Notices by Mr Penguin (mr_penguin@social.freetalklive.com)

Entertaining headline on Slashdot:

"FBI Arrests Cybersecurity Executive Over Data Breach After Contractor Fails to Update Oracle HR Platform"

The FBI is also charging the guy with:

"Dubrovsky is facing charges related to extortion and making threats."

The problem I have is nothing law enforcement says is connected to reality. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there was some good reason the system wasn't updated and his knowledge within the criminal sphere was used against him independent of any actual malice or action. Or it's some other absurdity like 'if not for' the threats couldn't be made and therefore he's somehow an accessory of the crime even though he didn't even know about the incident at the time it happened.

And yea... they pull that kind of crap. In the Crypto6 case with Ian Freeman they pulled a 'if not for' him selling crypto to what they wanted us to perceive as 'little old laddies' being conned out of life savings (few if any really) when they [prosecutors] admitted in court (though this was never in front of the jury) that Ian had ZERO knowledge that the individuals in question were being scammed at the time. He only became aware of any of these victims the day he was arrested after a ~5 year investigation (with the exception of like ~1 person of whom he did become aware they had been victimized before the transaction fully completed I believe, and he spent 6 months working to get that victims money back via her son).

So I'm watching this video on how evil Amazon is with their price fixing where sellers on the platform are coerced into getting other retailers to raise their prices such that the prices on Amazon are lower and many of the companies are claiming they have no choice. It's their only income and it's 90% of the revenue. That may be true, but it was still YOUR decision to sell on Amazon in the first place.

I run a business too and I've always chosen to NOT sell on Amazon. It may be more work. It may be I'm 'losing sales', but at the end of the day I'm in control and not contributing to the problem (err to the degree I don't use Amazon I suppose myself, but that is admittedly often difficult).

Anyhow... the answer? Stop selling on Amazon. Save up some of your profits and tear yourself away from Amazon. It is possible. My small company is proof of that.

"I use to be registered republican, but then I got my heating bill. We all know trump is responsible with the never ending war in Iran..."

And all I'm thinking is... right... so I switched to independent, and vote libertarian.

Pretty sure that wasn't the intent of the messaging, but I thought it was hilarious.

@proliberty

You can and I highly encourage you to write to Ian at:

Ian Freeman #34755509
FPC Lewisburg
P.O. Box 1000
Lewisburg, PA 17837

What a great story, Cloudflare escaped penalties and further scrutiny over it's limited site blocking regime after the copyright cartels requested penalties for failing to sufficiently comply in-so-far as they aren't blocking sites via their 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver (only through their CDN):

"Canal+ also argued that, under the EU Court of Justice’s UPC Telekabel Wien ruling, intermediaries must block effectively. The Paris court disagreed. In its view of the same ruling, intermediaries only have to take reasonable measures, which Cloudflare did with its CDN blocks.

The court therefore rejected the requested penalties as neither necessary nor proportionate. In addition, Canal+’s request for €20,000 in legal costs was also denied."

https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-keeps-1-1-1-1-out-of-piracy-blocking-escapes-penalties-in-france/

@proliberty He does not have access to internet radio to the best of my knowledge. There might have been a slight chance of that at some point as he did have a tablet while caged by the state on behalf of the feds at one point. The federal prison system isn't as ?modern? and in some ways sounds better, like real human visits, not some video conferencing crap (even if you go in person as I understand it, not sure if that is all jails or just some of the jails in NH). mailtojail is dead, but it is still possible to write to Ian via snail mail. I don't know who ran mailtojail specifically, but it was a really cool solution when we had a bunch of activists in NH that were caged.

Talk about insane. I'm watching this video on the largest apartment building in the world (and failing), and then I hear something that just don't go together and think 'wow', just 'wow'. This thing has an AI powered alarm system for smoke. Talk about just asking for a disaster to occur.

@sister_sam I think my point was your devices are doing a lot behind the scenes and not telling you about it in any real way.

@proliberty I'm not in charge, but nobody is going to tell you what to do.

lol

I think the LRN network is no more if my memory serves me right.

@proliberty No, I don't believe I'm scheduled for a show this month yet. Who knows when I will be scheduled. I have to communicate with a certain someone to get on the schedule or otherwise remember to ask for that matter. I could have earlier today... or yesterday now... but didn't think of it.

