It has emerged that the FBI has, for several years, been able to remotely activate your webcam while disabling any indicator that tells you it's recording. In a revelation that should surprise absolutely nobody, the former assistant director of the agency's Operational Technology Division maintained that it's all good; such recording is used "mainly" in terrorism investigations.
Sleep well, Citizen.
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Several people, along with me, have noted since Dec. 4 that Chrome displays a "Malware Ahead!" warning when attempts are made to access this site. Prior to that, there were no such warnings, nor is there any malware of any sort anywhere on this site. I have filed a complaint with Google, and I'm not alone: IObit has also filed a complaint, and they are threatening legal action, as seen below -
Dear Sir or Madam,
I'm a staff from IObit.com.
Recently we notified that Google Chrome always reports our program setup files "appears malicious". And we received numerous complaints from users too. All software packages have been tested with various virus scanners and online malware detection software verified to be absolutely clean, like www.virustotal.com. But Google Chrome is still showing a warning (checked with latest release installed on a Windows 7 machine).
We have reported via About Google Chrome -> Report an issue numerous times without any results. And we still get this kind of warning.
Currently, the followings two still have this false flag.
http://download.iobit.com/imf-setup.exe
I would appreciate the soonest response of a Google representative solving this issue. Please understand that this damages the reputation of our company and the benefits of our users. We'll not hesitate to start legal actions in case this issue is not quickly solved.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to clarify this on a fair base.
With kind regards,
Cicely
Apparently, one of Google's surreptitious "upgrades" wasn't thoroughly tested prior to implementation.
IObit is a tech company that's been around for years. I checked back with them just a few minutes ago, and Google appears to have removed the false flags on their site.
As noted below, other sites are reporting the same issue. Google's really ticking a lot of site owners off.
Oh, and yes: virustotal, mentioned above in the IObit letter, also rates this a "clean site".
Google Dorks.
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What is the current listing status for www.maxredline.typepad.com?
This site is not currently listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, www.maxredline.typepad.com did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.
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Caran Johnson, of Vancouver, WA, is a scanner addict; she listens to a police frequency scanner and uses Twitter to pass the word along. That's what she was doing yesterday afternoon when she heard about a bad wreck at I-205 and 83rd Street. She went into live-tweet mode, advising people to stay away so that first responders can get to work, and updating whomever follows her on conditions. She mentioned that it sounded like a horrible wreck, then passed along word that one person had died.
And then it began to dawn on her: her husband drives that route, and he'd left work early because he wasn't feeling well. She couldn't reach him; he wasn't answering his phone. The 47 year-old is epileptic, and she began to worry - tweeting at one point that she was a basket case.
With good reason, as it happens. The fatality that she'd been tweeting about was in fact her husband. The wreck remains under investigation.
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Katie wants to continue her ABC talk show, which she yesterday devoted half an hour of to the anti-vaccine nuts - but she also wants to do news programming for Yahoo, which is trying to remake itself under the leadership of Marissa Mayer. It's probably a good fit, as anyone who pushes the anti-vaccine hysteria automatically qualifies as a yahoo.
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Of course, they track your movements if you're a guy, too. But if they were tracking mine, this morning, they got a surprise. Almost broke the plumbing.
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It's Obamacare website works, and it's right up there with California and Connecticut as the top three in the country for enrollment success. The bottom three? Oh, that'd be Hawaii and the two tech-savvy Pacific Northwest states - Oregon and Washington.
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Photo credit: sincerelyhiten
Under the outgoing head of Oregon Lottery, programs and advertising geared toward gambling addicts have been terminated as contrary to their goal of raising more revenue. Moreover, they appear poised to restart the failed ORcade - online video gambling over the Internet.
They pulled the plug on that over concerns that such a venue would make it too easy for kids to get sucked into the maw, but they're taking another look at it. After all, it'll make it that much easier to snag their target demographic: the small segment of the population who presently camp in front of the machines until all of their money's gone. If they could get an online venue up and running, those folks wouldn't have to walk two blocks to a place with video poker/video slot machines; they could just fire up the ol' laptop, key in their credit card numbers, and play, play, play.
There's a lot of money to be made from convenience. This is the future. And it's kind of scary.
Now, one may think, "Well, it's a tax on the stupid. And it may be sad that they blow all their money on the machines, but nobody forced them to make lousy decisions." One would be right - as far as it goes. But such thinking fails to consider the further ramifications: addicts hurt more than just themselves, and for a state to so heavily promote addiction carries more than merely ethical issues, because addicts become desperate - and in turn, that affects many others.
Thus, it can be argued that in promoting such behavior, the Oregon Lottery fails in the single task that justifies its very existence: raising funds for economic development and the benefit of the general good.
As an example, my Bride worked for many years for a non-profit organization established to aid parents of children and young adults with disabilities in navigating the complex terrain of creating an effective Individual Education Program. Over the years, the director of the NPO apparently became addicted to video lottery, and despite being paid a good salary, she took to finding other ways to get money. Among them, she deducted income tax withholding from employee checks, and then pocketed the cash rather than transferring those funds to state and federal departments of revenue. In addition, it appears that she misappropriated certain other NPO funds, with the result that once found out, the organization closed.
