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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Attributing loosing or making preposterous strategic mistakes to some sort of 5D chess is a weird choice to make.

    I don’t know why so many of you people have such a hard time accepting that the popular conception of Russia as an Eastern counterpart to the US was inaccurate. Turns out that if you consistently invest less in your military equipment and personnel, you have a less capable military. It’s been 40 years since their expenditures have been comparable, and quite frankly it shows.

    Using your old equipment for an invasion would actually be a pretty novel strategy. Ukraine consistently used the best equipment available to them. That that was leftover NATO hardware doesn’t mean Ukraine was choosing to hold the good stuff in reserve.

    If they’re trying to use a “let the reservists die and then send in the competent soldiers” strategy, it doesn’t seem to be going very well. They’re somehow not holding the territory they took very well, and churning through a lot of what was presumably reserve hardware.

    Failing to execute a gulf war 1, and so deciding to chill in a Vietnam situation for … Some reason … for an indeterminate period of time is just not a strategy that any sane strategist would pick.

    If Russia has the ability to just handwave their way to victory if things got too rough, they’ve done a pretty terrible job of demonstrating it.
    I honestly can’t comprehend what you might have seen of this whole affair that would make you think they had that ability, beyond clinging to the notion that a former superpower must still be a superpower.
    They just don’t have the economy or the equipment to be able to afford to burn through endless waves of soldiers like you seem to think they’re intentionally doing.
    They didn’t even get air superiority, which is just embarrassing.



  • An all out war is unlikely, since if NATO involvement was going to kick that off it would have done so by now.
    The next point of escalation that could start something bigger would be stuff like NATO openly sending troops or actively providing fire support.

    US hesitation to allow our hardware to be used for this type of attack is much more to do with the political issues surrounding the war being framed as a proxy war instead of defensive support.
    The electorates support for “saving the day” and “superior US hardware helping keep a country free” is high. Support for a protracted and complex proxy war without clear right and wrong sides is exhausting and hits too many Iraq/Afghanistan buttons for people to care.

    Asking for and publicly being denied permission to bomb targets adjacent to the capitol does just as well at communicating “we can bomb your capitol” as actually doing it.


  • There seems to have been some policy miscommunication between political and military parties of both nations.
    The US has maintained that the restrictions have been to not allow offensive use, or specific long range missiles for targeting well inside Russian territory.
    Ukraine understood this to mean using them to fend off an attack, and only targets within a specific distance from the border.
    In the past few months it seems that much of this has been clarified, and Ukraine is now using US munitions for a proper US “preemptive defensive action inside enemy territory”, because a Russian base in Russia is full of Russian soldiers who will be ordered to attack, therefore an attack is defensive.

    If it was an actual miscommunication or a pivot is unclear, but the US language seems to have not changed, and a policy that acknowledges that almost anything Ukraine does in this war is inherently defensive is much more reasonable.


  • It’s also thought but not confirmed to be used for parallel construction. If the information is collected through illegal or inadmissible means, the NSA can inform the relevant agency that they have reason to believe that the individual is doing “illegal activity in question” and relevant details. The agency, now knowing the conclusion, can use legal means to gather the needed evidence for something they otherwise would never have even looked at.
    The NSA isn’t supposed to monitor anything on US soil that doesn’t involve both terrorism connections and communication with foreign parties, but due to “reasons” they regularly collect a lot of stuff that isn’t that, and they’ll (likely) inform the DEA.

    It’s a preposterous violation of the 4th amendment, but it’s also nearly impossible to prove.


  • I think concerns about China in specific are overblown.
    That being said, what we’ve learned about the topic from US tracking programs (slight chuckle at China having scope or abilities beyond anyone else in that regard) is that all information can be fed into what is essentially a statistical model of interests, behaviors, expressed opinions, and contacts.
    From that, you can determine a few things that are specifically “useful”.

    The first useful thing is the ability to tell if someone’s behavior has changed in an unexpected way. If someone starts talking to someone new via text message and they “shouldn’t” know each other (no common acquaintances, never at the same place at the same time, no shared interests) you have an anomaly that can be processed further.

    The next useful thing is once you have this model of expected behavior you can start modeling stuff like “A talked to B, B to C and then C changed behavior. A talked to D and D talked to E, and E changed behavior”, and more or less direct chains.
    This effectively tells you that A is influencing the behaviors of C and D. By tracking how influence (and money and stuff) flows through a network of people, you can extrapolate things like leadership, communication pathways, and material support pipelines. If you’re the US, you can then send a seal team to shoot someone.

    If you’re, supposedly, anyone doing this you can more selectively target people for influence based on the reach that it’ll have, use your models to target them better, and generally improve the quality of your attempted influence.

    I personally have my doubts it’s being used that way because it’s just as effective and far cheaper to hire a public opinion research group to pay a significant sample of people $5 to figure out how to make better propaganda, and then like 75¢ each to get Facebook to target the right people.
    It’s really only valuable if you eventually care about an individual. Most unfortunate privacy violations are aggregates.

    Even if it’s not directly actionable or a threat, you should still be wary about letting your browsing habits leak because the information can much more plausibly be used for phishing purposes.
    If you just bought some clown outfits and get an email about your clown plants being held at customs you’re a lot more likely to click to figure out what’s going on.



  • Most of them are mediocre. Most burger places were mediocre, and then the American gastropub trend saw burgers being made nice as opposed to diner food or bar food. They could also charge more money because they were making nicer food.

