#OR it might be the homophobes containment breaching | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gothighunicorntolerance · 3 years

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Containment Breach. But For Real This Time.

@chaos-family-scp-au @chaos-family-writing @orange-side-please-appear @unlawful-lawyers-chaos @hihello-what-is-chaos-doing are you ready? :)

SCP-0475 hung upside down by their knees from a pull-up bar that SCP-0472- well, only the researchers called xem that; 0475 called xem Orange-had requested (0475 had actually asked Orange to request it, but details ruined a good story!). It, like everything else on xyr room, was made of hard tungsten metal and bolted down. 0475 snacked on some heavily buttered popcorn as they watched Orange.

Orange lay spread eagled on the floor beneath 0475, making vaguely annoying humming noises.

Xe sat up without warning. “Everyone calls you by your number. 0475. But what’s your name?” Xe asked.

This caught 0475 by surprise.

“I… I don’t know.” 0475 replied.

“Don’t you know, like, everything though!?”

“Only things that have been proven.”

“Okay, well, if you don’t have a name, I’ll give you one!”

This caught 0475 by surprise- and not the kind of surprise that Orange usually invoked- no, Orange’s usual surprise consisted of fire, screaming, and sometimes a sentient roomba.

“Okay. Um, what kind of name?”

Orange’s reply was drowned out by the blaring of sirens.

“Um, this breach wasn’t my fault!” Orange shouted over the sirens.

“Oh, this time! Stay here, you’ll be safer.” 0475 told xem before teleporting out of Orange’s cell into the hallway, where the alarms blared even louder and the walls were bathed in red light.

“Where’s Graves!” 0475 muttered to themself.

Their question was abruptly answered when the doctor ran into them- quite literally.

“0475! What are you doing here!? Get out! This isn’t safe!” Dr. Graves shouted over the alarms.

“Well then you need to get out, too! What happened!?”

Their question was once again answered as another creature came barreling down the hallway.

“You motherfucker!” 0475 shouted at the teddy bear ambling closer to the doctor.

“Stop antagonizing it and run!” Dr. Graves shouted, pulling 0475 along with vem, 0475 giving a long string of swear words as the bear came closer.

“Fuck this! I hate running!” 0475 shouted and grabbed Dr. Graves before closing their eyes and teleporting.

With no particular destination in mind- only away! The darkness that surrounded them when teleporting seemed thicker- or maybe it was also the fact that they had never teleported with another person. Was 0475 even a person? They looked like one, but were they really? The void seemed the consistency of maple syrup, or maybe molasses, when it usually seemed like water.

They trudged through the darkness until they pushed through a light. A second later, 0475 and Dr. Graves tumbled out of the darkness into a grassy field.

“What. Was. That.” Dr. Graves gasped, sitting on aer knees.

“Teleporting. What else would it be?” 0475 replied.

“Oh… I really, really hated that.”

“Oops,” 0475 gave a sheepish grin. “But you should be proud of me! That was the first time I’ve teleported with someone else!”

“Really? Can you describe how it was different?” Dr. Graves sat up.

“It was… heavy. Normally I just step from one place to another, but this was like… I dunno. You know those videos of someone pushing a car uphill? Yeah, like that. Except you’re the car. And the hill is the teleporting void. If that makes sense, I guess.”

Dr. Graves nodded. “This is valuable information. Thank you.”

0475 gave a small grin. “Now, uh, I think we should just stay here until the asshole of a murder-y teddy bear is caught.”

“Agreed. Wait- how do you know about SCP-1048?”

“Remember in the interview I said that I know everything that’s been proven as a fact? Yeah, the fact that SCP-1048 is a keter. The 1048-A, B and C, the ears… I know it all. I wish I didn’t know some of that. I wish I didn’t have access to everything that I do.”

“Would you change, if you could? Be… normal?”

0475 fell silent for a minute.

