Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Nervous Democrats

32 Comments

I suspect that Greg Sargent is a canary in the coal mine about the Hillary coronation.

[Update late morning]

Mollie Hemingway fisks Hillary’s press conference within an inch of its life.

[Update a few minutes later]

Am I the only one who thought it bizarre that she would have been using a decade-old machine for her server? She said that it had originally been installed during her husband’s administration, which means no later than 2000 (though it could have been earlier). That means it was probably a Pentium III or a K6-2 running at best about half a gigahertz, and it likely had at most 64 megabytes of RAM. If it was a Windows machine, it would have been running 98. Again, at best. If it had been installed earlier, it might be running 95, on an older, slower machine, with less memory. If it was running Linux (which it would have been if I were setting up a mail server), it would probably be better.

Fast forward to 2009. Now, for a few hundred bucks, you can buy a new machine, dual core at 2 GHz, with several gigabytes of RAM running Windows 7 (or Linux). Why would you be trusting your email to what was, at that point, an antique, not just in power, but in reliability?

I don’t believe her. I don’t understand the point of this particular absurd lie, though. She didn’t even have to say how she acquired it. She could have just said they purchased it from Dell. It’s not like we’re ever going to get our hands on it to verify that.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why the Clinton emails matter, politically.

[Late-afternoon update]

OK, now it’s a full-blown document destruction scandal.

They were doing the same thing all through the nineties. The only difference is that she blatantly admitted it in the press conference. She’s always gotten away with destroying evidence before, why wouldn’t she think it could go on forever?

[Friday-morning update]

Hillary’s favorability plummeting:

As her book tour showed, Hillary is a political mediocrity … at best. That’s why she lost the nomination in 2008 to a one-term Senate backbencher even with Bill trying to pull her across the finish line, and that’s when the Clintons were still culturally relevant. If a reasonably gifted Democrat challenged her, Hillary would likely lose the nomination again. If Democrats move forward with the coronation, those trend lines will have 20 months to develop into yet another electoral disaster for Hillary.

Yup.

32 thoughts on “Nervous Democrats”

  1. A lot depends upon the Dem’s purpose for the debates with “opponents”:

    If the purpose is to salvage Hillary’s campaign, and burnish her reputation by throwing up opponents whose only function is to lose to her, well then it’s a sham (pretty much like every other Dem activity).

    Democrat party debates are only meaningful if the opponents are striving to win the primaries and if the media doesn’t play favorites.

  2. No, you’re not the only one who thought it wacky that she would be using a some-15-year-old-server. The first obvious thought is that the reason is that they have to continue to hide stuff dating back to Bill’s terms, so why not use the same machine if you you’re going to add to such stuff.

    The next is that when she spoke of the server she was not talking about the hardware, but inadvertently indicating that all the “stuff” from Bill’s term has carried over to later model servers. Uh-oh… 😉

  3. I don’t understand the point of this particular absurd lie, though. She didn’t even have to say how she acquired it. She could have just said they purchased it from Dell.

    Narcissists do that. It’s part of demonstrating to themselves how stupid and gullible other people are. In this case, she knows the claim can never be proven, ha-ha you stupid rubes!, so it can be as audaciously absurd as she cares to make it. “But not to worry, the IT experts I’ve spoken with assure me that the Coleco Adam we used for our server is completly un-hackable.”

  5. I don’t know about you, but I use cheap ancient machines for various services because they just last forever. I used a 1996 era pizzabox machine for a firewall up until just a couple years ago when I ‘update it’ to a box from circa 2002. I remember a Linux box that got accidentally walled up and that kept ticking for years.

    If a server machine is doing its job, there is simply no reason to update it unless you are making a fashion statement.

    1. So you are sayin’ that Secretary Clinton is a nerd hacker who pulls an old “pizza box” out of the basement closet, slaps on a ‘Nix distro, and runs her own server?

      Cool!

  8. My server is always my oldest working machine that’s not stupidly slow. It’s not exactly hard work to serve up a few files and web pages and send around emails.

    Currently I’m using a 1.25 GHz G4 PowerPC Mac Mini circa 2005.

    *No* *one* is writing malware for PowerPC machines now.

