Afternoon Tea 10.22.20 - Security Engineering

The importance of picking a strong password.

October 22, 2020

Some guy threatened Harris & Biden with kidnapping, a building exploded in Karachi, ICE tortured African migrants, your tax dollars funded every new drug approved since 2010, and Dutch hackers discovered Trump’s Twitter password was “maga2020!” It’s Thursday, October 22nd 2020, and this is the Tea.

Dutch Ethical Hacker Logs into Trump’s Twitter Account (de Volkskrant) & How Trump’s Twitter account was hacked – again (VN.nl) Trump saw Rudy punch himself in the dick yesterday and said “Hold my Filet o’Fish/Diet Coke Smoothie.” Before the 2016 election, this same group of Dutch Hackers got into Trump’s twitter account. Not only do you not need 2-factor authentication to access the account of a person who can launch nuclear weapons, the Babylon Bee tweet I alluded to yesterday might have been THE HACKERS TRYING TO GET TWITTER’S ATTENTION.

US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade (Institute for New Economic Thinking) The Leftist position isn’t that these drugs should be affordable. The Centrist/Fiscal position is that these drugs should be free, because we funded their research. The Leftist position is that the profit from selling these drugs overseas should be dispensed to American citizens as early-stage investors.

US ICE officers 'used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders' (The Guardian) Between this and the news about the separated children’s parents being “lost,” I think we can fully dispense with the “This isn’t us” rhetoric now.

‘We are the ones your children have nightmares about’: Maryland man charged with threatening to kidnap Biden, Harris (Baltimore Sun) I’ll just leave you with this quote from the guy. For your discussions about antifa and the non-issue of violence from the Biden camp:

“We have a list of homes and addresses by your election signs. We are the ones with those scary guns, We are the ones your children have nightmares about. The Boogeymen coming in the night.”

Thousands, including indigenous people, march in peaceful Colombia protests (Reuters) There’s a general strike going on in Colombia, like, France tier.

At least five dead in Karachi building blast: Rescue officials (Al-Jazeera) Mentioned because it’s not that there was a terrorist attack or a gun fight. A multi-level residential building exploded, and no one has claimed responsibility yet.

Will a vaccine stop Covid? (UnHerd) Given the enormous logistical challenge of its distribution…No.

China Has a Few Things to Teach the U.S. Economy (Bloomberg) In which Bloomberg’s chief neoliberal argues that the West should relegate austerity to the wastebin of history. If we want to accelerate out of this crisis, Congress better get to spending.

Levelized Cost of Energy and Levelized Cost of Storage – 2020 (Lazard) These two charts are the most hope-inducing things I’ve seen all year. The “levelized” cost of wind & solar energy is now lower than fossil fuels, even without subsidies. Bring on a modern power grid and battery tech.

Informatics of the Oppressed (Logic) A rapture of a read detailing revolutionary library science. I had no idea there were entire alternative systems of information networking suppressed by the Catholic Church and anti-Communist efforts in Latin America:

If peripheral innovations like the Latin American experiments with informatics did not become mainstream, this is not because they were necessarily inferior to corporate, military, and metropolitan competitors. The reasons why some technologies live and others die are not strictly technical, but political. The Cuban model was arguably more technically sophisticated than its US counterparts. Yet some technologies are sponsored by the advertising industry, while others are constrained by a neocolonial trade embargo. Some are backed by the Pentagon, others crushed by the Vatican.

Honest email auto-replies you can use during these challenging times (NonProfitAF) I’ll be using the existentialist one, but lots of great stuff here for people in all sectors.

Song of the Tea: Lady-fronted, Mongolian rock band named Behi. I really want to learn the Way of the Northern Fist in a montage to this track.

You’re so close. Don’t quit just yet.

Yours,T