It should be obvious to everyone by now that Musk has some sort of ape-brained obsession with the letter "X," so discussing the rebrand as if it was some soft of carefully considered marketing decision is a bit silly. The point was to feed a man's ego, and I guess it succeeded in that.
> It should be obvious to everyone by now that Musk has some sort of ape-brained obsession with the letter "X,"
Yeah, it's not just some sort of commercial thing either, it's sad (perhaps even a "tragedeigh") how it gets inflicted on his offspring. (12 total, 3 mothers.)
In particular, he tried to name one "X Æ A-12", but state law required A-Z so he was forced to shorten it to "X", and later tried to name another "Exa Dark Sideræl", which seems like a terrible example of hand-me-downs.
There are many cases of bad branding. Note Microsoft's habit of naming things without doing the simplest trademark search.
I used to covet 3 letter domains. If I had a 1 letter domain I would want to use it.
Musk was stuck on that name a long time ago, and it's a way to assert power over his platform and drive away people who won't play along with him but it is a real gift to Bluesky. People might not be so offended by the name if they weren't offended by everything else.
I don't disagree, but this is about *re*branding. Twitter was and is a globally iconic trademark, brand name, and has even entered the lexicon (tweeting, etc), and he flushed that for no obviously good reason. Worse he then replaced that branding with something unremarkable and generic.
I can't think of a similar case at this scale, where SO MUCH was traded in for so little, without any external pressure to do so.
Not a tech industry example, but the Royal Mail becoming ‘Consignia’ has to be on the same level (they changed it back pretty quickly; it was kind of at the height of early-noughties branding consultant madness, when quite a few silly short-lived renames were happening).
One is that Elon Musk was able to curry Donald Trump's favor by destroying Twitter and setting an example. If he gets enough political power out of it to justify the cost it might be rational.
Another is that Elon just was not thinking straight. Like having a midlife crisis, possibly complicated by a neurodivergence. Remember how he tried to back out of the deal when the price collapsed but faced a lot of "external pressure?" Plenty of people spend money on something stupid around age 50, he just has a lot more money than most of us.
Well certainly if this has all been a carefully orchestrated plot to destroy Twitter, then Musk has been achieving his goal with a fairly high degree of plausible deniability. I do have some suspicions which lead me away from that conclusion though, such as the initial circumstances of the purchase, which seemed to be a case of him running his mouth and being held to it by a court. Or at least, being close to that, and then caving in.
Now if that was 5D chess all along, with the high price of the purchase being an investment in this long-term project, then my hat is off to the man.
To the second point I think that's probably closer to the truth. We recently had a post around here about someone contemplating their life after becoming wealthy, and by the time buying Twitter was even on the horizon, Musk had been unbelievably rich. For someone who may have wanted more- political power, attention, acclaim- maybe the combination of mid-life the above factors led him astray.
I can also imagine his alleged drug use could play a factor, the degree to which that kind of thing can derail ANYONE shouldn't be understated. Maybe he just has so much money that buying Twitter and running it into the ground doesn't actually matter; it certainly doesn't impact his lifestyle. Sure the numbers on the page went down, but did he really feel it? Tesla and SpaceX alone ensure his enduring success, not to mention wealth.
It's the fact that he got other investors involved which is mind-boggling to me. On the other hand I can imagine the last man bitterly complaining that we could have made it to Mars if Elon Musk just wasn't so obsessed about Twitter.
That said, there was always something about Twitter that seduced certain people, particularly journalists.
The target is Estonia. Putin should have them in his sights for sentimental reasons as one of the first "break-away" republics from the former Soviet Union. Additionally this could be seen as punitive some the Nordic countries have sided with NATO against Russia since Ukraine.
I guess it'll be obvious that a server is running portspoof after you find that 3 random services that nobody uses anymore seem to be running, but now that you know the host is up, which ports do you tinker with?
If you assume that scanning/attacking each port on each server takes about the same effort, you are better off finding a machine where the scan/attack has a higher chance of being successful, even if you can tell which ports are spoofed and not worth attacking.
Maybe you can run portspoof locally on 127.0.0.35 and compare which responses seem different (data, timings) from what you get back, but the space is suddenly 5000x bigger than the handful of ports that normally seem to be open and ports on other servers may seem more likely to yield success.
I agree, returning legit banners on common ports is likely to get you looked at more rather than less, since most tools are not accounting for situations where every single port is open, indicating false positives. This is a common scenario on penetration tests, and while it does end up wasting time, I'd rather not give attackers any more reason to be looking at my infra. I would prefer port knocking, which is kinda of the polar opposite approach to this.
By default, return nonsense on all ports. But once a certain access sequence has been detected from a source IP, redirect traffic to a specific port from just that IP to your real service.
Not a network security expert, but the level of traffic necessary to figure out whats real would probably trip other detection mechanisms in the process.
If you're worried about mass internet scans, I can see the downsides. But if you're worried about a targeted attacker scanning just your organization’s IP ranges, this seems like it would hinder them quite a bit.
Yea, thinking about it for a minute I would expect limited threat models this tool would help with. I think for broad attacks, this would only be somewhat effective if deployed on tens of millions of hosts so it becomes impractical because the adversary is just finding and interacting with the honeypots.
If you are specifically getting targeted, there might be a slight delay by having the adversary try and exploit the honeypot ports, but if you're running a vulnerable service you still get exploited.
Also if you're a vendor, when prospective customers security teams scan you, you'll have some very annoying security questionnaires to answer.
Or it takes expertise to do anything sophisticated in those fields. Representing yourself is not a good idea because you probably don't have the courtroom experience arguing cases, and likely don't have an in depth understanding of the law.
That sounds plausible. You also see an abundance of center embedding in older philosophical works. In highschool I tried reading through these, and they way they write forces you to read slowly and constantly backtrack.
I think you see it with more complex subject matter because you have more tangents shooting off. It means the writer needs to think ahead and do more mental work in order for the sentences to be read more easily. It was also more burdensome to edit your manuscript back then, so you had physical as well as mental friction.
This was literally the case when we look at history surrounding Jim Crowe laws. They were purpose built to disenfranchise. You always have to wonder what the actual intent of a given law is. The incentive to work in an ulterior motive within the text is always going to be there. And we have not designed a system to be robust to that. Most we can do is attempt to pass yet another law that might rectify the “bad” one but that one itself might be filled with bullshit. Pork barrel politics is a real phenomenon and a side effect of our legal system.