    Oh, and I’ve got a Pentium 3 acting as my router and counting packets to allocate internet costs to different users.

    At a previous job, we used a 68030 Mac SE/30 as the server for many many years after all the clients were PowerPCs. It was still able to full up the ethernet connection, so what difference did it make?

  9. I still use my 10 year old black MacBook Pro as backup. It’s a bit clunky, but it still works just fine. So why wouldn’t Hillary use an older machine? She’s almost certainly not a computer techie. Having said that, if her campaign gets derailed by the email issue, Republicans can only hope that the donkeys are suicidal enough to nominate Elizabeth Warren, and not O’Malley or Webb, especially Webb.

  10. The email server wouldn’t be Windows 95 or 98; it would likely be Windows NT, which was and still is a fairly solid server OS. As server hardware got better, it could have been ported into a virtual machine and run on pretty much any platform. As Bruce Hoult notes above, after awhile hackers start focusing on newer systems.

    Still, the whole press conference had some of the same tone deafness to regular Americans as her claim to be broke after leaving the White House. She was so broke that she purchased a multi-million dollar home and sent her daughter to a Ivy League school, while her husband went speech to speech earning 6 figures each one. Fortunately, she had enough money to afford her own email server so she could conveniently avoid having to carrying two mobile devices. Thankfully, the Secret Service was willing to guard the server and her husband, which saved enough money for her to have a chauffer since she couldn’t drive herself.

      1. NT 4.0 Support ended December 31, 2004. Next option would be Server 2000, support ended July 2010. Then Windows Server 2003, which will end support this coming July. Then there is Windows Server 2008.

          1. My last certification was for NT 4.0, but Windows Server 2008 says it is IA-32 compatible, and IA-32 goes back to 386 processors (good news for ISS!). Minimum System requirements are 1 GHz processor, 512MB, and 20GB HDD. 386 and 486 could barely get to 100 MHz overclocked. Pentium III was first marketed 1 GHz processor and it was released in 1999. Hold that… the Pentium III 1000 wasn’t released until March 2000. 20 GB HDD were available, especially for server grade systems. 512MB RAM was doable.

            But the Clinton’s were broke, so perhaps they started with a Pentium II on a Slot 1 with 64MB and upgraded over time. And perhaps the Easter Bunny will come and drop eggs in my yard next month.

    2. “She was so broke that she purchased a multi-million dollar home and sent her daughter to a Ivy League school, while her husband went speech to speech earning 6 figures each one. ”

      And she was so brave that she withstood (non-existent) sniper file in Tuzla…..

      ….and so determined to punish those responsible for the Benghazi murders that she vowed to go after a video maker (who had zero to do with the event)….

      ….and so determined to go for convenience that she had only one device upon which to communicate (except her iPad and Blackberry)….

      ….and so determined to obey the laws as she is required to do that she turned over all her documents the moment she left office (2 years later)…..

      …and so willing to go the “unprecedented” extra mile in turning over the documents 2 years later that she turned over 60,000 *pages* (not emails..printed pages) and none of them included a single missive from her 2001 trip to Libya……not one…… and the stuff turned over has months-wide gaps……….

      none of which is believable.

  11. IMHO, we’re overlooking the glaringly obvious regarding why the Clintons would go with such “obsolete” hardware; security (seriously).

    Yes, older systems are more vulnerable to hackers in a conventional sense. However, let’s not forget the NSA’s bag of tricks, which includes planting spyware on hard drive firmware. That’s almost impossible to detect, and even harder to get rid of.

    So, when it comes to security, the “obsolete” hardware makes perfect sense from a security POV, if the NSA is a bigger worry for the Clintons than forign hackers. In fact, the age of the hardware argues strongly for this interpretation.

    That, of course, begs the question of why.

      1. Indeed. At the very least, her current bout of ever-increasing foot-in-mouth would have attained even more amusing depths.

  12. Two thoughts:
    1) The private email server is typical Clinton – too clever by half.

    2) I wish somebody would actually talk to some Democrats about the coming Clinton “coronation.” There is a significant “anybody but a Clinton” wing to the party (in my case because of #1, above) and has been since at least 2008.

