Category Archives: Security

Campus Intolerance: Uttering "All Lives Matter" On Social Media Gets Student Sanctioned

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Certifiably brown Texas student Rohini Sethi1was suspended from the University of Houston student government after she uttered “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like AllLivesMatter.” while not being brown enough on social media. For offering the wrong empathy Sethi faces the following sanctions:

  • 50 Day unpaid suspension from her paid2 student government position.
  • Compulsory attendance at an August diversity workshop and three university sponsored cultural events every month from September through March with the exception of December.
  • Compulsory writing of a "letter of reflection" about how her TweetCrime has impacted the student government and the University of Houston as a whole.
  • Mandatory public presentation on September 28th, 2016 on “the knowledge she has gained about cultural issues facing our society.”

Handing down the punishment white Student Government Commisar Shane Smith3 (WOT:nonperson) attributed the intensity of Sethi's sanctions to her failure to acknowledge just how much more the class of black lives matter at the moment compared to the class of all lives.4 Smith was granted one time powers to punish Sethi as he saw fit in a vote that only required a simple majority, because kicking her out of her paid Government club gig would have required mustering a 3/4 majority and a trial5  in front of Student Supreme Court.6

Shane Smith on the implications on his decision on speech at the University of Houston offered:

The first amendment [sic] prevents a person from being jailed by the governmetn [sic] for what they say. But [it] does not prevent people from receiving other consequences for what they say.

Apparently you can't get a university education in Texas.

  1. Vice President of the University of Houston's Student Government association and WOT:nonperson  ↩

  2. ~700 United States Dollars monthly  ↩

  3. Self declared 3.4 GPA anticipated graduation Spring 2017 with a major in economics. Considering graduate school and full time employment according to his LinkedIN. ↩

  4. In fact lives do not matter all that much.  ↩

  5. Shane Smith is a member of the University of Houston Mock Trial Association.  ↩

  6. And everyone knows Supreme Courts are clogged with old white men with names like Clarence Thomas, Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagen, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and son of an immigrant Samuel Alito.  ↩

Hackers Catch "Pokemon Go" Creator's Twitter And Quora Accounts

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Hacking group OurMine has struck again, this time targeting the twitter account of Pokemon Go creator John Hanke. Hanke was apparently too busy catching them all to have done any password hygenics. This neglect allowed the hackers to easily breach his Quora account, which led to the twitter account being compromised. The account still displayed tweets by the hackers at the time of this article (archived). Mr. Hanke is merely the latest in a series of attacks targeting high-profile users on social media, this is likely fallout from the trove of passwords leaked by the hacker Peace. Him in our time.

Qubes Hit By Xen Privilege Escalation

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Qubes a "securtity focused" desktop operating system has been hit with a privilege escalation vulnerability inherited from the Xen hypervisor which holds the whole thing together. The entire security model of Qubes depends on using the Xen hypervisor to isolate all the things, but privilege escalation vulnerabilities happen to hypervisors. An update has been released to address this particular bug, but for actual security skip virtualizing and try physicalizing. Check those privileges.

Florida Catches Zika

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Following this summer's failure to begin a serious program of mosquito eradication, emerging news is suggesting that flying syringes in Florida have begun passing the Zika virus among humans. Now that mosquitoes have begun using women in the United States as a weapon, the government of Florida has announced it will begin serious mosquito control measures. Britain responded with a guidance1 on sex among its subjects who have traveled to Florida this summer. This British sex ban features substantial gender inequality affecting males for six months following their return from Florida where unspecified other genders face only 6-8 weeks. Sorry for your loss.

  1. Really a ban  ↩

RBG Black Rebel Sanctioned Further As Police Apparently Fear Mysterious Organization

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Alleged Rebel But Gangster Black Rebels member Justin Payne faces further sanctions after police allege a tweet was sent from one of his old alleged twitter accounts. The tweets reportedly alleged that police and the FBI set Payne up, expressed remorse that alleged Dallas police shooter Micah Johnson was killed in a drone strike, and further suggested that Micah Johnson was a Rebel But Gangster Black Rebel. Payne was hit with six months of house arrest and intensified monitoring of his computer and cellular phone use. Payne waived his opportunity to challenge this restrictions in a hearing though Payne has not admitted authorship of the tweets.

