Friday, December 21, 2018

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards Went to Congress First

 From the article:
Edwards reportedly spoke with "six different congressional committee staffers to air her concerns." Then, in July and August 2018, she purportedly met with "staffers of one of the Senate committees investigating Russian interference during the presidential campaign." It was then that she claimed that FinCEN "withheld documents revealing suspicious financial transactions of Trump associates that the committee had requested." Edwards and an unnamed colleague reportedly had "lawful documented evidential disclosures of violations of law, rule, and regulations, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, and substantial and specific danger to public safety."

More:
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/treasury-official-who-allegedly-leaked-trump-associates-bank-records-claims-she-went-to-congress-first/

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Russian Agents Sought Secret US Treasury Records On Clinton Backers During 2016 Campaign through the Treasury Department

 Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides "dirt" on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

More:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a80hht/russian_agents_sought_secret_us_treasury_records/

Monday, December 17, 2018

This is amazing!



Package Thief vs. Glitter Bomb Trap


Trump Demands Stop To Emoluments Case As State AGs Subpoena 38 Witnesses


You know it's bad when you are reaching all the way back to Washington and Jefferson slave-run plantations to say "but, but, but they did it, too!" 

From the article:

Trump attorneys cite Washington D.C. land records from 1793 to show that George Washington purchased "several lots of federal land" during his presidency, adding that "no concern was raised that such transactions conferred a benefit."

The DOJ goes further, however, and reaches for the slave-run plantations that Washington and Thomas Jefferson ran while in office as examples how the Constitution permits presidents to run private businesses while in office.


More:



•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Friday, December 14, 2018

That Time Trump Spent Nearly $100,000 On An Ad Criticizing U.S. Foreign Policy In 1987

 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent-nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us

Strange real estate deal raises specter of Putin buying Trump - SFChronicle.com


In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider possible business prospects.

Only seven weeks after his trip, Trump ran full-page ads in the Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post calling for, in effect, the dismantling of the postwar Western foreign policy alliance.

More:

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

John Kelly signs an order allowing American troops to use lethal force at the border

 Where is Alex Jones on this abuse of power? Why isn't he screaming about "Posse Comitatus"?

Just kidding. He's a fraud and a tool.

From the article:
It's unclear why this authorization came from the desk of Kelly, rather than the president. Further, as the Military Times notes, the order might run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of the military for domestic purposes.

More:
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/152373/john-kelly-signs-order-allowing-american-troops-use-lethal-force-border


•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Friday, November 2, 2018

The CIA's communications suffered a catastrophic compromise

 OMFG

FTA:
"was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result"

More:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html

Friday, October 19, 2018

From the Houston Chronicle



For U.S. Senate: Beto O'Rourke

There's one more reason O'Rourke should represent Texas in the U.S. Senate: He would help to serve as a check on a president who is a danger to the republic. Cruz is unwilling to take on that responsibility. Indeed, the man who delighted in calling the Texas senator "Lyin' Ted" all through the 2016 presidential campaign, who insulted Cruz's wife and his father, is bringing his traveling campaign medicine show to Houston next week to buoy the Cruz campaign. The hyperbole, the hypocrisy and the rancorous hot air just might blow the roof off the Toyota Center.

While the bloviations emanate from the arena next week, imagine how refreshing it would be to have a U.S. senator who not only knows the issues but respects the opposition, who takes firm positions but reaches out to those who disagree, who expects to make government work for Texas and the nation. Beto O'Rourke, we believe, is that senator.






•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Papadopoulos Sentencing Document Out

 "No, it's not Trump who's lying! It's Comey and Struzk, and Cohen... and Flynn,... and Bruce Ohr and Steele of course and Papadolulous, oh and Rick Gates, ahh and Bannon, Omarosa, and Micheal Wolff, ...... and Stormy Daniel's, and McDougle. Puhh all these people are lying, some even under oath. And somehow they must have coordinated because their stories fit together, or at least sent contradict each other. That's so how you know they're lying, because they all stuck with their stories, while Trump has adjusted his stories to the evolving truth and truth evolves of course as we've learnt from Giuliani.

Lol, who the fuck still believes this?!"

Courtesy Reddit user Greenhorn24




•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Sunday, August 26, 2018

AWS SA Associates FAQs


AWS SA Associates FAQs



Compute

Monday, August 13, 2018

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. - POLITICO Magazine


Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I'm His Uncle. - POLITICO Magazine

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I'm His Uncle.

