Air Canada Introduces "Exceptional Policy" To Expense Passengers Affected By Strikes
Air Canada announces a surprising new policy to compensate passengers after a cabin crew strike grounds hundreds of flights. The airline promises to cover transportation costs, but details are scarce. What's the catch?
Air Canada's New Compensation Policy for Strike-Affected Passengers
Air Canada introduces an 'exceptional policy' to cover expenses for passengers impacted by the recent cabin crew strike, including refunds and flexible rebooking options.Prachi Patel (Air Canada)
30+ human rights groups demand universities dismantle surveillance & protect free speech
- Refuse to cooperate or share data with law enforcement agencies: Refuse to cooperate with local, state, and federal lawmakers, law enforcement agents, and immigration authorities seeking to surveil, detain, and deport students, faculty, or staff. This includes prohibiting university staff from voluntarily sharing campus community members’ personal data with law enforcement, especially data that can aid in the targeting of activists, like immigration status and records of disciplinary actions. This also includes discontinuing any default data sharing agreements with campus police and local police departments.
- Secure data with end-to-end encryption: Secure student, faculty, and staff data with the highest levels of protection, including end-to-end encryption. Mandate training for university staff on data security practices.
- Delete sensitive data: Purge any data collected on students, staff, and faculty that is not essential to the functioning of the university––including data that can be used to fuel the targeting of protesters, immigrants, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Delete video footage and photos of campus protesters acquired through surveillance cameras and ID swipe records that identify student and staff movements across campus.
- Dismantle surveillance: Discontinue the use of invasive technologies that collect sensitive data. This includes tools and practices such as ID swipe tracking, social media monitoring, facial recognition tools, license plate readers, motion and heat sensors, WiFi vendors that collect people’s location data, and biometric online exam proctoring programs. The data amassed by these tools may be weaponized by local, state, and federal agencies to target activists, immigrants, journalists, and other vulnerable groups on campus.
- Reject mask restriction policies: Mask restrictions fundamentally threaten free speech and increase the criminalization of protestors. These policies also jeopardize the safety of the entire campus community by exposing people to the ongoing threats of COVID, Long COVID, and other public health issues. Universities must oppose proposed restrictions on masking, and retain COVID safety policies that allow students to remain masked.
- Harm reduction related to doxxing: Provide campus community members with information about data deletion services (i.e. services that remove personal data and other information from data broker databases) and educational resources that allow students, staff, and faculty to proactively protect themselves against doxxing. Also provide tools and services to mitigate harm once doxxing occurs.
Letter: 30+ human rights groups demand universities dismantle surveillance & protect free speech
Dear university administrators and trustees, We are human rights organizations writing to express concerns about campus surveillance tools and policies that have the potential to fuel attacks on free expression and academic freedom across the country…Fight for the Future
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IBM and NASA Release Open-Source AI Model on Hugging Face to Predict Solar Weather
NASA, IBM’s ‘Hot’ New AI Model Unlocks Secrets of Sun
Editor's Note: This article was updated Aug. 20, 2025, to correct the number of years of training data used and the model accuracy. The original article saidDerek Koehl (NASA Science)
new Star Trek Voyager videogame: Across the Unknown
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I enjoyed Elite Force, but it's more actiony than I want my Trek games to be. My favorites have always been the ones that try to put you into an episode—Judgment Rites, ST: 25th Anniversary, A Final Unity, and Resurgence. I think the adventure genre is a much better match with the franchise than strategy or action.
Sadly(for me), that doesn't seem to be the direction they're going with this Voyager game. Hopefully it turns out well, though.
Re: new Star Trek Voyager videogame: Across the Unknown
oh gosh judgement rites... the fact they built a full on 2D dogfight simulator in that game was epic.
I got good enough at it that I could shoot down Trelane.
Spoiler alert — it didn't matter, he stranded you on the planet anyway.
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes
It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes | Defector
It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division.defector.com
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Price Tag for Trump’s D.C. Military Surge: At Least $1 Million a Day
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Price Tag for Trump’s D.C. Military Surge: At Least $1 Million a Day
An analysis conducted for the Intercept found that the militarization of D.C. could end up costing hundreds of millions.Nick Turse (The Intercept)
Apple wants to bring Touch ID to its watches starting next year
Apple wants to bring Touch ID to its watches starting next year
It would make payments more secure and more hassle-free. According to a new report purportedly based on internal Apple developer code, the company is...Vlad (GSMArena)
Apple's Greed Is Finally Backfiring
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Apple's Greed Is Finally Backfiring
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Yes.
I'm not watching a fucking YouTube video.
No judgment if that's your thing. I just don't enjoy it.
The very tl;dr is that Apple has been catering to shareholders first and foremost to the point that all else suffers. To elaborate a lil more:
The video shows an internal email from the iPhone VP of marketing that basically says they should only add features that are good enough and that what the iPhone already offers could be considered too much. “ Anything new and especially expensive needs to be a rigorously challenged before it’s allowed into the consumer phone”
Then there’s the thing where Cook allows stock buybacks which Jobs didn’t. I am not sure what this means exactly but it plays into the broader point that Jobs was a product genius and Cook is a financial genius. (also, they spent $77 billion on stock buybacks, this will be relevant in a second).
Lastly there is AI. Apple is lacking in AI chips so there was a request to double their amount, which would’ve cost about $10bn. But this request was denied. So they had to not just work with their own aging chips, but rent cloud computing infrastructure from Google.
tl;dr Cook is cooked or something idk
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A hidden network handles chats for OnlyFans stars. AI could soon take over: Impersonators for OnlyFans models said their sales quotas are soaring, and once AI improves, they could be out of work.
- Tech companies are automating parts of the OnlyFans universe, which until recently was powered by cheap labor.
- AI chatbots are trained on the chat logs of Filipino “chatters,” who impersonate OnlyFans models while messaging with fans.
- AI-generated images of the models are so realistic they cannot be distinguished from photographs.
AI threatens jobs of Filipinos running DMs for OnlyFans creators - Rest of World
Filipino workers posing as OnlyFans creators say sales quotas are rising and AI could soon replace them.Munira Mutaher (Rest of World)
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36027977
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
Source: Graham Day, a Twitch partner on X/Twitter.
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AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36027977
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
Source: Graham Day, a Twitch partner on X/Twitter.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36027977
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
Source: Graham Day, a Twitch partner on X/Twitter.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36027977
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
Source: Graham Day, a Twitch partner on X/Twitter.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36027977
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event(Gamescom) Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
Source: freelance product and UX designer Robiny-Yann Storm on Bluesky.
Source: Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult on Bluesky.
Source: Developer JC Lau on Bluesky.
Source: Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, on Bluesky.
Source: Graham Day, a Twitch partner on X/Twitter.
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A network of nearly 90 TikTok accounts has been using AI to create fake versions of Spanish-language journalists and spread falsehoods online
What's behind the TikTok accounts using AI-generated versions of real Latino journalists?
The accounts point to the challenge of stopping or controlling the surge in fake images and misinformation targeting Spanish-speakers in the U.S., as AI technology advances.Nicole Acevedo (NBC News)
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Meta Quest 3/3s XR headsets finally rooted after 2 years
Meta XR headsets are very cheap for the performance they give. Unfortunately they require a Meta account and one can assume as much data as legally possibly is sent back to the advertising company.
For years now, since the Quest 1, those Android devices have not been rooted except for some specific version number of the Quest 2.
