cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1246200/pdf-a-hacker-s-arrest-reveals-microsoft-can-track-users-ip-history-even-with-vpn-full-we
You can read about it yourself here on page 12 (or page 8 of affidavit), then page 33 and down (page 29 of affidavit)
First one to notice this: Security researcher, VX-Underground.
There was just a thread on the privacy community about how Linux has a similar machine-id that could be used to identify and track you.
Far from a Linux power user, so I don’t know the veracity of that claim or how far it goes, and at least it isn’t tied directly to a company that you know is tracking you. Just pointing out that Linux generally seems to have a similar machine-id it presents to browsers with a lot of information that could be used to identify you.
Disposable virtual machines.
Whonix generates a new one at boot by default.
Oh, but I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist when I tell people something like this almost certainly exists…!
… god fucking damnit.
Yeah. Yeah this is what the TPMv2 push was for.
This is why dual booting is always impossible in practice, because Windows can rewrite the boot sector, whenever it wants, and the Pluton system allows Windows to have an effectively below ring 0 level of access to the kernel, and… you cannot audit this.
https://en.ittrip.xyz/windows11/pluton-firmware-event
Windows 11: Bonus Combo Bundle with unremovable NSA rootkit!
Its for your health!
… they never needed to do this, it makes and it made no sense to throw away so much goodwill/reputation by just declaring the vast majority of the worlds pcs are now e-waste, upgrade to our new hardware standard for secure computing!
The only explanation that could ever make sense was that they wanted total control. Because its insane brand suicide from a purely capitalistic pov, the juice is not worth that hard of a squeeze.
Fucking… Windows is malware, by the FBI’s own guidelines for that from not too many years back.
… they just applied the same approach they did to making Xboxes non hard-moddable… to all PC hardware.
Make it so the system physically cannot function if you remove or even poke the part you’d need to poke or remove, once it has their software on it.
People think the Israeli pager thing was a well done supply chain attack.
… MSFT invented this shit.
Used to work for em, had a veteran co worker tell me about the one time he got deployed to Saudi Arabia to flash the bios of hardware destined to be installed in Saddam’s CnC/Air Defense systems.
And that was for Gulf War 1, by the way.
As far as I know, that is still fucking classified, because I’ve never heard anyone else talk about that, anywhere, ever.
… fuck.
Doesn’t matter now, I guess.
You assume capitalism is about money. Money is the means. It’s becoming obsolete.
Its about control. Its about power. The lines of corporations, where they begin and end, are fake even on their own terms-the ownership structures are all a hapsburgian mesh of hedge funds and recursive investments.
Buy you can look at the actual power, who can make what happen, who has agency to do what. What they use it for. Fucking analyze this shit. How their rhetoric and aesthetics and means change.
Money worked because its faith in self interest and the democrayicish government. They can refine that. They have a version they like more now. They go to the faith directly, cut out the self, the interest. Yay, technology.
Mostly unrelated: The NSA had snitch chips mandated by at least the 90s, getting them out was a big push, I’m not sure if there was a gap where clean hardware was produced. They’re always trying.
Benn Jordan released a video where he calls it Leveragism.
He essentially does his owm material analysis and arrives at the same conclusions Marx did. Because yes, it makes more sense for someone with wealth that rivals cities, states, and countries, to instead of increasing their own profit, to instead remove wealth from those beneath them to make them more pliable, more willing to hand over control or to do what they want. It’s control. It’s authoritarianism.
You are correct.
Like, I actually don’t think I have any notes, at all, for once, hah.
No, yeah… once upon a time I was naive bright eyed idiot that thought the system was fucked, but at least theoretically could be fixed.
Worked for a few corps. Some genuinely good people, management never has any humanity.
One day… I walked past a crumpled lump, in the alley, just before the block with my building.
It was a person.
I’d… never actually seen that before, a homeless person, just sheltering under a blanket.
I could not shake this… it bothered me immensely… what was the point of this whole city, if that can happen? What the fuck am I even doing this for? Who am I trying to impress?
… Go out for lunch, walk past the same spot.
The lump is gone.
Men with essentially flamethrowers are burning the… spot, on the ground, where he was.
I had a complete break down, panic attack, whatever.
The existential dread became fully realized in the same moment I realized… I am part of this machine that eats people. I pull its levers. I am having a pathetic break down, whereas that man died.
That was it. That was what radicalized me.
Quit, worked for a non profit helping the homeless, after that.
You’ve seen more people die since. Do you still even count? You probably knew some of them. It hits different, doesn’t it? When its you losing one, rather than killing them? When you know you’ve saved some?
Well without going too much deeper into my own story:
I then got very badly injured, got fired, got evicted, spent years crippled and homeless.
… So I know I don’t count.
And, having been something of an impromptu … effectively a field medic … oh yeah, I had ODs die on me, had people with necrotic, long untreated wounds, exacerbated by drug use… that I could do a basic field dressing of, beg them to go to a hospital, then never see them again. Sometimes I was treating minor gunshot wounds, stab/slash wounds. Sometimes I was dodging drive by shootings myself.
I’ve now very directly personally saved some, at least temporarily, and lost friends.