    2. For those, who might be lean towards the GOP, that want Clinton because she may be easy; I disagree. I want to good candidates on both sides. I’m tired of the Jim’s of the world “both sides do it.” I want both sides to not do it. Send Rove, Powell to jail, its fine. Palin was punished. Clean house!

      Also, ABB!

      1. Republicans should take heart from the Clinton scandal; while such goings-on will make her very easy to beat, we can faithfully rely on the Republican party’s unrivaled ability to snatch defeat from the looming jaws of victory.

        Oh, wait… take heart? That’d be assuming that Republicans want Hillary to win. Sorry, I overlooked that little detail, but then again, so does the freaking Republican “establishment” who thinks it’d be just great to saddle us with an unelectable candidate while also arrogantly flouting all their campaign promises from 2014…

      2. ack…. that was a badly written post on my part. I’m glad CJ could make something of it.

        GOP is just as bad at putting forward an unelectable candidate. Really, the press deserves blame on both sides for this, because they prefer candidates that create scandal or interesting stories. The gaff machine of Biden is just fine by them, because he can be a story on a slow day.

  13. Turns out that the server was easily…all too easily…hacked:

    Hackers, probing Clinton server, cite security lapses
    James Rosen, Fox News

    Some excerpts:

    “Stirred by the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state, a determined band of hackers, IT bloggers, and systems analysts have trained their specialized talents and state-of-the-art software on clintonemail.com, the domain under which Clinton established multiple private email accounts, and uncovered serious lapses in security, according to data shared with Fox News. …

    Fox News has previously reported that, with the aid of software named Maltego, experts had established that the server is up and running, receiving connectivity to the Internet through an Atlanta-based firm called Internap Network Services Corporation. Clinton’s stern insistence at her news conference that her server “will remain private” would appear to rest, then, at least in part, on the inviolability of Internap.

    Now, working with publicly available tools that map network connectivity, experts have established that the last “hop” before the mail server’s Internet Protocol, or IP, address (listed as 64.94.172.146) is Internap’s aggregator in Manhattan (listed as 216.52.95.10).
    …….
    they took the relatively simple step of examining the source code on the front page of clintonemail.com. This yielded the discovery, sources told Fox News, that the Clintons have not been using the latest version of Microsoft Outlook Web Application (OWA) to send and receive emails. The most recent version of OWA is listed as 14.3.224.2, whereas tests show clintonemail.com to be using the older 14.2.390.1.

    “[It’s] an indication they’re not keeping up with software upgrades,” one hacker told Fox News. “If I were a bad guy, I’d start looking for any vulnerabilities in that older version they’re using.”
    ……….
    Perhaps most concerning, private analysts determined that clintonemail.com has been running an older model of Microsoft Internet Information Services, or IIS – specifically version 7.5, which has been documented to leave users exposed on multiple fronts. The website CVEDetails.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate security vulnerability datasource,” is awash with descriptions of serious security vulnerabilities associated with version 7.5, including “memory corruption,” “password disclosure vulnerability,” and the enabling of “remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service.”

    The cyberlab technician who discovered the Clintons’ use of version 7.5 marveled at “the vulnerabilities the Clintons are ignoring” in an email to Fox News. “This is a big deal and just the thing real-world hackers look for in a target and will exploit to the max,” the source said.

    “Several of these vulnerabilities have been known since 2010 and yet HRC is running official State comms through it.” ”

    and so on.

    RTWT

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/03/12/hackers-probing-clinton-server-cite-security-lapses/

    1. At this point, it would be a national service for someone to hack it and turn over the contents. But they’d have to get the physical drive to recover deleted information.

      1. Wouldn’t it be funny if someone did that and Clinton and/or the government went after them for hacking a machine that had…..

        classified info on it?

      3. Actually, there’s no reason they couldn’t recover deleted files remotely. It requires gaining access to the server, then running a program that images the hard drive. There’s no reason that can’t be done via the internet. The key is the “disk image,” which, instead of “copying” the contents of the drives, reads each bit and records it unchanged. In Linux, “dd” will do that. It all doesn’t have to happen in the same computer, or room, or country.

  14. I do not understand the eagerness on the Republican side to help Hilary self destruct now. Wait for her to sew up the Democratic nomination first.

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