The funny thing to me is, this has been here forever. I been tellin’ people there’s gremlins in these things – ya think? It’s like listening to the news on the car radio when the story about ur defective tire’s lawsuit comes on.
Micro$oft Again
Offline
LATE UPDATE: No wordpress migration issues this time – woot-woot! I just did it manually, piece-by-piece with the maintainer’s instructions, and everything worked perfect. Maybe the import/export parsing’s improved in recent years, dunno. Good luck using the Debian wiki. Seemed odd to even mention the maintainers that way, but oh well – interoperability’s a bitch sometimes…
Should check the records for accuracy, but looks like my DSL connection lasted like 6-7 years this time. It’s a new record! That was around the last time we changed ISP’s, IIRC. It’s still going, I’m just not using it. I suspect it was hacked, dunno. Time-wasting forensics foregone, I decided to re-architect things with Comcast. I had a couple ideas for better ways of doing this with some upgraded hardware anyway. Michelle’s Dexter® business needs carved out of my network nonsense. Centurylink® will be upstairs Internet, going forward.
Things arbitrarily stopped forwarding for some reason on or about 15 MAR, returning failed reset and configuration attempts for a few days. WiFi stayed online during troubleshooting, but Internet access eventually dropped, leading to a factory reset on the 18th, restoring connectivity. Not sure what’s going on with Centurylink®, but the service level dropped noticeably in the past year, with regularly expected congestion periods during evenings and weekends. Once again, a network change seemed called for.
New C-link modem arrived two days later, but I waited until the following weekend for a full dynamic diagnosis with the DSL monkeys, so as not to interrupt Michelle with the swap-out. That Centurylink® reset really resonated, but their awful tech support disappoints. That’s the last time they’ll reset my modem without permission during troubleshooting. It belongs to Michelle now. Comcast® has to deal with me for awhile again, and I have a network diagram update to do. First came a new switch upgrade, including all-new re-loads in everything live on the wire with a chip in it. Here’s one reason why I no longer trust any-body or any-thing.
Interesting 1st blush Comcast observation belies similarly brain-dead tech support, underlying a much bigger, faster network, with all the same ne’er-do-wells prowling around. Sticking my toes in gingerly, surprised to see upwards of 90% of traffic visits pulling 404’s pointing to the WordPress site. I thought online docs were the most popular, at least according to Google analytics. That Bosch injection pump manual had more downloads than everything else combined. Looks like it’s all cached everywhere.
Sorry for focusing on the cybercrime while offline. I was one of the OG cybercops. The ongoing online list for why anybody gives a shyt about the Internet resumes here now.
New Mansions in the Neighborhood.
FSK Bridge from the Right-Wing Perspective
Favorite toons saved here to mark Stuff’s offline time…
Mutherfuckers
Millions of Americans caught up in Chinese hacking plot.
I been warning about this since the turn of the century when we ID’d the first Russians swarming into the unclassified networks. Oh boy – Online action, e-commerce, entertainment, social media and lotsa money to be made. Really sucks when the venn diagram intersects with healthcare and we get the ransomware debacle crippling that sector in recent weeks.
Not So True People Search
The truth is that these people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress begins to realize it’s time for some consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century.
Good luck with that.
Code Monkeys Gettin’ Antsy
Like 9-11, when we couldn’t find the Shanksville jet because all the radars were pointing in the wrong direction?
“This is a reminder that any organization can be affected by a cyber vulnerability and having an incident response plan in place is a necessary component of resilience.”
Search for Boeing
Just On Stuff. Been talking about it since before I retired from USAF. Been writing about it for at least a couple years. The last conversation I had with a Boeing employee was standing in front of a comm rack at the SBIRS facility in Boulder. We’d been waiting for the new links to go live for a few hours when I decided to go check on them. He was in the middle of swapping out a crypto module when I walked up looking over his shoulder and jokingly quipped you guys know what you’re doing? IIRC he replied simply saying “I’m competent.” I stuck around and helped him key the box, but detected a little eye roll as if to suggest maybe all four of that particular gang here that day weren’t.
Having been exposed to both sides of the customer/contractor fence in DoD aerospace contracting from the purely military perspective, I shudder to think what shenanigans go on in the private sector. The human factor always looms large. If I had a nickle for every time I had to ask who was the last one touched it… Try doing that job as a COMSEC inspector.
Tik Fucking Tok My Ass
If there’s one thing the Chinese are really good at, it’s imitation. We been through it already with Zuckerboy, Musky, et al, busily evading responsibility for exploiting social media’s dark side since forever. I guess the government only gets really worried about it when the threat becomes existential to themselves.
In Small Part…
Mandiant Threat Intelligence reported in June 2019 that the People’s Republic of China created a network of hundreds of inauthentic multilanguage accounts across social media, including on TikTok, and attempted to “physically mobilize protesters in the U.S.”
As part of this campaign, short videos on TikTok and other platforms discrediting Chinese dissidents and U.S. officials were created and promoted to the feeds of U.S. citizens. Many of the videos provided the targeted individuals’ contact information and home addresses, Mandiant said.
In 2021, the PRC sponsored a campaign that targeted Asian Americans with thousands of posts urging them to protest the profiling of Asians in the U.S. on April 24 in New York City. The posts, illustrated with a large wrist smashing the “whites,” urged Asian Americans to “fight back.” Mandiant observed later reports saying that the protest was “successful,” with other minority groups joining the Asian Americans.
