It is, but at the same time it's already bad enough that search engines stopped being boolean in nature and have started using synonyms and other like-words to where the results are watered-down.

Al might well contribute to that phenomenon even moreso.

There can be many reasons for blocking particular websites, and among them is the ability to content-moderate. If DuckDuckGo didn't allow for K12s to set policies that would limit exposure to explicit material then the site would be blocked.

IIRC Google made it fairly easy to react to organization-installed cookies that told the search engine to filter explicit results to the degree requested, but that doesn't mean that all search engines had that capability or that those tasked with implementing it were going to go through the effort to make it happen for other search engines.

And replacing them with Al tools seems to be the new-hotness of the moment.

Which is of course hysterically funny given that compromised Al tools were the instrument of the breach.

they just lost 10% of their stock value in a day because it was revealed that when AI search results are showing, there's fewer ads to show (and even fewer get clicked), meaning revenues are down.

this is just compounding that problem. they're shoving AI in ways that are losing their core revenue base and that's already screwing them.

One of the headaches with the modern Internet is how so much beyond just HTTPS traffic runs on destination TCP Port 443 as encrypted traffic. If the rogue device connects outbound to a command-and-control server to port 443 it can be difficult to determine what the traffic is for, particularly if the nature of the flow of traffic looks superficially like a lot of other encrypted traffic. If it's all outbound from the subscriber's connection then it may blend in with all the other non-HTTPS traffic.

If the command-and-control server operator is smart then they'll have a whole slew of IPs, even possibly using DNS with a whole bunch of DNS entries retrieved via DNS over TLS to obfuscate the domain lookups themselves, allowing them to rotate the actual IPs.

The botnet compromised endpoints don't need to use some special port or have incoming connections to them, they can do it all via pulls rather than requiring pushes.

I like the sticker, "DANGER: Do not connect this machine to the Internet no matter how much it asks"

The 'prior art' is not y2k but rather the DST change in 2006 (to our current weekends in North America).

That was when they restructured most of their timezone information into easily updated files that made the operating system generally adapt pretty quickly, along with client-side software for anything *newly* generated in scheduling software.

However, the issues here are what to do about already-existing scheduled events - how do they adapt depends on what your internal model is for storing "where" they are (which timezone they're meant to follow). If you didn't separate out America/Vancouver in your system because it was always the same as America/Los_Angeles...it is an almost unfixable problem because you have no way to isolate what is and isn't in "Canada".

So this is why I've been saying, for months now since it was announced, that it was going to be a mess because there wasn't enough time to develop and test the solutions in the middle of all of the other work that app teams are doing (often with reduced resources due to the layoffs of the last 3 years) before everything went live. You really want this stuff tested AT LEAST 6 months before the first change, preferably a full year.

I can't imagine the scheduling disasters for anybody actually using Egypt time over the last 15 years, when they ditched DST, *partially* brought it back (the day would change based on Ramadan) and then in March of '23 announced that in April of '23 they would go back to switching. Pretty sure anybody of any import just set their clocks collectively to something from Europe for the stability.

because, well, there's nothing new here.

Unfortunately I've found that no single search engine does a particularly good job anymore. I end up searching in Duck Duck Go, Google, and even Bing of all things because they all do a crap job of returning good results now.

I suppose if altavista.digital.com was still working I'd try it too.

Normal search has normal + ad results - the top lines are ads, the rest are the results. the ads (even if they are in the results) get clickthroughs. Maybe you can see an ad graphic on the right-side and get eyeball and maybe click points for that.

But not under AI. Everything about the AI system no longer gives an ad result at the very top (that's the AI summary part), and then the slow-typing animation draws your eyes to it...and away from any ad that may be on the right side. You no longer see it if it is there because the system is still slow-typing out the summary of the search result...that, of course, is all meant to stop you from clicking through to the actual site, which MAY be a site that used to pay for advertising but now no longer does because their ads aren't shown anymore in this AI mode.

Hoist with their own petard, indeed. They've created a new page layout where the AI slop has replaced the ads...and now complain that they aren't making ad money. Geniuses...

well, their chips are coming out of a foundry after all...

Not sure about the assembly of small electronics. It looks like that's still a fairly hands-on, manual process.

One of the barriers to automating the assembly of commodity microelectronics is that the revisions iterate fairly quickly. It's difficult to build an automated assembly line that can handle those changes. It usually just ends up being easier to have a person do that assembly work if the product is going to change in a few months and it would take a couple of months to retool for the change.

A broken clock might be right a couple of times a day.

Unless of course someone rips the hands off. Or if it's a digital clock that simply doesn't display anything. Or probably for a bunch of other possible reasons.

MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.

...is normally preferred with a good, crisp apple.