Putting the tech aside for just a second, in a world where we're trying to stop polluting the planet with sh*t and filling the oceans with garbage, you want me to buy a plastic device that I will only ever use once in my life and then either put it or throw it away? Sure I can understand that you require a physical device to achieve the kind of serious entropy you need to make this possible, but I can't see the green crowd cutting you much slack on this one if that device is one-time and made of plastic.

I'll tell you what will happen, the more fuss Epic make about their cash-cow the less people will care about it and slowly abandon it, it'll be this years MySpace. Pound-to-penny that in 18 months time Epic will sell the Fortnite franchise off at a loss.

Having a teenager about to turn 18 myself, I tell you for a fact that kids have an app attention span of about 18-24 months tops. No generation wants to be seen to use something old that the previous generation used, all the little 8-10 year olds that Epic and TikTok are hoping snare are going to see those two platforms as garbage, when the current crop of 10 year olds hit that magic 12-14 age group they'll be looking to secure their won set of apps to see them through to 16-17 before they move on.

Trust me, Fortnite will become a niche gaming app within 24 months tops and only a handful of hardcore fans will still be playing it.

If the code has sufficient safeguards and blocks of pre-defined code it will simply slot together, then might be OK albeit limited to start with.

Howvever when you consider the damage a mispelled variable or missing terminating semi-colon can cause in some high profile apps, you'd better pray to your favrouite deity that the code is not built on the fly from standard syntax coding rules, or at the very least the source parser is absolutley shit-hot!

"...the government will realise what a pack of idiots they were..."

You haven't dealt with governments much have you? Ha ha. Come on, when has any government admitted to any liability for anything, least of all the Chinese government. This is the same government that told the first doctors who identified COVID last year, to shut the hell up about it or risk a few months in a Chinese gulag.

Goverments don't make mistakes, they "miscalculate the risks". They don't admit to anything, they "concede certain key facts".

We either lose $15m recovering the last known backups from 60-90 days ago and have to put the whole of our IT back together ( overtime payments, hire in new people, etc ).

OR

We just pay these guys their $10m and get back on track with only a week or two of lost revenue and data.

They're still the scum of the earth of for pulling this scam and Garmin have now legitimized a company paying a ransom to save itself. This will only spur on other scammers to toughen up their game and push for bigger targets. However I can imagine their's most likely quite a few law enforcement bods looking into the whole affair with an eye to trying to trace down where the money goes. Although finding $10m amongst the billions and billions that get moved around the world every day is no easy task.

I say this as someone who's stuck with Android for 12 years, that these aren't services, they're paid apps by private companies and these companies have a perfect right to control how their company and it's products operate. They gave notice back in March that this would happen for Andoid version. This sort of thing happens all the time and it never makes news, companies stop supporting certain parts of their business for various reasons, most try to be reasonable and give customers time to switch.

A privately funded app that supplies weather data is not like gas, electricity or water. There are a ton of other places to get weather updates, almost all governments fund local meteriological depts for their countries, so losing one app doesn't mean you will not be able to get the weather tomorrow. I really can't see what the fuss is about.

All well and good saying "X is better than Y." but does this take into account the distribution of those using these languages?

Back aroun 2000 the only people learning languages were those who wanted to be devs, now kids are forced-fed Python in school IT classes. Biz people looking to extract and burn through data ar eusing Pything and R ( alright not exactly a generic dev language I know ). I cut my teeth on BASIC, C and Pascal way back in the mists of time but I've learned Java and lately learning Go as I need languages that I can use in certain situations.

I'm a systems and biz automation person, so I need a spread of languages, I can't get in depth with a single language like I used to when I first started out. I need scripting lanaguages, so I have to know Powershell, Node and Unix shell. I need good SQL and NoSQL variants. For more indepth tasks I have to known C# for our inhouse devs, I need Java for binding systems together and I'm learning Go in order to write standalone multi-platform utils for pushing data around onprem and cloud systems.

Gone are the days when one language was good enough for one person to make a career, these days even a glorified systems admin like me needs to be competant in at least 7-8 languages. True full time devs needs even more if they're going be able to keep working until they quit their careers. So ranking one language over another is pointless, each has strengths weaknesses, each company has standards and each problem needs unique approaches.

The Luddites didn't hate technology or progress, what the Luddites wanted was for people to be considered as machines started to replace more manual work. The mill owners of the 17th/18th Centuries didn't care about their workers, if machines replaced people and machines meant more money, screw the people they could starve for all the mill owners cared. The cottage industries were being obliterated by factory mechanisation.

The Luddites wanted compensation for workers, they wanted pensions and disability payments. When the mill owners wouldn't listen the Luddites smashed the machines to slow the progress down so they have time to convince the mill owners. Sadly many Luddites were hanged for criminal damage simply for fighting for workers rights over machines.

Propaganda was spread that Luddites were anti-machine and anti-progress.

Really, this is news? One website blocks another for a couple of hours? Slow news Sunday! What's next, "Facebook employees use other sites than Facebook! Some employees even use porn websites from their home machines in their own time!".

