Up in the sky: It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s ... Ron Paul?
If a whimsical publicity stunt goes as planned, a blimp hyping the long-shot Republican presidential campaign of the Texas congressman will launch next week.
The Ron Paul blimp is set to fly from North Carolina, over Washington, New York and Boston, before heading to New Hampshire, where the Jan. 8 primary offers the iconic libertarian perhaps his best chance of translating his zealous Internet support into votes.
Like the unprecedented online fundraising behind Paul’s bid, the blimp effort, which appears on pace financially, isn’t affiliated with the official campaign and pushes traditional political conventions.
And that’s not just because it likely would be the first blimp to be turned into a flying billboard for a White House hopeful.
It also tests the reach of campaign finance rules by employing an innovative funding structure that could expose a new way to pour largely unregulated money into politics.
If the model is successful, hypothetically it could allow a media consultant to produce slick attack ads and — without ever disclosing how much was raised or spent — solicit millions from “sponsors” to air the ads in key states.
“It’s much more than just Ron Paul’s campaign,” said Jerry Collette, a former California Libertarian Party official who’s managing the effort.
“It’s a whole new way of presenting opportunities to individual people to be able to participate in elections in a way they’ve never really done before.”
Researchers track Ron Paul spam back to Reactor botnet
In a report published this week by security firm SecureWorks, researchers reveal that the recent flurry of Ron Paul spam originated from a Reactor botnet controlled by a commercial spammer through a colocation facility in the US.
The researchers analyzed header elements of the spam e-mails to trace them back to zombie systems that were infected with the Srizbi trojan, an unusual piece of malware with highly advanced features. According to Symantec research, which has independently studied Srizbi, the trojan is one of the first pieces of malware found in the wild to operate fully in kernel mode with no userspace code. Srizbi bypasses firewalls and packet sniffers by directly manipulating the kernel-level TCP/IP stack. The Srizbi trojan is largely propagated by the well-known msiesettings.com site, which is paid by spammers to deploy viruses and trojans for spam botnets.
SecureWorks collaborated with network administrators to analyze the traffic from some of the computers infected with Srizbi that were responsible for sending the Ron Paul spam. This allowed the researchers to discover the location from which the botnet was operated—a colocation facility in the US. The researchers collaborated with Spamhaus to get the server shut down and then obtained the source code used on the control system, a Python-based spam botnet management tool known as the Reactor Mailer. The logs present on the system prove that it was indeed the origin of the Ron Paul spam. Further research showed that other systems in the same colocation facility were also controlling various segments of the Srizbi botnet, and using it to transmit spam advertising replica watches and enlargement pills.
Meet The Press is excluding Ron Paul from their "Meet The Candidates" feature. Let's bombard them with emails letting them know this is bogus. Maybe a huge outcry will make them come to their senses. This is something that costs you nothing that could make a huge difference for the Ron Paul Revolution!
Actually, I saw that on Digg and just CnPed the introduction because I knew it would interest you ^.^
In all seriousness, with 2008 almost here, I have to start thinking about who I'm voting for in November! I was too young to try to help vote Bush out, but this election is my first time! ^.^ I do plan on voting!
Hopefully you clicked on some of the links in this thread and as long as you are informed you are better off than alot of the U.S. Glad to hear you are going to vote no matter who you are going to vote for!
I'm one of the people that believe everyone should vote because everyone has that opportunity. A lot of people have died in the past to give us all that opportunity and wasting it purely ignorant.
I don't really have anything intelligent to talk about other than I like Ron Paul.
It does seem he might be a bit weak on the military aspect of government, though.
Anyway.
I have a present for all you Ron Paul fans out there. Something I cooked up myself:
Hhm.. maybe, you could link a banner to Ron Paul's site, The Helper, somewhere in the links or something like that, to support him I'm not sure if many people are old enough to vote though.
I do know this - xenforo dropped the ball by not keeping the vbulletin reputation comments as a feature. The loss of the Reputation comments data when we switched to Xenforo really was the death knell for the site when it came to all the users that left. I know I missed it so much and I got way less interested in the site when that feature was gone and I run the site.
I'm on a page about incorrect corrections, and spent the better part of like two hours trying to get someone to understand that -5^2 = -25, not 25, and then that post had comments get reposted because that group is self sustaining, and that person was in turn trying to explain what I just explained to them. And I'm taking that as a victory