Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take they'll be watching you.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/google-buys-fitbit-for-2-1-billion/

Out from his basement, greybeard's voice did ring
Seems he was troubled by just one thing
Checked his shell PID, and shook his fist
and said: "Whatever happened to my well-configured zsh?"

It's now just bash, the default shell is bash
The default bash, on Debian it's dash
It's now just bash, it'll catch on in a flash
It's now just bash, the default shell is bash

From my infrastructure in the US-east
To the master bedroom where my bedtime ceased
The DDoS came from some IoT nodes
And gave my front-end some error codes

They made it crash, they made the website crash
The website crash, it was production SaaS
They made it crash, I logged on in a flash
They made it crash, they made the website crash

I was working in Gitlab, late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For the RAM used in a tab, began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise

It made it crash, Slack made the browser crash
That browser crash, it caused a keyboard smash
Slack made it crash, it made me lose my cache
It made it crash, Slack made the browser crash

Happy Halloween!

I always thought it would be interesting to see the lawsuits and other aftermath in cop movies when the hero and villain destroy half the town in the car chase and final standoff:
"Police Owe Nothing To Man Whose Home They Blew Up, Appeals Court Says" https://n.pr/2JuLI8f

Data isn't gold, it's uranium. Companies stockpile and refine it because of the great power it creates. But the industry is largely unregulated and creates hazardous by-products. When it spills it's almost impossible to clean up and when it explodes it leaves a wasteland behind.

Many people don't know that @purism offers an anti-interdiction service for laptop orders. In this post I describe what the service is and some of the measures we put in place, including some new ones based on our PureBoot tamper-evident boot process.
https://puri.sm/posts/anti-interdiction-services/

Five years from now: "Whoops, it turns out we trained our AI on existing staff so it finds white men most trustworthy. Sorry everybody, we were told AI was unbiased." https://www.maketecheasier.com/face-scanning-ai-judge-job-applicants/

Two interesting tidbits:
1. Actual enforcement of the penalty clause for abusing DMCA takedowns.
2. He could use DMCA takedowns to get a person's home address!

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/man-agrees-to-pay-25000-for-abusing-youtubes-takedown-system/

I've gotten some questions about Packagekit and why we don't provide interactive signing during package updates. I talk at length about some of the challenges with that approach here: https://github.com/osresearch/heads/issues/533

I wrote an article about best practices (including travel tips) for PureBoot, @purism 's #FOSS tamper-evident boot firmware that allows the user to control all of the keys and secrets used for the signing process. Check it out here: https://puri.sm/posts/pureboot-best-practices/

Hey! Hackers disrespecting me?
Take 'em out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey! Pager's calling after me?
Prod is out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey, they don't pay no mind,
If they're not on a pager won't be working overtime.
Hey, come out and play.

By the time you hear the pager,
It's already too late,
Some untested code pushed to Ruby on Rails,
One server's wasted and your uptime's a waste.
It goes down the same as the thousands before,
No one is getting smarter,
No one's learning the score.
The neverending spree of hacks and simple mistakes
Is gonna tie your own rope tie your own rope tie your own.

Hey! Pager's calling after me?
Prod is out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey! Hackers disrespecting me?
Take 'em out.
You gotta keep 'em separated.
Hey, they don't pay no mind,
If they're from a different country won't be doing any time.
Hey, come out and play.

Like the latest fashion,
Like a spreading disease,
Devs will login all the way to production,
Getting root shells with the greatest of ease.

Pentests staked out your whole network locale,
And if they pop your Jenkins then it's all over pal.
If one dev exploit gets a shell in Linux,
They're gonna bash it up, slash it up, hack it up, prod's not up.

Inspector Gadget is a cautionary tale about a tech-obsessed gadget geek dealing with the consequences of buggy voice recognition software.

That said, if I ever do use a voice assistant, I'm changing the trigger phrase to "Go Go Gadget."