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All the News That Is Fit to Print - Part 1
25 Plays5 years ago
This week Josh and M get around a scheduling issue by talking about the news and only the news! Julian Assange; WhatsApp; crowdfunded Walls; and White House petitions!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Recent Events
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I'm Josh Addison, sitting next to me, as you might expect, is Dr. M.R. Extenteth. Now, there have been two electoral upsets in the last day or so. One was the Australian government. The other, much more interesting, of course, is Eurovision. Did you watch Eurovision?
Eurovision and Politics
00:00:38
Speaker
No, because the state of Israel and the relationship with the Palestinian territories was a contentious issue for Eurovision this year, so I didn't watch it. Indeed, and I understand there's a bit of a ban on any sort of political messaging in the performances as well, so I understand it. But not nearly as contentious as the fact that Norway... Sorry, you were going to say that Norway's not winning is more contentious than the Palestinian territories. That is exactly what I'm saying.
00:01:07
Speaker
Well, this is awkward. But no, the Netherlands won and their song was rubbish, is what I'm saying. Couldn't even, like, we heard they won, and like, which song was the Netherlands song? And then heard it sung again, and we're like, yeah, it's not ringing any bells. Forgettable bollocks, that's what I say. That's Eurovision in a nutshell.
00:01:25
Speaker
Well, but this was especially, I mean, Lordi won one year. The Scandinavian people dressed up as monsters metal band. Like, sometimes, last year was the reason why it's hosted in Israel, of course, is because the winner of the previous year hosts the next year's competition. So last year was the Israeli singer whose song involved clucking like a chicken.
00:01:44
Speaker
So they do. It's not always boring middle of the road bollocks, but this time it very much was. To get us away from talk of Eurovision and back to a much more important political upset, such as the Australian one, did Australia have an entry in the competition this year? They did, because they do. Well, I can't remember.
Australian Election Surprises
00:02:02
Speaker
I think it's just because Eurovision was a
00:02:03
Speaker
really big in Australia, and Australia sort of got invited to be on one year, and then they just gave them lifetime initiative. No, Australian petition to join Eurovision for a long time. Eurovision has no relationship to the European Union, or indeed Europe, it's a brand name, and anyone can enter as long as they're willing to stump up the phase. And Australia now regularly competes in Eurovision, as they do in general elections.
00:02:29
Speaker
And what an upset that turned out to be. I'll be honest, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it until afterwards when everyone's like, oh, Labour didn't win and we all thought they were going to. Yeah, and people did. I mean, someone actually put down a one million US dollar bet at Ladbrokes on the notion that Labour were going to win the election. And that actually one of the
00:02:50
Speaker
betting agencies because you can bet on elections in Australia. What a wonderful country that is. One of the betting agencies actually paid out two days in advance because again more punters think Labor's going to romp home with 81 seats easily. So why wait for the election? We'll pay out now.
00:03:11
Speaker
And then the coalition government seems to have actually swung the election after all, which is a bad sign for everything, including the Australian environment. Because even though Scott Morrison admits climate change is occurring, he doesn't want there to be any economically detrimental effects, so they're not going to do anything to stop it.
Tony Abbott's Humorous Defeat
00:03:33
Speaker
Yup.
00:03:34
Speaker
because I'd rather you have cheap power prices than a world to live in in 25 years time. But at least Tony Abbott got the boot, so that was nice. I heard literally, not literally, figuratively, but graphically on TV.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yes, apparently I've seen a clip from an Australian news show where their choice of graphics for showing things was to have the sort of the person's face in a little box on a sort of a stand. And then when it turned out Tony Abbott had lost his seat, a literal CGI robotic looking sort of boot swung down and kicked his thing off camera.
00:04:08
Speaker
So kicked his thing off camera. Kicked his thing off camera. Wow, that's Australian political commentary. They don't use it around in Australia, no. It's really, really wrong.
Podcast Schedule Changes
00:04:17
Speaker
You know, we should get onto a bit of old political commentary by going to the news. And this week, it's all news. It's all news all the time. All the time. For a rationale which I like to call, Josh is an unreliable bastard, Joshua.
