sylver_dragon

No, it’ll just get disabled. Security baselines are a common feature of enterprise IT, this will just be another requirement.

I have to believe the actual poll and report aren’t as glaringly stupid as that headline. If you ask nearly anyone, “do you want peace?” They are going to respond with “yes.” The devil is always in the details though. Ask them, “should the war in Ukraine be ended by the Ukrainian Government capitulating to all Russian demands to secure an immediate peace?” And, you might find a lot of folks are suddenly less peaceful. This reminds me of the old saw:
There’s lies, damned lines and then there is statistics.

With a crafted question and a bit of p-hacking you can get a lot of results you want out of people.

My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.

Had a Windows 2000 computer show up on the company network about a month ago, it was an oscilloscope. It was already infected with malware and trying to reach the malware C2 server.

And once you have found your specific collection of plugins that happen not to put the exact features you need behind a paywall but others, you ain’t touching those either.

And this is why, when I’m investigating phishing links, I’ve gotten used to mumbling, “fucking WordPress”. WordPress itself is pretty secure. Many WordPress plugins, if kept up to date, are reasonably secure. But, for some god forsaken reason, people seem to be allergic to updating their WordPress plugins and end up getting pwned and turned into malware serving zombies. Please folks, if it’s going to be on the open internet, install your fucking updates!

New ethical dilemma just dropped - kill 300 to forge the sword, or deny 3150 people blood in an emergency to forge the sword…

Attempt at serious answer (warning: may be slightly offensive)

Wow, you are a fucking moron. But, there is an interesting question buried in there, you just managed to ask it in a monumentally stupid way. So, let’s pick this apart a bit. Assuming Trump gets re-elected and speed-runs the US into global irrelevancy, what happens to the various standards and standards bodies? tl;dr: Not much.

• FIPS - This will be the most effected. If companies no longer need to care about working with the US Government (USG), no one is going to bother with FIPS. FIPS is really only a list of cryptographic standards which are considered “secure enough” for USG use. The standards won’t actually change and the USG may still continue to update FIPS, people would just stop noticing.
• UNICODE - Right so UNICODE is a code page maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Maybe with the US being less dominant, we see the inclusion of more stuff; but, it’s just a way to define printable characters. It works incredibly well and there’s no reason such would be abandoned. Also, there are already plenty of other code pages, Unicode is just popular because it covers so much. Maybe the headquarters for the consortium ends up elsewhere.
• ANSI - Isn’t a standard, it’s a US Government Body. So, assuming it stops being good at it’s job, other countries/organizations would likely stop listening to it’s ideas. The ANSI standards which exist will continue to exist, if ANSI continues to exist, it’ll probably keep publishing standards but only the US would care about them.
• ISO - Again, this isn’t a standard, it’s a Non-Governmental Organization, headquartered in Switzerland. Also, ISO is not an acronym, it’s borrowed from Greek. And ya, this one would almost certainly keep chugging along. Probably a bit more Euro-centric than they are now, but mostly unchanged.

For this reason, and a lot of other reasons, I am in favor of liberterianism because then, it would not be a government ran by octogenarians deciding standards for communication,

It’s ok, I was young and stupid once too. The fact is that, while many telecommunications standards started off in the US, and some even in the USG, most of them have long since been handed off to industry groups. The Internet Engineering Task Force is responsible for most of the standards we follow today. They were spun off from the USG in 1993 and are mostly a consensus driven organization with input from all over the world. In a less US centric world, the makeup of the body might change some. But, I suspect things would keep humming along much as they have for the last few decades.

Will we live in a post-standard world?

This depends on the level of fracturing of networks. Over time, there has been a move towards standardization because it makes sense. Sure, companies resist and all of them try to own the standard, but there has been a lot of pushback against that and often from outside the US. For example, the EU’s law to require common charging ports. In many ways, the EU is now doing more for standardization than the US.

Worse, cryptography. Well, for ‘serious shit’, people roll their own crypto because…

Tell me you know fuck all about security without saying you know fuck all about security. There is a well accepted maxim, called “Schneier’s law” based on this classic essay. It’s often shortened to “Don’t roll your own crypto”. And this goes back to that FIPS standard mentioned earlier. FIPS is useful mostly because it keeps various bits of the USG from picking bad crypto. The algorithms listed in FIPS are all bog-standard stuff, from things like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) process. The primitives and standards are the primitives and standards because they fucking work and have been heavily tested and shown to be secure over a lot of years of really smart people trying to break them. Ironically, it was that same sort of open testing that resulted in the NSA being caught trying to create a crypto backdoor.
So no, for ‘serious shit’ no one rolls their own crypto, because that would be fucking dumb.

