Hey… this week is sort of bittersweet for me. When I was just nine years old my Mum told herself ‘you know what, I should be making sourdough’. That’s right, she was doing it before it was cool. So she made a sourdough starter, and it’s been living in her kitchen ever since — in fact, it just turned 25. This is obviously amazing but at the same time, our precious sourdough starter will now never ever have a shot at being Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend. Such a horrible shame…

ANYWAY this week was sort of okay I guess? 🤷. Because:

• The James Webb telescope is being used for malware somehow

• In a stunning act of neutrality, Cloudflare support raging right wing hate mobs.

• How to turn $100 into $10.5 MILLION

🪐 Is there anything hackers WON’T try?

That’s a silly question, I know. Anyway, picture this: someone sends you an email with a .docx attachment. Even though you don’t know the sender, you open the email AND the attachment (you are an idiot). The attachment downloads a jpg file — the jpg is a lovely recent photo taken by the James Webb telescope! Wow!

Not wow: inside the certificate for the jpg file is some code written in GO (an increasingly popular language among malicious hackers because it’s hard to reverse engineer), and now you have a virus.

Serves you right for opening that silly attachment. But also, what an ingenious way of hiding malicious code. Read more about it here.

⛈️ Cloudflare, why are you like this?

Look at this tweet:

foone @Foone

Hey Cloudflare, here's a fun fact: you aren't the only CDN/reverse proxy/DDOS protection service. And when my boss is like "hey which CDN should we set up?" and I look at the options, I don't immediately have a hugely negative opinion of Fastly or Akamai or CacheFly.

August 31st 2022

2,635 Retweets14,622 Likes

What Foone is referring to is how Cloudflare continue to provide services to the most putrid back-water caverns of hate that the internet has to offer. This week there is particular focus on Kiwi Farms, a forum of despicable individuals who recently forced someone into hiding after doxing them just for being trans.

Cloudflare have been completely silent about this so far, but their actions suggest that they don’t think it’s their responsibility to do anything about this. Well… they’re wrong, obviously. They provide infrastructure, and as such, they have the power to take shitty websites like Kiwi Farms offline. But they won’t because that would be ‘too political’ I guess?

So, now we get to hear from the school of people who insist the infrastructure is purely neutral and doesn’t play any part in violence and oppression. These people often compare internet service providers or content delivery networks to roads, and then say stuff like ‘you can’t hold them accountable for traffic accidents’.

🐫 Two things: roads and the internet are NOTHING alike, and actually, you can blame the design of roads on traffic accidents.

The internet is a huge open space where people can freely connect with each other — eventually, someone is going to be a dick to someone else. It’s hard to control that. But when there’s an entity (Cloudflare) that has an opportunity to actively reduce harm, and they refuse to do so, they become the biggest dick of them all.

🔚 Let’s finish you off with something really dumb

The best features of blockchain technology are the ones that force crypto exchanges to shoot themselves in the foot. Example: a woman asked for a $100 refund from crypto.com and instead got $10.5m.

Here’s what I think: that’s just fantastic for her. Really, what luck. Since getting the money, she bought her sister a house with several bedrooms in it — I absolutely love this for her.

And now, the usual story is playing out:

1. The crypto community will of course champion the use of what is essentially an append-only database as money transaction system, even though it’s completely unhinged and stories like this prove it.

2. Crypto.com fucked up (how do you send $10.5m instead of just $100???), and blockchain transactions are not reversible so naturally they have to take this matter to the courts.

3. Yes the courts, which are designed to uphold the law of central governments, yet another thing crypto evangelists hate until they need it to get their money back.

Protip: if crypto.com was just a normal bank, the transaction would have been reversed in a day and none of this would have made the news. I hope the woman is very happy with the money and never has to give it back.