…what does sense have in common with courtesy?

Rishi Sunak has attempted to appease the right wing of his party by appointing Esther McVey as a Cabinet Office minister.

The GB News presenter, who was one of the first to be ousted from the 2019 Conservative leadership race, is reported to have been tasked with leading the government’s anti-woke agenda, acting as a “common sense tsar”.

McVey’s appointment, officially as a minister without portfolio, is one of the final moves of the prime minister’s wider reshuffle, which kicked off with Suella Braverman being sacked from his cabinet.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/13/sunak-seeks-to-appease-tory-right-by-giving-esther-mcvey-ministerial-role

…we call it common but it seems as rare as hens’ teeth most days when politics is involved…but then…one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist…& one person’s common sense is another’s reactionary bullshit…& esther’s?

Esther McVey has been appointed Minister of State for the Cabinet Office, with her main role said to be “speaking common sense” on behalf of the Government.

Her role will be to represent Rishi Sunak’s government on TV and radio as much as possible, with sources saying she has been appointed in an attempt to show the Government is committed to its “anti-woke” agenda.

https://www.gbnews.com/politics/esther-mcvey-rishi-sunak-reshuffle

…I wouldn’t normally sully your eyes with the garbage GB news shovels…but…they are (…were if common sense were involved…but…quite likely are as this shit goes) her employer

GB News currently employs four serving Conservative MPs as well as the former prime minister, Boris Johnson.

This has raised questions about whether GB News is abiding by Ofcom rules and if Ofcom is doing its job properly.
[…]
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson, Esther McVey and Philip Davies all host their own shows on GB News.

Sir Jacob has not revealed his salary, but Mr Anderson has recorded a £100,000 salary from GB News.

Former cabinet minister, Ms McVey, received £58,650 for her show in 2022. Husband and co-host, Mr Davies, received £46,203.

Mr Johnson announced he was joining the channel last month, it is not known how much he is being paid.

Lord Grade told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that Ofcom did not “want to be in the business of telling broadcasters, licensees, who they can employ, who they can’t employ”.
[…]
Lord Grade also said he had to “be careful” when speaking about GB News as Ofcom has 14 investigations open into the channel.
[…]
An interview by married presenters and serving MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies, with chancellor Jeremy Hunt, was found to have breached impartiality rules.

Sir Jacob’s show is under investigation for allegedly twice breaching the “politicians as presenters” rule which means “no politician may be used as a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programmes unless, exceptionally, it is editorially justified”.

Ofcom will not tell GB News to stop hiring politicians [BBC]

…in a sane world that would all add up to the tories’ electoral prospects having sunk without trace…but…alas…we don’t live there

James Cleverly was gutted. No more flying round the world on private jets. Or, if he really must, then slumming it in first class. He had lived for travel. For people telling him he was marvellous. Hanging out in embassies. Never paying for anything. Now he had been asked to take over as home secretary. That was a thankless fucking job. Just being driven in cars to detention centres. Nothing the government did was going to stop the small boats. This was just Sunak’s endgame. Spinning out the futility till the next election. And Jimmy Dimly had no choice but to go along with it. He didn’t have the self-worth to resign. Still, home sec would look good on the CV.

Just then a vaguely familiar middle-aged man was spotted walking up Downing Street. Was it … ? Could it be … ? It could! It was Big Dave Cameron. But what was he doing there? He’d last been seen there in 2016 when he’d whistled his way back into No 10 after single-handedly wrecking the country. Mmm. Perhaps he was on his way to do some more dodgy lobbying for Greensill. Things hadn’t panned out well for Big Dave in the intervening years. He’d just drifted aimlessly from non-job to non-job. “I used to be prime minister,” he would say sadly to anyone who would listen. We’ve tried to forget.

“Here’s the thing, Big Dave,” said Rishi. “I’ve rather scraped the bottom of the barrel. I’ve hunted around the gene puddle of talent that is the Tory party and concluded that not one of them is fit to be foreign secretary. So I’d like you to give it a go. It’s not that hard a job. Hell, how could it be if Jimmy D’s done it for a year without starting a war? And obvs, you’d get a peerage thrown in. Though, to tell you the truth, I thought you’d have one already by now. So what do you say? You wouldn’t even have to answer departmental questions or appear in the house. So there would be no accountability at all!”

