A war on nerds? Could be.

Fixing your shit for you, because you Normies can't read the manual.

I've noticed, over the years, that everybody likes to push the nerds around. We're "weirdos." We act "funny."

Yeah, we do. Because our fucking brains work different than the Normie brain. Usually, better in most respects. We actually know how to program the VCR. That absent-minded dork you're making fun of? He's doing calculus in his head, trying to figure out how to make your friggin' iPhone work better.

But we can be annoyingly dense in social situations. Its true. We actually annoy each other.

Normies like to pretend that our failings are some kind of choice to misbehave, a moral failing, the result of Mommy Issues or some other need to be nonconformist square pegs in a world of round holes. But that is not the case, my friends. The difference is literally bone deep. We have different DNA than you Normies. We're built to be this way from the ground up.

What's that like? Its like being a Ferrari Dino, living in a world made for Volkswagen Beetles. Everything moves too slow, the speed limit is too low, all the other cars are sluggish and they get in the way. The best part of life is when you find a piece of open road. Then you can put your boot down and hear that engine roar like the raging beast that it is, eating up the miles and leaving the little piss-can Beetles in the dust.

Beetles don't like that. They gang up and trap you in traffic. That's what its like. Thanks, Normies. You pricks.

So how far would the Normies go to be rid of the annoying Nerds?

Two fairly scary news items tell the tale when you put them together.

First, a very large scale DNA survey study claims to have found genetic markers unique to ADHD.

Geneticist Ditte Demontis and her colleagues used data from more than 20,000 people with ADHD, comparing them to a control group of 35,000 people without an ADHD diagnosis. They found 304 points where tiny differences in DNA—like single letter swaps—were distributed across their two groups in a statistically telling way. If any of those variants were very close together, the researchers counted them as representing the same stretch of DNA, grouping them together into 12 important regions.

The authors of the study emphasize that there is no "gene for ADHD," but they have found that in their study population genes common in ADHD were also common in other disorders, like Autism and Schizophrenia.

Which sounds about right. People with Aspergers or more pronounced Autism often are also diagnosed with ADHD. Twenty or thirty more years of research in that direction, they may be able to isolate all or most of the markers for a wide range of behavioral neurology.

Nerds will be instantly identifiable with a cheek swab. How do you like that?

Second, the Chinese have been gene-editing humans. Link to Nature article here.

They finally hatched two that lived.

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.
If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.
A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.

Taken with a grain of salt, this claim is a bit questionable. Nobody really knows if they actually managed it. But the thing is, they clearly want to, and eventually they will manage to gene-edit human beings and bring them to term.

Therefore China will be the first country to discover just how bad an idea it is to meddle with the Human genome. If they really did bring two baby girls to term, my prayers go out to those two babies. I really hope that the eggheads didn't frig something up. But they probably did, and nobody will ever know exactly what.

Well, so what, Phantom? What's that got to do with nerds?

If you can identify nerds with a simple test, and you can modify DNA at will, how long before nations (or companies!) start demanding citizens weed undesirable nerd traits out of their offspring? 

Particularly tech companies. They've shown a fine disregard for privacy and basic human rights, and they really don't like depending on guys like James Damore to create their products.

Damore is a great example. He's a huge Nerd. He's famous for being the guy who put his foot wrong in a typically Nerd way, by pointing out the elephant in the room at Google. They need his Ferrari 500hp brain to solve their problems, but they can't stand the way he doesn't know to shut up like any Normie would. He uses his brain to discover Truth in places where they don't want him to. But they NEED him, because they are all just fucking Volkswagens where it counts.

(And you better believe that every Nerd in Silicon Valley was watching that whole thing. If there's one thing nerds all know, its bullies. Like nerds everywhere they made plans to deal with it. Are you watching Google and Facebook stock prices tank? That's what happens when you piss off the Nerds. They are subtle and quick to anger.)

Wouldn't it be nice if the authorities could chop and channel that nerd-brain into something a little more Normie and a little less annoying and loose-cannon? Wouldn't China, and probably Google, love the chance to -make- people get their children edited?

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

We could actually live to see that. And the terrifying Revenge of the Nerds that inevitably followed. It would be legendary.

Dear Normal People: please realize that the last guy on Earth you want to toy with is the guy that designed everything that keeps you alive. There's no more dangerous creature than an engineer with a grudge. So cut us weirdos some social slack and get the fuck out of the way. We've got stuff to do.

