nonrandomstring

You total chaos machine!

Give a wrong time. Stop a traffic line!

I've mentioned it too often and sound like a stuck record, but Jaroslav Hasek's Svejk has it perfected [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk 11;rgb:0000/0000/0000

Funding is irrelevant and a distraction. Dismantling civil cybersecurity is a way to expose a population to influence and other harms that necessitate more "strong-man" solutions later [0,1]. Only after they've destroyed "cyber defenses" can they claim a crisis and declare "cybsersecurity is dead, long live the new cybersecurity". And you can be damn sure it won't be security for you.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/computer-security-is-a-polit...

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/usw/

The line between serious and frivolous vanished. Edutainment, gamification of work... the lines blur. I won't get into why I think this is deliberate but for many people I ask, social media occupies the same space for novel gossip as being "essential to business and career". For a proper separation of concerns I think tech is set to split into what is serious, essential, regulated - and everything else that is some variation on entertainment. Where that leaves companies that ride on deliberate ambiguity and confusion, I don't know.

I think we agree. But security is also very much about examining assumptions.

> What "people" want is already irrelevant

This! Software is stuck in some illusory ideal from the dotcom days, a global market of meritous choice. It's long been political and about sovereignty, control and security. Some comments above sing the praises of Adobe as a "no alternative" software. So, remember that time when Trump passed an executive order banning Adobe in South American countries [0]?

The US does not get to use access to tech as a weapon, so they're not good enough by wider criteria in a changing political world. It doesn't matter how good are products by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta...

I also happen to think they're technically inferior to a diverse inter-compatible and free ecosystem, but that's becoming a side show.

In a way its good that there are no European vendors. The coming change cannot be mistaken for trade preference. People are being "forced to be free" of dangerous influence [1].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49973337

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/

> seems to be no alternative

That feeling (you invoke "seems" and thus the realm of appearances) is now common in all walks of life. It has rather little to do with the reality of change. Mostly it means when change comes it's as a surprise. One of the ways to unblocking is to challenge assumptions.

I think as entrenched tech people we get even more stuck in a set of assumptions that the world is moving beyond.

Like the idea of "an OS that becomes popular" Does anybody (except us tech sorts) want that? If API interoperability exists then popularity is actually undesirable and is the root of many failure modes. Why care about popularity? People want and need at least adequate functional utility.

In many ways tech never got off the starting blocks.

50 years of commercial IT and has significantly failed to achieve many of the basics. If being able to copy a simple text file from one computer to another in 2025 is still a struggle, that's failure by any reasonable standards, and BigTech companies are right at the heart of that failure.

I've got decent challenges to many of the other seemingly "no alternative" stuckness I see in this thread, but no need to labour the point - which is to clear ones mind of unexamined assumptions.

> No. There is no vendor for this.

You seem stuck on this model and not at all open to those commentators who are saying the single product vendor model itself is the problem?

My observation is that, regardless the myriad solutions based on strongly enforced interoperability standards, no government has ever had the courage to directly go up against US technopoly. I can see that changing at last. And my goodness, what a long, long, dark time it's been coming.

Fluid mechanics has always seemed so complex that scientists joke about it. Supposedly [0] Werner Heisenberg and/or Horace Lamb quipped that when they died they'd ask God about relativity, quantum electrodynamics and turbulence... and they didn't expect he would have an answer for the last.

[0] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-heisenberg-really-say-...

As someone who loves to cook I think kitchen advances are somewhat overlooked, from pressure cookers to microwaves to air-fryers, IR ovens and all sorts of amazing combos, hand blenders and whatnot Time to make good home food got much shorter and more energy efficient.

Edit: showing my age, cos that's 80s, not 90s. In fact I think pressure cookers got popular in the mid 70s.

In Britain young people say "Leave me in peace". Peace is the state of being left alone, not just an absence of violence. Only later, adults develop separate notion of "privacy", a diluted and weaker version of natural 'peace'?

