The Dystopic Cyberpunk Present @the-dystopic-cyberpunk-present - Tumblr Blog

"no you can't control the computer because uh that would be user unfriendly" <- shit they expect us to believe

"The user doesn't know what they are doing, but luckily we are smart and can make all the decisions for them" <- voice of an operating system that kills its own firewall for no reason and doesn't tell anyone for months until you ask it where the firewall is

lawfulgoodness

This is exactly what the movie "TRON" was telling us over 40 years ago, but nobody listened.

targetedknowledge

cryoverkiltmilk

Completely disable Copilot in Windows 11

You too can get the satisfaction of maiming or killing a spy embedded in your organization.

sevastiel

HELL YEAH DESHITTIFICATION!

For everything we do here, please be sure to be careful with what you edit, and restart your computer to lock things in. If you don't have access to the Group editor, (likely to happen if you're on base windows) you can do this as well by opening your Registry Editor app, then inputting this after your 'computer' or whatever the initial segment is. (Mine is computer. If I just try and paste the below string it gets SO mad at me)

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

Navigating to your "turnoffwindowscopilot", hit modify, and set the value data to 1.

If done correctly, it'll look like this.

While we're at it, you can also get rid of the integrated search, (or that thing where it searches the web when you search anything, whether or not you want it to) and such through regedit as well.

Integrated search will have you going to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Navigate to your "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions" bit, if you don't see it, you can make it by right clicking and creating a new registry D-Word key of that exact name. Edit the key, set it to 1. It'll look like this if you do it right!

To get rid of Windows Spotlight, (The thing where it pulls up ten billion pages on windows start page, shoving ads in your face and cluttering everything) we go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DesktopSpotlight\Settings

And set "Enabled State" To 0. If you do it right, it'll look like this!

Disabling edge on startup will also help a fair deal with processing speed and the like. This you can do in all sorts of ways, the easiest being turning it off entirely on startup through settings in the like.

If you want to kill it *entirely*, though? :)

In regedit, run along to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft

Navigate to your MicrosoftEdge key subcategory. If you don't see it, you can make one! Note, this is a KEY, not a d-word. *inside* that subcategory, we want to either make or find the D-Word key of PreventLaunchEdge and set that to 1 in the same way as all the others. It'll look like this.

Aaaand while we're here, I'd HIGHLY recommend shanking Killer Networking Services. It's just bloatware. (Ostensibly it's supposed to monitor your network bandwidth and even things out, but that really means it's constantly monitoring and pinging things, which eats up the bandwidth you DO get, and also chunks your computer's processing power.) Getting rid of it entirely is borderline impossible, since it's set to redownload on regular updates and intel is very pushy with its updates.

This you can do by opening your Services.msc, which basically shows you all the background stuff that Windows does. Find Anything with Killer in the name, right click it, go to properties, and disable startup. It should look like this, if done successfully. It will probably reenable itself in time/in later updates for windows, but it's a quick fix. I'd also check your TaskScheduler app to make sure that nothing's scheduled to open up there, either.

If you CAN completely kill Killer services through uninstalling and the like, I would warn that at very least for my computer, the only ethernet/lan support applications that are available ARE Killer's. When you download updates, you really do have to do it manually and ONLY download the ethernet services, or just be cool with not having Lan functionality.

One last thing, not a shit application but is a shit service. If your computer's constantly overheating or just warm, you likely have Turboboost enabled. (Default setting that you can't change) If you want to be able to turn it off and drop your temps by like 40 degrees, in Regedit go to

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\be337238-0d82-4146-a960-4f3749d470c7

(Note- This isn't the string copy paste from the reddit thread, this is mine that does the same thing. If my string doesn't work for you, check the reddit thread string. If that doesn't work either, you can follow the path and find it pretty easily. Probably has like, one letter of difference somewhere. The bits all start the same, though, so it's easy to find.)

and go to "attributes". Set the value from 1 to 2, and now in your advanced Power Plan settings in control panel, you'll be able to *see* turbo boost and turn it off.

It'll look like this, and in power options, a successful disabling of boost should look like this.

Turning off quick startup's also a good call, since that basically stops your restarts from actually shutting things down properly.

GOOD LUCK OUT THERE YALL. MAKE SURE TO CLEAN YOUR PC!

#windows 11 #win11 #enshitification #deshitification

perdvivly

So, Zendesk, a third party software that Discord uses just got hacked. Of course, after the introduction of the Online Safety Act, discord requires UK users to upload photo ID with the express assurance that they won’t retain any of the information upon successful verification. Now, does anyone want to guess what the data the hackers got that they are trying to use to extort Discord was? That’s right, it’s 2,185,151 government issued IDs!

self-loving-vampire

To be clear, we did not simply predict that this kind of attack was going to happen any more than we "predict" the sun is probably going to rise tomorrow.

It is something that has already happened more than once before and there is no reason to expect that's going to stop anytime soon. It was bound to happen.

#discord #government id #hacks

vague-humanoid

The trend marks the latest example of tech development outpacing governance.

At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

bmoreisapunkrocktown

THIS HAPPENED AT WORK!!!

One of the parties in a grievance mediation had Otter.ai installed on his computer for a previous meeting. He thought (and, honestly, had been led to believe by the company) that he was the one triggering when it was used, and had wanted it to provide captions and a transcription for another meeting. He intended to use it once. Unbeknownst to him, it activated on EVERY MEETING. The worst part is no one noticed, so it is actually unclear how many meetings he'd been in that the AI had been activated on, but for this particular meeting, it sent the meeting host (my colleague) an email saying that it was RECORDING (which is illegal in this line of work, highly illegal, there's hearings in Congress right now on someone recording a negotiations meeting) the proceedings.

