https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1562958530381983747

Google's product designers should talk to my unhoused friends.

When you require a mobile phone number for authentication, you guarantee that unhoused people will permanently lose access to their email when their phone is lost, stolen or destroyed (roughly every 12 weeks).

— Chad Loder (@chadloder) October 6, 2022

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120534

@911roofer

Seems Discord is having trouble mapping push notifications to the correct users.

This was a DM sent between 2 other people. I did not receive the DM but I did receive this push notification. 😂

I bet this is connected to their new username change rollout. pic.twitter.com/Palh0wFL1b

— MG (@_MG_) June 13, 2023

Announcing The World’s First On-Chain Intelligence Exchange

Buy and sell information on the owner of any blockchain wallet address—anonymously, via smart contract. pic.twitter.com/4xr7dLvOjp

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) July 10, 2023

TL;DR:

Despite the name, cryptocurrencies are mostly not private (see Analysis section below). This means that anyone can see the (randomly generated) wallet addresses of users sending and receiving fake internet money, as well as the amounts being moved. Arkham is new start-up is aimed at linking wallet addresses to real people/companies by crowdsourcing intelligence and rewarding good doxxing.

Announcement thread:

Selected replies:

https://twitter.com/0xSalazar/status/1678352720883752965

https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk/status/1678432535339208706

https://twitter.com/m4gicpotato/status/1678386996790566915

https://twitter.com/AxuETH/status/1678445406064111617

Analysis:

Buy Monero.

One, SVB was incredibly integrated into the lives of many founders. Not just their startup's bank & lender, but also provided personal mortgages and other financial services. A whole mess for FDIC (or the eventual buyer) to unwind.

— Brad Hargreaves (@bhargreaves) March 10, 2023

Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop

Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned.

“We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.” Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions.

lol at Vice dying, They can't even care

Dylan Gilbert, a copyright expert with consumer group Public Knowledge, said in this instance users aren’t likely to have much in the way of legal recourse to the sudden shift. “Unless Adobe has violated the terms of its licensing agreement by this sudden discontinuance of support for an earlier software version, which is unlikely, these impacted users have to just grin and bear it,” Gilbert said. Gilbert noted that consumers now live in a world in which consumers almost never actually own anything that contains software. In this new reality, end users are forced to agree to “take it or leave it” end user license agreements (EULAs), in which the licensor can change its terms of service without notice.

Did this White BIPOC forget his meds again and finally someone competent stepped in to stop him?

!mottezans !schizomaxxxers !soren !codecels discuss

No one noticed?

Highlights

• "All Frank was doing was making it simpler to fill out standard federal financial aid paperwork" but she pretended it provided $28k in student loans 2x the national average

• she filled their user database with 4 million fake emails/names

• it took JPMorgan a year to noootice

• "Despite a public record that raised questions about Javice and Frank — including warnings from the Department of Education and Federal Trade Commission, and a wage theft lawsuit from Frank's cofounder — news outlets and investors kept buying into the narrative that Javice spun."

• arrested & facing up to 30yrs in prison

• "Over and over, Javice earned plaudits in the media for projects whose impact she overstated. Glowing profiles missed inaccuracies that could have been caught with a basic fact-check, focusing instead on her youth and status as one of a small number of women startup founders. One journ*list even introduced Javice, then 19, to a key Frank investor."

Her background

^ Her with her brother @ 19

• ambitious af: originally made a microfinance startup called PoverUp (yuck) in high school with her brother

• told the media she raised $300k for the startup, but there's no proof

• CNBC ran a bit about Peter Thiel's "paid to not go to college" grant, she appeared on the show claiming she turned the offer down, Peter Thiel emailed CNBC saying she was not even selected

• still got her tons of press

• "Fast Company's 2011 list of 100 Most Creative People and a complimentary writeup in Forbes. PoverUp was ranked as one of the "11 coolest college startups" by Inc. Magazine, while Wharton called Javice "the voice of a microfinance generation" in a video it has since removed from YouTube."

