Notices by Marcus Hutchins :verified: (malwaretech@infosec.exchange), page 4

To clear up some confusion, I'm not saying "government" as in I think they are legitimate. I'm saying government as in they literally govern the Gaza Strip. They are the de-facto government of the region. It's pretty important to understand that. The question isn't should the Palestinian people be free, it's how do you free them without affording more power to a terrorist organization that controls the region and has sworn to eliminate your state. I feel like people are kind of glossing over that part.

The case for leaving Twitter

"You’re not fighting a war, you’re not stopping Twitter from falling into the hands of the far-right, you’re selling burgers in a Nazi bar, paying more than you profit in rent. Every dollar Twitter makes in ad revenue is a dollar against everything you stand for."

https://throwawayopinions.io/the-paradox-of-intolerance.html?1

I work from home, I don't even own a car, I live in a major apartment complex where all my groceries and other needs are delivered by vans that are already making deliveries to 10-100 other units within the building (and a lot of these vans are now electric). My carbon footprint is significantly less than the average person's, yet you don't see me dunking on people for commuting to work, going to the grocery store, taking vacations. That's because as well as carbon emissions, I understand two other things: privilege and empathy.

I just saw that Am I The Asshole reddit thread where the white girl started going to a black salon because she had extremely curly hair and the black salon was the only one that didn't massacre it. Her white friends straight up gaslit her into believe she was engaging in cultural appropriation and stealing resources from black people. WILD 💀

I'm a big fan of social media platforms that let you delete comments on your own posts. I get so many where people are going out of their way to call me out for something that was neither said, implied, or even existed in the near vicinity of my post. It's just like "nah, ur comment priveledged are revoked. Come back when you've worked out some issues lol"

I do wonder how many people are staying on Twitter due to follower count alone. Having had an account for over a decade, I'd have previously estimated about 20% of my followers were dead accounts. Based on now leaving and making new accounts on other platforms, my estimate is closer to 90%.

As a blogger I've always known only like 1% of people who retweet/like a post actually clicked the link and read the article, but I assumed that was just a social media thing. Having experimented with basically every other platform, I learned it's more likely that a significant number of Twitter engagements are fake, and those that aren't don't really care enough to read your work, they'll just give you a retweet/like for appearances.

Between the collapse of the advertiser model, record high interest rates, and generative AI content farming, the next decade isn't looking great for the free and open internet.

Coming at AI from a philosophy standpoint is super frustrating. A lot of questions like do LLMs think or understand are very complex, but many tech people simply take the position of we don't fully understand how human brains work, and we don't fully understand how ML models work, therefore those things are the same.

Twitter made a new ad for the platform that features a phone scrolling through Twitter. They ended up pulling it and remaking it after people noticed it contained a tweet mocking Elon for trying to blame Twitter's advertiser exodus on the jews. The second version of the ad, which is still online, contains a tweet about creampieing a rotisserie chicken.

My favorite quantum physics explanations was from someone who responded to the question "what is electron spin" with "Imagine a ball and it's spinning, except its not a ball and its not spinning". It seems like a shitpost, but pretty much sums up all of quantum physics philosophy.

It might Be Time to Rethink Phishing Awareness

#cybersecurity #cybersecurityawareness #phishing

https://malwaretech.com/2023/09/it-might-be-time-to-rethink-phishing-awareness.html

This is the 20th time this year that I've overdrafted my bank account by forgetting to pay myself. Certified most useless person in existence.

@dangoodin Your regular reminder that the average person would rather literally support fascism than get slightly less attention on social media

@GossiTheDog I love that someone would interview the person who very nearly bankrupted the world's 6th largest economy overnight about their opinions on economics

The concept of being a felon is so funny to me. It's like "hey, you did some crime when you were 19, so we're going to make it exponentially harder to not do crime in future by limiting basically all your options for survival".

Translations: "our ad business is dying so we're forcing you to put more and unskippable ads on your videos so we can boost our earnings for the quarterly report"

For people who for some reason still want to use Chrome:
Settings > Privacy >Ad privacy, then just toggle everything off.

Whenever someone replies to one of my threads about LLMs claiming they work the same as human brains, I assume they mean specifically their brain, or their lack thereof.

This is absolutely crazy stuff. Chinese hackers were able to get into a bunch of government email accounts by forging Microsoft access tokens, but how it happened is wild.

Apparently an internal Microsoft system responsible for signing consumer access tokens crashed, then a bug in the crash dump generator caused the secret key to be written to the crash dump. Microsoft's secondary system for detecting sensitive data in crash dumps also failed, allowing the crash dump to be moved from an isolated network to the corporate one. The Chinese hackers compromised a Microsoft engineer's account and were able to get a hold of the crash dump. They were not only able to find the key and figure out that it's responsible for signing consumer access tokens, but were also able to exploit a software bug to use it to sign enterprise access tokens too, basically giving them the keys to the kingdom.

So many security system had to fail for this to happen. Either the hackers were very lucky or extremely patient.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-technical-investigations-for-storm-0558-key-acquisition/

This is a testament to just how hard cybersecurity is. Microsoft had the forethought to not store keys into crash dumps, had the forethought to build a secondary system to double check them, had the forethought to store them on an isolated network, but a cascading failure basically blitzed through all their security controls and allowed nation/state hackers to walk off with critical signing keys.