The FDA lied about it, got sued, and had to retract their statement. I have that linked somewhere around here too. Ah, https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

Your summary completely -- and I would further suggest deliberately and maliciously -- mischaracterizes the case. The article you cite states that the Fifth Circuit found that the FDA overstepped its authority by providing medical advice. Nowhere did the court find the FDA's statements were materially false or misleading -- it is and remains a fact that ivermectin is ineffective and inappropriate for treating COVID. Therefore, claiming the FDA "lied" willfully misrepresents the case.

The article then goes on to support my point and the Democratic Administration's efforts -- that misinformation concerning COVID-19 was and remains rampant, and that it needs to be combatted for the sake of public health.

Speech is not violence. Speech is not a threat to public health. Speech is necessary to find truth in society.

Look up the term, "fighting words." Then go visit a venue with a principally African American clientele, and explain how you should be free to use the N-word without consequence, because it's merely "speech."

It sounds to me like your sanctimonious polemics would be better received on X. They have a prettier UI as well. Off you go, sonny...

...there was extensive documentation on how Biden pressured social media companies to silence everyday American citizens. [ ... ]

Couple 'o things:

1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,
2. Assertions made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

Not even ordinary evidence was provided. So we can set that nonsensical statement aside.

The Truth: The Biden Administration was seeking to remove maliciously posted lies and falsehoods concerning COVID-19's risks and how to mitigate them, so that people without mad Google sk1llz searching for information on staying healthy would be less likely to encounter false, life-threatening information.

Example: Back in 2020, there was this slob who suggested on national television that the best way to avoid COVID was to inject disinfectant , and that the disease could by treated by ivermectin -- which is a horse de-wormer (i.e. an anti-parasitic, not an anti-viral). Both claims were absolute bullshit , but nevertheless got repeated millions of times on social media by "everyday Americans." It was this kind of LIFE-THREATENING GARBAGE that the Democratic Administration was seeking to mitigate. So that people wouldn't, y'know... die.

Well. It seems that Google has been cowed by -- or now is under the complete control of -- fascist filth.

Post links to viable substitutes for Google's various services here.

ve never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM. Bazillions of dependencies and no signing of packages. [ ... ]

Rust's cargo packaging system is almost exactly the same way. And the last time I looked, Go's packaging was very similar. And package signing won't help if the maintainer's key/cert has been exfiltrated and cracked.

This is what you get when you embrace DLL Hell -- the idea that you should pin your program to a single specific revision of a library, rather than, y'know, doing the engineering work to ensure that, as an app author, you're relying only on documented behavior; and, as a library author, to be responsible for creating backward compatibility for old apps linking to old entry points. Sticking to that principle lets you update shared system libraries with the latest enhancements and bug fixes, while remaining relatively sure none of the old clients will break.

"Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility." Agreed, but the interval between those breaks should be measured in years, not days.

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

Thankfully, he was mostly wrong...

Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?

There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.

I'm self-hosting Vaultwarden on my LAN, a Bitwarden-compatible backend written in Rust. I have it running inside a jail on TrueNAS Core (which, alas, is now end-of-life). It hosts its own Web interface, but also is compatible with Bitwarden's Android app and browser plugins.

So far, it's worked out pretty well for me.

...Because no one uses Edge.

Clearly you have never worked in a large corporate environment that has shackled itself to the entire Micros~1 ecosystem -- Office, Outlook, Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, Engage, SharePoint... The whole ball of earwax.

I thought that's what the front page was. It keeps wasting space with things I'm not interested in, or actively dislike.

New Video from The Primagen!
<block channel>

NotAIHonestly Gets Rare Interview with The Primagen!
<block channel>

FrierenFan04 Reacts to !AIH's Interview with Primagen!
<smashes keyboard>

Yes; that more-direct link works too. The link I suggested provides a little more context, perhaps, although to download the document it ends up using exactly the same link that you suggested.

About twenty years ago, I was privileged to be one of the authors of a security specification written at the behest of cable-based telecom companies that described the detailed design of a system for securing phone conversations that were carried over their networks. https://www.cablelabs.com/spec.... The design specifically started with the assumption that the network was penetrated, and was designed to ensure that the attacker could neither disrupt service nor learn anything useful about the traffic (for example, taken from the specification: "All media packets and all sensitive signaling communication across the network [are] safe from eavesdropping. Unauthorized message modification, insertion, deletion and replays anywhere in the network [are] easily detectable and [do] not affect proper network operation").

Once the specification was completed and it came time to deploy, all the telecom companies decided (whether in concert or individually, I do not know) that they were not going to deploy the design. When the lead security VP at one of the major telecom companies explained their decision to me: "We don't need gold-plated security like you've designed: we have firewalls"; I knew that the battle was lost. I also wondered how long it would be before the kind of intrusion like the one described in the article would occur.

Frankly, I'm amazed that it took this long; perhaps, though, what took the time was not the fact of a thorough intrusion, but, rather, the detecting of one.

Not true: I had exactly this happen to me this past week. FWIW, it was the local UPS store... and I got routed to India instead of the phone at the local store despite having called the local number.

Then not only did I have to navigate a phone tree that very nearly caused me to throw the phone across the room, but then (after hitting '0' so many times I lost count) got to speak to two lovely Indians, neither of whom -- as far as I could tell - had more than a very basic grasp of English. I say "as far as I could tell" because both the initial person and her supervisor had accents that were all but incomprehensible. In the end, I slammed the phone down, got into my car, and drove several miles to the store to talk to one of the people there in person (I should mention that they were very nice, sympathetic and apologised for the experience I'd been put through, even though, obviously, there was nothing they could have done about it).

Still, corporate UPS -- like so many companies these days -- are obviously unconcerned about the image they are projecting to the public.

This is how I've come to understand it. I welcome any and all corrections.

Passkeys are a cryptographic key stored in a Secure Element. This is usually a private key inside a small cryptographic engine. You feed it some plaintext along with the key ID, and it encrypts it using that key. The outer software then decrypts the ciphertext using the public key. If the decrypted text matches the original plaintext, then that proves you're holding a valid private key, and authentication proceeds.

The private key can be written to and erased from the Secure Element, but never read back out. All it can do is perform operations using the secret key to prove that it is indeed holding the correct secret key.

On phones, the Secure Element is in the hardware of your handset. On PCs, this is most often the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip. In both cases, the platform will ask for your PC's/phone's password/fingerprint/whatever before forwarding the request to the Secure Element.

Yubikeys can also serve as a Secure Element for Passkeys; the private key is stored in the Yubikey itself. Further, the Yubikey's stored credentials may be further protected with a PIN, so even if someone steals your Yubikey, they'll still need to know the PIN before it will accept and perform authentication checks. You get eight tries with the PIN; after that, it bricks itself.

The latest series 5 Yubikeys can store up to 100 Passkeys, and Passkeys may be individually deleted when no longer needed. Older series 5 Yubikeys can store only 25 Passkeys, and can only be deleted by erasing all of them.

Theoretically, you can have multiple Passkeys for a given account (one for everyday access; others as emergency backups). Not all sites support creating these, however.