US Politics Mega-thread - Page 53

On March 29 2018 01:19 Plansix wrote:
He was walking into a group of liberal justices who have been debating with Scalia for years, if not a couple decades. There wasn't a lot that he was going to bring that hasn't been debated already.

On March 29 2018 00:38 TheTenthDoc wrote:


I mean, it's repugnant and parallels are almost all incorrect beyond "these people are young," but you can't say "you can't draw these comparisons because they're incorrect" in the United States when it comes to political speech. You can just barely do it for commercial speech and even then it's childishly easy to weasel your way out of it. There is zero will for censuring candidates for demonstrably false statements, let alone media networks drawing uninformed and incorrect parallels.

On March 29 2018 02:01 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wonder what happened?

https://twitter.com/AP/status/979037581508857857

In a statement released on Wednesday, Ecuador said that the step had been taken because Assange had failed to abide by an agreement not to interfere in the South American country’s relations with other states.

“The government of Ecuador warns that Assange’s behaviour, through his messages on social networks, put at risk the country’s good relations with the United Kingdom, the other states of the European Union, and other nations,” the statement said.

The Supreme Court justices seemed to grasp the problem of gerrymandering in oral arguments Wednesday and that it will only get worse, as computer-assisted redistricting gets even more refined.

But they appeared frustrated with what to do about it — without becoming the constant police officer on the beat.

This case, involving a Democratic-drawn congressional district in Maryland, is essentially Act II of the gerrymandering play at the Supreme Court.

Act I opened the first week in October when the nine justices heard arguments in a case testing whether there is any constitutional limit to partisan gerrymandering — the practice of drawing legislative district lines to maximize and perpetuate the power of the incumbent party. At issue in the case is the Republican gerrymander of the Wisconsin Legislature — a design that delivered nearly two-thirds of the districts to the GOP even as Republicans lost the statewide vote.

In the Maryland case arguments Wednesday, Michael Kimberly, the attorney for the Republican plaintiffs, argued that the map drawers succeeded in "rigging an election," and the average American voter understands what's going on. He dubbed it an affront to democracy.

That's the kind of argument that Democrats have made about lots of other states throughout the country, where Democrats are underrepresented in the House.

The Supreme Court has ruled that racial gerrymandering is illegal, but has recognized that a degree of partisan gerrymander will take place and is OK.

But several justices echoed concerns about how much partisan gerrymandering is taking place and how much worse it would get because of technology in 2021 when the districts will be redrawn after the 2020 Census.

Liberal justice Elena Kagan said this case is too much. She said Democrats did not need to move as many Republican voters out of the formerly Republican district as they did.

Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, said this district geographically didn't make much sense. It stretches from the Washington suburbs to the more rural, Western part of the state. He joked that both areas had farms but different kind — real ones and hydroponic ones...

"It's put-up-or-shut-up time," Hasen said. "Either he's(justice Kennedy) going to say, 'We've got to start policing this' or he has to recognize that what is going to happen in the next round in 2020 is going to look a lot worse than in this round, that it's going to be no-holds-barred, squeeze out whatever you can, in favor of your party and against the other party."

The City of Atlanta’s 8,000 employees got the word on Tuesday that they had been waiting for: It was O.K. to turn their computers on.

But as the city government’s desktops, hard drives and printers flickered back to life for the first time in five days, residents still could not pay their traffic tickets or water bills online, or report potholes or graffiti on a city website. Travelers at the world’s busiest airport still could not use the free Wi-Fi.

Atlanta’s municipal government has been brought to its knees since Thursday morning by a ransomware attack — one of the most sustained and consequential cyberattacks ever mounted against a major American city.

The digital extortion aimed at Atlanta, which security experts have linked to a shadowy hacking crew known for its careful selection of targets, laid bare once again the vulnerabilities of governments as they rely on computer networks for day-to-day operations. In a ransomware attack, malicious software cripples a victim’s computer or network and blocks access to important data until a ransom is paid to unlock it.

“We are dealing with a hostage situation,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said this week.

The assault on Atlanta, the core of a metropolitan area of about 6 million people, represented a serious escalation from other recent cyberattacks on American cities, like one last year in Dallas where hackers gained the ability to set off tornado sirens in the middle of the night.
Continue reading the main story

Part of what makes the attack on Atlanta so pernicious are the criminals behind it: A group that locks up its victims’ files with encryption, temporarily changes their file names to “I’m sorry” and gives the victims a week to pay up before the files are made permanently inaccessible.

Threat researchers at Dell SecureWorks, the Atlanta-based security firm helping the city respond to the ransomware attack, identified the assailants as the SamSam hacking crew, one of the more prevalent and meticulous of the dozens of active ransomware attack groups. The SamSam group is known for choosing targets that are the most likely to accede to its high ransom demands — typically the Bitcoin equivalent of about $50,000 — and for finding and locking up the victims’ most valuable data.

In Atlanta, where officials said the ransom demand amounted to about $51,000, the group left parts of the city’s network tied in knots. Some major systems were not affected, including those for 911 calls and control of wastewater treatment. But other arms of city government have been scrambled for days.

On March 29 2018 04:20 Kyadytim wrote:

www.nytimes.com
The US has massive vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, and not enough people seem to care about it, because nothing is getting done.

The #DeleteFacebook movement is putting its money where its mouth is. Since the company's recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's stock has plunged 18 percent — decimating about $80 billion from the company's total market value, according to a couple of analyses.

The nosedive comes after Facebook admitted that Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked on behalf of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, misused personal information gathered on the social network to target U.S. voters. Since then, the company has seen a barrage of criticism for its failure to protect user data.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk-run companies Tesla and SpaceX have deleted Facebook pages, as has Playboy over privacy concerns.

Even before the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Facebook was in hot water for allowing its ad network to be exploited by Russian agencies during the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed that his company would "learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward" days after the scandal broke. CNN Money estimates that Zuckerberg's own net worth has fallen by about $14 billion. The 33-year-old is still worth well over $60 billion.

But some major companies aren't buying Zuckerberg's assurances. And the more that delete their pages and disengage with the platform, the more its engagement rates decrease. As that happens, so does overall ad revenue.

"The recent news about Facebook's alleged mismanagement of users' data has solidified our decision to suspend our activity on the platform at this time," reads a statement from Playboy, which deleted its page on Wednesday. "There are more than 25 million fans who engage with Playboy via our various Facebook pages, and we do not want to be complicit in exposing them to the reported practices."

The social media platform is dealing with more than just decreased user engagement and stock loss — it's also facing a host of legal and regulatory issues. The Federal Trade Commission confirmed earlier this week that Facebook is under investigation for the possible misuse of the personal information of as many as 50 million of its users.

On March 29 2018 05:41 Plansix wrote:


Source

Facebook continues to take it in the teeth, losing almost a 5th of its stock value. I doubt there is going to be a rebound with two governments digging into the company, new regulations pending the EU and the public finally having their worries about Facebook confirmed. My biggest fear is that this will pass us by without any substantive regulations for online data and content hosts.

On March 29 2018 05:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


That's pretty much guaranteed.

No one is even lobbying for effective legislation within either major party.

On March 29 2018 05:54 zlefin wrote:

what effective legislation would you like to see?