RE: https://masto.hackers.town/@OffTheHook/116450828620072113

Hey, we're live! Put us in your ears!

Substack promoted Andrew Tate as their #1 "bestseller" last week. Cool company. Great leadership.

So I went ahead and made a browser extension.

Kill Yr Substack intercepts every Substack link (even on custom domains) and redirects it to `archive.is`.

Substack's numbers go down. You still get to read the thing tho.

https://jasoncosper.com/kill-yr-substack/

Tim Cook will step down as Apple CEO and hand reins over to the iPhone maker’s hardware leader

https://apnews.com/article/apple-tim-cook-ceo-chage-john-tenus-3e179f3ba156f37ebdc4da5c137a8263

RE: https://mastodon.social/@matthiasott/116437672552754529

"At rest, the bridge does nothing. The binary does not run until a browser extension with one of the three listed IDs calls it. So on my machine, right now, nothing is happening. That is the one argument Anthropic will try to hide behind. Let me cut through it in advance."

"MAD Bugs: Even "cat readme.txt" is not safe":

https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-even-cat-readmetxt-is-not

Not every number is okay. Some are even ILLEGAL!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_numbers

What the heck is #meshtastic ?

DEF CON 610 is working with Make Lehigh Valley to help spread knowledge about this point-to-point community wireless network! Join us on May 3rd, 2026 at noon, at Make Lehigh Valley, with the folks from Philly Mesh, to learn about this #offgrid communication technology. Details in the flyer!

#technology #meetup #DEFCON610 #community #offgridtech

I'm excited to announce that the Girls Who Hack Staying Safe Online: From a Hackers Perspective webinar with Take 9 has been posted on YouTube!

This video covers so many cool tips, tricks, and stories you won't want to miss! Make sure to watch and share with family and friends 🎊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfDGUrD8MW0

🔒 Mark your calendars! #Lockfest2026 is officially happening Sept 18-20 at the DoubleTree in Crystal City, VA.

Get ready for three days of picks, panels, and community. More details coming soon! 🛠️🏛️ #TOOOL #Locksport #Lockpicking #Locksmith

This year's @hopeconf is back in Manhattan! Grab your ticket today—a portion of the sale is going to EFF. We'll see you there 👋 https://www.eff.org/event/eff-hope-26

I've been uploading #hacking magazines from #China, some of which have been removed for reasons I don't understand, to Internet Archive. This is a decent scan of an issue of Hacker Defence (or Hacker Defence Line?) from I think the early to mid 00s.
#hacker #history
https://archive.org/details/hacker_defence_unknown

it seems someone decided to prove you really can just publish any nonsense protocol draft with the IETF https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-meow-mrrp-00.html

"Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers say it takes 2 minutes to break it."

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-brussels-launched-age-checking-app-hackers-say-took-them-2-minutes-break-it/
#ageVerification is and was a bad idea to protect minors online. The app stores sensitive data UNPROTECTED on the phone. I really don't know who works on such project in Brussels...

TIL: in Chrome, if you encounter any cert error, you can just type `thisisunsafe` while on the error page and blammo! you're on the insecure page.

This even works for HSTS preloaded domains:

https://subdomain.preloaded-hsts.badssl.com/

@llorenzin and I were in Asheville over the weekend and were on campus at AB Tech for an event on Saturday when we saw a sign for the Asheville Radio Museum.

Following the signs through the building and up to the 3rd floor, we found a lovely museum with working tube radios including the centerpiece Zenith Stratosphere (of which there are only ~40 left in existence). They have a Bluetooth to AM transmitter setup in the museum room so they can play music the radios will pick up, and it sounded amazing!

They also have a lot of ham (and other) radio gear and a full ham radio station setup in the corner that operates as W4AFM.

Wonderful little museum, and both the docents we talked to were great! It was fairly random that we were there, the museum was open, and we had the time to stop in. I highly recommend going to the Asheville Radio Museum if you're in town.

#HamRadio #AmateurRadio #Museum

From the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook;

“The targeting of trans people - and specifically trans youth and trans women in sports - is not a policy agenda. It is a strategic operation. Understanding it as policy produces the wrong response. Understanding it as strategy produces the right one.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works, identifies the targeting of vulnerable minorities as a core mechanism of authoritarian consolidation. The function is not primarily to harm the targeted group, though that harm is real and intentional. The primary function is to test the solidarity of potential opposition coalitions, to find and exploit the fracture lines, and to establish a precedent: that some members of the coalition can be sacrificed when the political cost of defending them is judged too high.

Every successful authoritarian project has done this. The question it is always asking of the opposition is: is there anyone in your coalition you will abandon to protect the rest? Because if the answer is yes, we know exactly how to proceed. We find that person. We make defending them as costly as possible. And we watch the rest of the coalition either hold together or fracture. If they fracture, we learn where the next fracture line is, and we push there.

The targeting of trans people is not the end of this strategy. It is the test. And what the test is measuring, in real time, is whether LGBTQ organizations, progressive coalitions, and pro-democracy movements will sacrifice their most vulnerable members when the pressure is sufficient.

"Off The Hook" is on tonight at 7 pm EDT on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City and on wbai.org online! "Overtime" follows at 8 pm EDT at https://www.youtube.com/live/E4A5UxYx0f4

Do you want to come to Brussels, mingle with BSD people, perhaps do a talk, a tutorial or a BOF session?

The Call for papers https://2026.eurobsdcon.org/cfp/ is open until June 20th, for the conference in Brussels September 9-13, 2026.

We also offer pre-submission guidance/mentoring, as described in the CFP document.

Wonder what BSD and the conferences are about? See https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html

@EuroBSDCon #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #freesoftware #libresoftware #brussels #bruxelles

Shortwave Unlocked: A New Book from Patrick Garner

https://swling.com/blog/2026/04/shortwave-unlocked-a-new-book-from-patrick-garner/

#Books #PatrickGarner #ShortwaveUnlocked

I have been using email for 40 years. It used to work.

As an (independent) academic researcher, I need to contact new people, primarily in universities, to ask questions.

I refuse to use Google, Microsoft or the other American IT giants.

But they are increasingly preventing refuseniks from sending email at all.

I know what RFC, DNS, MX, SPF and DMARC mean. My email goes through small British companies with intelligent, friendly and helpful staff.

mxtoolbox.com says that I must have DMARC to send email to M$. So I set it up. I now get a dozen copies of the same report from G or M$ for each email that I send out.

They show that my email gets to G and M$ sites, but then it is marked as spam.

The stupid senior management of numerous universities has surrendered their staff email to M$.

Web searches and AIs preach about spam. I don't send spam - I want to contact my colleagues.

Rumour has it that previously unknown senders are treated with suspicion and their emails are sent to spam. In other words, it is impossible to **initiate** communication with someone.

Let's be blunt about this. They are a mafia that is enforcing an **oligopoly**. It's got nothing to do with reducing spam --- I have no doubt that they let through emails from "trusted partners", ie companies that bribe them enough to send their spam.

The result of this is that it will only be possible to send emails by paying M$ to do it, and then it will only be allowed to express "approved" opinions.

What can we do about this?

At the very least, those of you with senior positions in universities can tell your management to revert to competent standards-based email systems hosted on Linux systems.