I’m writing this post on Wednesday evening here in California. Normally I wouldn’t point that out but in this case I want to put a kind of timestamp on my writing because at this moment we’re at the end of the second day of a concerted attack by the UAE Electronic Army on various DNS providers in North America. If you follow this stuff and bother to check, say, Google News right now for “UAE Electronic Army,” your search will probably generate some Facebook entries but no news at all because — two days into it — this attack has gone unnoticed by the world at large. My last column was about fake news. This one is about real news you never hear about.
We have a great example of such news this week in the Yahoo one billion account hack. Sure, it’s all over the web but it happened in 2013. Are we really supposed to believe that one billion user records were stolen from Yahoo and it took three years for somebody to notice??? The story is that law enforcement officials came across the stolen data, or some of it, and took it to Yahoo for verification. Maybe, but having written these stories for 30 years I think it is much more likely that somebody already knew about the breach and simply chose not to say when it happened. This is not to say that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer knew or didn’t know about the breach, just that shit happens and often isn’t reported if jobs are perceived as being on the line.
It’s very likely that word of this breach or another has floated around Yahoo for years. But since nothing bad seemed to be happening as a result, well the people who knew may have decided just to forget about it. We’ll never know.
So there’s knowledge and then there is knowledge and in this era where plausible deniability seems to be so important, which type of knowledge you have can make a difference. Some types of knowledge, apparently, are too volatile to even be remembered. There are some things we just choose to ignore… unless, like Yahoo, we can’t.
I’ve come across this phenomenon before, right in these pages. Two very specific examples come to mind. First is a column about energy policy I wrote in October, 2010. Here’s the money graf, a quote from one of my best friends in the world:
“During the summer of 1973 I worked on a tow boat on the Mississippi River. Every 10 to 14 days, we’d load our barges on the Gulf Coast and deliver petroleum products to some place in the Midwest. That was the summer of the big gasoline shortages. As we would travel up and down the Mississippi, we’d pass an Exxon tow. It would have eight barges (a double unit) fully loaded, or about 10 million gallons of gasoline. The tow wouldn’t be moving, it would be tied up in a quiet spot on the river. Each trip we find more tows tied up. Shell, Texaco, Exxon, Amoco were all doing it. One day they announced in the news how much gasoline would be used in the USA in a single day. I made some quick calculations and realized we had passed a month’s supply on our last trip.”
I went on to explain. “In 1973 U. S. oil prices, thanks to price fixing by the Texas Railroad Commission, were already the highest in the world at $5.50 per barrel for West Texas Intermediate — the global standard. World oil prices were around $2 per barrel and going down. Until the OPEC embargo, that is, when, with the assistance of the big oil companies as described above, an oil crisis was created from nothing. World prices went from $2 to a peak of $43, sending every drilling rig in the world back to work and over time doubling U. S. oil production to almost 11 million barrels per day until demand crashed and the price of oil dropped back to a low of $8. That was still higher than $5.50, but recovery to an inflation-adjusted version of that peak $43 price took another 25 years.”
Where was this news in 1973? Didn’t the local sheriff notice all those barges tied-up? Didn’t the local newspaper editor? Didn’t the TV news copter pilot in St. Louis or New Orleans? Why didn’t anyone put this together? Those of us who remember 1973 knew how panicked we were as a nation listening to Richard Nixon — Richard Nixon (that should have been a clue) — tell us through our TV sets to turn down our thermostats and drive at 55. Didn’t Nixon know the truth?
To heck with 1973, why wasn’t this news picked-up in 2010 right from this page? That column was read by more than 300,000 people including most of the top news organizations in America. Why wasn’t it picked-up by one of them?
If this seems to you like old news and not worth rehashing, please note that Rex Tillerson, our next Secretary of State, spent his entire 40+ year career working for Exxon, starting in the mid-70s. Did he know about the manufactured energy crisis? Was he told about it over beers after work on some Friday night in Oklahoma? Did he understand that his company helped engineer a geopolitical crisis that helped create the mess that is today Middle East politics? How will those events and the attitude of his lifetime employer inform his performance as Secretary of State?
The other example that comes to mind was from one of my old PBS columns back in 2004 titled Fred Nold’s Legacy. That column and 650 more were recently taken-down by pbs.org and I am trying to acquire them for my archive here. Until I am successful in that you can find a copy at archive.org. That column explained how the Reagan Administration created policies in the Department of Justice that made inevitable our current U.S. prison crisis and its economic repercussions for African-American and latino communities. Worse still, the Department of Justice was told this would happen and chose to ignore advice it had, itself, commissioned.
That story is completely true and I have told it to anyone who will listen (including both the New York Times and Washington Post) for the last 20 years to no effect at all.
Some news is just too uncomfortable I guess.
So what news is there right now that people know and aren’t saying? Maybe I’ll get a little jump on this year’s predictions.
For those of us who are Americans there’s a shit storm coming and it has everything to do with President-elect Donald Trump. Forget the parts we can see, let’s try to anticipate the parts we can’t yet see. The players here are Republicans, Democrats, Russians, hackers, and of course Donald Trump.
Nobody so far claims to have hacked the Trump Organization, itself. The Russians probably did it at the same time they were hacking the GOP and the DNC. After all, they hacked John Podesta’s Gmail account, why not Trump’s?
But he doesn’t use a computer.
Yeah, right. But somebody sends email for him.
