Re: The MS Enshitiffication Project
"ensure its survival and ultimate victory"? Agree with the over-used "enshittifcation", but I hope your comment was written with a sardonic look on your face.
1230 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2013
I liked DDG for quite a while but I started to notice that its search results favored sites like LinkedIn. It took me a while but then I realized that it was just repackaging Bing search results.
Switched to kagi about six months ago. It works the way I want a search engine to work (altavista anyone?). Faceted (lens) searches, decent date/time specs, etc.
The operatives that work for trump are known for being honest and not motivated by personal profit. There were probably no nice dinners, trips to exotic locations such as merdelargo, baubles and beads.
If this doesn't work out as outlined on that back-of-the-napkin deal, the US taxpayers will gladly chip in. (If there are any left.)
Pegasus has probably been used for many such operations. They can cloak their terms in statements that it should only be used by benevolent "state actors" but everyone knows, everyone knows that the darkest forces on earth will also be using it.
This is why state-mandated back-doors into privacy functions will be ultimately used for ill purposes. Whether by the states or by the rest of the criminals.
While a .RU TLD might raise some eyebrows, it is childishly simple to have 2 or more levels of indirection as owners/maintainers to the code base.
It seems obvious (to me) that anyone that delivers software or hardware from within the USSR would be highly suspect. Just like any news coming from that autocratic state. Easily co-opted.
Since the US is apparently a vassal state with Putin as its behind-the-curtain leader, I'd question a lot of American products also.
This is a good way to show the United Nations how seriously trmp thinks of them. First he proposed a congress-critter-liar named Stefanik who had to be withdrawn. Guess it's like an FBI agent assigned to Juneau, AK. Or a russian dissident assigned to Siberia.
Most of my duties were receiving paper-tape, reading it, punching cards and passing them through a mechanical sorter and then collator, and then reading these back onto the tapes on the 360 where they were further massaged. An incredibly tortuous way that had been slowly improvised on over the years.
One day the consol popped up a message about SYSVOL being out of space. Since I had spent idle time reading every IBM manual I could, I knew that our particular operation didn't need to have a fancy BAL library that was stored on the SYSVOL. So I deleted it. Everything continued to run fine until one day a chap from Chicago shows up to build and load some new software. Boom!
I learned enough in those few months to start a 50+ year career - and still loving it!
on many different inputs. Not just text; not just existing mathematical equations.
But also applying these recognition analyses on some of the alternative sources mentioned such as the audio-visual one or geometric modeling seems like a logical extension.
I remember when we were using PCRE to try to decode genetic sequences via the protein alphabet. This technique kept improving but it was still mainly an initially hand-created algorithm. Same with the tensor models which have expanded to handle so much more for which it was constructed.
Mainly after that 9/11 incident, but I'm sure well before also.
'some' of us might have added some interesting words to our email/AIM/etc. exchanges to get the agents all hot and bothered. Perhaps words like jihad, bomb, explosives, riots, subvert elections, foster an insurrection, russia, russia, russia, trump.
Lots of fun characters around the world are looking to create some new mischief. Cue the NORKs, the "Internet Research Agency" in the USSR, etc.
Since a lot of the CVEs have to do with industrial control systems this could be a fun time to handle crises at major utilities.
And here in the poor old USofA there are large areas that aren't reached by cell service and the states have "committed" to 100% broadband access by 20xx. Local communities (speaking of Vermont) are pretty vehement about not allowing new cell towers. This may allow the states to say they have fulfilled their commitments by just showing that it is available via these cell-phone satellite capabilities.
There's no regulation anymore in Doge City. Larry will probably have to suffer through a budger dinner with slobby as penance.
And I'm sure that DJT wouldn't use risky software like Oracle to manage his off-shore holdings!
"Like many criminal gangs, Arkana has tried to give itself a veneer of respectability by saying it's actually in the security business."
I don't know why this one sentence seemed so apropos:
Let's not forget the mantra: "We care deeply about our customers and take your trust in us very seriously."
