Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

“Absolutely, 100 percent that the DMs could have been compromised,” Jackie Singh, founder of Spyglass Security, told Newsweek. “I mean it looks like they had ‘god mode’ with seemingly few limitations and we don’t know how long they had it for.”

Source: Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

So Twitter has an internal backdoor system, which has been exploited by “the bad guys,” including access to people’s private messages. Since politicians are all over the platform, there are now national security concerns in play. Apple should bring this story up the next time the FBI/CIA/NSA demands that they implement a backdoor system that only “they” can use, in the name of the “war on terror.”

My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

The black market for Amazon reviews makes some sense if you consider how valuable positive reviews can be to sellers on the platform. With more than 2.5 million sellers on the platform, getting seen by customers who might make a purchase is no easy feat. As one friend who has been selling on Amazon Marketplace since 2016 explained to me, on Amazon, “the more reviews you have on an item, the more likely for the item to come up in an algorithmic search. The more customers like the item, with reviews, the more Amazon likes it.”

Source: My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

For many years, I’ve been complaining that you cannot trust ANY system of review on the internet. Always to deaf ears, of course.

Shoutout to Chiptunes

I just wanted to post about how much I love chiptunes, and the whole scene. Especially Chipzel, who is my favorite in the genre. I bought Dicey Dungeons and The Crypt of the Necrodancer, based in large part on the music. Turns out, she was the force of nature behind both. Per my previous post on video gaming as I’ve gotten older, I’m terrible at Necrodancer, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to master Dicey. But the music for both is just terrific.

I also like this chiptune station: http://hyperadio.ru:8000/live, but I can’t seem to find where I found it to begin with. I think it was an Apple Music radio station, from it’s internal listings, that I put in a playlist, but Apple took the listings out of the application. You can still add manual entries, and I guess I can see where they’re coming from, but I sure hope they don’t remove the ability to stream an internet station entirely!

Why Don’t I “Consult?”

I get asked this question fairly often, and I usually just mumble something to move the conversation to something else, but I was thinking about my experience with it this morning, and wanted to write about it.

About… 25 years ago, I was working very heavily with Linux at my home, my church, and work. A good friend told me that his company wanted to get an email sever, and a file-sharing server. Aha! I was an expert at doing those things! I would indeed love to help!

In those days, there was a prominent local business-to-business consulting company which was charging $100/hr for their services. I quoted my friend’s boss at $50/hr. He balked initially, but eventually agreed. I bought them a server, installed Linux, configured postfix with spam rejection, and set up their computers with Outlook using IMAP. I bought a domain, setup a web site, and created a shared directory for internal file sharing. Except for the occasional new user I had to provision (which I could do remotely), everything ran fine for many months. I didn’t even charge them for less than 15 minutes of maintenance work like that.

Then the owner started making noises about paying too much for changes. I wasn’t doing much, so I agreed to cut my rate to $25/hr. Then he started making noises about how that was still too much, and my buddy told me that he was planing on bringing in a kid who was making local-business IT consulting his main gig. This guy was saying he could set them up with a wiz-bang Windows server for only $10/hr! I told him I wasn’t going to cut my rate any further, and they were welcome to replace me and my server.

Through my buddy, I heard how the kid bought the new computer, but couldn’t get mail to it. For days, he struggled, blaming my computer, which was turned off and sitting on the floor. Then he started blaming me, personally. So I wrote a nice, long letter, explaining that he needed to change the MX records in DNS, sent them the password to GoDaddy, told them what to do, and said that if they needed any more help, I would be glad to, without charge. None of this kept my name from being dragged through the mud by the owner.

Months went by, and I would occasionally ask my buddy how it was going with the new IT setup. Turned out that it was more down than up. About a year later, my buddy tells me that the owner was open to using my services again, if I would come back, and basically grovel for the work again. The whole process had been pretty dismal, but that’s when I decided, once and for all, that I didn’t have the patience or the temperament for doing consulting work.

Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface | Nature

The origin of eukaryotes remains unclear^1,2,3,4. Current data suggest that eukaryotes may have emerged from an archaeal lineage known as ‘Asgard’ archaea^5,6. Despite the eukaryote-like genomic features that are found in these archaea, the evolutionary transition from archaea to eukaryotes remains unclear, owing to the lack of cultured representatives and corresponding physiological insights. Here we report the decade-long isolation of an Asgard archaeon related to Lokiarchaeota from deep marine sediment. The archaeon—‘Candidatus Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum’ strain MK-D1—is an anaerobic, extremely slow-growing, small coccus (around 550 nm in diameter) that degrades amino acids through syntrophy. Although eukaryote-like intracellular complexes have been proposed for Asgard archaea⁶, the isolate has no visible organelle-like structure. Instead, Ca. P. syntrophicum is morphologically complex and has unique protrusions that are long and often branching. On the basis of the available data obtained from cultivation and genomics, and reasoned interpretations of the existing literature, we propose a hypothetical model for eukaryogenesis, termed the entangle–engulf–endogenize (also known as E³) model.

Source: Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface | Nature

Just a little light reading that caught my eye. I think this pretty well sums it up, don’t you?

Why The Internet is Terrible, Part 1

Josh Topolsky, writing at Input:

But thank god for the internet. What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be.

So true. Feeling isolated? Cooped up? Me too. But imagine what this would’ve been like 30 years ago. This sort of crisis is what the internet was designed for, and it’s working.

Source: Daring Fireball: ‘Thank God for the Internet’

I’m dubious about the quoted article’s opinion of the net value of the internet to society at large, and it’s Gruber’s take that precisely highlights my problem with it. The underlying assumption is that we’re all going stir crazy, and the Internet is saving us from the worst of it.

It’s the information bandwidth created by the internet that is driving us crazy, forcing us all to live at breakneck speed to keep up with it. Thirty years ago, you simply didn’t know the social activities of every one of your acquaintances. Because of that, you couldn’t feel compelled to try to fit them all into your schedule, and participate, in some capacity, or, at the very least, acknowledge them, lest you offend someone, and then suffer their displeasure in the form of them pressuring other parts of your social life in negative ways.

Thirty years ago, you had a small circle of friends, because that’s all your “information bandwidth” would allow for. And you were happy. You made things work. You made phone calls. You went to church. You went over to someone’s place, and talked, or played a game. The internet ruined that. The internet is the reason that families run 24×7 to keep up with every thing and every one. It started with an assumption that, hey, you and I are friends, and if you only knew *this thing* was happening, you would, of course, want to show up for it. And now, every single person you know is trying to get *their thing* onto your schedule. The problem is that we feel socially guilty about saying no, for fear that we will lose standing in someone else’s eyes, and perhaps not be invited to the next thing that we actually do want to be involved with.

The internet is the reason that you know what people you wouldn’t have even called friends in high school are up to, thirty years on, and you kinda-sorta feel compelled to congratulate them for it. The internet is why you know that that one guy at work is doing this charity thing next month, and you don’t really know him, and don’t really care about his cause, but the event is pulling in a couple of people you want to like you, and you really don’t have anything better to do in that 2-hour block of time, so, fine, you’ll go.

So, yeah, “the internet” is the only thing that can help you refill that emptiness created by “the internet,” which keeps you binging on it. And all the “Web 2.0” companies laugh all the way to the bank for preying on your need for human connectivity and relevance, manipulating your opinion for their benefactors, and “monetizing” your “eyeballs.”

And that’s just the social networks. What about the actual facts of science relating to the virus, and the government’s response to it, and the media coverage of it all? It’s a frightening mess of clashing opinion, creating warring tribal factions about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s literally tearing society apart, fractioning us into camps which can never be reconciled.

