Thursday, October 07, 2021
Bonjour to You Too: A Happy Afghan War Story
Pet bird evacuated from Afghanistan says ‘bonjour’ to new life in French embassy
A mynah bird that arrived in UAE with a young Afghan refugee has found sanctuary – and a new word – at the ambassador’s residence
Last modified on Thu 7 Oct 2021 13.59 EDT
" . . Ambassador Xavier Chatel said he was moved by the little girl, who arrived “exhausted” and carrying the bird, named Juji, at the Al-Dhafra airbase in the UAE during the chaotic evacuations from Kabul.
The girl was left in tears after being told she could not take her pet on the onward journey to France for “sanitary reasons”, Chatel said in a series of tweets.
“She had fought all the way at Kabul airport, to bring the treasured little thing with her,” he wrote.
“She cried silently. I was moved. I promised to take care of the bird at the residence, feed him. She could visit him anytime and take him back. I won’t forget her look of desperate gratefulness.”
Juji now has a “girlfriend”, a dove that visits him daily, and after much coaxing finally said “bonjour” – a moment that “went straight to my heart”, Chatel said.
...Or so I thought. Until one day, the (female) manager of the French residence sent me this "Bonjour" that went straight to my heart.
— Xavier Chatel (@Xavier_Chatel_) October 5, 2021
7/8 pic.twitter.com/0k5BIn7hR7
“Today, from Paris, the bird’s owner, ‘Alia’, found me on Twitter. She was so happy to see her bird thus cared for,” he wrote, using a pseudonym for the girl.
“She wanted me to teach him French. Alia, your bird has become the embassy’s mascot, but he is here for you, and if I can, I’ll take him personally to you one day.”
WHOA! At&T Set Up + Paid For OAN Propaganda Network
AT&T Set Up And Paid For OAN Propaganda Network; Yet Everyone Wants To Scream About Facebook
from the ill-communication dept
"They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. "They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one."
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BLOGGER INSERT: Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs uses both FOX News and OAN to spread his own propaganda in his weekly Newsletter
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Interview with Fox Business on Varney & Co.
I joined Varney & Co. to discuss the Freedom from Mandates Act that I recently introduced to block President Biden’s vaccine mandates. President Biden has not followed the science throughout this pandemic and continues to use fear to pit Americans against each other.. I believe Americans should be free to choose whether they receive a vaccine, and should not have to choose between their jobs and the vaccine. It is the right of every American to make their own health care decisions. And it is my duty, as your Congressman, to defend it. Click on the picture below to watch my interview:
-Interview with OANN on Tipping Point
I joined Kara McKinney on Tipping Point to discuss the Biden administration’s refusal to call the situation at the border a “crisis”. Instead, Biden and the Far Left continue to gaslight Republican members of Congress who visit the border to highlight the failure of Biden’s inhumane border policies. Click on the photo below to watch my interview:
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> It was previously known that AT&T was one of the few major cable TV distributors to carry OAN, therefore providing 90% of the channel's revenue (even Comcast long refused to carry the network). That's not surprising, given how well inflammatory bullshit sells. But it wasn't previously known how closely linked the two companies were, with OAN claiming AT&T even utilized the network to help put a positive shine on the company's disastrous, $200 billion, job-killing megamerger spree:
"[AT&T told OAN's owner AT&T] needed help to allay FCC and other officials’ concern that the DirecTV deal – a consolidation of providers – might make it harder for independent networks to get on the air, Charles Herring said.
So, he said in the affidavit, Slator proposed a new deal: If the Herrings lobbied on AT&T’s behalf, AT&T would air OAN and WealthTV on both U-verse and DirecTV. The Herrings would be paid one-third less per subscriber, but because DirecTV had so many more subscribers, the deal could be worth $100 million over five years...The court filings also cite a promise by OAN to “cast a positive light” on AT&T during newscasts."
Given the sheer scope of the propaganda being funneled through online platforms, cable TV news channels like OAN are often dismissed as less relevant. But in a nation where elections are often decided by a few hundred votes, a dedicated propaganda network (one at the direct beck and call of Donald Trump) really can make all the difference, media experts say:
"If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many – and here, it’s literally millions,” Watson said of the OAN audience. “When you have that sort of poisonous influence on mass media, it’s a problem; because elections in the United States tend to be so close, a few percentage points here or there can really make a difference."
The story saw a tiny fraction of the mind-space usually reserved for modern day issues surrounding "big tech."
> While Facebook certainly deserves intense scrutiny for very serious screw ups, there's an obvious asymmetry in policy and media attention when it comes to "big telecom." That apathy extends to the Biden government, which rushed to appoint a big tech critic at the FTC in Lina Khan, but still hasn't been bothered to staff the nation's two top telecom and media regulators, the NTIA and FCC. This despite the fact COVID has highlighted broadband's importance, and issues like media consolidation are more important than ever in the face of a struggling news industry and soaring propaganda.
