Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Past that, he could either refuse to pay, or declare bankruptcy. Both have legal downsides; both also rather strongly damage his public image. (Of course, if he cared about his public image, he would have gotten off this road a long time ago...)
Meh. That’s what they all say.
thats like saying a zip file must not contain any data because it didnt come with a copy of the unzip program.
the underlying arguments for this judgement are just as nonsensical as the contest
It simply scans files looking for strings, and outputs those strings.
Montgomery's code is incomprehesible and weird, so I wrote my own extract program in C. https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/blxtract
> One of the contest judges testified that the binary data would yield a spreadsheet similar to the other one analyzed during the contest. But "without column headings, we have already concluded that such a spreadsheet does not meet the definition of election data," the panel wrote.
I don't understand the panel's reasoning either. Nobody knows all that these .bin files contain. There's no evidence they are from the 2020 election, but no evidence they aren't. I didn't enter the contest because I thought the rule were rigged, that nobody could prove what these files don't contain.
They look like either randomly generated or encrypted data, within which ever couple megabytes a line of text has been inserted. The line of text is ROT3, which may be what Dr. Frank refers to as a "test" to see if people know what they are doing.
Graham did not find any such thing, and was disappointed that the Cyber Symposium was such a mess, and that he didn't get any PCAPs. So the winner of the challenge isn't alone in saying that the files provided were untainted by packet captures and had nothing to do with the 2020 election.
Could this be it?
I'm libertarian, not conservative leaning. I loathe and despise Trump. As a centrist, both polarized sides see me aligned with the opposing side.
The ~20 cyberexperts in attendance were invited due to their support of Republican causes. The two independnets were myself, invited through Lead Stories (a fact-checking firm) and Harri Hursti, invited through CNN. Lindell was so certain of himself that he invited his fact-checking adversaries CNN and LeadStories to come see for themselves. I'm a well known "pcaps" expert and a well-known centrist that doesn't have an ax to grind either way, so LeadStories sent me as their representatives. You'll find me debunking/confirming other fact stuff, like the AlphaBank-TrumpTower theory, or the Hunter-Laptop theory.
Lindell didn't give us pcaps. I think he honestly believed he had them. It's just that he's non-technical, and has no ability to judge whether somebody is technical enough to judge whether he has pcaps. He's also not very good at listening. It appears he surrounded himself with technical-looking people (like Phil Waldron) that assure him he had pcaps.
Lindell's claims are incredibly implausible. Election machines aren't on the Internet in the numbers Lindell claimed. But pcaps could answer questions. For example, the TTLs would show whether they were captured near the victim, near the attacker, or someplace in between (like an undersea cable). It's unbelievable they would show election hacking, but I was burning with curiosity about what they DID show.