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Comment Re:Banks responsible in part (Score 1) 54

Banking industry is sometimes really stupid and oblivious, I received dozens of scam emails asking me to urgently install the "Security App" to unlock my bank accounts. It took a few months, before my bank decided to create an app to securely access my bank account. You'll never guess, what they called that app.

Paypal change of ToS would also be an example of frequent emails, that I had to research before actually deeming them legit.

Comment Re:I blame the government ... (Score 1) 54

tariffs against violating countries

Goddamit. Trump has been President for 17 months and people still don't seem to understand that a tariff is a tax paid by Americans.

Tariffs are a tax, if you apply them across the board. If you apply them highly targeted, they are an easily avoidable tax for all Americans, yet an economic hit on the country trying to benefit from scams.

If the scammers are in Bulgaria and an American company is buying specialized industrial equipment from Bulgaria, then that American company pays the tariff. You are in effect punishing that American company because of scammers in Bulgaria.

If Bulgaria hosts these scammers, the USA are well within their right to lean on EU to clean up their back yard. Also, Bulgaria wouldn't last long in a direct economic confrontation with the USA, so these tariffs wouldn't have to last long.

To make a long story short: if you apply tariffs and sanctions smartly, they are very impactful and effective. If you do it like DT47, then they're like a tax.

Comment Re: How many beers? A LOT (Score 1) 68

There are European countries with a lager tradition, and those who prefer ales. The lager drinkers vastly outdrink the ale drinkers, and all recent beer converts in Southern Europe also drink lager. There's a hipster circle trying to make IPA palatable, but that's 1. new and 2. not that big in volume.

And yes, I did experience lager beer with flavored hops e.g. at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto, which was a cool place to be while it lasted. They were very proud of their flavored hops and happily presented them to us "look how good" during a guided tour through their brewery. And yes, I do agree with you, that a flavored lager is a shame.

While the Americans in our group insisted, that Oregon Pale Ale was very good, in fact at least as good as any decent lager beer, the profound quantity difference of beer consumed at happy hours (compared between a keg Pale Ale vs. a keg of Spaten beer from Munich) told a vastly different story.

Comment Re: How many beers? A LOT (Score 1) 68

The main premise, why "American beer is bad" comes from two sides:

  • 1. Central Europeans, who are the most avid beer drinkers and therefore most likely going to complain about "bad beer", typically prefer lager beer. So you have the choice between cheep American lager beer and expensive craft beer.
  • 2. For some reason Americans like flavored hops, which is a big nono in Central Europe. So even the few craft lager beers will not match their expectations.

Comment Re:Wow, a high quality security update (Score 1) 30

Starting with the Clownstrike thing (blamed on Microsoft, rightly or wrongly) and accelerating with the Windows 11 shitshow and the contemporary Copilot / cloud services force-feeding.

When people blame Microsoft, they typically mean their Microsoft loving corporate IT. The same folks, who bought Crowdstrike products, also think that Windows is the only viable operating system in a corporate outfit. Since I am sure, that Microsoft's sales reps do anything in their power to support this view, they do share some of the blame.

Comment Re:Must've all been a big mistake. (Score 3, Interesting) 58

Take a look at Nightmare-Eclipse (6 Windows zero days, 3 of them still unpatched), the Oracle Peoplesoft zero day, the Cisco zero day, and on top of that a remote DoS against OpenBSD, hundreds of CVEs against linux and Firefox. This is a lot of crap raining down on corporate America, possibly more than they can handle. They can especially not handle this, if zero days keep hailing in as they did. They are not geared for this.

One can all blame this on poor coding practices, maybe the bugs were found by some other means, but we do know, how the OpenBSD remote DoS was found. I would have shut down the new Anthropic stuff just as well, bribes or not. We can't allow most of corporate America to implode, just to show, that software wants to be free.

Comment Risk management 101 (Score 1) 4

These are incredibly complex pieces of software, which simply shouldn't be made accessible to the big bad internet. We saw the same situation last year with Sharepoint, and are bound to see more of the same. I believe, that "attack surface" is the right term. There are many ways to provide these services to people working from home, which do not expose such high value targets to random hackers.

According to the article (I know, I know), of these 100+ affected entities more than two thirds were "institutions of high learning" aka universities. These are the entities brimming with experts, many with big well funded CS departments, they sure have experts of IT security and risk management, and seemingly nobody sounds an alarm, when such services are accessible from everywhere. Just wondering ...

Comment Re:USA chooses authoritarianism, again (Score 1) 166

What does this mean? Why would a child have 2 phones? Why would a single adult have 2 phones?

Quite a few kids "need" two phones these days: a crappy one, which gets proudly and visibly locked away before the exam, and the second one for the actual cheating during the exam. There are similar situations for adults, where a second phone can come in handy.

A second phone number may also be helpful for content producers for social media, or any other public facing and potentially controversial person. And yes, in this case you don't want both phone numbers to be associated with the same name.

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