Supremely confident, Donald Trump may think he can’t be hacked. He’d be wrong.
While I mention Russian hackers here, that’s not really what I find interesting. What I find interesting are hackers who are not state sponsored. What if Trump was hacked by, say, Anonymous? If it didn’t happen before the election I’ll guarantee you it has happened since, if only out of spite. What would they find? Trump is completely clean? If they did find something, why haven’t we heard about it?
Hackers aren’t the only group that might be willing to drop some dirt on our President-elect. What about the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies Trump has so far done little but insult? What about rogue employees at the IRS? Again, what would they find and why haven’t we heard about it?
I’m guessing January 21st will be a big news day.
Boo…
There, somebody had to say it.
It was a beautiful cloudless day, save those mushroom shaped ones, and I was updating my undigested corn containing feces photos on Facebook when… hey, where did my data go??? Why is my internet down?? Is there a Starbucks in Heaven? I wonder if they have green cups?
Fascinating article, but what do you know about the UAE Electronic Army hack? And why would they be attacking the U.S. right before Putin’s BFF takes over?
I think there’s a small number of people with access to Trump’s tax returns. I remember an IRS worker got fired just for accessing Romney’s tax return four years ago. I wonder if the auditors even get the full return, or just the piece they’re assigned to audit.
I think you forget one critical piece of information: the UAE Electronic Army is not necessarily affiliated with Russia (or China, for that matter).
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Just look at the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey. A radicalized police officer did that, and had no affiliation with Russia, the US, China, or any other major player. The implications of that –a POLICE OFFICER conducted the assassination– should make people look askance at any person who claims to be in authority. If that happened in Turkey, why wouldn’t it happen in the US? Because our officers are better than that? How do we know without reading minds? We don’t know.
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But I expect that the news cycle will talk more about islamic radicalization among the general populace rather or how radicals infiltrated the ranks of Turkey’s police force rather than “how a police officer became radicalized”. That unspoken piece of news is the critical one, because the assumption that “police officers can’t become radicalized” is a very bad one.
What about the missing story that you keep ignoring, when are you going to make an update to your Kickstarter project? When you last mentioned it on this website, you said that you had no idea what to do. Is this project what you are choosing ignore?
I thought the last line of this column was an indication of that project, but perhaps I’m mistaken.
Bob: all that happens is for the benefit of the people of the USA. The crisis, the lack of crisis, the increase and the decrease in the oil price, Bush, Reagan, Mr Peanuts, Johnson, Gerald Ford, Trump … even Nixon….”…and the United States needs the oil…”, as Alistair Cook was quoted as saying (I heard it, nobody told me, yep, that was the OLD BBC, not the current). Snowden was wrong opening his wide mouth, it changed nothing. America is only for the Americans. So please Bob, stick to IT and don’t bother with the rest, we can’t do a thing.
I’ll write about what interests me, Anibal, just as you may, too.
Agree !!!
I am very stupid. (sometimes)
Recently, I’m concerned about you injuring your shoulder as you keep patting yourself on your back!
Time for you to post another article based on input from an unnamed “world class” expert who’s identity must remain undisclosed. Kind of like reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces
Fake news serves a purpose to the faker. It is political, it generates clicks… what ever.
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Bob has always been fake. His so-called inventions/investments… what ever.
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I come here for the entertainment value. There is never anything an intelligent person would call substance. It’s like watching the loons on Jerry Springer have their daily (very scripted) meltdown.
Exxon didn’t become a “brand” till January 1973. Are you sure you saw tow boats with “Exxon” painted on them? Unlikely they would have gotten to paint new names that quickly.
Previously, Exxon was called Esso. The story I heard was that it was a naughty word in some Middle Eastern country, so it was changed to Exxon.
Some parts of what are now Exxon were “Esso”. They had a lot of different names, e.g. Humble Oil & Refining, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Enco, and others. The story on the so-called dirty name is that a proposed name “Exon” meant something in Japanese. When companies change names, they will normally check the proposed names against words in other languages, existing trademarks, etc. Esso still in common use outside USA for retail operations.
I’m just wondering if it’s true that in 1973 one could see “Exxon” tow barges as reported by Cringley’s friend. Seems like such vessels would be a low priority to re-paint after the adoption of the new name earlier that year.
@RMS: search images.google.com for ‘esso barge’ or similar. They put big signs on tank barges back then.
I’m not wondering if “Esso” (or any other brand painted on barges)–I’m just wondering if the word “Exxon” on moored barges could have happened as described. I just sort of think the re-branding would have taken a few years and barges might not have been a priority. Maybe they did have the re-branding on barges done by then. Don’t know. Not saying it didn’t, but something that if this conspiracy their were to be investigated would need to be checked. Something doesn’t feel right about it.
Wouldnt Exon be pronounced the same as Exxon?
Only one problem with your theory about the ‘Exon’ having a meaning in Japanese. The Japanese language doesn’t have the following sounds/letters/hiragana/katakana: L, V, Z, C, Q, and X.
It would be transliterated as “ekusonu” — “u” is the customary silent vowel in Japanese. I have no idea what it might mean. The story sounds apocryphal.
Transliteration would explain “k” replacing “x” getting Ekson or Ekkson. Why introduce the “u”, silent or not?
From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon By the late 1960s, Humble [Oil & Refining Company] officials realized that the time had come to develop a new brand name that could be used nationwide.
