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In a lawsuit that echoes a civil case against President Trump, an Alabama woman on Thursday sued failed U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and his campaign for defamation, citing harsh personal attacks she faced after coming forward with allegations that he touched her sexually when she was 14 years old.
Leigh Corfman is not seeking financial compensation beyond legal costs, said her attorney, Neil Roman. She is asking for a declaratory judgment of defamation, a public apology from Moore, and a court-enforced ban on him or his campaign publicly attacking her again. Corfman said in a statement that the suit seeks “to do what I could not do as a 14-year-old — hold Mr. Moore and those who enable him accountable.”
A representative of Moore’s campaign, Brett Doster, said, “We look forward to transparently discussing these matters in a court of law.”
Corfman told The Washington Post in November that when Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney in 1979, he took her to his house, undressed her, touched her over her underpants and bra and guided her hand to touch his genitals over his underwear.
The allegations upended the race. On Election Day, exit polls showed 52 percent of voters in Alabama believed the allegations against Moore were probably or definitely true, and 7 percent said those allegations were the most important factor in deciding their vote. Doug Jones’s victory marked the first time in 25 years that a Democrat in Alabama won a U.S. Senate race.
Among Moore’s statements that the suit claims are defamatory: He called Corfman’s allegations of abuse “politically motivated,” “completely false” and “malicious.” On Nov. 10, the day after The Post published its story, Moore told Sean Hannity of Fox News he had never met Corfman. Weeks later, in a complaint that unsuccessfully sought to disqualify the election results, Moore said a polygraph examination confirmed that he did not know her.
Corfman was among five women who told The Post that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.
Doug Jones is sworn in, shrinking GOP Senate majority
Corfman’s suit — filed in Montgomery County, Ala., one day after Jones took the oath of office — represents a fledgling legal strategy where people who say they were victimized long ago are litigating their claims through defamation lawsuits. The strategy allows them to proceed even after the statute of limitations has run out for criminal charges or for lawsuits seeking damages for sexual abuse, as it has in Corfman’s case.
The defamation suit against Trump was brought by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on the reality show “The Apprentice” who says he kissed and groped her in 2007. During the 2016 campaign, Trump called the claims by multiple women that he had touched them improperly “big lies,” and he called the women “liars.” A judge in New York State Supreme Court is weighing Trump’s motion to dismiss the case.
Zervos’s attorney, Gloria Allred, has said that a defamation case she and attorney Mariann Meier Wang settled in New York in 2015 is “an important precedent.” In that case, two former ballboys accused a Syracuse University basketball coach of defaming them after they spoke up about alleged sexual abuse.
Allred also represents a woman who accused Moore of kissing and groping her when she was 16 years old. At a news conference, Beverly Young Nelson produced her high school yearbook containing an inscription she said was written by Moore to prove that he knew her, though she later acknowledged adding the location, date and initials “D.A.” after the signature.
Comedian Bill Cosby has also been sued for defamation in cases that involve allegations of abuse years ago. A federal judge in Pennsylvania last year tossed out a suit filed by a woman who said Cosby defamed her in the media after she accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her. A separate defamation lawsuit, filed in 2014 by several women who say Cosby sexually assaulted them, is pending in Massachusetts. Yet another defamation case, filed against Cosby in 2015 by former supermodel Janice Dickinson, is pending in the California courts.
Under a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the legal standard for defamation of a public figure is that the statements were known to be false or showed a “reckless disregard for the truth,” experts say. The standard is lower for defaming a private individual — negligence toward the truth — though Corfman’s suit claims Moore’s comments meet the higher standard.
Corfman’s lawsuit cites numerous negative comments made by Moore and five top campaign allies, including campaign manager Rich Hobson, who announced Wednesday that he is running for Congress.
Read more:
Lawyer clams donations won’t cover costs of defamation suit against Trump
Trump attorneys argue he was expressing opinion about accusers
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During a conference call Wednesday afternoon, Intel shed more light on the CPU kernel vulnerability, now being referred to as a “side channel analysis exploit”. Expect to see patches roll out to address the flaw over the next several weeks, executives said, though the performance impact of a patch still remains at a frustrating level somewhere between 0 and 30 percent, with “average” PC users expected to see little impact.
The company, whose products had been a focus of an initial report from The Register, said that both ARM and AMD had been notified of the vulnerability, as well as several operating system vendors. The flaw was first discovered by Google’s Project Zero security team, according to Intel, which the company confirmed.
Intel said that it would issue its own microcode updates to address the issue, but over time some of these fixes would be rolled into hardware. At press time, Microsoft declined to comment on how it would proceed, though it is expected to release its own patches soon. Google, too, issued its own report on which of its products could be affected: these include Chrome and Android phones, though the latter will depend on how quickly phone makers roll out updates.
