Tag Archives: yahoo

Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

Mother Jones

Donald Trump used the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey to amp up his call for profiling of Muslims. “You know, our police are amazing—our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, referring to terrorists. But, he said, “they’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling, and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”

Only a few days after picking up the endorsement of the nation’s largest police union, Trump was, without evidence, making an incendiary accusation about some of his most important supporters—that police are knowingly letting terrorists walk free because they’re too politically correct. (In reality, the Elizabeth, New Jersey, police department that apprehended the alleged bomber was not familiar with the suspect, although the family’s chicken shop had received noise complaints.)

Just as notable is what Trump proposed instead. As an example of what more effective policing would look like, the Republican presidential nominee pointed to Israel. “You know, in Israel they profile,” he said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do.” If a person looks suspicious in Israel, “they will take that person in.” He added, “They’re trying to be politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse.”

There are many components to Israeli-style profiling, but a key aspect is racial profiling. Being of “Arab nationality” is enough to get you flagged by screeners, interrogated, and maybe strip-searched at an Israeli airport. The US State Department’s travel advisory page for Israel even includes a warning about the country’s racial profiling: “Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.” Case in point: Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, was detained and interrogated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2010, despite having just returned from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump, for his part, has previously made clear that he’s interested in profiling Muslims specifically. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he told Yahoo News in November when asked if he’d consider warrantless wiretapping of American Muslims. He added, “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” In that same interview, he declined to rule out creating a database of Muslims in the United States and suggested the government should conduct more surveillance of mosques. He proposed hiring ex-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose department’s “Demographics Unit” spied on select “ancestries of interest” and even infiltrated a Muslim Students Association rafting trip. (For its years of work, Kelly’s Demographics Unit produced a total of zero terrorism indictments and was ultimately shut down as a result of a lawsuit.) Trump even entertained the idea that the government could shut down mosques.

A few weeks later, Trump took his religious profiling several giant steps further, unveiling his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump has never clarified how such a ban would be enforced, but it would by definition entail wide-scale profiling by customs officials. That proposal is still posted on his website. Trump revisited the subject in June, after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said, invoking Israel as an example of a successful program. He has repeatedly cited racial profiling—or fear of being accused of racial profiling—in his discussion of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack, alleging that neighbors of the couple had seen bombs scattered across the floor but not done anything. This was, again, baseless; there is no evidence that anyone ever saw the bombs.

Trump’s positions on many issues have fluctuated wildly. But his solution to threats against Americans has been uncharacteristically consistent, if alarming to many observers: an expanded, unconstitutional police state targeting a religious minority.

Taken from – 

Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

Posted in Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

Hackers Stole Voter Registration Data in at Least Two States

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The FBI believes hackers tried to get data from the State Board of Elections in at least two states in July and August, according to a notice sent to elections officials around the country and published by Yahoo News Monday morning. It’s unclear what data the hackers were able to get, but the information suggests they scanned the state elections boards’ websites looking for vulnerabilities. They found several and attempted to enter the systems, and some “exfiltration”—which refers to theft of data—occurred.

On August 18, state elections officials received a “Flash,” a notice sent by the FBI to various relevant parties, titled “Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems.” The FBI reported that it had received reports of an additional IP address—a unique series of numbers that identifies every device that connects to the internet—within the logs of one state’s board of election’s system in July, and then another attempt at breaking into a separate state’s system in August. The IP address numbers can be easily masked to hide an attacker’s true origin, but the flash included detailed information about the methods used by the hackers. The FBI asked state election officials to scan their own network logs for similar activities.

The FBI didn’t identify the states involved, but Yahoo News, citing “sources familiar with” the FBI flash, reports that the attacks likely targeted voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In Illinois, state election officials shut down the state’s voter registration system for 10 days in late July, Yahoo News reports, while the attack in Arizona was more limited.

The FBI flash does not attribute the attacks to anyone specifically, but the revelation comes following recent hacks of the Democratic National Committee and other major Democratic Party organizations and officials that, the US government says, implicated hackers working with or on behalf of Russia. The hacker who has claimed responsibility for the DNC hacks, Guccifer 2.0, has told Mother Jones and others that he was born in Eastern Europe and is not at all connected to Russia, a claim doubted by outside security officials. Russian officials have repeatedly denied that the Russian government had anything to do with the hacks.

