Monthly Archives: June 2017

Trump commits to NATO’s Article 5 – CNN International

Posted: June 11, 2017 at 4:55 pm

"I am committing the United States to Article 5," Trump said at Friday's press conference, referring to the alliance's principle that an attack on one NATO nation is an attack on them all.

"And certainly we are there to protect," Trump added, saying this is why the US is "paying the kind of money necessary to have that force."

"Yes, absolutely I would be committed to Article 5," he concluded.

But Trump declined to make the same statement during his speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels last month, when he scolded NATO leaders for failing to meet the alliance's defense spending guideline of 2% of GDP.

Appearing with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on Friday, Trump also reiterated his call for NATO members to meet the guideline along with his claim that NATO members should repay what he regards as underpayments from previous years.

That didn't seem to bother Iohannis, who noted that Romania was the first country under Trump's administration to "step up to 2 percent of GDP for defense spending."

"I'm very glad that due to your strong leadership NATO decided to go against terrorism," the Romanian president said. "Your involvement made so many nations conscious of the fact that we have to share the burden inside NATO."

Ahead of Trump's comments Friday, Democrats had slammed the President for failing to commit to Article 5 while at NATO, as well as his comments during the campaign that the alliance was "obsolete."

"While it is important that senior officials such as the vice president, secretary of state and secretary of defense reiterate that commitment, explicit endorsement -- and the absence of an endorsement -- has meaning," seven House Armed Services Democrats, including ranking member Adam Smith of Washington, wrote in a letter Friday.

But Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and ally of Trump in the Senate, argued Trump was just misunderstood.

"It's a good thing that President Trump made explicit what he plainly meant in Brussels last month: the United States stands by the collective security guarantee of NATO Article 5," Cotton said in a statement. "But make no mistake: uttering magic words does not deter aggressors like Vladimir Putin. Only the credible threat of military force does. And until Democrats and our European allies get serious about funding our common defense, deterrence in Europe will remain dangerously weak."

CNN's Dan Merica contributed to this report.

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Trump Commits United States to Defending NATO Nations – New York Times

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New York Times
Trump Commits United States to Defending NATO Nations
New York Times
WASHINGTON President Trump on Friday reaffirmed the longstanding United States commitment to come to the defense of any NATO members that are attacked, more than two weeks after his refusal to do so during a trip to Europe stirred resentment ...
Trump confirms commitment to NATO's Article 5Fox News

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President Trump Confirms His Commitment to NATO’s Article 5 Mutual Defense Pact – TIME

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U.S. President Donald Trump stands outside the West Wing of the White House as Klaus Iohannis, Romania's president, not pictured, arrives at the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, June 9, 2017. Pete MarovichBloomberg/Getty Images

President Donald Trump is at last publicly confirming his commitment to NATO's mutual defense pact .

When Trump spoke at the alliance's gathering in Belgium last month , he did not make reference to the agreement, which is known as Article 5.

But on Friday during a press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, Trump said was "committing the United States to Article 5."

Trump's omission in Brussels raised concerns on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. White House aides said that the president's support was implied even though he deliberately did not utter the words.

The only time that Article 5 was invoked was after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001. Trump was asked if he would move the U.S. to defend NATO if Russia attacked; he did not answer that part of the question.

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In 1983, A NATO Military Exercise Almost Started a Nuclear World War III – The National Interest Online (blog)

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On the night of November 20, 1983, Armageddon went prime time. Over 100 million Americans tuned in to the ABC television network to watch the two-hour drama The Day After. This depiction of a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States attracted a great deal of publicity and controversy. Schools made watching the film a homework assignment, discussion groups were organized in communities across the country, and even the secretary of state at the time, George Schulz, took part in a question-and-answer session hosted by ABC after the films broadcast. That a mere made-for-TV movie could garner such attention from a leading figure in the Reagan administration indicates how real the fear of a nuclear apocalypse was at the time. But almost no one watching that Sunday night realized just how close fiction came to reality in the fall of 1983.

The possibility of the worlds two greatest military powers destroying each other and the earth in a full-scale thermonuclear war was a fear shared by many throughout the world. At the time, both the United States and the USSR maintained huge nuclear arsenals of over 20,000 nuclear warheads each. In North America and Western Europe, nuclear freeze movements were gaining new members daily, with mass demonstrations that routinely numbered in the tens of thousands.

World events seemed to only reaffirm peoples fears. It was the third year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a man who had built his political career on a virulent hatred for all things communist. His 1980 victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter had largely been the result of his hard-line stance against the Russians. A former film actor with a natural flair for the dramatic, Reagan both inspired and shocked people with his hardcore rhetoric, such as his statement before the British House of Commons in 1982 that the Marxist ideology would be relegated to the ash heap of history. Perhaps his most memorable and antagonistic remarks came on March 8, 1983, when Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the focus of evil in the modern world and an evil empire.

