Let's pretend for one moment that he does die before the election, just for the funsies. What happens then? Will the nomination revert to option number 2, aka Bernie Sanders? Or will his running mate automatically replace him just the way Vice-President is supposted to step in after the Big Man in the White House chokes on a piece of matzo? Does he even have a running mate yet?
US Joe Biden News Megathread - The Other Biden Derangement Syndrome Thread (with a side order of Fauci Derangement Syndrome)
- Thread starter Borscht
- Start date
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
HILLARY SAID MEAN THINGS!
Mnutu
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2020
I’m drunk enough to state the obvious; if the ideology outright states in every one of its forms that it is entirely antithetical to the core principles of our nation, it should be understood as an enemy and be totally opposed top fucking down.
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2020
To be fair, anyone who doesn't give unwavering support for Hillary and Co.'s "nation building" and forever wars, gets tossed swiftly into the basket of deplorables.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
I don't understand. Why now are many jobs hiring but nobody is working?
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
COVID gibs. Unemployment insurance pays more than what most workers make at most states' minimum wages. The extended benefits need to be terminated before they become quasi-universal basic income.
Minor PL, but I got laid off for about 9 or so weeks from work at the opening salvo of the pandemic. For those weeks on my state's insurance, I made a shocking amount of bank. It felt good. Too good. But it wasn't right to remain on it so I gladly went back to work when called after I realized around the summer that COVID was such weak-ass shit that was manageable even before vaccines got introduced.
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2019
Imagine being so obsessed with Jews vs Arab gypsies on an entirely different continent that you abandon all pretense of ideological unity and reee online that Joe Biden is equally obsessed but picked the wrong team.
I wish Hitler did kill all the Jews, because God I am sick of hearing about them,
I wish Hitler did kill all the Jews, because God I am sick of hearing about them,
MrJokerRager
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2019
People been conditioned slowly that fun is better than the wage cage along with deterioration of whatever remains of the American or Protestant work ethic.
FlappyBat
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
We Found Joe Biden’s Secret Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone.
www.buzzfeednews.com
BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.
On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
The president’s transactions are not public, and BuzzFeed News is not identifying the usernames for the accounts mentioned in this story due to national security concerns.
After BuzzFeed News reached out to the White House for this story, all the friends on the president’s Venmo account were removed. A White House spokesperson did not have an immediate comment.
After this story was published, a Venmo spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”
By late Friday night, the Venmo accounts tied to the president and first lady Jill Biden were no longer online.
Privacy advocates and journalists have warned about Venmo’s privacy problems for years, yet the PayPal-owned app has persisted with features that can place people — including the president of the United States — at risk.
While many critics have focused on how the app makes all transactions public by default, Venmo’s friend lists are arguably a larger privacy issue. Even if a Venmo account is set to make payments private, its friend list remains exposed. There is no setting to make this information private, which means it can provide a window into someone’s personal life that could be exploited by anyone — including trolls, stalkers, police, and spies.
No other major social network or service has contact-based friend lists that are publicly accessible by default to anyone — and that cannot be made private. People use Venmo to get paid, often using their real names. They often also import their phone contact lists or Facebook friend list — something the app highly encourages when you sign up — creating networks where people are automatically “friended” with dozens if not hundreds of other Venmo users and allowing them to find people they want to pay more easily. Venmo makes it impossible for users to hide their list of friends. To remove someone as a friend, a user has to unfriend the person manually.
Several former Venmo employees told BuzzFeed News that Venmo’s public transaction feed and friend lists were integral to the app’s early design. Launched in 2009 as a simple and free way to transfer money between friends, it relied heavily on the social dynamics pioneered on Facebook. People were unafraid to publicly share that they had paid their friends for pizza after a night out or were splitting a gas bill among their roommates.
The idea, according to one former engineer, is that building off someone’s social network was a much easier way for someone to trust who they were paying or receiving money from. Since then, the app has become one of PayPal’s main drivers of growth, clearing $51 billion in payments during the first three months of 2021.
