Society is far from perfect and some are definitely leaning more towards broken than perfect. I don't know how many people really see themselves as part of society vs individuals living among other unconnected individuals.
Homelessness, poor physical or mental health, crime, domestic violence, discrimination. There's a long list of social ills that get worse when a society is inequitable and unequal. These problems and their effects go down significantly when a society acts to maintain its own health and distribution of resources is more equal, there is social mobility, individuals are under less financial stress, etc... Number will never go to zero or even close but there are countries where the base homelessness rate is similar to the US but the manifestation of problem is very different as is the approach, mostly that being homeless isn't considered criminal. e.g. very few people sleep rough, their homelessness period is shorter and living in cars is not normal.
Just that last fact, that living in cars is relatively common and that includes children, makes me look at the US and decide that yes, US society is broken.
The massive difference here is that the Doge team is acting as quickly making decisions about government funding and classifications of that spending e.g. if it's a "scam". If they're supposed computer experts making incorrect decisions about something as simple as web hosting you can be sure that they're making incorrect decisions in more important topics.
Many on the Doge team are software engineers. And calling it an audit is being very generous. Looking at the Doge feed on approved state media it's mostly just DELETE FROM Contract WHERE Description like '%DEI%'
Odd question considering they didn't say that being an audit team is what makes them an expert at websites, or that they were experts at websites specifically.
DOGE isn't staffed with seasoned auditors (the government actually has those, and they're called Inspector Generals, and they mostly got fired by Trump); it's staffed with engineers who are supposed to be making the government "more efficient", and who are completely unqualified to determine whether something is "wasteful" or not.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think for those cheering on it's a mix of both. Culture wars have made them gleeful when they see opportunities for others to suffer and they're ignorant of how this is negatively affecting them, their morals and society.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
During the first Trump administration I regularly tried to discern the difference, but ultimately that was a mistake--a kind of engaging and draining analytical junk food--and one I'm not going to make a second time.
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
It might be prudent to consider emigration or at least divesting from real estate assets. I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.
> I assume property values will evaporate along with the stock markets if this train keeps on rolling.
The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%
The author also outlines how to disable them: by creating a user account with Jeep and agreeing to T&Cs and remotely disabling notificaitons. Such centralised control leaves them open to them deciding to re-enable ads in the future if they feel like it.
And also implies an always on connection to the mothership that can push arbitrary content to the infotainment system (which we can be sure is totally airgapped from the CAN bus right? right?)
> “This was an in-vehicle message designed to inform Jeep customers about Mopar extended vehicle care options. A temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.”
So everyone can put down the pitchforks now, unless you are assuming deliberate malfeasance.
ads in a car should not happen, period, even if stopped. just because you're not moving this instant doesn't mean you shouldn't be paying attention.
imagine you get to a stop sign, come to a complete stop, and then an ad pops on right as you're trying to figure out if you should make that right turn
hell, the loud crash bang honk sounds on radio shows and radio ads have been banned in many places for that reason.
A significant part of the animosity towards the EU and Trump's threat of tariffs is its consumer protection and preventing US companies, especially US tech companies, from doing whatever the hell they want.
A major difference between the US and EU is what the TikTok nonsense proved: the US is happy for a US company, aligned to Trump's authority, to track, influence and commodify its users at will; whereas the EU doesn't want any company to have that power regardless of location.
Do you think Trump understands how tarifs work exactly? Or is it just something he learned other countries are afraid of but he has no idea that American importers and their customers are gonna pay them (and he shares this misunderstanding with more than half of the population)?
This article doesn't indicate that he knows what tariff mechanistically does. Only that it will take inflict some amount of suffering on American citizens and possibly force manufacturing back into America.
He knows how they work: he threatens them and his supporters cheer, he implements them and people negotiate. There are other, some would say better, ways to get the same effects but tariffs are Trump's go to. In the metaphor "when you have a hammer everything is a nail" maybe Trump is the hammer and tariffs the nail?
While this is true in principle, it's worth adding the caveat that EU countries have also been pushing for backdoors to encrypted communications in order to expand law enforcement access. Of course while this contradicts the stance on privacy the EU put forward with the GDPR (which sneakily redefined the right to privacy and control of your personal data as an indelible human right btw).
