Fazal Majid

@codinghorror@infosec.exchange the US started diverging from the rest of the developed world around 1980. Who could have imagined Reagan's "Greed is good" ethos would lead to wide-scale looting in the health care sector? /s https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure?time=earliest..latest

Some commentators hyperventilate about China's huge new embassy, but did you know until last year UK Power Networks, the operator for the electric grid in London and most of Southeast England, was owned by a Hong-Kong company? Xi Jinping thus had the means to plunge the UK's most critical areas into darkness at the stroke of a pen. You can't make incompetence like that up. Fortunately, it's been acquired by French company Engie, so the French had to come and rescue the British (and previously it was owned by the French state-owned utility EDF, ÉlectricitÉ de France).

The engineer interviewed lists:

• selling off pumping stations to housing developers, which means there isn't capacity during periods of drought
• reducing pressure to slow leaks instead of fixing them
• hiring freezes means there are no more qualified staff to replace the ones retiring

@jeremiah_@mastodon.social @codinghorror@infosec.exchange it's much less nuanced than you think:

• The AMA maintains a cartel to keep the supply of doctors limited and salaries high
• Pharmaceutical prices are much higher than in the rest of the world. To some extent, it's because they free-ride on R&D paid for by Americans, but that does not explain why insulin is so much more expensive than anywhere else, despite being a mature medicine (hint: it's by minor adjustments to formulations and delivery mechanisms so they can be patented and kept expensive). It's also unconscionable that Medicare/Medicaid (50% of US health care expenditures) were until recently prohibited from negotiating volume discounts on the price of medications, that only being changed on the margins by the Inflation Reduction Act
• Insurance "administrative costs" are double that elsewhere. This includes marketing expenses and all the AI systems designed to deny coverage to patients
• Hospital charges are also far, far higher due to inefficiencies and stacking bills from multiple orgs

@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social The intellectual property argument against AI is the one I find most puzzling. We were on the losing side of the copyfight with publishers, music labels and film studios passing draconian laws like DMCA trampling over fair use, or in France extorting a tax on all storage so a portion of the cost of your MRI goes to Taylor Swift (or Carla Bruni). They have also extended copyright terms beyond all reasonable justification. They are all marginal businesses that barely register in economic statistics, but with disproportionate cultural influence so the tail wags the dog, and we seem to have internalized their specious argument that copyright infringement is tantamount to theft. Here in England, they have even molded the school CS curriculum to indoctrinate children early. Fortunately US courts have consistently ruled training LLMs on copyrighted content is sufficiently transformative to be fair use, and I applaud them putting the copyright lobby back in its place.

@jeremiah_@mastodon.social @codinghorror@infosec.exchange the life expectancy trend does not support your assertion about relative quality of care. I've lived in France, the US (on a top of the line PPO in San Francisco) and now in the UK, and I'd rate the European care as better. Where the US shines is in exotic, ultra high-end and lucrative procedures that concern such a small minority as to be statistically insignificant to the quality of life and welfare of the general population.

@ryanboswell@sfba.social the UK's PSTI bans default credentials in consumer IOT devices, but exempts EV chargers that are covered by Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/the-uk-bans-default-passwords.html The EV Smart Charger regulation does also require unique passwords per charger if present, however. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1467/schedule/1/made Thus these chargers would be illegal in the UK.

@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social there’s a reason why the Privacy subreddit bans discussion of VPNs.

@F3715H@rubber.social @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems relying on user education is unlikely to work. Ordinary non-technical users deserve secure communications by default. That's why for all Meta's faults, WhatsApp is such a major win for user privacy, in that there is no way to run it insecurely unlike, say, iMessage that falls back randomly to unencrypted SMS (for some reason, it's doing that with my wife, just because she had a temporary new phone number after her phone was stolen). Signal is definitely better, but there are some areas where WhatsApp's more polished UI protects users from real-world pitfalls that wouldn't even occur to us technical types.

@carnage4life@mas.to given how long the product cycles are for the auto industry, I doubt AI-driven layoffs would have had enough time to make a meaningful increase in recalls. I think it's more that firing engineers is a symptom of a culture of contempt from financial/managerial trained executives for people who actually do the work, and that attitude led to discounting engineers' advice long before AI was a twinkle in Sam Altman's eye. Much the same way as in the industrial disaster that is Boeing when Harry Stonecipher, well known for his disdain for engineering, took the reins as CEO.

