Nat Tuck @nat@ferrus.net
Switzerland is planning to run an election over the internet. Turns out their software has a backdoor that would allow the election administrators to undetectably alter votes.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/13/principal-agent-problems.html
The security requirements for an election are pretty straightforward. The #1 threat is the people running the elections. Anyone running an election who downplays that point should be treated as actively engaged in election fraud.
Nat Tuck
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ISO 8601 will save us all
https://xkcd.com/1179/
Here's why the gun debate isn't just about guns. Making guns isn't that hard, and any regulation that effectively prevented it would also necessarily ban any sort of useful home workshop. This very quickly becomes an issue impacting the right to repair, and more importantly the freedom to tinker.
Great. Apparently the New England Journal of Medicine can't even meet their own commitments on handling statistical cheating in papers they've published.
https://boingboing.net/2019/02/15/pre-specified-outcomes.html
Nat Tuck
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Important→ Someone hacked the official site of #PHP PEAR and replaced package manager (go-pear.phar) with a "tainted version"
https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/php-pear-hacked.html
If you have downloaded/updated #pearPHP package manager from its official site in past 6 months, consider yourself compromised. https://t.co/PUm7o9CP8S
Apparently the entire internet is slowly turning into an Amazon service: https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336
Nat Tuck
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Annotated version of my #35c3 presentation "Modchips of the State" about hypothetical SPI bus hardware implants in Supermicro servers' BMC: https://trmm.net/Modchips
Turns out that when cell phone companies sell location data, that means that people can buy that data.
Nat Tuck
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"Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech" by Cory Doctorow (video) https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummitmedia-2018-courtyard-2?start=509
I missed this when it came out a few months ago, but this is a great talk. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the problems of technology centralization can't be solved without antitrust. Tim Wu's recent book "The Curse of Bigness" also comes to mind here.
Nat Tuck
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Nat Tuck
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Become a Facebook-Free business
https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business-5bfefc20c09d
Nat Tuck
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Seriously, @mozilla ?
Not only you went and implemented this DRM crap and now you're downloading non-free binaries behind our back???
Nat Tuck
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The New York Times reports Facebook gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Yandex, Yahoo and others far more access to users' data than previously admitted, including access to private messages:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html
There is never going to be a better time to #DeleteFacebook, the violations are only going to get worse.
If you know someone who wants to try alternatives and needs a simple non-technical guide, try sending them this:
https://switching.social/ethical-alternatives-to-facebook/
(via @bobstechsite)
Nat Tuck
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RT @aaomidi@twitter.com
So @SlackHQ@twitter.com decided to send me this email. No way to appeal this decision. No way to prove that I'm not living in Iran and not working with Iranians on slack. Nope. Just hello we're banning your account.
Apparently the only valid UI for LDAP is manually typing LDIF files. Anything else - even things like the ldapscripts package - will make incorrect assumptions that break everything 100% of the time.
Nat Tuck
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courtesy: I love Mathematics
Nat Tuck
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I released a new version of my Firefox extension that will forcefully redirect you away from privacy erosive services to better alternatives. It started as a joke, but I end up actually using it.
When I want to look up a place, I instinctively and mechanically start typing "maps.googl...". This extension will instead take me to OpenStreetMaps. It will also functionally translate Google Search links to DuckDuckGo and Google Translate links to Deepl.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resist-the-internet/
Nat Tuck
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"This is retaliation at its most brazen," Snowden himself told the Post via text message from his temporary refuge in Russia. "You can’t look at something like this without getting a sense that the mask has dropped … (and) there’s a machine that would burn everything we love to the ground without a tear if it meant making a problem go away."
https://nationalpost.com/feature/canadian-lawyer-says-he-and-his-refugee-clients-have-been-targeted-since-hiding-edward-snowden
https://nationalpost.com/feature/canadian-lawyer-says-he-and-his-refugee-clients-have-been-targeted-since-hiding-edward-snowden
