I suspect a lot of people have difficulty recognizing that what they believe about the world may not be representative of how the world actually behaves. I certainly do, frequently.
Like with politics, people think they need to go vote and march and stuff to effect change, but if you're willing to accept the idea that there are limits to your ability to perceive the world and your perceptions are misleading, you can pretty reliably go and see that isn't true.
You can also decipher deeper realities like you can basically put whatever you want on flat bread, or that you dadskf;'akse'wfaegqrwt;'lj'a fuck my brain. I'm asd I'm not sure what I was trying to say.
I have a security background and it's largely all theater. Locks are just to keep out people who believe in them. All those badge swipes and things are about tracking access, not securing things. Matter of fact, most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety.
Learn to hack, learn to quadcopter.
Learn to hack
And let's be honest here, even Fort Knox is only ever as secure as the people who operate it.
Generally speaking, an operation is only as secure as the people who function within it and these people tend to be the most vulnerable points in a chain of security.
What I'm trying to say here is that you don't have to be a good hacker to be a good penetration tester and one of the most fruitful areas for "hacking" is always going to be social engineering.
Calling people up and just asking for their passwords is a time honored tradition.
I re-watch this at least once a year religiously just because it's the best worst best good bad movie, and is so ridiculous and weirdly not all at the same time.
I always wanted to try being a pen tester because me and my friends used to like to sneak and I liked to schmooze. I would always be the one to distract the cashier or whoever.
Why so much time in isolation? Because someone convinced the judge that he was capable of "initiating a nuclear war by whistling on a public telephone".
"Mr. Clinton, listen to this for a sec." [impossibly beautiful rendition of The Internationale performed in whistling]
"I understand. AmeriKKKa must burn."That also happened at a time where most people in the gov and leo really didn't understand tech yet. Not that it's much better now, but the sort of people who were chasing and abusing Kevin couldn't figure out how to program their VCR. #FreeKevin
Realizing that judges are, by and large, have no qualifications at all, of any kind, whatsoever, really helps you on your way to realizing that society is silly and you shouldn't take it at face value.
A little while ago our company wanted to get rid off local administrator rights, but as developers we kind of need those (like installing the software we develope and other unimportant things), so they installed some crappy software that wraps the user access control and I guess gives them more control over what can be run
It breaks every couple of weeks, but luckily you can use that same software to disable and bypass it by running the control panel as admin
Every windows PC that has a USB port can be hacked into locally. Boot into windows install USB, open elevated command prompt, change the ease of access button's target location to be an admin command prompt instead of the ease of access settings, reboot, click the ease of access button, change the admin password in the admin command prompt, enter the password and you're in.
Yeah, most commercial non-deadbolt locks are really fucking cheap. A lockpick gun will get you in most doors relatively quick. Most security, keypad, and fire boxes are all using one of a handful of keys. Same with the old crown vic police cars, actually. Also, golf carts.
If you live in an apartment with coin operated laundry, you can buy a key for the coin box really cheap too.
I've been so tempted to do this for years, but I'd be so afraid they'd notice the missing income and figure something was up.
I would also recommend casing the joint real well too. There could be a camera. It could be thwarted with a well placed laundry basket though.
I lived in an apartment with laundry, and I found out that if you push the quarter "slider" in reeeeal slow, sometimes it would kick on and I could gank my quarters back
Matter of fact, most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety.
Does this mean that passing a strong-ish magnet over them would typically make them open?
Fail open means that fire code requires an unobstructed path of egress; You can't be locked in a building in an emergency. So mag locks are powered all the time in order to maintain the lock and then you remove power to open the door. This way if power goes out the door opens. In most major Corporate buildings, if you go into the fire panel room, you will find a relay that can simply be pulled out and will remove power to every maglock in the area. Or you can pull the fire alarm, cut the power, etc. Most big buildings also have a little lockbox aka a knoxbox outside their front door with a set of keys inside and some have a switch inside to kill the locks as well. They do have tamper switches though.
