AmericanChopper

I would agree. Which is why I’m suggesting that the Irish Data Protection Commission and Engadget should refrain from saying that.

It’s also impossible to say that I am not responsible for a breach of your private data either. How much should the Irish Data Protection Commission fine me?

That describes an entirely different incident to the one referenced in this article.

It’s a control failure, not a breach. It would also be an incident, one that could result in a subsequent breach, or one that warrants some work to be done to ensure it does not turn into a breach. But it has not resulted in an unauthorised party gaining access to the data, and is therefor not a breach.

This is a very imaginative use of the word “breach”, according to the details reported in the article at least. Internal staff (inadvertently) had access to users plaintext passwords. The article doesn’t mention any use of these credentials in a breach though, and doesn’t make any refutation of Meta’s claim that this never occurred. Internal staff having access to my data is what I would normally expect from a service like the ones Meta operates. It’s a bad mistake to make, but contriving these circumstances into being a “breach” is a bit more mask-off than I’m used to the Data Protection agencies being. Hope Ireland makes good use of its $102M.

Aside from some especially uncompetitive seasons, driver skill has evidently always been a factor. The gap between Max and Checo has shown the importance of driver skill during the recent RedBull dominance, and during the Mercedes hybrid dominance, the gap between Hamilton and Bottas showed the same thing. Mercedes > RedBull > Mercedes was an incredibly common podium during that era. With Bottas and Checo are also both great drivers in their own right.

The only confounder is really that the top teams have the ability to attract the top driving talent, so it can look like driving skill matters less than it actually does at times.

You are 100% correct, but that’s a photo of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, who were each others primary competitors at the time, and each have rabid fan bases. Whenever they have an incident together the commentary is usually (or at least was at the time) completely unhinged. A lot of people seriously claimed Max was trying to kill Lewis after that incident at Monza.

Hah, how interesting. I can’t believe I’ve never seen that one before.

These password guidelines were the state of the art at the time they were popularised. It really only becomes obvious why they’re bad when you observe the knock on behaviours they encourage, and even then the only way to make them not bad is with the use of modern tooling like password managers.

The world has been rather slow to move off this standard, but NIST has been a huge enabler of that, so I don’t think they deserve any hate for this. Not too long ago the NIST password guidance was THE authority that enabled regulated companies (like PCI companies) to migrate off password complexity requirements with a compensating control.

There’s plenty of other toxic security ideas out there as well. I would argue any control that generates large amounts of user friction for a negligible security benefit is probably a net downgrade in security posture, as user friction just normalises a culture of circumvention. Hopefully authorities like NIST can lead the way in tackling many of those as well.

If you only need one VPS, then you potentially only need a tiny fraction of 1U worth of compute/storage. That’s not a sensible colo use case.

From the DC perspective, the biggest costs for providing colo are power, AC (which is mostly power), network and real estate. Supervising rack access is a very small line item in their accounts.

A 1U can very easily contain 64+ physical cores, many TB of storage, and a few hundred GB of RAM. A 1U colo can be a great deal if you’re looking to use that much compute/storage.

The admin for those arrangements is pretty simple really. Even if you’re providing supervised access, it’s not going to be much work. I run several small colo deployments like this, and I probably only visit the sites every couple of years.

If you need something close to the full compute a 1U can offer, then you can definitely get value for money from ordinary colo like that. But you’ll get a lot more value if you need a full or half rack. But if you just need a single VPS it’s not going to add up.

The issue with the “cost of switching” line of reasoning is that it’s not possible to offer the services that AWS, GCP, Azure do, without having a high cost of switching.

As a baseline, moving production workloads that run entirely on VPS or physical servers between datacenters is already a very high cost/high effort task.

Anything you do to make the architecture more complicated is going to increase those costs.

All AWS (and co) did was offer a platform for building complicated architectures. The market response was overwhelmingly positive, and entire new engineering disciplines sprung up around managing and building these new complicated architectures.

Migrating them is typically rather difficult and high cost, but everybody knew this from the beginning, and this is what the customers want. The PaaS providers could maybe do something here or there to make it easier, but there’s nothing they can do to address the fundamental problem.

Production workloads are incredibly difficult to move, regardless of location.

Yeah I just googled it when I posted that comment. How disappointingly stupid.

Israel is ultimately unimportant to every other country in the world, and the argument that they contribute anything to regional stability is rather laughable. What is important is that we contribute to the defence of our allies, but they are an incredibly low quality ally. Regional stability is arguably a lot more important to Saudi Arabia (a country that has never tried to sink any US navy ships I might add).

I remember the house buying as being very basic. You could buy a house, fill it with items, sell the house, steal all the items from it, and buy it back for less, as many times as you like. I also remember being rather frustrated I couldn’t pull the sword out of the stone by becoming max good, to I gave up and became max evil, much to the disappointment of my character’s wife.

