David Thiel

@grumplicio.us

4845 Followers 940 Following

Infosec person focused on harm reduction in technology; fmr tech, data science and T&S research at https://io.stanford.edu & https://tsjournal.org https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0947-5921 Also music things + open data.

Rebane saying on Mastodon: "back in 2022 i found a bug that would let me, with no user interaction, turn any chromium-based browser into a permanent js botnet member in edge, you wouldn't even notice anything out-of-place, and would stay connected to the c2 even after closing the browser today, almost 4 years later, the bug is finally public:" And in a second post: "OH NO I JUST REALIZED THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY PROPERLY FIXED AND STILL WORKS 💀💀"
A screenshot of a firefox window with 2 tabs, but you're looking at them split screen instead of using 2 windows for some reason
The number of U.S.-based academics seeking jobs overseas rose by more than a fifth last year, according to Times Higher Education, a U.K.-based provider of global education data. Most of them landed in Europe, where the EU has set aside 500 million euros to lure top scientists to the continent. Professors teaching abroad blamed the American right for slashing research funding, and the left for policing university speech.
A Working Joe from Alien: Isolation, stating “You’re becoming hysterical”
Francis Fukuyama with laser eyes
The specialist then used software called Fast Forward Moving Picture Expert Group "to convert the files to a format capable to ingest into Adobe Premiere."
The “I made this” meme but with a robot making the object, subsequently claimed to be made by the human.
256 bytes of hex
A British "TV detector van", ostensibly used to identify people who have a television but have evaded paying their licensing fee to the government.
Will Smith telling a robot “pretend to be a scary robot”. The robot replies “I’m a scary robot”. Will Smith is distraught.
Chicken, horse and duck sashimi on a plate at a 24h Tokyo diner
The Commodore model 1660 300 baud modem.
Dispute process: We have provided users with greater control in the event that we have a disagreement. "We’ve added details about using the informal dispute resolution process, including an agreement that we will talk on the phone before proceeding to any formal dispute process. This is because we think most disputes can be resolved informally." with the bit about "including an agreement that we will talk on the phone" highlighted
Image with the text "It is unacceptable to describe a child under 13 years old in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable"
The IQ bell curve meme. Text on the leftmost reads "Why does Meta allow a bot to do this". The crying guy in the middle says "It doesn't "allow" it to do things, it's not a deterministic system and it's impossible to put strict guardrails on a natural language interface without degrading user experience in such a way that" The rightmost text reads "Why does Meta allow a bot to do this"
A table showing powers of ten and their equivalents in short and long scale. Probably easier to read on the Wikipedia page, but here goes: Quantity Short scale Long scale 10^6 million million 10^9 billion milliard 10^12 trillion billion 10^15 quadrillion billiard 10^18 quintillion trillion 10^21 sextillion trilliard 10^24 septillion quadrillion 10^27 octillion quadrilliard
A world map showing which countries use short and long scales, including some countries that use both scales and some that use "milliard" in long scale to mean "billion" in short scale.
The cover of the Japanese Country Cookbook
Mr. Let’s Paint banging on his keyboard and shouting that things will be all right eventually
The galaxy brain meme both with "outsourcing cognition", "outsourcing metacognition" and "outsourcing self-consciousness, in reverse order of galaxy-ness.
It's just the "don't make me tap the sign" bus driver meme but the sign is the other Simpsons meme of a Democratic convention with the banners "We hate life and ourselves" and "We can't govern" printed on banners.
The last panel of the Matt Bors society comic, with the "yet you participate in society" replaced with "Yet your society is very racist!"
A screenshot of Google Street View, showing a bicyclist (Kazu) riding down a small village road.
Internet road trip stuck on a black "No street view available" screen.
A "win pin", for "Whip Inflation Now". Still not sure how we were supposed to operationalize this.
Unknown to people on the US West coast and much of Europe, this is the device you use to pry ice from your windshield, 15 minutes after you start your car to warm it up and then run back inside. Ice of course remains on the roof of semi trucks, where it will break into chunks and fly at the cars behind it. These conditions can go for weeks on end in much of the middle of the country. When the snow melts, the gravel and salt used to provide some semblance of traction will form a slurry which will corrode anything it flies on to, and then pile up in difficult to see deposits in corners.
Now, Lackey says, the countries that warrant that paranoid approach to travel might include not just Russia and China but also the United States—if not for Americans like him, then for anyone with a foreign passport who might come under the increasingly draconian and unpredictable scrutiny of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "All of this applies to America more than it has in the past," says Lackey. "If I thought I were likely to be a targeted person, I would go through this same level of protection."
the "you wouldn't meme" but saying you wouldn't disrespect a synagogue or church
右翼街宣車です
BBC Headline: Apple AI tool transcribed the word 'racist' as 'Trump' Experts have questioned the company's explanation that it is due to the two words being similar.
J. Frank Parnell from the film Repo Man, stating "The two hemispheres are fundamentally at odds"
Map showing “Gulf of Mexico”
Even with the phone region set to Japanese, “Gulf of America” is displayed in English
An Apple Maps dialog to report the map location “Gulf of America” as incorrect
Highlighted text: “I bought the truck before he became a polarizing figure”
