Bishma

I saved my fortune cookie for a snack, and it turns out this guy really like how they smell.

Alt Title: How to take over the world using abandoned S3 Buckets

Watchtowr has moved on from using expired domains to assume authority over entire TLDs and instead is using blind trust in S3 addresses to infiltrate governments and militaries across the world.

The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines - and then abandoned.

As for the research itself, it panned out progressively, with S3 buckets registered as they were discovered. It went rather quickly from “Haha, we could put our logo on this website” to “Uhhh, .mil, we should probably speak to someone”.

These S3 buckets received more than 8 million HTTP requests over a 2 month period for all sorts of things -

• Software updates,
• Pre-compiled (unsigned!) Windows, Linux and macOS binaries,
• Virtual machine images (?!),
• JavaScript files...

Not as catchy as "swasticar," but I like it.

Good evening, Nick and fight fans throughout the Federation! Tonight, we bring you a battle of the virtual assistants—a clash of the quirky, the helpful, and the homicidal!

That's right Johnny. Badgey has a tip for Clippy, and it's at the end of a bat'leth.

I was cleaning out our car after 17 years of loyal service and I found these unused tickets to see The Toasters at a great venue in Eugene, Oregon from January,08.

My wife and I aren't sure why we didn't go (or give away the tickets) but it probably was a combo of it being a Wednesday and that we moved the weekend before.

My gift's wrapping paper knows that Santa can't get his work done without Tux.Fittingly, inside were 3 PiZeros.

As Home Assistant continues to grow and evolve, so does our commitment to making it more inclusive, accessible, and aligned with the diverse needs of our community. To that end, we’re launching an annual survey—and we hope you’ll participate!

We could keep assuming our community’s wants and needs, but we’d rather base our decisions on data-driven insights 😉. With this survey, we aim to better understand not just how you use Home Assistant, but also who you are as a person, a smart home user, and a member of our community.

First and foremost, the survey is entirely anonymous, and you can skip any question you don’t want to answer. For sensitive questions (e.g., gender), we provide options like “prefer not to say” or open text fields.

Normally I wouldn't spread word of a survey, but considering Fenick has suggested the Home Assistant community use BlueSky over Mastodon, I thought it might be a good idea to reaffirm to them that the Fediverse has a voice. I also wrote in Lemmy in "Other" responses where applicable.

It's a fairly long survey; they estimate 20 minutes, I think it took me around 15 after skipping a few questions.

Sometimes its just nice to know you have company.

source

UHC, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, Caresource and more are removing or redirecting their about us pages.

Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage. In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos. He feared that his content could be used to train AI systems, even if they weren’t specifically ones tied to the Pentagon project. “I don't control any of the future outcomes that this will enable,” Mohandas thought. “So now, shouldn't I be more responsible?”

The site (TheySeeYourPhotos) returns what Google Vision is able to decern from photos. You can test with any image you want or there are some sample images available.

I can't say it better than (TV's) Frank Conniff:

Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, Police Squad, Top Secret, etc... I mean, come on! All of these projects and more gave us not just laughs, but huge belly laughs. Jim Abrahams was an inspiration to me and I will be forever grateful for all the great comedy he gave us. Rest In Peace.

Conan O'Brian did this to me.