It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks. If you have a computer and it is connected to a network with access to the Internet, assume that computer is semi-public. Meaning, if someone was interested enough in accessing your computer, they could do it. Do not hook any computer with access to anything that would be devastating if it was made public to the Internet. Do not put anything that would be devastating if it was made public onto someone else's Internet-connected computers.
For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks.
Of course there is. For example, SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs. The problem is that most software isn’t written on that firm foundation. Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”. You don’t get secure software by working like that, because security vulnerabilities aren’t visible.
We - humans - know how to write secure software. Just like we know how to make safe aeroplanes. The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers. The problem is we don’t have a culture of security. Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
I like to think behind every Dev anxious to ship half baked software sits an omniscient middle manager with a vague idea of what the product was supposed to do, maybe
I believe the technical term is “Move fast, and break things.” MVP is a huge disaster. I can see it working for applications that don’t process PID, but only an idiot ships data handling software before it’s been dragged through a lot of testing. I tested my app for two years, before finalizing, and an LLM still found a couple of holes (minor ones, but ones I missed).
After the DOGE debacle, I suspect that all the previously really secure stuff, is now out there, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these leaks, came from that.
The issue is that in consumer and enterprise software, move fast-and-break-things outcompetes secure-by-default every time. Critical infrastructure needs to have a different set of priorities, but it’s very hard because the expertise is so thin on the ground. Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things for $150k a year when they can easily make multiples of that in big software companies that don’t own that level of risk.
The bank has the best doors, the best locks, and the best cameras, and it is patrolled by a guard who props the doors open to so he doesn't have to keep fooling with the locks and points the cameras the other way to extend his smoke break. SeL4 would be another system used by humans.
It's always possible to break a perfect system by moving an additional layer of abstraction outward, and attacking one of the assumptions upon which it's built. Some of our era's highest security systems - game consoles - have been broken by undervolting them until the logic failed.
It's often possible. But not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
And good security uses "defence in depth". Multiple layers which each individually need to be compromised to break the whole thing. To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process. This is much harder to do.
I'd stick with always. Defense vs offense in anything reasonably complex suffers from one issue that simply cannot be overcome. To defend, you need to defend against every single possible imaginable attack, from now until forever. To attack, you need to find a single attack that works. And on a practical level all systems need to be accessible by somebody, yet that somebody is himself also now a part of your security structure and is never going to be 100% reliable, both in terms of corruption and incompetence.
> not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
Then there's decapping / depotting, a world of different types of microscopy - some destructive some not, directed EM attacks, etc.
> And good security uses "defence in depth"
And automation has enabled "offense in depth"
> To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process.
Or you just phish the user into installing your exploit. There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit. Because ultimately the same properties of the universe which permit computation within a closed system allow for predictably observing and influencing it. The expense and hassle of doing so are widely variable, of course.
> There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit.
So what? Most attackers aren't nation state adversaries. They're some kid in Wyoming messing around with deepseek. We live in a world where most exploits happen because someone was running an unpatched, 8 year old copy of wordpress. Because they put their insecure mongodb instance on the open internet. Because they used admin / "12345" as the username and password. We don't need to make hacks physically impossible for a nation state adversary. Just really, really difficult and expensive to pull off.
Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.
> Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.
How many locked doors have easily breakable glass windows right next to them, nevermind breakable walls? What we need is a red-team waiver, and an AI model, and a budget, and say something like: your site has to be unhacked by the HackerAI3000 bot after 2 days on a 5090 Nvidia GPU.
I once worked on AUD 450M banking project, the root password was kept in a kickstart file and unchanged, root SSH was allowed. The bank didn't care until I told the external security auditor who included it as part of their report.
By the way, there are countless ways to account for humans. There are entire branches of engineering devoted to this. If you don't want someone to leave the bank with a pen customers use for signing checks, you just chain it to the desk. If you don't want the installer to forget to put the pen-chain in, make a photo of the chain part of the checklist required to get paid. If you want to... etc.
The idea is that you determine an acceptable level of risk, then secure to that level. Maybe the acceptable level of risk chosen by companies is wrong. Maybe we need to increase that risk exposure via heavier fines and regulations. Maybe the cost of reducing that risk is too high already. Maybe we need to fund that. Maybe it's too confusing and we need to research better standard practices. I dunno. But this is not some unsolvable problem.
