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Comment Re:Who's buying? (Score 1, Insightful) 659

by Tekkah Tek (#53733665) Attached to: George Orwell's '1984' Tops Amazon's Bestseller List

First we should make sure it's not the Trump administration buying these. They might be mistaken for operating manuals.

We've heard Trump's inauguration speech with echoes of the villain Bane from the Dark Knight Rises, followed by the censorship of government agencies communicating actual science, and suffered through the administration's validation of "alternative facts." I think it is safe to say that the Trump's administration's use of 1984 as an operating manual is not a mistake, though the emotional maturity appears to be more in line with Lord of the Flies.

Comment Songs of the Dying Earth (Score 1) 338

by Tekkah Tek (#53559207) Attached to: What's the Best Book You Read This Year?

Top 2016 read book: Songs of the Dying Earth--a collection of short stories written by a variety of talented sci fi writers in tribute to Jack Vance, edited by George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois--quite a engrossing and mind-expanding journey.

A close second was The Political Writings of William Penn. He was a Christian Founding Grandfather (100+ years before the American Revolution) that would likely be appalled at current right-wing "Christian" politics.

Submission + - Inside Amazon's clickworker platform (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Hope Reese and Nick Heath at TechRepublic ask: "Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered?"

The article says: "Just over half of Turkers earn below the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, according to a Pew Research Center study."

The article quotes people who believe: "it will become increasingly common for computer systems to orchestrate labor".

That trend was also was the beginning of Marshall Brain's "Manna" short story...

Submission + - Security Firms Almost Brought Down Massive Mirai Botnet (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Level3 and others" have been very close to taking down one of the biggest Mirai botnets around, the same one that attempted to knock Internet offline in Liberia, and also hijacked 900,000 routers from German ISP Deutsche Telekom.

The botnet narrowly escaped due to the fact that its maintainer, a hacker known as BestBuy, had implemented a DGA (Domain Generation Algorithm) to generate random domain names where he hosted his servers. Currently, to avoid further takedown attempts from similar security firms, BestBuy has started moving the botnet's command and control servers to Tor.

"It's all good now. We don't need to pay thousands to ISPs and hosting. All we need is one strong server," the hacker said. "Try to shut down .onion 'domains' over Tor," he boasted, knowing that nobody can.

Comment Re: Finally, the gloves will come off! (Score 1) 1058

by Tekkah Tek (#53400693) Attached to: Twitters Says It Will Ban Trump If He Breaks Hate-Speech Rules

We're talking about banning speech based on someone taking offense ?

That's what you are talking about, but it appears that you are confused between government censure and private rights.

You can stand in the street and say whatever you want. That's your first amendment right.

You may not come in my house and do/say whatever you like. If I don't want you here, I can throw you out. That is my right.

Comment Re:Trump is love (Score 1) 1058

by Tekkah Tek (#53400639) Attached to: Twitters Says It Will Ban Trump If He Breaks Hate-Speech Rules

Honestly, how stupid is Twitter's management? Here is one person who has helped Twitter actually eclipse the MSM, despite the fact that nobody want to buy them, and this is how they wanna treat him? Go right ahead, and he can dry up the Twitter swamp.

That's right. Greed = Smart; Decency = Stupid.

Now, exactly how did we get in this mess in the first place? I forget.

Comment Re:Agent Smith (Score 1) 85

I'm not sure what Agent Smith has to do with satellite time lapse view or why a comment about mammals overpopulating can get modded up to an insightful 5. Mammals also defecate--now that is truly insightful or at least as insightful as the fact that they/we breed and if they/we do that a lot there will be too many of them/us.

Here's some truly deep insight for you: Some people can string words together and other people will think they make sense. (e.g. I am the eggman / They are the eggmen / I am the walrus / Goo goo g' joob). Put that in your pipe an smoke it.

I expect this comment to be quickly modded up to an insightful 5 as well as an informative 5 and a just plain silly 5.

Comment Re: WaPo? (Score 1) 272

Kuwaiti incubator babies Saddam did 9/11 Nigerian yellowcake Iraq's WMD That's just one set of and endless series.

It's true that they and others got some major stories wrong. It is also true that they have gotten the vast majority of their stories right. Please let me know when you've found an outlet with a better track record.

Comment Re:WaPo - leaders in the post-fact era (Score 1) 272

A lot of Western hard left is basically in love with Putin (and Assad, and they also loved Gaddafi), on the basis that, since they all are in opposition to "Western imperialism", they're the good guys. So no surprise here.

By your definition, Republican President-elect Trump is "hard left" except for the Western imperialism bit (which you put in quotes as if it were not a real thing that's been going on for centuries). If this dream weren't strange enough, I'd almost think you just made that up.

Submission + - You Can Now Rent a Mirai Botnet of 400,000 Bots (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two hackers are renting access to a massive Mirai botnet, which they claim has more than 400,000 infected bots, ready to carry out DDoS attacks at anyone's behest. The hackers have quite a reputation on the hacking underground and have previously been linked to the GovRAT malware, which was used to steal data from several US companies.

Renting around 50K bots costs between $3,000-$4,000 for 2 weeks, meaning renting the whole thing costs between $20,000-$30,000. After the Mirai source code leaked, there are countless of smaller Mirai botnets around, but this one is the biggest, accounting for more than half of all infected IoT devices. This is also the botnet that supposedly shut down Internet access in Liberia.

The original Mirai botnet was limited to only 200,000 bots because there were only 200,000 IoT devices connected online that had their Telnet ports open. The botnet that's up for rent now has received improvements and can also spread to IoT devices via SSH, hence the 400,000 bots total.

Submission + - SPAM: False CNN-porn report shows how fast fake news spreads

Submitted by xtsigs
xtsigs writes: No, despite what you read, CNN did not run porn for 30 minutes last night, as was reported by Fox News, the New York Post,Variety and other news organizations, several of which later corrected their stories. — from USA Today .

The story goes on to explain how the story started (a single tweet), how it was quickly picked up by media outlets (without verifying if CNN actually did, in truth, broadcast porn), how it was then retracted by some outlets (but not others).

Other outlets jumped on the story of the story while, as of early Saturday morning some sites are still running the original story claiming CNN did, in fact, broadcast 30 min of porn.

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