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Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
It's also sort of funny that PiS and PO both existed mostly to oppose each other and yet kept swapping members between each other all the time.

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Residency Evil
Jul 28, 2003

4/5 godo... Schumi
Thanks for the refresher. My parents moved to the US 30+ years ago, and my mom (from the South of Poland, and from a working-class family) seems to be following the news and on the side of the PiS, although doesn't have a very cohesive opinion on the matter beyond saying that the government has been corrupt. As an outsider, I just look at the regressive policies that PiS seems to have been responsible for over the past few years and shudder, but it sounds like there isn't a very viable party to oppose them at this time?

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.

Residency Evil posted:

on the side of the PiS, although doesn't have a very cohesive opinion on the matter beyond saying that the government has been corrupt

Yeah, I think you've got a fairly accurate view of PiS' electorate.

And yeah, the opposition is in shambles.

The formerly respectable (in terms of size) parties - Civic Platform and the Democratic Left Alliance have descended into a spiral of self-destructive incompetence and stupidity, with Civic Platform still the top dog by pure virtue of being too big to fail (despite its current leader striving really, really hard to self-destruct) and the rest of the opposittion being equally regrettable. Democratic Left Alliance are practically dead now, forced to mingle with miniscule leftist forces such as the Greens, but they might snatch a few seats come next election. You'll probably be able to count them with one hand.

When it comes to new forces, .Nowoczesna (Civic Platform 2.0, or Poland's Hillary Clinton wannabees) had a fair chance of truly succeeding the Civic Platform, but their leader is a real oaf happy to squander all their chances. They do have a cool female politician on the forefront of the current and past pro-constitutional/judiciary protest and honestly if they make an internal coup in favor of her, the party could go far.

KOD, the nominally apolitical organization behind most of the mass demonstrations since the elections first got abused as a self-promotion platform by the old guard politicians and then got sorta humilitated by their leader/organizer turning out to be really dumb and corrupt. The anti-abortion ban Black Protest spawned a bunch of women-centric organizations fiercely opposing whatever dumb poo poo PiS is trying to push at a moment, but so far they're really more a resistance catalyst than a particular political force you could vote for.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke is Janusz Korwin Mikke. The Polish People's Party (PSL) is PSL. They're really two of universe's constants.

Razem are cool young leftists that still scrape by because we have a US-level disgust for the word "socialist" here. At least they get invited to TV now.

Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jul 25, 2017

Rincewinds
Jul 30, 2014

MEAT IS MEAT
Trump is finally prioritizing the issue of Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/889788202172780544

:v:

SaltyJesus
Jun 2, 2011

Arf!
stolen from Reddit:

Yesterday in Poland there were two speeches at the same time, given by the President and the Prime Minister


:laffo:

SaltyJesus
Jun 2, 2011

Arf!
also https://blog.marai.me/2017/07/24/18-year-old-arrested-bkk-tsystems-e-ticket/

18 year old guy arrested for reporting a shamefully stupid bug in the new Budapest e-Ticket system

quote:

The amount of stupidity in this story warrants that this is going to be somewhat long, so I start at the end: as the title says, an 18 year old guy was arrested two days ago for 'hacking' the new Budapest public transport e-Ticket system a week before, even though he immediately reported the vulnerability he found.

As the story has stirred the online and the social media, this outrageous move from the police brought about fierce reaction resulting in tens of thousands of 1-star reviews on the facebook pages of the companies involved: the Budapest Transport Authority (operator of the new service, abbreviated as BKK for its Hungarian name) and T-Systems Hungary, developers and maintainers of the e-Ticket System. T-Systems Hungary happens to be owned by Telekom Hungary, which itself is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems is also a brand of DT and is a pretty big player being present across all Europe. (The reason the reviews landed on the global/German page instead of the Hungarian one is that the latter doesn't have this feature enabled.)

The story started a few weeks ago, when the BKK announced that it would launch mobile based a e-Ticketing system. Everyone, including me, was enthusiastic and surprised at the same time. We knew that they have been working on an NFC/smart card based system for around 4 years, without any visible result despite the millions of EURs spent. (The last article I've seen quotes 9 million EURs as the final cost.) The first questions that came to my mind when I heard the announcement were: 'How come so suddenly, without any previous rumours, news?' and 'I wonder how will they make it really hard to cheat, what copy protection/authentication mechanisms will be there...'

