People are amazed that Joe Biden has turned into a progressive president, with ambitions comparable to FDR and LBJ, but he’s exactly the kind who can do that. Just as Richard Nixon, a famous communist hater, was able to open relations with China in 1972. Biden has a reputation as a moderate, therefore he has credibility when calling for more radical approaches to recovery.

This is what "podcasting" is going to be like once its Spotification is complete.

Reporters generally miss why Reagan’s attacks on government were so well-received by Americans. The reason: Nixon, Vietnam and Watergate. Jimmy Carter was the first response to all that. A guy who was so clean he thought that having lust in his heart for women other than his wife was a sin. Then Reagan was the final eradication of Nixon, or so we felt. We had no trust of government, so our votes were all about hobbling government. The error was not realizing the role it played in American power. He went way too far. That became clear, to me, with the response to 9/11. We needed a smart government that used American power with care and respect. Dubya was what we got instead.

I've been using Twitter Spaces, their new competitor to Clubhouse, at the encouragement of Robert Scoble, who has taken to it the way he gets involved in everything, head first and way over his head. Completely submerged. Fine. I'm vulnerable to media like this, so I spent a couple of hours there in the last few days. I've been recovering from the stomach thing, so there's no harm in wasting a bit of time I wasn't going to use productively anyway. One thing Scoble said to me, when we were discussing Basecamp, is that's fine but you're a white person. To which I said what I've always wanted to say to this. Yeah, but you're not refuting what I said, which has no race, age or gender. How about considering the ideas, where ever they might come from. In my experience, good ideas can come from places you're not expecting them. Sometimes I'm sure I've missed them altogether because of that. Other times I've almost missed them. It has happened enough that I consciously try to turn off that kind of judgement and just listen and consider regardless of who's speaking. This is one of the worst things about the current rage to discount anyone who isn't young, of color and/or female. What made me think about all this is the flack the kids who are upset about inaction among adults re climate change are getting. The adults are attacking them because they're children. They aren't even listening to what they say.

I've said this a million times. One more time won't hurt. Podcasting was created so everyone can make media. It was designed, deliberately, without gatekeepers. To have a podcast, you have to have a public RSS feed with enclosures. That's why you hear at the end of podcasts, "You can get this where ever you get podcasts." They may name one or two of those places, but you know, because it's a podcast, you can listen to it in any podcast client, or in a pinch just by entering the URL of the feed into a web browser. That's why when Spotify calls what Joe Rogan does a "podcast" it's an insult to all the people who worked so hard to make podcasting the huge juggernaut it is today. They should be crucified and burned at the stake for being total corporate assholes. I don't use Spotify. Never have, never will. Luckily I don't give a shit about Joe Rogan. I hear he's mean and stupid. And if you make an exclusive deal with Spotify as he did, you can be sure I'll never hear what you say. There's nothing wrong with Spotify offering proprietary radio shows. Just don't fucking call them podcasts. Same goes for Audible and all the other asshole companies who think open networks don't matter.

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According to Bloomberg, Verizon is considering selling AOL and Yahoo -- two once high-flying dot-com brands it purchased in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Bloomberg reports: Verizon Media could fetch as much as $5 billion [...]. The company is talking to Apollo Global Management about a deal, they said. It couldn't immediately be learned how a deal would be structured or if other suitors may emerge. No final decision has been made and Verizon could opt to keep the unit. The move comes as Verizon divests tertiary media assets while ramping up its focus on its wireless business and the the rollout of its 5G service. Last year, it agreed to sell the HuffPost online news service to BuzzFeed Inc. and it unloaded the blogging platform Tumblr in 2019. This divestiture would mark Verizon's final retreat from an expensive foray into online advertising, a strategy that never really took off.

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schwit1 shares a report from Threatpost: Quick-response (QR) codes used by a COVID-19 contact-tracing program were hijacked by a man who simply slapped up scam QR codes on top to redirect users to an anti-vaccination website, according to local police. He now faces two counts of "obstructing operations carried out relative to COVID-19 under the Emergency Management Act," the South Australia Police said in a statement announcing the arrest. His arrest may just be a drop in the bucket: Reports of other anti-vax campaigners doing the same thing abound. Law enforcement added an additional warning to would-be QR code scammers: "Any person found to be tampering or obstructing with business QR codes will likely face arrest and court penalty of up to $10,000." The police said no personal data was breached, but the incident highlights that truly all an attacker needs is a printer and a pack of Avery labels to do real damage. In this case, the QR codes were being used by the South Australian government's official CovidSafe app to access a device's camera, scan the code and collect real-time location data to be used for contact tracing in case of a COVID-19 outbreak, ABC News Australia reported. That's a lot of personal data linked to a single QR code just waiting to be stolen. "In this instance, people who scanned the illegitimate QR code were redirected to a website distributing misinformation from the anti-vaxxer community," Bill Harrod, vice president of public sector at Ivanti, told Threatpost. "While this is concerning, the outcome could have been far more perilous."

