Notices by VessOnSecurity (bontchev@infosec.exchange), page 2

Now, *that's* what AI should be doing, instead of writing buggy programs and hallucinating wrong answers.

As somebody said once, I want AI to wash the dishes, so that I can write poetry; I don't want to wash the dishes so that AI can write poetry.

"Moravec's Paradox and the Robot Olympics":

https://www.pi.website/blog/olympics

I'm attending an on-line lecture on "cyber hygiene". The lector is some old guy who used to be in the military and now works for an infosec company. You wouldn't believe the "useful" stuff I learned there. 👇

"Over 120,000 home cameras hacked in South Korea for 'sexploitation' footage":

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj01q6p7ndlo

As Rob Graham noted once, security cameras (of all brands) are actually "insecurity cameras".

@Daojoan
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is four feet, eight and a half inches.

That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the U.S. railroads.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the prerailroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long-distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of its legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman war chariots made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, the standard U.S. railroad gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches derives from the specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses.

@GossiTheDog We (F-PROT) had something similar, minus the telemetry.

The reason for them was to speed up the scanning process. They were short and fast and easy to check. Signature not present - just don't bother scanning any further. Signature present - that by itself doesn't warrant a report but triggers our other, more precise but slower malware identification algorithms.

I don't know what Microsoft is using these for but this might be the idea behind them too.

@GossiTheDog I don't think that it works any more; 94.74.164.136 seems to have been nuked.

@GossiTheDog You "scanned the internet". Lucky you. I couldn't get permission to scan even my own organization. 😢

The cybersecurity awareness month is over. You may resume using your dog's name as your password. Just make sure to use a different dog for each account and also use a dog manager.

How do I enter the BIOS setup??

@patrickcmiller Why exactly does a nuclear weapons plant need SharePoint?!

@lorenzofb There is a HUGE difference between the two.

One is "The Swiss courts, under whose jurisdiction we are, received a request from a Spanish court and ordered us to do this", the other is "Some shmucks from the Korean CERT who had no clue what they were doing complained to us that they didn't like somebody, so we suspended his account". The first was proper and unavoidable, the second was Proton being idiots.

Also, note that in no case was the contents of the encrypted e-mail compromised - only the sender was identified in one case and his account suspended in the other.

"Undocumented Radios Found in Solar-Powered Devices":

https://www.darkreading.com/ics-ot-security/undocumented-radios-found-solar-powered-devices

@GossiTheDog I wonder how big the ransom was...

"New Banksy mural appears at Royal Courts of Justice":

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrq0r0y878o

"The artwork was quickly covered up by large sheets of plastic and metal barriers. Court officials told the BBC the work would be removed."

"From drones to nukes: North Korea pushes AI military modernization plan":

https://www.dailynk.com/english/from-drones-to-nukes-north-korea-pushes-ai-military-modernization-plan/

James Cameron: Don't give an AI control of the nukes.
North Korea: Let's give control of the nukes to an AI.

What could possibly go wrong?

@GossiTheDog Man, 20C is fucking COLD! My ideal room temperature is 24C, although anything in the range 22-28C is fine.

"Four-year-old girl dies of hunger in Gaza as Israel throttles food supply":

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/20/middleeast/gaza-girl-food-crisis-intl

@ryanc Wait until you need to convert pounds per square inch into newtons per square meter...

@GossiTheDog Yeah, how very inconsiderate... Truth-seeking, jokes-making, telling stuff like it is, and being skeptical and neutral - that's literally Hitler.

@GossiTheDog Ahh, I finally succeeded!

You wouldn't believe what the trick was... I manually reduced the default GoFundMe "tip" from 14.5% to zero. 🤣