Hacker Takes Over Numbers Station For Rickrolls And Memes

Buzzer is a Russian military station currently haunted by radio pirates:

Mysterious Russian shortwave radio station UVB-76, known as The Buzzer, normally broadcasts nothing but indecipherable beeps and numbers. But recently it has started to take music requests and post memes, after hackers seemingly took control of the channel for their own purposes. "Aboba" a voice repeatedly said over the station earlier today, before proceeding to blast Russian rave music.

The Buzzer, a Russian numbers station in use since the Cold War, became a sensation on the internet in the late 2000s thanks to 4Chan, and ever since people have wondered about the channel's origins and purpose. It's been especially good fodder for online creepypasta and paranormal enthusiasts because of the mysterious voices that occasionally read out nonsensical chains of numbers and words.

This week, however, it was home to Guy Fawkes masks, Discord pings, and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," as listeners gathered around YouTube streams for The Buzzer to witness the ghostly mashup.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #bigbrother #computers #conspiracies #glitch #madscience #mpegs #music #pranks #retrocomputing #space #zalgo

Instagram: How not to do messaging

Though Facebook is really good at a few things -- being a rage amplifier; providing a clean, well-lit space for fascists; and allowing unmedicated schizophrenics to find each other and thereby elevate their delusions into national movements -- it's important to remember that they are actually stultifyingly incompetent at just about everything that comprises what most people think their business is.

Sadly, my businesses still have a presence on Facebook and Instagram because choosing not to use those services essentially means choosing not to advertise , and that's not really a stand we can afford to take during this pandemic apocalypse.

And since I still have to manage this shitshow, here's me pissing in the wind again about how terrible it is to try and actualy use it.

I've written before about the mind-boggling unusability of Instagram's inbox-management for business accounts: that the messages are partitioned into four different places with four different interfaces with no rhyme or reason. It's just unfathomable how anyone is able to communicate with their customers through this disaster. [Narrator: "They cannot. They mostly don't try."]

Well, a couple years ago, Facebook integrated Instagram into this "Facebook Inbox For Business Suits" thing or whatever they're calling it today. In theory, now you can use a Facebook web page instead of the postage-stamp-sized Instagram app to manage your messages while typing with your thumbs like an animal.

Take a look at the image to the right. Zoom in. Let the hate wash over you. I'll wait.

• First indignity: you have to make the window be basically full screen width or none of those icons on the right show up, because it's got 3 different sidebars (not shown). And even then, sometimes the message author's profile picture appears on top of the buttons , making them unclickable.

• The "All Messages" tab is not all messages. So the very first words on the page are already a lie. You still have to click through to the four other tabs to see everything.

• When it shows you an Instagram "story", you almost never get to actually see it. Stories usually expire after 24 hours, but I look at this page once a day and I can't remember the last time a story actually showed up as something other than a broken-image box.

• When it does actually show you the contents of an Instagram story or post, it is 240 pixels wide. You can't resize it. You can't click on it to open it in a new window. You can't copy its URL. Hope your eyesight is good!

• When it shows you Facebook messages or replies, it doesn't show you the actual message. It shows you the post on which the messages were made. And it is always set to "Most relevant comments", meaning it's showing you the top-rated 5-of-30 or whatever, in bogosort-order. Because that's what you want to see in your "Facebook Connect Businessy Direct Comments Suite". Not the most recent message, but one that was popular two weeks ago.

• There is no "mark all read" button. You have a thousand messages in the list, but a couple of them, 700+ messages ago, are marked as unread, making the unread count up top useless? Congratulations, you get to click a thousand times to clear that. Also, the position of the "delete" button changes every time. Sometimes those 5 buttons are horizontal, but sometimes they wrap to 2 or 3 lines, depending on... I don't even know what. (See "Facebook Cow Clicker".)

• Once you have deleted a message, it is gone forever. There is no Trash folder. The message itself exists, and everyone can still see it, you just have no way to navigate back to it from "Facebook Presents Inbox by Marc Jacobs" or whatever this is.

• That "Exclamation point" button means "Mark as spam". As far as I can tell, it's the same as Trash. It does not even move it to a spam folder, because as I said, folders aren't a thing. There is no Spam folder, nor a Trash folder, not an Archive folder. And it absolutely for sure does not report the message as spam. It's just a handy busy-box for you to click that does nothing, like calling 311 about a blocked bike lane.

• Is there a way to report abusive Instagram messages? Sure there is, there's a "Report" item hidden on a dot-dot-dot popup menu in the "User" sidebar! That takes you to a FAQ telling you to run the Instagram app on your phone, find the message again (good luck with that), and report it from there.

• If it's a Facebook comment, there are context menus for blocking and reporting, that work completely differently. What you want is a button that means "report this abusive asshole and make them go away forever". What you get is three different paths to report comments, delete comments, and block users, which take like 14 clicks, and if you miss one step, some or all of those things don't happen. Also it's entirely possible that "block" means "don't show this person's abuse to me personally, but do continue showing them to everyone else who looks at my business page." After all these years, I still have no idea.

• My business account manages multiple Facebook and Instagram pages. Do messages to all of them show up in the same place? Hahahahahahahaha no. Each one gets its own separate "Instagram By Facebook Inbox Business Message Console Business" page.

• Oh yeah, those red message count badges at the top? They never change as messages are read or tabs are changed. I mean, that sounds too hard, right?