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syn3rg shares a report from ZDNet: A Linux backdoor recently discovered by researchers has avoided VirusTotal detection since 2018. Dubbed RotaJakiro, the Linux malware has been described by the Qihoo 360 Netlab team as a backdoor targeting Linux 64-bit systems. RotaJakiro was first detected on March 25 when a Netlab distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet C2 command tracking system, BotMon, flagged a suspicious file. At the time of discovery, there were no malware detections on VirusTotal for the file, despite four samples having been uploaded -- two in 2018, one in 2020, and another in 2021. Netlab researchers say the Linux malware changes its use of encryption to fly under the radar, including ZLIB compression and combinations of AES, XOR, and key rotation during its activities, such as the obfuscation of command-and-control (C2) server communication. At present, the team says that they do not know the malware's "true purpose" beyond a focus on compromising Linux systems. There are 12 functions in total including exfiltrating and stealing data, file and plugin management -- including query/download/delete -- and reporting device information. However, the team cites a "lack of visibility" into the plugins that is preventing a more thorough examination of the malware's overall capabilities. In addition, RotaJakiro will treat root and non-root users on compromised systems differently and will change its persistence methods depending on which accounts exist.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: The Oculus Quest 2 is a hell of a lot of hardware for $299. In fact, we're convinced that Facebook is making a loss on each unit sold. Even so, that pricing is one of the main reasons it's the most popular headset on Steam and our pick as the best VR headset. Well, that and the ease of use. [...] The thing is, that price seems too good to be true, with no other manufacturer's VR headset close to the specs list of the Quest 2 -- in either tethered or standalone form -- hitting the same low, low price. That money gets you a robust virtual reality headset with 6GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 CPU, 64GB of storage, 1832x1920 per eye display and a pair of controllers. [...] But there's one factor that could potentially offset that price -- Facebook has access to a whole lot of your data. This is something the Oculus Quest 2 is upfront about: You absolutely need a Facebook account in order to use the device and it does have its data collection policies in black and white. Although what isn't quite so obvious is how much your data is worth to Facebook. At least it isn't without a tiny bit of digging. There is another version of the Quest 2 that isn't as discounted as the consumer version, and that's the one aimed at businesses. The actual hardware is identical, but the difference is you don't need to login in with a Facebook account in order to use it. The price for this model? $799. There's also an annual fee of $180 that kicks in a year after purchase, which covers Oculus' business services and support, but that just muddies the waters a little. The point being, the Quest 2 for business, the headset from which Facebook can't access your data directly, costs $500 more. So that's looking essentially like the value the social media giant attributes to your data, which either seems like a lot or barely anything at all, depending on your stance. The Supplemental Oculus Data Policy outlines what sort of data is actually being collected when you use the Quest 2. Such things as your physical dimension, including your hand size, how big your play area is using the Oculus Guardian system, data on any content you create using the Quest 2, as well as more obvious stuff like your device ID and IP address.

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For at least the third time since the beginning of this year, the U.S. government is investigating a hack against federal agencies that began during the Trump administration but was only recently discovered, according to senior U.S. officials and private sector cyber defenders. Reuters reports: The new government breaches involve a popular virtual private network (VPN) known as Pulse Connect Secure, which hackers were able to break into as customers used it. More than a dozen federal agencies run Pulse Secure on their networks, according to public contract records. An emergency cybersecurity directive last week demanded that agencies scan their systems for related compromises and report back. The results, collected on Friday and analyzed this week, show evidence of potential breaches in at least five federal civilian agencies, said Matt Hartman, a senior official with the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency. "This is a combination of traditional espionage with some element of economic theft," said one cybersecurity consultant familiar with the matter. "We've already confirmed data exfiltration across numerous environments." The maker of Pulse Secure, Utah-based software company Ivanti, said it expected to provide a patch to fix the problem by this Monday, two weeks after it was first publicized. Only a "very limited number of customer systems" had been penetrated, it added. Over the last two months, CISA and the FBI have been working with Pulse Secure and victims of the hack to kick out the intruders and uncover other evidence, said another senior U.S. official who declined to be named but is responding to the hacks. The FBI, Justice Department and National Security Agency declined to comment. The U.S. government's investigation into the Pulse Secure activity is still in its early stages, said the senior U.S. official, who added the scope, impact and attribution remain unclear. Security researchers at U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye and another firm, which declined to be named, say they've watched multiple hacking groups, including an elite team they associate with China, exploiting the new flaw and several others like it since 2019.

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Zoe Roth, the centerpiece of the "Disaster Girl" meme, has made nearly half a million dollars after selling the original copy as a non-fungible token (NFT), the New York Times reports. From a report: The market for ownership rights to digital art and media as NFTs has recently soared in popularity. Roth's photo was taken in 2005 when she was 4 years old. Her family went to go see a controlled fire in their Mebane, North Carolina, neighborhood. Her father entered the picture in a photo contest in 2007 and won, and for the past decade the "image [has been] endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon," the Times writes. Most Americans are not at all familiar with NFTs, though they have become major buzzwords among asset managers and market participants. All NFTs contain a unique segment of digital code as an identifier of authenticity and are stored on the blockchain, a public digital ledger.

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Later -- I learned that the Gates Foundation has equity in the company that makes the Pfizer vaccine. So when he talks about not needing to share the patent with countries where the virus is running wild, like India, that's not really the new Bill Gates, philanthropist giving away all his money for the good of humanity speaking, rather it's the new Bill Gates, seeking world domination as always, posing as a philanthropist who's giving away all his money.