* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

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This is going to go down in history "How not to do IT you depend upon".

Since the 70's or so, that book has become, fat, fat, fat.

Right next to it is a thin volume about "successful land wars in asia waged by people from the european landmass", but that's for another discussion.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Early adopters of data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) software

This seems to be a very good tool to have.

I don't see why anything should go more spectularly wrong if you have it.

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Re: My buddy works in IT

> decades ago

> vaporize the primary system nobody would even notice.

Choose exactly one.

(Then subtract one)

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Re: @HWwiz

Your post has been noted and an officially-credentialed MBA will be dispatched on site

I'm happy to hear that. I'm ready provide you with names and complete CVs for a few of ours.

'Do not tell Elon': Ex-SpaceX man claims firm cut corners on NASA part tests

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Re: Don't be their 'rogue engineer'

Making copies of such emails to take with you after you quit / are fired could be used against you, if they contain anything the company could possibly consider confidential or proprietary - even a code name or (at the time) future product.

Bullshit point. Anything can be used against you nowadays, so you better play too.

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I knew a 17 year old kid who trained with me, did something he was ordered, even though he knew it was wrong; a power bank exploded - killing someone. Guess who went to prison, the trainee, or the boss who ordered him to do it??

Makes no sense. If he's a trainee of 17, there is no doubt that the manager is responsible. Is this in Nigeria?

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Re: Differing cultures

Audit/Culture/Boeing

Epic answer. The only item missing is Risk Management. Today's legal and technical environment is a minefield, you are never sure whether your newly build device will fail in interesting ways, whether your currently breaking some law or will after the next parliamentary session, or whether some guy of a suffering minority won't start a discrimination lawsuit and bring the mighty wrath of the slacktivists down upon your head.

Only the well connected or those who can deploy muscle can survive.

'Major incident' at Capita data centre: Multiple services still knackered

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Mushroom

Self-inflicted Cyber Pearl Harbor

Always remember the terrible banking holiday of May 2017!

1) BA down

2) CAPITA and appendages down

3) Sainsbury's down

4) Theresa May generates hot air in parliament

"I felt a great disturbance in IT, as if thousands of servers nicely aligned in datacenters were suddenly engulfed in fault reports and red blinkenlights, then silenced. I fear terrible downtime has happened."

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Just order more sandwiches?

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Multiple clusterfucks incoming

Apparently they are not related and BA has denied that any hack occured.

“Uh, we had a slight computer malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you.” [winces] “Uh, how are you?”

Sainsbury's IT glitch spoils bank holiday food orders

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Re: Thank God it wasn't Ocado

This is terrorist talk!!

TRUMP SCANDAL! No, not that one. Or that one. Or that one. Or that one.

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WTF?

I think Chomsky had something to say about that.

Apart from him being a semi-literate real estate developer who behaves like an elephant in must in a porcelain shop full with progressive and necon false idols (idols that are squamous yet ruguous), as well as having a definite lack of oily suaveness / fake coolness expected in high-pedigree presidential material, I still don't see what is so douchebag about him. (Well, I wouldn't let my daughter near any of that, true.)

Of course, one is expected to behave like we are told, and we ARE told. All the time via throwaway lines....

In the months following the election, the FBI and Congress have launched investigations into just how much (if anything) the Trump campaign knew of the Russian meddling.

Especially as said "Russian meddling" is still , in spite of more than a year of overheated talk and innuendo, generally by necon/globalist outlets like the NYT, not apparent.

On the other hand, nobody is looking at the bizarre killing of Seth Rich, DNC ex-leaker.

(Here is a link on how Trump and Putin may be connected though: The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin: Where Trump's real estate world meets a top religious ally of the Kremlin.. Pretty good.)

EU ministers approve anti-hate speech video rules

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Re: You can con the regulators, but you can't con cancon.

Just be selective.

As long as you don't rail against Israel or Oppressed Female Muslim Furry People Of Gay Color it will be ok.

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

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Thumb Up

I hope they succeed ... but! Economics!

Reminder to read this fine article at IEEE Spectrum:

The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors: Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so

Also:

It took financial backing from the Chinese government to land.

Ah, Sinotriumph coming.

Coal-free day

I never found out whether that was a stunt (i.e. due to random downward fluctuation and the grid able to run on renewables for a limited time for once, or maybe more gas turbines coming online) or something sustainable.

What's got a vast attack surface and runs on Linux? Windows Defender, of course

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Re: Fuzz?

First time I heard about this was in Communications of the ACM, early 90s.

(Apparently 1989: "An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities", available here: http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz.pdf)

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Re: I think the spell checker got fuzzed

No, it seems you have arrived at the Grauniad.

IT firms guilty of blasting customers with soul-numbing canned music

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Re: Vomit

I thought it was a legal requirement nowadays to tell you your place in the queue. Especially if you didn't phone a freephone number

"Your current position in the queue is ... way down. Way way down."

America's drone owner database grounded: FAA rules blown out of sky

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Re: The cops will shoot on sight.

weaponizes a drone

How about 100 drones?

You could deliver a few kg of TNT in a "autonomous bomblet" application.

The cat is out of the bag.

Maybe somebody already wrote up the idea for "inspire".

Targeted kills by hi-tech trickery: It's not only for Mossad anymore.

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

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Facepalm

Why did I get a fragment of neocon central all of a sudden

So, liberal and left-leaning newspaper The Guardian, one of Google AMP’s early adopters, gets to share space with Russian propagandists, as Andrew Betts of Fastly recently pointed out. Betts found content from Russia Today, an organisation 100 per cent funded by the Russian government and classified as propaganda by the Columbia Journalism Review and by the former US Secretary of State

> liberal and left-leaning newspaper The Guardian

I don't know what the Guardian is, but "newspaper", "liberal" and "left-leaning" it aint. Warmongering goodthinking twitter journalism is more like it.

> the former US Secretary of State

The guy who came out on record being okay with ISIS messing things up?

While Microsoft griped about NSA exploit stockpiles, it stockpiled patches: Friday's WinXP fix was built in February

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Re: Plenty of blame to go around

Microsoft's "crime" amounts to "not giving away their code for free to people who had made a positive choice not to pay for it".

Now, if XP had been open sourced and Microsoft had told everyone that, given the expiry of yadda yadda, they are out in the rain but can do something if need be, I would agree.

The actual situation is reckless endangerement of people and property by not fixing a problem in product that turns out to be rather unfit for purpose after having hit the market. I think courts might want to look into that.

74 countries hit by NSA-powered WannaCrypt ransomware backdoor: Emergency fixes emitted by Microsoft for WinXP+

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Russian angle found in the gutter press

Who are the Shadow Brokers? Were they behind this attack?

In keeping with almost everything else in the world of cyberwarfare, attribution is tricky. But it seems unlikely that the Shadow Brokers were directly involved in the ransomware strike: instead, some opportunist developer seems to have spotted the utility of the information in the leaked files, and updated their own software accordingly. As for the Shadow Brokers themselves, no-one really knows, but fingers point towards Russian actors as likely culprits.

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"We shall redouble our efforts to improve the basic computing infrastructure"

Sometimes one wishes to see elegant germanic uniforms worn by highly capable people with unquestionable authority to get messes sorted out.

Or maybe a visit by Darth Vader to make sure procurement and implementation stay on track and politics don't interfere all too much or are at least single-sourced.

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Re: Head in hands or head in sands?

Not a lot and maybe lawyers will smell blood in the water, enormous arse-ripping events will be observed and attitudes in the "industry" will change.

Could be occasion for a Righteous Presidential Tweet (RPT) to start things moving.

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Re: Dear Donald & Theresa

They will probably think pressing on with mandated disaster will preclude problems like we are seeing right now.

That's how politicians' minds work. Once a stupid idea has gelled underneath their bony domes, it must be realized by hook or by crook.

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Re: Risk Management

Not only is using Windows a known risk (and not only technical, but also legal as the friendly Microsoft Auditor drops by), it is also often *completely* unnecessary.

And in scenarios where machinery is embedded, not updated often, mobile, or runs special software it is also reckless.