At a first glance, disclosing connections among people may seem trivial: Who cares if you know whom someone is connected to? But these public connections can be used to expose very private information. Using the public friend list, for example, a motivated fan was able to figure out who won a season of The Bachelor.
Some examples are much more serious. US government agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration have used this feature in criminal cases, such as in the overdose death of rapper Mac Miller.
Using public friend lists and transaction feeds, BuzzFeed News found two members of Congress who were roommates in Washington, DC, as well as reporters who were on friend lists with Trump administration officials, potentially exposing sources. BuzzFeed News also has also spoken with survivors of domestic violence and abuse who suspected that former partners used Venmo to track them and therapists who use Venmo to receive payment from clients who were unaware that their friend lists showed who they were working with.
Last year, Nick Cadena, then a student at Louisiana State University, told BuzzFeed News he had been the victim of an impersonation scam on Venmo. A scammer took his photo and profile details and created a similar account, and then used it to request money from Cadena’s friends. Some people completed the transactions, believing that they were paying the real Cadena.
“Venmo’s privacy failures are already a big problem for everyday folks who use Venmo, and that's been the case for years,” Gennie Gebhart, the acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, told BuzzFeed News. “All of those problems are magnified when we’re talking about a major public figure.”
Ever since 1998, when Bill Clinton sent an email to then-senator John Glenn, presidents have struggled to use new technology while safeguarding national security and complying with public records laws. After months of wrangling, Barack Obama was allowed to use a personal BlackBerry while in office, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was reportedly hacked by correctly guessing his password — maga2020! — and candidate Hillary Clinton faced her own controversy after she set up a private email server at her home while she was secretary of state.
But Venmo poses a new challenge, and this is not the first time a government official’s Venmo account has been easily discovered through publicly available information. In early 2017, people found White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Venmo account and spammed it. The account of Trump's daughter Tiffany was also found. This year, transactions between Rep. Matt Gaetz and alleged sex trafficker Joel Greenberg appeared to pay three young women for “tuition” and “school.” (In an op-ed Gaetz claimed he had “never, ever paid for sex.” Greenberg pleaded guilty to federal charges.)
Accounts belonging to celebrities have also been found, and in 2017, privacy researcher Hang Do Thi Duc created the Public by Default project, which scraped public Venmo transitions for the word “drugs.” The project revealed how much people probably don’t notice what their privacy settings are, even when doing highly personal transactions.
Venmo’s parent company PayPal settled an FTC suit in 2018 over how it allegedly failed to properly explain its privacy settings. “We are pleased to conclude this process with the FTC in a cooperative way,” a PayPal spokesperson said at the time, and while Venmo streamlined its settings, crucially, transactions were still left public by default for new users.
President Biden’s transactions were not public, and he had fewer than 10 friends on Venmo. But he was easily verifiable given the people he was connected to, including an account that appears to be for his wife, first lady Jill Biden. Jill Biden’s account, in turn, was linked to various aides, senior Biden staffers, and family members, including an account that appears to be for the president's son Hunter Biden.
“For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.
On Friday, the Times wrote that a Biden adviser said the president “had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.” Some of those grandchildren are locatable on Venmo, posing an avenue for possible harassment. On the accounts for at least two extended family members, BuzzFeed saw that the same stranger had spammed them with requests, asking them to get President Biden to give him money.
“If somebody wanted to map out the activities of the first family, they could just look at their activities on the social network and figure out what the family is up to by looking at what the what their associates are doing,” Vahid Behzadan, the director of the Secure and Assured Intellect Learning Lab at the University of New Haven, told BuzzFeed News. “I assume that the extended associates, like friends, grandchildren, don’t enjoy the same level of security as the first family, and so it may be easier to monitor them passively through their network.”
By finding these accounts, a person could physically stalk the president, his aides, or members of his family, creating a physical risk for the White House. There are also espionage risks. A spy or political opponent could also use this information to find out personal information about those close to the president, or to pose as a member of Biden's inner circle and communicate with the president or others under false pretenses. There are other possible consequences. A connection between a White House official and a journalist, for example, could potentially expose a whistleblower.
“This is a great example of why apps with social features should not default to allowing strangers to see each others’ data,” said Stanford University professor and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. “As we’ve seen with other products such as exercise apps, national security–sensitive information can be easily gathered by intelligence services as well as from more prosaic adversaries, such as abusive spouses and stalkers.”
We Found Joe Biden On Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone.
The peer-to-peer payments app leaves everyone from ordinary people to the most powerful person in the world exposed.
BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.
On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
The president’s transactions are not public, and BuzzFeed News is not identifying the usernames for the accounts mentioned in this story due to national security concerns.
After BuzzFeed News reached out to the White House for this story, all the friends on the president’s Venmo account were removed. A White House spokesperson did not have an immediate comment.
After this story was published, a Venmo spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”
By late Friday night, the Venmo accounts tied to the president and first lady Jill Biden were no longer online.
Privacy advocates and journalists have warned about Venmo’s privacy problems for years, yet the PayPal-owned app has persisted with features that can place people — including the president of the United States — at risk.
While many critics have focused on how the app makes all transactions public by default, Venmo’s friend lists are arguably a larger privacy issue. Even if a Venmo account is set to make payments private, its friend list remains exposed. There is no setting to make this information private, which means it can provide a window into someone’s personal life that could be exploited by anyone — including trolls, stalkers, police, and spies.
No other major social network or service has contact-based friend lists that are publicly accessible by default to anyone — and that cannot be made private. People use Venmo to get paid, often using their real names. They often also import their phone contact lists or Facebook friend list — something the app highly encourages when you sign up — creating networks where people are automatically “friended” with dozens if not hundreds of other Venmo users and allowing them to find people they want to pay more easily. Venmo makes it impossible for users to hide their list of friends. To remove someone as a friend, a user has to unfriend the person manually.
Several former Venmo employees told BuzzFeed News that Venmo’s public transaction feed and friend lists were integral to the app’s early design. Launched in 2009 as a simple and free way to transfer money between friends, it relied heavily on the social dynamics pioneered on Facebook. People were unafraid to publicly share that they had paid their friends for pizza after a night out or were splitting a gas bill among their roommates.
The idea, according to one former engineer, is that building off someone’s social network was a much easier way for someone to trust who they were paying or receiving money from. Since then, the app has become one of PayPal’s main drivers of growth, clearing $51 billion in payments during the first three months of 2021.
At a first glance, disclosing connections among people may seem trivial: Who cares if you know whom someone is connected to? But these public connections can be used to expose very private information. Using the public friend list, for example, a motivated fan was able to figure out who won a season of The Bachelor.
Some examples are much more serious. US government agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration have used this feature in criminal cases, such as in the overdose death of rapper Mac Miller.
Using public friend lists and transaction feeds, BuzzFeed News found two members of Congress who were roommates in Washington, DC, as well as reporters who were on friend lists with Trump administration officials, potentially exposing sources. BuzzFeed News also has also spoken with survivors of domestic violence and abuse who suspected that former partners used Venmo to track them and therapists who use Venmo to receive payment from clients who were unaware that their friend lists showed who they were working with.
Last year, Nick Cadena, then a student at Louisiana State University, told BuzzFeed News he had been the victim of an impersonation scam on Venmo. A scammer took his photo and profile details and created a similar account, and then used it to request money from Cadena’s friends. Some people completed the transactions, believing that they were paying the real Cadena.
“Venmo’s privacy failures are already a big problem for everyday folks who use Venmo, and that's been the case for years,” Gennie Gebhart, the acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, told BuzzFeed News. “All of those problems are magnified when we’re talking about a major public figure.”
