and humans eat as many as 100 spiders per day!

it's easy to get impressive numbers when you prefix it with "as much as". That's just the upper limit. Often not even anywhere near the average

Clickbait.

People that consider themselves vital, but then have to take steps to create artificial vitality - their own actions are proving them wrong.

If you were truly vital, your simple absence would be a disaster all by itself. If you have to engineer that condition, you're NOT vital. This is just an arrogant, self-important narcissist behaving badly and getting what they've got coming, at the cost of others.

I don't think there are enough stories like this in the news. It's pretty easy to find accounts BY such individuals that created kill switches and caused chaos when they were dismissed. It's good to see one of them get hat they deserve. Jokers like this give the rest of us a bad name.

I didn't realize China even HAD any IP laws on the books over there? Do they specifically say "except when we copy IP from another country because that's OK", or do they just "selectively enforce" it that way?

from the company that went all in on "digital cameras are just a fad".

Embracing bad business decisions is supposed to put you out of business. I'm amazed they're still around at all.

She didn't really resign, it was almost certainly more of a "you resign or we fire you, which do you want on your job history?"

Companies need their employees to have some level of trust in their HR people. A smart employee will know "HR is NOT your friend". They're not employed to be your friend, their main job is to protect the company from its employees. Like discouraging them from filing lawsuits the company will lose, and to stop their manager (and other employees in general) from doing illegal things to other employees that will trigger such a lawsuit. They try to spin "this will be bad for the company" into "this will be bad for you", to change your mind or change your behavior. You can be much more influential if people feel they can trust you.

And "I cheated on my spouse" is not a trustworthy look. That, along with the sprinkling of bad press the company got, is why she "resigned".

Years ago, "protection rackets" used to be a much bigger problem, often leveraged by the mob. Vinnie would stop into your shop and "make you an offer you couldn't refuse". Pay them monthly "protection money" or goons would come by and smash up your business.

There's a very clear parallel between that and "ransomware" of today. Instead of smashing up your shop, they smash up your computer system. But they do it in a way that they can fix, IF you pay. So the threat comes AFTER the damage instead of before. But otherwise it's the same thing, it's just a reverse-"godfather offer"

It's also got lots of additional benefits for the attackers - it's hard to trace, and easy to do remotely, even from another country. It's very convenient and low-risk for them. So the law needs to approach this from the receiving end, not the sending end, to choke it off. A bit like bribery, it's illegal to OFFER a bribe, but it's equally illegal to ACCEPT a bribe.

It pisses me off every time I see a big outfit pay off ransomware gangs. "one big job" pays their bills and hackers for another six months, AND fund them to upgrade all their hardware and support systems, so they become a MUCH bigger threat for the rest of us. You are funding a criminal organization that is harming the public.

"But my business was crippled, we had no choice, we were going to go bankrupt!" What happens when your busines burns to the ground because you didn't install sprinklers? You go bankrupt. That's what I expect you to do. You made your bed and now you get to lay in it.

So lets flip the script. Vinnie walks up to you as you watch the flames and says hey bud, if you loan me $20k I'll organize a bank heist and rob that little bank over there and your cut will be big enough to rebuild your business. Deal? So you consider funding a criminal gang to help you recover from the consequences of your own bad choices, in a way that will end up harming others. Is that legal? Of course not. It's also incredibly selfish of you, and you're transferring your (well-deserved) problem to some other random innocent people. You'll be indirectly-responsible for the damage they do, but you'll just turn a blind eye to that since you get your business back. You had no choice, right? You HAD to pay them off, right? Just keep telling yourself that.

Paying off ransomware groups absolutely should be illegal.

"one cracked password" was NOT "all it took". That was just one link in a long chain. Bad/nonexistent backups, inadequate/nonexistent logging, obsolete hardware/inadequate patches and updates, lack of compartmentalized access, etc etc.

This sounds like what happens when the owner's nephew is managing the network. And now they're trying to play the blame-game for one password having "ruined everything". But for them it doesn't really matter anymore. They have no lessons to learn, it doesn't matter who or what's to blame, they're gone now.

At this point all we can do is put a stop to this "sensationalizing" the wrong target, so that other ex-mom-and-pop shops can look at it and truly understand what really happened. Help them see how they'll be next if they don't take action and correct the ACTUAL problems that they share in common with this latest victim of cyber-crime. All this focusing a spotlight on "one broken password" just helps the criminals do it again to someone else that doesn't recognize all the things they're doing wrong.

TL;DR: if one cracked password can destroy your company, you don't fire the user, you fire the network admin.

