I don't think any security services are daft enough to have actual backdoors now. They just look for vulnerabilities and then keep quiet about them.

So I'd be more worried about the mass bricking US made routers, world-wide. Do it as a false flag, pretending to be some teenage hacker. Give their own tech a nice boost too.

It's occasional mass outages for a short time, vs more frequent small outages and security issues.

Don't forget that Cloudflare handles a lot of the security for sites that use it. Not just DDOS protection, but things like user authentication and HTTPS.

I mean it matters, not that there is good competition. Cloudflare is rather dominant.

In this case centralization isn't a bad idea. Okay, occasionally there is a problem, but when there is a massive amount of resources are thrown at it, and it gets fixed quickly. Meanwhile their software is updated and constantly tested, so it's more secure and stable than most in-house efforts. It's their full time job, where as it's usually just the IT guy's background task when the company manages it themselves.

What matters is that there is still competition, to keep the market working properly, and that such services are properly regulated.

The only laptops I'd consider to have even half decent security are Lenovo ones, and of course Lenovo is a Chinese company.

Siri has been one of the weakest assistants for many years now, and given that they usually just ship half finished software (Apple Maps comes to mind), I'm surprised they were able to resist. Maybe there is another reason, like it kills the battery.

It's interesting that there seems to be more paranoia over fears that the Chinese government may possibly have backdoors in network gear, than there is over US companies that we know for a fact have NSA backdoors in their network gear.

Your job probably has a lot of weak passwords. Humans can remember a small handful of semi-decent ones. Password managers are the way to go.

It's a grift, taking advantage of a grieving person's desire for it not to be so final, for there to be hope of seeing their loved one again.

They all have cloud sync too, and in a pinch you can look up the password on your phone and type it in.

I get not bothering when it's a throwaway account, using the built in password manager is usually the path of least resistance.

I don't think it's just that people are bad at passwords, it's that they don't care. If their account gets compromised, it will probably hurt the service provider more than it will hurt them.

Gen Z are particularly sensitive to this, because they have noticed that most of the advice they get is bunk. If they are told to protect something like a password, they are more likely to evaluate if it actually matters to them to protect it, rather than just blindly following the advice.

That said it's a little surprising that password managers aren't having a bigger effect. All the major browsers offer to create and remember strong passwords for you.

Our government seems to mostly react to Facebook posts these days. I'm sure China, Russia, and others are all busy spamming Facebook in order to destabilize us.

The plant is over half a century old, and it was originally shut down supposedly because the state cut off the subsidies. It seems very marginal to restart it now, especially if they are relying on a single customer.

At this point it's not a question of if we are screwing whales, it's how and how much. Between noise from shipping and sonar, fishing, whaling, general pollution, micro plastics, and climate change, we aren't doing them any favours.

They would rather not sell you a car. More profitable to sell you a loan to buy a car, or even better just lease it to you for a monthly fee, then take it back and sell it to someone else, maybe in a different market.

List prices are mostly to deter people buying those cars, but at least in the UK if you look around you can usually get them with a very hefty discount. Mine was about 30% off.