Shouldn’t the lesson be, “don’t put your conspiracy online”?

If you’re plotting something and want to recruit a horde of fellow conspiracy theorists to join you, the go-to company you call to provide “confidential” web services is Epik.

Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post.

Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

They also host anti-abortion groups, including that prolifewhistleblower page (which has since been removed). You’d think someone would realize that if your group requires support from an organization that also supports Nazis and Proud Boys and kooks and violent militias, maybe you should question the company you’re keeping.

It’s a notorious den of villainy, as you can tell. But maybe not anymore…would you trust your evil plan to a company after this?

But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.

Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.

“It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”

The founder of Epik, Robert Monster (surely one of the most appropriate names ever) is busy denying that any leak happened and is pretending that it’s all business as usual. Everyone else, however, is laughing at their incompetence, except maybe the far-right individuals who trusted them. They’re probably too busy trying to hide their trail.

Since the hack, Epik’s security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who’ve marveled at the site’s apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public.

The files include years of website purchase records, internal company emails and customer account credentials revealing who administers some of the biggest far-right websites. The data includes client names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords left in plain, readable text. The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.

This is going to be so entertaining. Probably also disappointing as the bodies are unearthed, and the American justice system does nothing.

I’ll just say that the only individuals who have ever been trusted with my Grand Elaborate Scheme to Rule the World are the spiders I whisper to, and they’ll never crack. It’s going to be such a surprise!

A cure for arachnophobia? On your phone?

You may have noticed that I abstain from showing photos of spiders here, because when I do I get so many piteous complaints from people who are grossed out and terrified by innocent little spiders. And here I was working with my lovely crop of over a hundred babies yesterday!

I don’t know if it really works, but there’s an augmented reality app called Phobys that you can download that uses your phone’s camera to generate images of cute little spiders in familiar places, using exposure therapy to help you adjust. I downloaded it to see — screenshot below the fold — and the “test” to see if you’re arachnophobic is free. I’m not. The “training” module to get increasing exposure levels is $5, and I didn’t pay for it. I can find real spiders anywhere, so I don’t need virtual ones.

Also, though, I’m not worried about it. It’s not like the COVID-19 vaccine — no one dies of arachnophobia, and you can even live a perfectly normal life with it, unless it’s a pathologically extreme case.

You’re just missing out on some of the beauty and wonder in the world.

[Read more…]

She made her choice

Kristen Lowery, 40 year old mother of four, anti-vaccine fanatic, chose poorly.

She’s dead of COVID-19, leaving behind a GoFundMe to pay for her funeral expenses.


Meanwhile, here in Stevens County, MN, we’re having a little spike, with 63 new cases reported yesterday.

There are only 10,000 people in the county, so this is a fairly substantial number. I’ll also note that this surge hasn’t made an appearance on campus yet — we don’t have good testing and reporting requirements, but we do have a vaccine requirement, and none of our dedicated quarantine spaces are currently in use.

That spike is just among the townies, I think — all those people who are running around maskless, going to church, going grocery shopping, hanging out in the bars, dropping by the pharmacy to pick up cold remedies…acting like plague lice. It sure is hard to be sympathetic anymore.

Yes, Elvira, I’m angry at someone

But not you. I’ve long been a fan of Cassandra Peterson, AKA Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, because she’s goofy and kitschy and flamboyant and doesn’t take her persona at all seriously. Now she has come out, and revealed that she’s been in a same-sex relationship for almost 20 years, but was afraid to go public about it.

The two have been together for more than 19 years now, with Wierson taking on the role of Peterson’s assistant. They had to keep the relationship quiet because, as Peterson writes, the couple felt they had to protect the Elvira brand. “Would my fans hate me for not being what they expected me to be?” she shares in the book, adding, “I’m very aware that there will be some who will be disappointed and maybe even angry, but I have to live with myself, and at this point in my life, I’ve got to be truthful about who I am.”

And Peterson’s truth? She writes that she’s never been happier. “For the first time in my life,” she writes, “I’m with someone who makes me feel safe, blessed, and truly loved.”

