Hacker News

Sullying Halloween's good name

Trump doesn't have a few skeletons in his closest, he boasts a series of catacombs.

If I was Iran I'd leak the innocuous stuff first to let them know I had access to potentially more damning things, to try and force the US to the table.

From the news I’ve read the most “embarrassing” things in his personal email are photos of him smoking cigars, holding a bottle of rum, and posing in front of a supercar. What a scandal…

I dunno, a sitting FBI director testifying under oath about details that are clearly false, goes above and way beyond "to party and sightsee". At least in my world it puts him up there together with the rest of the weirdos.

That's not remotely true of his history.. he's a full on Jan-6er, deep into Q-Anon, he was involved in numerous serious scandals during the first Trump admin (Nunes Memo / Russiagate 'parallel' investigation: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-men...), he has a number of sketchy moneymaking side-businesses, he was formerly living with a GOP megadonor 'Timeshare Tycoon' as roommates in Vegas (https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/trump-fbi-pick-kash...), he collected enemies' lists for Trump which resulted in firing of most of the Iran counterintel team right before we started launching attacks because they had the termerity to investigate why Trump was showing donors top-secret maps of Iran after he left office..

How can you way that with a straight face when this book exists.

https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...

90% of US media is not aligned with the Democrats and as such they do not possess the same power to manufacture outrage as the Republicans do.

So you mean to point out that the sitting FBI director is a bro's bro.

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The press was stupid. They were doing stupid gotchas like swiftboats, fake reports on GWB (Dan Rather), but couldn’t care less about things like the CIA and the crack cocaine connection[1], or lots of other things the government gets away with (including Clappers total information awareness unconstitutional surveillance efforts) The press is always carrying water for someone but that someone is rarely the public unless is just pure coincidence.

[1] there was one reporter who dared but the toll from the story resulted in his suicide, some years later. His colleagues poo-pooed his reporting on the connection.

well if you're listing your hopes, not talking from what those hackers brought...

that just means the operation is a dismal failure -- nothing to see

this really undermines iran hackers' claims regarding 'big things' on trump administration

Well, if the president sets the example. What can you expect from the rest ?

Dan Quayle lost a serious bid because he couldn't spell potato.

Now look at where we're at. It really is wild. Right, wrong, or indifferent. How far we've shifted is absolutely wild.

There is no credible evidence that either of the Presidents you alluded to visited "the island". It's amazing to see conspiracy theories promulgated on HN.

This simping is such a bad look. Why go to bat for a man who wouldn't piss on you to put out a fire? Act like a man jesus christ

Trump is currently in office ;)

That can't be the first one. Colin Powell used a personal email account during the GWB administration.

https://www.npr.org/2016/09/08/493133413/colin-powells-ways-...

Of course that pales in comparison with the practices of the GWB White House:

https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/george-w-bush-white-hous...

Check this out (can't wait til mine arrives): https://www.clicks.tech/

Also wildly illegal to use to conduct government business, especially confidential government business. (and yes the messages were auto-deleting and largely lost before anyone chimes in with technically they could be archived!)

> Signal is one of the most secure communication platforms out there

That might be true amongst the communication platforms available for the average Joe. It is definietly not the most secure communication platform available for someone high ranking in the USA government.

> it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering

Nothing is immune. But there are systems more and systems less prone to these issues.

https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use...

Ok? Signal is not the topic of my comment really, nor has anyone claimed it's less secure than other chat apps.

> The investigation has led to turmoil within the Defense Department, raising tensions and the firings and resignations of several top DoD officials, including former Chief of Staff Joe Kasper. [...] On May 1, 2025, it was revealed that both national security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong would be leaving their posts in the National Security Council

Let me guess, the "leak" was intentional just to break a bunch of laws and to cause a bunch of people to get fired and leave their posts?

The facts simply do not bear this interpretation out. Investigations and heads rolling for a stage whisper? Nah

Source?

Yes. Only people who are used to living in non-corrupt countries presume corruption is covert.

> the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

Except, of course, that this is historically wrong. Transitions from democracy to dictatorship are common, but I cannot think of one that happened because of "loose fiscal policy".