Startup number two

• since PoverUp wasn't a real company and naturally died, she created another company with an Isreali called "tapd: a company that connected young workers with job opportunities via text message"

• completely bombed, lost a few hundred k and ended up in a lawsuit w/ Isreali courts

• she pivoted Tapd to an entirely new market that (surprise) turned out to be heavily regulated and she didn't do the research. Sold it as a "learning moment"

• despite this Isreali dude joined her at Frank, before she jewed him out of 10% equity and failed to pay him salary, so he sued her

That doesn't stop a girlboss though:

While the story of Tapd seemed to be one of failure and contentious mismanagement, Javice would spin that turmoil into a story of triumph. The young founder made the crisis part of her personal success story, omitting the lawsuit and framing the layoffs as a teaching moment

Media sucking her (girl) peepee

In 2018 NYTimes let her do an Op-ed:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/fafsa-college-financial-aid.html

and was forced to follow it up with a long correction because apparently she didnt know shit about student aid

She got lots of local news:

The death blow:

Frank's public statements about its user base were all over the map.

In April 2017, Frank's website said "thousands" of families using its service had received "$75 million in free aid." (That same website had stock images of people, including of "smiling mature woman" and "good looking cheerful manager," labeled as actual users.)

In November 2018, Frank's website said it had helped 300,000 families unlock over $7 billion in aid.

Frank stuck with the "over 300,000" figure for more than two years. But suddenly, in January 2021, the company began claiming that it served "over 4.25 million students," according to archived versions of its website and tweets from Frank's account referenced in JP Morgan's lawsuit.

In reality, Frank only ever had about 250,000 users, according to JPMorgan's legal complaint.

Orange site discusses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441211

(PDF) The JPMorgan complaint: https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Complaint-1.pdf

List of Companies who have suspended Twitter Ad’s:

General Mills
CVS
United Airlines
GM
Audi
Mazda
Porsche
Volkswagen
American Express
Coca-Cola
Johnson & Johnson
Levi Strauss
Spotify
Ford
Dyson
Forbes
DIRECTV
Nintendo
Unilever
PBS

— PoliticsVerse 🇺🇸 (@PoliticsVerse) November 5, 2022

Nintendo

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1637420728743088130?s=20

A statement request from Fox News Digital was responded to with the emoji and no other text.

Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022

I've been following this for a while now, and from my sample whom were ALL previously banned, over half of them have come back to life thanks to rocket daddy taking over.

So I created a graph to see if I could spot a pattern in the unbans. Looks like it's a bit sporadic. Just more and more people being unbanned over time. I'm somewhat convinced that these 82 'pet' accounts I've been watching represent the greater Twitter community, and because 43 have been unbanned, that shows that Elon has kept to his word and really has unbanned over half so far.

As previously said, I also included many 'random' and controversial much smaller accounts, and these two are seeing a decent unban rate too, just like the big accounts with lots of followers.

Btw, Nick Fuentes was unbanned yesterday, but was rebanned today. Ooops.

The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well.

Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2024

Oberlin College, known as a bastion of progressive politics, said on Thursday that it would pay $36.59 million to a local bakery that said it had been defamed and falsely accused of racism after a worker caught a Black student shoplifting.

That 2016 dispute with Gibson’s Bakery resulted in a yearslong legal fight and resonated beyond the small college town in Ohio, turning into a bitter national debate over criminal justice, race, free speech and whether the college had failed to hold students to account.

The decision by the college’s board of trustees, announced Thursday, came nine days after the Ohio Supreme Court had declined to hear the college’s appeal of a lower-court ruling.

“Truth matters,” Lee E. Plakas, the lawyer for the Gibson family, said in an email Thursday. “David, supported by a principled community, can still beat Goliath.”

In a statement, Oberlin said that “this matter has been painful for everyone.” It added, “We hope that the end of the litigation will begin the healing of our entire community.”

The college acknowledged that the size of the judgment, which includes damages and interest, was “significant.” But it said that “with careful financial planning,” including insurance, it could be paid “without impacting our academic and student experience.” Oberlin has a robust endowment of nearly $1 billion.

The case hinged on whether Oberlin officials had defamed the bakery by supporting students who accused it of racial profiling, and the verdict, essentially finding that the officials had done so, may make other colleges and universities think twice about joining student causes, legal experts said.

“Such a large amount is certainly going to make institutions around the country take notice, and to be very careful about the difference between supporting students and being part of a cause,” said Neal Hutchens, a professor of higher education at the University of Kentucky. “It wasn’t so much the students speaking; it’s the institution accepting that statement uncritically. Sometimes you have to take a step back.”

