Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A statement from Freedom of the Press Foundation director of advocacy Seth Stern on the conviction of Asheville Blade journalists for documenting a homeless encampment sweep at a public park after closing time on Christmas night of 2021:

The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course is published!

This book doesn't aim to be an exhaustive guide to everything you need to know to be a system administrator. Instead, this book allows me to act as a remote mentor to someone starting out in IT or system administration whether as a full-time job or as a full stack developer.

It's available in premium hardcover, paperback, and ebook forms here:
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/kyle_rankin

#writing #SelfPublishing #linux #publishing

@anathema_device @Teri_Kanefield

… and as a result, Fox is paying over three quarters of a billion dollars. Right? What if Dominion went to trial and the jury found in their favor, then felt fair damages was $20 million?

This is a civil lawsuit. This settlement is fucking unreal. They did very well. Dominion doesn’t owe anyone except their shareholders anything, for better or worse. That’s how it works.

Has Larry Lessig Lost The Plot? Tells Supreme Court That #AI Should Get #Patents - https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/18/has-larry-lessig-lost-the-plot-tells-supreme-court-that-ai-should-get-patents/ staggering in its unexpectedness and deeply disappointing...

For the past seven years, a malware-based proxy service known as "Faceless" has sold anonymity to countless cybercriminals. For less than a dollar per day, Faceless customers can route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service. In this post we'll examine clues left behind over the past decade by the proprietor of Faceless, including some that may help put a face to the name.

Riley Kilmer is co-founder of Spur.us, a company that tracks thousands of VPN and proxy networks, and helps customers identify traffic coming through these anonymity services.

Kilmer said Faceless has emerged as one of the underground's most reliable malware-based proxy services, mainly because its proxy network has traditionally included a great many compromised "Internet of Things" devices -- such as media sharing servers -- that are seldom included on malware or spam block lists.

In January 2023, the Faceless service website said it was willing to pay for information about previously undocumented security vulnerabilities in IoT devices. Those with IoT zero-days could expect payment if their exploit involved at least 5,000 systems that could be identified through Shodan.

March 2023, Faceless started marketing a service for looking up Social Security Numbers (SSNs) that claims to provide access to "the largest SSN database on the market with a very high hit rate."

Kilmer said Faceless wants to become a one-stop-fraud-shop for cybercriminals who are seeking stolen or synthetic identities from which to transact online, and a temporary proxy that is geographically close to the identity being sold. #Faceless currently sells this bundled product for $9 -- $8 for the identity and $1 for the proxy.

More here:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/04/giving-a-face-to-the-malware-proxy-service-faceless/

The Grassroots Economic Organizing weekly newsletter is out!

https://mailchi.mp/17160b0464db/geo-weekly-newsletter-the-advance-of-the-commune-in-venezuela-production-for-use-the-cooperative-commonwealth

PSA: don't order from SeeTickets. They passed my details on to some sort of scam company called Complete Savings. Bank says I should be able to get my money back but it seems like a pretty huge GDPR breach, as well as, you know, theft!

BREAKING: Congress just reintroduced the dangerous #EarnItAct, an internet surveillance bill that makes all of us less safe by attacking online encryption. We’ve killed this bill 💀twice 💀, and we’re going to do it again at https://www.noearnitact.org/

Now, here’s a refresher:

Damn, this sucks...
______________________

About 60% of monkeys, apes, and lemurs are currently threatened with extinction, and climate change is only a part of it.

Habitat loss, hunting, the illegal pet trade, and disease have already cut back primate populations. Climate change will likely increase the duration and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones and droughts, putting more pressure on the survival of already struggling species.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://theconversation.com/monkeys-lemurs-and-apes-at-risk-climate-change-threatens-a-quarter-of-worlds-primate-habitat-161955

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #Extinction

Who are the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary forces who have provoked an escalating civil war with the Sudanese government?

Known as the Janjawids, these mercenaries accumulated arms, funds, and recruits as shock troops in conflicts throughout the region. Sudanese dictator Omar Al-Bashir was one of their chief funders. They began by crushing a rebellion in the western region of Darfur and went on to play a role in violence in Yemen and elsewhere. In 2019, after demonstrators successfully toppled Al-Bashir, the Rapid Support Forces carried out a massacre to regain control of the capital, Khartoum.

We documented their rise in this text:

https://crimethinc.com/2019/06/14/sudan-behind-the-massacre-in-khartoum-the-perpetrators-and-the-backstory

Now the Rapid Support Forces are fighting against the Sudanese military, at great cost to ordinary people in Sudan.

The militarization of a society does not benefit anyone in the long run, not even the rulers.

#Sudan

Friends -- please check out this event. Hastily publicized but there are great people participating and it should be a serious conversation about some challenging issues in co-op organization. Especially the role of workers in consumer and multi-stakeholder cooperatives.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/owning-together-worker-consumer-co-ops-in-conversation-registration-615930553867?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

After five years of helping to build hardware and software that protects people's privacy, security and freedom, at the end of the month I will no longer be at Purism (I'll still be helping out as an advisor).

For the near term, I plan to spend my time promoting my new book (coming very soon), writing yet another book, and thinking about what's next for my career.

If you have any suggestions for what I should do next, email me at next@kylerank.in (DMs are disabled on this instance).

For years I've been supporting nonprofits to transition from power-over to power-sharing. A tiny slice of that is practicing #workplacedemocracy, and I've finally put together a corner of the Internet to gather resources on the topic and advertise the services that I and my co-organizers offer. Want to take a look and tell what's confusing, what's missing from the Library, or how to improve? This is the beta version! https://www.tosstheboss.org/library

If you installed a Linux system with disk encryption more than a couple of years ago, there's a decent chance it's using a weak key derivation function and someone who cares enough would be in a position to brute-force it. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html has more details and instructions on how to update to a better KDF.

Missouri's transgender snitch form would have been right at home in the most evil days of the old East German regime:

Hey, if you use WordPress and you also use Redis, is there a trick for getting the site to update properly when you create a new post? I have to wind up flushing Redis cache and THEN flush site cache these days, and it's really annoying.

Ivan, an imprisoned anarchist in France, released a public letter last week in which he says that the police managed to break the LUKS encryption on his Linux laptop. The password was longer than 20 characters:

https://nantes.indymedia.org/posts/87395/une-lettre-divan-enferme-a-la-prison-de-villepinte-perquisitions-et-disques-durs-dechiffres/

They had the computer since last summer, so there was enough time to brute force the PW using cloud computing, though it would certainly have been expensive.

This enemy site talks about using up to 10,000 computers with GPU acceleration to attack a LUKS password:

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2020/08/breaking-luks-encryption/

All of which is to say that what constitutes a good password has changed. One guideline is to use seven random words -- easy to remember,hard to force.

#technology