This recent work github.com/FreeXR/eureka_panth… makes the latest headset with a rather recent update (but NOT the very last ones, so be cautious!) rootable.
GitHub - FreeXR/eureka_panther-adreno-gpu-exploit-1: Our first exploit: a memory corruption vulnerability in the Adreno GPU driver for Eureka/Panther (3/3s) devices, enabling arbitrary kernel memory read/write and privilege escalation.
Our first exploit: a memory corruption vulnerability in the Adreno GPU driver for Eureka/Panther (3/3s) devices, enabling arbitrary kernel memory read/write and privilege escalation. - FreeXR/eurek...GitHub
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- Quest 3: v79 5115411.12900.520 (August 7, 2025) and below, to about version v71.
- Quest 3S: v79 117688.9900.610 (August 6, 2025) and below, to about version v71.
according to github.com/zhuowei/cheese/tree…
GitHub - zhuowei/cheese: CVE-2025-21479 proof-of-concept, I think
CVE-2025-21479 proof-of-concept, I think. Contribute to zhuowei/cheese development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Thank you for finding that.
I got lucky, I bought a quest around July/August and needed to do the mandatory/initial OS install.
I ended up with v78 (August 3, 2025) release.
I didn't realize there was a WiP announced in July 2025.
Quest 3 Rooting
i want to root quest 3, and there isin't a lot of discussion on it. Therefore, i've created a discord server where we can talk about these stuff {Mod edit: References to Discord removed! Oswald...ilovecats4606 (XDA Forums)
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The Era of 'AI Psychosis' is Here. Are You a Possible Victim?
The Era of 'AI Psychosis' is Here. Are You a Possible Victim?
Psychologists have been sounding the alarm for months.Ece Yildirim (Gizmodo)
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Gemini for Home is Google’s biggest smart home play in years
Gemini for Home is Google’s biggest smart home play in years
Gemini is finally, officially coming to Google Home. The all-new assistant will arrive on Nest smart speakers and displays later this year.Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (The Verge)
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Gemini for Home is Google’s biggest smart home play in years
For the next 3 to 4 years (if you will be lucky), then they will pass to something new and they will simply kill it, like they done with a lot of other projects.
SpaceX to Launch Secret X-37B Space Plane Thursday
SpaceX to Launch Secret X-37B Space Plane Thursday
The hunt will be on shortly, to once again recover a clandestine mission in low Earth orbit. SpaceX is set to launch a Falcon-9 rocket from launch pad LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center Thursday night August 21st, with the classified USSF-36 mission.Universe Today
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Quasarr Hostnames
So I'm trying to setup Quasarr (direct downloader for sonarr+radarr) but I'm not sure what hostnames to use.
I added some from the suggested pastebin but most of them serve German content and I haven't heard of any of these websites (new to DDL)
Can anyone help me setup some good English sources? Or at least tell me what the rest of the abbreviations mean?
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Just look and figure it out. It’s really straightforward name matching. You don’t need someone to spell everything out to you, if you make a mistake just try something different. You can do it!
OPs_cops_post.html ass post. “Please explicitly tell me what illegal websites these initials refer to!” Guaranteed you are British 100% because only British cops would be stupid enough to do this.
Ddl is gonna be mainly stuff for poor Europeans who are scared of getting caught sharing files and are relying on the “loophole” of “I never actually shared the file, the file was shared with me and that’s substantively different” (it’s not, they’re just using it as an excuse to haul you in for some other reason or frame you for something).
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Well at least your username is fitting...
Im gonna be blunt, this dude wanted to learn how to use something that interests them. Getting slapped with 'just figure it out' and some unsavory comments about where you think they're from is a surefire way to kill someone's interest in ever interacting with a community.
Do better for fucks sake
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My response: you can figure it out! Just try a little! Don’t ask such cop ass questions, also ddl is the realm of non-English stuff.
You: unsavory!
Just looked into this a bit. While I don't know exactly what each one corresponds to, I did find that pastebin has some lists of urls you can use.
This one has English and German-> the comments should differentiate what's what. Hope this helps!
Quasarr Hostnames English German Latest - Pastebin.com
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.Pastebin
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How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World [404 Media]
How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook.“We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea - Women’s Dating Community’, that could be a perfect transition for the ‘Are we dating the same guy’ facebook groups since it sounds like those are on their way under… Tea has all the safety measures that Facebook lacked and more to ensure that only women are in the group,” Burns said. “We are looking for a face and founder of the app and because of your experience, we think YOU will be the perfect person! This can be your thing and we are happy to take a step back and let you lead all operations of the product.”
The Tea app, much like the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, invites women to join and share red flags about men to help other women avoid them. In order to verify that every person who joined the Tea app was a woman, Tea asked users to upload a picture of their ID or their face. Tea was founded in 2022 but largely flew under the radar until July this year, when it reached the top of the Apple App Store chart, earned glowing coverage in the media, and claimed it had more than 1.6 million users.
Burns’ offer to make Sanchez the “face” of Tea wasn't the first time she had reached out to her, but Sanchez never replied to Burns, despite multiple attempts to recruit her. As it turned out, Tea did not have all the “safety measures” it needed to keep women safe. As 404 Media first reported, Tea users’ images, identifying information, and more than a million private conversations, including some about cheating partners and abortions, were compromised in two separate security breaches in late July. The first of these breaches was immediately abused by a community of misogynists on 4chan to humiliate women whose information was compromised.
A 404 Media investigation now reveals that after Tea failed to recruit Sanchez as the face of the app and adopt the Are We Dating the Same Guy community, Tea shifted tactics to raid those Facebook groups for users. Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook groups with nearly identical names. 404 Media also identified a number of seemingly hijacked Facebook accounts that spammed the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups with links to Tea app.
404 Media’s investigation also discovered a third security breach which exposed the personal data of women who were paid to promote the app.
“Since first creating these [Are We Dating The Same Guy] groups, I have avoided speaking to the media as much as possible because these groups require discretion and privacy in order to operate safely and best protect our members,” Sanchez told 404 Media. “However, recent events have led me to decide to share some concerning practices I’ve witnessed, including messages I received in the past that appear to contradict some of the information currently being presented as fact.”
Burns is no longer with Cook or involved with Tea, and she did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But messages from Burns to Sanchez show that Cook changed his story about why he created Tea after they broke up. 404 Media also talked to a former Tea employee who said she only knew Burns as “Tara,” a persona that also exists in the Tea app and on Facebook as an official representative of the Tea app. This employee said that when Burns left the company, Cook took over the persona and communicated with other Tea users as if he was Tara.
Overall, our reporting shows that while Cook said he built Tea to “protect women,” he repeatedly put them at risk and tried to replace a grassroots movement started by a woman who declined to help him. As one woman who worked for him at Tea told us: “his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people.”
Tea did not directly answer a list of specific questions regarding 404 Media’s findings and the facts presented in this article. Instead, it sent us the following statement:
“Building and scaling an app to meet the demand we’ve seen is a complex process. Along the way, we’ve collaborated with many, learned a great deal and continue to improve Tea,” a Tea spokesperson said. “What we know, based on the fact that over 7 million women now use Tea, with over 100,000 new sign ups per day, is that a platform to help women navigate the challenges of online dating has been needed for far too long. As one of the top apps in the U.S. App Store, we are proud of what we’ve built, and know that our mission is more urgent than ever. We remain committed to evolving Tea to meet the needs of our growing community every day.”
