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cyberlab

790 karma · joined February 19, 2021

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cyberlab··on Edward Snowden ousts a scammer during live stream [video]
Have you seen Invidious? https://invidious.tube/feed/popular
cyberlab··on The CEO That Jeff Bezos Called “His Teacher”
Amazon is this super well oiled machine. People never think of it that way. They just think: 'Amazon: Oh yeah that e-commerce store where I buy my gadgets and groceries'. But it's so much more complex and nuanced. What I always loved about it is the self-dogfooding that happens with AWS. The fact the store uses it means they get to use AWS for free (in a sense). It's pretty clever.
cyberlab··on Fediverse.Party – Explore Federated Networks
> Sadly, many of them look like ghost towns

That is why I think we are still in early days of the (fediverse-powered) web. All this fringe tech will blossom eventually and we can live the 'decentralists dream' we all seem to be pushing for. Give it time. Yes, effort is still needed, and we all need to do our part to make it work, but simply being patient too, waiting for all this tech to bloom will be worth it.

cyberlab··on CEO fired for microdosing LSD
Shrooms actually help with visual acuity (at least according to Terrence McKenna). I recall him saying it in a talk. His 'stoned ape' theory suggests that people used to take shrooms before hunting to give them an unfair advantage.
cyberlab··on Edward Snowden ousts a scammer during live stream [video]
Only learning now that that site is built using a thing called LBRY[0]. What a fascinating thing to learn about. I should have known about it earlier. Might build a few things with this...

[0] https://lbry.com/faq/what-is-lbry

cyberlab··on Edward Snowden ousts a scammer during live stream [video]
Yes, here's the timestamp URL:

https://youtu.be/Hv3UC4lz3oQ?t=468

cyberlab··on Linux Hypervisor Setup (Libvirt/QEMU/KVM)
Browse with JS disabled by default. Then in uBlock Origin you can temporarily whitelist the page and browse it with JS enabled if it really requires it.
cyberlab··on [dead]
Good OPSEC practice using Medium for your anonymous parody ramblings. I know some people genuinely wanting to be anonymous and their full legal name is in the whois records of the domain!
cyberlab··on CEO fired for microdosing LSD
It would be wise not to disclose it, if you do decide to microdose for the purposes of productivity. There are many people who don't tell their coworkers that they take certain medicine in order to be functional. LSD is no exception. It's a tool like any other molecule or medicine.
cyberlab··on QEMU 6.0
Is there any screenshots of the QEMU GUI running? I'm thinking of using it, but I am aghast that there's no screenshots page on the website.

Also: how do you pass files into QEMU? Does it have software similar to Virtualbox's 'guest additions' software?

cyberlab··on DigitalOcean data breach exposes customer billing information
It's not very damaging though. What good is `the last four digits` of a credit card? Also: Although PII was leaked, how useful is that, when previous breaches have exposed half the planet already? If I want someone's SSN to do identity theft, then I can access that very readily and easily in other breach corpuses, and they don't need to be in this breach.
cyberlab··on Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster
There seems to be a lot of people very focused on keeping a lot of tabs open in their browser. For me, I browse the web, hit CTRL+D for a site that I would like to visit again later, and then close all my tabs automatically by simply quitting the browser. Why do people hoard URLs in the tabstrip? I guess that's how people use the web+browsers now, and my approach is very unique and unpopular.

I know for me I have several Firefox profiles for different things, and doing cumbersome things like creating a new Firefox profile for task `x` is too much for people, but splitting sessions up is a big win both for privacy and productivity. If I'm in a browser tailor made for email, there is a better chance I will focus only on email and not trying to do something else.

Compartmenting your browsing like this is good for privacy because secrets can't spill over into other sites since your more sensitive browsing is done in a separate session, insulated from work email, and cookies can't correlate activity, and build a profile of you. Bonus points if you do all your political browsing in things like the Tor Browser Bundle or use privacy-aware browsers like Brave or Firefox. But that's just me!

cyberlab··on Ask HN: How many projects do you work on at a time?
I swing between some kind of superhuman 'do all the things' productivity freak, and a singularly focused person all the time. When the circumstances are right, I will go full `sprint mode` and achieve a lot in a small amount of time. Other times I am in `marathon mode` where many-littles-make-a-lot and something much more complex is completed.

