Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 4 months ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago

the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:

”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.

All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.

so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?

Q: Is this really free?

A: If it's not, you should already see a Pricing page.

this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago

wonder if it's white-label Cloudflare

[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago

I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare

also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard they’ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm they’re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

that's fabulously odious!

yeah, think i'll be writing this one up for the weekend

this sort of thing does not help me have an anti-carceral attitude

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

This is slightly weird. There's a company called "DNSfilter" that's been advertising itself for a few years as an "AI-powered DNS resolver" - since well before the present hype. I suspect their "AI" bit is threat detection with machine learning in. They appear to be going for the lucrative boring enterprise market.

This thread suspects the whole 0ms.dev thing was written with LLMs and the "mirrors" bit is basically an open proxy.

You sure they're skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker ...

[-] self@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago

You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …

see I don’t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (it’s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or it’s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.

this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting — a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago

and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy

could test this by setting up a simple example page and seeing the originating source for the traffic

same technique as previous, using an http (not https) canary:

geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.98.196', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.98.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}
useragent: (no user-agent specified)
request_headers: {'Host': 'canarytokens.com', 'X-Real-Ip': '141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-For': '2a06:98c0:3600::103, 141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-Host': 'canarytokens.org', 'Connection': 'close', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip', 'Cf-Ray': '89f1a3a114752508-LHR', 'X-Forwarded-Proto': 'https', 'Cf-Visitor': '{"scheme":"https"}', 'Cf-Ew-Via': '15', 'Cdn-Loop': 'cloudflare; subreqs=1', 'Cf-Connecting-Ip': '2a06:98c0:3600::103'}
request_args: {}

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 4 months ago

idle thought: since this is (as @self highlighted) effectively an open proxy, you could also just resource-bomb it quite easily

not that I'm planning to, but it'd be dirt bloody easy and it would be a very quick test as to the claims on the site

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago

while looking into this I was surprised to find that hickory doesn't seem to have a cli binary in its crates. did find crab-hole and adguardian in the process though, gonna have to play with those later

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

a quick check using a canary. test command:

curl -H 'accept: application/dns-json' 'https://0ms.dev/dns-query?name={snip}.canarytokens.com'

canary trigger:

geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.70.74', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.70.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}

so, yeah, the actual resolve is being done by cloudflare servers too - it's not even just a cf frontproxy to a different backend service. could be done with cf workers or something, I imagine, would need to test a bit further to know/try see

this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024

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