How Tea Tried to Recruit a Female “Face” for the App
Sanchez started the first Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group in 2022 after her terrible experiences dating. The basic premise—a space for women to share information about men with other women—has existed in various forms before, but Are We Dating The Same Guy quickly became an online phenomenon. Today, Are We Dating The Same Guy is comprised of more than 200 different Facebook groups dedicated to different cities across the U.S. and Canada and has more than 7 million members. The groups have many volunteer moderators, but Sanchez is still the administrator for most of them.Women in the groups, who can also post anonymously, share a wide range of experiences, from relatively benign complaints about men they didn’t like, to serious accusations of infidelity and physical assault.
The popularity of Are We Dating The Same Guy groups is evidence that its members find them useful, but that popularity has come with a cost. Sanchez has become increasingly cautious after several attempts at retaliation from disgruntled men who are organizing on Telegram to dox women in the group and at least one lawsuit. In that case, a man accused Are We Dating The Same Guy of libel after a user in the Chicago group called him “clingy” and a “psycho.” Sanchez also said she had a rock thrown through the window of her family’s home by a man who wanted to stop Are We Dating The Same Guy, that she pays for a service to wipe her personal information from the internet, and that she generally keeps a low profile. This is the first time she has talked to the press.
By the time she was first approached by Burns in October, 2022, Sanchez was suspicious of Tea’s interest in Are We Dating The Same Guy because of some of the negative attention the groups already got.
“I’m a huge fan of all the work you're doing and I think it will have an ENORMOUS and important benefit on the lives of women,” Burns said in a Facebook message to Sanchez on October 25, 2022. At the time, Burns’ Facebook profile picture was a photo of her and Cook smiling. “My fiance and I have been working on a similar project due to my own dating woes and thought you’d be the perfect person to collaborate with on it.”
This is an entirely different origin story than the one Cook tells about Tea today. On Linkedin, Tea’s site, and interviews, Cook says that he “launched Tea after witnessing his mother’s terrifying experience with online dating—not only being catfished but unknowingly engaging with men who had criminal records.”
Before starting Tea, Cook worked at a couple of tech companies in San Francisco, including Salesforce, where he held a “director” title and rapped and made songs about Salesforce products during presentations he shared on Linkedin.
0:00
/3:59
1×A video Sean Cook uploaded to Linkedin
There is no mention of Burns on the Tea site, but in 2022 she persistently asked Sanchez to join Tea.
In addition to messaging her on Patreon and Facebook, on December 2, Burns sent Sanchez $25 on Venmo along with a message thanking Sanchez for her work. “Sent you a PM on Facebook re: Business collab when you get a chance! 😊” On December 7, 2022 Burns sent Sanchez $15 on buymeacoffee.com along with a message about a “business opportunity,” and “an app with a similar concept to the facebook groups you manage that I would love to collaborate with you on!”
In April2023, after Sanchez didn’t respond to Tea’s requests, Are We Dating The Same Guy group admins started banning a set of Facebook accounts posting links to the Tea app over and over again. For example, Are We Dating The Same Guy moderators banned one Facebook user named Crystal Lee from 25 groups across the country after the account repeatedly encouraged members to use Tea and suggested that information about the men they’re asking about was available there. Lee’s account was clearly hijacked from a woman with a different name sometime around 2016. While the account name is Crystal Lee, the name in the URL for her page is Kimberly Ritchart. I found Richart’s new Facebook account, where her first post in 2016 says she lost access to her original account. 404 Media couldn’t confirm who was in control of the account, and saw no evidence that Tea was behind it, but activity from similarly hijacked accounts indicate that there was an organized effort to stealthily promote the Tea app in the Are We Dating The Same Guy groups.
Two other Facebook accounts, Norma Warner and Morgan Ward, were banned from 23 groups and five groups respectively for spamming Tea app promotions. Warner and Ward also shared identical replies two weeks apart. “If I remember correctly, I think he’s been posted to Tea. I maybe [sic] mistaking him for someone else but looks pretty familiar,” both replies said in response to different posts in different groups.
Veronica Marz told me she was hired in April 2024 to be Tea’s partnerships manager. Her job was to manage the affiliate program that would pay people $1 per user who signed up to Tea via their unique affiliate link. She also moderated a number of groups named “Are We Dating the Same Guy | Tea App” for different cities, which were started by and owned by the Tea app and could obviously confuse Facebook users. Marz also reached out to admins of the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups to ask if they’d be willing to join the affiliate program.While reporting this story, 404 Media discovered that Tea’s data about the affiliate program, including who signed up for it, their real name, how much they have been paid, their emails, phone numbers, Venmo accounts, and charities they wanted to donate to if they didn’t want the money, were left exposed online. All a hacker or other third party had to do to view all of this data was add “/admin” to the public Tea affiliate site’s URL. Tea turned off this site and the affiliate program entirely after 404 Media reached out for comment for this article on August 13.
On December 1, 2024, Marz noticed an account named Nicole Li who was spamming Tea app promotions in one of the Facebook groups she managed for Tea as part of her job. Li was not part of the affiliate program that Marz managed, and unbeknownst to Marz, moderators of the original Are We Dating The Same Guy groups would eventually ban the Li account later. At that point, Marz was reporting directly to Cook, and she flagged the account to him because it was suspicious and spamming several groups at the same time.
“Sean uses that account to communicate directly with users on the app, but people think they are speaking to someone actually named Tara."
“Just wanted to check and see if this person was working with the Tea app?,” Marz said in a text to Cook along with a screenshot of the account seen by 404 Media. “I’ve noticed that they’ve joined all the groups regardless of location and they’ve been promoting the app, but they aren’t a part of the affiliate program that I saw.”Cook replied: “Not sure what’s going on there but as long as they’re not bothering anyone, I guess let’s just let them do their thing!”
All of the Facebook accounts that spammed Tea promotions were either deactivated or did not respond to our request for comment. None of the accounts were officially part of Tea’s affiliate program, according to the exposed data.
404 Media has seen several messages from Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook group members and moderators confused about whether the Tea app was the official Are We Dating The Same Guy app, and whether Sanchez was affiliated with it. Several people also wondered if the Tara persona, which reached out to them on Facebook, was associated with Tea or if Sanchez was behind it. One review of the Tea app on the Google Play Store from January, 2024 also seemed confused and disappointed by the app.
“A girl in a FB group referred me (I think she was actually advertising 🤷),” the review said. “She called it a free app. It’s not free [...] The fb groups should have raised MORE THAN ENOUGH to cover app costs that are referred to in other reviews [...] I find this gross. Maybe I’ll come around or be back, but for now I’ll stick with fb.”
Marz also told me that several users in the Tea-owned Facebook groups were confused, and thought that they were in the original Are We Dating The Same Guy groups owned by Sanchez.“Maybe five to seven people in different groups asked me about Paola Sanchez, and I had to explain to them, like, ‘Hey, this is not Paola’s group. This group is owned by the Tea app,’” she told me. “I had to explain to them the difference between the two.”
Tea’s promotion strategy clearly managed to poach and confuse some members of the Are We Dating The Same Guy community and get them to join the app. Later, its strategy was to undermine Are We Dating The Same Guy directly.