Big Dave stroked both his chins. This was a tricky one. A job that might actually require some work. Not his usual bag at all. “You do know that I have been critical of almost everything you have done as prime minister,” he said. “At almost every opportunity, you have made the wrong call. Come to think of it, you might even be slightly worse than I was.”

“That’s why I want you back,” Rish! enthused. “Because I am the change prime minister. I am the Conservative who will clean up the country after the Conservatives. Nothing shouts ‘change’ more than bringing back the prime minister who started the decline to help manage the decline. So what do you say? Obviously, we’ll try and keep you away from Europe. The EU hasn’t forgiven you for Brexit. So do try and not be so careless this time. Concentrate for more than five minutes if you can. OK? Now what’s your plan for the rest of the world?”
[…]
As Big Dave bounced out of Downing Street, Rish! returned to his spreadsheet. Still far too many gaps. What he wouldn’t give for at least one vaguely competent minister. Some hope. Obviously Thérèse Coffey would have to go. She had been the anti-environment secretary. Her proudest legacy to the planet would be her resignation. Let the rivers rejoice!

Maybe Steve Barclay could replace her. At least he was quite nice. If equally useless. But then he would need a new health secretary. Who better than the entitled Vicky Atkins to take over? Someone with no experience of anything. It wasn’t as if the doctors were on strike, waiting lists were at a record high and hospitals crumbling. Yup, Vicky would be perfect. What could possibly go wrong? While he was about it, he could also sack the hopeless Greg Hands as party chairman. A man who literally did nothing except tweet the same unfunny Liam Byrne letter five times a day.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. It was Olive Dowden. Junior ministers were resigning in droves. Even the ones who were OK at their jobs. Getting out while they were still young. Had their lives ahead of them. Ready for a last chance powerdrive. Their best hope of re-election to wipe their fingerprints from government. Or just get out completely. The ultimate detox. So that just left the dregs. The desperate who would take any job. Anything. What a shit show. Imagine Grant Shapps as defence secretary. Or Esther McVey as minister for common sense. Has Sunak ever met her? Or watched her show on GB News? She’s senseless. This is the end, beautiful friend … the end.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/13/sunak-searches-the-gene-puddle-of-tory-talent-and-finds-david-cameron

…except…it’s not, is it? …although…it might resemble the means to a few

At a recent press conference an IDF spokesperson displayed a satellite photograph of the hospital site with military “command” elements marked on it, which it described as an illustration based on “the true material that we have in our hands”. In footage said to be from an interrogation, a Hamas militant captured last month described how Hamas had “hidden in the hospitals”. Israel has also released other evidence apparently showing tunnels close to or in other medical facilities in Gaza.
[…]
Hamas and officials of the Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza have denied the claims, saying they are propaganda used to justify attacks on health facilities. Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British doctor working at al-Shifa described the Israeli claim as an “outlandish excuse”. Human Rights Watch, the US campaign group, said it could not corroborate the Israeli allegation.

[…] Al-Shifa has become a strategic objective for Israel, which sees the hospital as the nerve centre of Hamas’ administrative and military capabilities. For Hamas and its supporters, it has become a symbol of the organisation’s ability to fight against a militarily more powerful foe. For millions across the world, it has come to epitomise the suffering of innocent civilians. More than 11,000 people, about 40% of them children, have been killed, according to Palestinian authorities, and more than half of the population of Gaza have been made homeless.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/13/what-is-happening-at-al-shifa-hospital-and-why

…so…it’s not you…the world is fucking crazy…& innocence remains a lousy defence

US rights group sues Biden for alleged ‘failure to prevent genocide’ in Gaza [Guardian]

…I’m not here to tell you ol’ joe doesn’t deserve his share of blame for a whole bunch of stuff…but…when it comes to that particular failure

This Photograph Demands an Answer [NYT] [ETA: …I’m not saying anyone ought to feel obligated to wade through these waters…but…if you ask me…which apparently I neglected to do when putting this together…they deserve not to be dammed behind a damned paywall…so…https://archive.ph/SCMph]

