Indeed, most of the tickets aren't so much that a middle class type can't afford the occasional one. One doesnt need to be a billionaire to not care.

The heavy lifting is you connecting 'if paid' to the statement you quoted.

Picture a Musk, Gates, or Bezos type. They have virtually unlimited ability to speed or run red lights for what is to them a trivial sum.

Yeah, I read through those... and found that while it described a vulnerability, it was still light on actual exploit details.

Did they compromise the inward facing web interface, or an outward web interface? Did they do it through social engineering, or through malware running on devices on the internal network? Was the malware persistent or was it a drive-by instance running a portscanner in a browser instance?

Basically, the question I have is - would flashing say, openWRT on these devices been enough to prevent network intrusion, or were they already inside the gates to begin with?

The linked articles are remarkably light on details of how the routers were compromised. Were they breached from the internet side due to backdoors or poorly implemented services? Was it some sort of configuration default for remote administration that was just bulk abused? Or were the routers compromised from inside the network by malware running locally on machines, or on malware compromised pages? Was it due to remote code execution or was it due to default admin credentials or easily guessable passwords?

Kind of hard to defend against a threat if they won't tell you how the deed was done.

That's because people willing to pay to take a toll road to save speed can always avoid said toll road if they actually have to follow the speed limit on it. That eliminates the revenue the toll road gets, costing them money.
Florida had this situation with a new toll road that runs parallel to the highway around Orlando. Cops were running speed traps there. They were quickly banned because they noted it was killing the number of people taking the road, costing them far more in revenue.

Perhaps, but camera systems without the officer don't actually issue "tickets" that carry points. They issue "citations" that show up nowhere if paid.

To paraphrase a general, by ensuring they do die for their cause, and we don't.
Our job isn't to die for our country, but to make them die for theirs.

That said, it's expensive and hard, and best avoided when possible.

Can it clone proprietary software and turn it into an open source project?

If so, then I think the tradeoff is fair.

The problem you get though is what I call the "California Cancer Warning Problem"
Basically, people can only pay attention to so many warnings. The more often people get false or trivial warnings, warnings where they have to continue to get things done as standard, the more likely they are to just plain ignore the warnings.

While hackers might be able to figure out a way to do something malicious without triggering the warning, the warnings back then were worse than useless, because they not only triggered for just about every document, users by default could not assess the document for safety without enabling the scripting. IE I couldn't by default open the document and look at the scripts to assess them (and some of them were only like a dozen lines) without enabling them.

Saying the warnings were necessary also ignores that there have been exploits that didn't even require opening a document to cause infection. Preview was enough.

Basically, if the hackers figured out something clever, just add that to the check. It would still be a better situation than what we had back then.

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

I remember those days where it would warn if there was any scripting at all, rather than look for dangerous commands first.
Just as a thought, not bothering if the script cannot reach outside of the document itself. Functions that access other files or documents, email functionality, and such triggering the warning instead would have been more effective.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

They're still in denial about that. Had one just a couple days ago saying that the gas price increases are just the regular price increase in the spring.

There's a bit of subversion here though: Going by my uncle, social security disability has made it even easier: They automatically reject every application the first time.