Notices by Kee Hinckley (nazgul@infosec.exchange)

マリウス . The Day WhatsApp Goes Dark https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/the-day-whatsapp-goes-dark/

It would absolutely be a disaster.

Every business in Mexico has a WhatsApp account. It doesn't matter whether it's Walmart, or the local dog groomer. It's customer support. It's how you order tickets to events. It's how you get alerts when your blouse gets mended. It's how you schedule appointments with, show photos of your issues with, and get your prescriptions from, your doctor. And although there are social groups on Facebook, they are far more on WhatsApp.

Shutting down Google Maps would be nearly as devastating. It's where you find out the menu for a restaurant. It's where you find out the hours. The reviews, and whether the thing is still open. But Whatsapp would be far worse.

"Not she berry or he berry"

#lgbtq #nonbinary

Trans girls:
I grew these breasts myself and by the grace of God, I'm gonna show them off whenever the chance comes up.

Trans guys:
I had these breasts removed myself and, by the grace of God, I'm going shirtless at all times.

#transgender #transmen #transwomen #TransJoy #trans

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116736495067438407

You can't make this stuff up. (But they do.)

I mean, they always did. I co-founded a web development firm with @Serena back at the beginning of the web, and we got written up by one of these firms as being one of the top five or so web development firms in the country. It was bullshit. They didn't go out and research it. The guy who wrote it was friends with our CEO. The same was probably true with the other firms. But boy did it result in an infusion of investment.

Cannot verify, but funny regardless.

Guanajuato is at around 7000' (around 2000 meters). The difference in height between the center of the city and the road at the top of the surrounding hills is over 300' (100 meters).

Between the two are a few roads and a lot of tiny callejones that weave up and down the hills in a series of steps, ramps, and an ocasional plaza.

They hold international BMX races down those stairs.

And once a year they have a foot race that goes up, down, up down, over and over? gradually working its way around the city. Some people take it seriously, some are couples holding hands, or other people doing it just for kicks.

They are all nuts. :)

Anyway, they're setting up for the road race. Walking in the alleys during it is a matter of pausing for an opening, and then dashing to the next doorway to get out of the way.

❝ The U.S. model is broken,” he says bluntly. 
In the United States, hospitals hit by ransomware are often treated as negligent culprits. Regulators fine them for HIPAA violations, lawyers file class-action suits and insurance rarely covers the fallout.  
Article content
“A hospital can pay $10 million in ransom or $100 million in penalties,” he says. “Guess which they choose? That’s how we end up funding cybercrime.” ❞

https://financialpost.com/technology/tech-news/the-doctor-who-hacked-medicine

@juergen_hubert My wife subcontracts for somebody. And they recently gave her a proposal for a job that they would be working on, that had been written by an LLM. They said, "Don't write a proposal, just edit this."

It was hell.

She had to double check everything it said. Every page she had to add comments to. And then there were things that it had proposed that she didn't think made sense. But she had no way of knowing whether it was something that the person she was subcontracting too had wanted, or something the LLM had made up.

And it had the usual problem, that the kinds of errors it made, were not the errors humans would make, and were much harder to catch.

On top of all of that when it was finally done and went to the client, they got really upset because the proposal said that their existing system was "weak". You can see why an LLM would say that. If you're proposing enhancing a system, most likely the thing it's replacing was weak. But in this case that was not true, and the client was pretty pissed.

Don't do it.

"Nearly 40% of adults who undergo surgery experience serious financial hardship in the year after, according to a new University of Washington analysis."

https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/12/12/healthcare-costs-surgery-debt-private-insurance-uw-study

@Lazarou No idea if this is real, but....

We've moved into a new phase of fascism. Where the government is threatening to shutdown nonprofits like the Ford Foundation for funding news organizations who pointed out that Charlie Kirk was racist. Miller, who calls the shots for anything in this regime that has to do with promoting white men, has called those nonprofits terrorist organizations. And remember that Congress is talking about revoking passports for anyone who supports terrorists organizations.

This is moving very fast. And any such actions will be greatly enhanced by Palantir technology, which can easily map who supported what organization, and who said what on social media, to their address, SSN, and tax records. Hitler had IBM to organize tracking his enemies. Palantir is millions of times more powerful.

#USPol

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/vance-miller-announce-crackdowns

❝ The crazy thing is not that garlic isn’t grown from seeds; it’s that, for the most part, it can’t be. Ever since people began cultivating garlic — six millennia ago by some estimates, 10 by others — it’s primarily been done through asexual reproduction. In all those thousands of years, scarcely a single plant was coaxed to produce one solitary seed.
And so it forgot how.
About 15 years ago, a Missouri farmer and former union painter named Mark Brown began trying to coax true seeds from his garlic — an attempt, essentially, to undo thousands of years of domestication.
❞ https://ambrook.com/offrange/crops/so-you-think-you-know-garlic?utm_source=clivethompson&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=linkfest-38-tk-tk-and-tk

If you're wondering what you can do about ICE as a white person in a blue state...

#uspol

#NotTheOnion

Someone spent two weeks "generating a book" in ChatGPT.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/nhLwG2Idrt

This is like a parody of queer erasure.

❝ Before the first update, the Stonewall National Monument page acknowledged that "before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.” The revised version then stated, “almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal.” Now, a new version of the page indicates that “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal.” ❞

The pot is boiling.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/after-trans-people-trump-now-erasing

❝ While humpbacks commonly use bubble nets to trap prey and bubble trails during mating, these bubble rings seemed to occur only during relaxed, voluntary encounters with humans — not while hunting or competing for mates. ❞
https://www.kqed.org/science/1997307/humpback-whales-blow-bubble-smoke-rings-to-communicate-with-humans

I was having sushi in #Split, #Croatia / #Hrvatska (excellent fish, but Croatia's idea of "spicy" needs work) when I was faced with the following doors during a bathroom break.
I guess if you have a Prince Albert you need to find a door with a champagne bottle on it.

Won't be the last.

@evan @NaClKnight This is what I get for rewriting sentences just before posting.
13th in the world. The Balkans in general are all in the top group,