Amazon's Alexa is worst receptionist ever: Crazy exes, stalkers' calls put through automatically

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I'm sure you can have your Alexa customized with a tasteful "KAR120C" lettering.

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Next up

"Amazon Virtual Cloud accepts packets from all comers, on any port"

For now, GNU GPL is an enforceable contract, says US federal judge

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Re: One point of criticism though...

Which always makes me wonder how 'free' it really is?

This is not an interesting question.

About the same as asking how charged an electron really is.

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This is what this all is about, right?

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Good writeup, I guess

Except that the author mixes up self-similarity (fractals), self-propagation (von Neumann machines?) and recursion (GNU is not Unix).

And really, does anyone who isn't self-loathing call himself a hippie? Hippies were a thing when The Shockwave Rider was still science-fiction...

And what does this mean for EULAs?

Finally, there is no announcement on the GNU.org homepage yet, nor at opensource.org.

Someone is sending propaganda texts to Ukrainian soldiers

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"Sinister text messages reveal high-tech front in Ukraine war"

How childish.

Meanwhile, sinister statements reveal low-tech front in Ukraine itself:

Ukrainian general calls for destruction of Jews

Space upstart plans public cloud in low Earth orbit

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One runs a real-time OS on ARM or PowerPC silicon and gets the job of keeping the satellite humming. The other will be air-gapped [vacuum-gapped? – Ed] from the main board and will offer “x86 Intel-based, multi-core hardware including several terabytes of high-speed solid state storage.”

If this circuitry hardened?

If not, it will be dead soon.

US spymasters trash Kaspersky: AV tools can't be trusted, we've stuck a probe in them

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Comey woz fired!!11

But it wasn't Hillary who did, as was her right, it was Trump, so it's wrong.

Crying Democrats now uniting with Crying Republicans in the Daily Emoting circus.

Anyway, maybe one should investigate Microsoft for un-american activities, like pumping out capitalistic shit that needs EVIL COMMIE NATIONNO LONGER COMMIE NATION BUT STILL EVIL sourced antivirus to keep going at all?

Ceterum censeo; Ron Paul: Comey Fired… Now Fire the FBI!

Mozilla to Thunderbird: You can stay here and we may give you cash, but as a couple, it's over

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Re: Apart from security fixes - why change Thunderbird ?

What useful enhancements can you think of for Thunderbird ?

Integration with systemd!

Cisco gobbles AI biz MindMeld for $125m

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Got it!

Platforms, platforms, platforms, powering workplace of future, yada, yada

So if these platforms are vertical, we will be working literally in a trash compactor?

You future PHB, a trash monster!

Bot you see is what you get: The cold reality of Microsoft's chat 'AI'

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Punch these people in the face!

Ryan Volum, another Microsoft developer presenting during the session, said, "Command lines are inherently unintuitive."

That's why, he suggested, software engineers have gravitated toward graphic interfaces. "Instead of users having to figure out the language of the machine, we showed them what to do with icons, menus and pointers," he said.

Which is why we have graphic interfaces that are inherently unintuitive, if not frankly obnoxious. Basically "can't do this" nork legoland, nowadays everchanging and auto-rearranging according to passing designer fads.

SpaceX settles $3.9m shift pattern class action lawsuit

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Time to bring in some STALIN to expedite processes

"Can't eat my meal on schedule".

Such microaggression!

These people are far away from IT support, it seems.

FBI boss James Comey was probing Trump's team for Russia links. You're fired, says Donald

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Is The Register now The Onion?

This whole article is unbelievable, complete with links to "100% true" allegations by the NYT, and fantasms from the desk of Anne Applebaum and Louise Mensch stated as "fact".

Fully expecting El Reg to write about how Lizard People are actually running the world next.

smug_pepe.jpg

Hackers emit 9GB of stolen Macron 'emails' two days before French presidential election

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Re: This was just the starter

I really don't want to see shops of merkel in compromising situations.

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It did not only "come on" on /pol/, it was immediately declared B8, too.

(Same as the document about Trump pissing on Obama's bed in Moscow, as I remember)

https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/123933076#p123934632

The most hilarious thing is the french journo trying to uncover some kind of conspiracy instead of low-brow asshattery with bad shops.

