I'm always shocked by how expensive basic European experiences are in the US. One of my favorite things is high street shops. You have a bunch of stores with apartments above them, so you can always live within walking distance of basically everything. In the US they separate things into commercial and residential districts so you have to drive everywhere.
Areas that allow mixing residential and commercial buildings are so rare that supply & demand sends costs through the roof. In Europe living in an apartment above stores is a budget option for people who can't afford homes, in the US you basically have to be wealthy and often those apartments cost as much as an entire house.
The other thing I've never been able to wrap my head around is the cost of living difference. For the same as rent on a 2 bed apartment in west LA, I could buy absolutely any residential property in my hometown, including even some of the hotels.
And before someone mentions Texas. No. I don't move to Texas for the same reason I don't try to save money by buying off-brand cereal that's made with asbestos.
I just saw that Am I The Asshole reddit thread where the white girl started going to a black salon because she had extremely curly hair and the black salon was the only one that didn't massacre it. Her white friends straight up gaslit her into believe she was engaging in cultural appropriation and stealing resources from black people. WILD 💀
I'm living the free-market libertarian dream right now. Some random no-name ISP has negotiated an exclusive deal with my apartment complex, so they've cut off all other service and forced everyone to pay for the same garbage internet.
One of the backlog items we all took on during the pandemic was replacing the saying “avoid it like the plague” with something more reflective of modern day views on such things.
FML. My apartment management just showed up to install the new internet package, which sounded pretty good (Symmetrical Gbit). Dude comes in to set it up and is trying to install a wifi access point behind my couch. I told him I don't need an access point because I have my own mesh network, I just need to connect the new modem to my network rack. He starts trying to explain that the internet doesn't require a modem, so I'm like confused af.
After like 10 minutes of trying to figure out wtf this guy is talking about, I realized they've installed an apartment complex wide wifi mesh network, so there is no individual internet packages anymore. Everyone in the entire apartment complex is just connected to one big wifi network. They claim all the users are segmented by VLAN, but I genuinely don't think I've ever wanted something less in my life.
The LinkedIn meta of creating fake Tweets from yourself, photoshopping in a verified badge, then quoting yourself by posting screenshots makes me want to kms.
I genuinely did not think it was possible to be more cringe than chronically online Twitter users until I learned about LinkeInfluencers.
I suppose it's not rocket surgery to figure out which is the real me here. How/should one report these kinds of things for investigation? I never much cared on Twitter about imposters because reporting them never did anything. These are all using my Twitter photo for profile pics.
@briankrebs Those instances are automated bots that just mirror Twitter accounts to mastodon. They're not malicious impersonation, but the whole idea is pretty spammy.
This is absolutely crazy stuff. Chinese hackers were able to get into a bunch of government email accounts by forging Microsoft access tokens, but how it happened is wild.
Apparently an internal Microsoft system responsible for signing consumer access tokens crashed, then a bug in the crash dump generator caused the secret key to be written to the crash dump. Microsoft's secondary system for detecting sensitive data in crash dumps also failed, allowing the crash dump to be moved from an isolated network to the corporate one. The Chinese hackers compromised a Microsoft engineer's account and were able to get a hold of the crash dump. They were not only able to find the key and figure out that it's responsible for signing consumer access tokens, but were also able to exploit a software bug to use it to sign enterprise access tokens too, basically giving them the keys to the kingdom.
So many security system had to fail for this to happen. Either the hackers were very lucky or extremely patient.
This is a testament to just how hard cybersecurity is. Microsoft had the forethought to not store keys into crash dumps, had the forethought to build a secondary system to double check them, had the forethought to store them on an isolated network, but a cascading failure basically blitzed through all their security controls and allowed nation/state hackers to walk off with critical signing keys.
Also, FWIW, things makes a lot more sense when you stop looking at police as the solution to crime and start looking at them as the solution to rehabilitating individual criminals. If you want to address the problem you have to address the underlying societal causes. Not a single police officer I've spoken to even think that playing whack-a-mole with criminals is going to solve crime. ISPs censoring Nazi websites do far more to protect society than infinite policing (especially when being a nazi isn't even illegal). If you're going to knock the censorship, then pitch a better solution than "more cops lol".
This article from the EFF seems naive at best. They argue that Tier 1 ISPs should not police speech, which is fair, but their proposed solution is to just let hate sites sit around and radicalize people, then have the law deal with the few who cross the line between protected speech and criminal harassment.
Below is an extensive list of all the times 'just throw more cops at the problem' has solved anything:
The entire reason for-profit companies are policing speech is because the law makes it so they are literally the only ones who can. The big kicker is how they felt the need to put "Solid enforcement of existing laws" knowing full well they literally don't exist.
It's like if some dude was stood on a street corner giving people maps to the local banks, instructions on how to rob a bank without getting caught, and a free loaded gun, then we concluded the best solution here is to have the police just try extra hard to find and arrest anyone who has previously robbed a bank.
@z3r0fox If the pentesting company was giving people instructions to commit crimes and encouraging them to do so, they could and most certainly would be held liable