If Snowden taught us anything at all it's that the NSA are light years ahead of what people think is possible as far as data collection, storage and processing is concerned. Only relatively recently it was reported that the US were buying huge amounts of commercial information off the open market. I can't believe for one second they're not also routinely augmenting that with OSINT data on top of that. In fact it would be incredibly naive to think that they wouldn't be doing so on a mass scale for decades at this point.

Google and Meta will also be incredibly good at dealing with masses of data of course, but their focus is very different and I'd suggest the volumes involved, as huge as they are, are still smaller than the NSA. But I don't need to speculate. Back in 2013 the NSA released a letter that revealed it was "touching" about 30PB's of data a day which at the time was 50% more than Google at 20PB. It is a reasonable assumption that they've at LEAST kept pace with that. I think it's a pretty safe assumption that they are handling mutiple exabytes of data a day at this point.

There are four massive datacentres dedicated to this work that are known. The one in Utah cost 1.5 billion to build and the governer of that state is on record saying it was designed to hold a yottabyte of data. That's roughly 45 million 22TB HD's so it's not beyond the realms of reality when there's plenty of companies with exabyte storage.

xKeyscore is already known to handle petabytes of data even 10 years ago so by now it's not unreasonable to assume it's handling 10's or even 100's of exabytes. When you have 10's billions available to you "for free" and you have a singular goal with no sharehilders to worry about or any need or focus on generating money it's likely going to be very specifically focussed.

You are the poster child for confirmation bias.

I used to be like you and believe all the corporate and Wall Street bullshit, I really did. I used to think that there were checks and balances in place to ensure that things like naked shorting could be and would be trivially detected too. That the likes of RegSHO and other FTD mechanisms ensured that naked shorts couldn't stay hidden. Then I learned about all the scams and loopholes companies use to avoid their FTD requirements - and here's a hint, there's a lot of them and I dug a bit deeper.

Just take this as an example

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com%2F2016%2F09%2F24%2Fnaked-shorts-cant-stay-naked-forever%2F

Guess who owns Knight now? Yep, Virtu. You think they all just suddenly stopped doing it for no reason? You think they care about getting caught like Goldman when the fines are orders of magnitude smaller than their profits? As I said, you're deluded.

But if you actually go to look, instead of just regurgitating the rubbish you're taught in university or even worse the trash spouted by most mainstream media financial sites or pundits, you'll find a whole new world. That world is superficially legal on the surface but completely fraudulent at the core with next to no checks in place.

Goldmans fine was $15 million incidentally and was a tiny proportion of the billions they made from the fraud so they couldn't have cared less. IIRC the investigation took 6 or 7 years to even happen.

Must be great to live in your imaginary world. Allow me to educate.

So short seller attacks are a thing and at the higher level they're called "Short and Distort"

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.2iqresearch.com%2Fblog%2Fshort-seller-attacks-what-are-they-and-why-are-they-important

This is not some fantasy and contrary to your claims it's a tactic used by short sellers to increase profit. They do suggest in this article it's also to protect investors but I suspect altruistic short selling is virtually non-existent in reality.

Then there's the short selling designed to bankrupt companies. This comment on the SEC site sums it up pretty well

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sec.gov%2Fcomments%2F4-627%2F4627-95.pdf

You do everything in your power to hit the reputation of the company you're shorting and then finance dries up, confidence wanes, investment becomes difficult to get and you can't grow. This is especially true in any industry with a high barrier to entry. There are even examples of hedge funds embedding rogue staff in companies to spy and trojan horse the companies from the inside.

Then there's naked short selling where you're shorting more shares an actually exist which hugely distorts the price as without true supply demand price discovery doesn't exist.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marketwatch.com%2Fstory%2Fwhy-naked-short-selling-has-suddenly-become-a-hot-topic-11674503568

Considered a taboo in the industry for years and claims from Wall Street that it didn't exist for a long time but it's there and it's existence (and prevalence) pretty well accepted by everyone now.

Finally there's the outright illegal cellar boxing

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.investorturf.com%2Fhow-market-makers-are-naked-short-selling-stocks-known-as-cellar-boxing

Cellar boxing is a thing for years and years and it's been shown to happen countless times. Just because something sounds like a conspiracy theory doesn't mean it's not true.

So please stop being so naive and believing the market isn't crooked as hell. Short selling in isolation and in its purest form will not bankrupt a company provided you ignore ALL the ridiculously shady wrappers around it. Sadly, when you consider distortion, fraud, lies and naked short selling (stealing a phrase from the Big Short) "it's dogshit wrapped in catshit".

They don't like crypto because they don't control it.

Just as soon as there is complete transparency on the financial markets, the finances of our elected officials and corporate tax avoidance schemes I might be on board. Until then they can GTFO.

I think you're misunderstanding what's being said.

*NO* indraday trades of any kind have any impact whatsoever on price discovery. Think about that for a second - the entirety of all retail trades (approx 23% of all Intraday trades) and *ALL* of the other trading during those core hours has no impact on price. Considering the volumes are orders of magnitude greater AND contain the entirety of retail sentiment how can you possibly suggest it's not a scam?

It means by definition that price is controlled by the TINY number of companies who trade out of hours. It means that control (and possibly manipulation) is vested in a tiny minority and not in the vast majority. That is unless you're suggesting that price SHOULD have been stagnant across the entire S&P 500 for the past 40 years?

It's a casino and a scam and the whole thing is going to come crashing down some day very soon with any luck.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpapers.ssrn.com%2Fsol3%2Fpapers.cfm%3Fabstract_id%3D3705017

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bespokepremium.com%2Finteractive%2Fposts%2Fthink-big-blog%2Fintraday-selling

Not just that.

