mjr
@mjr@infosec.pub
- Comment on ChatGPT Gave Teen Advice to Get Higher on Drugs Until He Died | Futurism 1 day ago:
I wished our lawmakers were of a less senile age so we can write and pass more appropriate laws for this stuff…but not much we can do.
Talk with them. Explain stuff. Vote for better ones. It’s still not much, but it’s better than doing nothing and letting them keep on blundering unchallenged.
- Comment on Age Verification: What’s sold as “online safety” means surveillance via ids checks or face scans. 3 days ago:
It’s almost like this law is more about shutting down small online forums that might organise and agitate against governments than it is about safety online, isn’t it?
- Comment on A new public footpath is planned for one of the UK’s most famous ancient sites 3 days ago:
Council councils in the East of England have been putting out plenty of news releases about the numbers of trees. 🌳🌳🌳 Cynics have been pointing out how many council planted or council required developer planted trees have died over the last few years due to inappropriate species, or simple failures to water during heat waves after planting thirsty young trees in a drought area. 🍂☠️😧 They still get counted as plantings and sometimes so do the replacements 🤦
- Comment on Serial rail fare evader faces jail over 112 unpaid tickets 3 days ago:
That’s really unusual because GoVia usually settle out of court (costs them less) and if not, only charge for the offence where the evader was caught red-handed. Loads of examples of that on rail forums, even for repeat offenders. Multiple prosecution on that scale is rare.
- Comment on I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows 4 days ago:
archive.is is not related to the internet archive and I believe is run by a solo dev with private funding.
I looked into who runs it a bit and oh wow, it’s far far worse than that. If you get a captcha from archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today and allow it scripting permission, it seems to use your browser as part of a DDoS attack. See infosec.exchange/@iampytest1/115902693235671566 and linked pages.
- Comment on RSPB 'shuts down' X account in 'foreseeable future' update 4 days ago:
It’s really not. Bluesky is just a twitter repeat, another centralised service ready to be subverted when it helps the far right.
- Comment on I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows 4 days ago:
Not every time, but far too often. They don’t seem to care that they’re discriminating against people with AV impairment, plus locking out some secure browsers.
- Comment on RSPB 'shuts down' X account in 'foreseeable future' update 4 days ago:
If I’d seen this earlier, I would have congratulated their chugger at the shops! I wonder if that would have gotten back to HQ. Now, are they in the fediverse yet?
- Comment on Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public 5 days ago:
Such as?
- Comment on School pool barricaded as repairs contract ends with work unfinished 1 week ago:
PFI companies like Innisfree usually hire sharper lawyers and accountants than councils, so these projects tend to become scandals where government is fleeced. Here, Innisfree is accused of taking dividends early then letting the PFI company collapse at the end of its term with work not finished and the council having no tools to make the PFI company’s owner save it.
The bigger scandal is some politicians who ignore or deny this danger and still want more PFI and PPP with minimal safeguards.
- Comment on Musk’s Grok AI Generated Thousands of Undressed Images Per Hour on X 1 week ago:
(though: Why TF are you still using that shithole of a site‽).
Maybe some places don’t have alternative suppliers than Walmart? Similarly, some places have governments that still only use the porno social network for some services.
- Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox 1 week ago:
Wait wait wait. Where does Vivaldi say that in any way?
In the bit I quoted from what was linked. Of course, they don’t phrase it like that, but it’s what they’re doing.
Their user security vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.
…which is immediately contradicted lower down the page by most paragraphs in “Type and purpose of data collected by third party vendors”. OK, it’s not personal information, but it is still information that they’re sharing with third parties.
It’s also not clear to me how much notice they give of changes to that policy, either.
That’s privacy not security, though. The basic problem is that we can’t look at all the code, audit it, modify it, test it, check it always behaves well.
No disagreement there, but Vivaldi isn’t repeating anything that’s been tried before. Vivaldi is an employee owned company that wants to succeed, wants to offer the best interface, security and features to the general public it can whilst simultaneously keeping itself uniquely true to its values and survival. Gee, so horrible of it to want to scrape a living for its employee owners. Ridiculousness indeed.
But this has been tried before. I’ve worked in employee-owned software companies for decades and seen many others come and go. Attempting to hold part of your code hostage seems doomed to fail eventually: most go bust, and some get bought out by so-called “carpet-baggers”. To succeed in an ethical way, they need to find a way to get paid to develop the software, not fall into the trap of creating it and then trying to get paid later by keeping part of it secret. I don’t want to be caught in the fallout yet again if another company learns this the hard way and then their software becomes obsolete and lost.