The IP addresses provided by the FBI in the flash point to computer systems in the Netherlands and Delaware, according to online IP tracking tools, but Wired says further analysis shows at least one of the IP addresses appears to be linked to a website linked with the Turkish AKP political party. The Yahoo News report cites a cybersecurity expert saying one of the IP addresses has “surfaced before in Russian criminal underground hacker forums,” and the attack methods resemble a hack of the World Anti-Doping Agency earlier this month. Others have blamed that hack on Russia as well. But the types of attacks, methods, and tools detailed by the FBI flash are quite common in the hacking world. That means blaming Russia or anybody else at this point is only speculative.

The hack, combined with other vulnerabilities in the American election infrastructure, including voting machines that produce no verifiable paper audit trail, reinforces the notion that the US election system is vulnerable to disruption.

“This is a big deal,” Rich Barger, the head of cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect, told Yahoo News. “Two state election boards have been popped and data has been taken. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.”

Link to article: 

Hackers Stole Voter Registration Data in at Least Two States

Posted in bigo, Cyber, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hackers Stole Voter Registration Data in at Least Two States

Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When Donald Trump declared that President Barack Obama was the “founder” of ISIS—and then stuck to that claim—most of the media dismissed this rhetoric as silly. No doubt, Trump, the onetime champion of birtherism, was trying once again to depict Obama as some foreign presence who is not truly American, but he was roundly slammed by journalists who described this move as yet another Trump misstep. Somehow, though, Yahoo did not get the memo.

If you go to the Yahoo search page and type in “Barack Obama,” one of the top results that appears is a truncated description sourced to Wikipedia that reads:

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is also the founder of ISIS. He is the first African American to hold the office…

Click on the link attached to this short bio, and you land on the Wikipedia page for Obama, where there is no mention of him and ISIS. It appears that at some point a Trumpish troll inserted the ISIS line into Obama’s Wikipedia page. The folks there must have excised it. But as of this afternoon, Yahoo (unlike other search engines) was still telling its users that the president created the terrorist outfit he has regularly bombed. Uh, #fail?

Original article:  

Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

This Is the Greatest Correction I’ve Ever Read

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Adele’s new album is subliiiiiiiiiiime. Read our review.

Read More – 

This Is the Greatest Correction I’ve Ever Read

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is the Greatest Correction I’ve Ever Read

Donald Trump Says He’s Open to Requiring American Muslims to Carry Special IDs

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Amid growing concern following last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, including calls from 30 governors to halt the relocation of Syrian refugees, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has taken things a step further.

In an interview with Yahoo, Trump explained that the United States would have to implement new and draconian strategies to protect the homeland.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he said. “And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

What type of unthinkable things is Trump—who has also floated the idea of shuttering certain mosques—proposing? He says he’s potentially open to the creation of a database to track Muslim citizens, or requiring that Muslim Americans carry a special form of identification noting their faith.

It is worth pointing out that of the 745,000 refugees resettled in the United States since the September 11 terrorist attacks, only two have been arrested on terrorism-related charges, and in that case they were allegedly trying to aid Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Continued:

Donald Trump Says He’s Open to Requiring American Muslims to Carry Special IDs

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Says He’s Open to Requiring American Muslims to Carry Special IDs

Anonymous Pianist Plays John Lennon’s "Imagine" Outside Paris’ Bataclan Concert Hall

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This is really moving.

Original link: 

Anonymous Pianist Plays John Lennon’s "Imagine" Outside Paris’ Bataclan Concert Hall

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Anonymous Pianist Plays John Lennon’s "Imagine" Outside Paris’ Bataclan Concert Hall

Amazon Is Going After People Who Write Fake Reviews

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When you’re online shopping for the perfect Halloween mask or an awesome shirt for casual Friday, do you ever get the sense that those five-star reviews seem a tad exaggerated? You’re not the only one: For the second time this year, Amazon is cracking down on fraudulent product reviews.

