What if #infosecbikini is a CIA psyop?
Also, Github Copilot is just 21st century enclosure of the commons.
What if #infosecbikini is a CIA psyop?
Lately, people in infosec twitter have been posting pictures of themselves in bikinis. Considering that infosec as a field is propped up by extremely talented femmes, many of whom are also extremely hot, the #infosecbikini trend is neither unusual nor unwelcome. And while posting bikini selfies on Twitter doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex work, it’s important to acknowledge that sex workers played a part in pioneering infosec, and are still key contributors to the ongoing development of opsec practices. So security as a field is hardly one that should be shy about body positivity and hot women, considering that, you know, they did a lot to build it.
But of course, it won’t surprise you when I say that there are weird nerds who are upset about this.
I’m not going to go digging for any specific posts, but you can probably find them by checking out the hashtag. It doesn’t take much to figure out that the “#infosecbikini is a social engineering plot to get bikini pics” theory is just thinly veiled misogyny.
Anyway, I hope people keep posting bikini pics. It makes nerds big mad and that’s great. And I hope that more cute infosec dudes get into it next time. Not for any reason, you know. Just uh, because.
Github Copilot is just 21st century enclosure of the commons
Github drop ICE, obviously. But there’s also a discussion to be had on Copilot itself. Before I get into it, I want to make it clear that I think Copilot is a neat productivity tool, and the people who wrote it are probably very talented and cool. I’ll probably grit my teeth and give in to Copilot soon, because I hate writing my own code when I could just copy someone else’s. But Copilot exists within and propagates a shitty system, and also, fuck Github.
Despite Github’s dodgy attempt to claim the contrary, Copilot does launder open source code. If you need any proof that Copilot’s code isn’t “uniquely generated”, just look at… this.
Could a billion monkeys on a billion typewriters accidentally recreate someone’s about me page? Sure. But could an AI generate the famous Quake code? No. Only a human can create such greatness.
A core issue of Copilot is that it copies open source code for use in commercial works. Let me rephrase this: Copilot takes code that people have written because they genuinely thought it was valuable and wanted it to be freely available to others, and then puts it into software owned by corporate ghouls who make money off other people’s labor while hypocritically closing off their own code.
Of course, this has already been happening for ages since most commercial apps are built on mountains and mountains of open source work. But the fact that Copilot is going to have a paid tier is just a blatant slap in the face, and Github trying to pretend that they’re not doing what they’re doing is just gross. And all your favorite tech influencers on Twitter are fawning over how good this is. I’m not mad. I’m not.
Anyway, all hail Copilot, the hottest new alternative to copying code off Stack Overflow.
Back to bullshit jobs for a second
In the last issue, I talked about David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs book and my own experience with having to work a job that was completely pointless to both the company and society as a whole. I mentioned that anyone who has a similar experience to share and wants to stay anonymous can email me their story and I’ll post it here without identifying details. I got a couple responses, which surprised me because I don’t know why anyone would trust a random Twitter shitposter. But thanks!
They’ve been edited for spelling/grammar, brevity, and removing identifying details. Nationalities have been fudged. Otherwise, the stories remain the same.
I think I had one of these bullshit tech jobs which you wrote about in the latest issue of Left Align.
I work for one of the biggest French tech companies, in the financial/banking department, currently in never-ending projects: one is a new product for commercial banks, the other is just maintenance of an old (~15 years? more?) system for another bank. That last one is an endless stream of pain for everyone who opens a Jira ticket. Most of the code is unmaintainable, true fucking legacy spaghetti bullshit code hell. The Jira tickets are often for bugs that are nonexistent in the real world 99.99999% of the time, impossible to reproduce. We (me & my other old production system maintenance coworker) are feeling like Sisyphus, rolling those fucking rocks... rolling them again for two weeks at least. And sometimes it appears after a few days (or weeks in the worst cases) that the bug was 100% the fault of the client's (bank's) tech team, some small, niche options in config files or a patch to a server, which we were not notified about.
Ouch. The second email:
I work in dev for CAD software (basically 3D modelling for industry, so think of it as a boring Blender). My first job was for a kinda big Italian company. They had a small office in Australia, and they just started the CAD division there when I arrived. I really wanted to work in another country so they agreed to send me across the ocean for a couple of years.
The only problem was: no one needed us there! Turns out that in Australia, unlike in Italy, companies don’t pay you thousands of dollars to double-click on install.exe on their computer, at least for CAD where the software was pretty user-friendly compared to the other, more advanced activities of the company.
The first two month were nice tho. I developed a prototype for a plug-in to show to a potential client so that we could hugely simplify their design process. I mean, it's still helping a rich dude getting richer, but the work itself was rewarding!
The client was happy and ready to pay, but before they could do anything they were bought by an international megacorporation, which halted all ongoing projects (including the one I was working on). So in the end all this work was for nothing.
And that's basically everything close to useful I did for almost one and a half years.
I asked again and again for the Italian office to send me things to do, but each time they took longer and longer to send me tasks. I ended up translating some outdated training material between English and Italian most of my days, trying my best to do in five days what I could do in one, and finding ways to kill time without looking like I'm slacking too much.
At first I was spending office hours coding a video game I was working on with my girlfriend. But after snide remarks from one of the managers, I realized that even with my desk strategically placed in the corner of the room with my back against the wall, it wasn't discreet having a big, colorful moving window on my screen...
So then I started reading and writing stuff. During the last months I was, and I wish I was bullshitting you but sadly I'm not, writing kinky erotic fiction during my working hours! That's how bad things were... It was super cringey but I can't help feeling a bit of joy thinking about the fact that my boss gave me money every day for me to basically write horny stuff that no one would ever read!
The hardest part for me was the "pretend to be useful" shit. My visa was linked to my job for this company, so basically I wasn't allowed to search for another job, and if they fired me, me & my girlfriend would have to go back to Italy (as her visa was linked to mine)... So the stakes were pretty high.
I realized maybe it wasn't worth it when I started trying to walk as slowly as possible to the bathroom just to waste a few more seconds in my boring day. Not that it changed anything in the end, since they just decided to close down the CAD division six months before the planned end of my stay in Australia (firing me and a kind 55 year-old Australian with a two week notice in the process).
Good stuff. Thanks for sending these through!
Thanks, LinkedIn
Okay, fine, one good Copilot thing
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I am interested in this erotic fiction possibly involving infosec dudes in bikinis. 👀