Today, Tea’s website credits an influencer named Daniella Szetela as helping to widely promote Tea: “One day while scrolling, Sean discovered a viral creator, Daniella, whose content resonated with millions of women—and saw an opportunity to bring that same energy to Tea. What began as a simple idea quickly turned into a social media movement.” The site says Cook was so impressed with her voice and following, he made her “Head of Socials.” A March, 2025 archive of the same page on Tea’s site tells the same story, but at the time Szetela’s title was “Chief Female Officer.”
“Together, Sean and Daniella have transformed Tea into more than an app—it’s a movement,” Tea’s site says.
In September 2024 Tea started posting videos to its official TikTok and Instagram accounts named @TheTeaPartyGirls. Some of the videos are of Szetela showing the app and talking about how great it is. Other videos are made to look like they’re coming from other Tea users, but in reality are produced by a company called SG Social Branding, which describes itself as a “Gen Z Creator Powerhouse Delivering Short Form Videos to be used for YOUR Brand’s Paid Social Ads.” According to its site, SG Social Branding has a team of “over 35 gen Z creators” who create videos for clients. These videos are made in the the style of common social media posts, like an influencer talking directly to the camera, doing man on the street interviews, or videos that look like they are clips from podcasts, but are from podcasts that don’t actually exist.
On a “case studies” page for Tea on the SG Social Branding website, the company says that Tea’s “ask” was to “Develop the narrative that Tea is the go to for Women who like to stay safe while dating.”
“We deployed creators for street interviews in locations such as NYC during daytime and the Nightlife scene on college campuses. Additionally, we made entertaining podcast clips of girl talk that is truly un-scrollable,” the case studies page says. Under “results” it says “The TEA app went #1 in the app store on July 23rd, 2025 and is now viral! Videos deployed from SGSB creators crossed over 3.4 million views with over 74k shares and rising.”
In these videos, the influencers don’t only promote Tea and talk about it as if they actually found information on it about men they know, they also repeatedly disparage Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook groups.
“Instead of using that Facebook group Are We Dating the Same Guy, what girls are doing now because it’s so much easier is they’re downloading Tea,” a woman holding a microphone says as if she’s talking to someone off-camera. The text overlaid on the video says “Tea Party Pod.” The woman, Savannah Isabella, is an influencer who works for SG Social Branding. She goes on to talk about how one of her friends found a guy she was seeing there and all the red flags other women have posted about him. “Miss me with that. Boy bye. And it’s so much easier and faster than that Facebook group.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Tea - Dating Safety App for Women (@theteapartygirls)
In another video, Isabella is at a bar, demoing the Tea app. “Girls, forget about Are We Dating The Same Guy,” she says.Isabella and SG Social Branding did not respond to a request for comment.
Marz told me that she was hired to Tea by a woman named Tara and that initially she only communicated with Tara. Marz did a Zoom interview with Tara before she started to work for Tea and the woman identified herself as Tara over text and email. In November 2024, Marz said that Tara left the company, at which point she started reporting directly to Cook. When I showed Marz a photograph of Christianne Burns, Cook’s then fiancée, she said that was who she knew as Tara, who first interviewed her over Zoom.
After "Tara" left, Marz said Sean took over the “Tara Tea” account which was used to communicate with Tea users in the app and on Facebook.
“Sean uses that account to communicate directly with users on the app, but people think they are speaking to someone actually named Tara,” she told me. Essentially, a man is posing as a woman to an audience of women who are trying to protect themselves from, at best, deceptive men.
How Tea Deleted Posts About Men
Tori Benitez has a private consulting business for victims of domestic violence who are in Family Court for high conflict divorces or custody battles. She told me she joined the Tea app because it promoted digital safety, talking about abusers, and protecting people by letting them share information anonymously.“I'm in the dating scene and on dating apps, and have had my own experience, so I first joined as a user, and then I saw them post that they needed help with escalation claims,” she told me. The escalation claims were complaints both from men about what women were posting about them in the app as well as complaints from other users. She thought her experience as a paralegal would be useful, and she could use more remote work, so she sent Tea her information.
“I had a Zoom call with Sean, and he wanted to know not only a little bit about my business and how I help people, but I had to tell my own personal story.” Benitez said. “I had an ex who literally threatened to kill me and told me how he was going to kill me, even after a restraining order. My story is deep and scary, and he kind of interrupted me and started crying. And I was like, ‘Oh, are you okay?’ Looking back, shouldn't I have been the one crying? It's kind of weird.”
Benitez said she took the job because she wanted to help women. During the interview and at several points while working for Tea, Benitez said that Cook wanted to make her consulting business part of Tea. Benitez said Cook floated having a tab in the Tea app that would send women to her consulting business if they needed help, or having her run workshops for users.
“I feel like his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people, and I think that his story about his mom is a crock of shit.”
Benitez started working in April of this year but said the job wasn’t what she expected because it made no use of her experience as a paralegal. She said the work was more like customer support, and mainly had her filtering through complaints, responding to them according to a strict script she was given, and keeping a record of the responses.If a complaint contained words like “defamation” or seemed legally threatening, she would find the post in question and the user who posted it. At times she would contact the user and ask them if the post was true and if they had any evidence to prove it. Sometimes users would respond and say the accusations were true, and the post would remain. Sometimes the users also provided supporting evidence, like court documents. Sometimes the users would delete the posts themselves, or Tea would delete the posts if the users didn’t respond to Benitez’s questions after a certain amount of time.
“That's when things would get deleted and literally no longer exist on there,” she said. “Nobody could find them. They did not go into an archive. They are just poof gone.”
She would record all the complaints and responses in a spreadsheet for Tea’s internal records, but said it didn’t always make sense when Tea decided to delete a public post on the Tea app vs when it decided to leave one up. In one interview in May, 2025, Cook said the Tea app receives “three legal threats a day from men,” and that Tea has a full legal team that helps it manage those situations.
Benitez said that in one case, Cook told her he would handle a complaint from a man regarding what was said about him on the app himself because Cook knew the man personally.
“He [Cook] seemed to side with or randomly choose to delete things that just didn't make sense and felt really concerning to me,” she said. “But I felt I had no room to complain, because every time I brought up a concern his response was either ‘ignore it,’ or ‘I will handle it,’ and there's no HR, so it's not like I can go anywhere to say all this stuff's happening. I didn't have any other point of contact other than him.”
Benitez also said she raised concerns about users’ behavior on the app. She said that at some point earlier this year Tea went viral in one town in Louisiana, where Tea users started going after each other and the number of complaints exploded.
“There was a lot of fighting in the comments between users. There were a lot of threats between users. It just turned into a chat room,” she said. “They would be fighting each other. Like, ‘Where are you at? I’ll pull up on you.’ I was like, ‘holy shit.’ There would be racist posts. It just started getting bad, and I mentioned that to him [Cook] as well, and I basically got the answer of let them say whatever they want. And like this whole like, you know, ‘It's free speech.’ I thought this was about protecting people,” Benitez recalled.
In May, Benitez said Cook was late to pay her. When she asked about it, Cook said he didn’t have the money, and asked her to keep working until he did, or work for less pay. At that point, Benitez said she wouldn’t work until she got paid for the work she already did. Eventually Cook sent her the money for the hours she already worked, but Benitez never came back.
There are currently two class action lawsuits in motion against Tea accusing the company of failing to properly secure users’ private information. After these complaints were filed Tea updated its terms of service, which now require users to waive their right to participate in class actions against the company, and agree to attempt an “informal dispute resolution” before suing the company.
