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jstarfish

5,456 karma · joined August 23, 2017

Reverse [Anti-]Social Engineer.

Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

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jstarfish··on 'The Manipulaters' improve phishing, still fail at opsec
> part of what makes a global internet hazardous is the it is fully connected in a graph theory sense.

Nah, the bigger problem is that you can reach victims, but the long arm of their law enforcement can't reach you.

You don't need OPSEC when you're judgment-proof. You can operate in plain sight since nobody can do anything to you.

jstarfish··on Why isn't dental health considered primary medical care?
It's not that uncommon. Root canals are unaffordable.

The ER will at least give you antibiotics for an abcess. But few can afford to actually deal with it.

jstarfish··on Pornhub Blocked in Texas
> even the "consenting" ones often have histories of sexual abuse and unresolved trauma that are tainting their "consent." A hypothetical society where every daughter grows up in a two-parent household, is known and loved by her father, and is never raped, is going to have a major shortage of porn stars.

Your heart's in the right place but your logic here is flawed. By framing it this way you muddy the entire concept of consent by declaring an entire class mentally unsound on account of unsubstantiated past events. Exceptions for intoxication are arbitrary enough. Now past "trauma" invalidates consent?

Don't get complacent. It's easier than you think to recruit the next generation of porn stars from stable families; it's been happening in front of us all along. Just expose kids to sexual topics early and often, nudge them in the direction of alternative religions with euphemistic masturbation rituals, promote the idea that promiscuity and "sex work" is normal and empowering, get them used to posing for cameras for validation, offer them more attention than their parents, get them to reblog excerpts of erotic literature with strangers, persuade them to run away, and coerce them into prostitution/child porn. It's the "fuck you mom and dad please help me" pipeline. The sexual abuse starts under your own roof and the rape only begins at the end. It's the parents who assume their family is immune that end up blindsided. Everything throughout is engineered coercion.

Once grooming became a taboo topic, we stopped talking about it long enough to forget what it even looked like. Anyone interested can trawl /r/runaway or Roblox/Discord looking for fresh faces to add to the NCMEC posters. The FBI has been warning about this for years...but fuck those morons, we're "protecting kids" by banning Backpage, TikTok and PornHub. Porn stars don't all start as junkies from broken homes but they often end that way.

If you and your community care as much as you claim, please advocate for effective mandatory parental controls, especially within multiplayer game environments that allow communication. The action against PornHub is an empty stunt that will likely not stand and achieves nothing.

jstarfish··on Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Austin Found at Garage Sale
Heh. That was one of the few games I could pump $20 into, hit start for both players and get most of the way through akimbo-style.

I tried it again later with House of the Dead 3. It didn't work as well. Harder to dual-wield shotguns.

jstarfish··on A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
You missed the actual threat.

Troll files bad faith lawsuit on behalf of Falcon Ltd. claiming S. Andworm infringed upon their copyright on multiple gay porn titles uploaded to TorrentSite. This stuff gets picked up by sites scraping dockets and resold as "background check" services.

You are now falsely associated with this content in an authoritative context. The suit will obviously fail but until then people will see a lawsuit was filed against you and by who. The scam works because nobody questions the legitimacy or sees it through to resolution.

"Fake and gay" has never described something so aptly.

There isn't much you can do about bad faith claims. Claimants either face no consequence for false reporting or are able to plausibly deny it.

jstarfish··on BlackCat ransomware group implodes after apparent payment by Change Healthcare
It's a crime in Japan to pay protection money to Yakuza. It seems to be working. They are a shadow of their former selves.

You can mitigate adverse consequences. Punishments for child kidnapping used to be severe, but then abductors would just kill the hostage since they had little more to lose. Today's sentences are next to nothing to encourage surrender.

jstarfish··on BlackCat ransomware group implodes after apparent payment by Change Healthcare
Attribution is easily deflected. You really don't want to recruit mercenary vigilantes to respond to a false flag operation.

> This tit for tat type response would seem to be more consistent with how governments respond to terrorism

Lol. Not a selling point these days.

The US has always had a very strange policy of criminalizing hacking, regardless of intent.

Places like Russia and Israel look the other way as long as the target is foreign, and we outsource our own phone forensics to the latter (Cellebrite). Thus, Israel has a better understanding of our own vulnerabilities than we do.