Stephen Miller is pictured. | Getty Images

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar's army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

Story Continued Below

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family's passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen's mother, Miriam, is my sister.

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family's life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the "America first" nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

Like other immigrants, our family's welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn't buy homes in some towns, couldn't join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.

Story Continued Below

Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen's is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump's in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife's own citizenship.)

These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the deaths and suffering of thousands, our senses are overwhelmed, and the victims become statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.

In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. "They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see."

Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.

Story Continued Below

Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan. He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was "illegal." But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.

Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears physical scars as well. He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.

Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.

Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America. Immigration reform is a complex issue that will require compassion and wisdom to bring the nation to a just solution, but the politicians who have based their political and professional identity on ethnic demonization and exclusion cannot be trusted to do so. As free Americans, and descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.

Dr. David S. Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist: formerly a member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University School of Medicine and Jefferson Medical College.

•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Oh wow! Huge for Slack and Smart for Atlassian. Goodbye HipChat: Slack and Atlassian Team Up on Chat Software - Bloomberg


Goodbye HipChat: Slack and Atlassian Team Up on Chat Software - Bloomberg

Goodbye HipChat: Slack and Atlassian Team Up on Chat Software

Stewart Butterfield's startup will subsume Atlassian's corporate chat tools to take on Microsoft.

Atlassian Corp. is selling its corporate chat software to rival Slack Technologies Inc. and taking a small stake in the startup, as they face greater competition from Microsoft Corp.

Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian's HipChat and Stride assets, chief executives from both companies said. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield described both the payment and the investment by Atlassian in his company as "nominal" in financial terms but important strategically. He declined to elaborate on the former. 

The deal gives Slack more customers, most of whom pay a monthly service fee, and allows Atlassian to exit a business that failed to generate as much demand as expected. Combining the two businesses bolsters Slack at a time when Microsoft is pushing a rival product called Teams to some 135 million Office cloud customers. Microsoft introduced a free version of Teams this month in a bid to lure people who don't subscribe to Office 365.

Taking out a competitor is good for Slack, said Butterfield: "There's fewer choices for people."

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder chief executive officer of Slack Technologies Inc., 

Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

The deal lets each company focus on the area where they lead—Slack in chat rooms and Altassian in project management software. The two companies share lots of customers already. Hundreds of thousands of groups using Atlassian products like Jira and Trello have Slack accounts, said Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. Those include Capital One and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Atlassian, which is set to outline the agreement in a quarterly earnings report Thursday, said the impact of lost revenue will be largely offset by Slack's payments over the next three years. Although HipChat predated Slack, the younger company quickly added more features and attracted more users. "Hipchat and Stride are not doing as well as some of Atlassian's other products," said Wayne Kurtzman, an analyst at IDC. Atlassian shares jumped as much as 18 percent in extended trading following the news.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (L) and Scott Farquhar (R), co-founders and co-CEOs of Atlassian pose for a photo on October 13, 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Fortune)

Photographer: Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images North America

Atlassian made a last-ditch effort less than a year ago to keep pace with Slack and Microsoft in chat software. In September, it tried to move HipChat customers to a new product that combined more of the features that Slack and Microsoft have been adding to their chat services. Called Stride, the app offers audio and video conferencing and project-tracking. When not enough users showed up, Atlassian entertained the idea of a sale. "We're very proud of what the team has built," said Cannon-Brookes. "But at the same time, it is a crowded space, and there's a pragmatic option there."

About two months ago, Atlassian President Jay Simons met Butterfield for breakfast and asked if he wanted to acquire the chat business, Butterfield said. The two companies had worked together in the past on software projects and shared congratulatory baked goods to celebrate product releases, said Cannon-Brookes. The agreement marks the first time Atlassian is making a strategic investment in another company, he said.

Atlassian will continue to manage the chat products and customers until the cloud services are shut down in February. Customers with HipChat installed on their own servers will be able to use it for an extra few months or as long as two years, depending on the version.

Slack and Atlassian will make it easy for customers to move, but they won't be forced to switch, Butterfield said. He expects most will transition, though, adding "single digits" in percentage of market share to Slack. Butterfield and Atlassian declined to say how many people are using HipChat and Stride. Microsoft claims 200,000 organizations use Teams. Slack said it has 500,000, totaling 8 million people who use the service every day. Three million of those accounts are paid.

(Updates with Atlassian shares in the sixth paragraph.)



