austinkurpuis

Yesterday I was targeted in a fairly convincing phishing attack disguised as the Washington State toll payment system known as Good To Go.

Luckily I realized it was a scam before providing any important information to the attackers.

I took this opportunity to learn more about the scam. The linked gist contains my findings.

This website was my dad’s second bible when I was a kid. He went down the rabbit hole and ended up building a massive steel spud gun that had a 10 foot copper barrel. That thing could throw a potato close to a quarter mile. Some great childhood memories right there.

A charge from something I bought today says March 1st.

My wife’s company had an issue with this today. A couple hours before I read this she mentioned it to me and I just assumed human error was the cause. Then I read this and it clicked. Crazy shit.

Same here. Also having trouble publishing to S3 via CLI and API.

He has some interesting points. I can't say I agree with his opinion of where the "real value" of a service comes from. No doubt a service would be nothing without it's users, but it would also be nothing without the blood sweat and tears of the developers who built it.

In the end we're creating something that people want to use and giving people something like Instagram for free is all the reward they deserve. If you Instagram where to pay their users they'd go bankrupt. It's not a viable business plan.

I also feel like he's missing the whole point of open source. No one ever said it would distribute wealth. Bryan Cantrill said it best: "You should open source your project because you never know when a magical little pony is gonna come flying by and shit out a fucking rainbow right in front of you.".

This man is a hero.