Her fans would not hate her or be disappointed or angry with her for being her true self. The only disappointment is that we have to live in a culture that makes love something to be ashamed of.

I escaped in time!

I got out of Facebook, but the stench still follows me. Yesterday, a reader told me about a new Facebook group that was recruiting. It’s called “Skeptic Revival”, and its aim is to resurrect the old skeptical movement, you know, the kind of antique skepticism that existed before the Deep Rifts shredded everything, the kind of skeptical organization that Don Draper would have loved to join. The first problem is that Barbara Drescher is leading this effort, and I couldn’t imagine a worse person to rally a modern skeptical movement…until I saw the rogue’s gallery she’s assembled in her big tent.

There’s DJ Grothe, former president of the JREF who ignored sexual harassment complaints and lied about them.

There’s Ben Radford, creepy litigious sex pest who believes that girls have an evolved preference for pink.

Russel Blackford, generic philosopher and waffler in the middle ground who dislikes all those SJWs.

Abbie Smith, deranged hate-blogger (I thought Drescher despised those?) who started the Slymepit.

Just seeing these few names has me throwing up in my mouth a little bit — I wouldn’t want to be seen in public with any of these people, let alone join the same club. These are the people the rifts formed to separate us from their regressive brand of conservative skepticism, but there they are, standing on the far side of the chasm.

If you want to join them, feel free: here’s a link to Skeptic Revival. I will think less of you for joining, but I won’t know, I won’t be following their shenanigans, I’m not on Facebook, so you can secretly join the narrow-minded skeptic harasser’s club. No one who matters will know. Except yourself, of course.

Yet another of those stories

Dusty and Tristan Graham were a couple of Alabama eBay resellers, who made videos of their collecting trips which were interspersed with denunciations of vaccines and pandemic responses and all the usual ridiculous complaints by the gullible victims of rightwing ideology. Can you guess what happened a few weeks after they put out a video insisting that they weren’t never gonna get no vaccine? Of course you can. If it weren’t so deadly, it would be a joke.

According to a GoFundMe page set up by their children, Dusty died Thursday after battling COVID-19 for three weeks. His wife had “passed suddenly in her sleep” weeks earlier due to coronavirus complications on Aug. 25.

“Unfortunately Dusty and Tristan have both passed away,” the couple’s daughter, Windsor Graham, said. “Thank you for all the kind words and helping us during this difficult time. We will be using the money to pay for funeral expenses.” The announcement of their deaths follows an announcement from Dusty weeks earlier that he was in the ICU “battling it [COVID-19] out.”

Look, people. I’ve got two choices for you:

  1. Stop declaring to the world how useless the vaccine is and you aren’t going to take it. Pride goeth before the fall and all that. It’s just going to make you a target for derision if you do come down with it, and you’ll have enough anguish to deal with without the libs poking at your corpse.
  2. GET THE DAMN SHOT.

The worst part of it is that they’ve left behind a couple of kids (maybe adult children, at least) who have to deal with all of this grief and chaos.

For the love of god, get vaccinated. These stories are terrible and completely unnecessary. You don’t have to tell anyone, just go in and get the shot in secret, and take your loved ones in to get it too.

Irony gasps back to life! Thanks, Florida GOP.

Florida, America’s poxed appendage

Their finances are in a shambles now, because one man held the keys to all of the accounts.

After spending months railing against COVID-19 precautions and criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Republican Party official in Florida passed away this week — leaving his county-level GOP organization without access to critical financial accounts.

Gregg Prentice, 61, served as accountant for the Hillsborough County GOP and also chaired the organization’s committee for election integrity. A software engineer by trade, Tampa Bay’s local Patch outlet reported that he built and maintained the local Republican party’s campaign finance software last year and was responsible for filing its monthly reports to the Federal Elections Commission.

A FEC filing from the surviving members of the organization claims that Prentice died without sharing login information for these accounts, or any sort of instructions for how to use them. The letter also tells the regulatory agency it will likely need more time to complete a report on its August fundraising numbers, and foreshadows trouble compiling the local party’s financials for future months as well.

Can you guess how he died? Can you? Guess! The Republicans are frantically straining to get extensions, so they explained how.