However bad Facebook is (and I 100% agree with complaints that its executives are monumentally terrible), think about this: in just the last few years AT&T has been:
> fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired;
> fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families;
> fined $105 million for helping "crammers" by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills;
> fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of "unlimited" data; caught in a scandal in which the company paid Trump's fixer $600,000 for closer access to the President;
> fined $7.7 million for turning a blind eye to drug dealers running directory assistance scams; caught lying about its claims it stopped funding politicians supporting January 6 insurrectionists; and was accused of ripping off the nations school systems for years by one of its own, former lawyers. I'm sure I missed some.
. . .The occasional, piddly fine is laughable to a company that enjoys not only a regional broadband monopoly in many parts of the country, but received a $42 billion tax break from the Trump administration for doing absolutely nothing (technically less than nothing, given it has laid off roughly 50,000 employees since the 2017 cut).
> Tethered to both our domestic surveillance and first responder systems, AT&T is largely immune to serious government accountability because it's effectively now a patriotic part of government. It shouldn't be.
Where's the week long hearing about AT&T getting billions in subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for nothing?
Where's the several-year exclusive media focus on the shoddy state of U.S. telecom and media?
Where's the Congressional hearing about how cable and telecom giants are funding and promoting outright, blatant propaganda?
Where's the endless parade of think pieces and deep dives into these problems?
Why has Facebook, and big tech, completely dominated the policy discourse?
Why are we seemingly incapable of chewing gum and walking at the same time?
We haven't seemed to figure out yet that it's all one, over-arching problem tethered to consolidation, monopolization, antitrust apathy, regulatory dysfunction, and corruption. "Big telecom" is seeing a tiny fraction of the scrutiny of "big tech," something the telecom sector is actively encouraging. Similarly, countless U.S. industries are filled with sectors dominated by heavily consolidated giants, created by the mindless rubber stamping of terrible mergers. Not a one is seeing equal levels of scrutiny.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be heavily scrutinizing Facebook and technology giants, whose failures are clearly established. I'm just saying that the bizarre asymmetrical policy myopia -- where "big tech" is seemingly all that matters -- is starting to drive me a little batshit."
Filed Under: big tech, cable news, charles herring, disinformation, propaganda, tv news
Companies: at&t, directv, facebook, oan
Wednesday, October 06, 2021
SYNIVERSE: Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years
Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years
Syniverse hasn't revealed whether text messages were exposed.
Syniverse isn’t revealing more details
When contacted by Ars today, a Syniverse spokesperson provided a general statement that mostly repeats what's in the SEC filing. Syniverse declined to answer our specific questions about whether text messages were exposed and about the impact on the major US carriers.
"Given the confidential nature of our relationship with our customers and a pending law enforcement investigation, we do not anticipate further public statements regarding this matter," Syniverse said.
The SEC filing is a preliminary proxy statement related to a pending merger with a special-purpose acquisition company that will make Syniverse a publicly traded firm. (The document was filed by M3-Brigade Acquisition II Corp., the blank-check company.) As is standard with SEC filings, the document discusses risk factors for investors, in this case including the security-related risk factors demonstrated by the Syniverse database hack.
Syniverse routes messages for 300 operators
Syniverse says its intercarrier messaging service processes over 740 billion messages each year for over 300 mobile operators worldwide. Though Syniverse likely isn't a familiar name to most cell phone users, the company plays a key role in ensuring that text messages get to their destination.
Syniverse's importance in SMS was highlighted in November 2019 when a server failure caused over 168,000 messages to be delivered nearly nine months late. The messages were in a queue and left undelivered when a server failed on February 14, 2019, and finally reached their recipients in November when the server was reactivated.
We asked AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile today whether the hacker had access to people's text messages, and we will update this article if we get any new information.
Update: T-Mobile provided Ars a statement saying that it has "no indication" that text messages or other types of personal information were exposed. "We are aware of a security incident involving one of [our] third-party vendors, Syniverse. They provide reconciliation services for payments made between carriers. The breach impacted numerous carriers, including T-Mobile, however we have no indication that any personal information, call record details or text message content of T-Mobile customers were impacted. We will continue to investigate and work with Syniverse to close any vulnerabilities identified," T-Mobile said. . .
Syniverse's SEC filing was submitted on September 27 and discussed yesterday in an article in Vice's Motherboard section. According to Vice, a "former Syniverse employee who worked on the EDT systems" said those systems contain information on all types of call records. Vice also quoted an employee of a phone company who said that a hacker could have gained access to the contents of SMS text messages.
Vice wrote:
Syniverse repeatedly declined to answer specific questions from Motherboard about the scale of the breach and what specific data was affected, but according to a person who works at a telephone carrier, whoever hacked Syniverse could have had access to metadata such as length and cost, caller and receiver's numbers, the location of the parties in the call, as well as the content of SMS text messages.
"Syniverse is a common exchange hub for carriers around the world passing billing info back and forth to each other," the source, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to talk to the press, told Motherboard. "So it inevitably carries sensitive info like call records, data usage records, text messages, etc. [...] The thing is—I don't know exactly what was being exchanged in that environment. One would have to imagine though it easily could be customer records and [personal identifying information] given that Syniverse exchanges call records and other billing details between carriers."
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