Agree 100%. Also, re. "a third of a house"; I bought an old (1941) but comfortably livable 2 bedroom house with garden and driveway in Columbia, South Carolina for only $86k last year. Most of the cyberfuck owners paid MORE than my house for their dumb cars...

Wow, I'm sorry. Please, consider moving away from the USA before you work yourself to death

Roman Catholic cola? In Scotland we just drink buckfast

Fair point! I think that's part of why I admire him, humble greatness

Eh, bagder is more than "just some guy" to a lot of people! To me he's kinda been my tech idol for 20 years lol, he also was a core part of building Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) which was the first open source project I got seriously involved in as a kid ☺️

I've built a couple of useful products which leverage LLMs at one stage or another, but I don't shout about it cos I don't see LLMs as something particularly exciting or relevant to consumers, to me they're just another tool in my toolbox which I consider the efficacy of when trying to solve a particular problem. I think they are a new tool which is genuinely valuable when dealing with natural language problems. For example in my most recent product, which includes the capability to automatically create karaoke music videos, the problem for a long time preventing me from bringing that product to market was transcription quality / ability to consistently get correct and complete lyrics for any song. Now, by using state of the art transcription (which returns 90% accurate results) plus using an open weight LLM with a fine tuned prompt to correct the mistakes in that transcription, I've finally been able to create a product which produces high quality results pretty consistently. Before LLMs that would've been much harder!

I'm sure a lot has changed in 10 years ago so this won't be relevant today, but back when I was last playing with this, sslstrip was the tool I was using on the pineapple to enable SSL mitm attacks - https://github.com/moxie0/sslstrip

I'd imagine there are new techniques to counteract new defenses - this stuff is always cat & mouse

Yes, back when I was playing around with my WiFi pineapple there were a wide variety of tricks to break SSL authentication without it being obvious to users. Easiest was to terminate the SSL connection on the pineapple and re-encrypt it with a new SSL cert from there to the users browser, so to the user it looked like everything was secure but in reality their traffic was only encrypted from them to the pineapple, then decrypted, sniffed and re-encrypted to pass along to the target websites with normal SSL.

Man in the middle attacks really do give the attacker tons of options

Put the URL into 12ft.io

Agreed, this is a blog post from 3 days ago but all of the sources they link in the footer are from early 2021... nothing new here and this article is a biased mess.

That said, there's nothing surprising here anyway, lobbying in the US is just bribery and corruption by another term and obviously these companies are going to do anything they can to defend their profits

The rot economy

Same