Volkswagen left an unprotected database with up to two years of sensitive personal data on 800k networked VW, Seat, Audi and Skoda cars accessible online, including names, user IDs, sensor and geolocation data.

CCC talk by @fluepke and @michaelkreil (in German):
https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/relive/598

Spiegel article:
https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/volkswagen-konzern-datenleck-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-a-e12d33d0-97bc-493c-96d1-aa5892861027

If you somehow missed it, this is a political ad of the German party the richest man in the world has thrown his weight behind.

If you don’t see the roman salutes in the picture, you are part of the problem and not the solution.

#afd #romansalute #farright #nazis #elonmusk #88

we just stopped at a restaurant near the autobahn to hamburg to eat something and say that the MNT Reform Next campaign (it's our new 26mm thick 13" open hardware laptop) just went live aaaaa! https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next

The Open Source Movement has proven that, in a technical context, sharing and transparency has tremendous advantages and benefits for everyone involved.

It is time for governments, societies, economies, cultures, families and individuals alike to take these ideals of cooperation to heart, so we can all thrive as a species. Let's work together, not against one another.

We can do this.

#opensource #foss #society #culture #cooperation #transparency #sharing

Boost if you want less generative AI in your tech in 2025.

in switzerland you aren't allowed to have a train with exactly 256 axles because of an integer overflow in the axle counting machine

i wish i could fix my software bugs by making it illegal to cause them

I wrote about the reaction to the shooting of a CEO.

"It seems to me that when you create a world where human life has been made as cheap as possible, you will eventually find you live in a world where your human life is deemed by others to be cheap, too."

https://www.the-reframe.com/peaceful-solutions/

It isn't that far-right has suddenly become a big movement in Europe. The far-right support has always been and will always be around 20%. The task of society is to keep that support in the "morally unacceptable" box that is buried deep in the ground. Clickbait, polarisation supported by technofascism and Putins money and methods for destabilisation in democracies however are the most powerful attack against that equilibrium I have ever experienced. And we are losing.

are you a programmer? do you like heavy metal? would you like to be *really upset* by a music video?

do i have something for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yup8gIXxWDU

software engineering methodologies are simple, there's really only two goals

the first goal of a methodology is to make workers replaceable, and this is usually achieved by removing any worker agency in the project

the second goal of a methodology is to insulate decision makers from risk and this is usually achieved by blaming the workers for failure—for not hitting estimates forced upon them

unfortunately, "delivering software people want" doesn't make the cut

Wow, an adversary first compromised a neighbor of the target, and then attacked the target over Wi-Fi (with stolen password).

This is the first observed case of the #AntennaForHire attack that AirEye hypothesized.

Any Wi-Fi attack is now a remote attack!

https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/11/22/the-nearest-neighbor-attack-how-a-russian-apt-weaponized-nearby-wi-fi-networks-for-covert-access/

$ git revert c1d1ba844f01 # ("Code of conduct: Fix wording around maintainers enforcing the code of conduct")

This seems to have regressed. Let's revert.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.

The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.

The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.

Two weeks left to submit talks to the 1st #eBPF devroom at #FOSDEM (CfP closes on 1st December) ⚙️ 🐝

Send your proposals, or if you know people who might be interested, spread the word, please!

https://ebpf.io/fosdem-2025.html

Journalist: Do you believe that Israel has a right to exist?

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese:

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza

made me chuckle - For de av oss som trenger en oppmuntrin på morgenkvistenen: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/11/05/curl-v-google-com/ via @bagder #curl #https #google #therealstory

Tech workers don't need unions.

We can, after all, just hop jobs if we want significant salary increases. We all love intermittent employments and hustle culture. We dislike forming stable attachments, becoming experts on projects, and seeing them to fruition.

9,4% p.a. - or a total of 38% for the next four years - is something every single one of y'all individually successfully negotiates, right?

https://www.dw.com/en/boeing-factory-workers-end-7-week-strike/a-70690180

#Unionize #WeDeserveTechUnions #CollectiveBargaining

“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”

~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

#comedy #quotes

"Isn’t it ironic that we’re banking on a technology we don’t have the resources to power sustainably, expecting it to save us from a problem it’s actively contributing to?"

How AI is fuelling the climate crisis, not solving it:

https://energytransition.org/2024/10/how-ai-is-fuelling-the-climate-crisis-not-solving-it/