…I don’t know as I’d single him out that way

US officials sign memo criticizing White House for ‘unwillingness to de-escalate’ Israel-Hamas war [Guardian]

…which isn’t to say I don’t think it’s applicable…just…I’m not clear quite what it is he’s supposed to be able to single-handedly do…even as president…to prevent the culmination of a project pursued for many years by one of the staunchest allies of his career in US politics…even if bibi treated him like…I dunno…some old school stiff-upper-lipped brit in a pin-stripe suit with a brolly & a bowler hat regressing to childhood before the withering opprobrium of the nanny of his formative youth…it’s not like that magically lets him rein in the rabid wing of his militaristic peers…let alone some foreign geezer who ain’t even jewish pulling off that feat

‘Nakba 2023’: Israel right-wing ministers’ comments add fuel to Palestinian fears [NBC]

…god damn it…though…with all due respect to those more inclined to credit the existence of one to do the damning…I’m not sure I’m convinced if you’re right about that part that they didn’t already make with the damning part…just look at the state of indictments & tell me what you think seems like an applicable adjective

Jack Smith’s team says Trump wants a ‘carnival’ at his election interference trial [NBC]

…& while the show goes on…outside the spotlight is where the “magic” happens

A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

The GOP offensive started during the 2020 election as public critiques and has since escalated into lawsuits, governmental inquiries and public relations campaigns that have succeeded in stopping almost all coordination between the government and social media platforms.

The most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. Employees at two U.S. tech companies who used to receive regular briefings from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force told NBC News that it has been months since the bureau reached out.

In a testimony last week to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray signaled a significant pullback in communications with tech companies and tied the move to rulings by a conservative federal judge and appeals court that said some government agencies and officials should be restricted from communicating and meeting with social media companies to moderate content. The case is now on hold pending Supreme Court review.
[…]
The FBI told the House Judiciary Committee that, since the court rulings, the bureau had discovered foreign influence campaigns on social media platforms but in some cases did not inform the companies about them because they were hamstrung by the new legal oversight, according to a congressional official.

“This is the worst possible outcome in terms of the injunction,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured.”
[…]
More than a dozen current and former government and tech employees who have been involved in fighting online manipulation campaigns and election falsehoods since 2020 echoed those concerns. Most agreed to speak only on the condition that they not be named, all citing the current climate of harassment against people who work in election and information integrity.

A common theme among those interviewed: The chilling effect that Republican attacks had on the sharing of information about possible interference, which could make it easier for foreign adversaries to manipulate U.S. public opinion and harder for 2024 voters to sort out what’s real from what’s fake.
[…]
“Some of these efforts really are designed to isolate people and make them feel like they can’t communicate with CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] [which oversees federal election cybersecurity and has become a favorite target of Republicans], like they can’t communicate with their peers in other states,” a person who works in state election administration said.

“People feel that things are really, really fraught, and common sense does not rule today,” the person added.

…seriously, folks…when mitt fucking romney sounds like the goddamned voice of fucking reason…has anyone checked the ice caps are still here & there isn’t a roaring gateway to the fires of hell where we left them?

“I understand we don’t want to interdict constitutionally protected speech, but what is constitutionally protected speech?” he said. “Certainly foreign agents don’t have constitutionally protected speech because they’re not subject to our Constitution. I presume bots don’t have constitutionally protected speech. American citizens do.”

…I dunno…I try…but it’s hard not to lose all sense of perspective…most days these days…I mean…there I’ll be…minding my own business…& the latent logic implied in the political calculus of playing to their perceived advantages ambush me…& the next thing I know…I can’t seem to see daylight between the hostile foreign powers & the domestic “populists” with their supposedly home-grown nationalistic agenda…frog-marching along to the same song…beat for beat

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had vocally pushed for election security coordination after 2016, told NBC News he had “grave concerns” about the setbacks of the system that defends against social media and election manipulation.

“We are seeing a potential scenario where all the major improvements in identifying, threat-sharing, and public exposure of foreign malign influence activity targeting U.S. elections have been systematically undermined,” Warner said.