At first, consideration was given to simply rebranding all stations as Enco, but that was shelved when it was learned that the word “Enco” is similar in pronunciation to the Japanese slang term enko, meaning “stalled car” (an abbreviation of enjin no kosho, “engine breakdown”). (I found this by searching for: exxon means japanese)
@gregconquest: Thanks. Until recently, for the previous decade, my local station was called “Encon”, the only one I ever saw anywhere. It was popular for low prices compared to all the other brand names, especially the Mobile station that was there before it. This year it was spruced up and rebranded as Shell. I think “stalled car” is a great name for a gas station, if we think of it in the same sense as a horse stable with stalls. The cars are “stalled” by the pump while being filled or serviced, even though the service is now performed by the car owner.
To say that Japanese doesn’t have certain sounds or letters is missing the point. When an English word is transliterated into Japanese, it can be based on the spelling, the pronunciation or some combination. There are only around 100 possible syllables in Japanese, and any word in any language can be transliterated (often in a very reductive way) to Japanese. So Exxon could be transliterated various ways, like エックサン(ekkusan), エキサン(ekisan), エックソン(ekkuson), エキソン(ekison). None of these has a dirty meaning in Japanese.
The best I could find was Enco – another name used by the oil conglomerate. This easily becomes エンコ(enko) or エンコウ(enkou) which is an abbreviation (phonetically) of 援助交際 (enjokousai) which means compensated dating aka teen prostitution. It’s a widely enough used phrase in Japanese that it would be comparable to a foreign company in the USA adopting the brand name “P4P” (play for pay).
By the way, neither the names Exxon nor Enco seem to be used in Japan, only ESSO.
I’m an American expat, bilingual, been here in Japan 33 years. A devoted reader of Robert X. for most of those years, though this is my first comment.
@ gregconquest & Daniel Eck: It looks like the Wiki doesn’t even mention the word “Encon”, so I wonder if my local station added the “n” to the end of “Enco” to clean it up. Perhaps the company named “Encon” actually opened some stations: https://www.encontech.net/gas-stations.html, though it’s not evident from the website.
Are you going to become the Rush Limbaugh of the left? Never giving our President Elect a chance to see if his presidency benefits America? At least he is talking to all sides of the issues for input. He had the leaders of the top tech companies at his hotel yesterday and even talked to critics like Al Gore, Anna Wintour and Leonardo Dicaprio. I also liked how you made the case for Rex Tillerson being a great choice for Secretary of State. Rex will be awesome for America! … So, will we receive the MineServers by Christmas 2016?
If you make me a meal out of garbage, I don’t need to eat it to know what it’s going to taste like.
Trumps proven what kind of president he’s going to be with cabinet picks he’s made. Sure, there’s a small chance that he’ll surprise us — that his pig-sphincter-picks really will taste like calamari, so to speak — but you’ll have to pardon my lack of optimism on that front.
Some of us don’t want to try the communist calamari, but we’ll take a chance with the capitalist made version.
How about wanting to try neither calamari? The societal options aren’t binary.
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As for Trump’s cabinet picks, you don’t simply become a selfless public servant after decades of enriching yourself by any means necessary, and neither do you crap on people in public without there being a private cost. I’ve seen plenty of people jump from business into public office in local government, and –with the rare exception– most of them turn their public office into an enrichment scheme for themselves and their friends. Working for the benefit of all is simply not in the DNA of people who are used to looking after Number One.
Re: “The societal options aren’t binary.” Quite true. But just like Paul Ryan, when faced with the choice a conservative vs a liberal administration, those of us leaning toward conservative, chose the Republican over the Democrat. As far as dna is concerned, some of us believe that what’s good for the country, is also good for the individuals in it, both rich and poor.
Why don’t we hear certain news? How about fear? I remember ’73, and I remember a conversation I had with person in the petroleum industry; not way up, but higher than a pump jockey. I said something like, “You guys (meaning the oil companies) are fabricating this thing, aren’t you?” and he quite calmly replied, “Sometimes you have to make a point.” So if “they” are willing to make a point by throwing the world economy into a tailspin, what might “they” do to someone who makes a news story out of it?
Sure, the Constitution guarantees Freedom of the Press, but it was in this same time-frame that both the President of the United States and the United States Attorney General directed threats of retaliation at the Washington Post and its publisher Katherine Graham, ranging from license renewal problems to “tits in wringers”. And, of course, there’s that enemies list that POTUS kept. When conglomerates own businesses that run the gamut from media to pharma, one thing that makes certain news “too uncomfortable” is that it might embarrass a related business segment . . . or—heavens forbid–an advertiser.
A lot of work on criminal behavior was going on at Hoover in the 70’s: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/59668NCJRS.pdf
So where DO we get information about the UAE attack?
Congrats, as of Dec. 15, 12:43 ET, your page is the first (and apparently only relevant) page to come up in a Google News search of “UAE electronic army”
@James try Syrian Electonric Army. https://www.cnet.com/news/syrian-electronic-army-hacks-forbes-steals-user-data/
Did the Russians do it, or was it a pissed-off DNC staffer? See
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/14/craig-murray-says-source-of-hillary-clinton-campai/
And recall that a DNC staffer was murdered in an attempted robbery not long after the leak was revealed.
