• 0 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 27th, 2023

help-circle
  • Not saying it can’t be, but I’ll be more convinced by an article that is a bit less emotionally loaded. It’s clear that the author has a bone to pick with Microsoft, and it reads as it’s written by a high schooler who wants to LARP as a journalist.

    Just to be clear I have been in big tech corpos with cult-ish undertones and I have also seen the mindset poppycock shoved to my face multiple times, it’s not that I find their contents hard to believe. I just find that article hard to trust.



  • More than some nefarious corpo, I think this is more an evolution of the same problem that existed before AI was popular.

    Some people realised that their credibility as a job candidate was tied on a very surface level to their GitHub profile, so they sought to optimise it. They started going to cool projects and proposing absolutely stupid merge requests, like “replace single quotes with double quotes in README.md” or “improved spacing in this sentence” in the hopes that the developers would go “well why not”, so they could show that they contributed to tensorflow or redis or what have you. Already years ago, a lot of FLOSS projects were plagued by spam PRs.

    Now coming up with absolutely stupid reasons to issue a PR is a tedious job and you have a very fierce competition of people doing the same thing as you, so… why not gain the edge with AI?








  • There are a lot of answers here but I feel they mostly miss OP’s point so I’ll try my own:

    What stops a scammer from HTTPS certifying foobar.reputable.com is the trust system.

    Anybody can create a certificate on their machine for anything within seconds, even you could create a certificate for www.google.com. The problem is that you, as an issuer, are not trusted by anybody.

    Browsers and operating systems are released with a list of issuers that are considered trustworthy, so if you want your certificate to be recognised it has to come from one of these, not from you.

    All of these issuers are in the list because they have been individually vetted, and are known to do their due diligence before issuing certificates, so they would not give you that cert unless they know that the bank domain or subdomain belongs to you, and the technical means to achieve this have been explained in other answers.

    But if one of these issuers went rogue, or if you hypothetically hacked into their certification authority, then indeed nothing would stop you from obtaining a valid and recognised certificate for foobar.bank.com.

    This is why for example Trustcor was removed from this list in 2022: from that position it would be trivial for a certificate authority to allow third parties to spy on people.