I have no exact number of projects, since my work is so intertwined with other projects, so the number varies often wildly as time goes on. But if you wanted to force a number out of me I would say 6-7 major projects and many mini sub-projects which get better over time due to gradual microhabits being cultivated over time.

cyberlab··on Hedonometer: Average Happiness of Twitter over Time
Site seems down for me. I remember a tool for Twitter where you could automatically engage with people posting positive or uplifting tweets (better known as sentiment analysis). I forget the name of the tool, but it would search for any tweet with a simple smiley like `:-)` plus a keyword that you pick, and it would favorite it, tricking people into thinking your interaction was an 'organic' one.

Over time Twitter naturally would have accounts with nothing but performative anxiety present, as Twitter (at least for me) is more an antisocial network, not a social network highlighting our more positive nature (Think Instagram, and TikTok for contrast).

cyberlab··on Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware
Yeah, which is why I suggest faking metadata than simply stripping it. There are anti-forensic tools for doing that.
cyberlab··on Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware
Yes. Although with Google and other tech giants, they have good security, but really bad privacy. So there is little chance of your Google searches being leaked onto some shady darkweb forum, but a better chance it is being leaked to NSA etc. Also haven't you heard about NSLs[0] & Prism[1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

cyberlab··on Why Is There a Chip Shortage?
Moore’s Law Is Dead (2016):

https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-la...

cyberlab··on Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware
Yet the samples retain their original creation date?
cyberlab··on Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware
> the malware samples appear to have been compiled seven years ago, in 2014

So it was possible then to analyze the metadata of the files and determine when the malware was made/compiled? That seems like bad OPSEC. If I was CIA I would be rigorous in modifying and faking when certain files were last modified or created, and possibly stripping other damaging metadata (if it's incriminating enough). This is basic metadata hygiene employed by journalists, whistleblowers etc

cyberlab··on Free Domain Names
Freenom domains are free for a year, but you have to pay after a year if you want to keep it. So don't build anything important with those domains, unless you are willing to pay to keep your site online...
cyberlab··on User tracking inspection result for about.gitlab.com
Yes, pasteboard scraping and exfil was rampant prior to Apple's new prompts.
cyberlab··on User tracking inspection result for about.gitlab.com
Yes that's what I forgot to mention. Windows can steal focus and you could accidentally spill secrets into them
cyberlab··on User tracking inspection result for about.gitlab.com
I always wondered about JS-powered keyloggers. What if you type your Linux admin password, or other sensitive things by accident into the webpage and it all gets scooped up? Yes: the keylogger would have a privacy policy in place, but it irks me to think I could accidentally reveal my dearest secrets into some nosy webpage.
cyberlab··on Social Facilitation
> The Yerkes-Dodson law, when applied to social facilitation, states that "the mere presence of other people will enhance the performance in speed and accuracy of well-practiced tasks, but will degrade in the performance of less familiar tasks."

So in other words - people would enjoy showing off because they know they're potentially being judged and do better because of peer pressure? That's how I read it anyway

cyberlab··on William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World (2019)
The Internet is largely run by the geeks and is a sort of mecca for geeks, all pepped up on caffeine, or some even enjoy using illegal nootropics to create websites and this would give them superhuman unfair advantage over the general population. (Of course you have to be intelligent in the first place for nootropics/stimulants to really shine).

The Internet will always be run by geeks and technophiles and taking away the ability to tinker is akin to cultural genocide. It would be like killing off a whole race of people (the geeks). Even if the megacorps water the Internet down to a curated and sanitized version, there will always be pockets of the web run by indie developers who like to exchange techne[0] and advance the web.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne

cyberlab··on Using <details> for menus and dialogs (2019)
Does anyone else notice that many 'hamburger menus' don't work when JS is disabled? It would be considerate to use the <details> element to make a hamburger menu work with JS disabled, for that dynamic effect. Note: I surf the web with JS disabled by default, and only run JS on sites I trust (i.e not Youtube who are known to fingerprint you with webgl)
cyberlab··on Dan Kaminsky has died
You can watch one of his talks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGwol-keXM and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xneBjc8z0DE

He always had a certain eccentricity to him. I never met him in person. He always was the prototypical nerd judging from his talks and mannerisms.

cyberlab··on The Asses of Parnassus
Amazing that Tumblr is still around. Someone needs to scrape it and have a backup copy incase it gets shutdown for whatever reason. (Similar to the fate of Soup.io) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup.io
cyberlab··on Argentine version of Google falls into “wrong” hands
If you're looking for domains potentially getting 'dropped' by Google, look no further: https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Google_domains
cyberlab··on Software Engineering Body of Knowledge
Thanks for that. Had a quick cursory glance and randomly spotted this gem: 'The arsenal of OSs is abstraction'. It sounds debatable, but it's probably correct lol
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