This development raises serious questions about the Rebel But Gangster Black Rebels including:

  1. Why does this organization alleged to have a national presence only appear in a local newspaper.
  2. Where does this organization fall on the "law enforcement" threat radar? Somewhere around ISIS or somewhere around Trendon Shavers?
  3. Is the whole Rebel But Gangster Black Rebels just one of those entrapment things law enforcement sets up to create terrorists, except this one outgrew their sandbox?

Peace in our time.

LastPass Sucks, Always Sucked

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Tavis Ormandy (WOT:nonperson) uncovered a serious security vulnerability in LastPass. Before disclosing the vulnerability to LastPass developers, Ormandy tweeted:

Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap.

Due to the number of suckers entrusting LastPass for every login, Ormandy received numerous panicked responses due to a postmortem published yesterday on a serious vulnerability that lets websites take passwords held by Lastpass at will. Peace in our time.

Monsanto Led Dicamba Enthusiasm Raises Tensions Among Farmers

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The debut of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready Xtend Crop System(TM)(R)" is raising tensions among soybean and cotton farmers who have and have not adopted the seed component of the system, especially in the American Mid South (archived). This year's combination of weather and desperate tillage has lead to ideal conditions for Palmer's Amaranth to flourish in soybean fields threatening to greatly reduce yields by shading soybean plants and consuming soil nitrogen1 far more aggressively than the soybeans can.

Glyphosate resistant Palmer's Amaranth after its debut in 2006 has swiftly spread across the country and this year's proliferation of the weed has forced farmers who planted "Roundup Ready Xtend Crop System(TM)(R)" cotton and soybeans to spray their fields with Dicamba. The twist is that Monsanto isn't done bringing the herbicide portion of "Roundup Ready Xtend" to market so farmers who planted seeds from this Monsanto crop system are just spraying and dumping Dicamba on their fields out of desperation. Farmers who lack these seeds are watching their soybeans curl up and suffer, because Dicamba is especially effective on legumes.

The fallout from this year's soybean season will likely include the consumption of immense amounts of various EPA and Department of Agriculture functionaries time, substantial monetary penalties and torts against the farmers who manage to harvest soybeans this year, and pain for Monsanto as restrictions on applying Dicamba increase and diminish the point of marketing Dicamba resistant soybeans. Sorry for your loss.

  1. Most plants take soil nitrogen and pump it into growing above the soil. Palmer's Amaranth isn't content with that. It takes soil nitrogen for growth and then takes still more soil nitrogen and stores it as nitrates. At one point Palmer's Amaranth was grown as a staple grain, but in the contemporary farm environment the level of nitrates accumulated turn the plant toxic.  ↩

John Hinckley Junior Released From Psychiatric Hospital

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John Hinckley Junior, (WOT:nonperson) the man who shot Ronald Reagan (WOT:deceased), is being released from the psychiatric hospital where the United States government has held him for reprogramming since he was found not criminally responsible for the March 30th, 1981 shooting. In addition to Reagan, Hinckley wounded a police officer, a secret service agent, and crippled press secretary James Brady (WOT:deceased). For political reasons Brady's 2014 death was ruled a homicide resulting from his being shot 33 years earlier.

EU Trying A Bitcoin Registry Seeing How Regulation Fails

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The EU supposes that if they can't actually regulate Bitcoin, they can make a registry for it. The proposed central registry would be fed data through all cyrptocurrency wallet providers and exchanges operating within European Union member nations. Law enforcement agencies across the Europe Union would have access to the registry under the pretense anti-terrorism.1 Sorry for your laws.

  1. You know terrorism like #Brexit, Italeave, and Departugal.  ↩

Coinbase Fumbling Through Ether Huffing Fork Experience

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Early this morning on Twitter, Coinbase's "exchange" GDAX announced they will temporarily maintain sole custody of the Classic portion of their Ether huffers' forked tokens for several weeks. The exchange released an announcement:

100% of ETC associated with ETH balances at the time of the hard fork are secured in GDAX cold storage.

We plan to allow withdrawal of an amount of ETC that corresponds to ETH balances at the time of the hard fork. We'll be working on this feature over the coming weeks and will provide updates via this Twitter account.

The freeze has some users on social media wondering if early post fork shenanigans at Coinbase might have threatened the firm's solvency. Sorry fork, your loss.