November 26, 2016

Without free and open elections a government leader is not legitimate.

You can talk all you want about Cuba's record on literacy and health care. But there is no ignoring the fact that the Cuban people do not have any legitimate mechanism to peacefully select those who rule them.

You might think Fidel was swell, but there is no legitimate way of knowing whether the Cuban people thought so. Because Fidel never had the guts -- or the respect for his own people -- to stand for free, fair and open elections.

Yes, I know what the Cuba-apologists are going to say. You are going to claim that the sham one-party elections in Cuba where candidates must get approval from the government to run unopposed are more democratic than the American system because electoral college, campaign contributions, hacked voting machines, Trump, imperialist Yankee propaganda. And I don't doubt you believe it. But that doesn't make it true.

Elections. There is no substitute.

November 25, 2016

This dog just won the mannequin challenge

November 24, 2016

(DEBUNKED!) Ivanka Trump in 2006: "If he wasn't my father, I would spray him with Mace."

Snopes says this is FAKE.

In my defense, I actually checked the original source in the Chicago Tribune before I posted to verify. I guess you can't trust anyone these days.

* FALSE STORY BELOW *

November 22, 2016

Fake news story says pizzeria is the center of child abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton, John Podesta

This is insanity.

November 22, 2016

Bernie Sanders: Trump Infrastructure plan a "scam that gives massive tax breaks to large companies"

November 20, 2016

Anyone else get faked-out by Trump's "White House" pictures?

This is a pretty genius bit of political theater from the Trump people. I keep seeing these pictures of Donald Trump in what appears to be the entrance to the White House.

It's actually the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey.

But still. Surely it's just a coincidence that out of all the properties Trump owns, he's holding photo-ops at the one that looks like a door to the White House.

November 19, 2016

Mike Pence went to see Hamilton on Broadway last night. The cast had a message for him.

This video was taken during the curtain call.

November 15, 2016

Welcome back!

First of all, thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding as we worked this last week to deal with the hack and bring our website back online. The hack could not have come at a worse time for all of us, and the DU Admins feel terrible that we let you down on the most important day of the year. We blew it and we are sorry. As part of our efforts to be responsive and transparent, we have posted a detailed explanation of the hack in another announcement which we encourage everyone to read. A link is provided at the end of this message.

We have made extensive security upgrades to the site over the last week, and as part of those upgrades there are likely to be a few minor glitches that need to be fixed. For example, one issue that we are aware of is that quotation marks are automatically stripped out of post titles. If you encounter any bugs please report them in this thread.

Obviously the election -- from president on down the ticket -- did not go how we all hoped it would. In the wake of our defeat, Democrats across the country are taking part in a much-needed conversation about what went wrong in 2016 and what we need to do in the future. Democratic Underground intends to participate in this discussion, by providing a platform to our members who are capable of participating in a manner that is inclusive, civil, and constructive.

The old “General Discussion: 2016” forum has been re-named “2016 Postmortem” and will serve as the temporary location where this conversation can take place. Discussions about the 2016 elections will not be permitted in the General Discussion forum. Whenever a member tries to start a new thread in either the General Discussion forum or the 2016 Postmortem forum, they will be presented with an interrupt page directing them to post their topic in the appropriate place.

In addition, we are going to temporarily suspend the “Don’t rehash the last presidential primary” rule. While we do not look forward to re-opening that wound, we know that any discussion of the 2016 general election is likely to include discussion of the Democratic primaries. We trust that the vast majority of our members are capable of having this discussion in a civil and constructive manner. If everyone participates with the right attitude there is a good chance that it could be a worthwhile discussion. But if the discussion is just insults and rage then there’s no point in having it.

Those of you who do not wish to see any of the discussions from the 2016 Postmortem forum have the option to trash the forum, which will remove all of its topics from the Latest Page and the Greatest Page. Just visit the forum and click the button near the top of the page that says “Trash this forum.”

The 2016 Postmortem forum and the removal of the “don’t rehash the primaries” rule are temporary changes which we expect to last for a few weeks to a few months. While we believe this is an important discussion to have, we don’t think it is in our best interest to spend the next four years arguing amongst ourselves while Donald Trump is busy destroying the country.

