Ethan Black @golemwire@librem.one

Hey everyone! I'm guessing a lot of you will be buying last minute gifts for people, and those tend to involve gift cards. Be very careful when you're buying these off-the-rack at retail stores that sell gift cards for various popular restaurants and brands. Especially those that are not in particularly tamper-proof packaging.

A friend just shared some photos he took after buying a bunch of Dardens restaurant gift cards for some gifts to clients. They didn't discover until leaving the store that several of the cards had been tampered with, their PIN scratch-offs re-covered with look-alike scratch off stickers. Also, the phony ones seem to have goofy looking barcodes, like they were scanned and printed by a laser printer without enough ink.

The trick here is the thieves pull the card out, scratch off the PIN part, record that, cover up the pin with fake tape, and then shove the thing back in the packaging and put it back on the shelf. Then, when someone buys it, the thieves can access the value on the card the minute it is activated (purchased).

The image shows two of these cards that are non-tampered (left) and two on the right that were. These cards can slide right out of their packaging with a little wiggling, and slide back in the same way.

Some stores keep their gift cards behind the counter for this reason. Might be best going for those instead of the ones in aisle 19.

I wish @pluralistic and others had chosen a name that wasn't a swear word for poop.

I'm not going to talk with my mother, sister, and nephew about "enshittification" over dinner.

I'm glad to see Wikipedia lists #PlatformDecay as an alternative. Can we use that instead? Or come up with something better if you like
--
#NamingThings #words #WordsMatter #ImEating #gross

Debian/Linux users beware:

Due to an issue in ext4 with data corruption in kernel 6.1.64-1, we are a pausing the 12.3 image release for today while we attend to fixes. Please do not update any systems at this time, we urge caution for users with UnattendeUpgrades configured.

Please see bug #1057843:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057843

#debian #linux #ext4

Annoyed that a website is doing something custom on right-click?
Did you expect the browser's context menu (Back, Reload, Save Page As, View Source etc.)?

Just hold the ⇧Shift key while clicking and Firefox will show the built-in context menu.

The fascinating snow globe effect of a soap bubble freezing.

Video credit: Lorie Shaull / CC BY 2.0
Further reading: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/freezing-soap-bubbles/

Last night I set a new record for the length of time it took me to find a specific cybercriminal in real life. This one only took ten years, and hundreds of hours of research -- almost all of it in the wrong direction. I'm ecstatic, but also kind of mad at myself for missing key pieces of the puzzle that it turns out I had IN MY INBOX all along.

Anyway, the person in question is a big fish, and this going to be quite the story when it's ready. So, if I'm unresponsive to nudges etc for the next, er...week probably, you know why.