@sister_sam I think given what we know about what various companies are actually doing this isn't paranoia. We already know that at least one TV manufacturer was recording audio conversations using mics in the TV and sending that to servers. Car manufacturers have all sorts of invasive spying going on that they're then selling onward to insurance companies (again we know that for certain). Every single Android phone had some component or other that was also doing some kind of spying and reporting back to ?cellular carriers? I think that the Replicant Project guys discovered. The only fork that didn't include it was Replicant and only because it was in a proprietary component and the whole point of Replicant was to NOT be dependent on code for which we don't know what it is doing. Then we have devices like Amazon Echo similarly sending back audio (though this is a little bit more public) and ASLR or automatic license plate readers and AI tracking people everywhere they go. Not to mention your cell phone is literally a tracking device. It doesn't even function without the carrier knowing roughly where you are, but all the way back in the 90s the government passed a law to mandate more detailed tracking for '911' / safety reasons. Carriers have to be able to pin-point a high percentage of calls down to a very small area. Now tell me again who is being paranoid?

LOL-

Holly crap: The leading socialist figure in America (Bernie Sanders) appears to have just introduced one of the most libertarian sounds bills if the description below is to believed I've ever encountered:

"on Friday U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Ban Flock Act. The proposed bill bans federal agencies in America from using automated license plate reader systems 'without explicit statutory authorization'. The bill also lets certain federal agencies (including the Homeland Security Department) withhold grant money from State and local governments that use automatic license plate readers."

It's NOT perfect, but it's as solid as anything I've heard proposed before, or probably close to it:

"covers any and all ALPR systems. The bill allows exceptions only for toll collection and for uses that Congress approves in future legislation, which would have to limit data retention to no longer than 48 hours."

New Hampshire might have a slightly better restriction on ALPR cameras already as it also limits the time the data can be retained by police and is very short.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/02/sanders-introduces-bill-to-ban-the-federal-government-from-using-flock/

I'm watching this Al Jazeera video (not something I do very often, but it's good to get in a bit of non-totally western aligned propaganda once in a while in addition to Russia Today and other outlets) and one thing I can say about non-western aligned outlets is they'll throw on socialist and libertarians here and there and it creates some really entertaining videos.

Here both sides make some good points. Social Security is failing even if it's not a total collapse. The socialist insists it's not stealing if we start forcing billionaires to contribute more, and they think, he thinks it'll solve the problem, but in reality it won't. It gets us part of the way there and it is theft. It's a new tax on billionaires so to speak. Social Security has always been essentially a pyramid scheme. On the other hand the socialist is right in saying the wealthiest have stolen from the rest of us. The question is how they're doing it and they're doing it through copyrights, patents, and similar artificial creations created through law.

The solution is partly an end to copyright/patents. You don't need to steal from the billionaires via taxes. Foster real competition by not protect the 1% from 'piracy'. IP laws don't protect the masses. IP funnels the wealth to the top 1%. This will not totally solve the 1% taking near everything, but it's a start. Monopolization by other means exist and it can't be solved this way as a short monopoly granted in the 80s is still paying dividends because no one can come in now and compete. It's a type of 'first mover advantage'. This is when your debts were long ago paid off so you can outlast any new competitor that might dare enter the market. If someone tries you just drop prices till they go under.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwQQQSHfMQ

@proliberty Ohh I just realized that you need a M.2 Key E slot, though there is a possibility if it is thick enough to install an adapter and fit a key E card in a M key slot (ie the M.2 SSDs are M key).

@proliberty

You can try popping one of these M.2 cards in and seeing if it won't work. Keep in mind that the M.2 wifi chip isn't a chip geared at AP use and so while it may work and work in FreeBSD (or the OS your OS is derived from for that matter) how well it will work it's harder to say.

