InfoSec Person | Alt-Account#2

  • 5 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • My bachelor’s thesis was about comment amplifying/deamplifying on reddit using Graph Neural Networks (PyTorch-Geometric).

    Essentially: there used to be commenters who would constantly agree / disagree with a particular sentiment, and these would be used to amplify / deamplify opinions, respectively. Using a set of metrics [1], I fed it into a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and it produced reasonably well results back in the day. Since Pytorch-Geomteric has been out, there’s been numerous advancements to GNN research as a whole, and I suspect it would be significantly more developed now.

    Since upvotes are known to the instance administrator (for brevity, not getting into the fediverse aspect of this), and since their email addresses are known too, I believe that these two pieces of information can be accounted for in order to detect patterns. This would lead to much better results.

    In the beginning, such a solution needs to look for patterns first and these patterns need to be flagged as true (bots) or false (users) by the instance administrator - maybe 200 manual flaggings. Afterwards, the GNN could possibly decide to act based on confidence of previous pattern matching.

    This may be an interesting bachelor’s / master’s thesis (or a side project in general) for anyone looking for one. Of course, there’s a lot of nuances I’ve missed. Plus, I haven’t kept up with GNNs in a very long time, so that should be accounted for too.

    Edit: perhaps IP addresses could be used too? That’s one way reddit would detect vote manipulation.

    [1] account age, comment time, comment time difference with parent comment, sentiment agreement/disgareement with parent commenters, number of child comments after an hour, post karma, comment karma, number of comments, number of subreddits participated in, number of posts, and more I can’t remember.















  • That’s not a very valid argument.

    First and foremost, most devs probably see it as a job and they do what they’re told. They don’t have the power to refute decisions coming from above.

    Second, in this economy where jobs are scarer than a needle in multiple haystacks, people are desperate to get a job.

    Third, yes, there may be some Microsoft (M$) fan-people who end up being devs at M$. Sure, they may willingly implement the things upper management may request. However, I’m not sure whether that’s true for most of the people who work at M$.

    Your comment suggests to shift the blame to the devs who implement the features that upper management request for. Don’t shoot the (MSN) messenger.


  • Looks cool and I’m glad something new has arrived after nitter.

    A few things, however:

    1. It doesn’t look like I can view comments on tweets; I can only view the tweet. (Firefox mobile if that matters)
    2. It’s pretty slow. It’s not a big problem, but it is very noticeable.
    3. Somewhat irrelevant, but why is it called TWStalker? It’s a… bit of a weird name. ‘Stalker’ makes me feel like I’m doing something illegal even though I definitely am not.



  • Ah, maybe the whole context wasn’t added here, but I tried to download an XPI file for a different program that uses Firefox under the hood (called Zotero). I wanted to download the file to install it manually for the other program.

    Firefox naturally thought that the XPI file was meant for itself and tried to install it. The XPI file was never intended for Firefox.

    Edited to add: probably a pretty obscure thing that I noticed, but it’s still bizarre.



  • Will you (the community) be setting your username to your public username (a username you use everywhere) or something that’s different from your public username?

    Idk why, but signal feels more… personal(?) and I’d hate for general people to stumble across my signal account just by guessing whether my signal username is my public username.

    I’d be fine if they got my Discord account, mastodon account, Lemmy account (they’re all different usernames anyway) because they’re public-ish accounts. Signal feels less public and I’d want to go with a username that only I can send to people I know.

    It looks like there will be a message requests area and it looks like usernames can also be changed (should a username ever be doxxed).

    I’m still on the fence.