“I feel like his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people,” Benitez said, “and I think that his story about his mom is a crock of shit.”
Tea’s Security Breaches Put Users at Risk
On July 25, 404 Media broke the news that Tea made an error that completely exposed a database containing at least 72,000 thousand images from its users, and that a misogynistic 4chan community downloaded them and shared them online in various forms in order to harass and humiliate women. On July 28, 404 Media revealed an even worse security breach to Tea, which exposed more than a million private messages between Tea users that included identifying information and intimate conversations about cheating partners and abortions.After the first hack, someone created a website modeled after “Facemash,” the site that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously created while he was a student at Harvard to rank the attractiveness of female students at the university. This new site, based on Tea data, took the selfies women uploaded to Tea in order to verify they are women, presented them to visitors in pairs, and allowed them to choose which they believed was more attractive. The site used the votes to create a ranking and also highlighted the list of the 50 most and least attractive women according to votes.
The second breach was far more dangerous not only because the direct messages between Tea users that were exposed included conversations they thought were private about sensitive subjects that could become dangerous in the wrong hands, but also because those conversations included details that could be used to deanonymize users. Direct messages between users often included their real phone numbers, names, and social media handles.
“I posted on the app about a man who groomed and abused me as a minor,” one Tea user whose direct messages were exposed in the second security breach told 404 Media. The user asked to be anonymous because she’s heard about “incel dudes” doxing Tea users. “I joined Tea because I appreciated the premise of a ‘whisper network’ for community safety—because a huge amount of men are, in fact, unsafe individuals, and most of the time those impacted don't find out until it's too late.”
This user added that they felt safe enough to share intimate details on Tea because it was advertised as a “safe space” for women with a strong emphasis on anonymity.
“My reaction to the breach is anger, just anger, and some disgust,” the user said.
Kasra Rahjerdi, the researcher who flagged the second security breach to 404 Media, said there were signs he wasn’t the only person who may have accessed more than a million of private Tea messages. Every Tea user is assigned a unique API key which allows them to interface with the app in order to log in, read public posts, share posts, or do other actions in the app. Rahjerdi discovered that any Tea user was also able to use their own API key to access sensitive parts of the Tea app’s backend, including a database of private messages and the ability to send all Tea users a push notification.
This access also allowed users to create new databases, and Rahjerdi told 404 Media he saw someone else doing just that while he was looking at Tea’s backend. Most of these databases were empty, but one contained a link to a Discord server with a handful of users which shut down shortly after 404 Media tried to join it on July 26. This activity indicates that someone else found the same security breach as Rahjerdi and could have accessed more than a million private messages of Tea users as well.
In a podcast interview in April, 2025, Cook said he doesn’t know how to code, and that the Tea app was built by two developers in Brazil. According to Tea’s Linkedin page, both developers are contractors who are available to hire via Toptal, a platform where software developers offer their labor as remote freelancers. Those two developers did not respond to our request for comment.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media that the private Tea messages could be especially dangerous to Tea users who talked about abortions or specific men.
“I would be particularly concerned about posts about abortions in say Texas, where SB 8 grants a private right of action to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion that violates the law,” Galperin said. SB 8, also known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” bans abortion after the detection of a “fetal heartbeat,” which is usually six weeks into pregnancy. The law also allows anyone to sue anyone else who performs abortions or “aids and abets” performing or inducing an abortion in violation of the law. “I’d also be concerned about DMs containing information of sexual orientation or immigration status, or details about sexual assault that the survivor was sharing in private.”
Galperin said she would be “extremely concerned” if the messages got out, not just because of the men who are named in the messages, but because “There are people who think that anyone who has an account on this platform is fair game for harassment,” referring to some of the harassment we’ve already seen from 4chan.
Despite the risks the Tea app has already put users in, Tea has downplayed the impact of the security breaches, and has continued to grow in popularity. On July 28, Tea said in a post to Instagram that “some” direct messages were accessed as part of the initial incident, and that it had temporarily disabled the ability for users to send direct messages. The statement does not acknowledge that more than a million messages were exposed, and also misleads users that those messages were leaked as part of the initial breach. The messages were exposed in an entirely separate breach around different security issues. On July 26, after 404 Media reported about both Tea breaches, Tea said on Instagram that it received over 2.5 million requests to join the app. The replies from users on Instagram are filled with people who are on the Tea app waiting list to be approved. Again, even after it said it has hired a cybersecurity firm to address the two previously reported breaches, 404 Media found a third security issue that exposed users’ private information that Tea wasn’t aware of until we reached out for comment.
Today, Tea’s site boasts that more than 6.2 million women use the app.
Joseph Cox contributed reporting.
A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
The more than one million messages obtained by 404 Media are as recent as last week, discuss incredibly sensitive topics, and make it trivial to unmask some anonymous Tea users.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
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"Best practices" (?) with laptop battery driving me crazy
Ok, well, to start with, my Lenovo X1 Carbon 10th is known for not having the greatest battery life.
Despite this, to preserve battery health, I have notifications set to warn me when a charge goes under 20% or over 90%, so that I either plug in or unplug when I get them, which TTBOMK constitutes "best practices." Very possibly I'm just getting old and getting lost too deeply in whatever I'm doing, but I feel like I'm constantly getting these notifications, and they're really starting to get on my nerves!
I've tried tlp and auto-cpufreq without any noticeable difference in performance, and usually I'm on "Power Saver" in Mint.
Mrs. Erinaceus has a gaming laptop and just keeps it plugged in all the time, battery health be damned. Is that what I should do? Maybe time to get a new battery? Or is there just some way to tell it to stop charging and leave it plugged in?
Palestine was the problem with TikTok - Congress seemed to think a scrolling video platform was a national security threat. What changed?
Palestine was the problem with TikTok
After pro-Palestine content flooded the app, Congress treated TikTok as a national security threat. What changed?Sarah Jeong (The Verge)
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They appointed an exIDF instructor to determine what's hate speech...
Suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore
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Wyoming launches first state-backed stablecoin on seven blockchains
After years of research, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission has unveiled the mainnet launch of its first official state-backed stablecoin. The so-called Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), marking the first time a U.S. state has issued a blockchain-based, fiat-pegged token meant to be used by retail and enterprises alike, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
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Just great.
Obviously the customers don't need to know that their audit logs not only could have been turned off for conversations without any extra authentication, but also are so easy to turn off that it happens by accident without any extra intervention.
Also their entire Vulnerability disclosing guideline is security/compliance/image theater.
AI has passed the aesthetic Turing Test − and it’s changing our relationship with art
AI has passed the aesthetic Turing Test − and it’s changing our relationship with art
If a machine creates a video or a song that brings a person to tears, does it matter that the machine felt nothing?The Conversation
KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot: Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks – without job losses
- Hackernews.
:::
KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot
: Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks – without job lossesSimon Sharwood (The Register)
AI Website Builder Lovable Abused for Phishing and Malware Scams
- Threat actors are increasingly using an AI website generation platform to create fraudulent websites for credential phishing and malware delivery.
- Threat actors created or cloned websites that impersonated prominent brands, used CAPTCHA for filtering, and posted credentials to Telegram.
- The barrier to entry for cybercriminals has never been lower.
Cybercriminals Abuse AI Website Creation App For Phishing | Proofpoint US
Key findings Threat actors are increasingly using an AI website generation platform to create fraudulent websites for credential phishing and malware delivery. Threat actorsProofpoint
[Meta] Can you allow the English language posts?
