birthday_attack
@birthday_attack@lemm.ee
- Comment on fossil fuels 6 months ago:
This new report is the same story all over again. From the linked report:
Applying this factor to the standardized production results in the emissions from the combustion of marketed products, comprising nearly 90% of total emissions tracked by the database. These are scope three category 11 emissions, corresponding to “use of sold products”
The vast majority of emissions attributed to these companies, nearly 90%, are those emitted by the consumers who buy the crude oil/natural gas/etc. But news outlets are obscuring that fact in their headlines, which makes it seem like the gas companies themselves are wholly responsible.
- Comment on Desperate TikTok lobbying effort backfires on Capitol Hill 8 months ago:
The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”
There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”
Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.
But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.
- Comment on Desperate TikTok lobbying effort backfires on Capitol Hill 8 months ago:
TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That’s one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.
A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.
So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.
- Comment on Ex-CIA computer engineer gets 40 years in prison for giving spy agency hacking secrets to WikiLeaks 9 months ago:
When people claim that leaks “get people killed,” they’re referring to when undercover agents are identified while they’re in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.
The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.
You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that’s really tenuous. It alap assumes that the CIA isn’t constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.
- Comment on Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank - ‘You won’t need a bank account... it would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year.’ 1 year ago:
Not to mention that the existing Twitter infrastructure was already incredibly insecure before Musk even took over.
Twitter does little to monitor for so-called insider threats, employees or contractors who use their positions in the company to steal information, and instead leaves them “virtually unmonitored."
Twitter suffered security incidents significant enough to warrant a report to a government agency about once a week, with 20 breaches in 2020 alone.
Twitter devs can already take over user accounts since they all have prod admin access (which they need because Twitter still has no QA or staging environments). I can only imagine the potential for abuse once people’s finances get tied together with their account.