iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2026

Security through obscurity is a terrible principle but in practice a lot of things didn't get hacked bc people ignored them, or didn't know they existed, or just generally got missed. AI makes it easy to probe all of these things at scale + makes it easier to find/develop exploits

But it has become clear that AI, broadly defined, has fundamentally changed both offensive hacking and defensive cybersecurity. This is not because AI has become sentient or because human beings have lost control of it or because of “swarms” of “rogue agents,” but because AI is proving something that we have always known: much of the software that runs the internet, our devices, our accounts, and our lives is vulnerable, or out of date, or has security flaws that human beings never noticed, or was installed by someone at a company who left the company six years ago and has been replaced four times and no one knows how to find them now or how to update it. This doesn’t mean that all of the vulnerabilities that have been found with the help of AI have been obvious or trivial; skilled hackers and researchers, driving AI tools, seem to be better than humans alone at finding vulnerabilities. But, critically, AI and large language models have made it extremely easy to essentially brute force the internet; if every piece of software is a door, AI makes it exceptionally easy to turn turn the knobs of every door to see if it’s unlocked, even on buildings that human beings had never really bothered to try to open. What we are learning at an alarmingly fast pace is that not only are some of the locks easy to pick, in some cases the door is wide open or there’s a giant hole in the wall. The recent spate of people using AI to hack their internet of things devices to run new software shows that, in some cases, it takes essentially no expertise to actually use AI to hack something.

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

can someone tell me what cords i need to play a video on this sick space helmet tv i just picked up? am gonna use this as source […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/12/2025

SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars. […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2025

I don't know how this is going to go in the long term, but I suspect that the rough edges of this process for Americans are going to eventually be smoothed over, meaning it will just be a logistical nightmare for the small businesses / individuals overseas. But everything will be more expensive:

There are two ways this can go: One everything becomes much more of a pain in the ass, certain products are not available, the tariff prices and subcharges and processing fees and times end up getting paid transparently by the customer, and everyone becomes mad at this state of affairs. Or two, and unfortunately more likely: The rough edges of this process get smoothed out because big shipping companies and platforms are terrified of upsetting Trump and the burden of dealing with all of this is passed primarily onto overseas sellers who will simply incorporate all of these new fees into the prices of the actual products and will pay the tariff ahead of time, so everything costs more because of the tariffs but the artificial, completely self-inflicted reasons that it costs more to do your hobby become largely invisible and accepted over time. The “normal” state of affairs will be that buying things from small overseas sellers is expensive and slow. But it is worth remembering that none of this is necessary, that it wasn’t always like this, and that an immeasurable number of small businesses and regular people all over the world have been immensely impacted by these tariffs.

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/12/2024

Artist makes website that lets you take selfies through NYC's network of traffic cameras. NYC Department of Transportation sends cease and desist. Artist nails cease and desist to a very very very long pole & holds it up to one of the cameras to take a photo […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2024

When people talk about Kash Patel and Trump "going after" journalists it doesn't just mean suing or trying to arrest them. It also means filing demands for information about their reporting and embroiling them in legal proceedings they have nothing to do with.

If we begin divulging our sources to the companies and governments we report on, we can no longer credibly offer vulnerable sources protection and those sources would understandably not trust us and would not be willing to talk to us. And so Paxton’s subpoena not only demands that we serve as an unwilling agent of the State of Texas, but also requires that we sacrifice our own hard-earned credibility to do so. At that point, we are no longer journalists, we are a quasi extension of state or corporate power.

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/11/2024

This industry is booming because of communities of people—mostly men—who are trying to make money without showing their face and are buying step-by-step guides about how to do this. This is from the intro to a guide that costs $220

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