I rode an electric kickscooter down to a side alleyway across from a rail transit station to pick up some second hand body modification electronics (a CPAP) from a man who has cybernetic implants in his chest! I had to get the 2nd hand body mods off the street because I can't afford proper healthcare.
In another example of how US healthcare is a scam.
I just paid: $1,212 (this was AFTER insurance. It would have been $2,710 before insurance) for sleep studies that confirmed what I already knew. I need a CPAP machine.
They want to sell me a CPAP machine for $758 (again, AFTER insurance). That's for the model "11". The model 10 goes on retail for $400 brand new. And I haven't even shopped around for a less expensive but still good model.
That's a total of almost $2,000 when I could have gone down to the corner CVS and bought a CPAP for $300 just to "try" and resell used (or return within 30 days for full refund).
So hydroponics are kicking off (as well as soil container gardens, backyard gardens, and community plot gardens) with me and my friends....
....and with that now is a good time to emphasize that this is not just a hobby (or a hobby at all for some). It's easy. sure. And takes little time, money, and effort... and is fun... and calming... don't get me wrong.
But we're not doing this for shits and giggles.
This is one part of a larger effort at bringing about post-scarcity food. (Note: One part. No one thing is a panacea.)
So right now, we have efforts to garden (hydroponically or otherwise) for one's self and one's family. That's good. It either supplements or fully replaces a corporate grocery store. Great.
But it's only part of it.
The next part is mutual aid. When we plant food, we also plant for our neighbors and greater community. For every 5 plants I harvest, I give away at least 1 plant. At least 20 percent. The question then becomes, how do we get the food out. How do we distribute it?
Food banks are fine. They're already set up. Many accept home grown produce. The issue with food banks is they are often means tested. You have to prove you NEED the food before you get it. That has a shit ton of issues and often just means that people who are hungry don't get to eat.
Instead of food banks, I've been using two solutions to distribute food.
1) The Olio App ( https://olioapp.com/en/ ): The Olio App let's you list your produce online. Folks can then request the item and arrange for pickup. It's like craiglist and uber eats and specifically is about giving away free food.
2) Community Fridges / Community Pantries ( https://freedge.org/locations/ ): Free fridges and pantries are physical nodes in your community where folks that have extra food, put it in the pantry. Folks that need food, take it out. Give a food, take a food. No need for apps, low overhead, works really well and is efficient.
The key to all of this is it's NOT charity. This is MUTUAL aid. You give AND you take. As we produce for ourselves we also produce for our neighbors. Everyone eats.
@aral - So many comments continuing to "debate the technical minutiae of Threads" under a post decrying folks for "debating the technical minutiae of Threads."
So... I get banning the Threads server. I might do it myself, actually.
I get leaving an instance that doesn't ban Threads to join another instance that does ban it. Cool, migration is a feature of the fediverse.
But... don't ban servers that don't ban Threads. Like... that's some weird Civ III peer pressure bullshit.
I probably will ban Threads from my account. But I'm not leaving infosec.exchange. @jerry does entirely too well at server administration and this entire instance is comprised of too many people to be of one mind.
Like... we can all agree, no nazi's and racist shit, right? But politics and socio-economic models... fuuuck.... there's no way.
And I really want to talk with y'all. And I really really really don't want to spin up my own instance right now.
So. Ban Threads. Don't ban Threads. Instance wide or individually. But don't balkinize each other because of each other's stance for/against/indifferent Threads.
"We survive capitalism. Evolving into a library economy, we flourish in a garden city powered by the sun. People no longer need to kill themselves working or each other, with all of our needs met. And yet, malice lives on in paradise.
When a painter is murdered in a library of things, citizen detectives use crowdsolving to catch the criminal. A Native-American crime-scene investigator pools his expertise with a full-time dad, an ex-cop bloodhound handler, and a femme fatale."
So question for everyone... I'm building out https://fxbg.town to list all the post-scarcity / free services in my town, public mutual aid networks, transit, library services, local solarpunk meetups, etc
I need a good piece of solarpunk art for the title page logo. It needs to be in the public domain or copylefted. I'd like it to have folks in it to highlight community. I don't mind paying for its use and giving credit, of course.
Currently I have the Chiboni ad and would like to move beyond that.
Hackers / Pentests - Wanna sniff out canary tokens?
Ya worried the blue team seeded fake credentials throughout their environment? Put them in LSASS, LSA, or even that suspicious "too good to be true" passwords.txt file?
Ya worried that if you use those creds, blue team will get alerted that you used them because no one ever uses those creds and any login attempt triggers massive alarms?!?!?!
Just dump Active Directory (with other valid creds) via LDAP and go through the resulting LDIF.
Look up the sus account and look for the parameter "lastLogon:" : Was it a while back? Has anyone used the account in a while?
Now look for the parameter "pwdLastSet:" - Is it close to the lastLogon? Did blue team set the password, set the alert, and then leave it to sit?
If they are recent dates, maybe it's a new hire. So maybe it's fine.
But if its older... thats a little suspicious.
Look for other parameters and paint a picture. Look at passwordExpirationTime. Is it 0? Look for accountExpires, is it set for near forever? (or a long way off).
Big thing is, compare it to other accounts, especially accounts you know are good. Look at normal and then conduct anomaly analysis and see how well your sus account stacks against known good or known normal.
Active Directory gives a lot of information. Dive into it.
So some of you might remember this post (and the subsequent demonstration on national news) of using a voice cloning tool (AI, Audio Deep Fake) by @racheltobac
(If you haven't seen it, go watch it. Rachel is amazing.)
I'd never needed to do a similar attack before, but! I was just tasked yesterday with researching it.
Asked some friends for a turn-key solution to clone voices. Got pointed to a website. Signed up for $1 a month (first month... then it goes to $5 a month thereafter).
Pulled some audio of my target's voice down from a youtube interview (a podcast works great too).
Only needed a minute's worth of audio.
Uploaded it to the website for cloning.
Typed out a quick script for the voice to read.
30 seconds later, I had my cloned audio.
It was so good, that it even included natural voice inflections AND!!! verbal pauses like umm's and uhh's that matched the target's original presentation. I can't tell the difference between the cloned voice and the original person.
Y'all... voice cloning and audio deep fakes are well past the ease of "script-kiddy" level. Anyone can do it.
Reminder to go to your local library and volunteer to speak on their behalf. Let them know that if folks try to come and ban books that you'll speak publicly against them.
We found out folks were going to be commenting at our library calling for banning books.
So.
We all went and spoke out against them.
Only one person got up and called for a ban. She went first. Everyone after her started calling out her behavior and telling the library staff to keep the books.
The first woman and a couple others soon left before the end of comments.
The two novellas in Becky Chambers' "Monk and Robot" series are like the book version of LoFi Beats.
They are so chill, so hopeful, so relaxing.
The world is wonderful. Conflicts are minimal. Folks treat each other with respect and kindness and gentleness.
Great solarpunk aesthetics including ebikes, renewables, sustainable tech, environmental responsibility, LGBTQIA+, polyamory, etc.
I hate that this is an "escape" from our current world. These books are what I want our world and our interactions to be.
Anyhow, if you haven't had a chance to read them, yet, check out A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy from your local library (ebooks and audio books were available on the Libby app for me).
Does anyone know a Federated app (one that uses ActivityPub) that allows for multi-user access to a single profile?
For a contra-example, if I use Mastodon to create a profile for an organization, I can only create one account and one password. Sure I could share that password with other org leaders, but if one person changes the password, the others are locked out.
So I need an app that can create a multi-user profile and that people can access with their own username and password and give "admin" rights to multiple people, less privileged account rights to others, etc.