The press may be free to print, but it prints what it chooses…
Excellent illustration of Bob’s point. The staffer murder story is, of course, fake: https://www.snopes.com/seth-conrad-rich/
Perhaps we should say that Snopes reported the murder story as fake: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/17/fact-checking-snopes-websites-political-fact-checker-is-just-a-failed-liberal-blogger/
Another excellent illustration of Bob’s point. How many people will click through to Snopes and read it impartially to see if it reflects what the article implies.
It’s been obvious to everyone that Yahoo has been hacked for years – there’s just too much junk mail coming from their accounts for it to be just individual users getting hacked – and it’s all Yahoo. I wouldn’t touch them with any barge pole.
As to who knew and when – we’ll probably never know at Yahoo and there’s every chance that the upper management didn’t know. People get fired for a lot less than that so the low level IT folks would keep their moths shut and their resumes available.
The bottom line – as Dr. House said – is that “Everybody Lies” – it’s time to admit that the Internet is fundamentally insecure.
You know we COULD have a secure Internet, but then it would require everyone and everything connecting to identify themselves up front, connecting to the router (and having the router establish identity and then carry it for every transaction throughout). It hearkens back to Bob’s prior article about his work to print newspapers through a secure network of printers. We could even fix DDos attacks as well, as certificates can have revocation lists (and servers to check), and attackers could be almost instantly “blacklisted”. But I really think that we like our anonymous “Wild Wild West” Internet better, where a person can send hate posts, watch porn, and pretend to be someone else. The Ashley Madison hack proved that. We sell a lot more security hardware and software with the Internet we have, and there’s just so much “unruliness” that we really like, under the covers. It feeds the conspiracy theories, allows for production of fake news, allows for hate posts, and makes life much more interesting than if people really identified themselves as who they are. But we do have limits. Banking and bills and Venmo and eCommerce have to be secure and work, and when those break, all hell breaks loose. As for me, I’ve already started moving my accounts off my yahoo email, and it will be used henceforth for things like posting to IT pundit websites.
there were stories about the fuel barges tied up at the time, popped up and went away. what commonly happens is fuel hoarding all along the supply chain. I’m sure you’ve heard once the wholesale price of gas is posted noon/11/10/9 depending on your time zone, the stations factor their minimum state pricing or personal need for profit margin onto that, and change the signs. there was one memorable trip I made to the hospital for a recheck after 9/11 (and a wheelbarrow full of stents,) and all along the 8-mile trip, the guys with the long hooks were all changing their signs, one after another, as I drove by. came back home on a roundabout route to pass between the Amoco and Williams tank farms. at the time, Williams had the sliding tops without vapor-trap hats on them. all the tanks were full. this was price anticipation, aka, “gotcha, dude, for today.”
Thanks Bob. What do you think about Trump so far, as he is heading towards the White House? I’m still dismayed by my last break up and why in the hell she called her ex instead of me when she was involved in a car accident. She gave me the news two days afterwards. Enough of the Jerry Springer material. Do we really need anymore?
There’s the TRUTH and then there’s the truth they “they” want you to believe.
You have to be the one to find your truth. Hopefully it’s the one that is based on reality and not someone else’s fiction.
News nobody is writing or talking about: Look up Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the current DSM-5 and read through the symptoms. Does a recently “elected” person spring to mind?
A former university colleague (an historian specializing in oil booms and busts), later a Department of Energy official and now an independent oil consultant with many useful connections once laid out for me what happened when Nixon relaxed oil import quotas.
In spring or early summer of 1973 big oil argued domestic demand could not be met without more imports of oil. Nixon said, but what about an embargo? No way big oil argued, OPEC has never done that and the CIA advised they wouldn’t do it as well. A few months later the embargo began, enforced by big oil which then had the only access to the world market. He said something to the effect, Saudi Arabia asked for the world-wide printout of oil shipments worldwide and then picked entry points where oil was to be cut off.
There was some information about a tanker shortage at the same time which got into print as they were also being used for storage during the embargo. The next year extensive hearings by the Jackson committee revealed during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 Exxon refused to refuel U.S. ships at Naples, according to the Chief of Naval Operations, and it was clearly established big oil had exactly the same financial interests as Saudi Arabia.
But this is not the biggest news. During the Eisenhower Administration big oil got a provision in the tax code whereby foreign taxes could be counted against U.S. taxes. Sounds reasonable enough. Then big oil asked Saudi Arabia to call their charge for purchase of oil a tax. Voila, what you could deduct as a cost against profits was now to be directly used as a rebate on taxes paid to a foreign government.
This is the biggest subsidies for an industry on the backs of consumers, taxpayers, and competitive sources of energy such as solar. So far as I know this political windfall is still in effect as is California’s lack of an oil depletion tax which every other oil producing state has. Could be enough revenue to California to finance the State University system.
And now we have an oil man as Secretary of State designate!!!
Hillary would have been the most compromised US president in history.
HAHA*SNORT*!!!
I read Fred Nold’s Legacy, but didn’t see the reasoning stated. We can be pretty sure that those in jail aren’t causing new crimes outside while they are there, but I can imagine how it might not have a material positive impact. But what was the thinking why increased imprisoning caused *more* crime, and how does that relate to the years of declining crime stats?
Nixon formally broke the gold standard, and gold went from $35 an ounce to $140 an ounce. This meant that OPEC was not getting one fourth as much gold for their oil as before. So they ended up raising the price to get back what they were getting before. It wasn’t that the prices went up, but that the dollars were worth less. And Jimmy Carter ended up being associated with inflation, stagflation, malaise.
