For those not in the know: this has been a thing for a while, is available to anyone (at least on AWS), and I have very deeply mixed feelings about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located “crowdworkers” to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon.[1] Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site.[2] As of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.[3] It is named after the Mechanical Turk, a chess machine.[4]

Three times++, actually. The second attack was documented to have resumed after the third, with different payload URLs.

https://securelist.com/notepad-supply-chain-attack/118708/

As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.

We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.

To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.

And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.

There are lemonade stands making more money than OpenAI. Right now. In January. In sub-freezing weather.

Or you’d get lucky and some other program you installed happens to have the right dependencies. Just copy them to the application install dir or to C:\windows\win32\ and off you go.

Yeah, stuff like that continues to be the best use-case for windows virtualization. Sounds a lot like trying to upgrade the BIOS or Firmware on an older PC; often the installer is some binary that only runs on Windows of the same vintage.

Backwards-compatibility with older web browsers so engineers can build websites for them, is another. I’ve also heard of industrial automation (e.g. CNC machines) being married to Win2k or WinXP, so being able to run an old OS on new hardware is crucial.

Windows, can I run this 25 year old software I just installed?

I don’t think he knows about second bubble.

Thank you for your service.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

Exactly. That and the “they came for us” poem is too Nazi/Germany coded for a lot of folks, and they fail to see how it applies.

I’ll go as far as to say that 40% of everyone has never been bullied, or did/does try to avoid it by conforming.

This was a lesson I learned at age 9. You get bullied for whatever reason, so you try and change your behavior on the basis of the bullying. Hair, clothes, accent, likes, dislikes, whatever. The following week, the reason you get bullied changes or you outright get bullied for changing. Why? It’s about power, exercising that power, and abusing others; the bully has a bottomless pit somewhere in their psychology and abuse makes them feel better about it. It was never about the stated reason. You can never make this stop by accommodation, and by all accounts, can only make things worse.

It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

True, but what about the “two legs good, four legs bad” variety?

Other than “because of BLM”, cooperation with local law enforcement would be a good reason for ICE to focus efforts there.