rinze

joined 1 year ago
 

Hi,

For reasons too absurd to explain, this Wednesday I'm invited to a virtual "coffee break" with the speaker of one of Spain's cryptoexchanges, https://bit2me.com/. The event is organized by Cinco Días, one of the main economic newspapers in the country.

I'm looking for a list of potential questions I might ask if I have the chance. I already have the basics ("how's this different to a tulip", "what super-legitimate uses, apart from paying for drugs, hitmen, sex trafficking, launder money, evade taxes and inflate bubbles", "what about the electricity usage", etc), and given that BBVA (Spain's second largest bank) and Telefonica (Spain's main telco) are investing money, I also want to ask how they're handling the child porn they have in their servers.

If anyone has more suggestions, I'm all ears.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yes, it is. I didn't see the old thread, sorry for the noise.

 

I guess self-driving cars are not killing people fast enough and they're diversifying.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 2 points 3 months ago

A true role model.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 1 points 3 months ago

In Spain at least I have two small alternatives to this:

  • Paypal (I don't like it too much, but it works fine).
  • A prepaid credit card offered through my bank. Good for sites that don't look too trustworthy but I need to buy from. I just activate it, load it with whatever amount I need, I make the transaction, then disable it again. Even if it gets leaked no one can take any money out.

For everything else I have a virtual credit card number that's not dynamic, but at least it's something I use exclusively for online stuff.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 3 points 3 months ago

Here you get a debit card by default with your bank account, and that one's free. You might get a credit one, but credit limits are typically low. I lived in Canada for 9 years and by the time I left I had a CC with a limit of 26k CAD. Here my Spanish credit card has a limit of 1.2k euros, and I've had it for quite a long time.

In Spain at least there's quite a lot of confusion with this. People call any card type a "credit card", even debit ones.

 

What the URL above says. It's getting crazy on Xitter.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 2 points 4 months ago

I'm not completely sure. Sometimes I find stuff in one site I don't find in any of the other two. Also, I don't know how often catalogues are synced.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 37 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yes. I combine libgen with Anna's Archive and Z-Library and there's very, very little I can't find.

Combine that with KOReader and this is pure bliss.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I've been using Fastmail for a few years and I'm quite happy with the service. Being a semi-large organization I expect their security to be OK, but if anyone has comments on that aspect I welcome them.

As for privacy, I always consider e-mail to be a postcard. If I want to encrypt something, I use GPG locally.

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.

I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don't recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.

Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they'll think about it.

So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it's still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 3 points 5 months ago

I like it a lot, but sometimes I feel he's going to get eaten alive by the character he's created. He should tone it down a notch sometimes.

 

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/12406642

Body of the toot:

Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

What a time to be alive in IT. 🤦‍♂️

 

Body of the toot:

Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

What a time to be alive in IT. 🤦‍♂️

[–] rinze@infosec.pub 1 points 5 months ago

Just subscribed, thanks a lot.

 

Google responded to Ed, Ed responds.

I've suggested the orange site changes the title to "In response to Google?" to keep up with latest practices around there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164393

 

The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning that the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. [...]

One person said that the White House had grown increasingly frustrated by brazen Ukrainian drone attacks that have struck oil refineries, terminals, depots and storage facilities across western Russia, hurting its oil production capacity.

Russia remains one of the world’s most important energy exporters despite western sanctions on its oil and gas sector. Oil prices have risen about 15 per cent this year, to $85 a barrel, pushing up fuel costs just as US President Joe Biden begins his campaign for re-election.

Un-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/wv1Y3

 

A thread compiling all Verge articles about AI influence on the upcoming election.

Has its own RSS feed: https://www.theverge.com/rss/stream/23862839

 

AKA "surprisingly, oligopolies are there to make money and care about their customers just enough not to pee on their faces while someone else is looking".

 

Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.

So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.

LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.

On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

 

Desjardins Group announced as of Feb. 1 it would no longer offer new mortgages for properties in “0-20 year” flood zones — where there is a five per cent chance of flooding in any given year — because of what it called the rising effect of climate change.

There are some exceptions: buyers can get financing for up to 65 per cent a home’s selling price if the previous owner had a Desjardins mortgage and the property has protective measures to prevent flooding. But the company’s decision has left mayors of low-lying towns worried that homeowners will be left with properties that no one will buy or that are massively devalued.

 

What the title says. Before you had to choose either SMS / call via phone or a very clunky code grid.

view more: next ›