By Jay Valentine
\nAmerican Thinker<\/p>\n
Scammers sold products, did not deliver them to paid customers, then dropped off the site.\u00a0\u00a0The perp then changed every identifier \u2014 name, address, credit card, phone, literally every ID \u2014 and rejoined the site.<\/p>\n
Fraud detection software was blind because there was nothing in common between the bad guy and the newly listed same bad guy.\u00a0\u00a0Neural nets were useless; there were no patterns.<\/p>\n
This was a high-profile deal.\u00a0\u00a0It was front-page national news for months.\u00a0\u00a0The Secret Service, the FBI, about every fraud detection company was trying to solve it.\u00a0\u00a0They could not.<\/p>\n
We delivered a fraud technology that stopped auction fraud in its tracks.\u00a0\u00a0The auction site publicly stated such, noting it in its annual report.<\/p>\n
We know a little bit about fraud, cyber-security, computer programming, and “glitches.”<\/p>\n
Software is really stupid stuff.\u00a0\u00a0It does not go off on its own, has no mind of its own, and there is no intelligence anywhere in code.\u00a0\u00a0It performs instructions and does them over and over, exactly the same every time, no matter what.<\/p>\n
Until something changes.<\/p>\n
Something changing is not a “glitch.”\u00a0\u00a0It is a change.<\/p>\n
Software does not wake up in the morning and suddenly shift 6,000 votes from candidate A to candidate B, as in Biden.\u00a0\u00a0An electrical impulse hitting from that outdoor lightning strike does not make code do something different.\u00a0\u00a0It may fry a hard drive, but it does not change vote counts.<\/p>\n
Software leaves tracks.\u00a0\u00a0These are called log files.<\/p>\n
This is a little geeky, but software runs on an operating system.\u00a0\u00a0You have one on your phone, that thing that updates itself right in the middle of the phone call you need to take.<\/p>\n
Operating systems need to track everything they do, so they write automatically to a log file for everything that happens.\u00a0\u00a0The software vendor usually uses these log files to see what happened, when something that was not expected did happen.\u00a0\u00a0Log files are really useful, and most serious applications use them.<\/p>\n
Log files are huge<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0They are really ugly.\u00a0\u00a0If you saw a log file, it would look like thousand pages of random numbers and letters.\u00a0\u00a0It would mean nothing…to you.<\/p>\n To a system that reads log files, it would mean everything.\u00a0\u00a0A log file is the equivalent of having a social media post for every one of your eye blinks, heartbeats, finger movements, 24 hours a day \u2014 you get the picture.<\/p>\n You can screw around with log files and modify them, but it is really hard.\u00a0\u00a0It also leaves tracks, as any change to a log file is written to \u2014 you guessed it, that log file.<\/p>\n Some applications run on very constrained machines and do not create log files.\u00a0\u00a0To create them is to eat up dear storage.\u00a0\u00a0No log file means that an application problem is harder to find.\u00a0\u00a0Think days of work, maybe a week.<\/p>\n If a computer system appears to wake up in the night, when a national election has stopped counting votes, and “glitches” votes from one candidate to another, guess what: it isn’t the standard code.\u00a0\u00a0Something changed and it is discoverable in the log files.\u00a0\u00a0If there are no logs, it can usually be found in places where the application is writing to a database.<\/p>\n Whatever it was, and there are lots of choices, vote-counting software would be highly unlikely to do this during an election.\u00a0\u00a0These kinds of problems are solved during the quality assurance testing as the first item one might check.\u00a0\u00a0Such checks would be run over and over against every conceivable circumstance.<\/p>\n Vote-counting software \u2014 checking if it actually counts votes for the right guy is something one does pretty early in the process.\u00a0\u00a0And if it works, it will continue to work \u2014 unless something changes.<\/p>\n So when you hear that there is a “glitch” in the dark of night and votes got moved around, you can bet it wasn’t the lightning strike or a broken water pipe.\u00a0\u00a0It was someone changing something.\u00a0\u00a0It likely left some tracks.<\/p>\n And my experience is there will be lots of tracks.\u00a0\u00a0Competent forensic investigators know just where to look.\u00a0\u00a0They are likely to find that someone changed something, and it was not a “glitch.”<\/p>\n