Its entirely about this. Either the ML will be the new printing press or it won't but if it is they want to make sure the crown remains in control of it this time, and damn sure they are the royalty.

Right because of the regulations, that already exist.

Anyone actually responsible for engineering at a coal fired generating station will tell you they are running a "flue gas remediation facility" that happens to generate a little electricity as it is.

Let me first say - I think you are correct

but - I also don't think that is the only explanation. One other I think reasonably likely possibility is they are hedging. The law gives the POTUS authority to delay enforcement for some additional months if he finds there is 'progress' being made toward divestment.

Progress - is one of those squishy bits of language that can mean anything anyone wants it to mean. TikTok knows they are popular with the Biden voter, and they know an election is coming. Even thought he initial drop dead date is after the election, there isn't anything to say Biden can't announce they are being given the extension early. They might want to secure the extra time by threatening to take their ball and go home. There is not grantee they will be able to get an injunction or stay while they fight this in court, or they might simply want to secure a few extra months to see home many young Americans they can convince to become transexuals.

except that fore the most part education and the ability of the public to think critically have not changed THAT much.

Its the social media that is new, and the degree of near constant coupling to it via smart phone that is newer still.

So using a little of that 'critical thinking' clearly you are wrong and social media is very much the problem.

I would like to think the ascendant wing of the GOP is the Goldwatter wing.

Nixon was were things started to go wrong and we are going to put it right; by moving to the right.

And in all likelihood the current leadership will be 'proven right' in terms of profitability. Its not like Boeing can actually fail no matter how many of their plans fall out of the sky. They are TBTF/Strategically_Important dear old Uncle Sam will step in a save them somehow no matter what. Sure if things get embarrassing enough some of the top dogs are send off with their severance packages (large enough to completely alter the life of anyone commenting here) so what do they care as individuals?

You want to crank the cynicism all the way to 11 - They have made the right call. Pumping the stock so they could sell off the options over the years, and converting the value of the company to cash dividends was and likely remains a lot more valuable than trying to build a competitive or even safe aircraft; at least as far as anyone with interest more significant than exposure via some mutual fund someplace, or handful of shares in trading account.

The ghost writers have gone along with it and I think really shot themselves in the foot.

We are still getting new Tom Clancy novels. Sure you can look below the line any see who actually wrote it but that isn't the big bold letters on the cover. This is true for a lot of the popular "air port series", I guess Lee Child is actually still writing his own books.

How are new authors supposed to make a name for themselves when marketing all goes to guys already in the ground. The authors actually writing those books have more or less allowed themselves to be comoditized and just wait for the LLMs to come for them...

I don't fundamentally disagree. The thing is Azure is to big and complex with to many cooks in the kitchen for there being really any hope of getting it right.

Microsoft absolutely needs to have a hard, delete after-N policy, and then start writing very specific exceptions around certain critical components of Azure infrastructure. The Federal government should be 'beta-testing' the could with the rest of Industry. Azure / Office 365 are good examples of to much to fast at to high a value.

No its 100x worse than that. Its probably coming from the coal plant in another state like the story about all the Data Centers near DC.

They need to Coal power (because coal keeps the lights on) because the renables don't cut it; they suck for super dense constant base loads. However since the green morons decided to make it impossible to burn coal near by the grid operators and generation people are tearing up more of the WV mountains and cutting up the valleys on Northen VA to run more transmission lines.

Study after study has shown the importance of large UNBROKEN areas of habitat for wildlife. Slicing up what little we have left on the Eastern half the US to run more high voltage lines is terribly short sighted and stupid. Wind and Solar might be low carbon but as gird solutions they aint green!

So much this. The Intel lobby practically just burnt down congress, (it sure as-f**k looks like they blackmailed the speaker of the House) to defeat having to even get a warrant for spying from their special FISA court, when the 'F' (foreign) part is deeply in question.

That does suggest to me its time to 'trust them' more and just hand over the keys to all communications privacy. They basically finished throwing a tantrum and screaming about how they can't do their jobs AND respect the Constitutional rights of the public.

Yes I realize this is the EU but come on right after spooks ram rod the privacy shredding 702 thru congress suddenly the issue comes to the fore other side the Atlantic... right like the 5-eyes cool kids are not coordinating their abuse of democracy..

Actually they were extremely careful and slowly wormed their way into a maintainer ship position via sock-puppets and astroturfing where they could insert code with perhaps less scrutiny than say trying to trojan some pull request. Then they put most of the payload in some binary material that ships with the software rather than source codes someone would likely feed to some SAST tool or otherwise audit effectively as part of due diligence. They did this over a long span of time and did legitimate maintenance work as well.

