bcovertigo

(The choice between a “daemon in the sheets” or “cronD in your log folder” joke is left as an exercise for the reader.)

“Nut meat” is a common phrase so I would guess the peanut product is closest, but please stop this line of thought for your own safety.

Confusingly, there’s actually two similar staves that get mixed up. The helix patterned one with two winged snakes I think you have in mind is called the Caduceus, but the the single wingless version I meant is the staff of Aesculapius (multiple spellings out there).

Go check out the alledged link between the snake wrapped staff that’s used to represent medicine and the treatment for guinea worms. Googling puts that theory with the Ebers papyrus from 1500 BC if it’s true!

It’s valid to point out that we have difficulty defining knowledge, but the output from these machines are inconsistent at a conceptual level, and you can easily get them to contradict themselves in the spirit of being helpful.

If someone told you that a wheel can be made entirely of gas do you have confidence that they have a firm grasp of a wheel’s purpose? Tool use is a pretty widely agreed upon marker of intelligence and so not grasping the purpose of a thing that they can describe at great length and exhaustive detail, while also making boldly incorrect claims on occassion should raise an eyebrow.

Low effort speculation:

That’s a vodaphone portugal IP, but this is likely traffic routing though their customer cellular network and not their corporate. It’s possible that someone in PT has a similar username for this service and is fat fingering it. It’s also possible that you’re seeing a tiny sliver of a larger attack.

Spur.us tracks that IP as an egress point for openproxy and windscribe ResIP networks so it’s worth considering that the origin of the authentications you’re seeing may not be Portuguese cellphone but someone hiding behind those services.

Here’s a paper describing the difficulties such a service creates for folks trying to secure accounts with traditional IP reputation based rules. “Resident Evil: Understanding Residential IP Proxy as a Dark Service” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8835239

Shooting in the dark for how a bad actor would monetize account takeover for this service if this is in fact an attack… They could try to sell your invitation to that private tracker. They could also look to scoop up a bunch of folks to try and blackmail based on what victims are download/seeding. Other more creative options I’m not thinking of might be on the table.