What are you more worried about, third party, MitM interception (e.g. IMSI catcher) or Google knowing who you are communicating with? The former is technically harder for an attacker, but the use of such devices is well documented and poorly controlled. Google is, well Google. And you can expect them to monitize any bit of data they have on you. Also, that data will almost certainly be handed over to local law enforcement, especially if they have whatever the local equivalent of a warrant is.

As with most security, there are trade-offs. You have to decided what risks you are willing to accept and what you are not.

A joke is a lot like a frog, it can be informative to dissect it, but the patient usually dies in the process.

IT is what you do when you are good with computers and not so much with people. You get really good at making the magic number boxes work for the MBAs and start explaining RFCs or networking protocols so that they fuck back off upstairs so you can go back to digging through log files and pcaps. It’s all just puzzle solving, reading and a crippling fear of social interactions.

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.

I guess being a walking disaster is now considered “experience” for disaster management.

It certainly makes sense. AWS hosts infrastructure specifically for the US FedGov. That infrastructure includes systems for the US DoD. So, that makes it a valid military target. And while cyber attacks can do a lot to degrade command and control, nothing DoS’s a server farm like a few hundred kilos of high explosives.

Honestly, I’m not terribly impressed with the magic. We’re experiencing the Ashlands for the first time (kinda late to that party) and running a pure mage has been a bit painful. I’m in the “fully” upgraded Embla set (there is an upgrade step which is locked behind the content wall) and I’m still incredibly squishy. Part of the reason I’m doing the greydwarf spawner training is to make my bubble last more than one hit from an asksvin. And also to have my skeletons be able to withstand more than a strong breeze. While I don’t expect to be able to tank a two star Morgen, even no star asksvins still hit like a truck.

Assuming we finish up this run before The Deep North drops, I’ll skip the magic on the next playthrough. We basically never go back to a previous playthrough when returning after a long break.

I remember this being quoted when Bush II dragged us into Iraq. And here we are again:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Foice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
– Hermann Göring

If the thing you are claiming exists does not interact with anything else in any way, how are you proving that thing exists in the first place? It’s basically a circular argument. You make a claim that something exists yet then state that it is impossible to prove that the thing exists. It’s just one big circle of “trust me, bro”. The question isn’t “does it exist?” the question is properly, “how do you know it exists in the first place?” You need to prove that the unicorns exist before expecting people to accept that they exist. Their existence is not a given.

BMY is Bristol-Myers Squibb
BMZ seems to be up for grabs though.

The value of pi depends on who you ask

I must have gotten one after the enshitification. I bought a HiSense TV during the pandemic and the unit I got was trouble from nearly day 1. A line of pixels went dead all the way across the screen. I tried to work with their warranty department and they asked for a picture of the problem.

Ok, easy enough. Take the picture and send. They reply, “can you take a picture with better lighting of the bezel?” Ok, no problem. Gerry better lighting, snap picture, send off. They reply, “can you get better lighting on the bezel?” Seriously? Fine, get the TV under really good lighting, take picture, send. “Can you get better lighting on the bezel?” WTF? Ok, I’ll admit I don’t have 50,000 candle power spot lights on it, but this is just obvious stalling. Each round of pictures and request for more is taking weeks.

During this time, the TV OS sees several updates and the underpowered nature of the system is starting to slow. The menus aren’t just sluggish, they are downright unusable. The home screen is now half ads. I finally decided, “fuck it” took the TV to the dump and bought something else.

Thankfully, the TV was only around $500. Not cheap, but the cost of the education in not buying crap didn’t hurt too much.

tl;dr: Fuck HiSense

If your goal is to document changes to a system, something like RegShot is a useful tool for this type of thing. There is also WhatChanged but development of that tool seems to be dead.

Got about half way through the article before it became obvious that it’s just “DOOM, DOOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” in prose form.

Gaming is changing, which is different from never. I mean, I could bemoan the death of 2d puzzlers ala King’s Quest because Sierra is no more, but there are still similar games being made by smaller studios. We may hit a slump, and the main actors may change, but gaming isn’t going anywhere. AAA titles will continue to mostly be money chasing shovelware, indie titles will continue to be where the real development and experimentation happens. But making games, especially PC games, has become so accessible that even the death of a major studio will amount to nothing more than some IP changing hands. And there is still a lot of money to be made in games, so companies will keep chasing that.

Magazines have been predicting the death of PC gaming for decades now. And yet, PC gaming is still incredibly vibrant. The current RAM shortage is just a hiccup. We’ve had RAM shortages before. If the demand for RAM stays at the current level manufacturers will respond by bringing new fabs online. More likely the AI bubble will pop and we’ll be flooded in used RAM and GPUs. The economy will cycle, hiring will pick back up and markets will move on to the "Next Big Thing"^TM

But ya, a headline of “Markets in down cycle, RAM supply currently constrained by high demand” doesn’t motivate clicks.

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.

Kinda reminds me of the gladiator’s feasts the night before a game. I guess if we’re going to send young men off to die in foreign military adventures, the least we can do is give them a nice dinner. Though, it seems it would be better to support them by not sending them off to die in foreign military adventures.

The spending review found that in the month of September alone, the Defense Department spent $6.9 million in total on lobster tail and $2 million on Alaskan king crab

How the fuck do you even do that?
Ok, let’s assume each meal is $1000 and maybe you have a dozen people eating. So, that’s $12,000 per meal. September has 31 days, so $12,000 * 31 = $372,000. Even if we assume they eat that 3 times a day, we’re still only at about $1 million. How the fuck do you spend $6.9 million on lobster tail in September alone? Are we feeding the entire First Marine Division on crab and lobster? I guess that’s going to do more for morale than MREs, it’s also a bit excessive.

That’s funny, while I still buy Samsung TVs, I hate their phones. So much of what their phones can do is usually locked to only working in Samsung’s apps and those are universally dog shit. The phones themselves are also often privacy and user control nightmares.

Granted, there isn’t a lot of good choices for phones these days. I’m still running an old LG phone and have been looking outside Android as my next possible solution. But, I also haven’t had a reason to upgrade.

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.