Many of your victims won't be able to say anything even if the files aren't decrypted -- this case is a good example, since the company in question couldn't admit publicly that they were paying ransoms.

A little searching shows that scams (beyond the base "pay to decrypt") are very common. You're dealing with criminals. If you pay a ransom, they now know that you have money that you're willing to pay, and they're going to do whatever they can to get more of it.

And he knows this is the "only hypervisor bug left" because...he hasn't been able to find another one yet?

This smells like some dude saying "AI is better than me at my hobby, so I'm taking my ball and going home!"

Take a look at who the current frontrunners are for the next Democratic presidential nomination.

For that matter, look at what's going on during the current midterms. They've got a golden opportunity to make major gains ... and it's looking more and more like they're going to piss it all away.

Ah, yes. The old "there's totally evidence to back up my statements, I just can't be bothered to give you enough details to find the evidence" routine.

The only instance that some googling shows up is the same one linked to in the summary of this story -- namely, that 404 Media worked with a "rare bookseller" (who they won't name) to put an airtag inside one of the books (which they won't name) in a shipment of 1000 books.

There's rare and then there's "rare." From what I've seen, the people involved have declined to say what the books involved were. About the only reason I can think of to hide that is because they know that people won't be as outraged when they find out what the "rare" books actually are. However, it was a bulk lot of something like 1,000 books, so it's a pretty safe bet that they weren't exactly valuable.

The 1973 manual for a toaster that I found in my grandfather's attic is certainly rare, but we're not losing anything if Amazon feeds it to their AI machine.

If I got one for free, I'd probably plug it in and mess with it a bit, establish that it doesn't really add anything useful, and shove it in a drawer.

If it was $25, I could see a few niche users buying it.

But $230 is insanity.

The historically-bad results of the final at least suggest that doing out-of-class work themselves actually helps students.

Starts? This has been ongoing for a long time.

...you realize that pennies don't solve that "problem," right? We already have to round the final total for virtually all purchases after calculating the tax.

Just last week, we received notification that IBM is rolling out a "program" to upper-level employees with decades of experience. The idea is that we would work reduced hours for the next year at full pay, and then leave IBM after a year (next March, I believe.)

Of course, this is for US employees only. I think we can be sure that the replacements for these employees (if there are any) won't be in the US.

You didn't "cut cable" if you didn't have it in the first place; the number they're citing is a percentage of total households without cable, not the number of total households that had cable and got rid of it.

It was "proven false" by mathematicians who considered the number 200,000 to be the same as "infinite."

A quick Google shows that our resident village idiot's claim is nonsense; tuition was charged in the 1950s, although it was (even adjusting for inflation) much cheaper than it is today.

Sure there is; the search engines can ignore robots.txt for reddit.

It's one thing to use robots.txt to say that you don't want the content on your website indexed by search engines, but if reddit is pulling this kind of stunt (giving that access only to Google,) then there's no ethical problem with other web search engines bypassing whatever anti-scraping techniques that reddit uses.

Whenever I've had to return something that was obviously a prior return, I always take a sharpie and write "BROKEN" or something similar, in big letters, on the packaging. I figure that should keep them from trying to just send it out again.