Basic tech facts a layman must know - Because we're stupid

[Lemmingwise]

It's a basic tech fact everyone should know. Sure some government suit would know of whatever deviant shit you jack off too but in all honesty, he's seen it from millions of others he autistically cyberstalks to see if they had some link to a group like ISIS. Until someone manages to push some law to monitor thought crimes and arrest someone for simply using a certain word, there isn't much to fear yet.

If there's one thing I've learned from internet people self-destructing when people discover the facts that they're most ashamed of.... yes, yes there is plenty to fear.

 

[DumbDude42]

Until someone manages to push some law to monitor thought crimes and arrest someone for simply using a certain word, there isn't much to fear yet.

thats already reality in most parts of europe though
for now the police are mostly limited to arresting people for what they post publicly on twatter and facebook, because cops are just as tech illiterate as the general population, but in time they absolutely will start monitoring peoples online activity through ISPs and their logs

 

[Horrors of the Deep]

It's a basic tech fact everyone should know. Sure some government suit would know of whatever deviant shit you jack off too but in all honesty, he's seen it from millions of others he autistically cyberstalks to see if they had some link to a group like ISIS. Until someone manages to push some law to monitor thought crimes and arrest someone for simply using a certain word, there isn't much to fear yet.

1. It's not very interesting
2. The volume of information is so big that you can't be bothered with some random furry jacking it to diapers.

I'm not sure about this. As long as you use your internet connection without VPN or Tor or such your ISP can see what you're accessing anyways

TLS is shitty but generally does a good job at protecting packet contents or rather making decryption computationally heavy enough to not roll it out for absolutely everything. DNS tracking on the other hand allows tracking at very little computation cost - you simply log IP address and DNS record it looks up. Internet privacy isn't as much about making yourself fort Knox as much as about making mass tracking inconvenient.

tl;dr When you access kiwifarms.net on your computer your ISP can see that you're accessing kiwifarms, what it can't see is what threads exactly you're looking at. Only the domain name is tracked with DNS tracking. With DNS over HTTPS your ISP can't see that unless they set up deep packet inspection which is too much effort for some random internet guy.

 

[c-no]

If there's one thing I've learned from internet people self-destructing when people discover the facts that they're most ashamed of.... yes, yes there is plenty to fear.

And with people self-destructing over facts being founds, it's less on some NSA guy monitoring you and more of your own lack of security and revealing shit to any troll and the like that finds out, at least until law enforcement has to start monitoring online activity beyond seeing what's publicly posted on social media.

thats already reality in most parts of europe though
for now the police are mostly limited to arresting people for what they post publicly on twatter and facebook, because cops are just as tech illiterate as the general population, but in time they absolutely will start monitoring peoples online activity through ISPs and their logs

And I thought it was only in Britain they were monitoring anyone for saying mean things on Twitter and Facebook. The moment they start monitoring ISP's and logs is the moment they'll have to get someone to sit through all the information, including random furries jacking it in diapers.

1. It's not very interesting
2. The volume of information is so big that you can't be bothered with some random furry jacking it to diapers.

And for every kiwi farmer that has some degenerate fetish they manage to withhold, that volume is enlarged tenfold by everyone else.

 

[a_lurker]

there are not "hot singles in your area"

Unless your running windows ME or older, or windows xp on a TI-83, your registry doesn't need to be cleaned

if your buying a pc, get a SSD.

"hackers" haven't taken over your pc. Unless you're fucking loaded, your not worth the hassle of an individual attack. You've most likely downloaded some sort of malware or your kids/neighbor/ex/someone you know is fucking with you.

Steve (the one with the accent) from microsoft doesn't work for microsoft at all, he's a street shitter who wants to scam you out of your steam/apple gift cards.

If you own a computer that you didn't build yourself microsoft has already collected their money from you, and will not provide any technical support. They do not give a fuck about you and will never call you. Even if you somehow do manage to get in touch with someone from microsoft on the phone they can't help you, and will blame any problem you have on your PC manufacturer, ISP or third party software vendor.

from my own experience, eset nod32 and windows defender are the only two antivirus programs that aren't going to make your computer run like shit or massively fucking break something. The best thing about eset is that it blocks PuPs (potentially unwanted programs) by default. Things that aren't necessarily malware/viruses but allow other shit to get in, or make it easier for you to get yourself fucked up.

stop fucking reusing passwords. "Oh its a good password" when it does get leaked at some point, they've got a skeleton key that opens every door in the kingdom.
just use a password manager, it may take a while to get everything in it, but it will greatly improve your quality of life. its like a ram upgrade for your brain.