“In the end? No, I don’t think I would. There are definitely some things I would like to forget about… but I like doing this. Being able to teleport. Being essentially bulletproof. And punching fascists is kind of what I do now. I wouldn’t give up my powers, but I do wish there were some things I didn’t know. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?” 0475 gave a fake laugh.

“No. No, knowledge is a tool. A vast, useful tool. And I’m glad you have that knowledge. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t teleported me away? I might have been made into SCP-1048-D, and then 0472 would burn the place down. And- wait- you said you were bulletproof!?” Dr. Graves put aer hand on 0475’s shoulder and frowned.

“I guess you’re right. But that doesn’t change the fact that I know things I wish I didn’t. And yeah. I found out when some asshole tried to shoot me,” they laughed.

“I’m sorry. I would offer you amnesiacs, but I don’t know if they would help.”

“They wouldn’t. I think that’s how I got into this whole mess in the first place.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“I could. But I don’t want to. It might get back to Bitchard.”

“Bitchard?” Dr. Graves bit back a laugh.

“Yup. He’s a bitch. Beta gave him that name.”

“You’ve talked to hum?”

“Yeah, hum’s pretty nice. Hu likes it when I do most of the talking, though.”

Dr. Graves nodded again. 0475 noticed ve did that a lot- nodded in the way that someone with a lot of gears turning in their head nodded. Like how a therapist or a professor nodded when thinking about a particularly difficult question.

SCP-0475 and Dr. Graves sat in the field until the sun set. “Do you think they have murder bear under control yet?” Graves asked.

0475 closed their eyes and thought for a minute. “Yes.” Their voice suddenly turned almost robotic, as if they were programmed to read off the page. “Attention all staff members. SCP-1048 has been recaptured and is now in transport to site A-24 under high security. SCP-1048-D has been terminated, with only three D-Class KIB (killed in breach). No other SCPs have escaped. It is safe to exit your offices or wherever you have hidden. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“I’ve never seen you do that before. How did you access the foundation’s emails?”

“It’s a verifiable fact that SCP-1048 is in transport, and I just… saw the email. I don’t know how to explain it. I’m sorry.”

“That’s what my job is. Research. If you’ll let me research, I want to help.”

0475 shook their head. “I’ve seen what happens to Orange and Green after experiments. I know what Beta is like after research. No thanks.”

“Okay. I won’t force you. I know Bitchard would say otherwise, but gathering data by any means is unethical and is not what the foundation should be doing. Now come on, I should be getting back,” Dr. Graves stood up and offered a hand to 0475, who accepted.

As soon as 0475 gripped Dr. Graves’ hand, the two teleported out of the field and entered the void. It wasn’t nearly as thick as it had been, though it was still difficult, carrying Graves.

They tumbled out of the darkness, landing on top of Dr. Grave’s desk.

“Wow. The second round was not any better.” Ve rubbed aer head.

0475 shrugged. “Sorry about that. Again. I’ll be back, so don’t be surprised if I’m watching Jeopardy! again on your computer. Bye!”

Dr. Graves was going to reply- say something, even a returned goodbye- but 0475 teleported before Graves could even think of something.

Ve sat down at their desk (on the chair, not the top) and put aer head in aer hands.

Somewhere on the other side of the world, SCP-0475 remembered what Orange had said: “Okay, well, if you don’t have a name, I’ll give you one!”

0475 probably had a name, a long time ago, but they couldn’t remember it anymore. It would be nice to have a name, rather than a number, they mused.

Perhaps they would let Orange give name suggestions the next time 0475 visited.

But for now, 0475 was content to have a number and punch homophobes.

#chaos fam #scp au

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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Patronscan wants cities to require bars to scan your ID with its service so it can maintain a secret, unaccountable blacklist

Patronscan is the leading provider of ID-scanning/verification services to bars and restaurants, and one of its selling points is that it allows its customers to create shared blacklists of undesirable customers who can then be denied services at every other establishment that uses its services.