@Ulrich_the_elder@thecanadian.social @NotTheLBCGuy@mstdn.social Didn't Starmer make ten pledges that were left-wing, then promptly reneged on all of them after being elected leader? He also had Labour Together and its dodgy financing behind him (sock-puppeting him?). https://web.archive.org/web/20200701030502/https://keirstarmer.com/plans/10-pledges/

@ReggieHere@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop @NotTheLBCGuy@mstdn.social far more people voted for Corbyn's Labour in 2017 (12M) and the catastrophic 2019 election (10M) than did for Starmer in 2024 (9M), despite being an election Starmer couldn't lose given how fed up everyone was with the feckless Tories. The so-called mandate Starmer got from a numerical artifcat of FPTP simply does not exist. The British people had the opportunity to fix this in the AV referendum of 2011, and blew it. 2/3 voted against, so basically the Tory and Labour voters colluding to ensure the other 1/3 remain disenfranchised.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange considering even pthread_create is a “pretty please start my thread before the heat death of the universe” situation, pthread_cancel was always a fool’s errand.

@randahl@mastodon.social Xi purged his entire PLA brass after finding such corruption, they were "fueling" rockets with water and pocketing the difference. He doesn't know if his Potemkin army cash fight, and he does not have officers to rely on. Otherwise, yes, it would have been a no-brainer.

@realmurphy@social.linux.pizza @codinghorror@infosec.exchange @buherator@infosec.place @jwz@mastodon.social @bovaz@misskey.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer O(25)? More like O(600). It helps I wrote my own feed reader and have been maintaining it for almost a quarter century now, it's perfectly suited for my needs, foremost being filtering out stuff I am not just not interested in, whether the Kardashians or football, but feel attacked if I am even exposed to a mention of.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social you do realize he was the architect of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, had most of his associates guillotined, ordered what has been called a genocide in Vendée, and was eventually guillotined himself. The prototype of how noble intentions turn into murderous atrocities.

@ryanboswell@sfba.social As Schneier points out, California was first: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/05/california-passes-law-that-bans-default-passwords-in-connected-devices/ Also, Congress passed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 in 2020: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-15863/pdf/COMPS-15863.pdf in response to which NIST published SP 800-213 and the NISTIR 8259 series: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-213.pdf https://www.nist.gov/itl/applied-cybersecurity/nist-cybersecurity-iot-program/nistir-8259-series The Biden Administration created the "Cyber Trust Mark", but it's optional labelling, not mandatory, and it is still being set up: https://www.fcc.gov/CyberTrustMark Normally devices would have to pass UKCA certification, and the manufacturer would have to attest compliance under penalty of perjury, but what practical enforcement there is, I have no idea. Certification testing was a big business in the UK before Brexit, but many manufacturers just skipped UKCA as the UK was too small a market compared to the EU and CE.

@Research_FTW@sciences.social probably because the despicable right-wing UK press has found a new crush in Rupert Lowe.

@jwz@mastodon.social That's exactly what WAF does, how else is it going to protect against SQL injection attacks and the like if it can't see the payload? That leaves you with only network-based layer 3 filtering solutions, but for performance reasons and due to hardware limits in their Nitro chipset, they are usually limited in how many ACLs you can have, and Hong-Kong being a highly-developed society, has too many netblocks to fit within the 20 (upgradable to 40) ACL limit of VPC and the equally puny limits of Security Groups (29K IPv4 blocks and 70L IPv6 blocks, merging contiguous netblocks buys you less than 10% savings). Thus the answer is, "no, AWS does not have something off the shelf to solve your problem". Blocking an entire country is trivially easy to circumvent for bad actors with access to a botnet, in any case, so at best it would buy you only temporary relief.

@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu then why is Serbia still on adhesion track to the EU?

@BartV@mastodon.social @corbet@social.kernel.org @lwn@fedi.lwn.net @blenderartists@mastodon.art Who would have a motive to DDoS LWN or Blender? Other than Microsoft and Adobe, of course. Most likely those IPs are from residential proxies so you can't do an easy filtering rule like "Block all IPs in AWS/GCP/Azure address spaces". There were revelations last week than half of all Smart TV apps include residential proxy SDKs.

@gptreb@aus.social TrueType is Turing-complete and this has been the source of a number of CVEs.

@neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org Here's a sample with crows

@neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org have you tried Monument Valley? It features plenty of crows, albeit as antagonists.

@codinghorror@infosec.exchange so the two Asus screens do not appear as one tall portrait-mode screen to the laptop or its OS?

