Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    When all the worst things come together: ransomware probably vibe-coded, discards private key, data never recoverable

    During execution, the malware regenerates a new RSA key pair locally, uses the newly generated key material for encryption, and then discards the private key.

    Halcyon assesses with moderate confidence that the developers may have used AI-assisted tooling, which could have contributed to this implementation error.

    Source

    • Kofi Loves Efia :verified:@mstdn.social
      7·
      20 hours ago

      @nightsky @BlueMonday1984
      I worked in the IR space for a couple of years - in my experience significant portion of data encrypted by ransomware is just unrecoverable for a variety of reasons: encryption was interrupted, private key was corrupted, decryptors were junk, data was encrypted multiple times and some critical part of key mat was corrupted, underlying hardware/software was on its last legs anyway, etc.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      There’s a scene in *Bladerunner 2049" where some dude explains that all public records were destroyed a decade or so earlier, presumably by malicious actors. This scenario looks more and more plausible with each passing day, but replace malice with stupidity.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      this is just notpetya with extra steps

      some lwers (derogatory) will say to never assume malice when stupidity is likely, but stupidity is an awfully convenient excuse, isn’t it