Pithy. But a made up quote by Tytler, he never said or wrote that.

Tyler expressed some skepticism of Democracies but nothing like this. The too on-the-nose nature of this often passed along bit of propaganda should also be the giveaway that it might be one of those rare things on the internet that someone may have been less than honest about the origins, and go look and see.

"A witty saying proves nothing." ― Voltaire 1767

Tytler's quote is trying to say too much. It might be acceptable as historical commentary, but it carries little weight to me; it seems overly confident about what the future might hold.*

Tytler died in 1813. We have learned much since then: much about human nature, institutions, experimentation, statistics, evidence, constructing good theories, and governance.** Sure, the quote is worth some reflection; it has grains of truth, but it should not be given undue weight.

* I am not saying "we can predict nothing"! Far from it. I am ok with predictions (even bold ones) to the extent they are deeply rooted in the best understandings and models we have available.

** I'm talking about what motivated people figure out through careful reasoning and evidence, not simply how the median person funnels information from their ears to their mouth. And I'm certainly not commending the effort and thought that the median person puts into stewarding their democracy (if they have one). While we (in the USA, for the time being?) have something like one.

The whole reason the US founding fathers are amazing is that they proved him concretely incorrect. US will celebrate 250 years of democracy this year.

You know, it's very funny. This is the most reproduced quote from Tytler, and yet you also have these chestnuts:

    While man is being instigated by the love of power—a passion visible in an infant, and common to us even with the inferior animals—he will seek personal superiority in preference to every matter of a general concern.

    The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.

The quotee would be surprised to see how little voting is being done by the people receiving the largesse in the last 20 years.

Not to mention how little voters had to do with the decisions which caused the deficit to rise the most. The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy.

I think we all know the answer to that…

HN is overrun by partisans whose majority does not care about factual interpretations of current events and flags level-headed comments in favor of cheap shots, double standards, hyperbolic misconstructions, and ad hominem. I don't think it's difficult to be critical of the government without resorting to such low-brow commentary, but it is what it is. I once offended some people by comparing HN to Reddit, but the lines are getting more blurred by the day.

It's beind downvoted because "but, her emails..." is not saying it's the same thing, but rather, that so much fuss was made about her emails, and then when something similar happens, the right conveniently ignores it. For example, as you mentioned, signalgate, or the times members of the Trump administration used their "own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications."

It's being down voted because it's attacking a strawman. No one is saying they are the same exact thing. It's that you will see people activatley defending this as a big nothingburger when in truth, it's still a security breach that has the potential to lower our defenses.

> I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.

It wouldn't be the first thing related to her that died https://web.archive.org/web/20220331092216/https://www.arkan...

> And you know it was a show, a mockery, because with cases like this where something equally bad happens and nothing will come from it

How is this case equally bad? It's just his private email being hacked, he did nothing wrong.

There are probably about a thousand things you could point to in the Trump administration that are worse than Clinton's private email server, but this isn't one of them.

Yes. That man lied us into the Iraq war. He is a traitor.

"Both sides" is the biggest cop out of the last decade.

I'd say the bigger issue in 2016 was the Russian interference, which has been proven and has lead to convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

> Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump

I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

How was Cambridge analytica debunked?

> In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen

This is not even remotely true.

One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, culminating in a violent attack on congress itself.

The other party had concerns about foreign interference in our elections.

We isn't an imprecise word at all, it's very precise in it's definition.

I can honestly not come up with a single example of the distinction between 'zanmen and women' being useful besides this specific case where you really want to be able to say in 1 sentence that you identify as the same group as someone else, but that that group is subdivided into 2 groups, and you're talking about the sub-group that you're specifically not a part of.

In English, you can say "we" or "they"

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And it’s your upbringing that has the biggest impact on who your peers will become.

It means whatever you want it to mean. That’s why it’s primarily used by people who don’t know how to articulate their thoughts. If you think you know what woke means, you’re wrong by definition.

