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Nicholas C. Zakas on Twitter:
“Mom: Dad said you invented a thing? ESLint?
Me: Yes.
Mom: What is it?
Me: It finds and fixes problems in JavaScript.
Mom: Huh. Do people use it?
Me: Basically everyone writing JS.
Mom: How much did you make on it?
Me: Nothing.
Mom: I don’t understand your industry.
Me: Me either.”

► Open Collective @opencollect
Organizing the Internet generation, one community at a time.

Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

Bryce Weiner “The true financial power of cryptocurrencies aren’t in the limited supplies which drive market volatility, but in the ability to mint your own money. That’s what “being your own bank” really means.”

Hacker Fantastic “2,982 bitcoin miners exposed to the Internet, have factory default credentials of “root/root” and an insecure unsigned firmware update process… this is going to end in tears

Wikipedia’s Larry Sanger Joins Blockchain Startup to Disrupt His Own Creation

World War II’s Best Codebreaker Was a Woman Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Shodan is the world’s first search engine for Internet-connected device  Antminer

►  Tim Bray · Google Memory Loss is ongoing – google isn’t coughing it up anymore / they don’t waste their effort going back to get what you are looking for – this has become the worst search engine to use.

[ECP] NetHappenings: email remains vulnerable, responsible for 94 percent of all attacks

Today’s Read

On what grounds can the FBI investigate the President
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-grounds-can-fbi-investigate-president-counterintelligence-threat

A transnational crime syndicate backed by Russian oligarchs is pushing the UK off a cliff. You cannot, like Jeremy Corbyn, stand up against corruption at home but not stand up against it abroad.”
https://www.patreon.com/posts/24843802

Elections Commission Chief Uses the “Nuclear Option” to Rescue the Agency From Gridlock
The agency’s chair says she won’t allow its lawyers to defend it when it’s sued.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/elections-commission-chief-uses-the-nuclear-option-to-rescue-the-agency-from-gridlock/

Zuckerberg didn’t “sell” data he sold “access” !!!

K12 Department of Education #BetsyDevos Brother Founder Of Blackwater, Is Setting Up A Private Army For China

The controversial Blackwater founder says he is setting up two bases in China, but his company says “this does not involve armed personnel.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/betsy-devoss-brother-is-setting-up-a-private-army-for-china

Erik Prince — founder of the private military company Blackwater, financial backer of President Donald Trump, brother to the new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and frequent Breitbart radio guest of White House power broker Stephen Bannon — has been offering his military expertise to support Chinese government objectives and setting up two Blackwater-style training camps in China, according to sources and his own company statements.

The move could put him at odds with Trump, who has often taken a hard line against China, and could also risk violating US law, which prohibits the export of military services or equipment to China.

Erik Prince.

Former associates of the 47-year-old Prince told BuzzFeed News that the controversial businessman envisions using the bases to train and deploy an army of Chinese retired soldiers who can protect Chinese corporate and government strategic interests around the world, without having to involve the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

The American mercenary behind Blackwater is helping China establish the new Silk Road

For years, China has groomed landlocked Yunnan province in its southwest to be the country’s strategic bridgehead into Southeast Asia, building highways and rail lines to its borders with Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar to one day weave them into a regional, and eventually, transcontinental transport network.

As China pushes ahead with president Xi Jinping’s ambitious $1 trillion One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative—which reimagines a historic trade network as an overland Silk Road Economic “Belt” and a Maritime Silk “Road”—protecting Chinese business executives and other personnel and their rapidly growing investments in the region is more important than ever.

Mueller evidence shows Blackwater founder held meeting to create Trump-Russia back channel: report

Special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence showing that a meeting in the Seychelles last year between the founder of a private security company and a Russian official was intended to set up a back channel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that a witness cooperating with Mueller has told investigators that the meeting was set up in advance, apparently contradicting what Erik Prince, the founder of the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, has told lawmakers about the meeting.

Prince had previously told lawmakers and the press that his meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian official close with Russian President Vladimir Putin, happened by chance and was not set up ahead of time.

But the witness, a Lebanese-American businessman named George Nader, has testified before a grand jury that the meeting, which took place shortly before President Trump’s inauguration, was, in fact, a planned effort.

‘Here’s the system; it sucks’: Meet the Hill staffers hired by Ocasio-Cortez to upend Washington

They will help shape how Ocasio-Cortez works as an activist hoping to refashion the Democratic Party, while she also tries to serve as a more typical member building coalitions and moving legislation.

“It needs to be pointed out how insanely greedy” it is to be a billionaire, Riffle said. “We have to comprehend the scale of $1 billion — just the amount of money we’re talking about. Five million dollars is a lifetime’s fortune; you can live off the interest of that and still be in the top 1 percent. Five million dollars, times 100, is still only halfway to $1 billion.
“It’s a systemic failure on society’s part. On one part of the city, we have people with helipads and yachts that they park inside of yachts, and on the other side we have thousands of people who are homeless and children without health care or food. Those things should not exist simultaneously in a society.”

Bill Browder Head of Global Magnitsky Justice campaign explains why Putin is our enemy.

Who Is Bill Browder?

#Putin, #KGB #Russians #Browder, #Magnitsky, #Trump, #Rohrabacher, #Mercer , #Billionairs, #Brexit #Propaganda #Panama Papers, #Offshore,  #Marcus Ranum
https://twitter.com/Billbrowder
billbrowder.com
Hedge fund manager Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, estimates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wealth at $200 billion — which would make him by far the richest man in the world.
“After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn’t been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on — all that money is in property, Swiss bank accounts, shares, [and] hedge funds managed for Putin and his cronies.” Bill Gates is considered the world’s richest man with a net worth of $79 billion. Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel,  became Russian prime minister in August 1999 and president in May 2000. Browder notes that the “first eight or 10 years about reign over Russia was about stealing as much money that he could.”
Browder’s full interview 
2015 Putin is one of the richest man in the world, or one of the richest men in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth that was stolen from Russia.