But in case anyone thinks this is a dunk on the EU: this is still not as invasive as the US law enforcement's powers of warrantless surveillance which have repeatedly blown up the EU-US frameworks for data sharing (Privacy Shield and its other iterations, which Mr Schrems seems to have personally made a sport of shooting down faster than they get implemented). It's also not entirely contradictory as the focus here is on protecting the rights of people against corporations while still providing means for the state to violate those rights when necessary (similarly to how the state can violate your right to free movement through incarceration or your right to bodily autonomy by shooting you, neither of which seem to upset the people who'd think this one is a gotcha).
Considering the EU's main function is being a transnational economic region (if you ignore all the fluff about shared values and history and instead follow the definition of "a system's function is what it does"), it's absolutely true that the EU is remarkably restrictive on what corporations can do compared to the US - even before Trump.
EDIT: The two sibling comments prove my point: while EU member states have been pushing for legislation like providing backdoors to encrypted communication, this is neither unique to the EU nor a contradiction and the US already has far wider reaching measures in place.
Consider for example the Switzerland-based CIA and BND (Germany) shell company that distributed backdoored encryption to hostile nations which Germany backed out of when the CIA defended distributing the same technology to friendlies without informing them or their intelligence agencies. Or literally any of the Snowden leaks, which described not only mass surveillance of US citizens but also espionage against US allies (infamously including wiretapping then-chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone) to a degree none of the EU member states have ever done anything comparable to - and which those mostly didn't act on because of the importance of maintaining good terms with the US. Or the post-9/11 legislation which not only allowed warrantless surveillance with gag orders (which is why "canaries" became popular in cryptography communities) but even literally killing or abducting and indefinitely incarcerating US citizens without a trial - not to mention torture.
You can criticize the EU for state overreach. You can't do so by using the US for grounds of moral superiority - not even moral equivalence. You can argue about different attitudes to free speech, gun ownership or the right to self-defense (e.g. castle doctrine), sure. All of these are valid grounds for debate. But the US government can (according to its own jurisdiction) legally do so many more things to both its own citizens and non-citizens both within and outside its borders that trying to use it for a libertarian "win" against the EU seems farcical at best.
The error is viewing the EU has a single entity with only one viewpoint on any subject.
Europol + most major euro police forces + a number of european deputees want to have access to backdoors to spy on citizens, other european deputees do not. The battle is here.
Related, Oslo has rules for reducing emissions from building sites which has made it a pioneer in the development and use of electric building machinery. Some of it is battery powered and some requires a really long extension cord. I do wonder how practical that is when maneuvering and if they need somebody to move the cable out of the way when it reverses.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/10/oslo-leads-qui...
Thanks, whoever you are. We Americans, with pollution control laws and noise ordinances, didn't know other peoples are also concerned about these things.
Well, you had those laws and ordinances! Let's wait a few days to see if they survive the ongoing bonfire of government entities once they are deemed criminal government interference, a scam or communism ;)
I don't know where the poster is but Europe has very loud cities. Oslo is particularly quiet and car free in the centre and almost every other city I travel to in Europe seems loud and hectic in comparison.
You're right, let's wait and see if speculations turn into reality. We can't talk about what is, because something might change one day, and it may change in an unknown direction.
But lecturing Americans, as one whole, who care not for noise or the environment, we can do right now.
I see a lot of posts, articles, etc... stating that people are surprised by the complexity of a cyber attack or scam. It seems that most people haven't yet learnt that this is a full blown industry targeting countless businesses, institutions and individuals 24/7, not just some script kiddies in their bedroom. There are office blocks full of trained professionals with sophisticated tools working to compromise digital security and manipulate human nature to gain access to accounts, data and funds. Everyone needs to be adopting a form of zero trust or trust but verify to every digital interaction and every use of technology.
As a passive hotel owner and active programmer, I can confirm it's always been the case. In the hotels business, getting customer requests, invoices and refund requests seemingly out of nowhere isn't too uncommon. Receptionists, who have the authority handle customer cancellations and refunds, but also package / documents receipt for them, frequently fall for the slightly more laborious scams, in spite of the safeguards in place.
