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Software developer gets $5M judgement against My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell
- brianwawok 4y agoIf you win 5M from someone who lied, and you are never able to recover a cent due to shell companies and financial trickery, did you really win?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- metalliqaz 4y agoWell, I'd consider the damage to Lindel's credibility a win.
- rco8786 4y agoAnyone who gives Lindell a shred of credibility is doing so explicitly against all available evidence, and any new credibility destroying evidence will not change their opinion...unfortunately. The horse is dead. This new revelation just further beats that dead horse. And the Lindell fans will continue to act as though the horse is alive because they operate in an alternate reality in which the events of this reality do have no effect.
- Maarten88 4y agoThey may operate in an alternate reality, but they are probably very sensitive to success and wealth. In their world successful people can't be wrong. Making him poor may be more effective than pointing out he's a nut.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ars 4y ago> And the Lindell fans will continue to act as though the horse is alive because they operate in an alternate reality in which the events of this reality do have no effect. We need to stop operating in black and white (polarized). Some Lindell fans will indeed stop being fans, some will be less of his fans, etc, etc. It's a continuum. I'm sure you are see as well as I the current problems of today arising from treating everything as Black or White with no shades in between.
- dpflan 4y agoIs it useful in other legal cases? If you can reference this case in your own case and evidence of patterns of behavior? IANAL
- northrup 4y agoIt would be a win if anyone who didn’t already think Lindel was a lying POS had their mind changed. Sadly shame and logic don’t really work on that crowd.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- turmeric_root 4y agoclearly the arbitration panel ruled against Lindell because it's part of the deep state. /s
- programmarchy 4y agoThere’s at least three factors in play. The prize money, the principle of correcting the public record, and the notoriety of being the guy that correctly called a big bluff. He seemed to win the last two, and the money would be icing on the cake.
- vkou 4y agoThe problem is that the political movement these guys spearhead doesn't give two figs about the public record. Winning an argument against them is great for scoring sick debate points, but debate points don't matter if Panzers are rolling into Poland.
- tedunangst 4y agoIs it foregone conclusion you can't collect? Apparently the creditor is the pillow company, and they have seizable assets.
- version_five 4y agoI'm sad I didn't get to participate in this "challenge" - this is the first I've heard of it. Otoh, it looks like it boiled down to something very uninteresting, in that it didn't really hinge on any analysis, it was just nonsense data.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoLots of boring yet lucrative work out there.
- JAlexoid 4y agoYou couldn't. You had to literally be there to get access. It was an in-person event with some people deemed to "be worthy enough" to get their hands on "the data". I just hope that some kid got their college paid for, by selling this crap to Mike in the first place :D
- fdaskjvalkj 4y ago> “He [the software developer] proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data. Failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”
- bena 4y agoThis is probably the absolute stupidest way to have lost $5 million. The claim was very specific: Prove this data isn't from the 2020 election. All you had to do was actually include 2020 election data in the set. And right there, the problem becomes much harder. Hell, you could have just used a dump of 2020 election data and been fine. Just claim it proves your accusations. And that's probably part of the reason that they worded the challenge like that. Because it's the easiest one to manufacture reasonably well. Yet they still fucked it up. I still cannot believe how anyone can believe in the competence of anyone in Trump's political sphere after the Four Seasons fiasco. How often does one have to kick themselves square in the dick before people start wondering if they're not the sharpest bulb in the box?
- shanebellone 4y ago"before people start wondering if they're not the sharpest bulb in the box?" Sharpness is relative.
- JAlexoid 4y agoIt also degrades. At 40 I'm definitely not as sharp as I was at 20. I mean... Give me a leetcode challenge today, and I'll flunk a lot of them.
