I agree.
In my mind, it cant even be justified to be called a dumb-phone, when you can install a webbrowser or apps from the app store.
The fact that you have a different/smaller display, or a button for offlinemode, doesn't make the phone "dumb". At most it makes it "different". Going for a dumbphone, the only feature I would miss, would be the camera. But on this phone that also seems to be so shitty you would have to bring a seperate camera.
Kudos for trying to build a different phone, but while the execution is stupid, the phone isn't actually "dumb" enough for me.

From a pure intelligence standpoint, it's not that hard to do, if you have all of the "requirements" in place.
You would need to know:
- That your enemy is buying these devices
- How and when they are being deliverd
Then you have to do a few things:
- Build your own identical device (possibly only build a new battery, and add some circuitry to support your "hidden feature")
- Intercept the delivery and replace the purchased ones with your version

I imagine that there are Israeli sympathizers in most companies around the world, so it's not hard to imagine that one was present in the company that made the pagers. Someone who could supply Isreal with the delivery details, maybe even move the delivery date far enough into the future for them to manage building, or modifying their own device. It's also possible that someone simply had all of Hezbollahs communications tapped, and knew from there, and infiltrated the supply chain otherwise.
The real feat is that they managed to build copies faster than the manufacturer. Or they would have managed to put in their own order to arrive ahead of Hezbollahs, so they had time to modify identical devices.
Another interesting feat, is that the explosives were not caught in any airport security, or random sweep, or security check of the device. Arabs are generally subject to much harsher security checks, and I cannot for the life of me imagine that Hezbollah doesn't have at least one clumsy guy who smashes his pager and the repair man not noticing the attached explosives. So this part means that the people doing this would have to have an explosive that is not visible, and also not caught by the current chemical trace analysis commercially available. Even if moulded to hide inside the battery, this should be worrying to a LOT of people.

I've been doing the same, not for GitHub, but for our development platform.
My problem has been, to a large extent, that so much bad code exists, that it's really difficult to train the model on "good" code. Sometimes guidelines change as software matures, or they depend on the underlying hardware. These are some of the things the AI has trouble understanding. I've also had to find ways to get the AI to understand that internal guidelines must never be set a side in favor of other solutions...
So for me, this is good news. I'm happy to see how others solve these problems. I hope they have some really smart ideas that can adapt to other platforms.

I dont really have the current numbers for the cost of VMware alternatives. But I know that our savings going from server based, to virtualization based was around 40-50%, so with a potential hike in licensing a lot - if not all - of that saving could easily be gone. If that's the case, the the business case for keeping VMware dies.
Luckily there are alternatives.

I worked for CSC for a number of years, and there were layoffs there too. I applied for the voluntary layoff every time. But they never wanted ME to leave. It was always the guys working in the less profitable areas, or with the older technologies. Never us making money hand over fist.
And as usual, the same day they announce the layoffs, they go and hire a nearly identical amount of new people with different skills that are now the "new business model". When all they REALLY had to do, was to retrain the current staff. But hey that would require investments in education.... Wasn't there once a company with the motto "no learning - no earning" ? Wasn't that... Oh yeah... IBM...

I have to agree with the supreme court on this one. In majority of Europe it has long been a requirement to get a warrant to locate the owner of an IP.
You may not NEED to have a users PC, if you have their IPs history of interactions with sites. As such it seems reasonable that anything that can reveal the owners identity is subject to privacy.
If police sees a phonenumber dialing a drug dealer, they would also need a warrant to tap that phone line, or identify an unlisted caller from the phone company. There really should be no difference to privacy, if it is via letter, telephone, email, messenger, or even smoke signals or carrier pigeons. All forms of communications are private, and the minute you start snooping into that, either by reading it, or identfying the owner of it, that should only be done due to legitimate concerns, enough concern to convince a judge to sign a warrant.

I noticed the same thing. As an IT architect, I frequently have to remind our business and others, that we NEED to keep things updated to a reasonable level, in order to ensure future compatibility, support newer security measures, and generally keep in line with the vendors recommendations regarding releases.

Now I totally get that people don't WANT changes, because changes cause a disruption of the status quo (which they are used to having working or them). But to EXPECT to never need to change, seems... Illogical, especially for developers, who really should be the ones pushing for updates and changes... So why is it a chock for people to find our that their dirt old OS is no longer fully supported ?

