yes

Smart. Easier to say ‘no’ to a shiny rock, hard to say it to a kitten.

He said he likely wouldn’t be dropping anything til July, June should be “safe” (as safe as running windows is normally anyhow)

yes, the problem is you did not sacrifice a live goat while mercury is in retrograde and github is down, as is custom for digital magic and necromancy.

I’ve always thought about it as something similar to what happened with Ritonavir, i.e. disappearing polymorphs. But inside your own body and with proteins instead of a drug.

It might be that normal proteins, while optimal in their function with their shape, might be more stable or have a lower potential energy when misfolded as prions. They don’t do the job they originally did, anymore, hence why they cause disease; but they certainly seem to be a lot more stable (given they require significant time in an autoclave to fully denature them…) and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make them go back to the way they were before. It’s just our luck that they’re not easily transmissible the same way tiny crystals of ritonavir were, else we’d be really fucked.

I was today years old when I learned that the Children of Atom have a real-life counterpart. Not quite worshipping the radiation, yet, but they might yet get there.

Sure, but then it’s a lot easier to notice it’s broken. It also makes a lot of noise, shooting a gun; a spray can is near silent.

nothing worth sticking around to see.

Wars over clean water and food. Wildfires, drought. Even if the US recovers from Trump we’ll almost certainly still be living in an extractive capitalist hellscape run by sociopaths, along with the rest of the world. By this time I suspect something similar to Cyberpunk’s Blackwall will be necessary, as if one is not the cause of an apocalypse I can fully believe rogue AIs would become a nuisance/hazard on the open internet by that time. And we’ll also probably start seeing things like Neuralink and other BCIs coming onto the market for general purchase to provide a whole new avenue of technofascist horrors – how about running ads in your field of view? In your dreams? Or how about mind reading, anyone? Or even just simple malware. Fun! Fun fun fun.

I’m aiming to die of a massive heart attack in my fifties, so hopefully I will be dead before the 2060s.

Some of the other 0days this guy released are already being actively exploited in the wild, but no reports of big losses as a result of them yet. Having said that, the entire point of BitLocker was that it was full disk encryption that you didn’t have to think too much about; and now I bet every corporate IT department out there is looking at it with suspicion. If this guy can keep delivering on “things that keep sysadmins awake at night”, like “oh god every hard drive we’ve had stolen in the last few years can be fully decrypted now”, eventually a lot of them will decide it is less harrowing and less work to move their entire stack away from Microsoft than it is to live with them.

They’d better not be overselling this bomb they’re gonna drop in July. I’m already moved over to Linux fully now, to quote photonicinduction: I want flames. I don’t just want to see it all over the tech news, I’m hoping he screws with them hard enough the story makes it to actual TV news channels.

to add to the other excellent theories here: Most if not all flagship AI right now is extremely sycophantic. Not only is it a magic black box that gives correct-sounding answers and never needs to sleep, eat or unionize; it also makes you, the user, feel ✨ s p e c i a l ✨. and wouldn’t you know it, CEOs fucking love being made to feel like they’re the smartest man in the room, even when (sometimes especially when) they are in fact the biggest moron to suck oxygen in a five mile radius. LLMs are genuinely phenomenal at making your unhinged, disconnected-from-reality half-baked ideas not only sound good, but then they also convince you you’re the next Einstein for thinking of them.

Yeah, gee, I wonder why CEOs love AI so much.

you know, since this little saga began I’ve had this tiny voice in my head hoping this one vindictive dude is, eventually, directly responsible for Microsoft going out of business/doing severe restructuring or downsizing as a consequence of businesses losing faith in the company’s products. Lots of people already raise an eyebrow at Windows 11’s issues, things like “all our shit is fundamentally insecure because microslop left a backdoor in [insert critical thing here], and has been for [weeks/months/years/???]” tend to have an adverse effect on sales, especially to risk-averse business customers. It’s not impossible to imagine that continued “holy fuck what 0day exploit just dropped?” incidents, on the level of YellowKey, happening every month, could result in businesses deciding to drop their enterprise licensing of MS products; and that’s going to hurt. That’s where a big chunk, if not the biggest chunk iirc, of their revenue comes from. It’s unlikely, it’s a longshot, but I’m allowed to have hope.

I’m especially now wondering, if YellowKey was the teaser – you know, just casually revealing a backdoor in BitLocker, like nbd – what the actual fuck are they going to drop in July? If that’s the appetizer, how juicy’s the entree gonna be?

funderstandable, have a nice day

It’s quite possibly the most useful application that textbook will ever be used for, statistically speaking.

okay, but why are they Wanda and Cosmo colored?

Oh, goddamn it, now you tell me!

Ya love to see it.

I do not believe anything is “all good” when a website starts speaking R’lyehian.

I’m pretty sure I got TM 32-201-1, the master blaster’s training manual, the improvised munitions handbook, and a handful of others from archive.org.

Less reputable sources are available in all sorts of dark corners of the web, and certainly people could upload tampered versions to IA, but it is generally best to stick to resources that have… some kind of pedigree, when dealing with things that go boom when you look at them wrong.

Not that I’d ever do anything of the sort.

I mean, for you, at home? No, probably not, I don’t believe there is. In a lab with dedicated testing equipment, sure, that’s how they calculate THC levels you see advertised (or at least it’s how they should come up with that number).