Enshittification alert:

WhatsApp (owned by Meta) is reversing its no ads policy... over the next three months if you use WhatsApp you'll going to be seeing adverts while you're chatting.

It may be a bit later than people expected, but given the Tech Bros past record(s), surely we're not surprised.

#WhatsApp #SocialMedia @pluralistic

h/t FT

scammers preying on people's basic decency fucks me off no end.

I gave two of the "desperately need money for insulin" ones the benefit of the doubt a week back, despite being pretty sure they're bots, and lo and behold today I see another three accounts using the exact same images with slightly different pretexts and donation links.

scamming people out of donations while also eroding trust in people who really are desperate is the lowest of the low.

Hype cycles are not good and you should not contribute to them. They mis-allocate and squander, and cause long term bad decisions that ultimately hold back progress.

They kind of operate like an upward transform on the utility curve. In the positive utility but less than cost area, you get "but without the hype we wouldn't have X". In the negative utility area, you get straight up harms positioned as stepping stones to awesomeness.

https://github.com/ubuntu/authd/security/advisories/GHSA-g8qw-mgjx-rwjr

When a user who hasn't logged in to the system before (i.e. doesn't exist in the authd user database) logs in via SSH, the user is considered a member of the root group in the context of the SSH session. That leads to a local privilege escalation if the user should not have root privileges.

This 👇

#IsraelIsATerroristState

🚨 Meta announced today that it will introduce ads on WhatsApp, which will be based on personal data from Facebook and Instagram. This move further consolidates Meta's social networking monopoly. EU law was actually supposed to prevent this.

https://noyb.eu/en/whatsapp-getting-ads-using-personal-data-instagram-and-facebook