Yes - makes me think of the assassination of Shinzo Abe.
The gunman made his own gun, in a country with ultra-strict gun laws. The Unabomber made his own bombs. The Seattle mall Islamist knife attacker refused to stay down after being shot multiple times.
My takeaway: political terrorists are particularly motivated. Secondly, gun laws slow them down but don't stop them.
You might want to look into what happened in Japanese politics after the Abe assassination. Public opinion was not unfavorable to the plight and motivations of the attacker.
I just wanted to mention that. Recently I was wondering what was that even about, and I was surprised to read this on Wikipedia:
> Yamagami told investigators that he had shot Abe in relation to a grudge he held against the Unification Church (UC), a new religious movement to which Abe and his family had political ties, over his mother's bankruptcy in 2002.
> The assassination brought scrutiny from Japanese society and media against the UC's alleged practice of pressuring believers into making exorbitant donations. Japanese dignitaries and legislators were forced to disclose their relationship with the UC, (...) the LDP announced that it would no longer have any relationship with the UC and its associated organisations, and would expel members who did not break ties with the group. (...) [The parliament] passed two bills to restrict the activities of religious organisations such as the UC and provide relief to victims.
> Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that "... Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective ... Political violence seldom fulfills so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history".
Risk mitigation; statistics and funnels. It's all just trying to reduce the likelihood and severity of bad outcomes, not preventing them altogether. Same story as seatbelts and stoplights.
No, they're the same thing from a risk management perspective. As a defender, you do not (or at least should not) care about motivations. Seatbelts protect against genuine mistakes (by you or others), mechanical failures, road rage, etc.
There's a long funnel of all the things that could happen, probability of each, and total resulting probability. That's no different for being in a car wreck or being shot at.
Now, on a moral level, sure, malice is different from negligence is different from coincidence.
> As a defender, you do not (or at least should not) care about motivations
The motivation is not the important part. Sentience is. This person is playing a chess match trying to defeat you.
Consider biology. Cancer is a hard problem to solve, but it's not scheming against you with an intelligence. What about someone in a lab engineering bioweapons?
It's only an accident when taken out of the bigger picture. There is a reason it's often called car collision (or similar nowadays): Because it's a statistical inevitability when taken in aggregate.
There are whole continents of countries showing how effective gun control is. At this point you've got to be ignoring it on purpose.
It's not some statistical difference between almost no violence and no violence. It's night and day. Orders of magnitude. Teens walking back from parties through the middle of the city at 1 am with their parents permission vs clan wars.
I don’t doubt you’ve heard someone argue that, but I never have. I’ve always heard it as a right to defense, generally as in a right to defend yourself from oppressive authorities. I never took that to mean assassinations as much as militia actions against militaries.
You can argue whether or not that is an effective approach to securing freedom, but that’s the argument I’m most familiar with.
The 2A people couch it in metaphor and implication, but "we need guns to stop tyranny" is fundamentally saying that tyrants ought be shot. We can argue whether the semantics of whether death in battle counts as murder, but I think that's just quibbling over the definition of "assassination".
More of a distinction without a difference. Once you get to that situation, you've legitimized murder; now we see what that looks like.
"Militia" action against "military"? Neither side will bother with the scruples of waiting for the enemy to put on a uniform and pick up a weapon. It will be death squads vs car bombs.
Are attacks like this—ransomware—always aimed at Windows-based systems? Is that the common denominator?
I've noticed that most Internet attacks are Windows-based but somehow "Microsoft" or "Windows" never makes it into the news copy. I've wondered if MS has a massive marketing/legal outreach to make sure that doesn't happen. And to make it sound like "this can happen anywhere", and "no computer is 100% attack-proof".
Hosting History
Netblock owner IP address OS Web server Last seen
Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond WA US 98052 13.107.213.64 Linux unknown 26-Nov-2023
Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond WA US 98052 13.107.246.64 Linux unknown 25-Nov-2023
British Library 194.66.233.215 Linux unknown 20-Jul-2023
British Library 194.66.233.215 Linux nginx 15-May-2019
British Library 194.66.233.215 unknown nginx 5-Jul-2016
British Library 194.66.233.215 Linux nginx 4-Jul-2016
British Library 194.66.233.215 unknown nginx 26-Jun-2016
British Library 194.66.233.215 Linux nginx 21-Jun-2016
British Library 194.66.233.215 unknown nginx 17-Jun-2016
British Library 194.66.233.215 Linux Apache 17-Jan-2016
Very true. This website[0] by a library consultant says the library system was “Aleph 500.” The product documentation[1] says it is an Oracle on RHEL. Other components also indicate Unix flavors.
No they aren't always aimed at Windows based systems but it is the most widely used operating system so of course it is targeted and exploited. Every system is vulnerable. The secret is that coders are normal people just like everyone else, they make mistakes. The real problem is that our economy is driven by money so these things don't get fixed because there's no profit in it, only features that make money get added or fixed.
This is bait, but I'll bite. From what I've seen, the common denominator is misconfiguration. We can all do it, but it seems especially concentrated in organizations with limited IT human resources largely dependent upon contracted service providers. Spend a butt load on systems and hope Bill in IT doesn't screw it up. A lot of that ecosystem happens to be Windows based.
This is a great observation. What if, back in the Ford Explorer Firestone tire explosion scandal, they said "SUVs are being recalled because tires are exploding". Makes the article much less informative.
I'm planning my transition away for 10 or so subdomains and 30 records.
The only feature I need to research in new providers is: access to Whois ASN numbers, which I insert into HTTP request headers. I use this to tailor my site for .gov and .edu users.
That's the inference, but AFAIK there's been no direct assertion or explanation: Why has CF been knocked back to Alpha-status reliability across the board.
"""
In a nutshell, Cloudflare rolled out a new KV build to production. It turned out that the deployment tool had a bug, and some traffic got diverted to the wrong destination, which triggered a rollback … which failed. The result was that engineers had to manually switch the production route to the previous working version of Workers KV.
The problem is that an awful lot of Cloudflare products and services depend on Workers KV, meaning that when there is a problem with the platform, the blast radius can be impressive.
"""
We're currently in the Nov 2-3 outage, soon to rollover into Nov 4 in my timezone. This one is the power outage — also mentioned in the article — but unrelated to KV.
