We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

You're off by about 3/4 of a century. Margarine became a mass market thing around the civil war era, if not a little before. Perhaps corpos strongly pushing margarine as a healthy alternative to butter began around WWII. Of course like most marketing, it is almost entirely bullshit.

Don't verb my pronouns! That's repressive wordism!

In the case of kits like that, it's more likely that being a low volume business, that sort of thing will be handled by a contractor who already has an injection molding line which has capacity to spare, and the completion--retail boxing, inspection, cutting spruces etc) would be done by the kit maker.

Yes on all counts, sometimes they even share the same office.

I wouldn't be fine with that. Someone would probably "buy" something because they wanted to have it available indefinitely. If they later found that their "permanent" purchase was revoked, they might no longer have the option to buy it elsewhere because it was no longer available, even if they did have that option available when they first "bought" the product from the other vendor. It's still a scam in the lying vendor's favour.

Of course you want off-site backups. And everyone has been doing that for decades so I don't see the problem with that.

Streaming replication of databases and the like is pretty much ubiquitous as well.

What exactly did you think all those big cloud services were doing for their managed database offerings?

Have you... heard of backups at all?

If the kind of site that would host this kind of system internally at an organisation like a police service has been catastrophically damaged then you probably have bigger problems than the time it takes to restore a backup.

The British government has some excellent IT people. It's a meme really that Civil Service staff are only there for the jobs for life because they couldn't make it in the private sector. The GDS team in particular have successfully automated a huge variety of government interactions with tens of millions of people and for example are widely regarded as having some of the best UX design and accessibility experts anywhere. Building on that to support other government activity, including internal functions not normally seen by the public, would have made a lot of sense. In the longer term we're going to want people like that dealing with the astronomical challenge of modernising NHS IT.

Surely, if someone requires a social worker and a therapist, it is an indictment against that person being a normally functioning, mentally healthy individual. Something was up with him which caused the parents to seek out that sort of help.

This looks like it might be a useful feature for some users. If it is clearly advertised and using it is optional, I'm not sure I see a problem here.

Is there any (non-tinfoil) expectation that any related behaviour in Firefox is not being added transparently and optionally? The description seems ambiguous about what triggers these previews. If merely hovering over a link would be enough to cause a visit to another page then personally that's probably something I'd want to turn off. Others might have a different attitude to risk there. In any case, if there's some kind of active choice where you need to click or press in a specific way to trigger it, that seems reasonable.

Don't worry, Microsoft has you covered. In a couple of months, Windows 10 will also be EOL. And there are millions of computers that could run Windows 7 or Windows 10 but can't run Windows 11.

Your long winded analogy is flawed on so many levels. Let me correct it for you. We will stick with the Americans vs Aliens scenario:

The Aliens and Americans were part of the same country for quite some time. The aliens had originally conquered America, and America became intertwined socially, economically, culturally and even genetically. One day, the aliens government fails, they spin America off into its own country, and left some of its people behind, as they have been there many generations. The Americans then treat the aliens as second class citizens, Balkanized into a section of the eastern seaboard, near the aliens mothership. They will not acknowledge the alien culture or language, even though it's quite similar to standard Murrican. To the uneducated outsider there is barely a difference racially, culturally, linguistically, but nonetheless they see a difference.

The American government proceeds to supply its militias and tacitly supports them as they shell, machine gun and harass the aliens. Aliens are killed by the thousands over many years, all the while the world turns a blind eye. The new alien government in the mothership scolds America and warns they will use their death ray to attack America if they don't stop.

America does not stop, and the violence escalates. In response, the aliens hover their drone ship over Boston harbor and use their ion canon to capture the area. The americans are completely unprepared and are easily overwhelmed.

Some peace accords are made, but they are soon forgotten, and America resumes punishing the aliens but now they're armed with more advanced weapons supplied by the rest of the worlds militaries.

The aliens continue to warn America, and posture their clone army, and the attacks continue. This time, the aliens deploy their mothership and launch a ground invasion.

That was at least 500% more apt than your analogy.