To the point that I have PTSD now too, and can tell you there is an entire second world behind the facade where a low level war is playing out, all the time, that most ‘normal’ people just … want to go away, whatever it takes, whatever it costs.
… To the point that I’m not able to be clever, or philosophical about it… I’ve fully experienced the horror of it, and can frankly only conclude the reason I am still alive is … basically, dumb luck.
All I know is that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that it is this way… causes me great anger.
My current goal is working on controlling that anger… pure rage makes you stupid, thus useless. Also makes you into a just generally unlikeable asshole.
I’m really still just recovering, physically, and mentally.
… yeah, don’t even know where I’m going with this, like I said, it broke my ability to … consider the implications of ‘the whole thing’. ‘The whole thing’ did too much damage to me.
Okay but it not being this way might invalidate some of the power structures that enable billionaires to have separate dungeons for the children whose blood they steal and the children the fuck.
Do you really want peter thiel or bill gates to have to fuck their blood boy? Or get blood from a kid they’ve fucked? That’s really upsetting for me to think about. Like I had to take a minute after typing that.
Yep.
The absurdity of it all… I do not see how any thinking person could understand, and not be enraged.
I did a bit of a stealth edit, wrote more after you replied here, but basically:
Anger is a gift, when it is righteous, it motivates just actions.
But it is also a danger, because too much anger makes you stupid, makes you do things that will not help the situation, potentially make it worse.
All I can say for myself personally is that self-discipline… must be strong, and diligent.
When death can visit such a dispossessed (or dispossesable) person so easily, making mistakes needlessly is just going to shorten your lifespan, and you must be alive to be able to enact or spur any kind of real and good change.
Thus the anger must be controlled, otherwise, you will lose yourself, in one way or another.
If I can offer a seemingly stupid but effective trick:
Box breathing.
Inhale for 5 seconds.
Hold for 5 seconds.
Exhale for 5 seconds.
Do that at least 3 times, if you need to, wait 30 seconds, do 3 of em again.
By some quirks of our biology, with most people, it does help lower cortisol, and help you maintain focus, be more rational.
Sometimes, in a particularly enraging or terrifying situation… which is still ongoing, you still need to be able to think, or you may die.
Or, just generally, when you’re not in a life threatening situation, it works too.
Anything that’s not Foss is malware imo. And even then you’re not always safe. Once you start needing to use google play services, need a Microsoft ID, meta api, etc etc it all gets thrown into the same bin “cc cleaners” get thrown into.
Sadly Ai is destroying whatever is left of the internet, and trying to enforce that it only remains slop malware. and Microsoft is ruining github. And even the Foss software now has to deal with constant flooding of requests from any idiot with an agent who has enough money or compute he thinks he can just force his way in through pure volume of spam. Its just before time before bad interests ruin all Foss projects because microsoft can essentially just steal anyone’s code and vibecode a shittier version of it because it got absorbed into training data. Any one who wants to put a virus in the back bone of anything could just put out an army of agents to find obscure projects and trying to fish out permissions or submit a change with some bag door or critical bug.
Ironically sometimes I think the only TRUE way is temple OS. Only having 16 colors isn’t that limiting if you’re creative. And its actually a feature that it doesnt have access to the internet, it already has everything you need.
Any “hacker” that thinks it’s a good idea to use Windows for their activities is really just a hack
The truly paranoid hackers will even unsolder the motherboard-level tracking hardware that the manufacturer adds. Cuz that shit runs below even the OS, and will track you even when you’re using something like TailsOS.
Even basic BIOS settings can be easy to miss, like Dell/HP/etc using Absolute Persistence/Computrace tracking. That one is particularly common with refurbished corporate fleet machines, because corporate IT will enable it to be able to track employees’ laptops. Then IT will upgrade the office computers, sell the old ones off to an refurbisher, and then the refurbisher never bothers disabling it when they’re prepping the machines for resale.
And old corporate fleet machines are extremely popular with hackers, (ThinkPad and ToughBook, for example), because they tend to be decent hardware for super cheap. But it means that the machines are still phoning home to Dell/HP/etc regardless of what OS the new user installs on them. Even completely swapping out the drives (ensuring a clean OS install) won’t solve it, because it’s happening directly at the BIOS level. And because of Persistence, even wiping the BIOS isn’t a guarantee. Because it will simply reinstall itself back onto the BIOS as soon as you connect a drive that has Persistence embedded on it.
Absolute can remotely track (and can even remotely brick) the motherboard regardless of what you’re running on it. Even security-focused OSes like Tails and Qubes would be affected, because the tracking is running below the OS level.
And good luck running anything on a bricked motherboard. The motherboard will literally refuse to boot anything. You can’t even get to a BIOS menu to flash something new onto it. At that point, if you were determined to keep using the device, you’d be attaching probes to motherboard leads like a security researcher to try and reset individual chips.
And because of Persistence, even wiping the BIOS isn’t a guarantee. Because it will simply reinstall itself back onto the BIOS as soon as you connect a drive that has Persistence embedded on it.
it is possible that they used a bare metal machine for testing purposes, that or this person was just a skiddie.
Dude was really dumb, he was using the same install for all his personal social media stuff