Ever since 1998, when Bill Clinton sent an email to then-senator John Glenn, presidents have struggled to use new technology while safeguarding national security and complying with public records laws. After months of wrangling, Barack Obama was allowed to use a personal BlackBerry while in office, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was reportedly hacked by correctly guessing his password — maga2020! — and candidate Hillary Clinton faced her own controversy after she set up a private email server at her home while she was secretary of state.
But Venmo poses a new challenge, and this is not the first time a government official’s Venmo account has been easily discovered through publicly available information. In early 2017, people found White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Venmo account and spammed it. The account of Trump's daughter Tiffany was also found. This year, transactions between Rep. Matt Gaetz and alleged sex trafficker Joel Greenberg appeared to pay three young women for “tuition” and “school.” (In an op-ed Gaetz claimed he had “never, ever paid for sex.” Greenberg pleaded guilty to federal charges.)
Accounts belonging to celebrities have also been found, and in 2017, privacy researcher Hang Do Thi Duc created the Public by Default project, which scraped public Venmo transitions for the word “drugs.” The project revealed how much people probably don’t notice what their privacy settings are, even when doing highly personal transactions.
Venmo’s parent company PayPal settled an FTC suit in 2018 over how it allegedly failed to properly explain its privacy settings. “We are pleased to conclude this process with the FTC in a cooperative way,” a PayPal spokesperson said at the time, and while Venmo streamlined its settings, crucially, transactions were still left public by default for new users.
President Biden’s transactions were not public, and he had fewer than 10 friends on Venmo. But he was easily verifiable given the people he was connected to, including an account that appears to be for his wife, first lady Jill Biden. Jill Biden’s account, in turn, was linked to various aides, senior Biden staffers, and family members, including an account that appears to be for the president's son Hunter Biden.
“For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.
On Friday, the Times wrote that a Biden adviser said the president “had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.” Some of those grandchildren are locatable on Venmo, posing an avenue for possible harassment. On the accounts for at least two extended family members, BuzzFeed saw that the same stranger had spammed them with requests, asking them to get President Biden to give him money.
“If somebody wanted to map out the activities of the first family, they could just look at their activities on the social network and figure out what the family is up to by looking at what the what their associates are doing,” Vahid Behzadan, the director of the Secure and Assured Intellect Learning Lab at the University of New Haven, told BuzzFeed News. “I assume that the extended associates, like friends, grandchildren, don’t enjoy the same level of security as the first family, and so it may be easier to monitor them passively through their network.”
By finding these accounts, a person could physically stalk the president, his aides, or members of his family, creating a physical risk for the White House. There are also espionage risks. A spy or political opponent could also use this information to find out personal information about those close to the president, or to pose as a member of Biden's inner circle and communicate with the president or others under false pretenses. There are other possible consequences. A connection between a White House official and a journalist, for example, could potentially expose a whistleblower.
“This is a great example of why apps with social features should not default to allowing strangers to see each others’ data,” said Stanford University professor and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. “As we’ve seen with other products such as exercise apps, national security–sensitive information can be easily gathered by intelligence services as well as from more prosaic adversaries, such as abusive spouses and stalkers.”
LmaoWe Found Joe Biden’s Secret Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone.
We Found Joe Biden On Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone.
The peer-to-peer payments app leaves everyone from ordinary people to the most powerful person in the world exposed.
BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.
On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
The president’s transactions are not public, and BuzzFeed News is not identifying the usernames for the accounts mentioned in this story due to national security concerns.
After BuzzFeed News reached out to the White House for this story, all the friends on the president’s Venmo account were removed. A White House spokesperson did not have an immediate comment.
After this story was published, a Venmo spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”
By late Friday night, the Venmo accounts tied to the president and first lady Jill Biden were no longer online.
Privacy advocates and journalists have warned about Venmo’s privacy problems for years, yet the PayPal-owned app has persisted with features that can place people — including the president of the United States — at risk.
