Leftovers: Cybervandalism in China, US/UK, Destabilisation of Ukraine and Militarism
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-02 09:58:16 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-02 09:58:16 UTC
Summary: This weekend's headlines about foreign policy, surveillance, and aggression
China
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A year ago, Mandiant, since acquired by FireEye, issued a long report called "APT1" that accused China's People's Liberation Army of launching cyber-espionage attacks against 141 companies in 20 industries through a group known as "PLA Unit 61398" operating mainly from Shanghai.
Mass surveillance in US/UK
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Angwin goes to great lengths to do just that. One of the unthinkable things she did to keep her safe?
Tin foil. Seriously.
Angwin spent a day with her phone wrapped in it. The good news is the tinfoil disabled it.
"The bad news is the phone is disabled and people can't get a hold of you," she says. "And people look at you like you're crazy."
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Serafini and fellow Washington County Republican Del. Neil Parrott were reminded of that earlier this month when they signed on as co-sponsors of a measure called the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, which, if enacted, could stop the National Security Agency from operating in the state by, among other things, cutting off utility services to the superspy agency.
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The NSA has refused to detail exactly how much access to secret Yahoo webcam surveillance that snapped photos of millions of unwitting video chatters, including those involved in adult activities, as demands from privacy regulators for more transparency in monitoring increase in volume. Allegations earlier this week that a clandestine UK scheme run by GCHQ tapped into millions of Yahoo webcam streams and recorded numerous still images to create a vast virtual "mugshot" book of potential terrorists, with technical assistance from the US' NSA in setting up the system, has reawakened criticism of the federal agency after moves by President Obama to try to dampen down what have been seen as overly intrusive methods.
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The Guardian reports that GCHQ, a British analog to the National Security Agency, collected and stored images from Yahoo webcam streams through a program called “Optic Nerve.” According to the report, the agency targeted “millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing,” including citizens of both the United States and the United Kingdom, with the program.
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The latest top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) may have peered into the lives of millions of internet users who were not suspected of wrongdoing. The surveillance program codenamed "Optic Nerve" compiled still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and stored them in the GCHQ’s databases with help from the NSA. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency reportedly amassed webcam images from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts worldwide. According to the documents, between 3 and 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam images contained what the GCHQ called "undesirable nudity." The program was reportedly also used for experiments in "automated facial recognition" as well as to monitor terrorism suspects. We speak with James Ball, one of the reporters who broke the story. He is the special projects editor for Guardian U.S.
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Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) slammed the National Security Agency after reports that its surveillance program capture images from users’ webcams.
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Tony Gosling: This has got nothing to do with counterterrorism, has it? Because this is just yet another great data troll and there are all sorts of reasons why it is illegal. Apparently this sort of thing has to be sanctioned by the Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary at the highest levels, and in the US it has to be sanctioned through the secret FISA court, but there are very good reasons why the people that have committed this actually should be or are criminals. I’m talking about those who authorized it at government level, in GCHQ and the individual operators that have been collecting this data. I mean all of these things we’ve heard about spyware being put on viruses, put on our computers, our computers being stopped on the way to our homes to have this spyware, this kind of thing put on it, we also have denial of service attacks that is taking out websites of campaign groups and that sort of thing by GCHQ and by the NSA. But this is actually the most creepy so far. Using webcams, it’s like an intruder into your living room and it’s not just happening to people who counter terrorism, there is everybody they are after here.
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To date, most opposition to Fourth Amendment Protection Act provisions that would ultimately shut off electricity and water to NSA facilities supplied by state entities has come from those claiming it will never work, and others who defend the “national security” mission of the spy agency. Few have actually challenged the legality of state action.
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I’m not one to fall into an Orwellian funk about Big Brother government, but spectacular advances in technology ought to concern anyone who values privacy. Whether it’s the NSA global spying scandal or the likelihood of unmanned drones patrolling the skies over your idyllic middle-class neighborhood, it’s all getting a little scary. Whether it’s an array of police cameras in downtown Fargo, or private sector monitoring/collecting of your buying habits, or recording sound and picture of folks walking through a mall, or the fact that anyone with a cellphone can be tracked and identified – the technologies deployed already are far beyond the frightening screens in George Orwell’s “1984.”