Russian Government Cyber Actors Targeting Networking Devices, Critical Infrastructure
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36017215
Research with details.
- Static Tundra is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit that has been operating for over a decade, specializing in compromising network devices for long-term intelligence gathering operations.
- The group actively exploits a seven-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171), which was patched at the time of the vulnerability publications, in Cisco IOS software's Smart Install feature, targeting unpatched and end-of-life network devices to steal configuration data and establish persistent access.
- Primary targets include organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government.
- Static Tundra employs sophisticated persistence techniques including the historic SYNful Knock firmware implant (first reported in 2015) and bespoke SNMP tooling to maintain undetected access for multiple years.
- The threat extends beyond Russia's operations — other state-sponsored actors are likely conducting similar network device compromise campaigns, making comprehensive patching and security hardening critical for all organizations.
- Threat actors will continue to abuse devices which remain unpatched and have Smart Install enabled.
Russian Government Cyber Actors Targeting Networking Devices, Critical Infrastructure
- Static Tundra is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit that has been operating for over a decade, specializing in compromising network devices for long-term intelligence gathering operations.
- The group actively exploits a seven-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171), which was patched at the time of the vulnerability publications, in Cisco IOS software's Smart Install feature, targeting unpatched and end-of-life network devices to steal configuration data and establish persistent access.
- Primary targets include organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government.
- Static Tundra employs sophisticated persistence techniques including the historic SYNful Knock firmware implant (first reported in 2015) and bespoke SNMP tooling to maintain undetected access for multiple years.
- The threat extends beyond Russia's operations — other state-sponsored actors are likely conducting similar network device compromise campaigns, making comprehensive patching and security hardening critical for all organizations.
- Threat actors will continue to abuse devices which remain unpatched and have Smart Install enabled.
Russian state-sponsored espionage group Static Tundra compromises unpatched end-of-life network devices
A Russian state-sponsored group, Static Tundra, is exploiting an old Cisco IOS vulnerability to compromise unpatched network devices worldwide, targeting key sectors for intelligence gathering.Sara McBroom (Cisco Talos Blog)
Russian Government Cyber Actors Targeting Networking Devices, Critical Infrastructure
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36017215
Research with details.
- Static Tundra is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit that has been operating for over a decade, specializing in compromising network devices for long-term intelligence gathering operations.
- The group actively exploits a seven-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171), which was patched at the time of the vulnerability publications, in Cisco IOS software's Smart Install feature, targeting unpatched and end-of-life network devices to steal configuration data and establish persistent access.
- Primary targets include organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government.
- Static Tundra employs sophisticated persistence techniques including the historic SYNful Knock firmware implant (first reported in 2015) and bespoke SNMP tooling to maintain undetected access for multiple years.
- The threat extends beyond Russia's operations — other state-sponsored actors are likely conducting similar network device compromise campaigns, making comprehensive patching and security hardening critical for all organizations.
- Threat actors will continue to abuse devices which remain unpatched and have Smart Install enabled.
Russian Government Cyber Actors Targeting Networking Devices, Critical Infrastructure
- Static Tundra is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit that has been operating for over a decade, specializing in compromising network devices for long-term intelligence gathering operations.
- The group actively exploits a seven-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171), which was patched at the time of the vulnerability publications, in Cisco IOS software's Smart Install feature, targeting unpatched and end-of-life network devices to steal configuration data and establish persistent access.
- Primary targets include organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government.
- Static Tundra employs sophisticated persistence techniques including the historic SYNful Knock firmware implant (first reported in 2015) and bespoke SNMP tooling to maintain undetected access for multiple years.
- The threat extends beyond Russia's operations — other state-sponsored actors are likely conducting similar network device compromise campaigns, making comprehensive patching and security hardening critical for all organizations.
- Threat actors will continue to abuse devices which remain unpatched and have Smart Install enabled.
Russian state-sponsored espionage group Static Tundra compromises unpatched end-of-life network devices
A Russian state-sponsored group, Static Tundra, is exploiting an old Cisco IOS vulnerability to compromise unpatched network devices worldwide, targeting key sectors for intelligence gathering.Sara McBroom (Cisco Talos Blog)
Cheap SBC x86-64 ?
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36014616
Hi,is it exist cheap ~$60 SBC in X86-64 ??
::: spoiler No thank you for Rapsberry PI
\
I used Raspberry PI SBC for a while now.But it's really hard to found a Linux distribution that support
- RPI (arm64)
- sysVinit 💖
- And that I likePlease don't bring systemD in this discussion thanks.
:::[^1]:
quick summary
Monolithic design: Systemd is a large, complex piece of software that combines many system management functions, rather than having separate, specialized tools as in the traditional Unix philosophy.rentry.co
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<60 range:
- hackerboards.com/board/digital…
- hackerboards.com/board/radxa-r…
There are some other options in >=100 range.
See hackerboards.com/?cpu_architec…
Digital Loggers Atomic PI
Technical specifications for Digital Loggers Atomic PI on Board-DB: Intel Atom x5-Z8350 (4x x86 @1.92Ghz) 2.0 GiB RAMhackerboards.com
Weapons of Mass Delusion Are Helping Kids Opt Out of Reality
Last week’s bombshell revelation of Meta’s internal chatbot guidelines has led to a surge of attention on chatbots and kids. The guidelines demonstrate what so many experts have been saying for not just years, but decades: these products are optimized for engagement over all else. Meta is not alone. The entire industry is building technologies that are designed not to connect us to reality, but to help us avoid it by living our lives on and through its products.While there are well-documented upsides to social media, especially among marginalized youth, much of the conversation about the harms inevitably centers on contacts and content: who are young people interacting with and what are they consuming. This grounds the discussion and action in acute and tangible harms: inappropriate content, online predators, excessive screen time, etc.
But alongside both real and perceived visible threats is a more subtle and perhaps more nefarious phenomenon: a distortion of how children view themselves, and how they experience and understand human connection of all kinds. Across platforms there are literal and figurative filters that warp our faces, relationships, friendships, and intimacy into fantasies — a perversion of some of the most basic human experiences. Social media, augmented reality, and the rapidly growing world of AI chatbots are enabling avoidance at a massive scale. It’s time we start thinking about it that way.
Now surging onto the scene, we have AI companion chatbots that create (as Yuval Harari calls them) “counterfeit humans” that purport to be the perfect friend, or partner, tailored to each person's needs, desires, and opinions. They essentially allow people to craft a fantasy person that pushes them further and further into a safe and cozy echo-chamber that is completely disconnected from reality. This is not an imaginary doomer future, it’s already here. Products that we are already using are not only allowing, but actively enabling young children to trade real relationships for an illusion — or perhaps more aptly, for a delusion.
So what are the delusions? I see two main categories: (1) the delusion of physical perfection, and (2) the delusion of connection. Let’s start with what we can see: appearance filters and the delusion of physical perfection.
Russian Government Cyber Actors Targeting Networking Devices, Critical Infrastructure
- Static Tundra is a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit that has been operating for over a decade, specializing in compromising network devices for long-term intelligence gathering operations.
- The group actively exploits a seven-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171), which was patched at the time of the vulnerability publications, in Cisco IOS software's Smart Install feature, targeting unpatched and end-of-life network devices to steal configuration data and establish persistent access.
- Primary targets include organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government.