The same thing is true for USB wifi adapters. These sorts of devices are geared at being clients, not APs even when they support AP mode. For example you may only be able to connect 5 or maybe it is 8 devices simultaneously. At least I believe that is true with our USB wifi adapter. Unless someone were to re-write the driver to off-load to the hosts memory there will always be a limited number of devices that can connect when used in AP mode. This isn't likely to happen. It's just not a chip geared at AP use however cool it may be for learning about GNU/Linux and doing fun projects with (and retaining full control over your hardware for that matter).

https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/wireless-n-m2-ngff-card-v2-tpe-m2ncrd2

This is entertaining:

"The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro as a self-hosted 'sovereign back-up' to Microsoft Teams and the reviews aren't great. Politico reported that several officials questioned its usefulness and usability, with one calling it 'absolute shit.'"

So they rolled out a self-hosted Matrix solution. I'm not sure how well it was rolled out, but I've been using Element and Matrix for several years, including hosting a self-hosted server. It's a PITA to maintain and keep up and really it collapsed in on itself after ~5 years. It was complicated and lacked solid documentation to maintain.

The user-complaints are very general, but I think the reality is the solution does overall work and is comparable in terms of features to Telegram.

The interface isn't great, and it is built off one of these new fangled development solutions. It uses rust and Electron. Both of which are garbage by comparison to properly written software based on languages like C/C++ that have officials standards. Rust is ever-changing with no standard and it's bloated. Electron apps are similarly garbage- a cross platform solution.

The good news is Matrix is end to end encrypted, feature rich, decentralized, and there are clients written in proper programming languages that while not entirely ready for prime time are MUCH better.

Right now you probably will have to suffer with Element if you use Matrix, but I do believe at least one of the C/C++ alternative clients will come of age at some point and there are some other aspects to like about Matrix. There is support for at least one of these other clients properly written packaged for distributions like Debian already.

Overall it's probably the way to go for decentralized self-hosted solutions.

"at some point the tech companies have to be held responsible because ultimately they are providing the tools"

So are we going to start requiring an ID before someone can purchase a hammer? I mean seriously. Just because folks are doing something bad with a tool is a poor excuse to ban or restrict or ID everyone else.

Like seriously.. scammers are using addresses such as:

"web361.cc"

If you don't understand technology at such a fundamental level maybe you shouldn't be investing in it.

People make stupid investments all the time and yet we don't make them whole when the investments fail. Why should anyone feel bad for someone who didn't take even rudimentary steps when the scams should have been easily spotted even by folks with little technical know-how???

Victim of scam:

"paranoid, questioning everything"

aww yea, that is how you should have been before.

It's the fucking internet. Did you do zero research before going online? Do you not understand that the world is full of bad apples? I mean seriously.

Your fucking television is spying on you. Corporations are doing all sorts of evil shit.

There are people out there who are actually victims through no fault of their own (maybe it is cancer, or being born into poverty or a religious household, or any number of things.. having a disability ...). It's sickening that 95% of the problem is self-inflicted by lazy people advocating for 'protection' rather than taking responsibility for their own actions.

If your genuinely stupid I can understand... but 95% of this is people being lazy stupid not that they're incapable stupid.

"Investigating the Online Scam Epidemic"

So there is this documentary on scams and they're talking about how folks, in this case 'kids' (probably more like teenagers) are being scammed and committing suicide.

The scam is intended to extract money from those with mental illnesses and/or those in areas where mental illness is ripe (aka religious areas).

The way the scam works is the scammer pretends to be a girl (I think the specific scam primarily targets guys... but other variations probably target elderly ladies and older men, ie romance scams) and gets the guy to send sexual photos of themselves to the scammer. The scammer than demands a ransom else the photos will be publicly released and sent to friends and family.

In at least some instances the victim of the scam can't pay up and the pressure is too great. The victims kill themselves.

The underlying problem is religion and authoritarianism. A scam like this only works because the persons being threatened are made to feel like they have everything to lose. The reality is mental illness in society and authoritarianism holding peoples options back.

The scam isn't the real problem. Religious nuts and those advocating "protection" are.

When youth/people have options that don't involve suicide they'll take those options. When you tie young people/anyone to parents/or forced schooling/etc they become vulnerable and victims.

Stop tying kids to adults and giving others authority and these problems literally wouldn't exist.

When young people have options, like work instead of school (ie get rid of laws prohibiting employment), aren't forced to live in abusive homes with mentally ill parents (religious), etc. there is no longer a reason to commit suicide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8I2b1TK2EY