The Goat Pen

innocentbystander wrote:
I think we just shun him. He is not a man, just a little fucking boy. Simply out of "hurt pride" he misused abused his board authority and I think aTm should take that authority away from him. He feels about as bad for what he did to me as Kathy Griffin does for what she did to our President.

bluetick wrote:Trump Travel Ban Suffers Another Defeat, This Time in Federal Appeals Court - NBCNews

How 'bout another Wiley Coyote splat?

hedge wrote:

hedge wrote:

Professor Tiger wrote:How exactly did the Russians get former Obama voters in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to switch parties and vote Trump?

How are the votes tallied? By hand?

"So your conspiracy theory is the Russians tampered with the vote count. Do you have any evidence to support that claim? And how did the Russians actually pull that off? With the help of the Trilateral Commision?"

bluetick wrote:Another congressional hearing, many more bi-partisan alarms about Russia attacking our most sacred democratic institution. And also today Bloomberg reports that Russians hacked into the VOTING SYSTEMS of 39 STATES!! Holy shit.

Prof, why do you think the president takes the position, all by his lonesome, that reports of Russian interference are a hoax and fake news? Is he stupid?

Thoughts?

According to the leaked report, the Russian military intelligence, GRU, ran a spear-phishing campaign targeting the employees of VR Systems, a voting hardware and software producer. At least one of its employee accounts was apparently compromised. Then, the hackers used the harvested credentials to trap local government officials in charge of organizing elections. Emails, coming credibly from a VR Systems employee, contained malware that would have allowed the GRU (although the report provides no clues as to how the attribution was made) to control the computers of these local officials. The NSA doesn't seem to have determined whether the hackers managed that with any of their targets.

In reality, even if the allegedly GRU-affiliated hackers got into the computers of local officials in the states where VR Systems technology was used, they couldn't have changed the election outcome.

VR doesn't actually make voting machines. It makes electronic poll books that make paper voter rolls unnecessary. They allow an election worker to check a voter's personal data against the rolls and issue a ballot. By messing with such a system, hackers could produce confusion, making it difficult for voter names to be verified. They could even enable ineligible people to vote -- but for such a ploy to work, there would need to be large numbers of such ineligible people available for a massive fraud operation on voting day.

But results in the states that use VR equipment and software -- Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia -- were not challenged. They yielded no surprises compared with polling data.

Clinton carried Illinois, New York, California and Virginia. She was so far behind in Indiana and West Virginia that it's difficult to suspect the results were tweaked. Trump won the too-close-to-call races in North Carolina and Florida, but the big surprises -- the ones that clinched the Electoral College -- came in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where VR Systems isn't present.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... d-backward

One of the mysteries about the 2016 presidential election is why Russian intelligence, after gaining access to state and local systems, didn’t try to disrupt the vote. One possibility is that the American warning was effective. Another former senior U.S. official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the classified U.S. probe into pre-election hacking, said a more likely explanation is that several months of hacking failed to give the attackers the access they needed to master America’s disparate voting systems spread across more than 7,000 local jurisdictions.

Professor Tiger wrote:I'm just a humble purveyor of truth.