Indeed intelligence is contextual - with difference being an intrinsic parameter within a precarious balance of co-existence. But this misses what critics of Rority (maybe Marcuse) mocked as something university professors could all politely agree on, but Charles Manson might not get with the programme. Some minds (and there are plenty) just don't have reasonable coexistence on their radar. No amount of talk or negotiation wll ever fix that. And it's likely those would be the first kinds of artificial minds to emerge - rather than Einstein or Socrates.

Something worth knowing is that "attribution" is extremely difficult.

Also "attribution engineering" is really quite easy and difficult to see through.

Often the purpose of a hack is not to exfiltrate data or sabotage systems but is exactly to direct blame (or sometimes distract/misdirect)

Indeed in vault 5 of Snowden's NSA leaks an "attribution engineering toolkit" was a interesting find. Malware is almost always engineered to throw forensic investigators off the scent.

That all said, I think this incident happening in US gov, in the current climate, without immediate urgent investigation is scandalous and in itself an indicator of deeper and very serious skulduggery.

This is a smoking gun. I'm a little shocked at how little MSM coverage this is getting and the moral gymnastics some commentators are performing to lend a veneer of innocence to this. It's an incident on par with 1950s Cambridge ring [0] and I cannot understand why an investigation team from the Pentagon are not all over this kicking-in doors and taking names?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five

> Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students.

Gaining focus as a skill is something to work on with every batch of new students

We're on the same page. I'm turning that around to say: let's remember focus isn't something we're naturally born with, it has to be built. Worked on hard. People coming to that task are increasingly damaged/injured imho.

We agree on human incompleteness. One limitation of recent tree-dwellers on utterly unremarkable small blue-green planets on the western spiral arm of the galaxy might be how we think about things like "consistent"? Or "knowable"? What if those things weren't a component of intelligence at all, but features a singularity which looks different depending on which side you approach it from? In maths, that's not even weird? [0]

[0] https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/yip-2025/

This quote stood out:

  "It’s not so much that people are persecuted because of their
  beliefs, but there is a certain trend where careful reasoning, the
  search for truth, all the delicacies of having a balanced point of
  view, acting on facts, being honest about what you do and don’t
  know, your uncertainty, all these values we have in science and
  scholarship are at risk."

Isn't this epistemic crisis [0]. I think mistrust in the world increased to the extent the it got digital, but taking advantage of crisis, even conjuring untruth, mistrust and polycrisis [1] as a smokescreen strategy for taking control is also a basic Machiavelli thing, right?. This (epistemic injury) is more easily done to already traumatised people. Germans of 1930s, already reeling from recent war, were vulnerable to a rampage of anti-intellectualism and a bonfire of knowledge.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/book/26406/chapter/194768451

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20210209-the-greatest-s...

From TFA abstract:

  "For example, students often redirected questions from their peers
  to generative AI instead of providing assistance themselves,
  undermining peer interaction. Students also reported feeling
  increasingly isolated and demotivated as the social support systems
  they rely on begin to break down."

It's odd how easily an author can place two sentences next to one another without noticing a bizarre anomaly, contradiction, "begging the question", or raising a new stark question.

Here, we can reduce it to something like: Students feel isolated because they choose to isolate themselves.

I don't think the study or abstract is "wrong". just that it's missing something extremely important about the psychology and politics of "AI".

Information not inflamation. Please.

We are not "silent", we're just not being heard. Those are not the same things. You'll find plenty of critique and analysis, anticipating and commenting on the unfolding cybsersecurity calamity [0,1,2] ...

[0] https://www.schneier.com/

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/

[2]https://www.dataandpolitics.net/trump-is-a-critical-vulnerab...

When those who own and control the means of discourse are donors to, and so in collusion with the problem, don't expect to hear opposition.

> laws of nature "must" be shorter

Coming at this from philosophy of science rather than as a physicist, I feel those quotes around "must".

