Notices by dm (_dm@infosec.exchange)

As I like to do whenever something hilarious and/or awful happens to the Trump admin, I go to https://FoxNews.com to see if they're reporting on it.

Nope! In the loyal Fox world, Trump is beating back activist judges and Pete Hegseth's OpSec is indeed perfect.

Wohnst du in der #Schweiz? Know someone in #Switzerland? Watching America with horror and angst?

Me too.

But we're going to do something about it. Sign up and pass this on: https://ofthepeople.ch/

I can’t claim to be an expert, but I called hundreds of voters before the election, and among the many who said they trusted Trump on the economy, I don’t think a single one thought he was offering a period of austerity and recession.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/us/politics/trump-recession-lutnick.html?smid=url-share

@Mer__edith The whole thing is weird, but I don’t see why attributing clicks is hard. Meta’s AI bots will presumably generate fake content, but won’t click ads, right?

Like, in implementation, this is just content generation. But it isn’t an automated browser surfing the web or whatever.

@Mer__edith Meta’s business is heavily dependent on keeping advertisers happy, and ad companies are hugely responsive to advertiser concerns about click fraud. They’re not going to start generating fraudulent traffic; that’d kill the golden goose.

@Mer__edith Well, if we’re lucky, we’ll find out which of us is right. ;)

But I think the rationale of “engagement pumping via fake content”, while icky (and obviously a betrayal of Meta’s alleged mission of “connecting people”), is pretty coherent and consistent with increasing ad revenue.

Whereas “fake traffic” is basically a scam on advertisers and, importantly, advertisers ultimately do see their own conversion rates from paid traffic—so they can catch on very quickly if Meta starts sending a lot of traffic which doesn’t convert. So the “fake traffic” approach strikes me as something that would cause the business to unravel in very short order.

@GossiTheDog

“Captain says @AmericanAir software outage preventing weight & balance calculations ‘company-wide’ with no estimate on resolution. Flights unable to depart as a result. Not a good start to Christmas Eve travel!,” a person posted on X.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/24/business/american-airlines-delays-cancellations/index.html

It's odd how favorable Trump's transition polling--and general media coverage--seem to be.

On the one hand, he's picked a bunch of losers, weirdos, and utter nutballs to serve in his administration. On the other, I think people are just exhausted from his bullshit, and with 4 more years to go.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/12/trump-transition-polling/

https://www.vox.com/politics/388284/trump-2024-win-global-anti-incumbent-system

@GossiTheDog I don't mean to be dumb, but how would an X-ray scanner backdoor work? Like, how would an object being scanned trigger the backdoor?

I wonder how pollsters deal with the fact that, in my unscientific experience, voters who say the economy is their most important issue often soon reveal in discussion that the economy is not, in fact, their most important issue.

https://nypost.com/2024/09/01/us-news/tiktok-chase-bank-glitch-shows-people-trying-to-exploit-atms/

Those of us old enough to re,ember the 20th century know this as old-fashioned check fraud

I didn't see this until @mmasnick pointed this out, but Trump's apparent confusion about who was President in 2020, when he was running for re-election, feels...problematic?

Is it the behavior of an "elderly man with a poor memory?"

I am deeply, deeply sympathetic to Pavel Durov, in exactly the same sense that Telegram is a “secure e2ee messenger.”

Kaplan then spoke directly to Trump, who was seated at the defense table. “Mr. Trump, I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial,” he said. “I understand you are probably very eager for me to do that.”

At that point, Trump threw up his hands, saying, “I would love it. I would love it.”

“I know you would. I know you would,” Kaplan replied. “You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently.”

Trump shot back: “You can’t either.”

Ah yes, the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense.

@jwz @anildash It might be stupid of me, but, personally, I have always felt there must be some difference between "platforms" vs "promoters".

I struggle to get behind the idea of promoting and helping to monetize Nazis, but I also struggle to get behind the idea of everyone blocking Nazis from DNS resolution.

CloudFlare's position strikes me as somewhat more principled than Substack's, though maybe still troublesome.

@jwz @anildash And to be clear, I say this to describe my own ruminating--I'm not sure I have an answer here.

But, like, "We promote the best writers; see these Nazis on our homepage" feels quite different to me than, I dunno, "We issue TLS certs, and some of those certs are issued to Nazis."

There's probably a bunch of shades of gray between those two extremes.