Notices by abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)

The good news: this hospital does at-home sleep studies! They just wire you up with portable equipment and send you home

The bad news: an hour on public transportation looking like I’m wired to blow

it has been 0️⃣ days since I had to send a corporation a nastygram about disrespecting my “reduce motion” and “do not autoplay videos” accessibility settings

from an article about the bitcoin crash: “Bitcoin is crashing hard, reaching historic lows of well below the $70,000 mark. At the time of writing, the token is hovering just above $63,000, levels we haven’t seen since October 2024.”

Given that I personally remember people being excited that bitcoin had reached the mark of one (1) dollar, the term “historic lows” to describe returning to the state of things slightly over one year ago is rather telling about the tech industry’s lack of perspective and cultural memory…

(it’s still dropping though 😌)

today in Dutch news: Kinky Bridge’s two halves aren’t slotting into each other properly. Without achieving interlock, no-one can step on them https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/236754/kinkerbrug-sloot-niet-meer-goed-probleem-inmiddels-verholpen

I think Odin sincerely believes humans can conjure bacon out of thin air if you stare at them cutely enough #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

as a practical example, Google has agreed to settle over claims the assistant app was recording without the user’s permission (which would be in the form of the command word) *for advertisement purposes.*

There’s two basic scenarios here:

1) completely true, Google knows it, and the faster they can get the lawsuit over with and out of the news cycle, the better. Instant settlement.

2) okay, well, admittedly sometimes the assistant mishears the command word and starts recording, and this may lead to accidentally recording sensitive conversations without consent, but it’s a bug — it’s not an *intentional plan* to illegally record people in hopes they’ll say something that can be used to target ads.

In the second case, if they didn’t want to settle, they’d have to basically disclose all the source code and every email and chat conversation between every employee who has ever touched these systems to exhaustively prove lack of intent, given the fact that there’s some nonzero number of suspicious recordings. Or… they could just sigh and send everyone gift card money for the inconvenience.

I’m inclined to believe it’s case 2 (just because it doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to be evil), but obviously it could be case 1. The point is just that it’s not PROVEN that it’s case 1.

a common point of confusion:

A corporation agreeing to settle a lawsuit with money does not mean that the allegations were conclusively proven. It means they hit the “fine fine here’s some money to compensate for your troubles, please shut up” escape button. These concepts may have overlap, but they are not the same.

In particular, a company may agree to settle over something that isn’t really true, because the amount of sensitive internal information they’d have to disclose at the court’s orders to PROVE it’s not true would do more damage than just sighing and forking over the money.

It also might just be true and they know it! But not necessarily.

Notepad++'s update mechanism was compromised from June to December 2025. They believe it was a state actor practicing selective targeting and not a no-hosts-refused malware gang situation. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/

Confucius said Guan Zhong had a small "container of liquid". A small "capacity to pour out". A small "tool". A small "utensil one would keep handy". This is definitely a metaphor for his virtue

I have finished Chapter 3 of "The Analects of Confucius: An Internet Translation for Internet People." The page is also now more legible on mobile.

Featuring several episodes of "The Ji Clan Is At It Again," plus:

The Master remarked “Prime Minister Guan Zhong had a really small ‘jug,’ if you know what I mean!” Someone guessed: “… You mean he was frugal?” Confucius scoffed.

https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/analects/

#classicalchinese #philosophy #translation #localization

The “hot network questions” column on stack exchange is always an unhinged experience, especially if you interpret it as one stream of consciousness:

How to build a coin-operated car wash without concrete? How to deal with a player who wants to run away? Is velocity defined in the instant a body hits the ground? What is the purpose of glutinous rice flour in this kimchi paste? Could a person be very evil and still go to heaven due to good karma? What exactly is an electron?

@tuban_muzuru as a senior engineer, 10% of all technical knowledge is only publicly documented in the form of the third most-voted answer on stack exchange

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115975129032610730

I think that whoever put “sleeping,” “socializing” and “spending time with family” on the list of hobbies in the python developers survey needs to take a vacation for the safety of themselves and everyone around them

to take a stab at a more popular rendering of a random bit of Chinese philosophy:

"Respecting his father is a son's crowning virtue; respecting that his son has become a man is a father's highest obligation."

(academic translation in screenshot is Scott Cook)

#classicalchinese #translation #philosophy

It’s my bedtime. This is the view from the foot of my bed #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

Odin has been spending more time curled up on my bed, which on the one paw is very cute, but on the other it’s the time of year when Amsterdam is 110% mud and wet wipes at the door can only do so much #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

Odin saw two teenage girls making the "aww how cute" face from across the street, and he planted himself down and stared at them until they crossed the street to pet him.

RE: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761

they edited the clearly LLM-generated-and-human-unread readme to “clarify” that by production-ready matrix server by Cloudflare they meant a proof-of-concept matrix server not endorsed for production use by Cloudflare. They removed all the lines like “// TODO: implement authentication” from the source code without implementing anything

#cloudflare

Things I actually miss about America:

— Halloween
— Waffle House
— Goldfish crackers
— Pumpkin pie
— Apple cider (nonalcoholic)
— the way honey comes in those little bear-shaped bottles

I left a pot with the dregs of some stew out where a very large dog could reach it (which is to say, anywhere). I heard a loud clatter and discovered the plushie Mr. Sloth at the scene of the crime, covered in stew.

Mr. Sloth claims he's been framed... :neodog_amogus: