221–230 of 269 posts
If you did not go into the details, chances are that when you will, this will turned out to be a false positive case.
If you did, where are the evidence?
Visa application is riddled with scams. From the simple website that charges you twice the price to websites that will tell you that you were rejected and then fake your documents to get in with your name. So they're probably trying to see that you're not one of those web servers, a proxy for them or detect some known C2 channels.
That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a n…
No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go
> According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants.
> It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry.
> Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years.
> Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.
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I don’t know if you’re US-based or not but in the US, government work has the stigma of attracting the bottom of the barrel. It is nearly impossible to get fired for performance reasons. Combine low pay and high job security, and you’re not going to attract the most innovative, motivated, or competent people. Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my…
> high job security Not so much after DOGE fired entire departments for dubious reasons. I don't know why anyone would work for the federal government now - pay still sucks, and job security has been demonstrated to no longer be guaranteed.
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That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a n…
Hey, this is actually something I have a keen interest in as I'm fighting my government (as an MP) to drop those scammers where possible. Do you have any media links to send me about them selling the "good hours" on the black market? Even if the US has a horrible visa system – as I can attest, despite only having to do it every 5 years – the EU countries could benefit from attracting talent by being more welcoming. S…
https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cz5r2l43kn2o
https://medyascope.tv/2024/01/22/vize-sorunu-kontrolden-cikt...
On the social media the anecdotes differ but some say they were able to get the visa appointments bots, others say it was agency personel selling it to them under the table. Maybe its really the agency personel, or maybe it's people running bots to snap appointments and sell those pretending to be from the agency - can't know for sure but there are multiple services where people purchase appointments unofficially.
In general the news situation in Turkey isn't very good as with the law enforcement but as you can see even BBC took notice.
Generally speaking, these visa agencies are very unfriendly and unreachable. They seem to just collect the money, provide no personalized help at all. My GF had some questions about her US visa application, we were not able to reach VFS Global. The phone numbers provided don't work, it's not even like taking long to speak with a human, the phone just gives you calling error.
She previously used the same company for her Schengen visa for a company event in Paris, of course unreachable again and no appointments available. Because she works at a French corporation, she was able to ask a high ranking French person in the company who has a contact with the French embassy and they arranged the appointment shortly.
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You might be making the assumption that the US wants to make the process easier.
The web front ends are awful, but the back ends are even worse. The backlogs for some of these applications is insane. I was at a US embassy one time and got talking to a girl who had just had her application approved after an 18 year wait .
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>I'm Danish and we have lots of Turks. They are generally much nicer than the Danes but almost all of them are dunces That's rich coming from someone who doesn't understand what the Schengen visa is about. FYI it's not about settling in Denmark, it's for up to 90 days stays in 180 periods for tourism and business purposes. But hey, the inventors of of the mRNA vaccine are both Turkish immigrants to Germany and there…
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Internal apps on non-private IP addresses occasionally use this. There is a standard called Private Network Access[1] that requires these requests to have preflights like CORS requests. Only Chrome has implemented it so far. [1]: https://wicg.github.io/private-network-access/
Why though? What is the use case that demands this? It'd better be a real pressing need because the security risks are immense and obvious. This is a backdoor to every network firewall.
Home Assistant has a well-known public name that opens your local instance. On first access, you need to give it the name or ip of your instance, which is saved in browser storage. This supports deep links into your config from forum posts.
My mum also had a shitty D-Link wifi mesh device, which was packaged as an appliance. I cannot speak lowly enough about that garbage device, but then, I am not really the target market. iirc it had something similar; a public dns name for local appliance mgmt.
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Or Microsoft Edge
Microsoft will eventually (TBD) remove Manifest v2 support from Edge, too[1]. > Manifest V2 extensions will no longer function in Microsoft Edge, even with the use of enterprise policies. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions/...
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The web front ends are awful, but the back ends are even worse. The backlogs for some of these applications is insane. I was at a US embassy one time and got talking to a girl who had just had her application approved after an 18 year wait .
18 year wait for approval or 18 year wait for family sponsored immigrant visa? Because from some countries those do have 18 year backlogs.
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Not to defend the US immigration system, but my experience is that this user-hostile behavior (modulo the port scanning lol) is endemic across US government websites - including those that nominally want to serve you, those that are at the state level instead of the federal level (such as the DMV sites), and those that are even internal for use by government employees only. It's bad enough that in some cases I believ…
Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules. Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent. As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortun…