Verifying myself: I am
@drwho in the
Fediverse.
BEGIN KEYBASE SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. kXR7VktZdyH7rvq v5weRa0zkFLUiWS VPZ3U48F7ZtSgPj wefiNd7VuwhcPTR twvzOMIJnFa45ac 9x1UEDMIjFcn3nq u7Rlldjihk74ohS IGKUECH96urnVF1 gn7wM6ahu9MJY9m yvwzo8IX6Lq6cpz z4ALlqryKh5mHwX cJPmbQ5dBsHgbq3 i6cEnn0SUl8P3Ka t0p8kNuM9eWM4P0 eg8WT2QiaRGsAbz 4itKIoK47onnbZg 1E2xCGNDevM3J9s SBF2Sd9grU14k. END KEYBASE SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE.
Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Infragard for laybeings:
Infragard is described as a public sector/private sector partnership (part of the FBI, though I don't know off the top of my head which one) where they share intel pertaining to information security with active security professionals. This means, you have to work for a company which is in a fairly important field, such as aerospace, a tier-1 or tier-2 ISP, finance, or software products. I worked at NASA at the time, and later went into fintech. Both times I had to join Infragard because I did information security as my job. When I worked as a pen tester for a consultancy, it was before Infragard existed, otherwise I'd have had to join.
Yes, I had to undergo a background check. They want to make sure that members work for established companies, actually do security work, and don't have any connections to criminal groups that would try to misuse the information (at the time it was Russian organized crime they were worried about).
Being a member of Infragard means you get access to bulletins a couple of weeks before the information goes public. Most of it is under Chatham House rules - you can use it, but you can't say "I got this from Infragard."
Unfortunately, most of this information is between three and six months out of date. If you do even a minimal amount of proactive intel gathering as a security practitioner (run honeypots, read your server logs manually once or twice a week), or have any kind of intelligence system in place (#exocortex) you'll scoop them easily.
Supposedly they have classified infosec intel that they disseminate, but I've never seen any of it. If I had, common sense says I'd stay the hell away from a site like hackers.town and not say a damned thing about this tempest in a teapot.
Infragard has periodic members-only meetings where they talk about stuff going on. The group nomenclature /APT [0-9]*/ was first brought up during some of these seminars. Once in a great while a speaker will bring up something timely, but most of the time the meetings are pretty much a waste of time. Most of the ones I went to had to do with security policy compliance (meaning, "Did you follow all the steps in $handbook to lock your shit down?"), logging and analysis, that Windows XP wasn't going out of support just yet (at the time), and stuff like that. It's usually two or three speakers with an MC from Infragard while the rest of us sit in uncomfortable plastic chairs drinking crappy coffee and eating more-than-halfway-decent bagels and muffins for breakfast.
Yes, I had to wear a suit to attend. Highly uncomfortable in the DC metroplex in the summer, I can assure you.
No super-secret info, tips, or tricks were given out. I wish. It's all stuff that you'd know anyway if you'd ever been a system administrator. Hell, most of the people there weren't even techies, they were policy wonks. Quite a few times I was the only person there who actually worked /with/ and /on/ computers in any capacity. I was certainly the only person there with long hair.
For the record, if you want the High Gibson 0-day intel, crash a room party or two at Defcon or HOPE. That's where the good stuff is.
Infragard does not solicit, demand, or even request intel from its members. Everything was push (they tell us stuff), not pull (we tell them stuff). I doubt they'd even listen to us if we did tell them anything. A couple of times I spoke to presenters during breaks to correct them, because their knowledge of something was incorrect (see above remark about doing proactive infosec stuff) and either their eyes glazed over or they "Well, actually"'d me.
It's nothing really impressive if you have a technical background. Most of the time you'd be bored out of your mind, unless you were a checkbox-checker that did C&A (certification and accreditation) work (which is NOT actually testing security, it's asking questions on a checklist, only about 1/3 to 1/2 actually have anything to do about actual infosec; but that's a rant for another time).
