The format of this post isn’t Slack’s default format.

The way <!here> is rendered is the giveaway that non-employees have been given a (potentially complete) export of Twitter’s private Slack workspace.

Such exports can (and often do, for enterprise users) include Slack DMs

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601361141611270144

If I was a former Twitter employee, I’d be furious. Access has been described as “complete” and “unfettered.” Combined with the screenshot, it leads me to believe that non-employees were given a complete “compliance export” of Twitter’s private Slack Enterprise Grid workspace.

With the bounty of raw video and photo files available from the January 6th Capitol terror attack, participants can potentially be identified using the video taken by someone else. Or, more specifically, by identifying who is recording the video.

A thread!

1/9 Every cellphone uses a sensor to convert a visible image (or video) into digital data that is processed to create the final media file. These sensors—and the digital signal they create—are imperfect (because physics). But every sensor is *uniquely imperfect*.

2/9

Parler getting kicked off AWS is really wild. Don’t get me wrong, AWS has the absolute right to do it, but the fact that they ARE doing it is mostly unheard of.

For sure, the act *itself* makes Parler toxic to every other cloud computing provider with infrastructure in the U.S. Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure certainly won’t touch them with a ten foot pole. And as much as Parler admins claim they developed the site to avoid vendor lock-in, that’s probably the most expensive way to host on AWS, and is almost certainly not true in real life.

Twitter told @verge: “If a government account, like @POTUS, was used to evade @realDonaldTrump’s ban, Twitter said that it would remove the content associated with this behavior and try to remove Trump’s access to this account.”

theverge.com/2021/1/8/22218… Looks like he already deleted them.

But @TwitterSafety / @Twitter knows he did it.

Protesters are now **inside** the Capitol Building. Senate hearings are suspended.

These MAGA terrorists are now brawling with police inside the U.S. Capitol Building, and trying to get through to the interior chambers.

We’re gonna win this thing. I’m serious, we’re gonna win this thing.

You’d think that Trump’s own DOJ would be shouting from the rooftops about “Hunter’s hard drive” if it was found to be legitimate after a digital forensics analysis. But they’re not.

One thing we do know: the FBI was investigating if it’s a Russian disinformation campaign. The repair shop owner said the computer (an an external hard drive that appears to have been purchased by the shop after the laptop was allegedly dropped off) was given to the FBI for a grand jury investigation in December 2019.

“The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it…”

German journalist Sebastian Haffner, writing in 1939 about Nazis. If you wonder why Trump’s rallies all have the same lies, the same lines, and the same call-and-response with the crowd, it’s because it’s effective as a propaganda tool. The impressionable people watching those crowds can be made to feel a sense of belonging when they watch.

As some of you may remember, I spoiled my mail-in ballot. Rather than risk a mail delay and requesting a new one, I planned to surrender it and vote early, in person.

It struck me how lucky and privileged I am to live in a (mostly) blue state, and in a (mostly) white county.

1/ After arriving at the county clerk’s office—where early voting has been live for three weeks—I waited in line to surrender my mail-in ballot. By “in line,” I mean, “I waited three minutes to be helped by a county official.”

I then waited for them to process my replacement.

2/

This Hunter Biden laptop story is fucked.

Docs show the laptop was dropped on Apr 12, 2019. They also show an external drive and its serial number.

Western Digital’s web site says that drive’s **3-year** warranty expires Apr 18, 2022…meaning it was manufactured Apr *18*, 2019. If the data was on the MBP’s NVMe SSD, it was either readable or not. The TRIM command is constantly shuffling blocks around to level the wear on the memory cells, and any legit data recovery firm will tell you: recovery of damaged/deleted files from an NVME drive is impossible.

You’ve probably seen this ad here. The majority of the video is for another product entirely. It shows a projection from the Sega Toys Homestar, which is $240. (And is amazing. I know; I bought one like 15 years ago.)

You can see it briefly in the video (snapshot below)

https://twitter.com/finfou23/status/1315580667627929601

The Sega device is amazing, has multiple lenses, and microfilm-style projection discs that create an amazingly lifelike star field. Like, seriously, it’s fucking amazing.

But this advertised device is cheap, and projects a cartoonish scene without regard for realism or focus.

