abduhl

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shalmanese 1 hour ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without he...

One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.

Then I'd do the same Luigi-like low key messing with them for a while. My favorite was when a friend had a VNC server running on their machine with control capabilities. I would sit next to them and subtly jerk the mouse pointer right before they were about to click on something and it drove them mad for a good 20 minutes before I couldn't hold onto the giggles anymore.

edit: To add a bit of context, this was in the Windows 98 era, before the age of social media where we started putting all of our secrets onto our machines. And it was among a group of friends where everyone was trying to hack everyone else and pretty much anything was considered fair game. All of us were high school kids so there wasn't some super serious reputation we had to protect.

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Comment · 2 months ago
Are we reading different articles? The headline says immigrant visas. The first paragraph says immigrant visas.

“The Trump administration has paused processing of immigrant visas, which allow recipients to move permanently to the U.S., to train visa officers on new guidance ensuring that applicants have enough financial means to support themselves after they arrive.”

Comment · 2 months ago
First they came for those that were far away from me and I did not speak out because… I didn’t know them?
Comment · 3 months ago
Whoever explained this to you has done you a terrible disservice. The border is the border - on one side you are in the USA and on the other side you are outside it.

If there was a strip of land where you are not in a country then how can CBP assert any authority? No, you must be in America. There is no "no man's land," and there is no such thing as "international land" at America's borders where no law exists.

Comment · 3 months ago
I’m saying local officials are the ones where your vote counts the most.
Comment · 3 months ago
Comments like this are even more tiring. Everyone knows that there are moneyed interests in politics. But decisions on these issues are made at a local level and so are the most addressable by local political actions.
Comment · 3 months ago
Do you need apples to turn on your lights? Was there a sudden new influx of pie makers? Is growing apples a government granted monopoly business?

If the answer to these questions was yes, yes, and yes then I think you would grumble.

Comment · 4 months ago
Is the child of a diplomat a US citizen if they are born during a diplomat’s commercial activities?
Comment · 5 months ago
I think our disagreement is with respect to what it means to "claim" to be following a principle. Most people do not say "my principle is X," they just make statements that hint at a core principle. In many cases this is willful, as you aptly point out for corporations, and it is specifically for the reason you are articulating now: if you never state a core principle you can always back into one later that is not hypocritical. I reject your framework where a principle must be explicitly articulated and cannot be inferred by statements/actions.
Comment · 5 months ago
>> Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science.

This statement sounds like the type of language one uses when trying to get a patent.

Comment · 5 months ago
This is shifting the principle/value discussion up to a level where it's meaningless. Let's use a different example.

Old value: Returning value to shareholders.

How to do it? Treat your employees like family and don't be evil.

New value: Returning value to shareholders.

How to do it? Treat your employees like human resources and get away with what you can get away with.

Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.

Agents may be changing the game for how software gets produced, but all it's really done is switch software developers from being managed to being managers. And software developers trying to square their historic value/principle that management tasks are useless, easy, and ceremonial (to borrow GP's word) tasks that should take a back seat to ~flow state coding~ with their new view that management is an integral, difficult, and requisite part of writing code reeks of hypocrisy.

Comment · 5 months ago
Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable.

I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think is that it’s some kind of ego satisfaction play people make when their place in the world is threatened.

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