The Bad Guys are on a losing streak

Earlier this week we saw a bunch of Russian hackers sentenced to prison, now we see Interpol execute a massive take down of multiple groups of Bad Guys:

Interpol is reporting a big win after a massive combined operation against online criminals made 41 arrests and seized hardware thought to be used for nefarious purposes.

Operation Synergia II – the follow up to the first Synergia raids that were announced in February – saw cops in 95 countries crack down on phishers, ransomware extortionists, and information thieves around the world. The operation was carried out in conjunction with the corporate world, specifically Group-IB, Trend Micro, Kaspersky and Team Cymru.

In addition to the arrests, Interpol revealed 65 people are still under investigation and claimed to have shuttered 22,000 IP addresses, taken control of 59 servers and 43 other computing devices.

Bravo Zulu, y'all.

New substack that's worth your time

Randal emails to point out that he's started a Substack.  It's pretty interesting.  Here's an example about trade unions:

For the longest time much of the media has fed us the idea that “union = overpaid/lazy/bad”. Now we should all have the following ingrained in our skulls by now, “the media lies”.

Proceeding from that “law” (it really should be a scientific law at this point) we can deduce that the media is lying about unions. The real question to ask ourselves is, “why?”

Like I said, pretty interesting.

 

CMP Update

Ever want to be an M1 Garand armorer?  The CMP might be able to help out:

Designed for those who wish to take their passion for the venerable M1 Garand to the next level, the Advanced Maintenance Class (AMC) held in Anniston, Alabama, offers students a unique opportunity to receive unparalleled training from our knowledgeable Custom Shop Staff and build their very own M1 Rifle.

RANDOM DRAWING ENTRY WINDOW AND PROCESS 

Due to limited spaces and high demand, CMP will hold a random drawing to select participants. Interested individuals may enter the Random Drawing between November 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.

If this is your bag, baby, then get on over there.

 

Dad Joke CCCXLV

No matter how kind you are, German children are kinder.

Spasiba, tovarisch!

Wow:

Four members of the now-defunct REvil ransomware operation have been sentenced to several years in prison in Russia, marking one of the rare instances where cybercriminals from the country have been convicted of hacking and money laundering charges.

Russian news publication Kommersant reported that a court in St. Petersburg found Artem Zaets, Alexei Malozemov, Daniil Puzyrevsky, and Ruslan Khansvyarov guilty of illegal circulation of means of payment. Puzyrevsky and Khansvyarov have also been found guilty of using and distributing malware.

...

REvil, which was once one of the most prolific ransomware groups, was dismantled after Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced arrests against several members in an unprecedented takedown. 

They aren't just going to prison, they're going to a Russian prison.  More of this, please.

 

 

What's Donald Trump's carry piece?

Lawrence has the details.

Someone at Netflix is getting fired

So their live streaming of the Mike Tyson fight last night was an unmitigated disaster.  But come on - you'd think that Netflix IT would understand how to spin up capacity to meet demand.  Maybe their replacements will.

For those who like the Sweet Science (or who used to), this is a fascinating episode from Hard Core History about how boxing has changed over time, mostly for the worse.  Dan Carlin interviews Mike Silver, author of The Arc of Boxing which is a terrific read.  I'm in general agreement with both the podcast and the book, although have to admit that I quite enjoyed the Barrios/Ramos bout last night.  It had a very Friday Night Fights feel to it.

The good security news keeps rolling in

I don't remember a week of such good security news:

A 25-year-old man in Ontario, Canada has been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting more than 160 companies that used the cloud data service Snowflake.

On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario, on a provisional arrest warrant from the United States. Bloomberg first reported Moucka’s alleged ties to the Snowflake hacks on Monday.

...

In a statement on Moucka’s arrest, Mandiant said UNC5537 aka Alexander ‘Connor’ Moucka has proven to be one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024.

 Too bad we can't send him to a Russian prison, nyet?

AI failures in healthcare

Oh my word:

On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

Of course, they use it because it's cheaper than paying a human transcriber.  So riddle me this, Healthcare Administrator: what do you call yet another AI that lies all the time?  A day that ends in "-day".

And people have started noticing:

While the vast majority of people over 50 look for health information on the internet, a new poll shows 74% would have very little or no trust in such information if it were generated by artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, 20% of older adults have little or no confidence that they could spot misinformation about a health topic if they came across it.