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Trollface

Trollololo

Russian Nationalist Blogger Anatoly Karlin's take on the Topkek show: The French Elections 2017 (Round Two)

Needless to say, this has created quite the stir on cyberspace. Wikileaks and Jack Posobiec spread the message on Twitter; as I write this, #MacronLeaks is the number one trending hashtag on French Twitter. The French police have taken a formal interest in ascertaining the identity of the leaker.

Problem: The French media has entered its election silence period, so there will be no substantive discussions of the MacronLeaks in the MSM. (I checked the front pages of the major French newspapers and Le Monde is the only one to have prominent coverage of MacronLeaks).

Which begs the question of whodunnit.

The MSM has, of course, rushed to blame the Russian hacker Ivan. However, as more level-headed people have pointed out, what would be the point of doing this at the last moment? Macron is the least Russia friendly of the four major candidates – his campaign has scandalously barred the Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik from his events – and, the logic goes, would now be even less well disposed towards Putin.

On the other hand, a more cynical view might be that the Kremlin views the prospects for cooperation with a Macron-led France as being so dismal anyway that it might as well begin destabilizing him straight away.

Two other possibilities:

(1) Bryan MacDonald: “My bet is other state actors trying to ruin any chance of a future Macron-Putin arrangement or freelance Russians acting the maggot.”

(2) Technically competent, disgruntled Leftist/Communist supporter who wants to undermine Macron, but who doesn’t want Le Pen to benefit from it.

We are 'heroes,' says police chief whose force frisked a photographer

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#EverydayHeroes

In 2017, this means managing to exhibit the amazing intellectual power and daring of a ferret on crack, so I support this presumably queen-approved quality label.

Leaked: The UK's secret blueprint with telcos for mass spying on internet, phones – and backdoors

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So when will the marketing effort start

A little sarin event in downtown London, possibly involving "barbaric aggression" by ... ummm... "Assad"? No, wait: "Assad aided and abetted by Putin".

Fake news is fake news, says Google-backed research

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Incubator babies, Ghaddafi bombs Pan Am, Assad's sarin and assorted #UnfakeNews

> the potential to support or undermine democratic processes

I wonder which side is good and which side is bad, eh?

Meanwhile, NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms

Yet, while such intentionally fabricated articles as well as baseless conspiracy theories are a bane of the Internet – and do deserve hearty condemnation – the Times gives no thought to the potential downside of having a select group of mainstream journalistic entities feeding their judgment about what is true and what is not into some algorithms that would then scrub the Internet of contrary items.

Since the Times is a member of the Google-funded First Draft Coalition – along with other mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post and the pro-NATO propaganda site Bellingcat – this idea of eliminating information that counters what the group asserts is true may seem quite appealing to the Times and the other insiders. After all, it might seem cool to have some high-tech tool that silences your critics automatically?

...

There also should be the fear – even among these self-appointed guardians of “truth” – that their algorithms might someday be put to use by a totalitarian regime to stomp out the last embers of real democracy. However, if you’re looking for such thoughtfulness, you won’t find it in the Times article by Mark Scott. Instead, the Times glorifies the creators of this Brave New World.

“In the battle against fake news, Andreas Vlachos — a Greek computer scientist living in a northern English town — is on the front lines,” the article reads. “Armed with a decade of machine learning expertise, he is part of a British start-up that will soon release an automated fact-checking tool ahead of the country’s election in early June. He also is advising a global competition that pits computer wizards from the United States to China against each other to use artificial intelligence to combat fake news. …

“As Europe readies for several elections this year after President Trump’s victory in the United States, Mr. Vlachos, 36, is one of a growing number of technology experts worldwide who are harnessing their skills to tackle misinformation online. … Computer scientists, tech giants and start-ups are using sophisticated algorithms and reams of online data to quickly — and automatically — spot fake news faster than traditional fact-checking groups can.”

It suspiciously sounds like an addy for some whitewashing powder.

Red alert! Intel patches remote execution hole that's been hidden in chips since 2010

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Mushroom

Small Business Advantage? Very Small Indeed.Minidick levels of small.

