aka the Fyre Festival of monetary policy

Translation:
At Cellebrite, we pay cash for exploits, repackage and sell them to repressive governments the world over so they can find new ways to accelerate state surveillance, crackdown dissent, and jail/assassinate their citizens

If you're rich, paying taxes is the equivalent of 'being strangled', it follows that in order to avoid the life threatening injury of having slightly less money, the rich must do what they have to in order to survive. They have to evade taxes, otherwise they wouldn't be able to keep breathing.

Whereas, if you are middle or working class, you are used to living with little to no money (and a lot of debt), therefore paying taxes is totally safe for you, it won't hurt you in any way.

Can you even imagine a society in which tax law is actually enforced, a society in which the insanely rich are moderately impaired in their ability to get insanely richer? It simply wouldn't work.

The bigger question is: how is even legal to sell exploits?

It should be illegal, or at the very least heavily regulated.

We need to find economic and legal ways of doing things that result in better security, not simply allowing private companies to profit from making everybody less secure.

Replying to myself but yes, 'Israel' not 'Isreal'.

Time for that second cup of coffee....

Well I couldn't help thinking about the Iranian civilian program and the 'alarming rate of failure' of their centrifuges.

Are the contractors who worked on Galileo going to discover some kind of Stuxnet variant on their network?

Technically, it's possible. Thanks to work of security researchers we know it happened before, Stuxnet is well-documented. And thanks to Edward Snowden and the journalists who reported on the documents he leaked, we know the NSA/TAO does in fact hack allies.

I wish these kind of doubts could be instantly discarded as conspiracy theories, unfortunately, this is not the world we live in. The most technically capable nations (USA/China/Russia/Isreal) have made the choice of using hacking as a weapon rather than helping secure the systems used by their citizens.

A very thorough timeline about the whole thing:
http://www.thompsontimeline.com/the-hidden-smoking-gun-the-combetta-cover-up/

Get a cup of coffee, it's long but worth it. The timeline is non-partisan and sticks to the facts, basically it is alt-right/trump troll/conspiracy free.

Bottom line: It doesn't look good at all.

October 28, 2014: The State Department formally asks Clinton for all of her work-related emails.

December 5, 2014: She turns over 30,000 emails from her @clintonemail.com account to the State Department. Another 31,000 emails from the same account were deemed personal, and Clinton kept those. Her lawyers did the sorting, no State Department or National Archives personnel had a chance to appraise or examine the remaining 31,000.

December 2014: Shorty after turning the 30,000 emails, Clinton decides she no longer needs access to any of her emails older than 60 days. Her staff is told to change the retention policy on her server, which will lead to the deletion of all her the emails that weren't turned over to the State Department.
The FBI later recovered about 17,500 of Clinton’s “personal” emails. FBI Director James Comey has said that “thousands” were indeed work-related.

March 25, 2015 and March 31, 2015: There were two conference calls between Clinton staffers and PNR, the company managing her emails. Between those two calls, Combetta, the PNR employee managing Clinton server (and Reddit user 'Stonetear'), has an “Oh shit!” moment and remembers that he’d forgotten to make the requested retention policy change back in December 2014. He immediately deletes all of Clinton’s emails and uses BleachBit to permanently wipe them.
He later told the FBI that at the time he was aware of emails mentioning a Congressional request to preserve all of Clinton’s emails.

Sometimes in 2016: The Justice Department gives Combetta some form of legal immunity.
The FBI having Combetta take the fall for the deletions while making an immunity deal with him *could* be a particularly clever move to prevent anyone from being indicted. That part isn't clear yet.

In any circumstances, the FBI giving Combetta immunity makes no sense at all. It's the equivalent of giving a hired hitman immunity without going after the person who hired him.

You would think that by now the utter disaster that is the Galaxy Note 7 would have made Samsung see the light so that they would go back to selling phones with a removable battery... Right?

Nah....

Soldered battery, "Edge" curved shape, no sd card, appalling battery life due to 4K screen and as a bonus: constant Google location tracking that is impossible to turn off (welcome to Android 7). You know, what users asked for... /sarcasm

Between this and Apple's "courage" no headphone jack iphones, the Android/iOS duopoly is really paying off... it's so nice being able to fuck your consumers over with shit products that make no sense... what are you going to do? Buy a Microsoft phone? Google and Apple own you.

Twitter can fix Twitter with just a few lines of code
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjesterscourt.cc%2F2016%2F08%2F15%2Ftwitter-can-fix-twitter-just-lines-code%2F

tl;dr:
If you block someone that should also prevent them from @mentioning your user name

Monday last week: Bill Clinton meets Attorney General Loretta Lynch at Phoenix airport
Tuesday: FBI Director Comey recommends against charging Hillary Clinton
Wednesday: Attorney General Loretta Lynch announces there will be no charges
Thursday: FBI Director Comey says the guy who claimed to have hacked Clinton server actually didn't do it.

That's quite an amazing timing. Can anyone one really pretend the power that be did not decide that they were going to take a week to bury the Clinton email scandal? Can you imagine the coordination required to make all that happen the *same* week? Do they even care about how it looks?

So that Romanian guy that was very public about the fact he got into Hillary's mail, he didn't. And since the FBI conveniently has no proof about anyone else hacking her server... I guess everything is definitely dandy and 100% clean.

The level of "Move Along, Nothing to See Here" is so high it's not even funny.

Now all we need is an "NSA My Activity" and we're good to go.