USG Hypes Operation Delivering "Gifts" To Troops In Syria As All Mentions Of Withdrawal Apparently Lies

Despite the withdrawal of USG troops in Syria being loudly announced several times only for "withdrawal of troops from Syria" never actually meaning that in the plain sense, the USG is touting the alleged success of "Operation Holiday Express" (archived). Despite USG military capability falling to the point it can only play at projecting power through deploying its troops as human shields with the limited effect of prolonging conflict between active parties, the USG appears to be doubling down on its attempts to warfight through spending on moral, recreation, and welfare.

Naturally the USG's ability to carry out this sort of image campaign has declined substantially from Dubya Bush bringing professional wrestling to Baghdad shortly after his invasion to this year's enlisted band and church donation box offerings (archived). Increasing expenditures and years of "progress" are showing markedly reduced USG capacity even when it comes to producing targetted propaganda for their captive audience back home.

Trump Signs Bill Vastly Increasing US Military Personnel Costs As Capability Keeps Declining

With his signing of the "2020 National Defense Authorization Act" democratically elected US President Donald Trump has enacted several structural changes to the way US military personnel are compensated (archived). Among the costlier changes: Continue reading

16 Year Sentence Handed Down In Iowa Flag Burning Case

Adolfo Martinez of Ames, Iowa has been sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment by a Story County court after he removed a rainbow "Pride" flag from the Ames United Church of Christ on sixth street and burned the flag in from of a "Gentleman's club" on fifth street (archived). On the so-called Court's way to sentencing the 30 year old Martinez to incarceration through his 46th year of age, the court assigned him convictions for allegedly committing Arson and Hate Crime for his burning of a piece of cloth that someone happened to assign great political importance.

On their own none of the charges against Martinez carry a maximum possible sentence over five years, but the Court elected to impose sentences over the maximum through the "habitual offender" device.

North Korea Bolstering Nuclear Deterrent This Holiday Season

North Korea launched a satellite into space earlier this week, this is a traditional step for nuclear armed states demonstrating their capacity to wield intercontinental missiles (archived). Korean leader Kim Jong Un has removed denuclearization of Korea as a possible outcome for negotiations between Korea and the US. Meanwhile the breakaway government in South Korea has produced and broadcast a propaganda reel showing hypothetical F-35s delivering a hypothetical victory against Kim's Korean government.

African Bus Arsonist Who Tried To Burn 50 Italian Children In His Care Blames Wops For Not Letting More Of His People In

Afro-supremacist Ousseynou Sy, who tried to burn 50 Italian children under his care as a bus driver back in March has claimed that he is not to blame for his attempted holocaust. Instead he asserts that former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is to blame for implementing policies discouraging African migration to Italy (archived). Sy claimed the policies contributed to the deaths of Africans despite reported drowning deaths actually declining during the period they were in effect. Salvini has since lost the Interior Ministry after his party's coalition with the Five Star Movement was replaced by a coalition between Five Star and a legacy Pantsuitist party. Unrepentant and without any legal defense, Sy claims he would burn busses full of children "a hundred times" to avenge his African fellow travelers.

NGINX Hit By Russian Police Raid Over Copyright Drama

NGINX developer Igor Sysoev's former employer Rambler Group has entered a claim to ownership over the software's codebase leading to a police raid on NGINX's Moscow offices (archived). NGINX was initially released in 2004, and Sysoev started a commercial venture around the code when he left Rambler Group in 2011. When San Francisco based F5 networks spent 670 million USD to acquire Sysoev's firm earlier this year, it seemed to raise issues with Rambler's management as to what exactly Sysoev had been doing while on their payroll.

Saudi Air Force Lieutenant Shoots Up Naval Air Station Pensacola

A Saudi Air Force Lieutenant assigned to US Naval Air Station Pensacola reportedly killed 3 and wounded 8 before being gunned down by local police (archived). Six Ten other Saudi nationals were taken into custody (archived). Three of the detained Saudis allegedly filmed the assault. The late Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani published something resembling a manifesto on Twitter declaring his hatred for American crimes against Muslims and humanity several hours before commencing his attack.

Alshamrani was 9 months away from completing a three year "Foreign Military Sales training program" purchased by the Saudi government.

VPN Breaking Zero Day Effective Against Many *nix Systems Burned

RecentlyBurnedWorkandLivingVanA zero day that allows nearby network actors to detect and inject payloads into VPN tunnels has been revealed (archived). All VPN implementations appear to be affected including allegedly "hardened" ones like WireGuard and IKEv2/IPSec while the vulnerability hits numerous *nix TCP/IP stacks including those by Apple, Google, OpenBSD, and Linux. Linux appear to be most gravely affected when running versions of systemd published after November 28th, 2018 when the default "reverse ip path filtering" default was changed to more easily facilitate hijacking VPN sessions in this manner.

The original disclosures to the Openwall oss-security mailing lists are presented in full below: Continue reading

Some Key Stealing Libraries Found in Python Package Index

Two key stealing libraries were found in the PyPi Python Package Index (archived).  One mimicked the dateutil library by prepending a "python3-" so that suckers could stumble into python3-dateutil. The other, mimicked the jellyfish library but swapped a lowercase L for a capital i. Both were allegedly uploaded by the same user and exfiltrated data to the same destination. This is not the first time PyPi has had to remove malware mimicking popular packages, but they remain open to all comers and continue to exercise little actual control over the namespace they index.