Before 2016, there was little political will in the U.S. for the government or for tech companies to share intelligence with each other or protect voters from foreign influence campaigns. That year, Russia launched a multifaceted interference campaign that included the Kremlin-tied Internet Research Agency reaching tens of millions of Facebook and Twitter users. Hackers working for Russian intelligence stole and leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, probed an election machine company and stole voter information from the state of Illinois.

In the aftermath, President Barack Obama’s outgoing secretary for the Department of Homeland Security declared elections to be critical infrastructure, a move that drew immediate criticism from conservative election officials. Congress voted for the Department of Homeland Security to spin out its cyber and infrastructure protection efforts into CISA.

Meanwhile, the FBI created the Foreign Influence Task Force, meant to act as an intermediary that ferried information between the U.S. intelligence community and tech companies. The National Security Agency declined to comment for this story, but its director said in 2022 that the agency had fed intelligence about foreign propagandists to the task force to share with tech platforms.
[…]
These partnerships between government, corporations and legal and academic researchers were praised after 2020 as a crucial part of ensuring a secure election.

…so…”naturally”…their most fervent opponents are the people who claim that election was in fact not secure even with that going for it…sure-jan.gif

Last year, the attorneys general offices of Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that federal government outreach to tech companies about content on their platform — including law enforcement tips about election integrity and Covid-19 — constituted intimidation and a violation of First Amendment protections to free speech.

The case is still winding its way through the courts. Last month, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s ruling in favor of the conservative states’ case while it hears an appeal.

Other efforts have been stopped before they could get started. In March 2022, the Department of Homeland Security created a board to help coordinate its own response to viral falsehoods, prompting outcry from conservatives who claimed the government was policing speech. Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who studies disinformation and technology, was brought in to run the board and quickly became the target of a debilitating harassment campaign. Homeland Security shut down the board five months later.

Jankowicz said that the decision likely sent a message to federal workers that they might face retaliation for speaking out in a way that upset vocal critics.

“If you’re the one who’s raising the alarm about foreign interference or about something that is disenfranchising people and letting the platforms know, but it might cost you your job or your safety and security, you think twice about doing that,” Jankowicz said.
[…]
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” [Jen Easterly [Biden’s head of CISA] a decorated intelligence official who had no prior experience in a public government role] said at a talk hosted by Wired magazine in her first year on the job.

But Easterly, who frequently characterizes herself as nonpartisan, soon withdrew the agency from roles that most actively fought disinformation. Aside from maintaining a webpage that corrects common misconceptions about how elections work, CISA now focuses more on goals like protecting poll workers’ physical safety, connecting election officials with cybersecurity resources, and pushing software companies to do a better job building secure programs.
[…]
Republican demonization of the agency hasn’t abated. After the GOP took the House of Representatives in 2022, the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has spent much of this term focused on grievances from the 2020 election. It subpoenaed Easterly earlier this year, then issued a report that claimed “CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”

In a podcast interview on “On with Kara Swisher” in June, Easterly explained that CISA will also no longer help flag state and local election officials’ concerns to social media companies.

“I need to ensure we are able to do our core mission, to reduce risk to critical infrastructure. And at this point in time, I do not think the risk of us dealing with social media platforms is worth any benefit, quite frankly,” Easterly said, though she did not specify the source of the risk.
[…]
Through an agency spokesperson, Easterly declined to comment. In an emailed statement, she said: “Election security is one of CISA’s top priorities, and along with our interagency partners, we’re fully focused on supporting state and local election officials as they prepare for the 2024 election cycle. As we have since 2017, CISA will continue to lean forward and do our part to ensure the American people can have confidence in the security and resilience of our most sacred democratic process.”

Meanwhile, some platforms have cut back on trust and safety teams. Tech companies are still sharing their findings with each other, a Meta spokesperson told NBC News. The exception is X, whose owner Elon Musk released a giant cache of emails and company documents related to its previous trust and safety efforts and also made huge cuts to its trust and safety and election integrity teams. During the Israel-Hamas war, X has left viral terror videos from Hamas go viral and linger on the site for days.

