In case the name doesn't ring a bell: Sinclair is the group that was widely reported on a few years ago in a series of viral videos that showed dozens of their anchors reciting the same exact line about fake news.[1] They control a large segment of the "local news" market, and viewers are frequently unaware that they are watching a Sinclair station.
Glad I'm not the only one here who does not like this company. When thinking about companies I wish I could easily boycott, Nestle comes to mind, and then there is Sinclair. The fact that the stations are down is pretty huge though. That's really bad opsec, unless they were all tied together with some 3rd party service.
> That's really bad opsec, unless they were all tied together with some 3rd party service.
The article addresses this:
> The attack could have been isolated, but many sections of the Sinclair IT network were interconnected through the same Active Directory domain, allowing the attackers to reach broadcasting systems for local TV stations.
> companies I wish I could easily boycott, Nestle comes to mind, and then there is Sinclair
Sorry if this question seems presumptive, but isn't it actually extremely easy to boycott both of these companies? I would be surprised to learn I have consumed any of their products in the past year, and I haven't even been deliberately trying to boycott either of them.
(I live in the United States, but I don't buy bottled water, candy, or watch local television.)
Nestle products are titled under 2000 different brand names.
For instance, cheerios, golden grahams, digiorno pizza, jacks pizza, lean cuisine, gerber, maybeline makeup brands, some shampoo brands, etc…
It’s definitely possible, but it’s a rabbit hole and isn’t as easy as “i won’t buy nestle hot chocolate.”
Honestly, I understand the can of worms this might open, but a part of me thinks the parent company name should have to be on all products–transparency so we have something closer to information symmetry. It’s more difficult than I think it should be to buy ethically.
We hear all the time “If you don’t like what a company is doing, then vote with your dollars.” But then we see how many companies have a multi-tier web of subsidiaries which can sometimes feel like they’re obfuscating intentionally. I don’t mean to imply they’re all intentionally obfuscating but it sure feels like that sometimes.
Yeah, fair enough, I can see it being hard for most people to bin Nestle (though not Sinclair?).
My response to Nestle was a "me personally" thing which probably doesn't apply to most other people - I don't really buy branded junk food, almost everything I eat I prepare myself from fresh ingredients. I read through the Wikipedia list [1] and didn't see any brands I've purchased this year.
But you're quite right that I was wrongly exaggerating by saying it was easy to boycott Nestle. I should have just emphasized that it's possible to boycott Nestle (if you know what the subsidiaries are), and easy (I think?) to boycott Sinclair.
> everything I eat I prepare myself from fresh ingredients
Nestle owns a lot of brands in the "ingredients" space too, unless you mean you are making everything from scratch. Buitoni pasta, Maggi bullions and soup bases, Carnation condensed and powdered milks, and Garden Burger meat alternatives are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Carnation has been the most annoying for me to boycott because at my grocery store there is no other options for evaporated milk, dulce de leche, and malted milk powder.
I just went through the entire list of brands on that page and realised I'd been boycotting Nestle as well this last year or so, only without my knowledge. (I'm peripherally aware that they're considered "evil", but haven't given too much conscious thought w.r.t my own actions, and so haven't taken a position on whether I'm "boycotting" Nestle producsts or not.)
I'm similar to you -- make most of my own meals and don't really consume snack food and drink. Even all of the "prepared ingredient" type stuff that I buy (dried pasta, sauces) tend to be non-Nestle brands, so I really have to wonder if it's a lack of imagination that prompts people to claim that it's hard to avoid Nestle.
Of course, I'm in the UK (London) and not the USA, so maybe it's different? But I have a hard time understanding why it would be.
Edited to add: I also have a recent infant, to whom I've (again, without even trying) avoided feeding any Nestle products.
I was doing really well until I saw on that list that they own Purina, which is what we feed our cats. It's a shame, as several veterinarians I've talked to have said they believe Purina (Pro Plan/ONE) to be some of the best stuff out there for cats.
No opinion on Purina, but it's shocking to me how widely understood it is that medical professionals are bought and sold, and nobody seems concerned about this or worried about whether it violates professional ethics standards.
Every dentist I've ever been to has given me an Oral-B toothbrush at the end of my visit. Oral-B gives free stuff to dentists with the understanding that when they give it to their patients, it will have the connotation of an endorsement and the patients will go on to buy these things themselves.
I remember as a kid our family doctor would give my mother little samples of things that various pharmaceuticals had given him. Can't recall what they were, some kind of herbal remedy or naturopathic thing probably.
Not only that, but that statement was in response to making deals to buy up water several places, taking more than they bought, leaving some towns without a local water supply, bottling it up, and then selling the bottles to the locals who no longer have safe or sufficient tap or well water.
They also did a huge media blitz in poorer countries to convince mothers that their formula was far superior to breast milk.