•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Sunday, July 1, 2018

About Immigration Counseling Service (ICS)


About Immigration Counseling Service (ICS)

About ICS

Our Mission

ICS is the oldest, and only, independent nonprofit law firm dedicated to improving the lives of immigrants in Oregon and Southwest Washington for 40 years. ICS is dedicated to improving the lives of immigrants, their familes and communities by providing low cost legal services, and operates the only program serving detained, unaccompanied minors, and a full-time anti trafficking program. 

History

When ICS was founded in 1978, lower income individuals who needed counsel and representation with immigration matters had absolutely no where to turn for help. What began as a grassroots effort was championed and nurtured by long-time immigrant advocate, Margaret Godfrey. Over the years ICS has provided legal assistance to many thousands of individuals from over 90 countries around the world. ICS carries on Margaret's legacy, remaining dedicated to ensuring that anyone with an immigration matter has a place to come for help.

Financial Information

If you would like financial information about ICS, please contact:
Lisa LeSage, Executive Director
llesage@ics-law.org

Looking for our Hood River office? 

ICS's regional office in Hood River is located in the Union Building at 216 Columbia Street, Suite B, Hood river, OR 97031.  Request a consultation or call (541) 399-8029 for more information. 

ICS has been serving Oregon's immigrant communities for 40 years!

Donations to ICS, a 501 (c)(3) exempt organization, are tax deductible and greatly appreciated.  Your donation allows ICS to continue these invaluable services.  Thank you for your generous support!


More ways to give

With Fred Meyer Community Rewards you can help ICS earn donations at no cost to you! Learn more here.

By shopping through smile.amazon.com, you can help ICS earn donations with every purchase. Learn more here.

Do you work for NIKE?  ICS is a beneficiary of NIKE's Employee Matching Gift program.  Find us on www.globalgiving.com/wegiving and NIKE will match your generous gift.

Vegas, re:Invent and great breakout sessions


Vegas, re:Invent and great breakout sessions

Vegas, re:Invent and great breakout sessions

It's been a while since re:Invent happened, but in my defense it has been a very busy three months. Other than Christmas, New Years, taking some time off and working with clients I had the opportunity to attend the recent re:Invent held in Las Vegas. Going to re:Invent in Vegas was an excellent way to catch what's been happening in cloud technologies and what to keep an eye out from the eponymous service provider. In this post I'll start with the fun stuff like the swag, welcome reception and 5k run and finish with the breakout sessions I really enjoyed and got the most out of.

Swag

To start with here's what you're all interested in, the sweet sweet conference swag. re:Invent was brilliant. Here's a summary of my favourite things picked up while there.

Hoarding stickers like an angry dragon.

  • Joyent Trition shirt: Fancy shirt, big thankyou to the folks at Joyent.

  • re:Invent thermos: For doing a short survey of two breakout sessions you got to take your pick from a selection of AWS merch. I picked the AWS water bottle/thermos. I've been using this regularly as my day-to-day water bottle, big thanks to AWS!

  • Amazon Snowball USB drive: Although only 1/16000th the data capacity of a standard AWS Snowball (80TB Snowball, 5GB drive) I very much like this diminutive storage device. It is currently being used as a Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" boot stick for repairing an old laptop of mine.

  • Amazon Echo dot (not pictured): On registering for the conference everyone got an AWS hoodie and their own Amazon Echo Dot. The day after I registered I immediately spent a few hours working it out, playing with it and planning a backlog of skill projects which I hope to implement and talk about here in the next year. Great little tool.

  • A ridiculous mountain of laptop stickers: Over the three days between scheduled talks I made sure I spent plenty of time jumping from booth to booth talking to vendors about the services and/or software they provide. This was a great way to know what's out there and say thanks to the companies who's tools already make your life easier. In the process I collected so many stickers. So many. My highlight was chatting to an AWS maker space developer working on a disaster sign-in system that could be deployed to key places in the event of some major event like an earthquake and based on tagging could let loved ones know you were ok if you were in range of the device.

This was all of my favourites, the one thing I regret not getting was one of the re:Play Las Vegas 2016 grid t-shirts with the compute cube in the middle, if anyone knows where I can get one let me know.

Welcome Reception

Of course all of this event swag was collected from the conference hall, much of it on the welcome reception night. There were 30,000 attendees and from the queues to enter the hall a good percentage of that number were present. There was a great vibe and you can tell that AWS really fosters fun in their community, it was also great to hear about new services vendors are promoting and see the projects AWS work on that aren't generally at the forefront.

Pictured below is the Simple Beer Service stall in the developer lounge.

