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Merged All things Trump + Russia

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Cl1mh4224rd said:
As a technically-minded person (or at least enough to know what to search for), this is kind of hilarious as "evidence".

The timestamps (created, modified, accessed) associated with a file on either a Windows or Unix-based operating systems (including Linux) are not timezone aware. They are stored as UTC.

It's done this way to make conversion to local time much easier. Otherwise, before displaying the timestamp to the user, the operating system would have to either 1) convert the timestamp from "the file's local time" to UTC, then back to your system's local time, or 2) calculate the relative offset between the file's local time and your system's local time and then apply that to the timestamp.

Both of those options are a complete waste of CPU cycles. In addition, storing the timezone info along with the timestamp takes up unnecessary space (disk and memory).

Early pioneers in this field were all about optimization, because they had very little processing power and storage to work with. They had to make the most of what little they had.
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RAR Times: Local or UTC?

Forensicator said:
Some reviewers have questioned the claim stated in the Guccifer 2.0 NGP/VAN Metadata Analysis report that the .rar files analyzed in that study recorded file times in local (relative) time. In short, newer implementations of WinRAR use the “version 5” format and in that format times are recorded as UTC times. However, the .rar files analyzed in this study use the older version 4 format which records times in “local” (relative) format. [...]
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trustbutverify said:
Just because the highest levels of the Trump campaign met with a Kremlin insider to obtain stolen information damaging to his opponent in an effort to aid his campaign doesn't mean there was any collusion or anything.
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Haha!

Politics can be a dirty game but even the guy running for high school president might think to send his best friends' cousins' girlfriend, who goes to a different school, to get the scoop on his opponent.
 
Arcade22 said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-congress-republicans.html

I knew that Republicans have, as a group, been incredibly pathetic and weak in tackling Trump despite his outrageous behavior (with the typical token critics) but this is the ultimate proof of how worthless they are.

Cowardly bewailing, too frightened to stand tall. Play the hand you have been dealt, You've got no balls at all!
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Cowards and traitors. For all the Democrats' faults, it's nothing compared to this.
 
Try not to break out laughing at how Fredo is handling his email scandal.

picture.php
 
mgidm86 said:
Do we know this to be true? Was the lawyer an official representative of the Kremlin? There seems to be doubt about this. Seems like the only thing that could get Trump out of hot water is if she were not, unless it is illegal to receive election help from a citizen of another country.

I have seen it asserted on BBCs website that she was an official government "something", but I see denials too.

Is this, or will it be, the main point of contention?
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It is my understanding that under US election law it is illegal to solicit or knowingly accept donations from foreign nationals. Donations can consist of goods or services freely provided as well as money. If my understanding is correct, the points of contention should be: 1) whether providing the "opposition research" the lawyer claimed to have constitutes performing a "service" for the campaign; 2) whether it was understood that the "opposition research" was to be received for free or for below "market value". It isn't necessary for the donor to be an agent of a foreign govt. for a donation to be illegal, they only need to be exclusively a citizen of a foreign country.

According to the most recent reports, Trump Jr. was aware that the information that the lawyer claimed to have was provided by the Russian govt.
 
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Breitbart knows they're going to be spinning lies about this.

"So like, this is straight up collusion," he wrote in the news outlet's internal Slack, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by CNN. "Right?"

Minutes before, Donald Trump Jr. had disclosed on Twitter an email exchange from June 2016 in which he'd agreed to meet with someone he'd been told was a "Russian government attorney" about "very high level and sensitive information" that would "incriminate" Hillary Clinton.

The text of the emails sent shockwaves through most newsrooms. At Breitbart, not everyone was on the same page.
Some staffers were seemingly left astonished. Writing in the company Slack, senior editor Rebecca Mansour reacted with only one word: "Wow." Amanda House, the outlet's deputy politics editor, wrote only, "???????"
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Civet said:
I'm not up on every detail of this. Does it still look like Pres. Trump and his main man Bannon are personally distanced from the most incriminating stuff?
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Childlike Empress said:
RAR Times: Local or UTC?
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This doesn't indicate that the timezone is actually stored along with the timestamp. In fact, looking at the file format specification, there are only 4 bytes allocated to the file time (FTIME).

As far as I can tell, the timestamp, adjusted for the system's local time, would be stored, but not the timezone offset itself (let alone a DST flag). This is pretty crucial information if you want to know, accurately, the time that a timestamp represents (I've had to "deal with" "non-local local time" as part of my job). You would need to already know at what time the file was created or modified in order to make any educated guesses about the timezone offset.
 
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Childlike Empress said:
Last time you "told us" you weren't even aware that the issue was about .rar files. I suggest looking into the thing before shooting from the hip.
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I'd suggest looking into how easy it is to change the system time on a PC, which makes any timestamp suspect unless one has access to the PC that generated the file and its system logs.
 
Childlike Empress said:
Last time you "told us" you weren't even aware that the issue was about .rar files. I suggest looking into the thing before shooting from the hip.
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Now, now... I actually took the time to research the claim by checking out the file format specification. I may still be incorrect, but I did do additional research. Research which seems to indicate that the claims made about the files' timezone are still, at best, unproven.
 
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Babbylonian said:
I'd suggest looking into how easy it is to change the system time on a PC, which makes any timestamp suspect unless one has access to the PC that generated the file and its system logs.
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This is also true, and probably much more important than what I've been talking about.

Timestamps are metadata. Easily modified metadata. They are most certainly not a means of authenticating or validating the origin or chain of custody of a file.
 
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