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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think everyone jumping on this and trying to argue that Apple is so very wrong in this assertion that people will get bombarded with malicious garbage is coming at this from the wrong angle. The part that I think we should be pushing back on in the argument that, in order to protect them from themselves, we should allow Apple to restrict them unilaterally.

    People, in general, make just awful decisions in terms of security and quality of the apps they download. We’ve seen it since the very first app store and it continues today. “But Android apps can be side loaded and it’s not that bad” Yes, it is that bad. The fact that you, someone that is more informed and experienced than the average, can navigate this successfully and safely is not an indicator of the general population.

    Ultimately, the argument that people will mess this up is objectively true. The place we should push back is the argument that we should allow Apple to protect us from ourselves.

    If Apple believes they can cultivate a safer and higher quality app store, they should take that message to the people. Convince them that if they stay in Apple’s app store ecosystem, they will be happier and safer. If you can’t convince them, though, the law should not allow you to force them into compliance. If we have a variety of marketplaces, they will need to differentiate themselves from one another somehow. That’s most likely going to be on price, but we could also have someone step up to make a market focused on security, privacy, or some other value proposition.

    “It won’t expose people to bad apps” is just the wrong argument. We should instead just say “Yeah. And?” The freedom to make that decision, and possibly make those mistakes, isn’t the problem - it’s the point



  • There’s nothing magical about the 15th reboot - Crowdstrike runs an update check during the boot process, and depending on your setup and network speeds, it can often take multiple reboots for that update to get picked up and applied. If it fails to apply the update before the boot cycle hits the point that crashes, you just have to try again.

    One thing that can help, if anyone reads this and is having this problem, is to hard wire the machine to the network. Wifi is enabled later in the startup sequence which leaves little (or no) time for the update to get picked up an applied before the boot crashes. The wired network stack starts up much earlier in the cycle and will maximize the odds of the fix getting applied in time.


  • Being in a small company is different, but not worse (or better). With the roles you have on your plate already, you have a sprawling blank canvas to work from, and in a small company environment, you tend to have a significant amount of flexibility so long as you don’t take your eye off of the main company objectives (vs a large company where “that’s not your department” situations can squash many learning opportunities).

    First, figure out what areas you want to focus on. This doesn’t need to be forever, but you are going to need some degree of focus or you’ll risk doing a hundred things poorly and not really learning much.

    Once you’ve figured out what you want to focus on first and have done some basic research/discovery, seek a mentor. This is one place where small companies make things harder, as you almost always need to look outside to find mentoring.

    With the Project Management and Cloud Architecture bits of your role, you can look at Financial Operations. Just make sure you take a high level look first to see if there’s sense in that (make sure the ROI on you and your co-workers time plus any new services/providers needed makes sense for what you can potentially save - you want to be able to show that your time was well spent with any self-initiated project or you risk someone deciding that you need to be more closely monitored in the future).



  • Most of the west has already been dealing with this for decades, and the way they typically deal with it is through offshore manufacturing and immigration. The process has been to identify a low cost nation, build up enough infrastructure to work from there, move manufacturing to that nation, and then when the nation becomes wealthier and no longer able to be exploited, restart the process. We’ve seen this cycle with India and China, and now it’s starting to branch out (a lot of South American nations are being bulked up as “near-shore” partners that are cheap, but also in the same timezone and closer for shipping). Africa is another continent with a lot of potential future options.


  • What the ballot initiative was meant to do and what the legal wording of the initiative are are two different things, though.

    there are a million and one ways to implement a standardized open protocol securely.

    Right, but that work hasn’t been done yet, and moving ahead before that exists is a big risk.


  • Title’s a little click-baity there. The Massachusetts ballot initiative that passed is a poorly thought out security nightmare, so until those issues can be addressed it would be dangerous to follow it.

    Now, according to Reuters, NHTSA has written to automakers to advise them not to comply with the Massachusetts law. Among its problems are the fact that someone “could utilize such open access to remotely command vehicles to operate dangerously, including attacking multiple vehicles concurrently,” and that “open access to vehicle manufacturers’ telematics offerings with the ability to remotely send commands allows for manipulation of systems on a vehicle, including safety-critical functions such as steering, acceleration, or braking.”

    The title isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.



  • “In the West today, their talks on the understanding of the human race are dominated by (concepts on how) humans are more like animals, according to the Darwinian evolution theory,” he said when debating the Human Rights Commission’s 2020 Annual Report in the Dewan Rakyat today.

    “This contradicts the Islamic understanding of what constitutes a human, as Muslims believe that God created our spirit and body. This thinking has been rejected by Western scholars.”

    Oh, so you should have an even higher standard on human rights than the west since the human soul is divine, right? No? 🙄

    Just more “west bad” screeching from someone that doesn’t appreciate being told that people (LGBTQ+ people in particular, but not exclusively) have human rights too.



  • Very fair point. The unsealed indictment paints an interesting picture that I’m still digesting into this whole tapestry (Trump and his aide successfully tricked his lawyers into attesting that all documents had been turned over through a shell game of boxes in different locations and properties). I need one of those big cork boards with pictures and red string to organize all of the parts to this mess.


  • I don’t know if I’d call that doubling down. For them to come out and say anything that could be construed as disparaging or even hinting that Trump is guilty here would be extremely unprofessional (they’re job is to represent the client), so this is a pretty boiler plate resignation message.

    The real message is in the timing. Leaving your client hanging with just a couple of days before the hearing speaks volumes. Whatever the conflict or disagreement that existed here, it was big.




  • That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn’t created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn’t created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a “next phase in the evolution of this concept”, and while it took a catastrophe, they’re ready to consider that it’s time to move on now.

    The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there’s room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don’t have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.