The Phantom

Update! In case some of you think I was a little harsh lumping Google in with the Chicom government as a force of diabolical oppression in the world, guess what? You're wrong. I was not harsh enough:

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/28/google-employees-chinese-surveillance-tech/

Google employees unhappy with the project, which would extend China’s surveillance state by creating an application that would further censor Chinese search engines, renewed their protest in a new letter published Tuesday by Medium, which has about 435 signatures.
 “Dragonfly would also enable censorship and government-directed disinformation, and destabilize the ground truth on which popular deliberation and dissent rely,” the open letter reads.
The signatures on both letters objecting to Project Dragonfly reveal a growing internal concern among employees who do not wish to be part of a company that allows governments to censor its citizens and enable a surveillance state.

However, around twice as many employees signed a letter in April opposing Google’s involvement in a Pentagon program, Project Maven, that aimed to improve drone analysis to better identify civilians, thus reducing the amount of accidental civilian casualties.
This opposition letter was signed by between 3,100 and 4,000 employees between April and June and included dozens of senior engineers, according to another Times report.
Thousands of Google employees addressed their letter to Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive officer, asking that Project Maven be canceled.

 Now, I don't know about y'all, but in my school days 4,000 is more than twice as many signatures than 435. 4,000 is an order of magnitude larger than 435.

An order of magnitude more Google employees object to working for the United States government than object to working for the Communist Chinese government.

Upperdate! The Chicom government blinks!

China’s government ordered a halt Thursday to work by a medical team that claimed to have helped make the world’s first gene-edited babies, as a group of leading scientists declared that it’s still too soon to try to make permanent changes to DNA that can be inherited by future generations.
Chinese Vice Minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping told state broadcaster CCTV that his ministry is strongly opposed to the efforts that reportedly produced twin girls born earlier this month. Xu called the team’s actions illegal and unacceptable and said an investigation had been ordered, but made no mention of specific actions taken.

 I would like to think that this move was brought on by a sudden attack of conscience on the part of the Minister of Science and Technology. I would like that a lot. But the cynic in me suspects it may have more to do with the Party being made to look bad in front of the international community.

The cynic also suspects that Dr. Evile was spirited off by the Chinese Secret Squirrel Squad to a secret lab on a mountain peak somewhere, and set to work making more CRISPR tots.

Self-driving hotel room?

Some things simply demand to be mocked.

Robotic self-driving hotel room, dream version.

The robotic hotel room on wheels - is this the future of travel? Self-driving suite can ferry guests from place to place - and drones deliver room service through the sunroof

• Toronto-based Aprilli Design Studio has designed a hotel suite housed within a self-driving vehicle 
• Renderings reveal how the battery-powered hotel-room-on-wheels includes a double bed and shower room
• The vehicle's designers note that travellers would simply specify the route they wanted to take via an app

Yes friends, the "future of travel" is a camper van.

Actual robot hotel room after 15 years of service.

Also, these geniuses think that "room service" can be delivered by a quadcopter to a moving vehicle that is driving down the highway. Because that will totally work, right?

But best of all:

So that travellers wouldn't miss out on the usual perks of staying in a hotel, Aprilli says it plans to install dozens of hotel facilities across road networks.These stop-off points would house 'public amenities such as food and beverage, meeting room, spa, pool, and gym along with housekeeping, maintenance, and charging services for the travel suites'.

Hotel faclilty with public amenities, dream version.

Trailer parks.

Actual version. Good luck getting room service, bro.

Enchanted Forest Robot Hotel, 2045. Clem cooks meth in the red one.

You know what kills me? Artists and designers got paid good money to come up with this bullshit.

The Phantom

Goalposts have moved again.

It is no longer enough to remain silent on the subject of gay marriage. If you do that, they'll come for you.

A leading Australian bridal magazine has shut after being ditched by advertisers for refusing to feature same-sex couples, one year after the country changed its marriage laws.

The Christian founders of "White", Luke and Carla Burrell, said they did not feature gay weddings in their magazine as they had "no desire to create a social, political or legal war".

In a farewell blog on Saturday, the couple said they were targeted by activists because of their stance and forced to "pick a side".

As a result, several advertisers withdrew their sponsorship making their publication "no longer economically viable", the pair added.