00:04:31
Speaker
That's not unfair. Yes, no, my hectic lifestyle has meant I wasn't around for the usual recording time this week, or while I be next week. So we're mixing things up a little bit. And by mixing things up, we've got a trove of news, which we're going to dive into with a bit of a sting right now. Breaking, breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yes, so this week, the news section and the main content section are the same section. It's all a grand unification. It's an all-encompassing conspiracy starting off with Julian
Julian Assange's Legal Troubles
00:05:12
Speaker
Assange. Good old Julian Assange. Australian, don't you know? Australian. There we go. We've got continuity. So, yeah, so I understand now he is in custody in London, is he? Because he was initially picked up for bail jumping. Yes, he's been choking for 50 weeks for bail jumping.
00:05:28
Speaker
I don't know the sentence, I just know that it was bail jumping initially, but now apparently the Swedish authorities are looking to reopen the rape case that he was initially being pursued for. There were two allegations of rape, the one of which has basically expired due to a statute of limitation in Sweden, but one of which actually will expire in 2020.
00:05:52
Speaker
Swedish prosecutors have basically reopened the case and they would like Mr Assange to go to Stockholm for questioning. And this is leading to what might be a bit of a diplomatic furor, eh? I don't know whether I can answer that correctly. I don't actually know. Furor? Yeah, furor. Maybe.
00:06:12
Speaker
It sounds a bit more exotic in European use. In the UK, because of course, there are now competing extradition requests, one from Sweden, one from the US, and certain MPs in the British government are saying, well, the Swedish
00:06:31
Speaker
allegations are older, and they also run out sooner, so natural justice means asylum should go to Sweden. But of course, if you're tossing up between being pally with one country or another, you might choose big old superpower United States of America,
00:06:52
Speaker
rather than good old Scandinavian Sweden, which might be a lovely socialist democratic country, but isn't one of your biggest pals when it comes to invading other countries. Although it did come down to the Netherlands and Sweden in the Eurovision contest. I wish no more of this Eurovision talk. Okay, so yeah.
00:07:18
Speaker
Again, it's just such a fraught case of competing sort of thing. Julian Assange, definitely a bit of a dick. That doesn't mean that he's not being unfairly persecuted in some areas, but the fact that he's being unfairly pursued in some areas doesn't mean he's not being unfairly pursued for some of the other allegations against him. It's all just such a quagmire. I guess all we can sit back and do is sit back and see what happens next. And one can't help but think that
00:07:47
Speaker
In a choice of countries which are liable to extradite you to the US, the UK or Sweden, the UK has a much longer history of extraditing people to the US than the Swedes do. Maybe he should have just gone to Stockholm, answered that particular case. It's not likely it would have been prosecuted because even though Sweden being a much more utopic socialist democratic country than many
WhatsApp Security Breach
00:08:13
Speaker
others even there the prosecution of rape is actually fairly rare he could have been back in Australia living his best life without having spent x number of years in an Ecuadorian embassy going slowly crazy from the sounds of things yes and getting lung disease yes oh well something less contentious what have we got next oh israel okay
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah, do you use WhatsApp on your phone? I do. Because if you do, you might want to think twice. I mean, I have WhatsApp on my phone as well. It turns out that a particular company called NSO, which is an Israeli company, has been exploiting a vulnerability in WhatsApp that allowed them to infect phones with advanced spyware called Pegasus developed by NSO.
00:09:05
Speaker
Josh, tell me about how this vulnerability works. I have no idea. It's in the notes, but it's a buffer overflow in the voiceover IP stack which allows remote coding. Actually, I do know what a buffer overflow is.
00:09:21
Speaker
There aren't checks that when you put a certain bit of information into a certain bit of memory, it doesn't check to see whether or not the information you're putting in there is longer than the allowed space, which means you can put more information, which means it spills over into another area of the memory. And so if you have a very good code injection, you can stick a bit of code where it shouldn't be and so on and so forth. Anyway.
00:09:40
Speaker
And I know about all this stuff because it's the main way that you put Homebrew onto consoles. You find a way to get an overflow, then those do a code injection, and then you can, if you do it the right way, unlock the console and boom, Homebrew. So there you go. There is about, they found a buffer overflow in WhatsApp. So it's not that WhatsApp itself is spyware or anything that's just not. Vulnerability has been discovered in WhatsApp, which is allowed. And this company has used this
00:10:10
Speaker
to spy on others. Now it's important to note, NSO is a group that produces spyware themselves and works with law enforcement agencies.
