Hey @[email protected], your blog post really seems to be making the rounds now!

Edit: not sure why the downvote. It was originally posted by mirrorwitch, of the awful.systems instance, on the tech takes community there. Direct link: https://awful.systems/post/4558700

It also got noticed by Hacker News, which is funny to me given that the original community it was posted to is incredibly anti-HN. Also that roughly half of the comments are people who were unable to follow how it was written (funny given HN’s overwhelming elitist slant). Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200773

If mirrorwitch doesn’t want the shoutout, just say so or send me a private message and I’ll take this comment down.

Yep, this discussion has been done to death decades ago when datacenters and other secure facilities started using iris scans.

Biometrics is the username, not the password.

It’s frustrating that so many reporters and news orgs can’t grasp this.

Yep, basic opsec (which I’m totally not following on this account). Mix up your slang and phrasing, fake personal details, and rotate accounts to avoid any singilar one building up too much info on it.

No, but the parrot isn’t hallucinating either.

Yes, the price is the point. Excel (Office) is that dirt fucking cheap, industry standard, and comes with a bunch of other shit included that can be legitimate value add for a small business.

If you’re at a firm that has legitimate need for specialized accounting software, you’ll have enough money to get those. But even those generally export to Excel format. Without outing myself too much, I’ve had comsiderable exposure to financial tech over the last decade and less than 10 specialized accounting softwares I’ve seen couldn’t export to Excel. All of those still exported to csv, or “software agnostic excel” if we want to bend things a bit.

The power of being industry standard for going on 30 years now cannot be overstated.

Son of a bitch!

Shouldn’t be much of a surprise. His family has always been eugenecists with a “benevolent” mask. Not knocking what his foundation has done against malaria, but I believe he’s said some very direct things about wanting lower birthrates in the global south.

being born into a little seed cash and enough comfort to go a while without working a straight job. As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain’t no garages in the trailer park.

We need look no further than the “hackathon,” that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn’t.

Yep. If the network is local only and can’t reach Azure (for Entra) or the Domain Controller (for AD) that we’re saying is at another physical location, then there’s no way for the machine to see the new password. It will continue to accept the old cached password until that network issue is resolved.

But that’s always been the case. It’s how Windows NT and forward work. In that scenario, you could only reach the machine over RDP if you were on another machine on that isolated network.

I’m not exactly calling bullshit, but I’ve worked almost the entire last decade in IT in a Windows environment that has a decent amount of RDP use and has grown from ~2000-4000 employees during that time.

We’ve never encountered this as described. Whatever this situation that allows the cached password to persist indefinitely is, it is a situation that would need to be engineered by the attacker.

From what I can tell, this “exploit” is just the standard NT password caching functionality that Windows has had for literal decades. Windows caches the last valid password used to log in, so if you lose your connection to your identity provider (AD or Entra) you can still log in with the last password confirmed to be valid.

In AD environments, this is what allows you to log into your laptop at home before you connect to VPN. You can’t hit your work AD before you’re on the work network. It also causes some fun because if you changed your password at work but didn’t lock and unlock your computer with the new one, it might still have your old one cached for the login screen but need the new one for VPN. This was a fairly common support call (I’m out of direct user support now so I can’t easily see if it still is).

Any situation where an old password would be valid indefinitely and a new one not recognized would require the machine to not be able to reach AD or Entra, but also to still be reachable by RDP… indefinitely. That’s definitely not impossible, but it’s one hell of an edge case to use the term “indefinitely” for.

It’s annoying that there aren’t separate settings from “local logins with AD as the IDP” and “remote logins with RDP” or “logins with Entra”, but this feature is pretty damn critical for remote workers to be able to function and it is an intentional design choice as Microsoft states. Any potential workaround for a theoretical lack of this functionality is worse than the current state. Can’t rotate passwords on a local break glass account if the machine can’t reach your IDP, leaving effectively the same hole except with an account known to have elevated access.

There’s no nefariousness here or lack of due dilligence. Labeling it as some horribly dangerous security hole with the amount of vagueness this article has is just misleading and clickbaity.

On paper, it’s one of the uses for AI image recognition. It could reduce the amount that needs human review drastically.

In reality, Youtube’s partially automated system (to my knowledge the most robust one around) regularly flags highly stylized videogame violence as if it is real gore. It also has some very dumb workarounds like simply putting the violence more than 30 seconds into the video (which has concerning implications for its ability at filtering real gore).

Edit: missed the context. This was about Torvalds, not Tech Tips

Theres a lot more problems than that. Both GamersNexus and Louis Rossman have made videos on it.

Shady sponsor deals. Making huge mistakes when testing things from new small companies (one guy machining custom watercooler blocks), calling the device garbage because their own mistakes caused it not to work, refusing to return the prototype one they tested as they had agreed to, and then auctioning it off. Claiming all of that was just honest mistakes while making no efforts to make it right and doubling down on calling it shit. Many many cases of Linus just being an abusive bastard of a boss behind the scenes. Many cases of anonymous current and former employees talking about toxic workplace culture (coming from the top down), insane crunch, deadlines set too tight that cause issues in reviews.

Regular smaller mistakes in their reviews and videos with no standard company policy on how they should go back and edit them to inform viewers of the mistake. Numerous cases where they acknowledge the mistake privafely but refuse to even add a pinned comment to the video.

