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Joseph's posts Back to profile
6 posts total
Joseph Cox

New from 404 Media: leaked Slacks and interviews show paranoia and fear inside Automattic over the WordPress chaos. CEO posting ultimatums to Slack and is intercepting signup emails from Blind, the anonymous platform for workers. Could unmask users 404media.co/automattic-buyout-

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they'd need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace. "We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic lemployees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they'd “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees rom signing up for Blind by redirecting emails."|
17 October at 17:47 | Open on infosec.exchange
WTL

@josephcox @GossiTheDog I'm increasingly convinced that Mullenweg needs to be punted from Wordpress.org and he can do what he wants in Automattic.

17 October at 17:55 | Open on mastodon.social
DELETED

@josephcox sincerely? I think he lost his mind.

17 October at 17:56 | Open on mastodon.social
Rich Felker

@josephcox How do these guys not understand that anyone who does anything like that is automattically the villain? 🤡 🤦

17 October at 18:01 | Open on hachyderm.io
Joseph Cox

New from 404 Media: Google is serving AI images of mushrooms when users search for some species. Very risky, potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to find what mushrooms are safe to eat. Could have "devastating consequences" one expert said 404media.co/google-serves-ai-g

24 September at 13:13 | Open on infosec.exchange
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Elon Muksis
Sternentau :antifa:

@josephcox

Asked about three years ago, what would happen if there plopping thousands of new mAIshrooms articles in Wikipedia.

The psAIcAIdelic Death morel.
24 September at 23:04 | Open on don.linxx.net
Andre_601 🇨🇭 :kt_bs:

@josephcox in all fairness: Using google to determine what mushrooms are edible is a stupid and risky move in general.
It's better to directly use proper sources than just googling stuff.

25 September at 11:19 | Open on swiss.social
Joseph Cox

Turns out Perplexity, the AI company that has been ripping off journalism, started by posing as academics and using those fake credentials to scrape Twitter 404media.co/perplexitys-origin

Perplexity took advantage of this free access for academics by creating fake powered Bird SQL. “So we built all this into a good search experience over Twitter, which we scraped with academic accounts just before Elon took over Twitter,” Srinivas said on the podcast. “Back then Twitter would allow you to create academic API accounts and we would create like, lots of them with like generating phone numbers, writing research proposals with GPT.”
27 June at 15:36 | Open on infosec.exchange
Joseph Cox

New from 404 Media: we’ve obtained an internal Google database detailing thousands of privacy/security incidents. Everything from Street View collecting license plate data, to childrens’ voices being recorded. Most not previously reported

404media.co/google-leak-reveal

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media. Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people's lives.
3 June at 13:10 | Open on infosec.exchange
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Bowreality
Kevin Karhan :verified:
Binary Large Octopus

@josephcox I'd say even one more reason for #decentralization and #selfhosting, but such an incident shouldn't even surprise anyone anymore by now.

4 June at 12:51 | Open on hachyderm.io
Joseph Cox

New AI twist on old scam—a law firm is emailing outlets, saying they’ve used images without permission. To fix the issue, the outlet needs to add a link to a specific gadget review site. But law firm doesn’t seem real, uses AI generated photos of lawyers 404media.co/a-law-firm-of-ai-g

4 April at 14:56 | Open on infosec.exchange
Boring

@josephcox It does seem that AI has really revolutionized the scam and fraud industry.

4 April at 15:13 | Open on strangeobject.space
pinkdrunkenelephants

@josephcox Critical thinking is now vitally important to survival, as vital as fire or water or food.

4 April at 15:33 | Open on mastodon.social
Joseph Cox

Wild: Google confirms it *is* throttling YouTube load times for some viewers. Firefox users reported the issue today. Google says, instead, it’s supposed to tackle ad-blockers regardless of the browser used 404media.co/youtube-says-new-5
20 Nov 2023 at 22:41 | Open on infosec.exchange
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Some Puffstool

@josephcox Yeah, I don't buy Google's excuses for a second, considering their history of covertly irritating users into switching to Chrome (i.e. death by 1000 cuts).

In general, people would be able to tolerate ads if they were properly vetted, were less numerous, and were less intrusive. But since doing that doesn't make the line go up, this will never happen unless companies are essentially forced to.

21 Nov 2023 at 6:02 | Open on toot.community
craftycat

@josephcox It's impressive to me how eager companies have been lately to make their product worse and less useable in order to "make money". They're REALLY banking on being absolutely irreplacable.

21 Nov 2023 at 7:20 | Open on cyberplace.social
TransitBiker

@josephcox ah, so it’s not my computers. Assholes.

21 Nov 2023 at 10:33 | Open on urbanists.social
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