New Things to Beware on the Internet

On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) -- these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.

Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.

Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: ".zip" and ".mov".

This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it's in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.

What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.

Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.

This is what we're seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.

What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you're on, don't enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.

I'm seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company's internet, and that's probably wise.

Be cautious out there.

I really want to reiterate how this can go wrong frequently and fast, folks.

A malicious actor sets up a page with an auto-downloader squatting on a domain name that matches a common zip file name like photos DOT zip. This website is set up to start an auto downloader upon being visited, downloading a zip file with the same name as the URL which contains malicious software (virus, worm, keylogger, etc).

Scenario.

Someone you know well sends you an email or text with promised photos attached. The email even reads something like this.

Because .zip is now a TLD, that plain text is automatically formatted into a link to malicious actor's website without them having to send you anything.

Folk with family with iPhones or iPads that are sent multiple photos in one go might be familiar with iCloud's tendency to automatically compile them into zip file for the sender and less savvy tech users have trouble NOT doing that.

These same less savvy users, or even just someone just not thinking in the moment, will click that .zip link, not realizing it isn't the the same as clicking on the promised attachment.

They download a file that matches the name they expected. They open it because they were expecting that file and it's from a trusted source. Except the file they downloaded isn't the one that was sent by their trusted source and now they have malware.

Another Scenario.

An IT person tries to send you an email with instructions on how to resolve a problem with a commonly used filename like install-repair DOT zip or to install new software like microsoft-office DOT zip.

The email may start with instructions of where to go get the legitimate file to do the install or repair, but now a line later in the instructions is also has a link to a .zip URL. A user, already frazzled by IT problems, may click it to ensure they have the right file. Again, they download malicious code from a squatting website or it prompts them with a fake login and now the squatting website has stolen their login credentials for a legitimate site. All due to an expected email from a trusted source.

Above you can see microsoft-office DOT zip is already out there with a fake Microsoft login screen waiting to steal your credentials.

These risks are already out there now because the TLD has been activated.

Plain text on old post are already being resolved into links to the new websites.

Here you can see a tweet from 2021, long before .zip was a domain name, now resolves that plan text into a clickable link. You'll start seeing this everywhere, and malicious actors do not have to lift a finger to send it to you.

Yes, a lot of users aren't going to click that, but a lot of folk will. Whomever is squatting on photos DOT zip domain name has made a one time payment to have access to anyone that ever sees that file name typed out.

In an example of an existing squatter site, clientdocs DOT zip is exactly one such pre-setup .zip domain name that initiates an automatic download. This one may be harmless, but the set ups are already out there and waiting to catch folk.

It's an unnecessary and risky can of worms that's been opened up.

Holy Unforced Errors, Batman.

quick and easy workaround (until you can find a better solution)

is to add

to your My Filters tab in Ublock Origin. reblog to save a life

Imagine a world where homosexuality was still in the DSM but society had moved gradually toward some moderate acceptance of queer people, but only with the understanding that we are sick and that leading out our queer lives is medically necessary for us, and so a person would have to get diagnosed with being gay by a psychiatrist in order to be allowed to have gay sex

this is basically the reality that trans people are living in right now. and that's for those of us that are lucky enough to live in a place where we *are* allowed to lead out trans lives once we get gender dysphoria written down in our medical charts

Maybe the reason people find the lesbian label too restricting is out of a combination of:

If you, not being a lesbian, try to force yourself into the lesbian label, you're gonna feel restricted, same as any bi or gay person would feel trying to make themselves fit the straight label. Do you understand that whether a label feels rigid or not is entirely subjective? It WILL feel restrictive if it's not the right one for you.

I, being a lesbian, did in actual real life feel desperately restricted and suffocated by the bisexual label as well as the straight label, when I tried to force myself into each of them. I was always performing and policing my unattraction to men and punishing myself when I found myself not liking men "enough" (at all).

I didn't feel unrestricted when I identified as bi, I felt trapped and constricted and that's not the fault of the bi label itself and much less was it a sign that the bi label needs redefining, it was a sign that I wasn't bisexual.

That's what we mean when we say if the lesbian label feels too rigid or restrictive to you that might be because you're just not a lesbian, or you might have a lot of internalized lesbophobia (I definitely had the idea that "not giving men a chance" was mean/uptight/rigid/cruel so I didn't want to be a lesbian in part because I didn't want to be a Mean Dyke to the Poor Men who might desire me and thus had a "right" to a chance with me).

