fishstock25 (u/fishstock25)

fishstock25 commented on Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle lcamtuf.substack.com/p/in... · Posted by u/zdw

pammf · 7 months ago

Truth lies somewhere in between. It's also a generalization to think everything related to the “evil-nation” postulation is nothing beyond a conspiracy theory. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Edit: quoted evil-nation since it’s a debatable term usually applied to any country not politically or culturally aligned with some intelligence activity presence.

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

> Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Correct. Not more, not less. Question is what the default assumption is. With enough BS thrown around, the public seems to tend to tilt to "something is fishy" without any (non-debunked) evidence having ever been presented. Doesn't mean it never will be, but until then, a lot of debunked falsehoods shouldn't create more bias than just silence. Sadly, something always sticks.

fishstock25 commented on Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle lcamtuf.substack.com/p/in... · Posted by u/zdw

matheusmoreira · 7 months ago

In the absence of further information, I would totally choose to believe the story.

Corporations cannot be trusted. Proprietary software is bad enough but proprietary drivers is on a whole new level. You really have no idea what those things are doing unless you reverse engineer them.

Here are example of corporations essentially pwning your computer with their "justified and trustworthy" software:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...

Shipped a browser stealer to users and exfiltrated on an unencrypted channel the usernames and passwords of users they deemed to be "pirates".

https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...

https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...

Screenshots your computer screen and exfiltrates the picture to their servers.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...

https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124

https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html

https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit

The driver literally provided privilege escalation as a service for any user space executable.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who trusts these corporations with kernel level access to their computers is out of their minds. I don't trust firmware but at least it's contained in some isolated device.

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

Sorry but you are blurring the lines between an actual malicious attack and a badly designed driver.

The first is what the original claim was, screaming "Russians!" and "Chinese!" at the same time with poor technical understa ding.

The second is what actually happened. It's no worse than inserting a CD-ROM and installing a driver. As bad as that is, and to be criticised in its own right, it's qualitatively different from the first.

Let's not muddy the waters by conflating the two and make the (IMO legitimate) criticism of one of them wade into a conspiracy theory about the other.

fishstock25 commented on Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle lcamtuf.substack.com/p/in... · Posted by u/zdw

tacet · 7 months ago

>It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate

I laughed. While there certainly are very smart people here, HN crowd is pretty diverse and large parts of crowd are startup/business/framework of the week/ai bros folks. Not someone who would know what spi is from the top of their head.

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

I meant relative to a random dude on the street.

fishstock25 commented on Cheap rj45 ethernet to USB adapter contains malware twitter.com/evapro30/stat... · Posted by u/rsecora

necovek · 7 months ago

I liked the graceful admission of error too: https://x.com/evapro30/status/1880123024474796107

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

I like when people put their thoughts so out in the open. Makes it much easier to know whom to not work for, since the work culture must be terrible, if they even publicly express themselves that way.

fishstock25 commented on Nobody cares grantslatton.com/nobody-c... · Posted by u/fzliu

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

I've lived in sweden for a while, I have family ties. People there care, compared to US. I've seen people pick up some random trash on an otherwise spotless sidewalk. I've seen people point out to somebody misbehaving that they are out of line. I've seen city council adjusting sth on a sidewalk within a week after some people living there pointed out a minor issue. People care.

Not everywhere, bot everybody. But enough for me to notice.

fishstock25 commented on Nobody cares grantslatton.com/nobody-c... · Posted by u/fzliu

stdbrouw · 7 months ago

It's probably getting better but the amber-colored LEDs used to be rather inefficient. I've also heard that white lighting can slightly improve reaction times of those in traffic and leads to slightly clearer captures for security cameras. I personally think these benefits do not outweigh how extremely ugly and unwelcoming they are, but "city officials just don't care" is not what led to the adoption of white LED street lighting at all.

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

A lot of wildlife, like birds, bats, insects etc. are really confused by white light. There are some nordic countries which are experimenting with red street lights in outer districts which are showing great promise. (Don't have a reference atm but should be googleable)

fishstock25 commented on So you want to build your own data center blog.railway.com/p/data-c... · Posted by u/dban

kqr · 7 months ago

I wouldn't oppose telling a client "we can meet at your data centre". I would not tell my wife "we need to discuss building our apartment complex" when we are planning interior decorations in our flat.

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

Haha fair enough

fishstock25 commented on So you want to build your own data center blog.railway.com/p/data-c... · Posted by u/dban

inopinatus · 7 months ago

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

When you invite a girl/guy over, do you say "let's meet at my place" or "let's meet at the place I'm renting"? The possessive pronoun does not necessarily express ownership, it can just as well express occupancy.

fishstock25 commented on Is the world becoming uninsurable? charleshughsmith.substack... · Posted by u/spking

BoxFour · 7 months ago

> Perhaps it is, I don't have enough insight to know.

You can spot it in this post, too.

> Is it actually a free market argument?

The argument is:

Large corporation A offers service B at price $C. $C is an extravagant amount, and is due to the greed and inefficiencies of A. A can only charge $C because of regulatory capture, or using capital to elbow out upstarts, or whatever other argument you want to assume (ie it's not a truly free market).

If A should leave the market (forcibly or not), company D can now flourish by offering B at $E, where $E is much less than $C. Because D doesn't have the inefficiencies and greed of A, everyone profits.

Seems like a pretty standard "free markets/Econ 101" argument to me.

> Honest question: Why?

Frequently it’s nothing more than a flimsy pretext for cowardice, a lack of knowledge, or simple indifference.

I don't disagree with you, many topics are complex. Generally though, people dislike those who refuse to take a stance even if it's a weakly-held one (thus Machiavelli's famous advice).

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

> Seems like a pretty standard "free markets/Econ 101" argument to me.

Hm I think I see what you mean. It's a free market argument that includes that some regulation is in place which keeps A in business and keeps D out of business.

But wouldn't the free market corollary then be to remove that regulation so the market can be more free? That's hardly the suggestion coming from the left-leaning perspective, which instead proposes to add more regulation. So the end-to-end argument (including s corollary for what to do) doesn't actually sound free market to me.

fishstock25 commented on Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle lcamtuf.substack.com/p/in... · Posted by u/zdw

dgfitz · 7 months ago

Hmm, why is it sad and scary?

fishstock25 · 7 months ago

It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate and should be one of the last communities to even remotely buy the debunked story.

It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost.

The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.