...and you know which telephone numbers send data to the pager and at which time. That is sufficient to track or identify individuals.
If this is a supply chain attack, the attacker already knows, which pagers are part of the organization they want to target.
What this thread here shows really well, is that the general population vastly underestimates the abilities of intelligence agencies and technology in general.
And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.
When you're 12 and your parents have no idea what you're doing, you'll end up in very dark corners.
Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it's not perfect, it's one of the better uses of my tax euros.
This is what's happening in highly complex software over time. Every larger system has corners like this.
I've worked on a system that required that you send invalid XML, because some bloke 10 years ago didn't know what he's doing and hardcoded a certain structure.
Easy fix, but our clients relied in the old behavior, and nobody bothered fixing it.
Had that once. Never again.
We had meetings with several people about 30min tasks being booked using the wrong category, despite both being part of the same budget. Absolute insanity.
For a lot of Asian countries the "asian dream" is still somewhat realistic.
Just look at China or Korea. Many of the older folks there grew up in abject poverty, but the countries managed to develop themselves through hard labor into modern, wealthy nations. The promise of "my kids will have it better" was actually true for them. And that promise still drives a lot of the work culture. In China the first cracks already appear, since for the first time in 50 years or so, the current youth has no way up anymore.
It's clearly the other way around. These animals leave, causing plates to slip because of reduced weight.
If you're so far on the right that even Goebbels would have found you extreme, everything is left wing.
I worked for a company that handled a ton of personal data. Pretty much every person in Germany, including addresses, bank account details, etc.
On my first day there (fresh from university) I was given literally full read access to the entire database. And as I later found out by accident: they did not track any data exfiltration at all. I copied several gigabytes of data without anyone noticing.
Your data is only as secure as the least motivated data broker sees fit. And that's not very fit.
Problem is, people usually by far overestimate their position in society.
If you say "tax the rich" a whole lot of people feel like it's about them even though they barely count as middle class.
Here in Germany I've had countless debates about inheritance tax. If your parents die, you only have to pay taxes (10%) on anything over 400k, and that's per child. That means, most people will never pay a cent of inheritance tax, yet they are horrified by the idea of it, because they firmly believe, their parents shitty house in a village somewhere will bankrupt them and their two siblings.
People fundamentally don't understand their own wealth and how tiny their wealth is compared to the billionaires class.
It's not about capabilities, it's about cost.
If you can exploit your workers, pay shit wages for long hours, you'll get a cheaper product. You can get the same output by applying higher standards, but that would mean hiring more people.
It's the same crap like with blockchain.
People have no idea how sophisticated modern IT systems already are, and if you glue fancy words on solved problems, people will cheer you for being super innovative.
...or it's the gremlin who tries to get by, but only has like 30min a week for his project, since he has a day job and two gremlettes to feed.
See the xz debacle.
The underlying problem is, that there's no monetary value being assigned to good software. As long as it's good enough to sell it and buy insurance, that's fine.
And just about 5 of them have the same capacity as an iPhone battery. Absolutely insane.
A similar thing to the first point happened at my old company.
When it became clear that working from home won't go away, management came up with some new and actually reasonable rules, that basically allowed 100% wfh, if the team was okay with it.
Now, here in Germany east/west differences are still pretty stark. So someone asked "sooo, I'm in the East, get a low wage, but work with a team from the West. If my neighbor would start working for the same team, formally at an office in the West, but 100% from home, he'd get West wages". Management didn't address that at all, so a bunch of people (including myself) just said fuck it, quit and now earn way better wages working from home.
They killed stuff before.
Google's downfall seems to be this weird promotion culture where you only get attention by launching new products. That's why they keep introducing half assed messengers. Nobody gets anything from maintaining a successful product.
That combined with myopic shareholder value management gives us the corporate equivalent of a 12 year old kid with ADHD and a bad tamper.
I wonder what will happen with all the compute once the AI bubble bursts.
It seems like gaming made GPU manufacturing scale enough to start using them as general compute, Bitcoin pumped billions into this market, driving down prices (per FLOP) and AI reaped the benefit of that, when crypto moved to asics and crashed later on.
But what's next? We've got more compute than we could reasonably use. The factories are already there, the knowledge and techniques exist.
Given the brittleness of civilization, chances are the backup tapes with the exact flight planes get lost during a thunderstorm and 50 years later nobody remembers this ship even exists.
Our legacy system always puts the label in the water and our clients rely on the faint cardboard flavor.
And it's a bad argument anyway. You're only good at memory management until the first bug takes down production.
Rust isn't a panacea and certainly has problems, but eliminating an entire class of potentially very dangerous bugs is a very good argument.
Guys like him are survivorship bias as a person. They think they owe their success to nobody and nothing but their own determination, while ignoring all of the lucky coincidences that made that possible. And ignoring all of those who worked just as hard, but did not make it. Instead they blame lack of success on personal failures and laziness.
