Archive for September 21, 2024

Elon Musk MIGHT Be Caving In To Brazil’s Demands

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 21, 2024 by itnerd

You might recall that Elon Musk has been in a bit of a fight with Brazilian authorities over the fact that he won’t ban certain content within the country. That led to Twitter being banned in the country. Now Elon has been pretty defiant about this. And even going as far as antagonizing the Brazilian officials who were behind the Twitter ban. But that might be changing:

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

Now why would Elon fold up like a cheap suit? The fines that he was dealing with may be hurting him. Or it might be that the fact that Brazilians were signing up for Bluesky and Tumblr in record numbers was something that he could not ignore. But I am going to put this out there. This isn’t over. I think that Elon may comply for a short amount of time. But he’ll go back to playing FAAFO with Brazil. I say that because Elon isn’t an honest broker and I have no reason to believe that he’s being honest now. Thus if I were the Brazilians, I would keep that in mind before considering any lifting of the ban on Twitter.

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Bluesky Isn’t The Only Social Network Gaining Users In Brazil At Elon Musk’s Expense… So Is Tumblr

Posted in Commentary with tags , on September 21, 2024 by itnerd

Remember Tumblr? The blogging site that was once bought for $1 billion by Yahoo, only to be sold to Automatic the owners of WordPress for a mere $3 million? It’s suddenly become very popular in Brazil thanks to the banning of Twitter in the country. Via Tech Crunch:

According to Tumblr, in the days since the X ban in Brazil, the site saw 222.99% growth in communities and 349.55% growth in users. More specifically, Tumblr’s daily active users in Brazil have shot up by 30% from the 110,000 it was seeing, on average, in the days ahead of the ban.

What’s more, the new users aren’t just visiting the site, they’re creating accounts, too, Tumblr claims. The company says blog creation and community joins have also increased. (The company didn’t provide metrics on this front, however.) 

Of those users who joined communities, Tumblr found that the percentage of daily active users in Brazil was also five times higher than those in the rest of the world.

While this isn’t the sort of growth that Bluesky is seeing, it’s not insignificant. The thing is that the longer that Twitter isn’t available in Brazil, the more likely people will seek out alternatives. And if people like those alternatives, the more likely that Twitter will never see those users again. Surely Elon has to know that. Or perhaps he’s not smart enough to know that given some of his more recent behaviour. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

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A New Rogers Text Message #Scam Is Making The Rounds

Posted in Commentary with tags , on September 21, 2024 by itnerd

One of the things that I teach people to do when I give my seminars on how not to get scammed is to closely look at any email that you get or any website address that you’re asked to visit. We’re going to focus on the latter today by doing an exercise where I am going to show you two web addresses, and you need to determine which one is fake and why:

  1. https://mobile-2fa.rogers.com
  2. https://mobile-2fa-rogers.com

The correct answer is the second one. That’s because the technical term for a web address is uniform resource locator or URL for short. And understanding how URL’s work can help you to determine what is real and what is fake.

Here’s how a URL constructed:

  • A URL starts with a protocol followed by the name of the resource that has to be accessed. In this case https which is a web page with SSL encryption during transport from the server to your web browser.
  • That is then followed by the domain or host name. For example, itnerd.blog is my domain or host name.

If you look closely at the two examples above, they look the same. But they are not. the first one ends in “.rogers.com” after the “mobile-2fa” part of the web address. Which means that this domain name is the one for Canadian telco Rogers. And it’s going to a specific host that Rogers controls named “mobile-2fa”. That’s why there’s a period between the first part of the web address (“mobile-2fa”) and “rogers.com”

For the record, Rogers doesn’t have a host named mobile-2fa. But I am going to use it for reasons that you’ll see in a moment.

The second one has a domain name of “mobile-2fa-rogers.com” which means that that one is going someplace else other than Rogers because the entire text above is the name of a host that has been set up by a threat actor called “mobile-2fa-rogers”. And what that threat actor is hoping for is that by setting up a web address that looks very close to something that Rogers might use, you might click on it because you’re not paying attention to the details. And that in turn will lead you into all sorts of danger.