I think you also recognise how that might be a sort of "fundamentally wrong assumption".

Imagine your words replayed 50 years in the future, not on physics but applied tp the problem of general AI/sentience.

  "The equations that we already have are sufficient to describe human
  thought to 99.9999999% but they are a hodge podge of several
  different theories...."

Whereupon a psychologist/neuroscientist in any epoch would say:

  "Why on Earth are you looking for a *singular*, unified explanation
  of human experience?"

What you can have is a set of "best they can be", internally self-consistent and well evidenced theories, none of which can ever fully explain the system - and that is the nature/feature of the system. Isn't that what Godel and Russell showed us?

A punchy article that centres on the concept of trust. Yesterday I wrote this one [0] with similar themes.

The idea that the US administration is turning against the existing trust-based cybersecurity order is terrifying and almost unthinkable. But history shows rising authoritarian regimes usually scrub existing security apparatus before bringing in their own.

In this case they're attacking an international order, and that could lead to the US soon being on the outside of the network it (DARPA) built.

It's something I hope to talk to a resistance group "We The Builders" [1] about.

[0] https://www.cybershow.uk/blog/posts/usw/

[1] https://www.wethebuilders.org/posts/next-generation-of-emplo...

Or maybe there's nothing wrong with the equations, they're just the wrong equations. Or based on a fundamentally wrong assumption.

CAs are a horrendous weakness, but are still a "pillar" weakness and not even a "base" problem. In other words the threat exists not because of a base technological capability or necessity, but because we _choose_ to stick our fingers in a blender and play with the switch. Like the liquidity deadlock persisting the post 1929 depression these things happen because humans, collectively are clinically insane in surrendering before systems (hubris, pride, social control). No one dares to override the system. In reality decisive emergency action can mitigate such sticky situations.

We also worry about existential threats from "class" points of weakness. Like a mathematical breakthrough that makes factoring large primes or mapping elliptic curves trivial. Again here, one can imagine that were it possible to entirely switch-off encryption and return to early 1990s operation, even a catastrophic class failure would not be that bad - we'd just have a massive cybercrime and infosec problem instead of a systemic failure.

Real dangers come from systems where logical regression is strictly not possible. A base weakness like a backdoor or fault in every ARM or Intel processor that could brick half the devices on Earth is a likely cause of widespread civic harm - because it could be unrecoverable, turning devices into e-waste overnight. Crowdstrike had a flavour of this because it reminded us that computers are actually pieces of hardware in data centres that can need manually rebooting or need human physical intervention at scale.

> piñatas

Thanks for that word. I'm probably not smart enough to get your exact point, but I just had a nice dive into Mexican culture.

The last people I am ever going to trust about matters of security is US BigTech. Consortium or not. This idea has no legs. We absolutely need an international cyber threat intelligence network, with many checks, balances and oversights. If we're going to ask "who funds it?" then we need to ask "who really benefits from a technology industry?"

Amidst all the inhumane political calamity TFA hits on the most interesting sounding discussion on the limits of rational perception, relation of computabilty and knowability. That's a talk I'd like to see.

Good point. Yes I think I miss that of Slashdot too. There's such a thing as a healthy amount of banter, and the good stuff (not overly sardonic) takes the edge off the doom imho.

Yes. It's consistently very well filtered. This article is fairly typical, if you have the patience for such thorough long-form analysis.

I'm not familiar with Reddit, but assume it descended into total clownery. Hence the rules "don't comment that this place is starting to get like Reddit" I guess.

Mine started 5/6, but the more recent books are made for kids. The earlier newspaper cartoons are not. Same with TV, the later Japanese/Dutch produced TV series is lovely. The earlier TV series (there are several) are dark as the cupboard under the stairs and the Groke goes postal killing everything in one.

[0] https://www.moomin.com/en/blog/moomin-tv-animations/