You are not broken.
You are not behind. You are not lazy, too sensitive, too intense, or too weird. You may be a brilliant, feeling, pattern-seeing, meaning-making autistic being. You may not be, and that’s beautiful too.
The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) has claimed its first scalp with the sentencing of a corrupt Western Sydney Airport official who asked for a $200,000 kickback.
Sajish Erasery pleaded guilty to soliciting a corrupt commission after he attempted to invite a bribe from a company vying for a $5 million contract to provide automated parking systems at the soon-to-be completed airport.
Western Sydney Airport official who sought $200k kickback narrowly avoids jail time
Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005
How I Came to Be in the Epstein Files
A conspiracy wrapped in a conspiracy theory wrapped in an enigma
Boris Akunin sentenced in absentia
Popular Russian author Boris Akunin has been sentenced, in absentia, to fourteen years in jail; see, for example, the report in The Moscow Times.
Hey, the prosecution had apparently asked for an eighteen year sentence .....
Aside from the jailtime: "A judge ruled to ban him from operating websites for four years after his release".
Akunin presumably wasn't going to head back to Russia anytime soon anyway, but this certainly makes any return even less likely.
“Wikipedia is this economic anomaly. In many ways, it’s sort of magical that people will just volunteer without explicit economic incentives to create artifacts that are meant to share knowledge with everyone in the world”
The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever
Wired – no paywall – “The attackers were in thousands of corporate and government networks. They might still be there now. Behind the scenes of the SolarWinds investigation…According to the sources familiar with the incident, investigators suspected the hackers had breached the Justice Department server directly, possibly by exploiting a vulnerability in the SolarWinds software.
The Justice Department team contacted the company, even referencing a specific file that they believed might be related to the issue, according to the sources, but SolarWinds’ engineers were unable to find a vulnerability in their code. After weeks of back and forth the mystery was still unresolved, and the communication between investigators and SolarWinds stopped. (SolarWinds declined to comment on this episode.)
The department, of course, had no idea about Volexity’s uncannily similar hack. As summer turned to fall, behind closed doors, suspicions began to grow among people across government and the security industry that something major was afoot.
But the government, which had spent years trying to improve its communication with outside security experts, suddenly wasn’t talking. Over the next few months, “people who normally were very chatty were hush-hush,” a former government worker says. There was a rising fear among select individuals that a devastating cyber operation was unfolding, he says, and no one had a handle on it.
In fact, the Justice Department and Volexity had stumbled onto one of the most sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of the decade. The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers.
Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list…”
