I suspect a lot of people have difficulty recognizing that what they believe about the world may not be representative of how the world actually behaves. I certainly do, frequently.

Like with politics, people think they need to go vote and march and stuff to effect change, but if you’re willing to accept the idea that there are limits to your ability to perceive the world and your perceptions are misleading, you can pretty reliably go and see that isn’t true.

You can also decipher deeper realities like you can basically put whatever you want on flat bread, or that you dadskf;'akse’wfaegqrwt;'lj’a fuck my brain. I’m asd I’m not sure what I was trying to say.

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    80
    ·
    1 year ago

    I have a security background and it’s largely all theater. Locks are just to keep out people who believe in them. All those badge swipes and things are about tracking access, not securing things. Matter of fact, most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety.

    Learn to hack, learn to quadcopter.

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      1 year ago

      Learn to hack

      And let’s be honest here, even Fort Knox is only ever as secure as the people who operate it.

      Generally speaking, an operation is only as secure as the people who function within it and these people tend to be the most vulnerable points in a chain of security.

      What I’m trying to say here is that you don’t have to be a good hacker to be a good penetration tester and one of the most fruitful areas for “hacking” is always going to be social engineering.

    • mayo_cider [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      25
      ·
      1 year ago

      A little while ago our company wanted to get rid off local administrator rights, but as developers we kind of need those (like installing the software we develope and other unimportant things), so they installed some crappy software that wraps the user access control and I guess gives them more control over what can be run

      It breaks every couple of weeks, but luckily you can use that same software to disable and bypass it by running the control panel as admin

      • Blottergrass [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Every windows PC that has a USB port can be hacked into locally. Boot into windows install USB, open elevated command prompt, change the ease of access button’s target location to be an admin command prompt instead of the ease of access settings, reboot, click the ease of access button, change the admin password in the admin command prompt, enter the password and you’re in.

        • NewLeaf@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          1 year ago

          If you live in an apartment with coin operated laundry, you can buy a key for the coin box really cheap too.

          • Azarova [they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            11
            ·
            1 year ago

            I’ve been so tempted to do this for years, but I’d be so afraid they’d notice the missing income and figure something was up.

            • NewLeaf@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              9
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              I would also recommend casing the joint real well too. There could be a camera. It could be thwarted with a well placed laundry basket though.

              I lived in an apartment with laundry, and I found out that if you push the quarter “slider” in reeeeal slow, sometimes it would kick on and I could gank my quarters back

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      Matter of fact, most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety.

      Does this mean that passing a strong-ish magnet over them would typically make them open?

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        20
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Fail open means that fire code requires an unobstructed path of egress; You can’t be locked in a building in an emergency. So mag locks are powered all the time in order to maintain the lock and then you remove power to open the door. This way if power goes out the door opens. In most major Corporate buildings, if you go into the fire panel room, you will find a relay that can simply be pulled out and will remove power to every maglock in the area. Or you can pull the fire alarm, cut the power, etc. Most big buildings also have a little lockbox aka a knoxbox outside their front door with a set of keys inside and some have a switch inside to kill the locks as well. They do have tamper switches though.

        I can’t remember using a magnet to neutralize a maglock, but I wanted to.😅 It would have to be a big one and honestly it would be easier to just slap something with a bit of thickness on the maglock when the door is open to prevent it from getting a solid "seal’. It’ll give the appearance of being locked, but a good yank will let the door open right up. Often you can also just slide a piece of paper on a coat hanger between double doors or under a door to trip the PIR (passive infrared) sensor used to auto-open for people exiting. It shouldn’t work, but those PIR are cheap as hell and often very oversensitive.

        • bubbalu [they/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          You can also spray a condensed gas through a door with a PIR on the other side. Only really secure building I worked in was for one of those Billy Budd type people who were really good at some niche technical thing and just hired enough people to be able to focus on the part that they found fun. His shop was in a squat brick building with steel doors that you had to press a button on the inside to open. There were well built steel edges to the door so that a hangar or some other means of attack could not be slipped around.

          • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            1 year ago

            You can also spray a condensed gas through a door with a PIR on the other side.

            Yes! It wasn’t consistent, but we were able to get that working with canned air a few times. Double doors worked best where you could get closer to the PIR above the doors. Holding the can upside down worked best, iirc.

            • bubbalu [they/them]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              1 year ago

              Awesome to hear this actually working! I wonder if holding it upside down works best bc it grabs the coldest fraction of gas and causes the biggest temperature differential for the PIR?

              • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                1 year ago

                That’s my thinking. Most of the PIR aren’t very impressive and they’re just looking for that temperature change, it doesn’t matter which direction. I actually wonder if maybe the paper trick works when it does because it moves the air flow from air conditioning around.

          • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            1 year ago

            Not a clue tbh, the maglock uses an a pretty strong electromagnet on one side, metal plate on the other. Not sure what it would take to interfere enough once they’re seated properly. Preventing that is your best bet and is often their downfall.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      most mag locks and electronic doors, by law, have to fail open for safety

      I used to work in a room at a place that violated this regulation. It was a laboratory, too. Those probably catch fire more often than office cubicles.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    60
    ·
    1 year ago

    Lol everyone here getting it while everyone on Reddit was like “Oh you cut a hole in the wall you’re not so smart I could cut a hole in the wall, too!”

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.

      I’m not sure if there’s a name for this particular phenomenon but I like to think of it in terms of naive responses to contemporary art or, in short, Contemporary Art Syndrome; when people encounter contemporary art they tend to have the reaction “But I could have made that!” and the obvious response to this is “Yeah, but did you?

      (Putting aside the fact that there’s actually [apparently] a high degree of technical skill required for, say, a Barnett Newman painting for argument’s sake.)

      • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        30
        ·
        1 year ago

        Nothing is possible until someone realises a particular possibility and then, after that point, not only does it become a possibility for everyone else but it seems as though it was always completely obvious.

        Sites on the net claim the physicist Ernest Rutherford said the following but Wikiquote says it’s unsourced.

        All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.

        • berrytopylus [she/her,they/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          23
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I think that way about evolution sometimes. It’s blitheringly obvious when you consider the two points

          1. There is a difference between parent and offspring and yet they also inherit traits
          2. Differences add up

          Both are easily observable in the natural world. The first one can be seen with babies “oh you have your mother’s eyes” while also the baby not literally being the mom. The second one is used by walking where we cross a large distance one step at a time.

          And all you need is those two principles to come to the conclusion that the small yet inheritable differences between offspring will add up over a long period of time. The question to be asked isn’t if it will happen but rather just what traits it happens to.

          And yet, it took humanity (and for many people still they refuse) millennial to grasp it. I’m looking at the process as so simple only from the lens of someone born after it was figured out.

          • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            11
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Yeah, this is a great example. Darwin is such a cool figure in the history of science in part because–in contrast to other “Great Man” figures like Newton or Einstein–he didn’t really come up with any novel methodological tools or earthshaking new ideas about the structure of reality. Everything Darwin said in The Origin of Species was out there already, and much of it had already even been proposed by other people (including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin). His contribution was just systematizing all that stuff, providing a unified narrative, and explicitly thinking through the immediate consequences of a pile of things that was already known. People already knew (very roughly) about heritability of traits (though the mechanism would prove elusive for a long time after Darwin). They also already knew about environmental selection and competition for resources, and knew (or at least strongly suspected by that point) that the Earth was very, very old. If you just put all those facts next to each other, the consequence–that descent with modification can and does explain the diversity of life we see all around us–almost just pops out by itself, and once you start thinking that way lots of other stuff in biology suddenly clicks into place within the explanatory framework. There’s that famous quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution,” and while that’s a bit of an exaggeration, it’s very close to being true. Evolution is the paradigm case of an explanatory theory: it’s obvious in retrospect in large part because so much of what was before just a “pile of sundry facts” suddenly makes perfect sense as soon as you start looking at it through that explanatory lens. It always makes me wonder what else we’re missing that might seem just as glaringly obvious to people a century from now.

            For what it’s worth, I think Marx’s work is in pretty much the same boat: it’s a theory whose power comes from providing a framework for making sense of a bunch of bits and pieces of data about the world that, in the absence of the theory, don’t seem to quite fit together. That there are problems in the details of how the originators of each theory first expressed it (which there are in both cases) doesn’t really matter much, because the insight is a way of looking at the world more than it is the precise articulation of this or that mechanism or phenomenon.

      • NewLeaf@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Along those same lines, I’m always bothered when in movies, there’s a seemingly unstoppable evil that the people can’t kill, then a little girl spills some water on one of the beasts, and it works. Word spreads and there’s a montage of people in the US, France, India, China etc spilling water on the creatures and winning. Like, motherfucker they are organic beings! There are hundreds of ways to kill them!