The answer to the first question, well, at least the partial answer, is that they wanted it to be available for the visitors of the FINA world championships, that is being held in Budapest right now. Even more cleverly, they timed the public launch to be on the day of the official opening event (14th July). This already stinks a bit. First of all, of course, you don't just launch such a system in a city, with a pretty large public transport system and 1.7 million people, without serious testing. For example the public bike system, built by the same company, was in public beta with thousands of testers for months, even though it has far less users and far smaller importance. Second, you definitely don't launch it during an event that attracts a lot of extra tourists. Third, if the goal is to be usable by the visitors, you probably want it to be available at least a few days before the opening event, because well, a lot of them will arrive early.

But the second question is more intriguing: how do you make it secure. What we knew ahead is that the e-Ticket would be web based, so no app install is necessary, which makes it even harder to fight tricksters. (Otherwise a user friendly move in itself.)

Now what happened on launch day was unexpected even if you are an overly cynical 'been there, done that' type of software engineer born in a small, Central (or Eastern, if you will) European country during the Soviet era. Yes, of course there were problems, yes of course, the ticket was simple to copy between devices, but it was even worse. We quickly learned about a few serious flaws (as reported by the non-government controlled part of the press):

  • the system stored the passwords in clear text and it emailed it to you if you asked for a password reminder. Now, this means that for most people, anyone who had access to the system, got probably access to their email account as well. (Because, let's be hones, most people will just use the same password everywhere.)
  • after logging in, people were also able to get the data of other users (probably through manipulating the url, the news report was not 100% clear here). I.e. the app didn't have proper permission handling. Some people claimed that they were able to access the profiles of other users this way. Now, to register, you have to provide your name, your address and an ID number (national id, driving license or passport). These have to be real, because you may have to prove ticket controllers that the pass belongs to you.
  • if you just typed in the url (shop.bkk.hu), the site just wouldn't appear. At first I thought they've taken it offline, but it turns out that they just didn't set up the http -> https redirection. And it was left like that for days. If you just heard about it, you couldn't use it. You had to click a link (normal users won't figure out to put an https in front of the host name, even I didn't think of it).
  • the ticket wouldn't show up properly in Safary on iPhones.
  • someone found out that the admin password was adminadmin and managed to log in using that.
  • of course the tickets were 100% copyable, a few guys made a video of passing ticket control 10 out of 10 times without being caught. The ticket controllers used a QR reader only twice (majority of them doesn't have it, nor knew much about the app at all) and even then they wouldn't be caught. (Unsurprisingly, I would add.)
  • but the most ridiculous flaw, and as far as I know the first security issue to have been discovered, was that you could just set the price for the pass you were about to buy.

This last one was the one found by the 18 year old gentleman I started my story with. According to him, he doesn't even know how to program yet (he'll start the university this autumn). He just used the developer tools in the browser, that everybody has access to, saw that the price was being sent back to the server when he was about to make a purchase, and tried if he could change it. A monthly pass costs 9500HUF (about 30EUR) and he modified the price to 50HUF. When he got the confirmation that it worked and was able to see his pass in the app, he immediately emailed the BKK (the Transport Authority) that there was a serious problem. He got an email that his pass was invalidated, but otherwise they didn't get back to him. Instead, when it got leaked out to the press, and in a few hours everyone were talking about the above issues (not just this one), BKK together with T-Sytems Hungary started to, what I would call, massively covering their arses.

They started to talk about a series of hacker attacks (which may have been true), how the society wasn't acting like grown ups, that every system can be broken but their firewall has caught a number of attacks, that people were using indecent names for registration, that they have of course deleted, etc.

One T-Systems Hungary representative also told at a press conference four days later, that they are happy to receive bug reports AND that they have reported one case, that was definitely an illegal hacking attempt. While they have also mentioned what sounded like SQL injection attack attempts, you could be just sure that it was the poor 18 year old 'hacker' who was stupid enough to email them. BKK representatives talked about how the system was under continuous attacks, of which none were successful, that no need to stop the system, everyone's data is safe.

And a week later the news broke out that he was taken from his home by the police in the early morning and taken to custody. (He was released after a few hours.) Now, of course, in a normal country, in a well functioning democracy whoever reports a suspected crime is not responsible for whatever the police does afterwards. (Even if that's totally assholish and amateurish from their part to do so, instead of saying thank you and maybe giving a small bounty.) But in such a country the police doesn't raid the house to catch someone who is not dangerous to the society. Especially if it's not legal. And in Hungary, according to the law, this was pretty much illegal. The only reason they did this is to threaten.