The phishing emails we get at my software dev job for security certification and pen testing pale in comparison to the actual effort being put in by scammers, who coordinate bookings with parcels and random invoices so that they tell a story, always targeting different shifts (almost never the same).
As the other commenter has posted, refunds for inexistent bookings or refunds for someone else's booking are pretty frequent.
Other simple stuff is overdue payments for fictive deliveries such as soaps, toilet paper, cleaning bills or even outsourced work.
The more complex scams involve making bookings and sending packages with fees and totals paid by the recipient, they try to convince the receptionists that their package needs to be delivered, and an actual delivery of random stuff happens using a real delivery company to complete the scam. They don't always mention that there's payment required on delivery.
Other scams involve claiming lost luggage, wallets, electronics without them being the owners, and trying to convince the receptionist to send the item internationally. We're a hotel next to the airport, so international travellers are the norm, plus we have a room full of lost stuff. They make a booking with a fictional name, then cancel it or no show, and then ask for their black luggage, black wallet, tablet, gold bracelet, etc.
While zero trust is great, humans have experimentally established that it is more or less impossible to maintain by all people in all cases all the time. Eventually someone will fail, and it can even be a security professional. Trustless is a tokenbro buzzword and it's not a viable path for users in general. We need some good trusted core software from which we can move further to auth other less reliable apps or machines.
> Everyone needs to be adopting a form of zero trust or trust but verify to every digital interaction and every use of technology.
I'd be interested in hearing how folks find working with "zero trust"; my employer's adoption of a zero trust VPN has been pretty bad, but I don't know if it's normal.
In my company, it's made it much harder to give decent support to users; previously, a user knew if they were on the VPN or not, and if they were on the VPN but they couldn't reach our service, that was a very rare event and it lead to a P1 outage getting an immediate response from a senior engineer.
Now, users don't know if they've passed the device posture checks or not - user plugs in their phone to charge it? Unauthorised external storage device, silently reduce their network access. So now if a user knows they're on the VPN but can't reach our service, that's very common; it's a P4 issue and within a 4 hours an intern will tell them to reboot their PC and try again.
Apparently users can't be told when they've failed the device posture check or why, for 'security'.
Needless to say, the engineers hate the much larger support burden, and the users hate the the much slower and less helpful responses.
Weren't there implemented protocols to use the devices connected to the VPN that would proof against the most common sources of posture check failure? I imagine most problems are quite trivial, like the phone you mentionned, especially if treated as P4 (there might wven already be a document with the required advice used by the interns when telling people to reboot).
No, and this isn't the concept of Zero Trusts fault. This is inexperience and/or a lack of competency from your security people and your support people. Although, more likely given that two "silos" are impacted, systemic organizational issues that aren't going to go away.
But isn't the whole point of Zero Trust to move away from a binary "fully trusted (allowed on the VPN) or not" and towards nuanced, dynamic, semi-trusted states?
i.e. isn't the fact you can be on the VPN yet blocked from accessing the service the goal of Zero Trust?
THIS. People who are trained by common stereotypes (generally from the entertainment industry) don't have a clue.
I wonder how it might work out, if Hollywood produced a "Breaking Bad"-style series, about an ambitious young cybercriminal moving up into the really big leagues.
> if Hollywood produced a "Breaking Bad"-style series, about an ambitious young cybercriminal moving up into the really big leagues.
I'm waiting for the biopic of Ross Ulbricht. It's got all of the bits that Hollywood loves with the young protagonist breaking bad, FBI agents also breaking bad, and now comes with a guilty conviction turning into a full blown pardon.
The hard thing about this is that a montage of "complicated chemistry in an RV in your underwear" is way more interesting to watch than a montage of "typing on a computer in your underwear".
No, there are global cyber espionage programs going on.
War is something entirely different. The belligerents are not trying to disable agricultural systems or power grids; an actual war is a horse of a different color, and would likely be regarded as a proper escalation in the physical realm.
It's not unrestricted cyberwar, but I also don't think we have a complete picture of the scale of the cyber conflict, nor do we have a complete picture of the attacks and defences being mounted.
