If unauthorized purchases will continue to happen on my account, at least it will be something I kinda want.... erg

-m

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Exponentially higher amounts of cooling are needed for spinning drives vs SSD. Major cabon/electricity use there.

A typically narrow view of just manufacturing costs....by a manufacturer.

Pure and simple user error... on a few different levels... but user error.

Signal actually did great if no other parties were able to see the info (aka Russians)..........

-m

+1 !

I used to screen scrape jail registry records for county jails in my home area. Though the IDs weren't exactly sequential, doing groups of 50 would get hits for two of the local counties.

What I found was that, while the website UI wouldn't show juvenile records, you could access them directly w/the ID. Surfacing it to the county took a day or so to find the right person but they quickly closed that hole, but who knows how many records were handed out to malicious actors over the years before I found it.

That's a neat way to trigger something. Kudos for thinking of that.

-m