The infiltration by the boy musk nerds to implant spyware and devices on the networks in the first few hours was completed early in this attack.
The exfiltration of data from the various databases and servers started right away. The end-points for this exfiltration will not return the data - even if they could be identified.
As the president of El Salvador said when planes landed with illegally exported people - ordered back by the US courts: "Oopsie, Too Late".
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/03/oopsie-too-late-el-salvador-president-mocks-judge/
Used it to remote into another system that was outside of my LANA (US area-code registry) and would incur huge telecom bills if I dialed in directly.
Totally forgot about it since it was working so well.
Sold the townhouse to a nice couple. A few days later got a call from a US Government number asking about the hidden server and the extra phone line coming in. Turns out the couple worked for a 3-letter agency in Langley, Virginia.
I remember those handheld card punchers. They were sometimes needed to fix (patch) a binary punch-card deck that was used to cold boot one of those room-filling beasts (in my case GE-635.
It was an extremely difficult task on one or more cards that needed patch tape (to turn an on-bit to off) and use of the punch. One small error and your dead cold machine wouldn't start back up.
dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dit
Translated: Gawd Help Us!
An important application is signalling for help through SOS, " ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ". This can be sent many ways: keying a radio on and off, flashing a mirror, toggling a flashlight, and similar methods. The SOS signal is not sent as three separate characters; rather, it is a prosign SOS, and is keyed without gaps between characters.[45]
or even a state-issued edict.
Reminds me of what was happening in the beginning of the gene-editing days where quite a few cerebral organizations made pronouncements about how/when/where/etc. modifying the human germ genome should only be done with serious reflection and consultation with these learned organizations.
Then one scientist in China decided to do so anyway. Same will happen with AI - inside the USA (or USSR) and outside.
I'm just a rando in the internet space but my understanding is that there are many organizations that expose http and https endpoints in order to interact with the outside world. As in "doing business".
You seem not to be in the world where external access to your platform is necessary. Orders and payments delivered by postal mail? Sales inquiries over the POTS? Good for you!
I had coded in Algol and Jovial but they were the begin....end types.
We were so glad to switch from B to C (this was on a GE-600 / Honeywell 36-bit machine) since we could actually address "characters" instead of "words". Note that for us "characters were 9-bits and "words" were 36 bits - an exasperating mismatch with the rest of the world which was quickly coalescing around the powers-of-two.
We data people may be the best to demonstrate the old adage about data, statistics, and lies.
Having worked in a few shops that are responsible for producing fancy presentations for my customers, I know very well how to let other interested parties know how valuable my work is/not.
Nothing like getting a self-serving robot to decide what is best for its existence.
Is gitlab going to divulge how many dollars/efforts it expended to implement this? (That is a question to the chatGPT embedded within.)
that hasn't been compromised.
Probably the same probability of Methuselah living past 100.
Having worked in US federal and state agencies that deal with health data, sometimes the desire to to the right thing is there, but the actuality is far less than perfection.
No. Musk and his minions are there to set up backdoors into these US government systems so the data and logic can be manipulated by external entities.
Also, your "gummet drones" have gone through security checks. Elon's kidz have zero qualifications, other than hackers.
Just saying.
Perhaps security at some level, but privacy - hell no.
Obviously they had forged "relations" (means money transfers) with some of the companies (Meta, etc.) that they didn't even bother handling. Of course MS customers aren't the most discerning types.
Even I could pen a better response:
"As you all well know, Garmin is committed to providing the absolutely best experience to our valued customers. We work 24 hours a day to make your lives as productive as possible. This update was made to help you get back to experiencing real life instead of fixating on your stupid baubles."
Unless their authority comes from the Christo-Fascist coven of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Federalist Society which are all riddled with Catholic wing-nuts and supported by filthy-rich plutocrats from the US and everywhere.
Oh, I guess it makes sense when I think about it.
Welcome Dark Ages, dear old friend.
Here we go again.