There are bots that openly advertise themselves as such. Less common on Lemmy than Reddit but I’ve seen a few.
undercover bots pushing agendas
Do we have any real evidence these exist? I only see very spurious accusations of being a bot directed towards communists and other left-wingers, particularly towards racialised people and colonised people. I’d be both sceptical of their widespread existence and of their efficacy at effecting any kind of political change even if they did exist.
I didn’t say it categorically wouldn’t happen, just that if that was the person’s real intentions then they’ve been very stupid about it. If you’re going to commit a murder don’t create evidence pointing to you. Like the other commenter said, a gun and self defence skills will cover you in both cases.
I’m a she. But yes, I think arming yourself is a good idea regardless of the likelihood you’ll need it.
Get a gun and learn how to use it.
But as other commenters have said, if he was actually intending on killing you, it’d be real stupid to call you in advance to say so. Most likely just wants to scare you.
It depends. I have worked for nonprofits and know a lot of people who do. Word of mouth/connections with people already working there is a good way to find relatively decent NGO work. You would likely be paid near minimum wage though, it’s true, but a lot of NGOs do have well-meaning people who try to make a difference working at the lower levels; they normally have a bureaucratic layer that sucks but your actual coworkers are normally quite sound if you can find the right job. And some NGOs still do overall decent work even if the leadership sucks; they aren’t revolutionary organisations by any means, but when you’re looking at jobs, you’d be comparing them to some generic corporate job which sucks more.
Then you can still look elsewhere in the nonprofit sector. It doesn’t have to be a law firm.
If you can’t feasibly vet the code yourself (I think it is feasible for things like scripts and other small projects) and the star count is low/it’s not already well known and trusted, probably try running in a VM first and look out for signs of it doing things it shouldn’t, e.g. if it’s sending HTTP requests to the internet despite it being a program that should be completely offline. Using things like AppArmor and SELinux to prevent programs from doing things they shouldn’t need to do is also good practice.
Also, the tool itself may be low star count, but is the developer known at all? Someone with any kind of a reputation wouldn’t risk putting malware on their profile.
I suppose you could also look at the list of dependencies of the program. Is it using any libraries that don’t make sense? e.g. with the above, is there some kind of HTTP request library being used for a program that shouldn’t need to access the internet at all?
I think generally the risk is quite low as the author would be hiding their malware in plain sight if the source code is available. They’d have to bet on literally nobody checking. Which is fine for very obscure projects, but if you want your malware to spread, you want a good number of people to use it, at which point someone would presumably look at the code and notice it’s malware.
You could look for another job in the nonprofit sector. Your past experience will help you. You’ve not said what your specialisation is or what exactly you do—if you’re a lawyer and want to keep lawyer-ing, I suppose you could look for another nonprofit law firm, or something like a human rights law firm.
I use SpamAssassin. It’s fine, but definitely needs training. I might look into migrating to rspamd as it seems better, but I don’t have time atm.
Commands are normally not considered “code” on their own. Someone who just runs commands on their computer to get a few operations done will normally not learn any programming constructs or concepts. If you’re doing shell scripting that usually crosses the line into code as you’d be using if statements, for loops, etc, which you normally don’t use if you’re just moving files around or whatever in the shell.
For the outside, I just use an antibac wipe. For the ports and grills, I bought a set of anti-static tweezers for this purpose.
The key was published in the files. It’s not suspicious to use the key given that it’s public info; it’s not illegal to read the released files.
I think the point of the reddit screenshot is to show what Windows users are putting up with, not to share the meme itself.
This is just an archive. No different from using the wayback machine or any other archive of web content.
10 years old is 2016. That’s not that old. I still have multiple devices from 2017 going strong, and they don’t feel old.
That’s why you don’t keep clothes if you wore them while committing a crime. Burn them.
So it mirrors repos before they go down? I think I get it if that’s the case; I thought it was just a host for “lost” software/source code in which case if you have a copy you can upload it to any software forge (if permitted by the licence). But if it’s meant to contain all software that currently exists, even if it shows no sign of disappearing, that makes more sense.
My point is that you don’t need a separate website for this; you can use existing software forge software and websites.
I’m not saying astroturfing doesn’t happen, but I don’t think it’d be worth investing into a bot farm just to leave low-quality social media comments for a political agenda. I’d be surprised if the practice is widespread. There are plenty of things intelligence services do that are more effective at achieving their goals.