After the ensuing outrage, they have softened their tone, going from 100% accusation and denial to a kind of a "we're sorry that it happened to him". Even the CEO of T-Systems wrote a somewhat apologetic post, but never admitted that reporting the guy wasn't the best thing to do (instead he pointed at internal policies that he said compelled them to do so) or that the system doesn't meet the expectations. He talked about how this was controversial and demonstrating how there wasn't a widely accepted consensus about ethical hacking. But the interesting thing is that, first of all, they earlier talked about how this was not ethical hacking because no one asked the guy to do it and also, of course, if anyone looks at the reactions from the IT professionals, then it becomes 100% obvious that there is a pretty strong consensus on this among us.

If you start to put together the pieces it starts to look really-really bad for all the parties involved.

  • BKK ordered and accepted a system that was full of amateurish errors. Make no mistake, your average just-out-of-the-bootcamp junior developer would have created a better solution than this in one or two weeks. Even if you think it's an exaggeration, it wouldn't have been a problem for an experienced engineer.
  • T-Systems Hungary agreed to develop (probably with an unrealistic deadline) a solution that couldn't have been good enough even if built properly. (Assuming that it wasn't their task to figure out how to make the tickets hard to copy or cheat with.) And then they've built it out as they did. And then some manager said OK, let's do a release.
  • BKK pays T-Systems Hungary 80kEUR/month to operate this system. Which sounds surprising, because the 80k sounds like enough to cover all the development cost of a decent implementation of this idea. Or maybe 2-3x the 80k of you add a few managers, some extra testing and just a little bit of corruption. (I haven't factored in the QR readers + mobiles used by some ticker controllers, but those seem to be pretty few and far between so far.)

You might ask the question: why was it so-so loving urgent to do a release for the FINA championship? They said at the press conference that they wanted to test it and gather experiences, so that they can perfect the system by September, when the (public transport) high season starts. But let's forget about the BKK people, as that organization is controlled by the politics top down. How come any sane professional manager would let this pile of crap into release? Didn't any of the engineers on the team tell their managers that something isn't right? I find it hard to believe.

Again, was it related to the FINA event? Why are these guys covering up so violently? Knowing Hungary it's somewhat granted that people just don't like to admit if they have screwed it up. But usually it's the strongest when politics is involved. Add to this the unwarranted arrest of the guy who reported a bug. They could, or according to some lawyers should, have just cite him. Oh, BTW, and according to the law, what he did very probably wasn't even illegal. He was reported for 'unauthorized influence' of the system, which is covered by the paragraph about 'fraud committed using information systems', but the conditions mentioned therein are not met. Which makes it hard to believe that the police did their job properly (or maybe that the T-Systems Hungary guys provided all information they reasonably could).

UPDATE: He is being a suspect based on a different paragraph than I thought: unauthorized access to a computer system or data. IANAL, but after reading into it, that doesn't seem to hold either.

UPDATE2: The BKK CEO told the press that they didn't receive the original report from the guy, because he sent it to the wrong email address. Of course, this was refuted with a screenshot pretty quickly.

seriously read those bolded bullet-points, I have seen some stupid poo poo before but this is in another league

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
They'll find a way to pin it on George Soros.

Cat Mattress
Jul 14, 2012

by Cyrano4747
"adminadmin"! I got the same password on my luggage!

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend

Lichtenstein posted:

- The Smoleńsk plane crash was successfully spun into some JFK-assasination grade poo poo

JFK? No. Nobody serious believes JFK was kill`65432q1`by an NWO second shooter.* It's Benghazi with a side order of Buttermails and a spicing of birth certificates: thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that refuses to die because it is supported by high-ranking authorities and keeps getting from simply bullshit to legitimately crazy spinoffs.

*He was obviously murdered by the NWO third man, Hollywood Hulk Hogan.

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
Right-wing butthurt over Duda's veto has birthed this wonderful article.

For those not blessed by understanding of the moon language, nor google translate, one of the right-wing rags wrote about secret service supposedly making a psychological profile of Duda right after election and launching the satirical series Chairman's Ear to strike at his overblown ego* to pressure him in the future (now).


* The only part of this somewhat resembling reality is that of all the PiS officials, he was the one somewhat butthurt by his portrayal on the show.

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
One of PiS' parliamentarians:



(He's likening Duda to the Red Army during the Warsaw Uprising, perhaps the most PiS thing ever said outside of "Tusk did Smolensk")

HUGE PUBES A PLUS
Apr 30, 2005

https://twitter.com/StollmeyerEU/status/890156063953125377

Elukka
Feb 18, 2011

For All Mankind
How meaningful is that? By a quick googling Article 7 seems to require an unanimous decision by the European Council (i.e. all heads of state) for anything to happen, and that seems to me unlikely to ever happen.

