We knew this, decades ago -- which is why all advertising was banned. But as short-sighted next-quarter-profits commercial interests took over, of course all of that went away, and now we have advertisers (parasites) and marketers (parasites) and spammers (vicious parasites) and worse EVERYWHERE.

All web browsers should have universal ad blocking built-in and turned on by default. The parasites will of course complain, but we don't need them. (I don't want to hear "but my web site won't survive without advertising"-- I've been running sites since they were a thing and I've never allowed advertising, so I don't want to hear any whining about how it can't be done.) We need to permanently blacklist all advertiser domains on sight, and we probably need to block advertiser networks.

And the thing is: it didn't need to turn out like this. If advertisers had just behaved like responsible grown-ups then we could have grudgingly tolerated their worthless presence and just ignored them. But they couldn't do that; they had to turn their entire ecosystem into a massive assault on security and privacy.

Well, screw them.

The correct move here was not to (re)invent a source code control system so that it could handle such an enormous volume of changes.

The correct move was to realize that such an enormous volume of changes was a problem to be eliminated, not accommodated.

(1) Any day that crypto bros get ripped off is a good day.

(2) It's becoming more apparent that not only are hardware supply-chain attacks becoming more prevalent (that's hardly news) but they're becoming cheaper to execute -- which means that devices which might have escaped previously may be targeted now, because now it's cost-effective to do so. Moreover, the market for fake products is expanding thanks to trade restrictions and tariffs, so anybody who can build a credible forgery and market it appropriately is probably going to be able to do a lot of damage before they're caught....if they're caught.

All of our system configurations are under revision control. Before any revision can be committed, it must be reviewed by someone other than the person who wants to make the commit. (I trust this kind of process is familiar to everyone. It's designed to at least partially mitigate the problem that most people won't see their own mistakes even if they're diligent about looking for them.) Once a revision is committed (and thus checked into the revision control system and subsequently deployed in the live environment) notifications are sent to all the relevant people -- so that if something breaks shortly afterward, there's at least a fighting chance that someone will connect the two events and start debugging in the right place.

The LetsEncrypt automation breaks this process, which is why we don't use it. And this pointless focus on short expirations -- when other things are vastly worse problems -- just means that more hours/year are going to be spent renewing certificates.

And not just for headlights, but for taillights. Far too many vehicle designers are indulging some artistic/creative whim at the expenses of human factors and thus safety. All headlights and taillights should be designed to a handful of fixed templates (to accommodate vehicles of different widths and heights) that specify the distance between the lights, the shape of the lights, the size of the lights, the brightness of the lights, the frequency at which turn signals blink, etc.

Fixing all of these -- as much as possible -- will make it much easier for drivers to estimate distance/speed at night; it'll get rid of the animated rear turn signals; it'll dispense with the ridiculously blue headlights that some idiot in my neighborhood has; and so on. One thing that I think could be adde dto this -- mentioned elsewhere in the thread -- is rear brake light signaling for hard braking. I'm the opposite of a tailgater, and I pay attention, but even I've mis-estimated the deceleration of a car in front of me, and an additional cue would be helpful in such cases.

We need cameras and microphones set up outside their homes, livestreaming everything constantly. We need to follow them wherever they go and post audio/video/stills from that too, along with their exact locations. We need to run facial recognition on them and everyone they encounter. We need to do everything possible to ensure that they have absolutely no privacy, ever. This includes the children because, after all, they're doing it to our children -- why should theirs be exempt?

This is what Flock is doing to us; it's only fair to return the favor.

I see: decades of work in the field, a lot of successful rescues and some unsuccessful ones, plus the study and practice required to become a certified instructor, means that I'm..."short-sighted".

I'm fully aware of the multiple ways that people evacuated (or didn't) during Sandy. Not all of them made the best possible choices because they were scared, confused, or uninformed. Not all of them could make the best possible choices because they were old, disabled, or trapped by circumstances. For example, some of them chose to try to evacuate by car in places where that was impossible because streets were flooded. You and I and everyone else can sit in here in our nice dry, warm, comfortable chairs and criticize that; it's easy. It's very different when you're standing in waist-deep water for hours trying to get panicked people to stop before they make their predicament worse.

One of things that we do following every response is a debrief. We analyze it and ask ourselves what we got right and what we got wrong. No rescue is ever perfect, unfortunately; all we can do is try to do the next one better than the previous one. And one of the consistent conclusions from hundreds of these is that communication is both imperfect and essential. We need to use every possible means, with a strong preference for the ones that will keep working as conditions deteriorate over minutes/hours/days. An AM radio in every vehicle is one component of that; obviously it's not the only one, we'd be delighted if everybody had a couple of cheap battery/crank/solar powered emergency radios in their homes. (We'd also be delighted if everyone had plain old POTS, because it's far more robust than cable/fiber/wireless.) But we have work with what we have, not with what we wish we had.

(I'm no longer in the field very often, but I train the people who are.)

The negligible expense of AM radio in every vehicle is an investment that's paid back in lives saved. I'll give you an example and presume that you can extrapolate to other events.

When Sandy hit, it took out all kinds of communications. (Cellular networks are particularly vulnerable to this because backup power supply systems are only designed to run briefly and because the towers fall in hurricanes/tornados/derechos/etc.) Even local radio stations -- yes, including AM stations -- were knocked off the air by the event. But non-local radio stations that could be received in the affected area stayed on the air, and when we asked WLS-AM (mentioned in this story) and other stations (e.g. KMOX-AM) to broadcast evacuation instructions, they did. And some people heard those broadcasts, which I know because I was there and asked them how they knew to come to the evac staging zones we'd set up.

