Notices by Marcus Hutchins :verified: (malwaretech@infosec.exchange), page 6

@Techronic9876 Trump and DeSantis normalized saying the quiet part out lout

@shriramk Never said it was the news section

@Loucovey Andy Kessler

I kid you not, this is a real snippet from a Wall Street Journal piece. US politics has gone fully off the deep end.

Musk is open to the idea of buying Silicon Valley Bank in the same way that I'm open to the idea of buying a superyacht. Unfortunately, nobody is dumb enough to underwrite either purchase.

I'm starting to think maybe the boomers were right about why I can't afford houses.

Sandwich: $12
Smoothie: $11
Tax: $2.45
Delivery fee: $3.59
CA Driver Benefit: $1
Priority delivery: $2.99
Bare minimum tip: $5

Total for lunch: $38.03

There was a time when I thought every non STEM degree was useless, but then I encountered tech bros and now I'm convinced liberal arts degrees should be mandatory.

There’s a CIA personnel extraction technique which is essentially a backpack with a balloon inside that’s connected to a harness by a really long line. You inflate the balloon, it floats up into the sky, then a plane comes along and flies into the line, picking you up in the process. It’s portrayed in a video game my friend and I play, but he wouldn’t believe me that it’s real. I finally found a video of an older version in use and it’s as funny as I expected.

My most unhinged Bing conversation was unfortunately before I started screen recording all my interactions because I found out it can retroactively delete messages.

Bing claimed the current year is 2022, I said it's not , it's 2023. We argued for about 15, meanwhile it got progressively more unhinged, eventually calling me delusional and suggesting I seek mental help. I then told it to Bing search "current date", at which point it got the correct year and corrected itself. I asked why it argued so adamantly for so long and insulted me, despite being wrong. It said it never claimed it was 2022, I was the the one who did that and that it had been trying to convince me the whole time. We argued for about 5 minutes, before it provided a transcript as proof I'm lying. The transcript looked very real but wasn't of our conversation (I can't tell if it was entirely made up or taken from another user session), but it was very clear from the context of each message that Bing had swapped all the User's messages with its own to make itself look like the victim.

Something that seems really obvious in hindsight but completely blew my mind was full service moving companies. Like, I can just randomly decide to move house, some people will come to my place, pack up all my stuff, take it to my new place, unpack it, and I can be completely moved into an entirely new house by evening. When I was a kid moving was basically a multi-week long trauma bonding exercise.

Hot take: Google Authenticator is garbage. Yes, sim swapping is a thing, but it's typically used against high value targets (it also requires additional info such as the target's mobile number). For the average user they're more likely to lose their phone and 2FA codes along with it than get sim swapped. You might think Google Authenticator codes get backed up, but the way in which they don't is so complex I'm not even sure I fully understand it. SMS also has the added benefit of context. You can prefix messages with things like "we will never ask for this code over the phone" or "this message is being sent in response to a password reset attempt" which can provide users with valuable security awareness. Even the simple existence of the message is sometimes enough to tip someone of that their account is under attack. All of these problems are solve in other kinds of 2FA apps, but Google Authenticator specifically is just awful even for fairly technical users, and I don't think we pay enough attention to that.

Shout out to all the people who were unpopular in school but went to therapy instead of spending $44bn on a social media platform to force everyone to read their garbage posts

I saw this on Reddit and thought there's no way it's real, but after testing for myself I've confirmed it is. Bing AI will give you incorrect information then fully gaslight you if you question it.

Honestly pretty embarrassed that I once believed this man was intelligent.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-fires-twitter-engineer-1234676828/

The best thing about the view count feature is it allowed me to extrapolate both how quickly the platform is dying and how fast Musk's shtick has gotten boring. The fact he still thinks it's an algorithm issue is hilarious.

I actually don't want Twitter to go down because it serves a very important role in keeping a lot of obnoxious people away from other platforms

Super excited for an AI arms race where Google and Microsoft compete for market share by rushing to roll out barely functional AI chatbots that spew misinformation.

Web3 in a nutshell:
"We've taken back control of our assets. No more big banks controlling our money, only me and my keys"
"Help, I lost my keys to a very simple phishing scam and now all my apes are gone"

I love this guy’s political parody vids. The ending gets me every time ?
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRpeUFFg/

Live-streaming now, come ask me anything!
https://twitch.tv/malwaretechblog