Apple is a meme. generally overpriced for what you get. they're not really much better in terms of security (they're based on unix, maybe slightly better than windows), the big thing is more malware and general attention is paid to windows security because it is on the majority of computers so it is a bigger/easier target. their entire design philosophy is designed around the least common denominator. if you don't like computers, or just want an appliance to browse the internet/facebook/porn/youtube get a mac, or better yet an ipad. The limited storage and constrained permissions make it a lot harder for you to severely fuck it up in a way that can't be fixed with a factory reset (except physical damage of course)

outlook has a delete button, and a trash bin for a reason. fucking use them.
Hoarding every bit of goddamned junkmail since the 90's or hanging on to every email someone sent you with an attachment (pictures/important documents) is going to cause a problem eventually. outlook pst files (basically a big fucking file that it stores all of your messages in) are prone to corrupting and fucking up severely once the file gets too big, and its goddamned tedious to fix.
just delete old emails from time to time. save the fucking attachments in a folder like all the other files on your pc.

better yet, stop using fucking POP like some fucking caveman, switch to IMAP and let the goddamned mail server deal with your hoarding.


RAM "memory" CAN make your computer faster. Its not going to make your 2009 celeron run battlefield 4, it probably wont make your bootleg movies download faster, but if your computer runs like ass when you've got more than 3 windows open ram may help (unless you have a celeron from 2009, then its just your cpu is shit)

think of it like this, if your cpu is the engine of a truck, ram is the truck bed. a celeron with 16gb of ram is like an S10 with a dumptruck bed on it. Lots of room to haul shit, no power to move it anywhere. an i7 with 4gb of ram is like a dump truck with a cardboard box to haul shit in.

Another security researcher found a non-documented flag on an older VIA chip not too long ago that basically gave you full Ring 0 access to the machine from whatever process. This was just something he found in the first random machine he picked off the shelf he knew nothing about. It took him quite a bit of work to find it, such things are not easy to find if they are there.

i remember that video. I think it was like a c7? they had flag that flipped turned on a secondary "core" that shared like one or two registers with the main processor (but had full cache/ram access) something like that that he had to feed instructions through and (a whole new instruction set) he ended up brute forcing the opcodes until he was able to get a basic halfassed assembler that could run shit on the second cpu, completely out of band that could only really be detected by religiously watching that one register

That's the sort of wholesome deep magic I like learning and reading about. I need to look that shit up again, wasn't it a defcon talk?

EDIT- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eSAF_qT_FY

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

When approaching a problem that refuses to be solved it is useful to assume that you know less than you think you do, it sounds obvious but it isn't. The solution might be trivial but when proficient enough you no longer make trivial mistakes, until you or someone else makes one, and it's going to be a pain in the ass to find and very embarrassing when found.

So when you can't figure it out take a step back and give yourself the most basic advice you would give to the person that says "I did all that and it's still not working, you have to come over!", and you know he didn't do it, then act on that advice yourself. It has served me well with hardware, software, programming and networking.


Sneakers is the best and the only good hacker movie.

 

[Ineedahero]

Unless your running windows ME or older, or windows xp on a TI-83, your registry doesn't need to be cleaned

What if you are running Windows 10 home on a laptop full of dumb fucking hp bloatware and mcaffee bullshit? I had to go into the registry and delete a bunch of dumb shit just to change the fucking lockscreen background.

 

[Recoil]

How to properly ground yourself and avoid touching hot wires.

 

[a_lurker]

What if you are running Windows 10 home on a laptop full of dumb fucking hp bloatware and mcaffee bullshit? I had to go into the registry and delete a bunch of dumb shit just to change the fucking lockscreen background.

That's a specific case where you should use something like revouninstaller that compares installer information to the actual registry entries its removing because it knows the program is going to be fucking gone.

"magical registry cleaner 9000" is snakeoil that either doesn't do shit or deletes things in the registry it assumes are safe, if the program crashes or anything weird happens or it assumes the wrong thing it can corrupt permissions on registry keys or cause other issues.

the point is, the registry is a big file full of mainly text/hex data that generally isn't going to make your computer run super slow or crash if there is some cruft in it. there are specific cases where you may want to correct or change something in the registry, but it isn't enough that your going to need a dedicated utility for "cleaning the registry"

Don't use a chainsaw for something that you could open with a pocketknife.

How to properly ground yourself and avoid touching hot wires.

