This is an incredibly important article and Charlotte Cowles (@charlottecowles) should be praised for writing it. Everybody should read it.
People laughing at her for getting scammed are missing the point, such as what the following picture does. thecut.com/author/charlot…
No, I wouldn't have gotten scammed like her. For one thing, I believe every phone call is a scam, either a criminal one, or some vendor trying to waste my time getting me to pay for things.
But I hate to think what I might fall victim to.
The only real defense is reading articles like the one above. Forget advice about what you should/shouldn't do told to you in a vacuum, instead, read about such stories about what sorts of scams actually happen in the real world.
For example, I can tell you that one CERTAIN way to tell if something is a scam is if they tell you not to tell anybody else (which you can trigger by telling them you are going to talk it over with somebody). A second person can easily see the scam you are falling for.
And that's what happened in the story above.
But telling people this without context doesn't help. They'll just forget about it. You need to educate them on the entirety of the story, not just one part.
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🧵So let's talk about the difficulties Netflix is having streaming the Tyson v Paul fight, how the stream gets from there to your TV/computer. This will a longish thread.
In 1985 on his first fight, TV technology was based upon "broadcasts". That meant sending one copy of a video stream to thousands, often millions of receivers. A city would send the signal to a radio tower and broadcast that signal across a wide area.
In today's Internet, though, everybody gets their own stream. There is no broadcasting, no sharing of streams. Every viewer gets their own custom stream from a Netflix server. That we can get so many point-to-point stream across the Internet is mind boggling.
By the way, the energy density of C4 is 6.7 megajoules/kilogram.
The energy density of lithium-ion batteries is about 0.5 megajoules/kilogram.
C4 will "detonate" with a bang.
Lithium-ion batteries will go "woosh" with a fireball, if you can get them to explode. They conflagrate rather than detonate. They don't even deflagrate like gun powder.
To get a lithium-ion battery to explode (in a fireball) at all, you have to cause physical damage, overcharge it, or heat it up.
Causing heat is the only way a hacker could remotely cause such an event.
I don't want to get into it, but I don't think Travis is quite right. I mean, the original 25million view tweet is full of fail and you should always assume Tavis is right ....
...but I'm seeing things a little differently.
🧵1/n
I'm a professional, so I can take the risk of disagreeing with Tavis. But this is just too dangerous for non-professionals, you'll crash and burn. Even I am not likely to get out of this without some scrapes.
3/n To be fair, we are all being lazy here. We haven't put the work in to fully reverse engineer this thing. We are just sifting the tea leaves. We aren't looking further than just these few lines of code.
The reason IT support people are so bitter is that YOU (I mean YOU) cannot rationally describe the problem:
You: The Internet is down
IT: How do you know the Internet is down?
You: I can't get email.
IT: Is it possible that the email servers are down and the Internet is working just fine? Can you visit Twitter on your browser?
You: Yes, I can visit the twitter website.
IT: Is there any reason other than email to believe the Internet is down?
You: The last time I couldn't get email it was because the Internet was down.
The fact that IT doesn't call you a blithering idiot on every support call demonstrates saintly restraint, even if a little bit of their frustration leaks through.
A lot of good replies to my tweet, but so far this is the best:
Trump is pure evil, the brutality of his answers appeals to ignorant brutes who reject all civilized norms.
But the yang to Trump's yin is a liberal elite like Rosen whose comfortable with the civilized norm of lying politicians who play this game of deceitful debates.
To be fair, Biden (and Obama and Bush before him) have stood up for important democratic principles, the ones that Trump flatly reject. But still, the system has gotten crusty. There's no reason to take presidential debates seriously as Rosen does.
It's the same as all Ben Cotton's analysis's, looking for things he doesn't understand and insisting these are evidence of something bad, that the only explanation is his conspiracy-theory.
I can't explain the anomalies he finds, either, but in my experience as a forensics expert, I know that just because I can't explain it doesn't mean there isn't a simple explanation.
For example, he points to log messages about mismatched versions. I know from experience that such messages are very common, I even see them in software that I write. It's the norm that when you build something from a lot of different software components, that they will not be perfectly synchronized.
That he would make such claims based solely on log messages of mismatched versions proves that he's really not competent -- or at least, very partisan willing to be misrepresent things.
In particular, I disagree with his description of these files. In the C#/.NET environments, creationg of new executables is common. In particular, these are represent web server files. It's quite plausible that as the user reconfigures the website, that these executables will be recreated.
I don't know for certain. I'd have to look at Dominion in more detail. I just know that if any new C#/.NET executables appear in the system that they are not automatically new software.
The certification process looks haphazard and sloppy to me, so it's easy for me to believe that uncertified machines were used in elections.
But nothing in Ben Cotton's report suggests to me that this happened. He's not looking for an explanation for the anomalies he finds, he already has an explanation, and is looking for things that the ignorant will believe is proof of that explanation.