Tag: paul joseph watson

Thomas Holbrook II | The *Nixed Report

This is the first in a weekly series that rounds up the week for those who were busy with the daily grind. Here’s what you missed over the week.

Unix

Open Source luminary Eric S Raymond along with Susan Sons have been blending concepts from martial arts and hacking. They are identifying what they call different Hacker Archetypes.

… Susan Sons reports having found it very effective for motivating young and newbie martial artists. “It gave them their first glimpse of what they were trying to become,” she reports, “They both knuckled down not just in the obvious physical parts of training, but in the mental aspects, far more than they had before and far more than their age/experience peers.”

So, Susan had the idea that it might be a good idea to develop a parallel gallery of hacker archetypes to help motivate newbies. We brainstormed this on IRC for a while. One thing that had been blocking Susan is that, by her own report, she sucks at naming things. I, on the other hand, am pretty good at that; I was able to come up with names that helped the archetypes develop more definition.

The different archetypes are listed and kept up to date on ESR’s blog.

System76 has recently updated their Galago Pro line of notebook computers. It’s extremely portable and can have as much as 32 GB of RAM. They are available for pre-order and they have an offer for $50 off.

Speaking of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate Edition 17.04 has recently been released. Martin Wimpress had the following to say:

We’re totally over the bloody moon to announce Ubuntu MATE 17.04. This is our favourite release of Ubuntu MATE so far and, we believe, a real return to form. Ubuntu MATE 16.10 was a transitional release, in every sense, and 17.04 concludes the upheaval of migrating to GTK3+. This has been a release focused on refining the distro and sweating the details. As always, we’re never finished and eager to start work on 17.10 to bring you further improvements and refinement. But for now, we hope you enjoy Ubuntu MATE 17.04 as much as we’ve enjoyed making it for you.

Their release announcement has more details on updated features.

Overlooked Pop Culture

Tim Berners-Lee has been going back to the drawing board regarding the web. He argues that spying has taken place, while mean ideas have proliferated. Ironically, the only way to address the latter is to enable the former.

In spite of President Trump’s recent actions regarding the Middle East, Paul Joseph Watson of PrisonPlanet is still defending him.

Trump’s response to the alleged chemical weapons attack allowed him to look decisive and was a show of strength towards China and North Korea. It also served to temporarily silence the repeated accusations that he is in collusion with Russia.

Trump’s aim with the air strike was to destroy Syria’s remaining chemical weapons to make Assad follow through on the deal. If he didn’t act, Trump would have been eviscerated by his critics as being equally as weak as Obama.

Watson ends the article by claiming that if Trump were to manipulated by neo-conservatives that he would have a legacy equivalent to George W Bush’s.

To end the week with weird stuff, Tony Ortega has the latest on celebrities and their involvement with the Church of Scientology.

Have an excellent weekend and we’ll be back next Friday.

Thomas Holbrook II | The *Nixed Report

Update: Over a week later, they implemented SSL. They have a security certificate from Comodo.

In light of the election results and the accusations of venues acting as fake news outlets and/or propaganda arms to the Russian government, there has been concerns regarding free speech. There is legislation that is indeed concerning as it could potentially violate the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution.

With that said, the fourth and fifth amendments should also be valued as well. I am no fan of tearing down other venues, but there are times when criticism is warranted. When I saw Infowars ask for signatures for a petition, I became irritated.

It is a similar tactic used by Newsmax and other venues. I have no problem with petitioning or asking for people to signup for a newsletter. Where I take issue is when I see that the website doesn’t use SSL Encryption.

I had a similar issue with John McAfee himself when he announced he was running for President. He was requesting volunteers on his campaign site, but there was no SSL Encryption.

To be fair, after being called on it, a certificate was implemented, thus ensuring the privacy of those who signed up to volunteer.

Without encryption, any information submitted in an online form can be intercepted by a third party interloper. Other sites like The Intercept use SSL due to the revelations from Edward Snowden. Having a plan for OpSec, or Operational Security, is important and should not be overlooked.

This means protecting the information of visitors in any way possible on the entire site, not just a customer’s online shopping cart. This site is no exception.

This means any comments you submit will be encrypted and not intercepted by a third party. We value your privacy, which is why we don’t complain when ad blocking is used.

The idea is to earn money with the site, but without visitors, that won’t happen.

So the next time you see a call to action, double check and make sure the connection to the site is secure. In the meantime, you may want to e-mail Kurt Nimmo or Paul Joseph Watson and ask them why Infowars does not implement site wide SSL Encryption.

Out with 2013, and in with 2014.  No matter what this year brings, it won’t be boring.  With that said, here’s some links for you to check out this week.

Unix

• Getting Involved in FOSS (opensource.com): The Red Hat sponsored website has seven ways for people to get involved in various projects that share their source code and invite collaboration from others.  For those who can’t code their way out of a paper bag, there’s always writing documentation and creating digital art for the various projects, because good instructions and pretty icons can go a long way in making an application more attractive.
• Exciting Changes to 5.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite GUI (phoronix.com):  Though it was initially written in GTK2, HTML 5 is being used instead.  According to Michael Larabel, “This new GUI to Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 is being written as an HTML5 interface. This is being done for portability and network transparency with the Phoronix Test Suite commonly being used on embedded devices and servers where there is no connected devices — remote support for PTS 5.0 HTML5 GUI can be enabled, otherwise it’s only exposed locally.”  Work on the interface is currently ongoing.
• Now It’s Our Turn (Blog of helios):  Ken “helios” Starks has been through quite a bit over the years.  He decided to tell the story of how he is now able to give back to those who have helped him, starting with Randy Noseworthy.  It looks like the Reglue Project will be able to help bridge the digital divide more than ever.

Overlooked Pop Culture

• District Judge Rules in Favor of Warrantless Border Searches (Maximum PC):  The controversy continues over warrantless border searches as a Federal Judge declared that risk of seizure was insignificant, so plaintiffs have no standing.  It looks like it’s time to learn how to use encryption or data wiping techniques before traveling to other countries.
• Horrible Things Done to Male Sexual Organs (deadspin.com): In weird news, males have apparently hurt themselves in the no no parts in 2013.  Some of these entries will make you laugh, others will make you cry, and the rest will make you hurt down there.
• 14 Million Doses of Potassium Iodide Ordered (infowars.com):  The stuff that prevents radioactive iodine from being absorbed by the thyroid is apparently being ordered in an unprecedented quantity, according to this.  It is apparently related to the problematic Fukushima reactor.  U.S. Sailors have apparently come back sick after helping out in the area, and have sued the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).  This tidbit may crop up again this year.