As a Political Party Committee, we file our FEC reports on a monthly basis. For several years we have been submitting the reports electronically, and for over a year we have done this with software developed by one of our members, Gregg Prentice. Gregg’s software converted data from our Quickbooks accounting software to supply the information needed by the FEC.

Unfortunately, Gregg passed away suddenly from Covid 19 on Saturday, September 11, 2021. Gregg did not share the software and instructions for its use with our officers. We will have to enter the August data manually, and according to the information we have received from our FEC analyst, Scott Bennett, we may likely have to re-enter the data from our first 7 months of 2021. We will be struggling to get all of this entered in the proper format by our deadline on September 20, but we will try to do so with our best effort.

Killed by a virus he had denied. It would be sad if it weren’t so fitting.

In addition to his role compiling the Hillsborough County GOP’s financials, Prentice spent most of the past year fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, mask mandates and other pandemic safety measures. Like many other conservatives in public life, he took aim in particular at White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, writing on Facebook that America needed to “End Faucism.” He also argued that “we need more socialist distancing than we do social distancing.”

Think of all the work the party would have been spared if only Gregg had taken a few minutes to get vaccinated. The pandemic is going to not only cull Republican voters, but is going to disrupt their organization. I hate to suggest it, but in the name of our common humanity, go get the shot, Republicans and other kooks.

The most charming magical bar that has ever been

The other day, I got in my car and discovered a few fine strands of silk between the steering wheel and the dashboard. Just a few; some spider had been making a few exploratory leaps inside the car, leaving traces behind, and then probably left because there isn’t much spider food in there. It made me just a little bit happy, though. It’s good to see the little ones out and about.

I can only dream of someday owning a Cobweb Palace.

That’s the interior of a San Francisco saloon that existed between 1856 and 1893, established by a wise gentleman and kindred spirit named Abe Warner.

Cobweb Palace was unlike any other saloon in that it had dense spider webs fixed on the bar’s ceiling. More threads draped over the shelves that stored the liquor bottles. The spiders cast a veil over nude portraits on the walls, and some of the webs reportedly grew 6 feet wide at times. But Warner refused to destroy them.

“The spiders just took advantage of me and my good nature,” Warner told the San Francisco Chronicle. “When I first opened up here, I didn’t have time to bother with ‘em and they grew on me. It’s a great neighborhood for spiders, anyway, and the news got around among ‘em that I was easy and they founded an orphan asylum and put all the orphans to work spinning webs.”

All good things must come to an end, though, and the enchanted saloon eventually failed after a prosperous 40 year run.

Cobweb Palace would continue showcasing its curios, wild animals, and web-covered ceiling for nearly four decades, until the crowd outgrew their taste for the peculiar fortress Warner created. The saloon began to lose its luster in the 1870s, when the area became mostly industrial. Years later, the Sausalito ferries moved away from Meiggs’ Wharf, causing a bigger blow to Warner’s business.

Customers stopped coming to Cobweb Palace and Warner couldn’t make enough cash to pay the rent. The property owner had no choice but to evict Warner by 1893 to tear down the saloon and make way for new housing.

The end of Abe Warner was especially poignant. Is this me in a few years time? If it is, it’s not that terrible a way to go.

Warner is remembered in historic articles as a man whose only friends were the spiders, and in a way, they were. Warner’s best days were among the spiders that coexisted inside his bar as they kept him company long after the crowd abandoned him. Some webs had been undisturbed since the saloon’s inception until the auctioneers finally cleared them out.

Warner refused his daughter’s call to return to New York after the failure of Cobweb Palace. It would be too painful of a move after the decades spent in San Francisco. Even when local relatives wanted to take him in, Warner declined their offer, preferring his own solitude. Then, three years after the saloon’s permanent closure, Warner passed away in 1896 without a dime to his name. He was 82 years old and died alone, save for the spiders that watched over him until the very end.

What’s especially sad about that is that I haven’t accomplished anything as glorious as the Cobweb Palace. I’m going to have to get to work fast in my remaining years.

Also, anyone else read his story and think he sounds like a great character for an urban fantasy novel?