It's not an insult at least when I say it. It's just a fact.

Too many of you believe that the evils of capitalism begin and end with whether or not workers get paid enough. But capitalism is inherently wasteful by design. It is resource intensive and exploitative by design. Even if we killed every billionaire and redistributed all their wealth tomorrow (a good thing) we would still have to restructure how we manage society from the ground up, globally.

And no, you as an individual are not responsible for figuring out all of the answers, sad white person. There are people all over the world already working on the solutions their communities need. We just have to empower them to make those solutions happen.

If the U.S. minimum wage became $25 tomorrow and everyone got universal healthcare, capitalism would still be bad because it would still be a system that prioritizes exponential and limitless economic growth over everything else.

im a materialist. i love to have items

dialectical materialism is when you have two things

historical materialism is when you've had them for a while

thinking about them

Tumblr is returning to its natural state. Nature is healing.

This is what they say at the aisle instead of “I do”

This is revolutionary

Thinking about how around Halloween I went to a gay bar and one of the bartenders had "We Won't Go Back" bedazzled on the back of their costume... of fucking Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The way so many LGBTQ people in the United States are stuck in utterly false consciousness about how their rights were won and who their heroes should be genuinely makes me want to cry.

The inevitable result of bourgeoisie "civil rights" discourses is that marginalized people come to idolize and lionize the members of the ruling class who put the rubber stamp on what rights and concessions are eeked out to them after years of struggle. The people who actually struggled, who led their communities to fight and win against the laws and systems that kept them oppressed, become forgotten or are viewed as simply one part of the process that ends with the Supreme Court Justice or President, who by definition can never be their allies or leaders. It fucking sucks.

more people would be for prison abolition if they just tried to send mail to an inmate even once

for almost a year now i've been trying to send a copy of the literary magazine i edit to an inmate who requested one. his prison prohibits any written materials that so much as mention drugs, weapons, criminal activity, or malicious violence of any sort. i've been poring over what's available of the 95 volumes my magazine has printed over the years, and of those found 3 that might pass inspection. the first two were sent back undelivered two months after i sent them because one had a short story that alluded to a playground fight, and the other a poem that used the word "fist" in a nonviolent context. The third was returned for the stated reason that its contents depicted the use of firearms. i reread the entire issue, there's not a single gun mentioned in all its 120 pages.

while going back and forth with this guy trying to figure out how to get a copy of the magazine in his hands, two of my letters bounced back for unspecified reasons. i learned that inmates are not given their correspondents' original letters, but scanned copies, often poorly reproduced and sometimes illegible. these people aren't even granted the ink their loved ones used to pen their messages, or to hold in their hands the paper their loved ones held, if they're able to receive their words at all.

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

hey

you know why forty hours a week is considered the standard maximum?

because for SEVENTY FUCKING YEARS, unions demanded a forty-hour week and worked their asses off trying to get it.

SEVENTY YEARS workers organised, communicated, educated, protested, screamed at the establishment. They stood defiant, they persevered in the face of violent opposition from their employers, they went on strike to the point where one fifth of america’s labour force was on strike in 1919. 

Organise. Unite. Stand up.

Stop listening to the bullshit about unions as a concept being corrupt or bad. Stop listening to the bullshit that capitalists invented these things and gave them to us out of the non-existent goodness of their slimy black hearts.

Unions gave you the labour rights you have. A minimum wage, a 40-hour week, Saturdays off, meal breaks–all these basic things were fought for by unions. UNIONS did that. I’m not asking you to feel guilty I’m asking you to BRING IT BACK. We have the power if we unite.

Please support your local unions, even if you can’t be in one.

You know what I love? 

Reminding people that the majority of wage theft is committed by “small, local” businesses and that their idealizing of small businesses is stupid 

- Ungovernables and Yuppie Tears: A Saturday Night on Locke Street

Love local coffee shops. your “refugees are welcome here” sign goes really well with the one that says “bathrooms are for paying customers only”

You’ve clearly never had to deal with people doing hard drugs in the grocery store bathroom and it shows.

