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.

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.

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, ...) for an online word processor. Domain names used to load scripts from change wildly between authentication, actual application and surrounding feature set, few people will ever be able to tell, which domain is held by Microsoft or some other malicious entity. A domain name (especially with a TLS trust chain) used to be a reliable sign of authenticity, for Microsoft it's just another set of key words to denote managerial fiefdoms.

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

I have as much concern for job stability as anyone else, but as one, who has suffered through educational software that long I can only say: it couldn't have hit a more deserving target. I really wish, that all companies in this same business environment go extinct soon. They really have it coming.

You can call AI output degenerative all day long, but it's still miles ahead of what I have seen in educational software products: English language testing requiring exactly the expected wording of the answer, endless delays and hangs when uploading homework assignments, ridiculously bad UI, anything non-Windows completely unsupported. It ranks in the same league as software for medical doctors and corporate software for time booking.

If you want to shed honest and deserved tears for tech workers losing their jobs due to AI, then please look elsewhere.

I know (or at least hope), that you meant this in jest, but hear me out anyway: there is this common perception, that war clears out the deadwood, burns away the dry shrubbery, and after all the killing has been done and done to, fresh minds will spring to life and reinvigorate society. Reality shows a very different pattern, though. Russia tried to bring this concept to life in the last almost four years, lost over a million convicts, misfits and whatnots, and total alcohol consumption went up, not down.

If you send all these "less than average" people to slaughter, you leave behind a lot of misery, which bogs down the rest of society. This "cleaning steel bath" is a dangerous myth mostly spread by people, who think themselves so far above average, that they don't expect to get sacrificed in this madness..

For over a decade I have heard these lame stories by American phone companies, that it is completely impossible to block calls/messages with obvious fake displayed numbers. Hand wringing stories are being told about something, which every half-competent router admin considers a 101 level skill.

Then you have the Chinese government, which is very strict on perpetrators against their own people. They handed out 11 death sentences, 2 suspended death sentences and multiple life terms against one of their crime families running scam centers in Myanmar targeting Chinese people.

At the same time they are extremely lax against their own perpetrators, who facilitate crimes against westerners. British stolen/robbed cell phones end up there, they are on lists of stolen phones and still operate without problems inside China. They just don't care. Now you have these scam messages and there will be, again, no reaction from Chinese government.

I am not very optimistic about this, neither about US phone companies clearing up the mess, nor about the Chinese government doing anything about it.

My old, grumpy and cynical interpretation of this garbled sentence is: "These are the files of those 6 companies, who did not pay the ransom."

All these "revolutionaries", who'd like to "stick it to the man" and communicate their schemes through smart phone based means, are not going to be protected by any app's design or technology, and whether Signal changes encryption algo or not will not make much of a difference. Anyone decrying this as tinfoil hattery or conspiracy theory driven nuttery shall reread the serious reporting about the US gov't communicating over Signal.

The main criticism was not directed at Signal's encryption standards, and the fact, that a journalist was carelessly added to the conversation was only a side act. The real criticism came about, because they hosted their app on private, i.e. insecure, phones. Signal can use whatever encryption they want, they have no control over the platforms their software is run on.

A few months ago top US officials discussed secret stuff over Signal, and the outrage over this was heard world wide. So much for the trustworthiness of Signal. Pepperidge Farm remembers ...

I am shocked, shocked to hear, that Crowdstrike has sloppy software management practices in place!

I am glad, that you found a cancel mob's rationale to ditch Proton. Anyone using Proton should take a closer look at the Crypto AG story. If you think, that Swiss companies are neutral, humane and fair, then you will be in for a rude awakening, They're in it for the money, and if you are in the way, you're gone. Or betrayed. Or both.