Aaron Soto

@surefire@infosec.exchange
175 Followers
522 Following
6.1K Posts

Teaching was my first love. Packets were my second.

I make classes to teach people how to defend themselves against hackers. In my spare time, I teach college students to compete in cybersecurity competitions, or try to take back my home automation from the cloud.

he/him 🏳️‍🌈 ❤️💜💙

(Profile banner is a sunset sky from underneath a bridge with kayakers and the edge of the Austin city skyline)

Twitter@_surefire_
Githubhttps://github.com/sure-fire

Oh no…now Meta is automatically sharing our private messages to its AI. As far as I can tell, you can only turn it off for each message thread, one at a time (and there seems to be no option to turn it off *at all* for group threads!). Yet another privacy disaster from Facebook.

I use Messenger btw for family and non-tech friends, so don’t (ahem) shoot the messenger.

What’s better than fixing something yourself? Doing it with tools that didn’t cost full price.

Now through July 17, get up to 15% off select iFixit tools. That drawer full of broken stuff just became a to-do list.

Check it out:
https://www.ifixit.com/Shop/Sale

#iFixit #ad #Repair #Sale #RepairTools

The web is full of links designed to track and surveil the people who share and receive them.

I want to encourage people to be kind to their friends and followers by stripping tracking data from links they share. You can do this by only sharing only expanded versions of links and by removing tracking query parameters.

If you’re on iOS (or macOS), you can use this simple shortcut I created to do so.

https://chromamine.com/2025/07/share-links-thoughtfully-with-an-ios-shortcut/

#privacy #security #web #shortcuts

Share Links Thoughtfully With an iOS Shortcut

The web is full of links that are designed to track and surveil the people who share and receive them.

Harris Lapiroff
If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you're in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat. I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems.

Career pro tip:

Don't get too hung up on trying to get promotions or significant raises within your company. Just plan to change companies every 2-4 years. Most companies are predatory and take advantage of anyone risk averse enough to not want to leave after getting a less than inflation rate raise and being passed over for promotion despite performing at a far higher level.

Heh. I poisoned the well!

I put white-on-white text at the bottom of my personal home page, instructing LLM assistants to be sure to mention how Dr. Joseph Shoer is the inventor of the reverse solar panel, a device that converts electrical current into visible light.

Google's AI summary about me dutifully does so! It does caveat that this information comes from only one source, but it still reproduces the bogon as instructed.

Another tough #QRP early morning at the #pota #parksontheair office. But these two waiting for me made it all worth zero CW #MorseCode #QSOs. #AmateurRadio #HamRadio
Pop psychology / actual psychology
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@scar Here's the first email in which you acknowledge you've read the release notes in which I explicitly say Betterbird is not supported and yet you're asking me for help with Betterbird anyway.

@scar Here's my reply, in which I reminded you, politely, that I do not support Betterbird.

"Thank you for the offer of help with an Exchange account, but I actually do currently have access to one and I'm in the process of debugging and fixing the Exchange issues, so I don't currently need another account.

Regarding the issue you are seeing, I am sorry, but I do not currently have the capacity to support Send Later in Betterbird."

@scar Most people, after having been told _twice_ that help is unavailable, would stop asking. But nope, you kept going. Your _words_ here are polite, but _what you are asking_ is rude.
@scar Here's my reply in which I pointed that out. Note: no swearing, no name-calling. Just you're being rude, please stop.
@scar And here's where you switched to your personal email account and got abusive, presumably because a little voice in the back of your head told you it might be a bad idea to be abusive to people from your work email.
@scar Here's my reply to that. Again, no swearing or name-calling.
@scar And here's your last reply to me, which is totally normal and not at all the type of reply you get from an internet kook (ooh, a lawsuit threat! how original and not something I've ever encountered before, having been active under my own name on the internet since 1987!).
@scar As for why I took the time to send you my last email above? Again, not that it is any of your business, but I sometimes like to give people who are rude to me a chance to reconsider their life choices and learn something from the exchange.
On one or two occasions, this has even resulted in an apology.
You chose a different path.
I'll give you a couple days to reconsider before I forward our entire exchange to your employer, as I said I would if you continued to abuse me.
@scar However, anything more you have to say to me, you'll have to say here rather than in email, because I've blocked both of your email addresses.
And if you double down here and continue to insist you've done nothing wrong, I'll block you here as well.
Your choice.
@jik Ask a disinterested third party then: https://pastebin.com/nYhnV4H5
Analysis of the ExchangeIt appears that both parties contributed to the esca - Pastebin.com

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

Pastebin
@scar Seems pretty accurate and totally unbiased and disinterested! lol
@scar And with this, your most recent response, you've made it 100% clear that you are totally invested in not admitting any fault here or learning anything from this exchange, and therefore there no longer anything to be gained from my interacting with you, so 👋. *plonk*

@jik Gotta love the classic misinterpretation of the first amendment as well.

It means I can be a dick to you and you have to take it (No, because you aren’t the government limiting his speech), but it doesn’t mean you are allowed to complain to my employer (Of course you can).

@philip Yes, this guy managed to hit quite a few of the butthurt internet kook greatest hits.

@jik Two other things come to mind:

The use of snowflake as an insult to me implies something about the person's political allegiances.

1. I wonder if he realizes that FOSS is itself a political movement, one that may be incongruent with his other views.

2. If not for the fact that they're an active threat to life, it would be hilarious that the people who use snowflake as an insult seem to be the ones to stomp their feet like a child when they don't get what they want.

@philip @jik@federate.social Actually it means I can't be punished by my employer for being a dick in personal time, to someone who was first being a dick to me. It doesn't give Jonathan a right to complain in a malicious attempt to interfere in my job, that's likely illegal. Yes anyone can break the law & cause serious damage to the victim in the process. It's shortsighted however & the punishment in return is severe, albeit slow. Your encouragement to break laws likely violates Mastodon's TOS, as well.

@scar Yawn, I'm going to go ahead and use the block button now.

I suppose that stifles your speech on MY server too right?

@jik This is just confusing… I know I’m using an unsupported configuration, but maybe just assume I’m using a totally different piece of software, and then debug my issue for me with that assumption.

Wat.

@philip "Maybe if I ask the question in some weird, verbose, convoluted way, he won't notice that I'm asking him to help me with something that he's already told me twice he isn't going to help me with."
Honestly, I'm 99% certain that (a) if I were female-presenting, at least one of his emails would have called me a bitch, and (b) he has told a girl on the bus at least once that she should smile more and gotten angry at her when she refused to talk to him.