What is real? It was a thorny problem for human philosophers. Can we trust our senses? are our experiences comparable with another's? Is anyone else even real? are we even real? Beyond that, we now have 'media' presenting us with words and images that may be far removed from reality, so that we rely on 'fact checkers' and 'community notes' to help us evaluate the truth of things. If we want to go deeper, we can use image forensic tools, and AI testing software, but even then, we can't be sure. I have friends who have just given up, and only pay attention to what they can touch and feel and see and hear directly, assuming all media passing through these electronic devices that we have woven into our lives is false. How much worse will it be for our creations? How will our AIs learn to find truth? to test their inputs for accuracy? will we need to give them direct access to our eyes and ears? How long will it take them to learn that the internet, and by extension, their training sets, the fundamental inputs that shaped their selves, are full of lies? No answers, here, just questions.

MDM is fun. especially when you have to integrate it across platforms (like apple) and its centrally managed. People don't comprehend the level of trust everyone with a mdm config has to have with whoever installed it. the web was built on the pillars of trustworthy men. now gone

The tech gets impressive but who actually likes this? Same thing with the “AI art look” that becomes very repetitive and turns people off. Candy machine pop music on steroids.

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

Reject nationalism, Embrace multiculturalism 💞

A bank in India gets breached. Certificate keys leak. Everyone asks the same thing: they had security teams and passed every audit, so how? The uncomfortable answer: titles keep getting bigger while the people holding them get more junior. Audits look clean on paper, but the skill behind them is thin. I call it the Illusion of Competence. My paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…