I've spent time on the difficult end of black-boxing a BINARY file format. You jokers with your XML and LABELS have it faaaaaar too easy. Here, I'll tell you my secret:

Gather as many saved files as you can, from as diverse of a group as possible. (there is NO upper limit, literally grab as many as you can) Write a short little test script to import and then export every single one. Then compare the export with the original. Refer the mismatches to the dev. I had over 1,000 test files in my suite, and in the initial release only a SINGLE flag was missed, because of all those test files, nobody implemented that feature and the dev guessed the storage would be the same as EVERY other one. (it turned out to be quite unique)

Oh and as for XML depth.... it's RECURSION. It literally does not care if it's 5 levels or 200 levels deep. (unless your IDE has a truly pathetic stack size)

So it's not difficult. QYB.

Unfortunately, since the coding technology that was used in the previous app version is different from what is used in the new app, it is not possible to recover word lists.

Oh it's most definitely possible, but they have no convenient place to put them since users can't login anymore, and so they're just going to label it as "impossible" to get people off their back. (data conversion is relatively easy to do, I do it occasionally)
And if they honestly are saying they think it's "impossible", some PHB is being lied to or there's some severe incompetence afoot.

We might see a class-action for this. It's always risky just "deleting" a "lifetime" service without at least re-branding.

Artificial Intelligence will never beat Real Stupidity

Since black holes are considered points in space, and a point can't spin, are they still considering spinning black holes (which is essentially all of them) "ringularities"?

And it would seem that angular momentum is likely to increase with each merger, since they're going to tend to orbit each other in the plane of their spinning? And when they merge, that will add to their angular momentum in that plane?

Lastly, I haven't read any discussions regarding "theoretical limits" to how fast a black hole can spin. Would anyone care to elaborate on that? Are we talking about the event horizon dragging approaching the speed of light? I thought there was nothing that said that SPACE can't move faster than c? (or was that the *expansion* of space?) And wouldn't it just be getting closer and closer to c and not ever getting there anyway? (a problem of limits)

As many have stated, "lifetime" services often refer to the lifetime of the provider. This looks like a classic "pump and dump", as they saw their profits crest they closed the doors.

project off the coast of Scotland has four 1.5-megawatt turbines - enough to power 7,000 homes for a year,

megawatts is a unit of power

powering homes for a year is a unit of ENERGY. (describing megawatt-hours)

If you're comparing those units directly, you don't understand electricity. Like, "your car gets 25 miles per gallon, but I drove MY car 200 miles last week". The comparison doesn't make sense, and you can't draw any conclusions from it.

Apple has been steadily moving their hardware into Vintage and Obsolete over the last SEVERAL decades. When a device hits 5 years old, it turns Vintage, which basically means they don't promise to have all parts available anymore, and some may be restricted to "repairs only, not stocking". At 7 years they turn Obsolete, and Apple sells off their entire inventory of parts. In both cases, Apple retains a small number of parts for repairs in places like California, where manufacturers are legally required to carry parts for longer. (10 years in cali?)

So I don't know if I'd classify this as "news", more like a minor update in an ongoing process. "City fixes another pothole, news at 10." I assume most manufacturers have similar policies, but a lot of them are either secretive or aren't so consistently applied. If anything, Apple's doing a much better job for the consumer, with their very public and consistent policy. Now go and try to find out how long Whirlpool is going to carry parts for your dish washer.

Sidenote: I recall a few rare cases where someone REALLY wanted their old mac repaired, and I asked "do you know anyone in California?" I suggested they ship it to their friend and have them take it to a local apple store to get it fixed. AFAIK that plan worked.

I was also known to, from time to time, order a bunch of a part that was prone to failure just before it crossed into Vintage territory. That way we had parts on-hand to repair a common issue when nobody else did. There were a few parts we never ended up selling, but there were also a few that were like gold, with people driving klong distances to come pick up a part not even Apple had anymore. It was a bit of a guessing game. My manager questioned my stocking the last 23 iMac G5 power supplies Apple was willing to sell us, and it took several years, but we sold our last two to an APPLE STORE 100 miles south of here. We probably should have started marking them up, but we never did.

The first rule of security is usually "don't make your own". In other words, use existing, tested, verified, trusted code, protocols, and processes. Now if your INTENT is to roll your own, you really do need a lot of peer review. Even if you have a Ph.D in cyber-security and secure coding, you really still need others to take a look at it to see if you missed something. Because EVERYBODY misses something. The attack surface is just too broad to catch every subtle thing on the first run though.

And if some 3rd party hops in and IMMEDIATELY finds a hole (without the benefit of the source to look through) it's virtually guaranteed to have a lot more holes in it just waiting to be zero-day'd.