The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: No smocking guns. - Page 709 - Politics and Economics

That's actually why I think this is sort of pointless to harp on. There are so many better examples of their incompetence and malfeasance, that using one that can be easily knocked down as being not a big deal and just partisan bickering is counter-productive. Hit them where it hurts; don't throw them pitches they can easily foul off and don't add to the noise that distracts from the big issues. This administration would love nothing more than to spend the next couple of days watching the news media debate whether 22-minute gate is a big deal.

Edited to add: Also, arguing about this just draws extra attention to the jobs report that Trump gets to take credit for, which builds up his political capital.

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.

03-10-2017 , 05:37 PM

#17702

ScreaminAsian

For President

Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 33,333

Quote:

Originally Posted by markksman

Trump has to pull their green MAGA hats, designed to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, down from website.

shamrocks are the symbol of the aryan brotherhood

i imagine those hats will be very popular year-round

03-10-2017 , 05:42 PM

#17703

AllCowsEatGrass

banned

Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 1,839

Quote:

Originally Posted by Minirra

As best as I can understand it, there's a particular server affiliated with Trump.* Servers have DNS addresses. Other machines can query/look up these addresses,

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Minirra

and someone found out that about 80% of the lookups came from Alfa bank in Russia, and about 20% came from a company owned by Betsy DeVos (or her husband). Other traffic went another route.

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.

Quote:

Last year, a small group of computer scientists obtained internet traffic records from the complex system that serves as the internet's phone book. Access to these records is reserved for highly trusted cybersecurity firms and companies that provide this lookup service.
These signals were captured as they traveled along the internet's Domain Name System (DNS).

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.

03-10-2017 , 05:44 PM

#17704

Huehuecoyotl

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Sep 2009 Posts: 29,296

Quote:

Over the past 25 years, the federal government’s Energy Star program has become a valuable marker for all kinds of industries. Real estate agents upsell buildings that have been Energy Star-certified as energy efficient. Homeowners seek out its blue logo on electricity-guzzling appliances and devices.

But the White House has proposed eliminating funding for Energy Star and instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to “begin developing legislative options and associated groundwork for transferring ownership and implementation of Energy Star to a non-governmental entity,” according to a draft budget the energy news service E&E News obtained this week.

They really are gutting everything.

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

03-10-2017 , 05:51 PM

#17705

Clovis8

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 16,503

Quote:

Originally Posted by Huehuecoyotl

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.

03-10-2017 , 05:56 PM

#17706

Max Cut

Guest

Posts: n/a

Quote:

Originally Posted by AllCowsEatGrass

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.

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).

03-10-2017 , 06:10 PM

#17707

thethethe

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 8,675

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!'.

03-10-2017 , 06:41 PM

#17708

microbet

Solar Powered

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 57,077

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!

03-10-2017 , 06:43 PM

#17709

ChrisV

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 40,336

Quote:

Originally Posted by DVaut1

But the Democrats/Trump opponents aren't really telling a coherent story on it, and so far it's just a collection of sometimes suspicious (Flynn, the story of the Rosneft sale), sometimes bizarre (the Steele dossier) and sometimes completely innocuous facts (Sessions met with a Russian!!!).

The story about Trump's email server communication with a Russian bank is the same thing: that's a little weird, suspicious but not dispositively so (e.g., you have to bring some prior assumptions to make it more dubious), and perhaps innocuous. It's really the perfect microcosm of Trump:Russia.

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kerowo

The physical location of the server is irrelevant, why do you keep saying "rural Pennsylvania?"

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by well named

for whatever this is worth, some of the conclusions Slate reaches in that article seem speculative to me, and I wish there was more information.

For example, how specifically were they "pinging" the server? Trying to connect to SMTP or POP? ICMP ping? It's not clear, nor what they mean by errors, and the details could make this whole question seem irrelevant imo.

They also don't actually know whether or not the Alfabank was also receiving errors if it tried to talk to the server, at least as I understand this story. They know that servers belonging to Alfa and Spectrum Health were initiating DNS lookups on mail1.trump-email.com. That's quite different from "pinging" the actual server, no matter how the ping is performed. Because of the way DNS works they have access to very comprehensive data on DNS lookups, but not direct traffic between servers, so they don't actually have information that says that subsequent connection requests made from Alfa to the Trump server succeeded whereas their own attempts to connect fail. They are inferring it from the patterns in the timestamps of the DNS lookups, which I agree are suggestive but not really dispositive.

Basically I agree with the conclusion that it's odd and something I would be interested in digging into if I were an FBI agent, but it's far from being conclusive imo.

As far as the value of my opinion, you should take it with a healthy dose of salt since I have no access to the data and am purely going off of the articles I've read, but fwiw I spent a few years doing research on click fraud in online advertising. Which is very different, obviously, but it was similar at least in the sense of spending a lot of time trying to find nefarious patterns in various data. One thing I learned is there's a lot of messiness and weird things that happen in network traffic that technically "shouldn't" happen, or which were surprising. The analogy here is that I think Chris is likely right that the space of bizarre but benign explanations is actually larger than you might think.

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:

Quote:

No one has produced evidence that the servers actually communicated.

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

Last edited by ChrisV; 03-10-2017 at 06:55 PM.

03-10-2017 , 06:58 PM

#17710

goofyballer

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 70,719

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

Quote:

Mr. Pitts and Ms. Gross claim that the Trump International Hotel, in the Old Post Office building in Washington, and the restaurants within enjoy an illegal advantage in the city’s restaurant market because of their association with Mr. Trump and that Cork has suffered as a result.

...
But Cork is losing business to the Trump hotel, which they say — as others have suggested — may be attracting diplomats and politicians looking to curry favor with Mr. Trump.