Susie Cagle (previously) delves into Patronscan's practices and the risks the company presents to privacy and fairness. For example, Patronscan's database contains the names, addresses and other details of people who patronize LGBTQ bars, or fundraisers for political causes. What's more, Patronscan allows law enforcement to access its records without warrants.

More disturbing is the creation of shared blacklists of undesirable customers: bar staff can block anyone for any reason, and while Patronscan's product allows staff to list a reason ("Assault," "disturbance," "drug possession," "drug trafficking," "fake ID," "fighting," "gang violence," "public intoxication," "sexual assault," "theft") there is no need to provide evidence for these claims, and your due process or right of appeal are based on the company's terms of service, not your constitutional rights. Once you're added to Patronscan's blacklist, you are barred from any participating establishment.

But even if there was some system of private justice you could appeal to, it might not matter: bar staff can also add people to the blacklist and give the reason as "other" or "private" -- 60% of the people blacklisted in Sacramento were blocked for "private" reasons.

This opens up the door to widespread, illegal discrimination by racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic bar staff, whose blacklistings will ripple out to many other establishments (Patronscan has captured scans from 200,000,000 people in sixty countries).

Patronscan has an aggressive lobbying arm, which has successfully lobbied cities like Pomona and Sacramento to adopt mandatory scanning laws for licensed establishments. Patronscan also deployed its lobbyists to attempt to scuttle a California privacy law that limits the retention and sharing of its data -- the law passed, and Patronscan is currently in violation of it.

Once scanning is in place in a city, it doesn't take long for the databases it creates to swell to terrifying size: in the first five months of 2018, Patronscan scanned 561,087 people in Sacramento -- the latest numbers put Sacramento's population at only 501,901 (!).

There's many reasons to worry about this kind of unaccountable private blacklisting, especially when it deputizes itself to serve as an arm of the state and law-enforcement, the sort of thing that causes real anxiety when it's tried in China. In an environment where immigration status and other basic facts of peoples' lives puts them at risk of loss of liberty, family separation and arbitrary detention, collecting, retaining and sharing data about our everyday activities represents a kind of depraved indifference to the human consequences of the pursuit of profit.

There's also the risk of a breach or leak, or of unethical employees using the company's stored data in unethical ways, from stalking to identity theft. This might be the easiest leverage point for curbing the company's worst practices: simply by creating a breach law that entitled victims to statutory damages from data leaks, states or the feds could make businesses like Patronscan uninsurable unless they drastically curtailed their data collection and retention. With New York and California attempting wide-ranging privacy protections, and with Europe already there, companies like Patronscan might have numbered days: one good lawsuit or enforcement action could trigger insurance audits of their business practices that would force them to enact deep product changes, or forge ahead with no insurance, something that would scare off any investor or shareholder, and pose real hazards for anyone who joins the company's Board of Directors.

There are already businesses that could fill the void if this were to come to pass: Patronscan competitor Idscan.net lets bars verify IDs and keep records on which patrons have been barred from their premises, without sharing or retaining that data (regrettably, Idscan.net is also operating a facial recognition database as part of its product offerings).

https://boingboing.net/2019/06/05/robo-jim-crow.html

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androgyne-acolyte · 5 years

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The Radical Queer Gospel

(My first try at a sermon, for Pride Sunday 2019. You can also listen on Soundcloud.)

Why do we need a Pride Sunday? Especially in June? [Note: our local Pride festival is held in July.]

Because there is still a great lie that queer people — LGBTQ+ people — and Christians can’t get along.

I’ve had people on the internet tell me that my decision to go into ministry as a genderqueer person is worthless, because “the belief system of some two-thousand-year-old desert tribe didn’t care about being nice to gay people”. We routinely get messages telling us our church sign is wrong.

Anyone can spout talking points about this; but wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. [cf. Matthew 11:19]

I’m going to tell you about Jesus today; how he lived, and what he taught. For me, there is something powerfully relatable about the shape of Jesus’ life; not just as a person of faith, but as a queer person. I want to talk about how Jesus’ story resembles, in many ways, nothing so much as a queer life — with all the upheaval, scandal, and confounding of expectations that implies.

