Monday, August 6, 2018
Putins Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip, Logo Indicates
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gift of a soccer ball to U.S. President Donald Trump last week set off a chorus of warnings -- some of them only half in jest -- that the World Cup souvenir could be bugged. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham even tweeted, “I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”
It turns out they weren’t entirely wrong. Markings on the ball indicate that it contained a chip with a tiny antenna that transmits to nearby phones.
But rather than a spy device, the chip is an advertised feature of the Adidas AG ball. Photographs from the news conference in Helsinki, where Putin handed the ball to Trump, show it bore a logo for a near-field communication tag. During manufacturing, the NFC chip is placed inside the ball under that logo, which resembles the icon for a WiFi signal, according to the Adidas website.
The chip allows fans to access player videos, competitions and other content by bringing their mobile devices close to the ball. The feature is included in the 2018 FIFA World Cup match ball that’s sold on the Adidas website for $165 (reduced to $83 in the past week).
Adidas declined to comment on whether the chip could be a vector of a Russian hack. There is no suggestion that such balls or their chips have any security vulnerabilities. The chip itself can’t be modified, according to the product description on the Adidas website. “It is not possible to delete or rewrite the encoded parameters,” it says.
While the logo on the ball advertised the presence of the chip, it couldn’t be determined from the photos whether the chip might have been removed, replaced with actual spy gear, or, even more remotely, whether the entire ball itself was fabricated for the event and only resembled the Adidas model in question.
“The security screening process that is done for all gifts was done for the soccer ball,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in an email. “We are not going to comment further on security procedures.” The White House declined to say whether any modifications to the ball had been identified or where the ball would be kept going forward.
The chip is the same technology used in some contactless payments, including those with Apple Pay and Google Pay.
In theory, such tags can be programmed to initiate an attack on a phone, at least one hacker has shown. In 2015, Forbes reported that an engineer used an NFC chip to send a nearby Android phone a request to open a link that -- if the user agreed to open it -- installed a malicious file that took over the phone.
However, such a multi-stepped attack via a soccer ball seems unlikely, said Linus Neumann, a spokesman for the Hamburg-based Chaos Computer Club, a hacker collective that for decades has exposed weaknesses in German banking, government and other computer systems. Adidas, a German company, would normally be in the CCC’s sights, but not in this case.
“Trump would have to ignore multiple security warnings and intentionally install a malware on his device,” Neumann said, adding that such a hack working would depend on the president, “falling for a silly attack like this.”
Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific
=>
***********************************************
Read More Here: Putins Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip, Logo Indicates
************************************
=>
Sponsored by E-book Vault - Free E-book's
=>
This article was searched, compiled, delivered and presented using RSS Masher & TrendingTraffic
=>>
Putins Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip, Logo Indicates was originally posted by Viral News 2
Sunday, August 5, 2018
The Accused Russian Agent as Trump Republican
Here are some things we know about Maria Butina. She is a 29-year-old white woman with an enthusiasm for guns who has attended multiple National Rifle Association events, socialized with NRA leaders and repeated NRA talking points.
She attended Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's 2015 announcement seeking the Republican nomination for president, and later supported Republican Donald Trump for president. She attended the National Prayer Breakfast, a Republican gathering place, in Washington this year.
Butina published an article in a conservative journal advocating close ties between Republicans and United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin, citing shared values and the GOP's support from "social conservatives, businessmen and those that support an aggressive approach to the war against Islamic terrorism."
In addition, she has had a romantic relationship with an older male Republican operative who introduced Butina to other Republicans and appears to be the type of entrepreneurial grifter that is a mainstay of movement conservatism.
The most obvious conclusion to draw from this brief profile? Maria Butina is a Republican.
Federal prosecutors might dispute that characterization. They jailed Butina last weekend on charges that she is a Russian agent who worked surreptitiously, on orders from a close crony of Vladimir Putin’s, to subvert U.S. politics for Russia’s benefit. But in the era of Trump, days after a summit in Helsinki, Finland, that forced the entire world to reckon with just how blatantly subservient the American president is to the Russian president, the distinction between Russian and Republican is not what it once was.
Butina appears to have been shrewd enough to recognize that herself. In 2015, she made a trip to South Dakota and spoke to a teen Republican group. According to Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican and current congressional candidate who attended the event, Butina "described Putin as a dictator and a tyrant.”