That's the thing about AM radio: because powerful stations can be heard hundreds of miles away on cheap gear, they constitute a communications channel that is likely to be keep working even when everything else is down or severely impaired. It's dirt-cheap insurance, and the feeble excuse from EV vendors that it causes interference is absolutely bullshit: we figured out how to solve that problem a long time ago. Their real reason is that want people to depend solely on communication channels that they control, even if they know full well that they'll fail in emergencies, and they don't care how many people die as a consequence.

Nobody can march down the street and burn them down.

The fascist oligarchs behind the AI/data center scam know that the public hates these and that eventually, it will occur to someone to torch one of them. That's not going to be so easy if they're in orbit.

This has nothing to do with research or innovation or anything else: it's pure self-preservation.

Billionaires have decided, either explicitly or implicitly, that they can survive a dying planet and therefore all the rest of us are expendable. They're building climate-proof riot-proof bunkers, they're funding life extension research, they're funding cloning research, they're doing everything they can to ensure their survival (in one form or another) while also doing everything they can to accelerate the end of everyone else.

It's sad that it's come to this, but: either they all go or we all go. I don't like it, I wish things weren't this way, but this is where we find ourselves and the only remaining question is how far we'll let things go -- and how many of us will die -- before we decide to act.

My guess is that it will take some kind of unfortunate, awful, cataclysmic event to finally get people to act. I say that because we've been watching gradual and inexorable events for decades and we're done nothing: it's just business as usual. So I suspect a mass tragedy will be necessary to galvanize the population into doing what needs to be done.

""Fifty sites seized and 150 domains disabled in a single action is only possible when the hosting providers, the exchanges, the model providers and the data holders all move at the same time," security company SpyCloud told The Hacker News."

That's nice. But how was this facilitated in the first place? (1) Domain registrars who will sell scammers as many domains as they want. (2) Hosting providers who will host obvious phishers/scammers/typosquatters as long as they pay the bills (3) Cryptocurrency operations, aka fake money for criminals. (4) AI companies who have utterly failed to building even pretend guardrails because they don't care how much damage they cause (4) &etc.

What we have here are the people who set the house on fire taking credit for belatedly putting it out.

I've been designing, building, and running email systems for a very long time. And one of the things I've observed is that it is impossible to secure any email system running on Microsoft platforms. I've watched colleagues -- sincere, smart, dedicated, hardworking, diligent colleagues -- try over and over and over again...and all of them have failed. ALL OF THEM. Not even Microsoft, which has for all practical purposes infinite money and infinite personnel, has managed to pull it off. Given this 100% failure rate, I'm convinced that it can't be done.

Not that other operations don't have their issues: Gmail is overrun with spammers and phishers, for example. But those might be fixed given some attention by the right people. Microsoft will never be fixed.

This.

Minimizing civilian casualties is of course always important if you want to even pretend to be a civilized country. But in this case it was, and I'm using the past tense there on purpose, even more important. Before the US started this war, Iran had an aging, sickly, increasingly-unpopular leader who probably would have been dead in a few years from natural causes. But as long as he remained alive and in power, he was a focal point for Iranian dissidents, and if the goal really was to encourage those dissidents, then he should have been left exactly where he was. But the US killed him, an enormous mistake -- because then he became a martyr. And then made an even worse mistake by killing over a hundred schoolchildren, because Hegseth et.al. cut staff in a critical area. Which means that even the dissidents, and the people who might be inclined to support them, now have a greater evil to focus on: the US. Any chance of the US fomenting a popular uprising resulting in regime change disappeared in that moment. That wasn't merely an enormous mistake, it was a catastrophic blunder -- and the consequences are going to last a long time.

So as a human being, I'm appalled by this completely avoidable tragedy. As a strategic thinker (I hope) I'm convinced that it will have dire consequences for the future.

The perverts and thugs buying/using these aren't using them for some benign reason; they're using them to invade the privacy of anyone they can, any way they can. That statement shouldn't surprise anyone: it's why these were designed, built, and marketed. They're explicitly intended to appeal to people just like Mark Zuckerberg: misogynists, psychopaths, sociopaths -- in other words, he's marketing to his peers. And predictably: it's working.

What comes next? The nonconsensual AI-constructed nudes, the stalking, the harassment, the extortion, the exploitation, everything that inevitably follows when some of the very worst people in the world are handed a powerful tool that they can readily use for whatever purpose they wish. To Zuck, these outcomes aren't problems to be solved; they're valid use cases to be supported and encouraged. They're the entire reason why he did this: he doesn't have to go out and be the creep if he has a willing army of creeps ready to do it for him.

"Were his posts always like this?"

It appears to me that this is a serious question, so I'm going to give a serious answer: yes.

This is how he's always written (and spoken), although arguably it's gotten worse in the past few years as his dementia progresses. The press -- right, left, and center -- has unfortunately whitewashed much of this by often not quoting him unredacted or by paraphrasing what he's written/said in order to make it intelligible. If you actually listen to him, word for word, and read him, word for word, it's obvious in minutes that he's not only an incredibly stupid and uneducated man, but that what's left of his mind is deteriorating rapidly.

Keep in mind that Trump was born into an organized crime family, was raised to be a mobster, and built his entire "career" on fraud. At every point it was always about him and only about him: he doesn't care about anyone or anything else. He was able to conceal that -- to a certain extent -- for a long time, but now that he's losing his mind, the mask is off. He's been reduced to a toddler, who only wants ME ME ME. Except in this case, he's willing to destroy the US in order to get it, and US adversaries have quite adeptly leveraged that. Both the Iranians and North Koreans have made him their dancing puppet, for example.

So to circle back to your question and answer it another way: he writes like a scammer because he is a scammer.