I very much dislike screen keyboards. I use a tablet to read books and for very limited browsing, but never browse on my iPhone. That's for phone calls, texting and the various apps I use.

Browsing on an iPhone is a pain, because no ad blockers. My fingers are far too fat for the keyboard, autocarrot chooses poorly and the multiple keyboard mode switches to enter numbers and symbols is wearisome.

Give me my IBM Model M and a full size screen any day.

Yeah, I know, it's all about the Benjamins. But JFC, the FBI just busted a huge SIM farming operation, claimed it was the Chinese trying to bring down the cell infrastructure, and here we have a US company doing pretty much the same thing "legitimately" (while the other hand tries to implement STIR/SHAKEN to *prevent* this sort of thing)

I'm sure many corporate "leaders" are thinking that way -- "let AI do it cheaper". Since the old way of working your way to the top seems to have gone by the boards, now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...

The illogic of the above approach probably doesn't even dawn on these Captains of Industry.

So glad our government is concentrating on the important stuff. Wars (of the flame variety) have been fought over fonts. All I need to say here is "Comic Sans".

...and the lucky ones use fiber instead of antiquated coax systems.

C'mon, Microsoft -- you had ONE JOB!

Words fail me here. A company whose core business is an operating system for a single user personal computer, and has had 30 years to perfect it, can't update it without significantly breaking it?

Maybe they should explore other occupations...

Time to run the cleaning ferret through the tubes again...

...and the error page helpfully provides a link to Cloudflare's site for more information...which is also unavailable

Unity was why I quit using Ubuntu and eventually landed on Mint MATE. Didn't like tiles then, don't now.

Couple of things I noticed...
The number of SIM cards seems to be greater than the number of cellular transmitters in some of these boxes.
The setups seem to be quite professionally installed (except for the one on the apratment floor) kinda odd for a one-shot DDOS campaign?
A lot of time, effort and money went into building these setups. How do the Feds know they're inteded for DDOS as opposed to robocalls and spam SMS (given that the latter is profitable, while the former is a one-shot deal)?

Yes, but what have the Romans ever done for us?
I mean, besides cryptography, roads, water...

"Undocumented cellular radios"...seems strange. Thoug our (expensive, Canadian mfr) office coffee machine had a cellular data radio for updating prices, etc. It's not "documented" in the manual, unless you know how to parse the description of the update mechanism.

But wouldn't one expect some sort of communications device in a generator controller? Admittedly, you'd expect it to be documented. The big question has to do with whether or not the cellular radio has the ability to connect to a random network *as configured*, i.e.: does it have a SIM? Or can it somehow connect without one?
That would be interesting. Or, perhaps, is it receive-only? If so, how is it triggered. A bit of reverse engineering here would be helpful, and hopefully, someone is doing that.

Fast forward 10 years and _de minimis_ will be reinstated, as the gov't discovers that it costs $25 to collect a $0.75 import duty on a $25 purchase from overseas.

Yep. I remember all the hoops I needed to jump through when putting Ubuntu(?) onto a laptop and trying to get the right driver/settings/config for whatever new WiFi chip was in it. Then configureing the wired network chip. Last laptop I put Mint on...it just installed and worked. Well, except for the HP laptop which supposedly has a gigabit ethernet chip in it, which doesn't seem to want to allow itself to be configured as a gigabit interface, even under Windows (yes, I pulled Linux off and reinstalled Windows just to make sure). But, hey, it's HP, so...

Dell Precision or Latitude always seem to just work. Those days of having to Google whatever incantations were needed to get the wifi or network or display working seem to be well in the past. And WINE seems to have had a noticeable improvement in its ability to install and run Windows apps.

Thanks, Linus...for 35 years of Linux!
(read his autobiography, "Just for Fun")

Linux absolutely does not require any more technical ability than Windows. I have converted two very non technical people from Windows to Linux, and in both cases "support calls" (to me) dropped from monthly to one or two a year.

Your point about Linux being a cheaper alternative to Macs is quite true. The rest of my family use Macs and I would as well, except for the "walled garden" and forced upgrade aspects. Linux meets my needs quite well.