Ostensibly I'm still an active member even though I haven't logged into the Infragard portal in about three years, though I still get the e-mails (I currently have over 200 in a folder, unopened, because most of the information is simply useless), and I can't be bothered to sit on the phone for three hours until I get through to a human who can unlock the account I never log into, anyway.
At no time, to the best of my knowledge, were any of us questioned about things we knew about or did. We were never even asked about stuff we saw going on in our own networks. I certainly wasn't, and I saw a lot of shit flying around on the Net at the time. Nobody ever told (or even gently suggested) to any us to keep an eye and ear open for anything interesting happening on Twitter, Facebook, or anything else. Hell, at the time Infragard didn't even seem to know anything about Lulzsec's shenanagains at the time, nor did any of the other members I talked to at seminars. I was the only person in the DC Infragard chapter who did, because I'd tasked part of me with monitoring the situation.
If the FBI /did/ want to monitor the Fediverse... well, pull up your profile and hit View Source. You'll see an RSS feed for everything you post. Here's mine: https://hackers.town/users/drwho.atom
tl;dr, they could surveil the Fediverse with a feed reader or even a shitty Perl script. No NSA magick required. Not even an account on that instance is required. So, there would be no point to standing up an instance for the purpose of surveillance.
Ask me anything I forgot about. I'll answer honestly and to the best of my ability. If I don't know, I'll say "I don't know."
Love is the Law, Love under Will.
At the end of this year, I should do a #WeAreNameless of _National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation_.
Something I keep saying I’m going to write about but never get around to is how my relationship to free software has similarities to how plain folk relate to all technology.
So instead of putting it off I’m just going to scribble some notes here.
Plain folk use technology but they avoid tech that might compromise their values. Key among these is preservation of their communities and their autonomy. One example is how they won’t use electricity from the grid but they will use solar panels. This might seem confusing if you don’t consider how depending on the grid conflicts with their value of autonomy.
Autonomy is key to these folks because it is how they have been able to keep their way of life inside of a militant, capitalistic nation for centuries. If a community can feed, clothe and house itself, there’s not a lot a government can do to interfere with them short of the kind of violence that would look really bad on TV.
One of my key motivations for using free software is to preserve autonomy as well. If I have non-free software in any of my workflows I am vulnerable to whatever whim the maker may throw at me. I’m also vulnerable to any legal entity who might change the rules about what I can make and how I can use my tools. This is important when you’re trying to divorce yourself from things like capitalism which have an immune response to such threats.
Most people won’t argue with say a Mennonite who won’t use a telephone, but they will argue with me all day for refusing to use Autodesk software; and what I’m saying is that the underlying rationale is the same.
Let's all love Lain!
#feditips
@drwho
Followup to that: https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1541794169349439490
2022 GenX Mixtape https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2022-07-05/2022-genx-mix-tape/ #misc #2022 #music
Building an Extremely Detailed Cyberpunk Book Nook #cyberpunk https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/07/04/building-an-extremely-detailed-cyberpunk-book-nook-cyberpunk/ #cyberpunk
I'm seeing more and more since the pandemic started reports of Ikea just not giving a shit about parts.
Before the pandemic, you could walk into any ikea and say "the screw for part B on the floofkerbital table leg fell off and I can't find it. Can I get one here" and they'd hand you that fucking screw and you'd go home and put your table together.
What I'm seeing now is more and more folks in the 3d print community dropping models for small parts that Ikea will no longer replace. Their response seems to have changed to "buy a new floofkerbital or gtfo".
Their quality has been dropping anyway but this is yet another reason to not buy ikea shit anymore.
Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Burnout. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. BOFH. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Otori Academy '96. Cyberpunk. Making the Net /<-r4d again. Sburb speedrunner. XKCD 705. DJ at the crab rave afterparty. Vax'd x3. Fuck cancer.
Lil alurl velve zhah lil velkyn uss.
Magneto was right.
(Avatar by Avery Liell-Kok.)