In another fit of "if you're not with us you're against us!!!" the gay mafia managed to get the magazine closed down. Not because the publication or the owners were anti-gay, but because they refused to bow to the Don and kiss the ring. It is no longer sufficient to just be quiet, now you have to actively go along and promote the cause.

I predict this will not end well for anyone.

The Phantom

Orangutan extinction: blame Kellogg's!!!

Are there any greater liars than Greenies? I have my doubts.

Cadbury bars and Oreos are among products from TWELVE companies driving orangutans to the 'brink of extinction' with the use of palm oil.

Long story short, the Daily Mail has a story that the poor Orangutans of Indonesia are having all their forests chopped down to grow palm oil plants.

Which is true. Palm oil plantations are growing at a huge rate in the tropics. It's a very big deal.

The lie is blaming American and European food companies for this growth. Edible oil is available from a large number of sources. Corn, flax, sunflowers, those are all grown industrially right here in Ontario. World-wide there's plenty of vegetable oil to eat. Big food companies use palm oil because it is the cheapest, not the best. Food consumption of palm oil is a tiny fraction of the overall production.

Why is palm oil so cheap, and why is so much of it produced?

Bio diesel.

Who caused that to happen?

Greenpeace.

Will they come clean and admit that burning food oils in our cars is fucking insanity?

No.

They will blame Big Business for something Big Business has resisted for 40 years, since it was first proposed. They will do this because they are pusillanimous liars.

May their trousers burst into flame. At the gas station.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!

Stan Lee passed away. Yancy Street mourns.

What a revoltin' development.

Stan Lee, the man who co-created Marvel Comics, has died ... Stan's daughter tells TMZ.

We're told an ambulance rushed to Lee's Hollywood Hills home early Monday morning and he was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. We're told that's where he died.

Lee had suffered several illnesses over the last year or so -- he had a bout of pneumonia and vision issues.

Stan started Marvel with Jack Kirby in 1961 with The Fantastic Four. He went on to create Spider-Man, Black Panther, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Iron Man and The Avengers.

Farewell Stan. Yancy Street and every superhero in the cosmos salute you.

The Phantom

The failure of imposed morality.

Here's something interesting I stumbled upon on Drudge today: "How the GOP gave up on pr0nz"

From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument—its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences. It was treated as a matter of urgency not just by the religious right, which decried the hypersexualizing of society, but by the radical left, which denounced the objectifying of women. Liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals found themselves unexpectedly allied in vilifying the adult entertainment industry. After decades of intensifying conflict, Ronald Reagan convened a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985; two years later, Reagan held a press conference to announce his administration's plan to combat illegal obscenity—and issue a warning to the porn professionals: "Your industry's days are numbered."

And now of course the pr0nz sites have the most traffic of anything in the internet. Top Five traffic sites are all filthy pictures and filthy movies. Kids, adults, everybody looks. Now we joke about Rule 34: if there's a character or an idea, then there's porn of it. But Rule 34 has gone from being a joke to being an actual rule. If you can think of it, there really is pr0nz of it. (I'm not going to give examples, sorry.)

Something else has become apparent, porn is bad. It is bad for the people who view it, and extremely bad for the people who make it. Plenty of high-profile suicides and mental disintegrations in the pr0nz "industry" make that painfully obvious.

The article makes it clear that the author thinks an opportunistic politician could find plenty of grist for their fame-mill in safety issues alone, and lots of "For The Chilllldren!!!" activity. But nobody does.
 

What happened? The pervasiveness of porn is a reminder that politics historically hasn't been much of a bulwark against the most primitive human desires—money, power, sex and, in this instance, a combination of the three. But it's also a window into the mentality on the right, which has surrendered the fight on many social issues as America has moved left. Even with Trump in the White House and five conservatives on the Supreme Court, there is no reversing the cultural tides that have swept away the Moral Majority's footprint on supporting traditional marriage and prayer in public schools. The difference is that some on the right still pay lip service to those lost causes. When it comes to porn—more accessible, more acceptable and less scrutinized than at any time during its history—they don't even bother anymore.

What happened, from my perspective, was would-be totalitarians realized they couldn't get any traction with the issue and gave up. The fact that porn may be harmful to everyone doesn't matter to them, what they want is a hot-button to push that will get them votes. But now, porn is ubiquitous. The most freaky hardcore imaginable is no farther away than your smartphone. Everybody has seen anything they want, and probably a bunch of stuff they didn't want. (Important safety tip kids, you can't un-see shit.) People are not shocked by it anymore. Nobody is screaming "there oughta be a law!!!".

