Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space
Dragon. Agender, otherkin, occasional artist and writer, infosec engineer, in about that order. Avatar by Xeirla. Singular they/them preferred.
Also on @Goldkin (meow.social) for follow requests that don't work here.
Joined Aug 2017
infosec, in re, last boost
The calculus for posting stuff online hasn’t changed much since the 90s. If you don’t want to be on the record doing things that are illegal, for the love of all things good, do not post it to Masto.
Goldkin
boosted
Infosec rambling as a result of 'meta'
“The fediverse” is not a place you have to enter and announce your presence to witness. It’s not a house, it’s not a party. It’s a data stream and most of it is public, and the bits that aren’t are reliant on actors outside of your control to keep private.
Cancelling someone who outed them self as working with the feds isn’t going to keep the feds out. A lot of you know this and to a lot of you it’s symbolic and ideals-based, but it needs to be stated explicitly for those who do not know.
Most of the fediverse is public, most of it is unredactable, most of it is undeniable. Our current security calculus means it’s trivial, once an instance admin (or the wayback machine) gets a hold of your post, to prove you posted it— forever. Even if you delete it.
The fediverse has the same infosec concerns as birdsite did, and more, and worse. It presents opportunities for a better social space, but in the end you need to either limit posts to things you don’t care who sees, or things you’ve done very in depth risk assessment on with deep knowledge the fediverse security and deniability calculus.
That’s a shortcoming of the fediverse and AP. It’s one specific actors are working on fixing, but it’s not there yet and won’t be for some time.
Keep your “stuff” deniable. Keep it off line. The fed taps do not have high visibility accounts like that guy. The fed taps probably do not have accounts.
Fediverse Fed Discourse [3/~]
@mawr I think it’s tolerable to assume if an instance shuts down with no notice, and its admins suddenly go completely dark, they’re complying with an NSL (or equivalent).
Something I wonder about: whether Masto’s data portability can allow folks to rapidly failover to a new instance.
Not sure if this has happened with any nodes yet, but that sort of fault tolerance is worth considering by admins.
Goldkin
boosted
I hope that, whoever you are that takes the time to read this, you know deep within your heart that you deserve to be here.
Take a moment and remind yourself that you exist. That you should exist. That you belong in the world, with all its disappointments and its delights. That you deserve happiness. That you deserve to love yourself simply for the magic of being alive.
I know it's hard work every day to be good to yourself and others. I see how hard it is. I believe in you, and others do too.
Goldkin
boosted
@shoofle Nintendo tried this during the Virtual Boy generation, especially in VB Wario Land (and also in spinoff titles like VB Mario Tennis, and with foreground/background interstitials in VB Mario Bros). The effect worked really well, enough so that Mutant Mudds includes homages to that gameplay.
Recent licensed titles, but notably not Mario, have been playing around with that concept (DK Tropical Freeze, Sonic Mania, SSBU). So I think it’s on their radar?
uspol question, feel free to engage
@eightbitsamurai@elekk.xyz Yes, but only in a context in which we can look back on this through a historic (as opposed to contemporary) lens.
Which I guess is one of the reasons I’ve been buying and saving the daily newspaper whenever these things happen, so I can roll them out 20-30 years from now to give context to these times.
re: uspol, data science (?)
@zetasyanthis I (literally) cannot wait for the Numb3rs explainer on this, because it is going to be so epically cringe-worthy.
re: uspol, data science (?)
@zetasyanthis Definitely. But given internal polling data and one of the most robust advertising databases on the planet, you can do some pretty scary things even with a relatively simple model.
uspol, data science (?)
I guess I’m wondering how nightly news orgs are going to explain how machine learning and inference models work, because so many folks still consider this to be magic.
uspol, data science (?)
While things are kind of bonkers right now, this is an interesting observation about how state actors influence US elections (past and present): https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/02/25/on-august-2-2016-paul-manafort-gave-konstantin-kilimnik-75-pages-of-recent-detailed-polling-data/
One of the questions I’ve had is how polling data made it into the orbit of microtargeting/psyops companies and their state-sponsored counterparts, since that would be needed to go from how people behave (on social media) to how people vote (with high confidence).
He... gave it to them in paper.
@troubleMoney People joke about data companies shipping crates full of hard drives/flash devices, but it is still the fastest data transfer rate available. Other than IP-over-trebuchet, anyway.
Goldkin
boosted
At the risk of resurrecting my previous toot on the matter which ended up killing my notifications for a solid week, the new 1TB microSD cards just announced by SanDisk and Micron would mean that IPoverTrebuchet now supports packets of 225 petabytes
Goldkin
boosted
- a microSD card weighs somewhere around 0.4g
- the highest capacity microSD that's easily available is 256GB
- a trebuchet can throw a 90kg projectile over 300m
90kg worth of microSD cards is 225,000 of them
Therefore a trebuchet can throw 57.6PB of data over 300m
This would have the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created
shitpost, 90s internet reference, slightly nsfw
To this day, I still have to stop myself to remember the difference between VLC and VCL in any given conversation.
Goldkin
boosted
PSA about Russian state propaganda outlets (boost with content warnings for politics, mention of queerphobia)
From @June in two parts
https://kitty.town/@June/101631515854082851
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For folks who don't know: RT and In The Now are actual propaganda designed to be consumable and attractive to progressive Western audiences. They are a facet of the overall propaganda structure that includes Russia Today's internal (within Russia, in Russian) propaganda. Russia Today is much more directly anti-queer, anti-Semitic, etc, and RT filters this into a package DESIGNED to be palatable to English-speaking westerners, with the goal of spreading "just asking questions" style disinfo.
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https://kitty.town/@June/101631522761440479
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Do not share RT and In The Now (which is of course designed explicitly to look like NowThis) content, even if it seems innocuous. If it's something legit sounding, find another several sources for it. Supporting these platforms in any way is helping people do serious harm to queer people and other minorities.
@Aradia Cloudy drizzly when I need to drive, morning foggy when it’s a weekend curled up in bed.
with spoilers
Much-too-confident, socially awkward lizard-betwixt-author-proxy goes to college, generating too much scandal, in candid, unreliable narrator slices of life. All while somehow remaining endearing and being much too relatable about how bizarre and alien social dilemma often feel in real time.
Novelty blogs of that nature thrived on LJ, and I miss those in a way the more general literary and webcomic fandoms don’t quite cover?
An oddly-specific thing I miss from the LJ days is rambling about just how good Sythyry’s Journal (and its addenda) are to people.
Dragon. Agender, otherkin, occasional artist and writer, infosec engineer, in about that order. Avatar by Xeirla. Singular they/them preferred.
Also on @Goldkin (meow.social) for follow requests that don't work here.
Joined Aug 2017