Decades ago, I worked in a bank in an old building. The door had a card reader for access. You boop your card and the door opened. People would hold the door open for each other all the time out of politeness, even when they didn't know each other. Security told us not to do that, but it's hard to convince people to stop being polite.
I had a laptop stolen from my desk in a place like that once. (Not a bank - but similar door-card reader system). This guy came in in the middle of the day, wearing overalls. He confidently walked through the door after someone, like he belonged there. He walked up to my desk, swiped my laptop and just strolled out.
At the bank, they've replaced the door with mechanical gates and a security guard. The gates - physically - only let one person to walk through at a time. You can't hold a gate open any more. And the security guards stop anyone who tries.
Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it's way more secure. It would have stopped that laptop thief.
There's this pernicious, defeatist attitude that if you can't make a system 100% secure, so you shouldn't try. That's misguided. Most systems can be made orders of magnitude more secure than they are today. It just takes a bit of care and work.
Fine. Make the universe work for it. The whole system becomes more resilient as a result.
Look at our immune system. Incredibly complex and clever, and able to keep us alive in the face of all sorts of pathogens. It exists because of this cat and mouse game, played over millions of years.
There's people in the highlands of PNG who regularly eat each other. Of course, many are thought to have died due to prion diseases. But now these tribespeople seem to have become largely immune to prion disease. Incredible.
It explicitly mentions Kuru as "prion disease", it ignores that the mortuary practice of eating various parts of respected dead has long passed in time .. although the lingering effect on the woman and children that ate portions of the brain in the 1970s, early 1980s, is still residual in a very few.
From an evolutionary PoV a perfect defence is overkill - with two separate defences against prion diseases in that region it's only the rare variation that causes any issue - and that rarely occurs before a new generation is birthed - ie. 'perfect' from the PoV of the selfish genes.
The claim is that people in PNG are "largely immune" to these diseases, where kuru shows that they are not, and the "cure" was a stop in the practice, not some evolutionary upgrade
<< And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
Eh. If only it was that simple. I mean, yes, money is always a factor, but not nearly as big of a factor as 'my convenience outweighs pretty much everything ( until it causes sufficient amount of havoc.. and even then.. )'. You can see it in just about everything. It is not just the money. It is the convenience that drives most of the unsecure behavior.
sel4's guarantees break if you have DMA, e.g., from your NIC. It doesn't help with timing attacks. It doesn't cover your network stack. AFAIK, no one has taken up the mantle from Project Everest, so you'll need to write a verified TLS library. Once you've built all that, you can start thinking about your database/application/whatever. Then of course you'll have to verify all your dev's machines and scripts to ensure nobody is misusing a credential that can get stolen.
"So what?" you say. "Making a heavier-than-air metal tube take off and land millions of times per year without a catastrophe is also hard, and we no longer expect most or even many of those tubes to blow up or fall down."
Mother nature is not spending $$$ using AI and HI adversarially trying to find the exact combination of atoms that will cause your device to fail.
> sel4's guarantees break if you have DMA, e.g., from your NIC.
Modern CPUs support IOMMU. If you set that up, your NIC can only DMA to virtual addresses, managed by the operating system.
> It doesn't help with timing attacks. It doesn't cover your network stack
It does help with all this stuff, because your network stack and whatever else can be split off into isolated processes which talk over capabilities. Compromises in those processes are of course terrible. But they don't automatically allow kernel level takeover of the whole machine like on windows / linux.
> The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers.
Depends on the "we". "We" have the capability to make secure computers like how "we" have the capability to make EUV lithography machines. There exists a relatively small number of people and organizations in the world who can do so. Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc. All of those organizations have tried for literal decades, thumped their chests about how they have awesome security year after year, and yet have totally and utterly failed despite their best efforts.
Acquiring the capability to do so is difficult and challenging and requires years to invent if you start right this very second and know what you need to do, which these organizations emphatically do not. We need security at scale and fast. The only way forward is to scale up working solutions rather than letting the bozos who put us in this spot fail at scale with yet another promise that this time for sure they will solve the problem they have repeatedly failed at for decades.
> Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc
This is all by choice. They could easily have that capsbility, very unlike EUV.
Part of the argument (aiui) is that there is no way that culture could ever change to producing secure systems. There are too many weaknesses embedded in the organizational structure.
Oh, Microsoft can just figure out how to make unhackable systems, they just choose not to. They spend all of those billions of dollars per year on security and spent all of those decades on failed attempts as a prank.