So there are no votes there. No money. No leverage they can use to get power.

This leads to an interesting situation. There's nobody telling the populace not to watch the porn anymore. Churches have given up. Even the freaky Feminazis have given up, which is really saying something. If those nut-jobs give up on an issue, it is gone, baby. There is no more candy in that pinata.

From here on, until some new excuse is found, people will be free to view as much porn as they want. That it is harmful, if it is, will become apparent to everyone in due time. But it will still be there, waiting. So, it will be up to the -individual- to exercise restraint. Just like they have to exercise restraint with candy, booze and bacon.

Freedom, my friends. Sometimes it looks funny.

But the culture of self-restraint that grows from this freedom will be far more powerful and effective than the oppressive regulation imposed from above by our social betters.

The Phantom

Lest We Forget

100 years since 1918.

We still remember.

media behavior around mass shootings.

Another mass-shooting atrocity last night, this time in California. Condolences to the bereaved and the wounded.

Of note is the behavior of police and media today. This shooting occurred at roughly 11:20 last night. By 7:00AM this morning the police had released the shooter's identity.

White male, US Marine veteran.

That's pretty fast release of information on a guy that the news says didn't have any ID on him, and was too dead to have given police his name.

Ever notice how the cops seem to take a really looong time to release information on shooters, except when they're white, male and presumably Republican/Conservative Christian?

Maybe its my imagination, but there does seem to be quite a discrepancy in speed. Just sayin'.

The Phantom.

Robot grocery stores, get ready for it.

In my continuing series on job destruction and what inevitably happens when you raise minimum wage to idiotic heights, I give you the robot grocery store.

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands/NEW YORK, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Grocery group Ahold Delhaize will roll out small, automated warehouses to speed order picking and cut delivery times, Reuters has learned, as it revamps its ecommerce business in response to rising competition in a fast-growing sector.
At an investor event on Nov. 13, the world's eighth biggest food retailer is set to showcase a partnership that will allow it to automate order collection at mini "robot supermarkets" attached to the stores of its U.S. chains like Stop & Shop.
Now Netherlands-based Ahold Delhaize is teaming up with Takeoff, a start-up which builds small warehouses that stack groceries to the ceiling to save space and use robot arms to assemble shoppers' orders for items such as beer, milk, bread and fruit.
The warehouses serve as condensed supermarkets that can supply several stores with click-and-collect orders. They cost about $3 million to build, which Takeoff says is less than the cost of a typical store revamp.
"Ahold is preparing for a major push," Curt Avallone, Takeoff's chief development officer who led digital innovation at Stop & Shop until 2003, told Reuters.
"If it goes well, both from their side and our side, the hope is we would rapidly be able to build quite a few."

Lets list the advantages for the vendors here:

No shoplifting (Which is huge)

No employee stealing (Which is huge)

Much reduced breakage (robots don't drop stuff as much)

Much reduced spoilage (Just In Time delivery and stock rotation goes a lot faster.)

Tiny square footage compared to regular market

NO EMPLOYEES means the store can be open 24/7/365, including Sundays and holidays. It's a vending machine.

This is a perfect setup for big cities where supermarkets can't afford the real estate costs. Tiny space stacked two stories high with racking, no aisles, no lighting, no checkout, no cash registers, no samples, no nothing. Order on your smart-phone, all your crap gets spit out a chute into your car, you drive off.

One problem. All those people currently working at stores? They're on welfare now. They can't afford to buy the food at the robot store.

The Phantom

 Update: Welcome, Instapundit!

The American Election is over!

Yes, the American election is over. The world did not end, again.

Yay.

We now return you to the never-ending media meltdown.

Europe: you can smell their fear.

Europe, the cradle of the Enlightenment, 2018:

The freedom of speech does not extend to include defaming the prophet of Islam, the European Court of Human rights ruled Thursday.

The Strasbourg-based ECHR ruled that insulting Islamic prophet Muhammad "goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate" and "could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace."

The court's decision comes after it rejected an Austrian woman's claim that her previous conviction for calling Muhammad a pedophile, due to his marriage to a 6-year-old girl, violated her freedom of speech.
The ECHR ruled Austrian courts had "carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected."