His team knew about the Honey extension, one of their sponsors, being a scam. It hijacked any links to online stores nd made them referal links to kick back money to Honey. While countless other youtubers made exposes about it he refused to say anything about it to his viewers and then had a tantrum on the podcast about how it was unfair to expect him and his team to say anything about it after he was called out.

Every. Single. Time. When Linus is called out on this stuff in a large enough way, he throws a very public tantrum.

At best, Linus is an overgrown child who is unfit to run a business of the size and clout his has.

Lets not pretend that lowering the barrier to making fake nudes hasn’t changed the situation either.

Nope. As far as extrusion printing goes: normal 3D printing filament is not food safe and the tiny stairstep layers would be perfect breeding grounds for bacteria and plaque impossible to properly clean. For resin printing: that shit’s toxic in liquid form, very bad idea to ingest as a solid, and dust from the hardened prints (like if you sand a nub down) when breathed in works like asbestos on your lungs.

It’s how they kept everything from dying when they killed third party apps. They openly banned and replaced mods that were keeping their subreddits locked. It was a shitshow, but unfortunately reddit still exists.

When the protests against scientology happened. Long before it was sold. Long before MAGA or the politics board were even a concept. It didn’t die immediately from them, but it was the start of a measurable drop in discussion quality that never stopped.

The “protests” devolved into some of the cringiest irl meetups of online communities I have ever come across (yes, worse than dashcon), and it caused so much media attention that it accelerated the “eternal september” problem the site always had exponentially.

Motherfuckers forgot the golden rule about “hiding your power level”, which at the time at least meant doing your best to appear relatively normal in public and went full “I’m a horribly socially maladjusted mess with bad hygiene who can only communicate via tired memes, look at me! Look at me! I know memes! Haha longcat is long am I right?”.

A lot of people remember the cringe of reddit’s “When does the narwhal bacon?” forced meme attempt at the world’s most embarassing “secret pass phrase” bullshit. The scientology “protests” were significant orders of magnitude more cringe.

4chan was never a secret club, but the sheer agressiveness of non-tolerance towards obviously new posters helped to maintain a very low bar of “quality”. I’d argue that’s needed to maintain any semblance of a community on an entirely anonymous image board that has minimal moderation. Shitty threads would get saged relentlessly, eating up the maximum comments a thread could have and drowning out any discussion in the shitty thread, all without bumping it back up to the top. Hit the reply limit and the thread slides off the bottom, gone forever.

“Lurk moar, faggot” was the phrase of the time. Stop posting until you figure out how things work around here.

But as more and more people unfamiliar with what shitty community existed came in, there hit a point where they outnumbered the old guard, and the already low quality of discussion tanked.

/b/ used to have discussion threads about all sorts of shit. Actual thought provoking stuff now and then. Funny stories. Occasionally legitimately good OC. It was the breeding ground for most of the memes and meme formats that spread to the internet at large. Mudkipz, rickrolling, EFG (the progenitor of trollface and rage comics), lolcats, advice animals. All /b/.

Now it is almost entirely people sharing photos of women they know that they’ve downloaded off the ladies’ social media accounts to jerk off to. Previously they would have been chased off to the dedicated porn (or softcore) boards using fire, pitchforks, and spam of the most digusting images the internet had until the posters got the message. Or at the very least they would have been bullied into a single thread at a time instead of taking over almost every thread on the board.

Instead it has all devolved to the absolute lowest common denominator.

/b/ (and by extension 4chan as a whole) has always been a cesspit. I’m not trying to deny that. There’s screenshots out there of it back when the post count hadn’t breached 1000 that show that it was shit even in the very very beginning. Back when it was almost exclusively m00t, W.T. Snacks, and their friends from Something Awful. That said, it used to be engaging to scroll through because you could stumble upon some legitimately good discussion. It hasn’t been worth even trying to look for good discussion on /b/ for well over a decade.

The retro videogames board was a brief shining return to quality for a few years after it was created, even managed to find, back up, and translate some things that had been lost media. The DooM threads used to be the place to be for new DooM wads. Even that board’s pretty shit now too.

Out of curiosity I’ve tried the AI feature in Paint (on my work computer) to erase something and use AI to fill in the background

I was removing a line between two items on a flowchart, background had diagonal colored lines in a regular repeating pattern (think college ruled paper at an angle).

Instead of connecting the lines in the background it seemed to just take an average of the pixel colors of the edge of what I erased and fill it in with that average color. Such intelligence!

For AI? Corporations. No question.

Microsoft has to bundle its consumer AI products in with other licenses in order to achieve their frankly abysmal adoption rates. They also have recently significantly reduceded plans for further spending on datacenters, indicating that they might already see the writing on the wall.

OpenAI, the most successful AI “corp”, hemorages money to a mind boggling degree and actually loses money per query.

It’s not profitable or sustainable. The market forces, if left alone, would not provide enough demand to cover the astronimical costs. Companies with more money than god like Microsoft and now Softbank (although they are having to take out massive loans now) are burning astronomical piles of cash to prop it up.

There is no world in which the barely marginal convenience outweighs the additional cost (and near certain privacy invasion of a microphone equipped dryer).

Or speed. Some of the homebrew mods are ridiculous.