To add to your excellent list of impedances: All of the largely useless inspections required during construction that can extend construction time itself months. My favorite was the addition of sheet rock inspections following the Chinese sheet rock formaldehyde debacle. By the time the rules were in place (and of course they cover much more than the quality of the raw material), suppliers were already making darn sure they were not receiving unusable sheet rock but now every builder in the U.S. and Canada has to pause in the middle of construction until an inspector deigns to sign off on the sheet rocking.

You are not thinking like an information operations person. Think fake, but effective October surprise news releases. Fake videos that create credible SWAT situations near a key polling place. All you have to do is dishearten people into not voting or make it harder for one subset of people to vote.

Under our current laws, it is the person holding the camera or the microphone that owns the content recorded. We have to change our copyright laws so that WE own our own likenesses. Then, based on their work with the RIAA, the FBI would consider a non-consenting photo or simulacrum "theft".

There is something seriously wrong with how this problem was tackled. The bot seems to have no cognizance of how cities are typically structured bureaucratically and does not recognize entities like "City Attorney Office" -- which in New York is called "New York City Law Department". ChatGPT however does seem to possess this understanding about New York City. It feels like they trained on just the city website contents without enough supporting documents about cities in general. Their fear of a porn hallucination made them overly curtail the training corpus. Or maybe it was the fear of the bill.

I have also been through this with a couple of companies that thought they were not making the money that they should be making and basically didn't know what to do or how to run the company in a better way. These companies all ultimately folded after trying to take the advice from the consultants who of course knew even less about the company than the executives.

So it is either
Option A: The executives hired McKinsey with a plan that will likely destroy the organization as we know it
Option B: The executives are incompetent and executing on the advice from McKinsey will destroy the organization as we know it

McKiney is the company that:
- Advised AT&T in the 1990s that cellphones would only have 900,000 subscribers by 2000, when the actual number was 108 million
- Recommended SwissAir's "hunter strategy" in the 1990s, which led to the airline's bankruptcy in 2001
- Advised the General Electric strategy that resulted in the company losing $1 billion prior to the 2007 financial crisis
- Approved the disastrous $350 billion merger between Time Warner and AOL, which is considered one of the greatest corporate disasters of all time
- Had a close relationship with Enron for 15 years

that's basic economics right? :/

Or if you are one of those anti-capitalist communists you might say this is evidence of collusion even if the people colluding never talked to each other. (Ignoring for the moment that they all happened to share their proprietary business information with a 3rd party that they paid to help them choose optimal rents).

We elected one of the most selfish and disrespectful persons in the country as President of the United States. Many of the issues in this article come down to what is fundamentally selfish and disrespectful behavior. What do we expect? Children to not follow the lead of the President of the United States?

Apple has serialized all parts so that they could accomplish parts pairing. So Apple can easily their database of parts-used available to be checked for stolen parts in order to continue to disincentivize theft. It really is up to Apple to use this data for good rather than evil.

This would be a nightmare for Facebook if everyone filed individual federal lawsuits over this under the CFAA. Facebook seems to have checked all the boxes on this:

Federal law regarding unauthorized use of a computing device primarily falls under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is a United States cybersecurity law. Under the CFAA, there are several requirements that must generally be met to sue someone for unauthorized use of a computing device:
1. Access without authorization: The defendant must have accessed a computer system or network without authorization or exceeded authorized access. This means they accessed a computer or network they weren't supposed to access or they exceeded the access they were granted.
2. Intent: The defendant must have acted intentionally or knowingly. This means they knowingly accessed the computer system without authorization or exceeded their authorized access.
3. Damage or loss: The unauthorized access must have caused damage or loss. This could be damage to the computer system itself, loss of data, financial loss, or other tangible harm.
4. Interstate or foreign communication: The CFAA applies to conduct involving interstate or foreign communication or commerce. This means the unauthorized access must have involved interstate or foreign communication or commerce, such as accessing a computer system connected to the internet.
5. Exceeding authorized access: Alternatively, if the defendant had authorized access to the computer system but exceeded that authorized access, they may still be liable under the CFAA. This can include situations where an employee misuses their access rights to a company's computer system.

Of course this came from my favorite lawyer, ChatGPT so cave lector.

Many people who think they still have a landline really have a cell adapter attached to their house. If their last service "repair" resulted in them having an electrical adapter plugged in with a wire going through the wall of their house ... then their land line only goes as far as the exterior of their house. AT&T has been making these sorts of "repairs" for over a decade now. I'm sure the other providers are doing it to.

Fetal cells, including stem cells migrate to the mother. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Women can gain better immunity, healing, even new cells for their brains. But they can loose if this results in an auto-immune disease -- women are 4X more likely than men to get many autoimmune diseases.

Many corporate network security teams break and inspect SSL. End-point security tools used by IT often inject a generic cert in the CA store to make this seamless. So the MitM is often the IT org. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's own network security team requested this change. They work for one of the few companies where the OS of all of the user-endpoints are all their company's product.

The CISPE post states:

the only viable option in some specific cloud sector applications which must be certified by software or service providers"

But I can't find any actual related European regulation other than CISPE's own "Code of Conduct" requiring certified providers. Is it just that CISPE managed to interject themselves into contracting language which has resulted in contracts being only able to be fulfilled by VMWare?

Is this just an angry "dumped lover" break-up letter?

There are two kinds of CS colleges: 1) Preparing students for grad school -- this is most of the "elite" programs. 2) Preparing students for jobs -- the schools many employers eschew. The best option 2 schools have seniors work on a big project using git, unit tests, build pipelines, etc. The kids that attend an option 1 school and then do not go to grad school are also often not prepared to work -- especially if they only studied CS for career reasons and do not actually enjoy programming.

The Russians are famous for using reflected microwaves for surveillance -- see the Wikipedia page on the "The Thing aka the Great Seal bug". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Note the date of discovery: 1952! In the 1950s microwaves were not part of our ambient environment. Today with WiFi, cell phones, etc. we live in an ambient microwave environment which means the base carrier for a microwave reflection listening device would have to be orders of magnitude more powerful than was required in the 1950s in order to get a detectable reflected signal above the modern microwave noise ceiling.

I doubt the initial harm was intentional, since the whole point of using microwaves this way is to be able to listen without having a bug that can be detected. My take is this is the result of the Russians (or someone who learned from the Russians) trying to use a technique that used to work. They sent someone to collect intelligence and due to things like WiFi and cell phones they were having a hard time getting the old technique to work, so they kept increasing the power until they could get a signal.

You have to think about the type of personnel that are given these intelligence collection jobs. In the U.S. it would be a bright high school graduate that has a can-do attitude, has been enlisted in the military for a decade or more and is trained on the specific piece of equipment. They are told to turn a given knob until they can detect a signal. The ramifications of the knob turning would be largely glossed over in the training.

If you were to walk around a room being bathed in microwaves like this with a microwave SWR power meter, you would find wildly varying power levels on a centimeter by centimeter basis. So one person could be fine while standing in front of another person receiving brain damage. And the specific part of the brain would be different from person to person resulting in different symptoms. Microwave ovens have turntables for this exact reason. A still/sleeping person would be most vulnerable to brain damage.

This sort of activity is detectable, (e.g. Acousticom 2 RF Microwave Meter consumer product $200, or component-level Analog Devices AD8363 for $100) and can also be screened out using wire meshes and the sort of conductive features used in microwave oven windows. I don't understand why we wouldn't screen our facilities and install detectors on the outside of the screening. We have known about the possibility of these sorts of collection methods for decades and yet it seems we have done little to detect them or prevent them from working.