Network administration prof and infrastructure security architect Jan Schaumann has compiled a list of 88 "ops lessons we all learn the hard way" (e.g.: "Any sufficiently successful product launch is indistinguishable from a DDoS; any sufficiently advanced user indistinguishable from an attacker.")

Asher Burke died in March after a helicopter he'd chartered to visit the Kenyan ranch he'd invested in as an "entrepreneur playground" crashed in high winds; his stateside obits called the 27-year-old deputy political director of the Republican Party of San Diego as an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Ads, Inc, "on a mission to disrupt the lifestyle industry with our advanced approach to product creation and marketing."

When Latvia attained independence in 1991, the retreating KGB left behind two sacks and two briefcases containing indexed records of the secret informants who had been paid to turn in their neighbors for offenses including anti-Kremlin activism and watching pornography.

Yesterday, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story accusing the Chinese military of sneaking spy-chips "the size of a grain of rice" onto the motherboards of servers sold by Supermicro and/or Elemental for use in data-centers operated by the biggest US corporations (Apple and Amazon, among others), as well as US warships and military data-centers, and the servers used by Congress and the Senate.

Just look at it.

Richard Branson got a call from the UK Secretary of State for Defence asking for his help in a covert ransom payment of $5m to rescue a ranking diplomat from kidnappers; Branson recognised the man's voice but he was suspicious of the plan to validate the scheme by sending an assistant to lobby of a government building to meet the Secretary's secretary and exchange codewords.

In 1984, the Stasi — East Germany's notorious secret police — searched the flat of an auditor to determine if he'd leaked files that put the country in a bad light to Stern, a West German magazine, published in Hamburg. — Read the rest

According to Kaspersky, the Petya ransomware that raced around the world this week wasn't ransomware at all, and there is no way to get back your files after it does its work (that's why it was so easy to shut down the email address the ransomware used to negotiate payments and decryption with victims whose computers had been taken over).

After Colin Dickey wrote about United CEO Oscar Munoz's nonpology for the savage beating of Dr David Dao, he was taken to task for accusing the CEO of writing in the "passive voice."

The closer Dickey looked, the more he concluded that "passive voice" is not a good characterization of the style employed by corporate America; rather, the instantly recognizable "Bureaucratic Style" "makes use of both active and passive constructions, but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the bureaucracy." — Read the rest

DC Dave's "Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression" are a good analytical tool for understanding what's happening when governments are embarrassed by revelations of corruption and criminality and get to spinning, a kind of Spicer-Conway masterclass (albeit one that's spoiled by its descent into conspiracy theory with the Vince Foster suicide as an example of such truth-suppression). — Read the rest

Lawfare's Charlie Winter got ahold of a copy of Media Operative, ISIS's long-rumored, three-party guide to media strategy for jihadis; his fascinating account of the organization's media strategy is important reading, if only to see how ISIS views its own operations.

East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, were the most aggressive surveillance force of their day — at the Stasi's peak, one in 60 East Germans was snitching for the agency.

Privacy International interviewed 57 sources for their report on the link between surveillance and torture and murder in Kenya, including 32 law enforcement, military or intelligence officers with direct firsthand knowledge of the programs.

A team of esteemed scholars including Yochai "Wealth of Networks" Benkler and Ethan Zuckerman (co-founder of Global Voices) analyzed 1.25 million media stories published between April 1, 2015 and election day, finding "a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world."

Jonathan Stray summarizes three different strains of propaganda, analyzing why they work, and suggesting counter-tactics: in Russia, it's about flooding the channel with a mix of lies and truth, crowding out other stories; in China, it's about suffocating arguments with happy-talk distractions, and for trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos, it's weaponizing hate, outraging people so they spread your message to the small, diffused minority of broken people who welcome your message and would otherwise be uneconomical to reach.

The Anonymous activists behind "OpKKK" — which infiltrated and unmasked Klan members, including many in US military and police departments — began by creating thin-but-plausible fake identities on Facebook that signalled support for "Blue Lives Matter." By friending other accounts that indicated support for Blue Lives Matter, they found themselves being auto-suggested friendships with KKK members.

Despite his widely read criticism of Tor, The Gruqq — a legendary, pseudonymous security expert — uses it as first and last line of defense in keeping your secret, activist Twitter account a secret.

The New Jersey DA's office just announced that it had arrested New York's Habib Chaudhry in connection with a $200M credit-card fraud; Mr Chaudhry joins 19 others who've pleaded guilty to the frauds.

Amnesty International has published a damning report on the organized networks of Mexican Twitter trolls and botmasters for hire who orchestrate massive harassment campaigns against investigative journalists, including death threats and misinformation/slander; they also hawk products and fake out Twitter's trending topic algorithm, operating with relative impunity — thanks, in part, to Twitter's underinvestment in Spanish-speaking anti-harassment staff.

Morgan Stanley's pre-crisis fraudulent mortgage activity cost the firm $2.6B in federal fines, $550m in New York state fines, and $22.5M in Illiois state fines — and part of the evidence against it is emails from high-ranking bankers telling their subordinates not to talk about the criminal stuff in email, because it could get them all in trouble.