One current X employee, who wasn’t authorized to speak for the company, said they had no remaining faith that the company could handle propaganda campaigns.

How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda [NBC]

…would you credit it? …or…like the people whose business is deeming the credit worthiness of global entities…would you maybe ding it a little for the stuff you couldn’t turn a blind eye to?

Moody’s lowers U.S. credit outlook, citing political dysfunction [WaPo]

…&…it’s not like they don’t have a point

Johnson’s bill is the latest attempt to resolve a complex standoff over Washington’s spending that has pitted hardline Republicans against their moderate colleagues and the Democratic minority in Congress’s lower chamber, and also contributed to the chain of events that led to Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow as speaker of the House in October.

The US government’s authorization to spend money expires at the end of the day on Friday, and Johnson, a rightwing lawmaker who the GOP elected as House speaker last month to replace McCarthy, unveiled over the weekend a proposal to keep some agencies functioning through 19 January and others through 2 February while long-term spending bills are negotiated.

Congress has in recent decades enacted dozens of such short-term funding bills – known as continuing resolutions (CR) – but Johnson’s is unique because it proposes two different deadlines for the funding to run out.

“This two-step continuing resolution is a necessary bill to place House Republicans in the best position to fight for conservative victories,” Johnson said in a statement.

The White House immediately panned the proposal, which does not include funding for military assistance to Ukraine or Israel that Joe Biden is pushing Congress to approve – issues Johnson says he wants to handle in separate legislation.

“This proposal is just a recipe for more Republican chaos and more shutdowns – full stop,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said. “With just days left before an extreme Republican shutdown – and after shutting down Congress for three weeks after they ousted their own leader – House Republicans are wasting precious time with an unserious proposal that has been panned by members of both parties.”

Democrats, who control the Senate, gave the proposal a warmer welcome. In a speech on the floor, their leader Chuck Schumer said: “I am pleased that Speaker Johnson seems to be moving in our direction by advancing a CR that does not include the highly partisan cuts that Democrats have warned against.” Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s top Republican, said he would support the bill.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/13/government-shutdown-speaker-mike-johnson

…ummm…the “highly partisan cuts” without which the lunatic caucus has sworn blind they won’t deign not to sabotage the thing before it makes it anywhere near a binding opinion by the senate…those cuts?

…I guess some people think it makes sense…I dunno…relatively speaking or some shit

Measuring Israel by the Just-War Yardstick [NYT]

…so…in relative terms…if this is the state of product reviews online

Fake Reviews Are Rampant Online. Can a Crackdown End Them? [NYT]

…&…when it comes to current affairs…we long since turned reality into a commodified consumer product…so…uh…actually…quite a lot of people would very much appreciate you not taking that train of thought to any of the stops it makes

When President Xi Jinping of China made his first state visit to the United States in 2015, he wrapped his demands for respect in reassurances.

He courted tech executives, while defending China’s internet controls. He denied that China was militarizing the disputed South China Sea, while asserting its maritime claims there. He spoke hopefully of a “new model” for great power relations, in which Beijing and Washington would coexist peacefully as equals.

But back in China, in meetings with the military, Mr. Xi was warning in strikingly stark terms that intensifying competition between a rising China and a long-dominant United States was all but unavoidable, and that the People’s Liberation Army should be prepared for a potential conflict.

In Mr. Xi’s telling, China sought to rise peacefully, but Western powers would not accept the idea that a Communist-led China was catching up and could someday overtake them in global primacy. The West would never stop trying to derail China’s ascent and topple its Communist Party, he said in speeches to the military that are largely unreported by the media.
[…]
Despite his assurances to President Obama not to militarize the South China Sea, Mr. Xi told his senior commanders in February 2016 that China must bolster its presence there, saying: “We’ve seized the opportunity, eliminated intervention and sped up construction on South China Sea islands and shoals, achieving a historic breakthrough in maritime strategy and defending maritime rights.” (In the years that followed, China quickly expanded its military infrastructure in the area.)

Mr. Xi’s remarks are among collections of speeches that Mr. Xi made to the People’s Liberation Army and Communist Party officials, published by the military for internal study by senior officers, and seen and corroborated by The New York Times. The volumes, “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” cover his initial years in power, from 2012 to February 2016.

