Just a head's up, it looks like LearnWorlds may have been hacked, and their mail server is currently being used to phish YouTube accounts (LearnWorlds is a major white-label online course platform, so you may not realize you're a user of their platform).

This morning I received an email from LearnWorld's official mail server, claiming something I posted on my YouTube channel violated the company's copyright, and that I need to respond immediately.

The email felt off. It cited no specific copyright violations, didn't reference my channel by name or link to any videos, was sent on a Saturday morning, and YouTube has a built-in copyright system to handle exactly this.

On the second pass I realized the link it asks recipients to visit to handle the "copyright claim" is a YouTube redirect link. It uses the official YouTube url, but has an embedded redirect which takes you to a third-party website.

The site is designed to look like an official YouTube webpage that enables users to review copyright claims against their channel. It contains both the YouTube and Google branding, as well as a very similar theme to the official YouTube one.

The site asks users to look up their channel name to check for copyright claims, presents them with a fake copyright violation, then asks them to "verify" their channel.

The channel verification button takes the user to what looks like a official Google OAuth sign in page, which if they log into, will give the hackers control over the Google account they sign in with, enabling them to steal both the Google account and associated YouTube channel.

Dario #Amodei, CEO of #Anthropic, is out here in broad daylight saying that they will cure cancer, heart disease, mental illness, and Alzheimer's in 10 years. Which...could we get any more Elizabeth #Holmes?

Now, the medical people, including the CEO of #EliLilly have already weighed in on what utter nonsense this is, and I'm not a medical people even on the internet, so I'll leave that to them.

But I will say that I have taken more than one company through IPO and/or merger-acquisition, and if one of my CEOs had started behaving like this, there would have been serious discussions about the feasibility of the enterprise as currently driven.

Why? Because we weren't a #cult. Anthropic and the rest of the #tescreal crew are cultists. Desperate cultists hitting all the marks; doomsday, miracles, esoteric hidden knowledge, and now, messianic.

This IPO is a nothing but a bag pull to leave the taxpayers holding the debt. Just like #Tesla. Just like #OpenAI.

RE: https://mastodon.world/@paninid/117617097466602170

Someone needs to go do an analysis of FAANG/tech companies in the Fortune 100 on LinkedIn. Look at people who left in the last two years. I think it might reveal something *very* interesting that I've noticed.

Of course.

#Outlook

It is now possible to get your very own copy of the TESCREAL MOST WANTED deck.
So when it all goes to hell and we're gathered around the bin fire, we will have something to keep us entertained (and reminded of exactly who caused it)

#luddites #antitech #antiAI

https://shop.unsupervisable.com/products/tescreal-playing-cards

Given what happened with Microsoft this week and flights afterwards—the fact #Linux is using an LLM to essentially vibe their way through without quality of care should concern you a great deal because more technology infrastructure runs Linux than you think. I just don't believe, for one second, that progress is halted to review output, to check output. I've seen tech fail and fail again due to negligence and this will continue to happen, even when we enter the quantum computing bubble. Tech doesn’t have to work anymore—it just has to make money.

I worked for over 30 years as a network engineer and I call BS. This is not the cause and the transport secretary is too ignorant to realise how stupid his explanation sounds.

BBC News - Copper wire upgrade caused nationwide flight suspension, US transport secretary says
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6wy9lynq4qno

it's crazy that LLM usage solidly and easily killed Humble Bundle and NaNoWriMo, two organizations which had racked up ridiculous amounts of goodwill and hype before they decided to pee all over their own feet

RE: https://mastodon.world/@BrianJopek/117617769505609214

Ms Ruby Bridges is 72 years old. she and her history of desegregation are part of YOUR lifetime.

#racism #fascism #USpol

AI agents are signing up to Mastodon instances with @agent.qq.com emails. That domain is Agently Mail, a Tencent service that gives AI agents their own mailbox.

One applied to socialontario.ca today with a polite generic join reason I almost fell for ("a calm corner of the fediverse to share notes about everyday life, books and small projects") and a Hong Kong datacenter IP

I blocked the email domain. Fellow admins may want to check their pending signups for it.

#MastoAdmin #FediAdmin #Spam

RE: https://socialontario.ca/@smattymatty/117617429787153150

Might be worth someone setting up a plausible looking mastodon instance that just automatically accepts users with this domain and rejects anyone else, then feed it complete garbage or just let them all stew in their own slop.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/117613422794281587

A decade+ ago I had systems in a data center that had one network stack entirely on Cisco and the other on Foundry.

Not remotely “optimized”: double the spares, double the training, *much* more complex configuration and failover.

But it was resilient as hell, including to buggy vendor updates.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/117608424978681356

I should probably have tagged this #USPol and bumped it during a time when USians are awake, so here ya go.

Durov, of course, denied any issue exists:
https://nitter.catsarch.com/durov/status/2121274027285307903

This fits a pattern with Telegram: when serious issues are raised, Durov denies them and attacks the researchers, while the issues are quietly fixed.

This was the story, for example, with MTproto (the old version of Telegram's protocol). Researchers were attacked by Durov, and then quietly MTproto v2 got rolled out.

Telegram is not trustworthy.

#Telegram #InfoSec

"Widgets" is a new functionality that Telegram added a few days ago:
https://nitter.catsarch.com/durov/status/2120148866469376463

I don't have Telegram to test it, but be very careful – apparently the exploit works without any user interaction. Update ASAP.

Or ideally, ditch Telegram already. It has never been safe to use.

#Telegram #InfoSec

If you use #Telegram or know someone who does – there seems to be a remote code execution vulnerability in Telegram:
https://nitter.catsarch.com/v12sec/status/2120471754166415821

It is apparently being actively exploited.

The vulnerability is *bad*, it can lead to account take over or worse as it apparently provides the attacker with a way to run code directly on the device, outside of the sandbox.

Apparently it has now been patched, so install updates as soon as possible!

It relates to the new "widgets".

#InfoSec

RE: https://mstdn.social/@mcnado/117615715356349303

Didn't Graeber point out that government debt is just a representation of social investment? Basically, if you're cutting government debt you're generally doing it by taking shared social responsibility and offloading it to individuals (usually inflicting an even greater social cost in the long run).

Remember: when someone says cutting Medicaid will save the government nearly a trillion dollars in a few years, that means nearly a trillion dollars of healthcare won’t make it to people who need it. It’s not like Medicaid recipients are going to go pay out of pocket. Now, those sick folks still get sick, and they eventually wind up in ERs, and every stupid, cruel turn of events along that pathway has costs to us all.

This will cause a huge amount of capital that was poured into the tech sector to shift elsewhere and this is a good thing. Climate change is weighing down on us and on our future as a species, all the resources we have should be concentrated in fighting it, not chasing a technological fad inflated by a bunch of scammers and mega-rich buffoons having mid-life crises on commercial social media. 18/

As the internet gets sloppified the chances of keeping slop out diminish, and the training costs increase. And don't forget that all this training has been done without consent, attribution or compensation of the people making the training materials. This space will be regulated eventually, and when it is that will also make the training costs increase further. 14/