That, at least, was her message to the kids in flyover country. Back in Washington, however, where Butina assiduously courted conservative activists in the gun movement and the religious right, she recognized that her new friends were engaged in a racial struggle and culture war so intense that they might be open, even eager, to align with Putin to defeat their real enemy: fellow Americans.
Putin is a thug, but for Trump, obviously, and for many of his conservative acolytes, increasingly, Putin is a thug to admire. Polls have shown rising Republican support for Putin’s Russia despite Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe, Russian carnage in Syria, Russian murders of journalists and of Putin’s political opponents, and even Russian cyberattacks against the U.S. According to a 2017 Pew survey, the share of Republicans expressing confidence in Putin doubled from 2015 to 2017, from 17 percent to 34 percent.
Like Trump, some Republicans have weighed Russia’s attack on the Democratic Party in 2016 and concluded that they very much like what they saw. Two-thirds of Republicans approved of Trump’s summit in Helsinki, where the only known accomplishment was Trump’s obsequious exoneration of previously documented Russian sabotage. As the Trump team’s collusion with Russia, both open and covert, has come into clearer focus, many Republicans are moving from “No Collusion!” to “So what?” as their inevitable default.
Yet in a Republican Party where many are still wary of gangster politics, Butina chose her targets well. The gun militants of the NRA and the Christian militants of the religious right are Trump’s most unflinching supporters and pillars of the GOP’s authoritarian-racial wing. Those who are not already fans of Putin’s racist, homophobic, macho and militaristic Mother Russia are increasingly Putin-curious.
Putin clearly sees the potential for transnational white Christian solidarity. Dozens of Russians attended the most recent National Prayer Breakfast in February. As the New York Times reported:
In 2013, Bryan Fischer, then a spokesman for the American Family Association, called Mr. Putin a “lion of Christianity.” In 2014, Franklin Graham — the politically influential evangelist and vocal Trump supporter — defended Mr. Putin for his efforts “to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” even as he lamented that Americans have “abdicated our moral leadership.” In December 2015, Mr. Graham met privately with Mr. Putin for 45 minutes.
Butina didn’t camouflage her Putin connections in courting the NRA. She flaunted them. She worked as an assistant to Alexander Torshin, a Putin crony, oligarch and high-ranking member of United Russia, who had already been welcomed into the NRA’s embrace with a lifetime membership and social engagements with NRA leaders – despite credible allegations that he is has connections to organized crime.
Butina arranged a 2015 NRA trip to Moscow under the auspices of Right to Bear Arms, a small, strange Russian gun-rights group that she ostensibly leads – though she has been in the U.S. on a student visa since 2016 -- and which apparently remains unoppressed by a Russian government with little interest in large numbers of citizens bearing arms. Butina called the group a “Russian version of the NRA.” A 2012 article in the New Republic described it as “a soup of communists and nationalists.”
One NRA luminary on the trip, right-wing provocateur David Clarke, was Milwaukee County sheriff at the time and included the trip on a county financial disclosure form. According to Clarke's disclosure, the little Russian version of the NRA was flush enough with funds to pay $6,000 of Clarke's expenses in Russia.
Clarke tweeted that the NRA delegation had met with the Russian foreign minister, further evidence both that Butina’s outreach to the NRA was blessed at the highest level of the Russian government and that the NRA understood that very well. In pushing Republican gun extremists to ally with Putin’s Russia, Butina appears to have been pushing on a door that, at the very least, was flimsy and ajar.
In documents filed in Butina’s case, the U.S. Department of Justice wrote: "Moscow seeks to create wedges that reduce trust and confidence in democratic processes, degrade democratization efforts, weaken U.S. partnerships with European allies, undermine Western sanctions, encourage anti-US political views, and counter efforts to bring Ukraine and other former Soviet states into European institutions."
Just as Willie Sutton frequented banks in search of money, the implication of the criminal case against Butina is that she targeted the GOP because that’s where the extremism and authoritarianism are. To the current leader of the Republican Party, and to millions of his followers, the Justice Department’s description of Moscow’s espionage doesn’t read like an indictment. It reads like an agenda.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net
Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific
=>
***********************************************
Post Source Here: The Accused Russian Agent as Trump Republican
************************************
=>
Sponsored by FreePLRArticles.biz
=>
This article was searched, compiled, delivered and presented using RSS Masher & TrendingTraffic
=>>
The Accused Russian Agent as Trump Republican was originally posted by Viral News 2
Swedish student’s plane protest stops man’s deportation ‘to hell’
Elin Ersson refused to sit down on Gothenburg flight until man being sent to Afghanistan was removed
A lone student activist on board a plane at Gothenburg airport has prevented the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker from Sweden by refusing to sit down until the man was removed from the flight.
