| pronouns | he/him |
| lang | eng |
| founding organizer | #BSidesCambridgeMa |
serious business 
- 435 Followers
- 301 Following
- 32 Posts
always hopeful, rarely optimistic
TFW your wages are materially worse than a 15th century Florentine day laborer
CC @adapalmer
In a much lower stakes context, I now wonder (belatedly, in my early 40s) if the reason I seem to piss people off in corporate settings is that I try (naively?) to focus on the content of a discussion or situation (e.g., how do we solve for this technical or organizational problem in an economically efficient way), rather than trying to focus on playing to the status fulfillment of the various players in the scene (e.g., how do I make the highest ranking people feel good about themselves and attribute those positive feelings to me).
For a long time, I was caught off guard by these themes in sci-fi stories like Transmetropolitan and Banks' Player of Games.
Later, after Epstein and having spent more time in corporate America, I started to understand that this is a prevailing mode in a society like ours dominated by hierarchies and often predatory status seeking (two things that seem deeply intertwined.)
Transmet and other stories were trying to teach me a valuable, fundamental lesson - which is that people who are driven by seeking status through currencies of power (e.g., corporate executives, politicians, police) are exactly the same sort of people who will abuse women and children because it gives them the same feelings.
What always strikes me as particularly nasty about rich fucks abusing people is that it would be trivial for the abusers to use their wealth and fame to get the experiences they *ostensibly* want with consenting adults.
Instead, they prey on vulnerable people, which suggests that transgression and power over others is the *actual* underlying feeling they're seeking and the sex or whatever is a secondary concern.
So given a choice between using privilege to seek novel experiences and using privilege to insulate themselves from the consequences of predatory experiences, many choose the latter.
Is this a particularly harmful instantiation of status games? It seems like largely the same dynamics at work.
This is a toot about Neil Gaiman, but also some very significant portion of the ruling classes more broadly. To wit, Epstein et al.
#neilgaiman #politics #uspol #psychology #economics
CC @bhalpin
"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Wild ass day in the Tor node operator world. Got an email from my VPS, forwarding a complaint from WatchDog CyberSecurity saying that my box was scanning SSH ports!
> Oh no, oh no, I knew I should have set up fail2ban, oh god why was I so lackadaisical!
So I remote in to the machine: no unusual network activity, no unusual processes, users, logins, command history, no sign that anything is doing anything I didn't tell it to do.
So what's up? Turns out there's been a widespread campaign where some actor is spoofing IPs to make it look like systems running Tor are scanning port 22: https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-tor-relays-source-ips-spoofed-to-mass-scan-port-22/15498/14
Operators from all over are saying they're getting nastygrams from their VPS providers because WatchDog is fingering their source IPs (which are being spoofed and NOT part of a global portscanning botnet).
@delroth did an amazing writeup of the whole thing here: https://delroth.net/posts/spoofed-mass-scan-abuse/
[tor-relays] Tor relays source IPs spoofed to mass-scan port 22?
It would be hard to explain to Verizon I run Tor relays since they technically don't allow servers. I hope I'm not forced onto AT&T Internet Air as my particular co-op rental unit won't let met get Spectrum even when other units can, not that I wanted Spectrum, I don't. It shouldn't be necessary to go into great detail. Simply tell them there have been attacks going around the internet where people's ip addresses have been spoofed for ssh connections with an eye toward getting them in troub...
Freezing my credit with the big 3 agencies. (USian)
Experian was creepy but functional.
Equifax worked.
TransUnion is complete fucking clown shoes.
They should all be destroyed.
Every hacker should read this phrack article on repeat until they understand it.
https://phrack.org/issues/71/17.html#article
#phrack #finance #markets #crypto #stocks #infosec #cybersecurity
