TFW your wages are materially worse than a 15th century Florentine day laborer

#uspol #history #economics

CC @adapalmer

In a much lower stakes context, I now wonder (belatedly, in my early 40s) if the reason I seem to piss people off in corporate settings is that I try (naively?) to focus on the content of a discussion or situation (e.g., how do we solve for this technical or organizational problem in an economically efficient way), rather than trying to focus on playing to the status fulfillment of the various players in the scene (e.g., how do I make the highest ranking people feel good about themselves and attribute those positive feelings to me).

For a long time, I was caught off guard by these themes in sci-fi stories like Transmetropolitan and Banks' Player of Games.

Later, after Epstein and having spent more time in corporate America, I started to understand that this is a prevailing mode in a society like ours dominated by hierarchies and often predatory status seeking (two things that seem deeply intertwined.)

Transmet and other stories were trying to teach me a valuable, fundamental lesson - which is that people who are driven by seeking status through currencies of power (e.g., corporate executives, politicians, police) are exactly the same sort of people who will abuse women and children because it gives them the same feelings.

What always strikes me as particularly nasty about rich fucks abusing people is that it would be trivial for the abusers to use their wealth and fame to get the experiences they *ostensibly* want with consenting adults.

Instead, they prey on vulnerable people, which suggests that transgression and power over others is the *actual* underlying feeling they're seeking and the sex or whatever is a secondary concern.

So given a choice between using privilege to seek novel experiences and using privilege to insulate themselves from the consequences of predatory experiences, many choose the latter.

Is this a particularly harmful instantiation of status games? It seems like largely the same dynamics at work.

This is a toot about Neil Gaiman, but also some very significant portion of the ruling classes more broadly. To wit, Epstein et al.

#neilgaiman #politics #uspol #psychology #economics

CC @bhalpin

lol
lmao

Sauce: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa24-326a

#infosec #cybersecurity #redteam #cisa

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Wild ass day in the Tor node operator world. Got an email from my VPS, forwarding a complaint from WatchDog CyberSecurity saying that my box was scanning SSH ports!

> Oh no, oh no, I knew I should have set up fail2ban, oh god why was I so lackadaisical!

So I remote in to the machine: no unusual network activity, no unusual processes, users, logins, command history, no sign that anything is doing anything I didn't tell it to do.

So what's up? Turns out there's been a widespread campaign where some actor is spoofing IPs to make it look like systems running Tor are scanning port 22: https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-tor-relays-source-ips-spoofed-to-mass-scan-port-22/15498/14

Operators from all over are saying they're getting nastygrams from their VPS providers because WatchDog is fingering their source IPs (which are being spoofed and NOT part of a global portscanning botnet).

@delroth did an amazing writeup of the whole thing here: https://delroth.net/posts/spoofed-mass-scan-abuse/

#tor #infosec #cybersecurity #threatintel #privacy

Freezing my credit with the big 3 agencies. (USian)

Experian was creepy but functional.

Equifax worked.

TransUnion is complete fucking clown shoes.

They should all be destroyed.

#credit #surveillance #finance #infosec #usa

Every hacker should read this phrack article on repeat until they understand it.

https://phrack.org/issues/71/17.html#article

#phrack #finance #markets #crypto #stocks #infosec #cybersecurity

Degoogle update - I've successfully migrated a majority of the apps and services I use:

Gmail => Proton
Calendar => Proton
Drive => Proton, Nextcloud
Docs => Obsidian, Nextcloud
Sheets => Nextcloud
Maps => OSMand+
Android => GrapheneOS
Play => F-Droid
Authenticator => Aegis
Podcasts (RIP) => Podverse
Chrome => Firefox, Vanadium, Chromium
Voice => not replaced
Search => SearXNG
Contacts => GrapheneOS native Contacts app, manual backups

Overall, I'm really happy with the experience. It took some effort and cost some money to get things set up, but everything works about as well as the Google equivalents and the agency feels great.

In particular, I can't imagine using the web these days without uBlock Origin. Every time I see someone else's web experience I just want to say "you live like this?"

I still haven't moved away from YouTube / YouTube Music. At this point, I'm not sure I will. I know there's some functional pirate utilities, but my fam uses the subscription and I'm not super interested in trying to maintain a whole media center. Open to suggestions, tho.

Anyone else taking this journey feel like sharing their experience?