Bro I literally manage a coffee shop with an open restroom policy, and I prioritize enforcing that policy and making sure everyone feels comfortable. I’ve dealt with everything from the easy end of the spectrum (people quietly doing hard drugs) to a lady ripping all her hair out and setting it on fire in the sink. I clean up after this stuff day after day and I still feel VERY strongly about the fact that human beings should be allowed the basic decency of a place to poop. Yes, I very frequently end up having to kick someone out of the bathroom for doing drugs, and when I do I always offer them a cup of water on their way out. Because they’re a person and I give a shit…

It’s safer for people to do drugs in (clean) public restrooms than it is for them to do it on the street. It’s also ableist to deny someone the use of a bathroom. There are countless gastrointestinal disorders that cause bathroom urgency and potential incontinence. There are other conditions, like pregnancy, that necessitate quick and easy access to restrooms.

also what makes you think a paying customer wouldnt misuse the toilets in some way, and a person using it without buying something would?

contrary to popular beliefs people with money do drugs, and homeless people need the toilet just like the rest of us

Having a sharps container “for medication injection” in our bathrooms has dropped the amount of needles I find in the bushes and planters down to a whole 2 in the past 4 years since we rolled them out. I used to find them so often I got in the habit of wearing cut resistance gloves in 90 degree weather in case I had to pluck napkins out of the landscaping.

I read a lot of the notes and I really can’t say enough how the “you couldn’t pay me to clean up other people’s shit” comments kinda piss me off. It is not that serious, it’s really not. You dump a bunch of Triade III on it, let it sit for 10 minutes, wipe it up.

If it’s watery you throw absorbent on it like you do throw up, we use a kitty-litter type clay based absorbent. You put a trash bag in the dust pan and sweep it all into the bag.

Takes me 15 minutes to clean an absolutely destroyed bathroom stall in a place that sees THOUSANDS of people daily. It’s a shopping and restaurant area that opens up into a nightlife location after 5pm, with some bars opening at 3pm and several restaurants becoming full nightclubs after 9pm. You pay for parking, but anyone can walk in off the sidewalk and not pay a dime and just hang out until 2am.

On a busy night I cover 3 location’s restrooms (2 venues have multiple rr) but on slow days I’m covering around 7. 7 buildings, thousands of drunks, I get a LOT of bio spills.

Our sharps containers are toolbox-looking things that hang on the wall with a flap that allows things to go in but not come out, ever (rip to like 5 phones that I know of), when full it gets closed, locked, and sent to be incinerated. I literally never touch a needle anymore. If I find one on the ground outside we have sharps shuttles which are long plastic tubes that look like giant tampons with a flip top, you put it on the ground, step on it to hold in place, and sweep the sharp into it. Takes like 20 seconds.

The answer to this entire issue is to TREAT SANITATION WORKERS BETTER not make going to the bathroom a fucking ordeal. Pay me I will clean your bathrooms, let homeless people piss with dignity!!!

“In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the long study of a butterfly once thought extinct has led to a chain reaction of conservation in a long-cultivated region.

The conservation work, along with helping other species, has been so successful that the Fender’s blue butterfly is slated to be downlisted from Endangered to Threatened on the Endangered Species List—only the second time an insect has made such a recovery.

To live out its nectar-drinking existence in the upland prairie ecosystem in northwest Oregon, Fender’s blue relies on the help of other species, including humans, but also ants, and a particular species of lupine.

After Fender’s blue was rediscovered in the 1980s, 50 years after being declared extinct, scientists realized that the net had to be cast wide to ensure its continued survival; work which is now restoring these upland ecosystems to their pre-colonial state, welcoming indigenous knowledge back onto the land, and spreading the Kincaid lupine around the Willamette Valley.“

…

“Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are being welcomed back onto these prairie landscapes to apply their burning of ages past, after the FWS discovered that actively managing the grasslands by removing invasive species and keeping the grass short allowed the lupines to flourish.

By restoring the lupines with sweat and fire, the butterflies have returned. There are now more than 10,000 found on the buttes of the Willamette Valley.”

This is HUGE. The Willamette Valley Level III Ecoregion is easily the most ecologically damaged ecoregion in Oregon. It used to be primarily oak savannas consisting of a wide variety of native grasses, wildflowers, and other low-growing plants, with scattered patches of Garry oak (Quercus garryana). The Willamette Valley, which runs from the Vancouver, WA area down to a little south of Eugene, OR, once you start running into the foothills of the Klamath Mountains. And it’s bounded by mountains on both the west side (Coast Range) and the east (West Cascades).

