Here’s something we seldom see.
A high school senior from Fairfax, VA has been appointed to all four military academies.
No, that is not a misprint. The article says ‘all four main military academies’. It includes the Coast Guard Academy. The Marines come out of Annapolis.
http://www.fox5dc.com/news/local-news/231838829-story
He’s also following in the footsteps of other family members.
I hope he chooses wisely.
My congratulations to him. That is a real accomplishment.
Weren’t we in Somalia a while back? I think we were. Might have been a Tuesday.
If what is going on there is a civil war, I think that’s the wrong term for it. It is just constant, overwhelming destruction of everything.
The morning news is that there was another car bomb in Mogadishu which badly damaged a hotel. Some of the residents were fooled into leaving their rooms by the perps, who then killed them.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/somalia-gunmen-storm-hotel-capital-car-bomb-45029923
I would hardly use the term war-torn for that country any more. It is insufficient.
ZDNet reports on the latest data dump by Potomac Healthcare Solutions a subcontractor of Booz Allen Hamilton, they posted your PII to the web;
Many of the victims involved in the data leak are part of the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which includes those both formerly employed by US military branches, such as the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and those presumably still on active deployment. ]
The bulk of the data is made up of military personnel files and lists of physical and mental health support staff, including nurses, doctors, and mental health professionals.
Names, contract types, Social Security numbers, and duty start dates — dating back to 1998 — as well as billet numbers that detail the living quarters for when staff are not on active duty, are all included in the information leak.
Unit assignments and places of work, which include military bases and their postings worldwide, were also in the documents.
11 Gigs of PII were released because of unsecure computers sharing information – almost as if it was planned.
[Chris Vickery, lead security researcher of the MacKeeper Security Center, who found the data on the open web]’s discovery, however, was not as the result of any complicated heist, malware infection, or attack on the researcher’s part.
Rather, it was the subcontractor’s own insecure server and use of “rsync,” a common protocol used for synchronizing copies of files between two different computers, which weren’t protected with a username or password.
Thanks to Bobo for the link.
James Walker Morales, the former Army Reservist who stole 16 guns from a U.S. Army Reserve Center in Worcester, Massachusetts back in 2015 has escaped from jail in Rhode Island;
The prison warden said Morales climbed up onto a basketball hoop, cut through wire, got onto the roof during outside recreation, then jumped down and climbed a barbed wire fence to get out. Blood was found in various areas of facilities, so officials believe Morales is wounded and bleeding from the razor wire.
Morales is described as 6’1″ and 180 pounds with brown eyes and black hair. He has a large eagle tattoo on the left side of his neck and was bald at the time of his escape.
The car he stole when he absconded was found at a girlfriend’s house in Framingham, Massachusetts. The car he stole happened to have the keys in it and it was running when he found it.
Before the media blames his “specialized training” for his escape – the Army doesn’t teach us to be criminals. Morales has a long criminal record going back more than seven years, blame that instead.
MSN reports that two Fort Bliss, Texas solders, barracks buddies Jake Obad-Mathis and Melvin Jones, went missing last week;
Obad-Mathis and Jones were members of the same company at Fort Bliss following their enlistments in 2015. They were last seen on the base on Dec. 19 in a black 2013 Camaro that belonged to Jones.
Obad, 50, said she found out they were missing two days later. A sergeant called her to say her son had been declared AWOL after failing to report for duty on Dec. 19 and the following day.
Obad-Mathis was supposed to spend Christmas with his commanding sergeant, KTSM-TV reported Saturday.
Jones was supposed to attend Friday’s Sun Bowl football game in El Paso with his father Duane Jones, the station reported.
“When I got off the plane and looking for him and not having him looking for me, yea that was the hardest,” the father told another station, KVIA-TV.
According to the Wall Street Journal, spam filters stopped hack attempts into the RNC’s emails;
Russian hackers tried to penetrate the computer networks of the Republican National Committee, using the same techniques that allowed them to infiltrate its Democratic counterpart, according to U.S. officials who have been briefed on the attempted intrusion.
But the intruders failed to get past security defenses on the RNC’s computer networks, the officials said.
Imagine that, basic security training worked. The same security I use when I get stuff in my email that I don’t trust.
From Business Insider;
Messages sent to that address were quarantined by email filters traditionally designed to stop spam and potentially malicious emails, the experts said. GOP officials apparently had no idea hackers tried to breach their systems until June, after Democratic Party leaders announced that they were hacked, according to another unnamed source cited by The Journal.
The report said Republican leaders suspected they too may have been targeted and brought in a cybersecurity firm to investigate. The FBI later got involved, the newspaper said.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post and the New York Times tried say that RNC’s emails weren’t released by WikiLeaks because of hackers’ partisan intentions, but it seems that folks at the GOP were just better at cybersecurity than the Democrats. As if we didn’t already know that.
The Detroit News reports that voting machines in most of Detroit’s precincts reported more votes than voters;
Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.
[…]
Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the retabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.
The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.
So, I guess that one kind of backfired.