In a civil complaint filed in Seattle on Friday, the company targeted 1,114 users listed on the UK-based website Fiverr, where freelancers list odd-job services like proofreading, graphic design, programming, and translation. According to the complaint, most of the defendants use the site to sell five-star Amazon product reviews for $5 apiece—often asking Amazon vendors to send them prewritten reviews, which they post from multiple usernames and IP addresses to outwit the company’s detection software. The result, the company argued, undermines the credibility of all reviews on its website, violating Washington state’s consumer protection act and its own terms of service.

“Amazon strictly prohibits any attempt to manipulate customer reviews and expressly prohibits compensated reviews,” the complaint stated. “Nonetheless, an unhealthy ecosystem has developed outside of Amazon to supply reviews in exchange for payment.”

In April, Amazon filed suit against several websites that produced paid reviews of Amazon products, causing most of the sites to close. With the Fiverr suit, Amazon is trying a different tactic: suing individual users. The company admitted, however, that it only knows their usernames, many of which are no longer listed on Fiverr. Still, even a quick search on the site turns up many freelancers still offering the same kind of service. User Brett_lee, who is not listed in the lawsuit, says he’ll post a negative review on Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Yahoo for $5 (a one-day turnaround, multiple reviews, or downvotes on other listings cost extra):

Hi there, I will post negative reviews in anywhere you need. Its more better if you send me the text reviews. Need revenge or anything else, Just place your order 🙂

View this article – 

Amazon Is Going After People Who Write Fake Reviews

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Amazon Is Going After People Who Write Fake Reviews

Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Donald Trump is breaking every rule in the “how to be a candidate” handbook—and maybe that’s his secret.

Unlike the often-stodgy conventional political campaign, Trump’s presidential bid resembles the rollout of a consumer brand. The reality TV star and real estate mogul has a keen knack for self-promotion and an entertaining product to peddle (his unfiltered self), and this is letting him get away with things his opponents can only dream of.

For instance, one key rule of running for president is that you should never, ever put on a hat—or any headwear. You will look goofy and unpresidential. (Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis?) But when Trump arrived to inspect the Mexican border last month, he strolled off his plane wearing an ill-fitting plain white cap, adorned with the words “Make America Great Again.” And he’s worn the hat pretty much everywhere since, sometimes exchanging it for a red version. Arguably, Trump could not make a public appearance outdoors without a cap—it’s unclear how his complexly coiffed mane might react to weather—but the image was as unstylish as any presidential candidate has managed recently. And yet, it works. As Slate put it in an article devoted entirely to Trump’s hat, “Juxtapose almost anything with Trump’s sour puss, and you’ve got yourself an indelible image.”

Despite the conventional wisdom that hats are a nightmare for a politician’s image, last week, at a focus group of Trump supporters run by GOP pollster Frank Luntz, the hat was a high point.

“We know his goal is to make America great again,” a woman in Luntz’s focus group said. “It’s on his hat. And we see it every time it’s on TV. Everything that he’s doing, there’s no doubt why he’s doing it: It’s to make America great again.”

Luntz gushed over the results of the session, claiming the level of avowed support for Trump articulated by the participants stunned him. “Like, my legs are shaking,” he told reporters afterward.

It was a small sample size, and maybe it’s not just the hat. There’s also the catchphrase. “Make America Great Again” is compelling in a way that other candidates’ slogans aren’t, says Tom Bassett, CEO at Bassett & Partners, a San Francisco brand and design strategy firm. Getting consumers to remember a product’s slogan is extremely difficult. Only a handful of brands ever achieve a level of awareness where the line can be recalled with ease. Bassett, who has overseen international ad campaigns for Nike, Apple, and Yahoo, thinks the phrase has an unusual resonance—a nostalgia for American success.

The message is simple and easy to process, Bassett says: “People are a little fearful and they’re looking for someone with a really firm hand to say, ‘We’re going to make it, we’re going to be great again!’ versus anything too intellectual.” He adds, “‘Make America Great Again’ has a sense of mission to it; it’s clear to the reader/viewer,” Bassett says. “Maybe there is something about the clarity of his mission that makes it easier for people to respond to him.”