5K run

I've done some running in the past so I took the opportunity to do the conference 5k run, how often do you get the opportunity to sprint through the streets in a country you've never been to before right? Something that added some extra dimension was the forecasted freeze warning of below zero celsius the night before. Luckily the day was alright temperature wise, staying just above the positive degrees and was good fun, I ended up with a time of 25 minutes, 19 seconds. 189th out of 985, not too shabby!

re:Invent Sessions

re:Invent is one of the rare opportunities where you can have a chance to see presentations by architects and developers who are on the forefront of technology and ask questions to improve your understanding of services and take home some new techniques you can use in the field. I chose a set of sessions which were a mix of the work I'm doing at the moment (AWS account compliance and security) and my personal interests (Formal reasoning, AI and the frontier of software development). Here are a summary of my favourites, I highly recommend checking out the re:Invent breakout session YouTube channel, so much win.

Another Day, Another Billion Packets (NET401)

A great 400 level talk about the networking issues AWS face with their under the hood infrastructure and the solution outcomes. As a day-to-day user of AWS you will generally not see any of this, this talk gave insight into the service history and why some of the networking services are the way they are. If you're new to networking there is a lot to digest in this talk but it's hugely worth watching, especially in retrospective after re:Invent.

Compliance Architecture: How Capital One Automates the Guard Rails (ARC312)

This talk by Peter M. O'Donnell and Kapil Thangavelu was my introduction to Cloud Custodian which I have now been using for the past two months for a compliance project, a great tool I will hopefully have time to write about as an extension on AWS account compliance work I've written about in the past. Keep an eye on this project as it takes away the necessity of building your own automated account clean up and management tool. CloudCustodian can be found here.

Amazon s2n: Cryptography and Open Source at AWS (NET405)

A great talk about the S2N project about analysing the code behind the heartbleed SSL bug of 2014, how to improve software development practices that can let bugs like this slip by and the development of vulnerability detection solutions. Also a good eye into how AWS gets involved in open source software.

Bringing Deep Learning to the Cloud with Amazon EC2 (CMP314)

This was a talk by Tom Jones and Diego Oppenheimer, Deep Learning is not specifically my field but it's great to see how AWS and Algorithmia are harnessing the graphical hardware side to perform some amazing graphical processing tasks, super interesting stuff if you have the time to watch.

The Effective AWS CLI User (DEV402)

This was another great talk, by Kyle Knapp. I walked into this one thinking I was a pretty advanced user of the AWS CLI and came out surprised, I discovered some of the newer features added into the CLI can really speed up the time to automate infrastructure tasks and help you build your own set of command primitives.

Take-aways:

  • --generate-cli-skeleton output --query text lets you query what fields you should be asking for if you're just trying to access specific attributes of a JSON object being returned from the CLI.
  • The power of the ---debug argument, it will show you what the CLI tool as taken in, substituting any variables you have possibly passed in through Bash.
  • <command> --debug 2>&1 | less -S to cleanly check out these logs irrespective of the size of your terminal.
  • ~/.aws/cli/alias: CLI now has it's own alias file so you can build your own CLI commands that you would generally do by scripting these in bash, think your gitconfig file. Some great examples of aliases can be found on Github

Summary

In summary re:Invent was excellent, I'd highly recommend it if you're a heavy user of AWS, being surrounded by the people who build the worlds most prevalent cloud platform really made for a great week. I originally hoped for this post to be a longer one, seeing as how much happened over the week, what I took away in terms of AWS compliance checking and my extra week touring around California but it the post was already getting too long, next up I will have another compliance post.



•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Milo Yiannopoulos Encourages Vigilantes to Gun ‘Journalists Down’ | Observer


Milo Yiannopoulos Encourages Vigilantes to Gun 'Journalists Down' | Observer
Just words?  

No. Not at all. 

Milo Yiannopoulos Encourages Vigilantes to Start 'Gunning Journalists Down'

Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. MARK GRAHAM/AFP/Getty Images.

Milo Yiannopoulos has started issuing reporters threatening messages when asked to comment for stories.

"I can't wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight," the right-wing nationalist told Observer over text message, in response to a longer feature in development about an Upper East Side restaurant he is said to frequent.

When asked to elaborate on who specifically had upset him, Yiannopoulos explained that the statement was his "standard response to a request for comment."

Yiannopoulos also sent the message to The Daily Beast's Will Sommer in an article examining the struggling U.K. Independence Party, which the conservative commentator is reportedly seeking to join as part of, what an Info Wars host describes as, a "soft coup" lead by nationalist figures.