The actions of the Reagan administration in its first three years backed up his uncompromising rhetoric. To match the USSRs huge expenditures on its armed forces, Reagan and Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger initiated one of the largest peacetime military buildups in American history. Weapons programs such as the M1 Abrams tank, Trident nuclear submarine, and Stealth bomber were accelerated, while previously cancelled programs such as the B1 Lancer strategic bomber and the MX Missile were resurrected. To achieve the goal of creating a 600-ship navy, the Defense Department brought all four of its mammoth World War II-era Iowa-class battleships out of mothballs and returned them to active duty.

Star Wars and Fleetex 83: On the Brink of Nuclear War

On March 23, 1983, Reagan took the superpower rivalry to a new level when he unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative Program during a live television address. The SDI program, more popularly referred to as Star Wars, was to provide an orbital shield that would protect the United Statesat least partlyfrom a nuclear strike. Reagan and supporters of the project argued that such a defense network, while not being able to completely block a full-scale strike from Russia, would at least cut down its effectiveness considerably and would be able to destroy smaller scale strikes, accidental nuclear launches, or missile attacks from rogue states. Reagan proposed to share the technology with the Soviets in a bid to eliminate the threat of nuclear war altogether.

To Yuri Andropov, then general secretary of the USSR, Reagans intentions spelled trouble. Andropov had dedicated his entire life to defending the Soviet Union, whether as a member of the partisans fighting behind German lines during World War II or as head of the Soviet secret police, the KGB. His supreme ambition to lead the nation had been realized with the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982.

Andropov was scared to death of Ronald Reagan. He sincerely believed that Reagan meant what he said about the Soviet Union being an evil empire and seeing himself as a crusader who would not have any qualms in ordering the USSRs destruction. During the summer and fall of 1983, events only served to add fuel to Andropovs burning fears. In Western Europe, the United States prepared to deploy the latest generation of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM), the Pershing II. The Pershing missiles were a countermove to the Soviet deployment of the larger SS-20 IRBMs. But while the SS-20s could only reach targets in Western Europe, the Pershing IIs had the range to hit targets inside the USSR itself. It represented a new threat that the Soviets found intolerable.

In April and May of that year, as the rhetoric between Washington and Moscow escalated, the United States Navy conducted a series of fleet exercises in the Northwest Pacific known as FLEETEX 83. With more than 40 warships massed into three carrier battle groups, it was the largest concentration of American naval might in the Western Pacific since World War II. The massive exercise involved the counterclockwise sweep of these waters with the extreme right flank of the formation coming close to Russias Kamchatka Peninsula. Round-the-clock air operations from the carriers Enterprise, Coral Sea, and Midway were meant to make the Soviets respond by putting their eastern air bases on constant alert. During the course of the maneuvers, a combined flight of six F-14 Tomcat fighters from Midway and Enterprise flew over Zelyony Island in the Kuril Archipelago, a violation of Soviet airspace that the U.S. Navy later insisted was an accident, an explanation that the Soviets obviously did not accept.

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The NSA Says It Has to Spy on You to Find Out If It’s Spying On You – Motherboard

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The lovely catch 22 of living in the age of mass surveillance is that the NSA isn't even sure when it's illegally spying on you. To determine whether its activities are illegal, the NSA would have to conduct additional, also illegal surveillance. And so Americans are being illegally spied on, but no one knows how often this happens, why it happens, or how it happens.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the US is allowed to conduct surveillance on foreign nationals, but surveillance of "American persons" (citizens and Green Card holders) is illegal. The Snowden revelations showed that communications by Americans were regularly swept up regardless, and a court opinion from earlier this year confirmed that much of this collection was illegal and inappropriate.

For years, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have demanded that the NSA produce figures about the number of Americans whose communications are inappropriately swept up in the NSA's bulk surveillance programs, and Congress has recently begun asking for similar figures. Don't expect to ever get them.

Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA believes it is impossible to determine how often it is breaking the law.

"The NSA has made herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate and would respond to the question [about surveillance of US persons]," Coats said. "It remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a US person's communications may be collected under 702."

Image: Getty Images

Coats said the reason it is so difficult is that, in order to determine if the NSA illegally spied on you, the NSA would have to illegally spy on you.

"To determine if communicants are US persons, NSA would be required to conduct significant further research trying to determine whether individuals who may be of no foreign intelligence interest are US persons," he said. "I would be asking trained NSA analysts to conduct intense identity verification research on potential US persons who are not targets of an investigation. From a privacy and civil liberties perspective I find this unpalatable."

