Notices by Taggart :donor: (mttaggart@infosec.town), page 3

There are basically two irreconcilable camps in the Threads debate here.

- Camp 1, understandably, wants nothing to do with Meta and view them as an existential threat to the Fediverse for plenty of well-precedented reasons.

- Camp 2, also understandably, sees potential in connecting a managed platform that appeals to entities like news outlets and other services to the Fediverse, enabling us to access that information without requiring an account on a Meta-owned platform.

Camp 1 will not cede ground because they view the issue as existential.

Camp 2 will, I dunno, deal with it or move to a server where they can see what they want to see?

But given the scale of Threads already, widespread blocking of it will create a pretty noticeably weird gap in the federation graph, and make onboarding for new potential Fedi users even more confusing. That part, by itself, kinda sucks.

Hello, new followers! Here's a bit of an #introduction so you'll know what you're in for.

I'm Taggart, and I've been in IT for over 15 years. For the last 5 or so, that's been focused on #CyberSecurity / #InfoSec. Before that, I was a K-12 educator/administrator, and I haven't stopped teaching.

I run a school of sorts. I also maintain a threat intel/cyber news feed, and some other projects.

I love writing code, especially in #Rust these days.

This account is mostly infosec analysis/boosts, with occasional forays into things like policy. Kindness, inclusion, and allyship are the default settings.

If I'm reading this correctly, Chrome will route your traffic through its own proxies—and a chosen third party, which you can't decide about. It'll be opt-in for now.

The amount of concerns that this introduces to both individuals and organizations is significant. What will it take before Chrome itself is labeled a PUP? Even with the best of intentions, the browser is taking more and more for Google, leaving less and less for the open web.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chromes-new-ip-protection-will-hide-users-ip-addresses/

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/ip-protection

To recap:

- X added a Settings option for using HTTP proxies in the app.
- But, it doesn't actually route any traffic to a proxy. Nothing in the app references the setting, and dynamic analysis shows no traffic being sent to the proxy.
- This means people trying to stay safe by using this feature are in greater danger due to a false sense of security.

The bug report I reference below was closed instantly as not-a-bug.

RE: https://infosec.town/notes/9ky1hz9tcj5gf8va

@The_Asshat@infosec.exchange I would like to boost this to the stratosphere. I can't stand touchscreens.

@tw000@infosec.exchange @The_Asshat@infosec.exchange @da_667@infosec.exchange I would/will rather carry a laptop with me everywhere than attempt to write a paragraph on a capacitive keyboard.

Post your first cell phone and memento mori baybee. I'll start.

Hey, good job patching all your browsers for the latest WebP vulnerabilities (there's a new one today, btw).

Know what probably didn't get updated?

Yeah, all those Electron apps.

Actually, big thanks to #Unity for elegantly demonstrating a huge part of the risk model of proprietary software.

Stop pressing backspace until you feel safe: Ctrl+U clears the password prompt on the terminal so you can start again.

Is Hacker Summer Camp not your thing? Can't make it for life reasons? Still aware that the rona is a real risk?

That.

Is.

Okay.

Ain't nothing about going or not going to a conference makes you any less awesome. Keep doing your thing, cyberpunk.

Well that sucks. The company behind Libby/Overdrive has been acquired by the same group that gutted Toys R Us: https://karawynn.substack.com/p/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries

This is exceptionally bad news for libraries, which already strain against corpo nonsense to deliver digital materials.

Periodic reminder that oil companies knew about the effects of atmospheric CO2 in the 50s, researched it deeply, knew what would happen, and kept right on polluting.

And lied about knowing the consequences.

These aren't companies so much as existential threats to humanity that would rather watch billions die than stop the profit stream.

https://theconversation.com/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-in-its-own-words-170642