cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 194 Posts
  • 218 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•Iran to close Strait of Hormuz, strike twice as many targets in response to any US attackEnglish
    15·
    23 hours ago

    Their certificate was revoked (by their certificate authority, Actalis, part of the Aruba Group) on July 6. Presumably the CA was pressured to revoke it by the Italian and/or US government, and they will get a new certificate from someone else soon.

    There is a hexbear thread here about it; afaict there doesn’t appear to yet be any reporting about it. But in the CRL you can see it was revoked July 6:

    $ curl -s http://crl15.actalis.it/Repository/tls-subca-rsa-dv-2025/getLastCRL | openssl crl -noout -text |grep -A 4 02295E6BB25717C4652321F4ED9D2B29
    Serial Number: 02295E6BB25717C4652321F4ED9D2B29
        Revocation Date: Jul  6 13:54:09 2026 GMT
        CRL entry extensions:
            X509v3 CRL Reason Code: 
                Privilege Withdrawn

    The reason “Privilege Withdrawn” means it was the CA’s decision rather than their own.

    Because certificate revocation has never worked very well, many people can still access it (until their browser fetches the certificate revocation list, or checks OCSP, does some newfangled proprietary other thing i don’t understand…).

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltotechnology@hexbear.net•presstv.ir website X509 certificate revoked?English
    3·
    1 day ago

    update: it is now working for me in tor browser again (it had stopped when i posted my previous comment; i’ve since relaunched it), but is revoked in another browser.

    and yes they are seeing the same certificate (serial number 02:29:5E:6B:B2:57:17:C4:65:23:21:F4:ED:9D:2B:29, same as OP, with sha256 fingerprint D6:63:CA:4B:6A:48:54:D2:24:2B:E8:63:D7:37:CC:68:1B:B9:61:1A:86:81:55:F2:86:87:A9:DA:67:8A:4C:9A)

    in that thread i posted (post-revocation) linking to a story on www.presstv.ir there are lots of comments and nobody there has mentioned it being revoked.

    conclusions: (1) their CA definitely revoked their cert, (2) the revocation is not being evenly distributed.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Chefs kissEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    archive.is can be very irritating but sadly it is one of the only things which can archive some sites, such as this one.

    i usually access it using tor browser, which almost always works (though often it requires clicking “new tor circuit for this site” a few times).

    in this case the original archived URL is https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-launched-cia-covert-influence-operation-against-china-2024-03-14/ which maybe you can access without an archive? (i can’t access reuters through my VPN or Tor, afaict. and archive.org has 100 captures of that particular article but i think all are just blank pages because Thomson Reuters doesn’t want people reading their content anonymously.)

    here is a copy-paste of the article text (from archive.is):

    Exclusive: Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China

    By Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing

    March 14, 2024 4:18 PM UTC · Updated 42 min ago

    Former U.S. President Trump hosts a campaign rally, in Rome, Georgia Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, U.S. March 9, 2024. REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

    WASHINGTON, March 14 - Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.

    Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.

    During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.

    The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters.

    Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials said.

    Chelsea Robinson, a CIA spokesperson, declined to comment on the existence of the influence program, its goals or impacts.

    A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said news of the CIA initiative shows the U.S. government uses the “public opinion space and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion.”

    The CIA operation came in response to years of aggressive covert efforts by China aimed at increasing its global influence, the sources said. During his presidency, Trump pushed a tougher response to China than had his predecessors. The CIA’s campaign signaled a return to methods that marked Washington’s struggle with the former Soviet Union. “The Cold War is back,” said Tim Weiner, author of a book on the history of political warfare. Reuters was unable to determine the impact of the secret operations or whether the administration of President Joe Biden has maintained the CIA program. Kate Waters, a spokesperson for the Biden administration’s National Security Council, declined to comment on the program’s existence or whether it remains active. Two intelligence historians told Reuters that when the White House grants the CIA covert action authority, through an order known as a presidential finding, it often remains in place across administrations.

    Trump, now the Republican frontrunner for president, has suggested he will take an even tougher approach toward China if re-elected president in November. Spokespeople for Trump and his former national security advisers, John Bolton and Robert O’Brien, who both served the year the covert action order was signed, declined to comment.

    The operation against Beijing came with significant risk of escalating tensions with the United States, given the power of China’s economy and its ability to retaliate through trade, said Paul Heer, a former senior CIA analyst on East Asia who learned of the presidential authorization from Reuters. For example, after Australia called for an investigation inside China probing the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Beijing blocked billions of dollars in Australian trade through agricultural tariffs.

    Trump’s 2019 order came after years of warnings from the U.S. intelligence community, and media reports, about how China was using bribery and threats to obtain support from developing countries in geopolitical disputes as it attempted to sow division in the United States through front groups.

    China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing follows a “principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and does not interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States.”

