Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

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Information Warfare

Monday Evening Open Thread: Facebook, Going Down

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The Verge says it’s back online now, so don’t panic…

Just as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, its entire network of services suddenly went offline.

The outage started just before noon ET and took nearly six hours before it was resolved. This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours, as the downtime hit hardest on the small businesses and creators who rely on these services for their income.

After failing all tests for most of the day, a test of ISP DNS servers via DNSchecker.org showed most of them successfully finding a route to Facebook.com at 5:30PM ET. A few minutes later, we were able to start using Facebook and Instagram normally, however, it may take time for the DNS fixes to reach everyone…

Inside Facebook, the outage has broken nearly all of the internal systems employees use to communicate and work. Several employees told The Verge they resorted to talking through their work-provided Outlook email accounts, though employees can’t receive emails from external addresses. Employees who were logged into work tools such as Google Docs and Zoom before the outage can still use those, but any employee who needs to login with their work email was blocked…

And here *I* thought the Pandora Papers dump would cause more disruption sooner than last night’s 60 Minutes expose…

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Late Night Open Thread: A Win Against the Monsters

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… Judge Maya Guerra Gamble on Monday issued her ruling for default judgments against Jones in two different cases, which means he and the conspiracy-theory-spewing outlet Infowars have been found liable for all damages and a jury will now be convened to determine how much he will owe the plaintiffs. The new rulings became public Thursday.

In the filings, Gamble eviscerated Jones and reasoned that default judgments should be ordered because “an escalating series of judicial admonishments, monetary penalties, and non-dispositive sanctions have all been ineffective at deterring the abuse,” caused by Jones’ unwillingness to turn over documents related to the cases, the Texas judge ruled.

The ruling — which is often referred to in Texas as a “death penalty sanction” for a party unwilling to comply with court orders — is a rarity in the legal world. Jones, who is now on his seventh lawyer in these cases, had years to provide documentation requested by the court, including internal company emails…

The hometown paper, Connecticut Post, today:

Alex Jones called the 2012 massacre of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors.”

The parents of two children killed in the shooting sued him for defamation and won.

During pretrial, Jones refused to submit documents, made public threats and implied that the trials were a sham, the parents’ attorney said.

A Texas court ruled Jones had acted in “bad faith” and that he’d lost by default for not giving the documents.

The parents, who sued Jones for more than $1 million, will have their cases sent to a jury to determine damages.

Jones also faces a defamation lawsuit in Connecticut by six families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook massacre.

The judge in that case has also threatened default against Jones if he doesn’t comply…

Yes, odds are against the parents ever seeing a dime — much less shutting this sociopath up — but every hour Alex Jones is in court is an hour he’s not further poisoning the public discourse, so due honor to their service in support of their slaughtered children.

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Friday Evening Schadenfreude Open Thread: Further EPIK Failure

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One tweet in a long thread. From what I can tell, the EPIK user base seems to have been divided between grifters and would-be domestic terrorists — with considerable overlap between the two groups.

I don’t pretend to understand the techwork TechRadar presents here, but I grasp that it’s not looking good for Mr. Monster:

Hacktivist group Anonymous has shared server disk images extracted from controversial web hosting platform Epik, according to reports.

The latest leak compliments the 180GB of Epik’s data the group had shared earlier this month, in order to express its displeasure with the hosting provider serving as a refuge for hate mongers and extremists.

“A security researcher who was able to verify the extent of the leak to me described it as “a complete own.” At over 300 gigabytes worth of data, this leak is larger than the first,” tweeted Journalist Steve Monacelli, who broke the news of the first data release.

In a followup tweet, he added that the latest data dump is made up of fully bootable disk images of Epik servers, which also includes a wide range of passwords and API tokens…

Fame, of a fashion: “2021 Epik data breach” now has its own Wikipedia page.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Blat from the Past

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Or maybe that should be ‘shart from the past’…

Hey, Norman Rockwell’s painting was ‘controversial’ with a certain percentage of magazine readers — more than fifty years ago. I’m not sure this lady had even been born yet.

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: Lovely, Just Lovely

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Speaking of illegitimate Russian assets…

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Lovely, Just Lovely

(Clay Jones via GoComics.com)

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Excellent Link: Epik Failure

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I’m beginning to suspect the right-wing grifters have no respect for their marks, and therefore don’t even try to be professional. On the other hand, telling the marks & the grifters apart ain’t always easy:

Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity.

But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.

Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it…

Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post.

Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack…

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Late Night Open Thread: Why Right-Wing Scammers Hate Vaccines

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… NBC News’ Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny last month detailed a scheme to cash in on people who want ivermectin, but can’t get a prescription from a responsible medical practitioner. SpeakWithAnMD.com, they reported, is a telemedicine website touted on anti-vaccination social media communities for serving as a pill mill for ivermectin. The website offers consultations for $90; asks prospective patients whether they are seeking ivermectin, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, or another medication; and promises same-day delivery of prescribed drugs through an online pharmacy.

The telemedicine website has ties to the broader right-wing infrastructure, NBC News further reported. It partners with America’s Frontline Doctors, a fringe-right medical organization that regularly promotes COVID-19 misinformation and has drawn sympathetic coverage from Fox News and other right-wing outlets. (That group’s founder, Dr. Simone Gold, was arrested after storming the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct.)

This grift relies on three elements. First, demand for ivermectin is expanding due to its promotion by right-wing and contrarian media personalities and on social media platforms. Second, legitimate supply is limited because responsible doctors don’t want to give their patients a drug that the Food and Drug Administration and the drug’s manufacturer, among others, do not recommend as a treatment for COVID-19. And third, the drug is generally safe with proper dosing, limiting liability for the grifters. The marks are separated from their money but are otherwise fine — unless they actually have or get COVID-19 and thought that ivermectin was a substitute for the vaccines or more proven therapeutics…

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