00:10:23
Speaker
So basically they've found a way to put their spyware onto people's phones which they are claiming they're only doing for legal purposes. So law enforcement agencies have said we want to tap into X or Y and then NSO goes where we've got an exploit that will allow you to do this. What's disturbing about this
00:10:45
Speaker
is that targets, i.e. people that the code injection is working to infect, don't need to answer a call. You just need to do the initial call. It'll cause the overflow. And then the calls often just disappear from long. So there's no way to then go, oh, there's a strange phone number. What's that about? It's quite possible to have an infected phone without ever realizing your phone has been infected.
00:11:12
Speaker
Hmm and in interest I just read this morning grinder also the gay tinder I guess you call it Which is where it comes from gay tinder grinder, but where does the R come from?
00:11:27
Speaker
your mother. Right. So, yeah, apparently there's a bit of contention around Grindr as well because now it's apparently wholly owned by a Chinese company and people are worried about the fact that Grindr, you know, you put in quite a lot of personal information and in some cases very personal information. Like a photo of your penis.
00:11:48
Speaker
And there's a worry that the Chinese government is a lot less shy about compelling companies to hand over what data they have and so on and so on. So you're saying the Chinese government is collecting photos of penises? It's entirely possible.
00:12:03
Speaker
Well, it gets into more disquieting territory when it comes to the fact that it's known that in the US plenty of gay servicemen or servicemen and women and people in the military have been known to use Grindr. And so they're phrasing it more nicely, but essentially the US is suggesting that being gay could be a national security risk.
00:12:29
Speaker
if you're in the military, which has got people worrying about the whole, you know, they don't do Don't Ask, Don't Tell anymore, do they? You're allowed to be openly gay in the military, in the US military. You just can't be trans in the military. That's gone away. Haven't gone that far yet, yeah. Well, sorry, they did go that friendly. And then they took it back. Yeah, sorry. When I say they haven't gone that far, they haven't gone as far as going back to say Don't Ask, Don't Tell or anything like that. Although, I mean, there is a suspicion that's going to happen as well.
00:12:55
Speaker
So, yeah, and this people didn't look quite like the insinuation that yes, because China owns Grindr being on Grindr and therefore being gay if in the military is a security risk.
00:13:10
Speaker
Well, there's also the worry that in particular countries, whether or not you're a service person or not, where there's a social stigma around particular sexual orientations or gender identities, this is the kind of information that could be weaponized by foreign power for spying purposes or getting a bit of leverage. Yeah, blackmail was an ugly word, and it came up in that article.
00:13:37
Speaker
It did. So, yeah, if you're using WhatsApp, please be aware that if you're doing particular things, you might be inspired upon.
Grindr Privacy Concerns
00:13:44
Speaker
Well, I hope a patch will come out fairly quickly now that this has been made public. Yes, although the question now, of course, is we've found one exploit. The question is how many more exploits there are and the code base for WhatsApp is private. It's not open, open or accessible. And of course, this is one of the arguments that open software advocates put forward, which is when you have a code base which is closed.
00:14:09
Speaker
you don't know how many exploitable features there are out there because you can't inspect the code base. So we've found one exploit, which suggests there's a little bit of lazy or bad coding in what to begin with. There may well be more than one, and we don't really know. It's one of those unknown unknowns. We don't know how many exploits are out there. We found one.
00:14:37
Speaker
There could be more. Yes.
Border Wall Scam
00:14:39
Speaker
Yes, so it's all a bit of a worry. Something, I was going to say something lighter. There's certainly a fair amount of schadenfreude here, but I don't know if it's as funny as it initially appears. So you were probably aware that there was a campaign on GoFundMe to build the wall in the States.
00:15:00
Speaker
We the people will build the wall. They ran a crowd funder which got them a whopping 21 million dollars US, which was then to be used to build that wall that Donald Trump had promised, but that pesky Congress was not going to allow to be built. So we the people would build the wall with the breaking of ground meant to be happening on May 1st.
