This morning installment #7 of my email shadow box series Mikey Likes It dropped. Have a look.
It’s not the most sophisticated shadow box, but I’m not always the most sophisticated guy. Sometimes I like listening to Glenn Gould’s version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and sometimes I like watching old clips of Jackass.
If you haven’t subscribed, you can do it here.
Don’t call it a newsletter.
Inspired by the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell, Mikey Likes It is a refreshing reprieve from heavy content weighing down your inbox.
Something for the eyes, ears, and sometimes the mouth. That sounds weird.
Over at Slate, Franklin Foer reports on a weird log of communications between Donald Trump’s servers and a bank in Russia:
In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.
[…]
The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
And:
Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.
Could there be a bigger black-kettle-calling pot in the world than Donald Trump?
Regular readers of Daily Exhaust know I’m not a fan of Microsoft. I feel this way for a lot of reasons. I think they’re always a day late and a dollar short with new products (see Windows Phone, Nokia, Microsoft Stores, etc), they historically have not valued design, and every attempt at being cool ends up being very, very, very uncool.
The latest example is a recruitment email aimed at interns (via Twitter):
You’re not cool, Microsoft, you’re fuckin’ chilly, and chilly ain’t never been cool.