  All and all its worrying that it happened but it also suggest the overall pipeline and checks and balances as far as what makes it to a general release in the major Linux distributions is 'really pretty solid'. Someone put a good deal of analysis and long term effort into backdooring the big distros and it still failed. As you say perhaps one of the reasons it failed was because they saw their window of opportunity closing and had to do move quicker leading to the performance issue the Microsoft engineer noticed.

There again this is case where 'many eyes' really should be credited, and of course Freund who actually found it; more so than anything Microsoft the organization was/is doing. He wasn't doing security specific work, and he's just a good engineer that happened to be in the right place to spot a problem!

Logs are often a huge liability. I am not saying this is right, but in my experience very very few IT shops treat them like tier one confidentiality required data that they are.

developers rarely think critically about what can end up in a log, operating under the assumption that whatever logging framework is responsible for sinking them somewhere safe and if anyone has access all bets are already off; of course in the era of centralized logging, SEIM analysis, and data lakes etc, that is nonsense. I have seen a lot applications that have a ton code and thought dedicated to handling various types of secrets only to have it all wrapped and in
try { ... } catch ... {} catch ... {} .. catch Exception => ex { Logger.log("Unhandled " + ex.name + " exception - " + ex.message + "Sacktrace:\n" + ex.stacktrace);} and equivalent that under the write conditions will result in these secrets getting into the logs. That is the most innocent case, the far more common pattern in logs is:

Login failed for user P@$$word!1
Login success for user gweihir

and is almost the norm...

Right now the only things saving corporate and probably government IT from total disaster due to negligent log handling are:

1) The data volume is large so its difficult to exfil or search in situ without being notices
2) Searing logs you are not familiar with is hard and regex augmented with traditional correlation rules will only get you so far,

However attackers will start using ML and similar tools to start slogging thru it and pulling useful data out soon enough and all these data lakes, cloud trails, security workspaces, etc - are going to get some big organizations well and thoroughly pwnd.

At the very least actual APTs (not some ransomware gangs) will get hold of some Fortune 50s and large government logs and do some next gen-analysis to make sure their trade craft and tools leave exactly NO detectable IOCs. Which frankly I think boads quite badly for having a large WFH work force; nobody is going to be able to separate malicious remote access from legitimate. That is drifting off the topic however.

In the short term I would suggest to most operators, you don't know what is in your logs, you don't what signals someone might be able to extract from those logs even if you do have all the content identified. You probably should NOT be retaining logs for longer than either a few months or whatever regulatory requirements demand, whichever is greater.

In this specific instance its unfortunate, but I don't think MS actually got it wrong in terms of policy here.

Anytime you are doing "science" you need to know what you are measuring.

Cygwin inst emulation its a compatibility library. I highly doubt its use impacts network performance at all for certain parts of the scale.

CPUs are fast network cards mostly are not. You 14th i5 is going to outrun that 2.5GbE adapter cygwin or not. So if what you are bench-marking is the peer, say some router or IoT thing etc; I don't see the issue.

On the other hand if you are bench-marking the host with PCI-E 10GbE card or something; well this might be a relevant concern.

Still more caveats though it might be exactly the right approach if you are say deciding if you should host your POSIX network service (that will use cygwin on Windows) or Linux. That is of course the thing; you should measure as much as possible using the parts of the stack you can't or won't be willing to change, if your benchmark tool inst doing that its probably the wrong tool. So right don't test cygwin network performance if the application is going to be winsock2.

This has been a problem since the dawn of the PC tech press and its probably worse today than ever. In the late 80s and early 90s we reading about how such and such's 386-clone was 16% and sure enough on some synthetic benchmark it was because less memory wait state or something; but low an behold that turned out the be doing some sota softfloat thing for the test, and when you compared a real world app to intel-386 + 387 pair suddenly the performance advantage vanished or even flipped.

Thanks but I felt perfectly 'connected' to my apps when they were files on my Harddisk and click away on my Start Menu; I don't need any more help being connected thanks, and importantly I don't need you trying to convince me my copy of $APP-2013 isnt good enough every-time I open it.

By which you mean add to them be constantly subject to pressure to move up to some higher tier? Because I don't know help managing in any other sense and neither does anyone else unless you've gone out of your way to make things hard.

Why can't you just send me a e-mail to remind me I am about to auto-renew for another month/year whatever and inlcude a link to the 'my account page'? Toss another line on there to warn me if I need to update my pay-card onfile?

By this of course you mean extra steps to make sure other people are not locked out of my account don't you? Because bitlocker recovery password and the subsequent ability to overwrite the SAM are the only things any consumer should reasonably want in terms of account recovery. All other cases are really just abuse cases.