So you never know who you're up against given some ambiguous heuristics. As retribution, you might end up inadvertently attacking an "ally." It's safest to keep us disadvantaged.

jstarfish··on Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act [pdf]
It's censorship of content beyond the reach of domestic media interests. Next up'll be Yandex.

This has nothing to do with national security.

jstarfish··on AI Is Bad/Good Actually
I wonder about this. It never seems to conclude zebras are the problem. It's always humans.

Is eliminating humans the wrong solution, or just one that we don't like?

We see this with crime stats too (and as of late, voting results). Unfavorable outcomes surface, and interested groups immediately move to discredit it.

Because we can't fathom that the results might actually be accurate, nothing ever changes.

jstarfish··on AI Is Bad/Good Actually
> If our great-great-grandchildren were asked the question of whether we in 2024 should do away with animators so that they, our inheritors, could travel to Neptune, then I'm sure they'd say it's worthwhile.

Or...keep the animator jobs and send AI to fucking Neptune.

You haven't noticed that tech makes everything worse for subsequent generations? It keeps replacing menial jobs and adds expensive complexity to the simplest of transactions, concentrating all wealth amongst the owner class.

If our great-grandchildren travel to Neptune, it will be voluntary enslavement out of desperation.

jstarfish··on Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows why
> People like you are why I never ask for reasonable accommodations for my disability, even when I am having serious health problems.

Fair warning: when people like you break down and go AWOL, you end up on the radar of people like me. Then it gets handled as a semi-public security incident instead of the confidential medical issue it should have been. Once I reach out to your colleagues trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, rumors start spreading.

Your aversion to accepting accommodations only hurts you. If you need help, you must ask. Losing control of your own narrative is nobody's fault but yours.

jstarfish··on Bring back private offices
VGM is all over the place.

I used to like working to the Hotline Miami soundtrack myself, which worked great for coding menial stuff but sucked for troubleshooting.

The Unreal Tournament '99 OST is way better in that it's fast, low-key, and repetitive. I put on a 3-hour megamix and I'm crushing it until lunch.

jstarfish··on In Indonesia, Women Pirate More Music and Movies Than Men
I met my ex, a former friend, and two of his exes on Napster. Once it hit college campuses it onboarded a ton of female users.

Girls were later extremely prolific in pirating Sims add-ons.

jstarfish··on Abuse and Estrangement by Adult Children: A Sad Secret
Every single example comes down to "why didn't they humiliate themselves further by sharing the content of the lies and defamation brought against them?"

This is sophistry. This practice is a good way to get away with defamation though, by tricking the victim into repeating your falsehoods themselves.

I accuse you of being a child-sodomizing warlock, and shame you for not telling anyone you go crying to that you've been specifically accused of buggering kids.

This is just more abuse of victims, and an impressive new low. You hijacked my post for this?

jstarfish··on Abuse and Estrangement by Adult Children: A Sad Secret
The content of the post is underwhelming; the more interesting part is the comments.

Nobody deserves this.

If you think everything sucks and you truly want to make the world a better place, but don't know where to start, try showing kindness and empathy to the demographics the media has conditioned us to hate.

There used to be a disabled older homeless guy living out of a van on my street. I saw him scavenging for cans and struggling to carry them while using his cane. His story was that his family were estranged; no reason stated, but I didn't question it since there was a sparkle in his eye when he talked about rare occasions to see his granddaughter-- and anytime I came around (despite never once asking me for money). I'd donate my own cans as an excuse to stop by and see how he was doing though. It made his day to know anyone on earth gave enough of a shit to think about him. He's far from the only one out there.

jstarfish··on ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
> When the powers that be say "clean up that area", they round up stupid kids for bullshit, maybe hit up a few street dealers, etc. The actual hard work, say arresting street gang leadership or investigating property crimes isn't sexy and takes time.

Shotspotter is useless (5% is at best par for the course for every intelligence appliance I've used myself) but your expectations are unrealistic.

You're berating them for shaking down street kids for intelligence, then berating them for not taking down gang leaders? Lmao.

That's an impossible situation you've created. How about you demonstrate how policing should be done?

> why would they need microphones to tell them where gunshots go off?

