These attacks prove that leaving individual cities to fend for themselves on the open commercial internet is a complete failure of public governance. The fact that small towns in these states are actively fighting off what U.S. officials believe are foreign, state-sponsored adversaries like Iranian hackers highlights the sheer absurdity of our decentralized approach. Cybersecurity inherently scales; while Fortune 100 companies protect thousands of endpoints for pennies per user using enterprise-grade automation, resource-starved municipalities are forced to survive with tiny budgets and skeleton IT crews.

South Dakota is the only state that endeavors to give a protected network to its municipalities. Five years after Oldsmar Florida exposed this exact vulnerability, we are watching the exact same script play out as utility operators across the country are forced to switch to manual workarounds to keep their treatment plants online. For a fraction of the millions spent reacting to these disruptions, states could easily pool their buying power to build a single, hardened network infrastructure for every municipal utility. The refusal of almost all of our states or the federal government to implement a sane, centralized defense model like South Dakota's means American critical infrastructure remains an open, fragmented playground for cybercriminals.

And an "I told you so": I stated in the first post on this when Minnesota was the only state named that the rest of the states were simply incapable of noticing. Now we have 7 states -- the attacks are likely against all.

The attorneys for Op-Fortitude do not seem to know the difference between encryption keys and encrypted content.

"If the DCP is encrypted, please have the keys open from the time the asset lands through EOD on 6/16. This timing allows us to test the content and ensure a streamlined screening." In other words, Netflix expressly requested that the Film's DCP be either unencrypted or unlocked.

A request that keys be valid for a given time period is very different from a request that content be a-priori unlocked. Everything following "In other words" is a false assertion and this assertion is then a lynchpin for following claims. So claim 23 being false unravels much of the pleading.

The fact that there is no mention of the movie industry standard Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) in the pleading while referring to the event as a "screening" is a giant red flag. Keys are always time bounded in DCI and Netflix was likely assuming that they would be receiving DCI protected content when they made this request in this way. Either these attorneys are not too bright or more likely they are working with a client that requires a certain amount of willful ignorance on their part (In which case they already are expecting to lose this but are going to bill as many hours as possible in the process).

They can tax the prediction companies based on the wager returns to the state's citizens effectively making it too expensive to do business with the state's citizens. There is no federal law preventing states from implementing taxes.

At the time it was still providing "Reputation Ruining as a Service" among the many shady ways it made money, and they had no qualms about breaking the law in the process. There is likely some company that has risen since to fill this need.

I doubt Minnesota was specifically targeted; they are simply the first state to notice that multiple attacks occurred.

Despite the fact that SCO's attorneys were on the verge of being sanctioned for failing to produce any evidence last time, the way the case ended is SCO and IBM both just dropped the case without real resolution. Now we have a savvy attorney from Xinuos making the argument:

"But if we thought that infringement claims accrue at the time of copying, it might be that if IBM then uses the code again at a later time, there's a new infringement claim."

Even though exactly what was initially copied by IBM that was uniquely SCO content was never really made clear by SCO despite years of legal maneuvering.

This is just old fashioned gray mail. The only reason Xinuos exists is to extort money from IBM, so that is what they are going to do.

These numbers are based on a sampling of 60,000 households by the Bureau of Labor Statistics called the "Current Population Survey". Then the results of the survey are applied to the population as a whole.
IF any work was done for pay in the last week
THEN EMPLOYED
ELSE
__IF are they temporarily absent from a job
__THEN EMPLOYED
__ELSE
____IF actively looked for work in the last 4 weeks
____THEN UNEMPLOYEED
____ELSE NOT_IN_LABOR_FORCE

The market cap of BTC is much larger than the available liquidity of BTC. The "modernization" of the BTC market with things like options trading that help window losses also brings features like automated trading and triggers. The two largest holders of BTC, BlackRock and Strategy account for all available liquidity if they were to suddenly sell everything. But there are other whales with large enough positions that could kick off a cascading series of automatic trades and a collapse of liquidity. It only takes one large enough whale to kick off an avalanche of automatic trades to destroy this tulip market. These trigger settings are opaque to but are a risk to everyone who is betting that they will not trip.