I totally agree with the devs that the way it is being handled could be done smarter/smoother. But who in their right minds sets up an automatic update, and expect to not have problems requiring any intervention ? Surely it's not the first time someone has been surprised by the contents of an automatic update ? Isn't this why we TEST before moving things into production ?

The movement of Greenland on the arctic shelf actually causes a large percentage of the oceans sands to be created, and interestingly enough, the meltwater alone creates rivers accounting for at least 10% of the sand found in rivers world wide. Easy to pick up, freshly created sand, where the locals are even happy to build businesses around it. https://news.mongabay.com/2022...

That said, erosion or similar natural elements need not be the only way to find the sand we need. In theory, if we could club together 10-15 pieces of the "smooth" sand grains, we'd end up with a decently textured element. The question is merely, how do we achieve such a goal. It might be a cheaper option, than building a vacuum under the arctic. In both cases, we'd need to develop the right tools for the job. And in 20 years, we'll HAVE to as we'd be running out of sand from existing resources.

But we should also start to consider alternative materials. In many parts of the world, people want to live in "new" houses. So recyclable materials, or alternative materials, such as wood, steel, graphene, etc. might become cheaper than concrete as we move towards the unavailability of construction grade sand.
The future is already here... It is just a matter of when the price point for alternatives is reached: https://edition.cnn.com/style/...

Being in IT design myself, I am making the bots that replace certain types of work.
I enjoy every day of it, because just like any other tool I have built over the last more than 30 years, it doesn't take away from me, it gives me (and the people I give technology to) the freedom to be MORE creative, to be MORE productive, to be MORE profitable.
As such AI is a great tool to help my developers work faster, since they now have a helpful bot to let them know when they are making mistakes that will one day be expensive to fix, like when they use a while loop instead of a join, or do a count on all records, instead of a single record etc.
Throughout the years I have built automation, streamlined processes and saved millions of man hours that could then be used to further increase the productivity of the companies I have worked for. AI will help me save thousands more in the years to come.

That said, getting something done faster, easier or cheaper is only beneficial if it releases resources that can be used better elsewhere.
In an economy in decline, the lack of work means it might actually be cheaper for me to NOT build something for the developers, engineers or managers, as they already have the time to do the work they need done. They do not need tools to provide them with more time. They do not need to be able to deliver projects or changes faster. Time is plentiful
This hits freelancers, substitutes, consultants and anyone else who are first in line to handle the overflow. And it does not matter if the hit comes from my streamlining or from a general economic decline. This is a part of the risk you run when you freelance; You are the first to not get (more) work.

That said, AI is no threat to employment, it is just another tool in the box along with APIs, automation, reporting etc. Even the most specialized AI is unable to be creative to the same extent a human mind is. It is all about using the tools to optimize your output, and not about using the tool to generate your ONLY output. That would be like a mechanic who only services cars from 1994. Freelancers also need to move to where the work is.
Evolve or die.

I would guess jumpcloud rotated their keys because they found out the keys were compromised. And unless jumpcloud stores their private key where a hacker can get to it, they probably assume "nation state" because they believe one or more keys has been brute forced.
I'm not saying thats the case, or that any random hacker can't have access to a distributed network capable of brute forcing whatever encryption jumpcloud used. But until we know who was the target of the original attack, that would be my guess as to why jumpcloud say as they do...

But you are right, we are probably not hearing all of the story, and we might never hear all of it.

No hacker in his right mind would execute the end point attack from his personal workstation. This is done remotely, or through bot networks controlled by the hacker. So even with the domains and IPs where the attack originated, that is just a transit point, making it very difficult to identify the hacker, or his country of origin by these means.

When people say "nation state" it is because there are some types of attacks that is believed requires sophisticated resources. Presumably some of these resources were detected used in the attack.

However, without knowing the exact customer that was the point of the attack, it will be pure conjecture to guess at a source. But given the fairly low number of governments willing to engage in this type of hybrid warfare, a safe guess would be one of those.

As a student of human nature, one of the things I have found in many studies on digital bullying, trolling, and "harsh language". Is that somewhere between 90% and 99% (depending on the study and their focus) of shitposting online is stuff people would never say to another person face-to-face.
Lack of social interaction is what breeds horrible online behavior. People forget to be "nice" to eachother.

Now I totally agree that it's POSSIBLE to have the same amount of collaboration online as it is IRL. But these studies show, you can never have the same amount of respect, socializing, humor, trust, and all of the personal aspects, that make you like the people you work with. And that is, for some reason also important to companies.

Dude, You have to think about the differences between who profits and who pays.

If you are building a zero sum game, then yes, its more efficient for everyone to be at one place. But if you go down this route, you should sleep in the basement at work, and your kid should be schooled in the warehouse etc.

In this case, a lot of people who got used to the benefits of working from home (no commute, no issues with babysitters if the kids are sick, better lunches or whatever it is that people enjoy) are now angry that they are forced back to the office. For them it's not a cost saving measure. In most countries it's probably more expensive to work from home, as you pay your own utilities, vs. saving a little on the use of the car.

For the companies, there is also no financial gain to be had, or at least that is the argument the workers bring. Most office workers are actually doing backoffice tasks, that can be done fully remote. In my company we are also asked to work at least 60% from the office, which can only be done by shuffling people around like a game of musical chairs. I agree with my bosses that the socializing is an important part of the work, and that it creates an atmosphere of trust and cooperation. While I doubt this should be the deciding factor, in the end, it's whats in my contract I have to live up to.

As a software architect, I get approached by dozens of companies offering me software to help do codebase analysis, vulnerability scans, etc.

And working with many billion lines of code, there is plenty to review. The vendor also supports user exits and modifications, so worldwide, probably 100s of billions of lines of code. The issue isn't identifying the bad code. The issue is what to do with it. Even with this much data to sift through, AI will never be able to completely comprehend the purpose of all code, simply because there are so many bad programmers out there, and documentation is usually no help.
But an 80% solution would be most welcome too.

The same thing goes for warnings. Yes, we can run automated scans to react to warnings. But we already do this. Automation rocks. When I started, I spent at least half of my nights fixing filled harddrives, extending databases, restarting backups, etc. Today I sleep 360 nights of the year, or more. I applaud monitoring, alerting, automated responses, scripting, and of course vendors improving their toolsets, and 3rd parties adding what the vendor sees as "irrelevant", but which makes my life easier.

However, from a warning to an error, there is a long way. Warnings are there to inform us of an impending (and identified - thus known) problem. Errors happen when unforeseen problems occur. Keyword being "unforeseen". If the programmer knew what the problem was, he could fix it with checks, choices or calls to scripts fixing the issue. But when a programmer chooses to throw an error, it is because he CANT fix the issue. Again, we might be able to understand or add in fixes to some of the problems, simply because AI would allow us to effectively trawl through millions of identical errors, and determine a common cause, or a common solution that is not easily identified by the human mind.... But again, at best an 80% solution, I would guess.

Am I happy with 80% ? Absolutely. Can we go higher ? Hopefully ? We need to. Software evolves faster than our solution to the bad code, if it didn't I would be out of a job by now :)

Now once we get the AI to actually WRITE the code (effectively - not the simple procedures it can do today), we can add in purpose, direction, rules, principles. And unlike humans, the AI will be more inclined to follow those guidelines, resulting in fewer errors. And if the AI wrote the code effectively, it will be more likely to understand the purpose, and thus fix unforeseen problems. And more importantly, people with little or no programming skill can effectively join the ranks of the developers, which will make development cheaper and faster. Startups and new projects wont be dependent on good programmers, just good AI.

I know Americans (and now apparently no longer Australians) laugh at the communist like regulatory enforcements that fair compete laws and consumer protection laws impose on EU business (and business trying to sell their stuff in EU, as many a tech giant has found out over the years).

But in the end, the little guy actually can rely on the fact that he doesn't HAVE to get 3 competing offers, or validate every single word of a waiver. Because the law actually protects the consumers from deceptive behavior of business.

I'm willing to say out loud that I'm all for consumer protection and fairness in marketing. I think it provides trust in the business you are dealing with, and makes for a much more positive experience as a consumer. And it makes me more willing to spend my money, because I'm not afraid that I will get screwed by the company I'm dealing with.