Ya, the defense economics of a $50k Shahead drone being taken out by a $4 milion Patriot missile do not work in the defenders’ favor. If Iran can keep that up long enough, those conventional weapons will start slipping through. Still, this was a known factor with Trump and Bibi’s war and I don’t think a bunch of civilians getting killed in drone attacks was a significant deterrent (QED, that war is going forward). While I believe that could result in the US/Israel making some propaganda declaration of victory and quietly ending the war, I don’t think it would ever be a deterrent in the future. That’s why I would expect Iran to want nukes. If they want to ensure that the US and Israel don’t just randomly drop bombs on Iran when a US leader needs a distraction, they need a credible threat of Israeli cities disappearing in a mushroom cloud. That’s something that couldn’t just be ignored.

Between Trumps first and second terms, he has demonstrated the issue with any long term deal Iran might make with the US. Under Obama, Iran had agreed to international inspections and a general framework that would have ensured that they followed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which they are a signatory). Trump rolled up in 2017 and tossed that out the window. And now Trump has decided to further destroy any credibility the US had left by dropping bombs. I doubt there is any world left where the Iranian Government trusts the US Government. I’d expect them to go more the North Korea route, isolate themselves further and make a sprint for nuclear weapons. They will have to content themselves with being part of the BRICS system. But a nuclear umbrella, with a high likelihood of nuking Tel Aviv, seems the only way to ensure the US/Israel aren’t randomly lobbing bombs at them.

The uproar is the same uproar that has always existed when government overreach threatens privacy. The question should never be, “why are you fighting this?” the question is, “why is this needed?” And the answer is that it is not. It’s yet another mnaufactured moral panic which is being pushed by the folks who want to destroy privacy. Some want that destruction for the privacy so that they can spy on and control others, the rest are dimwitted fools who believe that they can give up privacy to obtain some small measure of security. They are wrong and in the end will have neither privacy nor security.

Kerchoff’s Principle has long been a keystone of cryptographic security. That a crypto system should be secure, even if everything about the system is known, except for the key. This has resulted in robust cryptographic protocols, specifically because the protocols could be open and well researched. This same principle shows up in other areas of security under the axiom, “security through obscurity is not security”. If the security of a system fundamentally relies on the details of the system remaining a secret, then that system is inherently not secure. Having security systems based on open source protocols and software is this working in practice. By having everything open and available for a wide range of researches to test and validate, we can be more assured of the security of a system. Closed, proprietary protocols and software are a risk to organizations. They have no way of knowing if those closed systems are really well designed or a house of cards hiding behind a curtain.

Given the roughly similarly sized drop in Win11 users. I chose to believe that the Win10 jump is from people nopeing out of the Win11 slop.

Tempting. though I might have to go with FauxPilot.

Well, you see. If Trump gets enough US soldiers killed, or as he called them, suckers and losers, there will be less demand for products and prices will go down. Checkmate, economists!

Microslop needs to ask Copilot about the Streisand Effect. As someone not chronically on social media, I hadn’t heard about this term yet. Now, it’s one of my favorites.

Funny enough, I’ve been experimenting with Copilot at work and it does have some genuine uses for looking up information quickly. Especially when trying to troubleshoot Microslop products. Between the disaster called “Windows 11”, the cluster-fuck which is New Outlook and the complete shitshow which falls under the umbrella of “Defender”, it’s obvious that they have stopped investing in QA and testing. At least Copilot can help me find the right document to quickly tell me that I can’t do something I used to be able to do in the old version of Outlook. Or, that Defender is incapable of doing things which even Symantec Antivirus had gotten right in the early 2000’s.

Guess they’re headed back to the BSA acronym:
Bigot Scouts of America

AI Slop code base. Did Microsoft go open source?

It will be a Paramount Discovery of new ways to make movies and TV suck.

This one is a mixed bag. KYC regulations are very useful in detecting and prosecuting money laundering and crimes like human trafficking. But ya, if this data needs to be kept, the regulations around secure storage need to be just as tight. This sort of thing should be required to be kept to cybersecurity standards like CMMC Level 3, audited by outside auditors and violations treated as company and executive disqualifying events (you ran a company so poorly you failed to secure data, you’re not allowed to run such a company for the next 10 years). The sort of negligence of leaving a database exposed to the web should already result in business crippling fines (think GDPR style fines listed in percentages of global annual revenue). A database which is exposed to the web and has default credentials or no access control at all should result in c-level exec seeing the inside of a jail cell. There is zero excuse for that happening in a company tasked with protecting data. And I refuse to believe it’s the result of whatever scape-goat techs they try to pin this on. This sort of failure always comes from the top. It’s caused by executives who want everything done fast and cheap and don’t care about it being done right.

It’s certainly one of those hard trade-offs to make. One of the methods for reducing crime is increasing the perceived likelihood of getting caught. Cameras can do that, if there is regular follow-though by government authorities to investigate, arrest and prosecute crimes. Though, there is probably more value in reducing poverty and corruption, which is known to reduce crime. And which has the added benefit of not creating a surveillance network when corruption does creep into government. Of course, that is expensive and might just help the poors, and that is antithetical to authoritarians of every stripe.

Cheeto Mussolini showing off his insecurities.

The best way to protect a dataset from falling into the “wrong hands” (for however the “wrong hands” is defined for that dataset) is to not keep that dataset in the first place. While I get that tracking the movement of citizens can make solving some crimes easier, the risks to privacy and of authoritarian abuse are far too great to accept.

I have two:

1. Waves glowing with bioluminescence during a red tide. We didn’t know it would be going on and were just camping by the beach. Walking on it at night, we all saw the waves glowing and weren’t sure it was real. As we got closer, our footsteps in the area where the waves were rolling in and out were glowing as well. Just surreal.
2. A house blowing up. Guy opened a natural gas valve in the house and touched it off. Insulation shot way up in the air and the house itself bowed outwards in basically every direction, stayed standing though. At least until it burned down.

Oh ya, I remember her greatest hit

Not every news article is going to be about some ground breaking research. That researchers are putting these sorts of fad diets to the test is important and knowing the outcome of that is useful. Journalism is about informing people, not entertaining them. If you can’t handle being informed without the sensationalism, you may need to seek professional help.

Pepperidge Farm remembers: