Month: June 2017

Too Toxic Even for Silicon Valley?

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Facing accusations that Uber executives turned a blind eye to sexual harassment and other corporate misbehavior, the ride-hailing service’s board moved on Sunday to shake up the company’s leadership, ahead of the release this week of an investigation’s findings on its troubled culture.

Uber directors were weighing a three-month leave of absence for Travis Kalanick, the chief executive who built the start-up into a nearly $70 billion entity, according to three people with knowledge of the board’s agenda.

In addition, a representative for Uber’s board said the directors “unanimously voted” to adopt all of the recommendations made in a report by the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., who was retained to investigate the company’s culture. One of the recommendations included the departure of a top lieutenant to Mr. Kalanick, Emil Michael, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential.

It appears that there are limits on just how unethical someone can be, and just how much of a sh%$ show that they can make out a company’s culture.

I would have figured that this would have all been dismissed as “disruptive”.

It does seem to be the rather larcenous ethics of tech startups these days.

Satire that Isn’t

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The noted satire military blog Duffelblog has an article on H.R. McMaster, the current US National Security advisor, whose PhD thesis argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff engaged in dereliction of duty for not recognizing that the Vietnam war was fundamentally unwinnable is now saying that  there is a light at the end of the tunnel in Afghanistan.

Of course, everything is different this time:

The man who once wrote a book highly critical of policymakers who escalated an unwinnable war in Vietnam is urging escalation in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, sources confirmed today.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, whose PhD thesis castigated the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their “dereliction of duty” during the Vietnam War, has laid out a plan to send thousands of additional troops to fight in Afghanistan.

McMaster, who rose through the ranks as an unconventional military thinker, dismissed comparisons to the Vietnam War, in which the US military tried to prop up the failing Diem regime amidst an insurgency sponsored by North Vietnam, and the war in Afghanistan, in which the US government is supporting the faltering government in Kabul against a Pakistan-sponsored insurgency.

“We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” said McMaster, President Trump’s national security adviser, citing nearly a decade’s worth of futile efforts to shift the burden of fighting onto the Afghan National Security Forces, much as US forces tried to promote the “Vietnamization” of the war in the late 1960s.

If there is anything to fault in this it is that this is not satire, this is as straight out analysis, except perhaps for  the ending quote:
You either retire an unorthodox thinker who speaks truth to power or you stay in the Army long enough to become a general.

I do think that this is where our military has ended up after 70 years of “Up or Out”, which means that unconventional thinkers are quietly cashiered.

Not The Onion or Duffelblog

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It appears that there some Russian malware out in the wild that uses the comments in Britney Spears’s Instagram account to update its botnet:

A Russian-speaking hacking group that, for years, has targeted governments around the world is experimenting with a clever new method that uses social media sites to conceal espionage malware once it infects a network of interest.

According to a report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset, a recently discovered backdoor Trojan used comments posted to Britney Spears’s official Instagram account to locate the control server that sends instructions and offloads stolen data to and from infected computers. The innovation—by a so-called advanced persistent threat group known as Turla—makes the malware harder to detect because attacker-controlled servers are never directly referenced in either the malware or in the comment it accesses.

………

Eset researchers explained:

The extension uses a bit.ly URL to reach its C&C, but the URL path is nowhere to be found in the extension code. In fact, it will obtain this path by using comments posted on a specific Instagram post. The one that was used in the analyzed sample was a comment about a photo posted to the Britney Spears official Instagram account.

………

The extension will look at each photo’s comment and will compute a custom hash value. If the hash matches 183, it will then run this regular expression on the comment in order to obtain the path of the bit.ly URL:

(?:\u200d(?:#|@)(\w)

Looking at the photo’s comments, there was only one for which the hash matches 183. This comment was posted on February 6, while the original photo was posted in early January. Taking the comment and running it through the regex, you get the following bit.ly URL:

(emphasis mine)

One has to admire the ingenuity shown here.

