71 Comments

I wish this kind of thing could be in high-school "If you have an emotional reaction: DON'T SHARE IT".. If you stop and think, soooo many of these things stop working.. But, stopping and thinking is hard.. It's a skill like any other, take lots of practice..

Expand full comment

Awesome pre-bunking Ryan.

Expand full comment

Pre-bunking is my new favorite term.

Expand full comment

Careful with that term.

Expand full comment

I prefer the term ‘Emotionally true’ instead of truthiness. It accurately describes what is happening to people

Expand full comment

I like that.

Expand full comment

'Emotionally true' is easier to understand and most effective when I'm conversing with my maga friends and associates.

'Truthiness' is a great contribution to the rest of us towards understanding the "mind"set of maga followers.

When Stephen Colbert popularized it, it helped me from cutting off all communications with some people close to me that I never want to turn my back on such as fellow marines I shared combat with.

So, thank yous (I'm from Brooklyn) to both Mike and Stephen for your contributions to keeping a few comm lines open. Semper Fi

Expand full comment

Great work Ryan thanks for covering this (from Australia)

Sad the disinformation.

The police inspector who shot him was an Inspector - like an area commander very rare to be frontline, well done to her.

Would love to see you over here

Expand full comment

Best $50 I spent this year. Separate the wheat from the chaff.

Expand full comment

Love your work Rysie. Quick off the mark with this one. Can I just help you with your pronunciation please. It’s Bon-Dye, not Bon-Dee. Cheers

Expand full comment

Is that a bottle of Winford Reserve in the background?

Expand full comment

Angel's Envy

Expand full comment

I drank a bottle a few years ago and my daughter took the bottle the minute I finished it and made a vase out of it. Good stuff.

Expand full comment

That was my second guess

Expand full comment

Those Chinese actors will also push two other narratives. One being that knives should be better regulated. The other being that this is the “inevitable result of the radical disarmament of Australian citizens” that’s happened over the last few years. The goal, again, being to divide the nation.

Expand full comment

I'm a Sydneysider who is somewhat familiar with that area. I personally wouldn't call Bondi Junction a "Jewish area", Jews would still be a minority, but certainly Jews are thicker on the ground there than in the rest of Sydney. There's a synagogue about ten to fifteen minutes' drive away from the shopping mall, for example. And plenty of Eastern European migrants, many Jewish, play in the Bridge clubs in nearby Rose Bay. (Eastern Europeans are bloody strong players too IMX.)

Expand full comment

From another Sydney sider well put.

Expand full comment

I know you mainly focus on disinformation, but as a software developer, could you do a video on the Linux vulnerability that was found? Does it seem like a state actor or is it something else?

Expand full comment

xz Backdoor CVE-2024-3094

March 30, 2024Blog

xz Backdoor CVE-2024-3094

By Bennett Pursell, Ecosystem Strategist, OpenSSF; Harry Toor, Chief of Staff, OpenSSF; Omkhar Arasaratnam, General Manager, OpenSSF

https://web.archive.org/web/20240331024907/https://openssf.org/blog/2024/03/30/xz-backdoor-cve-2024-3094/

Expand full comment

The very fact that you had to link to a two week old article on archive.org should be all anyone needs to know about its reliability.

Expand full comment

Which one? First of all, "Linux" generically refers to an operating system with the Linux kernel and a Gnu Project user space. The reality of the hundreds of Linux distributions, however, is they get libc from one place, a compiler from another, whatever network daemons from a myriad of different projects, a whole world of other user utilities from another myriad of projects, ad nauseum.

They can all encounter vulnerabilities on any given day.

Now, if you're referring to the recent xz/liblzma "supply chain" attack which could be exploited via OpenSSH , we'll...

I'm pretty tuned into I.T. security and I wondered if a state actor could be behind it, so I did a lot of reading and searching on the topic.

What I found was a definite "maybe." There's lots of people that think it could be, but there's no definite evidence, one way or the other.

Expand full comment

While I appreciate you taking the time to respond, your need to be pedantic is one of the final things preventing Linux and open source projects from becoming accepted by the general consumer. You went on a long explanation about how I was being unspecific and using the wrong terminology, only to then go on and answer the question in a way that showed that none of said specificity mattered because you knew exactly what I was talking about.

So long as there are people who insist on being right instead of being helpful or even being a jerk about being helpful, this world is worse off. They say you can always tell when a Vegan, a linux user, and a crossfitter are around, because they will tell you.

My main point is that you knew what I meant, so why did you feel the need to correct my terminology, that anyone in the field would understand anyway, instead of just answering the question.

Expand full comment

Two things:

I didn't know, I made an educated guess.

Joke's on you; I'm a FreeBSD user.

Expand full comment

It's really sad. There was a mother named Dr Ashlee Good that died later in hospital after trying to protect her baby from the stabber. The baby underwent ongoing surgery and is still in hospital

Expand full comment

Funny how the old Nazi regime and then in the 50’s, in the USofA, trumpie mentor Roy Cohn, his support of Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” scam, adopted the Nazi strategy of wrapping lies w/ snippets of truths… and now the MAGA trumpies are just soaking that flagrantly BS propaganda up likes flies muster to dog poop

Expand full comment

Not cool to insert politics here, but interestingly, ever since we saw NSA and Soviet archives it turns out that Joe McCarthy wasn't as wrong as some like to think. Look up the Washington Post write up on it.

Expand full comment

Yes, I was going to say McCarthy's methods were questionable, but history has proven his suspicions to be largely accurate.

Expand full comment

You see it your way, I see it my way - the bottom line is just like there is at least a smidgen of truth in most jokes, effective perpetrators of propaganda likely do so via the integration of some semblance of fact/truth that fits their narrative - the simpletons amongst us, instead of assessing further in search of more information so as to better understand what is being said, simply accept said claims as fact and further advance that which aligns to their chosen narrative

Expand full comment

Great piece, very accessible and clear. The great advice "If you have an emotional reaction: DON'T SHARE IT" will be a tough one to adhere to though, since almost all advertising has some element of fishing for an emotional reaction, though now that I think of it, it is pretty good advice about advertising too. "If you have an emotional reaction: DON'T BUY IT"

Expand full comment

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-uni-student-trolled-for-being-bondi-junction-killer-in-a-terrible-case-of-mistaken-identity-20240414-p5fjoo.html

Here is an article today down here in Australia where some missinformation about the attacker being a Jewiah man, and it wasnt him at all but it spread like wildfire

Expand full comment

Ron.I live in South Australia & it's all over bar the the shouting they have found that he has a mental health problem , that is why he know to police & it was a single a

police woman who shot & killed the attacker .The child was in the news as the person attacked was carring a child .As far as the news feed goes it's still early days but the cops did good no mention of jews in the paper at all. Sorry if my news is all over the shop but I'm a bit off this morning. ptsd

Expand full comment