00:15:27
Speaker
Now it's after May the 1st. It is. So we've had many days since May the 1st. May the 4th has already been. It has. May the 5th. May the 6th. I could go on. Until what number? Until the 19th, which is what today is. But yes, no, the point I'm alluding to is that ground has not yet been broken on any citizen-initiated wall building as far as I'm aware.
00:15:54
Speaker
But a luxury yacht has been purchased. Yes. Brian, I don't know how to pronounce that name, Colfeige. Sounds good to me. It'll do. Yeah, bought himself a million dollar yacht, which is an interesting thing to happen when you're in charge of a campaign that people have been giving millions of dollars to and you didn't appear to have millions of dollars initially.
00:16:13
Speaker
Some of you might be thinking, well, maybe you already had money in the bank. But Brian Corphage is also fairly famous for having lost a lot of money because of Facebook. So his online business basically started and died because of the Facebook marketplace.
00:16:29
Speaker
So he's not someone who's thought to have the kind of money he can splash out on a million dollar yacht. And so people are a little bit suspicious that the person who ran the crowdfunding drive for a wall that doesn't appear to be being built has bought a luxury yacht.
00:16:50
Speaker
So, yeah, there's a fair amount of glee among the left who's saying, oh, look, all these sucker, magga-wearing hat people giving their monies to build their imaginary wall have just fallen for a scam artist. But, I mean, it is people giving up their savings and getting taken advantage of by some manner of con person, which, you know, even if you don't agree with them, it's still a little bit of a shit thing to happen.
00:17:15
Speaker
It is, although I have to say I feel very little sympathy towards people who want
Victims of the Scam Debate
00:17:20
Speaker
to build walls. Well, yes, yeah, yeah. No, I don't know about sympathy, but it's still...
00:17:26
Speaker
I'm a little bit hesitant to go, hooray, haha, sucks to them just because the victims of this con man are of a different political persuasion. Yes, but it does appear that maybe Brian Corfarge has spent money that was meant to go towards building a wall for buying a boat, which is a little bit L Ron Hubbard, truth be told.
00:17:46
Speaker
It is actually, yeah. Because he went off and bought a fleet of boats taking money from Jack Parsons. So, you know, it turns out that certain people, when given money and a job to do, would just buy a boat instead.
Comic Relief with Boats and Plagues
00:18:04
Speaker
And in fact, their flagship boat was a bit of a plague boat, as we talked about last week or the week before, I can't remember. Filled with illness. So let this be a lesson somehow.
00:18:14
Speaker
There's make the heading wet, wet, wet, wet, where is I think I'm going to go wet. I'd like to get the plague if they bought a boat. Yes, that's that just follows from exactly what we just discussed.
00:18:30
Speaker
Yep, a life lesson all around. Now, I guess that this next one is kind of related to a couple of the things we're talking about before, because we're talking about the White House, we're also talking about social media.
White House Social Media Reporting Tool
00:18:41
Speaker
Now, this is official, right? This is an official White House thing? Yes, and I did check this, so I went to the page in question.
00:18:49
Speaker
And yes, it very much is real. The White House has officially launched a tool for social media censorship complaints. So not not complaining about being bullied on social media, but complaining about being blocked or banned or deplatformed on social media. And if you go to the page.
00:19:08
Speaker
It's the first page, the landing page, the launch page, but that's not quite right. Because social media platforms or caps should advance or caps freedom of speech.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned or fraudulently reported for unclear violations of user policies. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias, call such an action to be taken against you. Share your story with President Trump.
00:19:46
Speaker
And, I mean, there have been cases of people of a leftward persuasion being banned for what seemed like silly, spurious, or at least inconsistent reasoning. In fact, Emily Gorinski, who's a researcher who looks at kind of online radicalization, I believe people tried to get her banned for pointing out that during World War II we killed Nazis.
00:20:13
Speaker
So there have been those cases, but the main narrative that we tend to see as more alt-right type person is harassing or bullying on Twitter, gets banned and then starts complaining about their freedom of speech. The same thing for example, all trans people should die and then you get a complaint and then they get a 12 hour ban and then suddenly that's contravention of freedom of speech.
00:20:38
Speaker
So that seems to be what this thing, especially coming from the particularly alter-ity White House administration, that seems to be the more the scenario it's aimed at. So I understand there were some slightly interesting standouts on the page itself. Now this isn't in any way conspiratorial, but it does speak to the kind of audience this petition was aimed at.
