Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Mini Blue Team Diaries Story - Pride Month Special Edition:

You might be wondering, how could their possibly be an incident response story linked to pride month? Well, buckle up, because its a good one.

So, this happened a number of years ago, when it first became common for companies to update their logos on their social media pages to show support for Pride month.

Leadership had noticed that the company had not updated the logo, like so many others had, and as such, made a request to marketing to do so. It was late on a Thursday, and the person responsible for social media was about to leave for vacation - literally that evening, but the graphic designer jumped on the request, and by the end of the day, the modified logo was up.

Late that night, the Security On-call pager goes off, and I respond. "What's up?"

"Do you have access to our social media profiles by chance?" came the worried voice at the end of the line.

"Erm, yeah sure, I can get it, but why? What's up?"

Access to our social platforms was managed via SSO to a management tool, and since I had SSO admin access, I could just assign it to myself in the event of an incident.

"We need to change the logo back on Twitter - there is a problem with the pride one, but [social media manager] is on vacation."

"Mmmm. Ok." I was wondering, what on earth was wrong with the logo. "When you say, there is a problem with the logo, how so?"

"Erm. Apparently they did the wrong colors or something, and people are kicking off about it on social media."

Still confused I dutifully fired up the computer, and browsed to the Twitter page of the company.

It was immediately obvious to me, a nerd, what they'd done. In their quest to produce a pride logo, rather than base the logo on the pride flag, as one normally would, they somehow managed to take the rainbow colors from the old Apple logo and use them as the basis for the pride logo instead. Quite rightly this was being ridiculed by the masses.

I was able to revert the logo for them until the social media manager was able to fix it properly the next day, but in a further, even more hilarious turn of events, a post with the Apple pride logo had done the rounds in the company Slack and one employee had dutifully captured the image and turned it into an emoji for everyone to use - and many had already adopted said emoji into their usernames on Slack.

So yeah, proof, I think that you never know what is going to be on the end of the phone when the on-call strikes.

Want more stories like this? Check out: infosecdiaries.com/ and Happy Pride Month!

#infosec #DFIR #BlueTeam

@0xabad1dea @Edent @at
Reminded me of a Russian meme "the door only opens if you rotate the pigeons correctly"

The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove. Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001.

Then in early 2018, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract to build AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.

The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.

Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface.

#Google #AI #Tech

Stop thinking that the Fediverse needs to compete with corporate owned social media.

It doesn't.

Mastodon isn't in competition with X or Threads. PeerTube isn't in competition with YouTube. PixelFed is not in competition with Instagram. Friendica is not in competition with Facebook.

The Fediverse serves a different function then all of the billionaire funded social medias. The Fedi isn't meant to create a revenue flow for investors. It isn't meant to turn you into a product where your privacy is stripped from you.

The Fediverse is meant to give the USER control. It's meant to protect the disenfranchised. Give power to the people. Be safe from profit exploitation.

The Fediverse and corporate social media couldn't be more different. Trying to put them in competition is like trying to compare a toilet to a flower. Sure you can shit and piss on a flower, but the toilet will always stink and the flower will continue to grow.

Why you should stop donating to wikipedia.

TLDR; They are loaded with cash. They took your donations and still sold wikipedia to AI companies. They are sacking workers who try to unionise. They fired the people who most know how wikipedia actually works.

"The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The Wikimedia Endowment, a separate fund, sits on $169.4 million in net assets, up $25 million in a single year. Wikimedia Enterprise, the team that provides high speed, high volume API access to AI labs, just turned profitable on $8.3 million in revenue, a 148% jump from the prior year... The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. Revenue diversifying, not shrinking. They can afford six engineers. Whatever this fight is about, it is not about money."

As if wikipedia selling the work of volunteers to AI companies was not enough, now they are coming for the workers.

"In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications."

If you have a wikipedia account you can sign the solidarity petition here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity#Signatures

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

#wikipedia