The French ministry of foreign affairs (state department) have been giving advice to traveller for decades
There was a time when their advice for travels to the US of A was to not tell TSA or law enforcement that you had a bomb in your bag, as it wasn't funny anymore and they would not take it as a joke
Being from Europe as well I've also been hearing similar advice plenty of times. With time I heard stories about people from all walks of lives having been help up by TSA, from people on business travel to kids of US senators...
>Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Yes
They're threatening to blow up an airliner or actually doing so to hit the news.
911 terrorists had blades, bomb jackets (whether these things are actual doesn't matter, saying you have them is enough), and eventually destroyed the tallest towers in NY and part of Pentagon and erased themselves while committing the crime
The point of terrorism is to be visible, dramatic and cause teror.
It's not to get a stealth award for hacking the coupon system at the shop and get away with it
A bomb (real or not) planted by terrorists or hijackers is meant to be eventually known one way or another. It's the point
>The point of terrorism is to be visible, dramatic and cause teror. It's not to get a stealth award for hacking the coupon system at the shop and get away with it
I agree with you... that's exactly what makes this situation so ludicrous. I'm not sure that an ambiguous, vaguely menacing Bluetooth device name is really going to do the trick.
Indeed it's so dumb that even in the extraordinarily unlikely event that it really was intended as a threat, you can still quite safely ignore it. I rather suspect that if someone wants to make a threat they won't just throw up their hands in despair because nobody bothered checking their Bluetooth pairing settings page. They'll actually communicate their threat to someone in a less ambiguous way.
France's Scaleway already offers RISC-V bare metal servers.
It's a first step that brings most of the value with close to no cost, as RISC-V is cheap nowadays
This cloud provider is a for profit company, not a research institute, so they can see short term commercial value if they do it
I'm surprised that nobody ever tells about Loongson
China already produces government and business computers with their homemade LoongArch architecture. The run on homemade Linux as well. Their point was not only to not be worried as much about backdoors and sanctions, but also to get a platform that their own universities and engineers can maintain and develop
This brand used to coproduce with the French, open source and Java apps work, it's under US sanctions for supplying the chinese government and military, export was restricted so that none land in Russia.
It took decades to make, commercial value is uncertain, but they did master the entire computing stack now
not only can the same logics apply to any media, as you can always say that mass cultural consumerism exploits vulnerable, but I also struggle to consider the MAGA crowd as the vulnerable people right now
Some wanted really specific entertainment in the form of AI generated conservative young girlfriend, this guy provided it
If it's immoral, you should also go after Hollywood for making blockbusters that aren't AI generated but have somehow fewer substance these days
However, for now, no law was broken in the process
It does not seem clear if they knew it was Ai generated. The creator seems to think his marks were none the wiser, as evidenced by the liberal version experiment and his comments therein.
I am trying to refrain from being so derogatory and place the most likely reasoning on the loneliness epidemic.
If 1/3 Americans have in fact had a "romantic relationship" with Ai, that would be more than all of the MAGA men. Teens and the elderly are also above average.
Now they somehow got the management of large companies to also push to adopt Azure, with an aggressive "no capex" / "you pay for what you use" campaign when everyone knows their offering work terribly and are overpriced.
if Home Depot were to make an exam to pass a certification over their catalog, that would seem ridiculous.
But when Microsoft does this, management ppl are happy and feel like they manage when they sign up everyone for AZ900 "certification"
Microsoft saw that users, power users and admins who are from the jobs are not making purchases, so you no longer need to design products for them
imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for you ?
I'm really surprised at how they would rather ignore or silence all and report that they is strictly no problem among their pool of employees, to say they have the best employees and good KPIs
It doesn't look like a winning strategy indeed.
I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small. They prefer you to say you don't know nobody.
Also yeah, I agree with you. These forms are straight out of the 1950s when more liberal habits have been coming since the 60s. And we're straight up declining anyone who is outspoken about his habits while he knows the true boundaries of the laws.
The government is just selecting applicants who do the sharia or some straight up vague "you have to be a good guy" menaces that completely opens them to blackmail
> imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for you ?
To complicate this further I think people don't recognize how people can start their jobs without problems and then gain them. These are stressful jobs (and with low pay) so that itself is a common gateway to a drinking problem. But there's also very mundane ways too. A large number of heroine and fentanyl addicts had their addictions begin through use of legal medication. The problem is we have a culture that pretends addiction is a choice and that the only to become addicted is through poor decisions and that to kick an addiction just requires "really wanting to stop". But that's not really consistent with the definition of addiction...
It seems like a poor strategy for high security topics, like you say. If anything, I want these people to have zero fear of opening up about their addictions. Be it gained unintentionally or through bad decisions. Reason being that 1) it reduces the risk of blackmail and 2) giving them a pathway to help also reduces their chance of blackmail. We don't even need to mention the fact that these are people and should be treated with kindness, we have entirely selfish reasons to be selfless.
> I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small.
I always found that odd myself. Do these people know what the demographics of a typical American University are these days? If you don't have a decent list of foreign nationals then you're either 1) a social recluse or 2) in a cultural bubble, and probably not the kind that we want people with this kind of authority to have... But I think they could resolve some of this by clarifying what level of contact they mean. Is it someone you sit next to in class and talk to frequently? Or do they not count if you don't talk with them outside class or study groups? Last time I looked at the forum it seems like they want you to just list anyone you ever talked to.
Personally I've avoided getting a clearance because I just don't see the value. It is a lot of work to put together, forces you to be more quiet about what you work on, means you need to be more careful/vigilant in every day things and especially when traveling, and all for what? Low pay and not even that cool of work? I mean if it was working on alien technologies and cool sci-fi shit, sign me up! But the reality is that most of the work isn't very exciting. I'd rather have more freedom, more pay, and work on more interesting things. Maybe their work can have more purpose and more impact, but I am also not convinced that's true for the majority of things you need clearance for (even as a person in STEM).
PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.
The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight
I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site
Your bank and mobile data carrier and cable company already did for you, on your behalf. It’s all searchable via your phone number, which you have to provide to all the apps you DO sign up for, so they can easily query your name, photo, address, purchase history, etc.
They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data
You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.
If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it
Right, I understand they don't need a warrant for the databases. I'm saying that they use the databases to get enough data for a warrant that they wouldn't be able to get without the databases.
To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street.
One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them.
Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ?
They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who wants to create that company and try to sell it ?
I'm dumbfounded that a big tech company that says they take age verification so seriously just subcontracts that part to this set of various subcontractor with no apparent vetting.
I do love Discord as a platform and I happily took subscriptions for me and some friends, but I don't understand who steers it.
Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
There was a time when their advice for travels to the US of A was to not tell TSA or law enforcement that you had a bomb in your bag, as it wasn't funny anymore and they would not take it as a joke
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