so.cl

Repeat after me: Signal is a honeypot.

The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremmie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the “up” end of the grammeters.

The Turboencarbulator sounds like the usual SV gibberish. “AND IT RUNS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN!”

Github Enterprise source code , leaked on November 05, 2020; it seems Microsoft is really trying to get it removed. Not mine, I just ran across the zip archive. 😉

You’re always going to dependent on someone in the mainstream economic world if you want to have a web presence in North America. Even if you run your own servers, you’re at the mercy of your hosting provider, your ISP, your DNS registrar, and even browser level things like Google Safe Browsing. Any of these can be major points of failure.

I have a few gripes with Signal — the biggest of them all is it’s centralized, and in the US no less. This alone makes it not that different from WhatsApp — we’re simply moving from one silo to another. What’s to say that Signal will uphold its values, continue operating and evade censorship and potential compromise? To top it off, they’re becoming a fairly high value target off late. And if that isn’t convincing enough, Signal’s massive outage lasting nearly a day should be enough evidence against centralization. Further, Signal is known to use AWS as their cloud provider — what if another Parler happens and the rug is pulled from under Signal’s feet?

Earlier this week, 9to5Mac reported that Apple would soon start blocking users from side loading iPhone and iPad applications to their M1 Macs. Now, Apple has officially flipped the server-side switch to implement this change.

This means that it is no longer possible to use an app such as iMazing to side load unsupported applications from your iPhone or iPad to your M1 Mac.

http://solarleaks.net

We are putting data found during our recent adventure for sale.

• Microsoft Windows (partial) source code and various Microsoft repositories - price: 600,000 USD - data: msft.tgz.enc (2.6G) - link

• Cisco multiple products source code + internal bugtracker dump - price: 500,000 USD - data: csco.tgz.enc (1.7G) - link

• SolarWinds products source code (all including Orion) + customer portal dump - price: 250,000 USD - data: swi.tgz.enc (612M) - link

• FireEye private redteam tools, source code, binaries and documentation - price: 50,000 USD - data: feye.tgz.enc (39M) - link

Interesting.

gpg: Signature made Tue Jan 12 16:02:51 2021 GMT
gpg: using RSA key 24516C2E1CC7890832771178E2C73BC53B9118A0

An interesting comparison between Threema, Signal, Whatsapp and Telegram. https://threema.ch/en/messenger-comparison Keep in mind that Switzerland is not the promised land of privacy, remember CryptoAG ?

A paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports by controversial Stanford-affiliated researcher Michal Kosinski claims to show that facial recognition algorithms can expose people’s political views from their social media profiles. Using a dataset of over 1 million Facebook and dating sites profiles from users across Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., Kosinski and coauthors say they trained an algorithm to correctly classify political orientation in 72% of “liberal-conservative” face pairs.

That’s enough politics for me, remember to use Tor, use Signal/Telegram, use non-USA services, use your brain. There are always alternatives, do your research. We’re heading straight into the dark ages, head first.

First they banned those they deemed to have wrong think from “social media”, crying build your own social media, it is a private company after all, they can choose their users.

And they did, but the totalitarians were no satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service, crying build your own service it is a private company after all, they can choose their users.

There are two alternatives to Twitter and their ilk:

• The federated approach, where many Twitter like sites can interconnect and exchange messages. One current example of this is Mastodon , other is GNU social (status.net/identi.ca).

• The indie approach, where everyone basically hosts their own profile and there are no Twitter like sites at all, one instead uses readers that are completely separate from ones hosted profile, just like it was in the blogosphere days. One example of this is indieweb.org .

I tend to favor the indie approach as the federated one seems to in practice often end up with interoperability issues and mono-cultures, at least historically, plus there are still central providers whereas in the indie world everyone is a provider themselves.

Hypocrisy is thy name.

Speech without a platform isn’t speech at all. Also, if you are tolerant with exceptions, you are intolerant, period. Which applies to free speech too: if you can say what you want EXCEPT that the Earth moves around the Sun, congratulations, you have no free speech.

And you are Galileo Galilei.

Does nobody notice when they’re writing software with features designed around user “engagement” and “retention” that they’re doing a disservice to their users? If not outright building addictions?

As The Age of Surveillance Capitalism points out – social networks need to be regulated. We need to punish their bad behaviour just as we punish sexual abuse. But banning bad behaviour, sadly, isn’t enough. We also have to take responsible steps to protect ourselves.

I think we are quickly approaching a point in time when culture will start to swing the other way, and the internet will become this thing that people don’t take seriously, much like it was in the 90s. That, and some combination of that and censorship.

And the tech monopolies absolutely will not survive the level of influence they have now, even if they think they are playing it safe by supporting a particular political faction that happens to be popular at the moment. I think things are going to change fairly rapidly in this direction because it turns out being connected constantly is actually pretty awful in most of the ways that count.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France

Implemented the so.cl part of my website because I am trying to move away from all “social media” and follow the Indieweb principles more.

The greatest incentive for “social media” is to create outrage and agreement or disagreement, and it’s on a descending scale from there. “Quality content” is pretty far down the list, and of course the format makes quality content even harder.