@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@joXn@wandering.shop @benfry@information.garden @cstross@wandering.shop @mjtsai@mastodon.social @mwl@io.mwl.io It's known that all software hits a "Goldilocks point". It's in the literature, although few read it, and no managers believe it. Software hits a point where it has the right features, at the right level, for the right audience. It has the minimum # of bugs. All changes after this point make the software _worse_. You get more complex or more fragile or more bugs. We have to learn to leave well-enough alone.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 3w ago

Replying to

@wendythedruid@thistlenfern.org Trans people have always existed, and they always will. Fighting against that fact simply wastes your resources in a hopeless quest. These people are all losers. They might do damage in the meantime, but if folks can hold out, they'll win in the long term.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@robpike@hachyderm.io I'm just happy to be at the end of my career. I can't imagine having to job-hunt in a time where installing software on your phone and being interviewed by an LLM is a requirement. No one seems to recognize that LLMs create technical debt *at scale*.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @aka_pugs@mastodon.social I keep a 3c509 card in my desk. When the kids come around, I point out the three different media interfaces. Then I explain why there's an eprom socket on it. Minds are always blown by this. Although I suspect it's more that they boggle at the idea I lived in such a primitive era...

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@RaffKarva@sunny.garden @janeishly@beige.party Same thing happened to me, years ago. US Congress passed the "Know Your Customer" law, and that rippled out to the world, even places with bank secrecy laws. I remember thinking: You've got 10 years of me buying and selling without any issues. Surely that's more useful than a photo ID? But it's not about money, it's about tracking every dollar/euro as it moves around.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@mwl@io.mwl.io All I know is that Grosse Pointe Blank is one of my favorite movies. ;) I'm sure it'll sell well. There seem to be very few available homes on the market these days. Plus there's bound to be a real estate company who will buy it and keep it off the market to goose their stock prices or investment returns.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange So the AI guardrails are either inconsistent or incomplete? The article says that this is only true for a "finite" set of guardrails, yet at any point in time, they will be finite. They appear to argue that the more patches you apply, the better your code will be. Decades of software engineering literature shows that the opposite is true. At some point, software hits a point of "minimum bugs", and changes past that make it _worse_. So AI security is no better than any other code.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jef@mastodon.social Congratulations, Captain Dunsell. I keep vacillating between calling AI users "dunsell" or "coppertop".

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@squishymage42@dice.camp @deviantollam@defcon.social ...And *that's* how you honor one of the truly good humans who has ever walked the Earth. Don't forget that he's *directly* responsible for VCR's being legalized in the USA. The entire industry made trillions on that, but Fred simply wanted more children to see his shows, even from pirated copies.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@dannyjpalmer@infosec.exchange I've often criticized the very large defense contractor I work for because 1) our laptops have to connect to an untrusted network _first_ , then onto the VPN, if the user cares. Then 2) with the VPN on, they don't confine _all_ traffic inside. Yep, DNS runs outside the VPN. My personal laptop, OTOH, connects to a travel router, which in turn connects to the hotel. So NAT plus the host firewall. And DoT for DNS, plus DNSSEC.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange One thing we know he'll do is use Federal Agents to seize ballot boxes. They've already practiced. Even if that's all they do, they then get to explain that the election was not run "securely", since the ballots were not protected. All they need to do is spread doubt. Even a failure will do that.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@mwl@io.mwl.io "A midden may be a regularly used animal toilet area or dunghill, created by many mammals, such as the hyrax, and also serving as a territorial marker." I love learning new words. ;)

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@LJ@zirk.us Boy do I know someone who does that. @1dark1@masto.hackers.town makes stickers for events like Defcon, and her famous "Safety Third" decals.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@lauren They always put what's best for Canonical over what's best for the Free Software Movement. Remember when they collected all your searches? Even when it was local to your system? They've just about destroyed Debian, which no longer follows it's Social Contract. I moved to *BSD. Microsoft claims all versions of the Linux kernel infringe their patents. They even strong-armed Google and Samsung into paying them. So GNU/Linux is not the future.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@mwl@io.mwl.io Or at least hit the dojo, so the pain is contributing to growth. ;)

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@mwl@io.mwl.io email outage? or your bootless FreeBSD box?