Bob, hopefully you can get a hold of your older pbs articles. That’s a slice of computing history we’d hate to lose.
How many people think that if the Czech videomaker had stayed home, the media would have reported Hillary’s collapse on 9/11? Even with the video, many of them declared she ‘stumbled’.
Jack Cashill provides 20 years of fake news and real news not covered by the liberal media.
https://www.cashill.com/natl_general/16_fake_news_stories_over_last_20_yrs.htm
I live in the same geographical area as Jack Cashill. He’s a loony. Stay away.
As for the 73 oil crisis, I still blame Kissinger.
Kansas City- St Louis covers millions. It doesn’t give you any expertise on him.
I’ll just leave this here.
https://twitter.com/20committee/status/809105310052925440
Anything Trump has ever done in a Russian hotel room is on video somewhere.
Period.
Bob- are these folks regular responders to your posts?
Excellent question! Anywhere on the web a Russian topic comes up… Putin’s obfuscation propaganda army is on the scene. I wonder if they use a commercial monitoring/notification service or have rolled their own?
RE:”Hackers aren’t the only group that might be willing to drop some dirt on our President-elect. “. Pence 2017 (Impeach Trump).
The shadiness of Trumps deals that might have remained buried were he to stay as just citizen Trump will be too tempting to be overlooked by all the people he’s wronged.
He has even wronged people who he pry didn’t intend to wrong because he doesn’t think before he talks. Example? He said that he went to the army navy game to support the military.
But in an interview he stated that this isn’t great football.
He probably didn’t mean to insult the players who were playing their hearts out, but just because they didn’t have the talent of guys going to the big schools looking for pro football contracts they played as if it meant everything to them.
It’s like author Tony Schwartz said who is the real author of the Art of the Deal that Trump brags about as his book. Schwartz said that Trump has no filter that whatever thought enters his brain comes out of his mouth without regard to the impact of his words.
Undeniable truths don’t insult anyone, since even the so-called victims accept them as facts. The issue isn’t how hard they try, but what they ultimately accomplish. I suspect Trump would be the first to admit he’s not always politically correct.
RE:”Undeniable truths don’t insult anyone, since even the so-called victims accept them as facts”. Cute saying but incorrect.
So it’s undeniably true that Trump is fat and acts juvenille. According to you Trump would be ok with you telling that to his face?
Maybe not me, but from someone whose opinion he trusts, yes. Also, fat and juvenile are relative terms. Most Americans can be called fat by Europeans, most kids are juvenile, so what? At least we know he’s the conservative’s choice.
Sounds like the author didn’t get Trump at all. If he has no filter of the impact of his words, I’m finding it hard to believe he didn’t crash and burn in the primaries. Instead it looks like he had numerous well scripted attacks, sometimes made up on the fly. ‘Crooked Hillary’ was a slow poison drip on the campaign. Little Marco, Lyin Ted, Low Energy Jeb, even Ben Carson is a Nice Guy. All to great effect. He handled the attack on calling women slobs, by instantly interrupting and saying “Only Rosie ODonnell!” Then there is what I believe were the underrated instances of causing him to win the primaries. When he kept interrupting Jeb Bush and telling him to be quiet. You probably thought he was being a jerk. I say he was establishing to potential voters that he is in charge of the room. Then he tells Jeb, “Oh yea, you’re real tough”. Same thing when Rubio decided to get into an insult war with him. He proved for all to see that he is Little Marco, unable to get into the gutter with him, and simultaneously reinforced his image as the alpha male, literally talking about how big his hands are, and everything else.
“… one billion user records were stolen from Yahoo and it took three years for somebody to notice???”
HINT: In this case, the word “stolen” means “copied.” “Stealing” computer records does not mean the records are gone as when jewels or currency are stolen. There was no big hole in the compute where one billion records used to be. The records were still there.
You would think people using computers and the Internet would know a LITTLE something about how these things work!
Oh, you know why “Fred Nold’s Legacy” and the other columns “were recently taken-down by pbs.org”? Because “PBS no longer has the rights to distribute the content that had been provided on this page.”
-30-
How about a copy was made and stolen?
That’s just the legally safest static message that PBS can output in lieu of content that they’ve taken down, it’s not necessarily true in every case.
If you were their webmaster, would you want to research the circumstances of every page that’s to be taken down and write an accurate explanation for it?
And what did Snowden say ?
FYI a barge holds a half million gallons. Eight barges (a towboat can tow up to fifteen, BTW) — 4 million gallons. The US consumes about a million gallons a day. So your friend would have to have passed about 10 of these anchored tugs & barges to make a month’s supply. Of course, there’s no innocent explanation, right?
US consumes over ten million BARRELS per day, half a billion gallons. So a monthly supply is 15 billion gallons. 4000 towboats of 8 barges.
Are those consumption numbers from 2016 or from 1973?
The chart I looked at went back to 1980, and they weren’t that different. It is close to 600 million gallons now.
Perhaps this will be the first chapter of the next book – Decline and Fall of America. In another era, when TJW ran IBM, a book with the title Decline and Fall of IBM would have been unthinkable. Very similar phenomenon. The world had changed, but IBM rejected the change wholesale, and wanted to turn back the clock to the good old days when no one ever got fired for buying IBM. In the news stories about Donald’s meeting with the tech captains of industry, Bezos et al were mentioned by name, but IBM was only mentioned as an afterthought, and Rometty wasn’t mentioned at all. The arrow of time is only commutative at the quantum mechanical level, not at the level of companies or countries.