But what about primitives? For every suite, for every protocol, people use the same primitives, which are standardized.

And ya, they would continue to be, as said above, they have been demonstrated over and over again to work. If they are found not to work, people stop using them (se:e SHA1, MD5, DES). Its funny that, for someone who is “in favor of liberterianism” you seem to be very poorly informed of examples where private groups and industry are actually doing a very good job of things without government oversight.

Overall, you seem to have a very poor understanding of how these standards get created in the modern world. Yes, the US was behind a lot of them. But, as they have been handed over to private (and often international) organizations, they have moved further and further away from US Government control. Now, that isn’t to say that US Based companies don’t have a lot of clout in those organizations. Let’s face it, we are all at the mercy of Microsoft and Google way too often. But, even if those companies fall to irrelevance, the organizations they are part of will likely continue to do what they already do. It’s possible that we’d see a faster balkanization of the internet, something we already see a bit of. Countries like China, Iran or Russia may do more to wall their people off from US/EU influence, if they don’t have an economic interest in some communications. Though, it’s just as likely that trade will continue to keep those barriers to the flow of information as open as possible.

The major change could really be in language. Without the US propping it up, English may lose it’s standing as the lingua franca of the world. As it stands right now, it’s not uncommon for two people, neither of which speaks English as their native language, to end up conversing in English as that is the language the two of them share. If a new superpower rises, perhaps the lingua franca shifts and the majority of sites on the internet shift with it. Though, that’s likely to be a multi-generational change. And it could be a good thing. English is a terrible language, it’s less a language and more three languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one.

So yes, there would likely be changes over time. But, it’s likely more around the edges than some wholesale abandoning of standards. And who knows, maybe we’ll end up with people learning to write well researched and thought out questions on the internet, and not whatever drivel you just shat out. Na, that’s too much to hope for.

“High Impact” like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.

The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.

While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.

They’re less laws and more “guidelines”.

While I can understand Poland’s desire to have nuclear weapons available, this seems like it would be a really provocative step towards Russia. Nuclear weapons positioned that close to Russia will raise the threat of a nuclear first strike against Russia. Even without an unstable strongman in charge of Russia, it’s easy to see how a Russian government would be uncomfortable with this. At the same time, with an unstable strongman in charge of Russia, the provocation may not matter. Putin has proven he is willing to invade his neighbor and slaughter thousands, without provocation. So, I’m sure Poland isn’t as worried about provocation as they are defense.

While I’m a fan of Kali, some work environments see anything Kali related and go full “zomg! WTF!” Mode. Even in less restrictive environments, it’s often easier to just go with the flow and avoid making life harder for the security folks, without a good reason.

Nope, it was HER TURN! Now shut your deplorable mouth and quit questioning the Holy Neoliberal narrative! The Third Way shall provide!

~/s for the dumb~

I guess this guy must have joined the IDF.

And this is why indie games have been having such a good time of it. Sure, we might get the decade long “Early Access” of 7 Days to Die, or “We resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon” Palworld, but we get fun games with a lot of obvious passion behind them. I do wish we would see more Baldur’s Gate 3 style large productions which aren’t designed around micro-transactions. But, I also realize that big name studios are run by folks with business degrees and not gamers; so, I should expect major games to be after my wallet like a meth addict.

I remember the hint books for Sierra’s games (e.g. King’s Quest). Each hint would be a question or sentence with multiple boxes underneath. The boxes were blank and you used a special highlighter pen to reveal the content of the box, with each subsequent box being more and more specific. It was an interesting way to get hints.

2024 is off to a great start for proving that space is hard.
Joking aside, it sounds like the mission was mostly successful in demonstrating a precision landing, they just had an electrical connection fail. Given the vibrations that are experienced in launch, it could have been anything from a loose connector to a bad solder joint. Just one small problem and the whole mission ends up lost. So ya, space is hard.

The company, which generates its revenue primarily through advertising and also offers premium access for $5.99 per month, has yet to turn a profit

Ya, this seems like a bad investment. And the need to turn a profit will likely lead to a worse and worse user experience as Reddit tries to monetize them.

I would put up expansions, in general, as being the bane of my collection. Specifically, I’d pick out the Factions expansion to Alien Frontiers as being a particularly good (bad?) example of this. The base game plays very well and feels well enough balanced. The extra rules, cards and ports added in the expansion just seem to over-complicate the game, and picking the right faction card seems to play heavily into winning.

It’s popular in the social consciousness right now. So, governments and international organizations are scrambling to look like they are “doing something”. Once the incredibly short attention span of the masses moves on to the Next Big Thing™, the Israeli Government can get back to building some Lebensraum for it’s settlers, without the rest of the world throwing a performative fit about it.