⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

"The danger of exposure has now migrated from the dinner table to the smartphone; a careless post can alert the authorities, who are now armed with far more sophisticated #surveillance tools than #McCarthy or Cohn possessed.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/28/mccarthyism-family-donald-trump-enemy-within

I still use Firefox and other Mozilla products but I just got this email from Mozilla:

"We’re in the final days to reach our goal of raising $4.35 million USD from the Mozilla community. We’re close, but we’re still short."

I just want to let them know their CEO probably has $4.35 million USD since their salary a few years ago was about $7 million USD. Maybe ask them?

The #38C3 presentation about the massive #Volkswagen data leak is over and the leak was as bad as it sounded. 100,000s of cars could be located down to cm precision. Also a lot of metadata that is NOT supposed to be public. Disturbing.

The main takeaway was that the real problem here wasn't the leak itself, but that this data was collected in the first place.

I agree. It's not a good idea to create mountains of very personal data and then pray it never leaks.

#privacy #fail #leak #breach #vw

In 2024 ORG submitted a complaint about LiveRamp, an online advertising and data broking company.

The privacy-intrusive system combines online and offline identifiers to profile Internet users, linking browsing with real identities.

Read more ➡️ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/org-complaint-liveramp-adtech/

#ORG2024 #privacy #adtech #dataprotection #liveramp #digitalrights

FYI: the VW Volksdaten exploit wasn't quite an open S3 bucket - they managed to remotely extract AWS keys from a JVM heap dump using this (terrible) default configuration issue in older versions of "Spring Boot Actuator": https://www.wiz.io/blog/spring-boot-actuator-misconfigurations#1-exposed-heapdump-file-16

But also VW claimed they were truncating the precision of stored coordinates, but for a load of car models they weren't...

Hopefully there will be a full writeup somewhere soon, it was quite a good talk.

‘the VW [Volkswagen] Group stored sensitive information for 800,000 electric vehicles from various brands on a poorly secured Amazon cloud—essentially leaving the digital door wide open for anyone to waltz in. And not just briefly, but for months on end. The breach impacts fully electric models across Audi, VW, Seat, and Skoda brands, affecting vehicles not just in Germany but throughout Europe and other parts of the world.’ https://databreaches.net/2024/12/27/massive-vw-group-data-leak-exposed-800000-ev-owners-movements-from-homes-to-brothels/ #privacy #security #surveillance #cybersecurity

Lessons learned?

Lawsuits are temporary.
Glory is forever.

Go public!

#38c3

Today is the day. Welcome to THE charger!

USB-C is officially the common standard for charging electronic devices in the EU.

This means:

🔌The same charger for all new phones, tablets and cameras
⚡ Harmonised fast-charging technology
🔄 Reduced e-waste
🛑 No more “Sorry, I don’t have the right cable”

One charger to rule them all.

#SingleMarket #DigitalEU 

(This has so many advantages; it really is money well spent. For one, you can use it to argue that you’re not a monopoly – though, as recent rulings have shown, within limits. Then, you can have that champion of Definitely The Opposite Of Horrible Thing X advocate for self-regulation tactics like Do Not Track that stave off regulation for years, perhaps even a decade if you’re lucky. But that’s not all. You also gain a voice that can lobby softly for lack of regulation at institutions like the EU when your direct lobbying might be more suspect. Not to mention a honeypot that can attract people who actually care about the issues and keep them busy on projects you know won’t make a real difference. But, whatever you do, do train your future heads of public policy better so they don’t beg their friends at conferences they’re both speaking at to “go easier on us”, proclaiming “I don’t know why you’re holding to us such a higher standard, we’re just another Silicon Valley tech company.” Because those quiet parts should never be spoken out loud. Tsk, tsk.)

#mozilla #BigTech #SiliconValley #corporateCapture #honeypot #regulation #lobbying #institutionalCorruption

My new coffee machine wants to be connected to the internet. I am not letting it connect to the internet. If it’s bored, it can read a book.

As promised long ago, I slapped together a post about ditching my MacBook Pro for a Framework 16 and Ubuntu. If you’re considering not spending a couple grand on a milled aluminum “AI” advertisement the next time around, there might be something of value in here for you:

https://wil.to/switching-to-a-framework-and-ubuntu/

A new release of Einstein, the #NewtonOS emulator, just dropped.

https://github.com/pguyot/Einstein/releases/tag/v2024.12.26

My final problem with this generator could be solved by just shutting up and beating the game manually, but unfortunately, my brain thinks reverse engineering GBA games is more fun than playing them

There's no real world application for a currency in which a singular unit equals to 100,000€. That's a meaningless value only having a purpose for the previous bagholders of this grift. The people who were told that Bitcoin were to skyrocket to a different mark, such as 150,000€, are now left holding the bag, having created the fortune of those who helped create the fortune for those of the previous iteration of this never ending cycle. Everyone who's now in the negative will have to spend the coming years propagating the advance of this coin once more, to everyone and their mother, in order to ever see hope of making their money back.

@nixCraft After multiple failed attempts to move to Linux for my personal PC, with M$ trying to shove copilot down my throat, it motivated me to make Linux work for my personal use case. I’ve successfully moved to Linux 3 weeks ago. I had been using Linux for my work servers for ages, but on the desktop I always had a few things that made me want to go back to windows. Not anymore. Thank you M$ for pushing me to switch because of your anti-customer crap.

Almost a year ago (Jan 20, 2024) one little #JAXA lunar lander made a successful soft Moon landing... on its nose... 🌝 .

And then promptly refused to stop analysing rocks through 3 lunar night that should have frozen its metal behind solid.

Operations for. the SLIM mission are now over, and the team held a press briefing summarising the mission. The translated materials are here:

https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/topics/files/SLIM-press-briefing-20241226.pdf

Elon Musk has ordered everyone to stop donating to Wikipedia.

I never started, until today seeing a similar message.

‪donate.wikimedia.org‬ is the link, if anyone feels like disobeying a direct order from a billionaire jerkwad.

The Epic Games Store is currently giving away free copies of the base game of "Control" for PC so if you want to play one of my favorite video games

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/control

Note: I'm told the PC version leaves off by default the aim assist the console version keeps on, so if you play with controller instead of KBAM make sure to turn that on.

Tonight we celebrate the night many years ago when the MAC sector reactor began to overheat, but there were only enough carbon rods to moderate it for a single day.

Miraculously, the carbon rods lasted for 8 days, buying enough time for a new batch to arrive and prevent catastrophic meltdown.

From this we know that Friend Computer is always with us in our hour of need.
And that in great quantities, human bodies can substitute nicely for carbon rods.

#ttrpg #holiday #hanukkah