Ms. Gross and Mr. Pitts are not seeking monetary damages. But the suit, filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, offers a few improbable ways to resolve the issue: The hotel can stop operating; Mr. Trump and his family can fully divest from the business; or Mr. Trump can resign from office.

03-10-2017 , 07:07 PM

#17711

ChrisV

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 40,336

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.

03-10-2017 , 07:13 PM

#17712

einbert

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 14,911

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

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

03-10-2017 , 07:17 PM

#17713

einbert

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 14,911

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

03-10-2017 , 07:24 PM

#17714

champstark

aka starkwired

Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 14,838

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.

03-10-2017 , 07:26 PM

#17715

champstark

aka starkwired

Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 14,838

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.

03-10-2017 , 07:32 PM

#17716

JordanIB

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Sep 2004 Posts: 13,458

Quote:

Originally Posted by einbert

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

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

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

ETA: ponied somewhat

Last edited by JordanIB; 03-10-2017 at 07:50 PM.

03-10-2017 , 08:03 PM

#17717

will1530

self-banned

Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 5,773

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

03-10-2017 , 08:04 PM

#17718

prana

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 8,513

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisV

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

comments:

Quote:

Adam said...
I nearly had to stop here: "That the Trump Organization is the registrant, but not the admin, demonstrates that Trump doesn't have direct control over it." This demonstrates profound ignorance of the way domains are registered. Then, I wonder whether the author of this blog thoroughly read the original article. He says, "one journalist did call one of the public resolvers, and found other people queried this domain than the two listed in the Slate story -- debunking it", while the original article notes that "Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers." At no point did the author say that Alfa bank or any others were the ONLY entities looking for DNS resolution. Indeed, Paul Vixie, labeled a DNS expert by the Slate author noted, "The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it". I'm afraid the author of this blog post knows, as they say, enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be authoritative. Sadly, huge gaps of assumption are taking place in his knowledge.

Quote:

Paul Manafort resigned August 19th.

How is nobody treating this as politically relevant? Look at the spikes in activity leading up to the announcement of his resignation and a ton of investigations into his Russian ties becoming public.

Bunch of people squinting at the chart and laughing about it not lining up with politically relevant events. But they aren't considering politically relevant events that are not overlaid onto those DNS queries.

Quote:

“In other words, trump-email.com is not intended as a normal email server you and I are familiar with, but as a server used for marketing/promotional campaigns.”

Except for one problem.

A server used for Marketing/Promotional campaigns would be running constantly, blasting out bits.

This one is sitting there quietly, sending nothing most of the time, and yes, it’s being “pinged” randomly by Alfa Bank in Russia.

When? During the periods coincident with office hours in Russia, and office hours in New York.

Dude, listen. You can’t put lipstick on this pig.

This is a Server configured so NO outside traffic will get a response EXCEPT for Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

Anybody else gets an error message.

I tried to explain to someone, “if Bill Clinton wanted to meet secretly with someone, he’d pick a less obvious rendezvous than the airport tarmac in BROAD daylight”.

In fact, IF someone wanted to set up a dead drop isolated from the rest of the Internet, this is how they’d do it.

Emails sent directly between two servers that can’t talk to any other IP address.

Encrypted packets broken up, sent over the Internet, re-assembled at the destination; with just a little elementary encryption, unreadable by anyone without the cipher.

The fact that someone noticed the DNS logs was luck on the scale of hitting two “hole in ones” in a single day.

03-10-2017 , 08:25 PM

#17719

ChrisV

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 40,336

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.

Quote:

This one is sitting there quietly, sending nothing most of the time, and yes, it’s being “pinged” randomly by Alfa Bank in Russia.

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

Quote:

This is a Server configured so NO outside traffic will get a response EXCEPT for Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

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.

Quote:

In fact, IF someone wanted to set up a dead drop isolated from the rest of the Internet, this is how they’d do it.

Emails sent directly between two servers that can’t talk to any other IP address.

Encrypted packets broken up, sent over the Internet, re-assembled at the destination; with just a little elementary encryption, unreadable by anyone without the cipher.

The fact that someone noticed the DNS logs was luck on the scale of hitting two “hole in ones” in a single day.

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.

03-10-2017 , 08:43 PM

#17720

prana

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 8,513

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisV

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

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.

Quote:

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.

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:

Quote:

Paul Manafort: Took over the campaign on June 20th, a few days before the first increase in server activity following the Brexit vote. On the date of a server activity spike, July 31, Manafort denied that the Trump campaign changed the GOP platform on Ukraine on Meet the Press and was the subject of new scrutiny for his lobbying. Further details were reported in mid-August around the time of the first server “quiet period” Aug 13-17. At the end of this period, Paul Manafort resigned, officially leaving the campaign on Aug 19.

Quote:

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

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

Quote:

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

ETA:

Quote:

Paul Vixie, who helped design the very DNS system the internet uses today, was quoted in the Slate story saying that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization "were communicating in a secretive fashion."

03-10-2017 , 08:49 PM

#17721

prana

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 8,513

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

Quote:

"It's indicative of communication between Trump, the health organization and the bank outside these servers," he told CNN. "There is some sort of connection I can't explain, and only they are doing it. It could be completely innocent."

i'm confused lol.

03-10-2017 , 08:53 PM

#17722

fxwacgesvrhdtf

Guest

Posts: n/a

Quote:

Originally Posted by champstark

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.

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.

03-10-2017 , 08:58 PM

#17723

ChrisV

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 40,336

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

Quote:

My guess is that all of this will come up empty. There's a coincidence here, but a small one. Much of the technical details have been overhyped and mean little.

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.

03-10-2017 , 08:59 PM

#17724

well named

poorly undertitled

Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 78,078

Quote:

Originally Posted by prana

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

i'm confused lol.

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