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 1 week ago:
You’re the one talking about LineageOS, not me. I’m only saying the average user now in most countries isn’t walking into a store any more, but buying their phone online, having it shipped to them and following the pictorial setup instructions.
Stores here don’t directly charge for helping you, but they charge more for things: phones in store are often much more expensive than online (especially phone network shops - some of the broker shops sell closer to online prices), and they only sell a limited range of plans which usually don’t include the cheapest ones. The days of networks selling their locked phones much cheaper than unlocked ones seem to be over, when you add up all the charges over the minimum contract term.
Even the website of a phone company can be much cheaper than their own stores, and sometimes you can still get help from the stores if you have problems. The phone companies now all operate multiple brands and the brands without stores are even cheaper (Smarty and Voxi from VodafoneThree, Giffgaff from Virgin-O2, and so on).
- Comment on Cory Doctorow proposes how to break free from US digital domination 2 weeks ago:
It’s worse than that. It was one batch of rolls, specifically yesterday’s rolls.
Read the Bloomberg Chats That Got a Former RBS Libor Trader Paul White Banned for Life - Business Insider – businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-that…
- Comment on Cory Doctorow proposes how to break free from US digital domination 2 weeks ago:
They’ve had several punches in the face from tariffs, but keep insisting they walked into doors and it’s all fine and still love him.
- Comment on NHS England quietly removes open source policy web pages 2 weeks ago:
Getting ready to buy more secret-source systems from dodgy providers?
- Comment on Microsoft's Satya Nadella wants you to stop saying AI "slop" in 2026 2 weeks ago:
Just read “AI LLMs” as “alliums”, think about gardening and be happier!
- Comment on The Trump phone just missed another release date 2 weeks ago:
Potatoes
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 2 weeks ago:
Much more likely to be the phone vendor not releasing this “absolutely basic functionality” to customisers. Some vendors hate their customers having freedoms.
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 2 weeks ago:
That’s not so informative without any idea of your age and thereby the ages of your examples.
Many of them could still follow the assembly/card insertion instruction sheet with pictures that comes in the mail from the phone company, even without knowing which part is called a SIM.
And maybe your area’s phone stores aren’t as notorious for overcharging as the UK’s.
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 3 weeks ago:
You can buy an eSim adapter online for ~$15 off sites such as AliExpress.
And does it share with Chinese intelligence only, or the NSA too? 😉
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 3 weeks ago:
It says €14.99/month for life. And why is eircom now an Irish branch of a Jersey company? Tax dodging?
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 3 weeks ago:
In most countries, getting a phone in a store is something done only by people happy to pay lots extra for a little human help, surely? The average user now signs up online and gets a phone in the mailbox.
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 3 weeks ago:
Or much of the world never had a similar malfunctioning telco.
- Comment on Number of people who say Britons must be born in UK is rising, study shows 3 weeks ago:
There’s soooo many reasons to exile him besides that!
- Comment on Number of people who say Britons must be born in UK is rising, study shows 3 weeks ago:
As media pushes 3 main parties to start pushing fascist ideology. Media “acts” surprised.
Fixed that for you.
- Comment on AI content on Wikipedia - found via a simple ISBN checksum calculator (39C3) 3 weeks ago:
Not watched yet, but I suspect AI edits are using hallucinated citations with ISBNs that don’t even pass a checksum test. AI may improve on this if someone trains them about ISBNs better, but it’s cool if this sort of test weeds some slop out for now.
- Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox 4 weeks ago:
Out of the frying pan, into the Brave fire. You might want to look at the controversy around Brave, if you haven’t.
- Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox 4 weeks ago:
Vivaldi’s core reason can be summarised as
when it comes to large projects that have been around for ages or are household names, people might not even notice the fork. But with Vivaldi’s relatively smaller footprint, we could be easier to overshadow, making our brand more vulnerable.
They put their brand before user security and sustainability. And still have the gall to claim to be ethical. Sorry but that’s absurd. If imagined how it looks from outside their firm, they might wake up. Instead, they’ll probably putter along for a while, then get bought or fail or change direction or something, and their browser will be lost like the Presto Opera before them.
None are so cursed as those who fail to learn from history.
- Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox 4 weeks ago:
Anthony is a she?