#selfhosting #google #grapheneos #nextcloud #libreoffice #proton #obsidian

Reading SEC tea leaves in re: crypto…

1. Gensler’s SEC has been chomping at the bit to torpedo crypto;

2. They held off while markets were hot b/c they didn’t want to get blamed for harming too many investors;

3. Cooler markets coupled with recent bank failures gave them the cover needed to go after crypto guns blazing (which is exactly what they’re doing now);

4. Their Investor Alert (below) if left unheeded allows them to say, “Welp - sorry, but we told you so.”

https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and-bulletins/exercise-caution-crypto-asset-securities-investor-alert

Crypto / Digital Assets get a whole chapter (35 pages) in the Economic Report of the President 😎

h/t @chainagnostic

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ERP-2023.pdf

Whenever I see someone say something like:

"cryptocurrency isn't good for anything"

What I hear is:

"I'm comfortable with Bank of America deciding who gets to participate in the economy"

Every supermarket that throws unsold but edible food into a dumpster at the end of the day and pours bleach onto it to prevent the hungry from eating it is reminding us, over and over, that capitalism is not “trade” or “commerce” but rather *sabotage.*

Capitalism isn’t about producing and selling things; it’s about setting up toll booths.

I really like the Mastodon User Count Bot. The fact that it provides a glimpse into how the network is growing is neat and the fact that one of the most shared/followed bot accounts is hosted on the bitcoinhackers instance is hilarious given the Fediverse's general disdain for all things crypto. 😊

Everyone likes to shit on #cryptocurrency, but look at who's actually providing material support for the #TOR network as it's been fighting against a months-long DOS attack:

> We would like to add to this post a big thank you to everyone in our community—and to our friends at Ocelot, Quiet, Wasabi Wallet / zKSNACKs, Fedimint, Trezor, OpenSats, and Freedom of the Press Foundation—who are helping us right now in all sorts of ways, we thank you.

Half of these are #bitcoin orgs

Let's do a quick #OopSec postmortem on this dickwizard Nikolas Sharp, who tried to ransom his employer Ubiquiti for 50 BTC (~$1.5MM at the time) after pilfering internal files.

* Operated from his home address and home internet connection. Thus, when his VPN failed, his system touched Ubiquiti servers using his home IP, which obviously implicated him.

Lesson: Never operate from your home, and if you must, don't use your own internet connection.

Lesson: Configure your VPN connection to fail safe.

* Used a commercial VPN paid with his own PayPal account with his name on it. (Even if his VPN hadn't failed, they probably could have gotten him on this anyway.)

Lesson: Use an onion router like Tor or pay for a VPN with cash or crypto

* Lied to the FBI. This is almost certainly netting him extra prison time.

Lesson: Don't talk to cops. Shut the fuck up!

And finally, this last one really defies reason:

* After the FBI *raided his house* , he went out and leaked a bunch of information to the press, whose reporting resulted in the Ubiquiti stock price taking a dive. As if LEO and the company weren't already incentivized to crucify this straw-brained sackcloth and flannel mockery of a human being, he went out and gave them even more reason and urgency to throw him in a cage.

Lesson: Once again, shut the fuck up!

Don't do crimes, kids, but if you are compelled by fortune or circumstance, maybe come up with a plan that doesn't unravel the moment everything doesn't go perfectly for you.

The BleepingComputer writeup on the story, and the link to a PDF of the indictment docs here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/former-ubiquiti-dev-pleads-guilty-to-trying-to-extort-his-employer/

#insiderthreat #opsec #cybersecurity #infosec #ubiquiti

Hey folx, realized I still owe an #introduction. So (mario voice) here we go:

My handle means "serious business." I'm always hopeful. I'm rarely optimistic.

What I'm working on:
* Studying #cybersecurity as someone without a computer science background
* Self-hosting more of the tools I use, particularly as a means of -
* Opting out of surveillance capitalism tech platforms (you know the ones)

I'm a big fan of these things and you can expect me to toot about them:
* solidarity, mutual aid, organized labor, cooperative economics, and community defense
* #privacy and privacy self-defense tools like Signal, Tor, Cwtch, and GPG / PGP
* #FOSS, especially the more accessible #linux distros like Debian
* #solarpunk and #lunarpunk as incongruent and complementary ideals

Here's some things that are a meaningful part of my life, that you probably won't see me toot about: parenting, weightlifting, software product management, firearms, PC gaming, LARP, business, finance, positive nihilism, MApoli, CambMA

Here's what I think I can offer you:
* I've worked for all different kinds of organizations, ranging from big tech, little tech, governments, to DAOs
* for better or for worse, I know a lot about #cryptocurrency, particularly #ethereum, #bitcoin, and #monero
* I've been a software product manager for a while now, which means I help teams ship software that does what users need - mostly through prioritization, facilitation, and communication
If there's anything in my background that would be useful to you, please reach out. I'm happy to share.

One last thing - a message to fascists, TERFs, dominionists, abusers, and every other variety of petty authoritarian desperate for an excuse to control others: fuck you, y'all gonna lose