1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Use bots to apply for the open positions to waste time. Reject them all for not enough pay.
Post public info of the CEO class
Piracy
Give fake data when using all services.
Start and join boycott groups.
Use their social media against them. Eg post their dirty laundry as a comment on their post.
Stop using as many services as possible. It might not be funny but, I mean, what if you went to a music store and bought used CDs instead of using Spotify? Do all of that you can.
Start Self hosting. Keeping my data at home is how I'm sticking it to the man these days.
Do not use actual names, birthdays, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc. There's no reason they need to know that info and I love/hate seeing physical mail and email show up with my made up info. Doesn't work when paying for stuff though.
Report bugs that don't actually exist. Keep reporting the same bug from different emails. Works especially well for apps.
Explanation for illiterates?
It’s an SQL injection joke.
Basically, when dealing with databases, you can use SQL to search or modify the data in that database. By default, you can do this by polling the database with an SQL query. But this introduces a vulnerability called SQL injection. Basically, imagine if instead of filling in a name in the “Name” field, you filled in an SQL query. If the database admins haven’t protected themselves against it, then the database will happily run that query; You have just injected an SQL query into their database. Maybe you’re a malicious attacker, looking to get a virus onto the system, or looking to extract the data.
Protecting the database from injection is done with something called sanitizing. Basically, you set up filters to disallow SQL, so it can’t touch your database. In this comic, the database admins didn’t do that, so they were unprotected.
The actual SQL uses the student’s middle name to search for any tables named “Students” and permanently delete it. The joke is that when the school admin staff enters his name into their database, it will delete any tables named “Students” and wreck their database.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom
SQL sanitization joke. Won't affect most databases today.
As a security consultant who tests web applications on the regular: LOL
Still, any programmer worth their salt should filter their inputs. One group at work refuses to do it and they always get away with it and it's infuriating
One group at work refuses to do it
Sounds like a huge liability to the company.
and they always get away with it
Until they don’t. All it would take is one malicious actor (competing company, spurned employee, data thief, etc) wrecking/stealing their entire database with an injection attack.
If a company is publicly traded, then all leaked individuals are given 50.1% controlling stock in the company, split among the victims with new stocks created for them, with unclaimed stocks held in a trust controlled by anyone that did respond to claim stocks. They can sell the stocks, or drive the company into the ground out of spite. Maybe even both.
Companies not publicly traded have 3 months to make all code used, trademarked material, and patents open source in perpetuity, and 1 year to convert their corporate structure into a non-profit.
Regardless of the size of the company, the CEO, CTO, and board must eat their weight in fried bugs. They get to pick the type of bug from a list of 5 options, and any seasoning they want. Live streams of the bug eating will be monetized and the proceeds given to orphans, under the title of "It's not a bug, its a feature."
luigi had an idea
Use EICAR test strings as your password.
If they store your password in plain text the AV will lock the user database.
If your password gets leaked and they are using bad password security, when your password is cracked the AV will isolate the file.
Bold of you to assume a corporation storing passwords in plain text would be using AV
Being a non-programmer I had to look up what that is
According to EICAR's specification the antivirus detects the test file only if it starts with the 68-byte test string and is not more than 128 bytes long. As a result, antiviruses are not expected to raise an alarm on some other document containing the test string.
This won't work, assuming the database file is more than 128 bytes long
Ah... "advice" consisting of "I've heard of a thing"
ELI5 please? I've read the other replies, but would love to understand a bit more.
EICAR test strings are strings of text that can be used to test an antivirus. Basically, you bury the file somewhere, and see if your AV picks it up. The joke being that if they’re storing your password in plaintext (a big no-no from a security standpoint) then their AV will clamp down on the database once you create your account and the test string is embedded.
It wouldn’t work in this instance, unfortunately; EICAR test strings are only meant to work when embedded in files that are shorter than 128 bytes. And every database is almost certainly larger than that.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but Ad-Nauseum is a nice way to inject a ton of garbage into the data corps collect.
More in the spirit of this, prefer and actively seek out alternatives that collect as little or even no data at all and test to make sure they run without internet access. If they give you a hard time or straight up dont work without an internet connection when they ought to be able to, chuck em
Edit: also call them out in reviews. Why you collect data guys, dont you want my money?
This has been the go-to for decades and it's not working. I feel like we need to be prepared to engage with the system, but make it clear we are not just passive consumers. Something that becomes viral maybe?....
that only works when there are alternatives that work offline. which is not guaranteed.
If anyone has one specifically for airlines, I'd love to hear it! Got plenty of time to read the comments with my cancelled flight
Edit: whoops, I missed the "il" part in "not illegal". Anyway you should definitely not do the following. Allegedly doing the following would be arson, and society frowns upon such things.
Easy:
Don't use their services.
If you send back one of those reply mail envelopes it costs them money. Stuff those envelopes with junk and send them back.
I don't get many of them anymore, but when I do, I mail them back with a little slip of paper inside that says "poop".
This brings me so much joy.
Deny engagement and profit. It a takes a mind set change but a lot of shit can go avoided.
Streamimg can be replaced with Yarr
Use products you have longer until they break or not longer don't fit use case
Start your shopping on the second market.
Generally Corpo's and government are centralized and get benefits of that system, working class is decentralized naturally so we need to lean into that.
Absolutely.
Buy things used, repair and jailbreak what you can, and learn to make things for yourself.
We can’t, at least as individuals, divest from every exploitative system. But, we can remove ourselves from more than we think.
Often enough, you get a better experience out of the homemade and secondary market than whatever the new thing you’re being pushed can give.
The fake name generator might be useful. There are also temporary email services for when a site account requires a confirmed email.
Sounds like it does the opposite of what OP wants:
I stopped counting after 2000+ vendors
Make your data useless or wrong.
More passively, there's probably an oddly large amount of John Does born on January 1, 2000 ;)
More offensively, anti-image-gen data poisoning such as Nightshade exists. It's well-defended against IIRC so hopefully someone can Cunningham's Law correct me. And this is also more solo of a movement (as opposed to gaining mass support for something)
As others have said, the best instances of direct action are illegal.
I'm skeptical that anything legal will work for very long because they will quickly work to make said legal action illegal.
Send a copy of the receipt for your donation to the open source project that most closely aims to be their alternative. Explain why you're angry in 3 sentences and do so like you are condescendingly speaking to a five year old.
Make the letter public, so other people know & get informed.
Use AI to generate false info to feed into their database
I love putting wrong AI slop in every optional field or space I can get away with for profiles and accounts that don't really matter.
If an extension exists for this I'll use it
Maybe pirate your media and donate the money to open source alternatives
If someone stoles the data then the corp can't be trusted. Punishment: erase ALL records from ALL of their databases and forbid that corp to take data for at least one year. The time would depend on the severity of the leak. If the leak if catastrophic, 10 years minimum.
he doesn't rename low res episodes of the golden girls to "tax return[year].docx" and hide them in plain sight.
