Month: January 2017

Links – January 31, 2017

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Donald Trump’s government is taking up all the oxygen in the news. In a way, rightly so. But we have to keep ourselves sane and focus on the issues we can do something about. So I am continuing to look at the Russian connections. I’ll post when I have something ready. In the meanwhile, with an apology for too much Trump, here are some links.

One more fact: My yarn store had some more-or-less pink yarn that will go into some people’s pussyhats. It was all they had, and they said that the distributor didn’t know when they’d have more pink. Good job, ladies! đź‘Ť Read More

Russian Computer Experts Arrested for Treason

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Two men were arrested on Wednesday, January 25 in December by Russia’s FSB on charges of treason. The men are Sergei Mikhailov, a senior officer of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of computer incident response investigations at Kaspersky Lab, which makes antivirus programs. [Update: The arrest was just announced; it appears the men were arrested in December.]  Earlier, the firing of the director of the Center for Information Security, Andrei Gerasimov, was announced, reportedly related to an investigation into the agency’s cooperation with Kaspersky on criminal hacking cases. Moscow Times is now reporting that two more men have been arrested: Dmitry Dokuchaev, who worked in the same FSB unit as Mikhailov, and another whose name has not been released. Read More

Links – January 25, 2017

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Donald Trump likes and dislikes nuclear weapons, according to what he has said, as slippery as anything else he says. Here are excerpts from testimony to Congress by his Secretaries of State and Defense on the subject. Their views are fairly conventional. We don’t know how much they will influence him.

Why Trump’s bluffing won’t be effective on nuclear weapons issues. What the Trump administration needs to do to get up to speed on those issues. Read More

Trump and Russia – The Multiagency Investigation

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

There were plenty of clues before the election that Donald Trump and his associates had more ties to Russia than any other presidential candidate for the past fifty years. But the media chose to ignore them in favor of a Hillary Clinton email server that might have been vulnerable to hacking. Not actually hacked, just vulnerable. Oh, and her staff’s recipes for risotto after emails were hacked from the Democratic National Committee server, probably by Russia. Read More

Fails Dancing With The Stars, Wins Nuke Prize

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

According to the New York Times, Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, presidential aspirant, and now Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Energy, um, didn’t know what the Department of Energy does when he accepted Trump’s nomination. “Sure I’ll be Ambassador for Oil and Gas,” he said. Twitter is meeting this revelation with humor and “We’re all going to die.” Read More

Links – January 17, 2017

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Apologies for not posting my own writing for so long. I am working on posts, but so much news is coming out that it is hard to keep track. Here’s what others have been writing. Oh, and a movie recommendation: go see “Hidden Figures.” It is extremely accurate about what women of color faced in science in the early 1960s, much of which all women faced. I experienced a number of the situations depicted. And the clothes and other props are very well done.  Read More

Links – January 13, 2017

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

As I’ve noted before, Donald Trump’s strategy seems to be to keep enough balls in the air that we can’t keep track of any of them. And other sources are now lobbing some balls into the mix. These links don’t include much about the Trump – intelligence community – Russia dustup now occurring. I’ll try to address that separately (or at least present what I consider the better links). Here’s an FAQ for now. Read More