I’m certainly not saying that Jesus was gay, or trans, or intersex. Queer is a more expansive term than that, and is a much more immediately transgressive term; it’s a term, quite honestly, that is still very much connected to its origins as a term of abuse. While it can refer to anyone who experiences homophobia or transphobia, it carries with it a connotation of a way of being that goes against the grain; a state of being not quite one thing and not quite another.

But, fair warning: its use is sometimes quite contentious, even discouraged, within the wider LGBTQ+ community, especially when used by people who would not consider themselves “queer”. I’m using it today, however, because I’m speaking from my own point of view.

Jesus is born as an ordinary peasant, the son of a teenage mother and a carpenter — you know the story. He lives under military occupation by the Roman Empire, which has annexed all the best land; demands punitive taxes to build palaces in fortified seaport towns; has taken over the Jerusalem Temple, hiring and firing high priests at will, and doesn’t hesitate to violently crush any sign of dissent.

But as Jesus grows up, he starts to realize that he is called to be something different, something that will disturb the very fabric of the society that he lives in. He finds community through John the Baptist, a strange, wild figure who has quite a following, mostly among the more downtrodden parts of society — and through John he gets initiated into a new kind of life, a new way of being.

Then, Jesus begins to get noticed. Imagine the young Jesus, certainly no older than I am now, speaking in the synagogues all across the countryside of Galilee. And when he gets to his hometown of Nazareth, he stands in front of all his family and friends and begins to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives … to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” … The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)

This reads, to me, like a coming-out narrative. Because Jesus immediately follows up this seemingly empowering message with a bunch of uncomfortable truths that they don’t want to hear — namely, by citing the story of the prophet Elijah to make the point that God works from the margins of society, and plants the seeds of prophecy and change from the bottom up. “No prophet is accepted in their own country,” declares Jesus — and the congregation who had just minutes before said “Wow! This kid is going places! Joseph, isn’t this your son?” turn around and try to run him out of town.

There is something else here that the gospels aren’t quite obvious about. Jesus is giving up his place in the family structure that bound Judean culture together; striking out on his own, all the way to the raggedy edge — to share his message of healing and justice and resilience in the face of Roman occupation with those whom his people would have considered foreigners and outcasts.

It’s almost certain that Joseph assumed that Jesus would come of age and take on his father’s trade, inheriting his tools and going to work as a day labourer in Roman construction projects. All of a sudden, that’s not going to happen — because Jesus has fallen in with a very strange crowd; he’s been influenced by these people, and has come back home full of uncanny zeal and radical ideas.

I can imagine all too well the sight of Mary grieving for the image of the son she loved, who she assumed would grow up, settle down, and have children of his own — but all of a sudden he’s someone different; someone or something that can’t quite be contained. I can imagine this all too well because my own mother, my own father, have both gone through this.

But as it turns out, Jesus had discovered — he had understood, had even begun to embody — a kind of love that had never been thought possible; a kind of love that was so radical and so powerful that a lot of folks outright rejected it. The people in power certainly weren’t into it.

This is a kind of story that should absolutely resonate with queer folks like me, because we have a very similar experience — with and through each other. The dawning realization that we are meant for a different kind of life; something which not everyone can understand, but which we suddenly realize is beautiful. That moment when you see someone else, in person or in the media, who embodies an indescribable feeling that you have kept tucked away inside of you for your entire life.

Isn’t it possible that those ordinary semi-literate fishermen, Peter and Andrew and James and John, had a similar experience — seeing something in Jesus that was so powerful, so compelling, that they couldn’t help but respond when he said “follow me”?