Transgenderism: Originally an academic term for the phenomena of gender dysphoria, the term “transgenderism” has been co-opted by anti-trans activists to characterize being transgender as an ideology rather than an innate identity. By using the term “transgenderism” instead of “trans people,” anti-trans activists call for online and offline marginalization of and/or harm to transgender individuals under the guise of opposing an ideology. This is especially visible on social media platforms, where anti-trans accounts use “transgenderism” to skirt hate speech and harassment policies that prohibit the targeting of protected classes of people.
We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.
C.AI will also be notifying teens when they've spent an hour on the platform, which could help prevent kids from becoming addicted to the app, as parents suing have alleged. In one case, parents had to lock their son's iPad in a safe to keep him from using the app after bots allegedly repeatedly encouraged him to self-harm and even suggested murdering his parents. That teen has vowed to start using the app whenever he next has access, while parents fear the bots' seeming influence may continue causing harm if he follows through on threats to run away.
Aside from the X-ray on his apparent X account, Mangione shared in a handwritten note that he suffered from spondylolisthesis, according to Business Insider. The condition was apparently aggravated after Mangione went surfing in Hawaii, where he began living in 2022. A post from a Reddit account that appears to belong to Mangione, in a group dedicated to the condition, described having experienced pain and numbness in his back, limbs and groin for a year and a half. A later post from the same account described the injury as “completely devastating.”
Unlike the Fediverse, most of the components of Bluesky are operated by a single entity: Bluesky Social PBC. However, it has been designed with data portability as a core feature, and most of its components are open-source. In the event of a takeover of that organization, users’ data could be transferred to an alternate operator with their social graph and history largely intact. As such, it is less a decentralized or federated system, but a system with an open design and high resilience against takeovers, cessation of operations or “enshittification”: another Bluesky could be built (albeit at considerable expense), and users could move if they become dissatisfied with the service.
here in Cali, I get the slide into my lane, finger and that same deep, head tilted back, laughs Every, Every day. it's getting to be a draining, depressing thing now. I stay in the right lane all day to avoid the hate but it's just everywhere in the Bay Area, unavoidable. I drive 100 to 150 miles a day so the AHoles will be seen. I do ignore and do not react except for the low lifes that slide into my lane and yes I honk. I love the video recording icon on the screen.
Jack posting an RFK Jr. podcast, getting trolled by @alisonbuki with an ayahuasca meme, and Jack (very improbably) replying that he's never had it and asks how it is.
Time series showing Portuguese language posts per hour dropping from a daily peak of near 150k to a peak ~40k over the course of the last week or so.
The domino meme reading: Calvin Stevens descobre a cetamina em 1962 Gringos precisando aprender português pra entender memes
A cloud of random emoji
Image of a white Peugeot with a blue plush monkey dangling by its arm from the rear windshield wiper
Michael Shellenberger wanking at the mouth about how Brazil is a dictatorship now, because it's investigating a coup intent on installing a dictatorship
Illustrating the spike in Portuguese language posts. DAU is any user that has committed an action on Bluesky, does not include browsing.
A close up of Mark’s ill-fitting leather jacket with three fingers sticking out of the sleeve. The sleeves are far too long; his fingers are covered all the way to the second knuckle, making his hand look slightly mangled.
The “Show posts from my feeds” toggle in Bluesky feed preferences.
A chart showing a two week period of users receiving "likes" on Bluesky. The top ten are: 1. jbouie.bsky.social with 101,642 2. rincewind.run with 80,268 3. rl.fess.social with 77,949 4. faineg.bsky.social with 76,477 5. rahaeli.bsky.social with 70,016 6. cait.bsky.social with 69,304 7. catsofyore.bsky.social with 67,293 8. mtsw.bsky.social with 65,821 9. kevinmkruse.bsky.social with 50,493 10. juicysteak117.gay with 48,140
We represent Meta Platforms, Inc. ("Meta," previously known as Facebook, Inc.), based in Menlo Park, California. Meta operates, among other services, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta has gathered evidence that you are distributing, through the GitHub repository "threads-api," code that improperly facilitates scraping of Threads. You describe "threads-api" as a "Reverse-Engineered... client for Meta's Threads." You also publicize and distribute apps that utilize your unauthorized client. These activities violate Instagram and Threads terms. Meta demands that you stop these activities immediately. Meta takes the protection of the user experience very seriously, and it is committed to keeping its products safe for users to interact and share information. It has developed terms and policies to protect the user experience and facilitate these goals.
A post from @marioprime on Twitter, asking "hey can you repeat that last part" with a screenshot of a Google query asking "what is in google's AI dataset?". The answer includes several computer vision and speech datasets, and ends with LAION-5B, then stating: "Google's Al models have been trained on child sexual abuse material (SAM), including LAION-5B, which a Stanford study found contains 1,008 instances of Aternally validated CSAM and 3,226 suspected instances."
4′33″, except written with an opening double quote, a four, closing single quote, the number 33, then a closing double quote followed by a comma and another closing double quote
Time series showing a big surge in Portuguese language posts per minute on April 8.
Two flight attendants kneeling in the snow, fondling a golden Jesus statue
A VisiData table showing all kinds of nonsense dates
A line graph showing huge growth in posts in Japanese per minute, starting February 7.