While many critics have focused on how the app makes all transactions public by default, Venmo’s friend lists are arguably a larger privacy issue. Even if a Venmo account is set to make payments private, its friend list remains exposed. There is no setting to make this information private, which means it can provide a window into someone’s personal life that could be exploited by anyone — including trolls, stalkers, police, and spies.
No other major social network or service has contact-based friend lists that are publicly accessible by default to anyone — and that cannot be made private. People use Venmo to get paid, often using their real names. They often also import their phone contact lists or Facebook friend list — something the app highly encourages when you sign up — creating networks where people are automatically “friended” with dozens if not hundreds of other Venmo users and allowing them to find people they want to pay more easily. Venmo makes it impossible for users to hide their list of friends. To remove someone as a friend, a user has to unfriend the person manually.
Several former Venmo employees told BuzzFeed News that Venmo’s public transaction feed and friend lists were integral to the app’s early design. Launched in 2009 as a simple and free way to transfer money between friends, it relied heavily on the social dynamics pioneered on Facebook. People were unafraid to publicly share that they had paid their friends for pizza after a night out or were splitting a gas bill among their roommates.
The idea, according to one former engineer, is that building off someone’s social network was a much easier way for someone to trust who they were paying or receiving money from. Since then, the app has become one of PayPal’s main drivers of growth, clearing $51 billion in payments during the first three months of 2021.
At a first glance, disclosing connections among people may seem trivial: Who cares if you know whom someone is connected to? But these public connections can be used to expose very private information. Using the public friend list, for example, a motivated fan was able to figure out who won a season of The Bachelor.
Some examples are much more serious. US government agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration have used this feature in criminal cases, such as in the overdose death of rapper Mac Miller.
Using public friend lists and transaction feeds, BuzzFeed News found two members of Congress who were roommates in Washington, DC, as well as reporters who were on friend lists with Trump administration officials, potentially exposing sources. BuzzFeed News also has also spoken with survivors of domestic violence and abuse who suspected that former partners used Venmo to track them and therapists who use Venmo to receive payment from clients who were unaware that their friend lists showed who they were working with.
Last year, Nick Cadena, then a student at Louisiana State University, told BuzzFeed News he had been the victim of an impersonation scam on Venmo. A scammer took his photo and profile details and created a similar account, and then used it to request money from Cadena’s friends. Some people completed the transactions, believing that they were paying the real Cadena.
“Venmo’s privacy failures are already a big problem for everyday folks who use Venmo, and that's been the case for years,” Gennie Gebhart, the acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, told BuzzFeed News. “All of those problems are magnified when we’re talking about a major public figure.”
Ever since 1998, when Bill Clinton sent an email to then-senator John Glenn, presidents have struggled to use new technology while safeguarding national security and complying with public records laws. After months of wrangling, Barack Obama was allowed to use a personal BlackBerry while in office, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was reportedly hacked by correctly guessing his password — maga2020! — and candidate Hillary Clinton faced her own controversy after she set up a private email server at her home while she was secretary of state.
But Venmo poses a new challenge, and this is not the first time a government official’s Venmo account has been easily discovered through publicly available information. In early 2017, people found White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Venmo account and spammed it. The account of Trump's daughter Tiffany was also found. This year, transactions between Rep. Matt Gaetz and alleged sex trafficker Joel Greenberg appeared to pay three young women for “tuition” and “school.” (In an op-ed Gaetz claimed he had “never, ever paid for sex.” Greenberg pleaded guilty to federal charges.)
Accounts belonging to celebrities have also been found, and in 2017, privacy researcher Hang Do Thi Duc created the Public by Default project, which scraped public Venmo transitions for the word “drugs.” The project revealed how much people probably don’t notice what their privacy settings are, even when doing highly personal transactions.
Venmo’s parent company PayPal settled an FTC suit in 2018 over how it allegedly failed to properly explain its privacy settings. “We are pleased to conclude this process with the FTC in a cooperative way,” a PayPal spokesperson said at the time, and while Venmo streamlined its settings, crucially, transactions were still left public by default for new users.