Grounding:
If you want to be super by the book wear a grounding wrist strap with wire, button clipped to a grounded mat, or alligator clipped to a bare metal surface that is grounded, or grounding plug.
Third pin (round) on a US plug is ground.

avoid touching hot wires- turn off the breaker (overkill for just a pc), flip the power switch on the back of the power supply (or unplug the power cable), hold the power button down for a few seconds to drain any residual charge, a lot of desktop motherboards have an led of some sort that will light up even if the board is powered off if it has a supply from the wall or sufficient charge left between capacitors on the board/power supply.

they also make fancy current detector gadgets, i've got a fancy electric screwdriver at work that buzzes when its near any live circuit (never really payed attention to whether or not it works for d/c, but it definitely buzzes if i get near a/c with it), but common sense is cheaper.

 

[Wingus Dongshire]

A surprising amount of viruses handle their persistence via scheduled tasks and hklm\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run

An error that says "access violation" does not mean that you do not have suitable rights to a folder, it means that the program tried to access memory outside of its assigned range and the memory management told it to fuck off

Grounding:
If you want to be super by the book wear a grounding wrist strap with wire, button clipped to a grounded mat, or alligator clipped to a bare metal surface that is grounded, or grounding plug.
Third pin (round) on a US plug is ground.

avoid touching hot wires- turn off the breaker (overkill for just a pc), flip the power switch on the back of the power supply (or unplug the power cable), hold the power button down for a few seconds to drain any residual charge, a lot of desktop motherboards have an led of some sort that will light up even if the board is powered off if it has a supply from the wall or sufficient charge left between capacitors on the board/power supply.

they also make fancy current detector gadgets, i've got a fancy electric screwdriver at work that buzzes when its near any live circuit (never really payed attention to whether or not it works for d/c, but it definitely buzzes if i get near a/c with it), but common sense is cheaper.

Who cares if you're near a live DC current, there's no high voltage application to it. I guess if you're worried about accidentally shorting something, but if you need a tool to stop you from shorting a live DC circuit you probably shouldn't be digging around in the circuitry. You also shouldn't be grounding yourself if you're working with anything AC related, as that just makes you more likely to get murdered

 

[a_lurker]

A surprising amount of viruses handle their persistence via scheduled tasks and hklm\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run

is that why adobo flahs player updater is scheduled to run every 15 minutes?

You also shouldn't be grounding yourself if you're working with anything AC related, as that just makes you more likely to get murdered

yeah, I don't fuck with anything a/c unless I have to. Probably useful to mention for any amateur electricians - only one hand should ever go near possibly live wiring.

I guess if your the glass half full type, a short across your chest is an easy way to get a tool assisted speedrun in life.

 

[Autisimodo]

Regularly change your password, always aim for long phrases spelt in 1337 (LEET) with a mix of symbols ($, @, !) because they're nearly impossible for a computer to guess.

haveibeenpwned is useful for checking if any of your accounts have been compromised.

 

[Ineedahero]

That's a specific case where you should use something like revouninstaller that compares installer information to the actual registry entries its removing because it knows the program is going to be fucking gone.

"magical registry cleaner 9000" is snakeoil that either doesn't do shit or deletes things in the registry it assumes are safe, if the program crashes or anything weird happens or it assumes the wrong thing it can corrupt permissions on registry keys or cause other issues.

the point is, the registry is a big file full of mainly text/hex data that generally isn't going to make your computer run super slow or crash if there is some cruft in it. there are specific cases where you may want to correct or change something in the registry, but it isn't enough that your going to need a dedicated utility for "cleaning the registry"

Don't use a chainsaw for something that you could open with a pocketknife.

Ah, I get you. Actually I originally thought revouninstaller fit into that 'unnecessary hoax software' category and the only way to really do it is by using Windows add/remove, deleting any residual files and editing the registry, which I slimmed down to using a registry cleaner when I was finished. I am the neighbourhood tech guy where I live, but as others have said I really know nothing. Regardless, it sees me deleting a lot of bloatware from new laptops, so I will cut out the registry cleaning and use revouninstaller, cheers.

 

[MAPK phosphatase]

There are two types of hacking attacks, and as a result, two general strategies for avoiding them.
1. Broad attacks target everyone and everything. They run tools on as many attack surfaces as possible. They take advantage of common mistakes people make. Protecting yourself from these attacks is a matter of not being dumb. Don't make the common mistakes people make. Use a password manager. Don't open spam emails. Stuff like that. Avoiding government or corporate information gathering is primarily about adequate OPSEC.
2. Targeted attacks are when a specific person or organization is targeted by another specific person or organization. You protect against these by being smarter than the other guy. If you're a single person and a high skill, well funded targeted attack is made against you are basically screwed. At best you can minimize damage or try never to be a target in the first place, and for this you need excellent OPSEC. The best way to minimize damage is before the attack even happens. Kiwifarms engages in the low-mid skill level of very poorly funded targeted attacks that stay in the realm of legality but the targets are all idiots so we often see great success.

 

[Horrors of the Deep]

Registry is one of the reasons I got rid of windows. Bullshit magical lists saved god knows where in binary are the worst. ~/.config and systemctl way better in that regard.

Regularly change your password, always aim for long phrases spelt in 1337 (LEET) with a mix of symbols ($, @, !) because they're nearly impossible for a computer to guess.

haveibeenpwned is useful for checking if any of your accounts have been compromised.

Pro tip: All the "cloud" password services are shit. If you want to set up a poor man's cloud password service it's as easy as:
1. Getting Dropbox on devices you want your passwords at
2. Getting KeePassX clients (there are clients for windows, linux and android).
3. Make a new database, set up master passphrase, write down or generate passphrase in your newly created database. Make sure you've got a GOOD master passphrase
4. Dump that shit into dropbox.
5. Let it sync between all your devices.
6. Voila. Any time you add an entry to your database it will be synced across your devices. Entries are protected by encryption of your choosing, no benevolent company has access to your shit. Free as well.
Extra homework: If you have a useless box laying around you can set up NextCloud on it to have a poor man's Google Drive you fully own. You can use that instead of Dropbox.

As for regularly changing your passwords, I'd recommend making strong unique passwords rather than swapping them all the time. People can't be fucked to change their passwords every month, that's plain unreasonable unless enforced and even then the results are overall weaker passwords across the board.

 

[lil bitch]

1. NOTHING is hot-swappable except for hard drives you have unmounted safely. you have no idea how many people i know took RAM out of their computer as it was running. that's not how that works and dumbasses like those really irk me.
2. if you have a virus, your web browser won't alert you about it. this is a well-known scam tactic where you hop on the phone with an indian dude as he gets on your computer and feeds you bullshit as to why you need to pay up a massive sum of money to "fix your computer". your OS/antivirus will alert you about any threats found through notifications and anything else is a damn scam.
3. when building a PC, ground yourself. a static shock to any sort of PCB (mobo, GPU) can damage your parts before you even get to use them. it's been argued that this is a myth, but better safe than sorry.
4. when building a PC, make sure you know what you're doing, or make sure you have someone who does know what they're doing help you. a lot of people goof up on shit like GPU PCI-e slot locations, thermal paste, PSU fan placement, a lot of trivial shit that's important.
5. don't buy prebuilt. it's a complete waste of money and you can buy most prebuilts down to the parts for way, way less and build it yourself. my guess is when you buy prebuilt you're paying for labor and profit, which is why it's expensive.
6. do your own research, learn the ins and outs of PC parts yourself before taking anyone's advice or parts lists. with every person who knows what they're talking about (coughcoughme), there are two people who have no clue and will waste you money with their part suggestions. i'm talking those kinds of people who say "just trust me" when you ask them "why this part?" and nothing else. they don't know shit if they can't give you any good reason, and will either suggest a build that's too expensive, or a build that's too cheap for what you want. learn it yourself, make decisions for yourself, because at the end of the day it's your PC and it's a damn shame if you're stuck with a part some asshat gave you the recommendation to buy. research, research, research.
7. REGISTER YOUR PARTS FOR WARRANTY! if something goes wrong and it breaks you can send it back to the manufacturer for a replacement.

 

[Rungle]

Try to buy pc's from the elderly.
They usually dont know what gold or shit they have in their cases.

 

[Ineedahero]

If you are trying to use a VPN and wondering why everywhere still knows your location, it's probably because location services are turned on in windows.

 

[ForgedBlades]

If they sound Indian, hang up the fucking phone immediately.

 

[Cryonic Haunted Bullets]

There's a well known phenomenon called Moravec's Paradox which basically states that tasks humans evolved to do very recently (doing complex math, reading and writing, etc,) are easy for computers to do, while our most basic sensory and motor functions (seeing in 3D, identifying many objects in a scene, walking around in a physical environment, fine motor skills) are extremely difficult by comparison, even with advanced AI.

One scary implication of this could be the end of fulfilling work; a global economy where people are used only for these most basic evolved tasks, with all higher functions left to advanced computer systems. It sounds melodramatic, but such a shift is already happening with the advent of "ghost work" and online marketplaces like Mechanical Turk.