When will people marry his declarations and musings with the fact that he's marching Federally-controlled troops into cities to "fight crime". What the hell does everyone think is going to happen in next year's mid-terms when armed forces loyal specifically to Trump with little or no objection from Congress or the Supreme Court starting "guarantee" a "fair vote".

Everything he and the Republicans have been working towards since the claims of Obama's ineligibility has been preparing for the moment when they move in to seize control of state voting apparatus. He'll do what he's done with everything else and claim it's a "national emergency."

And MAGA will cheer while the Democrats put on their sackcloths and roll around in the dust crying about how they were impotent. The American people have chosen, they want tyrants who rule by fiat, engineer and weaponize crises to entrench their power.

The political system the Framers came up with was always a steaming pile of crap. Bagehot pulled apart deftly in the 1860s, explaining that the only thing that made it work was the "American genius for politics". Well, that's done. The Democrats are frozen in place, the Republicans, ruled by oil barons and sociopathic billionaires, intend on building a dictatorship with the shape of the American republic, but where checks and balances once existed, will be impotent paper tigers.

It's easy to forget how utterly fucked up things have become, compared to how a few decades ago, we(? well, at least I) thought things would evolve, and one of those has to do with dedicated services for secure communications.

The thing that defies my predictions, is that dedicated services for secure communications, exist at all.

When you wanted to secure email, you didn't use a "secure email" service; you (the user!) just added security onto your insecure email service. Send a PGP/MIME message and the email provider doesn't give a damn that it's encrypted, it just cares about SMTP.

But these days (could I call it the "Age of Lack of Standards"?), everyone is trying to manipulate you into depending on their software and services (inextricably linked; you can't use their software without their service, or their service without their software), so you can't just replace the service or easily "tunnel" security through their presumably-insecure (perhaps even mandated insecure) service. Whatever security they offer, is all you can reasonably get (pretty much the opposite of the classic email situation).

Why do I bring this up? Because the regulations are all about services! Not protocols. Not software. Services. (emphasis mine in all below quotes)

Here's the beginning of The UK Online Safety Act (1)(1)(a):

imposes duties which, in broad terms, require providers of services regulated by this Act to identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm

Here's good 'ol CALEA (US Code title 47 Section 1002 (a):

Except as provided in subsections (b), (c), and (d) of this section and sections 1007(a) and 1008(b) and (d) of this title, a telecommunications carrier shall ensure that ...

CALEA even mentions encryption:

A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication.

I haven't dived into the details of EU's DSA, but I see a hopeful sign right there at the very beginning of Article 1:

The aim of this Regulation is to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market for intermediary services by setting out harmonised rules...

Look at all those references to services! Not the code you run; the services you use.

What does it mean? I think it might mean that even in the UK(!) you might be perfectly fine and legal using secure software. You just can't have it rely on some coercible corporation's secure services. Send your encrypted blobs over generic protocols and un-dedicated services, and the law won't apply to your situation. I'm not necessarily saying "Make PGP/MIME Great Again" but I do think following in its spirit is a really great idea.

If you run a service, what you want to be able to tell the government (whether it's US or UK or France/Germany) is "we don't provide any encryption, though some of our customers supply their own."

Stop asking for secure services. Worse is better. Ask for secure software (which assumes that all services are completely hostile) decoupled from any particular service.

It's too much money and too much privilege. The billionaires really do think they're superior lifeforms that should receive automatic deference, and when they collide with reality, they show their true nature; emotionally stunted children.

It's a dating safety app for women. I think we can guess who used the hacked data to dox women, and the kind of people that justify that.

The first stage of the revolution is to keep a cordial relationship with the Mensheviks. We're all on the same team. We're hear to overthrow that rotting edifice of the old order and create a stronger, better society, with a government truly representative of the people. We're all a big tent, and can accommodate differences of opinion.

