Notices by Amit Serper :donor: (0xamit@infosec.exchange)

Command line mastodon reminds me of the good ol' days

When both of my Mastodon bots report rockets in Israel :\

My cat is living his best life right now
#cats #catsofmastodon

I'm happy to share my new (and small) open source project - Masto-rss. A small and simple Mastodon bot that posts news from RSS feeds.
I made masto-rss to bring news websites that don't have fediverse accounts into our feeds. The best way to use it is in its docker container form (which is linked in the README.md file). I am adding features to it as I go. Right now, it is powering @ynetmivzakim. Check it out here:
https://github.com/aserper/masto-rss

I met a friend who's #MIT faculty last night. The stuff that he told me about what's going on campus over there is truly scary. According to him "it's 1939 Germany". Jewish students (just Jewish, not Israeli, no relation to the situation in the middle east whatsoever) are being ignored and shunned by their fellow students. Study groups disbanded, their dorms are plastered with propaganda against them. When Jewish students walk down the halls of their dorms other students literally turn away on purpose in order to not have eye contact with them. And I'll spare you from what the Israeli foreign students are saying. So go on and tell me that "antizionism is not antisemitism" or whatever. This is EXACTLY what happened in Germany in the 1930s and it's repeating itself here, in the US, in ivy league schools. MIT administration is completely impotent, they don't want to take any action because a lot of the people who organize this shit are foreign students in a student visa and they don't want to expel them "because they will lose their visa to the US" (and MIT will lose the $$$). Absolutely disgusting.

I went to see my primary care doctor due to a super violent cough that's been going on for 3 weeks now. My doctor asked me how I was doing (he knows I'm Israeli). I said "well, I lost my job, my country is in a state of war and there's a bunch of antisemitism everywhere". My doctor, a lovely, kind and soft spoken Muslim Pakistani-american gave me a hug and told me "people like you and I didn't leave our home countries and immigrated to America to be surrounded by this crap. Surround yourself with good and kind people, lay off the news and focus on whatever makes you feel good. Let the haters soak in their own frustrations. In America we are all people, no matter what our religion is". I wish there were more people like him.

My dad went to his cousin's funeral today. His cousin was murdered by #hamas in Kfar Aza on October the 7th. #Terrorists went into their home and burnt my dad's cousin and his wife alive. It took the authorities two and a half weeks to recognize them because producing DNA from a lump of coal is very difficult. So many braindead takes about the war, so much ignorance, not knowing basic facts, not about what happend on the 7th, not about the conflict in general, not even about Gaza. I am so shocked and broken by people's blind hate. Something broke in me in these past few weeks, my entire political outlook is shattered (I used to consider myself a progressive), people that I knew started showing their true face, saying utterly antisemitic things, not out of antisemitism but out of sheer ignorance. I really don't know if I'll ever be able to look at the world the same way. Extremely depressing, where do we go from here as a western, democratic society?

I just noticed that I crossed 4k followers on mastodon. I joined after fleeing Twitter (where I had about 30k followers) a few months ago and I have to say - Mastodon is chill, the fediverse is an awesome concept (it's how the Internet should be!) And the amount of attention that social media takes in my life was reduced significantly to the point where my mental health was very positively affected by it.
Screw the rage baiting algorithm, screw the recreational outrage on the birdsite, and screw Elon.

Speaking of Twitter, apparently Elon is making some changes, again, by firing the new CEO without her knowing about it
https://www.businessinsider.com/linda-yaccarino-blindsided-elon-musks-announcement-found-new-twitter-ceo-2023-9

With the way things are, Twitter might not have any security people on staff soon. If you're using "login with Twitter" as a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution for some websites/services, I'd be worried if I were you. If you can switch to a different authentication method then do it and purge the authentication tokens/sessions.