    A year earlier, Trump gave the CIA greater powers to launch offensive cyber operations against U.S. adversaries after numerous Russian and Chinese cyber attacks against American organizations, Yahoo News reported. Reuters could not independently confirm the existence of the earlier order.

    Sources described the 2019 authorization uncovered by Reuters as a more ambitious operation. It enabled the CIA to take action not only in China but also in countries around the world where the United States and China are competing for influence. Four former officials said the operation targeted public opinion in Southeast Asia, Africa and the South Pacific.

    “The feeling was China was coming at us with steel baseball bats and we were fighting back with wooden ones,” said a former national security official with direct knowledge of the finding.

    Matt Pottinger, a senior National Security Council official at the time, crafted the authorization, three former officials said. It cited Beijing’s alleged use of malign influence, allegations of intellectual property theft and military expansion as threats to U.S. national security, one of those former officials said.

    Pottinger told Reuters he would not comment on the “accuracy or inaccuracy of allegations about U.S. intelligence activities,” adding that “it would be incorrect to assume that I would have had knowledge of specific U.S. intelligence operations.”

    Covert messaging allows the United States to implant ideas in countries where censorship might prevent that information from coming to light, or in areas where audiences wouldn’t give much credence to U.S. government statements, said Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist who studies the use of such tactics.

    Covert propaganda campaigns were common during the Cold War, when the CIA planted 80 to 90 articles a day in an effort to undermine the Soviet Union, Johnson said. In the 1950s, for example, the CIA created an astrological magazine in East Germany to publish foreboding predictions about communist leaders, according to declassified records. The covert propaganda campaign against Beijing could backfire, said Heer, the former CIA analyst. China could use evidence of a CIA influence program to bolster its decades-old accusations of shadowy Western subversion, helping Beijing “proselytize” in a developing world already deeply suspicious of Washington.

    The message would be: “‘Look at the United States intervening in the internal affairs of other countries and rejecting the principles of peaceful coexistence,’” Heer said. “And there are places in the world where that is going to be a resonant message.”

    U.S. influence operations also risk endangering dissidents, opposition groups critical of China and independent journalists, who could be falsely painted as CIA assets, said Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who wrote a book on the history of political warfare.

    Schectman and Bing reported from Washington. Additional reporting by Liz Lee in Beijing. Editing by Don Durfee and Blake Morrison.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest IncompatibilityEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

    Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).

    The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

    I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world•Leak Exposes Details of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ SocietyEnglish
    19·
    22 days ago

    For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.

    This is an odd thing to say given that neither Wired nor their source (“the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew”) appear to be publishing any of the actual data whatsoever, beyond the handful of mostly nonspecific references to it in the article text. (Eg, lots of sentences like “The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.” - omitting names of any of these people.)

    Also, the linked archive says:

    Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.

    Someone helpfully had already made an earlier archive before that, so we can see what information Wired journalists Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova removed at the request of a Dialog representative: where it now says “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin” it originally said “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin”.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•"Trusted" eMail Providers?English
    4·
    28 days ago

    Mailbox.org lets you keep your own private key.

    Every email provider lets you keep your own private key if you do encryption using the interoperable OpenPGP standard using software running on your own computer. Many email providers will recommend that you do exactly that, and will helpfully instruct you about how to do so (eg, the more reputable options in this thread such as migadu.com, mailbox.org, posteo.de, and even fastmail.com all have instructions for how to use some implementation of pgp to encrypt your email).

    Meanwhile any company selling non-standard “email encryption” (eg, proton and tuta) which is not compatible with pgp (or, in the corporate world, s/mime, which is also a standard…) is firmly in the snake oil business and should be distrusted and boycotted regardless of which shitty youtubers they’re sponsoring this week.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Companies now block older browser versions from accessing their websites!English
    1·
    1 month ago

    Companies now block older browser versions

    Now? This has been happening since the dawn of the web. At least the screenshot you pasted represents all of the big three rendering engines - it used to be common to see “Internet Explorer version XYZ required”, sometimes with javascript to prevent you from using the site with any other browser (even if in some cases it would actually work fine if you simply spoofed your user agent string).

    I have used kinda retro devices to surf the web at times

    Most websites became HTTPS-only sometime after the snowden disclosures in 2013.

    Over time old versions of TLS have been deprecated and eventually support for them is dropped from browsers and web servers alike. So, a browser from even 15 years ago literally cannot connect to most webservers today.

    Planned obsolescence is terrible but it’s a minor factor here: it’s actually dangerous to use even (especially?) a slightly-out-of-date web browser because every new release fixes vulnerabilities which can be exploited to run malicious code on your computer. The planned obsolescence which prevents people from being able to have an up-to-date browser comes mostly from proprietary operating system vendors; to have up-to-date software while continuing to use somewhat older computers you need to use free/libre software.

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