Because Section 702 surveillance programs deal with vast amounts of data from many people all over the world, Coats is suggesting that identifying who shouldn't have been spied on would require drilling down to more granular data setsan even more invasive spying than the original bulk surveillance.

This all means that the NSA has put itself between a rock and a hard place and is content to stay pinned there forever so long as its toys aren't taken away: Coats was testifying, after all, to urge Congress to reauthorize Section 702 without scaling it back.

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Trump Blocking Twitter Users Is a First Amendment Issue …

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Photograph by Getty Images

Twitter users block others on the service all the time, in some cases because they are abusive and sometimes just because they're irritating. But is it different if the user doing the blocking happens to be the president of the United States?

The Knight First Amendment Institute says it is different, or at least that it should be. The Institute, a non-profit group associated with Columbia University, has sent a letter to the White House arguing that Trump is breaching the First Amendment rights of those he blocks.

It might seem laughable at first -- and there are some First Amendment experts and supporters who appear to find it so -- but the Institute believes that it has a valid case.

According to the letter, written by Institute director Jameel Jaffer, the president's Twitter account fits the legal definition of a "designated public forum," and as such it can't be closed to public access under the First Amendment.

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In effect, the Institute argues that the law requires Trump make his account available to everyone regardless of whether they criticize him. It has said it is considering pursuing a case against the president on behalf of two users who were blocked by him.

"Though the architects of the Constitution surely didnt contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable," Jaffer said in a statement.

"Having opened this forum to all comers, the President cant exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what theyre saying."

Not everyone is buying this argument, however. Ken White, a former assistant U.S. Attorney who writes legal commentary at Popehat and is a First Amendment expert, said that he found the idea of the Institute's case "ridiculous."

Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, told the Wall Street Journal that the Institute had a "novel and ambitious argument" that was clearly in the public interest. But he also described it as a "tough sell."

Is the presidents Twitter account "a public forum where interactive free expression is expected or more like a newsletter, where the communication is all one way?" Paulson asked. Municipalities that establish Facebook pages and invite citizen input may be creating public forums, "but Im not sure that Donald Trumps brief bursts of opinion are the same thing."

There a number of problems with determining whether Trump's Twitter account is a public forum or not, and one of them stems from the fact that the law is far from settled on the question of what exactly constitutes a truly public forum.

The other complicating factor is that Twitter is a privately-held company, and the president is just behaving in accordance with its terms of service.

The laws relating to free public access to government property were designed to protect the ability of demonstrators, protesters, etc. to speak their mind in public parks and other areas. The extension of this right to any "public forum" didn't occur until a Supreme Court decision in 1972, and from that point things just got more and more complicated.

As University of Florida law professor Lyrissa Lydsky put it in a legal paper on the First Amendment and online forums that was published in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court's public forum and government speech doctrines are "lacking in coherence -- to put it mildly."

In a nutshell, there are several definitions for public forums, based in part on what the government's intentions were in setting them up in the first place. In a fully public forum, opposing views can't be censored. But a "limited public forum," which has a specific purpose, can be restricted in a variety of ways.

To further complicate things, the government and its representatives are protected from First Amendment rules on such matters if what they are doing is defined by the court as "government speech." If so, then feedback or input or access theoretically can be restricted.

So should Donald Trump's Twitter account be considered a public forum, a limited public forum, or a form of protected government speech?

Comments from press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday could be pertinent to such a case, because he said that Trump's tweets are considered to be "official statements by the president." That could support the argument that Trump is engaging in government speech, and therefore opposing viewpoints can be restricted without breaching the First Amendment.

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Editorial: First Amendment protects all faiths – NorthJersey.com

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NorthJersey 6:00 a.m. ET June 11, 2017

In this Sept. 23, 2016, file photo, Muslim worshippers pray during a service at the Bernards Township Community Center in Basking Ridge.(Photo: Julio Cortez/AP)

The right to worship, or not to worship at all, is one of the basic principles that has guided this nation since its founding. That right, though, increasingly, has come under siege lately as communities in New Jersey and across the country have tried to stymie Muslims in their efforts to practice their faith as they see fit.

As Staff Writer Hannan Adely reported, Muslims from New York to Minnesota are fighting what they believe to be an ongoing anti-Muslim campaign by filing lawsuits whenever they feel threatened. One such case recently involved Bernards Township in Somerset County. The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Bernards Township will pay $3.25 million to a settle a lawsuit over its denial of a permit to build a mosque.