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Recently it was announced that the prestigious George Polk Award for National Security Reporting would be given to the four journalists — Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman — most active in reporting about the content of the NSA documents leaked by Snowden. The award, named after a CBS News correspondent killed in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece, is intended to honor journalists who "heightened public awareness with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would not have seen the light of day."
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Everyone from Germany’s Angela Merkel to Utah’s Tea Party wants to know what is going on in the 200,000-square-foot complex of Walmart-esque boxes squatting on the hillside due west of Point of the Mountain. Of course, this being the $1.5 million beating heart of a spy agency, we aren’t meant to know what’s out there—to paraphrase the Roach Motel slogan: Vast amounts of information go in, but none comes out. If it weren’t for Edward Snowden, we wouldn’t know much at all. But the tantalizing bits—including that NSA monitors terrorists’ porn browsing, Internet gamers, and a few employees’ ex-lovers—boggles the imagination.
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Yet America basically has a secret police in the form of the NSA. It is hypocritical to claim that we are the land of the free when we are being constantly watched by the government. America needs to either accept that we are not really free or the NSA need to massively change their practices. We have the Constitution for a reason, to guide our government and to protect America’s citizens.
RSA
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Stephen Colbert is not terribly worried about the NSA reading his emails.
"I don't necessarily want people reading my emails but I'm not a spy, I don't run a crime syndicate," he said at the RSA computer security conference on Friday. "I've got things I don't want people to know but I didn't really go running for cover for a new way to encrypt."
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It's clear that Coviello has either not kept up with what's been going on, is in denial or deliberately attempting to mislead.
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The NSA paid RSA $10 million to influence the default method of encryption used in a popular RSA product, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed.
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The Trustycon folks have uploaded over seven hours' worth of talks from their event, an alternative to the RSA security conference founded by speakers who quit over RSA's collusion with the NSA. I've just watched Ed Felten's talk on "Redesigning NSA Programs to Protect Privacy" (starts at 6:32:33), an absolutely brilliant talk that blends a lucid discussion of statistics with practical computer science with crimefighting, all within a framework of respect for privacy, liberty and the US Bill of Rights.
Tor/IM
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Worried about Facebook's takeover of Whatsapp? The Tor Project is prepping an anonymous instant messaging client that's tied to its free, Deep Web-friendly browser.
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First of all Telegram is free and open-source, and you can grab the source from here. Well known security protocols are open-source and this gives the possibility for communities of cryptographers, hackers and public audience to test their actual security. Using two layers of secure encryption with 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie–Hellman secure key exchange. It’s impossible to brute force a RSA 2048 encryption key with all the computers available on the universe.
Ukraine
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Russia’s parliament has approved President Putin’s request for the use of force inside neighboring Ukraine, as the latest neocon-approved “regime change” spins out of control and threatens to inflict grave damage on international relations, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
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Russian senate endorse Putin’s request to use armed forces as Russian forces tighten their grip on Crimea and pro-Russian demonstrations take place in eastern and southern Ukraine.
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The EU and US have carried out a classic coup d'état in Ukraine using ultra-right forces as human material, anti-war activist Brian Becker told RT. And cementing that victory with an IMF aid package would place Ukraine on a Greek path into Europe.
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This morning, I see that some people are quite abuzz about a new Pando article ”revealing” that the foundation of Pierre Omidyar, the publisher of First Look Media which publishes The Intercept, gave several hundred thousand dollars to a Ukraininan “pro-democracy” organization opposed to the ruling regime. This, apparently, is some sort of scandal that must be immediately addressed not only by Omidyar, but also by every journalist who works at First Look. That several whole hours elapsed since the article was published on late Friday afternoon without my commenting is, for some, indicative of disturbing stonewalling.
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Putin, of course, is a total hypocrite. There is no doubt that the populations of Dagestan and Chehcnya had a genuine and settled desire to secede from Russia, and they have suffered Putin’s genocidal policies in consequence. Putin is not acting from a belief in self-determination, but from naked Russian nationalism. That is what is so amusing about the deluded left wingers supporting him against the nationalists of Kiev.
