Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, the Battle of Cold Harbor continues:
From May 31-June 12, 1864, more than 160,000 men clashed at Cold Harbor, Virginia, during the Wilderness Campaign. The 2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments took part. June 3 saw some of the worst fighting. When the 36th Wisconsin Infantry moved to the front, its colonel, Frank Haskell of Madison, was shot dead while commanding his troops to take cover. Co.G of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters, from Wisconsin, was placed in the front of the battle on this day as well.
Recommended for reading in full —
Heather Long and Steven Mufson report Trump thinks he’s saving trade. The rest of the world thinks he’s blowing it up:
President Trump appears prepared to unravel 70 years of painstaking effort that the United States has led to build an international system of trade based on mutually accepted rules and principles.
Ever since an agreement on trade emerged in 1947 from the ashes of World War II, presidents of both parties have pushed this system as a way to strengthen alliances and promote the expansion of democracy and prosperity in Europe and Asia.
But with Trump’s decision last week to enact aluminum and steel tariffs against U.S. allies in Europe and North America, he is subverting previously agreed-upon trade pacts. The result is a brewing trade war with Canada, Mexico and Europe, which are expressing shock and bitter frustration while enacting tariffs of their own on a bevy of American products.
Sam Bidle reports Here’s the Email Russian Hackers Used to Try to Break Into State Voting Systems:
JUST DAYS BEFORE the 2016 presidential election, hackers identified by the National Security Agency as working for Russia attempted to breach American voting systems. Among their specific targets were the computers of state voting officials, which they had hoped to compromise with malware-laden emails, according to an intelligence report published previously by The Intercept.
Now we know what those emails looked like.
An image of the malicious email, provided to The Intercept in response to a public records request in North Carolina, reveals precisely how hackers, who the NSA believed were working for Russian military intelligence, impersonated a Florida-based e-voting vendor and attempted to trick its customers into opening malware-packed Microsoft Word files.
The screenshot, shown below, confirms NSA reporting that the email purported to originate from the vendor, Tallahassee-based VR Systems, but was sent from a Gmail account, which could have easily tricked less scrupulous users. “Emails from VR Systems will never come from an ‘@gmail.com’ email address” the company warned in a November 1, 2016 security alert, which included the reproduction of the GRU email.
The specific Gmail address shown in the message, vrelections@gmail.com, matches an address cited in the NSA report as having been created by Russian government hackers, although in the NSA report the address was rendered with a period, as “vr.elections@gmail.com.” The timing of VR Systems’ security alert is also in line with the NSA’s reporting, which indicated that the email attack occurred on either October 31 or November 1 of 2016. The original classified NSA document contained intelligence assessments, but omitted any raw signals intelligence used to form those assessments.
North Korea, caught in a deception (yet again):
BREAKING: What first appeared to be a gesture indicating North Korea might be willing to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, appears to have been little more than a propaganda effort for the world’s cameras, @barbarastarrcnn reports https://t.co/1sLegVPr4H pic.twitter.com/cQ6jq8cA7X
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) June 1, 2018
Geoffrey A. Fowler writes Hands off my data! 15 default privacy settings you should change right now:
On the Internet, the devil’s in the defaults.
You’re not reading all those updated data policies flooding your inbox. You probably haven’t even looked for your privacy settings. And that’s exactly what Facebook, Google and other tech giants are counting on.
They tout we’re “in control” of our personal data, but know most of us won’t change the settings that let them grab it like cash in a game show wind machine. Call it the Rule of Defaults: 95 percent of people are too busy, or too confused, to change a darn thing.
Give me 15 minutes, and I can help you join the 5 percent who are actually in control. I dug through the privacy settings for the five biggest consumer tech companies and picked a few of the most egregious defaults you should consider changing. These links will take you directly to what to tap, click and toggle for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple.
Lindsey Bever reports A dachshund swelled to 3 times his size and ‘crackled like bubblewrap.’ Surgery saved him:
In top form, Trevor is a dashing black-and-brown dachshund with a long, slender body, stout little legs and droopy ears.
So when his owners found him blown up like a balloon to three times his normal size, they were understandably alarmed.
“When we picked him up, he felt full of air — because he was full of air — but he crackled like bubblewrap underneath your fingers,” Francine Jennings, from Cheshire in the United Kingdom, told BBC News.
The 4-year-old dog had somehow sustained an injury to his windpipe that was allowing air to leak into his body and seep underneath his skin, causing him to bloat, according to a statement Friday from the Willows Veterinary Group. Although it is unclear when it occurred, vets at the Beech House animal hospital in Warrington stitched up the hole, and the dog “deflated,” according to the statement.