BTW...

"Healing? Sure. But first, how about some life-saving surgery!" is a thing I've been saying a lot lately...

 

Currently (via FB friend)

 "Trumpism is not a monolith. It is steered and exploited by some very dangerous people: current and former police and military, members of white nationalist groups, members of government at all levels, fanatical terrorists.

But it seems to me that the average people who have been seduced by QAnon are largely the same people who would've been seduced by televangelists, and tabloid newspapers, and scammy commercials for gold coins 25 years ago.

They are – to put it in a single unpleasant but accurate word – losers. Scrubs. People who lack the intellectual and emotional tools to make sense of the world around them, and therefore to succeed in it. People too dim and naive to know when they're up to their neck in bullshit.

And here's a rich man in a suit, in the highest office in the land, telling them that they're special. Heroes, even. Not just to an invisible man, in some hypothetical afterlife – but right here in the living, breathing world.

And here's an internet which feeds them a neverending stream of grand, slickly produced propaganda reels – casting them as righteous soldiers in a battle against the evil that's kept them down all their lives. Finally, someone is championing *them* – the "real", everyday people.

Now, one can fairly ask *why* these people ended up without the tools to not be losers. And on the other hand, one can fairly call bullshit on this "silenced all my life" narrative.

We'll have time for those New York Times human-interest stories *after* we've dealt with the imminent threat that these people pose to American democracy. I don't care to participate in either of those debates right now.

I have no particular point. It's just something I've observed, over the last week of doomscrolling. Yes, we're being undone by hate, and power-hungry sociopaths, and deliberate malice. But we're also being undone by grifters, and ignorance, and losers clutching at anything that tells them they aren't losers. And it's often difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

It's been said before that fascism is to politics as multi-level marketing schemes are to business. It's all a giant grift. It's just a grift with potentially lethal consequences."

 

BTW...

 Often "healing" needs to start with life-saving surgery.

BTW...

So a group of developers latched onto the Press Release that Twilio put out at midnight last night. In that Press Release, Twilio accidentally revealed which services Parler was using. Turns out it was all of the security authentications that were used to register a user. This allowed anyone to create a user, and not have to verify an email address, and immediately have a logged-on account.

Well, because of that access, it gave them access to the behind the login box API that is used to deliver content -- ALL CONTENT (parleys, video, images, user profiles, user information, etc) --. But what it also did was revealed which USERS had "Administration" rights, "Moderation" rights.

Well, then what happened, those user accounts that had Administration rights to the entire platform... The hackers, internet warriors, call it what you will, was able to use the forgot password link to change the password. Why? Because Twilio was no longer authenticating emails. This meant, they'd get directly to the reset password screen of that Administration user.

This group of Internet Warriors then used that account, to create a handful of other ADMINISTRATION accounts, and then created a script that ended up creating MILLIONS of fake administration accounts.

Now that they had a way of creating admin accounts without interruption, they created a Docker Image (basically a virtual machine) called a Warrior, that anyone could download, and when fired up, would immediately start collecting data off of Parlre, in a coordinated fashion.

Consider it like SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) that people used to load up as screen savers when their computers were not being used. Same concept, crowdsourcing.

All of this data, the videos, the images, the posts, the metadata (including the GEO location of all images and videos, and the connections to the accounts that posted it, has been (since midnight) being uploaded to various cloud drives and storage arrays for the purposes of Archiving this information, for later retrieval by law enforcement, by the public, by Open Source Intelligence communities.

And the kicker.. is this: all of this information was thought to be secure and private by individuals who were making the posts. A significant number of those individuals went through the process of being a "Verified Citizen" on Parler. What does that mean?

It means they uploaded a picture of the front and back of their REAL State Driver's License........ Let that sink in for a second.

I am positive the FBI has been actively soaking in this information along with the Internet Warriors, but this is how they are going to officially track down.

And it's how the FBI, DHS, and FAA have been able to immediately and exhaustively create no-fly lists. Every verified attendee of the Capitol riot where they can find a real name has been placed on No-Fly Lists.

It might seem like a small geeky glitch or hack.. but in the age of Information warfare... this is the silver bullet for the people who used Parler as a place to organize their efforts.

Also, a lot of posts were deleted by Parler members after the riots on the 6th. Turned out... Parler didn't actually delete anything.. just set a bit as deleted.

Guess what has access to all "deleted" content?

Administrator accounts

 

 

 

 

 https://qz.com/1953366/decoding-the-pro-trump-insurrectionist-flags-and-banners/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

@uglybuttonupmillenial

You might know someone who remembers high fives becoming popular. #history #blackhistory #lgbtqhistory #Lgbt #LGBTQ #sportshistory

♬ original sound - Cameron

 

 

 

 https://shop.radical-guide.com/product/antifa-the-anti-fascist-handbook-audiobook-unabridged/

 

 

 

 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-anti-fascism-180975152/