So they want to abolish everything that could help those below them. They look at them with contempt. They will happily tell their own success story and their humble origins, but won't even touch a minimum wage worker with a pole.
This isn't an operation for land gains, it's political.
It's a huge embarrassment for Putin and might lead him to overreact and pull way more troops into Kursk than needed, thus freeing up capacity elsewhere.
Also, the myth of the mighty mighty Russian army gets kind of damaged, if basically a second Wagner convoy can just take large chunks of borderlands.
Putin wants to be seen as strong. And this shows how weak he actually is.
But this time he's for realsies!
That unfortunately means, you can't play a lot of games. And for most people it's practically unknowable what the installer is doing, they don't expect a game to nuke their computer.
There needs to be accountability and a certain level of trust. Microsoft shouldn't allow kernel drivers for crap like anti cheat.
Maybe a niche issue, but "that doesn't scale!" In the context of software development.
We're writing software for usually very well defined user groups, but so many of the architects and seniors want to build a second Netflix, which costs 4 times as much as the simple solution and in the end usually isn't even better, because those morons have no idea how to do that.
Currently, I'm in a project where I fought tooth and nail to avoid having a micro service architecture for a batch job that inserts less than a million entries per day.
Most people will never hear of this.
Big if true and big.
But what actually is "archival"?
Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?
Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.
That's the nature of capitalism.
Look at healthcare, software, construction. Unless there's a very clear incentive to produce high quality (laws or enforceable contracts) things will go lower and lower in quality.
And unfortunately, a lot of consumers don't care all that much about quality. They want crap that looks fancy.
Replacing C with Rust in the upstream kernel is akin to replacing the engine in a car while it's running or being used every day.
That's in no way what's been proposed. Rust is used in a very well defined niche, nobody wants to get rid of C.
But it's just that sentiment that got us here, you're arguing against a non-existent threat, and thus reject the whole proposal.
I've written it countless times before, but software engineering desperately needs to do some engineering.
What you're describing is absolutely true, but compare the way you're working with an actual engineer. No sane engineer would start investigating the production process of a steel beam just to build a regular old warehouse. The steel beam has certain characteristics and unless you have very good reasons, you don't need to question that.
We are software developers however need to know a lot of our steel beams and can't rely on many of them. That means even simple stuff takes forever and we tie ourselves to it way more than we should.
Most names are essentially just landmarks of some sort.
Hamburg is derived from Hammer Burg, simply meaning hammer castle.
Part of Hamburg is Altona, which is lower German for all too near, because it's really close to Hamburg.
East of Hamburg is Lübeck, which is means "settlement of the lub", whoever the lub were.
Even farther east is Warnemünde, which is located at the mouth (Mund) of the river Warnow.
Said river is getting pretty wide a bit upstream, which gave the city of Rostock its name ("where the river gets wider").
East of that: Stralsund. It's the sound (the water kind) of Strela.
And so on and so on.
Is it just me or is tech increasingly breaking down?
It's interesting how often Microsoft managed to bring truly innovative products a few years too early to market and then just silently fails.
They had tablets in the early 00s, ARM laptops, folding phones, media centers.
Is it? It's rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?
You'd have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That's not really low complexity.
As a software engineer, this is exactly how software works.
Everything is just a huge mess bolted and duct taped together, sometimes over decades. And it's all way too complex to understand and crap like crowdstrike happens.
You can't rely on anything anymore and I'm pretty sure, our highly interdependent world will come very close to collapse if anything major happens. Covid was a warning shot, but nobody heard it.
Google Reader didn't fail. And they killed it for no reason.
Chromecasts are probably simply not profitable enough. The device class is served by cheaper sticks and given the absurd salaries and profit expectations of these firms, it's probably not "worth it".
The newest iteration of the language might be okay, but the ecosystem is an absolute mess.
Working with npm projects is always a pain, everything changes all the time for no reason, and often enough in subtle ways you can't anticipate.
Plus, there's just an army of not very good and/or inexperienced developers vomiting their incompetence into the ecosystem.
Languages are not isolated. Java doesn't force abstractFactoryBuilders, yet hundreds of developers follow that pattern. So Java in practice is rather verbose.
I worked on a system whose database setup looked kind of like this. Interesting to see, that they weren't the only ones using that approach.
We had an online database for online transactions, all tables used a sequence generator table (basically a key/value with the key being table name and the value being the last id) l, every few minutes all the new transactions where dumped into a second instance for research and monitoring. Every night a job started, that first dropped all the transactions older than a few weeks from the online db and then exploded every single transaction into a bunch of id, key, value tuples. These were then push/pulled (very weird construct) into the datawarehouse. Since each new value was its own table, we had something like 20 tables, mostly being nulls. You might had columns like serviceA_call1_customer3_adress_streetname. Absolutely bonkers and only one man understood that thing.
I feel like there's a very fine balance for the effort required to publish a package.
Too easy and you get npm.
Too hard and you get an empty repo.
I feel like Java is actually doing a relatively good job here. Most packages are at least documented a bit, though obviously many are outdated.