teawrecks

joined 1 year ago
[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah, exactly. Very rare.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I agree that malicious firmware could cause the battery to combust, but I don't think it would be lethal except in the rarest of circumstances. When li-ion batteries fail, they usually don't explode so much as rapidly catch fire and spew toxic fumes. As an attack on a person, I don't think you'd achieve much more than some burns and maybe respiratory irritation. It would probably be more successful to use it to start a house fire when no one is looking.

But also, the agencies capable of doing this aren't spending the resources to do it on some random person. They were targeting very specific people.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (9 children)

Either you are an example of what I would call the propaganda, or you're in the bubble.

  • Literally, read the article. There's no world where "11,355 children, 2,955 people aged 60 or older, and 6,297 women" slaughtered is anywhere close to reasonable. It's not even that they are collateral damage, civilians make up HALF of casualties that we know about!

  • Literally, Netanyahu's campaign slogan was "It's Us or Them".

  • Their officials and supporters state in no uncertain terms that the time has come to eradicate all Palestinians.

  • Experts at the UN have said there are "reasonable grounds" to believe the bar has been met for genocide, and while the UN won't officially label it as such, they have officially told Israel that they are required to 1) "prevent a genocide", and 2) get out of Gaza immediately. But Israel continues to flagrantly disregard both instructions.

  • Meanwhile, the right wing media sweeps it aside with inhumane, Onion-level headlines like "UN revises Gaza death toll, almost 50% less women and children killed than previously reported". As though that...justifies something?!

It's not subtle, they're not trying to hide it, they are in the process of eradicating a rival religion from the face of the earth because they know they're in the position where every other first world country will help them do it, no questions asked. And we all just have to sit and watch it happen.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Depends on when you played it. It came out in a decade of generic war shooters (including other spec ops games) so the subversion slid under most people's radar, which was intended. There are subtle hints as you play, but iirc the scene described above was the first time the game really slaps you across the face.

It took a few years for the game to gain a cult following and recognize it for what it is. Nowadays the only people who go back to play it already have some idea of what they're getting into.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 17 points 2 months ago (13 children)

It sucks that this is how humanity has to learn these lessons. "Sure, we've done a holocaust before...but have we done a holocaust during the age of the internet with a bunch of propaganda saying it's not happening?"

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 months ago

I don't think people who refer to "Anonymous" are referring to "the average 4channer".

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 29 points 2 months ago

If you're ok with being up front with people, you could just say "hey, do you mind giving me some alone time while I eat? It's nothing personal, I just prefer to use this time to recharge by myself."

If you'd prefer to manufacture an excuse, you could tell her you're going to use your lunch hour to try a new mindfulness meditation technique you heard about, and need to avoid conversation during that time.

If you have the option to take your lunch somewhere else where she won't find or bother you, that's an option.

I think usually just keeping your nose in your book a few seconds too long before giving short answers to questions, then going right back to reading, is enough discomfort for a person like her that even if she didn't get the hint that you don't care to be bothered, she would at least prefer talking to someone else instead.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

For the record, Introversion and Extroversion have a scientific basis. The Myers-Briggs does not.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 months ago

That's the thing, it does. GTA doesn't support BattlEye for linux.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The best way to do this is to show them the exploit in action. Nothing perks a kid's ears up like holding up a USB drive and saying "there is a virus on this".

Run a demo in class of how easy it is to plug a random drive into one computer, and suddenly have full access from another computer (remote viewer and webcam access to really drive the point home. They're not going to be amazed when you type whoami and the console says root.)

Doing this is like saying "I know black magic and if you listen to me, I can teach you how it works, and how to defend yourself against it". What you have is no longer hypothetical to them, they will be invested.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 29 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

When I was in high school I wanted to learn how to program, how computers work, etc., but when I took the Java course offered the assignments were boring basics that I couldn't use for anything. Everyone in the class thought of it as a blowoff course.

What everyone in the class was intrigued by was the fact that the teacher ran her own local network for the class and didn't properly secure anything. It wasn't long before someone figured out that they could shut down any other computer on the network using a simple shutdown command on the cmdline, passing another host as the target. Which led to an arms race of people finding ways to block themselves from being shut down, while also managing to shut each other down. Turns out a shutdown can't be issued if another shutdown is already in progress, so the first line of defense was to issue a 24h shutdown on your own machine. But then we looked at the params to shutdown.exe and found the ability to abort shutdown options. Soon we all had a library of offensive and defensive .bat files, and the class was an all-out digital warzone!

All that is to say, kids like:

  • to play games
  • they like to compete
  • they like to poke and prod things, make them behave in ways they're not supposed to
  • experiment
  • feel safe breaking things and learning from the pieces that come out
  • "hacking"
  • and they like walking out of the class, seeing a random piece of technology, and having a new found understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, and how to manipulate effectively.

They don't like:

  • assignments
  • being told to do the same thing as the person next to them, print out some expected result, and turn it in
  • leaving the classroom and thinking "finally"
  • not knowing how to tie anything they learned back to their lives outside the class.

I know you have a list of things you'd like them to learn, but most kids will look at how difficult and primitive the computer you're showing them is, and then look at their phone, and say "why am I learning how to use an old style computer? New computers don't work like this, they have touch screens, and voice control, and app stores". You and i know this is a misguided mentality to have, but that's what they will think. It's up to you to relate everything in the class back to the computers they are actually familiar with. If you give them a new way to understand and interact with the computers they use daily, you will have them hooked.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I don't get why people use Twitter as a social media platform, but the format is/was useful when you just want to see what a certain person or organization has said recently. Ex. Local DOT updates or a game studio during a server outage.

That said, twitter has never figured out how to be self-sustaining, even before Musk implemented his air-tight nose dive strategy. And I'm not a fan of public orgs relying on a for-profit platform to communicate with the community. Especially when that platform retroactively decides you need to make an account and log in to view anything on it.

So it's kinda the inverse of OP's question: I get why it's a useful idea even though it's not actually working out.

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