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  • 116 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: April 24th, 2024
  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoFediverse@lemmy.world•Bluesky does federation-washingEnglish
    211·
    18 days ago

    Yep.

    Its ‘federated’ as long as you ignore a single massive chokepoint controlled by one company that allows them to block/ban/censor users of any part of the system.

    So functionally, their ‘federation’ system is actually just a false marketing/propoganda campaign that may also result in crowd sourcing some server costs.

    It’s psuedo-federation, along the lines of a psuedo-historian or psuedo-scientist: They pretend to be something they are not, in such a way that makes them seem trustworthy when they are in fact not.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoCybersecurity@sh.itjust.works•A single default password exposes access to dozens of apartment buildingsEnglish
    7·
    1 month ago

    I realize I am coming off a bit more aggressive than I mean to… very, very angry after watching the fascist goon squad in Idaho…

    Bleck.

    … Anyway.

    I would not expect basically anyone at this point to be any kind of competent whatsoever with any kind of cybersecurity.

    I worked in tech for a decade, database admin, backend stuff, handling PII, often having to teach front end web designers how to do anything more complex that building a CSS stylesheet or using Wix or something like that how to actually interface with an API… and my experience is that literally no one outside of a computer security minded role knows anything, at all, about cyber security.

    Non tech managers and team leads are usually even worse. You have to basically baby talk them through everything, and they usually don’t learn anything anyway, and will then just use all the terms and concepts completely incorrectly and conclude they said or agreed to or told you to do almost the exact opposite of the meaning of the sentence they actually used.

    The entire problem is that everyone just assumes that because they paid for something, it actually works as advertised.

    Buzzword? Other Buzzword? Authoritative salespitch? Sold!

    The vast, vast majority of people never do proactive due dilligence, only reactive finger pointing.

    Leaving default passwords in critical hardware systems that are made by somebody else and sold to people or businesses is widespread and has been widespread for decades.

    Here is basically a chatroullete of internet connected, public facing cameras that are basically all accessible, live, in realtime, because nobody bothered to change the default login/pws.

    The whole point is to illustrate how common this is.

    http://insecam.org/

    They used to have a lot, loooot more, but they had to start automatically delisting the absurd amount of cameras that were inside peoples houses, watching people fuck and have domestic disputes and such, and adopt a policy of ‘please email us if you see your own camera and we’ll take it off the site and also tell you how to fix the problem on your end.’

    Just going through the US, the first one that’s popping up for me is an amalgamated view of what looks to be the entire security feed of an apartment complex in San Diego.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•If God's in charge, He's in the process of shutting down the operationEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.

    The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.

    Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.

    The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.

    If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•"Reality" is often thought as a paragon of neutrality, being neither good nor bad. So why is a "reality check" ALWAYS felt negatively?English
    2·
    2 months ago

    I’d say a ‘reality check’ is not always negative.

    Say you’re very, very self conscious in public, always nervous about how others percieve you.

    But then, one day, a friend pulls you aside and ‘reality checks’ you with:

    “Look, in 90% of situations you’ll ever be in, if you can follow a few basic dress and behavioral rules, you’ll be fine. Barring situations where the whole idea is you making a good first impression… most people, most of the time, in most situations… really don’t care that much.”

    Things like that are arguably ‘positive’ reality checks.

    The reason why ‘reality check’ is often connotated negatively is because most of the time, cognitive dissonance develops as a way of excusing or justifying harmful or irresponsible behavior or inaction, all things that mean you are living in a mild to serious delusion which can no longer be maintained, and will require a lot more effort to grapple with.

    But it can be the case that reality is in someway better than it is perceived by someone who is overly critical or peasimistic in some way.

    In some sense, the initial realization that you’ve been incorrect about something is negative in that you may be embarassed about being wrong in the past, but if it actually means a more realistic outlook going forward, which is actually less troublesome, easier to exist with/in, then I’d say thats overall a ‘positive’ reality check.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•If God's in charge, He's in the process of shutting down the operationEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.

    The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.

    Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•If God's in charge, He's in the process of shutting down the operationEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.

    El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba’al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.

    The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to ‘God’ as El, and ‘The Lord’, Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means ‘The Gods’, and YHWH.

    Adonai was originally a title given to Ba’al.

    Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba’al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba’al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.

    This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.

    This is why you get Exodus 6:3

    https://biblehub.com/exodus/6-3.htm

    Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!

    Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they’re escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan…

    While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring… but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.

    …

    Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.

    This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn’t work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten’s death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten’s name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the criminal’.