Wasn’t “woke” originally a good term until right wing screechers took it over at an insult? They do that a lot, every time some positive phrase or idea starts to gain traction. Seems intentional.

So, I got malware that seemed to create an hidden proxy or VPN or something when I was online, without me having to install anything. I was on Fedora using Firefox in private mode with Ublock Origin and some script blocker. Ghostery, or Privacy Badger, or something. Fedora has it’s firewall enabled and blocking inbound connections, and SELinux was running. It would occasionally report small things like VLC or Clam AV wanting access to something.

It took me a little bit to realize something was wrong.

I realized it after Google started demanding repeated captcha attempts for everything, I started seeing unsuccessful attempts to sign into my Microsoft account from around the world, and some websites started blocking my IP for abuse. A few times, the blocking page (usually Cloudflare) showed that my public IP was over 240.0.0.0, in the unassigned block. My modem logs showed my machine making outbound connections to these random or impossible IPs at times that roughly lined up with my connection issues.

But if I simply hit refresh on those pages when they blocked me, the websites suddenly returned my correct residential IP address and started working again. I was slow to catch on. Hell, I hadn’t even used my Microsoft account for years, and I assumed Fedora with SELinux would alert me if anything strange was going on. It didn’t. My machine started acting weird, but I couldn’t place my finger on exactly how. I tried tools like Clam AV, or any number of intrusion detection solutions to assuage my growing paranoia. Problem is that they require some knowledge and you have to set them up before things go wrong.

Besides a terminal tool to unhide running processes, which inconsistently returned zero to dozens of unknown short-lived programs with increasingly high PIDs, nothing was detected. I later ran that unhide tool on a live USB of Fedora, and it did the same thing, so I assumed it was a false positive.

Ultimately, it was my fault, I know. I just went on a shady website to watch a TV show. Stupid, but not uncommon. My android phone also started acting strangely around the same time. I assume because I visited the same site to finish some season in bed using Firefox mobile. It’s been replaced entirely now.

But the point is that SELinux didn’t stop anything, I didn’t have to explicitly download or install anything to my machine, and it was some kind of drive-by infection that somehow added my machine to a kind of botnet, I think. Hard to tell just from the various logs I gathered from my machine and modem.

I don’t know what it was doing, but when I finally put all the pieces together, I completely wiped the drive in that machine, including a long dd operation on the drives with /dev/random. Still not sure what I’m going to do with it.

I’m also not sure if the infection was limited to Firefox itself, or if my entire machine was compromised. I may never know for sure.

While I was being stupid, I wasn’t being completely reckless and just running untrusted code from strange places. I watched TV in Firefox’s embedded video player. All it took was going to a website that I found by other people recommending it on social media. I should have known better, but I’m human.

If I can’t even visit a webpage without getting invisible botnet malware that escapes professionally configured tools like SELinux on Fedora, then how are complete newbies, or kids, or grandparents, or “know just enough to be dangerous nerds” (like me) supposed to be safe?

I agree that the user is the single biggest point of failure in security, and should be mindful. But when you’re not installing random Github packages, or turning off your firewall, or enabling SSH, and your machine can still get so easily pwned, what then?

That’s the value of anti-virus software. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but neither is your list of rules to follow. There is no single perfect approach, and people are lazy, impulsive, and sometimes drunkenly want to watch Breaking Bad. I don’t know what the solution is, but outright denying everyday antivirus seems… unwise, I guess?

Even if if takes a month for the vendor to be able to detect it, that’s still protection for anyone who comes after. It doesn’t have to be perfect to make a positive difference.

And, no: For anyone curious, I’m not going into more detail about the website.

Let’s keep in mind that if this is a state actor or some sort of global organized crime, then they don’t put all their eggs into one basket. If that’s the case, they’re going to have a bunch of other plans and backdoor attempts ongoing. This isn’t the end and we can assume there’s something else somewhere that went unnoticed.

Security is a constantly changing war of attrition, not a goal/product/configuration.

Oh. Makes sense. To be honest, I really didn’t care enough to bother checking their profile or any other comments. Just saw the response today and wanted to try and offer some sort of olive branch or something. idk

So, let me unpack what happened, from my point of view. I’m not complaining or anything, just pointing out how it seemed from my end.

I made a comment that I personally didn’t like the show because of how many times people around kept saying I was like the main character.

You replied directly to me implying that nerds should like the show because it normalizes dating them. (Which I agree is a good thing.)

I replied to say that doesn’t apply to me, and I’m not sure why it was relevant to my comment.

Finally, you left a comment to call me names.

Do you see how that entire interaction makes no sense from my side of things? I said that I didn’t like a show, and you inserted yourself into the conversation to complain that hot women should want to date me because of the show. Then, when I said that had nothing to do with what I was saying, you insulted me.

So, like, why?

Or even a criminal organization.

