SoylentNews

The Case Against James Comey

An interesting article about the man we love to hate, although this article focuses on his decision to hold a press conference about the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

We are probably stuck with Comey for another 6-7 years. Encrypt and patch.

So, 9/11 day was too much for Hillary, even with her excellent health.

Will this be the straw that breaks her Camel toe, errr, back?

Man, if only Jill Stein was the third runner......

Question: if Hillary is elected and dies quickly (totally by natural causes, though, nudge nudge), does Pence finish her term or does it spark another election run?

Green Party's Jill Stein to face charges after North Dakota protest

U.S. Green Party's Stein faces probe over North Dakota pipeline protest

Sheriff: Green Party presidential candidate faces charges in pipeline protest

New streaming show 'StartUp' rides bitcoin, fintech crazes

Call it a case of art imitating life.

The shadowy world of computer hackers, long an object of fascination in movies and popular culture, may be about to take a new leap as an entertainment vehicle. As hackers, anonymous data leaks and cyber intrigue fill real-world headlines, a new television show called "StartUp," featuring similar themes, launches on Tuesday — but with an added twist.

The 10-episode drama will debut on Sony Pictures' streaming platform Crackle, and centers around three strangers who find themselves enmeshed in a digital currency scheme (hello, bitcoin!) while fighting the FBI. "StartUp," which includes actors Martin Freeman and Adam Brody, has already released its first episode for viewers to watch on Reddit.

GenCoin, the fictional digital currency used in the show, loosely represents bitcoin, currently world's largest digital currency. Given that it's difficult to regulate and trace, some say it's an ideal vehicle for criminal activity such as money laundering.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cordcutters/comments/4zeuo6/startup_episode_1_exclusive_reddit_premiere/

The cartoon.

Charlie Hebdo slammed for 'lasagna' cartoon on Italy earthquake victims

Controversial French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has provoked fresh outrage with its response to last week's devastating earthquake in central Italy.

The latest edition of the edgy French publication features a cartoon entitled "Earthquake, Italian-style," which depicts victims of the 6.2-magnitude quake with varying degrees of injury, each likened to an Italian recipe. A severely bleeding man is labelled "penne with tomato sauce." A woman with a badly bruised or burned face is "penne au gratin." And a pile of victims pancaked beneath a collapsed building, their legs sticking out from the bloodied rubble, is "lasagna." The cartoon prompted a swift response in Italy and online.

Oh nooooo! We can't pretend to support free speech any more! They've gone too far this time!

Another day, another 500 miles, and another round of hacking. I'm dedicating an hour to this on and off over the weekend.

Right now, I've got an accurate int to hex function written in assembler for printing values of registers, an interrupt handler + installation, and some test code. Right now, I ran into a snag with calling the TSR function on int 21h, but I think its due to lack of sleep. Last few days has been very very stressful and I'm only picking at this as I go. I think I'm going to have to add a section to the next article talking about position-dependent vs. position-independent code as it will become important when we go to install into RAM.

Wish some of the documentation though on the specifics of how TSRs work internally survived; a lot say you have to use small memory model even though I have example code of tiny model TSRs.

Work has been going slow on the next installment of my retro-malware article. Right now, I've got an itoa function written in assembly, but real life has been kinda kicking my ass and I'm not making much headway in writing as I would like. As of right now, I know exactly what I need to write and code, but making the code flow.

Bleh. It doesn't help right now I'm travelling cross-country.

This submission was already run one year ago, with an extra link to the Diane Rehm show.

The Coddling of the American Mind

The Atlantic has some new coverage of the University of Chicago's rejection of trigger warnings and safe spaces that has hit the news this week.

I'm absolutely stocked with the response the first bit of original content I've written for SN has gotten over 80 comments (even if a fair number are my own). It's very good motivation to keep going with it, and I've started working on outlining and planning the next section which I think will cover the following.

• The Stack
• SI/DS registers
• Terminate and Stay Resident
• (Maybe) DOS memory layout

I'm targetting ~2000 words in total, not counting the prelude section of the article. This will serve as a prelude to looking at the DOS memory map as a whole as well as get our first taste of how segmentation and relocation work under DOS since we will have to manage CS/DS/SS when we're in TSR mode. I'm currently writing out some demo code but its been fairly slow going since I got tripped up by the fact a pointer is 2 bytes (16-bit), and a lack of free time until this weekend. I'm hoping to have the code half of this cranked out by Friday to write up over the weekend.

I've decided for the time being to continue using NASM. While NASM is not a period specific assembler, its very easy to use, free software and has excellent documentation, and its the only assembler that can target x86_16 from Win64 and Linux64 that actually works. I wouldn't mind using the OpenWatcom assembler except its essentially undocumented. If I was going for period specific, I would need a 16-bit copy of LINK.EXE and MASM. Both are in the Windows DDK but extremely unfriendly to setup, or use Turbo Assembler and code in VirtualBox (pass; I like Notepad++ on Windows).

I've had some hangups on figuring out where to go beyond the basics of TSR programming. Unfortunately, non-IP based stuff appears to have dropped off the face of the internet. LANMAN client on Microsoft's FTP is completely MIA, and I can't find a freeware stack available anywhere that supports anything !TCP/IP. I could write something using Layer 2 protocols, but even then I'm kinda "eh" since that really doesn't go into the history of early networking or stuff. As best I can tell, at least for IPX, the actual Novell NetWare client was TSR, but its essentially non-existent. LANMAN in theory is free on Microsoft's FTP, but no developer documentation that I can find.

One idea I had though was perhaps reviving my ham radio stuff, and plugging the whole thing into AX.25. KA9Q for DOS is open source and implements KISS, and I can emulate another AX.25 host over the serial port (or go full turkey, and plug the other side into an actual radip using Linux as a glorified BNC). That would get me a period specific way of getting the data out of a target system in a targetting attack. (obviously, real NSA would use something beside amauter radio bands, but the concept exists. You could easily hide a micro-radio in a PC case wired up to an ISA slot or something, using the case itself as an antenna).

Trump To Meet With Mexican President Ahead Of Immigration Speech

Now that's interesting.