Here’s the original report: https://securelist.com/stripedfly-perennially-flying-under-the-radar/110903/

It doesn’t specifically attribute this to the NSA, and it’s very hard to definitively say who created what malware anyways.

That being said, if you read through the report, the details on this really scream “state actor” most probably. The level of modularity, the infrastructure of the C2 server, and the detailed & flexible spying capabilities all point to some government agency more than anything else.

Never read again? These can’t be modified, but they can be read. After all, it’d be pretty useless to store data on a medium than can never be read.

Sure, but I suspect this is the real motivation for the article:

Windows 11 Pro force-enables the software version of BitLocker during installation, without providing a clear way to opt out

It sounds like many people may be using software encryption without realizing it, if Windows 11 Pro uses it by default.

Admittedly I haven’t been looking that hard, but I don’t think I’ve seen a TV for sale in the past 10 years that wasn’t a “smart” TV.

Just wanted to give props to this super informative comment. Thanks for the write up and relevant links!

No worries, the Democrats will do what the party does best with a majority - pretty much nothing.

Enough to say “see? We’re better than the other guys”, but not enough to even nudge the status quo.

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Spotify pays artists based on how many listens their songs get, so if you can get a bunch of bots to stream your music over and over you can get a legitimate income stream.

In this case, they’re using their illegal income to pay people to use a botnet to stream their songs - which then means they have a nice legal income instead.

But what if it was an African Swallow?

Building microchips is really hard and Taiwan has held a practical monopoly on the industry for a while now. It’s not that the US doesn’t have educated workers, but it wouldn’t surprise me that it is hard to find many qualified to build the actual facilities to manufacture microchips - most of the US’s involvement in microchips has been designing them and then handing those designs over to Taiwan for manufacturing.

The US can barely even put sidewalks where it’s convenient. I have very little hope for our local governments to add bike lanes to it.

“Sorry, our unbelievably massive military budget is only for active duty military. Best we can do is schedule you an appointment to talk to someone next year about the benefits you won’t be receiving.”

“If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters. Those values are passed [to Facebook]”

So they don’t associate your official score to your browser, but presumably students who are using that search tool would be searching their real score - or a range close to it.

The headline is fairly leading, but the statement from the College Board is also fairly misleading. They’re not directly selling your official score to advertisers, but they’re indirectly selling data about you that gives a pretty good idea of your score.

I don’t think it’s good enough to have a blanket conception to not trust them completely.

On the other hand, I actually think we should, as a rule, not trust the output of an LLM.

They’re great for generative purposes, but I don’t think there’s a single valid case where the accuracy of their response should be outright trusted. Any information you get from an AI model should be validated outright.

There are many cases where a simple once-over from a human is good enough, but any time it tells you something you didn’t already know you should not trust it and, if you want to rely on that information, you should validate that it’s accurate.

Notice the “up to” in their offer. It’s likely commission based and inflated numbers to lure the developer into doing it - to trick them into thinking exactly what you’ve said here.

I’d imagine what they actually pay out after you cave is significantly lower, only then you’ve already sold out your users so you might as well leave their tracking in there.

“To get a base salary of $170k you know you need to work hard as an Engineer, this sucks.”

As someone who has worked as a UPS driver and now as a software developer, I can say that the UPS drivers definitely work harder than your average engineer.

That quote is also deftly ignoring the fact that you’re generally paid for the value you generate, not how hard to you work.

GitHub Copilot is just intellisense that can complete longer code blocks.

I’ve found that it can somewhat regularly predict a couple lines of code that generally resemble what I was going to type, but it very rarely gives me correct completions. By a fairly wide margin, I end up needing to correct a piece or two. To your point, it can absolutely be detrimental to juniors or new learners by introducing bugs that are sometimes nastily subtle. I also find it getting in the way only a bit less frequently than it helps.

I do recommend that experienced developers give it a shot because it has been a helpful tool. But to be clear - it’s really only a tool that helps me type faster. By no means does it help me produce better code, and I don’t ever see it full on replacing developers like the doomsayers like to preach. That being said, I think it’s $20 well spent for a company in that it easily saves more than $20 worth of time from my salary each month.

Out of all the modern browsers, it’s always Safari that I end up needing to write compatibility code for. I’m sure the app works fine on Firefox, they just haven’t tested it.

The choice between Linux and Windows is not just about ideologically choosing open vs closed source software.

If you don’t want to use closed source software, don’t use VS Code - but if you want to use Linux, and you want to use VS Code, those two choices are totally compatible and perfectly valid