Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Are we about to see more enshittification with our smartphones?

From right back in the days of Nokia, every 12 months or so, mobile phone makers have tended to upgrade the specs on their phones.

Thanks to Apple, they've learnt how to slowly degrade the performance of their older models. But the tradeoff has been that you get a slightly better camera, or bigger screen, or more battery life.

Android Authority has noticed something curious about the latest phones from a number of major brands, like Motorola and Google.

Their smartphones for 2026 are basically the same specs as the ones from last year, or even slightly worse. In some cases, they have processors from as far back as 2021.

The main thing you get by upgrading is access to new AI features.

There's no reason last year's phones couldn't provide these features. They're powerful enough, have enough memory, etc. The companies are seemingly choosing to not make them available.

In essence, the mobile phone makers are saying that your perfectly capable phone won't get the software upgrades, and to use them, you'll need to buy a new phone with almost identical hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-oBr2yxOAg

The joys of late capitalism, huh?

#smartphone #Android #Google #Enshittification #phone #phones #Motorola #pixel #GooglePixel #Gemini

Sufficiently advanced adtech is indistinguishable from malware

I keep hearing people say that there's ways you can use these shiny new AI tools and they'll really help, and then I try them and they trip over their virtual shoelaces and smash their face into the pavement at step 1

Collatz semantic versioning: pick some integer to be your first version number. If it’s even, divide it by two to get the next version number, otherwise multiply by three and add one. When your software reaches version 1, proclaim it to be finished.

If the AI companies raise their prices 100x tomorrow, or shut down. Will you still be able to do your job?

#noai #capitalism #design #softwareengineering #askfedi #slop #programming #writing

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