You may conflate Russia's block of Telegram service and Starlink's sudden disconnection of Russian users. I would suggest, that the latter rather than the former was the main reason for the success of Ukraine's counter attack.
I was in the epicenter of Silicon Valley right when the dotcom bubble started inflating unreasonably. Looking at the level of douche baggery drawing millions from clueless but enthusiastic investors was breath taking. Yes, PEPE is trash, PEPE2 (whatever this is) is likely even worse trash, but neither are worse than some of the things I saw back then, and neither deserved their crazy valuations.
PEPE and these pathetic meme coins were by far not the only tokens created in this time frame: many tokens were created to finance and support otherwise quite reasonable projects, many of which floundered nonetheless (which is typical for startups and does not necessarily imply fraud. BTDT.).
Please tell me, what percentage of Silicon Valley startups survived in this time frame, what percentage of "new media" outfits made it through this time, and which restaurants opened and stayed open. This is really nothing new. This is, how capitalism is supposed to work: present idea, find initial funding, see, whether you can make money with this. Fail early, fail often, find your path to success.
You realize, that most web startups from late 90ies went up in smoke, but you'll agree, that the web is here to stay
By the time you shoot at your own people with machine guns, and no, sniper rifles won't kill thousands of people in so few days, the economy is about the least of your concerns. I assume, that the monsters committing these crimes are well fed and have all the water they need, even if Iranian economy shuts down completely.
The situation in Iran has moved from "murderous fascist dictatorship a la Chile" to "completely nuts like Sudan".
Yes, Trump saw which ways the winds were blowing with the loudmouths in his base. I don't have enough appendages to count how many times the Dems have also gone in on something stupid and/or self-destructive and corrosive to please their loudmouths.
Yes, libs have their own share of agenda driven "experts", and caused a lot of damage with their drivel. Some of their "experts" got enough traction to cause real damage (inflation thanks to UBI like covid payouts, increased public hostility to strangers thanks to stupid open border policy, downtown districts deteriorating thanks to open hard drug use, women's sport turning into a charade).
Still, the damage caused by the current agenda driven "experts" like "RFK's end vaccinations", "CBP/DHS chase the darkie" and "trump crypto embezzlement fund" seem to be much worse and also insensitive to popular backlash. These new agendas also do little to fix the problems created by left wing "experts".
Has RFK, jr actually changed the measles vaccine requirement? No, he didn't.
There are serious considerations to remove all vaccine requirements, which could create changes in liability insurance for vaccine side effects (yes, they exist, but are still a good trade for all the side effects of the actual disease they prevent), and also in insurance coverage of these (sometimes expensive) vaccines. Yes, the discussion about this is ongoing, but it's clearly visible where Kennedy is trying to take this. He is quite open about this.
Could it be, that an empty oil tanker doesn't hold much oil and is therefore not such a big issue?
As others have already pointed out to you elsewhere (with little effect it seems): yes, anti-vax used to be a left wing hippie thing, which was always considered fringe and never went mainstream there. Contrast this with the right, where Trump himself was in charge of getting the covid vaccine developed, praised it and got vaccinated, only to surrender to a torrent of lunatics demanding otherwise and effectively forcing him to change the tune. I can not remember an anti vaxxer running the show in HHS for the libs, and Robert Kennedy knew exactly which party would eventually elevate him to this position.
Ukraine has severely damaged some Russian shadow fleet tankers. If they are not loaded, it doesn't seem to be much of an "ecological disaster". If, however, a NATO member country overtly sinks a Russian ship, the resulting effects may be much, much worse than some local oil spill.
few people will ever be able to tell, which domain is held by Microsoft or some other malicious entity.
A query of domain against the WHOIS service generally answers the question. If the registrar is MarkMonitor, then you can guarantee the legitimate registrant is at least an enterprise if not Microsoft.
This is nice for us to know, but Joe Shmoe Microsoft user will not be able to make that determination and can, unfortunately, not rely on amateur level sanity checks "the message comes from microsoft.com, so it's probably legit". This is what we teach our friends and relatives "no, USPS/DHL/UPS won't contact you from an delewareflowers.com domain". And Microsoft actively destroys this one bit of helpful information through their pathetic domain name setup.
Due to the legitimate entity failing to keep up to date all SMTP security requirements, etc, such as NS records, DMARC, SPF management records, for all domains.
Or for that matter failure to manage what URL endpoints may exist behind every domain; allowing for exposures by way of some obscure outdated URL endpoint allowing an Arbitrary redirect or HTML content return. Such as the old https://example.com/?content=X... returns a document with exactly raw content XYZ; vulnerability.
We wouldn't need any of these, at least in this case here, if the link contained therein pointed to a domain, which even imbeciles could positively identify as legit. No, get[dot]activate[dot]win" does not fit into this category.
The main issue is that Windows ships with admin/dev tools such as Powershell, Start+Run, and command prompt - that Windows users do not understand, but social engineering attacks can persuade the users to do dangerous things. Such as paste clipboard commands into it.
If you ever try to run office365 from firefox with script blocker: Microsoft uses 5-10 different domains (live[dot]com, live365[dot]com, office[dot]com, office365[dot]com, microsoft[dot]com,
It surprises me not one bit, that they use yet another domain for something as fundamental as product activation. Microsoft sowed confusion, and they reap hacked users - again.
Kodak's biggest problem was not the digital camera, but their heritage in the chemical industry. Each industry moves at its own pace, and progress in chemical engineering (in which Kodak really excelled) was measured in decades and not in years or months. Then digital sensors came about, and all of a sudden they found themselves in the middle of Moore's law, which was alien to them and which they refused to acknowledge as something relevant to them.
Result: despite being the predominant maker of professional digital cameras (think DCS520/720) they completely misjudged progress in this field. They thought "digital will hit consumer space around 2010" and in the late nineties they invested in a huge coating facility. Less than 10 years later analog was mostly relegated to an artistic medium, and their brand new coating facility could have coated the whole world's annual demand in a few weeks.
None of the articles linked to here and elsewhere mention, how the hackers got in. Their career page gives it away, though: offshored part of the company running Microsoft Windows server infrastructure.
Imagine my consternation
What this article says while trying not to say it: Chrome and friends wield an unhealthy monopoly over the browser world, and a single bug can wipe most WWW users off the map.
This is not hyperbole, but a true statement of fact, and it's not good.
No such data is given, instead the article provides "CFOs think this and that" and "Financial professionals see an increase". The most credible number is "14% of all fakes have been created with AI tools", but it's still not mentioned, which percentage is seen as fake overall. As expected it also advertises ways for companies to make that problem go away by spending money on software.
If you don't believe my words, read for yourself here
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. -- John Muir
