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December 30

Taking down a darknet website

BlackCat (cyber gang)'s website was recently taken down by the FBI. Why did it take so long; why could this not be done in 2021, soon after their malware was first observed? My (probably naïve) thinking is that they have to use non-dark routes of the internet part of the way. Why can't those routes be blocked (or maybe better: quietly monitored to get a hold of their masterminds)? ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 16:48, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

To properly take down a web site, the servers would have to be confiscated. So they would have to be somewhere where FBI has jurisdiction, else they need cooperation from another authority. Routes can easily be bypassed with VPN's or TOR. Or the IP number or name of the servers can be changed to enable them top pop back up, even if ISPs block them. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:46, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

If you want to take down a normal website, you only need to disrupt the domain name resolution. The prime example is ThePirateBay.org. It is well-known that that particular website hosts tor links to illegal movie and music files. If the U.S. government were to demand that the domain name (thepiratebay.org) was redirected to a dummy website, it will be more difficult (not impossible) for the average user to access the website. U.S. Congress formed a comittee many years ago to discuss the possibility of demanding a domain name be redirected. However, when it came time to read a report on their observations before Congress, many people on the Internet (including Wikipedia) had a very strong negative reaction and had a world-wide "black out the Internet" campaign that kept the comittee from releasing anything discussed. So, instead of knowing what the government thought about it, we just had a day of a bunch of black websites keep us all in the dark.

The dark web doesn't use public DNS. So, it is not a simple matter of redirecting the domain name to another website. There are two options. You can take over the IP address or you can take over the servers (or both). The IP addresses were managed by organizations outside the control of the FBI. So, they had to take over the servers. It was time consuming, but not really hard. Security commonly fails because humans are insecure. That applies even to hacker organizations. The humans failed. The FBI gained access to the servers, spied on their organization for a time, and then took over the servers. They also released the decryption program for free so victims could get back their data. The FBI certainly could have done it all much fater than they did. But, it is the government. It moves very slow. There is a lot of paperwork and red tape. Also, the goal was not to quickly shut everything down. It was also an intelligence gathering mission. All in all, this is the new spy vs spy arena. Of course, I do not expect a Jerry Bruckheimer film about a handful of computer nerds in a DC cubicle farm trying to hack key pairs and reverse engineer encryption algorithms. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 15:32, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for your educative replies. As for the film: I'm not a movie buff, but I seem to remember that there was a film with a similar topic. Maybe I'm confusing it with A Beautiful Mind, which also covers a nerd working on reverse engineer encryption algorithms. But I'm digressing. ◅ Sebastian Helm 🗨 08:06, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

December 31

Folder address batch cmd

Hi, in the cmd box, what part of my folder string should I put in place here? (pdfs/party\ manifestos/ is the writer's own lorem ipsum.) Thanks everyone—and a Happy New Year to all! ——Serial 17:52, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

1=FOLDER=~/pdfs/party\ manifestos/

find "$FOLDER" -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext -enc UTF-8 {} \; ——Serial 17:52, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

You should omit the part  1=  in the first line and replace the part  ~/pdfs/party\ manifestos/  by the pathname of a folder in your filespace containing the pdf documents that you want to be converted. Make sure you escape any spaces and other potentially problematic non-alphanumeric characters in the pathname. You can issue the command

echo "$FOLDER"

after the command that set its value, to make sure you have the correct pathname. You need to have both read access and write access to the folder and its subfolders.  --Lambiam 17:33, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks very much Lambiam, appreciate your help. So my command prompt should look something like this?