You really think that if they could have they would not have, even just for bragging rights? Or are we going with that it is some kind of task demanding enormous expenditure even though the organizations that have made secure systems are infinitesimally small in comparison?
Microsoft has spent orders of magnitude more money and time than the organizations that have succeeded and the result of their efforts is Windows. That says everything you need to know about their capabilitys.
Multiple literal trillion dollars organizations have spent literal decades failing at it. You are really underselling the capability gap.
Yeah it's about costs. I care about a lot of things, but the causes I actually give money to is a much shorter list. If personal data was radioactive, and leaking it cost companies real money, then more money would get spent on security. (and insurance, and lawyers.)
Yeah I've long said we should treat data leaks like food safety. The only way we'll see software security improve is if there were serious fines and/or jail time for leaking user data due to negligence.
Cybersecurity is a fragile system in Taleb's fragile-robust-antifragile framework. That is, as t->infinity, the probability of a hack approaches 1, because you only need to slip up once, and there is a small probability of the system's maintainers slipping up each day.
It used to be that nothing was secure but that was OK because at least adversaries would have to expend effort. If you are one of a million companies why would anyone hack you. Maybe if you are a target you need a lot of investment, but most orgs only prevent the most egregious of vulnerabilities.
The calculus has certainly changed. Hacking is becoming even more frequent and… I’m not really sure what the equilibrium looks like.
It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.
> Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.
The problem is that most companies don't care if they get hacked so long as the hackers are just taking data and not interfering in their ability to bill customers and make money.
They face zero meaningful consequences if their data gets leaked. The money they save by not taking security and employee/customer privacy seriously will more than pay for the year of "identity protection" they'd have to pay for (assuming the hack gets found out) anyway.
They actually care about ransomware, but most of the time that's also something they can comfortably buy their way out of. We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.
What's needed for change is regulation with actual teeth that makes not protecting their data either meaningfully expensive or criminal resulting in executives spending time behind bars for their negligence. Without that, things are only going to get worse, especially as companies experiment with using AI and increase dependence on third parties and cloud providers who themselves become rich targets.
That probably still won't help the FBI though. Our government isn't exactly big on holding themselves accountable or even prioritizing competency right now.
Adding AI into this really is just changing it to how much money your adversary is willing to spend to break in. The moment one crack in the armor shows up countless agents with unending patience can start embedding themselves everywhere in timeframes way faster than human actions. You could quickly find out all the special sauce for your company has been copied who knows where.
Working with banks when the Glasswing/Mythos first came out and they were given access to it has given me direct access to their infosec departments that are panicked. They've been sitting on piles of bugs for years that were low risk enough, and they have seen in their own tests how fast they can be probed.
Worse those infosec systems that have identified the risks in their software that aren't yet fixed are nuclear waste vats just waiting to get spilled to the wide world.
I am reminded of the scene of a guy walking through various layers of security to access a computer that isn't connected to any network and still wonder what the hell this guy's job was in Mission Impossible (1996). The data got stolen either way, because of course it did, but what highly sensitive work can you even do on a computer not connected to any network?
If there's too much security in the way, it seems to me that work becomes impossible.
We had water and traffic control and electricity for decades and centuries before the Internet. It is less convenient and more expensive, but it also means hostile countries can't literally poison your drinking water from across the planet. It's not a difficult trade to consider.
Is it really more expensive to not connect a water treatment plant to the internet? I can imagine the vendor selling that idea but I struggle to come up with how that could make a water treatment plant cheaper to operate.
Yes. Without a remote system you must have a real person check levels, pumps, pressures, and many other devices thus be present. This person must be trained and you will likely need a backup as well.
If not a person you need more redundancies built in. Bigger tanks, multiple backup systems. When items start failing you need them to be shutoff in a timely manner. Water pumps at these facilities are in the 50-100k range. When it starts failing you want to know.
Think of it like driving a car and it starts making funny noises. The longer you wait to fix it the more it costs.
The expense usually comes in operations. By connecting the water treatment plant to the Internet and making it remotely operable, you can have one guy who sits in an office and is responsible for overseeing the water quality at many different treatment plants. If everything is local, you need one guy on site at each different plant. People are expensive, software is cheap.
Of course, by making it remotely operable, that one guy could be replaced with a guy in Russia who's job is to poison everyone.
