@RustyCrab wasnt a person i was dating lol, was just friends with him and his gf. But they were fun people, travelers, with an interesting story. Still not sure if they were intelligence to this day 😩
@RustyCrab reason i wonder if they are intelligence is because i met them right around a year into 0 internet use while before that being pretty active online, they just sorta showed up, he ran into me on a walk home and after that we were friends. Their line of work was never clear, and they spent a lot of money. Then one day they offered to take me to vegas and live with them for a bit.
@tard@a7 you'd think "how could they possibly have the resources for that" but then they stuck two feds on cream queen for an entire week over a post on an account full of preposterous nonsense
@RustyCrab@tard@a7 The secret service is kind of a special case. It's kind of a security theater thing after the assasination of JFK, same as the TSA after 9-11. They make sure that ANYONE who threatens a certain well known public ficgure is made to regret it, the investigation IS the punishment.
The standard police forces don't usually care unless they have a case they can actually prosecute and win, or I guess if they believe there's someone in imminent danger they'll move to intervene with that. (This is why swatting works-- TBH I think the police themselves on some level LOVE getting swatting calls, doing the whole production, gearing up like a movie montage to go out into the field and be badasses)
@a7@tard not completely out of the question then. I dont know the whole story seems odd. I guess theres a "why you" question. If you think its a welfare check you must have posted some real bangers
@RustyCrab@tard i have politically radical opinions i mostly dont express because i dont care that much about them, its more a "well this world sucks" view point. I think i said a lot of negative things about our society and culture and suggested many radical solutions, also kinda hosted a cult of people really into "magick" and often fed into their more radical views na opinions on them.
@RustyCrab@tard ya now that i think about it, might simply because i knew of members of o9a before they did anything and would often interact with them. not anymore obviously feds, i think thats about dead now and it was never what i liked, i would make fun of them.
@a7@tard not sure when this was exactly but in the late 2010s its kind of wild that most stuff posted online was completely transparent to the feds. Common sense opsec like we know it today didn't really exist and I think even https wasn't universally used so they could just monitor plaintext directly from your house a lot of times. A lot of stuff changed because of snowden exposing prysm.
@mischievoustomato@a7@tard I'm 100% sure its still trivial for them on windows and mac due to OS level compromise. Its just back then they probably didn't even need to do that.
@mischievoustomato@a7@tard I know for a fact they have a bunch of zero days for Linux. They've used them to catch csam distributors.
I think with linux however, dragnetting like they do with proprietary software is a LOT less likely. Its quite a bit harder to hide "if NSA request arrives upload all files" in a distro
@a7@mischievoustomato disappearing CPU cycles
Mysterious grinding of your hard drive for no apparent reason
Constant pinging of remote servers
A slight constant trickle of data uploading that you can't really identify
in short all of the stuff that happens on windows that doesn't happen on Linux
@a7@mischievoustomato mac doesn't seem to be as disgustingly blatant about it as windows is but I have no doubt they are still doing fed telemetry on apple devices. They would be literally stupid not to.
Hardware compromise is trickier. Components are a lot more streamlined and single purpose and their behavior is more directly observable. There is controversy over Intel ME being a backdoor but as far as anybody knows its never been caught doing blatant spyware behavior like windows does. Plus on modern chips you can supposedly turn it off, as many independent researchers and OEMs now claim to. In short, the people who really care about security dont seem to be that worried about it. Given the critical mass of people NOT getting caught on tor with linux I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato "kernel_task" taking high cpu usage is supposed to be throttling based on their comments as to what it is, but its been happening while computer feels cool lately, so its a little ... fishy
@mischievoustomato@a7 its scary by its nature because its running a proprietary version of minix that can read all of your memory, disk and has its own network stack. However we can monitor what it's doing and it doesn't seem to behave how you would expect spyware to behave, also respecting its own turnoff switch (which was required for military purposes).
At a certain point you can't worry too much about these hypotheticals because you'll just be paralyzed.
