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Yes, but to clarify, it's a particular sort of "grin and bear it". Stamina and stoicism in a hopeless situation, absolutely yes! Cybersecurity is a losing battle. It's being a tiny resistance against an unstoppable tide. But it's not the same "grin and bear it" as in most workplaces, like following stupid orders. On the contrary, I'm looking for initiative, confident self-leadership in recruits. Because, frankly, nobody knows what they're doing in cybersecurity, especially at the top where most CISOs are following a Microsoft script, or shooting for "compliance" (which is not the same thing as security). People who have that "protect the team" instinct and call it how it is, are pure gold.

You're absolutely right. I did hear a few of those. And there was as much shame as pride in the old stories.

Got a 2005 Asus EEPC netbook hanging around that is still part of the family and does useful work. Battery still good (replaced twice) and a few scratches on the screen and a broken key. Took it on the train with me recently as I just needed to read some PDF files and so scpd them to it and threw it in a bag.

Looking after electronics, repairing stuff and treating it with respect is just part of my way. That one has an old Puppy Linux on it. Works fine.

The original sense of the word "materialism" is a respect for material things - it's a very positive word. But it changed in the 80s (probably after Madonna's "Material Girl" :) to mean something negative and shallow.)

Excellent initiative. It's not just code, as in development, but we are desperate for good people in cybersecurity who can handle network security, complex operational procedures, data handling and compartmentalisation... a good service record is literally worth an honours degree. And age is a positive factor.

I noticed that the author put their email address clearly at the very top of the article. At least they eat their own dogfood.

However, the problem is the great many excellent online writers do everything they can to make themselves hard to contact. Worst of all are those professional writers who work for major publications. Their interaction model is sniping from bushes on the hillside rather than deigning to descend amongst the filthy masses and speak face to face as a peer.

Very much this. The world has changed. It used to be that assuming other people have a low capacity for political reason was itself a "political position" - namely elitism. Folks like Orwell come from a long, long tradition of the educated and socially astute working class. Social media turned the joy of everyday political banter, rational scepticism, and good-natured disputation into a bourgeois pissing contest with seemingly life-or-death stakes.

Ambiguity is a feature for propaganda. If people project random hopes and fears onto buzzwords that gets them talking and serves sales well. In an imaginary world where people were highly educated and journalists honest and specific, new advances would be taken-up quickly by a small group of beneficiaries and everyone else would move on. The idea of software "agents" is of course nothing new. "Buzz" - AKA "the warm thrill of confusion and space-cadet glow" appeals primarily to the idea that "this changes everything!". The smoke and mirrors machine never sleeps.

I don't envy any referee who hopes to keep politics and technology in separate corners and playing by Queensberry Rules. But good luck all the same.

> as institutional memory fades

This has nothing to do with institutional memory fading. It's to do with the total destruction of those institutions and the disappearance of the rule of law within the United States.

Things are moving too fast for people to adjust to the new reality. and so writers keep framing things in ways that are no longer relevant.

What actual institutional position or activity does the EFF suppose would effectively counter this in April 2025?

You don't need to take umbridge because your story is not everyones story. Unless you're claiming to speak for every serving person on the planet since 1949?

Now think, what do you suppose is the reason someone getting chewed out for scribbling on a shell really is when those are being used in a dubious theatre? (hint: attribution) The absurdity is the real crime.

And sitting on an airfield for months at a time bored senseless, it used to be cool to paint insulting platitudes like "Eat this MOFO" on munitions. Now:

1) Blowing kids to smithereens must be done in a politically correct fashion, even while violating the Geneva convention.

2) Nobody is sure who the enemy will actually be next week, so it would be shame to have to repaint them.

Yuri Bezmenov, a defector and ex-KGB analyst spoke publicly in the 80s about the "long game". What he described is pretty much a blueprint for everything we've seen in the past few years.

Most of them were told "Never, ever speak about any of this".

And they didn't.

Like the Zanryu Nipponhei [0], they were loyal to the last. Even my own father kept things about his airforce days way too tightly wrapped up long, long after the official secrets sell-by date. I have some admiration for this, but in the end it's a loss to historical record.

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

As the internet descends into naked lawlessness and technofascism the future of almost everything is allowlisting (whitelisting) and various zero-trust [0] strategies.

A lot of what we've previously considered "core estate" (Google, Microsoft. Amazon, Meta....) will be on the outside.

Remember Robert De Niro in "Meet the Fockers"? [1]

Circle of trust. And you ain't in it....

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Fockers

> We need to understand the origins of the Trump blitzkrieg to counter it

Nothing to "understand". Trump is and always has been a Kremlin agent.

