Many of your victims won't be able to say anything even if the files aren't decrypted -- this case is a good example, since the company in question couldn't admit publicly that they were paying ransoms.

A little searching shows that scams (beyond the base "pay to decrypt") are very common. You're dealing with criminals. If you pay a ransom, they now know that you have money that you're willing to pay, and they're going to do whatever they can to get more of it.

Yes, certain destinations were off-limits to people who chose to work in defense, however that falls far shy of this "Exit Ban".

The US saying "If you travel to Cuba, you may face charges when you return" or even "You have been charged with a specific crime, so you cannot leave until the charges are resolved is significantly different from China saying "You are important to our plans, so you cannot leave the country at all, and neither can your immediate family", or forbidden a US citizen from leaving because of visa inconsistencies, much less the common situation where Chinese employers require staff to surrender their passports.

Yes, a judge can require the defendant to surrender their passport as a condition of bail, but the USA lacks effective exit controls, so that isn't actually a high barrier to exiting (but makes it tough to come back).

If, as the article suggests, this is an "Exit Ban" on certain individuals and extending to their family members, that's significantly more restrictive than anything the US has imposed on defense workers and top scientists other than during wartime.

Yes, people with sensitive jobs and a security clearance are strongly discouraged from visiting hostile nations, with a subset even being required to submit their travel plans before any foreign travel, but this is explained clearly when you accept employment directly with the US government, or start working under a government contract, and you're always free to not accept the job offer. And yes, all US citizens were for many years prohibited to travel to embargoed nations (Cuba). But this was nowhere near an "exit ban" on key personnel, much less on their family members!

When I held a clearance, I was never forbidden to leave the USA. I might not have a job when I get back, but that's not the same thing at all.

And he knows this is the "only hypervisor bug left" because...he hasn't been able to find another one yet?

This smells like some dude saying "AI is better than me at my hobby, so I'm taking my ball and going home!"

Take a look at who the current frontrunners are for the next Democratic presidential nomination.

For that matter, look at what's going on during the current midterms. They've got a golden opportunity to make major gains ... and it's looking more and more like they're going to piss it all away.

Ah, yes. The old "there's totally evidence to back up my statements, I just can't be bothered to give you enough details to find the evidence" routine.

The only instance that some googling shows up is the same one linked to in the summary of this story -- namely, that 404 Media worked with a "rare bookseller" (who they won't name) to put an airtag inside one of the books (which they won't name) in a shipment of 1000 books.

There's rare and then there's "rare." From what I've seen, the people involved have declined to say what the books involved were. About the only reason I can think of to hide that is because they know that people won't be as outraged when they find out what the "rare" books actually are. However, it was a bulk lot of something like 1,000 books, so it's a pretty safe bet that they weren't exactly valuable.

The 1973 manual for a toaster that I found in my grandfather's attic is certainly rare, but we're not losing anything if Amazon feeds it to their AI machine.

Per the statistics, police shoot and kill quite a few white men as well. Nobody gets worked up about those dudes.

OTOH, when you dig into the individual incidents, pretty much all of those dead white men were actively attacking the police, usually with a weapon (), so it's difficult to get to worked up about those deaths.

I will not write it, Sam-I-Am,
I will not offer colored ham!

If I got one for free, I'd probably plug it in and mess with it a bit, establish that it doesn't really add anything useful, and shove it in a drawer.

If it was $25, I could see a few niche users buying it.

But $230 is insanity.

The historically-bad results of the final at least suggest that doing out-of-class work themselves actually helps students.

FACESNXT is fed from all Florida-issued photo IDs, including driver's licenses. So pretty much every Florida resident is in the database.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office submitted the poor image to a statewide facial recognition database maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office (PCSO), running a facial recognitio program called Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System (FACESNXT). This draws from a mix of sources including booking photos and all Florida state issued IDs and driver's licenses.

So good luck keeping your face out of that database if you live in Florida.

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.