- Static Tundra employs sophisticated persistence techniques including the historic SYNful Knock firmware implant (first reported in 2015) and bespoke SNMP tooling to maintain undetected access for multiple years.
- The threat extends beyond Russia's operations — other state-sponsored actors are likely conducting similar network device compromise campaigns, making comprehensive patching and security hardening critical for all organizations.
- Threat actors will continue to abuse devices which remain unpatched and have Smart Install enabled.
Russian state-sponsored espionage group Static Tundra compromises unpatched end-of-life network devices
A Russian state-sponsored group, Static Tundra, is exploiting an old Cisco IOS vulnerability to compromise unpatched network devices worldwide, targeting key sectors for intelligence gathering.Sara McBroom (Cisco Talos Blog)
Microsoft Still Can't Say How Much the ROG Xbox Ally X Will Cost Due to "Macro-Economic" Conditions, Despite Announcing Release Date and Availability Details(Leaked prices $549.99/$899 for Ally/Ally )
Microsoft Still Can't Say How Much the ROG Xbox Ally X Will Cost Due to "Macro-Economic" Conditions, Despite Announcing Release Date and Availability Details - IGN
Microsoft has confirmed release date and availability details for the ROG Xbox Ally X, its upcoming gaming handheld made by Asus, but notably held off on confirming how much the device will cost.Tom Phillips (IGN)
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Snot Flickerman
in reply to return2ozma • • •like this
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mesa
in reply to Snot Flickerman • • •My union got me a raise. And I have a pension of all things. Crazy. In 2025!
Unions are great.
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Avid Amoeba
in reply to mesa • • •mesa
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •ClanOfTheOcho
in reply to mesa • • •mesa
in reply to ClanOfTheOcho • • •Avid Amoeba
in reply to mesa • • •Olap
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •Em Adespoton
in reply to return2ozma • • •$165,000 tech jobs are still out there. Usually they require at least 10 years experience, or a masters in mathematics or data science.
Fresh out of school? Try a $48-64k job and get some experience.
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UnderpantsWeevil
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •Try renting an apartment in Silicon Valley with a $48k/year paycheck in your pocket.
The starting salaries justified the crazy cost-of-living in a city that wanted $5000/mo for 800 sqft. Now the question becomes how you afford to get the experience in a job that pays below the regional pricetag.
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mesa
in reply to UnderpantsWeevil • • •like this
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UnderpantsWeevil
in reply to mesa • • •I mean, its hardly unique to SV or to the Tech Sector broadly speaking. One of the biggest challenges I've seen down in Texas is teachers earning enough money to live in their (comparatively much cheaper than California) school districts.
But I gotta say, I was earning $48k back in 2006 way out in the Houston 'burbs and it was a tight squeeze. Nothing has improved. "Just earn less" doesn't work when you're bumping up against a bunch of landlords and lenders saying "Fuck you, pay me more".
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mesa
in reply to UnderpantsWeevil • • •I dont disagree. Yuck. Same salaries, different decade.
I actually made quite a bit more about 4 years ago, but took a downgrade in pay for less work. Worked out well for me. But I see a lot of people floundering right now. I know one person that's been out of a tech job for over a year and had to go back to manual labor after doing a ton of work in tech. At least he got paid unlike the poor saps that get unpaid internships.
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Boomer Humor Doomergod
in reply to UnderpantsWeevil • • •Counter offer: Rent an apartment in Bumfuck, Flyover and work for a tech company.
It’s the only way I’ve been able to afford a house.
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BombOmOm
in reply to Boomer Humor Doomergod • • •It's amazing how cheap living is when you aren't trying to jam yourself into a city. People talk about how there is a bunch of vacant housing, well, middle of nowhere is where it is! And it's damn cheap.
And now, with 5G and satellite internet both as solid internet sources, it is rare you will find a house that will prevent a work remote job.
Boomer Humor Doomergod
in reply to BombOmOm • • •SpaceNoodle
in reply to Boomer Humor Doomergod • • •Boomer Humor Doomergod
in reply to SpaceNoodle • • •SpaceNoodle
in reply to Boomer Humor Doomergod • • •xthexder
in reply to Boomer Humor Doomergod • • •Frezik
in reply to UnderpantsWeevil • • •UnderpantsWeevil
in reply to Frezik • • •fodor
in reply to UnderpantsWeevil • • •UnderpantsWeevil
in reply to fodor • • •It's a modest bedroom, small living room, and a kitchen.
You can fit in a smaller space. I wouldn't say you can live in it. 300ft is barely a hotel room.
Boomer Humor Doomergod
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •like this
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Em Adespoton
in reply to Boomer Humor Doomergod • • •like this
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empireOfLove2
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •Boomer out of touch take.
Damn. That'd be crazy if anyone was actually hiring anybody with no experience.
I know multiple group chats of people who graduated fresh from college, not even 20% of them have jobs a year after grad. And this is spread across comp sci, cybersecurity, and mech eng.
The entry level job is dead. Every company thinks they can replace the menial shit that entry level workers do to learn with AI slop.
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prettybunnys
in reply to empireOfLove2 • • •counterpoint: I work in tech for a Fortune 500 and we still have interns and still hire intern classes and kids right out of college.
We just had an intern project showcase, some neat stuff.
We are working with AI but we aren’t stupid, we still need people.
Not in Silicon Valley.
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Em Adespoton
in reply to prettybunnys • • •Exact same thing here.
If you ignore any company related to “cloud” or “AI”, especially if you focus on tech jobs at companies outside the software industry, there’s still plenty of hiring fresh coders going on.
prettybunnys
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •We have a pretty forward thinking AI offering of our own, but … it’s not being vibe coded, we have very educated AI engineers
I feel like honestly it’s outside of tech where they believe they can replace with AI
Prove_your_argument
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •lol... I don't think you're right at all.
Everybody overhired coders in 2020-2021, and everybody has been shedding them since.... along with tons of other roles.
Sure, they are always hiring and there's always exceptions. If the job is 60k and you have 3000 applicants and 300 of them have over 3 years of experience... how can a 0 YOE possibly compete?
atticus88th
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •It's weird that so many replies are attacking you when you are factually right. The industry has always been this way. And some kid with a GED and 3 years of CompSci from their community college is not going to land them a 165k dream job right after graduation.
I think some people have been living in a fantasy world or believed every headline they saw.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •Probably not the hottest of markets right now (not just because of Trump and company) and I was in a similar boat when I graduated. My first job was Best Buy (not Geek Squad unfortunately) then tech support then a reporting analyst. Took probably 4 years for me to get into a job where coding was the main aspect.
That being said, I feel bad for any new graduate except for maybe lawyers.
GissaMittJobb
in reply to Em Adespoton • • •On top of this, the AI jobs are paying some flat-out ridiculous rates.
Like, millions of dollars up-front in signing bonuses kind of ridiculous
Plebcouncilman
in reply to return2ozma • • •This is a good thing.
Fuck these kids getting overpaid remote jobs destroying the housing market of poor countries like mine.
TorJansen
in reply to Plebcouncilman • • •yeehaw
in reply to Plebcouncilman • • •Plebcouncilman
in reply to yeehaw • • •like this
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tatterdemalion
in reply to yeehaw • • •Plebcouncilman
in reply to tatterdemalion • • •Eager Eagle
in reply to Plebcouncilman • • •Individuals buying/renting for themselves don't destroy any housing market.