My primary isn’t for two weeks. If you’re doing any math around who gets whose Warren’s votes if she drops out before then:

I am a progressive Warren supporter. I decry racial, financial, gender, and social inequality. I believe that big corporations have an obligation to “pay back” (by way of higher taxes) the rest of us that paved their way.

I believe that free markets result in a consolidation of power and wealth that benefits the already-rich and powerful…which harms of the rest of us.

Over ten years ago, @guardian published a story about cults and their charismatic leaders. They included a list of behaviors that should be warning signs of an unsafe group or leader.

I'll list them in this thread, along with sample news stories about Trump that align with them. 1) Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.

Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao Zedong curated dysfunction in their respective governments, in order to gain power.

foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/02/the…

Update on Part 2 of my article series discussing #NLP/data science analysis of the Mueller Report:

• new "clean" source of OCRed text found, and will be used for all further articles in the series
• I found an excellent "coreference" tool that I will demonstrate and train

1/6 "coreference": when a noun (e.g. full name) is used once in a paragraph, and that noun is referred to later using another form (e.g. last name, or pronoun). This screenshot from a web-based demo shows how three "coreferences" have been de-referenced to their root.

2/6
"Manafort" and "He" are shown with arrows pointing to "Paul Manafort", indicating that those words were de-referenced back to the full name." src="/images/1px.png" data-src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5I9_PiWsAAtSaH.jpg">

Mueller Report #NLP analysis, live update: I've started cleaning up the code, and writing my article.

For my non-tech tweeps: the article will include code, but I promise to explain it all! Plus, you'll see the promised timeline of events from the report, tweets, and more!

1/5 For my geek followers: here's what to expect: the article is being written as a Jupyter notebook running with a Python 3.7 kernel. I'll include instructions to set up a venv with a separate kernel, if that's how you roll. I'll also include the requirements.txt.

2/5

Today, as I get back to the analysis exercise referenced in the old thread below, I’ll be updating here, in a new one.

First step: “fish or cut bait” on the full extraction and linking of footnotes. I may punt it to later…but I have a few ideas I’ll try

https://twitter.com/spdustin/status/1119118085443559425?s=21

Then: the ethics of using machine learning approaches to guess at what will fit under the redaction boxes.

Short answer: technically feasible (for some definition) with language models that are trained with every indictment, sentencing memo, etc. from Mueller. Ethically wrong.

I know a lot of media personalities, Twitter "influencers", or whatever have shared their treatment of the Mueller Report today. I'm a big ol' nerd, so here's what I'm doing with all this delicious, delicious data.

Yes, it's a thread. Because I'm doing something different.

1/23 Part A: Data Cleansing

I wrote a tool to do OCR (optical character recognition)—converting the PDF to searchable text—w/ 4 libraries. Using "natural language processing" (NLP) tools, I identified sections where tools (e.g. Abbyy, Tesseract) did a good job or a crappy job.

2/23

@LawrenceBJones3 @FoxNews That’s a cheap tactical backpack with a MOLLE attachment system (cosplay types refer to stuff like that as “EDC”, for “every day carry”).

That’s a cheap backpack that you’re wearing backwards.

You’re wearing a backpack with the “cool part” facing camera.

On purpose. @LawrenceBJones3 @FoxNews I recognized the pack; it's similar to one I bought my kid for a costume. So I cropped it for a reverse image search, and…

Coming up on Fox News: how-to tips for military cosplay fetishists.

https://twitter.com/lawrencebjones3/status/1113763507101741056

That’s an aftermarket AirPods case wrap, with a keychain holder. So, this cosplay isn’t that great.

1/8

Starting today, and continuing daily, I'm going to take some time to shine a light on the people affected by the #TrumpShutdown, and what it means for the rest of us.

Today, I want to talk about air traffic controllers (ATCs).

🧵 👇 2/8

ATCs do more than route aircraft safely to their destination, though that is certainly a key part of the role they play in helping people arrive, safe and sound, at their destinations. They also direct vehicles on the ground—aircraft and ground workers alike.

My video explainer: Yes, the video showing Jim Acosta and the intern was doctored. No, it wasn't sped up. What was done was far more insidious.

Video Tweet 1 of 2:

My video explainer: Yes, the video showing Jim Acosta and the intern was doctored. No, it wasn't sped up. What was done was far more insidious.

Video Tweet 2 of 2: