Better of the two jokes on the story, but it was such a rich target.

I once worked for a startup with a Harvard MBA in the CFO slot. Went bankrupt. But I'm not blaming the CFO. He was actually a nice guy. I think the main source of failure was the CTO, an Apple fanboi. Or should that be fanbois or fanboy? I don't speak the lingo.

Your second link contradicts your description of the link. Minimal correction is "no criminal records", based on the content of the link. Was that your intention?

However, I'm not sure how much of a legal defense that really is. Since ICE is acting outside of the law, they can just create crimes and criminal records as needed. They don't want to bother on a wholesale level, but if a particular case becomes too problematic, then they'll do it. Of course I'm thinking of the Garcia case, where he was deported, became too visible, and so was returned to the US and charged with a bunch of trumped up crimes. But even American citizenship is no longer a defense if they can devise or fake any reason to "revoke" the target's citizenship. It's basically the same as stop and frisk. If they search long enough, the cops will find something to bust (or deport) you for.

But returning to the story, it's a matter of searching the cultures to find something objectionable. Since cultures are big and complicated, that's an easy thing to do. Especially when you despise all culture, even including your own.

Solutions? I think it's just a combination of "It's too late" and "We can't get there from here." Too late for America to claim leadership in any category except lies and "there" is any solution space better than the status quo problem space called "here". I know it won't help, but maybe I could install a retro rotary dialing app on my smartphone to remind me of "Truth, justice, and the American way" and days of yore? (But that was actually a wartime slogan, circa 1942. And everyone knows truth is the first casualty of war...) I want one with a Lily Tomlin theme, where her voice starts with "One ringy dingy" after the dialing sounds finish, and then her voice starts the conversation off with "You have reached the party to whom you are speaking."

Thanks for the Funny though it took me a few seconds to get your joke. Never saw any of the movies--but I think the dinosaurs were too fast to run away from?

I couldn't understand this the first time I saw it, but now I think I understand and concur, though I don't got that far. I can see notifications of incoming priority Gmail, but the rest of it is out of sight and mind until a daily check. And I time it at the end of the day when I'm probably going to ignore it for lack of time...

Additional thoughts on the email book since I posted that comment... Comparing other forms of intrusive communications, including the notifications from Slashdot. Also remembering how much of my working time (in most mornings) was filled with email of small importance.

New even more retro thought: How about a rotary phone dialing app? You got me to check and it turns out there are a number of them. When it says "customizable themes and sounds" I wonder if it has a Lily Tomlin mode. (Glad to see she's still alive.) So the phone would make the dialing sounds followed by "One ringy dingy, two ringy..." and then a short joke you can both hear: "You have reached the party to whom you are speaking." Of course using her voice.

Earlier I noticed two spams that had bypassed the evil google's so-called spam filters.

Relevant per The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan. That sort of poison file is a primary tool for state-supported hackers targeting various organizations like this nuclear weapons agency. Of course when they go after an important target they are using retail-level spear phishing rather than the wholesale-level phishing that I'm seeing. I believe the targeted spear phishing is rather more likely to bypass the spam filters.

But the key question is whether a particular poison attachment is targeting a vulnerability that is unpatched or perhaps even still unpatchable within the target's computer. Just a click away from being breached?

Every day. For ever and ever. Have a nice day and don't let the bad clicks bite.

Largely agree, but two problems here

1) If your office burns down (flood / earthquake / war etc) you are only left with what is offsite
2) if your randsomware starts encrypting everything in the right way with a key held in memory (and restored on demand by them for as long as they want to hide) for long enough they can manage to get the data stored in your backups to be encrypted.

I think we should probably separate three things

- the archive system, which allows recovery of the other systems by storing time based deduplicated
- the backup system, which has a copy of the business critical parts of the archive system*
- the recovery system

Archive
- automated / time based recovery / understands data removal requests / rapid on demand data restore
Backup
- fully offline / fully offsite / understands how to restore the archive system or some restricted version of it. / rapid *bulk* restore but no need for random access
Recovery
- duplicate of archive system and production

In a cloud system S3 might be a good archive system ; your recovery system is easy, however the real question is whether things like Glacier which people are treating as if they are truly immutable offline storage are going to turn out as good enough backup systems.

Great comment. It also won't be done in most situations if it isn't somehow automated. It also (quite likely) won't survive if it isn't offsite.

The backlash doesn't matter too much to them in the same way that Google doesn't care about the fact that your problem needs a human. They have a release valve in the forums, where they can see what your problem is, measure it and decide that, since it only affects 0.1% of the customers, they don't care.

