> We then hooked that up to the AWS Route53 API, and just bought them en-masse. Honestly, it’s $20, and we’ve done worse with more.
> We’re incredibly grateful for the support of The Shadowserver Foundation, who have agreed yet again to save us from our own adventures and to take ownership of the domains implicated in this research and sinkhole them.
I wish we could collectively stop using the terms “buy” and “own” with regard to domains. Try “leased” or “rented”. If they could be bought then they wouldn't have been available again for this exercise.
Countries "own" their ccTLD in the sense that they (or most) have the military prowess to defend their usage of their ccTLD if ICANN, or the servers at root-servers.net, were to stop resolving TLDs appropriately.
I can only assume that the US has tolerated varied use of ccTLDs for the sole purpose of avoiding a competing alternate DNS root zone becoming more prominent.
From his discourse on inequality
> The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "this is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!"
Taken quite literally, property is armed theft from the commons I guess. Unfortunately, it's tricky to do otherwise in a loosely organized swarm of barely tribal actors, because any peaceful society based on shared ownership will be prone to exploitation by malicious actors. It's basically a very large prisoner's dilemma: the global optimum would be to abolish private property, but as long as there are (enough) people around to exploit the situation for their own benefit (and to the massive detriment of everyone else), we have to stick to a sub-optimal system where everyone is worse off than the optimum.
The alternative to large-scale force is small-scale theft. Which is not so small-scale when you multiply it across every village and province. Ever been in the middle of a full social breakdown? Or a riot? Anyone who's seen what actual anarchy looks like would beg for some sort of order, even if it has to be imposed by force. It requires a very sheltered understanding of how the world actually works to think that anything good will come from unleashing chaos.
This is a common but simplistic view that ignored e.g. concerns about popular legitimacy and support that often lead to the downfall of strongman regimes. Many people think they can enforce their views of ownership over others, but find that it's not quite that simple when they try to put it into practice. That's why I mentioned the social contract.
The Soviet Union had this I believe, at least with buildings, and it didn't necessarily work out optimally.
If I were to design a government from scratch I think it would actually be relatively easy to know what's best nationalized and what's best privatized. Nationalize the things that you do not want to be driven by the profit incentive because they need to be fair and accessible to all (mass transit, healthcare, utilities, communication networks, science), and privatize everything else (entertainment, retail, food, services).
yet:
> Nationalize the things that [...] need to be fair and accessible to all
Should food be accessible to all?
Or is food production privatized because market economies more accurately meet consumer demand?
At the same time, governments do not have a good track record of running the food/ags industry. I guess a system where the government heavily subsidizes it and incentivises domestic production, but lets farmers do their thing is probably as good as we can do?
I think this is globalism rather than free market.
What is ownership after all? The universe does not seem to have any form of ownership embedded in it's fundamental laws. If ownership is a human construct, then it is only meaningful insofar as a group of humans agrees on it.
I can stroll up to the White House and declare that I own it, but I'll struggle to convince a sufficient number of other people that this is true. If I can't assert my ownership, then I don't really own it, do I? It doesn't matter whether it is just, or fair (again - purely human constructs), ownership only matters if it can be enforced.
Being a human construct, it is also by definition temporary. It is only valid as long as humans are around to enforce it, and humans are fleeting. Humanity might endure, but there's no reason to think we are going to be around for eternity.
So it looks like ownership is not only temporary, but it is also fickle. People routinely disagree on ownership and are willing to kill- or be-killed for asserting their claims.
It looks like neither the communists, nor the liberatarians are in the right. Things will be owned by whoever has more pointy sticks :D
The point of PROPERTY writ large isn't the piracy or acts of violence that people here make it out to be. Property doesn't arise from the law. Legal frameworks arise from the existence of property. And legal frameworks are an unadorned good in a world without them, because normal, domestic, and peaceful life does not exist where laws don't exist.
