the clinic said.

The practice’s two ENT surgeons — Dr. William Scalf, 64, and Michigan state senator Dr. John Bizon, 66 — refused to pay the attacker’s ransom...

More at the StarTribune.  But notice the absence of an air gap between the computer and the backup files.

Not The Onion

An unarmed mentally ill man was shot at by police.  Some of the bullets missed and struck bystanders in the street.  The DA decided to charge the mentally ill man with first-degree assault because of the injuries to the bystanders.

Police later said that after a cat-and-mouse game, Broadnax had reached into his pants pocket and removed an object, briefly “pointing” it at the responding officers. They thought it was a gun, and fired three rounds. After the shots, and a tussle with cops, Broadnax was hit with a Taser and arrested.

When the dust settled, a few things became clear. First, Broadnax was unarmed; the object police had thought was a gun was, in fact, a wallet. Second, Broadnax seemed to be in the midst of a mental health crisis. He told investigators immediately after his arrest that he was having auditory hallucinations, hearing the “voices of his dead relatives.”

The third fact that emerged was that the officers who opened fire had missed their target. Broadnax was unscathed. The bullets meant for him had instead struck Khoshakhlagh and a second victim, 59-year-old Theodora Ray, who was getting dinner at a food cart on 42nd Street, as she did almost every night...

Then, near the end of October, Khoshakhlagh’s attorney got a phone call from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. Prosecutors had changed their minds about the case: They now planned to prosecute Broadnax for the bullet wounds sustained by Khoshakhlagh and Ray. Under an unusual theory of law, the prosecution claimed Broadnax’s actions that night in Times Square were so irresponsible, it was as if he himself had pulled the trigger.

The top charge alone — assault in the first degree — was enough to land him in prison for the next twenty-five years...

As Binder says, when police are involved in incidents like this — high-profile and potentially embarrassing mishaps — there can be pressure to ensure that someone, anyone, catches an indictment. “It’s not surprising that Mr. Broadnax was charged,” Binder says. “This is something prosecutors do when police behave irresponsibly.

More details in a longread in The Village Voice.


Actually in The Onion:

Scientists Announce Discovery Of Dry Ice On Mars Means Planet May One Day Be Suitable For Halloween Party

Tourist In White House Gift Shop Browses Rack Of Security Clearances

 Purdue Pharma Reports Opioid Deaths Falling Short Of Quarterly Goals

Mass incarceration in the United States

The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. This report provides a detailed look at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some modern myths to focus attention on the real drivers of mass incarceration.

More information at the Prison Policy Initiative, including discussion of these five myths:

The first myth: Releasing “nonviolent drug offenders” would end mass incarceration

The second myth: Private prisons are the corrupt heart of mass incarceration

The third myth: Prisons are “factories behind fences” that exist to provide companies with a huge slave labor force

The fourth myth: Expanding community supervision is the best way to reduce incarceration

The fifth myth: People in prison for violent or sexual crimes are too dangerous to be release

Via Neatorama.

American neo-Nazis reorganizing

As reported in The Guardian:

The year and a half since the Unite the Right far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ended in mayhem, the death of a protester and political turmoil, has been a rough time for the public facing and ostensibly political arm of the white supremacist movement in America. Those who marched in Charlottesville have to a large degree retreated, fleeing lawsuits, doxxing and personal scandal. Still, while public marches appear to be fewer and fewer, the period since Charlottesville has also been marred by individual episodes of extreme violence, suggesting that the wave of white supremacy that seemed to crest in Charlottesville is not so much receding as just changing in nature...

“It’s clearly gathering steam,” said JM Berger, an expert on extremism and research scholar at Vox-Pol. “Success breeds success, and we’re seeing people operationalize the self-education process. People are beginning to understand that they can emulate the actions of someone who went before them to work out whatever they want to work out.”

This certainty that evil forces are working against Trump has become prevalent within the far right, breeding conspiracies such as QAnon, which posits Trump is fighting a “deep state” conspiracy that seeks to thwart his patriotic agenda. As such, Trump plays a dual role within the world of rightwing violence: while a “sympathetic” administration can spur a rise in violence, the perceived persecution of Trump – in large part an image created by the president himself – can fuel the paranoid and violent fantasies of people like Hasson.

Both ideas can breed violence, especially if Trump is defeated in the 2020 elections...