@codinghorror@infosec.exchange I hope it's means-tested. It would be atroicous if smug sanctimonious tax-dodger Bono were to get any of this.

@Edent@mastodon.social what time and place were you thinking for dinner?

@Edent@mastodon.social Headphone jacks, specially the full-sized ones. They were originally designed for manual telephone exchanges where switchboard operators would insert them to connect a call, and thugs they were designed to handle hundreds of thousands of insert/disconnect cycles. The worst connector is micro-USB. You can blkame Nokia for that one, it was rammed through USB-IF with claims of improved robustness over mini-USB that were obvious nonsense.

@jwz@mastodon.social yet you also say you don't want the privacy risks of a CDN, but AWS WAF would have the exact same privacy drawbacks, and additional costs as well.

@carnage4life@mas.to don’t forget he is also drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at an alarming pace to hide his malfeasance, once it is fully drained, the feces will go ballistic.

@filippo@abyssdomain.expert Since many data models only support one row in the credentials table, it might be a good idea to allow multiple passkeys, or create a new scheme multi-webauth that encapsulates multiple passkeys.

@richarddegenne@mastodon.online @codinghorror@infosec.exchange also true of the UK under Thatcher, except she didn't kill the NHS. On the other hand our water is basically sewer bilge now, and there is no way our privatized water utilities will be ready for global warming induced drought (this July: first month when London did not get any rain at all since records were kept) before the heat death of the Universe.

@Mara@hachyderm.io I thought they were only good at engraving glass (I have an infrared fiber laser myself, good for metals and little else)

@seiz@mastodon.social @gruber@mastodon.social even if you pay, you are still the product. Corporations love to double-dip.

@jwz@mastodon.social It would help if you told us what web server you use. If it's nginx, you can use the third-party nginx extension module https://github.com/leev/ngx_http_geoip2_module to look up the country from the IP address in a free IP geolocation database like MaxMind GeoLite, then block if country=="HK". There is a similar module https://github.com/maxmind/mod_maxminddb for Apache and https://github.com/zhangjiayin/caddy-geoip2 for Caddy.

It’s hard for the VR glasses to kill a never-alive stillborn product like the Vision Pro.

@jeremiah_@mastodon.social @codinghorror@infosec.exchange also if you want non anecdotal data: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025_15a55280-en/united-states_3517f35e-en.html Note the number of doctors (2.4 vs 3.9 OECD average, and even that understates the case because the US is so large and drags the OECD average down), demonstrating the effectiveness of the AMA cartel's numerus clausus.

@Edent@mastodon.social David Allen's "Getting Things Done" is helpful in this regard: 1) if it can be done in 2 minutes, just do it 2) If not, record it in a system you trust, and that you review regularly I have a to-do list app (well, a vibe-coded clone of Cultured Code's Things, which is sadly not available on Linux) where I save the link, then move it to one of the projects ("Learning", "Software to build", etc). Tabs can get lost after a browser crash or bug.

@jeremiah_@mastodon.social @codinghorror@infosec.exchange same in the US, the AMA controls how many places there are in Med School, and no new med school has opened since 1980, whereas the population increased by 50%. The Federal Government actually has a way to work around that: the military has its own medical schools and they could massively boost enrollment there if the political will were there.

@jpmens@mastodon.social I interviewed once for a job that involved GECOS 5 running on a Bull mainframe. I couldn’t stop giggling whenever gecos was mentioned. I didn’t get the job.

@lina@ohai.social The only appropriate name for a nameserver is Kurremkarmerruk, tha master namer.

@Edent@mastodon.social my feed reader is fine, unless I am missing something. I do see your marquee tag

@jannem@fosstodon.org @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems they've been ordered by Xi Jinping to prioritize Chinese manufacturers. Not sure if Lenovo's for-export PCs qualify.

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems Thalys used to be much cheaper than Eurostar, but of course Eurostar absorbed Thalys and jacked up the rates. There’s going to be competition to Eurostar from Virgin, Trenitalia and Renfe in a couple of years from London, but it’s unclear if competition for the Brussels and Amsterdam routes will arise since the French state is the major shareholder of Eurostar.

@kottke@mastodon.social Monopoly was originally invented by a woman as a critique of rentier landlords, and plagiarized, in a perfect illustration of capitalism at work, and what is slavery but an extreme form of capitalism? https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/monopolys-lost-female-inventor

Too bad cryptome.org is no longer updated,