President Biden’s transactions were not public, and he had fewer than 10 friends on Venmo. But he was easily verifiable given the people he was connected to, including an account that appears to be for his wife, first lady Jill Biden. Jill Biden’s account, in turn, was linked to various aides, senior Biden staffers, and family members, including an account that appears to be for the president's son Hunter Biden.
“For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.
On Friday, the Times wrote that a Biden adviser said the president “had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.” Some of those grandchildren are locatable on Venmo, posing an avenue for possible harassment. On the accounts for at least two extended family members, BuzzFeed saw that the same stranger had spammed them with requests, asking them to get President Biden to give him money.
“If somebody wanted to map out the activities of the first family, they could just look at their activities on the social network and figure out what the family is up to by looking at what the what their associates are doing,” Vahid Behzadan, the director of the Secure and Assured Intellect Learning Lab at the University of New Haven, told BuzzFeed News. “I assume that the extended associates, like friends, grandchildren, don’t enjoy the same level of security as the first family, and so it may be easier to monitor them passively through their network.”
By finding these accounts, a person could physically stalk the president, his aides, or members of his family, creating a physical risk for the White House. There are also espionage risks. A spy or political opponent could also use this information to find out personal information about those close to the president, or to pose as a member of Biden's inner circle and communicate with the president or others under false pretenses. There are other possible consequences. A connection between a White House official and a journalist, for example, could potentially expose a whistleblower.
“This is a great example of why apps with social features should not default to allowing strangers to see each others’ data,” said Stanford University professor and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. “As we’ve seen with other products such as exercise apps, national security–sensitive information can be easily gathered by intelligence services as well as from more prosaic adversaries, such as abusive spouses and stalkers.”
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2020
- Joined
- May 18, 2020
Mix of things tbh. A lot of it is simply the fact that the majority of people who were in those jobs (a large number of the available jobs now are on retail front end/restaurants/etc that got hit hardest by wuflu) are now making more money on unemployment than they would have at the job. But I feel like these "omg look at all these jobs you guys" sentiments coming from these governors is every bit as stupid as anything Biden has done, because it's essentially the same shit Obama pulled. "Look at how many jobs we have! Aren't our jobs numbers great! Everyone can go to work!" Yeah, not everyone wants to go to work for fucking Walmart and mop shit off the floor for $15/hr and that's what most of these available jobs are.
Added to that is the reality that these funds going to unemployment are already accounted for and paid for by taxpayers in essence - if they decline this money and it goes back to the fed, the federal government will just redirect the money to something much gayer and stupider. I might not like the fact that helping people genuinely in need also helps Tyrone and Cletus stay home all day jerking their dicks while getting paid for it but it's a hell of a lot better imo than giving more money back to the federal government that they can spend on even more gay, stupid ideas like gender studies in shithole countries.
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2021
Most secure election, least secure Venmo.We Found Joe Biden’s Secret Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone.
We Found Joe Biden On Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone.
The peer-to-peer payments app leaves everyone from ordinary people to the most powerful person in the world exposed.
BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.
On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
The president’s transactions are not public, and BuzzFeed News is not identifying the usernames for the accounts mentioned in this story due to national security concerns.
After BuzzFeed News reached out to the White House for this story, all the friends on the president’s Venmo account were removed. A White House spokesperson did not have an immediate comment.
After this story was published, a Venmo spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”
By late Friday night, the Venmo accounts tied to the president and first lady Jill Biden were no longer online.
Privacy advocates and journalists have warned about Venmo’s privacy problems for years, yet the PayPal-owned app has persisted with features that can place people — including the president of the United States — at risk.
While many critics have focused on how the app makes all transactions public by default, Venmo’s friend lists are arguably a larger privacy issue. Even if a Venmo account is set to make payments private, its friend list remains exposed. There is no setting to make this information private, which means it can provide a window into someone’s personal life that could be exploited by anyone — including trolls, stalkers, police, and spies.