Not where, when.

jstarfish··on Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy
Being an expert certainly makes you a better auditor, but it's not any more necessary than making police officers have law degrees.

Software development has a frustrating history of reappropriating words from other contexts. Your "code auditor" is probably more akin to an OSHA compliance officer/safety inspector. Again, experience helps, but you don't need to be the architect of the Pyramids to ensure everyone onsite is wearing a helmet.

They make a good-faith effort to ensure some checklist of conditions are met.

jstarfish··on The 'Atlanta Magnet Man' is saving our car tires, one bike ride at a time
> Call me harsh, but that behavior should merit a serious prison sentence.

Not harsh, just lacking creativity and losing sight of what prison is for.

For every piece of litter dropped, the sentence should be to pick up 10 more. Make criminals fix the problems they cause.

jstarfish··on The 'Atlanta Magnet Man' is saving our car tires, one bike ride at a time
> I'll bet that, not being saint and under all that stress, you weren't perfect in what you were doing.

Foul. I applaud your boldness (the world needs it) but if you're going to play Bad Cop then you have to bring something more to the table than the rationalizations of a gambler. Otherwise this is coercion.

My favorite example: "I'd bet you wouldn't suck my dick, you homophobe." Your answer determines whether you go to bed tonight as a loser, a villain, or a cocksucker.

When you get these sorts of accusations wrong, you're being cruel to an otherwise-innocent person and causing them to doubt themselves. This causes harm. Skepticism and compassion can coexist-- it's called certainty. Call your shots or don't take them.

> The only way there is compassion in the world is when it's between stressed people acting less than their best, often much less. If it's restricted to near-perfection, it wouldn't exist; the word 'compassion' wouldn't have any usage or meaning.

Yep. Forgiving minor trespasses, turning the other cheek and all that hippie Jesus shit makes for a pretty chill life. Even he lost his temper.

jstarfish··on The 'Atlanta Magnet Man' is saving our car tires, one bike ride at a time
A huge part of this is that people who are willing to do so don't know how/where to offer it. Not everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit or the ambition of a trailblazer.

Today, I jump-started a car for a sketchy couple in rough shape at the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere that I encountered after making a wrong turn. Forensic Files episodes often start this way, but I still stopped to help.

To be happy, I recommend looking at what the media pushes and doing the exact opposite. No matter what it is. Even when you're wrong, you'll be right often enough to negate the losses.

Sob story about ___? The subjects are always going to prove to be criminals or assholes. Avoid them.

Be afraid of these people! They're probably being put upon and desperately need your help.

Don't be afraid of these people! They just want to scam you.

#believewomen! Don't.

jstarfish··on Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy
They'd also have to be trained in fraud investigations and counter-espionage considering who they're up against. It's not the purpose of an auditor.
jstarfish··on Bad Therapy: why kids aren't growing up
> At a California conference that Shrier attends, the facilitator encourages participants to share emotions like anxiety and fear with students before math class. “I began to wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of ploy by the Chinese Communist Party to obliterate American mathematical competence,” Shrier writes.

Haha, there is absolutely fuckary afoot here. How is it that two unrelated institutions (psychiatry and education) both took a sharp turn toward iatrogenesis at the same time? The more they "help" the worse everything gets.

Therapists do not help these days, they indulge, and there's a shortage of them. "Gentle parenting" is a delegation of therapists' useless role (affirm everything) to parents. Pharmaceutical supplies were disrupted for no legitimate reason (remember the DEA/FDA "quotas" being the problem? They never changed them, and now things suddenly work ahead of an official inquiry). The media prints nothing but negativity. Mental health crisis indeed. It appears engineered.

It's not the Chinese. They need us to keep taking Adderall and keep learning math-- to develop new IP for them to steal.

This one's an insider threat with the heuristics of world-class Narcissism.

jstarfish··on Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people
We're all about making the world Safe these days.

If we can criminalize people saying mean things about minority groups, we should be able to stop lenders (and casinos...) from financially-exploiting the minority group of irresponsible debtors. We have to save all people from the consequences of their own decisions in the name of safety.

Klarna is nobody's first option and for bad debtors is more predatory than even my worst card. Late fees are charged per transaction. If you go on a buying spree and are late with your payments, you get the financial fucking of a lifetime in a mere matter of months. It's like having 12 credit cards and missing payments on all of them.