C:\Users\SN54129>FOLDER=Articles\EngHistRev/

find "$FOLDER" -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext -enc UTF-8 {} \;

——Serial 18:19, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm insufficiently familiar with the Windows syntax for pathnames to be confident of the effect of the forward slash ("/") as the last character of the folder name. I suppose, though, that it should work fine if you leave it out and just use  FOLDER=Articles\EngHistRev .  --Lambiam 00:24, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

It appears that you do not understand that FOLDER is a variable. It is not necessary to use a variable in this case. you can simple use: find "Articles\EngHistRev/" -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext -enc UTF-8 {} \;

I do not know if find or pdftotext will work on Windows. Will it even recognize the / at the end? Does it require \? Basically, you are taking a Posix command line instruction and trying to use it in Windows. If you are in PowerShell with the Linux subsystem installed, it MIGHT work. Don't expect it to work. I epxect it to claim that the syntax is bad because it is trying to use the Windows find command, not the Posix find command. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 17:45, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

For the confused, all Windows pathnames only ever use backslash \ and all *Nix pathnames only ever use forward slash /. I'm not aware that the final slash is significant. Is all. MinorProphet (talk) 02:13, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Yeah if you're trying to do this on Windows via Windows Subsystem for Linux, you want to be running this inside the Linux environment, in bash or your preferred *nix shell. Then it should Just Work. You can access the host Windows environment filesystems under /mnt.

If you have done this and something still isn't working, copy-and-paste here everything from the terminal, inside <syntaxhighlight> tags: see Help:Wikitext#Format. Include error messages etc. Otherwise back up and tell us what you're trying to accomplish, under what conditions—"I have X, and I want to do Y". Slowking Man (talk) 04:27, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

• Hi all, and many thanks for the replies. Fair play to the anon: it's true, I "do not understand that FOLDER is a variable". In fact, I do not know what a variable is. And I'm afraid that goes for slash, bash, Posix, Powershell, *nix, etc., as well. I am a tool. FWIW, I get this in the Command line:

  C:\Users\User54129>find "Articles\EngHistRev/" -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext -enc UTF-8 {} \;
  File not found - '*.pdf'
  

Would it be possible, notwithstanding homework, of course, if we went back to the beginning as Slowking Man has suggested, to re-approach it in the X/Y fashion? Here's hoping! ——Serial 15:41, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

That output matches what you would receive when using the Windows find command in the shell. The line of text you are trying to use is !!!NOT!!! Windows. It is Posix (Unix or Linux). Windows is NOT Posix. To use the command, you must use a Unix or Linux computer, not a Windows computer. The answers can cause a bit of confusion because modern Windows computers have an optional Linux subsystem which lets you perform some Linux things in Windows.

The take-away you should be getting is that you copied a command for Linux. You are not using Linux. It won't work. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 16:59, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

January 4

Is Bing Chat lying to me?

A few weeks ago I remember asking Bing Chat (the Bing search engine's chatbot) who developed it and I'm pretty certain it answered it was OpenAI. Just yesterday I asked the same question and it maintained that it had absolutely nothing to do with OpenAI, that it was developed entirely by Microsoft. Am I misremembering or is it trying to gaslight me? Btw there's been several instances when it literaly lied, that is, did not acknowledge that it did what I plainly saw it just did, most often erasing an answer it was in the process of writing and then ending up refusing to answer my question. (Incidentally it has a stupid formula, always the same, after it does that: "Hmm... let's try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?". Examples of questions it's refused to answer: "What does FAFO stand for?", "What does it mean to be cucked?", "Do you know of another case where an ethnic or racial slur is used by the very people it targets like the term nigger by black people?". "Does the accent in County Donegal sound more like Northern Irish or Southern Irish?". It also erased its answer to a question I'd asked about a Pete Seeger song for some reason and that it had started to print and then denied it had done it. And there've been many other cases. And when you push it, it simply aborts the session). Thanks. Cheers. 178.51.15.36 (talk) 14:24, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Chat bots cannot lie. They take your question and turn it into a set of search parameters. They find blobs of text that tend to match the search parameters and regurgitate that text to you. They have no intention of being truthful or telling a lie. They are just performing pattern matching and nothing more. It is complex pattern matching, but still just pattern matching. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 16:56, 4 January 2024 (UTC)