It has been proven that in hours trading has absolutely ZERO impact on price and that every single long term shift in price has been a consequence of after or before hours trading.

We'll also ignore the fact that as much as 90% of *ALL* retail trades are "off exchange" and/or internalised so CAN'T actually affect price discovery too...

It's all a total and utter scam

I'm not sure where this perception that Netflix isn't a major player has come from. It's one of the largest on almost any metric you care to consider.

I did some research a few months ago. Netflix ($146B) is the third largest pure play entertainment company just behind Disney ($181B) and Comcast($159B) by market cap. They invest more in foreign language programming than all of the other top 5 companies combined. They have profits of almost $5B a year and while they have a chunk of debt most of it doesn't mature for years and they have a good few billion in cash on hand to pay it if they need to.

Netflix is *WAY* bigger than the likes of Warner Brothers ($32B) Paramount ($14B) and is MUCH bigger than almost any other company in their market sector except for Apple, Amazon and Disney.

They also spend more on content per year than almost all other streaming content providers combined.

The ONLY companies that would have anywhere near the kind of money to buy out Netflix would be Amazon or Apple. No one else even comes close UNLESS you'd consider a merger with the likes of Disney.

If there were any scenario it would be Netflix buying out the likes of Paramount or Warner

Horseshit. Show me your evidence.

There are certainly a tiny number of very high profile historic examples of specific VPN's being caught providing law enforcement with information under court order but if you're peddling kiddie porn or you're perpetuating mass fraud on innocent civilians I'm OK with that kind of exception. There is very little evidence that most VPN's are in any way "leaky" or in any way don't provide first line safety as they describe.

On the contrary many go to great lengths to provide some kind of assurance that they are secure such as independent audits, warrant canaries, transparent policies and so on.

The problem though is that you can be tracked and traced trivially with a VPN unless you take other precautions. Now if THAT'S what you're suggesting then yes, you are absolutely 100% correct. Browser profiling being the obvious one but there's other ways you can do it too. That said in COMBINATION with other measures a VPN is one part of the puzzle.

It also depends on your reason. If you want to torrent a bit, watch a bit of IPTV, get around geo locking then a VPN is ideal and more than enough to protect your interests. If you're leaking nation state secrets, running a paedo website or defrauding businesses out of million of pounds then you're going to get caught if you're relying on only a VPN.

Sorry but that's not the admins (or Mastadons) job. The point of a decentralised server approach is that you CAN'T kill a server if someone wants to make one just because you don't like it (illegality is the responsibility of the law in the hosting servers country). What you CAN do is de-peer it to isolate it from the rest of the peer to peer network. One of the CORE goals of Mastadon is exactly what you describe so I'd suggest it's working as intended.

Mastadon is not twitter, it's not designed to be and it's never meant to be. If you just want a Twitter clone then why bother? It's MEANT to be fundamentally different in approach and in structure. All these people comparing it to Twitter are missing the point and are comparing apples to oranges.

You don't like how it works or the communities on it then go back to Twitter.

Eh? I don't understand your reply.

What do you mean "Hosts was bypassed long ago"?

I used the Hosts file to make some entries on a fully patched and updated Windows 10 machine this week. It over-rides everything else and is the very first thing Windows uses to resolve addresses.

Didn't I read somewhere a while ago that MS were "retiring" the hosts file in a future OS?

It is SUCH a useful tool to have when you're troubleshooting I'd hate to lose the simplicity of hosts to fix problems.

What?

Since when is my household defined by how my technology connects to a network? That's ridiculous.

I think they *VASTLY* overestimate their value. Of course there's many people "sharing" accounts but I know in my case I let my mother use it and a close friend who never had Netflix and had no interest in paying for it. My mother rarely uses it and my friend uses it once a week. If they think either of those people would EVER pay for their own account then it's never going to happen. Not to mention those sharing an account and paying 1/2 or a 1/3 each. No way they're ever going to convert into paying members either.

There's just not enough on Netflix to persuade those casuals to sign up so I think this is going to SEVERELY backfire in the long run considering that it seems a lot of people are just looking for an excuse to cancel.

What utter tosh.

CNSA (and NSA Suite B before it) allows for AES256 and SHA2 to protect TS Codeword material. If you're suggesting they would approve a suite of crypto to protect that level of information they KNEW could be cracked by a FIS (primarily China and Russia) you're very wrong. They would never risk it.

What *IS* absolutely vital is the implementation of that crypto. It's often why (if not always why) the equipment you can use for TS protection is very heavily regulated. They trust the crypto, they absolutely DON'T trust how it's implemented unless it's thoroughly tested along with very strong supply chain controls. In the higher end stuff a lot of the storage and compute are also done with proprietary chips that are often fabbed in country by the manufacturer themselves to ensure FIS didn't modify the chips to insert back doors.

Password managers are not magic and they primarily serve two main purposes

1. Use of different passwords for every single site
2. Use of passwords that are random, difficult to guess and difficult to crack but difficult to remember

They also have some fringe benefits in that it's a single place to go to store all your passwords and the automated inputting and autocomplete on login but ultimately they *ALL* suffer the same "flaw".

You can think of the parallel of a bank vault and passwords being money. You make it extremely hard to get into the vault but if the robber is already inside the bank and is hiding round the corner to mug you for the key when you pull the key out to open the vault door then it's not going to save your money. A bank vault is still objectively safer than someone walking around with money in their pockets but banks get robbed all the same.

It has been the case for as long as I've been in IT security - once your OS is compromised, which this requires, it's game over at least as far as any mainstream OS is concerned. Other OS' in history have some capability to mitigate this risk using various schemes and even some hardware. Mandatory Access Control being the most notable but full on MAC is a nightmare of pain.