Which is more likely? Russians hacked the DNC Servers, or the DNC staff “was extremely careless” with confidential data?
I heard Podesta’s password was literally “p@ssw0rd” according to wikileaks and he got hacked because he clicked on a phishing link.
The guy in charge of the DNC’s email server posted on reddit asking how to delete certain messages that contained certain words. He even posted info that contained the exact server address. And of course he has immunity from the FBI.
You are conflating several things. The guy who posted to Reddit was dealing with Hillary’s e-mail.
DNC hack is separate from the Podesta hack. Podesta had the weak password. DNC hack is what is being blamed on the Russians.
What’s more likely? The CIA which probably has the most sophisticated cyber-crime capability can’t tell when the Russians hacked a system? Or the DNC was careless?
The CIA still reports to the current administration. Rather than hear a digested version from a CIA spokesman of hacking and it’s effectiveness, I’d rather have the CIA geeks explain what happened to a geek I trust, like Steve Gibson, and then get the digested version from him.
In his most recent Security Now podcast, Steve made a couple of interesting comments about hacking in general, from “10,000 feet away” from the election hacking issue:
1) It’s impossible to prove that hacking did not occur.
2) History has shown us that hacking can’t be prevented.
The CIA refused to give a briefing to Congress about their findings. Looks like this is just more politicized intelligence, like how ISIS is a JV team.
My guess is Israel was unhappy with how Obama and Hillary tried to interfere with their elections, and decided to take revenge and pin it on an Iranian-Syrian benefactor. Really, some connections were made thru Yandex, and they found some Cyrillic? Is that the actions of super hackers who are trying to hide their tracks?
The CIA did give one to Congressional leadership, and McConnell made it plain he considered it partisan. So why would the CIA want to give another briefing and let McConnell (and others) claim it partisan once more?
How about because they were asked to provide a briefing, along with Clapper and Comey?
Tillerson earned a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, joined Exxon in 1975 as a production engineer.
I don’t think we’re going to be hearing about any new hacks on January 21. The press can’t run amok against whoever the President is forever and I expect them to largely fall in line and pitch a subliminal message of unity by then.
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As for fossil fuels this is the era of fracking and liquified natural gas. I don’t see coal coming back, but maybe infrastructure jobs doled out to distressed areas. An oilman for an ambassador to Russia makes sense to me. I never understood Hillary & Dems manic obsession with Russia-as-the-enemy and seeming quite eager to start world war three. First Bernie, then Trump ran as peace candidates which served them both well. Who cares about Crimea? Trump also hit a nerve when he complained about America being Europe’s unpaid mall cop.
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I don’t see Trump being susceptible to blackmail. I do see him as being susceptible to goading. Quite a difference.
I really hope you’re right, but the so-called “Press” is actually a lot of individual businesses, trying to please their target audiences. With the country divided almost equally between two diametrically opposed political philosophies, they will continue to “speak the truth” but colored by the bias of their bosses, writers, and audience.
Yeah we’ve really got a massive urban-rural split going that globalization and technology has pushed to extremes and I’m not happy about that either. The press will lean left (PBS) and right (Fox), but I think there will be an implicit acceptance to the new man in power. There always has been up till now.
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Trump was a Democrat most of his life and I suspect his switch to the Republicans was opportunistic, sensing a chance to grab the brass ring which he ultimately did. It’s of course too early to tell, but it could be that he will be live and let live on social issues (abortion, gay rights, etc.), laissez-faire on economics and non-interventionist with the military. If so, then Trump could be the moderate Republican we’ve all been looking for and others might follow his lead.
Actually the country isn’t equally divided between the two ideologies. Given the statistics from the election bashed against the population numbers from the census bureau for the day of the election (the census bureau has a counter that shows day by day population growth extrapolated from the last census) – you end up with 1/6 of the population voting republican, 1/6 voting democrat, 1/6 independents voting republican, 1/6 independents voting democrat, and the remaining 1/2 of the population not voting – or not able to vote.
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Based upon this Pew Research report: _Political Polarization in the American Public_ (https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/) the majority of Americans “do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views. Most do not see either party as a threat to the nation. And more believe their representatives in government should meet halfway to resolve contentious disputes rather than hold out for more of what they want.” Furthermore, “The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%.”
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So it seems 20% of the people are holding the rest of us hostage over ideological BS that the remaining 80% consider negotiable or non-issues that should be shelved. That also means – a large minority of Democrats and Republicans don’t hold consistent opinions (looking at the breakdown of voting populations above – 1/3 vote in primaries, but only 1/5 hold consistent liberal or conservative bias). The virus of charged ideological and emotionally driven speach unleashed by Frank Luntz (his work includes assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, promotion of the terms death tax instead of estate tax and climate change instead of global warming, and public relations support for pro-Israel policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) has finally infected just about every part of our government resulting in a dysfunctional partisan driven system that is so far out of control that he stated was planning on moving to New Zealand in an interview with Vice TV after the Trump election. What a guy.
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Rather than throwing rocket fuel on the fire, and then running away to New Zealand, all of us need to stay and work together. Looking at these numbers, I think it also provides us with a strategy for 2018 if we want to really fix a dysfunctional government. The independents and non-hardcore party affiliated independent voters need to get out the vote – and elect candidates who are interested in working for all Americans, rather than furthering out-of-touch extremist ideologies. I think technology can help us do that for local, state, and federal elections coming up. I think it is time for centrists to have their ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” moment – and get to the job of rededicating this country and its government to serving all the people – not just a few.