Russia and North Korea are obviously doing so, but I haven't seen any direct evidence that China is providing intelligence support to Iran, do you have any links? It is certainly plausible, China would love to see Russia tied up in Ukraine and the US tied up in Iran.

Can you blame them? Iran is fighting for its own survival and has to find help where it can.

If the US had an educated administration not composed by lap dogs they would've known that attacking Iran was going to be a terrible idea.

Saddam did the same mistake in 1980.

He thought that the Iranian Kurds, the political opponents, the Iranian Arabs, civilians were going to raise against the regime.

None of this happened. None. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people, even kids, rallied around the banner. There are documented stories of 13 year olds, jumping on barbed wire to use their bodies as bridges for infantry. Disgusting, yet telling of the fact that the Persians will do everything to defend their land even if they don't like its leadership.

It's very difficult to convince people you're bombing left that you're helping them get rid of a regime (which, you never know for sure how popular or unpopular it is).

Iranians, yet again, are rallying around the flag for what is effectively a foreign aggression.

That’s right thanks. The same Hacker group as this story. Yeah I didn’t hear much after the initial breach so I assumed it was minor.

Edit: apparently 80000 employee workstations got remotely wiped. So not so I guess I wouldn’t call that minor.

Also that’s what I get for commenting before reading the story, they mention the Styker incident in the story lol

USA cannot do a full scale invasion without major internal unrest.

Changing a password that's randomly generated is security theatre. It doesn't meaningfully improve security

Also it's entirely possible they only compromised a honeypot.

Considering their track record, that's actually more likely tbh

Just saying that there's a working link if you search. It's a useful information on its own.

There's no reason to post it directly. Their server is slow today even without adding lazy (ok, HN readers not interested in applying some effort to the matter) HN readers to the mix.

Bretton Woods, Petro dollar and Lindy effect?

Also the only major economy which didn't fight World War 2 on its own territory.

Plus huge amounts of braindrain from all over the world after WW2 (originally from Europe, but nowadays mainly from India and China).

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He was well known in the first Trump admin.

woah but even I haven't heard about that gmail feature...?

maybe google doesn't advertise about this much?

Why would he, when he wasn't director of the FBI then?

It is also possible he is an idiot. There are few valuable sentences that begin with "it is possible..."

Security in depth. Even if you think you don't have anything particularly valuable in there, you still protect it as if you did.

The confusing thing is that googling "google advanced protection program" takes you to the en_in locale, even if you are in the US. An American has no clue what a crore is, so it is just an SEO failure on Google's part, which is funny. I didn't know there was an en_us equivalent to the page when I googled the topic.

It doesn’t really tell you where the copywriters were from but you notice that the locale of the page is Indian because the numbers are given in crore.

"Gmail blocks over 10 crore phishing attempts every day."

Petty racism, probably linked to the FBI director's ethnicity.

Over 90% of my managers got into their positions by either stabbing someone in the back, or walking across their dead body.

per Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

> In some cases, Patel appears to have sent emails from his former Justice Department email address in 2014 to his Gmail account. TechCrunch found that the emails sent from Patel’s DOJ account also appeared to be authentic.

Are you kidding? He had extremely sensitive roles as Devin Nunes' House committee aide from 2017–2019 in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, National Security Council aide and deputy director of national intelligence (2019–2020), and then Chief of staff to the secretary of defense (2020–2021).

Maybe something fun about his book. https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...

That’s arguably even more objectionable of a term. Jester’s role was often a critical one in the court system, serving as deliverer of uncomfortable messages in light hearted ways and often also confidant to the monarch.

These rather evil and cruel bumbling fools are an insult to clowns and jesters alike. Maybe “fool” is the applicable term.

the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.

Almost all phishing attempts at my domain are from google. Many Norton subscription bills for around $350. I report every single one to google. I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.

Meanwhile have a complaint volume of more than 0.1% and they'll consider you extremely suspicious and start actively interfering with your deliveries.

Then you get into the forgotten early 2000s era google "postmaster tools" to try to poke through the chicken entrails to divine the nature of your issue.

Google was banned from Usenet once, so there's hope. Every single provider was so fed up with spam they just blocked the whole network.