That percentage was even higher among older adults who say their mental health, physical health or memory is fair or poor, and among those who report having a disability that limits their activities. In other words, those who might need trustworthy health information the most were more likely to say they had little or no confidence they could spot false information.

People are smart enough to catch a whiff of marketing Bravo Sierra.

From now on I will start asking all of my healthcare providers if they do transcription, and if so whether they use AI for the transcription.  If they do I will demand to review the transcript.  If they won't, I'll get a different provider.

Anarcho-Tyranny in the UK

Paging George Orwell:

A journalist with the London Telegraph has been visited unannounced at her home by police in the UK who told her they are investigating a “non-crime hate incident” over a tweet she posted a year ago.

...

Allison Pearson relates what happened on Sunday in an article, noting that police will not tell her which post is the subject of the investigation, nor will they tell her who her accuser is or what they feel offended about.

Well okay, then.  But the UK Plods seems to have forgotten the old saying to not mess with someone who buys ink by the barrel:

Way to shine a spotlight on your policy, dumbasses.  Streisand Effect much?

I've just caught up with this by @AllisonPearson. Fortunately, she is a member of the Free @SpeechUnion, but I hope the @Telegraph will also be vigorously defending her freedom of expression. The ‘non-crime hate incident’ industry is a malignancy.https://t.co/iLsuNX4MgQ pic.twitter.com/yf0Cr2f0Vr

— Adrian Hilton (@Adrian_Hilton) November 12, 2024

The Democrats spent the last 4 years chasing the Great Orange Whale

I've been a bit startled by the unhinged reaction by so many Democrats to Trump's rather resounding victory.  Probably I shouldn't be - after all the lesson of Facebook (and most social media) proves the old adage that it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than it is to open it and remove all doubt.

Sure, I've been wrong all the time in the past (click on the tag for polls - often wrong but at least I showed my work).  But when things didn't go my way it was a shrug and get on to what's next.  That's not what we see at all.

Sure, the Democrats never really talked much about issues that most people care about - are you better off than you were four years ago, that sort of thing.  Instead, for the last four years it's been OrangeManBad, and nothing but OrangeManBad.  Now they are standing amidst the destruction of their hopes as the Great Orange Whale swims off to the White House.

And it clicked about why they are losing their minds.  Herman Melville wrote about this 175 years ago, and Ricardo Montalban immortalized the greatest lines from the book.

Maybe it's time to reread that novel, and an exercise in understanding the broken political philosophy of the Democrats.  But then again, I don't think that *I* need to reread it.

They do.

Absurdum est ut alios regat, qui seipsum regere nescit.

It is absurd that a man should rule over others, who cannot rule himself.

- Latin proverb

Dad Joke CCCXLIV

The latest announcement from President-Elect Trump is that on Day 1 he is going to sign an Executive order to ban pre-shredded cheese. 

He says he's going to make America grate again.

Veteran's Day

It's the soldier, not the reporter who has given us
Freedom of the Press.
It's the soldier, not the poet, who has given us
Freedom of Speech.
It's the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the
Freedom to Demonstrate.
It's the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the
Right to a Fair Trial.
It's the soldier who salutes the flag, serves under the flag and
whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who gives the protestor the right he abuses to burn the flag.

- Father Dennis O'Brien, USMC

 

Dad Joke CCCXLIII

Have you noticed that Donald Trump only wins when he's competing against a woman?

Quote of the Day

It's been oddly quiet after the election - no cities burning, that sort of thing.  And this is interesting:

Only anecdotal but my girlfriend says her lefty keyboard warrior friends have been oddly silent on Facebook since Tuesday. This is the way.

Very oddly quiet for a bunch of folks who wouldn't shut up about how Trump was a fascist and democracy would be dead if he won.   Very oddly quiet.

22/24 and 45/47

Only two Presidents have been elected to non-consecutive terms.  The first was Grover Cleveland who served as 22nd (in 1884) and 24th (in 1892) Presidential terms (his two terms interrupted by Benjamin Harrison in 1888 even though Cleveland won the popular vote).  Long time readers will know that Cleveland is very much a Friend of the Blog, being listed as one of the top US Presidents since forever.

The second, of course, is Donald Trump - Presidential terms 45 and (now) 47.  We will see how history rates his two terms; 45 was pretty successful but with a lot of important stuff left undone.  His great Presidential flaw was the people he appointed do implement his policies where they often submarined him.