In addition to no longer having a job, my Bride had no forms W-2, which made filing taxes rather a convoluted process. As well, disable children and parents across the state suddenly found themselves with no one to turn to for help with their issues. In all, the now former director was eventually indicted on 14 felony counts. She'll never be able to find another job, so she's severely damaged herself. But she also damaged employees, and any number of people around the state who depended upon the services provided by NPO staff.
Of course, nobody forced the director to make lousy decisions. But the impacts of her decisions affected people across the state. Oregon Lottery has unquestionably been effective at producing a money stream; it has equally unquestionably failed in its mandate to promote the general good.
For a state whose politicians cultivate a "sustainability" image, their reliance upon Oregon Lottery to generate a revenue stream appears quite the opposite.
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For a place that prides itself on its "Silicon Forest", cutting-edge technologies, and copious quantities of certified Really Smart People, Oregon seems incredibly incompetent. It seems as though every couple of years, one governmental agency or another blows tens of millions of dollars on computer systems that never work. Given that track record, whoever would have believed that the healthcare insurance exchange known as Coverup Oregon would be any different?
We were one of five states granted federal dollars ($48 million) to develop the technology. The agreement was we would then share what we had developed with other states, which is a reasonable approach. The warning that immediately went up is the fact the State of Oregon has a miserable track record when it comes to IT development. In this case, even though much of the work was contracted out to a company called Oracle, we have held true to our record of failure. We have been assured all of the problems can be fixed, and maybe that is true over time, but here we are with a non-functioning web site and 400 new government employees to do manual processing. By the way, this brings the number of employees in Cover Oregon to nearly 500, which is really not the type of job growth we need.
Things have gone so horribly wrong with this "exchange" that Coverup Oregon held a couple of sign-up sessions in a local hotel this weekend, and it was like a trip to the DMV: lots of waiting, long lines, a dozen and a half pages of paper to scribble on, and at the end of it all, "You'll get a letter explaining your options in 3 to 4 weeks". In other words, the in-person sign-up session's no different than downloading and printing out the form that's available on the functional portion of the website, because when you fill it out and mail it in (all 19 pages of it), you'll get a letter back in about a month.
Oh no - you're not actually signed up for coverage, that comes later.
A spokeswoman for Cover Oregon seemed to hope you'd forget about the website and everything it promised the half-million Oregon residents who don't have health coverage.
"There are so many people for whom this is their top choice, where they can talk to somebody face to face, avoid technology and work on paper," said spokeswoman Elizabeth Cronen.
"Based on the fantastic reaction we've gotten from folks here who are so glad to talk someone in person, it really reinforces for me this is a valuable tool for Oregonians regardless of the other technology available or not available," said Cronen.
Liz's spin is so transparent that she's not even fooling herself. And things are likely to get even more interesting a little further down the road, because "federal funding" for operating the exchange goes away in two years.
Presently, politicians refer to Coverup Oregon as "trailing the rest of the nation in health coverage signups", which is just more spin. To put it into layman's terms, what they mean is that Coverup Oregon has yet to sign up even one person.
And when people do sign up (if ever), they're going to find that every policy costs more than last years' similar product; often significantly more. But they're "affordable", in many cases, because the purchaser gets a subsidy or other credit, which brings down the cost. In essence, then, they're now on welfare.
But hey - Free Stuff™!
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Around the beginning of the year, former MultCo jailer turned lawyer Bruce McCain ran a multi-part hit piece on a blog run by former KPAM radio talker Victoria Taft. Much of it seemed believable enough; certainly, the subject of the series seems to have a lot of issues.
However, McCain is clearly not without issues himself, as the purported conservative has attempted to spur division among conservatives in several Oregon counties while inexplicably trying to portray himself as some sort of a pit bull for freedom. It hasn't been an especially productive approach, and while a number of conservatives around the Willamette Valley are perturbed by his actions and those of his associates - and arguably, with considerable justification - his antics have counterintuitively coalesced many conservatives into a unified opposition force. Rather than splintering conservatives and independents who form the putative base of a movement favoring limited government, McCain and cohorts appear to have achieved the opposite effect.
But things are likely to wind down, at least for a time, as in all probability, McCain won't have as much time nor as many resources to continue his escapades: as of last week, the subject of his series on the Taft blog filed suit against him, alleging economic harm and libel. He's seeking to extract over half a million dollars from McCain. And even for a guy with a fat PERS account, that's a significant chunk of change.
Oddly, McCain's series has disappeared from the Taft blogsite. Evidently, McCain and Taft are unfamiliar with the wayback machine. Or much of anything else.
January 25, 2013 in Uncategorized
THIS IS THE FIRST OF A FOUR PART SERIES ON BRUCE MCCAIN’S INVESTIGATION INTO “CAMERON ELIZABETH JORDAN”, A FRAUD.
It really doesn't take much effort to find McCain's series, despite the fact that it's been taken down from the Taft blog. You don't even have to be a rocket scientist to manage it. But this leads to a considerably more interesting question: why would the series be excised from the blog at all? It almost looks as though someone doesn't want it to be found. Whoever might worry about a bunch of words on a public blog?
Perhaps Taft or McCain took the series down prior to knowing about the lawsuit, but it seems unlikely. In any event, the removal doesn't inspire great confidence in the veracity of the series. Unfortunately for them, the posts are still out there on the Intertubes, just waiting to be recovered.
And McCain, with his 25 year career as a jailer behind him and what he evidently had hoped to be a budding career as an investigator and attorney, is going to have to defend his blog series. In court. Rots o'Ruck.
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