> The belligerents are not trying to disable agricultural systems or power grids; an actual war is a horse of a different color, and would likely be regarded as a proper escalation in the physical realm.
There have been any number of attacks on physical infra. and civil institutions that fit that description. Sandworm (a group in the Russian military) alone has successfully brought down power grids multiple times.
I think that there's a difference between state sponsored hacking and a government turning a blind eye to illegal activities that happen to fulfill the same effect without their hands being dirtied. Incentives, such as potential future employment or the good graces of (more or less corrupt) local authorities when it comes to other illegal activities, can make a significant impact on influencing an adversaries' overall cyber readiness.
"According to a report on grid security compiled by a power industry cyber clearinghouse, obtained by POLITICO, a total of 1,665 security incidents involving the U.S. and Canadian power grids occurred last year. That count included 60 incidents that led to outages, 71 percent more than in 2021." [0]
Uh, no. There have been a massive number of attacks attempting to take down the power grid. It's just that the protections in place are currently working most of the time.
Unfortunately, the official stats tends to combine both physical and cyber attacks, so there's no clear sense of which is dominant... But, frankly, there isn't a need to separate them. The attacks are happening.
While clearing out an old tub of ice cream I noticed that industrial ice cream doesn't melt in the same way as 'real' ice cream. It holds its shape well beyond what you'd expect. Left at room temperature real ice cream puddles, industrial ice cream slumps. There's emulsifiers and stabilizers that keep the consistency for a larger range of temperatures, so that's it's soft to scoop at -18C whereas real ice cream is as hard as concrete. The ingredients list includes things such as whey powder rather than milk. Like so many ultra processed foods it's just cheap powdered ultra processed ingredients held together and flavoured by additives.
I have seen scoops of cheap ice cream, accidentally dropped onto pavement on a hot sunny day in the Southern US, maintain their scoop-like shape for hours.
- I worry about businesses with a "pay once" model as your costs are recurring. Even if the costs are low you will need a constant flow of new sign ups just to break even. You can't ever have a stable user base that ensures the service longevity. You could have a million happy users but if there are no new sign ups then the service is at risk of closing as it's losing money. I prefer an adequate free tier and then low monthly or annual costs for power users who want more features.
- I wonder about the use case and that may limit the potential customer base. It looks like your target audience is those wanting to send a one off invoice or a handful or less manual invoices a year and have a separate accounting system that does not send invoices. I worked for a few years developing invoicing applications and the actual generation of the invoice is the easy bit. What's necessary for even a small business is the accounting, integration to other systems, tracking, reporting, reminders, payment handling, etc... In some countries it is necessary for all invoices to be electronically reported to tax authorities. A lot of small businesses or self-employed people already have highly featured accounting software that includes invoicing. So your target market for perpetual new signs (see first point) seems rather small.
Sorry if this is all rather negative. Products pivot over time and and I think you in the future you shouldn't be too committed to the pay once model as your main selling point. Perhaps cheap & simple is good enough. And good luck!
No this is so good!! Im just trying things and learning as i go. Im in no way stating that this is the perfect idea or the perfect product.
From what i have seen in the freelancing world, the alternatives are way more feature packed, but way harder to use, and they all come with a monthly bill - some even charge based off of how much you are invoicing.
The customer profile is freelancers and small business owners, who just want to send some invoices whenever they need - without having a monthly bill.
Im already considering doing 35$ a year instead of a one-time payment going forward with new customers.
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback. Trust me, i appreciate you guys a lot.
Homelessness, poor physical or mental health, crime, domestic violence, discrimination. There's a long list of social ills that get worse when a society is inequitable and unequal. These problems and their effects go down significantly when a society acts to maintain its own health and distribution of resources is more equal, there is social mobility, individuals are under less financial stress, etc... Number will never go to zero or even close but there are countries where the base homelessness rate is similar to the US but the manifestation of problem is very different as is the approach, mostly that being homeless isn't considered criminal. e.g. very few people sleep rough, their homelessness period is shorter and living in cars is not normal.
Just that last fact, that living in cars is relatively common and that includes children, makes me look at the US and decide that yes, US society is broken.
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