I’m traveling this week and next, so this post is brief, but not unimportant. It also includes a science “Who’d’a thunk?” from Sabine Hossenfelder and a musical treat.
Links
Two links for today. First, regarding our most recent piece on Julian Assange:
consider the following as one of Assange’s great sins:
• Vault 7 (Wikileaks via Wikipedia)
Naked Capitalism reprinted our Julian Assange piece, about which a commenter there wrote:
Kinda forgot Vault 7. In my estimation that’s why he is really the enemy of the state. The CIA could electronically hack anyone anywhere and leave bogus digital footprints…no final chapter in any ‘who-done-it’ ever again. Pompeo’s panties will forever remain bunched by this great reveal.
That’s accurate. A lot has been written about Wikileaks’s 2017 Vault 7 release. Here’s a taste of what it contains.
First, from the Wikileaks Vault 7 main page:
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
Translation: The Vault 7 software and manuals had already been circulating among the public when Wikileaks was given access to them. I’ve bolded (above) the consequences of that.
Curious? Surprisingly, Wikipedia has a pretty extensive write-up. For example (emphasis mine):
Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, detailing the activities and capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dating from 2013 to 2016, include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera,[2][3] the operating systems of most smartphones including Apple's iOS, and Google's Android, and computer operating systems including Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.[4][5] A CIA internal audit identified 91 malware tools out of more than 500 tools in use in 2016 being compromised by the release.[6] The tools were developed by the Operations Support Branch of the C.I.A.[7]
The Vault 7 release led the CIA to redefine WikiLeaks as a "non-state hostile intelligence service."[8] In July 2022, former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte was convicted of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks,[9] and in February 2024 sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment.[10]
File under “Any lines these people won’t cross?”
• Faster Than Light Travel May Be Possible (Sabine Hossenfelder on YouTube)
As regular readers of these Links posts know, I’ve become fascinated by the work of this person, a theoretical physicist and out-of-the-box thinker. Here’s one to ponder if you ponder these things.
File under “What ‘everyone knows to be true’ may not be true.”
Music
Your musical treat is an older song, but one of the cleverest penned in the genre of “extended metaphor.”
The YouTuber who posted this also posted some background information:
Honey Cone was an American R&B and soul all–girl vocal group, who are best remembered for their Billboard #1 hit single, "Want Ads". They were the premier female group for Hot Wax Records, operated by Holland–Dozier–Holland after they had departed from Motown Records. […]
Honey Cone and Hot Wax's debut single “While You're Out Looking for Sugar” peaked at #26 on Billboard's R&B chart, but the follow-up “Girls, It Ain't Easy,” reached #8 on the same listing. Their third release “Want Ads” proved to be their biggest success, topping both the R&B and pop chart, selling over one million copies, awarded with a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. in May 1971.
—Wikipedia
But hell, it’s the lyrics, right?
Extra, extra. Read all about it.
Wanted: Young man single and free.
Experience in love preferred
But we'll accept a young trainee.
Bold. And clever. Very clever. But also bold.
There was a certain high school senior who loved the song and the women that sung it. Our lily white prep school had quite an affiliation with R&B. For four consecutive years, Ike and Tina Turner was the Prom band, until my year. Rather than ensure a life time of enduring memories, my classmates choose a farmhouse for an all night booze and bong fest. I remember getting ill. Not the enduring recollection anyone could wish for. At least I did not have a date to embarrass.
Count me as a huge Sabine Hoßenfelter fan! She is brilliant. I don't always agree with her opinions but she is a straight shooter which is increasingly too rare a quality to find in a public persona.
Vault 7: Any claims made by any U.S. governmental agency with regards to computer evidence need to be viewed with extreme skepticism.