Emmanuel Macron's New Campaign Trail

Click to enlarge. Image Source: 4chan via Twitter.

Hackers have opened the e-mail account or accounts of the favoured French electoral candidate, Emmanuel Macron, and dumped 9 gigabytes of the contents online, current up to 24 April 2017. BBC:

"The campaign said that genuine files were mixed up with fake ones in order to confuse people. ...

About nine gigabytes of data were posted online by an anonymous user.

The details are unclear so far, but Mr Macron's En Marche movement said internal campaign documents, including emails and financial data, had been taken in an 'act of massive, co-ordinated hacking'.

'The leaked files were obtained several weeks ago by hacking personal and professional email accounts of several officials of the movement,' it said in a statement.

The campaign said the documents showed only legitimate campaign activities.

France's election authorities have warned media outlets against reporting on the contents of the leaked documents because of the restrictions now in place. ...

That too remains unclear. The Macron camp has not blamed any specific party but said the hack clearly aimed to damage it and undermine French democracy[.]

It compared it to the leak of Democratic Party emails in last year's US presidential election that was blamed on Russian hackers.

Wikileaks, which published those emails, posted a link to the Macron documents on Twitter but implied it was not responsible."

The NYT, which is firmly anti-Le Pen, reported that Le Pen's campaign also faced regular (unsuccessful) hacks during the campaign. Some people on Twitter think the hack is Russian; some think the hackers were American. Some think the hack is fake. Liberals think it is anti-democratic and Russian or neo-Nazi-sourced.

Exoplanets In Kepler's Eye

Click to enlarge. Image Source: Stellarium.

I have the free program Stellarium on my computer and set it to show the night sky on my computer while I am reading. I turned on the 'exoplanets' option and jumped! What are those alien green blobs? In the screenshot above, the green circular grid near Vega in the night sky shot for 4 May 2017 shows where the Kepler space telescope has focussed, with corresponding discoveries of exoplanets. They are marked as bright green dots. There is another cluster of exoplanets in the bottom corner in the constellation of Sagittarius, by the star Alnasl and the planet Saturn.

April 17, 2014. NASA's Kepler Telescope Discovers First Earth-Size Planet in 'Habitable Zone' pic.twitter.com/iE2k8LgVSy

— History (@HistoryTime_) April 17, 2017

EVE Online crowdsources the search for distant planets using Kepler space telescope https://t.co/3ph1AcP7vb pic.twitter.com/mVpksOuwtQ

— Neowin (@NeowinFeed) April 10, 2017

Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope trails Earth in a heliocentric orbit. NASA's Kepler and K2 projects have yielded several thousand exoplanets, of which 21 are almost habitable like Earth. A list of the projects' news releases is here. On 20 April 2017, the lead Kepler scientists were included among Time's 100 most influential individuals in the world:

"Three extraordinary planet-hunters have been recognized by TIME Magazine as this year’s top 100 most influential people: Natalie Batalha from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; Michael Gillon from the University of Liège in Belgium; and Guillem Anglada-Escudé from the Queen Mary University in London.

'It is truly exciting to see these planet-hunters among the other movers and the shakers of the world,' said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics division director at Headquarters in Washington. 'These scientists have transformed the world’s understanding of our place in the universe, and NASA congratulates them for their well-deserved recognition.'"

Later in 2017, players of the MMPORG game, EVE Online, are participating in the crowd-sourced scientific discoveries of Kepler exoplanets. Raw Kepler data will be added to the game.

Your Cyber Smile for Today: Curing Deafness

I never get tired of watching this. A deaf baby hears his parents for the first time. pic.twitter.com/2NJ1c1knSj

— Daniel Hannan (@DanielJHannan) April 28, 2017

Some readers cannot see the embedded video. This is the same video on Youtube. Video Source: Youtube.

Google's Infogate

Google was initially listed on 4 September 1998, hosted by Stanford.edu, having been developed by a couple of Gen X PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Image Source: Business Insider.

This post is the first of several on decentralized information dynamics and real-fake, mainstream-alt news. I will start with the beast behind it all. On 4 September 1998, the search engine Google first appeared online. It is hard to believe, because it feels like a short time ago, but it was a pivotal moment between the way the world was and what it is now.

It used to be that if you wanted to find information you had to amass a personal book collection, and visit libraries and archives. You built a professional or amateur reputation as researcher. You had to get to know people - contacts, translators - who knew things, and travel around the world to see sequestered books, diaries and sealed files. Everything had to be taken down in pen and paper notes.

Orson Welles's sarcastic scene from Citizen Kane (1941), in which a journalist is granted permission to read in a private library which holds the unpublished memoirs of a deceased banker. Video Source: Youtube.

Once photocopiers existed, if the archivist was inclined, you would be permitted to photocopy small amounts of material at exorbitant rates. An average person might find one or two books at the bookstore or library, or have saved newspaper or magazine articles in a personal, physical, metal filing cabinet. That was it.

Before the Internet, information was hard won, and knowledge, wisdom and judgement about information even more so. The latter required time, contemplation, and reflection in total silence. It also demanded discussions with others who had done the same. It was a fundamentally different way of thinking.