One might hope that this incompetence indicates that they simply don't have employees who know what they're doing, and one might dream that maybe that's because Facebook is just too embarassing a place for the competent to work. Maybe the people capable of getting jobs elsewhere took my advice and quit. But that's wishful thinking. Ethics are not correlated with programming skill. It's just that they don't give a shit. Tools to allow businesses to use Facebook to intermediate communication with those businesses' customers are not a priority. As a rational, sane person, the things that you expect are part of Facebook's business are not. If you think you are their customer, or even that your customers are their customers, you are wrong.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #corporations #doomed #firstperson #spam

Oddly specific botnet

Whoever once had the address "mim@mcom.com" has a vast and extremely enthusiastic botnet trying to crack their password on mcom.com's (nonexistent) IMAP server, from 20,000+ unique IPs in the last 30 days.

Never give up hope, it might work some day!

Though I am impressed by the IP space they control, I guess.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #doomed #firstperson #nscp #security #spam #www

Mannequin Mountain

Remember the Mannequin Mountain? Here's a recent interview with the proprietor. "Over a period of about four months, 25,000 of them showed up."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #mpegs #parts #perversions #robots

Mecha Tardigrade

Mitsuru Nikaido:

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#uncategorized #art #mutants #robots #tentacles

I'm In This Photo and I Don't Like It

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #art #doomed #plague

Scoundrel of the Year

The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we're just supposed to accept it.

It doesn't matter.

This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future -- and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all -- the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he's made -- is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #bigbrother #computers #conspiracies #corporations #doomed

Metaverse

Gonna tell kids this was The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #doomed #movies #mpegs #thefuture

Let's check in on Sealand, shall we?

Hackers plant card-stealing malware on website that sells baron and duke titles:

> Hackers have taken control of the government site of Sealand, the North Sea micronation, since Oct 12th. People buying Baron or Duke titles have likely been skimmed. Sorry, sirs!

While it declared its independence and sovereignty in the '60s, the principality was never recognized as a formal state by any other UN nation and is considered a media stunt. The principality is primarily known these days for selling nobility titles through its website, a practice used by many other small countries or local governments to raise funds for their local budgets.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #pranks #security

It's a Series of Logarithms

Fake-cry more, fashy boy.

Kyle Rittenhouse's judge bestie, ladies and gentlemen:

"Ipads ... have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms," the defense team argued. "This isn't actually enhanced video. This is Apple's iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there."

Schroeder responded that the prosecution shouldered the burden of proof that Apple does not use artificial intelligence to manipulate footage.

Ok, everybody's going to be dunking on that logarithms thing for a long time, because let's face it, it's hilarious, but let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a fascist judge searching for loopholes to let a fascist, white supremacist terrorist murderer go free.

Before the trial, Schroeder ruled that the men shot by Rittenhouse cannot be referred to as 'victims" by prosecutors. Defense attorneys may, however, call them "arsonists" or "looters" if they could justify those labels. [...]

Judge Schroeder's phone suddenly rang to the ringtone of God Bless the USA. Released in 1984 by Lee Greenwood, the song is popular in conservative circles and often played as Trump's entrance theme during his rallies.

Previously.

#uncategorized #bigbrother #computers #doomed #firstperson #stormtroopers

That Innsmouth Look

One used mass media to promote his barely-disguised virulent racism and horrific visions of humanity subjugated by incomprehensible, formless entities. The other was H. P. Lovecraft.

I wonder what Zuckerberg named his cat, though?

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #ab #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #firstperson #tentacles

XScreenSaver 6.02 out now

XScreenSaver 6.02 is out now, including iOS and Android.

Two new hacks this time, Marbling and Binary Horizon, plus a few minor updates.

Several of the old hacks have been re-enabled on Android, because it turns out that while they didn't work in the emulator, they do work on real Android hardware (of which I have none).

This release was built on macOS 11.6 instead of 10.14, so I think that means that it has native Apple M1 code in it -- though I doubt you'll notice any performance difference over the Rosetta2 emulation.

Also Apple completely changed how code signing works again, because hey, six more months have passed, it's clearly time for a redesign of the most incomprehensible part of their entire ecosystem, right? Is it better? No. No it is not, it's just differently awful. Again. Anyway, let me know if there are signing issues.

I also had to update Sparkle (the "Check for Updates" library), so hopefully auto-updates still work. Let me know.

About Marbling, the new one written by me. It started out fairly simple, but then it took the optimization train to crazytown. Here's the comment from the top of the source:

This generates a random field with Perlin Noise (Perlin's page, SIGGRAPH 2002 paper, Wikipedia entry), then permutes it with Fractal Brownian Motion (Wikipedia page, Book of Shaders, Shader Toy) to create images that somewhat resemble clouds, or the striations in marble, depending on the parameters selected and the colors chosen.

These algorithms lend themselves well to SIMD supercomputers, which is to say GPUs. Ideally, this program would be written in Shader Language, but XScreenSaver still targets OpenGL systems that don't support GLSL, so we are doing the crazy thing here of trying to run this highly parallelizable algorithm on the CPU instead of the GPU. This sort-of works out because modern CPUs have a fair amount of parallel-computation features on their side of the fence as well. (Generally speaking, your CPU is a Cray and your GPU is a Connection Machine, except that your phone does not typically require liquid nitrogen cooling and a dedicated power plant).

Update: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. A while back someone requested an Apple TV version of XScreenSaver, so I took a crack at it. There's a tvOS target in the Xcode project, but when you launch it, it never instantiates SaverRunner. I imagine there's some xib or storyboard problem, but I couldn't figure it out so I gave up. If someone can get me past that, I'll take another look. BTW, it turns out that one of the hurdles of porting iOS to tvOS is that tvOS doesn't have newfangled UI elements like checkboxes and sliders.

#uncategorized #computers #firstperson #linux #mac #phones #security #xscreensaver