Notices by abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)

every day my customers send me diagrams like this

This textbox is a message and part of a system of messages. Java is installed on over three billion devices. Java is found everywhere, even in your car. We thought we were a powerful culture.

@regehr when I was a student, I pranked my local emacs professor by writing on the marker board and pulling down the projector screen, knowing he’d come in and raise it —

GNU EMACS: Generally Not Used, Except Mainly Aging Computer Scientists

that was over 15 years ago, so you’re really holding the line 😂

our ISP likes to call me on the phone every few months to ask if there's any issues with our internet connection, which I imagine is helpful to the average household but I'm like "sir I am a computer scientist, if you EVER hear from me that there's a problem I couldn't fix myself, you're gonna need a fleet of engineers"

Outlook certificate errors be like:

❌ The certificate is not signed by an authority you trust, and in fact is signed by the Alien Alliance for Human Destruction.
❌ The certificate uses an algorithm deprecated in 1876 due to being solvable on paper by bright kindergarteners.
❌ The expiration date is notated in a calendar unknown to our science.
✅ The certificate has a valid name

here's a little story to brighten your day

Some LLM True Believer generated nonsensical pull requests against like 80 different github repos (mostly games) and became very angry and combative when told that they were just spamming, saying spiteful things like "this is why your project is so stagnant, if this is how you react to contributions."

Someone in my discord took the time to file a spam report against them, and github actually banned them 🎉 I imagine they're seething on reddit right this second.

@foone how much text could Astroboy for the GBA possibly have such that a convoluted custom compression scheme was called for

“Encryption is your friend” — ˙ ͜ʟ˙ added and removed here

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-officials-urge-americans-use-encrypted-apps-cyberattack-rcna182694

Odin having himself a stimmy stim stim with a stick

#dogs #dogsofmastodon

@foone Foone Invents Homestuck

Good news: The Dell firmware update utility definitely checks whether update executables are signed.

Bad news: Dell is posting unsigned update executables to their website labeled “critical” which then fail to install due to the good news

me: hey Linux, why'd the wifi stop?

Linux: wrong password

me: what do you mean wrong password? it wasn't the wrong password when you downloaded all that stuff five minutes ago

Linux: dunno. wrong password.

me: well I am extremely confident that my own wifi's password didn't change in the last five minutes, but here, I will enter it again

Linux: yeah no that's not the password

me: I literally pasted this from your sister Macbook's configuration. She's connected to the wifi, she says it's working

Linux: that's because Macbook is a sluuuuu--

me: *holds down the power button to suffocate Linux and reboots it*

Linux: wow! that was weird. guess you changed the router's wifi password while I was out because it works now

reposting an old hit: a typewriter (yes, they specifically listed it under typewriters and not under the separate home PC section) from a 1991 Christmas catalog... that runs Tetris.

A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.

Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”

when the front matter of a book entirely in the default font says "Typeset in LaTeX"

@foone if you showed up at our high security hardware lab with a USB stick and no badge I’d let you in

Company-wide emails in the hardware security lab:

• I am once again reminding you that just because you can pick a lock doesn’t mean you may
• we definitely own like 17 logic analyzers and yet they’re all missing
• urgent: who is 3D printing all these ominous skulls?
• using million dollar prototype circuit boards as a frisbee does not count as “stress testing”

one of these is the leaked official, original source code of Pokemon Emerald and one of these is a decompile made by hobbyists trying to reverse engineer what the game is doing

and you know I wouldn't be posting this if they were not, apparently, switched at birth.

nvidia: we are very concerned that if you don’t add 2fa to this account we forced you to make, criminals might download these free drivers without giving us accurate marketing demographic details

your bank: sorry, what? you want two tractors?

I have decided the best part of this job is telling the customer “I found the back door you didn’t tell me about in the IoT product you asked me to evaluate”