CVE-2021-22005: Trivial Remote Exploit of VMware vCenter

VMware has posted VMSA-2021-0020 (CVE-2021-22005), a very troubling vulnerability (CVSS 9.8) along with warnings of active exploitation:

…network access to port 443 on vCenter Server may exploit this issue to execute code…

It’s related to a simple file upload with this commonly open port, thus the alarming 9.8 score of risk out of 10.

Which versions are affected? Looks like VMware is confused. In the advisory it plainly states this:

This issue does not affect vCenter Server 6.5.

Then the recommended FAQ in the advisory states this:

In this case it is vCenter Server 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0.

Err on the side of caution and patch 6.5.

Unquestionably Fascist: American GOP Today Sounds Like 1932 Mussolini

I’ve warned about this here since at least 2008. And if you look back at my tweets nearly a decade after that (2016) I’m not mincing any words.

Source: Twitter

That crazy-sounding excerpt of text I’m tweeting out, in case it’s not clear, is literally a page from Mussolini’s infamous 1932 “The Doctrine of Fascism” (technically ghost written by fascist politician Giovanni Gentile).

And I find it actually surprising to see any likes or retweets of my tweet. It always felt like I was talking into a void on Twitter.

Nobody should be surprised by fascism in America, since it has been a huge problem since long before fascism was a common word, yet somehow people keep acting surprised by it.

I recently wrote about the U.S. Vice President in 1944 speaking on how to find and “smoke out” American fascists. Before that I wrote here several times about Nazi Germany using America’s racist laws, gas chambers and concentration camps as its blueprint for systemic oppression and tyranny.

Today I’m seeing reports that confirm this long-time problem has again reared its head, despite all the warnings.

Please don’t think this is a new problem related to some event or one election. This is a very very old problem, perhaps as old as the country itself:

I also covered this in 2019 in a post called “Why the White House Pardoned Convicted War Criminals” where I even tried to illustrate the problem:

Here you can see why America’s 1932 Presidential election was so critical to the rejection of fascism; rejection of the “strong man” propaganda spreading at that time.

Source: Graph created by me

There are judges in America today (notably schooled by Harvard) writing opinions that sit 180 degrees from obvious lessons of WWII (let alone Civil War), brazenly opening the door to domestic terrorism and thus fuel another rise of fascism.

Finally, in the vein of “I told you so” reporting, I’ll just leave you with another recent post of mine about a new book worth reading:

Going to War Against Fascists Earlier Prevents Late Realization That Fascism is Really Bad

“Fight Club” Ruling by Racist Judge Overturned, Yet Threat Grows in America

A US judge in southern California tried to rule that “freedom of speech” protects “fight clubs” meant to spread across the U.S. even when they clearly exist only to physically terrorize people.

On multiple occasions, [southern California white supremacist street-fighting gang] members showed up at protests in California and at the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville with their faces uncovered and brawled with leftists, which left Rundo and others open to criminal prosecution. With charges looming against Rundo and three other members of RAM in 2018, the young white supremacist fled to Central America, where he was later arrested by the FBI, and brought back to the U.S. A judge dismissed the charges the following year, concluding that their activities were protected by the First Amendment.

Street-fighting white gangs, training internationally with terror groups, as a form of protected free speech?

What?

That judge was looking at details like this.

The March 2017 Huntington Beach rally, to “Make America Great Again,” became especially violent. Prosecutors presented pictures showing Laube repeatedly punching a journalist in the face.

From this he concluded “an essential function of free speech is to invite dispute” therefore he wouldn’t jail the Nazi throwing punches in America.

A journalist is being punched in the face and judge Carney thinks that he is dealing with a speech issue where the physical attacker needs some kind of protection.

In fact, Carney makes a point to say he’s the kind of person who disagrees with the Nazi who might “throw punches in the name of teaching antifa some lesson”.

Nice try. Think about that phrasing for a long minute. An American judge officially wrote in his opinion that a being punched in the face by a Nazi is teaching “some lesson”. What lesson is that?

Carney had only in June 2020 been assigned the chief judge spot in the Central District of California (counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo — nearly 20 million people, about half the state’s population).

Judge Carney stepped down as chief a month later, when his subtle style of racism was very visibly outed.