He points out that this is not the case with the slogans of other candidates. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is using the catchphrase “Unintimidated.” (Merriam-Webster’s dictionary does not list “unintimidated” as an actual word, and it drives spell-checks crazy.) His campaign book is called Unintimidated. The super-PAC supporting him is called Unintimidated PAC. Last week, Walker made a major foreign-policy speech entitled “America Unintimidated,” and when he is unsure how to answer a question or is heckled, he frequently announces he is “unintimidated.”

But for all the synergistic branding effort, Walker is polling in the mid- to high single digits in most polls. (Trump is over 30 percent.)

Jeb Bush, meanwhile, has methodically built his campaign around the phrase “Right to Rise,” which is also the name of his super-PAC. But it isn’t a natural turn of phrase, and even Bush has to conspicuously shoehorn it into speeches.

Bassett asks, are “‘unintimidated’ or ‘right to rise’ a mission statement people can sign up for?”

Continue Reading »

Read article here:  

Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

Google’s Low-Wage Contract Workers Are Poised to Unionize

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Labor organizers with the Teamsters union announced Monday that they’re holding an election to unionize workers for Google Express, the shopping service that delivers everything from toothpaste to televisions purchased by online consumers. The union is seeking to represent about 140 Google Express warehouse workers employed by Adecco, a temp agency that provides much of the delivery service’s Bay Area staff.

“Workers are required to sign short-term employment agreements with Adecco that limit them to two years before the company lets them go,” the Teamsters Local Union 853 said in a press release announcing the vote. “Workers have also alleged subjection to constant harassment to work faster in poor conditions that include damaged equipment, cracked floors, and failing electrical systems that have resulted in fires.”

A Google spokesperson contacted by Mother Jones declined to comment.

Google Express currently operates in seven US cities, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Manhattan. Google started the the service in 2013 to compete with Amazon Prime.

The Google vote is the latest in a string of high-profile efforts to unionize Silicon Valley’s low-wage service economy. In recent months, the Teamsters have begun representing shuttle bus drivers that transport workers for Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo. And the Service Employees International Union has convinced Google and Apple to hire their own security guards, rather than working with subcontractors that were criticized for union busting.

Labor organizers see Silicon Valley as perhaps the most glaring example of how the American economy increasingly benefits the wealthy. The success of the tech giants has created a whole new population of millionaires but has failed to create many middle class jobs. Google, with a market cap of $354 billion, has just 53,600 full-time employees. By comparison, General Motors, with a market cap of only $50 billion, has 216,000 full-time employees.

Such disparities are exacerbated by Silicon Valley’s reliance on contract labor. Google Express workers make $13 to $17 an hour with no benefits, which is far from a living wage in the Bay Area.

“As subcontractors, we are treated as second class citizens,” Gabriel Cardenas, a Google Express worker, said in a statement released by labor organizers. “We get a different type of badge and don’t receive some of the most basic types of compensation like benefits. The majority of us work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. I am standing with my co-workers and community because I believe change for this invisible workforce is possible.”

Correction: An earlier version of the story stated that the Teamsters are organizing Google Express drivers. The union vote only applies to warehouse workers.

Continue at source:  

Google’s Low-Wage Contract Workers Are Poised to Unionize

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Google’s Low-Wage Contract Workers Are Poised to Unionize

Jim Webb Just Announced He’s Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know About Him.

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At long last, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (D) is officially a candidate for president. After weeks of supposedly imminent announcements—including ones his staff may not have known about—he declared on Thursday afternoon that he’s running, with a long statement on his website that blended a prudent hawkishness with economic populism. ” I understand the odds,” Webb notes, “particularly in today’s political climate where fair debate is so often drowned out by huge sums of money. I know that more than one candidate in this process intends to raise at least a billion dollars—some estimates run as high as two billion dollars—in direct and indirect financial support…We need to shake the hold of these shadow elites on our political process.”

Webb, as he concedes, is a huge underdog, polling at just 2 percent in nationwide polls. Here’s what you should know about the latest Democratic contender.

Continue Reading »

Continue reading here: 

Jim Webb Just Announced He’s Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know About Him.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jim Webb Just Announced He’s Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know About Him.