They’d give new mothers samples of formula and tell them it’s healthier and safer for their babies. Just enough that by the time it ran out the mother’s milk hadn’t come in and breastfeeding would be extremely difficult or impossible to start. Then start charging for formula.
Similar tactics to drug dealers, but most drug dealers I’ve dealt with had more of a social conscience than that.
> Glad I'm not the only one here who does not like this company. When thinking about companies I wish I could easily boycott, Nestle comes to mind, and then there is Sinclair.
It is extremely easy to boycott Sinclair by not purchasing any TV service or watching TV channels.
It is almost as easy to boycott Nestle since the packaging for almost all brands states the parent company’s name somewhere on the back under the ingredients.
If it does not, you can also search the brand and find the ownership relatively quickly on Wikipedia or the company’s About Us page.
Sinclair is more or less a smaller version of News Corp (Sinclair is largest owner of Fox affiliated stations in the US, notably). Facebook is a fairly different company with different reasons to be hated.
To me, where Sinclair is most insidious is where they own non-Fox stations. It would be easy if I only had to avoid anything with Fox branding top to bottom. In my city, they own the ABC affiliate, which adds to difficulty in knowing which sources are trustworthy.
Used to do IT (helpdesk) for one of the many local networks that got acquired by Sinclair around 2013. Company I worked for owned about a dozen stations across the region, when Sinclair bought us they owned around 200 at the time. In spite of this, our IT operations were way more advanced. For example, Sinclair had only started using AD and Exchange less than a year before acquiring us, they had been on some ancient Novell installation before that.
Most entertaining memory I have of their incompetence: after the acquisition my boss no longer had permission to approve payment of bills, it had to go through corporate. So my boss called and emailed for months to get payments approved for our internet, phone service, etc., keeping a thorough record of all of the times he had asked to get our bills paid. Fast foward to about 4 months after the aquisition and suddenly our long distance phone service stops working. We contact the phone computer and find it's because of non-payment (we already suspected as much thanks to all the late notices we received). Corporate flips their lid, attempts to blame my boss for it, and he just sends them the dozens of emails and refers them to the dozens of calls he made record of. No idea who (if anyone) took the heat for it at corporate after that.
Second story, we hired a new senior network engineer. Turns out he knew even less about networking than me and the other guy on the helpdesk. But the technical competency part of the interview process was administered by, you guessed it, someone in corporate IT. At least we were able to get the guy fired within a few weeks of him starting, and the guy at corporate who passed him had some major egg on his face. This was shortly before I left though so I don't know if anything more came of it. I only stayed for about a year after the merger.
I'm sure all of this is true, but I feel as though if a gang of thieves ran through your neighborhood and robbed everyone who didn't have a home alarm system, and/or leaving doors/windows unlocked.
Would we all be talking about how incompetent all these home owners are for not having basic home security.
Particularly for HN, I feel like we should be discussing how to attack the attackers - and less victim blaming.
This morning, flipped on the London Foosball game to run in the background. When no local commercials aired, I assumed someone was just gonna get fired. All that showed was a fancy placeholder graphic with a local affiliate code.
Speaking from a US perspective here, although these basics would likely be true everywhere. Stations have a process when this type of thing happens. There's usually a range of time when the commercials are "good", and there's often times enough non-commercial content in the breaks that things could be shuffled around and all spots can still be made good during the relevant program. At the very least, I'm sure they'd bump a lesser-paying commercial if it absolutely came down do it, to get paid by a more expensive commercial.
In this case, being live, the operator would be firing the break themselves. If they missed the break due to gross negligence, they'll probably lose their job (or at least be reprimanded). But, if the fault happened due to technical malfunction, or if they happened to be dragged away from the console by their supervisor, then they'll just make the spots good and move on.
Having your corporate network with clients, email and file server hit is something I can understand, but the broadcasting system? Maersk had the same problem, for some unknown reason the computers running their most critical infrastructure was/is allowed to run pretty any application.
Why is the broadcasting system on a network connected to anything else and if it most be: Why are those computers allowed to run anything but a few whitelisted application?
Worked IT at a Sinclair owned affiliate about 8 years ago. The teleprompter computer for the nightly news was connected to the internet, and was running Windows 2000.
Security of so many things is an absolute joke. The teleprompter only needs to be connected to the writers network, and could easily be a read-only system that just pull the script from the network.
There is so much room for improvement in pretty much any field using computers.
Even if we accept that programs need to come in directly from the internet, then at least do that via a VPN. The broadcasting software isn’t going to be an attack vector for a drive-by malware attack, so limiting the broadcast system to only preapproved software would still help a great deal.
Companies keep behaving like their critical systems isn’t that important and then they’re suprised when it goes wrong. At the same time they keep paying for useless audits done by accountants who will happily sign off on the security because there’s a firewall and anti-virus software installed.
[1] https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo?t=34