I can't remember using a magnet to neutralize a maglock, but I wanted to.😅 It would have to be a big one and honestly it would be easier to just slap something with a bit of thickness on the maglock when the door is open to prevent it from getting a solid "seal'. It'll give the appearance of being locked, but a good yank will let the door open right up. Often you can also just slide a piece of paper on a coat hanger between double doors or under a door to trip the PIR (passive infrared) sensor used to auto-open for people exiting. It shouldn't work, but those PIR are cheap as hell and often very oversensitive.
You can also spray a condensed gas through a door with a PIR on the other side. Only really secure building I worked in was for one of those Billy Budd type people who were really good at some niche technical thing and just hired enough people to be able to focus on the part that they found fun. His shop was in a squat brick building with steel doors that you had to press a button on the inside to open. There were well built steel edges to the door so that a hangar or some other means of attack could not be slipped around.
You can also spray a condensed gas through a door with a PIR on the other side.
Yes! It wasn't consistent, but we were able to get that working with canned air a few times. Double doors worked best where you could get closer to the PIR above the doors. Holding the can upside down worked best, iirc.
Awesome to hear this actually working! I wonder if holding it upside down works best bc it grabs the coldest fraction of gas and causes the biggest temperature differential for the PIR?
That's my thinking. Most of the PIR aren't very impressive and they're just looking for that temperature change, it doesn't matter which direction. I actually wonder if maybe the paper trick works when it does because it moves the air flow from air conditioning around.
Not a clue tbh, the maglock uses an a pretty strong electromagnet on one side, metal plate on the other. Not sure what it would take to interfere enough once they're seated properly. Preventing that is your best bet and is often their downfall.
Everything always fails at "guy who doesn't get paid enough to give a shit"
most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety
I used to work in a room at a place that violated this regulation. It was a laboratory, too. Those probably catch fire more often than office cubicles.
Lol yeah, that probably deserves a call to OSHA. Or in some libertarian place where that's not the fire code.
I seriously considered it at the time, but it was before I was radicalized and I was afraid of rocking the boat.
Lol everyone here getting it while everyone on Reddit was like "Oh you cut a hole in the wall you're not so smart I could cut a hole in the wall, too!"
Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.
I'm not sure if there's a name for this particular phenomenon but I like to think of it in terms of naive responses to contemporary art or, in short, Contemporary Art Syndrome; when people encounter contemporary art they tend to have the reaction "But I could have made that!" and the obvious response to this is "Yeah, but did you?"
(Putting aside the fact that there's actually [apparently] a high degree of technical skill required for, say, a Barnett Newman painting for argument's sake.)
Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.
Sites on the net claim the physicist Ernest Rutherford said the following but Wikiquote says it's unsourced.
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
I think that way about evolution sometimes. It's blitheringly obvious when you consider the two points
- There is a difference between parent and offspring and yet they also inherit traits
- Differences add up
Both are easily observable in the natural world. The first one can be seen with babies "oh you have your mother's eyes" while also the baby not literally being the mom. The second one is used by walking where we cross a large distance one step at a time.
And all you need is those two principles to come to the conclusion that the small yet inheritable differences between offspring will add up over a long period of time. The question to be asked isn't if it will happen but rather just what traits it happens to.
And yet, it took humanity (and for many people still they refuse) millennial to grasp it. I'm looking at the process as so simple only from the lens of someone born after it was figured out.