We queer people know a kind of love that wrenches us out of the closet and into the sunlight; a kind of love that makes us feel beautiful and strong and valued in a way that no other love has before; a love that opens our hearts to weep at the injustices done to our queer siblings, our trans siblings, our Two-Spirit siblings throughout history;

A love that can make us fearless, so that no catcalling, no misgendering, no homophobic preaching, no gay-bashing, no parental rejection can dissuade us from living out the kind of love to which we are called; the ways of being that upset cultural assumptions and power structures that most of us take as fact.

The love that took root in Jesus’ movement was one that breached walls and broke down borders; that reached across ancient religious schisms — such as the one between the Judeans and the Samaritans, who wouldn’t even speak to each other; that uplifted and empowered women; that extended all the way to the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts — who would have been considered not only foreign, but ritually unacceptable as a person! — to heal and unify and plant the seeds of distributive justice through small, beautiful, subversive actions. And it didn’t stop there.

Near the end of the Gospel of Matthew, some of the Roman-backed chief priests and elders come up to Jesus and start questioning him. But he takes the wind out of their sails by telling them a parable:

“What do you think? A man had two sons [keep in mind that in a lot of Bible stories, the second son is the underdog who comes out on top]; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the [sex workers] are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” (Matthew 21:28-31)

(Look at it this way; at least no one can accuse me of not being Bible-based.)

That passage is a proverbial smoking gun; of all the sayings in the Gospels, it’s the one that is still immediately subversive to us today. But it’s true, Jesus explains, because there’s one thing that the most stigmatized, most down-and-out people in society have that the respectable folks who actually obey the traffic laws and run the Temple don’t — and that is, a thirst for hope and meaning and healing, and a reason to imagine that another world is possible.

So, I’ll say it right now: I am not going into ministry to uphold the stability of the mainline church in its current form. I am going into ministry in the hope that I can help make the church into a refuge, where everyone has the opportunity and the tools to heal and thrive and care for one another; where this transformative divine love is as present and as accessible as the air we breathe.

I believe that I am called, among other things, to be a minister to and for my queer and trans siblings, for my radical siblings; to be an instrument of disorientation and reorientation and renewal and healing for the wounds that the church at large has inflicted by confusing white heteronormative Western social conventions with the actual, radical teachings of christianity.

Because how many queer and transgender children have been turned away, just like Jesus was run out of his hometown, by parents and communities and churches who don’t understand them?

I think what Jesus says to his own people later on in the Gospel of Matthew is something he might say to my radical queer siblings, and to the church that has historically rejected them, today:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children [— your queer and trans and non-binary children —] together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate.” (Matthew 23:37-38)

Because the great tragedy here is that that vital, transcendent love should have been the church’s stock in trade all along. We, the church, have the capacity and the knowledge to reach back to our radical, counter-cultural roots and throw people a lifeline of meaning and hope and healing in a tempest-tossed world — but in the eyes of far too many, we are still at best a bastion of the status quo.

I’ve connected with some wonderful radical theological people through the internet; one particular person, by the name of Jane Nichols — a remarkable lesbian trans woman who just completed her master’s degree in theology — says it better than I ever could:

[O]ur stance towards exclusionary theology should not be ‘well, actually, if we look in the Bible, we can see that it never actually forbids being gay,’ but instead, ‘how dare [we] presume to limit God’s love? What blasphemous arrogance could have possibly led [us] to where [we ended up]? When did [we] start worshipping [our] own image in place of the Divine?’ (Jane Nichols, Tumblr post, May 2019)

Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.

Where I have found the Holy Spirit alive and well and pushing the envelope is on the margins of almost every sphere. Most immediately, I encounter it in the deep insight and vulnerability of the women clergy members in my life — and most recently, I have seen it spring to life in the passion and brilliance and vision of the lesbian and queer women clergy with whom I was privileged to commune on the sidelines of the former Maritime Conference.

By the way — Jesus’ story is hardly the only one that’s relatable to queer and trans people like us. The Bible is replete with stories of transformation, of coming into new identity and purpose, even gender-ambiguity, if you know where — and how — to look.