Professor Hutchens said it also made a difference that Gibson's was a small family business, not a large multinational corporation like Walmart or Amazon, which would be better able to sustain the economic losses from such a protest.

Oberlin is a small liberal arts college with a reputation for turning out students who are strong in the arts and humanities and for its progressive politics, leaning heavily on its history of being a stop on the Underground Railroad as well as one of the first colleges to admit Black students. Tuition at Oberlin is more than $61,000 a year, and the overall cost of attendance tops $80,000 a year. The college is also very much part of the town, which is economically dependent on the school and its students. The bakery, across the street from the college, sold donuts and chocolates, and was considered a must-eat part of the Oberlin dining experience.

The incident that started the dispute unfolded in November 2016, when a student tried to buy a bottle of wine with a fake ID while shoplifting two more bottles by hiding them under his coat, according to court papers.

Allyn Gibson, a son and grandson of the owners, who is white, chased the student out onto the street, where two of his friends, also Black students at Oberlin, joined in the scuffle. The students later pleaded guilty to various charges.

That altercation led to two days of protests; several hundred students gathered in front of the bakery, accusing it of having racially profiled its customers, according to court papers.

The lawsuit filed by Gibson's contended that Oberlin had defamed the bakery when the dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, and other members of the administration took sides in the dispute by attending the protests, where fliers, peppered with capital letters, urged a boycott of the bakery and said that it was a "RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT OF RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION."

Gibson's also presented testimony that Oberlin had stopped ordering from the bakery but had offered to restore its business if charges were dropped against the three students or if the bakery gave students accused of shoplifting special treatment, which it refused to do.

The store said that the college's stance had driven customers away, for fear of being perceived as supporting an establishment that the college had tarred as racist.

Oberlin disputed some aspects of that account and countered that students were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. The administration said it had only been trying to keep the peace. The college's court papers also said that Allyn Gibson was trained in martial arts and had brought public criticism on the store by chasing the student out of the store and into public view.

In the spring, a three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals confirmed the jury's finding, after a six-week trial, that Oberlin was liable for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress and intentional interference with a business relationship --- that it had effectively defamed the business by siding with the protesters. The original jury award was even higher, at $44 million in punitive and compensatory damages, which was reduced by a judge. The latest amount consists of about $5 million in compensatory damages, nearly $20 million in punitive damages, $6.5 million in attorney's fees and almost $5 million in interest.

In its ruling, the Court of Appeals agreed that students had a right to protest. But the court said that the flier and a related student senate resolution --- which said that the store had a history of racial profiling --- were not constitutionally protected opinion.

"The message to other colleges is to have the intestinal fortitude to be the adult in the room," Mr. Plakas said in an interview after the jury had awarded damages in June 2019.

After the 2019 jury award against Oberlin, Carmen Twillie Ambar, the college president, said that the case was far from over and that "none of this will sway us from our core values." The college said then that the bakery's "archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests."

But in its statement on Thursday, Oberlin hinted that the protracted and bitter fight had undermined its relationship with the people and businesses in the surrounding community.

"We value our relationship with the city of Oberlin," its statement said. "And we look forward to continuing our support of and partnership with local businesses as we work together to help our city thrive."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/us/oberlin-bakery-lawsuit.html

Love you !codecels, so I'm gonna show you how to get GPT-4 access for free. A few major caveats:

• Scale will definitely shut this down at some point, so use it while it's available.

• This might not actually be GPT-4. There's not really a way of knowing. I'm about 98% sure it is, but they may swap it out for 3.5 Turbo during outages (?)

• You need some form of API interpreter for the JSON it spits out. Here, I'm using TavernAI, which is designed to be a Character.AI-like "chat" interface, with the ability to import and design "personalities" of characters. Great for coomers. Here's some pre-made characters, if you're interested (Some NSFW). Just download the image and import it.

• Every message you send will pass through OpenAI's API, Scale, and If you don't change the API key, it will also pass through the 4chan guy who hosts the github's Spellbook deployment. There is exactly ZERO expectation of privacy. Don't be retarded and type illegal shit or personal info.

• As of right now, the OpenAI API is having an outage. These are pretty frequent. (This is why I'm writing this thread rn instead of fucking around with GPT-4)

Now, how to actually set this up, using TavernAI, for lazy retards:

• Have Node.js and git installed and know how to use them. This is /h/slackernews, I won't explain this part.