Then there is the 1 MHW overhead on every single transaction which translates to roughly a $1 million per month electric bill (miners generally pay less for electricity than we do). Which requires that at least that much new cash keep coming into the system. If people only used BTC for illicit purposes to launder fiat currency transactions (which on net do not add fresh currency) the BTC ecosystem would slowly bleed out. New investors have to keep being added or the whole thing unravels eventually.

If mining becomes unprofitable for long enough and the hash rate drops, mining difficulty will drop by 75% every 2016 blocks. It could take months before mining again becomes profitable when the block reward falls behind the cost of the electricity to produce a block. Right now this is around $20,000/BTC. If people are trying to bail at a rate higher than 400 transactions per minute, the queue to be in a block will start getting longer and transaction times could grow to days, weeks, even months. We have already seen the backlog grow to as long as 560,000 unconfirmed transactions -- this is not a hypothetical scenario. If BTC is declining and the transaction timeframe becomes worrisome, more people will decide to sell and a this could lead to a bank run and whale triggers.

There are fundamental known structural weaknesses to BTC that have been ignored while the value went up and up, but are going to show themselves when the price is stagnant or falls for too long.

The vast majority of the ports in the world do not care if a container debarks one ship and eventually embarks on another without going through their customers and entering their country. There are major world ports that are considered "hubs" just like airports for people. 85% of the containers that arrive in Singapore for instance are transshipped.

It is extremely difficult once a container has left one port to know where it is really going to wind up. The logistics databases can be updated after a container has left one port and none of the top 6 companies managing the flow of the world's containers are U.S. corporations.

There are even businesses in 3rd world countries that all they do is completely unpackage and re-package the contents of shipping containers to eliminate the possibility of hidden tracking devices.

Even if the magical tech envisioned in the Chip Security Act worked, all it would tell us is what we already know, that boards and chips are winding up in places the U.S. government declared that they should not. If we can't stop specialized gas centrifuge components from getting into Iran, we aren't going to be able to keep commodity chips from getting into China.

A gross profit of only $2000 per vehicle in no way has to mean every vehicle has a negative net profit. The net profit is likely near $0, +/-500, which is a little different than the scale of the losses the article seems to imply. That they can capture so much of the market at so close to profitability is scary, but this is what happens when you shift all of your production to another country for their cheaper labor ... within a couple of decades they are producing cheaper products than the ones they were hired to make. Britain shifted production to the U.S. in the 1780s ... this has been occurring throughout history.

It is cheaper to make identical high end and low end chips and use a minimum number of mutable bits to disable features that it is to design two completely different chips. This isn't enshitification or a conspiracy, this is just Standard Operating Procedures for companies making complicated technical products. This is not a new practice. In the late 1970s the only difference between a 0.25 MIP and a 0.50 MIP HP3000 was one jumper on the motherboard, but the latter "product" cost significantly more (when you purchased the system you signed a contract asserting you would not modify the system). It is far more cost effective to have different levels of products be essentially identical and curtail capabilities than it is to actually make different chips.

There was likely some sort of internal feature review where it was noticed that a bit that marketing said to disable years ago had not in fact been disabled, so they "fixed" this issue in the AGESA 1.2.7.0, release.

When Blackberries came along managers stopped seeing anything more than the first couple of lines of text in emails, so you not only had to get your point across succinctly you had to do it in a way that what you wrote could be forwarded up the chain without detonating a shit storm.

Now it seems this is how one has to communicate with everyone, not just an irritating boss.

Unfortunately, most technical issues cannot be relayed in 2 sentences.

Fox must not understand just how toxic their brand is to half the country. Anything they buy is going to lose half its customers overnight when there are cheap, competitive alternatives.

The overhead on Bitcoin is $15 to $25 million per day for the electricity of the miners. This overhead requires constant new fools and when new fools stop injecting cash into the ecosystem the whole thing implodes. That hasn't happened yet, there is at least this level of new fools coming along every day or the miners would not be able to turn their block rewards into the cash needed to pay their electric companies. This is how Bitcoin will end -- a bank run followed by a bunch of overdue electric bills.

A few police officers pacing traffic would have cost a lot less than $33 million.