riQQ's recent activity

  1. Comment on Exposing AdFection - how Discover-Tech turned targeted ads into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware in ~tech

    riQQ
    (edited )
    Link
    There's also an executive summary by the citizen lab.

    This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps mercenary surveillance vendors track and hack devices around the world.

    A separate threat actor we call DARK CARTOGRAPHER is using Discover-Tech’s infrastructure to exploit vulnerabilities across numerous mobile carriers to link device advertising IDs with phone numbers, mass-deanonymizing internet users. We will detail our findings concerning this threat actor in a separate forthcoming report.

    Discover-Tech’s mass abuse, privacy invasion, and facilitation for mercenary spyware attacks illustrates structural flaws with the online advertising system, which failed to detect or prevent the abuse documented in this report.

    There's also an executive summary by the citizen lab.

    10 votes

  3. Comment on Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack in ~tech

  4. Comment on Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link

    Hundreds of French supermarkets have been hit by a cyber attack that caused their fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros.

    Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected.

    8 votes

  6. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

  7. Comment on End of development of Orion for Linux and Windows in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link

    We are ending development of Orion for Linux and Windows, and we're open-sourcing both so the community can carry them forward. Kagi is stepping back from developing these platforms directly so our team can put more focus on Orion for macOS and iOS.

    Linux: The current Linux Beta will keep working, but it will stop receiving updates from Kagi after October 2, 2026. We don't recommend using it as your main browser.

    Windows: We had planned to launch Orion for Windows in late 2026. That release won't come from Kagi. Instead, the code will be available for the community to build on. If you signed up for the Windows newsletter, this will be the last update you receive from that list.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Men arrested on suspicion of explosives offences near US air base in Britain following "major incident" in ~news

    riQQ
    Link
    https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/30/burnham-says-strong-indications-iran-played-part-in-raf-fairford-security-scare

    Burnham says 'strong indications' Iran played part in UK airbase security scare

    "There are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford," Burnham told the BBC, referring to Sunday's bomb scare near the base in southwest England, which the US has been using in its war against Iran.

    "Of course it remains an ongoing, complex, and serious police investigation," he added.

    Speaking to Sky News, Burnham said: "We have been waiting to confirm what we could say, but we can now confirm our belief that Iran played a part."

    https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/30/burnham-says-strong-indications-iran-played-part-in-raf-fairford-security-scare

    5 votes

  10. Comment on If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it in ~science

  11. Comment on An update on Wayback Machine access in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link
    I still have quite some issues when archiving websites but it seems to have gotten a bit better.

    We’ve heard you: “Fix the Wayback Machine!”

    Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running. One recent change: we rewrote the message you see when a request is blocked with a 429 error — the HTTP code that means “too many requests.”

    Those protections sometimes catch real people by mistake. If that’s happened to you, we’re sorry, and we appreciate your patience while we work to reduce the errors.

    We’re getting better at telling abusive bots apart from the people who depend on the Wayback Machine every day. If you think you were blocked in error, email info@archive.org with your operating system, browser, and IP address, and we’ll look into it.

    I still have quite some issues when archiving websites but it seems to have gotten a bit better.

    12 votes

  13. Comment on What it means to lose Autistici/Inventati in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link

    A terrorism designation is forcing Autistici/Inventati to shut down, taking its blogging platform NoBlogs offline with it.

    For 25 years, A/I has given activists like me a place to share our thoughts, but now it is being treated as a threat. Noblogs.org might not be online anymore when you read this. On August 26 A/I sent out an announcement that the US government had declared them to be supporters of terrorism. According to a press release by the State Department. “Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world.” The collective quickly rejected the allegations and wrote that they “strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.”

    8 votes

  15. Comment on Hibernating bacteria can invade hospitals and survive outer space - but their energy budget reveals a weakness in ~science

    riQQ
    Link

    A spore is a bacterium's survival capsule: dried almost solid and wrapped in protein armor, with its chemical processes shut down. Bacteria enter this state of hibernation when environmental conditions are unfavorable. What's left is close to indestructible: It can survive boiling, desiccation, radiation and the vacuum of space. NASA once bolted Bacillus spores to the outside of a satellite and left them in orbit for nearly six years; the ones shielded from sunlight were able to come back to life upon returning to Earth.

    Out in the dirt, bacteria have handed down this spore-forming ability for roughly 3 billion years. But if you put one of these bacteria in a comfortable laboratory flask and feed it well, within a few thousand generations it will lose the ability to make spores altogether.

    Why would a trait this useful, conserved for 3 billion years, vanish in a few thousand generations? This paradox has bothered microbiologists like me for decades.

    7 votes

  17. Comment on There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis in ~tech

    riQQ
    (edited )
    Link

    If you have a new domain, only the main page shows up on Google search results
    [...]
    My best guess (and to be clear, this is a guess): Google decided they could no longer effectively identify and swat away SEO slop, and figured that just massively nerfing brand new domains was their next best option.

    Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine
    Since this Google issue started, we’ve also launched a number of wikis on subdomains of an existing, established domain (wiki.leagueoflegends.com, wiki.warframe.com, hypixelskyblock.minecraft.wiki). Every single one of these has been immediately successful for getting articles other than the main page indexed on Google.

    It doesn’t even need to be a popular domain! overwatch.weirdgloop.org, which launched just 7 days ago, is already doing better on page-indexing than any of the wikis currently in Google Jail.

    I’ve always said that the only legitimately hard part about moving your wiki off Fandom is that you have to wage a years-long Google war against the zombified corpse left over on Fandom. When you’ve got the game’s community on your side and you’re not dealing with the new-domain issues, this is genuinely not that hard…

    …but when your wiki is simply not able to get its pages to show up because of this Google Jail, that doesn’t matter. You’re not going to get the majority of readers, which to me is what determines the success or failure of a move from Fandom.

    There’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, though - based on our experiments so far, it seems like once we establish these new wikis fairly well on Google, it should be safe to move them off weirdgloop.org back to whatever the appropriate name was, while keeping the existing Google juice that the subdomain picked up. I’m hoping that in 6 months or so we can just 301 redirect overwatch.weirdgloop.org to overwatch.wiki, use Google’s change of address tool, and put these wikis to where they should have been in the first place.

    14 votes

  19. Comment on UN says world will miss its climate target, warming must be reversed in ~enviro

    riQQ
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    According to the article, some of the leaks have been easy fixes yet there are states not even responding to alerts :(

    According to the article, some of the leaks have been easy fixes yet there are states not even responding to alerts :(

    The UN Methane Alert and Response System (Mars) sent 192 alerts of methane plumes to Turkmenistan in the last year. The country had three of the six worst leaks detected in the world by Mars in last six months, and nine of the top 50.

    Turkmenistan responded to about 20% of the alerts with on-the-ground information about the leaks and potential plans to fix them. In contrast, the US was sent the second highest number of alerts – 138 – but responded to none and had fixed no leaks in the last year. Other nations that failed to respond to any alerts were Iran, Russia and China.

    5 votes

  20. Comment on GPS tracker for an interstate move in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link
    Meta: Shouldn't this be moved to ~tech? I don't have the moving privileges to do it myself.

    Meta:
    Shouldn't this be moved to ~tech? I don't have the moving privileges to do it myself.

    3 votes