No word on when it'll be a crime to defame the Buddha, or Christ, or Ya*we*, or Thor and Odin, for that matter. And hey, how about Dread Cthulhu, no love for squid worship? Come on!

The Phantom

Update: Link fixed! Thank you, sharp-eyed reader!

Day after Weed Day: post-Apocalypse!

Well here we are, October 18th 2018, and I am not standing in the smoking ruins of my civilization. They made the demon weed legal yesterday, and the world did not come to an end.

The Ontario Cannabis Store web site was getting something like 100 orders per minute, and sold out not long after it opened. Similar situations across Canada at the Official Legal Weed Outlets. All shelled out before noon, from what I'm seeing in the news.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The official government plan was Fail On Purpose. Make weed "legal," sort of.  License its sale and growth, regulate and tax the living shit out of it, and make sure there's not enough for everybody.

Obviously the next few years the private sector will sue their way into profitability, because the way things are set up right now can't survive a court challenge. Its as if a high school cheer leading squad was given the job.

What I find interesting is the media buzz on this whole thing follows much the same pattern as when a state in the USA declares shall-issue concealed carry permits will be the law. Tons of fear-mongering, End Of The World, Blood In The Streets stories get circulated. Then the day arrives that everybody's been propagandized into terror about... and nothing happens. It was all bullshit. They were winding us up to sell papers.

By Tuesday you're not going to see the word "cannabis" in the news. That's what's going to happen. So make your life better and do what I do. Cut your TV cable, shut off the radio, and don't look at the newspapers. They're all lying to you about virtually everything, all the time, just like they lied about weed.

"LET them die!" James T. Kirk.

Happy Weed Day!

Congratulations Canada, we made it! We survived until the most important change in human history finally came. The demon weed is finally legal.

We can get wasted in peace.

Yay.

The Phantom

Illegal gun making... in Canada!

Over the years I've been yelled at by a -lot- of people over guns. Every good socialist knows that guns are horrible evil bad things, and only an insane evil Nazi murderer would even look at one in a store. I wish I was exaggerating. They're really like that.

The other favorite trope with them is that everybody is an inch away from SNAPPING!!!! and going on a murder spree. Take human, add gun, instant mass murder/death/kill. Yes, they really think that.

That's why they all love them some gun control, and they all demand a total 100% ban on civilian ownership of firearms. But not cops. Cops should have guns. Because a badge and a government paycheck are potent charms which render the police permanently sane, responsible, honest and guarantee they will never SNAP and do murder/death/kill. But anyone else will.

Essentially its moral laziness. They can't be assed to do the work to protect themselves. They think safety is something that should be handed to them on a silver platter, like television and health care.

But, being the eternal optimist, I often introduce inconvenient truths into the conversation. Such as, would you rather be shot or stabbed? Because when you ban guns, the thugs immediately switch to knives. So you are going to ban knives next? How are you going to do that? Prisoners in jails around the world make their own, under the most stringent surveillance that can be contrived by Man. You can make a knife out of a toothbrush. It just takes time and patience.

Another inconvenient truth, when you ban guns, people make their own. Yep. Just like with the knives, they get busy and make their own guns. Now, usually we see these little gun factories open up in places like Mexico, Brazil, Afghanistan, Pakistan. You know, them furrin countries where those picturesque primitive villages are, and where UNICEF goes to save the children. Places where Liberals like to send money, but they don't want to actually visit.

But not this time. No, this time the gun factory is in Montreal. This time it was a CANADIAN making guns for criminals.

A man who helped manufacture many illegal semi-automatic firearms at a factory in LaSalle faces the possibility of a four-year prison term for his crimes.

Daniel Spain, 51, appeared before Quebec Court Judge Mélanie Hébert at the Montreal courthouse on Monday for what was supposed to be the start of sentence arguments in his case. Instead, his lawyer, Joseph Elfassy, filed a motion arguing that the three-year mandatory minimum sentence he client already faces is unconstitutional.

Hébert agreed to carry over the sentence hearing to January to allow time for both sides to prepare arguments on the motion.

On March 29, Spain, an Île-Perrot resident, pleaded guilty to two counts of manufacturing prohibited firearms knowing that he was not authorized to do so. He worked Perfection Métal, a company based in LaSalle while its owner Jean-Pierre Huot made dozens of Tec-9-type semi-automatic pistols, including several that ended up being recovered by police at crime scenes in Quebec and Ontario.

