Hackers are reportedly getting laid off by organized crime groups
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
A number of sanctions has made Russian money harder to move around, likely making it more difficult to pay said hackers. Couple that with crypto falling apart, the entire ransomeware thing is not near as profitable as it used to be.
Then we have a large amount of cyber attacks focused on Ukraine that appear to be occurring at a military level. Its it possible the people that were busy spamming the world at one point are now caught up in this war and not working on external money making endevors?
The ones remaining have withstood the heaviest stress test across all asset classes, increasing the confidence in them
The price declines and high profile implosions are really just tip of the iceberg in the topic of “crypto” and largely a distraction
Is it "making things up" to not know this - particularly in light of the widespread reporting and web commentary?
Many people are not open to the concept of a working and legitimate aspect of the crypto world. Or "legitimate"/"use case" is something that people will play devil's advocate on forever ad nauseam, as opposed to learning or understanding why people are willing to keep building there (somebody will ask, name one legitimate thing, and then argue about why all the replies are not legitimate as opposed to how individuals are and could address various problems). So people get tired of talking to those kind of people.
As far as I can tell crypto is a place for speculation, ponzi schemes, and (to be fair) is a mild upgrade in the field of illegal payments. Other than that, there are no legitimate use cases 15 years after its invention. It's just a technological dead end with an unusual amount of hype
The same occurs in the crypto space.
What I mostly see are people that were fundamentally uncomfortable with speculation and serving speculation, and were either redirecting that energy towards the crypto space, or completely segregated from the financial services reality they live within. Unaware that their chosen criticisms applied equally to things they respected.
Okay, so one use case: the Uniswap application and its code base has over million users. You can look at this dashboard to see just Uniswap’s monthly users which seems to peak at 800,000
you can further extrapolate that to all the clones on Ethereum and other blockchains that have higher throughput
https://dune.com/queries/1219737/2088715
Uniswap’s “liquidity pool” concept solved a big need, while also introducing new problems that people rapidly try to improve upon.
Otherwise, crypto exchanges have been a large extortionate gatekeeper in commerce, and attracting liquidity even after being listed was a major challenge. The liquidity pool concept solved that.
I said peak, which was 2 years ago. the traffic quickly went to clones, which I also pointed out. there are plenty of other dashboards to find as well. Dune Analytics is a service for creating these dashboards, and sharing them.
I know, you don't have enough interest to look. But it comes across as a bad faith effort, no different than the kind of person I pointed out earlier.
The difference is that there were people that said "hey lets create this tool within 'useless crypto land' that could attract a million users", while over the last 15 years you were like "this is useless there's nothing with a million users", someone else said "hey lets make this better so an additional several hundred thousand more people can use it", while you were like "this is useless because there's nothing with a million users"
anyway, now its here and you don't even want to count it
there are plenty of people building, it is very lucrative to do so, primarily by taking small basis points of the volume flowing through the application you deploy, just like in the non-crypto financial services world.
Something like UPI payments (which is what crypto was supposed to achieve but completely failed) already has hundreds of millions of users in drastically less than 15 years, I can see why hash's POV remains unchanged and mine too.
800K is still close to 0 with almost nobody using crypto at all compared to over 500 million users using UPI payments.
a) you are not able to separate a single program from the entire concept of crypto. but compare a payments solution to that single program which is not a payments solution at all. they asked for one popular program and I provided it. there’s nothing for me to defend about that, its probably just a dashboard for Uniswap V2 activity and doesnt include Uniswap V3. its weird that this is not the level of discussion you would be willing to have. Why is the depth of discussion so low that I have to explain the limitations a random user made dashboard from Dune Analytics that I found on Google, in a forum where people are otherwise much more analytical. lets check back in 5 years.
b) its unclear the purpose of your observation. people have made billions of dollars converted to actual dollars in their bank account by servicing just those 800,000 users that are familiar with that one program, Uniswap. People will make another billion dollars servicing the next 500,000 users. There are millions of programs deployed on blockchains. Thats… attractive? The programmer and builder perspective is very attractive. Like I said, its the financial services industry. What exactly does everyone else do here? Making ad speculation programs for democracy destabilizing adtech conglomerates? Or some much more useless side project like owning the compose button in gmail? Its really hard for me to see such reductive understanding applied to the crypto sectors when there’s so much to build that is more lucrative than so many other things to build.
c) “15 years”, Uniswap V2 launched 3 years ago. On top of those other years of technology releases to make that possible. There is a clear chronology, that took many people just being willing to see it and where the technology is going. When the tools mature, applications are developed. It is impossible to have a discussion that conflates a specific application with being representative of anything except that application.
