Comment Bye-bye ransomware insurance (Score 1) 69
This will kill the ransomware insurance market for the affected sectors. That's probably intentional.
This will kill the ransomware insurance market for the affected sectors. That's probably intentional.
If you make it illegal to pay ransomware, what is the business model?
The business model becomes "wreck havoc on companies that are prohibited by law from paying up, to send a message to other countries to not pass such laws" followed by attacks on companies in those countries, accompanied by a "we've got a deal you can't refuse" ransom-payment offer.
A person's actual fingerprints are either unique or very close to unique.
This is about 1 in 20, which is far from unique.
As others have pointed out, it's also easy to change.
We are fully into "Trust, and don't even try to verify" territory at that point.
I've been trusting-and-not-verifying the output of my compilers for almost* my entire programming career.
Someday "AI" vibe-coding will get to that point. For some specific use cases, we may already be there.
* There were those times I suspected a compilier bug or was just curious how the complier implemented something, but both are very rare these days.
Will it be "another product" or will it be "The Real Thing?"
The closest thing we have to "The Real Thing" these days is "Passover Coke" which is available only around Passover and only in certain stores. Look for the yellow cap and "cane sugar" in the ingredients list.
I'm not sure if "Passover Coke" is 100% identical to the pre-corn-syrup coke of the before-times, but it's close enough for me.
The biggest advantage of "Passover Coke" over "Mexican Coke" is the price: It costs the same as regular Coke in 2L plastic bottles. Mexican Coke comes in 0.5L glass bottles with a much-higher cost-per-half-liter.
I am reminded of the company in the World Trade Center that had off-site backups. Which they kept in the other tower.
Reasonable risk-managers only go so far. There's always the "big asteroid that goes undetected" that lands on your building during a big in-person meeting tha thas most of your company's key talent.
A ransomeware group worth spit would have poisoned your backups so when you're having your genius moment to restore from snapshot or tape backup from last month guess what? It has ransomeware as well!
My recent backups might be infected, but my "day of compromise minus one" backups won't.
Even if my recent backups are infected, they are likely to not be ransomware-encrypted, which means they are still useful to me.
there should be no operational way to "delete" or "modify" existing records.
Technically, this is very hard to do. It's much easier to set things up so there should be no operational way to "delete" or "modify" existing records without it being obvious that something out of the ordinary is going on
With the right level of access, there will be a way to copy everything from the existing media EXCEPT what you want deleted to new media. As long as this is easy to detect (say, CCTV recordings showing someone entered the server room, downed the server, removed the write-once media, used a magic box* to copy only what he wants to copy, then replacing the old media with the new media), that's going to be a deterrent to unauthorized record-deletion.
* how the magic box works is left as an exercise to the student, but for planning purposes, assume such a box exists until proven otherwise
Microsoft is stalking you. Again.
Imagine it's 1950s or earlier. You run a business that lives or dies by paper records, such as an insurance company, land office, or something similar.
Your office burns down, taking all the data with it. You don't have off-site backups (microfilm, carbon copies, or what-not). Thankfully the fire was after-hours and nobody was hurt.
Your business is probably toast, figuratively and literally. At best, you are insured and will be able to start over from scratch, but your existing customers might prefer to start over with a company that knew how to keep backups rather than continue working with you.
Re:What do you mean by "possible?":
You mean the The MOnSter 6502?
The oldest monster6502.com entry in archive.org is from 2016.
If true, this is the modern-day version of a Letter of Marque, with the slight (cough cough) difference that the United States and China are neither technically at war (like N. and S. Korea) nor actually shooting at each other (like the various non-declared wars/hostilities the US has been involved in after WW2).
the green thing to do is build products on the continent they will be sold on.
If the raw materials are all on one continent, the end users are on another, and the finished product is less massive than the raw materials, it's going to require less shipping to build it where the raw materials are then ship it to the customer.
Also, what about things like coffee, that simply don't grow everywhere they are consumed?
If I read this right, ancient seafaring peoples had the same problem, just on a much smaller scale.
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." -- Mark Twain