I am cheering so fucking hard for cyber warfare at this point holy shit. Someone please blow up the internet already it has produced nothing of value

Imagine if we would’ve spent all the resources for computer processors into funding irl tools like high speed rail and efficient transportation systems. Like holy shit we really fucked up, I spent a few days unplugged and everything that people value about the internet can be boiled down to just another circus

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Everything about computational tech is turning me into a-guy.

      Admittedly, technology is one of the few thingsamerikkka does well in, but all that talent is wasted on Silicon Valley: techbros have made me hate the words ‘synergy’, ‘innovation’, ‘disruption’, and ‘wheelhouse’. Those four words should not receive 1st amendment protection.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        technology is one of the few things does well in

        Because they were first and bullied and dominated their way to the top via stolen talent of immigrants from the Global South and the need for advanced machines in the Cold War. There was that brief period where all the technology was new and was being developed in universities by students and researchers. Then corpos came in with NDAs and EULAs and that’s where we are now.

  • iByteABit [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago
    • Put a crapton of ads, spyware, bloat, borderline malware embedded in the OS

    • Push people to Linux

    • More people who didn’t know about FOSS learn about it and appreciate it

    • Make more people realize that capitalists are not needed for production and innovation

    • Empower class consciousness in the working class

    Critical support to Microsoft for taking a stinking hot dump on their own product

  • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    I am cheering so fucking hard for cyber warfare at this point holy shit.

    Professor Farnsworth voice: Good News @stigsbandit34z@hexbear.net! Microsoft was recently hacked by Xi and they made off with US Government documents. The United States is, to put it mildly, pissed off. (PDF)

    In May and June 2023, a threat actor compromised the Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes of 22 organizations and over 500 individuals around the world. The actor—known as Storm-0558 and assessed to be affiliated with the People’s Republic of China in pursuit of espionage objectives—accessed the accounts using authentication tokens that were signed by a key Microsoft had created in 2016. This intrusion compromised senior United States government representatives working on national security matters, including the email accounts of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, United States Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China R. Nicholas Burns, and Congressman Don Bacon.

    Signing keys, used for secure authentication into remote systems, are the cryptographic equivalent of crown jewels for any cloud service provider. As occurred in the course of this incident, an adversary in possession of a valid signing key can grant itself permission to access any information or systems within that key’s domain. A single key’s reach can be enormous, and in this case the stolen key had extraordinary power. In fact, when combined with another flaw in Microsoft’s authentication system, the key permitted Storm-0558 to gain full access to essentially any Exchange Online account anywhere in the world. As of the date of this report, Microsoft does not know how or when Storm-0558 obtained the signing key.

    The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred. The Board also concludes that Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul, particularly in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations. The Board reaches this conclusion based on:

    1. the cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors that allowed this intrusion to succeed;
    2. Microsoft’s failure to detect the compromise of its cryptographic crown jewels on its own, relying instead on a customer to reach out to identify anomalies the customer had observed;
    3. the Board’s assessment of security practices at other cloud service providers, which maintained security controls that Microsoft did not;
    4. Microsoft’s failure to detect a compromise of an employee’s laptop from a recently acquired company prior to allowing it to connect to Microsoft’s corporate network in 2021;
    5. Microsoft’s decision not to correct, in a timely manner, its inaccurate public statements about this incident, including a corporate statement that Microsoft believed it had determined the likely root cause of the intrusion when in fact, it still has not; even though Microsoft acknowledged to the Board in November 2023 that its September 6, 2023 blog post about the root cause was inaccurate, it did not update that post until March 12, 2024, as the Board was concluding its review and only after the Board’s repeated questioning about Microsoft’s plans to issue a correction;
    6. the Board’s observation of a separate incident, disclosed by Microsoft in January 2024, the investigation of which was not in the purview of the Board’s review, which revealed a compromise that allowed a different Review of the Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange Online Intrusion iv nation-state actor to access highly-sensitive Microsoft corporate email accounts, source code repositories, and internal systems; and
    7. how Microsoft’s ubiquitous and critical products, which underpin essential services that support national security, the foundations of our economy, and public health and safety, require the company to demonstrate the highest standards of security, accountability, and transparency
  • bigboopballs [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    I just wish computers had remained a somewhat niche interest for nerds, and not ubiquitous devices that EVERYONE owns and spends like 80% of their time staring at now.

  • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    I’ve really gotten rusty on my computer stuff over the years, but it’s only made it more clear how openly bad and user-unfriendly Windows is. A day will come when I start leaning into Linux or even Apple (I’m a musician, so may as well).

    • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Apple is just another digital landlord with more glossy stripes. They sell shiny e-waste with high powered chips that act more as state secrets than actual technology. The only way to be free is to use a free operating system such as GNU/Linux and support free software projects.

    • TheDoctor [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      I’m a Linux person. Daily drivers for work and for play are both Linux, no dual boot, including my gaming setup. That said, I have a little Mac mini that I got for pretty cheap and keep off the internet as much as possible. It’s for audio production. I just can’t reach the quality of plug-in support on Linux that I can on OS X or Windows. It’s not even close. The compatibility layer stuff just isn’t there yet.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      i wouldnt necessarily say user unfriendliness, its more privacy unfriendliness.

      part of the reason why people use the industry major stuff is because their basic needs is covered for the most part.

      While im enjoying my partial transition to Linux, I would not necessarily call it user-friendly, despite me being technically inclined. How i perceive it, windows is niche and hardware friendly, but modification unfriendly. Linux is friendly for self customization, but falters at times on getting what some people would consider very basic things (e.g how long it took to get monitor features working. like how long it took mixed resolutions working. Hell barely any distro yet is HDR ready) which is why Linux is a game of finding the right hardware to make your experience less of a pain rather than the reverse.

      • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        There has to be a niche for pre-built Linux rigs where all the configuration issues are solved and it just works out of the box. That’s what’s needed IMO to get Linux to been taken seriously outside of a small group of techies.

        • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          I personally see it like this:

          Linux is REALLY good for people who do very basic as fuck shit, basically chromebook adjacent. if all you do is use a browser and use web apps to do work (e.g google docs, google sheets). Linux is amazing. Your hardware never ages and slows down because there isn’t major additions to the OS to bog down the system down the line.

          its also amazing for people who are extremely technically inclined, because you have a lot of tools to fix or create a lot of shit, and modify stuff due to its open sourceish nature.

          where it’s not exactly ideal are for people in the middle. If you use it for specific programs (e.g youre a gamer, you mess with hardware drivers and worry whether your game will even run on linux. Youre an artist, you have to use alternatives to adobe suite. youre a streamer, you have to worry about which hardware you buy because not all off the shelf streaming hardware works on linux, list goes on) then you play this game of merry go round to get something working. Sometimes theres an easy solution, sometimes you have to jump through several hoops.

          • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            5 months ago

            That first group is where I see an untapped opportunity. If someone can build a sleak machine that runs Mint or Ubuntu and boots into a good GUI, has Firefox ready to go, LibreOffice or similar, etc. then it could compete with the likes of Chrome books or all of those “budget” laptops that feel like ass to use.

            No ads, no Spyware, no bloat, no subscriptions. Your grandma’s new favorite laptop. And without needing a Microsoft or Google license maybe it can undercut the existing models on price?