The announcement stems from comments Carney made a during a webinar sponsored by the Federal Bar Association on June 9, 2020. Carney said he used the term “street smart” to describe Gray. “This term was one of many words I used to recognize and compliment Ms. Gray…”

Ok, let’s be careful here. Context matters A LOT in this phrase, which is why it is racist.

“Street smart” indicates survival in dangerous situations. Urban dictionary even offers this rather blatant example:

…one who is knowledgible [sic] at some art of illegal activity. understands the code and conduct held within a certain crime family/ies. the term came from the common street hoodlum who knows how to succeed in areas that don’t necessaryly [sic] need a formal education to get ahead in life. for instance a group(crew) of criminals enterprise at trafficing and selling narcotics

Can you see why context of a white judge calling someone in his staff “street smart” is problematic (implying lack of professionalism/education and crime boss status under systemic oppression)… not to mention trying to then argue it was meant to be a compliment!?

His high-brow ivy-league style of racism in fact targeted Gray, the “first black woman to be named clerk of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California”.

It was Carney expressing his contempt, where contempt is the root of racism.

In his apology to her, this Harvard-educated genius in the seat of Chief Judgeship dug himself a hole so big it erupted like a volcano.

Carney compounded his problems when he spoke with Gray in a later conversation about calls for his resignation as chief judge, according to his email, sent to court staff members and judges. “In a moment of anger and frustration, I said to Ms. Gray that the people criticizing me were equating my well-intended use of the term ‘street-smart’ with the reprehensible conduct of a police officer putting his knee on a person’s neck,” Carney said. Carney said the statement about his critics was “an insensitive and graphic overreaction to the criticism that was leveled against me. I never should have made the comparison.”

Think about Carney telling America to tolerate angry racist mob violence because he thinks of them as just people trying to express themselves. Got that logic?

He tried to lay down a line that white male angry violence is just something Americans have to accept.

Then his saccharin racism is called out and in response he whines he doesn’t deserve anti-racism scrutiny, claiming his “moment of anger” and contempt towards critics explains his actions.

See why he tried to set loose the angry racist white mobs punching journalists?

What matters in this context is twofold:

1) There was a giant smack-down of that absurd Carney decision. The courts rejected his love of fascism, reminding America how awful it is for a racist judge to fraudulently attempt to frame white mob physical violence as protected speech.

…it made no sense “to assert that the government and its citizens cannot act, but must sit quietly and wait until they are actually physically injured or have had their property destroyed.”

2) White mob physical violence has been a long-time problem in America and is again an increasing threat, not least of all because of schools and courts passing upward deeply flawed thinkers like Carney. Harvard has a long history of sanctioning white mob violence, as well as graduating obvious racists (and some recent countermeasures).

1944: “The American fascist method is to poison channels of public information”

Source: LIFE magazine 23 Apr 1945, which glosses over how Truman had been nominated July 1944 to replace Wallace as Roosevelt’s VP.

Here’s a sage warning from the controversial U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, as recorded by the Senate on April 17th, 1944:

Source: Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the United States Congress. (1944). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Wallace wrote this for the New York Times, which had sent him a request to “write a piece answering the following questions”:

  1. What is a Fascist?
  2. How many Fascists have we?
  3. How dangerous are they?

His definition basically is a Fascist combines of lust for money/power with an intensity “most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact”, such as when America First will “use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism”.

Many of his ideas sound relevant to today’s news, such as one about the Facebook executives falsely using privacy as a slogan just to conceal their selfish surveillance.

Years of twisting themselves into a pretzel to appease Trump only to have him throw Zuck into imaginary Gitmo…

The “New Deal” of Roosevelt was about building a democracy powerful enough to defeat a destructive value system of the Facebook-like monopolists and cartels who pumped up Fascism as a way to block competition.

It used to be that TV and radio broadcaster fear of the FCC was tied to its origin story under Roosevelt’s 1934 Communications Act. What better way to fight “America First” (the infamous Nazi military intelligence operation) than regulate against Nazism being promoted by monopolists like Hearst? It was no coincidence the General Counsel of the FCC in 1940 (Telford Taylor) later became Prosecution Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials.

Or as Wallace put it

…inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. […] It was Hitler’s claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

The above NYT article was published by Wallace two years after his very famous May 8, 1942 presentation on how to counter Germany military intelligence influence campaigns (minute 4:04).

The common man will smoke the Hitler stooges out into the open in The United States… he will destroy their influence… [using] the four freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt… freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of the fear from secret police… and freedom from want.