The story is more complicated than that. The city switched its water-supply at the order of the third in a series of four "emergency managers", each appointed by the governor. Maybe they got to the point of needing an Emergency Manager because of 20 or 30 years of "socialist" city policies, but the Flint City Council and Mayor had no power to stop the water supply switch when it happened; they were just bystanders. (Unpaid bystanders, too; the city manager suspended their salaries, or tried to.)

As an aside to an aside, the first pro-Trump billboard I ever saw was just outside Flint.

Two years. Not "several", although there's been link-rot in the news-blog since then, not unique to Facebook. In my own timeline, the first FB post I ever made was in October 2007, and I believe that's actually correct; I was tagged in a couple photos posted before that, and I have some backdated "Life Event"s before that, but if it was exactly two years maybe it was just a backup script that had a bug, or something, and it might have affected some other users as well but no one else noticed and bothered to complain.

Yes, there's a whole RFC series for Unicode labels in domain names, including advice to registrars for how to mitigate that problem. The ".com" domain itself is managed by Verisign, and they have a policy to address exactly that problem.

I've been in the habit of cross-posting stuff to FB and G+. I don't think this "breach" would have affected me, as my profile is already public. I also have a ham license, and at least one domain without "privacy" service on the WHOIS data, and listed my real home address as my registered address last time I ran for office, and use my real name as my Wikipedia handle, with my birth year listed on my user page.

There's probably a way to subscribe to some of the stuff I was following on G+ by direct push, or on FB. I have other contacts who had been active on G+ in the past but have already gone dark there, I haven't figured out where they moved to (if anywhere) yet.

There's a change.org petition asking for Google to keep G+ open, if anyone agrees they should.

Maybe I'm missing something specific about Georgia's government structure, but in Michigan, it's fairly common for the incumbent Secretary of State to be running for Secretary of State (for reelection after the first term), or for a statewide office like Governor or Senator (in the second term; Michigan has term limits), with no public outcry. The path into Secretary of State is highly political, because the candidates are nominated by state party conventions (not a primary). In the current election, both candidates campaigned on, among other things, being the right person to keep voting "fair" (for their definition of "fair").

Different OS. If you're using "cifsmount" for /home/ user or something similar you might be vulnerable. If the lock-screen gets you to a desktop that can only run SSH, VNC over SSH, or a locked-down HTTPS-only browser, not so much. Then again, the attack described in that article isn't just a USB thing... someone could probably build a male RJ45 dongle that runs the same attack.

Looks like the link to the original report (not in the Guardian article, but posted a couple times in the comments) might be Slashdotted. I found an archived copy at Internet Archive. It was posted last April and updated last May.

If you're asking about the file domains.txt , that's not the "bad" domains, that's the "legitimate" advertisers who were victimized by the scheme. The whitepaper doesn't have full technical detail, but it sounds like the bot-farms used hosts files or private DNS to serve pages that seemed to be within those domains, without ever hitting the origin servers or even a public CDN. The list of "bad" actors, by IP address range, is the file IPs-CIDR.txt .

Over the years I've bought a few items from a mail-order vendor that uses Yahoo! for their checkout/payment. Nothing since the breach in question, though... their deals haven't been that good recently.

Yahoo! also offers "premium" mail service, no ads, IMAP access may be a premium-only feature.

I would support an effort to use direct national IRV for the President, but with a healthy dose of caution about making such a major change. An "incremental" change that I'd support before that would be to have a week-later runoff if the popular vote doesn't have a majority, or if it doesn't match the expected decision of the Electoral College, maybe with the ballots limited to the higher vote-getters from the first round.

The exact procedure for appointing electors varies by state, but in most (all?) states the electors are nominated by a party. For example, in Michigan, the Republican electors were nominated at the state convention in late August. The people voting at the convention were county delegates; county delegates were chosen by vote at a county convention a few weeks before; the people at the county convention were precinct delegates and incumbent elected officials; the precinct delegates were elected back in May. The elector from my district is a 70ish retired white guy from Oakland County who has never held elected office other than precinct and convention delegate. It sounded from the remarks of his supporters like he came from a blue-collar background and had been apolitical for much of his younger life, but had been a tireless volunteer since becoming politically active.

If Trump does something sufficiently heinous and notorious between now and mid-December, or if he's actually dead, it's possible that some, most or all of the Republican electors could defect, but if they do so, they're more likely to vote for some other Republican than for any Democrat. If not all agree, that could pass the election to the House. There again, a Republican-controlled House is unlikely to choose Clinton; although it's possible as some sort of brokered deal (maybe keep Clinton as president but with Pence or Ryan as vice-president, for example).

Since it'll be offline for a while, perhaps... Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years.

vDOS — a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets.

The vDOS database, obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com at the end of July 2016, points to two young men in Israel as the principal owners and masterminds of the attack service, with support services coming from several young hackers in the United States. [...]

The law that Snyder signed in 2014, Public Act 345 of 2014, codified as section 445.1574 Prohibited conduct by manufacturer, has a lot of detailed regulations about how manufacturers may treat dealers. The requirement that manufacturers only sell through dealers is terse, and buried in the middle of it:

(1) A manufacturer shall not do any of the following: [...] (h) Directly or indirectly own, operate, or control a new motor vehicle dealer, including, but not limited to, a new motor vehicle dealer engaged primarily in performing warranty repair services on motor vehicles under the manufacturer's warranty, or a used motor vehicle dealer. This subdivision does not apply to any of the following: [...] (i) Sell any new motor vehicle directly to a retail customer other than through franchised dealers, unless the retail customer is a nonprofit organization or a federal, state, or local
government or agency. [...]

(There are several exceptions, some are grandfather clauses for pre-2000 manufacturer-owned dealers, the others don't appear to apply to Tesla.) Subsections (h) and (i) were present in the prior version of the law, so I'm not sure how old some form of that requirement is. The bill changed the tail end of subsection (i) from a reference to "the manufacturer's" dealers to "franchised" dealers, but the substantiative changes to the law were a new subsection (y) "Prevent, attempt to prevent, prohibit, coerce, or attempt to coerce a new motor vehicle dealer from charging a consumer any documentary preparation fee allowed to be charged by the dealer under the laws of this state" and a new section (3) "This section applies to a manufacturer that sells, services, displays, or advertises its new motor vehicles in this state".