No other major social network or service has contact-based friend lists that are publicly accessible by default to anyone — and that cannot be made private. People use Venmo to get paid, often using their real names. They often also import their phone contact lists or Facebook friend list — something the app highly encourages when you sign up — creating networks where people are automatically “friended” with dozens if not hundreds of other Venmo users and allowing them to find people they want to pay more easily. Venmo makes it impossible for users to hide their list of friends. To remove someone as a friend, a user has to unfriend the person manually.
Several former Venmo employees told BuzzFeed News that Venmo’s public transaction feed and friend lists were integral to the app’s early design. Launched in 2009 as a simple and free way to transfer money between friends, it relied heavily on the social dynamics pioneered on Facebook. People were unafraid to publicly share that they had paid their friends for pizza after a night out or were splitting a gas bill among their roommates.
The idea, according to one former engineer, is that building off someone’s social network was a much easier way for someone to trust who they were paying or receiving money from. Since then, the app has become one of PayPal’s main drivers of growth, clearing $51 billion in payments during the first three months of 2021.
At a first glance, disclosing connections among people may seem trivial: Who cares if you know whom someone is connected to? But these public connections can be used to expose very private information. Using the public friend list, for example, a motivated fan was able to figure out who won a season of The Bachelor.
Some examples are much more serious. US government agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration have used this feature in criminal cases, such as in the overdose death of rapper Mac Miller.
Using public friend lists and transaction feeds, BuzzFeed News found two members of Congress who were roommates in Washington, DC, as well as reporters who were on friend lists with Trump administration officials, potentially exposing sources. BuzzFeed News also has also spoken with survivors of domestic violence and abuse who suspected that former partners used Venmo to track them and therapists who use Venmo to receive payment from clients who were unaware that their friend lists showed who they were working with.
Last year, Nick Cadena, then a student at Louisiana State University, told BuzzFeed News he had been the victim of an impersonation scam on Venmo. A scammer took his photo and profile details and created a similar account, and then used it to request money from Cadena’s friends. Some people completed the transactions, believing that they were paying the real Cadena.
“Venmo’s privacy failures are already a big problem for everyday folks who use Venmo, and that's been the case for years,” Gennie Gebhart, the acting activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, told BuzzFeed News. “All of those problems are magnified when we’re talking about a major public figure.”
Ever since 1998, when Bill Clinton sent an email to then-senator John Glenn, presidents have struggled to use new technology while safeguarding national security and complying with public records laws. After months of wrangling, Barack Obama was allowed to use a personal BlackBerry while in office, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was reportedly hacked by correctly guessing his password — maga2020! — and candidate Hillary Clinton faced her own controversy after she set up a private email server at her home while she was secretary of state.
But Venmo poses a new challenge, and this is not the first time a government official’s Venmo account has been easily discovered through publicly available information. In early 2017, people found White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Venmo account and spammed it. The account of Trump's daughter Tiffany was also found. This year, transactions between Rep. Matt Gaetz and alleged sex trafficker Joel Greenberg appeared to pay three young women for “tuition” and “school.” (In an op-ed Gaetz claimed he had “never, ever paid for sex.” Greenberg pleaded guilty to federal charges.)
Accounts belonging to celebrities have also been found, and in 2017, privacy researcher Hang Do Thi Duc created the Public by Default project, which scraped public Venmo transitions for the word “drugs.” The project revealed how much people probably don’t notice what their privacy settings are, even when doing highly personal transactions.
Venmo’s parent company PayPal settled an FTC suit in 2018 over how it allegedly failed to properly explain its privacy settings. “We are pleased to conclude this process with the FTC in a cooperative way,” a PayPal spokesperson said at the time, and while Venmo streamlined its settings, crucially, transactions were still left public by default for new users.