The absolute worst part of this is the United States’ two-party system, and the non-overlapping dichotomy of ideology it forcibly implies. So, given any statement, people feel license to derive an entire worldview for the other person, down to their income level, geographic location, intelligence level, and what they surely must think about every other topic. Twitter, for instance, is almost literally made of strawman arguments. Sometimes, it feels as though, if you used machine learning to delete strawmen from the platform, more than half the content would be gone, and it would definitely be the half that generates all the ad revenue.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t that way before. Respectable journalists digested the facts, wrote articles, and news editors gave us a well-formed narrative. Were there oversights? Was there propaganda? Sure, but people found ways to get the story out. Now, any crank with a computer can spew his or her unsound opinion on any particular topic, and entire communities spring up around it, to support it and keep it alive. I’m not talking about flat-earth or faked-moon-landing stuff here; I’m talking about anti-vax, climate change, human rights, and terrorism. Stuff that really matters, now, and to our children’s children.

Right now, the total effect is hardly distinguishable from everyone just stepping out of their homes, into the street, and screaming at the top of their lungs. In the same way as with America’s broken health insurance system, the people who are the fans of the status quo are, predictably, the winners of the current system: the blue checkmarks. You might find it to be great, because you’ve got a really loud voice, but that just makes other people even more upset with you.

“The internet” is perverting just about every element of human relations. Facebook and Twitter are the arch-villains here, but every other online forum isn’t far behind. At this point, I could probably write a book about what I’m seeing, but I’m sure that there are already several out there, and I’m just waking up. So, no, I don’t buy the argument that the internet is vastly more good than bad. To me, it’s marginally better, at best. In another 30 years, I think we will look back this time of the internet, and weep for the damage it caused, and the opportunity for good which was lost.

GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

And this year, Microsoft App Center and Google Container Builder showed up as Marketplace apps, signalling(sic) that GitHub isn’t just a storefront for startups but a cog in the code deployment machines of major tech firms.

Source: GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

Mark my words, this deal is going to wind up biting the developer “community” in the rear end.

I wish they hadn’t sold to Microsoft. It’s too much critical-path infrastructure for one company to manage. They now own the OS, the directory, the cloud, the languages, the dev tools, the database, the code repo, and the deployment tools. I mean, that looks good on paper, but we all know what happens when one company owns the entire vertical space.

It’s a perfect example of monopolies taking over the entire economy, and I think government should get serious about reigning-in this sort of thing. In my opinion, there should be limits on how large companies are allowed to be, based on various combinations of market cap, number of employees, and number of locations, and probably some other things that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability | Hacker News

I am giving up. WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers.

It was a very nice dream, pity it didn’t work out.

Source: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability | Hacker News

I’ve been making the same sort of comments about this technology for a long time now. Please pardon my schadenfreude. It would seem that the “Microsoft loves Linux” astroturfing for this feature is showing some cracks, and people are finally being honest about the actual impact of the technology on development workflows. Several people in the comments get one step away from my own conclusion: just install VirtualBox or VMware Workstation, and be done with it.

Windows. And Skyrim. Again.

I’m on vacation. At a beach. I don’t find the beach compelling. So I’m bored. Bored, but with a computer. Unfortunately, for this exercise, the computer is a MacBook Pro. And I want to play Skyrim. I’ve been having just a lovely time playing through it again on a PC I stitched together from parts, but how does one play it on a Mac? Good question.

The first attempt at an answer was to try using Parallels. Again. No bueno. Still no clues on the internet, which just seems wrong. Then again, if it were possible to do this, you’d think Parallels would advertise that fact, along with the other games they say it supports.

The only other realistic avenue was to try using Bootcamp to run Windows on the machine, directly. I’ve resisted this for a long time, because I just didn’t buy a Mac to run Windows games. Philosophy aside, this is surprisingly easy. I even still had the Windows 10 ISO file from when I built the PC, and Bootcamp found it on my hard drive, and offered to use it. I just clicked a couple of times, expanded the partition a bit, and waited. Within 15 or 20 minutes, I was in Windows (and denying all of Microsoft’s telemetry options).

Then begins the process I know pretty well by now:

Update Windows
Use Edge to install Firefox
Use the master key to setup 1Password
Get logged into Steam
Download and install Steam
Install Skyrim
Download and install Skyrim Script Extender
Get logged into NexusMods.com
Download and install Vortex
Download the dozen or so mods I like
Use Vortex to…

BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH

And this one was like there were 2 interleaved slides forming the BSOD message, and they were jiggling back and forth, stuck down in the lower, left quadrant of the screen, and that was enough for me. It just confirmed that this isn’t something that’s going to be well supported, and I don’t have time for this kind of nonsense any more. I rebooted into macOS, and immediately used Bootcamp to wipe out the Windows partition.

