This is the mental equivalent of Saitama’s workout from One Punch Man: 100 sit-ups, 100 pushups, 100 squats, and a 10-km run. (Repeat daily until your hair falls out.)

I’m speculating, but my guesses are:

• Gathering enough karma to post on subreddits that have a minimum threshold.
• Getting enough post and comment history to pass a casual inspection, either by human moderators or spam filters.
• Maturing the account to the point where it can be sold to another shady company.
• Generally having a lot of bot accounts ready, just in case.

Once mature, it’s usually used for spam or astroturfing. There is a noticeable uptick around big elections, wars, etc.

I saw one repost-bot that metastisized into the most vile porn-spam-bot you can imagine, but they’re usually more subtle than that.

They’re indistinguishable because they’re copied from top-voted posts that are a few years old (title, text, and image if applicable). It’s guaranteed to produce a post that fits the community and gets a lot of engagement, so it’s a cheap and effective way to mature a bot account. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere, and Reddit admins don’t care.

Elerium-115?

Sure, but there’s still no excuse for “store the password in plaintext lol”. Once you’ve got user access, files at rest are trivial to obtain.

You’re proposing what amounts to a phishing attack, which is more effort, more time, and more risk. Anything that forces the attacker to do more work and have more chances to get noticed is a step in the right direction. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

No, defense in depth is still important.

It’s true that full-disk encryption is useless against remote execution attacks, because the attacker is already inside that boundary. (i.e., As you say, the OS will helpfully decrypt the file for the attacker.)

However, it’s still useful to have finer-grained encryption of specific files. (Preferably in addition to full-disk encryption, which remains useful against other attack vectors.) i.e., Prompt the user for a password when the program starts, decrypt the data, and hold it in RAM that’s only accessible to that running process. This is more secure because the attacker must compromise additional barriers. Physical access is harder than remote execution with root, which is harder than remote execution in general.

I’m tired of having to choose between “Uvalde shooter” and “Uvalde cops” in every election. Fucking do something or get out of the way.

It’s a parody of overserious memes that are trying to sound edgy and badass. The archetype is a gun-wielding skeleton that’s riding a motorcycle and saying something about thin blue lines, but wolves and other imagery are also adjacent.

Instead, THE_PACK takes that aesthetic, cranks it up to 12, and adds some silly text. Everyone is role-playing as a skeleton that’s obsessed with motorcycles (hogs). You have to TALK IN ALL CAPS to be heard over the engine noise. And everyone’s friendly and welcoming in a way that edgelords aren’t.

A few great examples from the last year or so:

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B
• Exhibit C

IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT THIS MEME ABOUT CRANKING HOGS WOULD BE WAY BETTER IF IT HAD FLAMING SKELETONS IN IT.

Can anyone prove it’s NOT an extra-long cow?

Is this why Ian McCollum’s videos are getting altered? Over the years, he’s had many historical deep-dives featuring firearms from the Murphy’s auction house. In recent months, he’s been re-uploading those videos to cover their logo with the word “Morphy’s”. Even though the auctions are long over, I suppose Google counts them as promoting sales.

Mediocre.

Phase 1: Fuck around

Phase 2: Find out

Simple solution: Don’t connect it to the Internet. Hackers hate this one weird trick.