I note in passing that four years for making a gun does seem excessive when you consider that one of the guys who actually used the guns is out on day parole already. The cop who killed Sammy Yatim in cold blood only got six years. The owner of the factory, Huot, got seven years.

What's important in Canada? Cold-blooded murder, six years. Making a gun, seven years. Helping make a gun, four years. Okay, Lefties? Learning yet? Not using it, just making it.

In conclusion, lets make all this crystal clear. Nobody in government cares if you get murdered. Nobody cares if there are armed terrorists, insane cops, drug dealers, or plain-vanilla lunatics running around killing Canadians. Not to put too fine a point on it, nobody in authority cares that most of the victims are black. And most of the people getting murdered in Canada really are black, or Indian.

What they care about is their next election, and their ever-expanding retirement fund. That's all. That's who Liberals are, that's what they do.

The Phantom

WINAMP RETURNS!!!!

This is made of awesome.

The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic mobile audio app that brings together all your music, podcasts and streaming services to a single location. It's an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it's still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community — and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well.

For those who don't remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership (our former parent company) and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say it's long in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So it's with pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way.

They can call it "charmingly outdated" all they want, but Winamp has always been my favorite MP3 player. It does everything I want, it doesn't do anything I don't want. I'm really very happy to see it return to run on new operating systems.

Winamp currently doesn't do any of the advertising/spying/"suggesting" that Apple and Google do. It just plays the music. You put it on shuffle, it actually SHUFFLES the songs randomly, like its supposed to.

If they can resist the temptation to put spyware in the new versions, I will be happy to pay money for a copy of Winamp to put on my phone and all my computers. Once upon a time I paid money for the original Pro version, and I'll do it again.

Big Brother hack update, new evidence!

Previously, Bloomberg news asserted that SuperMicro servers had been hardware-hacked by their manufacturers in China.

Today, new evidence and a named source.

A major U.S. telecommunications company discovered manipulated hardware from Super Micro Computer Inc. in its network and removed it in August, fresh evidence of tampering in China of critical technology components bound for the U.S., according to a security expert working for the telecom company.

The security expert, Yossi Appleboum, provided documents, analysis and other evidence of the discovery following the publication of an investigative report in Bloomberg Businessweek that detailed how China's intelligence services had ordered subcontractors to plant malicious chips in Supermicro server motherboards over a two-year period ending in 2015.

But wait, it gets better:

The executive said he has seen similar manipulations of different vendors' computer hardware made by contractors in China, not just products from Supermicro. "Supermicro is a victim -- so is everyone else," he said. Appleboum said his concern is that there are countless points in the supply chain in China where manipulations can be introduced, and deducing them can in many cases be impossible. "That's the problem with the Chinese supply chain," he said.

Yep. Just like I said. Anything PC related that's made in China is fundamentally insecure, and can't be trusted in a secure network. IT guys all over the world right now are reading this article and crapping their pants. They know how much Chinese stuff is in their inventory: most of it.

The Phantom

Mini-review of Venom.

The new Venom movie came out this week. I saw it today. I give it a solid three out of five. 3/5 Its not boring, its not irretrievably stupid, they kept the SJW bullshit to a minimum. There's some good comedy, good car chases and lots of cool shit blowing up. This is not a cerebral movie, there are no deep thoughts here. But that's okay, I can work with that.

Bottom line, better than Justice League. Not a ton better, but still. We take what we can get these days.

The Phantom Film Critic.

Hey! Rats have feelings too, haterz!

Apparently there is a pro-rat advertising campaign in Paris.

The world's first public relations campaign to persuade people that rats have feelings too, and they should learn to love them, has been launched in Paris, where city authorities are waging war to exterminate the four-million strong rodent population.
"Stop the massacre of rats," is the slogan on posters on the walls of dozens of metro stations, which show pictures of cute rats and declare that rodents "are sensitive individuals" which can "feel emotions."
The campaign was launched by Paris Animaux Zoopolis, an animal rights group that aims to defend all animals regardless of whether humans like them or not.
The group's secretary Philippe Reigné said he was not aware of any other major campaigns to laud the merits of the much-maligned rodent and that the Paris one may be a world first.
"It is a political message which targets the Paris city hall, the prefecture of police, and the exterminators (of rats)," he said.
"Rats should not be seen as synonymous with filth," he said, arguing that Paris authorities are as motivated by the damage rats cause to the image of the world's most visited city as they are about hygiene issues.