> At a certain point you can't worry too much about these hypotheticals because you'll just be paralyzed.
yeah, this is why i really dont give a shit about privacy focused stuff. i don't go out there being a retard, i keep a bit of stuff, but i need my convenience
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Honestly I think everything is compromised to a FAR greater degree than we generally know, and the fact we're not seeing people get busted for it is because world fucking leaders are using this network, they're using major market operating systems, they're using fucking windows and macos and iphone. If you can get into what even minor government people are doing, even assuming that the real bigwigs are using much more hardened protocols (which I don't believe they are except in the most extreme situaitons, like military command and top secret stuff) like that is a fuckign WEALTH of information. Just knowing where different people are throughout the day, where they eat, how often they go to the bathroom, if they're sitting or standing, can give you insight into their mental state as well, which is a fucking cheat code for things like negotiations.
If they use this too much, they risk exposing the level of control they have, which may cause everyone to stop trusting these networks. All that great intel they're gathering, almost god-like insight, could dwindle to nothing and their jobs would get MUCH harder. They're not going to waste a resource that valuable just to do something like catching a ring of filipino kiddie fiddlers or stopping cartel networks or like... You know, make the world better in any way. They're gonna use it to ensure the continuity of their regime above all else.
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Sorry this post grew out of a post that got spontaneously deleted but what I forgot to include on rewriting it is that this is what I think the intel ME is. It's almost certainly working backdoor of some kind but they're being really careful to make everyone think "oh it's nothing" and it may even be difficult for a researcher to make it do anything evil in experiments but... I mean, why is it there? It's so suspicious. My feeling is that it works, but they engineered the situation to make it plausible that yeah, it's actually nothing.
@StumbleDonkey@a7@mischievoustomato its there so you can operate servers while they're powered off which is a feature that is actually needed for data centers. The way chip generations work is that every chip in all computers are identical but they just have certain cores disabled. So the "one chip" has Intel ME because theres no reason to make a chip without it. The same chips that go into servers also go into laptops. Its cheaper.
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Oh! I had no idea it was a die restriction thing. None of the articles I read on major tech news sites ever went into that. THAT... is plausible enough to make even me think it's nothing.
So is the ME physically disconnected from the rest of the die?
i've actually known for a while that chips across a generation are essentially the same more or less but tuned down be it to create segmentation or also silicon quality
@mischievoustomato@StumbleDonkey@a7 like chips are just very hard to manufacture and a lot of them come out busted so they just make the busted ones into weaker products. Smart if you ask me
@StumbleDonkey@a7@mischievoustomato I dont know about the hyper specifics of ME. I just got interested a while back and decided to see if we knew how much of a threat it was. You can and should look into it yourself but the tl;dr is that it does not appear to behave maliciously, it respects its own off switch and the exploits that it can do appear to be wildly academic and hypothetical.
Also honestly most of the time the governments approach to survailence has been "haha yeah we're watching you what are you going to do about it". I obviously dont have perfect knowledge but they seem to be somewhat bad at being sneaky.
And really why would they need to be? The vast majority of people are either completely ignorant or they believe that they have magical omnipotence and eyes on everything at all times so why even try
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato >it respects its own off switch
Ah so it's not physically disconnected? Yeah it's for spying. Even if they completely mapped its logic and showed there was no way with standard operations it should be possible for it to turn itself on in response to any signal, I would still believe it's a spy device.
There are physics of what you can do in microchips that scientists don't really understand, and it's not widely known, not really studied.. Now, the example I have is in FPGAs, but surely you could intentionally engineer something in a CPU that induces this effect.
Basically they were doing evolutionary research/AI training, letting FPGAs wire themselves in order to accomplish some task. The successful FPGA programs, however, would not work on other FPGAs. When they looked at the layouts themselves, they made no sense-- rings of logic units that were integral for the chip's operation were not connected to anything that could activate them.
It was because of defects in the individual FPGAs, allowing certain configurations to actually induce current in other parts of the chip, and the evolutionary algorithms had learned to take advantage of this. Something no engineer or programmer, in a normal state of mind, would ever think to even try.
I suspect they could VERY easily implement some kind of hidden activator we would not be able to see if we're only thinking in terms of conventional rules. It would be way too easy and profitable an opportunity to pass up if the knowledge exists.
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Call me retarded if you want but I'm not saying "OH MY GOD THEY'RE COMING FOR US ALL." This isn't paranoia, just my theory for why things are how they are. It seems like it's far more valuable to the people doing this not to come after us-- we're small fry. They wouldn't even NEED anything close to this level of subterfuge to come after us. If it is what I'm saying it is, it would be an operation that goes far above our heads.
