this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 155 points 1 month ago

My favorite part of this whole hilarious series of stories is that the guy who proved Lindell wrong was a Trump voter.

[–] demizerone@lemmy.world 125 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Imagine going from smoking crack, to making millions selling shitty pillows at Walmart, to losing it all for Donald Trump. What a loser.

[–] not_that_guy05@lemmy.world 35 points 1 month ago

Weird loser*

Hell of a life story though.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 119 points 1 month ago (1 children)

TL;DR

“Prove Mike Wrong” offered $5 million to any willing and able cyber professional who could demonstrate that Lindell was wrong about the election being co-opted by Chinese hackers working on behalf of the Biden campaign.

in addition to having to pay a guy [...] $5 million [...], Lindell will now have to pay some of that guy’s attorneys fees, which were incurred in court.

Did nobody proofread this article? The writing is so convoluted. Run it through ChatGPT at the very least, good god.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The only things is the use of "guy" but apart from that i dont see anything wrong with that section.

[–] Eiim@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Here's the full quote:

Case in point: in addition to having to pay a guy who he bet $5 million couldn’t prove him wrong $5 million after that guy proved him wrong, and after he went to court to try to avoid paying the money, Lindell will now have to pay some of that guy’s attorneys fees, which were incurred in court.

There's nothing technically wrong with it, it's just really awkwardly worded.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The only thing wrong with this is the person writing it should never be allowed to write professionally ever again.

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago

Yeah this reads like the slack messages I send to my work friends

Yeah ok i agree. The full quote is borderline unreadable.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 47 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They left the best part out of the headline

Business Insider reports that, in addition to the $5 million, Lindell will also have to pay the guy’s attorney fees. A federal judge has ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman $4,508 in attorney fees. Zeidman had initially sought as much as $12,800 for approximately 16 billed hours, but the judge ruled that some of Zeidman’s legal discovery requests were “overly broad”

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 19 points 1 month ago (4 children)

His lawyer bills $800/hr? Jesus Christ, who did he hire? That seems insane to me.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 56 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

5 million dollars is on the line. Paying 10k to get it is a good investment.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago

The lawyer probably did it on spec. He promised 5 mill to anyone who proved him wrong.

16 hours of work that gets paid by Lindell for a very-easy win? Absolutely.

[–] GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

one of the reasons the justice system favors the wealthy

[–] Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You just explained the essence of Nigerian scam.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Sure, but this was legitimate. Lindell admitted he had no intention to pay the 5 million, he just wanted to gin up free publicity.

He thought that "since you can't prove a negative" that he wouldn't have to pay. The judge in the case however found that since the data was literally technical gibberish, that the plaintiff proved that it could not be what Lindell had claimed it was, and was owed the promised payout.

[–] VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

Good lawyers aren't cheap, and in the grand scheme of things are well worth the money when they win.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

That’s not super high. Maybe a teensy bit above average, but every speciality is different. Some fields of law bill at just a few hundred bucks an hour, while others regularly go that high.

[–] snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

That's cheap.

[–] haunte@leminal.space 35 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This guy has always been weird, like in all his public appearances he's always frantic as fuck and makes no sense. But he could still be a pillow millionaire if he hadn't joined the trump cult and just chilled out a bit. Does trump drive his supporters into a frenzy of mass confusion, or do only confused people join the trump cult? What came first, the the shit bird or the shit egg?

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

The frantic part is because he's the crackhead version of a dry drunk. I'm not being sarcastic about the crackhead thing. That's part of his own supposed redemption story. If it's even true and he's stopped smoking the rock or snorting the nose candy. Maybe it's adderall these days.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The frantic nonsense is mostly fueled by coke.

[–] Kiernian@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don't believe so.

As I understand it, he was an actually recovered addict, so it would be "fueled by the damage drugs had already done to his brain before he quit".

And I think it was crack.

