Notices by CyberFrog (froge@social.glitched.systems)

Reminder for those who may not realize this, but #Stylometry is kind of an insane field of study, and you can be uniquely identified based on your writing style alone.

This has, in the past, been applied to open source developers and programming code too, and it was found that using stylometry techniques you can identify the author of a compiled binary based on their open source code style ~78% of the time

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.08546v1

There are some techniques to avoid this luckily, which involve fairly basic changes to your writing style and structure that can very effectively anonymize things again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social did you see that github's copilot will refuse to autocomplete ANY code which has the word "gender" in it? also several other banned keywords lol

supposedly there are over 1,000 words which it will detect and refuse to operate on...

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social @broadwaybabyto@zeroes.ca catch me hacking this algorithm and releasing information to the public to trick the system into believing everyone is impoverished, algorithmically driving Microsoft's profits into the dirt, and allowing thousands to buy items at a relative discount.

I promise me and those like me have infinitely more time and energy to fuck this up than the corporations have to fix it, I'll make it my lifelong side project to lose them vast amounts of money with the same technology they built to exploit people lol

The loops.video instance has been submitted to #FediBlock with the reason being outlined below. I can't say I disagree, the terms of service presents a serious problem for user content rights, and this should be addressed before federation of loops.

Otherwise for the safety of your users I would highly suggest that instance admins defederate loops immediately once it comes online (assuming the TOS is not changed first)

https://bajsicki.com/blog/loops-video-terms/

@futurebird@sauropods.win perhaps we should instead be teaching cooperation and mutual support structures, rather than assuming every single person should be taught how to rule over every single other person... but kindly lol

@futurebird@sauropods.win yeah, I think it is probably beneficial to push this into wider society still, although I am weary of the impacts it could have if further development on the ideas isn't also prioritized

What I really wouldn't like is a society of people all taught that they are smart and kind enough to rule, but with nobody to rule over, and very few skills for flat mutual cooperation

@aral@mastodon.ar.al #shametesla did nothing wrong!

@magicalthinking@noauthority.social @Humpleupagus@eveningzoo.club they regulate usage of the internet, they don't actually manage or run it right now (for the most part), I just don't think national governments that don't even manage or control the internet should be regulating how people use it

most of the world doesn't have net neutrality, and the USA repealed it recently (again), so packet shaping and blocking/censorship happens constantly online according to whatever your government just doesn't like that day, in the USA internet providers will check for insecure connections and inject extra advertising into websites just to rake money out of you (and this is technically legal), in other places entire protocols like torrents are blocked

The people responsible for running the internet should be working on regulating and managing more of it without intervention and demands from random governments, like US states that want to block porn, or Egyptian and Chinese governments trying to block news websites, letting some national government which only represents a fraction of the people online control how shared resources are used and accessed by everyone else is just shitty in general

This isn't even such a new idea, the people who built these systems understood the issues it could create, that's actually why the governments don't manage who can buy and run a website online, that'd be terrible lol

I feel like the internet should be an independent national organization, independently regulated with its own rule of law and governance systems, letting national governments which are tied to specific populations and land areas control such an important shared global resource is misguided and morally/ethically wrong tbh

@magicalthinking@noauthority.social no, I just care about improving the world and don't like the way governments manage the internet for their own interests smh

@alice@lgbtqia.space not saying the people who often reply this way really mean it, or that they're actively malicious, often they're genuinely just misinformed or whatever

but in saying that... there is a reason the CIA writes about this in their handbooks on how to disenfranchise and squash grassroots movements, it DOES take energy and momentum to sustain positive change, and comments that offer nothing of substance while broadly discouraging action absolutely have a big impact on people and wider movements as a whole, I think this is something most people don't consider very often but it's hugely important to remember

@aral@mastodon.ar.al I genuinely can't view this because reddit is a garbage platform not built for humans anymore, and they block my browser and network, and block people without an account in a lot of cases now, but I'm sure whatever this was it's damning lmao

@zannesan@mastodon.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io you know we really could make it stop... it's just the rich fucks with infinitely more resources than every other human kinda don't want to stop it right now smh

@dansup@mastodon.social I mean I'm not super knowledgeable on the value of analytics data, so I'm not sure how important knowing if the user hit the "read more" button (or similar) actually is for an effective FYP algo, but I can see how it might be useful at some point to have that kind of data coming in

Mostly I think even if you did want to force reporting of that data, it's better to work with the 3rd party clients, rather than leaving the only 3rd partys be those that break things until their tools run

@dansup@mastodon.social in general I would say release API docs and let 3rd party apps implement things correctly, but also, it's likely possible to implement very good FYP algos using mostly backend related data too (eg comment viewing, share related API calls) so maybe it might be worth implementing from a backend-first perspective and looking at if the client analytics even end up causing a significant difference in the future... then maybe it can just be generally avoided 😛

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @noybeu@mastodon.social the Irish DPC being basically useless on GDPR enforcement is a hot button issue in Europe right now, from what I understand the rest of the EU is essentially applying legal pressure and threatening penalties for non-enforcement so hopefully the Irish DPC gets much better in future

@patrickcmiller@infosec.exchange "unhackable"...

he does know what happened to every other person on the planet who ever called something unhackable right? lol, lmao even

@SmartFox@mastodon.social @patrickcmiller@infosec.exchange they had a "data breach" (really just a hacker stealing logins) recently and now people realize what a colossal fuckup it was so they want a "go back" button tbh

@aral@mastodon.ar.al is... is this real? I mean even just the branding here is awful from a PR perspective, wtf are they even doing... incredible

@mattly@hachyderm.io many MANY years ago, when I was first getting involved in security and had just started a github account (long since deleted) I got an email from someone who scraped my details from a repo where I did security patches

they offered me a significant amount of money for some relatively simple XSS related bypass methods in the (back then) actively maintained XSS auditor code of chromium

I refused of course, but to this day, I wonder how many millions of people are being exploited because some random person got an email and some money