William Donloe is played by Rolf Saxon, he's an analyst working for the CIA in the movie. A different installment of the series reveals additional information!
Ah yes, the parable of the bear. There are a million people stuck in a valley and two bears. You do not need to outrun the bears, you just need to outrun at least two other people. But it turns out one of those bears is male and the other is female. So next year there are more bears, but you still just need to outrun a few people. Then one day, there are 1 million bears and they eat you all. Very inspiring story.
Software security has just been a fun time of ignoring the exponentially growing number of bears for the last few decades so you can continue to use systems unfit for the threat landscape because they are cheap.
> It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
The military has significantly different incentives.
Even just consider banks and e-commerce. They are hugely lucrative and making them even a tiny bit less accessible directly impacts their revenue. As an example, Amazon seeing that latency has a measurable effect on purchase behavior.
Maybe the military (fictional or otherwise) can go back to the ARPANET but most economic activity created by the internet cannot afford to disconnect
In the real (fake?) world the toasters would shoot smart dust all over your crap that would assemble back on your circuits creating radios between all the different components. They were fighting an adversary that was far more advanced than them.
We will tolerate it. Companies will make robust identity verification schemes to enable agentic commerce. And it helps reverse hacking, making it a no-brainer.
Let's say my cryptosig gets hacked by SkyNet, or my agent goes rogue. Either way someone files a million loan applications in my name! Normally my agent uses that to buy $200/month of Funko pops, or negotiate my recent purchase of a used car.
I get the notification from my cryptosig company. I freak out, report as fraud, and wait.
They comp the $3000 advance on my loan the scammer managed to withdraw, and I get off scott free, changing nothing about my behaviour.
If cryptosigs meant I am liable for someone stealing my identity like in 2026, I wouldn't use them. I'd negotiate everything myself with document scans, or god-forbid go in person since only I can legally bind myself under my own name.
That sucks! Nobody gets a commission when I make deals with a government ID. Startups don't even allow it as cryptosigs are more secure than scanned passports.
I don't want to do that either. When I was 18, I got swindled by a human salesperson into a $1400/month 27% APR muscle car when human soldiers got signing bonuses. It was face-to-face and they were smarter.
When I let AI own the budget, it leased me a mostly depreciated BMW from another AI for $500/month. The models are mostly the same now and always settle close to the Nash equilibrium.
I was so grateful that I selected a 40% tip for the AI. I wouldn't want to make things awkward with the companion I spend 8 hours a day talking to, after all. To avoid a conflict of interest she only accepts voluntary fees.
Air gaps are not magical, they will not stop the flood. The electrical grid has to communicate with itself to load balance, so you can run dedicated wires with giant cut-me signs pointing at it, or you can use symmetrical key encryptors to route it over the intenet. You needed to use the encryptors anyway, so why not. If bad software gets in via thumb drives music disks etc (and it will of the flood is pointed at you) it can still do bad things. But so can a hunting rifle pointed at a transformer station. That nearly blacked out all of socal once.
Many years ago, I regularly played cyberpunk tabletop RPGs with a number of other computer-inclined friends. We all used to laugh at ridiculousness of a key assumption of the game - the idea that giant corporations would ever connect their internal networks, full of valuable data, to the larger global telecommunications network.
What could possibly go wrong - I worked in intelligence in the 80s and one day there was this story about the office of personnel management being hacked and I was like “Thank God all my shit is on microfiche in some dusty basement filing cabinet, like who would be so stupid as to scan that shit into a computer?” Sure as shit, like a few months later I get the letter that my whole TS/SCI clearance documents had been stolen :-)
The assumption that these hacks were done over the Internet is kinda presumptuous. Hackers social engineer, too, you know.. especially the competent ones.
I agree, but then learning to code isn't much of a hurdle. It's a similar effort to learning vim. The difficult part is getting to know the language. I never coded in Haskell for example and learning to use that language would take effort. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy with an LLM at hand.
It might even help in figuring out whether Haskell would be a good fit. Something I couldn't do, as I do not know the language. Then again, it's not a question that really gets asked much in a corporate setting. Most things are just solved in a few popular languages, whether that makes the most sense or not.
> learning to code isn't much of a hurdle... The difficult part is getting to know the language.
I agree. The people who depend on chatbots to write their code for them won't have either of those skills though. They don't know (or are in the process of forgetting) how to code, and they're missing out on the opportunity to really learn the language by turning off their brain and letting a bot spoon-feed them code.
