Lmfao sure dude, whatever you need to believe. We’ll save a seat for you over here in reality whenever you feel like joining the rest of us.

Lmfao, what law is being followed here? Come on.

They keep bringing up how small the protests were and how they “ran out of steam” or w/e. It really shows how little they actually know about the US.

It seems pretty clear that the negative implication is putin’s regime abusing his authority for sexual favors (especially given all the mass rapes by russian forces in ukraine…) and not that said favors are bad because theyre gay. It’s telling that they assumed it was based in homophobia, though.

I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

(I made “false landings” up.)

No, it’s not unique to the US. But we’re by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.

Yeah… this is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you’re subjected to a propaganda lecture (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they’re used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don’t even realize it’s an issue that could be discussed.

So lets be clear here, while you’re absolutely correct about what you’re saying, that’s not related to what I was saying.

The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It’s an area where the US isn’t even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven’t figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It’s so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

That’s just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic…)). There’s no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it’s embarrassing, we don’t even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it’s just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

Its just… we’ve got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they’ll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

The worst dressed nerd in a meeting is the most important one.

Did I stutter? Protecting your family is protecting your family, now fetch the jumper cables and a lightning rod, we’ve got some identity theft to thwart.

I despise them as much as the next queer liberal but it isn’t just the vile boomers falling for this. Keep an eye on your grandparents, maybe sit down and explain the more common scams and tell them to call you if they get something weird. No banking info over phones, etc.

Its amazing the number of problems in life that can be solved with a $2 harbor freight automatic punch. Speakers especially.

Yeah alright, fair enough! Crummy that they don’t make that clearer.

Nope they’re right about this one, see below

Read to literally the next line of text and you find:

Updated Aug. 28, 2024.

It’s not an insertable toy, it’s just a novelty vibrator.

Finally, a hunting season even the vegans can join in on! I cannot wait to have a row of taxidermy amazon drones above the mantle in my man cave…

Saved you a click: new E-Ink display with a 60-120hz refresh rate

… What??

Win10 LTSC-E is pretty great. Shame you can’t use it without a large scale government contract…

Discord is built on Chromium, which is the main concern I have heard. I’ve yet to see any evidence that they’re mining user data, which is a valid concern. They’ve done a shockingly good job of funding themselves without selling user info thus far.

Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They’re entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.

Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its… fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.

The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds…