via Hackernews. It really is comical the lengths to which companies will go to avoid being contacted by their customers.
What the fuck is a ‘fuck off contact page?’
"A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls. These companies tend to offer multiple tiers of support, with enterprise customers having a customer success manager who they can call on this ancient device we call phones, whereas the lower-paying customers may have to wrangle various in-app ticket mechanisms. If you solve your own problem by reading the knowledge base, then this is a win for the company. They don’t want to hear from you, they want you to fuck off."
They had me at the headline: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is
"From Amazon to General Motors to Booz Allen Hamilton, layoffs are being announced and blamed on AI. Amazon said it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs. United Parcel Service (UPS) said it had reduced its management workforce by about 14,000 positions over the past 22 months. And Target said it would cut 1,800 corporate roles. Some academic economists have also chimed in: The St. Louis Federal Reserve found a (weak) correlation between theoretical AI exposure and actual AI adoption in 12 occupational categories."
"Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs-amazon
Meta, Meta, Meta. So Meta. This Reuters report is 🔥
"Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show"
"Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’
I've been trying to get the cybercrime journalist nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqz08hn4eces2z8nkrltsf27edgwyccglvwu9fdjxcqeqhgmd8c5vsc6le0h to abandon their seat at the Nazi Bar, or at least to also post here. So please join me in giving them a follow and a friendly hello.
Jimmy Kimmel has been must-watch over the past few days. Total 🔥 monologues. Also, Spinal Tap!
Democracy in the US is under serious threat by a deranged orange comestible, but you wouldn't see any signs of that from watching the absolutely delusional stock market, which seems to only care about AI stocks continuing to lift the entire market thanks to their outsized value in it and all the wealth tied up in some fairly shaky but critical assumptions.
In other news, Financial Times reports just now that Oracle's market value jumped $200B thanks to a surge in AI investment, taking Larry Ellison's worth to that of Elon Musk.
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqfn9t5ayef45rd407wjzx4dzxsnm3lqu2g4e8yujv2zyzj9efvcesvfhetj exactly. why not just say this account doesn't exist anymore, or just doesn't exist. or terminated. TMI
I've never before seen this particular 550 error in response to an email that was sent to me by a reader. Proton seems to be dunking on their own user here.
"550 5.6.0 Message rejected due to potential violation of our ToS by the recipient"
The commenters who said the chrysalis looked like it had a parasite were probably right: That thing never grew any more after that and doesn't look much different or bigger now.
Alternative headline: Biggest purveyor of bullshit machines complains there's too much bullshit on the interwebs.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/sam-altman-says-that-bots-are-making-social-media-feel-fake/
I'm not sure how I ended up there, but this morning I watched a YT video about the most valuable comic books from the 1980s, and it turns out I have a ton of these in near mint condition, including The Punisher #1 and all the Secret Wars series. It would probably take several days to go through the whole collection, which has incredibly survived in a stack of boxes under the stairs for eons. It's just wild b/c I sort of forgot I had all those.
New, at KrebsOnSecurity.com: Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/07/doge-denizen-marko-elez-leaked-api-key-for-xai/
I've written so many stories about John Clifton Davies, the serial con man who continues to slick-talk tech companies into thinking he's a billionaire investor. In reality, his scam is simple: Find companies that are desperate for investment, dangle $20-$100M investments, and then insist the whole thing is managed by a third-party "due diligence" firm that is actually run by them and is a complete scam. They just go around bilking companies out of tens of thousands of dollars in due diligence fees, and then disappear and rebrand.
Over the past month I've heard from a bunch of his new victims, some of which have already sent his firms money. Incredibly, these scammers are still re-using the same boilerplate text in their bullshit investment sites that they used in past scam sites. It's a reliable "watermark" for them that they never bother changing, no matter how many times I point it out in a story.
Not sure I can be bothered to write about this guy yet again, but for the record his current scam due diligence firms are ROI Capital (roicap.co) and Apertura (apertura.uk).
