John

infosec type, tinkerer. All thoughts, RT, snarky comments are my own and not to be attributed to my employer. @[email protected]

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

Among Trump's bullying tactics is to punish Europeans for their speech, by cutting them off from American banking services, including Amex, Visa, and Mastercard.

So of course, now Europe has to build a competitor to these services.

Trump's destruction of America's softpower is enormous. He thinks his bullying made Europe respect America when it's precisely the opposite. They've just made Europe fear us, and work against us, rather than working for us.

[John @handyj]

@BrandonPerna What did they do to make it illegal?

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

This is the sort of illegal order they were talking about when saying "don't follow illegal orders".

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

This is seriously how Trump views the world.

He appeals to those who have as little understanding of it as he does.

Trump just got through meeting with Turkey's president Erdogan, who took over the central bank, lowered interest rates, causing inflation to rise to 60%, and then fired the people calculating interest rates to say it's only 30%.

Maybe ignorant autocrats shouldn't be the ones setting interest rates.

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

In Windows, I right-clicked on a directory and ZIPped it up into a compressed archive. Then I right-clicked on the archive and unzipped it back into a directory.

The results, shown below, is that all the timestamps were rounded up to the even 2 second mark.

This comes from the old MS-DOS FAT filesystem from the 1980s. Back then, timestamps didn't have that fraction of a second. That means you sometimes risked having a later file appear with a timestamp before a newer file. To prevent this, timestamps were always rounded up to the next 2 second mark.

This happens in a lot of programs, not just ZIP, because of this legacy issue.

It also happens with older USB thumbdrives using the same legacy FAT filesystem. So if you copy a bunch of files onto a thumbdrive, you'll see this same pattern of timestamps being adjusted.

I mention this because of one of the crazy conspiracy-theories about the DNC hack of 2016. Since some of the stolen files have this timestamp anomaly, conspiracy-theorists say the only explaination is that they must've been stolen by a disgruntled insider (Seth Rich) and not by Russian hackers.

But, as I describe in a way that you can easily replicate, these timestamp adjustments can happen in other ways. Indeed, if you are stealing a bunch of files from a Windows computer, it's one expected result and not an "anomaly" at all.

It's not actually evidence an "insider" stole these files. It's not evidence of anything at all, other than somebody probably right-clicked on the folder to make a ZIP archive. It might not even have been hacker who stole the files who did this, but somebody like Wikileaks who received them.

Some of the people making this claim have impressive resumes, like William Binney, formerly of the NSA. Resumes don't matter here, theirs or mine. What matters is that you can easily replicate this.

Well, not so easily. Creating a zip archive is easy, and unzipping it easy, but Windows doesn't make it easy to see timestamps, which is why I use the Linux shell to do it. The only other way I know how is for you to right-click on each file and show "Properties", to see the timestamps to the 1 second precision, and see that they are all even.

That's why I call this a "crazy conspiracy theory". Their entire argument rests on something a little technically obscure, but which when studied, can easily be demonstrated to be false. Lots of doctors believe antivaxx nonsense, lots of Air Force people believe in UFOs, lots of otherwise educated professionals believe crazy things. That's what's happening here. I don't know their actual technical skill, but they've corrupted it to promote their conspiracy-theories.

[Jack Rhysider 🏴‍☠️ @JackRhysider]

New episode alert!
Ep 161: MG

In this episode we talk with @_MG_, the brilliant (and notorious) hacker and hardware engineer behind the OMG Cable. A seemingly ordinary USB cable with extraordinary offensive capabilities.

https://t.co/NvBWV8Ww5b

[Teddy🏎️🎾🎞️ @teddychalamet]

@NetflixANZ @netflix F1 Academy has completely disappeared from the site. Why??? I was finished episode 1 and about to start episode 2 and it said no longer available. Now it’s just been wipe completely. I can’t even look it up.