00:21:01
Speaker
To submit the form, you have to fill in a capture to prove that you are not a robot. And the capture asks for the date that the Declaration of Independence was signed. Now, Josh, you and I are not American citizens and thus are not au fait with the date that is the signing of the year that the Declaration of Independence was signed. Give me a guess as to when it was signed.
00:21:32
Speaker
seventeen something can you be can you just give me four digits one seven one seven nine six if you put that in you'd be correct give me another four digit number nine eight two seven put that in you'd be correct give me another four digit number
00:21:51
Speaker
This is getting, I see where you're going. We could keep this up literally. Let's only go for one more. Okay. One, two, three, four. Would also be great. It turns out you could put any four digit number into that capture. And that is when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Good, I suppose. Now that
00:22:13
Speaker
doesn't say much at all and yet at the same time does seem to indicate that they really want your response but they're not particularly concerned that you'll actually look up that information. Also you can't submit a form
00:22:29
Speaker
unless you're a citizen of the US, which is understandable on one level, that you could understand that maybe people like ourselves might decide to troll the form by putting information in there, but at the same time, you might be, say, a green card holder or someone who's... 1776, Stevie, go back, just looks it up now.
00:22:54
Speaker
So easy to do as well. So easy to do, yeah. Or a permanent resident of the United States who is also concerned about these things and you wouldn't be allowed to submit the information. Now what makes this creepy is that when you get to the end, the fine print says, we want to keep you posted on President Trump's fight for free speech. Can we add you to our email newsletters so we can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter?
00:23:24
Speaker
It turns out the petition is largely an information gathering exercise, in that it's designed to basically get a large email listing for President Trump, which contains your age,
00:23:39
Speaker
your date of birth. That's kind of the same thing. You can put down a year without actually putting down a date of birth name and a lot of privately identifiable information, including the question, are you a US citizen, which arguably also might allow people to generate a list of people you might suspect might be illegally living in the US.
00:24:06
Speaker
So it seems to be a rather creepy information gathering exercise designed to rely on the outrage of a certain class of person who's really annoyed that they've been deplatformed by a social media algorithm, and yet seems to be designed to have easy access for the president to get himself reelected by working on that rage, by emailing people who are going to go, yes, I am one of the deplorables.
00:24:35
Speaker
So does it actually say anything on the page itself about what is supposedly going to happen? Trump wants to hear your stories, doesn't say that we'll do anything about it. Not at all. There's no inclination that they're going to do anything.
Speculation on Trump's Campaign Strategy
00:24:53
Speaker
They just want your stories, but also your private information as well.
00:24:58
Speaker
So, again, something that resembles somewhat of a scam being played upon members of Donald Trump's support base, kind of by Donald Trump's people. Yeah, and we often do Trump-related news as well, you know, podcast listeners, because we kind of burnt ourselves out on Trump.
00:25:20
Speaker
basically the beginning of last year. And at some point we do have to talk about the Muller Report, but we'll get around to that eventually. I suppose.
00:25:30
Speaker
I'm actually more keen to read a book by Kerry Bolton about how the Illuminati control the world than I am to actually sit down and read the Muller Report, truth be told, despite the fact that the Muller Report is a much more important text. Which one's Kerry Bolton? Is he the local guy? Yeah, the local alt-right scholar. Oh well. Do it and we can make a book review out of an episode. We can. Oh, the terror I will have reading that book.
00:25:58
Speaker
So that's all the news we had down for this episode. And given that the news was the content of that episode, this is kind of the end of this episode.
Episode Wrap-Up and Patron Teaser
00:26:07
Speaker
Unless, of course, you're a patron, at which point there's some bonus news coming up, which is largely about the racism going on at the University of Auckland and related issues about gun control.
00:26:23
Speaker
in this country. So that's the bonus content for patrons who are paying even just a dollar a month to listen to us go on about news that you, standard listeners, don't get to hear. But until then, for the rest of you, I guess we'll just say, see you next week. Wink. Wink indeed, old Rekha. Wink indeed.
00:26:50
Speaker
you
00:26:57
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:27:58
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.