I Really Hope that Prosecutors Don’t Blink

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The new 2nd in command at the CIA is Gina Haspel, who was torturer-in-chief following 911, is now the target of a legal action against her for crimes against humanity in Germany:

In late March of 2002, Gina Haspel had very little time to prepare for the torture to come. Haspel ran the “Cat’s Eye,” a secret CIA jail located near Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. It was very warm, 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit), with the kind of humidity that makes your clothes stick to you, but inside the black site, also known as “Detention Site Green,” the air conditioning had been cranked up to make it extremely cold. The cells had Spartan furnishings: a plank bed, four halogen lights, four meters by four meters (13 feet by 13 feet) of confinement with no windows.

America’s Central Intelligence Agency planned to use this site to test, for the first time, the new “enhanced interrogation” techniques President George W. Bush had approved six months earlier. Al-Qaida fighters’ will was to be broken through waterboarding, sleep deprivation or humiliation through forced nudity until they could be turned into valuable sources in the “war on terror,” which had been declared by the U.S. after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Haspel, a 45-year-old intelligence agent, was to carry out the first torture sessions in Thailand.

Fifteen years later, in 2017, President Donald Trump would appoint Haspel as the CIA’s deputy director.

………

This week, human rights lawyers at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin submitted a filing about former agent Haspel to supplement a December 2014 criminal complaint over the CIA’s extraordinary renditions and torture program it lodged with the Federal Public Prosecutor in Karlsruhe. The new information could create additional pressure for the Karlsruhe-based office to act. Thus far, the Federal Public Prosecutor has rejected calls to file any charges against Americans responsible for the torture – be it then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for incidents inside Abu Ghraib, former CIA head George Tenet or the intelligence agents at the National Security Agency (NSA) who eavesdropped on the German chancellor’s mobile phone. When it comes to relations with the United States, Germany seems to have a habit of looking the other way. That also extends to the Federal Public Prosecutor.

………

Months later, Abu Zubaydah and another prisoner from Cat’s Eye were taken to a secret jail in a forest in the Masuria region of Poland, and later to Guantánamo. Abu Zubaydah lost his left eye in detention. This, however, doesn’t seem to have done anything to hurt Gina Haspel’s career: She was appointed as chief of staff to the head of the directorate of operations at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Langley – and took care in this new role to ensure that incriminating evidence of the torture disappeared. She ordered the destruction of all 92 videotapes showing the torture of prisoners at Cat’s Eye.

………

The human rights lawyers would also like to see their criminal complaint force Germany’s top prosecutor to address the complex issue and its legal implications. If Gina Haspel or other suspects were to travel to Germany in the future, the Federal Public Prosecutor could issue an arrest warrant.

I really hope that the Germans put out an arrest warrant, but I see the possibility of that as being slim to none.

It’s pretty clear that there will never be any consequences for torturers in the United States, Barack Obama ensured this when he normalized their behavior, and not only looked the other way, but facilitated their rise in the US state security apparatus.

Well, One Blairite in the UK Exhibits Self-Reflection and Honesty

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Ayesha Hazarika, former senior advisor to Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband and current stand-up comedian, admits that she was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn:

I was in the busy, bustling media hub of ITV News when the exit poll dropped, and the shock was palpable. I was there as a political commentator with the great and the good of the media establishment. The last time we were gathered there we’d been caught out by the Brexit result, and once again we were all in collective shock. We had all overestimated Theresa May and underestimated Jeremy Corbyn.

I fess up to being one of those people. I got it wrong on Corbyn. He ripped up the political rules from the minute he decided to stand for the Labour leadership. I remember him speaking at the very first hustings for Labour MPs, Lords and MEPs. He spoke fluently, and with spirit and passion. I remember quipping that at this rate he would win. He hadn’t even got enough nominations to make it on to the ballot paper at this point. The rest is history.

Many of us thought that if Corbyn faced the electorate he would cost the Labour party seats and wipe us out. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the opposite happened. Labour gained votes, but most importantly looks like it will have gained seats.