Paris is lagging behind Los Angeles, the Californians skipped their rat extermination attempt entirely and went straight to the rodent population explosion.

But in case anyone was wondering -why- Typhus is making a big comeback in LA, this tree-hugging, bunny-loving, rats-have-feelings-too bullshit is why.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit! Sarah Hoyt linked me!

Upperdate: By the news, the California Typhus outbreak has spread from LA to Pasadena and Long Beach. The rats are very well fed and healthy. Thanks, Democrats!

Typhus outbreak in... Los Angeles?

How to tell when your city and state are run by DemocRats: flea-transmitted typhus.

An outbreak of flea-borne typhus has hit downtown Los Angeles, the county Department of Public Health said Thursday. Health officials say they are investigating several cases of flea-borne typhus, a disease that infected fleas can spread to humans.
...
"Although typhus normally occurs throughout L.A. County, we are observing several cases in the downtown Los Angeles area," Los Angeles County Health Officer Muntu Davis said in a statement. "We encourage pet owners to practice safe flea control and encourage all cities in the county to ensure maintenance of their trash clean-up and rodent control activities."
Typhus can spread in areas where there is an accumulation of trash that attracts wild animals like feral cats, rats and opossums.

The appearance of diseases that typically affect places like Haiti or Syria are increasingly showing up in California. These are not super bugs or crazy, rare things like Ebloa. We're talking about the type of common ailments that are spread by filth. When nobody picks up the garmage, and people shit in the street because there's no place else to go, you start seeing things like typhus, cholera, dysentery, all kinds of diseases that were defeated in Europe in the 17th Century by 1) sewer systems, 2) clean water systems and 3) garbage collection.

But in California we see these vital infrastructure systems being destroyed by the people who administer them. Between Green initiatives, Lefty labor policy and flat-out corruption, large cities in California are descending into 3rd World hell-hole status.

Just keep voting DemocRat, California. You've got two of the Four Horsemen camping in your state, Disease and Death. Pretty soon you'll have the Black Plague sweep through and kill all those inconvenient street people and illegal migrants. Won't that be handy?

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!
Upperdate: Paris is trying to catch up! 

Big Brother is hacked!

It is bad enough when Big Brother is your own country's government, watching you all the time and reading your email. But how about when Big Brother's servers get hacked, and somebody else's government is looking over their shoulder?

Welcome to America 2018, my friends.

Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

For a very long time I've been saying that having your hardware built in a foreign country, by slaves, is a very, very bad idea. Somebody might get a bright idea and do something to it, right?

Well, guess what. They finally did.

Nested on the servers' motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn't part of the boards' original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental's servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA's drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

The best part? This hack was NOT found by the super US Secret Squirrel gang. It was found by some un-named company in Ontario, Canada, because Amazon Web Services hired them to vet the servers. The CIA/FBI/ArmyNavyAirforceMarines/and every other alphabet-soup spook outfit was clueless. None of them checked the shit their networks ran on.

Ladies and gentlemen, every fucking thing in your life runs on hardware made in China. Your phone, your fridge, your toaster, your car. This hack was done by a chip the size of a kosher salt flake, disguised as a resistor. It had enough ROM and processing power to subvert any operating system and install its own kernel-level back door.

How easy would it be to put something like that is a car radio? If I were a Chinese Communist mastermind, I'd put something like that in car radios, and also specialized emergency services radios. I'd keep doing it for ten years, and never, ever use it. Then one day, I'd be able to shut off every car, police cruiser, fire truck and ambulance in the whole USA, and Canada, and Europe. One at a time, or all at once.

Too much? Okay, how about if I only put it in Apple iPhones? Then I could DDoS the entire telephone network.

Still too much? Okay, how about if I only subverted all those credit card swipe machines, and they all crash the same day. You can feel that one, right? Nobody carries cash, that's a problem that's right in your face.

Letting all your computer hardware be built in a foreign nation is like nailing a $100 bill to a telephone pole. Even in the most law abiding town in the world, somebody is going to take that money. Chicom apparatchiks are not the most honest people in the world.

The Phantom

Update! Welcome Instapundit! Thank you to Sarah Hoyt for the linkage!

Upperdate: Apple comes out swinging! "Its all lies, I tell you! Lies!"

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