Magnitsky Justice Campaign
http://www.billbrowder.com/sergei-magnitsky
Putin “understands he could one day be targeted by the Magnitsky Act” if he ever loses power. The Panama Papers showed Putin was part of the tax fraud scheme uncovered by Magnitsky. If targeted, assets would be frozen. See Projects
Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin and their campaign need to  lift Magnitsky sanctions so that Putin can get his hands on the 200 billion dollars of dark money his hides away in off shore accounts.

IT IS GOP REP DANA ROHRABACKER THAT GETS IN THE WAY OF THE MAGNITSKY JUSTICE CAMPAIGN 

GOP REP Dana Rohrabacker Got Direction From Moscow, Took It Back to D.C.

After being given a secret document by officials in Moscow, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher sought to alter sanctions legislation and tried to set up a virtual show trial on Capitol Hill.

<snip>

When GOP Rohrabacher returned to the United States, he delayed the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act by holding it up in committee and tabled an amendment to remove Magnitsky’s name from its title, citing several of the claims found in the Russian document.

Next, Rohrabacher and Behrends, with the help of Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet army veteran and lobbyist who was also present at the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, put together a subcommittee event with witnesses including Veselnitskaya and Nekrasov, the director of the movie.
When Royce, the chair of the foreign relations committee, got wind of the hearing, he nixed Rohrabacher’s plan and offered instead to hold a full committee hearing on Russia relations. House aides conceded that he did so, in part, to avoid Rohrabacher staging an event that could have embarrassed the Republican Party—and Congress. </>
 
Robert Mercer
Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Donald Trump, played key role with ‘sinister’ advice on using Facebook data
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit
The UK’s privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters’ personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year.  The intervention by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) follows revelations in last week’s Observer that a technology company part-owned by a US billionaire played a key role in the campaign to persuade Britons to vote to leave the European Union.

To have a foreign billionaire’s fingerprints left all over such a seismic moment in British history is deeply concerning and requires urgent further investigation as to whether electoral law was broken.”

A 2015 presentation by one of Cambridge Analytica’s analysts, until recently available on YouTube, explained how it had used “Facebook likes … as an input to machine-learning models.”
In the US, companies are free to use third-party data without seeking consent. But Gavin Millar QC, of Matrix Chambers, said this was not the case in Europe. “The position in law is exactly the same as when people would go canvassing from door to door,” Millar said. “They have to say who they are, and if you don’t want to talk to them you can shut the door in their face.That’s the same principle behind the data protection act. It’s why if telephone canvassers ring you, they have to say that whole long speech. You have to identify yourself explicitly.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/04/cambridge-analytics-data-brexit-trump
and
*Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire? We reveal how a confidential legal agreement is at the heart of a web connecting Robert Mercer to Britain’s EU referendum*
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/14/robert-mercer-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu-referendum-brexit-campaigns
Mr Baker set out how Vote Leave had worked out how to use front organisations to get around these spending limits.   He wrote: ‘It is open to the Vote Leave family to create separate legal entities, each of which could spend £700,000: Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3451588/Pat-McFadden-reports-leading-Brexit-campaigner-Steve-Baker-police-plot-break-spending-limits-EU-referendum.html
Using your personal data is now second nature for politicians
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/08/personal-data-politicians-election
The core focus of big data electioneering is identifying marginals – key demographic groups or geographical areas that could go either way, with enough combined weight to pull the overall result in their direction.

The Trump team’s move was to hire Cambridge Analytica. It was a natural fit – Trump’s trusted adviser Steve Bannon was formerly a board member and his friend and supporter, the billionaire Robert Mercer, is said to be a major shareholder. Their methods involve building up detailed psychological profiles of individuals based on up to 5,000 data points per person.

 

Just Follow the Slime-Trail by Marcus Ranum

@mjranum
<snip>
“Money can’t buy everything,” they say – but, then, why do the rich hunger after more, more, more? Once you’ve got a few tens of millions stashed away, you can spend the rest of your life in a blur of luxury, sex, drugs, fast cars and rock ‘n roll, if that’s your thing.
But, as Epicurus says, some people want money and power to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of life; others get confused and see the money as an end in itself. There are others who see it as a portable form of power, and will not hesitate to use that tool for whatever it is they want. When the wealthy person wants rock ‘n roll, you may get something wonderful. But when the wealthy person has an authoritarian political agenda that they want to promote – then we see the great flaw in modern pseudo-democratic oligarchies: one extremely wealthy asshole can unilaterally distort the political landscape.
I was surprised but not shocked to learn that Robert Mercer, who was one of the forces behind Trump’s ascent to power, also helped the “Brexit” movement. Because, it’s his right, as a rich oligarch, to spend his money tinkering with politics. It’s not news that Mercer interfered with England’s internal affairs, like it would be if the FSB did it, but he was another factor of many that helped bring about something that is going to be extremely damaging to England and Europe.
Whew, well, thank godless it wasn’t the Russians! It was just a random billionaire. Too bad he didn’t just give a load of money to start a jazz festival, or something, it sucks being you, England!

Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years’ experience in military disinformation campaigns and “election management”, claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump’s team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage.

Thank goodness it was just bog-standard political manipulation and public relations, not Fake News. Oh, wait, it was Fake News. Sorry.

longstanding friendship between Nigel Farage and the Mercer family led Mercer to offer his help – free – to the Brexit campaign because of their shared goals.

Their shared goals being “rich people do whatever the fuck they want?”
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