So why am I pointing this out? I got this sent to me the other day from someone who had this message pop up on his phone via text message:

The person asked me if this was a scam. And based on what I just explained above, it was. Fortunately they didn’t click on anything. And neither should you. But I did as I wanted to see what the scam was.

This is another one of these scams that uses a CAPTCHA to convince you that you’re going to the real Rogers site. But it’s clearly not the real Rogers site as explained earlier.

Once you get past that, you get to a site that has the feel of something that Rogers might create, and you also get this prompt saying that your account requires two step verification. Two step verification is something that adds security to your online accounts because there’s two factors in play. A password and a one time code that is sent to your phone. But this isn’t how Rogers does this. If you want details on how Rogers does this, click here.

You’ll notice that you as a person is not identified in any way. That should be a major red flag as any communication from Rogers will identify you with an account number or your name. Let’s continue shall we?

Now the threat actors want your name and address details. That’s great for swiping your identity.

Using some fake information to get past that, I now hit this page. I am not sure what handing over your credit card info has to do with two factor verification, but swiping your credit card details is also on the list of things to do for these threat actors.

What this example highlights is that you need to closely look at anything and everything that hits your phone, inbox, etc. Because anything and everything could be a scam. and if you’re not paying attention, you could be a victim.

Be careful out there.

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Elon Musk Gets Fined Daily For Trying To Get Twitter Back Into Brazil

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 21, 2024 by itnerd

Given that Elon Musk is a bit of a sleazy person, I’m not surprised that I am reading this:

Elon Musk’s X faces steep daily fines in Brazil for allegedly evading a ban on the service there, according to a statement from the country’s supreme court Thursday.

The fines imposed by Brazil’s supreme court amount to $5 million in Brazilian reals, about $920,000, a day. The court said it would continue to impose “joint liability” on Starlink, the satellite internet service owned and operated by SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace venture.

The suspension of X in Brazil was initially ordered by the country’s chief justice, Alexandre de Moraes, at the end of August, with orders upheld by a panel of justices in early September. The court found that under Musk, X had violated Brazilian law, which requires social media companies to employ a legal representative in the country and to remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X failed to suspend accounts allegedly engaged in doxxing federal officers.

X recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare and appeared to be using dynamic internet protocol addresses that constantly change, enabling many users in Brazil to access the site. In a previous setup, the company had used static and specific IP addresses in Brazil, which were more easily blocked by internet service providers at the order of regulators.

Honestly are we surprised that Elon would do this? Although he, or more accurately his talking heads deny that anything nefarious is going onI:

“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team,” a company spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

This sounds like one of those answers that you give when you get caught doing something you shouldn’t have. And I am a bit surprised that Cloudflare is going along with this as I would not be surprised if the Brazilians go after them for aiding and abetting this high tech game of hide and seek that Elon is playing. Though they too deny that anything nefarious is going on:

However, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince tells TechCrunch that X going back online in Brazil this week was all a “coincidence.”

“I don’t think anything about this change was intentional to overcome a block in Brazil,” said Prince in an interview with TechCrunch. “This was literally just [X] switching from one IT vendor to another IT vendor.”

Some months ago, Prince said, Cloudflare won a deal to provide X with cloud computing services in several regions across the globe, including Brazil. X had previously used Fastly, a competitor to Cloudflare, and the social media platform is currently in the process of rolling out that switch. Changing providers also changed IP addresses associated with X, which disrupted how Brazilian internet service providers were blocking the X platform.

“We have never talked with [X] about helping them get around the Brazilian dam,” said Prince. “They happened to transition a bunch of their traffic from Fastly over to us, especially in the Latin American region, over the last week.”

Prince describes this as wild coincidence, where his sales team won a deal, and as a result ended up inadvertently “wading into some geopolitical Elon Musk vortex of craziness” months later.

I personally don’t buy this because this to sounds like the sort of answer that you would give when you’ve been caught doing something that you shouldn’t have. At this point I hope the Brazilians really start to twist the screws on Elon as he honestly needs to pay a price for his actions. And a very steep one.

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