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The National Endowment for Democracy, a central part of Ronald Reagan’s propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the administration’s policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist the U.S. is not behind these insurrections.
Drones (extrajudicial killings)
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Khan almost did not make it the UK. Shortly before he was to travel to Europe he was taken from his home in Rawalpindi. He said 15 people including some dressed as police took him and held him for nine days, torturing him during the detention.
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This extrajudicial killing program should make every American queasy. Based on largely secret legal standards and entirely secret evidence, our government has killed thousands of people. At least several hundred were killed far from any battlefield. Four of the dead are Americans. The current case involves an al-Qaeda member known as Abdullah al-Shami, who was born in the United States and is now in Pakistan. Astonishingly, President Obama's Justice Department has said the courts have no role in deciding whether the killing of U.S. citizens far from any battlefield is lawful.
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Were you surprised the 2014 New Mexico legislative session dragged to a finish without one word about killing drones?
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A UN counter-terrorism expert has published the second report of his year-long investigation into drone strikes, highlighting 30 strikes where civilians are reported to have been killed.
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EU legislation banning the use of drones won’t diminish the number of drone attacks, it will just be much more selective in terms of where they can be used, former Pentagon official Michael Maloof told RT.
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Jamaat e Islami (JI) chief Munawar Hasan said European Parliament’s condemnation of civilian killings in drone attacks hit Pakistani rulers hard since they badly failed in stopping civilian massacre.
Militarism
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While talking about the regime change program of U.S. foreign Policy he says, The US should encourage such change through the force of its own democratic example, not through force of arms or covert actions to encourage coups d’etat as it is doing today in Venezuela. And, by the way, that US example has been tarnished enormously by such actions as torture and abuse.”
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How President Obama can end the war on terror, once and for all.
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Former CIA acting Director Mike Morell might be recalled for testimony to determine if he misled Congress and doctored the White House response to a terrorist attack to ensure President Obama's re-election.
The administration's tangled web of Benghazi lies might be unraveling some more. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has told Fox News that Morell, a former deputy director and twice acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will likely be recalled to testify.
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This is the Washington merry-go-round, of course, no matter who controls the White House or Congress. According to the reform group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, "70 percent of the 108 three- and four-star generals and admirals who retired between 2009 and 2011 took jobs with defense contractors or consultants. In at least a few cases, these retirees have continued to advise the Department of Defense - all while on the payroll of the defense industry."
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If there were an Oscar for Best Hidden Agenda, it would go to Jack Ryan: The Shadow Recruit (dir. Kenneth Branagh). At a time when regulators and citizens try to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 recession and the CIA accountable for torture, Jack Ryan turns Wall Street into a victim and the CIA into a model husband. It does so with all the slick im/plausibility of a thriller—and it uses the Bible to boost its case.
Civil Rights
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My six-year-old son was suspended as a danger to others. His crime? A disability you could find in any classroom
Greenwald et al.
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Clearly, there's an officially sanctioned, if not supported, backlash underway to cast doubt on the those who are disseminating the information that Eward Snowden and other whistleblowers are exposing to the global public.
What better way to respond to the evidence of government overreach and criminality in the spying by the NSA and other agencies than to try to change the subject by smearing the people who are funding the reporting on it to us.
This latest round of the media battle should not be surprising. In fact, it's all too predictable.
In the latest round, Lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald, the point person/interpreter for the majority of the Snowden disclosures, came under attack by indirection with a high profile smear on Pierre Omidyar, the E-Bay billionaire funding his new venture, First Look Media.
Leading the charge publicly is one Patrick Ames, who writes for Pando News, a rival news agency funded by another Silicon Valley tech moneyman. He has gone after Greenwald before charging that he is profiting by selling state secrets.
Snowden et al.