Having worked with a large number of researchers, this wasn’t my experience at all. A very common moan to hear was that they were underpaid, underfunded, and that if only the public was smart enough to understand the value of their work, then those problems would be immediately solved. This vague contempt for the public that funded them also seemed to be rather disconnected from any reasonable assessment of how valuable their work actually was.

Offshoring parts of your supply chain (and to high income countries no less) is your idea of colonial imperialism?

In principal I agree, but there is a benefit that you're missing out. The fact that the US is in a constant state of war for so long has made it by far the best country at doing war. Aside from being better equipped than probably the rest of the world's armed forces combined, the US armed forces are broadly speaking the most experienced and competent armed forces in the world, with the only countries that come somewhat close being the ones who regularly join us on our stupid wars.

The effects of inexperience and general unreadiness amongst some of our biggest adversaries are currently on display for all to see in Ukraine.

Not that I'm saying this is an adequate justification for any of the terrible wars we've waged, but it is an outcome that should be accounted for.

Globalization is not at all designed to exploit inequalities, it is in fact the exact opposite. The purpose of globalization is to increase the efficiency of the global economy, and the effect that has is to minimize inequality. Which is how China has ended up with the worlds largest middle class, Mexico has ended up with a very respectable middle class, and the middle class in India is growing at quite an impressive rate, despite all the other problems those countries have. It is also the reason that hunger/malnutrition and deprivation in general have been on a rather steady downwards trend over the past 80 years, "the 99%" are the primary benefactors of the improvements in quality of life that it has brought with it.

None of this would be possible without the security provided by the militaries of the western democracies. Strong militaries don't cause this outcome, but they are 100% required if you are trying to create it. The only way to prevent all of those bad things that you have the described western militaries doing from happening where you live is to have the protection of a strong military yourself. This is such a plainly obvious fact, denying it is about on par with the "defund the police" rationale. Sure they can do bad things, and that can be addressed, but society needs the military possibly even more than it needs the police.

The US foreign territories have nothing to do with resource extraction. They're primarily maintained to provide strategic territory to the US armed forces.

Historically, it is minuscule. It wasn’t too long ago that waging a war for too long would bankrupt most countries, but the US has been waging wars for almost the entire time it’s existed, and it’s managed to build the worlds largest economy while doing it. But you’re suggesting we debate whether defence spending should be 3 percent rather than 4 of GDP. If all of our allies properly contributed to our defence, it could probably be 2 or less. I’m not a big supporter of government spending, but the effectiveness of our defence spending for its tiny relative cost is remarkable compared to literally any other period in history.

Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life. The ability to load a huge defenceless cargo ship full of billions of dollars worth of goods and send it anywhere in the world is. The ability to choose how we govern ourselves is. The fact that it’s a reasonable expectation that we will have most of the fundamental needs of life provided to us no matter what is. None of that is backwards, all of it very obviously depends on our defence capability, and regardless of what you think about the quality of western democracies, we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life.

Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies.

Personally I can’t imagine not understanding that the defence funding is one of the most essential factors in enabling our modern way of life. It’s been so effective at providing the security needed to produce globalisation and highly democratic societies, that a lot of people have forgotten the reason we need it in the first place. Certainly worth the minuscule portion of GDP we allocate to it.

I don’t think it’s pure curiosity. Maybe physicists are driven by passion, but everybody understands that new physics has historically unlocked a lot of new technology.

I also don’t think that the public really has much of a say in what gets tax payer funding. Governments are just bureaucratic behemoths and once they start paying for something, they can almost never find an acceptable way to stop. Additionally I’ve never met a tax funding recipient that was grateful to be getting it, if anything the perspective that they should be entitled to even more is a lot more common.

If you can convince yourself that your problems are caused by modern novelties, then you don’t need to address the tricky problem of what’s actually causing them (it’s probably yourself). Any sort of scapegoating like this is going to have a lot of popular appeal.

There’s not a lot of solid state nitrogen or metallic powders in an airport. The rest of the high explosives that I’m aware of are all rather dense organics. Possessing those things is how you get yourself selected for secondary screening.

Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.

I don’t know how those scanners work, but I’ve always presumed they’re looking for individual chemicals. There’s not many you’d need to detect to find explosives (probably just high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen and metals?)

Well not intentionally engineered by the CIA, but definitely the result of their engineering. Much like the rise to power of our brave allies the Afghani mujahideen, and many others…

I’m struggling to believe that a qualified accountant said that. Tax avoidance is completely legal, if it becomes illegal, then that’s called tax evasion.

Avoidance and “minimisation” are the same thing, evasion is a crime.