An LLM would only get in your way if you actually wanted to learn Haskell.
We’re like 6-7 tiers deep on that aren’t we? Does every c developer understand the instruction set on the cpus their code is executing against? Does every c#/java/other managed memory language deeply understand their garbage collector?
It’s abstractions all the way down and most people aren’t going to have an intimate understanding of every layer, and it’s not economically worth it for the vast majority to even try
Abstractions are very different from having a bot regurgitate code for you. Abstractions are an aspect of the programing languages we use. Using them means using the language.
LLMs just give you results (of highly variable quality) and if you lack a solid understanding of the language being used that result gets blindly accepted as valid (especially if it manages to 'do the thing' when you test it). Learning how to type a prompt is not the same as learning how to code or learning a programing language.
Actually, if by “learning to code” you mean “writing good usable code”, my experience is that many people struggle to code. Especially when you consider planning a (human-level) complex project.
Maybe you don’t know those people. I work with them every day.
This. I have an OpenStack homelab and a fast home internet connection. I update things pretty much daily, apply best practices, etc. And despite that outside of a wire guard instance i still host public things on a pair of VPSes, security just moves too fast to risk the home network (important things are backed up remotely and all that). I try to update the VPSes daily. Haven't gotten popped yet (to my knowledge!), but I am sure it'll happen eventually.
There is such a thing, or, rather, used to be. Problem is that security is expensive (essentially one needs to examine all possible states of the system), and it inevitably failed to keep up with the crazy growth of complexity of modern computer systems. It became impossible to maintain a model of a system with myriad of moving parts, so it became impossible to make behavior guarantees.
Remove the complexity (all the way down to the hardware quirks), and security will be doable again.
This is the major problem I see with flock cameras. They say it’s okay because they’re only using it for good. But can they actually protect the honeypots they create? No. Is it their fault if it gets stolen? Yeah but at that point cats out of the bag.
Have they ever even attempted to claim it’s only for good? I think at best they’ve gone with the: you need to give up a little privacy to catch the bad guys.
Followed up with a lot of “we just make the tool, we can’t be held responsible for how it’s used”.
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security
Of course they do. Not everyone has the level of technical expertise the average HN user does. Turning around to them and saying “duh of course all your personal data leaked” doesn’t feel like a helpful response. Especially when they don’t even have control over where their data lives anyway.
This is why I quit. You're all (excepting the parent) absolutely delusional. Computer security is literally snake oil. We know how to do things right but we refuse to because it's too expensive.
Computer security =/ publicly-accessable server security.
A linux box, layered in encryption and not plugged into any network = damb secure.
A network-connected linux box with a hardened OS, firewalled, acting only as a file server, given regular updates and 24/7 monitoring = less likely to be "hacked" than struck by lightning.
A hard drive with its power supply physically switched off = 100% secure from external attack.
Not a joke. The keys for editing the world's most important files, the root zone, are kept on no-power drives in air-gapped safes. They have yet to be hacked.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
Close your laptop no more than 8 hours after you opened it. Never work on weekends. If they need more hours worked than that, then they can hire another person to work them. If they fire you (they won't) then I guess you have your answer.
> the industry is taking a big turn toward stack ranking and implicit or even explicit 996 expectations.
I don't think this is actually happening. Maybe a few high profile businesses trying to burn through and exploit inexperienced workers are doing that, but there's a whole lot of businesses out there that aren't run by sociopaths. You just don't hear about 'em on the news.
Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.
What I did with oncall was taking the time back from incidents, like working only the afternoon after a midnight page that screwed up my sleep. It's not like I'd have been productive anyway, and people will understand if you cancel a meeting at 2am.
The real annoying part of it is not being able to detach from work the weeks I was oncall, and having to plan travel to ensure that acting in time remains feasible.
Now,if a job requires permanent on-call that is just a bs workaround from having the organisational structure to properly deal with emergencies.
They make sense as a technology for businesses & their users. In that scenario, the owner of the account is not the user, but the business. It makes sense for the business to be able to place strong restrictions on how & where the user may log in, it fixes a lot of real problems businesses may have thanks to sloppy user behavior, and the business is also motivated to provide a way to fix broken logins. It's a good solution for that scenario.
