This is one of the reasons vigilantism works better in fiction than in real life. In cases where some vigilante left a beat up suspect and some sort of evidence, any competent defense attorney is going to move to have the evidence suppressed due to issues around chain of custody and possible tampering. They would likely also push the narrative that the vigilante is the real criminal and left the evidence to frame their client. Between possibly getting much of the evidence suppressed, and building doubt around anything remaining, a conviction could be really hard for the prosecutor.

This also ignores issues around vigilantes going after the wrong person for something (see: lynchings) and applying wildly disproportionate, extra-judicial punishments for crimes (see: lynchings, again). Crime and punishment really are hard problems which don’t lend themselves to easy answers. And there is a reason the Code of Hammurabi is seen as such a big deal in history. Rule of Law is an important concept which protects people.

When you have a potentially volatile situation, lobbing bombs at it rarely makes it better. This wasn’t a “time bomb to explod[ing]”. This was a deliberate decision by Cheeto Mussolini to launch a foreign military adventure. While the current regime in Iran was far from ideal, it’s important to keep in mind why that regime was in place. The UK and US were directly involved in overthrowing the elected government in Iran in Operation Ajax. That resulted in a violent, repressive dictatorship. But it was friendly to UK/US oil interests, so that made it ok. When the Iranian people overthrew that government, the current Iranian government came to power.

That the current administration expects a different outcome this time around is the height of stupidity. All this will accomplish is creating another generation of Iranians who hate the US due to direct experience.

Ah yes, let’s use contractors. Anyone else remember when USIS was just faking background checks? I’ve been a Federal contractor, and while there are some great, hard working people doing government work as contractors, the companies behind those contractors are almost universally doing everything they can to skirt the line between “completing the contract” and “outright fraud”. They certainly have no interest in doing what is best for the organization, people or tax payers. It’s all money grubbing assholes looking to leech off the tax payer.

We need to realize that 90% of everything done in the wake of 9/11 were bad ideas. With DHS itself being a monumental fuck-up. We did need better inter-department communications. But, by creating one agency to rule them all, we put too much budget in one bucket and failed to let specialists in each area focus on their area of specialization.

Maybe it’s a regional thing, but I don’t think it’s a common phrase. I’ve heard “nothing-burger” a lot, and this may be someone playing off that.

Ya, the defense economics of a $50k Shahead drone being taken out by a $4 milion Patriot missile do not work in the defenders’ favor. If Iran can keep that up long enough, those conventional weapons will start slipping through. Still, this was a known factor with Trump and Bibi’s war and I don’t think a bunch of civilians getting killed in drone attacks was a significant deterrent (QED, that war is going forward). While I believe that could result in the US/Israel making some propaganda declaration of victory and quietly ending the war, I don’t think it would ever be a deterrent in the future. That’s why I would expect Iran to want nukes. If they want to ensure that the US and Israel don’t just randomly drop bombs on Iran when a US leader needs a distraction, they need a credible threat of Israeli cities disappearing in a mushroom cloud. That’s something that couldn’t just be ignored.

Between Trumps first and second terms, he has demonstrated the issue with any long term deal Iran might make with the US. Under Obama, Iran had agreed to international inspections and a general framework that would have ensured that they followed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which they are a signatory). Trump rolled up in 2017 and tossed that out the window. And now Trump has decided to further destroy any credibility the US had left by dropping bombs. I doubt there is any world left where the Iranian Government trusts the US Government. I’d expect them to go more the North Korea route, isolate themselves further and make a sprint for nuclear weapons. They will have to content themselves with being part of the BRICS system. But a nuclear umbrella, with a high likelihood of nuking Tel Aviv, seems the only way to ensure the US/Israel aren’t randomly lobbing bombs at them.

Given the roughly similarly sized drop in Win11 users. I chose to believe that the Win10 jump is from people nopeing out of the Win11 slop.

Well, you see. If Trump gets enough US soldiers killed, or as he called them, suckers and losers, there will be less demand for products and prices will go down. Checkmate, economists!

It will be a Paramount Discovery of new ways to make movies and TV suck.

It’s certainly one of those hard trade-offs to make. One of the methods for reducing crime is increasing the perceived likelihood of getting caught. Cameras can do that, if there is regular follow-though by government authorities to investigate, arrest and prosecute crimes. Though, there is probably more value in reducing poverty and corruption, which is known to reduce crime. And which has the added benefit of not creating a surveillance network when corruption does creep into government. Of course, that is expensive and might just help the poors, and that is antithetical to authoritarians of every stripe.

The best way to protect a dataset from falling into the “wrong hands” (for however the “wrong hands” is defined for that dataset) is to not keep that dataset in the first place. While I get that tracking the movement of citizens can make solving some crimes easier, the risks to privacy and of authoritarian abuse are far too great to accept.

I have two:

1. Waves glowing with bioluminescence during a red tide. We didn’t know it would be going on and were just camping by the beach. Walking on it at night, we all saw the waves glowing and weren’t sure it was real. As we got closer, our footsteps in the area where the waves were rolling in and out were glowing as well. Just surreal.
2. A house blowing up. Guy opened a natural gas valve in the house and touched it off. Insulation shot way up in the air and the house itself bowed outwards in basically every direction, stayed standing though. At least until it burned down.

I remember working in environments where management had decreed that we would not install updates ever. . .

That’s…definitely a decision that puts a lot of trust in Microsoft’s security. Lol

It was a very different time. Security was still something that happened mostly at the network perimeter, and even then not much. Routers without firewalls were very common and things like SQLSlammer were much more possible.