Yeah, this is a great example. Darwin is such a cool figure in the history of science in part because--in contrast to other "Great Man" figures like Newton or Einstein--he didn't really come up with any novel methodological tools or earthshaking new ideas about the structure of reality. Everything Darwin said in The Origin of Species was out there already, and much of it had already even been proposed by other people (including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin). His contribution was just systematizing all that stuff, providing a unified narrative, and explicitly thinking through the immediate consequences of a pile of things that was already known. People already knew (very roughly) about heritability of traits (though the mechanism would prove elusive for a long time after Darwin). They also already knew about environmental selection and competition for resources, and knew (or at least strongly suspected by that point) that the Earth was very, very old. If you just put all those facts next to each other, the consequence--that descent with modification can and does explain the diversity of life we see all around us--almost just pops out by itself, and once you start thinking that way lots of other stuff in biology suddenly clicks into place within the explanatory framework. There's that famous quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky that "nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution," and while that's a bit of an exaggeration, it's very close to being true. Evolution is the paradigm case of an explanatory theory: it's obvious in retrospect in large part because so much of what was before just a "pile of sundry facts" suddenly makes perfect sense as soon as you start looking at it through that explanatory lens. It always makes me wonder what else we're missing that might seem just as glaringly obvious to people a century from now.
For what it's worth, I think Marx's work is in pretty much the same boat: it's a theory whose power comes from providing a framework for making sense of a bunch of bits and pieces of data about the world that, in the absence of the theory, don't seem to quite fit together. That there are problems in the details of how the originators of each theory first expressed it (which there are in both cases) doesn't really matter much, because the insight is a way of looking at the world more than it is the precise articulation of this or that mechanism or phenomenon.
It always makes me wonder what else we're missing that might seem just as glaringly obvious to people a century from now.
Along those same lines, I'm always bothered when in movies, there's a seemingly unstoppable evil that the people can't kill, then a little girl spills some water on one of the beasts, and it works. Word spreads and there's a montage of people in the US, France, India, China etc spilling water on the creatures and winning. Like, motherfucker they are organic beings! There are hundreds of ways to kill them!
Also, the "we tried something once, and did a bad job at it, so we won't try it again" movie trope.
The phrases I'd associate it with are obvious in retrospect or hindsight being 20/20.
eh, picking a lock is still better because it doesn't wake people up, and allows you to get away without the crime being noticed for a while
I agree that ramming a door down is stupid when you can just break through a window
Hello, Lockpicking Lawyer here, in this episode I will be making my wife very angry...
ancient plankton hundreds of millions of years ago died on the sea floor, got stuck between some rocks, turned into oil, and were pumped out of the earth and refined into plastic, just so they could be turned into that shitty "euphori-lock" that can be gotten around by simply flipping the container and cutting a circle in the bottom and going to town with a spoon.
He definitely didn't want to improve society, he wanted to kill a bunch of people as part of some social darwinist thing and dressed it up in liberationist clothes
Yeah, Nolan more or less screamed "look this is what Occupy wants this is what Occupy wants they want to kill rich people in bizarre ways and terror and stuff!"
Dork Knight Retires is Nolan trying to warn people about what he thinks the Occupy movement was trying to do or would do. It's anti-occupy propaganda. It even ends with the brave nypd running out of the sewers to bravely fight... terrorists i guess? In a hand to hand brawl.
The whole league of shadows thing isn't even minimally explained. There's a bunch of all-powerful omnipresent bad people who want to nuke nyc because they think nyc is bad? They're western liberal's idea of "terrorists" - unreasoning fanatics without any sane or inteligible ideology or goals who just want to hurt people and exist as like a force of nature or a curse. A totally alien, depoliticized other who acts as a cosmic foil to the perfect liberal civilization rather than as any kind of real or historical group or movement. Most of their bad guys are like that - either inexplicably destructive fanatics with no rational goals beyond destruction, or criminals trying to make money. And often the two are mixed together, with criminals who do horrible harmful things that make no sense at all, to the point where criminal behavior is decoupled even from economic goals and bad guys just do crimes because they're bad
Characters like killmonger are barely an exception, where the lib writers acknowledge that there are valid criticisisms of lib society but portray anyone who tries to change things as an evil puppy kicking monster to emphasize that there is no acceptable method of changing anything.
If their security details and handlers collectively decided that the ruling class no longer had power and that their money was meaningless
Which is why they're paid well enough to very much not think money is meaningless.