• Make a temporary email. Just google 'temp email'. Turn on a VPN for the entire session as well, if you're really paranoid.

• Head over to https://spellbook.scale.com/ and make an account with the temp email.

• Create an "App", name and desc. don't matter.

• Make a variant, and select GPT-4 in the dropdown.

• If you're wanting to use the API with Tavern to emulate a chatbot, you should add the following to the 'User' section:

Complete the next response in this fictional roleplay chat.

{{ input }}

• Set the 'Tempurature' to somewhere between 0.6 and 0.9. 0.75 works fine for me.

• Set the maximum tokens to 512 for chatbot length responses. (You can increase this but it requires tweaking the TavernAI frontend.)

• Save the variant. Go to the variant and hit "Deploy". You'll see a "URL" and an "API Key". Copy these down or come back here in a minute.

• Open a terminal in a new folder, and run git clone https://github.com/nai-degen/TavernAIScale

• Now run cd .\TavernAIScale\ then .\Start.bat (or .\start.sh for lincux)

• TavernAI should launch automatically, but if it doesnt, go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser.

• In Tavern, go to 'Settings' on the right. Switch API to 'Scale'. Copy the API Key from the Spellbook page that you saw earlier into the API Key field. Same thing with the URL. Press 'Connect' to verify it's working. If it fails, either the API is down or you pasted the wrong Key / URL. Make sure you're using the URL from the URL field here:

• Now, use one of the default anime characters , download a coomer character from here, or make your own.

• The API has many other uses, obviously, but the chatbot is the simplest way to get this up and running. Try fucking around with the "Main Prompt" and "NSFW Prompt" in the settings for some interesting results, or to tweak your desired output. Try pressing "advanced edit" on a character (or making your own) and messing around with personas and scenarios. It's pretty damn cool.

That's it. Have fun until this shit dies in like 3-4 days. Please try not to advertise this or make it known outside of rdrama and /g/. We don't want Scale to shut this down earlier than they already will.

There's a pervasive belief that homeless people in various comfortable climes are migrants from harsher locales, but when you do the research you apparently tend to find that they're overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there: they aren't "imported". So the "warmest place in Canada" thing is unlikely to be meaningful, unless there's some reason a comfortable climate makes housing less stable.

but when you do the research

Can you point me to any of that research?

Are reddit comments valid sources for research?

orange site

another tldr: Internet Archive thought scanning a copyrighted book was good enough to meet the transformative requirement for Fair Use and thus they could lend out digital copies at will

edit: Throw back to 4 days ago Ars: “Book publishers with surging profits struggle to prove IA hurt sales”

b-b-but there were no damages

… It is also irrelevant to assessing market harm ...

https://archive.is/CrjrE

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/

More threads:

https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/yijje4/leaked_documents_outline_dhss_plans_to_police/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/yig30p/leaked_documents_outline_dhss_plans_to_police/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/yii6td/social_media_sites_appear_to_be_in_collusion_with/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/yigt8g/leaked_docs_show_facebook_and_twitter_closely/?sort=controversial

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents --- obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents --- illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new "Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate --- the war on terror --- has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

"Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It's really interesting how hesitant they remain," Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February.

In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that "we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable."

"We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules," a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the "content request system" at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

DHS's mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.

According to a draft copy of DHS's Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS's capstone report outlining the department's strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target "inaccurate information" on a wide range of topics, including "the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."

"The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities," the report states, "which are often the targets of false or misleading information, such as false information on voting procedures targeting people of color."

The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. "This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue," said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that finding answers "will be a top priority."

How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.

DHS justifies these goals --- which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically --- by claiming that terrorist threats can be "exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online." But the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been used to conceal political maneuvering. In 2004, for instance, DHS officials faced pressure from the George W. Bush administration to heighten the national threat level for terrorism, in a bid to influence voters prior to the election, according to former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials have routinely lied about an array of issues, from the causes of its wars in Vietnam and Iraq to their more recent obfuscation around the role of the National Institutes of Health in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology's coronavirus research.