The only reasonable way to fight this is through the courts. Specifically both normal and small claims / cheap courts where it's possible to actually force companies to do what needs to be done. That's where we can fight back with appropriate generative LLMs which will be able to help normal people who find themselves with one of the exception problems and are having their lives badly affected by it will be able to force the companies to react.

That's a great example of where AI will be creating new jobs. Whilst the customer service jobs will be wiped out, what could have originally been a ten minute fix with a tiny exception to the company's customer service rules will turn into a multi week exercise involving judges, potentially juries, multiple lawyers and a whole load of support staff.

offline backups. In most recent randomware attacks the attackers have also attacked and encrypted or destroyed the backup systems. If you use your cloud's systems for immutable backups you have a decent chance, but actual regular offline backups on tape or even just USB hard drives will gvie you a much much better chance

I would love to see the corporate cancers fight to the death--except that the surviving cancer always seems to be worse. They never manage mass suicide.

However, you've motivated me to comment on the job market. Some sort of delusional hope that someone will URL a solution at us?

The top people in productivity terms are above the money thing. They are making lots of money, but they are "top" because of their results, not their greed for more money. Basically a paradox where too much greed prevents good results. These people are not recruited by trying to force them to fit into existing holes (AKA job slots), bur rather the recruiting pitch is inverted, and the position is created to let them do what they want to do which coincides with the most valuable thing they can do. Avocation matches vocation situation. If these googlers are available to any other company, it mostly reflects on problems within the work environment and corporate culture of the google.

Below the top people there is a large pool of good people who are recruited in a kind of balanced race to the bottom. Most of the job slots are clearly defined and the corporate objective is to fill each slot with the human who is capable of doing the work for the smallest salary. This seems to be working pretty well for maximizing profits, and the mental horizon is basically limited to the current accounting period. A "future thinker" is considering the next accounting period, too. But it gets worse when AI is brought into the picture, because well-defined slots are the best targets for occupation by AIs and the AI always becomes cheaper than the humans doing the work. Especially convenient that the AIs can scale by simple copying into additional cloud resources.

So most people seem to be becoming increasingly devalued and even unemployable. You may smell another paradox brewing, but only if you are an old fashioned economist who worries about having customers. The newfangled economists are going to fund everything with cryptocurrency games!

In traditional Slashdot joke format:

1. Get best solution from best creator (possibly stolen from competing corporate cancer)
2. Copy solution as needed
3. Dispose of excess humans and their costs
4. PROFIT

You forgot the "Amen". Maybe two?

Yes, the story needs funny, but that one was too classical and old to get much of a laugh... Thematic focus on drinking had potential, but the forced rhymes sap the vigor. (And I studied many of these characters' works a long time ago.)

The more obvious joke on Slashdot would be how the comments show a lack of thinking. It would help if the system flagged the robotic sock puppets so their tripe could be compared against the stuff from the alleged humans.

So that's another website feature I'm looking for and not finding. As part of MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) I guess it would involve a dimension like "predictability"? Even a human who is too predictable loses interest, but the GenAIs mostly interpolate rather than extrapolate. Or has the latest upgrade fixed that problem?

But we are all the mice now.

However part of the real problem is with bad boys who are smart enough to encrypt the backups, too. Just a matter of patience balanced against estimating the costs of figuring out and recovering from the mess even if some old backups are safe somewhere...

I think the solution has to involve disrupting the criminals' business models. Not involve creating new cryptocurrencies for laundering the loot. Not to mention the fake-money used to crypto-bribe the corrupt politicians to keep the game rigged against the mice.

So it's sometimes satisfying to imagine the kinds of physical punishments they deserve. Unconstitutional, but still the imagination soothes the emotions. Or disguised as a chemistry lesson: "Now you'll remember to pour the acid into the water with your remaining hand! Now that we have your attention, what are your plans for future cyber-crimes?"

But the applied psychologists are extremely good at making us want those little dopamine rushes all the time...

Relevant books? The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton, and A World Without Email by Cal Newport. Oh, and what the heck. How about The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan? Tangential, but intrusive... But none of them said enough bad things about TikTok. (And on Slashdot no one can hear a book scream?)

I have it configured so that only a few close friends can get a significant noise. Other stuff is either blocked or can only trigger a very weak sound that I am quite unlikely to notice.

I'm sure there's a joke lurking in here about where my wife fits in... Or some kind of learned tolerance joke?