Tag Archives: hack

The Republican Health Care Plan is Depraved, But It’s Political Genius

by JamisonMcAlpine Posted on March 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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This comes as no surprise to anybody, but here is Kaiser’s analysis of tax subsidies under Obamacare vs. the discussion draft of the Republican health care plan that was leaked last week:

The difference is pretty obvious. Obamacare provides subsidies to those who need it most. The Republican plan provides subsidies to everyone, even if they’re already well off.

Politically, you can see the attractiveness of the Republican plan. One of Obamacare’s major failings is that its subsidies phase out too soon. The poor get Medicaid and the near-poor get generally decent subsidies, but the working class gets very little and the middle class is left out entirely. The Republican plan provides bigger subsidies for working and middle-class families, and does it by cutting subsidies for the poor.

In other words, it helps two groups who vote at high rates, and who often vote Republican.1 It hurts a group that doesn’t vote much, and votes Democratic when it does. It’s immoral on almost every level, but it’s political genius. Luckily, thanks to the malignity of the tea party wing of the GOP, which views even this amount of government assistance as unacceptable, it will probably never see the light of day.

1The only downside is the cut in subsidies for older working-class voters, who Republicans very much care about. But I imagine that Paul Ryan can come up with some kind of hack that takes care of that.

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The Republican Health Care Plan is Depraved, But It’s Political Genius

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

by MizunoC36rm Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump was eager this morning to fight back against the news that Vladimir Putin worked hard to get him elected:

Greg Sargent comments:

By referring to this episode, what Trump is inadvertently revealing here is that, yes, the complaint about Russian hacking to hurt Clinton did in fact precede the election, and this was widely and publicly known. Of course, there is ample other evidence that Trump is fully aware of this. The intel community had publicly declared it weeks before the election. Trump had reportedly been privately briefed on it by U.S. officials. Trump was confronted with evidence of the hack at a debate with Clinton that was watched by tens of millions of people. At the debate, he cast doubt on the notion that Russia had hacked the materials to hurt Clinton. And yet, as Mark Murray points out, Trump himself widely referenced the material dug up in the hacks at rallies, where he used that material to — wait for it — try to damage Clinton.

Yeah, Trump knows all this. He just doesn’t care. He knows that most people have poor memories for this kind of stuff and are likely to believe him if he says nobody talked about the Russian hacking during the campaign. Give him a few months and he’ll be tweeting about how no one brought up health care during the election, so why are they all so upset about it now?

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

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China’s Huge Hack of the US Government Is Only Getting Worse

by AaliyahD69 Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Whenever someone wants a security clearance, the US government first asks a seemingly endless series of questions. Some of them are predictable like the applicant’s current address and social security number. Others are far more intimate like histories of drug use or psychiatric treatment. Now China likely has that information.

The AP reported on Friday that hackers believed to be working with China targeted the Office of Personnel Management and stole the forms used to gather information in those background investigations. This personal information could be used by a foreign intelligence service to blackmail someone with access to government secrets. Having that information in the hands of the Chinese government potentially puts some of the nation’s military and intelligence workers at serious risk.

Evan Lesser, the managing director of ClearanceJobs.com, a job site for positions requiring a security clearance, told the AP that “you don’t need these records to blackmail or exploit someone, but it would sure make the job easier.”

While it’s not yet known how many people are affected by the breach, government officials who spoke to the AP put the potential number in the millions:

Nearly all of the millions of security clearance holders, including CIA, National Security Agency and military special operations personnel, are potentially exposed in the security clearance breach, the officials said. More than 2.9 million people had been investigated for a security clearance as of October 2014, according to government records.

This hack is the second major breach into OPM records in the past two weeks. A hack announced last week may have exposed the personnel records and social security numbers of up to 14 million government workers.

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China’s Huge Hack of the US Government Is Only Getting Worse

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The Hack Gap Lives!

by NeilR53gqo Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been following the news a little vaguely over the past few days, but I noticed an interesting confirmation of the hack gap in the treatment of Hillary Clinton’s email affair. Perhaps you noticed too? There was, obviously, a difference in the way liberals and conservatives treated the news that Hillary had used a private email address for all her correspondence while she was Secretary of State. But it was a matter of degree, not attitude.

On the liberal side, I saw a lots of people seriously questioning what had happened. And not just here in the pages of MoJo. I saw it on MSNBC. I saw it in newspaper columns. I saw it in blog posts. Lots of liberals treated this as a legitimate issue and suggested that Hillary had some serious questions to answer. This didn’t just come from a few iconoclasts, either. It came from all over the place, and was generally viewed, at the least, as an example of questionable judgment, if not proof that Hillary is the antichrist we’ve always known she was.

I know the counterfactual game can get a little tiresome sometimes, but still: it’s hard to imagine the same thing happening if a heavy Republican frontrunner had done something like this. The hack gap lives.

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The Hack Gap Lives!

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How You Can Fake Solving a Rubik’s Cube

by Bonita2376 Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Matt Parker isn’t your average stand-up comedian. He doesn’t draw his material from the banalities of everyday life, like many of his peers. His routine substitutes equations and mathematical concepts for toilet humor and political jabs. And the audience loves it.