Ebay (and PayPal); Is This Really the Best We Can Do?

I see various Ebay competitors advertising on TV. It’s not hard to see why. It’s 2020, and Ebay’s web site hasn’t fundamentally changed for 20 years. Their incestuous relationship with PayPal, and all its attendant problems, is legendary.

I have an account balance. I keep getting emailed about it every month. It’s only $28.11, but it’s been, like, a year now, and I’m really tired of those emails. So I finally decided I’d try to get the amount sent to me as a check, because I don’t want these folks touching my bank accounts.

So I look around Ebay’s site, and, of course, I can’t find any reference to how to do this. So I search, and find a Q/A about it, and on their own site, to boot. I see that I have to actually call them to request a credit to be paid to me, like it was still 1998, and they hadn’t actually bought a payment processor. Really?! So I click the link, and then another, and another. Five clicks in, I see a phone number. I dial it, enter my one-time code, and get put on hold. Then I have a thought! I want an iPad cover, and that amount of money should just about cover it. So I hang up the phone, and start searching around.

Of course, I find something I want on Amazon, because, as bad as Amazon’s search is, Ebay’s is much, much worse. Then I go back to Ebay, and dig it up. I try to be very careful in the checkout process, but there’s no option to change any purchase methods. I double check the email I get, and, of course, Ebay has not used my balance; they’ve charged my credit card.

So I redial the phone number I called before, tell the system twice that I don’t have a one-time passcode, get put into a queue. When I get to talk to someone, I tell them what I want, and they ask for my account number. I don’t know what this is, and can’t find it immediately. She asks if I’ve made any recent purchases, so she can look up my account. I tell her the one I just made, and then she asks 3 different questions relating to getting a refund for that item. Once I finally get through to her what I’m really asking, she puts me on hold.

Another guy joins the call, and quickly refunds the money, but there’s no option here. Before I can even bring up how this will be refunded, he says he’s sent it TO PAYPAL, and then informs me that it will be SEVERAL DAYS before this transfer finalizes. So now I have to wait, and deal with it there. Sigh. At least there, I know I can have them cut me a check for a hefty fee, but then I’m done with both Ebay and PayPal.

Ebay created a way for collectors to connect with each other, and the marketplace corrected for the scarcity economics of finding buyers for old junk in local areas. This took the premiums out of it, and leveled the playing field. Now, whatever you might want to sell, the Ebay price for it IS the market price for it, even if you don’t use Ebay, and this is a win for people who are trying to buy esoteric things. Basically everything that can be sold, is sold on Ebay, so there’s a market price just about everything now. But, as an application, and as a business, it’s run its course. It’s boring. It’s overburdened by hassle. You take your life in your hands every time you sell something on the platform. Luckily, this has left the door open to competitors.

If you search on Ebay competitors, you find something fascinating. None of the top 10 sites are auction sites. Ebay has set the price in the “e-market” space, and the only “auctions” happening now are the figurative dances to weave your way through hundreds of no-name accounts all selling the same thing for differences of a few dollars.

But this list of sites is geared towards people who are trying to make a living selling handmade tchotchkes or Chinese knockoff imports. What about poor schlubs like me, who just want to clean out their closet? An another list, I see about 2 dozen eligible alternatives for selling stuff you don’t want any more. So I think a lot of people are finding newer applications to do the same thing, without all the overhead.

The next time I want to try to sell something, I will try a different platform.

For example, I see Decluttr is a clearinghouse, buying things and then selling them for a profit. They have a particular bent towards tech and… Lego. And I may or may not have about 8 large tubs of Lego that I’m tired of moving around in storage… However, I just looked at how that works, and apparently they simply buy Lego at $1/lb. Are you serious with me right now? Sheesh. I know I could get a lot more for my collection…

on…

Ebay.