Part of that settlement requires the township to train, within 180 days, all current and future members of its Planning Board and Township Committee in diversity and inclusion, particularly focusing on Islam and Muslims. It should never have had to come to this, not in diversity-rich New Jersey, and not anywhere in this country where people merely seek a place to pray or worship without feeling threatened.

Now, a new and similar case has surfaced in Bayonne, where a Muslim group filed a federal-discrimination lawsuit in late May after the city rejected its plan to convert an old warehouse on a dead-end street into a mosque. Indeed, as anti-Muslim sentiment has increased including reports of anti-mosque fliers being placed in childrens mailboxes at school Muslim groups have remained undeterred, and more determined than ever to press the issue.

Municipalities around the country should pay close attention to what happened in Bernards Township, said Adeel Abdullah Mangi, an attorney representing Muslim groups in the Bernards and Bayonne lawsuits. The American Muslim community has the legal resources, the allies and the determination to stand up for its constitutional rights in court and will do so.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in a report last year, said there had been a sharp increase in the number of its investigations into religious discrimination involving mosques or Islamic schools over the past six years. The same report noted particularly severe discrimination faced by Muslims in land use.

The founders of this nation were not perfect men, but they knew enough to realize the importance of religious liberty, the practical right of individuals to practice their faith without interference from the state. That right is enshrined in the Constitution, and it is going to stay there. Local municipalities around the country opposed to the building of mosques had better get used to the idea.

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Mark Levin: CNN Is Destroying the First Amendment Jake Tapper Is ‘Evil’ – Breitbart News

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Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Mark Levin, author of the forthcoming book Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism, read from a Federalist piece by Ben Domenech laying out how Domenech viewed CNNs war on President Donald Trump.

Domenech argued CNN was sacrificing balance and centrism in its quest against Trump.

Levin agreed with Domenechs findings but took it a step further by declaring that CNN was destroying the First Amendment and that Trump was right to say the media are evil in some circumstances and singled out CNNs Jake Tapper.

You can see how CNN has changed its coverage, Levin said. CNN is at war with Trump. CNN is violating CNN is destroying the First Amendment and freedom of the press. And when Jake Tapper says, How dare President [Trump] call us evil? Jake, youre evil. Youre unconscionable. All of you because you know exactly what youre doing. You dont care.

Later in the segment, Levin argued there was more truthful reporting on Russia TV than CNN, adding that he had never watched Russia TV before.

I think you get more truthful reporting on Russia TV, which I have never watched in my life, than you get on CNN, he added. How do I know? Because you dont get truthful reporting on CNN. And you know what youre getting on Russia TV. They call themselves Russia TV. Oh must be about Russia or something, Russia TV. CNN pretends to be something its not an objective news organization. Its not an objective news organization. They got one clown after another, one fool after another, one Democratic appointee after another.

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Weekend tech reading: Cryptocurrency valuations still rising, 3 years on a Hackintosh – TechSpot

Posted: at 4:52 pm

What the hell is happening to cryptocurrency valuations? The total market cap for all cryptocurrencies just surpassed $100 billion. The vast majority of these gains have come in just the last few months on April 1st the total market cap was just over $25 billion representing a 300 percent increase in value in just over 60 days. While some of these gains are from bitcoin itself (BTC is up ~160 percent in the same two-month time frame), other digital currencies like Ethereum are also responsible for the increase, which on its own has increased ~439 percent over the last two months. TechCrunch (also, 3 reasons the cryptocurrency exchange market is maturing & Cryptoeconomics 101)

My experience using hackintosh low-end PC for 3 years Almost 3 years ago I installed Mac OS X mavericks for the first time on my personal computer, before this I used a lot of distributions of gnu linux. but sometimes I had heard about Mac OS X and hackintosh, in that moment it seemed something Impossible to do. After spending hours reading guides in forums, reddit, tonymac86. I decided to try installing mavericks. The first thing I did was to download a torrent of niresh. For that moment there was no support for Yosemite. Jhonny Arana

Pirate Bay founder: Weve lost the internet, its all about damage control now At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and weve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we cant fix it we can only make it slightly less awful. The Next Web

An open letter to Microsoft: A 64-bit OS is better than a 32-bit OS There are a few absolutes in life death, taxes, and that a 64-bit OS is better than a 32-bit OS. Moving over to a 64-bit OS allows your laptop to run BOTH the old compatible 32-bit processes and also the new 64-bit processes. In other words, there is zero downside (and there are gigantic upsides). Backblaze

Following the money hobbled vDOS attack-for-hire service A new report proves the value of following the money in the fight against dodgy cybercrime services known as booters or stressers virtual hired muscle that can be rented to knock nearly any website offline. Last fall, two 18-year-old Israeli men were arrested for allegedly running vDOS, perhaps the most successful booter service of all time. Krebs on Security