Ya, I’m sure the AI code isn’t helping, but is it materially any different? I spent way too many long nights trying to unfuck Windows servers after updates failed to install correctly. And that was well before the AI Slop Boom. Even more fun is when the update reported installing correctly but the Nessus scans came back showing the old version of DLLs still in the System32 folder. There is a reason no one installs Windows patches on day 1. At minimum, you give them a week to let the foolhardy and fanboys get their disks slapped by Microsoft, again.

Going back to my days supporting Window 2000/2003, I remember working in environments where management had decreed that we would not install updates ever, because of too much downtime due to bad updates. Even today, updating in OT environments can be very difficult due to shitty software running on really old versions of Windows. At least that stuff can usually be kicked off the network and left to rot in isolation.

one day when we will hopefully be living in more peaceful times without imperialists

You don’t read much history? Humans have never lived in widespread peace for any length of time. We have evidence of violence between groups of humans well back into the Stone Age. We are not a species prone to peace.

While I don’t know the specific post you are referring to, Malware exists for Linux. Here’s a great overview from last year. If someone wants to argue, “oh it’s from a security company trying to sell a product” then let me point you at the Malware Bazaar and specifically the malware tagged elf. Those are real samples of real malware in the Linux specific ELF executable binary format (warning: yes it’s real malware, don’t run anything from this site). On the upshot, most seem to be Linux variants of the Mirai botnet. Not something you want running, but not quite as bad as ransomware. But, dig a bit and there are other threats. Linux malware exists, it has for a long time and it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux.

While Linux is far more secure than Windows by design, it’s not malware proof. It is harder for malware to move from user space into root (usually), but that’s often not needed for the activities malware gets up to today. Ransomware, crypto miners and info stealers will all happily execute in user-land. And for most people, this is where their important stuff lives. Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over. Attackers are looking at Linux now and starting to go after it.

All that said, is it worth having a bloated A/V engine doing full on-access scanning? That depends on how you view the risk. Many of the drive-by type attacks (e.g. ClickFix, fake tech-support scams) all heavily target Windows and would fail on a Linux system. The malware and backdoors that come bundled with pirated software are likely to fail on a Linux system, though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed. For those use cases, I’d suggest not downloading pirated software. Or, if you absolutely are going to, run those file through ClamAV at minimum.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to run anything as heavy as on-access file scanning or anything to keep trawling memory for signatures on my home systems. Keeping software up to date and limiting what I download, install and run is enough to manage my risk. I do have ClamAV installed to let me do a quick, manual scan of anything I do download. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy A/V product. Most of the engines out there for Linux are crap anyway.

Professionally, I am one of the voices who pushed for A/V (really EDR) on the Linux systems in my work environment. My organization has a notable Linux footprint and we’ve seen attackers move to Linux based systems specifically because they are less likely to be well monitored. In a work environment, we have less control over how the systems get (ab)used and have a higher need for telemetry and investigation.

One of the things to look at is the interest rate you would be paying for either loan and how that would effect the total cost of the loan. Also, there is the question of the utility of any money spent up front. For example, if using a loan on the existing house would result in no up front costs and a 5% interest rate over 30 years, and the standard mortgage would cost $20,000 and have an interest rate of 8%, you’re almost certainly better to use the existing house as backing and throw that same $20K in a long term interest bearing investment (e.g. government bonds). All this assuming you plan to hold onto the second property long term.

Compounding interest is a fantastic tool and a fearful master. If you can make it work for you, then do it. If you are facing the possibility of paying it, you almost always want to lower it as much as possible.

That of ServiceNow, whose tools help businesses automate various tasks, dropped by 13%

If AI can kill ServiceNow, I’ll happily praise our new AI Overlords. I’m sure ServiceNow can be really good. I’ve just never seen it in practice. Perhaps we just never paid for the “interface which doesn’t suck” module.

I ditched cable TV over a decade ago for a simple antenna (and wrote a notable Reddit post on the antenna while I was at it). That was done because I was tired of my wallet being raped each month, because I had to buy a higher bundle to get the channels I wanted. I was stuck with cable internet for a number of years afterwards, as it was the only option in my area. Then T-Mobile offered up 5G based internet in my area at a low price. That was around 6 years ago and I haven’t looked back.

The cable companies sat on their laurels while the world moved on. They are now shocked that their terrible offerings for terrible prices are falling to real competition. Sure, I fully expect the new carriers to do everything in their power to enshitify their service offerings. That’s the nature of business/ But, with the market open to competition, there is now a real opportunity for us customers to shop around and get a less shitty experience. Broadband internet is a commodity and is completely fungible. Prices should be falling and it was only rent seeking rules keeping the prices up.

It tends to be much more focused on bringing products to market, but of course they do. The transistor, the base unit of all of the microchips which make this conversation possible, came out of Bell Labs. And, as much as we might hate them for it, you have companies like Monsanto doing a lot of work on chemical engineering and genetics. Much of the work on AI (for good or slop) is being done in private sector labs now. Aeronautics research happens heavily in companies like Boeing and Airbus, though they are often working hand in hand with government labs (e.g. NASA, JPL, EASA).

Where Universities and Government really shine are areas like basic research and research which doesn’t have obvious commercial applications. Which is why support for those organizations is so critical. Those areas of research often have long term effects and can result in entirely new areas of knowledge, research and products.

It’s easy to think of large corporations as soulless organizations hell bent of accumulating wealth at the cost of anything else, because they are. But they are also surprisingly good at focusing wealth and effort to find new ways to do things cheaper, faster and more efficiently. Specifically because those things make money. Veritasium had a video on a good example of this recently.