Brian Dye, Senior Vice President of Information Security at Symantec, (in)famously declared back in 2014 that “Antivirus is Dead” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Symantec, if you’re not aware in non-Tex-land is the maker of Norton Antivirus.  So, needless to say, his remarks generated significant shock and criticism at the time.

The truth is he was and is absolutely right.  However, as with most things that’s not the whole story.

In my first article on TTP, A Clean Start, I made the following assertion, echoing Dye’s sentiment:

“Anti-virus is today at best about 30% effective at stopping malware.  It’s near-0% in stopping a determined attacker and also near-0% if not kept up-to-date daily.”

What he and I mean when we say Antivirus programs are “dead” is that any computing defense that relies on a “blacklist” of programs that shouldn’t be allowed to run is ineffective by itself in today’s connected world.  We need defenses based on new technologies like behavioral analysis and “whitelisting.”

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Some 450 days ago we were treated to melodramatic announcements from the media about the start-up of Robert Mueller’s “dream” and “all-star” team.

Reporters gushed in the general hysteria of the times that Mueller would no doubt soon indict President Trump, some of his family, and almost anyone else in his campaign—and therefore end the Trump aberration.

Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.

Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.

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Omarosa. The show trial for Paul Manafort. These are the things CNN chipmunks chattered about endlessly the last few days. But CNN has no news judgment because it is run by a moron with a Harvard degree and a Napoleon Complex.

To find the news, I read the South China Morning Post, which is worried spitless that the Red Chinese economy will tank like its stock market has.

Its stocks overall have declined in value by 40% in the last three years. Our stocks are up 33% since we elected Trump. The SCMP thus is running a series of columns by panicked investors and experts.  They should be.  Trump has China reeling for a number of reasons.

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In July, Facebook quickly withdrew its pending subsidiary in the province of Zhejiang, China.

The social media giant, along with Google, Twitter, and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook) is eager to reach China’s potential audience of 731 million internet users, but it has been blocked in the mainland for almost 10 years.

The subsidiary aimed to establish a new innovation hub as well as finally dip a toe in the Chinese market, but Facebook’s plan to enter China is doomed to fail.

This is not the first time Facebook has attempted to have a piece of the pie. It won’t be the last.  Facebook is still trying, but it needs to understand it will be all but impossible for it to survive in China.  Here’s why.

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Recently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.

So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

I suppose Caputo meant that Trump voters intrinsically lacked either the money to fix their teeth or the knowledge of the hygiene required to take care of them or the aesthetic sensitivity of how awful their mouths looked. Or Caputo was simply rehashing the stereotypes that he had seen on reality TV shows like “Duck Dynasty” and “The Deadliest Catch.”

Or none of the above: the journalist grandee was just stupid.

That last alternative seems most likely since Caputo then escalated and called them collectively “garbage people.” What did “garbage people” mean? That by birth or training such toothless, smelly people were subhuman, like refuse?

Could he have said something similarly degrading about the attendees of an Abolish ICE! or Black Lives Matter! rally and still have his job?

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Fascist is a big word not to be bandied about (though it too often is these days), so let me make myself clear.

I've spent about ten minutes of my life on InfoWars and think Alex Jones is a boring blowhard of little interest except to those who want to spend their lives worrying about whether there was a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.

Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones, led by our friends in Cupertino, the makers of the ubiquitous iPhone -- I've had a half-dozen myself and am typing this on a MacBook -- is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.

So what Apple is doing picking on the basically irrelevant Jones is a form of corporate virtual signaling, a particularly dangerous form if you believe in the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I know they're a private company not subject to government restrictions, but they are bigger, richer, and more powerful than almost every government on the planet, maybe more, which leads me to their noxious and equally powerful comrade-in-tech-arms.... FACEBOOK.

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President Donald Trump has a plan to defeat radical Islamic terrorism off the battlefield, judging from the publicly available evidence.

The plan is simple, if extraordinarily ambitious: Reform Islam.

More specifically, the aim is to induce Muslim leaders to reject jihad and terrorism, and to embrace and promote a moderate practice of Islam.

Trump’s public calls for an end to Islamic terrorism made headlines, but largely unnoticed has been a larger and concerted plan to reform Islam by eliminating the root cause of such violence: the extremist ideology that fuels jihad.

The president called upon Muslim leaders to fundamentally reform Islam by rejecting terrorism and global jihad during his landmark speech in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on May 21, 2017.

“There can be no coexistence with this violence. There can be no tolerating it, no accepting it, no excusing it, and no ignoring it,” the president insisted.  There are clear signs he is succeeding.  Here’s how.

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When the Wicked Witch meets Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” she demands the ruby red slippers the Kansas farm girl is wearing.  The Good Witch advises Dorothy otherwise. “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” she says.

The Magnitsky Act is something like those ruby red slippers.

Originally passed by Congress in 2012 and named for the Russian accountant found dead in his jail cell after exposing fraud involving Russian officials, it authorized the president to block travel visas and freeze bank accounts of individual Russians deemed guilty of human-rights abuses.

In 2016 it was expanded so it could be applied to other human-rights abusers anywhere in the world. We know its power the same way we know about the power of Dorothy’s red slippers: The bad guys obsess about it.

Like Turkish Dictator Recip Erdogan, who’s feeling the heat of President’s Trump’s Americans First foreign policy of using the Magnitsky Act to force the freeing of Pastor Brunson.

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You return from a great vacation and POW — reality hits like a punch in the nose.

The pain begins when you remember that the hapless Jeff Sessions is still the attorney general of the United States.

It sharpens with the realization that Rod Rosenstein, officially Sessions’ deputy but really the boss of the Justice Department and FBI, continues to get away with the biggest partisan heist of modern times.

Rosenstein is guilty of three main sins.  Here are all three, plus how Trump can trump all three with an ace in the hole.

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