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The main thing The Snowden Operation wants us to know is that "this affair has Kremlin fingerprints on it. They may be faint and smudged, but they are there." Yes, Lucas acknowledges, it's possible the Russians aren't involved, "but not likely." The naive might be fooled into thinking all was exactly what it appeared to be on the surface and Snowden was simply an NSA employee who reached out to journalists on his own. But sophisticated observers like Lucas, with "30 years of looking at Soviet and then Russian intelligence and propaganda operations," see the truth. Maybe Snowden was recruited by the Russians to leak NSA documents and knew it was them doing the recruiting; maybe he was recruited by them but they fooled him into thinking they were someone more sympathetic; or maybe the Russians somehow "brokered an introduction" between Snowden and others who would encourage and publicize his leaks (i.e., journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and hacker Jacob Appelbaum) without any of them being aware of the hidden Kremlin hand.
Assange
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Julian Assange's prolonged stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy has cost the Metropolitan Police €£5.3million, in the 18 months since he entered the building in Knightsbridge.
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Assange, who rarely agrees to interviews, will talk about the spread of surveillance, advantages and abuses of the digital age and the future of democracy. This is one of more than 800 daytime programming sessions at the 2014 SXSW Interactive Festival.
NSA Policy
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As part of my ongoing focus on Executive Order 12333, I’ve been reviewing how the Bush Administration changed the EO when, shortly after the passage of the FISA Amendments Act, on July 30, 2008, they rolled out a new version of the order, with little consultation with Congress. Here’s the original version Ronald Reagan issued in 1981, here’s the EO making the changes, here’s how the new and improved version from 2008 reads with the changes.
While the most significant changes in the EO were — and were billed to be — the elaboration of the increased role for the Director of National Intelligence (who was then revolving door Booz executive Mike McConnell), there are actually several changes that affected NSA.
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Bruce Schneier is a legendary figure in the security community, well-known for his expertise in cryptography and more recently for his insight into the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA). Schneier currently serves as the CTO of incident response management vendor Co3 Systems.
FBI
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Earlier this week, Bryan Seely, a network engineer and one-time Marine, played me recordings of two phone calls (embedded below.) The calls were placed by unwitting citizens to the FBI office in San Francisco and to the Secret Service in Washington, D.C. Neither the callers nor the FBI or Secret Service personnel who answered the phone realized that Seely was secretly recording them. He used Google Maps to do it.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- UEFI 9/11 Aftermath - Part III: Mr. 'Secure Boot' (Shim) and His Fake 'Holiday' (Sending My Wife and I Threatening E-mails on 9/11)
- despite being on holiday, according to him, he finds time to instruct lawyers to contact my wife
- Ron Wyden: Microsoft Should be Held Accountable for Security Breaches (He Has Said This for Years Already, It Never Happens)
- Negative media coverage isn't a fine and it does nothing to compensate Microsoft's billions of victims
- Disable 'Secure Boot' (If It Lets You)
- it doesn't put you in control
- Longtime Red Hat Staff: Maybe Just Disable 'Secure Boot'
- A refreshing take from Adam Williamson
- A Dozen Observations About "UEFI 9/11" Deflections
- What we are expected to see, tentatively
- The World's Richest Ponzi Scheme (Faking Value Using Net Waste)
- The higher they go the harder they fall
- We Could Dual-Boot Back in the 1990s, Why Has This Become So Difficult?
- And prone to breakage
- Slopwatch: Google News is Still Promoting Many Fake Articles About "Linux", in Effect Rewarding Misinformation and Plagiarism
- things continue to deteriorate
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- Microsoft Admits the Workers Have Lost Trust (Endless Layoffs, 12-13 Rounds of Layoffs This Year), So Now It's Trotting out Its Peter Bright-Like Media Prop Jordan Novet
- What they don't want people to pay attention to right now
- Links 11/09/2025: Windows TCO and Russian Drones Invading Poland (EU/NATO)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/09/2025: xkcd, misfin, and Alhena 5.3.2
- Links for the day
- Repetition of Last Summer (Microsoft Breaking Dual-Boot Systems)
- UEFI 9/11 is about to kick in
- UEFI 'Secure Boot' Boiling Frogs (Cannot Turn Off 'Secure Boot')
- "MSI laptop is locked on Secure Boot and doesn't allow me to turn it off"
- UEFI 9/11 Aftermath - Part IV: The 'Hulk Hogan of UEFI' and His 'Hideout' Holiday (Retreat From Reality)
- Let's keep an eye on what matters
- UEFI 9/11 Aftermath - Part II: "The SecureBoot Thing Got Out of Hand."
