Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

This blog will pay for itself.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The revolution will be supervised.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Every MSM headline appears to be written by DougJ. i hope he’s getting paid.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

This really is a full service blog.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

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

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

This fight is for everything.

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Friday Night Open Thread: Twitter Never Gives the Suckers An Even Break

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Whenever I see a photo of Jack Dorsey, I imagine Gimli the Dwarf announcing ‘He’s the cousin we don’t talk about.’ But he *does* understand his user base!

The Verge seems dubious about this latest Advanced Tech Move:

… On one hand, NFT profile pictures could be viewed as an incredible technology integration adding real utility for verified digital items. Alternately, it’s an unmissable signal pointing out the people that you should block or mute before they try to sell you some of their blockchain receipts.

No matter what your opinion of easily reproduced digital trinkets is, Twitter is integrating them in a way that separates ridiculous images of cartoon apes that have been right-clicked for use as standard profile pictures from ridiculous images of cartoon apes that are connected to blockchain tokens by adding a special “soft hexagon” shape around them…

Despite Twitter’s list of wallets, there are people who think it isn’t doing enough to verify the provenance of NFTs. As Adam Hollander points out, Twitter’s setup and hexagon logo only checks to see if there is an NFT connected to the user’s wallet — it doesn’t check or tell viewers if that NFT is verified as belonging to a high-profile collection (like the Bored Ape Yach Club, for example). You could go through the same right-click save exercise mentioned above, mint the image as a new NFT, and on your profile page, it will look identical to that of a person who has ownership of the verified image.

The only way someone can tell if your NFTs are actually from the collection that they appear to be is to click on your profile picture and check the details. Otherwise, a fake BAYC toke (like this one) looks at first glance just like the officially minted one (here). Twitter’s head of consumer product marketing Justin Taylor says this is on purpose, and that “We don’t want to limit this to just verified collections, that would be wrong, and non supportive of the broader nft movement. Anyone SHOULD be able to mint anything and make it their nft.”…

SURE ENOUGH…

Why do they laugh at my mighty sword?!?…

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Extremely Fungible NFTs

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Sure, we may be spending the first Saturday night of the new year online, but at least we’re not as dementedly ONLINE as some people…

… PAYC announced its launch in early December with a loose mission statement promoting decentralization and denigrating “rich douchebags” who had (allegedly) taken over the original ape market. It called back to CryptoPhunks, a similar project that flipped and resold expensive CryptoPunks images earlier this year. Early arrivals could mint left-facing apes for free starting December 28th, while others paid a fee of .042 ETH (currently around $157).

PHAYC launched shortly after with a tongue-in-cheek website describing the project as “a limited NFT collection where the token itself offers no membership and no allegiance,” an inversion of the promise made by BAYC creator Yuga Labs. One PHAYC community member described the project to CoinDesk as “a satirical take on the current state of NFTs and members of the NFT community who might be taking the NFT market a little too seriously.”

Somewhat ironically, PAYC and PHAYC have since fought on Twitter over which one is the authentic Bored Ape Yacht Club ripoff, with PAYC’s founder referring to PHAYC as a “cash grab fraud project.” PHAYC charged people to mint its apes, and CoinDesk reports that it took in around 500 ETH (or around $1.8 million) in sales. By contrast, it says PAYC earned around 60 ETH (or roughly $225,000) from its paid sales…

Pivot! Ugly pics are soooo 2021 — unreadable words are the new 2022 hotness…

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Late Night Open Thread: Ted Cruz Wants His Just Desserts

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And Murphy the Trickster God will no doubt ensure he gets them, good and hard. A man who needs to seek out fifteen-year-old ‘journalists’ for his ego-uplifting needs is a sorry spectacle, and the Washington Post‘s Phillip Bump is not averse to taking advantage:

One of the odder moments of the 2016 election was the announcement of the Republican running mate. Not Donald Trump’s announcement of Mike Pence. Sen. Ted Cruz’s announcement of Carly Fiorina.

Perhaps you’d forgotten this little incident. It was late April 2016, and it was already nearly certain that Trump would be the Republican Party’s nominee. Cruz (R-Tex.), eager to shock his campaign back into viability, took the unusual step of announcing that, if he won, he’d run with Fiorina at his side. Fiorina had been a candidate, too, so Cruz’s announcement seemed to be an effort to scoop up whatever loyal supporters she had — and, of course, to appeal to Republican women. It didn’t work.

It was very Ted Cruz, though. His political career has often involved too-clever efforts to game the rules to his advantage and related stunts. Even then, Cruz’s path to the nomination involved not winning more delegates but keeping Trump from getting enough to clinch at the convention. Cruz stayed in the fight to win not on votes but on process (a preview of his pre-Jan. 6 efforts, it turns out).

But Cruz excels at making lemon-related beverages out of lemons. So, in an interview with a 15-year-old conservative media personality, Cruz cited his not-quite-enough performance in 2016 as a mark that he could be 2024′s front-runner…

“I ran in 2016. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Cruz said. “We had a very crowded field with 17 candidates in the race, very strong field. And I ended up placing second. And you know, there’s a reason historically that the runner-up is almost always the next nominee.”

That’s true. There were reasons historically that Republicans who fared well in prior nominating contests continued on to later win the nomination. For one, they had experience building infrastructure and raising the money needed for an extended national campaign. For another, they built relationships with members of the establishment that helped them more quickly solidify support.

But that system was essentially shattered in the very campaign in which Cruz came in second.

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Late Night Open Thread: Piling On DeFaced Book

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Nobody is sad when the biggest bully goes down. Except for maybe the coatholders who’d been profiting off the bully, and they’re mostly smart enough not to lament too loudly amid the cheers…

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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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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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Sunday Night Open Thread: Cry More, Media Village Idiots

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Our Media Betters are abso-fekkin-FURIOUS that we — even the Very Serious business community — refuse to believe their narrative about failing Democrat Biden’s latest blunder…

Hyperconservative Max Boot, of all people!

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