bcovertigo

Corporate consolidation is the end goal and all of the others are part of the toolkit for accomplishing that. (You can use those tools for other things, but a hammer with blood on it is a murder weapon no matter how many nails are in it’s past or future)

I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities. Half of these issues at least can be avoided by treating digital spaces as the temporary fever dreams they are.

If you’re seeing this follow all this idiot’s posts and mass report.

We have Lemminati at home.

I can’t sleep :(

Typosquat domain for sure! In a sandbox I’m seeing that all the download links point to the same HTML page on a .ink domain that cloudflare is now refusing to serve.

But our buddy joe already got a copy for us so we can at least view that report for fun: https://www.joesandbox.com/analysis/1763244/1/html

Edit: It pulls down an MSI installer or something it runs with msiexec but disguised with a PDF file extension. It seems to want a copy of cmd.exe to exist in an AutoIT installation (SearchPathW vs “C:\Program Files (x86)\AutoIt3\cmd.exe”) as well as pointing toward the multilanguage (.exe.mui) and other cmd variants. I suspect we’re one step away from a real payload with this report and that’s what we’d see the “Invoke-Obfuscation” powershell the sandbox spotted used for (if that wasn’t a false positive due to the base64 offset string).

Sure, here’s an opinion.

Banning is permanent and shouldn’t be first or immediate response. Repeat offenders that cross some quality or quanity threshhold may deserve that, but you should adopt power rangers rules and seek proportional responses, and only escalate as a response where possible.

Bans should be transparent, contestable, and consistent in their application. However fair or unfair the rules you settle on, the perception of that consistency and impartiality influences the communitiea reaction. Too gentle and your community’s purpose blurs into something unintended, too harsh and your users will flee for greener pastures.

Asking instead of dictating is the right approach in my opinion so I think you’re aimed in a good direction.

Three strikes is where I would start, but maybe some strikes count for more than others? This is a hard problem and the answer will change over time. In cases where you can’t be consistent though, you must be transparent to salvage the trust you’re eroding.

(The choice between a “daemon in the sheets” or “cronD in your log folder” joke is left as an exercise for the reader.)

“Nut meat” is a common phrase so I would guess the peanut product is closest, but please stop this line of thought for your own safety.

Confusingly, there’s actually two similar staves that get mixed up. The helix patterned one with two winged snakes I think you have in mind is called the Caduceus, but the the single wingless version I meant is the staff of Aesculapius (multiple spellings out there).

Go check out the alledged link between the snake wrapped staff that’s used to represent medicine and the treatment for guinea worms. Googling puts that theory with the Ebers papyrus from 1500 BC if it’s true!