………

I applaud Corbyn and his team on a great campaign and a great night. The Labour party exists to win seats and power so we can action the positive change this country is crying out for. Overnight we have made progress but Corbyn must continue to work hard to reach out to all parts of the population, not just those in metropolitan areas, and we must focus on winning more seats not just piling up votes in safe areas.

I urge my fellow Labour colleagues to acknowledge Corbyn’s success and to try to find peace with him. What the past few weeks has shown is that Labour can be an inspiring and powerful force for good. Let’s try and come together and find some settlement. The country needs us to be a strong united party now more than ever.

Of course, for some reason, it’s easier for a stand-up comic to admit that they were wrong than it is for a politician, which makes no sense to me. 

History is littered with wreckage politicos who would have succeeded had they simply admitted failure and moved on.

Headline of the Day

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A Noun, a Verb and Vladimir Putin

—POLITICO

This is an echo of the quip that Joe Biden made about Rudolph Giuliani’s 2008 Presidential bid, where he said of the former NY Mayor, “Rudy Giuliani ……… there’s only three things he needs to make a sentence, a noun and a verb and 9/11.

It reflected the complete vacuity of Giuliani’s campaign and of Giuliani himself.

Politico just (quite justifiably) made the same point about the Democratic Party.

The party establishment done f%$#ed up, and you need to achieve some lessons learned before going all Giuliani in the next campaign.

Hung Parliament in the UK

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Whatever the final result, our positive campaign has changed politics for the better. pic.twitter.com/EHLta2rnIW

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) June 9, 2017

Not all the votes are celled, but as it stands right now, 12:00 midnight EDT, it’s certain that the Tories will lose seats and it’s almost certain that they will not have an outright majority in parliament.  (Live results are here.)

So, either the Conservatives will have to find someone to join a coalition, most likely with the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland) or have a minority government.

I expect Theresa May to be out within the next few months, possibly replaced by Boris Johnson.

In addition to the Tories, the losers tonight appear to be the Scottish National Party (SNP) who have lost even more seats than the Conservatives, (-18 vs -14) and they started with a much smaller base.

I think that another referendum on Scottish independence is off the table for the immediate future,

It’s pretty clear that Jeremy Corbin is a winner, and the New Labour wing of the party who have sabotaged him at every turn are now doing their best to make nice.

I’m not sure how Corbyn will proceed from here, but he is now clearly and unequivocally the leader of Labour, which gives him some latitude to clean house within the party.

Clearly, the Problem Is Not Enough Markets

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Drug rehabilitation clinics are paying brokers to get bodies in the door:

Days after he relapsed on heroin last summer, Patrick Graney received an offer that was too good to turn down.

How would he like to get treatment in a beach town with a hipster vibe in South Florida — with all expenses paid, including airfare from his Massachusetts home? Graney didn’t have to think long. He was on a flight south the next day. Two months later he was dead.

The arrangement — according to interviews with Graney’s mother and girlfriend and saved Facebook messages he sent — was brokered by Daniel Cleggett, a flamboyant figure, and some would say a pillar, in the Boston-area drug recovery community. A former addict who has spent nearly a quarter of his life in jail, Cleggett has turned entrepreneur in the burgeoning treatment industry for people addicted to opioids such as heroin and prescription painkillers.

He presides over an expanding empire of treatment facilities in Massachusetts, but he has also helped recruit addicted young people from Massachusetts for drug rehab centers in South Florida, according to the patients’ families and others who know Cleggett and are familiar with the arrangements. Two of these young men, including Graney, died from overdoses in hotel rooms in the oceanside resort communities where they were sent for treatment.

………

Patient brokers can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars a year by wooing vulnerable addicts for treatment centers that often provide few services and sometimes are run by disreputable operators with no training or expertise in drug treatment, according to Florida law enforcement officials and two individuals who worked as brokers in Massachusetts. Cleggett refused to say whether he was paid to find customers for Florida treatment centers.

