Didn’t this used to happen all the time?

I remember as a child my cousin’s siblings would sometimes call her “lizard breath” instead of Elizabeth

I remember as a child my cousin’s siblings would sometimes call her “lizard breath” instead of Elizabeth

In a sense what they’re describing here sort of already happened almost 40 years ago from Captain Midnight knocking HBO off-air.

You bought a bunch of land with no plan for it??

It looks like it’s been farmed recently. I don’t know what the growing season there is, you might be too late to start this year, but if you can lease it to a farmer for this season that at least has the land be productive while you figure out your longer-term plan. That way you can put plans in place to start work when the growing season is finished.

I’m no expert but given the repeated efforts from governments around the world to get backdoors added to encryption and frequent pushback from big tech, or at least Apple, I’m more inclined to think there currently, or recently, aren’t backdoors. At least, not easy ones, not official ones. As an example, recall a few years ago there was a terror-related attack in the U.S. where someone tied to Muslim extremists went on a shooting spree before taking his own life (I’m not bothering to look up the details and my recollection could be flawed). The attacker used an iPhone and the U.S. government took the opportunity of strong public outrage to try to force Apple to create a tool to break the encryption on the iPhone so they could examine its contents. Apple resisted and the effort went to court, with the decision eventually being that Apple did not have to break the encryption. The government then revealed that they had access to a third party tool that they used to break into the phone and recover its contents. That’s pretty much been the pattern before and since: a government will try to find a cause that seems likely to gather widespread support and use that to get a backdoor they promise not to abuse, and the companies push back to varying degrees. All the while there seem to be third party tools that exploit various flaws, including zero-day flaws to gain the access the companies won’t provide. My impression is that at least a couple times a year there’s a story about an Apple security update patching these holes and notifying certain users if they may have been targeted.

It’s possible that’s all just theater put on by the U.S. and allies to help Apple or Google tell governments the U.S. doesn’t trust, “see, we can’t even give the U.S. government we’re subject to access, so we certainly can’t give you access.” Given some of the cases that have been used to try to force access, though, I’m more inclined to think the government really doesn’t have the easy access some might like.

Of course, it’s also possible that some of the flaws used by zero-day exploits to gain access are intentionally planted, either by the software companies or by an individual programmer acting at a government’s behest. The later patches could be to maintain appearances to outsiders, since there always seem to be additional flaws. Still, programming is hard enough and operating systems are complex enough that I’m more inclined to say that usually these really are just human error and not something malicious.

None of that is to say that anyone should fully trust these encryption systems. Used properly, they’re probably good enough against ordinary hackers, people just looking for financial rewards. You can keep your family photos, important records, school notes, etc. on them without worrying too much. Financial records you might want to doubly encrypt, just so they’re not so easy to exploit if there is a breach and data dump. If you’re doing something any government cares enough about to really investigate, they’re probably going to find a way into your computer, phone, or cloud service, depending on how motivated they are. Maybe not some impoverished “third-world” governments, but most of the big ones have some resources. I’d be extremely cautious about things that could actually send someone to jail, either in your own country or one that is less friendly.

You’re torrenting from your phone?

For me (male) even turning 30 didn’t feel “old”; in my mind that was still basically in my 20s. When I turned 31, though, it hit me. Of course, it’s still not old, at most middle age, but hard to say you’re “young” anymore. But hopefully that means mature. You still have a lot of your energy and health, hopefully, but now also hopefully have a better understanding of what to do and how to make the best use of your life for your goals.

A guy I worked with went to high school with Randy Jones (the cowboy). He became the most popular person at all their class reunions.

Yes, but then last year he started saying it had known vulnerabilities that weren’t being fixed, around the same time Telegram was attacking Signal’s credibility. I seem to remember him outright endorsing Telegram but have only done a quick search and that hasn’t popped up.

How could BuzzFeed be ruined when it was always bad?

He has a junk shelf instead of a junk drawer

I’m guessing this is nothing to do with the plant that can grow on amusing terra cotta sculptures?

One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.

Side note: that disease she has sounds wild. I wonder if she wasn’t wealthy and famous if she ever would’ve even gotten diagnosed?

I wish I could show this to my father-in-law, but he’s in his 80s, speaks little English, and it would take a long time to even get the meme history built up with him to actually follow the humor. If I could get him to understand the humor, though, he’d probably love it; he taught this for decades at a university.

“Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here,” observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. “Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud.”

Reading the article, the service itself is interesting and it sounds like Apple might have found a way to process the data while preserving user privacy, but the fact that they unilaterally opted everyone in without giving them a choice is the biggest problem.