Less than one tenth of one percent of the original oak savanna remains there, because when all the settlers showed up to colonize Oregon Territory, the Willamette Valley was super popular because the soil is so incredibly fertile there thanks to all the topsoil, silt, and other material dropped there during the Missoula Floods ~13,000 years ago. And since it was primarily grassland there were fewer trees to chop down before the land got ripped up into farmland with plows, livestock, etc. and then later became the site of I-5 and the majority of the population centers in Oregon.

So the Willamette Valley has a LOT of species of endangered/threatened plants that reliant on the last fragments of oak savanna, some of which occur nowhere else. And of course their insect partners, some of which specialize in only one or a few plants, are also in trouble. The fact that they could get the populations of both the Fender’s blue AND the Kincaid lupine–both species only found in the Willamette Valley ecoregion–to a healthier point is an incredible piece of recovery. It doesn’t equal the restoration of entire ecosystems, but it’s an excellent proof-of-concept that shows that species restoration can be done, and that contributes to overall habitat restoration efforts.

we stole america just to pave it over and abandon it

when im walking surrounded by empty cracked parking lots choked full of trash. every building empty, furniture piled high in the windows, yet homeless huddling outside them. rows of small businesses dark and vacant inside, homes collapsed for years and never moved. roadkill left to rot in the street. when im surrounded by this, im wondering how this spot looked under the last caretakers. and im wondering what was ever the goddamn point beyond money to the wealthy

not "I hate it here" as in "I want to leave" but "I hate it here" as in "this is a list of the 50 counties in the whole united states with the lowest life expectancy and Kentucky is 14 of them"

this was jumping off from recent kentuckyposting, but if you're american this list should radicalize you. It's just a parade of the evils of this nation

The US county with the lowest average life expectancy (as of 2014) is Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota. It is a Native American reservation with a 92.9% Native American population. The average life expectancy there is 66.81 years.

If it were a country, it would rank below 150th in worldwide average life expectancy.

The second county on the list is Union County, Florida, at 67.57 years. It has a high prison population—one-third of the county's population is incarcerated.

The list is dominated from there on by Native American reservations, counties in Mississippi with a 70%+ Black population, and Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia coal country.

These areas in the USA have a lower life expectancy than incredibly poor countries without basic health infrastructure, without access to a clean water supply.

In Union County, the fact that 1/3 (one-third) of the population is incarcerated brings down the life expectancy so much that it might as well be a place without hospitals or plumbing. If that doesn't fucking haunt you I don't know what would

I wish I'd saved the titles of the books I read about the United States prison system. However bad you imagine it is, it's worse.

Like I will never be able to erase some of that shit from my head. Nightmares. Crimes against humanity. The only reason I haven't posted more about it is I don't even want to look it up again

Prison abolition sounds crazy and radical and then you read a book

Going to prison in this country literally ruins your life. Like every prison sentence should be thought of as a "life sentence" in some way, because in many ways there's no healing from it. It quite literally traumatizes people beyond the ability to be a "useful member of society" it's not rehabilitative in any way, it sets people up to reoffend because they have been abused in every way in an incredibly violent and coercive environment.

Prison CREATES crime in a lot of ways by traumatizing human beings with every form of violence, violation and dehumanization to the point that they...don't have the ability to be with other people in a peaceful society.

It's completely abhorrent that prison is an option for crimes that don't even harm other people. It's not just having your freedoms restricted or whatever, violent abuse is par the course

And people will say "What about murderers?" but you're like...to be entirely honest I don't think we should treat murderers like this are you reading this

this is going around twitter and i thought it'd be a fun little thing to bond over

in the tags as usual

Good afternoon Tumblr,

What if we started formatting text posts like emails? Kindly let me know what you think.

Best, Ena Da mens-rights-activia.tumblr.com

Good afternoon Ena,

I hope you enjoyed the weekend! I think this is an excellent idea and look forward to rolling out this new text post formatting option in the coming weeks.

Warm regards,

Indigo

indikos.tumblr.com

🌲 Please consider the environment before printing this email. Every unprinted email helps the environment.

suonds good👍

Sent from my iPhone