Links

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/an-11-year-old-changed-election-results-on-a-replica-florida-state-website-in-under-10-minutes
Aug. 12, 2018
An 11-year-old boy on Friday was able to hack into a replica of the Florida state election website and change voting results found there in under 10 minutes during the world’s largest yearly hacking convention, DEFCON 26, organizers of the event said.
Nico Sell, the co-founder of the the non-profit r00tz Asylum, which teaches children how to become hackers and helped organize the event, said an 11-year-old girl also managed to make changes to the same Florida replica website in about 15 minutes, tripling the number of votes found there.
Sell said more than 30 children hacked a variety of other similar state replica websites in under a half hour.
“These are very accurate replicas of all of the sites,” Sell told the PBS NewsHour on Sunday. “These things should not be easy enough for an 8-year-old kid to hack within 30 minutes, it’s negligent for us as a society.”
Sell said the idea for the event began last year, after adult hackers were able to access similar voting sites in less than five minutes.
Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who helped organize the “hacking village,” also noted that the children who participated in their own challenge last week were dealing with replicas that were in many cases created to be even more challenging to access than the actual websites used by secretaries of states across the nation.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/huppke/ct-met-trump-rick-wilson-huppke-20180806-story.html#
Aug. 6, 2018
Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist and the architect of all manner of knives-out campaign ads, has written a book called “Everything Trump Touches Dies,” and, because it’s written by a 30-year veteran of conservative politics, it does what no squishy liberal newspaper columnist like myself can do: It pushes the modern-day Republican Party into the public square and roundly shames it for allowing an obvious con man like Trump to become its standard-bearer.
He gives one of the most candid assessments of the cynicism of modern-day political tactics I’ve read, readily acknowledging the part he played in feeding and nurturing the more rabid elements of the Republican base that metastasized into Trump’s slavish supporters.
In our interview he said: “I had to do a kind of tough assessment on this thing, and I did. … Starting back with Sarah Palin, we built a system to turn on these people, to feed this endless stream that the liberals are trying to kill you, they’re coming for you. … We built a set of persuasion tools that persuaded these people, and the arrogance of our position was, ‘Well, we’re all responsible adults; we’ll motivate these people during the election” and then calm things down after.
“What we never anticipated was that somebody else would grab that tool box. But the Russians and Trump sure did, and they ran wild with it.”
It’s a reminder that, for the wide majority of us who aren’t too far gone, ideological disagreement should never be grounds for hatred. And love of country should rule the day


https://www.hoax-slayer.net/every-time-her-picture-is-shared-she-receives-1-facebook-scam-post/
[Saw someone taken in by this hoax on Facebook today.]
May 28, 2018
According to a post that is circulating via Facebook, you can help a sick child just by sharing her picture.  The post, which includes a photograph of a young child in a hospital bed, claims that every time her picture is shared, she will receive a $1 donation towards her medical expenses.
However, the claims in the post are a lie. The pictured child will not receive so much as a cent no matter how many times her photograph is shared. 
In fact, the post is just another despicable scam designed to promote the Facebook Page or profile of the people who created it. By tricking people into sharing, the scammers will gain a great deal of free publicity and will thereby substantially increase their likes and followers.
People who steal images of sick children and use them in such disgraceful self-promotion schemes are beneath contempt and have no place on our social networks.  Please do not help these disgusting scammers by sharing, liking, or commenting on their pages, posts, or profiles.