DEMOCRACY DIES IN GASLIGHTING:

 

SHARIA-FREE AMERICA CAUCUS GROWS: Three more House GOPers have joined the newly organized Sharia-Free America Caucus whose purpose is to stop, reverse and forever defeat the forces seeking the Islamization of this country.

 

CYBERSECURITY: New AirSnitch attack breaks Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises.

The hardware manufacturers face yet another challenge: The client isolation mechanisms vary from maker to maker. With no industry-wide standard, these one-off solutions are splintered and may not receive the concerted security attention that formal protocols are given.

So how bad is AirSnitch, really?

With a basic understanding of AirSnitch, the next step is to put it into historical context and assess how big a threat it poses in the real world. In some respects, it resembles the 2007 PTW attack (named for its creators Andrei Pyshkin, Erik Tews, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann) that completely and immediately broke WEP, leaving Wi-Fi users everywhere with no means to protect themselves against nearby adversaries. For now, client isolation is similarly defeated—almost completely and overnight—with no immediate remedy available.

At the same time, the bar for waging WEP attacks was significantly lower, since it was available to anyone within range of an AP. AirSnitch, by contrast, requires that the attacker already have some sort of access to the Wi-Fi network. For many people, that may mean steering clear of public Wi-Fi networks altogether.

If the network is properly secured—meaning it’s protected by a strong password that’s known only to authorized users — AirSnitch may not be of much value to an attacker. The nuance here is that even if an attacker doesn’t have access to a specific SSID, they may still use AirSnitch if they have access to other SSIDs or BSSIDs that use the same AP or other connecting infrastructure.

What a mess.

I keep my home network as protected as possible — which might not be enough — and quit using anybody else’s WiFi years ago, and just rely on 5G and tethering when needed.

INFILTRATION:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

POISONING THE MINDS OF BOTH OF THEIR VIEWERS:

SPIRITUAL SIDE OF AI/ADDICTION ISSUE: Consider the implications if algorithmic-induced addiction is as deeply serious a problem as is depicted in current litigation, and it can be combined with Artificial Intelligence:

“Artificial intelligence dramatically lowers the cost of deception while algorithmic platforms dramatically amplify its reach. Together they form a compounding loop: manipulation becomes cheaper, distribution becomes frictionless, and correction becomes nearly impossible. A lie crosses a continent before the truth has tied its shoes — and now the lie is written, targeted, and delivered by software that never sleeps,” writes Col. (Ret) Bob Maginnis in The Washington Stand.

But there are even more aspects of this dilemma:

“In my book ‘The New AI Cold War,’ I argue that the defining contest of this century is not merely geopolitical — it is civilizational. The conflict pits liberty-centered systems grounded in human dignity against authoritarian systems that weaponize information and treat citizens as programmable inputs.

“China’s social credit infrastructure and Russia’s disinformation apparatus are the most visible expressions of this model. But the temptation to centralize control through technology is not exclusive to tyrants. Free societies face a parallel seduction: the idol of efficiency, dressed in the language of innovation.”

This is an important piece that merits serious and thoughtful reading.

 

OPEN THREAD: You know what to do.

REPORT: Paramount Skydance victory in Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war came after failed Netflix exec visit to win over White House.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos failed Thursday to convince a skeptical Trump administration to approve his proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery – and with that, his nearly done deal to buy WBD’s streaming service and studio went into a death spiral.

Late Thursday, WBD deemed a revised bid of $31 a share from rival Paramount Skydance a “reasonably superior offer,” forcing Netflix to pull its bid thus ending a six-month takeover battle that has captivated Wall Street and the media business.

The backdrop of the announcement was the increasingly insurmountable regulatory hurdles Netflix faced in dealing with the Trump administration. As first reported by The Post, earlier Thursday, Sarandos sat with a skeptical Attorney General Pam Bondi, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Justice Department antitrust officials to try to convince the administration not to oppose the deal on antitrust grounds.

* * * * * * * *

The head of its news division, former opinion journalist Bari Weiss, will now likely control a combined news division that includes WBD’s cable news network CNN.

Oh to be a fly on the wall when Weiss meets with Christiane Amanpour.

In the meantime, some on the left aren’t taking the news very well:

 

IT WAS OBVIOUS EARLY ON THAT SURGICAL MASKS, CLOTH MASKS, AND OTHER “FACE COVERINGS” WERE JUST FOR SHOW, AND THAT ONLY N95 MASKS DID ANYTHING SIGNIFICANT: Pro-Maskers Accidentally Admit Masks Don’t Work, Debunking Anthony Fauci And Years Of Mandates.

In a new letter to the WHO head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, several mask fanatics, in an effort to promote the use of N95 respirators, claim that surgical masks do not “provide adequate protection against flu-like illnesses including COVID,” according to The Guardian. The letter says that there is “no rational justification remaining for prioritizing or using” surgical masks, because they provide “inadequate protection against airborne pathogens.”

Hilariously, one of the organizers of the letter, Professor Adam Finkel of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, also debunked one of the most popular pro-masking arguments. Anyone who argues against masking on social media has come across someone responding, “Well, if masks don’t work, why do doctors wear them?” Ignoring, of course, that not all doctors wear masks, only surgeons do.

But Finkel specifically highlights that those masks were never supposed to stop viruses or respiratory infections, but were “invented to stop doctors and nurses from sneezing into the guts and the hearts of patients.”

Finkel went further, saying that surgical masks are to respirators as typewriters were to computers. Those masks, he continued, are “obsolete.”

So the forever maskers now admit that cloth or surgical masks do not stop airborne viruses. They admit that surgeons do not wear masks to stop respiratory viruses, and that wearing lower-grade masks, the exact type worn by the vast majority of the world for years on end to stop COVID, could not have possibly stopped COVID.

N95 masks only work if they’re fresh, clean, and discarded after a few hours of use. One that you pull out of a pocket or purse is little better than a surgical mask. Masking was about compliance, not health.

WATERGATE WAS A THREAT TO OUR REPUBLIC BECAUSE REASONS, BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:

Related:

More to come, I’m certain.

I love that Jack Hughes did not apologize for the joke with Trump like the other guys on his team. Good for him.