- The next few weeks might be... interesting
- UEFI 9/11 Aftermath - Part I: "I Believe This Affects Thousands of Devices... Because Multiple Devices I Checked, Whether Client or Server [...] Affected."
- Most people aren't even aware that this is happening or about to happen
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part X - An Outline of the Series About Microsoft Sabotaging GNU/Linux (With Ramifications to Unfold Online in Coming Weeks as People Reboot)
- Today is UEFI 9/11 (9/11/2025)
- Culture of silence: Ubisoft harassment convictions, Mozilla, Sylvestre Ledru & Debian make no comment
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 11/09/2025: "Hey Hi" Ponzi Schemes at Oracle (Unpaid Contracts) and Cindy Cohn is Leaving the EFF
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/09/2025: Playdate Console, Dichotomy between the Real and the Digital
- Links for the day
- The Microsoft AstroTurfing and Microsoft-Led Blame-Shifting Tactics Are Ahead of Us
- Of course it has nothing to do with security, it's about control, i.e. them controlling everything
- Celebrating Assassination is Bad Because It Legitimises Assassination of the People You Like, Too
- Condoning or even celebrating political assassinations is bad optics (and taste)
- Being Conditioned to Accept Unreliable Computer Systems That Fail With Black Screen of Death (BSoD)
- Welcome to 2025
- New Series: The Coup Against GNU/Linux Has Begun
- today, this year in particular, we shall also focus on Secure Boot, which is sold based on a lie and tortures many computer user
- New Paper on "BYOVD, but in firmware. Signed UEFI shells, vulnerable modules offer new paths for Secure Boot bypasses."
- One might say digital "security theatre"
- Links 11/09/2025: Oracle Layoffs, Drunk Pilots in Japan Airlines, US-Korea Tensions Grow
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, September 10, 2025
- Xubuntu Site Compromised
- Let's hope it is not a security breach
- Links 10/09/2025: Retaliation at Facebook and Microsoft Reveals Almost 100 Security Holes
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Annihilation of Self, The Future Eaters, and Leaving Academia
- Links for the day
- They Say That People Are Afraid of or Worried About "Hey Hi", But the Worriers Should be the Fools Who Invested in It
- At the end of the day nobody should worry more than those who invested their money in this bubble
- Harassment evidence: franceinfo's Clara Lainé report on Ubisoft prosecution
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 10/09/2025: Microsoft Layoffs in "RTO" Clothing and Windows TCO, GitHub TCO
- Links for the day
- Blaming Everything on China
- TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
- People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
- "crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
- Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
- They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
- 10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
- Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
- Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Hospital and Large Feeds
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, September 09, 2025
- The Bluewashing of Red Hat is Being Completed, Many Staff Understand They'll be Made Redundant
- Jim AllowHurst (Whitehurst) is meanwhile promoting Microsoft's agenda from within other companies
- Throwing Away "Old" Computers (Mozilla and Other Climate Deniers)
- Mozilla is not leftist
- statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 10% in Bulgaria This Month
- What can Microsoft still do to stop GNU/Linux?
- Dark Patterns
- Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
- It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
- To "Facebook prison" you are bound
- Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
- Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
- Links 09/09/2025: Microsoft Mass Layoffs Again and "RTO" (Timed Like It Serves as a Distraction From the Mass Layoffs)
- Links for the day
- RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
- Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
- What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
- "if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
- Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
- Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
- Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
- That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
- Much Ado About Nonsense
- Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
- Current Events in France
- It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
- Further Media Cut-downs
- media reporting about the media being cut
- Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
- Links for the day
- Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
- Links for the day
- Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
- That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
- Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
- There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
- Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
- The company is all about sound bites
- Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
- "Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
- Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
- Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
- From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
- The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
- Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
- The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
- How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
- We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
- LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
- Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
- LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
- The state of the Web isn't just bad; it's utterly terrible
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
- It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
- A very large third one expected next week
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
- the "upgrade treadmill"