Scalping companies buying hundreds of houses and apartments in a city to leave them vacant and artificially pump prices do.
Plebcouncilman
in reply to Eager Eagle • • •Serinus
in reply to Plebcouncilman • • •Plebcouncilman
in reply to Serinus • • •some_guy
in reply to return2ozma • • •like this
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TorJansen
in reply to return2ozma • • •HertzDentalBar
in reply to return2ozma • • •FreedomAdvocate
in reply to HertzDentalBar • • •As a developer who has hired dozens of developers, you definitely don't. It makes no difference, especially in this day and age of AI being able to make websites and programs with ease.
AlecSadler
in reply to HertzDentalBar • • •masterofn001
in reply to return2ozma • • •gravitas_deficiency
in reply to return2ozma • • •Hey so just to be clear: a 200k comp package nowadays is the equivalent of about 81k in 1990.
Put another way: I am doing a good bit worse than my dad was at my age, despite being a pretty solid and experienced software engineer, with an EECS degree, and a lot of devops and system design experience.
This is the collapse of the American social contract. Even people like me who are ostensibly in “great” jobs are treated like code monkeys, and adjusted for inflation, it’s flat or worse than 30-35 years ago. We are doing worse than the generation before us. The American Dream is a nightmare.
sobchak
in reply to gravitas_deficiency • • •MBech
in reply to sobchak • • •Your last point is where I'm putting most of the blame. We're all doing worse because a few people at the top always, ALWAYS have to do better than last year.
Eternal growth is physically impossible. At some point, shit will have to stagnate, and if shit starts to stagnate, but the top still insists on eternal growth, they'll have to take some from the bottom. That's what's happening right now. The top can no longer keep making more money off of an industry in development, so instead they'll cut costs, costs being you, the worker, and hope they die before it all collapses under them.
e461h
in reply to MBech • • •MagicianWithABadPlan
in reply to sobchak • • •MagicianWithABadPlan
in reply to gravitas_deficiency • • •CheeseNoodle
in reply to MagicianWithABadPlan • • •GamingChairModel
in reply to gravitas_deficiency • • •Individual Income by Year: Average, Median, One Percent, and Calculator
PK (DQYDJ)Horsey
in reply to GamingChairModel • • •This data to me didn’t show much in the way of by-field statistics. If we’re comparing software development pay at the naîssance of the field to today, it should be complicated to do so. I’d expect to look at top 5% at the very least because of how new and niche computing and coding in general was in the 90s.
You have to expect that OP, who is well established in his field, to compare accordingly, not with average pay of 1990.
GamingChairModel
in reply to Horsey • • •I'm talking about a number that is 1.4x the 95th percentile generally. It'd be weird to assume that programmers were getting paid that much more than doctors and lawyers and bankers.
According to this survey series, median IEEE members were making about $58k (which was also the average for 35-year-olds in the survey. Electrical engineering is a closely related discipline to programming.
So yeah, an $81k salary was really, really high in 1990. I suspect the original comment was thinking of the 90's in general, and chose a salary from later in the decade while running the inflation numbers back to 1990, using the wrong conversion factor for inflation.
Edited to add: this Bureau of Labor Statistics publication summarizes salaries by several professions and experience levels as of March 1990. The most senior programmers were making around $34k, the most senior systems analysts were making about $69k, and the most senior managers, who could fairly be described as executives, were making about $88k.
Salary and Fringe Benefits Survey Data for IEEE USA Engineers (1971-2000)
ewh.ieee.orgKairuByte
in reply to GamingChairModel • • •That site is talking about averages, assembly across the board. The person you’re talking to is explicitly talking about CS jobs, like software developer or system engineer.
You can’t really compare the two.
GamingChairModel
in reply to KairuByte • • •No, but it is a starting point for passing some kind of sanity check. Someone who was making $81k in 1990 was making an exceedingly high salary in the general population, and computer-related professions weren't exactly known for high salaries until maybe the 2000's.
[This report] (bls.gov/ocs/publications/pdf/w…) has government statistics showing that in March 1990, entry level programmers were making on average about $27k. Senior programmers were making about $34k. Systems analysts (which I understand to have primarily been mainframe programmers in 1990) were making low 30s at the entry level and high 60s at the most senior level. Going up the management track, only the fourth and highest level was making above $80k, and it seems to me that those are going to be high level executives.
So yeah, $81k is a very senior level in the 1990s tech industry, probably significantly less common than today's $200k tech jobs.
panda_abyss
in reply to return2ozma • • •inclementimmigrant
in reply to return2ozma • • •peoplebeproblems
in reply to return2ozma • • •Wait what? Who is making $165k out of college?
I don't even make $165k after working for... I don't know let's say 12 or 15 I can't keep track what counts anymore
nek0d3r
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •AlecSadler
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •My first tech job out of college was $55k.
Average in my area for new grads at best is like $85k.
My highest paying was $195k as a Senior and my average is probably $150k as a Senior / Lead.
None of this was big tech though.
sugar_in_your_tea
in reply to AlecSadler • • •peoplebeproblems
in reply to AlecSadler • • •Yeah I made $51k out of college.
My first software job I made $68k? Granted Im at $150k after all that time, but still. Dang yo you know?
sobchak
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •HubertManne
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •peoplebeproblems
in reply to HubertManne • • •My mother won't answer me what her salary was when she retired. Easily in the industry for 30-40 years, but I know it was under $200k. Granted she was an electrical engineer before getting her masters in computer science, but I also suspect it has to do with the fact that she and I didn't work for the big tech giants.
And I have no interest in doing so.
HubertManne
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •Baguette
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •Big tech in HCOL areas (Seattle, all of Cali, etc.) pay new grads about 100k to 150k base, with a hefty sign on bonus (anywhere from 20k to 50k). RSUs usually only vest about 5 to 10% of their total stock in the first year, but thats about 5k to 10k
Of course HCOL means this money is relatively less than it seems, but still a lot for new grads.
GamingChairModel
in reply to peoplebeproblems • • •Computer science and engineering grads at the top of their class at top schools who choose not to go to grad school. This thread claims to cite Department of Education data to show median salaries 3 years after graduation, and some of them are higher than $165k. Sure, that's 3 years out, but it's also median, so one would expect 75th or 90th percentile number to be higher.
Anecdotally, I know people from Stanford/MIT who did get their first jobs in the Bay Area for more than $150k more than 10 years ago, so it was definitely possible.
But this NYT article has stories about graduates from Purdue, Oregon State, and Georgetown which are good schools but also generally weren't the schools producing many graduates landing in those $150k jobs as that very top tier. I would assume the kids graduating from Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley are still doing well. But the middle is getting left behind.
Prove_your_argument
in reply to return2ozma • • •return2ozma
in reply to Prove_your_argument • • •taiyang
in reply to return2ozma • • •So, life of a humanities major like my wife. Actually, most majors that weren't STEM.
If it helps anyone in this situation, you can try to bank on other skills. My wife is doing great now but got her start because of her bilingualism, and even that was only 35k a year. My sister did a little better with her music degree by pivoting to community manager, although in her case she had experience modding for a well known streamer. That was pretty good money right out the gate.
Point is, programming isn't your everything, even if you're leveraging something from your personal life.
BigTrout75
in reply to return2ozma • • •AlecSadler
in reply to BigTrout75 • • •turdburglar
in reply to BigTrout75 • • •fodor
in reply to return2ozma • • •