With FOIA and Body Worn Cameras I think we're in far better position to demand accountability from local police and sheriffs. Two tools the FBI are not compelled to comply with or deploy and which many state police agencies also resist using.

In any case I think you'd want to remove their enforcement mandate and instead refocus them on information gathering and rapid secure distribution, tailored forensic investigations, and on creating, monitoring and refining police best practices and training programs.

I'm surprised he put the 'e' on 'you're'.

Ameritech.net was backed by yahoo’s mail and IIRC, [email protected] and [email protected] would be the same mailbox.

Idiots

I dont know why your comment got grayed out but it made me smile.

are you saying someone can’t key information into an NCIC profile with EMacs? Ha! furious typing

They'd be a couple years late on that.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/foreign-hacker-2023-comprom... (reported last year)

> What we have is a rogue authoritarian executive that was incompetent enough to ignore military assessments and be manipulated by Netanyahu to strike.

Yeah, except we’ve had that for the entirety of this century so far at least.

how about "useful" and "not useful"?

We had allies. Now they are treaty signatories asking themselves WTF?

Are you serious?

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/03/06/iranian-and-iranian-...

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Yeah lol, if you're suddenly policeman of the world going after evil regimes, how is North Korea still standing? They're forced to be robots or they're killed

We've given a lot of people a lot of reasons to hate us sure, but no matter how much you hate someone, if you see them kicking their own ass it just makes sense to let them finish before you jump in.

Camacho is aspirational at this point. I would have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to do the right thing but unaware what that is.

> caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Excess mortality in the US during the pandemic was around 1.2 million.

I think it's the future of entertainment. Ruthlessly mocking idiots in power (and others). To be honest it's the present of some entertainment.

Totalitarianism and authoritarianism has been the norm for the majority of human history. The last century of technological progress created a bubble where the power of sycophancy wasn't strong enough to counteract the power of actual technology. Now that the technology is widely distributed and easily available to sycophants, and that they've had time to learn how to leverage the technology, sycophancy again brings an advantage.

The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.

However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.

Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...

It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.

Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.

Totalitarianism is not becoming more popular. Russia is not totalitarian, Venezuela is not totalitarian, and even China is not really totalitarian anymore.

These are authoritarian countries. Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it. If anything, they are focused on suppressing people and keeping them passive.

Iran is a notable exception here. They _are_ a totalitarian theocratic state, and this makes them more resilient. They are not governed by a single person but by ideology, even if it's unpopular among the people.

Authoritarian states are fragile in comparison. They struggle to survive the removal of their leader, especially the ones that had governed for a long time. The long-time ruler inevitably becomes the arbiter between the elites, a focal point of their undercover agreements.

And once the ruler is gone, the elites are now faced with a new round of struggles. So the smarter ones decide that perhaps it's a good idea to have some kind of collegial power, where people can discuss their disagreements rather than shoot each other. This usually results in the country becoming milder and not so carnivorous towards its citizens.

The USSR was a good example. Stalin died, and his successors decided that a new Stalin was not a good idea. Instead, they gave power to the Politburo, where the General Secretary was "the first among equals". The USSR did not become a human rights paradise afterwards. But it never had any more mass purges, deportations, or mega-projects built with slave labor of GULAG inmates.

I recently read one of the best descriptions of why middle of the road, non wealthy voters went for Trump in the book "The King in Orange," a book about the "magickal" aspects of the 2016 campaign by John Michael Greer, the former (?) head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.

I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.

I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.

I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.

yeah it’s totally plausible that Google would risk the reputation and legal status of its global multi-trillion empire to dunk on one of the handful of people who have the near-unilateral authority to dismantle them

i am eagerly awaiting your evidence for this claim

i think the facts of the matter are that a gmail vulnerability is on the very low likelihood kind of event. they wouldn't burn their insanely valuable vulnerability on showing how much of a fratboy kash is. the most likely possibility is that he either clicked on something dumb and gave access through phishing(really bad) or had a really weak password without 2fa(also really bad).

are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?

Did the director have his email on a vulnerable server? Yes. Yes he did.

He should have known better.

Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.