The speeches offer a new, unvarnished view into the leader at the center of a superpower rivalry that is shaping the 21st century. They show how at times he has voiced an almost fatalistic conviction — even before Beijing’s ties with Washington took a steep dive later in the Trump administration — that China’s rise would prompt a backlash from Western rivals seeking to maintain their dominance.

“The faster we develop, the bigger the external shock will be, and the greater the strategic blowback,” Mr. Xi told Chinese Air Force officers in 2014.

In Mr. Xi’s worldview, the West has sought to subvert the Chinese Communist Party’s power at home and contain the country’s influence abroad. The Communist Party had to respond to these threats with iron-fisted rule and an ever-stronger People’s Liberation Army.
[…]
Mr. Xi has been trying to stabilize relations with Washington, apparently pressed by China’s economic troubles and a desire to reduce Beijing’s diplomatic isolation. “We have a thousand reasons to grow the relationship between China and the United States, and none at all to ruin it,” Mr. Xi told American lawmakers in Beijing recently.

But with mutual distrust running deep, any easing of antagonism between the two sides could be tenuous.

Mr. Xi underscored that his judgment of the challenge posed by the United States remains unchanged, saying with rare public bluntness in March: “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/world/asia/china-xi-asia-pacific-summit.html

…uh huh…battened down tighter than the blast doors on a missile silo, I’ll bet…so…nothing to worry about there…allegedly?

How Chinese aggression is increasing the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait [WaPo]

…got to love a contained threat

Chinese hackers are increasingly implanting sophisticated, disruptive malware in U.S. critical infrastructure that’s difficult to uncover, top National Security Agency officials said Thursday.

Simultaneously, the NSA says it’s seeing a rise in China’s use of previously unknown or “zero-day” vulnerabilities, a trend that researchers said Thursday coincides with a Chinese law that requires swift disclosure of newly-discovered software vulnerabilities to the Chinese government.

It all points to China’s long-term ambitions toward the United States, which includes putting themselves in place to be able to harm U.S. capabilities to take action in a crisis, said Morgan Adamski, director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.

“It is prepositioning, with the intent to quietly burrow into critical networks for the long haul,” Adamski said at the CYBERWARCON conference. “Let me be clear: These target entities are of no intelligence value. The fact that these actors are in critical infrastructure is unacceptable.”
[…]
“The PRC is sitting on a stockpile of zero-day vulnerabilities,” she said. “We know, through operations the last couple of years, that we are seeing an uptick in the amount of Chinese use of zero-day vulnerabilities to get into U.S. infrastructure, software and capabilities that we care about.”

A law that China enacted two years ago that requires discovered vulnerabilities to be reported to the federal government within 48 hours — even if they’ve not been patched — appears to have abetted Beijing’s collection of vulnerabilities, said two researchers who presented at Thursday’s conference.
[…]
Taking root in U.S. infrastructure is another asset for hackers affiliated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Adamksi said.

“One of the main concerns that we had is that the PRC continues to use U.S. domestic infrastructure to hide their activities and evade detection by the government and industry,” she said.
[…]

“They’re trying to look like your normal users, trying to look like your normal administrators,” Zaritsky said. “They’re compromising small office and home office network devices all over the country. They look like any of your remote users, which we all have a lot of now ever since the pandemic. They don’t raise any alarms or trip wires into your normal environment.”

That makes it hard for the NSA to give organizations some of the usual clues to find out if they’ve been victimized, such as “indicators of compromise (IOCs).”

“As we go through these explanations, we get to the end, and then often we hear, ‘Cool, so can you share the IOCs?’’ he said. “And really, that’s not how it works here. There are no easy concrete IOCs where we can say, ‘This is the malware, this is what you need to look for.’”

Rather, he said, cyber defenders have to know their users, their administrators, how they operate and how their activity is logged. That will allow organizations to see abnormalities in patterns that could flag malicious activity, he said.