Her successful protest, footage of which spread rapidly across the internet, shines a spotlight on domestic opposition to Swedens tough asylum regime, at a time when immigration and asylum are topping the agenda of a general election campaign in which the far right is polling strongly.
I hope that people start questioning how their country treats refugees, Elin Ersson, 21, told the Guardian in an interview. We need to start seeing the people whose lives our immigration [policies] are destroying.
The social work student at Gothenburg University bought a ticket for the flight from Gothenburg to Turkey on Monday morning, after she and other asylum activists found out that a young Afghan was due to be deported on it. In fact he was not on the plane but activists discovered another Afghan man in his 50s was onboard for deportation.
As she entered the plane, Ersson started to livestream her protest in English. The video received more than 4m hits on Tuesday.
Facing both sympathy and hostility from passengers, the footage shows Ersson struggling to keep her composure. I dont want a mans life to be taken away just because you dont want to miss your flight, she says. I am not going to sit down until the person is off the plane.
Repeatedly told by a steward to stop filming, Ersson says: I am doing what I can to save a persons life. As long as a person is standing up the pilot cannot take off. All I want to do is stop the deportation and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal and I have not committed a crime.
When an angry passenger, who appears to be English, tries to seize her phone, she tells him: What is more important, a life, or your time? I want him to get off the plane because he is not safe in Afghanistan. I am trying to change my countrys rules, I dont like them. It is not right to send people to hell.
After a tense standoff, during which the airport authorities declined to use force to eject Ersson, passengers broke into applause when the asylum seeker was taken off the plane.
Ersson told the Guardian she had been volunteering with refugee groups for about a year.
People [in Afghanistan] are not sure of any safety, she said. They dont know if theyre going to live another day. As Ive been working and meeting people from Afghanistan and heard their stories, Ive been more and more in the belief that no one should be deported to Afghanistan because its not a safe place. The way that we are treating refugees right now, I think that we can do better, especially in a rich country like Sweden.
As the country heads towards a general election in September, Swedens centre-left coalition government is keen to keep up expulsions of asylum seekers whose applications have been turned down. If you get rejected, you have to go home otherwise we will not have a proper migration system, the prime minister, Stefan Lfven, said last year after an Uzbek asylum seeker whose claim had been rejected drove a truck into shoppers in Stockholm, killing five people.
After Taliban violence increased in January, the country briefly halted deportations to Afghanistan. But the Swedish migration board stands by its assessment that the country is a safe destination for asylum seekers whose claims have been turned down.
In its most recent assessment, the migration board said Taliban attacks had been aimed mainly at the military or foreigners, and violence against Afghan civilians was rare. As for a bomb in an ambulance in January that killed at least 95 and injured many more in Kabul, the board said it was unclear whether the purpose was really to attack civilians.
Tens of thousands of deportation cases are expected to be handed over to the police as the country continues to process a backlog of asylum applications, after 163,000 people claimed asylum in Sweden in 2015. Last year, the border police deported 12,500 people, while the rate of expulsions so far this year is slightly higher.
Normally deportations go peacefully, according to a spokesperson for the police in Swedens west region. But occasionally the process is disrupted by demonstrators such as Ersson or by asylum seekers themselves.
You do it once or twice, and if it doesnt work we rent a private plane to send them back to Afghanistan, or wherever, the spokesperson said.
Erssons protest was a civil and not a criminal case, he said. Should the airline and passengers decide to prosecute, Ersson could face a substantial fine.
When the refugee crisis began to escalate 2015, Sweden made it much harder for refugees to get into the country and asylum applications fell sharply. In 2016 almost 29,000 people claimed asylum, followed by just under 26,000 last year. So far this year, asylum applications are running at about 1,500 a month.
The fates of the young man due to be deported on Monday, and the man who was on the plane, are unknown. A spokesperson for the Swedish Prison and Probation Service confirmed that the young man would be deported again, once transport was found. The Swedish border police in Kalmar, responsible for the attempted deportation, did not return calls from the Guardian.
Ersson believes the young man was taken to Stockholm and put on a flight there already.
This is how deportations in Sweden work. The people involved know nothing and they are not allowed to reach out to their lawyers or family, she said. My ultimate goal is to end deportations to Afghanistan.
Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific
=>
***********************************************
Post Source Here: Swedish student’s plane protest stops man’s deportation ‘to hell’
************************************
=>
Sponsored by AMA News
=>
This article was searched, compiled, delivered and presented using RSS Masher & TrendingTraffic
=>>
Swedish student’s plane protest stops man’s deportation ‘to hell’ was originally posted by Viral News 2
Trump, Juncker Tout Deal Pulling Back From U.S.-EU Trade War
President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to suspend new tariffs while negotiating over trade, pulling the U.S. and Europe back from the edge of a transatlantic trade war.
The leaders pledged to expand European imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas and soybeans and both vowed to lower industrial tariffs, excluding autos. The U.S. and European Union will “hold off on other tariffs”’ while negotiations proceed, as well as re-examine U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and retaliatory duties imposed by the EU “in due course,” Juncker said.
“We had a big day, very big,” Trump said during a press conference with Juncker at the White House on Wednesday. “We are starting the negotiation right now, but we know where it is going.” Trump hailed “a new phase” of trade relations.
The deal eases tensions stoked by Trump’s threat to impose new tariffs on car imports. U.S. stocks and bond yields rose on signs of optimism that a U.S.-EU trade war could be avoided.
Trump added they would try to “resolve” steel and aluminum tariffs he imposed earlier this year and retaliatory duties the EU levied in response. The U.S. and EU will work together to reform the World Trade Organization, Trump said.
You Think GM’s Forecast Was Bad? Look What Auto Tariffs Would Do
Trump and Juncker took no questions after their brief remarks in the Rose Garden, an impromptu appearance scheduled after about three hours of talks.
Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, said he applauded the move to de-escalate tensions over tariffs.
“I’m glad. I think it’s going to help defuse some of the concern out there, not only in farm country but in our economy generally,” Portman said. “It’s a first step. We’ve still got to work out the details. But it’s been hard these last few weeks to see any light at the end of the tunnel,” with no signs of progress with the EU, Mexico, Canada or China.
The truce may prove to be short lived if the two sides can’t resolve their differences over trade in vehicles and car parts. In May, Trump abandoned a framework for trade negotiations with China within days of it being announced, before ratcheting up tariffs.
‘Semi-Truce’
‘‘They sold it as something very positive, but for me the announcement is not as big for now, because it’s kind of a semi-truce,” Marie Kasperek, associate director of the global business and economics program at the Atlantic Council, said by phone. “As long as the steel and aluminum tariffs are ongoing, the EU will not negotiate on a high-level basis.”
Trump says a 10 percent tax on imports of cars to the EU is too high compared to the 2.5 percent rate charged by the U.S, and he’s also been critical of the EU over its $150 billion trade surplus with the U.S.
Still, the deal announced Wednesday with the EU is an encouraging sign that America’s trade partners may be able to placate the Trump administration with offers to buy more U.S. goods, averting a trade war that the International Monetary Fund has warned may undermine the strongest global upswing in years.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a group of major automakers that includes General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp., welcomed the effort to negotiate a solution that will lower trading barriers, rather than increase them.
“Today’s announcement demonstrates that bilateral negotiations are a more effective approach to resolving trade barriers, not increasing tariffs,” the alliance said in a statement.
Final Effort
Juncker came to Washington for a last-ditch bid to avoid U.S. tariffs on cars. He told reporters he entered Wednesday’s meeting with the intention of reaching an agreement with Trump.
“We agreed that no other tariffs would be introduced as long as we are in the negotiations,” Juncker said during a speech in Washington after his press conference with Trump. “I’m happy that we agreed to this agreement today.”
Trump warned at a cabinet meeting last week that he would move forward with 25 percent auto tariffs if the meeting with Juncker didn’t go well. Trump could impose car tariffs on national security grounds once Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross completes a required investigation, which could come anytime before a deadline by early next year.
Auto tariffs at the level Trump has threatened would add about 10,000 euros ($11,700) to the sticker price of a European-built car sold in the U.S., according a European Commission assessment obtained by Bloomberg News last month. That would cut U.S. imports of European cars and car parts in half, the commission forecast.
Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific
=>
***********************************************
Post Source Here: Trump, Juncker Tout Deal Pulling Back From U.S.-EU Trade War
************************************
=>
Sponsored by E-book Vault - Free E-book's
=>
This article was searched, compiled, delivered and presented using RSS Masher & TrendingTraffic
=>>
Trump, Juncker Tout Deal Pulling Back From U.S.-EU Trade War was originally posted by Viral News 2