Yiannopoulos posted a picture on Instagram of the veiled threat issued to Sommer, captioning it "where is the lie."

Over the past 18 months, the provocative nationalist has seen his career implode following a Buzzfeed report linking his tenure at Breitbart to known white supremacists and neo-Nazis. After the piece's publication, Yiannopoulos lost funding from the Mercer family, known in the political world as prominent pro-Trump megadonors, and subsequently elevated his racist rhetoric.

This past weekend, the nationalist bragged on Facebook and Instagram that he'd sent $14.88 to The New Yorker's former fact checker Talia Lavin. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "The number 1488 is a combination of digits popularly used by white supremacists and neo-Nazis—14 to represent the infamous "14 Words" (a mantra about securing "a future for white children") and 88 to represent "Heil Hitler."

Lavin is Jewish.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Sweet! Ready for local Docker, VMWare, Hyper-V and VirtualBox too!


Amazon Linux 2


Amazon Linux 2

Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment for customers to develop and run a wide variety of cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2, customers get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux community. Amazon Linux 2 is provided at no additional charge.

Amazon Linux 2 LTS Candidate is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is also available as a Docker container image and as virtual machine images for use on VMware, Oracle VM VirtualBox, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization solutions. The virtual machine images can be used for on-premises development and testing. Amazon Linux 2 supports the latest Amazon EC2 features and includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS. AWS provides ongoing security and maintenance updates for Amazon Linux 2.

https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/

Saturday, June 23, 2018

The Miracle of the Loaves - The Washington Post


The Miracle of the Loaves - The Washington Post

The Miracle of the Loaves

IN MID-NOVEMBER 1979, Sigrid Cerf, an Annandale housewife, saw a picture of a starving Cambodian child on the cover of Time magazine. Reading that 2 1/4 million Cambodians faced starvation, she resolved to do something to express her sympathy for their plight.

Her options were limited; she was homebound with two sons, one only 10 months old, and further isolated by deafness. But drawing from childhood memories of her mother and grandmother baking in a warm kitchen on cold days, she was determined to raise money for Cambodian relief by selling homemade bread.

Cerf began to work in her tiny U-shaped kitchen, which, while convenient for preparing family meals, is hardly the space needed to turn out 70 to 80 loaves of bread a day. Yet the kitchen opens to the dining area and the family room beyond, making it possible for her to work while the baby slept or played nearby. And accommodations were possible: While Cerf mixed dough, dinner could simmer in a crockery cooker in the bathroom.

Soon television publicity brought so many orders she couldn't keep up and, even more than space, she wanted extra hands to knead dough. When word went out that she needed help, "the whole community of Camelot the Annandale subdivision where the Cerfs live was at my door," she says.

Neighbors kneaded dough, chopped apples, grated cheese, bagged, labeled and delivered bread. A woman confined to a wheelchair took telephone orders. The man next door took care of the Cerfs' yard to allow her computer-scientist husband, Vint, more time to help. The proprietor of Health Way, a neighborhood health food store, helped them to buy ingredients wholesale. "After people meet Sigrid they are transformed by the experience," Vint Cerf says.

More:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/12/26/the-miracle-of-the-loaves/dbb2244f-f3df-4dcc-ac87-4a18f6645291/?utm_term=.56e1e10ed286


Wednesday, June 13, 2018

'Expanse' star Steven Strait shares 'crazy' story of Amazon resurrection

 Two weeks later, that possibility became a reality when Amazon officially picked up the show, and it happened in the wildest manner possible. Instead of receiving a phone call from a producer, studio executive, or Amazon underling informing them of the news, the cast and Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar were actually informed in person by Amazon founder, chairman, and chief executive officer Jeff Bezos from the stage during an interview taking place at a space awards banquet.

http://ew.com/tv/2018/06/13/expanse-steven-strait-amazon/


•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Friday, June 8, 2018

WaPo: China hacked a Navy contractor...



...and secured a trove of highly sensitive data on submarine warfare


Holy crap... How do you miss the download of 614GB of data?  


•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Formspree



Functional HTML forms

Just send your form to our URL and we'll forward it to your email. No PHP, Javascript or sign up required — perfect for static sites!

Example:

<form action="https://formspree.io/your@email.com"
      method="POST">
    <input type="text" name="name">
    <input type="emailname="_replyto">
    <input type="submit" value="Send">
</form>