If there's a backdoor with the ME, I wouldn't be surprised if it's never even been used in the wild. It's like a nuke they're saving for when they really really need it.
@StumbleDonkey@a7@mischievoustomato I get that but once you get to that level of speculation you are entering unfalsifiable pseudoscience and there just isn't anything that can be reasonably discussed from a threat model perspective except to say "don't use a computer" which might be a real consideration sometimes.
@StumbleDonkey@a7@mischievoustomato my main point was that my annoyance with privacy discussions was trying to convince somebody "stop uploading all of your files directly to government servers" and someone steps in and says "no you may as well keep doing that because of this theory in quantum physics"
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Yeah, I agree people who are the most outspoken on this shit usually know the least (he says after writing 3-4 multi paragraph posts about it)
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Another problem is that the people who get deep into discussions like that seem to just like arguing. Like every thread they go into they're only there to show how much smarter they are than everyone else.
@RustyCrab@a7@mischievoustomato Well the thing is, it is a threat to somebody, just not to us. In the end, as nihilistic as it sounds, your best bet for security is to keep on the good side of the ruling power.
@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato@a7
Yeah, I regret not getting a VPN until 2015. Not that it protects you from government surveilance, but it at least requires them to use parallel construction to avoid exposing their taps at every data center.
@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato@a7
Increased effort makes it less likely they'll fuck you if you are a small fry. If you make it too easy they probaly can't resist though.
@mischievoustomato
I made the nordvpn mistake at the time (freaked out a few years later when I realized I couldn't find who the CEO was). I'm using mullvad now, at least the owners are publicly known and outspoken.
The userspace Linux desktop software stack is far worse relative to the others. Security and privacy are such low priorities. It's really a complete joke and it's hard to even choose where to start in terms of explaining how bad it is. There's almost a complete disregard for sandboxing / privilege separation / permission models, exploit mitigations, memory safe languages (lots of cultural obsession with using memory unsafe C everywhere), etc. and there isn't even much effort put into finding and fixing the bugs. Look at something like Debian where software versions are totally frozen and only a tiny subset of security fixes receiving CVEs are backported, the deployment of even the legacy exploit mitigations from 2 decades ago is terrible and work on systems integration level security features like verified boot, full system MAC policies, etc. is near non-existent. That's what passes as secure though when it's the opposite. When people tell you that Debian is secure, it's like someone trying to claim that Windows XP with partial security updates (via their extended support) would be secure. It's just not based in any kind of reality with any actual reasoning / thought behind it.
@mischievoustomato
NixOS has a hardening guide iirc. I'm not sure how far it can go. It would probably be even more ideal in many ways. The main benefit of basing it off of fedora is assuming that they have good SELinux policies which is a big assumption and I'm not aware of anybody having verified it.
@tard@mischievoustomato yeah "harderning" is where I draw the line on what in recommend to people. Not only is it an overwhelming thing to recommend to normies but it likely does not affect what a normie would be concerned about. If your operating system and browser are not ACTIVELY SENDING YOUR DATA TO THE FEDS that alone is such a huge improvement you likely do not need to do anything else.
@tard@mischievoustomato okay nigga back up
I'm not talking about security exploits.
I am talking about windows itself reading your files and sending them to Microsoft servers for the government to scan
I am pretty sure linux isn't doing that
Its really that simple.
A random Linux distro is immune to the shit normies fall for, aside from glowie spying (which was only confirmed with the Snowden leaks) there's less of a chance some normie will click on the Google Ad to download some shitware.
@PurpCat@mischievoustomato@tard I really fucking hate privacy discussions
They're so hopeless
Its like discussions about healthy diet
You got some nigga eating cheetos for dinner every night
So you set him up to eat brocolli with butter and fish instead
And then 40 retards barge into the conversation to yell about how the butter on the brocolli is bad and the fish doesn't have perfectly balanced omega6/3 ratios well and if that meal doesn't have perfectly balanced macros and micros he may as well just keep eating cheetos for dinner
THERE IS NOTHING ON GODS GREEN FUCKING EARTH THAT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN JUST NOT HAVING YOUR FUCKING FILES DIRECRLY UPLOADRD TO GOVERNMENT SERVERS EVERYTHING ELSE IS AN ASTRONOMICALLY DISTANT SECONDARY CONCERN
@bot@PurpCat@tard@mischievoustomato I agree but if a nigga is eating nothing but junk food you just need to ease them into eating vegetables and butter is an easy way to do that. I am not responding to food related bait after this post.
