The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: No smocking guns. - Page 710 - Politics and Economics

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

I mean one pretty plausible explanation for the repeated DNS requests is that whatever connection is being attempted is getting rejected and is being retried at intervals.

Just as an example of what could be happening: Suppose someone at Alfa has a marketing email from Trump sitting in their inbox somewhere. The email contains HTML content that links back to mail1.trump-email.com. The email client attempts to retrieve this content, executing a DNS lookup in the process. The server rejects the connection, meaning the email client cannot retrieve the content. Next time the person opens their inbox, this whole process repeats itself.

There might be details that make this exact story implausible, but there are a very large number of variations, one of which is probably correct.

Edit: There are a very large number of email servers, email clients, spam filters, antivirus programs etc etc out there, all of which interact with each other in complex and unpredictable ways. Having weird, initially inexplicable things happen when bits of tech are thrown together is the norm in computing.

Last edited by ChrisV; 03-10-2017 at 09:16 PM.

03-10-2017 , 09:40 PM

#17727

wheatrich

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 21,405

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisV

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.

You're making a flawed assumption here--pretend trump's IT guy is a complete moron like everyone else he hires.

I do agree with you that it seems ridiculous to go down this rabbit hole though.

Chaffetz spent $700 in campaign donor funds at the apple store, so what he's really saying is get suckers to pay for your iphone.

Last edited by wheatrich; 03-10-2017 at 09:47 PM.

03-10-2017 , 10:00 PM

#17728

DudeImBetter

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Feb 2012 Posts: 10,666

What happened to chimpstare, hulk hogan and trumps twitter feed?

03-10-2017 , 10:03 PM

#17729

Autocratic

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 11,276

Quote:

Originally Posted by DVaut1

It's a problem, though -- the Democrats have no audience for this kind of message either. That's the knot the establishment left/Democratic position has tied themselves in: by softening their criticism of capitalism and embracing market orthodoxy over the last few generations, there's no real audience for this message either. I think you're correct: there's a trenchent criticism there that the Trump style politics are controlled by a bunch of rich bozos whose first order priority is to capital accumulation and who sell their power and authority to ethnonationalists who care primarily about their white Christian identity. Nationalism is irrelevant to these people; they use it as a limited kludge and borrow its symbols but it's not a meaningful nationalism. But by the same token, it's not that Trump and Putin are colluding to help Russia insofar as they are mutually colluding to help themselves accumulate capital and power.

The left has gutted themselves by the same factors we were recently discussing in the Tragic Death of the Democratic Party thread and gun control; they spent so much time triangulating and becoming lite-Republicans that the meta-messages all tilted to the GOP favor: both parties just nod along with the idea that capital is great, capitalists are awesome, the rich are just like us, using capital to ensure you get everything you want and control the state is just smart business, if you want a job you have to compete and just do whatever capital interests want. By fellating business, capital, finance, management, and multi-national corporations and essentially embracing all of their talking points and policies, just with a large welfare state, they've totally abandoned any way to correctly frame what Trump is. What the wrong is here.

So they've fallen into these scandals that essentially try to rouse nationalist sentiments since they have an audience that cares little for the traditional leftist critiques. But they're faced with a population where neither side is essentially getting much: the left has never prized their American identity. The poor, racial minorities, etc. have never gotten to bask in the great things. The right is bewildered by the claim; how could a rich white guy stand opposed to America, he's one of us.

It's bad politics and it's a long-term problem.

Exactly right IMO. And moreover, the result isn't just that Democrats' positions are Republican-lite or that they are inherently conceding the validity of Republicans' stated values. They also open themselves up to a new line of attack in that they are being disingenuous. Dems are baffled when their transparent attempts to pander ("John Kerry, reporting for duty") fall flat, as if "us too!" is supposed to be a convincing message.

The inability of Democrats to provide a coherent affirmative vision for America is made all the more depressing by the fact that the left's analysis resonates more than they recognize. The DNC thinks that the GOP shouting "socialism" will lose them every election moving forward, as if we aren't 30 years out from the specter of communism haunting American life.

03-10-2017 , 10:20 PM

#17730

PocketChads

guaranteed 42-10 finish

Join Date: Jul 2006 Posts: 22,462

GOP is going to screech about THE LEFT and SOCIALISM and LEFTISTS and FAR LEFT no matter where the Dems position themselves

It's static

But financing is as big an influence as incompetence for the Dems

03-10-2017 , 10:27 PM

#17731

fatkid

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Nov 2011 Posts: 8,860

Dang son looking like Flynn is gonna be a thorn in this administrations ass. I like it. Also, anyone who thins Pence is an innocent little lamb in this **** storm is wrong. Pence is a crooked little cock clown too.

03-10-2017 , 10:40 PM

#17732

Paul McSwizzle

Pooh-Bah

Join Date: Nov 2007 Posts: 5,531

Quote:

Originally Posted by jman220

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.

Am I naive in thinking this is the sort of thing that could ultimately backfire on the administration? Elite attorneys seem like a bad group of people to make enemies of.

03-10-2017 , 11:04 PM

#17733

markksman

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 20,921

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisV

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 claiming because the admin contact is different than the registration contact is lol. The registered contact is the one who owns the domain and ultimately decides who has administrative control. If a security expert tried to make hay with that they are wrong. I have owned thousands of domains and having a different admin contact is not a magic firewall that means the owner has no idea what is going on. It doesn't work like that.

03-10-2017 , 11:15 PM

#17734

RV Life

old hand

Join Date: Jun 2016 Posts: 1,935

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul McSwizzle

Am I naive in thinking this is the sort of thing that could ultimately backfire on the administration? Elite attorneys seem like a bad group of people to make enemies of.