The goal of the email was for her to see how "helpful" of a tool that it was so that she could download it as well and enable it in her meetings. It sent her 1) an attendance summary (private); 2) a transcript of the meeting so far (illegal) and 3) a snippet of audio from the meeting (highly illegal). They had to stop the mediation entirely, switch to old school phones to see where the issue was and who had this enabled on their computer. The man was horribly embarrassed, and had to get help from his IT department to get the program uninstalled from his computer.

Genuinely, these AI tools are viruses. Because of this, we've been asking external people at the start of meetings if anyone else is present off-screen (a different story) or if anyone has AI programs installed on their computer. But most people don't KNOW because Copilot is now installed behind their backs, and it's being sneakier than other programs (like Microsoft isn't going to email someone and say "Hey, by the way, we've been listening into your meetings"), but that doesn't mean it isn't doing the same things.

If you are downloading and using these programs, please be aware of this and please fucking uninstall them.

swordsagedachsie

#ai #ai notetakers

dispatchesfromtheclasswar

#ownership #streaming #leasing

r2x2

moth-grrrl-mavis

Abandonware should be public domain

#piracy #abandonware

trans-gothic

dat-eyebrows

@gendernewtral holy shit what??

gendernewtral

an update to my insulin pump (a model which is highly recommended by doctors because it has software you can update, unlike other models) would allow my doctor to see more of my medical data because of the way my pump would now function.

i technically had the choice not to update it, but if i didn’t, my insurance company would not cover the cost of fixing or replacing it if something happened to it. they could say that the damage came from not updating the system, even if the damage was completely external.

some of the software updates have been beneficial, and have made my life easier. however, the choice to use these new system has always been made for me. i can’t afford to replace this $3000 device that allows me to live without injecting insulin upwards of five times a day.

disabled people already live in a world that is hypermanaged by people who have absolute control over our health and safety. anyone with a prosthetic, hearing aid, or pacemaker can face the same problem i did if the manufacturer decides they need to exert their presence in our lives more than they already do. the “cyberpunk dystopia” is already here, and if you want to change the ever-growing vice grip of “smart technology,” help disabled activists. we’ve been here all along.

(if you want a short primer on what it’s like to be disabled and rely on technology, read Jillian Weise’s personal essay in Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility).

#insulin #diabetes #medical devices

prof-grace-aspen

If you're on Windows 11 like I am for my "main" computer (in my case for school purposes and because I can't get Baldur's Gate 3 to play on Linux), then you might've seen this annoying piece of AI shit show up on your taskbar:

This is Windows Copilot, and it's fulled by the same shit ChatGPT is fuelled by. There is currently no way to uninstall it, but there is a way to deactivate it completely, which I've linked below. It's very easy, and it took me like, 2 minutes to do.

Remove Copilot from your Windows 11 computer using one of these two methods, depending on your Windows edition.

#windows 11 #microsoft #win11 #OS

ralfmaximus

Dental IoT devices caused millions of Euros in damages for Swiss company, says report.

According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets.

The most cyberpunk thing on your dash today.

pulpwrit3r

This....this is why you do not need to connect EVERYTHING to the internet.

omgsweetunlikelycollector-me

I'm comfused- how much damage could an enslaved toothbrush cause??

ralfmaximus

The aggressors installed remote control software onto the smart toothbrushes via their unprotected internet connections, aggregating 3 million of them into a botnet: a network of robot computers under remote control.

Next, they would instruct all 3 million of them to attack a website of their choosing, causing a distributed-denial-of-service (DDS) situation where the targeted website was so busy talking to hijacked toothbrushes that it couldn't do the work it was designed for, resulting in crashes and lost revenue.

catoperated

A DDDS, or Dental Distributed Denial of Service, if you will

#iot #internet of shit #toothbrush

fabricdragondesigns

Malicious code planted in xz Utils has been circulating for more than a month.

🥹

reblog to kill it faster

ralfmaximus

The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable.

So they didn't want people using the very things they advertised as being useful; the reasons you'd tolerate an always-on virtual assistant in your life.

timemachineyeah

this is the kind of stuff the cyber dystopias never think to include. "spying on everyone couldn't make enough money :(" like what

#alexa #amazon

theoutcastrogue

The train manufacturer accused the hackers of slander.

Members of an ethical hacking group called Dragon Sector, including Sergiusz Bazański and Michał Kowalczyk, were called upon by a train repair shop, Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych (SPS), to analyze train software in June 2022. SPS was desperate to figure out what was causing "mysterious failures" that shut down several vehicles owned by Polish train operator the Lower Silesian Railway, Polish infrastructure trade publication Rynek Kolejowy reported. At that point, the shortage of trains had already become "a serious problem" for carriers and passengers, as fewer available cars meant shorter trains and reduced rider capacity, Rynek Kolejowy reported.

Dragon Sector spent two months analyzing the software, finding that "the manufacturer's interference" led to "forced failures and to the fact that the trains did not start," and concluding that bricking the trains "was a deliberate action on Newag's part."

According to Dragon Sector, Newag entered code into the control systems of Impuls trains to stop them from operating if a GPS tracker indicated that the train was parked for several days at an independent repair shop.

The trains "were given the logic that they would not move if they were parked in a specific location in Poland, and these locations were the service hall of SPS and the halls of other similar companies in the industry," Dragon Sector's team alleged. "Even one of the SPS halls, which was still under construction, was included."

The code also allegedly bricked the train if "certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number," 404 Media reported. [...]

404 Media noted that Newag appeared to be following a common playbook in the right-to-repair world where manufacturers intimidate competitor repair shops with threatened lawsuits and unsubstantiated claims about safety risks of third-party repairs. So far, Dragon Sector does not appear intimidated, posting its success on YouTube and discussing its findings at Poland’s Oh My H@ck conference in Warsaw.

#trains #rail #right to repair