Good points. With trump it is all the more important that we focus on the worst as there will be a never ending tsunami of **** every day he is in office.

shamrocks are the symbol of the aryan brotherhood

i imagine those hats will be very popular year-round

Servers, like all networked machines (servers, workstations/personal computers, smartphones, etc.) have IP addresses. DNS is a protocol. There exists DNS servers, which are like phone books. When you want to go to a website, you type in your web browser https://website.com and hit enter. What happens is that your computer queries a DNS server, which is like a phone book. This DNS server resolves the host name "website.com" to the IP address. It's like looking up "Mr. Personname" in a phone book to find their phone number (IP address). Then your computer establishes a (usually TCP) connection to the IP address of the server, which was learned through the DNS query.

As stated in the article, some experts were able to obtain records of DNS queries from a DNS server that the Russian bank was using to resolve host names to IP addresses.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/09/politi...ion/index.html

I don't know what DNS server this was, there are many. Your ISP provides DNS servers, Google provides DNS servers, companies can provide their own internal DNS servers, etc. But the logs the researchers collected were like if you could see everything that someone had been looking up in a phone book.

We know from what the researchers found, that the Russian bank's server (which we don't know what kind of server it is, servers have many different purposes) sent 99% of their DNS queries to resolve the IP address of the Trump server, and the Devos server. This would be like someone over a period of time looking up information in a phone book to find out someone's phone number many different times, and 99% of the time they were looking up either Trump, or Devos. We do not know if connections were actually established to these servers, which would be like we do not know if the person actually called the phone numbers they found in the phone book, but we know that 99% of the time they were looking up Trump and Devos.

They really are gutting everything.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...0ed71826c70ef?

In the sea of awful trump ideas this one is hands down the worst. This program is the rare example of pure good with a massive ROI unheard of in policy.

This is just right ring ideologues trashing everything associated with the EPA without an ounce of thought put into the actual program.

There is LITERALLY no defends for this. None.

FWIW, I read it as: of all the times the trump server address was looked up, 99% were from either Alfa Bank (Russia) or Spectrum Health (DeVos).

Got to admire their ambition. Takes a real go-getter to wake up each morning and think to themselves, 'Why just stop at doing the most crappy things I can for my fellow countrymen? Instead I'll push the boat out and try to screw over the whole of humanity!'.

You used to be able to go to the Department of Agriculture's website and get information about the treatment of animals at thousands of research laboratories, zoos, and dog breeding operations.

Not in Trumpland you don't!

I disagree with this. The rest of the scandal is telling a simple and coherent story (Trump has business interests with Russia/they have kompromat, he colluded with them to gain an advantage in the campaign plus whatever other personal kickbacks).

The problem with the server story is that any nefarious explanation would involve some super hidden channel of communication to avoid talking to the Russians directly, and the entire rest of the scandal involves repeated direct contact with the Russians. I have not yet heard any theory about what this server could possibly be doing. I'm not even specifying "plausible theory", I'd settle for an implausible one, there just aren't any stories at all and the whole thing is totally at odds with the rest of the evidence for the scandal.

What I'm emphasising there is that the server is some random machine not even owned directly by Trump as far as I know, located in some backwater town. It's not located in the basement of Trump Tower surrounded by lasers and a pressure-sensitive floor. It seems an unlikely location for Russian Treason Cyber Command or whatever people think is going on. Every time I have to write a shorthand for what the conspiracy theory is I'm stumped because there is no theory.

As usual, well named with the comprehensive post containing everything I wanted to say but was too lazy to write.

Edit: By "pinging the server" Slate simply means the DNS lookup requests, which is not the same thing. A DNS lookup is like looking someone up in the phone book. Usually this lookup is a prelude to contacting the server, but it doesn't have to be - like a phone book lookup, you might just be ensuring that someone exists and has the phone number they're claiming. From the CNN article:

There's an article here from Errata Security that I only just read, debunking the story.

Regarding Trump violating the conditions of the Trump Hotel lease on the government building it's located in: Wine Bar Sues Trump and Hotel, Claiming Illegal Advantage

Also well named's second last sentence should be emphasised I think. If you're imagining that weird, inexplicable network traffic on the internet is mostly meaningful, you are off the mark. There's all sorts of random network infrastructure and forgotten half-working junk out there, it's chaotic. It's a million monkeys and million typewriters situation, and what's happening here is that someone sifted through the chaos specifically looking for something linking some facet of the Trump organisation with some sort of Russian thing. When you think about it, finding a (very vague) link between some marketing email server and a Russian bank is pretty weak stuff. If they'd found connections between Jared Kushner's personal computer and a known FSB server, I'd be more inclined to listen.

Jeff Sessions has asked 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys to resign.


https://twitter.com/KaivanShroff/sta...34106873470976

https://twitter.com/gabrielsherman/s...40280138063872

It's not surprising that they have been asked to resign. This is standard procedure in a new administration. The Bharara thing is weird, though. Sends a terrible message if he is actually fired.

Like, I don't think the Trump administration really realizes that there are very few lawyers (including the more conservative ones) who have any interest in working for a Sessions-led and Trump-instructed DOJ. To be clear, I'm talking about the career prosecutors and rank-and-file, not the big law partners who will go to be a head of whatever.

If the President directed it, it's because he watched Hannity last night.

ETA: ponied somewhat

You know the Fox News producers have a bet on who can get trump to do the craziest thing that day.

comments:

Sorry but all those comments are just complete nonsense start to finish.

1. Accusing a cybersecurity expert of not knowing how domains are registered. lol. Comment presents nothing which invalidates anything Graham said.

2. More vague "connections" but if you try to pin down what is being talked about here it evaporates. Why would Manafort resigning make DNS requests spike? It would help here if there was any coherent theory of what this server could be doing, which again, there isn't.

3.

The use of "pinged" here is a dead giveaway that this guy has no clue what he is talking about.

This is just completely made up. The server isn't responding to requests. There's no evidence Alfa or Spectrum can get responses from it either.

This is all just pure drivel. If you wanted to communicate secretly over the internet, none of this looks anything like how you'd go about it. Just for starters, you would just use IP addresses so no DNS requests would be needed. That's like point 1 of 100 of things that don't fit here.

I don't know the guy. I just went to his blog and read the story. I am not a computer scientist so I could be completely wrong. I probably am. The investigator originally handling the data was Paul Vixie. Among other credentials on Wikipedia, he is a trustee for American Registry for Internet Numbers Ltd. The FBI is still investigating it so that seems relevant also.

ok. yea I don't have any idea what they were talking about. But I have seen articles stating that they did increase during specific times of the eleciton:



I thought he was using pinged ironically since it was in quotes.

I'll take your word for it. It's over my head.



ETA:

Wait, the author of that blog in a CNN article said:

i'm confused lol.

Bharara was a prosecutor's prosecutor. He's a tremendous loss. I'm sure Trump shitcanned him because of all the US attorneys, the one mostl likely to prosecute trump and/or his cronies for corruption is Bharara.

From a blog post he made after the CNN article came out:

What he's saying to CNN is that it looks a bit weird, and it does. But weird doesn't equal nefarious. They also probably plucked that quote from like a 10 minute phone interview.

As he said in the new blog post, we don't even know at this point whether or not the DNS records are genuine, they could have been edited.

You don't usually do a dns lookup on a host name you don't intend to initiate a connection with. There are exceptions to this like how some anti-spam software works. But the idea that they are communicating is inferred rather than demonstrated

Vanity Fair article slays Trump as businessman. Dude is of course a complete con man.