President Biden’s transactions were not public, and he had fewer than 10 friends on Venmo. But he was easily verifiable given the people he was connected to, including an account that appears to be for his wife, first lady Jill Biden. Jill Biden’s account, in turn, was linked to various aides, senior Biden staffers, and family members, including an account that appears to be for the president's son Hunter Biden.
“For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.
On Friday, the Times wrote that a Biden adviser said the president “had sent the grandchildren money using Venmo.” Some of those grandchildren are locatable on Venmo, posing an avenue for possible harassment. On the accounts for at least two extended family members, BuzzFeed saw that the same stranger had spammed them with requests, asking them to get President Biden to give him money.
“If somebody wanted to map out the activities of the first family, they could just look at their activities on the social network and figure out what the family is up to by looking at what the what their associates are doing,” Vahid Behzadan, the director of the Secure and Assured Intellect Learning Lab at the University of New Haven, told BuzzFeed News. “I assume that the extended associates, like friends, grandchildren, don’t enjoy the same level of security as the first family, and so it may be easier to monitor them passively through their network.”
By finding these accounts, a person could physically stalk the president, his aides, or members of his family, creating a physical risk for the White House. There are also espionage risks. A spy or political opponent could also use this information to find out personal information about those close to the president, or to pose as a member of Biden's inner circle and communicate with the president or others under false pretenses. There are other possible consequences. A connection between a White House official and a journalist, for example, could potentially expose a whistleblower.
“This is a great example of why apps with social features should not default to allowing strangers to see each others’ data,” said Stanford University professor and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. “As we’ve seen with other products such as exercise apps, national security–sensitive information can be easily gathered by intelligence services as well as from more prosaic adversaries, such as abusive spouses and stalkers.”
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2019
They make more money by not working than they did working a MW/low wage job. If mw and worker pay overall kept up with the rate increases of inflation/cost of goods/ living, we wouldn't be having this issue imo.
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2016
The extra 300 is the killer. Unemployment scales with what you made, and is decent but not great - you really want to find another job when you can. But an extra 300 a week? For a higher-salaried worker that's considerable, relatively, but that represents more than a minimum wagie would make until years of climbing the shitty, cum-stained fast food ladder. Even after taxes that's like $7 an hour.
Hmm, I can make my normal wage and get yelled at by niggers in the drive thru, or I can make like 33% more by day drinking and playing video games while I jerk off at home. Honestly, which is worse for your work ethic? Takes one hell of a resilience narrative to convince yourself to give up the gibs.
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2017
Don't forget the child tax credit too.
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2019
if you dont want to earn your keep, go ahead and starve. theres no reason to house and feed lazy assholes who cant do menial jobs for a living wage.
the gov needs to cut unemployment wholesale and open up the schools so people can have their babysitters back.
walmart and mcdonalds pay more than minimum wage. the complainers are people who're born tired and live to rest.
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2018
The answer is in the middle; unemployment shouldn't be that generous, but wages shouldn't have stagnated for so long to make unemployment such a tempting offer. But that would require the US to tighten immigration and we can't have that now can we?
Radical Cadre
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2020
How's that border crisis going? Don't think I forgot about it just because the media are desperately trying to focus on anything else to protect their politicians.
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- Joined
- Sep 1, 2019
ill be honest i have little sympathy becauase my job didnt get shuttered and i didnt get any of this money.
i feel like that dad who whined to elizabeth warren about getting screwed for scrimping and saving to pay for his kids college. yah i saved cash but all my friends who spent thousands on credit cards got to live it up and pay off debt doing fuck all.
im envious as fuck.
Not Really Here
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Gibs are good as other people have said, if you know anyone who is on the gibs tell them to look at the $10 H/R fast food joints are paying and the $14+ H/R Walmart is paying for overnight stocking(rural numbers).
Lack of workers has caused companies to raise wages, this won't last as gibs end, now is the time to strike for much better pay than pre-covid. Young and barely employable people need to start putting in apps like last week.
TLDR Get out and get that paper now, it won't last.
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