THIS WHITE HOUSE REPORTER WON’T MISS OMAROSA ONE BIT: As Clint Eastwood once said, a man [or quasi-celebrity Apprentice grad) should know his limits. More from LifeZette’s White House correspondent.
Archive for 2018
February 16, 2018
PRIVACY: Beware “Protect” In Facebook’s iOS App.
In case you ever doubted Facebook’s commitment to hoovering up as much information about you as it can, the company has come under fire for a change in the Facebook app for iOS in the United States. In the last few days, users have discovered a new option when you tap the hamburger button to access your pages, shortcuts, and settings. In that screen is a section called Explore that lets you get to a vast number of Facebook services, such as On This Day, Crisis Response, Live Videos, Find Wi-Fi, and Device Requests. There are so many, in fact, that the last one is Show More, and tapping that displays another 11, including the reassuringly named Protect.
However, tapping Protect takes you to the App Store and displays an app called Onavo Protect — VPN Security. It is indeed a VPN — a virtual private network — that securely tunnels all your traffic through Onavo’s servers. The problem is that, as you might expect from the link source, Onavo is owned by Facebook. If you were to stumble on Onavo Protect in the App Store, you’d have to tap More and read the full description to discover that. If you read all the way to the end, you’d learn that Onavo Protect “directs all of your network communications through Onavo’s servers,” and that, “as part of this process, Onavo collects your mobile data traffic.”
And:
It’s bad enough when some unknown company provides a free VPN service in order to collect data about its users. It’s another thing when the company in question is part of Facebook, and that data can be combined with both any data you’ve allowed Facebook to have and any data about you that people you know have inadvertently provided to Facebook.
If you need a VPN, they’re inexpensive and not difficult to set up. Like any other “free” internet services, on a free VPN you are the product — and there’s nothing private about it.
KEVIN MCCOLLOUGH: Why We Must Arm Teachers Now!
The only real thing that gun confiscation has proven is that the increase of gun free zones in our society is also an increase in targets for people who never abide by laws on guns or anything else.
If the Broward Sheriff and the Parkland police were able to respond in 5-6 minutes yesterday….
If two squads of armed resource officers are on campus but not in the building where the shooter begins firing…
If electronic locks, and reinforced doors do not prevent the penetration of a committed killer into a school where innocent children wait like sheep to be slaughtered…
Then it is time for teachers to be armed, locked, loaded, and ready to end a killing spree before dozens more die.
As an added bonus, if you want to bring more men and conservatives into the teaching profession — and I do — this might help do just that.
U.S. REJECTS CHINESE INVESTORS BID TO TAKE OVER CHICAGO STOCK EXCHANGE: Interesting that the stock exchange decision comes the same week that the Director of National Intelligence (and the heads of other American intel agencies) told the Senate they were worried about Chinese cyber warfare and nefarious Chinese penetration of American commercial enterprises and universities.
Note that the U.S. government originally said yes to the stock exchange deal:
The decision comes after more than two years of reviews by officials.
The tie-up was initially approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, pending further approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
But US politicians, including President Trump, have said letting a Chinese firm invest in a US exchange was a bad idea.
Under the proposal, the Chinese-led North America Casin Holdings group would have bought CHX Holdings, which owns the Chicago Stock Exchange.
The exchange, which handles just 0.5% of US stock trades, had said the deal would have provided the exchange with “vital capital”.
That funding would have been used “to boost numerous initiatives designed to benefit the city of Chicago, the US economy and market structure as a whole”.
“Numerous initiatives” in Chicago, huh?…Isn’t Barack Obama from Chicago?…
During last Tuesday’s (February 13) appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the DNI and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI said the American public should be “wary” of using Chinese Huawei smartphones.
“We’re deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks,” FBI Director Chris Wray testified, according to CNBC. “That provides the capacity to exert pressure or control over our telecommunications infrastructure. It provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information. And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage.”
RELATED: My column on the DNI’s testimony which quotes DNI Coats as warning that America’s adversaries are “using cyber and other instruments of power to shape societies and markets…”
HMM: Syrian downing of F-16I begs the question: Why didn’t Israel deploy F-35s?
In early December, the Air Force declared initial operational capability of the nine F-35s now in its possession. And from the aerial activity reported by residents near its home base at Nevatim, southern Israel, the aircraft are accruing significant flight time.
Yet none of the operational F-35s were part of the eight-aircraft force package tasked with destroying an Iranian command center in central Syria. The command center was reportedly operating the unmanned Shahed 171 drone that Israel says penetrated its airspace in the early morning of Feb. 10.
Nor were they tasked to lead the follow-on wave of strikes on 12 separate Syrian and Iranian assets in the punitive operation launched later that day in response to the F-16I downing.
Perhaps these costly stealth fighters are too precious to use. Or perhaps the Israeli Air Force is not sufficiently confident in the aircraft or its pilots’ proficiency in operating the fifth-generation fighter.
The Israeli F-35I isn’t all that much more expensive than the newest F-16s the IAF flies, which have been modified in all kinds of interesting ways. So my hunch is that the IAF is still training up pilots and ground crews for its tiny force of F-35Is.
But I’m certain that the headline writer misused “begs the question.”
BERNIE SANDERS, MEET BERNIE SANDERS: One thing about the Internet, senator, is once you say it, it’s out there forever. LifeZette’s Jim Stinson has the details.
