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Security in depth. Even if you think you don't have anything particularly valuable in there, you still protect it as if you did.

I'd rather he worry about securing government secrets, not spend one second worrying about "personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum".

Obviously government secrets need to be properly secured, but the personal info/photos of a top official can often be used for blackmail or for determining close friends that could be used to compromise Patel.

There's so much speculation about how this hack could conceivably be damaging, but so little evidence that it actually contained anything damaging.

“The enemy broke into our nuke silo, killed our Air Force manned crew, stole the nuke codes, launched the missile. Not a big deal because we shot it down before it hit its target.”

Most of the time, actual harm is the most important issue. In this case because that office holds so much centralized power and authority over many aspects of American life (domestic law enforcement, some foreign law enforcement, domestic counterterrorism / counterintelligence / counterespionage, and security clearance background checks for all VIPs), the means are equally as important as the ends.

And I would throw in a wrinkle: what evidence is there that the dumps were not stripped of the most useful blackmail material? If I were in charge of a hack operation, I would dump the low impact stuff to show the world how much of a joke this guy’s security is, but only after I already used the best stuff to blackmail him months ago.


The scenario you're proposing is more like "They broke into our silo and launched a nuke, then they shot it down themselves."

A successful blackmailer doesn't want the security breach exposed or investigated, they want to continue to use the victim.


Security through luck?

The reality is that officials are targetted by various states looking to get some leverage, so not properly securing an email account is a serious failing unless it's part of a wider honeypot scheme. Personally, I'm not convinced that the current U.S. administration is competent enough to plan ahead and implement honeypots.


No point in going round and round with personal opinions and general speculation. The debate is easily settled: just point to some actual harm done by this hack.

I don't think you really understand how blackmail works. If the information is public, then that's a failed blackmail attempt. Also, the U.S. administration is unlikely to provide public information on how top officials have been compromised.

It's not really much of a debate as it's widely acknowledged that letting enemy states get access to the email accounts of officials is a really bad idea.


Bad take.

Patel specifically bypassed security clearance protocols for Bongino and other staff he hired. His top priority isn’t protecting government secrets — it’s to take down what he thinks is the part of the US government that resists bending to Trump’s will.

And you are wrong that the FBI shouldn’t care about securing the Director’s private life information. Anything and everything can and will be used to blackmail him by foreign governments, criminals, political actors.

I highly doubt the first public dump of messages would include the most compromising content — that’s like handing away a maximum severity zero day for the most common OS in the federal government. There’s no logical reason to do that for free, so I suspect the really incriminating/ salacious stuff was withheld for private use.

And if the FBI didn’t enable the high security setting on the FBI Director’s private email account, they might not have known what, if any, compromising materials were in there.


Trump bypassed clearance protocols for unclearable Jared. Nobody cares with an unaccountable executive.

Many of those shortcuts already existed in macOS before they were added in Windows. Inversely, a lot of desktop Linux stuff was designed specifically to mimic the Windows behaviour.

So, really, it's Microsoft that decided "we're different".

Also, as somebody who sort of lives in the terminal, the lack of the Command/Ctrl distinction is one of the things that really bothers me about Windows. In default GUI applications, application shortcuts use Command, and Ctrl is used almost exclusively for headline-style shortcuts (ctrl-k for kill line, ctrl-a for home, ctrl-e for end, etc). Ctrl-a Ctrl-shift-e is kind of baked into my brain as "select whole line".


On the other, as a Windows desktop person I can't live without Home/End/PgUp/Pgdown, and in different combinations with Shift/Control. That's one of reason I can't fully enjoy MacBook, not to mention the incredible fact that it doesn't have a Delete key. No, it's not the same that you can use modifier key with backspace, modifier keys are used for extra functionality, i.e. to delete to begining or end of the word, etc.

Macs have every one of those, just with different shortcuts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650

Sure, but using modifier keys. What if I want to add shift to the mix to select, let's say to the beginning of line or document? You'll need to press two modifiers. That's not optimal. And I use these all the time while editing.

And I don't consider this a MacBook flaw particularly, it's more or less general laptop flaw nowadays. If anything, other manufacturers have even more imagination to mess up keyboard layout.


I'd rather use more modifiers than reach for a key that's far away from home row. ctrl-a/e for start/end of line works pretty much everywhere.

Eh, I dunno. I played piano, so I'm not allergic to pressing 10 keys and a couple of foot pedals at once if needed. Here, that means I rarely consciously think about what chord I'm pressing to select from here to the beginning of the word/line/document.

On a related note, I've half-seriously considered wiring up a switch pedal[1] as a modifier key in Emacs through MIDI.

Where I really want chording to be universally available, though, is in video games when playing cross-input games on controller.

[1] https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/FC5--yamaha-fc5-foot...