The fringe groups are irrelevant, except insofar as they can swing the election, like the undecided voters. It appears to be mostly centrist Republicans vs centrist Democrats, which’s what I think you said. The popularity of a communist/socialist like Sanders is want scares me. What does “working for the country” even mean. By opposing the wasteful spending on “well meaning” social causes, the Republicans were serving the country in the best way possible throughout the past 8 years. The Democrats would disagree. That’s what I meant by “diametrically opposed”.
Interesting article, as usual … reminds me of Rumsfeld’s “known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, unknown unknown” statement. The oil embargo anecdote is fascinating.
But I have a question/request … please help me to connect the dots between your statements:
“Trump might be a nightmare but maybe the instincts of the electorate are correct and we need someone to do a cannonball in the pool, getting everyone wet. In the long run he’ll get very little done because he doesn’t know how government really operates and his helpers aren’t that helpful. It’s in the short run that he’ll really shake things up, not by doing anything, but through people imagining what he might do. Imagination tends to be worse than reality.” (Donald Trump: The Hangover – November 9 2016)
“For those of us who are Americans there’s a shit storm coming and it has everything to do with President-elect Donald Trump. Forget the parts we can see, let’s try to anticipate the parts we can’t yet see. The players here are Republicans, Democrats, Russians, hackers, and of course Donald Trump.” (News we aren’t supposed to know – December 15 2016)
Apart from the hacking reports (which we had suspected anyway) – and the cabinet announcements (predictably conservative and big-biz oriented) – and the general disregard for protocol and decorum – how did you get from “he’ll get very little done because he doesn’t know how government really operates” to “there’s a shit storm coming”?
Also, and apropos nothing in particular, Al Franken (NY Times Magazine, December 18 2016) observes: no one has seen Donald Trump laugh. Have you? Has anyone? If it’s true, what might this portend?
Perhaps the “shit storm” refers to “shake things up in the short term”.
The statement that, “The US consumes about a million gallons a day” is off by two orders of magnitude. According to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=23&t=10 in 2007 the US consumed 390 million gallons a day. 30 years earlier it would have been a little smaller.
I was motivated to look it up because the statement appeared so wrong.
Yea, so a month’s supply, at 500 feet per tow, would be about 400 miles. Almost 1/6 of the entire river.
Looks like Cringely’s article on real news is filled with fake news.
I get around two miles of tows per day, if you say a 4 barge double tow is 500 feet long (is it?) and the US uses 8.73 million 42 gallon barrels per day and each barge hold about a half million gallons.
So, that would be around 60 miles of tows.
Of course, not all the gas used in the US is going to be delivered via the Mississippi.
Also, you don’t need to completely cut off supply for prices to go up. A small reduction in supply might be enough to do it.
I don’t follow. I am guessing about the length of the tow, and if they are double lined I would lower my guess.
However, using 500ft, that is 10 tows per mile.
8.73 million 42 gallon barrels per day and each barge hold about a half million gallons,
would mean 8.73 million * 42 / 1/2 /(8 barges/tow)
=8.73 *84 /8 tows ~90 tows = 9 miles/ day of tows. Months supply is 270 miles. I also used the entire length of the Mississippi in my calculation, but the trip was likely much less.
RE:”Trump also hit a nerve when he complained about America being Europe’s unpaid mall cop.”
Trump said this but do we know if it is actually true? are we being unpaid or underpaid for our protection or are there other non-monetary things involved like military bases etc.?
I mean after all some people say that the way you can tell that this guy is lying is that his lips are moving
We probably are not paying Europe rent for military bases. However, we only need those because we have troops there. The purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
That’s the famous statement that’s been completely true in the past, but is that really what we want going forward? The Cold War was quite a bill delivered to US taxpayers. Now that we’re not as dominant economically do we really want that bill going forward? Is there another way with Russia?
The article Bob links from 2010 when he told this story before, is also fake news. He tells us that within 3 years there will be a company producing solar at 50c per watt, and that they are really ramping up manufacturing capacity(with no capital cost!). He says that this renewable energy will reshape the industry and the world by the end of the decade.
Funny that the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) mailing lists had nothing on them about this attack by the UAE Electronic Army. They would not miss something of this magnitude.
Anything about the MineServer for Christmas 2016? Prediction for delivery in 2017? You have really failed us on this one. Although following you for 20 years, you start a lot of endeavors that you never complete. I just had money in this one….
The MineServers are being retasked for the lunar mission.
The hardware is going to be so old by the time it ships; it is equivalent to Apollo era computers.
Mr Cringely, you seem like a wise saw on the topic of your expertise. But you reduce your viewer pool when you indulge your political spleen. I understand. Your side lost this go round. So it goes. I expect regressives to slime their opponent simply because they must. But to do so before the other guy even gets sworn in seems rather bitter. I’m frankly relieved that Trump isn’t a career pol. I’ve had enough of those who’ve made it their goal to find a government desk they can plant their bum in until they ossify. At least Trump brings hard ball negotiation skills to the office, something we’ve needed for far too long. I suspect that’s the chief skill he wants in the Secretary of State, too. He’s as human as you and I, so he will make mistakes. Of course, some of his mole hills will be made into mountains by those who blindly hate him now. So it goes….