GOOD: Clemson senators defeat ‘ideological indoctrination’ proposal. “Clemson University’s Student Senate struck down a proposal to make mandatory diversity training a condition of serving in student government, which one senator called ‘a poorly disguised attempt at ideological indoctrination.'”
and LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: 18 School Shootings?, Immigration Fail, and Much, Much More. “In total, all seventeen of Everytown’s shootings before the Parkland shooting resulted in a grand total of 5 deaths, two from suicide, one from a fight in a parking lot, and two from a true mass shooting. Three mass shootings is still too many for a year this young, but it is nothing like the 18 falsely reported.”
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz today.
REAL RUSSIAN HACKERS: Radio Free Europe cites a TASS report that last year hackers attacked the SWIFT international payments system through a Russian bank and stole $6 million.
OH, FUCK OFF JIMMY: TEARFUL JIMMY KIMMEL POPS OFF ON TRUMP: ‘YOU’RE OBVIOUSLY MENTALLY ILL.’.
SPIKED: No, the New York Times’ Bari Weiss isn’t a bigot.
This slim but strange chapter in the online culture wars tells us two things. First, that the propensity for speech-policing, hysteria and the crushing of even the most minor verbal transgression is not limited to college campuses. The NYT chat shows employees of one of the most esteemed journalistic organs in the world waxing lyrical about the daily violence of ‘microaggressions’ and calling for implicit-bias training. One said, ‘I felt that tweet denied Mirai her full citizenship just as the internment did’. The Safe Space no longer begins and ends at the college gates.
Read the whole thing.
DONALD TRUMP AND A PLAYBOY MODEL: Hard for me to see Ronan Farrow’s latest having the impact of the last story. Consensual affairs were once political career killers if exposed, but post 1998 I’m not so sure.
FASTER, PLEASE: SecAF Says B-21 ‘On Schedule’ As China Rises To Air Force’s Top Threat.
Good.
I can’t find the comment, but earlier this week, longtime Instapundit reader HMS Lion wrote that the battlespace in the Pacific will belong to vehicles and missiles with long ranges — not to short-distance fighter-bombers. With that in mind, he said, it would make sense to cancel some planned F-35A (the Air Force version) fighters to make room in the budget for more B-21s.
Makes sense to me.
BLUE ON BLUE: The Left’s War Against The New York Times.
The Times has flourished under Trump, witnessing a surge in digital subscriptions and regularly breaking major news about the administration and the Russia inquiry (not to mention #MeToo). Yet liberal criticism of the Times has also intensified, especially on social media. Not a day passes, it seems, without a prominent Twitter user complaining that the Times is biased against the left, too friendly to Trump and his supporters, or engaging in false equivalences between Democrats and Republicans.
Reporter Michael Schmidt was criticized for not asking more follow-up questions during an impromptu sit-down with Trump in December. His colleague Richard Fausset was accused of normalizing a neo-Nazi in his profile of an Ohio white nationalist the month before. Critics frequently charge that the Times is preoccupied with giving a voice to Trump supporters or even just saying something nice about the president, and the paper has openly struggled with how to cover racists. Broader criticisms go to questions of framing and context—whether news analysis of Trump is too gentle, like when Peter Baker described the president’s “reality-show accessibility,” or why the Times’ mobile phone push notifications seem strangely favorable to the White House. And then there’s the steady moan about the Times opinion section—not just stalwarts like Brooks and Ross Douthat, but Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, both of whom joined the paper last year from The Wall Street Journal.
“I think there’s been a lot more anger from the grassroots against the Times,” Willis told me. “They’re able to be more vocal about it because of social media and Twitter specifically.” Sean McElwee, a socialist policy analyst and columnist at The Outline, said this anger sometimes “unites everyone from a deeply anti-imperialist socialist to someone who works at a center-left think tank.”
The Left turns on its own, always.
SEARCH AND DESTROY, TET OFFENSIVE, FEBRUARY 1968: Marines in action north of Camp Carroll, Vietnam
SHADES OF TED STEVENS? Byron York: An unusual turn in the Michael Flynn case. New judge. Delayed sentencing. Mueller ordered to produce evidence. Talks about “sensitive material.”
I HAVE A HEADACHE: Drug maker hikes price of 2-in-1 painkiller >2,000% — $36 drugs now $3,000.
A 60-pill bottle of the drug combo, Vimovo, cost $138 in 2013 when AstraZeneca sold it to Horizon. The bottle now costs $2,979 after Horizon raised the price on 11 occasions.
Vimovo is a combination of the common painkiller naproxen and esomeprazole. Naproxen is the active ingredient in Bayer’s over-the-counter painkiller Aleve. Bought separately, the two can cost as little as $36 total.
Horizon also makes the two-in-one painkiller Duexis, which pairs painkiller ibuprofen with the antacid famotidine. The company charges $2,979 for a 90-pill bottle, while the drugs would cost as little as $15 if bought separately.
Nevertheless, Duexis and Vimovo are sometimes covered by US health insurance companies. And Horizon made $134 million in sales from both products in the first nine months of 2017, Rea said.
Rea added that he saw no reason patients couldn’t simply take the separate, over-the-counter versions of the drugs. But a spokesperson for Horizon argued that “there are no FDA-approved generic, over-the-counter, or clinically equivalent medicines to Duexis and Vimovo, and any assertion otherwise is completely inaccurate.”
In other words, the price hikes are a side effect of over-regulation (two inexpensive drugs don’t have the FDA seal-of-approval that the combined drug does) and the insurance-for-everything model (which isolates consumers from the actual cost of particular items).