…maybe…if he weren’t already short on time & something of a necessary prerequisite of this place’s existence…we could loan them @myopicprophet

Lockbit 3.0 ransomware software was used Thursday to disrupt the financial services arm of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, disrupting the U.S. Treasury market and forcing ICBC clients to reroute trades, the Financial Times’s Costas Mourselas, Kate Duguid, Joshua Franklin and Hannah Murphy report.

The report says: “The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association first told members on Wednesday that ICBC Financial Services had been hit by ransomware software, which paralyses computer systems unless a payment is made, according to several people familiar with the discussions.” A U.S. Treasury spokesperson weighed in saying the agency was aware of the matter and that it was in touch with key market participants, while ICBC did not immediately return a comment request. 
[…]
It was “extremely unusual for a bank of [ICBC’s] size to be impacted like this,” Allan Liska, threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, told the outlet. The financial industry typically invests more in guardrails to prevent cyberattacks, he added.

• ICBC, the largest banking entity in the world measured by the number of assets it holds, was forced to send a messenger around Manhattan with a USB drive containing the details of unfinished trade settlements, Bloomberg News reported late Thursday.  

“This is a true shock to large banks around the world,” Marcus Murray, founder of Swedish cybersecurity firm Truesec, told Bloomberg. “The ICBC hack will make large banks around the globe race to improve their defenses, starting today.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/10/nsa-officials-call-out-chinese-hackers-stealthy-off-limits-hacks/

…but sure…tell me again how matt gaetz belongs within reach of the federal purse strings with a clock on the play…& how that looks convincingly like responsible governance…cometh the hour & what have you

Political dysfunction, not China, is the greatest threat to the U.S. [WaPo]

…well…now the credit agencies have got the memo it is, I guess…seemed like it took over from baseball as the national pastime at some point, though…so…that’s a pretty schizophrenic diagnosis for a body politic…kinda makes those “unknown unknowns” seem like…I dunno…brute force & ignorance springs to mind for some reason…can’t imagine why

Ohio Republicans move to exclude judges from interpreting enshrined abortion rights [Guardian]

…nothing to see here…& obviously the judiciary has no business weighing in on the legality of the actions (or failures to enact) a legislative body might take it upon itself to get intransigent about…perish the thought

Across the globe, compassion for migrants has given way to cruel, performative politics [Guardian]

…see…I don’t want to tip all the way over into a full-time, card-carrying voice o’doom™…but…the thing about trading in rhetoric about existential threats in countries where they aren’t immediate

Zelenskiy warns Ukrainians to prepare for Russian attacks on infrastructure [Guardian]

…but do get to reference ones where it very much fucking is that way

Under bombardment, Gaza medics fight to save patients with no power, water or food [Guardian]

GOP targets Gaza’s biggest relief group, clashing with the White House [WaPo]

The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers [New Yorker]

More Than 700,000 Ukrainian Children Taken To Russia Since Full-Scale War Started, Official Says [Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty]

…dunno how many of the rest of you watched the americans…but…gotta imagine that kind of deal is a whole lot easier if your indoctrinated hole cards are stacking a deck they’re genuinely native to…but…maybe that’s stretching my definition of “existential” a little too close to the left bank rather than the west…then again…nobody…well nobody you ought to listen to in the expectation of sense, anyway…ever said that existential threats have to come on hard & fast

In a short study in 2004, co-authored with Prof Andrea Russell at Southampton University, Thompson first described the particles as “microplastics”. He hypothesised that as plastic entered the sea, it slowly fragmented into small but persistent pieces that spread even farther afield. He did not expect much reaction from his modest one-page article.

“It had been a May bank holiday weekend, and we’d been away camping. I came back in and every email that morning was from a journalist, and the phone was ringing continuously.”

The story was picked up instantly by networks in the UK, Europe and Asia. “Shortly after it was published, it was being discussed in the Canadian parliament,” says Russell, whose experiments had confirmed that the particles were plastic.

The discovery helped spawn an entire field of microplastics research, and would be instrumental in plastic bag taxes and bans on plastic microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics in countries including the US, New Zealand and Canada.