I'm reminded of the walmart storefronts that look like brick or stone but are really just veneers over extremely regular-ass walls
Lol imagine reading any of this living in a real country that doesn't allow new construction to be made out of wet toilet paper, termite shit and the bounced alimony checks made out to strippers under a fake name.
You use 'drywall knife'
'Concrete blocks and rebar with injectable insulation' is confused
Try again?
honey, wet toilet paper isn't the same as cardboard with powdered chalk glued to it
the latter is way more expensive
Okay now breathe the gypsum fibers directly into your alveolar lining, great. Nah you don't need a mask to install this, what kind of
what kind of
I think the drywall collapsed on him before he could finish his sentence
Sam Elliott voice: we used to make things in this country. Time was, a wall, was allowed to be a wall. If Kyle lost his CoD: MW II match, or mom forgot to get more Monster Energy, guess what? Broken hand, wall's fine.
UYgh I fucking hate lathe. You want to do anything? Literally fucking anything? Hang a picture? Run a wire? Check for mold damage? Anything? FUCK. YOU.
Yeah plaster is a whole different kind of creature from drywall. I fucking hate plaster.
Practicing decontextualization like this is great practice for inventing new praxis. A lot of folks learn the patterns and skills of organizing. Don't get me wrong, they're great. But it's great to be willing to do something a bit different when opportunity knocks.
We have to be able to adapt to a changing world. Marshall McLuhan saw our current problem over 50 years ago. Although his takeaway was more on the techno utopia side of things. He didn't account for people using global communication for propaganda, which is weird because he lived through enough war and technology leaps, he should have realized that killing people is the father of invention.
The only thing porn invented was hentai, which was completely destroyed from the world in 2008 due to the great reset.
A lot of people who study early civilizations think the father of invention was beer.
reminds me of that time that al qaeda operatives were using gmail Drafts to pass messages back and forth (all using the same login) and because they never SENT an email, they never set off any keyword-detector alarms.
That's ingenious. I assume the Feds forced them to close that loophole?
Hahahhaha I love that the feds just watch everything you do and there's nothing you can really do about it most of the time and no one cares and just accepts that the worst band of jackals and murderers in the world is just watching you pee and people just don't even see why that's something you should be upset about or interested in.
But let me tell you about the evil Seeseepee and their TikTok surveillance
Locks are just there to dissuade opportunistic thieves. If you're determined enough all it takes to get into a place is a sturdy crowbar and some elbow grease.
Which is one reason I don't lock my car. I also don't keep anything of value in it. I'd rather come out to a ransacked car than a broken window.
Tbf there are people who just go around checking for unlocked doors. Maybe it depends on the neighborhood which is more of an issue.
I lived in a trailer park for a year, and my sister lived around the corner from me. There were constant break ins to cars and I never kept stuff in there for that reason.
My sister admitted to me recently that it was her boyfriend and her friend, and they just didn't steal from me because I was family.
I was... touched, I guess?
My older car had a broken lock so it would open if you tried the handle, but the car alarm would still go off. I thought it was a huge upgrade.
I did this for a while but stopped after watching someone drive off with my car lol.
Yeah, this is why I've never bothered buying an expensive bike lock, any lock at all will have the vast majority of potential bike thieves just move on.
flashback to that time some guy used a boltcutter on my lock and took my shitty $120 bike like 2 hours into my workshift
motherfucker must've been waiting for an excuse to bust it out lmao
gonna take a drywall saw to a congressional baseball game
or that you dadskf;'akse'wfaegqrwt;'lj'a
This is true! You can make tiny pizzas by putting sauce or olive oil and cheese on saltine crackers, but... Where will we find lederhosen in our size, Frank?
Then the wall's made of brick and you're shit out of luck. Or it's time to go in through the metaphorical ceiling and blow the roof off of the world and how it perceives itself.
they lack the ability to articulate their lack of freedom and so on and so on
is the drywall knife?
