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Arainach

10,883 karma · joined April 7, 2013

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Arainach··on MS Paint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
It says that "no user interaction is required", so phishing is explicitly not what this vulnerability is about.

You haven't declared any privileged knowledge of this attack or MS Paint and have, on vibes, doubled down on what you assume must be going on despite other evidence.

It's a bad look.

Arainach··on MS Paint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
It's bizarre that you're doubling down in the face of statements from Microsoft's security experts who have the full context of the investigation and the source code. It's worth some self-reflection on what drove you to make this post.
Arainach··on Deus Ex
Deus Ex was an amazing game. My only regret is that the more we see the real world impacts of late stage capitalism and technology enthusiasm, I've spent more time wondering if the Tracer Tong ending was the better choice for the world
Arainach··on MS Paint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
MSRC[1] says otherwise:

> An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected service over the network. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code on the target system. No authentication or user interaction is required.

[1] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...

Arainach··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
Wages aren't the primary determination of slave labor, it's control. I suppose "indentured servant" would be even better, but there are an enormous number of restrictions on H1B holders in how they move (both between employers and countries).

(I don't love this analogy and consider it extreme and not overly accurate)

Arainach··on Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions
> Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time..

Have you? All of them I've encountered take a very standard 12V lead-acid battery - the same one that's inside consumer UPS units - and you can get replacements from a dozen brands on Amazon and other vendors.

I probably have to replace them every 2-3 years, though I imagine alkaline D-Cells would be far worse.

Arainach··on Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
Most things are to some degree works of fiction. The public personas of the rich and powerful are generally curated representations of how they want you to see them, and that isn't a new phenomenon.
Arainach··on noyb win: French electronics retailer Fnac Darty fined €7M
If tech company revenue is any indication, 3,650,000/yr to be able to access all your users' browsing history could be a bargain. The fine is a joke.
Arainach··on Show HN: To Honor Sir Patrick Stewart, Enjoy the TNG Episode Guessing Game
The Pakleds assembled a huge pile of technologies they didn't invent together into a powerful ship and social-engineered the Enterprise into giving them more valuable stuff to exploit.

This is Hacker News, replace "Pakleds" with "startup founder" and so long as it's profitable that's called being brilliant and innovative.

Arainach··on Show HN: To Honor Sir Patrick Stewart, Enjoy the TNG Episode Guessing Game
I appreciate this. The full text search is fairly crucial, as while I've seen the entire series more than once I cannot for the life of me remember "the name of the episode where the aliens pretending to be dumb kidnap Geordi", but the search is good enough to get there without being too obvious.
Arainach··on 'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack
The challenge is not a technical one, and cannot be solved with technology.
Arainach··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.

There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)

Arainach··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
It's not, as those policies allow those in power and currently benefiting from the status quo to abuse minorities. It's why rights and equal protections have to be codified.
Arainach··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.

And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.

I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.

In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.

Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.

Arainach··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
This isn't a "deep in your heart" excuse. It's a documented conservative strategy for decades.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

https://adams.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/supreme-cou...

Arainach··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
This DOES intentionally target black people. It's an intentional strategy to have "plausible" deniability dating back decades:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”

Arainach··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.

States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.

Arainach··on Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees
> 250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back

That's not how math.....or trees.....work.

Arainach··on Archive.today links going forward
Community moderator is a stressful thankless job, especially on a subreddit with a reasonable amount of (often political) content, PARTICULARLY on one regularly brigaded by trolls and antagonists from a competing subreddit, so I'm going to cut a lot of slack to the unpaid volunteers who put up with a lot of hate directed at them.
Arainach··on Archive.today links going forward
What's to be embarassed? These are busy community moderators, not whitehat hackers. They don't owe anyone a writeup of technical vulnerabilities. They owe the community clear communication of rule changes and most people expect explanation of why rules were changed, and they delivered both.
Arainach··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades

Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.

For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.

The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.

Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".

Arainach··on Nikon photography contest winner loses title after scientists spot signs of AI
> Why do we use a shovel instead of our hands?

AI is not a shovel. A shovel digs faster than hands, but it is still digging in the ground and cannot unearth anything that wasn't there.

Generative AI tooling creates things that weren't there. It is not deterministic and not compatible with the spirit or rules of creative competition.

Arainach··on Active incident at Dreamhost forcing password reset
It's cheap and reliable with predictable costs. It hasn't caused me any problems in a decade. Most of the websites I want to host don't need cloud anything, they're statically generated.
Arainach··on Pentagon grants DHS permission to test heat ray weapon for use at border
My point is that "the border with Mexico, which has a long history of abuse", with a particular emphasis on Mexico, makes it sound like you're stating that Mexico has a history of those things.
Arainach··on Pentagon grants DHS permission to test heat ray weapon for use at border
Your sentence is ambiguously phrased. Might I suggest "the border with Mexico, where US immigration officers have a long history of...."
Arainach··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
I disagree. Plenty of privacy friendly things are not totally anonymous. The average reader has no such expectation, and if you think they do you really need to expand your social circle beyond a subset of tech workers.
Arainach··on Is this the new cyber normal?
> If you find a vuln, you might as well disclose to everyone immediately.

This still doesn't work, since attackers are much more motivated and able to pay attention to such things.

If your goal is finding vulnerabilities / stealing money / whatever, you focus all your energy looking for new exploits.

The rest of the world has other things to do (listen to users, run services, whatever) and by definition cannot spend as much of their time watching every social media in the world for the chance of an announcement.

Arainach··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
That claim is meaningless without digging deeper. It's not the fault of any project that different people interpret terms like "privacy-friendly" differently. They don't say "anonymous".
Arainach··on Woman faces six years in prison over Cash App account she never opened
> If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction

Who says that's the case? US courts are overloaded and public defenders are massively overloaded.

Most people can't afford to hire a good lawyer, and a (let's say) 10% chance of years in prison isn't worth gambling versus a plea deal to them. Prosecutors know this, file massive scary charges, and motivate people to settle regardless of innocence or guilt.

Arainach··on Airbnb bans making guests do dishes and take out the trash
For a very long time they didn't. They still don't by default in the US, only in certain jurisdictions.
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