141–150 of 539 posts
It is not inherently bad. Some of the real life uses are practical and beneficial, but it can also be weaponized.
I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…
For location tracking they specifically called out things like equipment carts, but it was implied that it could track other bluetooth devices.
I worked for a company that made deep packet inspection based network equipment. Western customers mostly used it for "security" and media streaming man in the middle attacks (actually a useful feature saving lots of bandwidth). The boxes were also sold to Syria and Burma, and were used to facilitate censorship and human right abuses
It would be entirely reasonable to name the company.
It worked well enough, then quickly got to a state of overwhelming the agency responsible for following up. That's depressing enough, but it was then repurposed and unleashed as a way to find copyrighted content for major studios, which meant it went from something doing good to something just annoying people with cease and desist notices.
I've seen (and caused/fixed) so many horrific things that I feel compelled to improve my expression skills... so that I can write them up more formally.
Most recently, I moved some of our Ubuntu systems away from network-scripts to systemd-networkd
I didn't realize the gravity of this change. Be warned, systemd-networkd will significantly change how forwarding works.
Due to things outside of my control, we have some systems playing router. They didn't like this change a whole lot, and I neglected to test this.
On network-scripts with the usual kit of sysctl and iptables rules, you're good to go.
networkd however requires more explicit configuration; particularly which interfaces may forward.
Not a big deal, unless you don't know... like I didn't
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is now one of the top hits on Google for "Qatar slave helmet". And it's the only hit when I put quotes around the phrase to force an exact match. If this is real you should get in touch with investigative journalists, e.g. ProPublica. ("Get in touch with investigative journalists" probably applies to a bunch of the people posting in this thread.)
What would that accomplish?
I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…
A service to find CSAM online. It worked well enough, then quickly got to a state of overwhelming the agency responsible for following up. That's depressing enough, but it was then repurposed and unleashed as a way to find copyrighted content for major studios, which meant it went from something doing good to something just annoying people with cease and desist notices.
I'm coming up on 3 years now with very minimal progress on returning media to users and getting the site fully operational.
There are a lot of places where in hindsight I could have made better decisions. At every point the best course seemed to stand out, only to sour with unexpected obstacles.
At first I thought I could stay in the warehouse, but then the returns became too much to complete before I had to vacate. COVID struck, and delayed the container move. Then I couldn't use my warehouse, and couldn't unload the containers. This is delayed efforts to return media and restore files that would have been easy to replace if I could unload the containers. Meanwhile Murphy customers have been 3 years without their discs or access to their media. I feel terrible about it. Some have died without getting their media.
I'm still fighting to do the right thing. I've filed a lawsuit against the city for refusing to issue permits, and I'm constantly looking for solutions, but I feel like I've failed a lot of people.