I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.

My favorite way of doing that was asking them when I could expect HR to send me the new employee paperwork so I can sign onto the health insurance. Because if they’re going to treat a contractor like an employee, the least they could do is offer employee benefits. And if a manager thinks they’re about to get called into HR to explain why they hired an additional employee without permission, you’d be surprised how quickly their attitude changes.

There are plenty of (likely apocryphal) stories of new Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) recruits being fed C4 and chased around with a stun gun. The old timers tell the new recruit that electricity will cause C4 to detonate. In reality, it’s a potent laxative and will give them the shits in a matter of minutes. So the recruit is stuck running away from a taser that they think will make them explode, while desperately trying not to shit themselves.

No dev worth their salt is going to trust Unity period. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Investing in FOSS has never failed me, and Godot is growing exponentially as a result of Unity’s actions.

Yeah I can almost guarantee that the original plan was always for him to leave. He was going to be the scapegoat with a golden parachute, allowing the company to keep the unpopular changes while disbursing the bad publicity. It’s exactly what he did with EA too.

Basically reddit’s Ellen Pao plan. Bring in someone unpopular to make the unpopular changes, then let them go with a massive payout while keeping the unpopular changes.

But then Unity realized that the companies weren’t going to forget about the unpopular changes and it wasn’t going to blow over. Companies started bailing left and right and switching to other engines. At that point Unity realized that the smoke was actually a full blown fire, and started doing whatever they could to try and regain some trust. But by that point it was too late, because companies had already seen the potential for abuse. And as the saying goes, when someone tells you who you are, believe them. So now companies are unwilling to go back to Unity, and Unity is grasping at straws.

Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.

Chaotic evil is encrypting, compressing, then encrypting again.

Threads is going to be federated. But lots of instances have already said they’re going to defederate it immediately, because lots of people expect that federation is part of the EEE business plan. That’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Originally pioneered by Microsoft, it’s basically a way to kill off tech that you don’t want to compete with.

First embrace it, and do everything you can to be friendly towards the people using it. It’s an open standard, and you want to act inviting and supportive. Lull your competition into a false sense of cooperation.

Then extend it. Start creating proprietary additions which exist outside the standard. Do this under the guise of supporting the standard. These additions should be difficult for competitors to implement, but you maintain that this is all done to further improve the standard and bring more functionality to the end user.

Then extinguish the competition. Once you’re the de facto producer for this tech, (because users have come to expect those proprietary functions,) then lock down those proprietary changes so competitors can’t use them at all. Make the alternatives noticeably worse to use in every way, to force everyone into your (now closed standard) platform.

A good example of this is Microsoft Office. Ever notice that Word documents have historically been awful to try and open/edit in other word processors? This was because Microsoft was using EEE to make the other word processors worse. It’s also what Google does with Chrome, implementing non-standard additions then using their market share to bully competitors into joining; Every Firefox user has seen the dreaded “your browser isn’t compatible with this site. Use Chrome instead” message at least once.

Firefox doesn’t use chromium. It uses Gecko, which is an entirely separate codebase.

If only the power companies had been repeatedly warned that this would happen, and given millions of dollars of taxpayer money to increase power generation potential.

Oh wait… They were warned of this? And they were given taxpayer money? And they illegally used it for stock buybacks instead? And nothing was ever done to prosecute the illegal spending? Yeah, that sounds about on par for Texas.

That’s what we in the cybersec business call an “oopsie daisy I made a little fucky-wucky”.

For real though, this isn’t a problem yet. The TL;DR is that Mali has a top-level domain “.ml”. Just like “.co.uk” for the UK. And the military uses the domain “.mil”. So lots of emails accidentally get sent to “[Military email]@[Military email server].ml” instead of sending to .mil.

So a bad actor could simply set up an e-mail server with .ml domains that mirror the military’s .mil ones, and start collecting all of those mis-addressed emails.

So why isn’t it an issue yet? Because we had a contract with Mali to manage their domain. They literally signed administrative rights for the .ml domain over. So the US was able to basically set up their own .ml mirrored sites, to capture all of those mis-addressed emails. They have captured thousands throughout the years, because military members keep misaddressing their emails. Supposedly containing all kinds of sensitive data. Everything from medical records to troop movements and equipment inspection reports.

But that contract ends this week, so Mali could 100% start registering their own domains when that contract expires and domain registrations begin expiring.

Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.

Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.

I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.