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@tubetime@mastodon.social Don't feel bad. I had a Data General Nova at work that I used to collect and process data from flight testing. One day, the machine made a sound like bad brakes. I asked one of the admins, who said, "Oh, yeah. That happens from time to time. We always lose a bit of disk space when that happens."

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ElenLeFoll@fediscience.org I'm convinced one of the main reasons we die is that we get too old or too sick to manage our own healthcare. We can't do the research to find the right studies, we can't read or understand those studies, and we can't question our providers to be sure they actually understand what's wrong with us. Once we are dependent on mere employees, the quality of care goes way down, and mistakes get made, or our treatment is just ineffective.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Tarah@infosec.exchange @letsencrypt@infosec.exchange That's going to be fun when the CABrowser Forum mandates very short lifetimes for certificates...

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@davefischer Back in the '90s my company went paperless. (Which generated 3x as much paper...) All on Sun workstations. They had them stacked up like cord wood. I figured they were about $10,000 each at the time, so seeing all those lovely things just piled up boggled my mind at how much they spent to go paperless. And that doesn't count the cost of the custom software for our shop floor.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

@mms@mastodon.bsd.cafe I'm considering moving my main desktop to FreeBSD. I am quite happy with OpenBSD, but there are just some things which I do all the time that don't work (out of the box) with OBSD.

For example, I just digitized another book. And the main tool for that is "Scantailor". This is a port for FBSD, but not for OBSD. There are others, but you get the point.

FBSD and OBSD have enough differences that I've tried to just stick with one. But I may need to change my mind.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@evacide Oh, yeah. My uncle was a Sheriff's Deputy in Sacramento County, CA. I _continue_ to hear about things he's done which horrify me. Just because they're cops, doesn't mean they should be trusted. In my experience, it's quite the opposite.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Cdespinosa "Broadcast"... Is that still a thing? These guys aren't tilting at windmills, they're tilting at those miniature golf windmills.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@SwiftOnSecurity I've often thought about it. But to be honest I can't justify taking up that space for something I'll use maybe once every 2 years.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@a2_4am @cascheranno Hey! Me, too!

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@th When I was teaching myself how computers worked, I needed a "tracer round"; a question I could ask which would pull me through the workings. I wondered "why are the letters those specific patterns of dots?" Fast-forward, and I discovered the Apple //e Character Generator ROM. And how it was tied into the video scanner, which was also the DRAM refresh strobe. To close the loop, I modified the charset with my own bit patterns, and burned that into an EPROM.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@zachleat I've been thinking the same thing lately. I'm wondering if my current career has hit the wall, and it's time for a new one. This was my third career, so I would actually enjoy doing and learning a job I've never done before. But with the USA about to tank the global economy, maybe I should not risk a new job? (As old as I am, you'd think I wouldn't have to worry about that. But I do.)

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@tante@tldr.nettime.org I'd be surprised if there weren't women who were also addicted to chat bots. Someone who will listen without judgment, compliment their choices, and generally make them feel better about themselves. It sure seems to me that all genders would find something attractive in a bit of software which strokes their egos in whatever way they need.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@Tutanota@mastodon.social @robpike@cosocial.ca Well, I never believed them when they said they *didn't* scan emails. Nor do I believe their DNS servers aren't tracking ip vs site visits. To believe otherwise is like expecting a scorpion not to sting. It's what they do.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@wendythedruid@thistlenfern.org What happened to "I support the troops"? Strip this down to basics, and you have people who are willing to join the US military to protect and defend their country, and possibly die doing it. Barry Goldwater, poster-child for the GOP, said, "You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight." I'm with Barry. All people serving in the military deserve respect. And some simple human dignity. Not Acts of Congress.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Vladimir Putin has the easiest job in the world right now. Just sit back and watch Donald "J for Jenious" Trump split NATO, remove US troops from Europe, make it much harder to force-project in opposition to Russia's plans, and destroy the Western economy.

While Xi watches Putin, knowing how weak Russia is. Just a matter of time, now...

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@evacide@hachyderm.io I sure wish more things were a violation of some sort of law. I had to wear a stick-on sensor for two-three weeks, then peel it off and send it in to get the data downloaded and sent to my doctor. My email address started getting spam from that company.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jwz@mastodon.social Let me find my links (I'm not at home right now), and I'll post the way I had to block all of China, because they kept filling my logs, making it hard to see the non-trivial stuff.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

I found myself using this under fire at work today:

https://wizardzines.com/zines/tcpdump/

If you've never seen these, they are highly recommended.

