malwaretech

malwaretech, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

For anyone unaware, Google Chrome is currently rolling out an update that track your interests based on browsing history, then share them with 3rd party websites. The notification page makes it sound like they added a new privacy feature, but in actuality they automatically enrolled you into their tracking system and you have to go and manually opt out.

malwaretech, 4 months ago to random

Real freedom is saving 4% on my taxes by living in in a country with no healthcare, child support, or functional education system, then paying like 50% of my post-tax income if I happen to want any of those things

Europeans simply cannot comprehend this level of freedom

malwaretech, 4 months ago to random

Am I the only one who feels like still using employment rate as a metric for a healthy economy is basically just gaslighting at this point?

Employment used to mean you had a good chance of affording a home, maybe two kids, and potentially even on just a single income. Now you can have a full time job and still need food stamps or a side job just to pay bills.

Then of course, because salaries are so low relative to the cost of living, it makes employment numbers look even better because people who wouldn't have been forced to work now are. You have households where both parents have full time jobs, people with disabilities forced to work because they can't cover bills, students dropping out of college because it's now unaffordable.

Then some goober economist comes on TV and goes "well, unemployment is at record lows so obviously everything is fine"

malwaretech, 5 months ago to random

Twitter quietly dropped the government identity check requirement for verification, as well as the requirements that the account be 30 days old, have an avatar, and are not impersonating anyone.

I was able to get verification on a 2 day old account named Barack Obama with no avatar or posts.

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

The case for leaving Twitter

"You’re not fighting a war, you’re not stopping Twitter from falling into the hands of the far-right, you’re selling burgers in a Nazi bar, paying more than you profit in rent. Every dollar Twitter makes in ad revenue is a dollar against everything you stand for."

https://throwawayopinions.io/the-paradox-of-intolerance.html?1

malwaretech, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

I feel like even the people who dislike Musk are putting too much stock into the genius supervillain narrative. It's highly unlikely he's slowly executing some pre-thought out plan to shift Twitter far right. He's a naïve socially-inept billionaire manchild who got radicalized by a bunch of alt-right grifters. It's as simple as that. No master plan, no 4d chess, just someone who never underwent any real emotional development.

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

I made a new Twitter account just to make sure my disinformation research account wasn't somehow tainted by my scrolling habits. Here is the makeup of my news feed from a brand new account:

Elon Musk - Far right troll
Spectator Index - Neutral, high quality news
OSINTdefender - Disinformation account, possibly a RU bot
Disclose.tv - Far right news outlet
Matt Wallace - Far right troll
Scott Adams - Far right troll / Conspiracy account
Illuminati Bot - Far right troll / Conspiracy account
Hurt Copain - Left Wing, I think?
Catturd - Far right troll
Tim Pool - Far right troll
Gunther Eagleman - Far right troll
Chaya Raichik - Far right troll
Ian Miles Cheong - Far right troll
Nick Sortor - Far right troll

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

Outsourcing US defense capabilities to any corporation has always been a national security trade-off, but SpaceX specifically is a private company where a single extremely unhinged pro-Russia troll controls more voting shares than the entire rest of the shareholders combined. Anyone who doesn't see the national security issue with putting a nation's defense capabilities in the hands of a Wish.com Lex Luthor knock-off has actual soup for a brain.

https://infosec.exchange/@briannawu@mstdn.social/111024207167342302

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

This is absolutely crazy stuff. Chinese hackers were able to get into a bunch of government email accounts by forging Microsoft access tokens, but how it happened is wild.

Apparently an internal Microsoft system responsible for signing consumer access tokens crashed, then a bug in the crash dump generator caused the secret key to be written to the crash dump. Microsoft's secondary system for detecting sensitive data in crash dumps also failed, allowing the crash dump to be moved from an isolated network to the corporate one. The Chinese hackers compromised a Microsoft engineer's account and were able to get a hold of the crash dump. They were not only able to find the key and figure out that it's responsible for signing consumer access tokens, but were also able to exploit a software bug to use it to sign enterprise access tokens too, basically giving them the keys to the kingdom.

So many security system had to fail for this to happen. Either the hackers were very lucky or extremely patient.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-technical-investigations-for-storm-0558-key-acquisition/

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

The Paradox Of Intolerance
(And The Case For Leaving Twitter)

https://throwawayopinions.io/the-paradox-of-intolerance.html

malwaretech, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Twitter made a new ad for the platform that features a phone scrolling through Twitter. They ended up pulling it and remaking it after people noticed it contained a tweet mocking Elon for trying to blame Twitter's advertiser exodus on the jews. The second version of the ad, which is still online, contains a tweet about creampieing a rotisserie chicken.

malwaretech, 5 months ago to random

This will basically be the first US election where disinformation operatives have control over a major social media platform, rather than having to subvert its trust and safety apparatus.

malwaretech, 5 months ago to random

It feels like a lot of news sites kind of buried the lede with the "GTA6 hacker sentenced to life in mental hospital" headlines.

He wasn't sentenced to life for hacking rockstar. He was sentenced to psychiatric hold for doing hacking, then getting arrested for hacking, then while arrested for hacking doing even more hacking, then when arrested for that hacking and having all his computers taken away, doing ever more hacking to get computers to do even more hacking with. Like, he made it pretty clear he has no intention of ever not doing crime.

