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Links for 2018-09-03

  • Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system

    Similar to this thread by CJ Silverio, I’m not thinking about this in terms of whether Wil Wheaton or his detractors were right or wrong. Rather, I’m thinking about how this incident demonstrates that a large-scale harassment attack by motivated actors is not only possible in the fediverse, but is arguably easier than in a centralized system like Twitter or Facebook, where automated tools can help moderators to catch dogpiling as it happens. As someone who both administrates and moderates Mastodon instances, and who believes in Mastodon’s mission to make social media a more pleasant and human-centric place, this post is my attempt to define the attack vector and propose strategies to prevent it in the future.

    (tags: mastodon abuse twitter wilw harassment moderation)

  • Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

    a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.

    (tags: hacking malware security sequencing genome biohacking dna)

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