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link roundup 8

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finals next week! graduation the week after assuming i didn’t fail my online class 😑 lots and lots of reading in the meantime.

reading

When did the right wing get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous — not unlike the forces that brought them about. In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs — because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is 
 white. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. It was yet another message-board in-joke — freighted with political meaning — suddenly in the news.

[many more links and reading inside this piece]

For the next month, cryptographically unique coupons representing an undisclosed number of Jordanian dinars will be sent to dozens of shops in five refugee camps across the nation. Then, instead of using a smartphone or a paper wallet to access the funds, recipients will rely on yet another emerging technology.

Eye-scanning hardware made by London-based IrisGuard, already in place to verify the identity of some of the 500,000 recipients currently receiving traditional aid, is being repurposed to grant access to coupons.

The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

[highly recommended; i’m surprised i hadn’t come across this piece before, rip mark fisher]

Perhaps you noticed: I said that I used to enjoy #FrogTwitter. I haven’t lost my taste for heterodox shitposters, but Twitter keeps banning my faves. @menaquinone4 was knocked out of the sky. I don’t want to link to his current account — both because I’d rather not see him torpedoed again, and because I have no way of knowing whether the current iteration of Mena is run by the original Mena. I never followed @BronzeAgePervert, but he’s another community figure who has been suspended (although not banned
 yet
 as far as I know).

[…]

I’m a pretty mainstream type of person. You could say that I’m a run-of-the-mill Blue Tribe coastal elite! But I tend to gravitate toward the social fringes. I like people who are outgroup to almost everyone but themselves. I feel more comfortable with those people, because they tend to be nonjudgmental and open to exploring surprising ideas.

Dimitry Kiselev, director general of Russia’s state-controlled Rossiya Segodnya media conglomerate, has said: “Objectivity is a myth which is proposed and imposed on us.”3 Today, thanks to the Internet and social media, the manipulation of our perception of the world is taking place on previously unimaginable scales of time, space and intentionality. That, precisely, is the source of one of the greatest vulnerabilities we as individuals and as a society must learn to deal with.Today, many actors are exploiting these vulnerabilities. The situation is complicated by the increasingly rapid evolution of technology for producing and disseminating information. For example, over the past year we have seen a shift from the dominance of text and pictures in social media to recorded video, and even recorded video is being superseded by live video. As the technology evolves, so do the vulnerabilities. At the same time, the cost of the technology is steadily dropping, which allows more actors to enter the scene.

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

That points to two options. The first is that the [Shadow Brokers] files came from Hal Martin. He’s the NSA contractor who was arrested in August for hoarding agency secrets in his house for two years. He can’t be the publisher, because the Shadow Brokers are in business even though he is in prison. But maybe the leaker got the documents from his stash: either because Martin gave the documents to them or because he himself was hacked. The dates line up, so it’s theoretically possible, but the contents of the documents speak to someone with a different sort of access. There’s also nothing in the public indictment against Martin that speaks to his selling secrets to a foreign power, and I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that the NSA would leak. But maybe I’m wrong about all of this; Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s him.

The other option is a mysterious second NSA leak of cyberattack tools. The only thing I have ever heard about this is from a Washington Post story about Martin: “But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not thought to have shared the material with another country, the official said.” But “not thought to have” is not the same as not having done so.

Debuting during the twilight of the Clinton presidency and spanning much of Bush II’s, it predictably vacillated somewhat in response to events while remaining grounded in a general liberal ethos. Having writing credits for all but one episode in The West Wing’s first four seasons, Sorkin left in 2003, with Executive Producer John Wells characterizing the subsequent direction as more balanced and bipartisan. The Bartlet administration’s actual politics—just like those of the real Democratic Party and its base—therefore run the gamut from the stuff of Elizabeth Warren-esque populism to the neoliberal bilge you might expect to come from a Beltway think tank having its white papers greased by dollars from Goldman Sachs.

But promoting or endorsing any specific policy orientation is not the show’s true raison d’ĂȘtre. At the conclusion of its seven seasons it remains unclear if the Bartlet administration has succeeded at all in fundamentally altering the contours of American life. In fact, after two terms in the White House, Bartlet’s gang of hyper-educated, hyper-competent politicos do not seem to have any transformational policy achievements whatsoever. Even in their most unconstrained and idealized political fantasies, liberals manage to accomplish nothing.

How bad is this

That depends. Unless you’ve explicitly enabled AMT at any point, you’re probably fine. The drivers that allow local users to provision the system would require administrative rights to install, so as long as you don’t have them installed then the only local users who can do anything are the ones who are admins anyway. If you do have it enabled, though


misc

Climate is the ultimate command line tool for Linux. It provides a huge number of command line options for developers to automate their Linux system. This tool can be extremely helpful to learn various unix commands too. There is an option to print each command before they’re executed to help you memorize them over time.

Security tokens are small hardware devices one uses to prove physical access to a computer system in addition to traditional text credentials like a username or a password. The larger an organization gets, the higher the potential of a smartphone or a computer might be accessed by an unauthorized third party.

While adding the requirement of having to physically insert or touch a device to a username and password may seem simple, it is something one can not do remotely. This makes it a highly effective and simple way to greatly limit damage and data theft from remote attackers.

OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall. […] OpenSnitch is an application level firewall, meaning then while running, it will detect and alert the user for every outgoing connection applications he’s running are creating. This can be extremely effective to detect and block unwanted connections on your system that might be caused by a security breach, causing data exfiltration to be much harder for an attacker.