The second stage of the revolution requires the sidelining of the Mensheviks. Yes, they have their objections, but those objections are mainly spurious, perhaps a little too influenced by moderate opinions. It's understandable, revolutions have casualties, and not everyone has the stomach for the hard fight. Objections will be duly noted and recorded.

The third stage of the revolution requires the expulsion of the Mensheviks. They've become too influenced by counterrevolutionary ideas. The middle ground they try to occupy is the path back to the old order. The revolution cannot afford these divisions, the people must see unity lest they question the revolution. Show the counterrevolutionaries the door, we no longer recognize their standing.

The fourth stage requires the destruction of the Mensheviks. It is not enough that they have been rendered impotent, they are traitors to the revolution, and like the moderates, in the hands of the old order. Some, maybe, can be rehabilitated, others must face more severe punishments. We owe to the people to destroy those who would undo our accomplishments.

The fifth stage has no memory of the Mensheviks at all.

I think you need to provide your operating definitions for "socialism" and "communism".

Rather ironic that the real Communists are the Republicans.

orcs on Max, Mad Max. I think they should also switch from the unsafe oxygen to the government approved breathing mixture of putin's farts and healthy sulfuric acid vapors.

I've been busily installing Debian on our Windows 10 machines. A few little hiccups here and there, but all in all, it's working like a dream.

you must be new on life. Easy? What if the plane is replaced after the ticket purchase? Who is supposed to maintain this csv file? There are tons of ticket resellers, are there APIs? Etc. I don't work with airlines, I do provide systems in logistics and transportation management, nothing is ever easy.

we are on a technical site, supposedly. The work required to ensure that every single seat is marked 'window but not really' vs 'window' and then all of the plane schematics are adjusted according to every single airplane is insane and may not even be technically possible. You are buying tickets through a system that doesn't know the exact layout of that particular airplane, it knows the model. The layouts change because airlines replace seats and may change the number of rows and how the rows are aligned exactly against windows and doors, etc.

I am saying this is ridiculous to sue for this, because it's clearly way too complex of an issue, just like most other real life issues, they are not 'black' and 'white', 'democrats' and 'republicans', etc.

This is nonsense, what if it is not a window but a door instead, should you be suing based on a technical name? Window seat is seat adjacent to a wall, aisle seat is a seat adjacent to a corridor. Then there are middle seats. I got 'window seat' many times, where the window is not directly in my row but it is somewhat between rows, so what? It's a name.

The only Windows I use is the Server 2016 RDP managed service my company pays for, so updates are invisible to me. My two MacBooks and my Ubuntu laptop all have sane update policies which remind me of updates, without endlessly clogging up the works by downloading the updates. Every time I use an actual Windows machine I'm reminded of what an appallingly bothersome workflow-interrupting OS it has become.

Yup. I remember going to an IBM seminar around 1994 or 1995 where they demonstrated a new IDE environment that was going to end traditional programming. They gave a demo of writing some sort of simple application with input, with a library of GUI windows connected via some sort of flow chart. At the time I thought "Fuck me, I'm out of a job", but I never really saw the product again (for some reason I think it used Smalltalk, but it has been thirty years) and when I started using visual tools, it definitely wasn't the connect-a-dot that everyone claimed.

Worse, the stuff that was connect-a-dot, like all those horrible MS-Access applications written with Visual Basic, or the insane Excel sheets using lookups to make spreadsheets behave like RDBMSs, if RDBMSs had been written by victims of errant brain surgery, my career quickly morphed into a series of contracts in the vein of "Please fix the awful system we built in-house and we run all our Accounts Receivable through, but the guy who maintained it got hit by a bus."

(Which isn't actually much of an exaggeration, I had to take over a PHP project that had been half written by a guy who got some sort of serious illness, was taken over by some other guy who had no idea what he was doing, and the company had already sunk $40k into).

never mind subscription, how about turning a car into a one armed bandit, a slot machine, instead of coins you insert your credit card and 'pull the arm', if you get 3 of the same, it does what you need it next, the breaks work or the steering wheel turns :)