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FBI agents raided Manafort's home in July

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”

A variety of quotes from the Hypocrite-In-Chief:

        "Don't take vacations. What's the point? If you're not enjoying your work, you're in the wrong job." -- Think Like A Billionaire

        Pres. Obama is about to embark on a 17 day vacation in his ‘native’ Hawaii, putting Secret Service away from families on Christmas. Aloha!

        When will Obama next go on vacation if he wins the election? The day after.

        President Obama has a major meeting on the N.Y.C. Ebola outbreak, with people flying in from all over the country, but decided to play golf!

        Can you believe that,with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf.Worse than Carter

        The Obama's Spain vacation cost taxpayers over $476K http://bit.ly/JtGxxy They love to spend money.

        We pay for Obama's travel so he can fundraise millions so Democrats can run on lies. Then we pay for his golf.

Well it's official! Trump's Taken More Vacation Days To Date Than Obama During Presidency

Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious letter in the snail mail purporting to be from a certain PC Plod of Her Majesty's Constabulary informing me in somewhat stilted and ungrammatical English (Mrs Turgid teaches English at a secondary school and was highly amused) that he would like to speak to me regarding a inappropriate comment made on a UK web forum from an IP address apparently registered in my name. The method of communication requested was quite strange. PC Plod wanted to know my phone number so that he could speak to me in person. PC Plod managed to find my snail mail address, so this was a bit fishy, to say the least.

Smelling a rat, I decided to proceed with caution and to entertain the possibility that this may have been some kind of hoax.

Being a bit of a commie I'm a member of a trade union and have access to free lawyers, so I contacted them. I was granted a telephone conversation with a lawyer who was both very helpful and knowledgeable. I am not a lawyer, and what follows in not legal advice. I am paraphrasing from a conversation that happened many weeks ago.

The lawyer agreed that the wording of the letter was very strange. I made the point that I was quite distressed by it since I am not in the habit of intentionally stirring up trouble, certainly not of a violent kind and certainly nothing that would attract the attention of the police. She conjectured that if it wasn't a hoax, perhaps the police had imagined that someone using my network may have said something contravening the Malicious Communications Act. We both discussed that fact that a lot of subjectivity is involved when trying to argue that something is in breach of the Act and that this has implications for Free Speech. To put it a bit more bluntly, just because PC Plod takes issue with something that doesn't mean that a Court of Law would. It would be expensive and time-consuming for them to prove so. And we are still innocent until proven guilty in England and Wales.

She discussed the circumstances under which a police officer may speak to a member of the public. If a police officer has reason to speak to you regarding a suspected crime or such, you should be interviewed under caution and have the right to legal representation. What you discuss will be written down and signed. If the police officer wishes to speak to you in connection with a civil matter, they have no business doing so. They should not be investigating. Lawyers deal directly with that sort of thing. Finally, apparently, a police officer may wish to speak to you unofficially to offer "a few friendly words of advice." Communicating with the police by phone is a bad idea since you have no idea who you are really speaking to at the other end. You also have no idea whether the call is being recorded, whether there are other people listening in, or whether it is being transcribed.

So a letter was written back to this mysterious PC Plod expressing surprise, concern and asking for more information.

Eventually came the reply. PC Plod glibly and arrogantly stated that a message posted from somewhere behind my router broke Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act but that he had no idea who posted it. Upon looking at the pseudonym under which the message was posted, I suspected satire. The name suggested a certain amount of reactionary bad temper and perhaps a degree of non-conformity perhaps relating to ethnicity, the sort of thing that your typical alt-wrong snowflake would have difficulty with. Looking at the actual message and the discussion under which it was posted, it was patently obvious that it was satire, highly condensed, but in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The problem is, apart from the fact that PC Plod is poorly educated, not particularly familiar with the political culture of his own country, has no concept of context, but this particular forum has a major design flaw in that moderators may remove comments, thereby removing any context in which other comments may have been made.

PC Plod did indeed offer some friendly advice on Internet security and signed of with a thinly-veiled threat.

Let me just finish by pointing out that this "grossly offensive" comment was pretty tame compared with the stuff EthanolFueled and TheMightyBuzzard and even Runaway1956 post sometimes around here.

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.

Here's one. Suppose you were a Three Letter Agency and you needed to break some strong encryption. Now say that the cost of the hardware to do that was prohibitive (it's not likely to be invented for several decades, for example) but you remembered that millions of people were running "grid computing" (remember that term) applications on their home computers with juicy GPUs (e.g. Folding@Home). Do you reckon you could get some secret code deployed by those projects to help you break that encryption in parallel right under the noses of J. Random Citizen?

No, it's not Ethanol-Fueled. But it is relevant to Ethanol-Fueled.

Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

I understand Gayle Newland’s impulse to catfish – I posed as a man online for sex

Continuation of Doctor Who freakout:

Two former Doctors clash over Jodie Whittaker casting

Bad Western cultural influence excised from China:

Justin Bieber banned from China for 'bad behaviour'

Japan's First Lady trolls God Emperor Trumpu-jiichan?

BBC, LA Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

How OJ Simpson paved the way for Donald Trump

Parole board votes to release O.J. Simpson from prison in October

Also at BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vice, and CNN. Wikipedia.

The OJ Simpson trials: Where are they now?

One thing to note is that despite a $33.5 million civil judgment against O.J., retirement income is protected under federal law.

Don't forget O.J.'s greatest gift to mankind. One national treasure begets another.