Last 3 projects we engaged with consultancies from India were OK but it was odd. Each time the core devs know their stuff, they make the pitch and get the gig. The core devs do a stunning job and you get a good app. That's when it falls apart, they hand over to frontline support and it all goes to hell! We've have 3am calls for hours with frontline while they try to find the devs to fix minro issues or they haven't got a clue about simple stuff like doing restores or DR tests, patching would be done without asking and apps would stop, then wait hours to be rolled back.

My shop, we dropped around 75% ( about 15 ) "data developers", they're job was write and code apps just for reporting for the biz people. We switched to using MS PowerBI, we in the ops team and the remaining dev team just feed raw sources of data into a cloud warehouse that the data and devs designed, then hooked up PowerBI. The biz people love PBI, they can write their own reports, work direct with the data and worst/best of all they can feed their beloved Excel sheets direct into PBI and work reports.

Seen a slow "death of a thousand cuts" happening to ours and other company's dev teams. Core devs with wide ranging skills are doing OK but it was those that only focused on non-core skills like reporting and ETL apps ( MS SQL Reporter and MS SSIS ) that have suffered most. Classic stuff, you limit your skills to one area and you will be made obsolete if that area is replaced or changed. On the flip side, 30 years in ops depts and I've had to ramp up my dev skills, learn more in depth coding and methodologies as we now have to orchestrate "hardware" and builds as if they were just code objects, I've been coding C and Java for years so not a huge problem but others I know in ops depts are struggling as they never learned past coding a few batch scripts.

Things sure have changed up on Walton mountain the last 20 years!

It doesn't but I'm a PHB and I'll just pay for more cloud kit 'cos it's cheap as chips and then beat my in-house IT staff into making it stumble along and achieve results, albeit shoddy and unsupportable all the time ignoring the IT staff's insistence this will bit back in 18 months time!

I've seen this with flu before in a few people I know. People saying that had bad flu, a month later "they say" they caught it again. It was more likely they were still recovering from the first bought and caught a cold. Without the normal fully operational immune system they a bad cold made them feel like absolute crud. I've found on average that recovery from flu takes me about 3 weeks after the symptoms go, you catch food poisoning or a bad head cold and your immune system is still shot. Symptoms go but your body isn't instantly cured, it's just got it under control but it's busy doing it normal daily job of keeping you alive, bad illness are like unpaid overtime, you hate it and you're tired it needs to be done sometimes but you're not always at your top form on extra overtime.

As a western European when I hear the terms "master" and "slave" I don't think in terms of American history, I think of the Romans.

In Europe our history extends tens of thousands of years in the past, most children in Europe will start learning history from our cave dwelling ancestors, through Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Viking and finally the Middle Ages. Most of what Europeans learn about history and slavery comes from the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Vikings, all of whom captured, brutalised and traded in slaves.

One fact that unites these peoples in the early part of our history is that they didn't care whether you were black, white or Asian, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, too bad you're going on a long journey and your life is effectively over, you are and foerver will be a slave. The Vikings would raid monestaries in the North of England regularly to capture monks and ship them all the way to modern Turkey to be sold as slaves, monks were able to read and very valuable as slaves. The Romans and Greeks would capture anyone they liked who would not conform to the empire's rules.

So when I hear the words "master" and "slave" I think Roman and Viking raiding parties, capturing innocent men, women and children of any culture, creed, skin colour or religion, even those who were supposed to be protected by law.

I'd also bring to your attention the world of BDSM, which in recent years has moved to the softer terms of "top" and "bottom", or "dom" and "sub", however some still prefer the more possesive terms of "master" and "slave" in order to induce a more potent state of mind within the relationship. Soft terms like "dom" or "top" may not induce the same feelings, so referring to "master" or "mistress" make both parties feel stronger in the roles they've chosen.

"master" and "slave" are strong words, they have nothing but negative conntations but I'm getting sick and tired of objective words like this being erased from history simply because they're negative. You cannot remove all negativity from language simply because you feel personally offended by it in terms you have defined. Languages are rich and vibrant becuase of positive and negative words, they bring a language alive. While those term will be abused and they will be used to offend, simply turning your back on negative words and hiding them will result in a dull lifeless and generic language that cannot describe the world we live in.

Slavery continues to this day, we need the words "master" and "slave". Sexual and domestic slavery occurs still right around the world, it's happening right now most likely in the city you live in and you won't even see. We need those words until slavery is abolished and gone forever in any form be it people, animals or simple devices. I'll let you take those words when we no longer need them, but they describe important concepts of a foced relationship and they're still need to drive home the oppresive nature of that relationship.

The problem is that so many people are just buying tech, plugging into their routers as the instructions tell them. The basic setup usually asks for a change of password to the admin account and that's all the guidance people ever get. It doesn't tell to patch regularly, it's doesn't tell or even order them to cycle passwords, let alone any mention of 2FA through a phone app. Nothing.

Get a copy of nmap and just scan the local subnet "outside your frontdoor" and within 60 seconds you'll find way too many devices just plugged in with default settings ripe for the picking.