That sounds like the feudal or socialist systems. Isn't one of the points of modern democracies that we have the pointy sticks for outside invaders, and a legal system that replaces the system of internal-facing pointy sticks with an economic system and a justice system?
No matter how civil your society may seem, resistance to the state will eventually mean you get shot or beaten with truncheons.
Stop me if I missed the sarcasm.
Checking my facts now, I see it was actually Proudhon, not Marx (although Marx did discuss the idea here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_..., but seems to say it has a self-reference problem, and seems to delight in insulting Proudhon).
I think the "from the state" part is an accidental addition either of my own or from whoever explained the "proper tea" joke to me the first time. I just thought it always referenced the extreme philosophy that all property should be communal and therefore private property was theft from everyone, or equivalently from "the state".
Extreme philosophy or not, I reject the idea that "everyone"=="the state". Most (all?) states which confiscate property in the name of "everyone" don't distribute it fairly anyway, so it's all a bit of a sham. Even if it wasn't, I still don't fancy having the 7 or 8 drunks I know at the local bar showing up to sleep on my floor, shower in my toilet and claiming it in the name of everyone, or the state, or whatever. Screw those people.
i.e. own real estate? Try not paying the property tax on it, and see who really owns it. :)
That's a "feature" of human nature and English. People say "my car" and "my phone number" when those are leased. "My house" when they have a new zero-down mortgage. And all sorts of other conceptual contractions - with the messier reality assumed to be common knowledge. Or just irrelevant to the point at hand.
As the authors of this post note, they were careful to only receive + log traffic and not otherwise send interesting responses/engage with the webshells.
[1] https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/02/fbi-removes-m...
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-mysterious-grey-hat-is-patch...
> This is a line of CSS, specifying that the ‘menu’ style should fetch a background image from the given URL. On loading the page, the web browser will attempt to fetch the specified .gif file from the w2img.com server.
> Note: Disclosing just the domain in referrers is a relatively recent browser change, and indeed attackers using older browsers were sending us full shell URLs.
In particular re "attackers using older browsers": haven't the (original) attackers taken over the _server_ that's serving the CSS and the browser belongs to unsuspecting _users_ of the pwned server? Isn't it wrong to say the attackers use the browsers then, as the browser is used by a victim?
Under which circumstances would _attackers_ be using a browser? I can't make sense of this.
Typo: "a paint" is superfluous
> Taking a look through the results for high-value domains within our referrers, we the following stood out like a shining beacon:
Typo: superfluous "we" in "we the following"
> Atleast there will be memes on the record, and an awkward explanation of a raccoon.
Typo: "Atleast"
Adding visual crap and animation isn't minimalism at all.
From the amazing picture at the top, to the hand offering cookies, to the over the top shaking and spinning of everything on hover. This is one funny website.
I think the sticking out part is supposed to irritate somewhat, but it still needs to make some sense, like a hot take. I noticed some online personalities use the same strategy with pronunciation, consciously and consistently mispronouncing specific words, play up their accent. Media analysts also recognize verbal tics as a trope, for similar effect.
Back to fonts, another site that I remember using a similar thing is the Genius lyrics site. For a long time, while establishing their presence, they used the square character forms from the Programme font, which you can see on my link. They still use Programme, but use the normal forms for some time now though, presumably, because it was indeed irritating, and it hurt legibility.
Usually the recipe for success includes good quality / talent, sure. But it also usually includes something that is markedly different from others. People, searching for this distinct something, can seem tryhard, or just throwing sh!t at the wall, to see what sticks - and maybe they are - but they are also doing something that's an organic part of the road to success.
For a font-related example, that might be easier on the eyes, could be Fira Code. One of the immediate distinguishers is the ligatures. Check it out if you haven't already, it's quite neat, and it was the talk of the town for quite some time.
The only thing he doesn't explain (for obvious reasons) is the how he found the shells online (because as he puts it, they fell off the back of a truck).