So how did he become a mathematical comedian? “During the day, I was teaching math to teenagers, and then in the evening, I was telling jokes to drunk people in comedy clubs—which actually is a surprisingly similar skill set,” explains Parker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. He says he gradually began to work bits about “what it’s like to be a nerd” into his routines, and eventually “people started showing up expecting me to talk about math.”

“This is my ideal Venn diagram,” adds Parker. “If I can do math and stand-up at the same time, that’s brilliant.”

Parker has also just released a book—Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension—packed full of clever jokes and a lot of really interesting math. What sets it apart from a number of other recent math books is the fact that the reader is encouraged to actually do some math, rather than just read about it. “I put in loads of puzzles, hands-on activities, things you can build,” says Parker. “And you can read the book without doing them, but if you want to, you can get your hands dirty.”

This is the appeal of Parker’s brand of math: He wants you to not just understand the concepts, but to be able to use them to impress your friends. Take a look at the video above, for example, in which he describes how to cheat your way into “solving” a Rubik’s Cube in fewer than three minutes. (It might even help you get into Princeton.)

If that isn’t impressive enough, try this hack: Tell your buddies that you have the magical ability to recognize fake credit card numbers. Have them write down a series 16-digit numbers, one that they copy from an actual credit card and several that they just make up. Now, starting with the first digit in each sequence, take every second digit and double it. If doubling a digit produces a two-digit answer, add those two digits together. You should now have eight new digits. Add up all these new digits along with the eight remaining digits that you didn’t double. If the result is a multiple of 10, it could be a real credit card number. If not, you have one of your friends’ randomly-generated foils. “The reason we put that strange pattern in there,” explains Parker, is that “when you type it into a website, the website can do that calculation. If the answer is not a multiple of 10, it knows it’s not a real card.”

Parker bemoans the fact that many people don’t realize how much math affects their daily lives. “They think that math isn’t helping when, in fact, it is!” he exclaims. “It’s making their lives possible.”

But even Parker took a detour in his education before committing to a life in mathematics—the “dark days” in college when he was studying mechanical engineering. “I got about halfway through a mech-eng degree before I realized that if I finished it, it would leave me dangerously employable,” he jokes. “And I also realized that what I really liked was just doing the equations—that it was the actual math behind the engineering that set my world on fire.”

So what is it about math that ignites Parker’s passion? “It’s basically like a murder mystery,” he says. What can make an otherwise decent thriller turn sour is if there’s a nonsensical ending—if the author just brings in a random character at the very end and calls him the murderer, the reader will lose interest in that author’s work. “But a good book, you get to the end and go, ‘Oh, that makes sense, there were hints all along,'” says Parker. “And that’s mathematics. You get to the end, you go, ‘That was hard work, but it’s great.'”

Listen to the full interview with Matt Parker below:

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How You Can Fake Solving a Rubik’s Cube

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This New Charger Checks To See If Your Phone’s Been Hacked

by DenaeTina858 Posted on October 4, 2013

Photo: closari

The increasing ubiquity of smartphones has made these little computers an appealing target for hackers. Most phones operate on one of the two main mobile operating systems—Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android—and Android’s open nature, along with the ease with which it lets you download off-market software, has made it hackers’ favored target.

This isn’t a huge problem, if you’re careful. But, if you are downloading a lot of software outside of the official channels, you may be opening the door to your phone’s innards to malware. Quartz:

About 15% of the apps flagged by Verify Apps are commercial spyware, a diverse set of monitoring apps that range from tracking internet behavior to improve advertising to the very malicious keyloggers that collect personal information entered by the user and report it to the malware creator.

Many software hacks and bugs rely on code that prevents the computer’s built-in security from detecting the problem, either by tricking the anti-virus software into thinking the hack is harmless or by somehow masking it from view. To combat this kind of attack, says MIT Technology Review, the company Kaprica Security has designed a mobile charger that will scan your phone for malware while juicing its battery. Tech Review:

For the user, the charger is simple: plug it into the wall, and plug the phone into the charger. The charger then conducts a quick preliminary scan of the phone; if all is in order, it shows a green light.

If you leave the phone plugged into the charger, it will reboot at a time you’ve preconfigured—3 a.m., for instance—and start a more thorough process that sends the phone’s operating-system files to the charger for an analysis that takes about four minutes.

…If a problem is detected, the charger will alert you with a red light, and—depending on the user’s preferences—the charger can automatically repair the phone by using a previous “good” version of the operating system it has already stored.

The idea behind the charger is that, being independent of the phone, the charger wouldn’t be fooled by the tricks meant to confuse the phone’s protections.

That being said, we can’t help but be a little bit nervous about a company with a name like Kaprica Security. What if the charger is actually just paving the way for the Cylon invasion?

More from Smithsonian.com:

Smartphone as Doctor
When a Smartphone Becomes a Wallet
Your Smartphone Could Someday Warn You That Earthquake Waves Are About to Hit

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This New Charger Checks To See If Your Phone’s Been Hacked

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