Then on top of that he was posing as a law enforcement officer and sending fake emergency disclosure requests to tech companies in order to get the home addresses of several women he was stalking and harassing. When they finally did put him in custody, he was then involved in several dozen violent incidents.

There's plenty of cases of the justice systems being heavy handed with hackers, but this is like the exact kind of person that psychiatric detention was made for. It's not a life sentence or even a sentence at all. In the UK you can be released from psychiatric detention at any time, so long as the doctors assess you're no longer a continuous threat to society.

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

Translations: "our ad business is dying so we're forcing you to put more and unskippable ads on your videos so we can boost our earnings for the quarterly report"

malwaretech, 4 months ago to random

After a year off Twitter, I'm surprised that I don't have even a single regret about leaving. The more I think about it, the more I realize it wasn't the takeover that did it. Sure, there was a massive and harmful political shift, but there's just always been something about the platform that attracts extremely unhealed people regardless of political leaning.

You can make a post like "I just got a coffee and the milk was sour" then someone on the right will be like "Biden's border crisis is the reason we can't get good milk anymore" and then someone on the left will be like "do you think starving children in Africa would complain about sour milk?". Eventually, you just realize the platform is designed for people who's only form of therapy is logging on to the internet and being annoying as fuck.

malwaretech, 6 months ago to random

After everything that's happened, Meta quietly decided in 2022 that they're going to return to allowing political ads that claim the 2020 election was rigged 🥴​
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/15/facebook-ads-2020-election-rigged-stolen-instagram-policy

malwaretech, 4 months ago to random

A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts about how I think LLMs will be a net negative (at least in the near term), due to the extreme overhyping giving people unrealistic expectations of their ability. The direct result will be an overall degrade in internet usability as people begin flooding platforms with low quality spam that they erroneously believe to be high quality. Previously it was fairly easy to spot someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but now LLMs enable them to word things convincingly enough to waste the time of even domain experts.

Even now I'm still often surprised by all the creative ways that people are finding to waste other's time. I just saw this post from one of the curl maintainers reporting that they've been receiving nonsense bug bounty reports based on LLM hallucinations, which I imagine is likely due to people trying to automate bug hunting despite lacking the understanding to confirm their finding. They reported that in one case the submission was convincing enough that they went over the code 3 times before coming to the conclusion that no bug existed and the report was likely AI generate.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/

malwaretech, 4 months ago to random

AI in fiction: "we've automated all the physically intensive jobs so humanity can focus on creative endeavors like art and writing"
AI in real life: "we've automated all the art & writing so that there's more people to do backbreaking manual labor"

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

Oh no, the techbros are becoming self aware 🫣

malwaretech, 1 year ago to random

Browser extension for hiding tweets from Twitter Blue users is now available on the extension store.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blueliteblocker/gimbefnamedicgajjballjjhanhnpjce
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blueliteblocker/

video/mp4

malwaretech, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

I think this might actually be the first time in my life I've been more horrified by some of the left than the right. The Ukraine war came close-ish, with some factions of the left siding with Russia due to distrust of the US (which, fair enough), and then tankies apparently being confused as to whether Russia is still socialist or not. But all of that was balanced out by the right trying to undermine Ukraine funding in favor of the most stupid shit ever.

But this week a lot of leftists who support Palestine somehow stumbled past the point and went straight for glorifying one of the most horrific massacres in recent history, openly supporting Hamas, and even straight up calling for the elimination of Israel. I always thought the right had a monopoly on overt racism and unjust violence, but apparently if you substitute in words like "decolonization" you can get some of the left to go full Nazi too.

malwaretech, 8 months ago to random

The main thing that makes me curious about alternate economic systems is facts like a top 5% salary in the UK being £80k/year. Statistically that makes you 'rich', but it just.... doesn't. Rich is Lamborghinis and yachts, £80k pre-tax is maybe being able to afford a house in whichever major city you have to live for work and having a rainy day fund. I hate that we all just accept that having even moderate financial stability is to have made it, when in reality homeownership and not retiring below the poverty line should be the literal bare minimum that everyone deserves.

malwaretech, 4 months ago to random

We haven't done any layoffs, we just happened to relocate our office to the worst state in the US, resulting in many of our employees leaving.

malwaretech, 7 months ago to random

I'm always shocked by how expensive basic European experiences are in the US. One of my favorite things is high street shops. You have a bunch of stores with apartments above them, so you can always live within walking distance of basically everything. In the US they separate things into commercial and residential districts so you have to drive everywhere.

Areas that allow mixing residential and commercial buildings are so rare that supply & demand sends costs through the roof. In Europe living in an apartment above stores is a budget option for people who can't afford homes, in the US you basically have to be wealthy and often those apartments cost as much as an entire house.

malwaretech, 3 months ago to random

It's crazy how fast egomaniac billionaires will try to dismantle the systems that serve them the second they don't get their way. The entire state of Delaware basically exists as a haven for corporations, but suddenly it's an evil anti-capitalist conspiracy because it didn't let famed narcist manbaby, Elon Musk, use a public corporation as his personal bank account...