“Stinky”: U.S. Navy Senior Enlisted Sailors Installed Outlaw Starlink Network on Warship
September 4th, 2024How desperate is the U.S. Navy for personnel that these people weren’t thrown in jail or kicked out!?
Besides installing the Starlink system and lying about it, to boost wifi coverage around the ship, they installed wifi range extenders!
I wonder how many heads exploded in ONI/NSA/DIA when they heard about this one?
Most consumer grade wifi range extenders are made in China by Chinese companies and running closed source blobs. Here’s an example of what to expect from such devices:
…suspicious backdoors have been discovered in a Chinese-made Jetstream router, sold exclusively at Walmart as their new line of “affordable” wifi routers. This backdoor would allow an attacker the ability to remotely control not only the routers, but also any devices connected to that network.
Via: NavyTimes:
Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment.
For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.
But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.
As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.
So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.
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The enjoyment of those wireless creature comforts by enlisted leaders aboard the ship carried serious repercussions for the security of the ship and its crew.
“The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship and the Navy cannot be understated,” the investigation notes.
Led by the senior enlisted leader of the ship’s gold crew, then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, the effort roped in the entire chiefs mess by the time it was uncovered a few months later.
Marrero was relieved in late 2023 after repeatedly misleading and lying to her ship’s command about the Wi-Fi network, and she was convicted at court-martial this spring in connection to the scheme.
She was sentenced to a reduction in rank to E-7 after the trial and did not respond to requests for comment for this report.
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Marrero’s background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography.
The investigation notes that she should have known better.
“Her time in service and specialized training makes it clear the member knew or should have known the risks associated with an unauthorized Wi-Fi system,” the investigation states.
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After Manchester got underway from San Diego, Marrero and the chiefs soon realized the Wi-Fi signal didn’t cover all areas of the ship, so the senior chief purchased signal repeaters and cable at the Navy Exchange store in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, during a port visit in late April or early May, according to the investigation.
Argentina Ships Gold Bars Abroad to Be Financially Certified
September 4th, 2024Hmm…
Via: Bloomberg:
Argentina’s central bank sent part of its gold reserves abroad in recent weeks to be validated for financial use, a move that could give the country some much-needed flexibility, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Once certified, the gold could eventually be used as collateral to obtain financing, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Before the move, about half of Argentina’s gold was in domestic vaults with the other half in London, another person said.
Officials from the central bank, known by its Spanish acronym BCRA, declined to comment on the matter.
“States Struggle to Vet Coders of Election Software”
September 4th, 2024I’m not sure when I first wrote this on Cryptogon, but here it is again: The U.S. is a banana republic with nuclear weapons.
Via: Politico:
When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists.
So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.
But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.
The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.
The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.
The company that conducted the scan, ReversingLabs, has also warned about those issues in a blog post and a talk at a hacking conference last year, though it did not specify the state and the vendor where the issues were found.
New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.
Related: Everyday ‘Placebo Buttons’ Create Semblance of Control
Robert Reich Calls for the Arrest of Elon Musk for Resisting Censorship
September 3rd, 2024Via: Jonathan Turley:
We have previously discussed the anti-free speech views of Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, who has tried to sell citizens on the perfectly Orwellian view that more freedom means tyranny when it comes to the freedom of expression. He also demanded that former president Donald Trump be banned from ballots as a “traitor” — all in the name of protecting democracy from itself. Last week, Reich wrote a column declaring Elon Musk “out of control” in his refusal to censor citizens and appeared to call for his arrest.
AI-Implanted False Memories
September 3rd, 2024Ex-Google CEO’s BANNED Interview LEAKED: “You Have No Idea What’s Coming”:
Via: MIT Media Lab:
This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories–recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction.
U.S. Close to Agreeing on Long-Range Missiles for Ukraine; Delivery to Take Months
September 3rd, 2024Via: Reuters:
The U.S. is close to an agreement to give Ukraine long-range cruise missiles that could reach deep into Russia, but Kyiv would need to wait several months as the U.S. works through technical issues ahead of any shipment, U.S. officials said.
The inclusion of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM) in a weapons package is expected to be announced this autumn, three sources said, though a final decision has not been made. The sources declined to be named because they are not authorized to discuss the topic.
Sending JASSMs to Ukraine could significantly alter the strategic landscape of the conflict by putting more of Russia in range of powerful, precision-guided munitions, an important concern of the Biden administration, the officials said.
Military analysts have suggested the introduction of JASSMs – which are stealthy and can strike further than most other missiles in Ukraine’s current inventory – could push Russian staging areas and supply depots back by hundreds of miles.
This would severely complicate Russia’s ability to sustain its offensive operations and potentially provide Ukraine with a strategic advantage.
Related: Russia Updating Nuclear Weapon Doctrine Due To Western ‘Escalation’ Of Ukraine War
“Your Phone Really Is Listening In On Your Conversations”
September 3rd, 2024
Via: Daily Mail:
Millions of people have long suspected it, but now a leak suggests that our phones really are listening to us.
An apparent pitch deck from one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partner appears to detail how the firm eavesdrops on users’ conversations to create targeted ads.
In a slideshow, Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its ‘Active-Listening’ software uses AI to collect and analyze ‘real-time intent data’ by listening to what you say through your phone, laptop or home assistant microphone.
‘Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,’ the deck states.
The pitch deck goes on to tout Facebook, Google and Amazon as clients of CMG, suggesting they could be using its Active-Listening service to target users.
When You Ask Alexa About Voting for Trump vs. Harris for President
September 3rd, 2024This is insane.
Can more people replicate this? pic.twitter.com/gz7KH95LVg
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 3, 2024
Alexa is a Commie operative! You won’t believe this. Volume UP! ?? pic.twitter.com/mOQaaWULhK
— John Rich?? (@johnrich) September 3, 2024
Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess?
September 3rd, 2024Via: Brownstone Institute:
Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilization and set the path of history on a dark course.
And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies.
When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.
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Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said.
Then also you have the French arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, an event which surely rattles any major CEO of a communication platform. You have the arrest and incarceration of other dissidents like Steve Bannon and many others.
You also have the litigation over free speech back in play now that RFK, Jr has been cleared as having standing, kicking the case of Missouri v. Biden back to the Supreme Court, which wrongly decided last time to deny standing to other plaintiffs.
Zuckerberg of all people knows the stakes. He understands the implications and the scale of the problem, as well as the depths of the corruption and deception at play in the US, EU, UK, and all over the world. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve.
Berkeley Law School Dean: Constitution ‘Outdated,’ ‘Threatens the United States’
September 2nd, 2024Tell me another one, Professor.
Via: Armageddon Prose:
Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, promoting his very patriotic book “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” recently penned an op-ed and appeared on MSNBC to float the idea that we need to toss out the United States Constitution — arguably the most eloquent and functional if imperfect governing document ever written, which every Western nation has modeled their own on — and replace it with something a little more Democratic™.