Researchers now look at even tinier fragments called nanoplastics that infiltrate our blood, wombs and breastmilk. In some parts of the world, people consume a credit card’s worth of plastic this way each week.
[…]
Most recently, he has been catapulted into the heart of international negotiations to draw up a global treaty to curb plastic pollution, which had its most recent talks in Paris in June.
[…]
A UN-led plastics treaty is a “once-in-a-planet opportunity”, Thompson says, but on some of the supposed solutions being put forth, he is very clear. He is adamant that biodegradable plastic cannot save us. Neither can any amount of “cleanups”, like his own fateful expedition in 1993.

What’s worse, he thinks, is that if the plastics treaty sends the world chasing the wrong ideas, microplastics pollution will only worsen. “There’s a real risk that worries me,” he says. “That if we guess at this, we’ll get it wrong.”
[…]
What concerns Thompson is that policymakers may be led astray by much-hyped approaches that are already being used – for instance, hi-tech initiatives to remove plastic from the sea, such as the Ocean Cleanup.

Thompson stresses that he is an ardent believer in cleanups for coastal pollution, but that it is “naive to expect that [cleanups] can be a systemic solution” to the vast threat of microplastics.

“The psychologists would call it ‘techno-optimism’,” he says. “If we’re not careful, the public gets convinced that a big gadget whizzing around in the middle of the Pacific gyre is going to mop it all up for us, and that’s the end of the story.

“It’s an attractive story – from the point of view of not having to change anything we do.”
[…]
But, although they are a partial improvement on the fossil-fuel footprint of conventional plastics, and may have some legitimate uses, most biodegradable plastics do not melt away into nature – a fact Thompson first realised when, early in his research career, a trawl hauled a bag up from the bottom of the North Sea. On its side was printed “biodegradable”. “I’ve still got it here somewhere!” he says, gesturing behind him at stacked shelves loaded with folders.

We now know – again, thanks to experiments by Thompson and colleagues – that many biodegradables need controlled industrial conditions to degrade, and can take years to disappear in soil and sea.

“If we keep the nearly 300-400m tonnes of plastic we’re making every year, and all we’re doing is chucking biosource plastics [which are biodegradable] to fill the gap, it doesn’t fix the problem of litter, it doesn’t fix the problem of waste, it doesn’t fix the problem of chemicals,” he says. “It’s just substituting the carbon source.”

None of these kinds of actions change what he thinks is the real danger: the linear relationship we have with plastic – produce, consume, dispose – which created the problem. After two decades describing that problem, he is now focused on the cause. “It’s very much coming back to the land, my research, because the problem isn’t made in the ocean: it’s made by practices on land.”
[…]
But while items sheathed in Russian-doll-like layers of plastic are obvious candidates for cuts, certain plastics do bring legitimate value to our lives and are likely to remain with us, Thompson says. “I’m not saying we can carry on with business as usual. Reduce has to be the first action,” he stresses – but for the plastic that remains in use, he believes the challenge is to redesign it.

Just 10% of plastic is recycled globally, a staggeringly low figure that is partly due to the thousands of chemicals that give plastic its diverse qualities, colours and forms and make it almost impossible to remix.

“We do a really bad job of designing stuff for circularity. So when people say that it’s clearly failed because we’re only recycling 10%, I think the root cause of the error is at the design stage,” Thompson says.

“When I talk to product designers, they say they were asked to design a product that was attractive – they weren’t asked to consider end-of-life.”
[…]
Redesign can also soften the impact of plastic during its lifecycle. Take the problem of polymer-rich fabrics that shed plastic microfibres into the sea. Several countries now require filters on washing machines to capture these threads.

Yet Thompson and his team have found that half the shedding happens, not during washing, but while people are wearing clothes. Redesigning fabric for longer wear reduces shedding by a striking 80%. “So the systemic answer would work for the planet,” he says. His latest work is examining other design challenges such as car tyres, a primary source of marine microplastics.

‘We can’t carry on’: the godfather of microplastics on how to stop them [Guardian]

…gotta love a first world problem, eh?

And yet it's not at all clear that America's GDP advantage leads to a better average quality of life.

— StatisticalUrbanist📈🌈 (@Hunter007525972) November 13, 2023

…play it again, [uncle] sam?