Yea, I was thinking the same thing. Aren't these guys taking a huge pay cut to serve the DOJ in the first place? Good job giving them an incentive to bring your corrupt ass down.

03-10-2017 , 11:17 PM

#17735

uDevil

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 6,941

Stone's Guccifer direct messaging contact is pretty well sourced now.

Quote:

Roger Stone, President Trump’s former campaign advisor, engaged privately last year with a persona involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee, he told The Washington Times Friday, but insisted the conversations were “completely innocuous.”

“It was so perfunctory, brief and banal I had forgotten it,” the political consultant told The Times on Friday with respect to a private Twitter exchange he had with “Guccifer 2.0,” a pseudonymous entity explicitly tied to the DNC hack.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ges-innocuous/

03-10-2017 , 11:30 PM

#17736

RV Life

old hand

Join Date: Jun 2016 Posts: 1,935

This event is tomorrow. Sign up.

https://map.peoplepower.org/

03-10-2017 , 11:37 PM

#17737

NuklearWinter

veteran

Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 2,735

The bank / trump email connection is most likely a bounced email that is just queued up on a server trying to resend at regular intervals. This stuff happens in the background all the time on servers and it's never noticed. The reason is because it doesn't cause any problems 99.9999% of the time other than writing to a random error log which might fill up.

As much as I'd love to see a connection, this doesn't feel like a smoking gun. The fact that the story is using generic terms means it's likely nothing.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

03-10-2017 , 11:42 PM

#17738

Huehuecoyotl

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Sep 2009 Posts: 29,296

Sure maybe Sessions is a racist who's going to push back on civil rights. But he also doesn't know how terrorism trials work

Quote:

And he spoke disparagingly of transferring the Sept. 11 case to civilian court, which the Obama administration wanted to do before Congress barred transferring detainees onto domestic soil for prosecution.

“In general, I don’t think we’re better off bringing these people to federal court in New York and trying them in federal court where they get discovery rights to find out our intelligence, and get court-appointed lawyers and things of that nature,” he said.

The two factors Mr. Sessions identified are not unique to civilian trials. The commissions system’s rules for discovery of intelligence are modeled after civilian courts’ rules, which are set by the*Classified Information Procedures Act. And defendants in the military commissions system get government-provided defense lawyers, too.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/0....html?referer=

03-10-2017 , 11:44 PM

#17739

vaya

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: May 2012 Posts: 15,156

Quote:

Originally Posted by well named

Yep. And 99 percent of the attempted communications were by the Russians and the DeVoses.

03-10-2017 , 11:46 PM

#17740

uDevil

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 6,941

Quote:

Originally Posted by RV Life

This event is tomorrow. Sign up.

https://map.peoplepower.org/

Uhmm, 6 closest locations are full.

03-10-2017 , 11:51 PM

#17741

surfinillini

pessimist

Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 10,405

I find the server abnormalities interesting. I wouldn't be so quick to disregard them entirely. This administration has been quick to normalize the abnormal. I mean look at the ****tards this guy surrounds himself with. An NSA who was asked to register as a foreign agent, an AG who voluntary lies during a confirmation hearing, ****ing white supremacists and dominion theologists. It's a motley crew of fukery. So I doubt this orange **** has acid burn and crash override [aka zero cool] running his servers. He probably had some moron who wasn't up to the job.

And don't forget, the head of the CIA got busted using a ****ing gmail dead drop. (Leaving drafts in the outgoing folder of a shared account as a way of messaging). We're not necessarily dealing with the top of the food chain here folks.

****

03-10-2017 , 11:55 PM

#17742

RV Life

old hand

Join Date: Jun 2016 Posts: 1,935

Quote:

Originally Posted by uDevil

Uhmm, 6 closest locations are full.

Yea, that is a good thing.

03-11-2017 , 12:03 AM

#17743

Huehuecoyotl

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Sep 2009 Posts: 29,296

Quote:

Muhammad Ali Jr. was detained and questioned at a Washington airport before being allowed to board a flight to Fort Lauderdale after meeting with lawmakers to discuss a separate airport detention incident last month, a lawyer for the late heavyweight champion's son said Friday.

https://apnews.com/8b577f57c0df4507a...&utm_medium=AP

03-11-2017 , 12:09 AM

#17744

RV Life

old hand

Join Date: Jun 2016 Posts: 1,935

He was detained again? Hahahahaha what a f'ing shitshow this administration is.

03-11-2017 , 12:44 AM

#17745

microbet

Solar Powered

Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 57,077

Quote:

Originally Posted by RV Life

This event is tomorrow. Sign up.

https://map.peoplepower.org/

Ok, there's one like 4 blocks from my house. Signed up. Neighborhood resistance force activated.

03-11-2017 , 12:45 AM

#17746

PocketChads

guaranteed 42-10 finish

Join Date: Jul 2006 Posts: 22,462

Quote:

Originally Posted by RV Life

This event is tomorrow. Sign up.

https://map.peoplepower.org/

In, thanks

03-11-2017 , 12:45 AM

#17747

Louis Cyphre

Carpal \'Tunnel

Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 11,025

Quote:

Originally Posted by Huehuecoyotl

Sure maybe Sessions is a racist who's going to push back on civil rights. But he also doesn't know how terrorism trials work

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/0....html?referer=

A person on trial getting a lawyer? The horror!!!

03-11-2017 , 01:22 AM

#17748

AllCowsEatGrass

banned

Join Date: Mar 2017 Posts: 1,839

Quote:

Originally Posted by Huehuecoyotl

https://apnews.com/8b577f57c0df4507a...&utm_medium=AP

I think this is retaliation for being vocal and outspoken about his experience of being detained a few weeks ago. For instance, this interview he did on Democracy Now! a week ago.