The ARRL meltdown may or may not have compromised private user information. Most of the licensing information is in the public domain. The large Logbook of the World database is valuable, recording millions of QSOs (contacts) between amateurs, but it is not exactly private.

The more interesting data are in-house emails relating to policy and administration. Think salaries and other employee data, Board discussions, strategies, etc. The work of ~100 staffers has been interrupted for a week, as the headquarters internet and phone services are down. WFH. A blow to morale.

Most significantly, to me, is the lack of any meaningful communications with the membership about what is really going on. What is known about the cause of the outage, what concrete actions are being taken. None of the League's statements have been signed by leadership.

de AA6E

Very important analysis. But "Idaho" secession is even harder if you consider the economic problems. Kind of like Brexit. Somehow Idaho has to take on it share of the national debt and give up all national subsidies. Of course they also stop paying taxes, but many/most secession-minded states get more from the federal government than they pay in taxes.

Now, you type "ext4 filesystem corrupt".

I might buy a subscription to NOT upgrade Windows.

If your transporter converts you into a bit pattern and squirts that somewhere else, it's likely you've got yourself in RAM somewhere. (Or maybe it's just your flash frozen body.) It's a snapshot of yourself, and you can make as many copies from that as you like. Each one has your same life history up to the snapshot.

As a SF plot (I think it's been done), this is more interesting than simple transporter operation.

Shutting down the Internet completely includes e-commerce, e-mail, traditional news media, etc. The bread and butter Internet is economically important and politically relatively innocuous. Social media (Facebook, messaging, etc.) are much more worrisome and dynamic and subject to all kinds of abuse.

I might be open to shutting down social media -- in the weeks before an election, for example. We have seen tremendous abuse, both foreign and domestic.

Shutting down SM in case of civil strife is a harder case. It helps level the playing field by letting individuals show what's really happening, but of course it also empowers the forces of reaction. There many cases of both.

You whippersnappers may not remember there was a time when there was no commercial software, with the exception of assemblers and, if you were lucky, compilers. Somebody showed you how to punch cards or paper tape and gave you an instruction manual. (Thinking Datatron 205 or IBM 1620.)

So there were mostly no bugs except your own. There was little "OS" except a boot loader. There was no "network" and no bad guys lurking around.

It was a lot of fun.

Paying customer here. Got the same letter. I figured that if I really need the service, it's worth paying for. Free services (looking at you Google) are always suspect, since your info is likely to be the product, and they have no particular commitment to keep their services alive.

Still, Dyn's $36 is pretty steep for a low-volume DDNS customer. I see that no-ip provides a similar tier for $25.

The hard-to-quantify advantage of Dyn has been their (claimed) reliability and depth of technology - redundancy, etc.

"Project Athena" means X Windows, Kerberos, Zephyr, and all that. At least for MIT grads of a certain age (1980s). I wish Intel could have chosen another name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Tom Swift did it all around 1912. http://tomswiftaeroship.blogsp...

The military have converted many of their air operations to drones, and that must be part of the pilot shortage story. If we can operate in Afghanistan from a comfy seat in Reno, isn't this the inevitable future of air transport? It's much like the self-driving car situation, only a mistake kills ~300 people at a time. What would it take to convince YOU to fly on an automatic airplane?

I had that feeling when I got this all-plastic Toshiba Satellite. It replaced an old Sony Vaio that had a metal case. The Toshiba feels "soft", I'll grant, but it has been very reliable. Knock on ... plastic.