Which brings me to my final point. I said previously that I regret letting Democratic Underground become a haven over the last eight years for people who were contemptuous of President Obama and their fellow DU members. With the election behind us, my opinion has not changed. I spent much of the last eight years deeply disappointed by some of the things that people posted here, and compared to that ugliness I thoroughly enjoyed the period of relative unity and respect that we experienced during this year’s general election season. Going forward, Democratic Underground is going to continue to be a place for friendly, liberal people who support Democrats. If that describes you, welcome home.

For detailed information about the hack, click here.

--The DU Administrators

November 15, 2016

About the hack

This is an updated version of a message that appeared on our homepage while the site was offline this weekend, which provides a good overview of the hack and our efforts to get the site back online.

The site was first attacked around 4:30PM ET on Tuesday afternoon. This was not a "typical" hack like a DDoS or an attempt to gain control of our web server. Instead, the hacker had found a vulnerability in our forum software.

The hacker exploited that vulnerability in what appeared to be a politically-motivated act of vandalism: A large number of posts were removed and replaced with the words "God Emperor" (a reference to Donald Trump), and a ridiculously over-the-top pro-Trump video was served automatically to all of our visitors. If you're curious you can watch the video on YouTube (WARNING: HATE CONTENT).

The DU Administrators were online at the time when the attack occurred, so we immediately shut down the site in order to block out the hacker and limit their ability to disrupt.

As you know Tuesday was election day, our most important day of the year, so our biggest concern at the time was getting the site back online quickly so our members would have access that evening. We collected some preliminary evidence indicating how the hacker had managed to disrupt the site, and based on that evidence we made what we believed were the necessary changes in order to remove the vandalism, secure the site, and bring it back online. (During that time we put up an admin-only login box to block out the hacker. If you entered your username and password into that box, you did not expose your information to the hacker.)

After a few hours we brought the site back up, but it quickly became apparent that we had not sufficiently scrubbed the site and some malicious code placed by the hacker got executed again. So we took the site offline a second time. Since we had already failed once to secure the site, we agreed it would be irresponsible to bring the site back online again until we were confident that we knew exactly what the hacker had done, and we believed the site was secure. At that point we knew we were not going to be back online for election night, and we suspected it might take days.

It took most of the day Wednesday to figure out exactly how the hacker had managed to disrupt the site, and what user information may have been vulnerable.

It is likely that the hacker had access to certain member information on an account-by-account basis: Usernames, email addresses, and IP addresses. There is no evidence that the hacker had access to our database or the full table of user information.

We believe that the hacker was not able to see your passwords -- not even in encrypted format. But even if the hacker was not able to see your passwords, they may have been able to over-write passwords for some accounts. Put another way: The hacker doesn't know what your password was, but the hacker might have changed it to something that they did know. That is why we are requiring all members to change their passwords now that the site is back online.

We can say for certain that donor data, such as credit card numbers or addresses, were not compromised because that information is handled by PayPal and never passes through to our servers.

As most of you know, we have three employees at Democratic Underground, and only one of us (Elad) is a real programmer who could do the complicated back-end coding to deal with the hack. If our goal was to simply plug the specific vulnerability exposed in the hack, the site would likely have been back online in a couple days. But because we know that there is a sufficiently motivated and skilled individual somewhere out there who has already vandalized our website, we did a much more comprehensive security review to identify similar vulnerabilities to the one exposed in the hack.

We would be remiss if we did not recognize the invaluable assistance which DU member Lithos has provided during this security review. We are very grateful for his help. Thank you, Lithos.

We have updated the site on two levels: Elad has been fixing some of the code in our forum software (with help from Lithos), and we have been working with our web host to implement a higher level of security on their end. Now that the site is back up, we are temporarily limiting access to the site to Star Members only. We are taking this precaution because we want to make sure that we are receiving only legitimate traffic during the next couple days while our new security software “learns” what is legitimate traffic to the site. This limited opening period should only last two or three days.

We know that this has been a long and frustrating process, and the timing could not have possibly been worse. Thank you again for your patience and understanding. And thank you for the tremendous outpouring of encouragement we have received from so many of you.

--The DU Administrators

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