I’m thinking of maybe switching to a different Mastodon instance that isn’t slammed with traffic all the time. Good idea?
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Micah Lee
@micahflee@mastodon.social
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director of information security at The Intercept (he/him)
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Joined April 03, 2017
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Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022, Semiphemeral has deleted 7.7M tweets, 4.6M retweets, 13.2M likes, and 3.5M direct messages from Twitter
The real reason Twitter stopped the Blue Verified feature is because the only people who were using them were:
- Racists
- Crypto bros
- Porn performers (though honestly they should be verified for free)
Only 0.06% of Twitter users signed up. Because Blue Verified shows half the ads, they'd need to charge $44/month, not $8/month, to not lose money on it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/16/musk-twitter-email-ultimatum-termination/
Hey did y'all know that I've been hard at work writing a technical book for No Starch Press that teaches journalists and researchers how to investigate hacked and leaked datasets? It's called Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, and it will be published some time next year https://nostarch.com/hacks-leaks-and-revelations
If you’re just joining Mastodon, WIRED has a great introductory guide https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-get-started-use-mastodon/
Some excellent math jokes in the UC workers strike picket line https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/11/14/nearly-50000-university-of-california-graduate-student-employees-launch-open-ended-strike/
It's fun to watch America's Frontline Doctors, a group of anti-vax quacks that got filthy rich scamming people into buying ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid, fall into infighting and disarray https://www.thedailybeast.com/covid-misinformation-group-americas-frontline-doctors-implodes-over-dr-simone-golds-extravagant-spending
I broke the story about their scam, which triggered a Congressional investigation into them https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxychloroquine-ivermectin-hacked/
I've been writing a lot of code for semiphemeral.com, to help people delete tweets and DMs, but the Twitter API keeps lying to me. In many cases, when I call:
DELETE direct_messages/events/destroy
To delete a DM, the API responds with a 404 status code, and error code "34 - Sorry, that page does not exist." when that DM definitely exists.
Super frustrating that Twitter's API seems a bit broken.
If you want to delete all your old Twitter DMs (which I think is a good idea even if Twitter might retain copies of them somewhere), and also your historical likes, RTs, and any tweets you don’t want to keep, I made a Twitter app for that.
It’s called Semiphemeral and it’s pretty easy to use. I posted instructions for how to do it https://twitter.com/semiphemeral/status/1591258781098594304?s=46&t=L4aWvmyNxEFRL6eULgeO-A
The speed of Elon Musk's burning down of Twitter is wild to observe. Just today:
Twitter privacy executives quit, sparking FTC alarm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/10/twitter-security-resignations/
Musk Warns Twitter Bankruptcy Possible as Senior Executives Exit
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/musk-tells-twitter-staff-social-network-s-bankruptcy-is-possible
This post is good. Read it, especially if you're just joining Mastodon from Twitter https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/
OnionShare 2.5 is out! This version fixes all the security issues found in a comprehensive security audit, and also improves censorship circumvention https://micahflee.com/2022/01/onionshare-25-released/
Vulnerabilities the pen testers found:
- 0 critical
- 0 high
- 2 elevated
- 3 moderate
- 4 low
Huge thanks to Radically Open Security for bug hunting and OTF's Red Team Labs for paying for it.
You can read the complete penetration test report here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/onionshare/onionshare/develop/security/2021%20Penetration%20Test%20Report.pdf
Access Now and EFF condemn the arrest of Tor node operator Dmitry Bogatov in Russia https://www.accessnow.org/access-now-eff-condemn-arrest-tor-node-operator-dmitry-bogatov-russia/
He ran a Tor exit from home. “Surveillance footage shows Bogatov and his wife leaving a supermarket four minutes before one of the posts was made on March 29. Given that the supermarket is half a kilometer from their home, it is unlikely that Bogatov could have made it home and posted online within four minutes.”