Yes, queer people — LGBTQ+ people — and Christians, followers of Jesus, can and should get along. Yes, queer people can be Christian, and Christians can be queer; and yes, we can and should learn from one another!

Because we have a remarkable common ground — a remarkable birthright:

We are called to go against the grain; to challenge the basic patterns in which our societies operate, and to embrace a new and powerful kind of love;

a love that reshapes the way we think about ourselves, a love that beckons us to healing and renewal, a love that calls us to take action and cry out for justice, a love that is itself a radical way of being; a love that is potentially more beautiful and more life-giving than the power structures of this world are ready to understand.

Amen.

June 2, 2019 — St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax

#tamsin writes #tamsin sermonizes #queer christianity #transgender christians #anti-oppressive christianity #reclaiming christianity #rethinking theology #uccan #uccan pride #long post

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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Claims by Joy Reids Cybersecurity Expert Fall Apart

MSNBC host Joy Reid claims that recently unearthed homophobic articles attributed to her are fakes. And she says a cybersecurity consultant has proof that her old blog has been hacked.

But that consultant, Jonathan Nichols, had trouble producing the promised evidence. And what he did produce failed to withstand scrutiny, according to a Daily Beast analysis. Blog posts that Nichols claimed do not appear on the Internet Archive are, in fact, there. The indicators of hacked posts dont bear out.

Last year, the AM Joy host apologized for a 2007 blog post in which she had mocked Floridas then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist by referring to him as Miss Charlie and suggested that while on honeymoon with his wife, he secretly wanted to sleep with men.

Reid apologized on-air, suggesting she had evolved over a decade from those insensitive, tone-deaf and dumb remarks.

But Monday, media-news site Mediaite publishedusing screenshots taken from The Wayback Machines cached versions of Reids blogmore homophobic blog posts from the late aughts. In them, Reid appeared to crassly mock gay celebrities like Anderson Cooper and Clay Aiken, defend homophobia as intrinsic to straight people, declare that she wouldnt see Brokeback Mountain because of the gay sex scenes, and imply that gay advocacy groups prey upon impressionable teens. On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon followed up by revealing another set of homophobic posts not previously reported by Mediaite.

Reida Daily Beast columnistdid not apologize this time around. Instead, she released a statement saying that In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.

On Wednesday evening, Reids attorney announced that the FBI had opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts, including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid.

Reid said she hired Nichols, the cybersecurity consultant, to investigate the alleged hacking of her compromised old blog. In a letter distributed by MSNBC, Nichols claimed he found significant evidence that a hacker breached Reids blog and planted the offensive posts. Some of the posts in question were made while Ms. Reid was on the radio hosting her show, Nichols wrote. Text and visual styling was inconsistent with her original entries. Additionally, he claimed that at least some of the screenshots distributed by the @Jamie_Maz Twitter account, where the posts were first surfaced this week, had been faked and never appeared on the blog at allsuggesting a two-pronged attack on Reids reputation.

We have both evidence of fraudulent posts and evidence of screenshot manipulation, Nichols told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

Except, that wasnt quite so.

To support the screenshot forgery allegation, Nichols pointed to six images in the @Jamie_Maz Twitter timeline that he said were definitely not written by Reid nor posted by a hacker, but instead were outright fabricated images of posts that never appeared on the site. The most obvious one was an instance whereits an easy one, itll stick in your head [@Jamie_Maz] says Joy made statements about Eddie Murphy. Its obviously false, she never made that claim.

Nichols said those six posts are nowhere to be found in the Internet Archive. But that is not true.

Further searching on the Internet Archive turned up the posts for all six of the screenshots Nichols described as fakes, including the one about Eddie Murphy. The Internet Archives records indicate they were retrieved and stored between 2006 and 2009. And all six are exactly as they appear in the screenshots. A random check of other screenshots attributed to the blog produced the same result: None of the images are faked or doctored.

