China targeted and might have held for months access to the infrastructure used to do wiretaps on the AT&T and Verizon networks.

This is a huge "told you so" moment for the cryptographic community that has been saying that such infrastructure does present a huge risk to national security. China reportedly used this capability for intelligence collection, obviously without a warrant ...

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=C5ywbp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

A simple technique called “POSSE” offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party social media platforms.

https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/

#POSSE #indieweb

A new take on the sextortion email scam includes pictures of the targets’ houses, but don’t fall for it. You probably haven’t been hacked. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/new-email-scam-includes-pictures-your-house-dont-fall-it

y'all I just almost got phished by a really plausible looking domain renewal email impersonating gandi.net

the only reason I didn't get phished is because I logged directly into gandi because I had some other stuff to do instead of clicking the link. (The email was also in french which I'm not sure if that helped or hurt the scam TBH)

Keep your guard up, especially if you are on gandi.net (and turn on 2FA!)

john mulaney was at the salesforce conference and the transcript of him reading the attendees to filth is so cathartic https://sfstandard.com/2024/09/19/comedian-john-mulaney-brutally-roasts-sf-techies-and-ai-at-dreamforce/

📦 #Platypush 1.3.0 is out!

This release turns procedures into first-class citizens.

Procedures are the bread-and-butter of Platypush customizations. They allow you to specify some custom logic that can run within the application, either from structured requests or code snippets - both #Python and #YAML scripts are supported. They are akin to recipes in #IFTTT and tasks in #Tasker.

You can call them from an event hook when a certain condition is met, from a cronjob or an alarm, from stand-alone scripts, from other procedures, and so on.

This release improves the integration of procedures into the UI, turning them into entities that can be controlled from the entities panel - and, soon, embedded into custom dashboards.

It also introduces a new powerful procedure editor, which allows you to visually create your automation routines through an intuitive UI with drag-and-drop support (a big part of this release has been about getting drag-and-drop to work nicely on mobile too). The new UI supports nested if/for/while blocks, break/continue/return, setting context variables, variable name autocompletion, export to YAML (if you prefer to have your procedures stored in the configuration rather than the db), and more.

This UI has been inspired by the job done by Joao Dias on Tasker (I’ve always wanted to have a similarly powerful block-based UI to create custom routines also on desktop/server), and in part by IFTTT’s recipe editor.

Python procedures can also be easily managed through a new file editor component that allows you to precisely navigate to their definition.

This release also includes a new file browser component. You can now browse your files on the Platypush instance, create/edit/delete/upload/download them directly from the Platypush UI, even if you don’t have SSH access to the machine.

Happy hacking!

Reading @pluralistic 's latest was revelatory and infuriating. #longread

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/

We've had run ins with PBMs in our household so had some sense that they are clearly another way healthcare in the US is profoundly broken. I had no idea the depth of it. I felt my blood pressure climb realizing why we have deductibles and who ultimately benefits from them. Because of course.

Let's hope the action against PBMs by the FTC goes somewhere.

For over three years we've defended ourselves against a billion dollar oil company's attempts at forcing us to give them our internal organizational documents.

As the case heads to the Minnesota Supreme Court we need your support now more than ever.

https://donorbox.org/unicorn-riot-nodapl-legal-defense