Elizabeth Lopatto
Server farm experiences party fowl.
This is just a fun little series of Mastodon posts about a security breach at a “highly secure” data center... by a female mallard.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Senior Reporter
Senior Reporter
More From Elizabeth Lopatto
We aren’t your friends, and you’ll never be alone again.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Musk’s ‘antitrust’ tantrum takes on a new target.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Guess who’s thriving on Substack!
Nazis’ presence on Substack has only grown. “Sending out Nazi push alerts may not have been the company’s goal,” write Marisa Kabas and Jonathan Katz, the latter of whom sounded the initial alarm in November 2023. “But it is more of a feature than a bug.”
Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing
[The Handbasket]
Elizabeth Lopatto
The Anime Nazi has bank accounts and routing numbers for Columbia applicants.
As well as class schedules, scholarship disbursements, and student loan information. Neat! At least Bloomberg finally got around to telling its audience that the alleged hacker’s X account “includes a racist handle and racist remarks.” I wonder what a Nazi can accomplish with all this sensitive information? I guess we’ll find out.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Fortune throws its hat into the obituary slop ring.
Blackstone’s Wesley LePatner, 43, died yesterday in a mass shooting. Bloomberg wrote her a real obit (and says she’s 43, as do The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal); Fortune generated some AI slop that says she’s 44. As of this writing, the Fortune obit also contained the following paragraph:
New York Rep. Ritchie Torres posted on social media that LePatner “represented the very best of New York.” Calling her a “distinguished professional,” he honored her sense of civics, as a “. She left a lasting impact wherever she went: as a senior executive at Blackstone, a “devoted congregant” at the Altneu synagogue and a dedicated board member at the Heschel School.
Guess Fortune has decided to compete with the obituary spammers. “An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing,” the note about AI use reads.
Elizabeth Lopatto
An in-depth profile of Luke Farritor, 23-year-old IT Renfield.
“Luke’s résumé didn’t pass muster,” says one former government official, but obviously that doesn’t matter to DOGE. Farritor is “designated a GS-15, the highest salary rank for civilians, earning $167,603,” Bloomberg reports. He’s chauffeured around in a black SUV. And he’s betting that even if DOGE is a failure, he’s written his ticket for life: “To gamble like that shows you understand the theater of Silicon Valley.”
DOGE-Pilled
[bloomberg.com]
Elizabeth Lopatto
A crypto tycoon and a VC funded an experiment to literally block sunlight in California.
A University of Washington experiment with “a machine to create clouds” was shut down by the city of Alameda — because the scientists didn’t bother to tell the locals what they were up to, Politico writes. They were 20 minutes into the test when city officials ended the experiment.
Donors to the Marine Cloud Brightening Program include “cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen, the philanthropist Rachel Pritzker and Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist.” Can’t wait to find out what new conspiracy theories this spawns!
Elizabeth Lopatto
I just wanted to do a little media criticism!
I appeared on On the Media to discuss our story about the Anime Nazi who allegedly hacks universities. I explain why the identity of the alleged hacker is important, why the Times’ obfuscation of its sources is troubling, and what’s at stake in the Republican war on higher education: upward mobility.