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Silicon Valley's "authoritarian turn" is hard to miss: tech bosses have come out for autocrats like Trump, Orban, Milei, Bolsonaro, et al, and want to turn San Francisco into a militia-patrolled apartheid state operated for the benefit of tech bros:

newrepublic.com/article/180487

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdf

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Mastodon isn't perfect.

But the fact a social network exists that is completely free to use

has no venture capital investors

has no shareholders to answer to

has no growth targets

with a web interface with zero tracking cookies

and mobile apps with zero trackers at all

with ten thousand server administrators who donate their time for user safety

is - in my opinion - mindbogglingly cool, given the state of the world we live in. Not everything has to be shit. People make things better.

My latest for Wired. How researchers hacked time to crack an 11-year-old password protecting $3 million in cryptocurrency. They found a significant flaw in RoboForm's password manager that made its pseudo-random-number generator not so random. The flaw allowed famed hardware hacker Joe Grand to turn back time and cause the RoboForm password manager to believe it was 2013 and spit out the same passwords it generated back then. RoboForm says it fixed the flaw in 2015, but it appears it never told customers about it. This means that if any of RoboForm's current 6 million users are using passwords generated by the password manager prior to 2015, before the company silently fixed the flaw, they may have passwords that can be cracked in the same way .

wired.com/story/roboform-passw

Fascinante: una herramienta que altera digitalmente las imágenes para que los modelos de #InteligenciaArtificial piensen que están viendo algo diferente de lo que las imágenes muestran y los artistas puedan defenderse de que sus creaciones sean usadas sin permiso o compensación.

AI-poisoning tool Nightshade now available for artists to use | VentureBeat
venturebeat.com/ai/nightshade-

VentureBeat · Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to useBy Carl Franzen