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
I remember that over the weekend - where a daily fine was discussed as a punishment in case of passing the Supreme Court nonsense - there was an idea of making a resolution targeting both Poland and Hungary, so they couldn't veto for each other as the subjects.

Rincewinds
Jul 30, 2014

MEAT IS MEAT
So will Slovakia do it instead?

Plastic_Gargoyle
Aug 3, 2007

To lighten the mood, here's a bizarre response to the EU moving to sanction Poland that doesn't come from wacky Polish Nationalists:

quote:

Their democratically elected parliament was altering the system they use to interpret their laws. By definition not only is that sovereignty at a base level but also by definition that's the rule of law itself.

Thus the EC is fundamentally wrong here

I'm not sure how it's possible to be this blind.

Mind you, the person that said this also said that the only reason the EU was breaking off negotiations with Turkey was because of Islamophobia. And the proof of this was that many EU member states didn't meet their own definition of "democratic nations" that they were trying to hold Turkey to.

Pizdec
Dec 10, 2012

Residency Evil posted:

Thanks for the refresher. My parents moved to the US 30+ years ago, and my mom (from the South of Poland, and from a working-class family) seems to be following the news and on the side of the PiS, although doesn't have a very cohesive opinion on the matter beyond saying that the government has been corrupt. As an outsider, I just look at the regressive policies that PiS seems to have been responsible for over the past few years and shudder, but it sounds like there isn't a very viable party to oppose them at this time?
You got some really nice write-ups here, so all I'll add are two major reasons behind PiS still polling strong after two years of incompetency, in contrast to the immediate downswing Trump experienced:
1) The 500+ social welfare programme. Receiving the equivalent of a nice crisp $100 every month can go a long way in shaping a voter's opinion (it may not sound like much, but it's like one third of the net minimum wage here). The electorate of PiS roughly corresponding to the number of people eligible for the programme is no coincidence.
2) There is a weird preconception that while PiS may not be the shining beacon of progress and democracy, at least they are the ones keeping the Musselman away from Poland and as such are the right choice right now (this is despite the fact that the few dozen refugees the previous ruling party accepted promptly hosed off to Germany forever after facing the prospect of learning Polish).

So, much like Putin and unlike Orban, PiS would probably be able to win another term quite easily without any shenanigans, they just got greedy.

floppo
Aug 24, 2005

Pizdec posted:

You got some really nice write-ups here, so all I'll add are two major reasons behind PiS still polling strong after two years of incompetency, in contrast to the immediate downswing Trump experienced:
1) The 500+ social welfare programme. Receiving the equivalent of a nice crisp $100 every month can go a long way in shaping a voter's opinion (it may not sound like much, but it's like one third of the net minimum wage here). The electorate of PiS roughly corresponding to the number of people eligible for the programme is no coincidence.
2) There is a weird preconception that while PiS may not be the shining beacon of progress and democracy, at least they are the ones keeping the Musselman away from Poland and as such are the right choice right now (this is despite the fact that the few dozen refugees the previous ruling party accepted promptly hosed off to Germany forever after facing the prospect of learning Polish).

So, much like Putin and unlike Orban, PiS would probably be able to win another term quite easily without any shenanigans, they just got greedy.

Unfortunately I think Orban will also win next year quite easily with limited shenanigans.

RedSnapper
Nov 22, 2016
The Polish government continues their new, secular tradition of smashing their limos into "civillian" traffic. This time the car carrying our vice minister of the interior veered onto the opposing lane, straight into an oncoming BMW.

In other "news" Donald Tusk was called in (as a witness) by the prosecutor's office. Apparently regarding the Smoleńsk air crash murder.

Anne Frank Funk
Nov 4, 2008

RedSnapper posted:

The Polish government continues their new, secular tradition of smashing their limos into "civillian" traffic. This time the car carrying our vice minister of the interior veered onto the opposing lane, straight into an oncoming BMW.

But this time it was his wife driving not a brave BOR officer. Women drivers, right? :rolleyes:

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
Also:
- Unable to change the Supreme Court judges in time, one of PiS-appointed constutitional tribunal judges* and Ziobro-led prosecution are pushing to just straight up suspend Kamiński's case.
- Gazeta Wyborcza claims to have leaked radio chats of the police surveilling several opposition leaders.
- Fan favorite Antoni Macierewicz went on a rant claiming the protests were a clear example of a hybrid warfare attack aiming to create a pan-european liberal superstate that needs to pillage Poland to sustain itself.

* As a quick reminder, said appointment is very legally questionable in and of itself, while Duda's pardoning of Kamiński is bound to fail in a non-PiS controlled court, as it involved shenanigans such as pardoning a person who has not been formally found guilty.

