I recall listening to a cassette that would go through the alphabet, like a song. I tried hard, but never really got the hang out of it. But this time, Morsle would build the bridge more easily.
Upon registering for an account on Clicked.com to access intro cybersecurity courses, I encountered a field inquiring about my sexual orientation. I'm uncertain as to why Clicked.com would collect such data. I wonder if this is a growing trend among career-oriented online platforms (or anything common really).
Is this asked for diversity and inclusion purposes?
Are they simply collecting data to resell or marketing purpose? What is your take on it?
It seems an irrelevant data point to me. There's no obvious reason they'd need to know that in order to provide educational services.
I'd leave that unanswered. If that's not possible and I wanted to use the service badly enough, I'd lie in the most humorous manner I could in my response to it.
A very interesting project. Btw, I could not find a way to delete my account when created. I've also found that the generated report is very generic and quickly goes outside the actual question or specific theme/keywords used.
A final point, the notice states that "The risks associated with this study are minimal. Study data will be stored securely, in compliance with Stanford University standards, minimizing the risk of confidentiality breach." When I use STORM, I can see other people's request. Are they supposed to be confidential?
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
I love that quote too! I have it from the introduction, I believe, to Smoke and Mirrors:
>Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.
The corresponding original Chesterton quote is supposedly/apocryphally:
>Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
I like the original for the "children already know" portion, but I prefer Gaiman's for lyricism and, perhaps ironically given TFA, saying "defeated" instead of "killed."
On an only slightly related note: is there any good way to check PDFs for malware/executables?
If I'm stuck with an attempt at it, the best I can think of is opening in a new QEMU or docker with no Internet access, but that's 1) a fair but of work to check something, and 2) probably not even that secure. Using some cli tool, like xxx, bat, or ranger, that does some processing to extract the text and looking at just that feels more secure - but I know it really isn't.
What is a simple tool to "clean" PDFs?
An ML tool that does QEMU/docker/no-net to extract the content, turns that into game, and saves a typst/latex template with it would probably be the best possible outcome - but that's a decent (yet potentially very lucrative) task.
For analysis, I’ve used Didier’s tools. If you just want a safe way to open it, upload it to a cloud storage provider which destructively renders the pdf. Box or Google drive should work.
What you mean with "PDFs with malware/executables"?
If you're talking about embedded active content within them, then a reader application can just ignore/not run it.
If you're talking about a crafted PDF that exploits, let's say, font rendering bugs inside the reader than it's near impossible. Keep your applications updated.
Quite possibly perhaps that might be true-ish to some extent, I think, but take that with a grain of salt, I'm not an expert, that's just my wild guess :-p
It's pretty ridiculous to peel that off the following qualifier.
Readers have been aggressively attacked for a long time. It's certainly not impossible that some basic demonstration PDF will cause an issue, but it's probably not reasonable to expect it.
