However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can't recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated "from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale," without backing up any of the encrypted data.

So the victim had no way to get their data back, right? What's the incentive to pay the random then, if the attacker had encrypted the data without backing it up and wouldn't be able to decrypt it?

Gotcha. No security fixes would be a definite issue. TMobile would have to work doubly hard to minimize security risks while they switch to something else.

I've been running Linux for over 25 years on various desktops and servers, along with some Windows and NetWare servers and whatnot for even longer than that, going back to the 80s. One of my clients opted for RHEL back when CentOS was a thing, just because they wanted "support". So they got a whole bunch of licenses for RHEL and switched (I eventually switched, too, because of the bullshit RedHat pulled with CentOS, but I went to Debian). You know how many times we've had to call RedHat or post on their forums for support? ZERO Times. So I'm asking here. Am I naive, and do people really need support from VMWare? I mean, if you've got over 300K in VM cores, what could happen that you need support to resolve a problem? Or is it that they want updates and can't get them without support? Because in TFS is says "The carrier fired back by pointing out that it has made just two support calls in 2026", so it makes me think it's about actual support.

the "downsides" are all pretty racist in origin

Come again? What does race have to do with it? In my example, I used a French couple. Even if the issue I raised was a niche issue, I still don't think their child born in the U.S. should automatically be a U.S. citizen. It just doesn't make sense. Same as those who are here illegally. If you have a problem with the current immigration laws in the U.S., fix THAT. Here's who I think should be a U.S. citizen by birth: a child born to a couple who at least one of them is a citizen or a permanent resident (which, unfortunately to my demise since I'll get labeled a conservative, happens to be the Trump administration's point of view). Illegals? No. Student visas and J-workers? No.

Having said all that, though, I am a firm believer of the constitution. So if today's decision on birthright is the current interpretation of the 14th amendment, then let congress pass an amendment, amending the constitution to specifically limit that citizenship.

Even though I'm a liberal, I actually disagree with the court's decision in the birthright case. Just imagine a French couple go to Hawaii for vacation and she happens to have her baby early. Technically, that kid, when grown up, has to file taxes with the IRS annually and may even have to pay taxes while working in France. Worse yet, he may find that he's arrested when he comes to vacation to the U.S. because he's wanted by the IRS. I know it's a stretch, but that's no the only downside of the birthright citizenship.

This has nothing to do with being liberal or not. Obviously 3 conservative judges were included in the majority. Not everything the SCOTUS decides falls along liberal/conservative tendencies of the judges.

Despite having OpnSense as my router and a managed switch, for some reason I never considered separating things on my local LAN subnet until I was working on a remote backup PBS server I was going to put in my daughter's home and wanted it to by default VPN into my home, but I didn't want it to end up on my home subnet. Out came a separate subnet for a DMZ with no access to anything except me being able to access it. Once I did that, I ended up setting a guest WiFi VLAN, a second VPN subnet for remote access instead of SSH, and a separate VLAN for stuff like Roku which don't do anything but access the internet.

To be honest, doing the whole thing was somewhat easier than I thought, but nowhere near what a casual, non-technical user would be able to do. The problem is that without an actual VLAN implementation, a "guest" SSID is not ironclad. It just takes more equipment and more know-how to separate things for casual users.

That's if you don't use an account when you use it. I use an account associated with it. Recently, as an exercise to see what it had learned about me, I asked it to write an obituary for me. It was spot on and referred to conversations I had with it from last year.

Funny how I started referring to it as "he" and I'm completely heterosexual. But to answer your question, I'm almost to the point of jumping in at their lowest tier, which I think is $20/month. It's supposed to be my father's day present to myself.

Case in point, I was working on a project where I needed to do .csv file processing in a BASH script and I knew AWK was the perfect tool to do it, but I had never written an AWK script. So I went through a couple of iterations with ChatGPT, asking it to create me a script and then I modified much of it to work in the way I wanted it to work for my process. Without ChatGPT, it would definitely have taken more time to write something from scratch and I may not even have been inclined to use AWK had I not had a good start with ChatGPT and resorted to other, less optimal methods. But because of ChatGPT, I now can write decent AWK scripts and am not afraid to tackle projects which may come my way.

Whether it's a con job or not is irrelevant to me. While I've found ChatGPT to be completely mediocre when it comes to technical stuff, I have poured hours into discussing the humanities with it with astounding results, at least for myself, and I would hate to see the knowledge it has of our conversations vanish into thin air (or rather become unusable for me and become only a commodity for whoever buys them out). It would be a lot of time lost on my side and it would suck if I have to start on square one with another model.

I kept calling bullshit as I read the summary, but I wasn't going to say anything because I figured these people are smarter than me. They may still be smarter than me, but it may have been more believable if they hadn't thrown the kitchen sink in there.

Well, it looks like nuclear is right in between solar and wind.

For a second I thought you said "Salo" and thought "Man! That's brave to post that you've watched Salo!"

What people don't understand is that every language or programming method has its own strengths and weaknesses. Take, for instance, string processing on SQL server. It doesn't really exist. Sure, I can write a Perl script to get SQL data and manipulate it, but that's only useful if I am writing an interface and will be doing something with the data outside of SQL afterward. I loved the list processing functions in Coldfusion (and if I go back further, those from Advanced Revelation in the 80s), so I wrote a whole bunch of SQL Server functions that operate on lists: cf_gettoken, cf_listlen, cf_listfirst, etc. When it comes to manipulating strings on SQL Server, everyone else wonders how I can get the work done so fast, and none of them are willing to even sit down and look at the functions, which are actually very short by nature.