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.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    A fun little software exercise with no real world uses at all: https://drewmayo.com/1000-words/about.html

    Turns out that if you stuff the right shaped bytes into png image tEXt chunks (which don’t get compressed), the base64 encoded form of that image has sections that look like human readable text.

    What are the implications?

    Nothing! This was just for fun after a discussion with a colleague whether it might be even possible to make base64 blobs look readable. There’s certainly no poorly coded systems out there which might be hooked up to read emails or webpages and interpret any text they see as information.

    No siree I’m sure everyone is keeping the attachments and the content well and truly isolated from each other and this couldn’t possibly do anything other than be a fun proof of concept and excuse for me to play with wasm.

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      I’m apparently too out of coffee dumb to properly get the joke. What’s the implications if some system parses the PNG text chunks in the same way it does the body of the email?

        • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          2 days ago

          Ah, makes sense. My mind was going more towards actual security exploits, but… yeah. Makes sense.

          Anyways, thank you Flere-Imsaho, I will never not love seeing your username on here.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            2 days ago

            I mean, at the rate the chucklefucks are going, a number of these things are actual security exploits

            that it happens/works for a completely unhinged reason is almost a separate evaluation dimension in scoring

            • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
              5·
              2 days ago

              a number of these things are actual security exploits

              yes, sure, but in the sense of “social engineering the slopbot”, not “there’s a vulnerability in [x] which does not apply proper sanitation to non-body text content before evaluating it”