    Eventually a bunch of the mediocre places shifted to try to also be nice, but mostly just increased prices, changed decor, and started using the word aioli more than mayo. Oh, and pretzel buns on burgers that got taller without being bigger and are cumbersome to eat.

    In the plus side, if you like a Swiss burger with a garlic aioli, a burger with a fried egg on it, or a burger with 2 pieces of bacon, a spicy BBQ sauce, and fried onion strings and you’re in the mood for some fries with bits of peel on them and a garlic Parmesan butter, then you know exactly what they’re going to put in from of you and exactly what it’ll taste like.

    Mediocre. Not bad, but definitely not the best you’ve ever had.


  • Someone near him has recorded it on their phone if he has, and is just walking around numbly aware that they have the Nixon tapes sitting in their pocket.

    They’re using tap to pay, and having the stark reminder that they just bought a sandwich with something that could change the election be on the news for 30 minutes because no one expects him not to drop a hard N in casual conversation so it’s not as noteworthy as a woman politician laughing in public.


  • There’s a big difference between “buying stuff you don’t need”, and “not having legal review a contract”, or “accepting terms that include no liability”.
    Buying stuff you don’t need is in the authority of a VP seeing as their job is to make choices. Bypassing legal review and accounting diligence controls typically isn’t at any company big enough to matter.
    I trust your hypothetical VP to not want to get fired from his nice job by skipping the paperwork for a done deal.

    Do you honestly think that Amazon just didn’t read the contract? Microsoft? Google? The US government?

    They’re getting sued, and they’re gonna have to pay some money. Cynicism is one thing, but taking it to the degree of believing that people are signing unread contracts that waive liability for direct, attributable damage caused by unprofessional negligence is just assinine.


  • In this case, it’s really not a Linux/windows thing except by the most tenuous reasoning.

    A corrupted piece of kernel level software is going to cause issues in any OS.
    Cloudstrike itself has actually caused kernel panics on Linux before, albeit less because of a corrupted driver and more because of programming choices interacting with kernel behavior. (Two bugs: you shouldn’t have done that, and it shouldn’t have let you).

    Tenuously, Linux is a better choice because it doesn’t need this type of software as much. It’s easier and more efficient to do packet inspection via dedicated firewall for infrastructure, and the other parts are already handled by automation and reporting tools you already use.
    You still need something in this category if you need to solve the exact problem of “realtime network and filesystem event monitoring on each host”, but Linux makes it easier to get right up to that point without diving into the kernel.
    Also vendors managing auto update is just less of a thing on Linux, so it’s more the cultural norm to manage updates in a way that’s conducive to staggering that would have caught this.

    Contract wise, I’m less confident that crowd strike has favorable terms.
    It’s usually consumers who are straddled with atrocious terms because they neither have power nor the interest in digging into the specifics too far.
    Businesses, particularly ones that need or are interested in this category of software, inevitably have lawyers to go over contract terms in much more detail and much more ability to refuse terms and have it matter to the vendor. United airlines isn’t going to accept the contract terms of caveat emptor.



  • It’s a delightful PR gimmick by a most definitely not a tech company, since there’s not much cutting edge technology going on in the world of “flamethrowers are perfectly legal in America and that’s our business model”.

    In addition to strapping a flamethrower to a generic quadruped robot, they also strapped one to a drone.


  • I don’t think I implied that we couldn’t leave, or even that we shouldn’t. I said that Cuba’s not going to get us to leave by asserting that the agreement was never valid, because that’s just going to get the response of “yes it is”. For better or worse nations negotiate backed with weapons, and a power imbalance is inevitable.
    It’s not even a matter of right or wrong, just reality. Few would argue that the Japanese constitution is illegitimate and that power should rightly devolve back to the Empire of Japan.

    You have some misapprehensions about the embargo of Cuba. It’s sometimes called a blockade for rhetorical effect, but it’s not actually a blockade.
    It’s not “enforced” from Guantanamo bay, it’s enforced by civil penalties levied by the Treasury department on US entities and their subsidiaries, and to a limited extent by the department of state through threats of potential trade or diplomatic consequences.

    Cuba can and does trade with other nations, including US allies, and even the US. The harm the embargo does is via sharply limiting the availability of the lines of credit smaller nations rely on for continuing development of their infrastructure, not by literally preventing boats full of food from landing. Additional harm is done by denying them access to the largest convenient trading partner in the region for non-food, non-medical (embargo terms have excluded those items for decades) trades which further harms their economy by denying them a reliable cash influx their neighbors rely on, as well as making imports more expensive through sheer transport distance.

    Justified or not, and regardless of poor negotiating position, refusal to engage in a dialogue is not helping Cuba’s position.
    They have their own ideological motivations for refusing to engage. Even a tacit acknowledgement that maybe they shouldn’t have nationalized the assets of US companies without compensation would get them a lot of negotiation credit, and it costs them nothing, except for the ideological factors. The US doesn’t get much out of it, and $6 billion 1959 can be written off fairly easily for the PR win.

    One side doesn’t need to budge, and the other one refuses, and they both have their reasons. I believe that was the point OP was going for.


  • That’s not the case, you just need to be able to make an outbound connection.

    The minutiae of how certbot works or if that specific person actually did it right or wrong is kind of aside the point of my “intended to be funny but seemingly was not” comment about how sometimes the easiest solution to implement is the one you remember, even if it’s overkill for the immediate problem.