• 🍔🍔🍔@toast.ooo
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    5 months ago

    man i just spent like an hour in the bathtub reading further into this and belly laughing

    i will say though that i think the guy who sold mike lindell the ‘data’ that he’s referring to in the challenge might actually be a genius lol. this is apparently the third or fourth time he’s identified someone who needs some kind of technological hail mary and then he just shows up and is like “i have… the data”. he sold proof that obama faked his birth certificate and also sold a bunch of completely bogus software to the pentagon during the post-9/11 defense industry boom such as software that “decodes” al jazeera broadcasts into secret al qaeda messages. an employee of his testified that he doesn’t even have an IDE installed on his computer. he’s literally made tens of millions of dollars off of this grift and despite being basically constantly legally embattled for the past 20 years has apparently not suffered any consequences. i wish him a long and successful career being the smartest dumb guy in the room

    mike lindell actually comes away from this looking almost sympathetic because he is so, so clearly a moron whose conception of data is like, a PS1-era spinning icon of a CD-ROM. it’s very hard for me to guess whether or not he was acting in good faith: on the one hand, the logical thing to do with proof of election tampering is not ‘announce a five million dollar challenge for someone to prove that i don’t have it’, but on the other hand, it doesn’t make any fucking sense to do that if you don’t think you have proof either. either way i would love to know how much money he paid for it (by the way, the data is: a text file with a list of IP addresses in mainland china, a PDF with a ‘graphic depiction of voting machines’, and many terabytes of gibberish binary files timestamped to several days before the challenge was set up). look at this quote the guy is literally zoolander stupid

    “I said, ‘Wow!’ This would absolutely explain what I couldn’t explain!” Lindell recalled in an interview. “It was done with computers! I knew that was the only explanation."

    • Snapz@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The votes were IN the computers all along?

      Smartmaticsonite… I was WAYYY off!

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        5 months ago

        Oh, if only my moral compass was just a bit weaker. The TSA spent about a decade after its conception trying to find a magic box that identifies terrorists in airports. The millimeter wave scanners are the most successful thing to come out of the entire effort. Those at least sorta work, and most of the rest on the list are far worse than that. Made a bunch of people a lot of money, though.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I don’t know if it is unethical. They want a narrative and you sold it to them. Is making a superhero movie unethical? Is roleplay in the bedroom unethical? You are taking money away from fascists which is always a good thing.

    • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      The fact that he did a “prove me wrong” instead of a “here’s the proof” tells me, at minimum, had a suspicion that the proof had no merit.

      • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        No, he admitted at some point the “5 mil to prove me wrong” was a publicity stunt to drum up media coverage of his conference.

        He thought it was impossible to prove a negative, but in this case the data was so clearly unrelated to any election, much less election fraud, the judge found that the confrence go-er had proved him wrong.

    • mindbleach
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      5 months ago

      /u/benevolentwalrus:

      “Proof” to these people is a McGuffin like the Infinity Stones or Flux Capacitor. It’s not real information you can examine; it has no internal structure. It’s just an object you get in the third act that does the thing the plot requires.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      an employee of his testified that he doesn’t even have an IDE installed on his computer.

      that doesn’t make him not a programmer, plenty of linux pilled programmers don’t use IDEs.

      Hell some of the really prominent ones use shit like text mate, DHH for example.