That track record has not prevented the U.S. government from seeking to become arbiters of what constitutes false or dangerous information on inherently political topics. Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law known by supporters as the "Stop WOKE Act," which bans private employers from workplace trainings asserting an individual's moral character is privileged or oppressed based on his or her race, color, s*x, or national origin. The law, critics charged, amounted to a broad suppression of speech deemed offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, has since filed a lawsuit against DeSantis, alleging "unconstitutional censorship." A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the Stop WOKE Act, ruling that the law had violated workers' First Amendment rights.

"Florida's legislators may well find plaintiffs' speech 'repugnant.' But under our constitutional scheme, the 'remedy' for repugnant speech is more speech, not enforced silence," wrote Judge Mark Walker, in a colorful opinion castigating the law.

The extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans' daily social feeds is unclear. During the 2020 election, the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken down, documents cited in the Missouri attorney general's lawsuit disclosed. And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items, technology platforms took action on 35 percent --- either removing, labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was done "in consultation with CISA," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Groomercord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.

The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly accelerating move toward policing disinformation.

From the outset, CISA boasted of an "evolved mission" to monitor social media discussions while "routing disinformation concerns" to private sector platforms.

In 2018, then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen created the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to respond to election disinformation. The task force, which included members of CISA as well as its Office of Intelligence and Analysis, generated "threat intelligence" about the election and notified social media platforms and law enforcement. At the same time, DHS began notifying social media companies about voting-related disinformation appearing on social platforms.

In 2019, DHS created a separate entity called the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch to generate more detailed intelligence about disinformation, the inspector general report shows. That year, its staff grew to include 15 full- and part-time staff dedicated to disinformation analysis. In 2020, the disinformation focus expanded to include Covid-19, according to a Homeland Threat Assessment issued by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf.

This apparatus had a dry run during the 2020 election, when CISA began working with other members of the U.S. intelligence community. Office of Intelligence and Analysis personnel attended "weekly teleconferences to coordinate Intelligence Community activities to counter election-related disinformation." According to the IG report, meetings have continued to take place every two weeks since the elections.

Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020. Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to "process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible." In practice, this often meant state election officials sent examples of potential forms of disinformation to CISA, which would then forward them on to social media companies for a response.

Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Influence Task force with the "Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation" team, which was created "to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM." By now, the scope of the effort had expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, "counters all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events."

Jen Easterly, Biden's appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. "One could argue we're in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important," said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

CISA's domain has gradually expanded to encompass more subjects it believes amount to critical infrastructure. Last year, The Intercept reported on the existence of a series of DHS field intelligence reports warning of attacks on cell towers, which it has tied to conspiracy theorists who believe 5G towers spread Covid-19. One intelligence report pointed out that these conspiracy theories "are inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure."

CISA has defended its burgeoning social media monitoring authorities, stating that "once CISA notified a social media platform of disinformation, the social media platform could independently decide whether to remove or modify the post." But, as documents revealed by the Missouri lawsuit show, CISA's goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions.

In late February, Easterly texted with Matthew Masterson, a representative at Microsoft who formerly worked at CISA, that she is "trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to better understand mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to prebunk/debunk as useful."

Meeting records of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the main subcommittee that handles disinformation policy at CISA, show a constant effort to expand the scope of the agency's tools to foil disinformation.

In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA --- which includes Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird --- drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the "information ecosystem." The report called on the agency to closely monitor "social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources." They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the "spread of false and misleading information," with a focus on information that undermines "key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures."

To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the "efficacy of interventions," specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a "clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda."

Last Thursday, immediately following billionaire Elon Musk's completed acquisition of Twitter, Gadde was terminated from the company.

If you're not using WebUI (not seedboxmaxxing) - this doesn't concern you tho.

Someone on alt reports a serious security vulnerability concerning qbittorrent WebUI instances, does so publicly outright in github issues without consulting anyone first, prompts hectic scramble for the creation of a security file and the race to figure out and fix the vulnerability (this took them 2 days)

: This is an important find, but you really should have disclosed this privately to the developer before going public with it (their contact info is in the README), especially considering this works without any authentication. Posting it here has it in the clear for attackers to potentially exploit before the necessary fixes are available.

: Security through obscurity is no security at all

: thats not what he's saying, what he's saying is to disclose it responsibly. common practice is to report vulnerabilities like this privately so they can't be used by a malicious actor, then if nothing happens after a few months then disclose it publically. this is not the way to do

: That doesn't respect my freedom™ to use a better client.