- jcranmer 4y ago> The claim was very specific: Prove this data isn't from the 2020 election. All you had to do was actually include 2020 election data in the set. And right there, the problem becomes much harder. The core of the arbitration decision is that "election data" specifically meant "packet captures of machines related to the election," relying on the fact that pretty much everyone (sans Lindell) understood that that was the kind of data they expected to have. Lindell instead had a tactic of relying on him being the ultimate arbiter of what satisfied "election data" as an ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card (which likely could have run afoul of other good-faith laws, although arbitration didn't analyze that point because they didn't need to go that far).
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- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y agoThe mediator's report is a fun read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a68b42f4-d5dc-4ff9-b34e-84d52fa3fc32.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_11 https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a68b42f4-d5dc-4ff9-... I especially like these power moves by Lindell and friends - 1) Encrypt one of the files as a test to see who's a bad enough dude to validate the data. 2) Pack / possibly encrypt the largest chunks of data with a tool no one's heard of. Don't provide the tool with the data or say that's what you did, but do include a vague video showing the tool in use. This data was never meant to be analyzed by anyone taking it seriously. Purely a stunt designed to look good as long as you don't look too close. My only real question about this is whether Lindell is fully aware of this part of the con or if he actually believes this collection of bits proves anything.
- jaclaz 4y agoYes, thanks, really a fun read. I liked the reported reasoning about file J-15 (Chinese_SourceIP_HEX.txt): > It contains, according to Mr. Zeidman, only IP addresses and numbers ranking the addresses from high to low. He notes that it is not packet data because it has no packets and no data.
- Topgamer7 4y agoLogic is always fun. Tearing apart someones statements into base arguments they have to agree is true, then build that up to invalidate their statement is also fun. In this case it might be $5M - ~20K lawyers fee's fun!
- Waterluvian 4y agoI follow an individual on Mastodon who painstakingly decompiles things like Wii games, developing a very intimate understanding of the game's development. We've probably all seen individuals like this on the Internet. I'm deeply amused by people like Mike who don't realize these people exist. They will scrutinize every corner of something with an electron microscope, especially if the topic is juicy or you're a big enough ass to deserve it.
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- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoAn expensive, public way to prove Mike is the dictionary def of "fraud".
- ridiculous_fish 4y agoRobert Graham attended Lindell's Cyber Symposium; his Twitter thread is worth a read. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424878450867847181.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1424878450867847181.html An amusing anecdote is that they shared rich text files as hexdumps because "techies like to see things in hex."
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- tptacek 4y agoMy favorite thing about this is that Robert Graham was given all the same access the contest winner was, and livetweeted the same result. He apparently just didn't think to claim the award.
- rideontime 4y agoZeidman's clearly all about getting that bread. In the photo he provided to the Washington Post for their article he's posing with his self-published Animal Farm sequel, where the animals are "woke" now.
- tptacek 4y agoIt's 5MM to demonstrate that a list of IP addresses isn't a pcap file. Who wouldn't be all about getting that bread? I mean besides Robert Graham.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rideontime 4y agoI was working a very undemanding job at the time and watched the "Cyber Symposium" (and other amazing shows on "Frank TV") out of morbid curiosity. Was very happy that Graham could get his eyes on the "data," even if the conclusion was obvious. How the hell were we supposed to believe that Mike got his hands on these so-called "packet captures"?
- belter 4y agoLike stealing $5M candy from a baby...
- steve76 4y ago[dead]
- oh_sigh 4y agoMan, I'm disappointed. Reading the arbitrator's report, that is just about the easiest $5M anyone's ever made.
- infamousclyde 4y agoOh my god, same. I'm not exactly a cybersecurity whiz, but going through the details, it was like "Is this a PCAP? Is this a PCAP?". Good lord, this was a silver platter.
- datajunky 4y agoThe only way to prove “data doesn’t reflect the 2020 election” is to positively prove an alternative source for the data. For example, you would have to prove it is either made up data or Lindell’s shopping list. By proving the data does not contain pcaps only proves that the data cannot be PROVEN to originate from the election, however it does not prove that it is not sourced from such data.