The individual late fee is lower than a credit card, but they make up for it by driving reckless purchasing.

jstarfish··on Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people
> If they do that will be a hilarious attack vector for companies.

I used to think that before realizing it's only going to be customers that will suffer.

When someone does something that affects your account, now you're sucked into this vortex of virtual despair.

AI representatives just drown complainants in hallucinated bureaucracy. It is an illusion of service. I think we'll have to start bypassing it altogether and just taking companies to small claims court (or even arbitration) to compel human intervention.

Maybe AI can help customers with that.

jstarfish··on One of world’s smallest fish found to make sound as loud as a gunshot
They're one of two shrimp associated with the tapping noise, so it's an easy mistake.

You usually have to special-order mantis shrimp. It's easy to accidentally get a pistol shrimp when you asked for a peppermint; they look similar.

jstarfish··on How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
I don't know of any carrier hypervisory capability, but there has been a lot of discussion about OnePlus phones and the data they exfiltrate. There's a bunch of vendor bloatware even on my factory-reset phones so it's not out of the question that a carrier-locked phone might have snuck something else in there.

Intelligence can be inferred at the carrier level even with paranoid privacy settings and all apps using HTTPS. CDNs in particular frequently serve content over regular HTTP, and there aren't too many reasons why you'd be communicating with Grindr's CDN. All of this is visible over the wire.

DNS requests betray a lot about you. VPNs are notoriously leaky when it comes to DNS as well. I'd expect that even with a VPN running you're not stopping anything, just changing the exfiltration route for some of your traffic.

jstarfish··on Why Is Panera Exempted from California's New Minimum Wage Law?
I had the same thought:

35hr x $7 = 245, x4 weeks = $980

35hr x $15 = 525, x4 weeks = $2100

At my poorest (and with 3 dependents) EBT only ever paid out $~650 a month. The gross delta here is $1120. So the state should come out ahead.

But all I've heard of is hours being cut in line with wage increases. So few workers are pulling that $2100 and are presumably still on benefits.

jstarfish··on One of world’s smallest fish found to make sound as loud as a gunshot
You sure that wasn't a tiger pistol shrimp?

Mantis shrimp are exotic terrors of the deep you don't exactly forget you have.

jstarfish··on Man convicted for trying to help undercover game wardens recover deer with drone
> Actually kids on college campuses do this for zombies-vs-humans, smart zombies will blind humans at night with spotlights to make it hard for them to fire their nerf guns back at the zombies.

Also the mechanic behind all the strobing lights during police traffic stops. You can't see through them enough to know where to shoot at the officer.

jstarfish··on Man Running AI-Powered Porn Site Horrified by What Users Are Asking For
> And an aside, but as a result of my experience running that site I personally look sideways at anyone I see being obsessive about local LLMs for roleplay. It seems like the people who would rail the most about privacy on the site (drilling me about the ToS, what can I see, etc.) were the people most likely to be doing this stuff.

You're not too wrong in my experience, but it has the same effect as storing your web browser history in a public s3 bucket. Even if you're cool with sharing yours, you're only ok with it because you haven't had your data "creatively interpreted" and your life ruined by the likes of whoever appoints themselves Cybercardinal Richielieu tomorrow. Mine would put me on every terrorist watchlist on the planet.

There are a lot of really sexually-frustrated males among us, in a culture that actively devalues men and doesn't offer them much of a righteous path to meaningful existence and companionship other than whining to their online therapist, jerking off to a banal AI Girlfriend Experience, and [coming soon] dying in some meaningless war to defend some other nation's fragile ego and exploitative interests.

"Go to college, get married, work/provide for family" is not a message supported by popular media anymore. You've seen the media people are turning to as a result of this breakdown. The demand for CSAM exploded once we stopped being encouraged to have families and PornHub normalized fucking them.

Jerking off to Claudia Schiffer or whoever was not "objectification," it was reinforcement of aspiration. FamilySexParty or whatever should not be aspirational.

With simulated parent-child/sibling sex getting top billing during a 10 year old boy's first visit to PornHub, are you really so surprised at the degeneracy that came across your site?

At this point they can't help it; those controlling the media have condemned an entire generation to terminal sexual frustration by conditioning them to crave this content. Therapy won't fix them.

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