Did you read the entire story, follow the links, and also "do your own research"?

No, I'm not going to bother with so much work, but on the face of it, it seems the story just says they "captured" some of the loot. I'm pretty sure they didn't go to Cambodia and arrest anyone and don't even want to speculate how the passwords and account information were obtained. Near as I can tell, what the story means is that they were able to transfer a bunch of cryptocurrency into their control, but I don't even believe in the reported value of the Bitcoins.

Possibly related anecdote? Lots of recent warnings from the Japanese police about phone calls from fake police. However I can't even tell what's going on there. Might be reduced to personal offense because the police hate it when scammers work off of their reputation? And the international aspect may be making it difficult to prosecute?

Did you get that joke from TikTok? If not, I'm not buying the fries. (After all the levels of negation, I'm not sure whether or not I ordered the fries...)

However there must be some transmission primary source of the viral meme. My first guess was TikTok, but no mention in the discussion. Perhaps yet more evidence of the irrelevance of Slashdot? I knew I was an old fuddy duddy, but I didn't want to project to everyone around here.

Solution approach time? Confirm the deaths of some of the old UIDs and reissue them to some hip youngsters as a kind of enlistment incentive or bonus? Why would anyone "fashionable" want to join Slashdot now with a 7- or 8-digit UID? Or maybe Slashdot is up to 9 digits?

GrapheneOS doesnt' have the same aim. They happily run on Pixel hardware with binary blobs. In principle this project could be good for though because if the binary blobs can be eliminated then it would be possible to provide hardware support after Google has given up, so GrapheneOS could extend the lifetime of devices considerably.

Those projects almost all only physical address hardware. This project is about replacing some binary blobs with free software and seems more interested in Androide based systems like LineageOS and similar systems than Linux base systems like postmarketOS. LineageOS already works, so just getting it working on any modern hardware without any binary blobs would be a great achievement. PostmarketOS could then copy that setup and and run on the same hardware, which would also be great.

The announcement on the FSF web site explicitly mentions Replicant and on the Replicant web site they still seem to be alive, but they are targeting different / older hardware. The announcement also mentions that the project sponsor wants to get rid of binary blobs in his LineageOS install.

My understanding: Replicant is a full AOSP distribution with the binary blobs removed. Librephone is a project trying to eliminate binary blobs in the underlying Linux kernel. When Librephone succeeds it will be easier to move Replicant to more devices.

All of my banking apps (and I have a bunch) accept working on GrapheneOS. Even if Librephone doesn't themselves attempt to pass verification then a GrapheneOS build for whatever hardware they support would be able to work with their kernel drivers.

The main body of the OS inherits from AOSP so you are right, but the kernel is still Linux so GPLv2. That's where the main body of work for LibrePhone would be.

This is 100% going to require dedicated / custom hardware no matter what. Most phones have multiple important devices that need binary blobs. Most often that includes the cellular radio, so a normal phone with this system is going to be a brick with this.

There have, through history, been a bunch of projects for better / more free / more user owned phones. Fairphone, Purism / Librem / PinePhone and several of them delivered hardware. So far that's always been noticeably more expensive for worse hardware, but it shows it can and will be done. Now that Google looks like they will close off the hardware support for Pixel phones in AOSP, the GrapheneOS project are talking about doing a phone with an OEM so maybe we will end up with something much more competitive soon.

This kind of project can give a focus for getting one of those phones you more or less own actually over the line to the state where you really own it and have all the drivers.

even better - an actual Slashdot link from not so long ago:

https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/story/25/...

And nary a joke to be seen? Sadness.

You're feeding the diversionary sock puppet and propagating its stupid Subject. We don't need to increase the world's supply of stupidity. We need to find a way to convert anonymous stupidity into useful work. That would be the big victory against entropy!

On the story I think the point should be the reverse-imperialism. The Chinese government could have gone with ODF, but they deliberately preferred to insist on doing it their way--and they apparently have even gone the extra kilometer to annoy the rest of the world. I wouldn't be too surprised if they decided to drop the metric system, too, replacing it in the Middle Kingdom with some new system based on traditional Chinese units...

Funny anecdote about the triumph of Microsoft in Japan. Perhaps related to a major defeat in China, too, since I've heard that vertical Chinese writing has mostly been abandoned in China... Pre-computer context in Japan is that the traditional writing system for Japanese was from top to bottom and then continuing to the next column on the left, so the columns go from right to left on the page. In the Meiji period they started experimenting with some horizontal writing, but they did it from right to left. Later on they switched horizontal writing so it goes from left to right. But all of this is kind of weird because when they write individual characters, the primary direction is mostly from left to right with top to bottom kind of mixed in... However the basic idea makes most sense as a bunch of boxes to fill in with characters, and there are standard pages for writing drafts (by hand) that are laid out that way.

When computers came along, the Japanese developed a word processor called Ichitaro that "thought about" the document in the same way. I used several versions of Ichitaro during those years. It was closely linked to an input conversion system called ATOK for entering the Chinese characters (using the monstrous Shift-JIS encodings). After several years of struggle against Microsoft, the Word approach won out, sort of, though there are still places where vertical writing is used in Japan... (Most of my Japanese reading is vertical, and I still think that makes the horizontal Japanese tests kind of unfair or unrealistic.)

(So can anyone explain why there are two Nihongo Noryoku Shiken with different English names?)

[Now has anyone written a good joke about the story?]

Not ironic at all. All part of the same "destroy the West" strategy. Microsoft recently admitted that they are running US military classified cloud systems with administrators in China and that they don't intend to fix that, just have some people watching them in theory.

...China, obviously.

Looks like you didn't want to feed the troll, even though you got me to look to see if there was any connection between your comment and the coward's. However you forgot to change the sock puppet's Subject. Sometimes the bogus Subject appears to be the only objective.

Actually, I should have gone for funny, as in:

How dare you try to cancel your subscription to the fancy tea of the month club?!?

China's not winning because of some kind of hands off approach. They are winning because their governments forced an early switchover to electric and then also built the massive renewable energy supply needed to do that cheaply. That's the kind of active pro-business but also pro-national interest policy that got the US into the leading position it was in after WWII.

The DOJ already had their shot. However, they only ended up picking on one auto group and failing to deal with the others at least at the beginning.