This is definitely a Mac-apologia to the extreme argument. Microsoft isn’t event the one that came up with the layout, it was the IBM compatible PC keyboard layout that was specifically designed as a keyboard standard to be used across the whole industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard

And then Windows gained critical market share mass long, long before macOS did, and when it did they simply adopted the already popular IBM keyboard layout, which is common sense. Common sense would be for Apple to do the same when their mass market PC OS came along later down the road, even if technically neXTSTEP Classic macOS had their own layout, that OS was essentially irrelevant in the computing industry until Apple used it as the basis for modern macOS (and thus their macOS keyboard layout was not known to basically any normal person). macOS/OSX as we know it didn’t launch until well after windows was already very popular and thus had continued the already cemented IBM PC keyboard layout.

I’m all for Apple being unique and using their own layout if that’s what they wanna do/design around, but there’s exactly zero arguments available that actually they had the standardized and popular keyboard layout first and IBM/microsoft were the weird ones. That’s simply not accurate whatsoever.


I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.

As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.

Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a text editor rather than as an IDE.


The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo

I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot


EAFP is an explicit part of what makes code "pythonic", and the Zen of Python (`import this`) has the lines "Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced." Java has checked and unchecked exceptions. Rust has panics and Result<T, E>, and the ? operator.

The way a language's community handles errors and how the language itself handles errors are different things, sure, but they're not independent of each other.

That said, OP's snark against Rust is completely unmerited, and they can take my `impl From<OtherErr> for MyErr` from my cold dead hands.


Sure, but you can write bad code in any language. There are few languages where representative code shirks this interest. (PHP? Javascript? Idk what else to list.)

No amount of hardware/software hardening will save you if you delete "with spyware" and replace it with "with social engineering". If there have been cases of people being hacked through social engineering, it would be dishonest to make a blanket statement "nobody's been hacked", but it doesn't detract from the effectiveness of the technical measures.


A state actor will do those things if they're willing to be overt about their actions. Many aren't, both for the sake of preserving their image, and due to tactical concerns (e.g. you don't want to kill the golden goose).

I deliberately leave the most recent delivery box out for my cat to lounge in. Sometimes it’s a small studio flat, other times (like when my 3d printer arrived) it’s a whole palace. She likes them either way.

Mine likes them as well, but usually within 24 hours they're transformed into thousands of tiny cardboard pieces.

Chewy.com deliberately indicates that its boxes are for cats.

Also, their brown paper filler is loved by my cat. He doesn’t like Amazon packaging paper, but is all over Chewy paper. I wonder if they add a scent.


The punchline is that you can fill in the centre of Escher's piece by using complex analysis, and it produces a very satisfying, "obviously correct", solution.

But, as with all jokes, the punchline isn't funny at all without the setup.


The joke is that if you fill in the center, it shows the Droste effect of the image and kind of diminishes the magic of it.

> maybe with a more robust connector than RJ45

USB-C could be that connector, using USB-PD instead of PoE. Though I'm not sure I'd want to need that much smarts for every single power outlet.


Considering the number of times I've sheared off a USB-C connector vs ethernet, I wouldn't consider USB-C to be more robust than RJ45. YMMV.

How often do you unplug RJ45s versus USB-C, though?

I'm not talking about unplugging. Normal use.

And in normal use, how often do you handle or cycle an rj45 vs a usb?

Even when it's your job the usb are still handled and cycled way more often. You might handle 100 ethernet jacks today, but it won't be the same one 100 times. You plug it in and don't touch that one again for 5 years.


You mean the ethernet cable in my laptop? Couple of times a day. The box under my desk? Often? How about the hundreds of devices I work with that have RJ45 connectors for serial access? All the time? Are you seriously telling me you hold up a (decently made) ethernet cable next to a USB-C connector and think "yeah...the one a fraction of the size of the other is obviously mechanically stronger". Is this some Apple shill campaign to try and get people to think "no, no...the smaller, thinner, narrower and shallower the connector is the better it will be someplace where people bump it all the time"?

No, but looking at the two side by side, I do think that the one with a fragile clip that shears off every time somebody trips on it is going to be more of a problem than the friction fit one that will just come off.

As opposed to the one that has no clip to hold it in, and shears off the whole connector when you trip over it. And I can use the ethernet cable without the tab.

Some people will embrace any absurdity to pretend to be right.


USB-C devices tend to be mobile. Flexing and disconnecting are much more common.

And vice-versa. It's pretty interesting that the two projects haven't kind of merged despite all the collaboration.

Wine devs do not want to work with people who have looked at ReactOS[0] (see at the end) so any collaboration is one-way (or by ignoring the guidelines) and the likelihood of the two projects merging is zero.

[0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...


Surprised no one responded to the 7th comment in that linked email thread, the author brought up a good point about making progress without using any disassembled windows binaries.

Very different projects so I would not encourage a merge but sharing a code base? I can totally see that being a boon for both and other Windows emulation projects.

ReactOS periodically rebases some of it's libraries from Wine.

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