Finding a former Australian prime minister’s passport number on Instagram (2020)
mango.pdf.zone
mango.pdf.zone
It reminded me of a nice anecdote from Chris Miller's book Chip War.
When former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was deciding whether to ban Huawei from the country's 5G network, he "bought himself a 474-page-book titled a Comprehensive Guide to 5G Security to study the topic so that he could ask better questions of his tech experts."
Nice to see politicians getting into infosec, I guess?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beto_O%27Rourke [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow
Made me laugh.
This resonates with me. I've quite often heard people say something like "I think I broke it", when they've done nothing of the sort with their computer. There's a general fear or worry that some (a lot of?) people have that if they don't use their computer with care, they'll ruin something.
Of course, you can ruin things, but that willingness to experiment is how I suspect many of us got good at these things. Trying, experimenting, breaking, and then fixing.
Exactly the point made by the former Australian Prime Minister, Tony "speedos" Abbott when he rang the blog author directly to discuss the boarding pass issue and gave permission to post about this.
Or, as Former PM T. Abbott put it:
“You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”
Abbott stopped the nationwide FttP rollout (that had just begun after years of preparing) at about 5% so his political opposition predecessors got no credit for a nation building project (and Murdoch profited maximally and his media loves Abbott and the Liberals ever since)
A Co-worker of mine actually sent a lengthy email to him explaining the limitations and all he got back in reply was that he disagreed.
But yeah, lots of text written in a way that's just a little too obnoxious for me.
The blogpost itself is a really entertaining read.
It could do without all the cringe, the irony of writing a "I'm so zany and wacky guys, you don't even know how wacky I am" blog post and calling other people cringe is next level.
Lots of previous discussion:
Entertaining and informative enough to power thru, though.
literally fake news article. what a world we are living in. The original instagram text is even visible. Author should be ashamed of himself
"This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly."
I don't think he's dead, do you?