Citation please
> Then again, there already has been deflation from the peak of a little more than 19,900 to 17,600 dollars per Bitcoin. But nobody knows if the puncture will let the balloon slowly deflate or it will rip it apart, crash landing the Bitcoin.
Well, neither. Bitcoin went to 60k or something.
Did the tulip mania also have so many peaks?
Centralized exchanges and FTX in particular is the most normie and state-aligned part of crypto.
> it is only used for crime and speculation
It is not true.
They hardly did.
Only strong legislation will stop it.
They don’t do this now because it’s more work and they aren’t legally required to do so. The money they get from the spam outfits is greater than the cost, so the phone companies didn’t have an incentive to stop it. Make it uneconomical and that can change very quickly.
Britain also isn't plagued by spam calls though, so it's not only a language barrier.
But I've never heard of Microsoft germany calling endusers, nor doing that in english.
Was funny btw. I picked up, asked 'Wer stört?/Who is disturbing(me)?' and got an Indian accent bubbling something about calling from MS customer service, that they had to clean a virus.
Me in a mix between giggling and sighing: 'Could you stop your fucking script, PLEASE?!'
...You want me to open some page which tries to download some remote access tool, camouflaged as something else, hoping that would fly because my explorer doesn't show real file endings? While there is nothing from MS running here at all? Not even in a virtual machine?
He bubbling 'What is your name, what is this company?'
Me: 'I'm just the facility manager, doing house keeping stuff, and you don't need to know.'
He bubbling something about me being impolite.
Me countering with something about no need to be polite to fraudsters.
He flustered.
Me telling him about criminal acts, and our 'Bundesnetzagentur' where one can report such attempts, which leads to termination of such faked numbers, fines, and on occassion seized equipment, which makes the rounds in such circles, which leads to less and less acceptance of such 'businesses', because it's bad for their business. Too much hassle to be worth it.
About 10 minutes of hilarity ensued, where I asked why they are even trying it(in Germany), who would fall for it, if ever?
In the end, enraged gibberish, which I countered with 'Ja. Ja. Du mich auch, Arschloch!/Yes, Yes, the same to you, asshole!'
Clack...
Microsoft presumably have support in Dutch, but for example Adobe don't: https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/phone.html
Because of that I'd say it's very uncommon to have the hotline talk to you in English. Another reason would be that no hotline is ever calling you, without you having asked for that call(back). That just won't happen.
I guess it's a cultural thing, as evidenced by dubbing of movies/tv-series, and not just subtitling them like it is done elsewhere. At least in the past. Getting blurry with things like Netflix.
It seemed to work pretty well.
Turns out that he/it still works and there's a phone number that you can call -- or rather forward/3-way-call spammers to!! It's 347-514-7296. You can hear past recordings here [1].
I wish there was a way to pay for this incredible service, and can't wait to start using it!
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-th...
But based on just the title alone, I need to ask:
"What is the package ? Do you get to choose the color of your cement galoshes ?"
But presumably they aren't really at risk of being exposed by these guys. [2]
Prompt: Write a layoff letter to my penetration tester employees in a heavy Italian accent.
Dear [Employee Name],
It is with a heavy heart that I gotta tell ya that we gotta let you go. It's nothing personal, it's just business, capisce?
I wanna say, youse guys have been great at what you do. You really know how to get into those systems and find all the weak spots. But, unfortunately, things ain't looking too good for our organization right now, and we gotta cut back on some expenses.
I wanna let you know that we appreciate all the hard work you've done for us, and we're gonna make sure youse guys get a decent severance package. We also wanna help you out in finding new job opportunities, so if there's anything we can do to help, just let us know.
Again, I wanna emphasize that it's nothing personal. Youse guys are some of the best in the business, but we gotta do what we gotta do to keep the organization running.
Take care, and good luck with your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Sounds like an oxymoron: if they were unskilled, they wouldn't be worthy of being called hackers? Or perhaps you were making a joke about rats.
Your former employees are a liability legally and in business.
I was recently contacted by IP's abuse department about something on my network sending out malicious requests.
It turned out to be an old WiFi router I had, which was fixed by an update. I'm guessing it was compromised a while back and was only recently used.
The Fed reversing monetary policy has some interesting consequences.
Did you at least flash it?
https://kb.netgear.com/000061982/Security-Advisory-for-Multi...
But if it didn't, then that's another can of worms.
Hacker wondering if he had done moonlighting by doing consultancy.
Last i heard, NSA was hiring, not laying off. /s