Cat Mattress
Jul 14, 2012

by Cyrano4747

Lichtenstein posted:

- Fan favorite Antoni Macierewicz went on a rant claiming the protests were a clear example of a hybrid warfare attack aiming to create a pan-european liberal superstate that needs to pillage Poland to sustain itself.

What the gently caress is there to pillage from Poland? Isn't the country's only natural resource the Worst Coal in the World?

RedSnapper
Nov 22, 2016

Cat Mattress posted:

Isn't the country's only natural resource the Worst Coal in the World?

Our coal is best coal, everybody knows that - claims to the contrary are just the liberal, left, green conspiracy talk.


Cat Mattress posted:

What the gently caress is there to pillage from Poland?

It only seems that way - as soon as we beat back the EU-Russia axis that's robbing us blind we'll be a land of milk and honey.

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




Saakashvili has been stripped of Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko.

OddObserver
Apr 3, 2009

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Saakashvili has been stripped of Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko.

Kinda a dick move, since it seems like he gave up his Georgian one to get it.

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




OddObserver posted:

Kinda a dick move, since it seems like he gave up his Georgian one to get it.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-georgia-saakashvili-idUSKBN0TN1S220151204

Cat Mattress
Jul 14, 2012

by Cyrano4747

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Saakashvili has been stripped of Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko.

So now he's stateless, since he has also been stripped of Georgian citizenship?

Isn't it forbidden by UN treaty to strip someone of citizenship if they don't have any other?

fatherboxx
Mar 25, 2013

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Saakashvili has been stripped of Ukrainian citizenship by Poroshenko.

Now he can be a proud citizen of the world, sipping wine in NY while chewing his best tie.

It is dumb and infuriating every time Ukraine imitates its large neighbour, surely they would get at this point that reputation hits are not worth perfomative bullshit but nooo

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




It's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in more ways than I would like to.

E:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp_nSKTyOZE

:eyepop:

cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jul 27, 2017

Kekekela
Oct 28, 2004
Russian's apparently hit a Ukrainian ammo depot with a drone delivered thermite grenade and caused about a billion dollars worth of damage, video is pretty incredible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpwEZ_9VLD8



http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/news/a27511/russia-drone-thermite-grenade-ukraine-ammo/

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




That's pretty cool if true, damage dealt asides.

Rincewinds
Jul 30, 2014

MEAT IS MEAT
It was back in March, but dont think it was posted about here before.

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




Rincewinds posted:

It was back in March, but dont think it was posted about here before.

It was.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

I recall the video and such being posted, but not that it was a thermite grenade from a drone. Ordinarily i'd say it's excuse-casting, but the previously documented instances seem pretty damning.

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




TheDeadlyShoe posted:

I recall the video and such being posted, but not that it was a thermite grenade from a drone. Ordinarily i'd say it's excuse-casting, but the previously documented instances seem pretty damning.

Thermite grenade was not discussed indeed, but isn't this a very recently development?

Kekekela
Oct 28, 2004

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Thermite grenade was not discussed indeed, but isn't this a very recently development?
Yeah, the way its being talked about made me believe it was more or less "breaking news" http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/lat...-video-sanction http://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...e-ukraine-ammo/

steinrokkan
Apr 2, 2011



Soiled Meat
A Banderist leader in Ukraine has died in the middle of his party's assembly

https://twitter.com/xbCC0981LdF25kD/status/884747826382725120?ref_src=twsrc

Grouchio
Aug 31, 2014

steinrokkan posted:

A Banderist leader in Ukraine has died in the middle of his party's assembly

https://twitter.com/xbCC0981LdF25kD/status/884747826382725120?ref_src=twsrc
Neat.

What's the general opinion of Viktor Orban? He seemed like a drat good patriot back in 1989.

Fabulous Knight
Nov 11, 2011

Grouchio posted:

What's the general opinion of Viktor Orban? He seemed like a drat good patriot back in 1989.

He was one back then, but he is an rear end in a top hat wannabe Putin now, whether he really believes in being one or is just playing a role. These days he is remarkably much like the people he helped depose in 1989.

Then you've got the moron in the Czech Republic and Poland needs no introduction at this point. The V4 has really taken a nosedive in the 2010s, even though it hasn't really affected EU unity. Yet, anyway. Their position on migrants places a huge strain on others however, even if I understand migrants not wanting to move to those places. But maybe the Visegrad condition ATM is just a reflection of how much time it takes to truly transform societies politically.

Fabulous Knight fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Jul 29, 2017

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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Dump Hungary and Poland, rehabilitate Czechia.

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