Coupled with increased frustration by the limitations of political engagement comes the rise of more terroristic groups such as Atomwaffen Division, a militant neo-Nazi group linked to several murders. They and others have brought a less hierarchical and more disorderly structure to white supremacist activism, which makes them both harder to track and to control. Known as “leaderless resistance”, it has been a tactic of white supremacists for decades and lead to events such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but has been made exponentially easier by the internet.

“Leaderless resistance totally changes recruitment strategy,” said Belew.

“No longer is the movement trying to generate a mass protest of uniformed members. This movement isn’t interested in a crowd but in a dedicated cell of 12 people that are going to devote their lives to guerrilla warfare.”..

What remains an almost certainty is that Hasson is not alone in his desire to commit atrocities for white supremacist objectives. Others are still out there: armed, dangerous and plotting. Some will likely turn their thoughts into actions.

“My guess is that there are thousands like him,” said Belew. “These people are ideologically connected and preparing similar acts of violence.”

More at the link, if you want to totally ruin your day.

Hotel room insecurity

YouTube link.

Is your phone unlocked by your fingerprint?

If so, it can be unlocked by fake fingerprints, as explained in Vice's Motherboard:

Known as DeepMasterPrints, these artificially generated fingerprints are similar to the master key for a building. To create a master fingerprint the researchers fed an artificial neural network—a type of computing architecture loosely modeled on the human brain that “learns” based on input data—the real fingerprints from over 6,000 individuals. Although the researchers were not the first to consider creating master fingerprints, they were the first to use a machine learning algorithm to create working master prints...

The master prints generated by the researchers were specifically designed to target the type of fingerprint sensors found in most modern smartphones. These capacitive fingerprints scanners usually only take partial readings of fingerprints when they are placed on the sensor. This is mostly for convenience since it would be impractical to require a user to place their finger on the sensor the exact same way each time they scan their print. The convenience of partial fingerprint readings comes at the cost of security, which is convenient for a sneaky AI. 

So, basically, just assume that nothing you ever do is secure.  Ever.

Via Neatorama.

If they offer to pay you with $10 rolls of quarters...

A mass murderer speaks through Instagram

"... the gunman who killed 12 people at a country music bar, posted on social media during the deadly rampage, according to law enforcement officials.

The first call to law enforcement came in at 11:19 p.m. Wednesday, officials said. The authorities arrived at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, three minutes later. They entered the building at 11:25 p.m.

[redacted], 28, first posted on Instagram at 11:24 p.m: "It's too bad I won't get to see all the illogical and pathetic reasons people will put in my mouth as to why I did it," the military veteran said in the post. 

"Fact is I had no reason to do it, and I just thought.... life is boring so why not?" [redacted] posted, according to ABC News and Buzzfeed.

Three minutes later [he] posted, "I hope people call me insane (two smiley face emojiis) would that just be a big ball of irony? Yeah... I'm insane, but the only thing you people do after these shootings is 'hopes and prayers'...or 'keep you in my thoughts'."

He added, "Every time...and wonder why these keep happening... --(two smiley face emojis)."

How to open a lock with a paper clip

YouTube link.

Social unrest and xenophobia in Sweden

Excerpts from an article in The Spectator:

Around Gothenburg, the attacks have been far more dramatic: in mid-August, 80 torched vehicles made the city’s normally dull boroughs seem more like Aleppo. Videos are being circulated showing explosion after explosion going off. Groups of masked and black-clad arsonists blazed cars and caravans. Smoke plumes above the Gothenburg skyline could be seen for miles around...

Twenty years ago, such scenes would have shocked Sweden to its core. Now they are a prelude to a general election which is being fought amid bitter debates about immigration, integration, crime and populism. The Sweden Democrats, a party that was for years regarded as a sinister group of far-right cranks, looks like it may end up as the largest party in parliament. Even now, Sweden’s established -parties aren’t sure how to respond...

The governing Social Democrats are faring even worse. They, too, would in ordinary times be reaping the harvest from a broadly successful economy and what has been a boom time for the middle class. Unemployment is almost nonexistent among native Swedes and, with interest rates on mortgages still ultra-low, the average household seems more worried about Elon Musk delivering its new Tesla on time than making it through to the next pay day. State spending on schools, hospitals and social security has surged — and yet the government is running a big surplus...

Under the old rules of politics, this would guarantee a feel-good election win for the incumbent government. Instead, Stefan Löfven’s Social Democrats are heading towards their worst-ever result and seem to know it, looking and sounding like a defeated force in Swedish politics. Like the Moderates, they are being punished for failing to control what most concerns Swedes: law, order, immigration and integration.

More at the link.