        Also, the “we tried something once, and did a bad job at it, so we won’t try it again” movie trope.

    • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      eh, picking a lock is still better because it doesn’t wake people up, and allows you to get away without the crime being noticed for a while

      I agree that ramming a door down is stupid when you can just break through a window

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    46
    ·
    1 year ago

    All of the money that the ruling class has is belief-based power. If their security details and handlers collectively decided that the ruling class no longer had power and that their money was meaningless, they would crumble like dry leaves. oooaaaaaaauhhh

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        ·
        1 year ago

        But that’s the bad guy because he went too far and wanted to improve society somewhat and a nuke was crammed in along with a desecration of American football to make sure his evil status was confirmed. Nolan is very nonpolitical and an auteur mystery wrapped in an enigma.

        bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam

        • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          15
          ·
          1 year ago

          He definitely didn’t want to improve society, he wanted to kill a bunch of people as part of some social darwinist thing and dressed it up in liberationist clothes

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            26
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            I know that; that’s the Nolan take on presenting anyone who even appears to be wanting to improve society somewhat.

            A thief believes everyone steals; a Randroid believes everyone pursues self interest and actually caring about other people is a lie.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              32
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, Nolan more or less screamed “look this is what Occupy wants this is what Occupy wants they want to kill rich people in bizarre ways and terror and stuff!”

              Dork Knight Retires is Nolan trying to warn people about what he thinks the Occupy movement was trying to do or would do. It’s anti-occupy propaganda. It even ends with the brave nypd running out of the sewers to bravely fight… terrorists i guess? In a hand to hand brawl.

              The whole league of shadows thing isn’t even minimally explained. There’s a bunch of all-powerful omnipresent bad people who want to nuke nyc because they think nyc is bad? They’re western liberal’s idea of “terrorists” - unreasoning fanatics without any sane or inteligible ideology or goals who just want to hurt people and exist as like a force of nature or a curse. A totally alien, depoliticized other who acts as a cosmic foil to the perfect liberal civilization rather than as any kind of real or historical group or movement. Most of their bad guys are like that - either inexplicably destructive fanatics with no rational goals beyond destruction, or criminals trying to make money. And often the two are mixed together, with criminals who do horrible harmful things that make no sense at all, to the point where criminal behavior is decoupled even from economic goals and bad guys just do crimes because they’re bad

              Characters like killmonger are barely an exception, where the lib writers acknowledge that there are valid criticisisms of lib society but portray anyone who tries to change things as an evil puppy kicking monster to emphasize that there is no acceptable method of changing anything.

    • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      If their security details and handlers collectively decided that the ruling class no longer had power and that their money was meaningless

      Which is why they’re paid well enough to very much not think money is meaningless.

  • D3FNC [any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Lol imagine reading any of this living in a real country that doesn’t allow new construction to be made out of wet toilet paper, termite shit and the bounced alimony checks made out to strippers under a fake name.

    You use ‘drywall knife’

    ‘Concrete blocks and rebar with injectable insulation’ is confused

    Try again?

  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    1 year ago

    Practicing decontextualization like this is great practice for inventing new praxis. A lot of folks learn the patterns and skills of organizing. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great. But it’s great to be willing to do something a bit different when opportunity knocks.

  • PolPotPie [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 year ago

    reminds me of that time that al qaeda operatives were using gmail Drafts to pass messages back and forth (all using the same login) and because they never SENT an email, they never set off any keyword-detector alarms.

    • NewLeaf@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Which is one reason I don’t lock my car. I also don’t keep anything of value in it. I’d rather come out to a ransacked car than a broken window.

        • NewLeaf@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          17
          ·
          1 year ago

          I lived in a trailer park for a year, and my sister lived around the corner from me. There were constant break ins to cars and I never kept stuff in there for that reason.

          My sister admitted to me recently that it was her boyfriend and her friend, and they just didn’t steal from me because I was family.

          I was… touched, I guess?

      • Melonius [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        1 year ago

        My older car had a broken lock so it would open if you tried the handle, but the car alarm would still go off. I thought it was a huge upgrade.

    • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, this is why I’ve never bothered buying an expensive bike lock, any lock at all will have the vast majority of potential bike thieves just move on.

  • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    1 year ago

    or that you dadskf;'akse’wfaegqrwt;'lj’a

    This is true! You can make tiny pizzas by putting sauce or olive oil and cheese on saltine crackers, but… Where will we find lederhosen in our size, Frank?