In the worst case Wikipedia will have to relocate to Europe and block the entire ASN of US network estates. But if the United States is determined to commit digital and economic suicide, I don't see how reasonable people can stop that.

> Why would you crawl the web interface when the data is so readily available in a even better format?

To cause deliberate harm as a DDOS attack. Perhaps a better question is, why would companies who hope to replace human-curated static online information with their own generative service not use the cloak of "scraping" to take down their competition?

This is entirely as it is supposed to operate. See Archibald Tuttle [0]. Cowardly, weak little men who would never have the nerve to look another in the eye, are depicted in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" in a different way to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. Whereas the "Thought Police" of the latter are happy to use violence, the grey bureaucrats of Gilliam's world hide behind malfunctioning machinery which is their unpredictable attack dog. As with weapon dogs it is a vicarious instrument which they claim to have "no control over".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

Soldering to germanium? Personally I wouldn't have even tried such a method - rather pin the crystal between two spung gold contacts.

The kicker is it's not really a dichotomy either. Academia and industry have gotten closer together, colluding to decide what research is funded and what is silently dropped, what is taught and what never makes it onto the curriculum. This is even framed as a good thing by governments who talk of academic-industry "alignment" and how the academy "serves" industry. It's a way to get public money for training that is a subsidy to commercial interests.

"Objective" higher education and research designed to shape industry by genuine innovation is as rare as rocking-horse shit - mainly in niche areas of physics or biotech that don't have any commercial application yet.. but might one day.

Also typeset in a non-fixed width font with long lines truncated to fit the copy layout!

Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake is to identify them with individual responsibility. Do you blame Newton every time a vase falls off a shelf?

You might enjoy Rick Roderick's "Masters of Suspicion" where he talks about the influence (and perceived influence) of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and some other individuals credited with "changing the world".

  "You notice I haven’t given an analysis of the Enlightenment but of
   modernity, of modernisation, of the advance of capital, because
   four pedants don’t make an age. And two or three weird philosophers
   don’t give birth to a century of unreason. You know, Nietzsche
   didn’t, you know, from his drawing room give birth to a century of
   cannonade, slaughter, concentration camps, CIA subterfuge, the
   raping and the murdering of nuns, the bombing of continents, the
   despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet! Four or five
   pedants do not have that much power, and never have. That’s just a
   sort of bugbear. They didn’t 'unleash unreason on the world'
   Jesus... how crazy can some people get. I mean, even in the
   postmodern world you shouldn't be that crazy, to say that three or
   four pedants invented this stuff. " -- R. Roderick Nietzsche’s
   Progeny (1991)

The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical populist individuals and small unaffiliated groups of thinkers able to operate without material resources. The Goldilocks zone of quiet, contemplative science, of whimsical, "high-risk" enquiry reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is gone in the 21st century.

The key argument I read here is that, due to specialisation, academic philosophy is currently unfit to apprehend today's problems. It is no longer capable of incorporating politics, and politics itself has escaped rational discourse. Historians are enjoying some new limelight, and popular value-revisionism is in the air, at least if Lucy Worsley's BBC series is anything to go by.

The question is: "What is progress, really?"

This tired old contention that some great historical thinker is somehow single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation is nothing more than railing against intellect itself.

Sure here's something very simple take [0].

This is for RF, and you probably need less bandwidth. Search on Robert Penfold hobby designs for noise generators for audio too. In practice you'll need to do a few things to get a good digital noise source with proper entropy.

1) Shield it! What you want is noise from the bandgap transition not from your local radio station or ambient "cosmic" noise.

2) Thermally stabilise it.

3) Convert to a digital stream. A Schmitt gate with properly set hysteresis to get clean edge transitions and a 1-bit sampling circuit.

The whole design should cost you a few bucks and be buildable in hours. Maybe use a USB audio dongle (minus the DC block capacitors) as an easy-in for your digital side.

[0] https://www.radiohobbyist.org/blog/?p=1884

[1] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/schmitt-trigger/

I have a reverse biased OA91 germanium diode here that cost $0.05 and does the same thing. Has the desperate search for applications of "quantum computing" really come to this?

Tbh I've never felt the SV culture (or the HN ethos around here) is representative of the USA generally. They do say "rugged individualism leads to ragged individuals". My experience of the many USians I know personally is positively humane albeit they are all too easily led and prone to go along to get along in a way that is detrimental to their own interests. I think if they genuinely behaved as frontier rebels (rather than played at it) they wouldn't tolerate Trump, Musk, Vance an the like for even a few seconds.

Perhaps the Pastafarians were right? [0]

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