There’s no end to the options and opportunities out there if you need an Internet platform to advertise some product, good or service. Free access to a big user base certainly is valuable, but free is never REALLY free. Just figure out what it’s worth to you, personally.
Army Grabbing at Straws Again
ALARMIST RHETORIC: Today, the U.S. Air Force faces an almost-existential crisis… The U.S. military is woefully unprepared for warfare in this newly contested subdomain of the air littoral. Needless to say, the U.S. drone inventory looks nothing at all like Ukraine’s. It is a fraction of its size and scale, focusing on small numbers of highly advanced systems.
Boils down to old retired military dudes in a pissing contest, but I have questions. Is the honorable retired general unaware how drone technology has been a high-priority USAF focus ever since Gates fired the Air Boss back in…? Maybe he didn’t get the memo about ongoing Ai integration in the CCA program? I’ll forgive him for being ahead of the times Billy Mitchell was sinking battleships in this same scenario.
I am somewhat familiar with how the Army operates, and please believe me when I say they never seem to be opposed to doing things the hard way. He contradicts himself with a link to our own massive drone inventory. No, what we have here is an old ground pounder waxing nostalgic on the glory days before the zoomies started having all the military fun. I agree his guys need better localized drone protection. Try slicing up the Army budget correctly first, before eyeing bigger shares of DoD – and whenever they get in a real hot spot (not a 1-off blunder), just radio the nest locations and we’ll cluster the whole outfit with one shot, for ya. 😉
For the Benefit of All Humanity
Quizzical skepticism is always my first reaction when i hear Elon is up to no good again. It’s like, aw crap, what’s he tryin’ to pull now? At least alot of the other leading MAGA fuckwits seem to stay in their respective lanes of dis-ingenuity. Didn’t take long for some of the underpinning details to surface. Seems Musky‘s idea of beneficence to mankind focuses mostly on his $Billions and how it benefits him personally.
SpaceX fosters serial sexual abuse.
Now We’re Really in a Pickle
Been outta the biz professionally for almost ten years, so honestly have no real clue what’s going on at the zero line these days. Back in the day, sharp keyboard jockeys would be careful un-zipping stuff. Now it’s in a pickle. Same shyt, different day?
Supply chain vulnerabilities are so ubiquitous and insidious it’s just amazing, to me. Am I wrong to feel like my whole career was based on a big house of cards? I find the Github issues particularly disturbing. Apart from the state-sponsored espionage world, impactful malware and cybercrime effects have traditionally been quite imminently tangible. Trying to remember around when/where it was people might have begun suspecting they were even working with a clean code-base?
FROM THE COMMENTS: Considering that AI models are black boxes generally lacking source code or documentation… It can’t be considered surprising that there’s malware lurking in some of them.
AI pervades everyday life with almost no oversight. States scramble to catch up.
One of Several Reasons I Hate M$
They’ve always been they’re own worst enemy. Long story short:
Microsoft patched a high-severity Windows Kernel privilege escalation vulnerability in February, six months after being informed that the flaw was being exploited as a zero-day.
Windows users are advised to install the February 2024 Patch Tuesday updates as soon as possible to block Lazarus’ CVE-2024-21338 attacks.
NASA Astronaut Candidate Nichole Ayers
This is what I’m talkin’ ’bout. It’s time to put sexism, misogyny and all forms of bigotry to rest, once and for all.
Ayers graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2011… and the rest is history, with a straight-up trajectory like nobody’s ever seen before.
Reality-denying feminists do women no favours.
Eks Bigger Fraud Than Owner
Most X users who are regularly on the platform can attest to a noticeable uptick in seemingly inauthentic activity in recent months. When a post goes viral on X, its now commonplace to find bots filling the replies with AI-generated responses or accounts with randomly generated usernames spamming a user’s mentions with unsolicited “link-in-bio” promotions. Now, there’s data which backs up that user experience.
Inauthentic? This cocksucker gives new meaning to the word.
Twitter security defied Musk to maintain legal compliance.
Elon pumping himself with burner accounts.
JWST Update #31
I can’t fathom the bigness scale, which just keeps getting bigger.
“Having these extremely massive galaxies so early in the universe is posing significant challenges to our standard model of cosmology,” Lagos said. Mainly, this is because astrophysicists had not previously thought dark matter structures massive enough to facilitate galaxies as large as ZF-UDS-7329 could have existed in the early universe. Thus, additional observations will be required in order to help piece together the newly emerging puzzle of these early massive monsters.
Boeing: Litany of Failure
Oh, they didn’t want to hear it. The only thing they wanted to hear is how fast the planes can get out the door. And so that was their metric. And, unfortunately, it’s the same metric today. We have seen this for the last six years.
You don’t need me to list it out, just happens to be one of my many pet peeves. Talk to anybody in the USAF Maintenance Business. I’m taking credit for calling this one right off the bat – same problem everywhere. It’s just down to the people doing the work. There’s alot of places in aviation fields where the margin for error is very small.
Don’t Know About “Disabled”
But they’re definitely hurtin’. Target acquisition proceeding apace…
US disrupts Chinese botnet, American officials say.