There are more ® signs in these bullshit Intel arse-covering documents than there is information.

If this is true:

First a little bit of background. SemiAccurate has known about this vulnerability for literally years now, it came up in research we were doing on hardware backdoors over five years ago. What we found was scary on a level that literally kept us up at night. For obvious reasons we couldn’t publish what we found out but we took every opportunity to beg anyone who could even tangentially influence the right people to do something about this security problem. SemiAccurate explained the problem to literally dozens of “right people” to seemingly no avail. We also strongly hinted that it existed at every chance we had.

Various Intel representatives over the years took my words seriously, told me I was crazy, denied that the problem could exist, and even gave SemiAccurate rather farcical technical reasons why their position wasn’t wrong. Or dangerous. In return we smiled politely, argued technically, and sometimes, usually actually, were not so polite about our viewpoint. Unfortunately it all seems to have been for naught.

...then we are talking Thalidomide levels of bullshit. I hope a 60 billion dollar fine for shoddy overpriced shit endangering the public is roilling down the highway soon. Uncle Sam needs those because military budgets, they are increasing. It would only be just.

O (n^2) Canada! Code bugs knacker buses, TV, broadband, phone lines

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What in tarnation 2

Why are these buses fly-by-wire and who provided the software/hardware system (which I suppose has been checked using formal verification and all that). Toyota?

NSA pulls plug on some email spying before Congress slaps it down

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What in tarnation

Curious time to stop listening to Americans talking about foreigners, eh, Donald?

This subtitle makes no sense at all.

The TLAs have grown to cancer-killing-host proportions under 4 terms of Bushbama (and arguably Clinton) and are now apparently calling the shots, telling the (Trumpenstein / The President Formerly Known As Hitler / Brave Freedom Defender and Avenger of Gassed Syrian Babies) what he should be blowing into the mic ... or else. A little "scandal" might emerge from the NYT and the assorted churnalists hordes or a sudden stroke might occur, life is risky etc.

'I feel violated': Engineer who pointed out traffic signals flaw fined for 'unlicensed engineering'

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Well, he SHOULD have obtained the paper saying "me be engineer", if possible (one would probably have to submit a request, and attach the swedish diploma). He probably SHOULD have written an article for IEEE Spectrum only instead of waking sleeping boards. It's the standard story of modern, never-receding state control. That and making taxeaters look bad, which is completely unacceptable.

From the order:

"On September 3, 2014, Jarlstrom emailed the [Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying] alleging that the City of Beaverton engineers were misapplying well-known traffic engineering formulas and asked the Board to investigate the City of Beaverton. In his email to the Board, Jarlstrom indicated that he was perfonning engineering work. The Board has no jurisdiction over the timing of traffic lights in the City of Beaverton. Jarlstrom was informed of this lack of jurisdiction. Jarlstrom was also cautioned by the Board against practicing engineering without being registered and was provided with copies of ORS 672.005(1) and ORS 672.007(1 ), which define the practice of engineering as including both engineering work and use of the engineering title. Jarlstrom agreed to comply with the law.

...

On January 15, 2015, J arlstrom sent an email to the Board stating, "And yes, I'm an excellent engineer" contradicting his earlier statement of being willing to comply with the law. Included with the January 15 email to the Board was an email Jarlstrom wrote to KOIN 6 in which he introduced himself as a Swedish engineer, and presented traffic change interval timing calculations.

...

By indicating to the Board that he was perfonning engineering work, Jarlstrom purported to be able to perform engineering services or work and represented that he was authorized to perform engineering work. By purporting to be able to perform engineering services or work, Jarlstrom engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS 672.007(1)(c). By engaging in the practice of engineering and representing that he was authorized to perform engineering work, without registration, Jarlstrom violated ORS 672.020(1 ), 672.045(1) and (2), and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c).

Republicans want IT bloke to take fall for Clinton email brouhaha

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Re: Tell you what...

The President formerly known as Hitler a creature of Putin meme

You haven't got the memo that now that Trump is on track with the globalist/bombstuff agenda and actually overdoing it a bit, the "russia angle" has disappeared and is dead as disco?