What this means: At this point, we know that major chip and operating system vendors are aware of the problem and working to release fixes. The first should probably arrive as part of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, or earlier. What’s unclear is how many different types of software and CPU architectures the patches will affect, and the amount of performance (if any) that PCs will suffer as a result. It’s a very complicated issue, so we’ve created an Intel CPU kernel bug FAQ that breaks down all the info we know in clear, easy-to-read language to help you wrap your head around it.
What is a side-channel analysis exploit?
According to Intel, the exploit is a way for an attacker to observe the content of privileged memory, exploiting a CPU technique called speculative execution to circumvent expected privilege levels. That can give an attacker access to data it normally wouldn’t, though Intel has said that the data won’t be deleted or modified.
In fact, Intel and the researchers identified three variants, known as a “bounds check bypass,” “branch target injection,” and a “rogue data load,” all of which used slightly different methods of attack. In each case, operating-system updates mitigated the problem.
Steve Smith, one of the engineering leads at Intel who reported the company’s findings, added that no attacks using the vulnerability has been discovered in the wild. He also denied reports that the vulnerability was a flaw, or that it was specific to Intel. “The processor is in fact operating as we designed it,” Smith told investors during the conference call.
The discovery led to hardware makers around the world responding to the vulnerability in a “responsible manner,” Smith said.
Intel: this is an industry-wide problem
The companies had planned to make the disclosure next week when the patches became available. Intel said it was commenting in advance because of what it called “current inaccurate media reports,” though nothing in its statement denied those reports. The company released a statement to the media, then followed up with a conference call.
“Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed,” Intel said. “Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”
Intel maintained that the vulnerability is tied to other architectures beyond its own, naming AMD—which denied that its chips are affected—as well as ARM Holdings, the architecture at the heart of most smartphone processors—as additional companies whose products are “susceptible” to these exploits, along with several operating system vendors.
“We’re aware of this industry-wide issue and have been working closely with chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations to protect our customers,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “We are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and have also released security updates to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from Intel, ARM, and AMD.”
For its part, AMD denied that its processors were affected, telling CNBC that there was a “near zero risk to AMD processors” at the present.
Intel sought to explain why it hadn’t yet revealed the vulnerability, claiming it was close to having done so before the news broke. “Intel is committed to the industry best practice of responsible disclosure of potential security issues, which is why Intel and other vendors had planned to disclose this issue next week when more software and firmware updates will be available,” Intel said.
What can you do in the meantime? Intel’s advice is to follow the age-old mantra of patch, patch, patch. “Check with your operating system vendor or system manufacturer and apply any available updates as soon as they are available,” the company said. “Following good security practices that protect against malware in general will also help protect against possible exploitation until updates can be applied.”
Google also reported that its Chrome browser is affected, though there’s a two-step cure: first, make sure that your browser is updated up to version 63. Second, an optional feature called Site Isolation can be enabled to provide mitigation by isolating websites into separate address spaces. This optional flag, which can be turned on at chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process, turns on Site Isolation. Finally, Chrome 64, which will be released on Jan. 23, will protect users against the side-channel exploit, Google said.
The performance issue: will a patch slow your PC down?
But with a patch, is the cure worse than the disease? According to The Register, which originally reported the story, PC users could be “looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 percent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model” if a patch is applied.
Intel seems to feel that the typical end user won’t suffer any ill effects. “Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time,” Intel said in its statement.
Intel went a bit further on its call, but again without any of the real clarity customers may have hoped for. “It depends on the workload specifically in use,” Smith said.
Intel doesn’t differentiate between client PCs and datacenter servers when looking at the effects of the bug, executives said. Instead, those applications which exist primarily in the user space could see an impact of between 0 and 2 percent, executives said. But synthetic workloads, which lean heavily on the interaction between the application and the operating system, can push up to a 30 percent performance hit.
More evidence suggests that PC users won’t feel any significant effects from a patch. As our earlier report indicated, tests on several popular games using a patched version of Linux—not Windows—didn’t indicate any frame-rate drops outside a margin of error. The games tested included Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dawn of War III, F1 2017, and The Talos Principle on a Linux 4.15-rc6 machine with a Core i7-8700K and Radeon Vega 64.
None of those ran on Microsoft’s DirectX technology though, which integrates deeply with the Windows operating system. Again, Microsoft hasn’t commented.
Check back with PCWorld for upcoming reports, and see our updated FAQ for a summary of the latest findings.
This story was updated at 3:57 PM on Jan. 3 with additional details from Intel, Google, and Microsoft, including the effects on Google Chrome.
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