The facilities are tapping into a flood of dollars made available to combat the opioid epidemic and exploiting a shortage of treatment beds in many states. As center owners and brokers profit, many patients get substandard treatment and relapse.

The role of patient brokers in steering addicts to out-of-state treatment centers is now coming under scrutiny from law enforcement, including Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, according to a spokeswoman for her office. “These recruitment operations take advantage of the desperation of people struggling with addiction to refer them to treatment centers not based on their best interest, but in order to get a commission,” Healey said in a statement. “Patients need to access safe and effective recovery options instead of being treated like paychecks.”

Such arrangements can be illegal in some cases under federal and Massachusetts law if facilities pay brokers to bring them patients and if patients are given inducements, such as free travel or insurance, to enroll in a particular treatment center.

(emphasis mine)

It seems that the only growth industry in the United States these days is parasitism.

Oh, Those Backward Russians………

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The Russian MS-21 narrow body airliner is first use of non-autoclaved composites in the primary structure of a commercial aircraft:

As Russian aircraft manufacturer Irkut Corp. (Irkutsk, Russia) rolled out its narrow-body MS-21 (132-211 passengers) today (June 8), it’s time to recognize again the novelty of this plane. The MS-21 will carry into the air a major aerospace and composites industry milestone: The first out-of-autoclave (OOA) composite wing and wing box on a commercial aircraft.

As CW reported in early 2014, the MS-21 wing and wing box represent a major and hard-won accomplishment in aerospace composites manufacturing. Never before has such a large, complex and important aerostructure been made OOA. So, it’s worth reviewing now how it was made.

The OOA parts— the wing box, integrated stringers and skins, and spars — are fabricated by AeroComposit (Moscow, Russia), a sister company of Irkut (both are owned by Moscow-based United Aircraft Corp.). The materials used come from Solvay (Cytec when plane development was begun; Woodland Park, NJ, US). The layup is done via placement of unidirectional dry fiber with automated tape laying (ATL) equipment provided by MTorres (Torres de Elorz, Navarra, Spain) and Coriolis (Queven, France).

Lance Parcell, new business development director at Solvay, provided development assistance to AeroComposit starting in 2008 and says the material used, EP 2400, is “a unique product that is toughened and infusible without having to introduce tougheners in other forms like films or polymer fibers.” Further, the resin offers a long window for the infusion process, which provides more than adequate time for large primary structures such as wings. The result, says Parcell, is very low porosity in the final part that “is equal to or less than in an autoclave.”

In a conventional aviation composites, an autoclave, which applies both heat and pressure.

The pressure is used to push the resin in between the fibers to prevent voids.

An autoclave is both an oven and a pressure vessel, and at larger sizes they are expensive and finicky items.

Another option is to make smaller pieces and fasten them together, but that creates a whole new set of issues 

If you can infuse the resin without voids, then you can just cure the resin in an ordinary oven, which is cheaper and easier.

This has been done in marine composites for years, but in those applications, you are not trying to use an absolute minimum of material.

In the weight conscious aviation field, adding margin is not an option.

It’s a pretty impressive technical feat.

The Term is Not Disruptive, It’s Criminogenic………

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If the things that Silicon Valley companies did were done by black people, they would be in jail.

The avatar of such behavior is, of course, Uber.

Here is a roundup of their latest hits:

The obvious question is why do people patronize such an awful company, and I think that answer is that we have seen 30 years of idolizing behaviors that are at best dishonest, and at worst sociopathic.

The point here is not that Uber is a bad company peopled by criminals, though it is, it is that Uber  is merely the apotheosis of what is a larcenous culture.

If we had serious enforcement of corporate criminality and antitrust, many of the tech billionaires would be in jail.

Fail

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Someone is unwilling to learn from their mistakes

For a number of years now, the International Energy Agency(IEA) has published its predictions for the future, and every year they say that solar is done.