We will see how much he learned from that.  Glen Reynolds posts some interesting ideas (you should absolutely read the whole thing; it's certain that Trump's people have):

Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum.  He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him.  Here’s something I wrote in 2017:

Like airplanes on a runway.  Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time:  Shock and awe.  Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated.  Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach.  Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.

 

Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it.  Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain.  Divide and conquer.

Bold added by me, because it's right in line with something I posted in the last week or so:

The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies.  I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount.  That's how the game is played.  So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins.  I expect that this would pay big dividends.

So we shall see what we shall see.  The results from last night were not the landslide I was sort of expecting (although it was a solid win).  I expect there was some cheating but nothing like what we saw in 2020 - because as I've been saying, party apparatchiks saw the same Preference Cascade forming and a lot fewer were willing to risk jail to cheat for a loser.

But like Donald Trump, the USA dodged a bullet last night.

Big lines at the polls here

Well, and our precinct, at least.  I'm not sure what that means - there's no way that Kamala Harris will win deep red Manatee County, Florida.  But Republican voters seem eager to turn out and vote.

I guess we'll see tonight.

The Climate Change election

No, it's not because Harris is mad as a hatter on the Green New Deal or because Trump will kill all of this off - although both are entirely correct.  No, this is thinking about the polling which shows the race to be neck and neck even though it is anything but.

Long time readers know how I bang on and on about the hideous data problems in today's Climate Science.  I've been doing this for fifteen years - this post may not be the earliest where I delved into the problems in the climate databases, but it's one of the earliest.  How To Create A Consensus On Global Warming:

We keep hearing people tell us that there is a "consensus" that the planet is warming, because the "science is settled". Longtime readers know my feelings on the latter, so there's no need to rehash old arguments. Instead, I'd like to look at how one might go about manufacturing a consensus. It's actually not hard.

Step 1: Change the data

[lots of details on data manipulation and shenanigans removed]

We see this in high fidelity in the polls for this election.  There are a million ways to manipulate the polls to give you the results you want, such as estimates of Republican vs. Democrat turnout.  In essence, I'm not objecting so much to the results of the polls, but rather to the assumptions that go into the sausage-making machine.  Change the assumptions, change the output.

But my old post also highlights a key issue in play on today's polls:

Step 2. Fund only scientific research that confirms warming.

Who is paying for these polls, and what are their agendas?  Quite frankly, we don't know either of these but the polls are acting in very close agreement.  You could look at that as a measure of accuracy, or you could look at that as an outcome of the agendas - such as shaping public opinion and expectations.

Now I may just be nasty and suspicious but there is a way that we can test whether my suspicions hold water.  It's the same thing we can do with Climate Science, to validate what we hear from the establishment scientists.  All we have to do is ask a simple question: if the data are so settled, do we see lots of corroborating evidence or do we see a lot of evidence contradicting the establishment view?

In both cases, we see a lot of evidence contradicting the official narrative.

For example, for Global Warming, we see all sots of non-warming things:

• "Global Warming" seems to be causing a whole lot of blizzards.
• Record temperatures show the hottest year in US history was almost 90 years ago.
• We're told it's the HOTTEST YEAR EVER!!!11!!eleventy!!! but we still see record snow and cold.

You would think that if the science really were so settled that evidence for Global Warming would be falling off the trees.  It's not.

And so with evidence for a "neck and neck election".  If it were so settled - after all, essentially all polls say exactly that - then why all the evidence that says it's not?

• Donald Trump campaigns for Arab-American vote in Detroit
• LA Times, Washington Post, Gannet refuse to endorse Harris
• All the betting sites have Trump not just ahead, but way ahead.
• Even the crooked polls have Harris neck-and-neck, where both Hillary and Biden were up by 5 or 6
• She is the incumbent but only 28% of Americans think the country is on the right track
• Barack Obama is trying to shame Black men to vote for Harris.  And it's not working.

If it were a neck and neck race, you'd see a bunch of these on Harris' side, too.  You don't.

Remember, we're in the middle of a preference cascade.  Don't pay any attention to the polls which are trying to gaslight you.  Pay attention to what you see with your own eyes.  And as to the "margin of cheat" you can believe that a bunch of Democrat operatives are doing exactly that right now, and wondering if they want to risk 10 years in Club Fed to try to push a loser across the finish line.  A bunch of them will take a hard pass on that.

A stump removal kit

It's not super hard, you just need some things:

1. A chainsaw
2. Some shovels
3. Rope
4. Trailer hitch
5. Neighborhood friends
   

 I was part of #5.  Been a while since I dug up a stump.