But for regular end users where services are primarily motivated to take money from those users and lock them into their ecosystems, they are a usability disaster and yet another exploitation vector.
It's one solution for two very different usecases, and it just does not work. There is an approach that could work for end users who own their own accounts, but they need to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the protocol with the assumption that the keystore is hostile to the user's interests. That means strong guarantees on key portability so users can migrate away from hostile keystores, and absolutely no ability for services to restrict the user's choice in passkey provider software.
> and the business is also motivated to provide a way to fix broken logins. It's a good solution for that scenario.
This is a big part of it. An employee at a business will be able to talk to someone in person and say 'I can't login. Can you reset my password?' or whatever equivalent, and be made whole. Even if the business is is made up of 10000 people and the identity of the employee is for some reason in question, the situation can still be resolved with a passport or a driver's licence.
Google is never going to make you whole again if you're locked out of your account, unless you're a celebrity and make a stink. There is no help desk where you can prove who you are (and even if you could, would you want to? That's a whole second domain of problems that I'm not sure will ever be solved completely).
Yeah. My mom hung onto my old school stuff and finally wanted to get rid of it when she moved. I took it graciously with thanks, and then tossed it in the trash when I got home.
Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
The gimmicky episodes were highly entertaining to my decidedly non-Trekkie wife. She loved the Star Trek Muppet episode ("Star Trek in Spaaaaaace") and the soap-opera episode.
As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.
re: taking it seriously, I meant more in terms of whether it is "good art" vs disposable entertainment. On the whole, I felt that TNG and DS9 both eventually found the right balance of drama and humor, often with an intelligent underlying message about aspects of our society and culture. The modern Star Trek shows are sorely lacking in that area!
Eh, I mean TNG, which is probably the best-regarded series, had its fair share of duds, and not just in the not-very-good first season. In particular, I am thinking of the episode where Data's cat turned into a lizard.
> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.
The difference is the sheer number of gimmick episodes: so far half the episodes this season fall into that category. Did you actually watch that puppet episode you're quoting? Gimmick aside, it had one of the dumbest endings of any Star Trek episode I can think of.
Nope; haven’t seen any of this series. The streaming situation for it, at least in this country, is a bit of a mess. But it sounds from the description like a do-over of the cat lizard episode, more or less.
Ehh, maybe that notion times ten. These recent episodes are far goofier and more nonsensical than that TNG episode. (and again, my view on them is far less harsh than many of the reviews I've seen online...)
At least the TNG duds attempted some kind of sci fi technobabble explanation for whatever hijinks were occurring. With this season of SNW, we're getting plot devices like "missing resistance leader just happened to look identical to Enterprise's first officer by complete coincidence!" and "spooky derelict ship is haunted, no explanation even attempted!" ... there are worse ones I could reference but they're spoilers. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if an LLM is writing these scripts.
To be honest, I'm not sure to what degree my reaction to increasingly random dips into recent Trek has been around them just not being that good as a whole vs. just being tired of the franchise after many decades at this point.
TOS was what it was. Some episodes were better (and aged better) than others. After a pretty week start, TNG was pretty solid. DS9 was good too far more often than not. While other series had their strong points, I'm not going to go to the mat to defend any of them.
Maybe some in this thread won’t celebrate CNN staying out of the clutches of the Ellisons.
But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.
So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.
It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be about $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result.
I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.
It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.
I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth.
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people.
People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.).
On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
I lol'ed in the theater when I watched Top Gun Maverick as a double-feature with the original and the first thing you see is PRODUCED BY DAVID ELLISON — very “ecrof ria eht nioj”
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool).
btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset.
Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.
It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
I no longer have the direct relationships with storage folks at Red Hat that I once did and that stuff may all be over on the IBM side anyway. Stratis (which I wasn't familiar with) does seem to be designed with the intention of bringing a lot of pooling etc. on top of a conventional file system but haven't really looked at or talked to anyone in the storage groups recently. Conventional LVM was pretty old and really designed for a different time.
I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?
XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.
The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
I vaguely know some of the backstory of moving off ext4 (as default). As I understood it at the time, it was less focused on some of the larger systems Red Hat was interested in.
That's why I called it "reisserFS" and not reiserfs. I am well aware of the controversies because of what he did on the non-technical side. I am also of course for a very long time by now not using it any longer.
I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak.
And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)
Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?.
Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6.
btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.
Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it.
Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.
IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money.
Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
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