@jvns.ca@rss-parrot.net

wizardzines.com

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@mms@mastodon.bsd.cafe To be fair, the USA now seems to be post-law. Things which are _clearly_ illegal are brought to court, the judge rules they must stop, and they just appeal. While that works its way up the food chain, they continue the illegal behavior. The US Constitution is supposed to be the Ultimate Authority. Yet powers specifically assigned to Congress are being taken over by the President. Congress simply refuses to enforce their own powers. How can it change when the rules are simply ignored?

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange Oh, My, God. This is *exactly* what I've been telling people at my work. And it's nothing to do with software. You simply *can't* sustain talent if you don't invest in it. Which means, as you say, hiring juniors and *spending money* to allow seniors to actually train them. Instead, we underbid contracts. In order to deliver on that, we have zero room for any training or mentoring: our seniors are fully tasked with deliverables. We're eating our seed corn.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@lauren And let's not forget the time they sold super-computers via a third party in Europe (just like they did for Uncle Adolph), then sent their techs to Russia to ensure the machines were up and running inside the USSR's nuclear weapons simulation lab. At some point, we have to start declaring these corporations illegal, and shut them down.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thedarktangent@defcon.social "...the Village smithy stands." Nice.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @cryptomancer @CryptoOrrDun@ioc.exchange But the LLM would have to get into the HSM first, right? I mean, no one would leave keys just lying around in a filesystem, would they? And if they did, that tells me more about their skill than their PR release. Key management is _hard_. Mostly because it's a Layer 8 problem.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @cryptomancer @CryptoOrrDun@ioc.exchange An LLM might find _something_, but I won't believe it's a crack until a cryptographer or two with deep experience says it's a crack.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Am I the only one? Who thinks of Barbapapa whenever Trump pulls that smirk of his.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@evacide@hachyderm.io Gee, who could have seen that coming? We're talking about people who pull traffic stops just to get someone's name, address, and phone number. Not all cops are bastards, but it should be the default assumption.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jef@mastodon.social These days, it's "Trumparrhea", since his policies prevent the FDA from doing their job and preventing these outbreaks. Is America Great yet?

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jwz@mastodon.social Reminds me of the time I was buying a ton of Cisco gear (100k+) for work, and they had this line item for $700. When I asked what that was, I found out it was a CF Flash card. "You're kidding." "Oh, it's been certified by Cisco." Yeah, I didn't buy that, and ended up going with a reseller who got us a significant discount. (Still didn't buy their CF card...)

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange @janeishly@beige.party I fully recognize that all my efforts to block Google and company probably don't amount to much. I run a fully-free Android alternative (LineageOS), I have filtering in place to block trackers on the web, I run my own email, and use separate profiles for my Firefox browsing, to isolate banking from news. It's a _pain_ to live like I do. But I continue to do it as my own bit of resistance. And I'm OK with that.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kimzetter@infosec.exchange When the bow and arrow was the main battle weapon, there was the problem that arrows one side shot could be fired back by the other side. I think these digital weapons are the same; Stuxnet was fired back. The Equation Group weapons were fired back. Until someone works out a way to make these things one-way (like they did by making arrows incompatible with the bows of the enemy), any use will make the entire globe a worse place to live.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @cryptomancer @CryptoOrrDun@ioc.exchange Ross Anderson (of blessed memory)? Or one of his students? I'll have to look it up.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@catileptic@chaos.social I often thought about a sewing machine. I'm of a size where trousers come in two sizes: too long and too short. I'm too cheap to pay a tailor, so I just have frayed hems all the time. I wear a lot of t-shirts, and the workmanship is so bad in the sweat-shops that about half the time the seams are pulling out when I get it. A couple of minutes zipping through a machine would make me happy. But there always seems to be a money crunch.

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@jwz@mastodon.social That's not my experience at all. Not that it matters. What are you running this on?

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slash @agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@grimalkina@mastodon.social I recall buying a book, then the publisher went broke. So the only copies in existence were from that first print run; so something like 1000 copies. The author couldn't just take it elsewhere, because that's how book contracts are written. But it *was* in the time before publishers insisted on having all the digital rights. So the author's next book contained a CD with the full text of the out-of-print book. The system is stacked against authors.

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