Jan
1
2017

URLs du Jour

2017-01-01

Happy New Year, readers.

  • I got a little (actually, a lot) lazy about blogging this year. I toyed with making a New Year Resolution about blogging more. But then I said: why wait until the New Year? So far I've managed slightly over a week of daily blog posts.

    Can I keep up that pace? "Time will tell."

  • For those who might be interested: my yearly summary pages of the 61 books I read and 58 movies I watched in 2016. Turn off thy ad-blocker, lest you miss the attractive and tasteful Amazon links therein.

  • The Washington Post managed some fake news recently. Their headline screamed: "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say". Aieee!

    The significantly less scary reality emerged a few hours later. A routine scan of the computers at the Burlington Electric Department turned up a malware signature of "Grizzly Steppe" on a single laptop, one that had no connection to the electricity grid.

    And so:

    According to "Tyler Durden" at ZeroHedge it's worse than that: the "evidence" used to blame this all on Putin & the Russkies is worse than shaky.

    According to some cybersecurity specialists, the code came from an outdated Ukrainian hacking tool. As RT notes, IT specialists that have analyzed the code and other evidence published by the US government are questioning whether it really proves a Russian connection, let alone a connection to the Russian government. Wordfence, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in protecting websites running WordPress, a PHP-based platform, published a report on the issue on Friday.

    The analysis in the Wordfence article is impressively detailed. But the bottom line seems to be as Durden claimed. "Grizzly Steppe" is publicly available to black-hatters; its presence doesn't demonstrate "Russian hackers" at work, let alone a Russian government connection.

    As a conservative, I'm supposed to buy into every Commies-under-the-bed conspiracy theory that comes down the pike. But come on.

  • PowerLine provides "The Year in Pictures". You'll enjoy it.

  • And from Mr. Michael Ramirez, a look ahead:


Last Modified 2019-01-06 6:29 AM EDT