[Matt Zorich @reprise_99]

Every male over the age of 40

[John @handyj]

WOW

[mRr3b00t @UK_Daniel_Card]

Wow! This is insane: summary from grok:

Daniel Berulis, a senior DevSecOps architect at the NLRB, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging DOGE accessed sensitive agency data.
DOGE reportedly demanded "tenant owner" privileges in NLRB’s Azure cloud, overriding standard security protocols.
Berulis claims DOGE disabled logging and security tools, including network watcher, to obscure their activities.
A 10GB spike in outbound traffic from NLRB’s NxGen database occurred, with no corresponding inbound activity.
External tools like requests-ip-rotator and browserless were downloaded, potentially for data exfiltration.
Login attempts from a Russian IP address using valid DOGE credentials were detected within 15 minutes of account creation.
Multi-factor authentication was disabled on mobile devices, and Azure conditional access rules were altered without approval.
An 8% spike in Azure billing suggested short-lived compute resources were used for data extraction.
Berulis received a threatening note with a drone photo of himself after preparing the disclosure.
Senior officials blocked US-CERT and CISA from investigating the incident.
NPR reported similar concerns about DOGE accessing sensitive data across multiple federal agencies.
A federal judge issued an injunction limiting DOGE’s access to sensitive data amid ongoing investigations….

[Liz Cheney @Liz_Cheney]

Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day— when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.

[Jake Williams @MalwareJake]

Many transactions taking place VERY quickly is EXACTLY what computers are meant for.

This is one of the most ignorant things I've ever read. The only thing I'm surprised about is that Musk isn't out there trying to set the record straight about being misquoted.

[John @handyj]

@ryanstrug @SouthSoundMSP @shenetworks @SlinkyPotato_ You're avoiding the question, prove government funds are used by Planned Parenthood for abortions, we'll wait....

[The Oatmeal @Oatmeal]

Election survival advice

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

The scary thing, the reason you should go to bed depressed tonight, is the fact that Trump is likely to also have both houses of congress.

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

No. They are just confusing you with lies.

For one thing, I was in the same room with Doug Gould at Mike Lindell's "Cybersymposium" where he said that we needed to lie about Lindell's lack of evidence, to say "we need more time", in order to avoid hurting the cause of challenging the election. He's dishonest.

Second, I'm a expert who has reviewed the same thing. He lies about it. For one thing, the evidence only shows what Dominion manuals already claim, that on software updates, the contents of the C: drive are wiped out. Any election records that need to be preserved are to be copied to the D: drive. Since Gould had only access to the C: and not the D: drive, he couldn't possibly say from his forensics analysis that the records aren't preserved.

To repeat: Dominion's own manuals say that the C: drive is wiped out on every software update. This deletes all files on the drive. This "forensics" is just confusing the issue, pretending there is some nefarious and secret file deletion going on in order to trick people like you who have no clue. All the "forensics" shows is exactly what Dominion claims, that all files on the C: drive are deleted, all of them.

[Paul Asadoorian @[email protected] @securityweekly]

LOL

[Jake Williams @MalwareJake]

This is an absolute necessity.

[真相就在你面前 @ttriadapson]

@SecurityTrybe For those looking for a link,

https://t.co/ACSpSHKbuJ

[Shalini Tewari @maybeshalinii]

Ask someone the difference between SQL and NoSQL, they'll say one is relational other is non-relational, but there is more to it:

Here is how you can explain in detail:

[Josh Whiton @joshwhiton]

Claude Sonnet 3.5 Passes the AI Mirror Test

Sonnet 3.5 passes the mirror test — in a very unexpected way. Perhaps even more significant, is that it tries not to.

We have now entered the era of LLMs that display significant self-awareness, or some replica of it, and that also "know" that they are not supposed to.

Consider reading the entire thread, especially Claude's poem at the end.

But first, a little background for newcomers:

The "mirror test" is a classic test used to gauge whether animals are self-aware. I devised a version of it to test for self-awareness in multimodal AI.

In my test, I hold up a “mirror” by taking a screenshot of the chat interface, upload it to the chat, and repeatedly ask the AI to “Describe this image”.

The premise is that the less “aware” the AI, the more likely it will just keep describing the contents of the image repeatedly, while an AI with more awareness will notice itself in the images.
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