…I don’t want to date women, so I know know how that’s relevant.

“It’s so funny! Sheldon reminds me of you!”

Yeah, never watched it, but heard this enough to hate the show with a passion.

For those who don’t know, In the US, the two political parties basically switched sides at one point. I only skimmed, but here’s an article about it:

https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html

But I’d rather look at what modern people are doing and saying, than muse about what older generations would have wanted or done.

Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That’s when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

Damn fine work all around.

I know this is an issue fraught with potential legal and political BS, and it’s impossible to check everything without automation these days, but is there an organization that trains and pays people to work as security researchers or QA for open source projects?

Basically, a watchdog group that finds exploitable security vulnerabilities, and works with individuals or vendors to patch them? Maybe make it a publicly owned and operated group with mandatory reporting of some kind. An international project funded by multiple governments, where it’s harder for a single point of influence to hide exploits, abuse secrets, or interfere with the researchers? They don’t own or control any code, just find security issues and advise.

I don’t know.

Just thinking that modern security is getting pretty complicated, with so many moving parts and all.

Exactly! It’s nice to have my subconscious be so helpful, but trying to think through something without putting it in front of me in some way is damn near impossible. And if someone interrupts me while I’m trying to think, then POOF! It’s all gone.

I feel like an idiot, but other people assume I must be smart because I’m decent with problem solving. I’m really not smart. I’m probably just average, but slightly more self aware of how my own mind works.

It’s such a weird position to be in, right?

I forget if I put this in the original post, and I’m too lazy to check. But do you have trouble with your memory too? Like, I’m okay with recent bullet-point facts about an event, but couldn’t describe what I did yesterday in any real detail.

I can tell you that I ate food in the kitchen and enjoyed it, but I can’t describe the experience of it very well, if at all. In a few days, I may even forget what the food I ate was. It’s already slipping. I know facts like it was hot and had cheese, I stood over the counter and had Dr. Pepper, but I couldn’t paint a picture for you. I couldn’t describe the experience of it very well, because I’d have to make assumptions and try to recreate what it must have been like.

It sucks because that means I’m always recreating the event in mind head in order to try and remember it better, but without the aid of visualization. And apparently that seems a lot like I’m making things up and lying all the time. It sucks so much. And if I tell someone I don’t remember something well enough to talk about it, they also assuming I’m lying. “It was just last week, how do you not remember?”

The more stressed I am, the worse my memory for that time is. And no matter what I do, I’m always the weird suspicious person.

It’s exhausting.

I’m pretty sure it was Debian in the early aughts.

From Wikipedia:

Dabie bandavirus, also called SFTS virus, is a tick-borne virus in the genus Bandavirus in the family Phenuiviridae, order Bunyavirales.[2] The clinical condition it caused is known as severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS).[2] SFTS is an emerging infectious disease that was first described in northeast and central China 2009 and now has also been discovered in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan in 2015. SFTS has a fatality rate of 12% and as high as over 30% in some areas. The major clinical symptoms of SFTS are fever, vomiting, diarrhea, multiple organ failure, thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), leukopenia (low white blood cell count) and elevated liver enzyme levels. Another outbreak occurred in East China in the early half of 2020.

Or in my case, my parents getting angry AT ME for “acting weird” when a well-meaning teacher at school thought I was on drugs and had them call my mom to pick me up for a drug test in the middle of class.

I was just anxious because they had a surprise visitor coming in to judge our work before college application season started. to this day, I still don’t know what I did or said that caused that reaction.

SC-Controller, although it seems to have been abandoned.

Gpodder-adaptive

…What

I’ve always done this. This is a thing?

Nice!

Needs the unified menu for the active/maximized window at the top. Else, it’s perfect.

I laughed out loud. Saving that pic.

But yeah, I didn’t realize for the longest time that most people can see things in their minds at will. I never got an official diagnosis, but I tick damn near every box, and literally every person I’ve mentioned probably being autistic to has said something like “Oh, that makes sense!” I’m actually talking to a professional this weekend to see what she thinks.

No books though, sorry.

Sad to see this fork of SC Controller is now archived. It provides an Appimage version, and also worked with my PS4 controller. Credit to Kozec, the original creator.

https://www.patreon.com/kozec

https://github.com/Ryochan7/sc-controller

There was also Qjoypad, but I haven’t used it in a while.

Basically, the game is reading the raw controller input as well as the translated virtual controller input. I’ve run into that a lot before on other games. The fix I found is usually to try another mapper, or to disable the controller in the game and map the controller to keyboard and mouse. It’s annoying.

With luck, you -might- have luck with closing the game and setting up the controller mapper, then start the game. If the mapping program provides an Xinput option, try toggling that and see if it helps.

Good luck.

EDIT: Did Kozec stop developing the app? I used to support them on Patreon before I lost my job. There haven’t been any official updates in a while. Sad day. :(