"It's hard" is literally like "I'm living my best life". You either will or you're too much of a bitch to take responsibility for your own health, choose one.
@tard@mischievoustomato i mean i just think, even if i fed post, they show up, im literally harmless even if they searched all my shit, just find some sex toys and computer parts.
@a7@tard@mischievoustomato they can actually jail you for fedpostong by itself of they just decide they dont like you. I'm shocked they let creamqueen go given their extremely poor understanding how how fedi works and them thinking Cyberia was a "wignat forum"
@RustyCrab@tard@mischievoustomato i mean.. sorta they can, but it has to be believable, this is sorta the line for fed posting that is unclear, if they come to your house and you have no guns, no history of purchasing guns, what ever it is is 1000k miles away, and you dont have a car or money, your claim of a shooting would be unbelievable and legally ok.
@roboneko@a7@tard@mischievoustomato yeah thats my response to these people who "aren't doing anything wrong". You dont need to do anything wrong for them to hold you in a jail cell for 6 years without trial.
@RustyCrab@roboneko@tard@mischievoustomato i mean i agree with you, my main point is : threat model low, and im partially putting these points out there "feds dont bug me for this conversation"
@a7@mischievoustomato@roboneko@tard honestly I try to be more of a positive polly on privacy stuff because I really don't think its as bad as people believe. If you just use a standard computer with linux, a decent browser and a sane vpn you are 99% of the way there to "true privacy" and likely immune to the more obvious forms of dragnetting. Anything beyond that depends on specific threat model and very easily derails into schizophrenia.
i just use it because it has window shadows on wayland and vaapi decode on wayland, and is more reliable and performant than firefox (i wish i was kidding)
good point. I do still depend on sync between my phone and laptop though, a bit. I do already run Google services on my phone so... (and no it's not feasible to not run them)
@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato@a7@tard back in the mid '10s for like a year I would sometimes see a strange network connection to my main (windows) machine that I couldn't track down or see anywhere else on the network and this was concurrent with a funny car being parked in my neighbor's driveway and that sure was weird
@RustyCrab@tard i also have a childhood arrest for terrorist threats. i was pulled into "random" screening line for TSA for years. Last plane trip they didnt.
@a7@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato rofl I nearly got kicked out of public school in 9th grade because I told people "I know how to build a nuclear bomb" and in a telephone game loop it changed to "<bajax> said he was gonna blow up the school!" And being an idiot I was like "yeah I'm totally gonna <don't want to type the whole thing out so as not to trigger an algorithm>." They ended up suspending me for two weeks.
@StumbleDonkey@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato basically similar, i described how to make poor mans thermite and made an off hand joke about not coming to school next tuesday, taken very seriously by some one that heard us talking.
@a7@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato rofl yep, I knew how to make thermite too, as well as napalm and some drugs. Never actually did any of it when I was in school.
Learned about it all from a text file my uncle accidentally left on an old hard drive he gave me-- "The Anarchist's Cookbook". He had to apologize profusely to my parents for getting me kicked out of school lol. He was a cool uncle though.
@StumbleDonkey@RustyCrab@mischievoustomato ya basically i recited the Styrofoam and diesel fuel recipe, we made it one time but it was years before that and it was with my brothers, we just caught electronics on fire we thought we couldnt burn.
@RustyCrab@a7@tard Yeah HTTPS everywhere was pretty recent it seems like so long ago that we were all on HTTP only but it's been less than a decade.
The only reason google started doing HTTPS everywhere was because ISPs and other network middlemen were editing the resources in transit and fucking with a lot of google's web apps-- for example to add extra ads. It was never a security thing and if not for that we'd probably still be on HTTP.
@rher@a7@tard that was actually a typo and it was OnA or Opie and Anthony forums. A group of political radicals exposing a criminal empire ran by a man grinding black children into pepperoni
@RustyCrab@a7 natural born gamblers: instead of being about some mass murderers it's about a couple who just gambles every fucking day only to lose it all
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