i have a hot take
a couple months ago a bunch of short form content creators were complaining because youtube and instagram started adding some kind of "quality filter" to videos without the user's consent or knowledge which just made the whole video look ai generated. (and worse quality in general)
i think the point of this was not to make the platform better by making the videos better. i think the point of it was that if every video looks ai generated then its impossible to detect the videos that actually are ai generated. if this is achieved, it makes it much easier to push political slop fake news because people cant subconsciously filter ai opinions.
a couple months ago a bunch of short form content creators were complaining because youtube and instagram started adding some kind of "quality filter" to videos without the user's consent or knowledge which just made the whole video look ai generated. (and worse quality in general)
i think the point of this was not to make the platform better by making the videos better. i think the point of it was that if every video looks ai generated then its impossible to detect the videos that actually are ai generated. if this is achieved, it makes it much easier to push political slop fake news because people cant subconsciously filter ai opinions.
i bought a new phone over a year ago. the seller said that he used the phone for a short period of time for app testing before factory resetting and selling it. He said the phone never even left the house.
true to his word the phone he shipped me was in perfect physical condition. the only difference between it and a new phone was that the seals on the original sale packaging had been broken already.
today i started the process of switching to an esim and when i enabled the esim feature i found that it already has an esim installed
true to his word the phone he shipped me was in perfect physical condition. the only difference between it and a new phone was that the seals on the original sale packaging had been broken already.
today i started the process of switching to an esim and when i enabled the esim feature i found that it already has an esim installed
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apparently when you factory reset an android phone (or at least a pixel) it does not clear the esim profiles.
keep that in mind if you ever sell/trade in your phone
keep that in mind if you ever sell/trade in your phone
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skipper's musings
CVE-2026-45498 "undefend" crazy how they will just lie to your face when the truth is one query away.
context:
a lot of software maintaining companies have bug bounties where if you find exploits you can report them to the company and they will pay you for it. its kind of an open bribe to hackers to make cash in a way that is not harmful or illegal. realistically there are a lot of people that do this work for the legal cash but would never immorally sell exploits to threat actors.
the microsoft security response center (MSRC) has been doing their normal microsoft thing of just being garbage in general and snubbing the guys who expect to get paid for their work. For example they claim that big ticket local privilege escalations are actually not actionable and wont fix, then next tuesday a patched gets quietly released with no recognition or payoff of the guy who found it. this is a double whammy because not only is the guy not getting paid, by not even recognizing him they are also hurting his career because he cant say "i found a major exploit in windows" on his resume.
recently a guy named nightmare-eclipse / chaotic-eclipse got really fed up with MS for snubbing him multiple times and dropped several very high value exploits. one of them is able to decrypt any bitlocker encrypted computer. its entirely possible that he found microsoft's bitlocker backdoor that was given to the FBI.
For this cve specifically NIST is calling this exploit, which completely disables defender antivirus, a Big Deal, because it is. microsoft on the other hand says "yeah i guess its something. we'll get around to patching next month."
a lot of software maintaining companies have bug bounties where if you find exploits you can report them to the company and they will pay you for it. its kind of an open bribe to hackers to make cash in a way that is not harmful or illegal. realistically there are a lot of people that do this work for the legal cash but would never immorally sell exploits to threat actors.
the microsoft security response center (MSRC) has been doing their normal microsoft thing of just being garbage in general and snubbing the guys who expect to get paid for their work. For example they claim that big ticket local privilege escalations are actually not actionable and wont fix, then next tuesday a patched gets quietly released with no recognition or payoff of the guy who found it. this is a double whammy because not only is the guy not getting paid, by not even recognizing him they are also hurting his career because he cant say "i found a major exploit in windows" on his resume.
recently a guy named nightmare-eclipse / chaotic-eclipse got really fed up with MS for snubbing him multiple times and dropped several very high value exploits. one of them is able to decrypt any bitlocker encrypted computer. its entirely possible that he found microsoft's bitlocker backdoor that was given to the FBI.
For this cve specifically NIST is calling this exploit, which completely disables defender antivirus, a Big Deal, because it is. microsoft on the other hand says "yeah i guess its something. we'll get around to patching next month."
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The Porkchop Express
The city of London, the Vatican and the Freemasons made Trump do this performative legal challenge so that this thing that was already happening would keep happening!
no, i think he has a point.
there are organization like the the institute for justice, GOA, etc who's whole job is to just take cases pro bono with the intent to bring them to higher appeals courts and strike down laws they dont like.
they only take cases they think they will win not because they simply want to win, but because losing the case would be pretty devastating because it would mean the law has now been affirmed by an even higher court.
for the trump admin to take a case they KNOW they would lose all the way to the supreme court and then lose (as everyone expected) they have caused birthright citizenship to be affirmed by the highest court. for this to be struck down in the future by a court, it would require convincing the same supreme court to admit that their previous affirmation was incorrect, which wont happen.
there are organization like the the institute for justice, GOA, etc who's whole job is to just take cases pro bono with the intent to bring them to higher appeals courts and strike down laws they dont like.
they only take cases they think they will win not because they simply want to win, but because losing the case would be pretty devastating because it would mean the law has now been affirmed by an even higher court.
for the trump admin to take a case they KNOW they would lose all the way to the supreme court and then lose (as everyone expected) they have caused birthright citizenship to be affirmed by the highest court. for this to be struck down in the future by a court, it would require convincing the same supreme court to admit that their previous affirmation was incorrect, which wont happen.
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i bought watchdogs because it was on sale on steam for like 2 bucks and when installing it i saw that it wanted to install vmprotect DRM
so i look up vmprotect to see if just how malicious it is and straight up TAs will use it to obfuscate malware
like, its not just a rat that publishers use to spy on you like most other DRM services, is not even vulnerable to malware to be used to live off the land.
it is literally a tool actively used by malware devs to hide their malware and make it hard to reverse engineer.
so i look up vmprotect to see if just how malicious it is and straight up TAs will use it to obfuscate malware
like, its not just a rat that publishers use to spy on you like most other DRM services, is not even vulnerable to malware to be used to live off the land.
it is literally a tool actively used by malware devs to hide their malware and make it hard to reverse engineer.
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/g/'s Tech Memes
https://x.com/massgravel/status/2074304593303892354
this is the guy who maintains the premier windows activation script for when MS wont accept your license key despite you actually paying for windows.
so he knows what hes talking about
so he knows what hes talking about
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i had installed xanasoft's major privacy tool a while back so i used it to dig into the activities of software on my computer and it was in some ways worse than i thought and in other ways not as bad
1. a lot of applications will query the user home folders. most of them only query default folders. a few will also query everything that isnt a dotfile or hidden. they only query the top level of dirs and not any files or subdirs in the home folder. i dont know why
2. everything lives in appdata and only touches its own appdata folders.
3. the only significant spying was with MS defender's spynet sending off information about binaries executed and IRIS being actual malware (it got firewalled after that)
1. a lot of applications will query the user home folders. most of them only query default folders. a few will also query everything that isnt a dotfile or hidden. they only query the top level of dirs and not any files or subdirs in the home folder. i dont know why
2. everything lives in appdata and only touches its own appdata folders.
3. the only significant spying was with MS defender's spynet sending off information about binaries executed and IRIS being actual malware (it got firewalled after that)
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