Imagine being so drunk on the Kool-Aide that you can't listen to someone trying to help your company. Reached out to an executive at a manufacturing company about a security issue, and their reply was: "I'd like to help you. However, in checking out your website it is clear you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don't like the guy but he is our President and a refreshing change from a mentally incapacitated do nothing President." Oh well, I tried.
This seems like an ominous development:
"A new executive order from President Donald Trump aims to expand information-sharing across federal agencies as well as between federal and state governments, but civil libertarians and other experts are warning that the main purpose is to help normalize how the Department of Government Efficiency is handling government data."
"The order, issued Thursday, directs all federal agency heads to modify or rescind any regulations preventing the sharing of unclassified data and records between federal agencies."
"Agency heads also must ensure that the U.S. government has “unfettered access” to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding. The order extends to all such data even when stored in third-party databases."
"The stated goal is “eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud” — the supposed core of DOGE’s mission. The order does not mention DOGE by name."
"Civil libertarians and other experts, however, call the new EO an alarming development, and say it is meant to give cover to DOGE, which has been the subject of numerous lawsuits as its workers continue to root through government records and disrupt federal agencies. Trump also has previously sought to consolidate data for reasons that would infringe on civil liberties, the experts say."
"While the new EO asserts that the removal of data “silos” is designed to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse, disturbing mission creep is very possible, said Elizabeth Laird, director of equity and civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology."
"There are no assurances that the data won’t be used for “targeting people who the administration has separately said are a priority for them,” Laird said. “That can include immigrants, it can include people who are transgender, it can include people that speak up” against the administration. "
More here:
https://therecord.media/trump-executive-order-information-silos-data-sharing-doge
Wow. The US Treasury Dept. today announced it is lifting sanctions on Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service that state-sponsored hackers from North Korea have been massively using to launder their stolen billions.
"Based on the Administration’s review of the novel legal and policy issues raised by use of financial sanctions against financial and commercial activity occurring within evolving technology and legal environments, we have exercised our discretion to remove the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash as reflected in Treasury’s Monday filing in Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury."
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057
h/t to nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqs0j6fh5yzkqxr5jn9tlrch23fn8a743vgzfcqgx6wrakuj2nv5ksa96hn4 for the heads up. Weaver said: "The US government has just said "money laundering is legal as long as the process is automated."
"Every wei that flows through Tornado Cash, even if 'legitimate,' is helping the North Korean nuclear regime by hiding illegitimate flows," Weaver told me.
Here's Treasury sanctioning Tornado Cash in 2022: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916
At some point, this administration and its mouthpieces like Musk and Stephen Miller are going get a federal judge killed with their rhetoric that judges should be impeached for ruling against the president. Every time they do this they are effectively painting a target on judges for their more extreme MAGA base.
From WaPo: "Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers at the White House, is escalating the administration’s attacks on federal judges who have ruled against the president’s recent orders, labeling them as rogue Marxists thwarting the will of American voters."
Here's another way the DOGE team is behaving like ransomware actors: Their strategy for taking over agency databases is to wait until the federal employees go home on Friday and then show up and work through the weekend to undermine federal security.
Guess I'll just keep adding to the list as more infosec people from the financial industry continue to cheer on the illegal and unconstitutional actions by this administration, while bashing anyone who calls it for what it is.
Oh, and if you want to know more about yesterday's patches from Microsoft, see: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/microsoft-patch-tuesday-february-2025-edition/
Watched the phenomenal movie The Big Short for the second time today, and couldn't help feeling confident that if this whole journalism thing stops working out, I could have a satisfying career researching scam companies and shorting them till the cows come home.
Yesterday's story on the widespread tracking enabled through mobile ads and apps cited figures about the market shares of iPhone and Android: ~72 percent Android worldwide. But the situation is quite different in the US, where iPhones claim ~57 percent of the market.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america
This tracks incredibly closely to a poll I did here last year, which asked people in security dayjobs to share their main phone type. 54 percent said iPhone. 4,823 participants.
https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/110095934797227436
It's really nice when these polls end up being useful and relevant in reporting.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/the-global-surveillance-free-for-all-in-mobile-ad-data/