Not to defend the guy, but for a while there pre COVID, while I was doing some volunteer work, I heard from a connected volunteer that Mikey was donating cases upon cases of pillows to rehab locations in his home state, which, speaking as the bleeding heart liberal that I am who wishes we provided more for services like mental health and addiction, is pretty awesome.

A tax write off is possibly just a tax write off, but for a while, at least, it's possible he might not have been totally reprehensible.

I mean, he also professed to be Christian and there was a stink about him not paying employees like four or five years ago too, so since the Bible has specific things to say about THAT behavior too, it's pretty easy to draw conclusions but even people who behave like shit bags can perhaps sometimes be nuanced.

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This dude lies like he breathes. I don't know why we'd assume the recovered addict bit would be any exception

[–] Kiernian@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

People in the throes of full blown addiction don't typically donate to rehab non-profits?

Or not, I dunno. I guess they might when they're rich and don't have to worry about how they're going to afford their next baggie they probably don't freak out about where their money is going as much. Shrug

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he also professed to be Christian and there was a stink about him not paying employees

As William S. Burroughs said: "if you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. HIs word isn't worth shit, not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal."

[–] Jack@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

he also professed to be Christian

According to Luke 16:13 Jesus Christ said “You cannot serve both God and money.”

Mark 10:21 “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

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[–] Travelator@thelemmy.club 31 points 1 month ago

I'm just glad his commercials have disappeared from the crappy over the air TV stations I watch.

[–] suction@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Does someone know the details how he proved him wrong (in a nutshell…)?

[–] mholiv@lemmy.world 104 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

TLDR he provided a bunch of packet captures “proving” voting traffic was going to non American IPs. His captures where shown to have been faked because the packet checksums didn’t match, but only on the packets showing traffic going to non American IPs.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 31 points 1 month ago (4 children)

That seems like pretty technical and advanced forgery for someone of his inclination?

[–] militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 35 points 1 month ago

I'm sure he had help from a comrade or 2

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The reality is that it's probably him who got conned by whoever sold home the "proof."

[–] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Now I’m thinking I can grift extremists by faking stuff they would lap up.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can see people doing that all the time. The biggest barrier is if your ethics allow you to do it. A lot of people have gotten very wealthy because their ethics don't care.

[–] doubletwist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Reminds me of a lyric in a song by Ren:

Swallow all your morals, they're a poor man's quality

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 30 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A technical and advanced forgery would have corrected the checksums. Any script kiddie that knows a bit of python can forge packets with the scapy library, or any number of other packet manipulation libraries.

[–] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What would some use cases be for forging packets, aside from trying to claim a stolen election.

I’m not really asking because I want to do anything nefarious; just pure curiosity with these kind of things. Darknet Diaries is a great podcast for this kind of thing.

[–] cheet@infosec.pub 10 points 1 month ago

Funny packets make things behave funny sometimes. Sometimes you just need to see how something behaves when you send it illegal packets that the real software would never send.

It also makes it possible to cheat in some games by lying to the game server about interactions in game.

Essentially hackers need a way to talk to machines at every level of every protocol and Scapy is a pretty standard way of achieving that.

[–] mholiv@lemmy.world 30 points 1 month ago

I think someone sold it to him knowing he was too incompetent to have a second source check it.

[–] suction@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago
[–] betahack@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] mholiv@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

With the assistance of a LLM:

A man said he had proof that voting information was being sent to places outside of America. But when people checked his proof, they found out someone had changed it to make it look like it was true. The numbers in his proof didn’t match, so they knew he was not telling the truth.

[–] awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lindell provided data that turned out to be totally irrelevant to his claims

[–] Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

And the data was provided by someone who had a long history of fraud

[–] d00phy@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago

Finding out can get hella expensive!

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is sweet justice. Lindell had a bunch of nonsense data and this dude proved it easily. Oh, fuck, I just realized I’m pretty tired. Lemme go lay my head on NotHisPillow.

[–] workerONE@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

#NotMyPillow

[–] MrJameGumb@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

You mean his best friend Donald Trump didn't bail him out? 🙀

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