A closer look at the archived blog by The Daily Beast revealed an error in Nichols methodology. Nichols examined the content tags visible in the screenshots and compared them to an archived list of all the labels that were actually used on the blog. He found that the tags Gallup, gay and lesbian, and Dan Abrams in three of the six screenshots did not appear in the catalog of labels.

Based on that evidence, Nichols had concluded that the screenshots could not be genuine. But in fact the tags in question were not Blogger.com labels, but rather tags linking to Technorati.com, a long-defunct blog-tracking site completely external to Reids blog publishing host site. Reid made an apples-to-oranges comparison and concluded that because the apples were not oranges, they must be fake.

Presented with that information on Thursday, Nichols acknowledged his error. Yeah Ive become aware of some methodology issues, he wrote in an online chat. We are looking to resolve the discrepancy.

If, as it appears, the approximately 50 newly surfaced posts indeed appeared on Reids blog, that leaves Reids claim that they were posted by an imposter. To that point, Nichols said passwords used by Reid had been found in the wild on the dark web, where a hacker with a grudge against the MSNBC host might have found them.

A search on the breach-notification site Have I Been Pwned confirmed this: Reids email address, like millions of others, has turned up in batches of hacked and phished accounts over the yearseight batches in all, some of which contain user passwords. While six of the leaks postdate the disputed blog posts, the remaining two are of uncertain origin and timing. If Reid used the same password on Blogger and one of the websites that suffered a password leak, its conceivable that someone found it and used it to log into her blog back in 2005.

But Nichols could not provide any evidence suggesting this had occurred.

As described by Nichols, the conclusion that a hacker was posting on Reids blog rests primarily on two types of forensic clues within the disputed posts. First, he said, some of the allegedly planted posts contain punctuation choices and markup sharply different from Reids other posts. The Daily Beast compared scores of disputed and undisputed posts and could not discern any such anomalies. Pressed for specificswhich posts, which artifactsNichols said Wednesday that he did not have ready access to that information, but would provide it. Reached again on Thursday, he said he did not have any details to offer. I thought I did, he said Were kind of reevaluating as of yesterday.

The second giveaway, Nichols said, was in the date and time stamps of some of the posts. They indicated that the entries were posted in the middle of Reids live radio show. No one writes long soliloquies while theyre on the radio, he said . It just doesnt happen. Reids lawyer made the same claim in a letter written last December that was made public this week. It would have been physically impossible for Ms. Reid to have made many of the posts. Some have dates and times when Ms. Reid was doing her radio show and could not have been blogging.

The Daily Beast asked Nichols to provide those posts on Wednesday, and the cybersecurity consultant replied: I dont have that on hand. On Thursday Nichols passed on what he now says is the only example he has available. Dated Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007, the posttitled Is you is, or is you aint gonna impeach?reads in its entirety: John Conyers talks a good game in front of a hometown crowd, but is he serious about keeping impeachment on the table?

The timestamp indicates the entry was posted at 7:14 a.m. Eastern Time. The Daily Beast confirmed that the radio show Reid co-hosted in 2006 and 2007, Wake Up South Florida, aired weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m. No archive of the shows broadcasts from that era could be found online.

The contested post was followed by a longer blog post that went up at 8:10 a.m., also during the shows normal airing time. That posttitled The next war?contains 330 words of original writing discussing the prospect of war with Iran. Neither Reid, Nichols, nor Reids attorney have so far contested its authenticity.

The presence of the second post seems to admit only two possibilities: the blog washacked by someone with a well-considered view on U.S. conflict with Iran, or Reid, whether on the air or not, was able to blog that morning.

Reid declined to comment for this story.

The only other specific evidence offered by Reids team came from her attorney, John Reichmann. In letters sent to Google and the Internet Archive last December, which MSNBC distributed to journalists this week, Reichmann claimed that the timestamps on many of the posts on Reids blog are too close together to be the work of a single blogger. The letters provide as the only example Reids 2006 live-blogging of Samuel Alitos Supreme Court confirmation hearing, noting that Reid pushed short updates to the post at 10:18 a.m., 11:34 a.m., and 11:41 a.m.

