I simply can’t wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.

But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, “dawg i chatgpt’d the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there’s a problem with the license just lmk i’ll change it. we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal” when they are made aware of the fact.

This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.

Great points.

Regular solar cells with better efficiency are already are thing, even in a compact travel format or as a novelty part of some electric cars. Those are cheap to produce, but still aren’t practical at all, unless we’re talking about something like a 2m² solar panel to charge a phone in a somewhat reasonable time on a very sunny day in an off-grid situation.

Using transparent solar cells additionally to regular ones in buildings instead of windows is pretty much the only reasonable application I can think of right now, but with a visible transmittance of 20% that’s kinda farfetched as well.

Yup. A variation of the quote (basically capitalists instead of American businessmen) is commonly attributed to Lenin instead of Khrushchev. But that, too, can’t be verified and is said to be fake.

Buying a domain. There might be some free services that, similar to DuckDNS in the beginning, work reliably for now. But IMHO they are not worth the potential headaches.

DuckDNS pretty often has problems and fails to propagate properly. It’s not very good, especially with frequent IP changes.

Damn, that’s wild. Cheers for sharing!

I have an understanding of the underlying concepts. I’m mostly interested in the war driving. War driving, at least in my understanding, implies that someone, a state agency in this case, physically went to the very specific location of the suspect, penetrated their (wireless) network and therefore executed a successful traffic correlation attack.

I’m interested in how they got their suspects narrowed down that drastically in the first place. Traffic correlation attacks, at least in my experience, usually happen in a WAN context, not LAN, for example with the help of ISPs.

Sounds interesting, got any links for further reading on that?

I can’t quite connect the dots between wifi/internet traffic spikes when IRC is so light on traffic that it’s basically background noise and war driving.

Windows, as any operating system, is best run in a context most useful to the user and appropriate for the user’s technical level.

• Need to run Windows apps/games and aren’t afraid to tinker around if and when something doesn’t work as expected or your software simply isn’t supported? WINE/Proton.
• Need to run mostly light Windows apps and don’t want to tinker around? VM.
• Need to run Windows apps/games that don’t rely on Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat, want direct hardware access and aren’t afraid to tinker around, especially if you only have one GPU, and when something doesn’t work as expected? KVM
• Need to run any Windows app/game without things constantly breaking or the need to tinker around and staying on top of things? Dual-Boot from different disks, utilize LUKS/FDE and be done with it.

Great synopsis!

The cool thing about GrapheneOS: It provides basically all the comforts and usability as any Android (stock) ROM minus some compatibility issues with a portion of Google Apps and services (Google Pay doesn’t and probably will never work, for example) while providing state-of-the-art security and privacy if you choose to utilize those features. A modern Pixel with up-to-date GrapheneOS, configured the right way, is literally the most secure and private smartphone you can get today.

Well, this tells us that more privacy minded people with a background or interest in technology tend to be more present/engaging on Fediverse platforms. Not really surprising.

Interesting read.

So, in short:

• The attacker needs to have access to your LAN and become the DHCP server, e.g. by a starvation attack or timing attacks
• The attacked host system needs to support DHCP option 121 (atm basically every OS except Android)
• by abusing DHCP option 121, the attacker can push routes to the attacked host system that supersede other rules in most network stacks by having a more specific prefix, e.g. a 192.168.1.1/32 will supersede 0.0.0.0/0
• The attacker can now force the attacked host system to route the traffic intended for a VPN virtual network interface (to be encrypted and forwarded to the VPN server) to the (physical) interface used for DHCP
• This leads to traffic intended to be sent over the VPN to not get encrypted and being sent outside the tunnel.
• This attack can be used before or after a VPN connection is established
• Since the VPN tunnel is still established, any implemented kill switch doesn’t get triggered

DHCP option 121 is still used for a reason, especially in business networks. At least on Linux, using network namespaces will fix this. Firewall mitigations can also work, but create other (very theoretical) attack surfaces.