m3047

Disintermediate: "The elimination of intermediary agents in transactions between buyers and sellers."

Seems like a weird thing to get wrong in the context. Gives me a Zardoz vibe.

I've put contact info & jurisdiction for my domains in TXT records at the apex since Hover doesn't actually have whois. I publish dynamic status information in the DNS on a special server outside of the ICANN roots, but it's mostly technical information.

They requested presentation of a phone number and ID, so this sounds like info harvesting (for laundering / resale).

Depends on the small business obviously. I've been in IT for 40+ years and enjoy torturing clankers; I ran a bot motel 20 years ago. These things are so badly written, and obviously they don't care because they're not truly conscious, but the meat in charge is ignorant or doesn't care. So web scraping, and the point cloud of nearly indistiguishable abuse it travels with, is pretty easily tripped by some simple technical tests and salting of content. At least mostly.[0]

I've been wondering to myself "how can I get people to go through a login process without going through a login process?" for a few months, and I've come up with a simple solution which I'll be implementing in the next few weeks.[1] Like the other technical measures it doesn't identify bots but there will be a gate with backpressure that at a point in time a given IP address has some probability (adjusted in realtime based on $things) of passing through, and through my mysterious process is then "logged in". Then that address is pretty much given a free pass as long as its behavior remains "human". Real humans may be denied access initially and have to try again, and their luck will be affected by how aggressively the bots are fighting it out at that point in time. This isn't much different than the extant reality, but it is in terms of what happens after an initial successful page load. It's an experiment, I'm hoping it's tunable so that the experience is more or less indistinguishable from the status quo; we will see.

I'd love to find a group of likeminded individuals where we can discuss some of this TLP:YELLOW or Chatham House Rules. If you are savvy enough to hunt me down and can demonstrate that you're a real human, small operator, and that you can keep things closely held I'll talk with you, if you want someone to run your mitigations that would cost money.

[0] Had an episode last week where somebody scanned approximately 1000 URLs (maybe 60% of the discoverable URLs) over six hours. 1200 addresses fetched exactly one URL, another 400 or so fetched two or three. Every one of those URLs was fetched exactly two times. Real showshoe stuff, nicely done.

[1] Firewall rules and fail2ban. I give fail2ban special powers in terms of the logs it follows and the actions it can invoke. Conntrack without conntrack (of course the firewall has conntrack, it's just not the best option for this use case).

Good analogy! Exactly what is the variance in the height which sheep can jump? [Edit, can't help myself] Is it normal or does it have a long tail?

As flawed as the civil service is, it's the notion of "contractors" which concerns me most.

I like that metaphor. But what it calls to my mind is an "alien artifact" which was found by a road, and "how did these refined metals get placed inside of a rock, in such an unnatural formation?" and there was much debate about this artifact. Years later it was determined that it was in fact a spark plug which had been remineralized by the effluent from a mine upstream: an unusual process acting on a discarded object, and people who want to believe. Nobody thought that the remineralization process could take less than hundreds of years, which ruled out "spark plug".

Specifically pertains to voting systems in GA.

"a security vulnerability disclosed back in 2022 shows the shuffle can be reversed, and some states have not applied the software update that resolves it."

"a team of researchers published a report showing that certain ballot scanning machines used throughout the US had a critical privacy failure in how they anonymized ballots"

"Specifically, the machines would assign a seemingly random number to each electronic ballot record at the time of scanning to label each ballot for later auditing."

I can tell you that before WA went to all-mail voting it wouldn't have happened, because I served as a pollworker and election site inspector. There was a optical scan ballot reader / counter, my confidence is high it only kept running totals. The ballots fell into a bin, at the end of the day the bin was unlocked and the ballots were tossed into bags (no particular order) which were then sealed. As inspector I printed a copy of the tape which went downtown with the bag(s); they would have been able to print a new tape until the machine's memory was wiped (at which point they still had "hardcopy backup"). The ballots were not marked upon by the scanner in any manner. There was an incident where one of the ballot printing / counting companies (because they both typically had to come from the same manufacturer) started printing sequence numbers on ballots (not just ballot styles) and that went to court.

I've not witnessed what happens with all-mail voting, but there is no sequence number on the ballots. ;-) The count is not supposed to start until the polls close. Before that the ballots are ostensibly separated from their identity (the envelope) in an identity confirmation ceremony. My impression is that they're scanned at this point and the scans are utilized for counting / optical scan, but I'm not certain about this or that it's the same everywhere. I don't know what happens to the physical ballots; back in the day what I know is that if a ballot needed to be corrected (defacement or damage renders it unreadable) then a new ballot was prepared under the supervision and adjudication of election observers and the old ballot was destroyed; but that's the exception which proves the rule that physical, anonymized ballots were retained.

The voting process is in the hands of the individual (United) States; in WA it's largely in the hands of the County administrators and varies to a degree Statewide.

Here is the timeline:

"In 1992, on a factory floor in a Toyota auto-parts subsidiary in Japan, workers were drowning in barcodes."

(collect underpants)

"And that decision is about to change every single thing you buy."

I think recognizing packaging sounds like an ideal use for AGI. Boil them oceans, not the eggs.

One of the questions today is whether frontier models, in the hand of frontier labs, and capable of extracting rent (and extracting intelligence from customer-provided signals) will be able to predominate over locally run models of indeterminate provenance.

So much of what I see is which is in this genre is completely and utterly AI slop: spray bottles cleaning driveways, miracle putty miraculously repairing a rotten porch... If I saw those kinds of pictures my first suspicion would be that the AI completely faked it.

"California could solve its water shortage if every household ate sixteen less almonds per day." -- I said this [edit] A DECADE AGO at the conclusion of an all-day water resources hackathon to illustrate the fact that ag water and urban water are not the same.

Conflating them is category confusion. Lying about water usage is part of CA culture.

Magecart has been very $ucce$$ful at hiding in JS dependencies.