The Blog, however, also shows a lengthy, fraudulent entry, Things people say when theyre on the Fox News Channel, supposedly posted right in the midst of this, at 11:28 a.m., wrote Reichmann. Ms. Reid did not have the superhuman blogging skills needed to do all of these posts simultaneously.

But the lengthy, fraudulent entry about Fox News Reichmann is referring to consisted of just two lines of original text, plus a copy-pasted quote. A check of CSPANs archive also shows that the post was made shortly after a 15-minute break in the hearing.

If there was a hack, it would have taken place years ago. The Internet Archives records show the disputed posts were mirrored by the Wayback Machine no later than 2009, and many of them were archived much earlier, some within hours of appearing on Reids blog. Reichmann explored the possibility last year that the posts were crafted more recently, and that someone inserted them into the Internet Archive with false dates. Reichmann contacted the nonprofit in December to demand that you provide us with the information needed to determine how the fraudulent posts came to be included in the archived posts.

But at least one of the entries was contemporaneously referenced on a completely different website. A Feb. 6, 2007 post containing the line most straight guys (and women) do react with winces at the sight of two men kissing on the lips drew a comment on the Democratic Underground forum the same day: Oh, Reidblog… why, why why

Today Nichols says Reid and her team no longer believe the archive was hacked, and the Internet Archive has denied any such manipulation could have occurred. We found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions, an archiver for the site said in a statement.

That means the supposed hacker was posting alongside Reid for years. According to Reichmann, that even included inserting updates in Reids live blog of the Alito hearing in January 2006. Reichmann claimed that the hacker was responsible for two consecutive updates sandwiched between Reids legitimate ones. The updates report that Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch was using his questioning time to metaphorically fellate the judge. Oh, look, Orrin Hatch is putting on his Supreme Court knee pads to save Alito, one line read. The posts title, which Reichmann says the hacker changed, was Brokeback Committee Room, another reference to the film about gay lovers. All the contested material in the post is present in the earliest archived copy, which was captured the day after the hearing.

All of this alleged hacking apparently went unnoticed at the time by Reid.

Thats an extraordinary claim, and so far the bits and pieces of evidence offered for it have not stood up to scrutiny when theyve been specific enough to test. If she wasnt hacked, it doesnt necessarily follow that Reid is lying. Her decision to hire a security consultant to investigate the posts, and a lawyer to demand the access logs for her blog account, suggests she genuinely believes at least some of the posts were planted. After 12 years and tens of thousands of written words, Reid simply may not remember.

Its possible that in the end Reid will discover her adversary isnt a determined hacker, but a far more dogged foe: The Joy-Ann Reid of years past, writing in a voice she can no longer recognize as her own.

with additional reporting by Andrew Kirell and Maxwell Tani

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/claims-by-joy-reids-cybersecurity-expert-fall-apart

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

Text

Claims by Joy Reids Cybersecurity Expert Fall Apart

MSNBC host Joy Reid claims that recently unearthed homophobic articles attributed to her are fakes. And she says a cybersecurity consultant has proof that her old blog has been hacked.

Reid apologized on-air, suggesting she had evolved over a decade from those insensitive, tone-deaf and dumb remarks.

We have both evidence of fraudulent posts and evidence of screenshot manipulation, Nichols told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

Except, that wasnt quite so.

Nichols said those six posts are nowhere to be found in the Internet Archive. But that is not true.

Presented with that information on Thursday, Nichols acknowledged his error. Yeah Ive become aware of some methodology issues, he wrote in an online chat. We are looking to resolve the discrepancy.

But Nichols could not provide any evidence suggesting this had occurred.

Reid declined to comment for this story.

All of this alleged hacking apparently went unnoticed at the time by Reid.

with additional reporting by Andrew Kirell and Maxwell Tani

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/claims-by-joy-reids-cybersecurity-expert-fall-apart

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2x0YrvI via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

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