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Comment Re:Too good to be true ... (Score 1) 33

For most PC-based operating systems, you can find the files on the internet archive. It may take you as long to search for them as to download them, because the files were so small in many cases. I've run NeXTSTEP in some emulator, can't remember which, it wasn't difficult and it worked reliably. I don't see the appeal of doing more than poking at it briefly if you're not running it on real hardware, but there it is. I think I ran it in QEMU/KVM with one of the older hardware models.

Comment The timeline is of note. (Score 1) 31

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

Comment Re:Why the myopic obsession with O2? (Score 1, Informative) 25

The appeal of Mars is that it could theoretically be made Earthlike, with a bit of handwaving perhaps, but not wholly outside the realm of plausibility.

As the appeal is in sending humans someday, there's going to be little support for building a toxic atmosphere, especially one which is particularly unpleasant to die in.

Comment Definitely a bad look... (Score 4, Interesting) 35

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.

Comment Re:Context/Priorities (Score 2) 121

These do not seem to be mutually coherent goals... (subsidizing the power industry, providing NASA with adequate resources, and potentially restarting the nuclear arms race)

Of course it makes sense. Giving it to the power industry means we need to make more, and he can award the contract on a bribery basis.

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