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http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/vent+spleen “Etymology: from the idea in the past that the spleen (an organ in the body) was the place where evil intentions began” Bob is also providing a forum for us to collectively vent our spleens.
It’s worse than that. By attacking Trump so vigorously, they are making Trump more conservative. This is a guy who has been a Democrat for a long time, and is pretty liberal on social issues. Yet he is attacked so vehemently by all the liberals. We have learned that Trump is a narcissist, and that when hit he will hit back twice as hard.
So the Left could have had Trump endorsing their agenda, and instead they have driven him to the Right.
I know this is days old, now, but the idea of the GOP being hacked after all became very realistic from their actions in the last 2 weeks. For a brief moment, Ryan and McConnell had announced their support for investigating the hacking. Two days later, McConnell backtracks, with prejudice, and says there will be no investigation.
I don’t think it was Trump who secretly gave McConnell a clue-by-four. I believe it was the hackers, revealing that they had stuff on him.
Yes, I firmly believe the GOP leadership is effectively being blackmailed.
After the DNC hack came out, RNC hired a security firm who contacted the FBI for details. When they checked for similar things, they discovered the same attempts, but they had been blocked by existing security precautions.
Obama never wanted Debbie as DNC chair, and his campaign team had a technical brilliance that I believe would not have had this result. I am convinced that the hacks of State and later OPM were in fact the result of Hillary’s server, which served as a gateway.
More news they don’t want you to know. The LA Times has had audiotape of Barack Obama’s remarks at a party for Rashid Khalidi of the PLO, and it has been locked up for 8 years. I they had released it, I bet it would have revealed the mindset that led Obama to declare Israel an illegal occupier at the UN(fake news is media saying it is about settlements).
This Wiki article seems to support the “illegal occupier” view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law_and_Israeli_settlements but I guess, like most controversial things, it’s just a matter of opinion.
Happy new year! Or not so happy, as the Mineserver, like so many things in 2016 was a failure…again.
Happy new year!
I find it interesting that when I tried to add a link to the last kickstarter update, the post was markd as spam and not editable.
I don’t know why but coming here looking for Mineserver information and seeing that picture with “I am not a Crook” is starting to annoy me. I think that picture is a Freudian Slip by Cringely.
That CR in CROOK even stands out. CRook CRingely.
Well we know with absolute certainty that all the MSM that sold invisible WMD’s to the gullible public on behalf of the future profits of the military industrial always for war machine/MIC, are the biggest source of so called ‘fake news’. Of course our government which is essentially a subcontractor outfit of the MIC provided endless sources of the existence and even locations of the invisible WMD’s, you couldn’t flip between MSM corrupt outlets like, cnn,cbs,nbc,etc without seeing some stooge in a uniform claiming to be an expert on all their details. The government is corrupt from top to bottom and their campaign to reign in ‘fake news’ is merely an attempt to avoid exposing the ridiculous propaganda levels the msm media has stooped as has the fbi in covering up the massive criminal enterprise which is the federal government. Anyone who browsed through the K’linton Podesta emails knows that pizzagate needs a complete unveiling and all those including the former-president-rapist and his enabling victim attacking wife and presidential hopeful and pizzagate friends carted off to jail for a well deserved vacation.
For those so naive as to not rub two brain cells together, remember the so called ‘Egyptian army’ being neutral during the recent revolution? Did you believe the MSM on that tremendous and OBVIOUS lie? We gave them billions over the preceding decades, and as soon as someone the ussa didn’t want was elected, it was the end of neutrality and installation of who we wanted. All the while the blatantly lying MSM maintained their so called ‘neutrality’ while the public swallowed that nonsense whole like suckling pigs. Jefferson maintained that a people can’t be ignorant and free, clearly he is right and we are not citizens but subjects of a criminal enterprise and their criminal propaganda mouthpieces in the MSM, that’s why they hate independent investigation and opinion and are seeking to snuff it out. This site will not pass the ‘official lying liars’ test and will be targeted fake because it takes no pay from the corrupt paymasters and disagrees with war party propaganda.
As I recall, the Iraq war was about taking out a cruel tyrant, who wouldn’t allow the inspections needed to verify the absence of WMDs. He was using the threat of the non-existent WMDs to keep his neighbors from attacking him, all the while claiming to us that they didn’t exist.
I’m not surprised his immediate neighbours fell for that ploy, I’m more surprised that the US didn’t know they didn’t exist.
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The US isn’t as great at building nations (Japan not withstanding) as deposing cruel governments.
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Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, aren’t much better off now than they were before.
Re: “The US isn’t as great at building nations” It’s not the job of the US to build nations, only to protect themselves and their allies from other nations that threaten them.
This is one my favourite columns from Cringley. Now saved in my email archives. I hope you are successful in repatriating your older columns from pbs.org. A must read book that goes along with this column’s theme: Willfull Blindness by Margaret Heffernan.
https://www.amazon.ca/Willful-Blindness-Ignore-Obvious-Peril/
https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_the_dangers_of_willful_blindness
Will there ever be an update on mineserver?
Cringe-ly, have you just taken our money?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/583591444/mineservertm-a-99-home-minecraft-server
The last update, on November 10th, says “we’ll finally start shipping the week after Thanksgiving.”
thank admin
thanks
I must say it was hard to find your website in google.
You write interesting content but you should rank your website higher in search engines.
If you don’t know how to do it search on youtube:
how to rank a website Marcel’s way