I’m wondering how many former oil industry types work there:

Every year the International Energy Agency publishes the World Energy Outlook, which, among other things, forecasts the growth rate of solar PV installations. The 2016 edition even included a whole “special focus” on renewable energy. Presumably this means they took an extra careful look at their solar PV forecast. Here it is:



That looks…odd, doesn’t it? Solar PV has grown at a pretty fast clip over the past decade, but the IEA assumes the growth rate will suddenly level out starting this year and then start to decline. And this is their optimistic scenario that takes into account pledges made in Paris.

Considering that it was originally founded to ensure reliable fossil fuel supplies, it should come as no surprise that they are dismissive of renewable energy sources.

Basically, this is “Hey, you kids, get off of my lawn!”

The Joys of Marriage

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I was coming home from the chiropractor today with Sharon* driving, and the song Don’t Stand So Close To Me by the Police came on, and she turned up the volume.

I asked her why she liked this song, but hated the Pink Floyd song The Wall, which she hates for what she sees as its anti-teacher message. (“We don’t need no education ……… Hey! Teacher, leave them kids alone”)

I replied that she just turned up the volume on a song about an affair between a teacher and a student.

She said that she was unaware of this, and then she quickly changed the station.

I then sung:

Her friends are so jealous
You know how bad girls get
Sometimes it’s not so easy
To be the teacher’s pet

And then she elbowed me.

I am amused.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

You Heard about What Happened in Portland?

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I’m not referring to the white supremacist terrorism, I am referring to the giant hissy fit over burritos.

A couple of chefs went down to Mexico to review and recreate their cuisine, and once they did, the Social Justice Warriors immediately started screaming “Cultural Appropriation” and said chefs closed down their food stand.

This is complete crap.

Restaurants steal from each other, both within and across cuisines, and have from time immemorial, and to suggest that there is something wrong with that is to infantilize the surveyors Mexican cuisine:

My thoughts on cultural appropriation of food changed forever in the research for my 2012 book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. One of my personal highlights was discovering the restaurant that Glenn Bell of Taco Bell infamy had cited in his autobiography as being the source of “inspiration” for him deciding to get into the taco business. How did he get inspired? He’d eat tacos the restaurant every night, then go across the street to his hot dog stand to try and recreate them.

Bell freely admitted to the story, but never revealed the name of the restaurant. I did: Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino, which is the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurant in the Inland Empire. I was excited to interview the owner, Irene Montaño, who confirmed Bell’s story. I was upset for the Montaños, and when I asked Montaño how she felt that Bell had ripped off her family’s recipes to create a multibillion-dollar empire, I expected bitterness, anger, maybe even plans for a lawsuit in an attempt to get at least some of the billions of dollars that Taco Bell has earned over the past 50-plus years.

Instead, Montaño responded with grace: “Good for him!” She pointed out that Mitla had never suffered a drop in business because of Taco Bell, that her restaurant had been in business longer than his, and “our tacos were better.”

It’s an anecdote I always keep in mind whenever stories of cultural appropriation of food by white people get the Left riled up and rock the food world. The latest skirmish is going on in Portland, where two white girls decided to open up what the estimable Willamette Week called “a concept that fits twee Portland”: a breakfast burrito pop-up located within a hipster taco cart. The grand sin the gabachos committed, according to the haters, was the admission that they quizzed women in Baja California about how to make the perfect flour tortilla.

For their enthusiasm, the women have received all sorts of shade and have closed down their pop-up. To which I say: laughable. The gabachas knew exactly what they were doing, so didn’t they stand by it? Real gumption there, pendejas.

But also laughable is the idea that white people aren’t supposed to—pick your word—rip off or appropriate or get “inspired” by Mexican food, that comida mexicana is a sacrosanct tradition only Mexicans and the white girls we marry can participate in. That cultural appropriation is a one-way street where the evil gabacho steals from the poor, pathetic Mexicans yet again. 

………

What these culture warriors who proclaim to defend Mexicans don’t realize is that we’re talking about the food industry, one of the most rapacious businesses ever created. It’s the human condition at its most Darwinian, where EVERYONE rips EVERYONE off. The only limit to an entrepreneur’s chicanery isn’t resources, race, or class status, but how fast can you rip someone off, how smart you can be to spot trends years before anyone else, and how much money you can make before you have to rip off another idea again.