Automate the freight: maritime drone deliveries Ships at sea are literally islands unto themselves. If what you need isnt on board, good luck getting it in the middle of the Pacific. As such, most ships are really well equipped with spare parts and even with raw materials and the tools needed to fabricate most of what they cant store, and mariners are famed for their ability to make do with what theyve got. Hackaday (also, Japan to launch self-navigating cargo ships 'by 2025')

Its been so windy in Europe that electricity prices have turned negative It's been very windy across Europe this week. So much so, in fact, that the high wind load on onshore and offshore wind turbines across much of the continent has helped set new wind power records. For starters, renewables generated more than half of Britain's energy demand on Wednesdayfor the first time ever. Vice

Amazon lent $1 billion to merchants to boost sales on its marketplace Amazon.com Inc has stepped up lending to third-party sellers on its site who are looking to grow their business, a company executive said in an interview on Wednesday. The e-commerce giant has doled out more than $1 billion in small loans to sellers in the past 12 months, compared with more than $1.5 billion it lent from 2011 through 2015, said Peeyush Nahar, vice president for Amazon Marketplace. Reuters

DARPA funds development of new type of processor A completely new kind of non-von-Neumann processor called a HIVE Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit is being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to the tune of $80 million over four-and-a-half years. Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are participating in the project, along with a national laboratory, a university and a defense contractor North Grumman. EE Times

Xbox Unleashed: Our deep-dive study of how millions use Xbox Live For three years now, Ars Steam Gauge project and the public sampling projects it has inspired (such as Steam Spy) have provided an important behind-the-scenes look at what kinds of games are popular on PC gamings most popular marketplace. Today, after years of work, were ready to unveil a new effort that similarly uncovers whats popular among Xbox Live users on the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Ars Technica

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Top 5 Ways to Shill a Cryptocurrency – The Merkle

Posted: at 4:52 pm

In the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, we have a phenomenon known as shilling. This particular endeavor revolves around tricking as many people as possible into thinking a particular coin or token will be valuable in the future. There are many different ways to go about things, although some methods are far more common compared to others. Below are some of the more common methods people use to shill particular cryptocurrencies.

One of the places where people often used to shill cryptocurrencies was the Trollbox on the Poloniex exchange. Albeit such hangout places are designed to have a nice chat with other users, they often become a tool to promote new cryptocurrencies regardless of whether they have any real value whatsoever. Trollboxes and chatboxes on most cryptocurrency exchanges simply need to be avoided when it comes to any cryptocurrency advice. Shilling is the top priority there, rather than having mature conversations. Thankfully, Poloniex shut down its Trollbox not too long ago.

The BitcoinTalk forums are the go-to place for any discussion related to cryptocurrency. What once started out as a bitcoin-only bastion slowly evolved into a place where multiple cryptocurrencies can be discussed at any given time. Do keep in mind a lot of people hanging out in the altcoin section are merely shilling particular coins, though. There are also quite a few paid advertising campaigns to spread the world about coin X or token Y. Always be careful when looking for specific information on BitcoinTalk.

As we have come to expect these days, a lot of people rely on Reddit for the latest information regarding cryptocurrency. Virtually every token, asset, or coin has its own subreddit these days, which is good. However, a lot of those Reddit posts in those subsections are merely speculation, fake news, and shilling attempts as well. Any information found on Reddit regarding whichever cryptocurrency needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt, to say the least. There is also the risk of seeing a paid Reddit advertisement at the top of a particular subreddit, which is designed to shill a particular coin.

One of the most common ways to shill currencies, tokens, and assets is by using social media. Things are getting a bit out of hand on both Twitter and Facebook these days. A lot of people will tweet something in quick succession to gain some form of social traction. That is not always a successful way of doing things, but it certainly ensures things get noticed on the platform. This is especially true with most ICO tokens and altcoins which bring nothing of value to the table.

Things are virtually the same on Facebook, though. Every group related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency will ultimately attract shills trying to promote a specific project or service. In most cases, these coins are useless or the service turns into a scam. It is impossible to trust the information one receives from social media, as shilling becomes a second nature pretty quickly.

The most intriguing way to ensure some projects gain traction regardless of their legitimacy is by paying for content on blogs and news sites. We often see scam projects and pointless ICOs issue press releases to sites, who publish them in exchange for a small fee. In some cases, such paid content will show up on PR Newswire, or even get picked up by mainstream media outlets. People need to be especially wary of this type of content, as a lot of shills will gladly pay a small fee to ensure their flavor of the month project gets some attention.

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