When Oberlin (where else?) students accused food services of cultural appropriation for serving allegedly crappy sushi, the REAL issue was not cultural appropriation, it was bad food.

When a friend was saying that dreadlocks were cultural appropriation, because white people could wear them, and black people were told that it was unprofessional, I said, “That’s not cultural appropriation, that’s racism.”

The only cultures that don’t appropriate from others are dead ones.

Cultural borrowing is a fact of life, and it more prevalent in cuisine than almost anywhere else.

I don’t like crappy mass-market bagels, a food of my people, but my problem is not cultural appropriation, it’s that the mass market bagels are complete sh%$.

If you are ranting about cultural appropriation, you are an imbecile.

If you are ranting about how outsiders have gotten a cherished aspect of your culture wrong, you are just like the rest of us.

Remember the Study That Had Rats Killing Themselves with Cocaine?

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It turns out that the study placed rats in miserable conditions, and when rats were placed in better environments, not only did they eschew drugged water, but addicted rats placed in better conditions stopped using as well.

The addiction crisis is driven by misery in the lives of ordinary Americans.

The parallels between the current US opioid epidemic and the explosion in drug and alcohol abuse in the Soviet Union just prior to its collapse are striking:

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

………

 Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

(emphasis mine)

Addiction is not just an artifact of pharmaceutical company malfeasance: It is a canary in a coal mine.

The Incercept Just Failed OPSEC 101

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The latest NSA leaker, the rather incongruously named Reality Winner, may have inadvertently been outed by a screw up by the online publication The Intercept:

Across the computer security world yesterday, heads were shaking.

The FBI filed a criminal complaint against Reality Winner, an NSA contractor, who the agency alleges stole classified documents and shared them with an “online news outlet” believed to be The Intercept. Because the documents in question appear to have been printed, some security experts have been wondering if a mysterious code used by some printers is to blame for Winner’s capture. That code is an almost-invisible grid of dots that some color printers ink into every document they print.

The complaint also details how agents say they tracked the leak back to Winner. The news org contacted the National Security Agency and said they were “in possession of what they believed to be a classified document.” The news organization then sent that document to the NSA, presumably for verification. “The U.S. Government Agency examined the document shared by the News Outlet and determined the pages of the intelligence reporting appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space,” the complaint continues.

From there, the agents say that they simply looked to see who had printed the document—six people had—and then discovered that one of them, Winner, had been in contact with the media company in question from her work computer (although on an unrelated topic).

When FBI agents showed up at her house, they say she confessed to “removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the News Outlet.” She faces up to 10 years in prison.

It’s clear that in releasing high resolution scans, The Intercept made it much easier for the authorities to identify the leaker.

This is a major f%$#-up.

FYI, a good primer on the printer tracking dots here. Basically, various law enforcement agencies, most notably the US Secret Service, have required these dots on color printers as an anti-counterfeiting measure.

I Hereby Apologise on Behalf of My Fellow Countrymen for This Gross Disrespect and Am Firm in My Opinion That a Man of His Status Should Have Been Saluted with a Mass Whakapohane*

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Following Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited New Zealand, and the crowds lining the route of his motorcade were rather demonstrative:

The weather was awful and the mood of the locals wasn’t much better when US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson​ arrived in Wellington.

US media travelling with Tillerson were surprised by the number of people flipping the bird at Tillerson as his motorcade sped through town.

New York Times correspondent Gardiner Harris said he had been in a lot of motorcades but even he was taken back by the negative reaction.

“I’ve been in motorcades for a couple of years now … I’ve never seen so many people flip the bird at an American motorcade as I saw today,” Harris said.

I am amused.

*Not my line. It was spoken by JH at the Stellar Parthenon BBS is native New Zealander, and the term “Whakapohane” refers to the Maori practice of baring ones buttocks as an expression of contempt .