Why not?
He's not in China's pocket. Oh, wait...
FILMS FINANCED BY STEVEN MNUCHIN WERE TAILORED TO APPEAL TO CHINA
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/films-steve-mnuchin-china-hollywood-censorship/
1536 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2012
I worked at an aerospace firm in the 1970's, and those brown envelopes also existed in classified form. And where I worked, as an Engineer, you were not allowed to walk from lab to lab with tools or hardware, no matter how small. You were supposed to get an "expediter" to come and transport it. Expeditors were (all union, of course) High School dropouts who generally had a gallon of beer for breakfast, and another for lunch. (A couple of them dropped a mockup for a multi-billion dollar project the night before a bunch of Generals were showing up as they imbibed too much at dinner.) And after showing up late, union rules required they would charge your project a minimum of 4 hours labor even for 5 minutes of walking an object down the hall. If you, as an Engineer, were seen carrying anything, you could be stopped by a union rep, and if found to be carrying something an expediter should have been called to carry, all hell would break loose, you'd get written up, and they'd charge you project 4 hours labor anyway. The best use of the classified version of those intraoffice brown envelopes was to put the object in one of those, as if a union rep stopped you, you just hold it out and say "You open it." If he did, while you'd get written up for carrying the object, he'd get a more serious writing up for violating the unsealing of a classified envelope where he didn't have project "need to know", even if he held the proper clearance level. (If you could, you used an envelope above your own clearance level to really feign ignorance.) So then you'd have a cat & mouse game of walking around with the rep following you until he got tired or you found a classified lab to enter that he didn't have access to. (I was young, the reps were old. Did I forget to mention, they were all overweight?) Oh, the joys of overly bureaucratic defense conglomerates. I left that place in 1980. Probably hasn't changed.
Moving one's cell number when one changes providers is trivial in the US. Very few people change numbers to avoid a harasser. Most change numbers because they didn't pay their phone for some period of time, or are trying to avoid bill collectors, or some other dumb ass reason.
It would not be an undue burden on cell phone companies to require numbers be deactivated for some amount of time, measured in years, before being recycled. These days, in the US, area codes are meaningless so phone numbers really are 10 digits (not counting the 11th US country code digit which is optional inside the US), so roughly 10 billion possible numeric combinations most of which work as phone numbers. Mandatory retarding the recycling of phone numbers would benefit a lot more important things that Farcebook, like 2FA of bank accounts and such.
Mine is the one who founded a small company. We supposedly had a patent that locked all competition out, but those of us with technical chops knew our product didn't use it despite said boss telling the world it did. We got to the whopping size around 2002 of 10 people with ~$6M/year revenue, and a big company we worked closely with offered $16M to buy us as they realized they could not trust the guy, but they needed our product. And they wanted to close the deal in 2 weeks. I owned vested options representing a 5% equity stake, the COO 10%, and the remaining employees maybe 10% combined. Said boss was such a small-minded crook* & idiot he stretched out the negotiations for four months over trivia like who would pay the final phone bill (I am not kidding). During that time, the big company's tech folks figured out our patent wasn't used in our products, so they withdrew the offer and extended an $8M offer. Said boss said, "No way". All of our customers hated said boss, but one day, about a month later, he overheard the COO talking with one of us about walking out and starting a rival company, as the customers would follow us. So said boss runs back to the big company and asks if the offer is still good. They smelled blood, so they said "yes" at $4M. He takes that offer, having "negotiated" the sale of the company down from $16M to $4M in less than six months. (Great businessman, eh?) But it gets better. He then tries to do what is called (according to my business lawyer) a "dirty departure" by not honoring the option agreements. As you can imagine, lawyers and such get involved (with "suggestions" of going to the State Attorney General), and we got our pound of flesh (reduced by 4x due to his price negotiation skills of that $16M offer going to $4M.).
What a gem of a guy. That saga ended over 20 years ago and I'm still hoping that if I ever hear of the guy again, it's because he's been convicted of something & going to jail.
*He had a lot of shady personal side businesses that he wasn't good at hiding . The Feds threatened to raid the company at one point as part of their dealings with him.
I'd be more worried about what's going on with the steel chassis. Dissimilar metals in contact with each other in water, especially water that contains ionic solutes, will result in galvanic action. And one metal will corrode at the expense of the other, usually the steel in the case of SS and non-SS steels in contact with each other. Given how Musk has a reality distorion field problem like Steve Job's, it would not a big surprise if the chassis rust out from under these cars.
https://www.appmfg.com/blog/how-to-prevent-galvanic-corrosion-between-carbon-and-stainless-steel
The patch also does not recognize when the machine has no Windows Recovery Partition and hence doesn't have Windows Recovery.
It's a fail all the way around. Even if there's "still" a reason to have the patch applied to a system that has no Recovery Partition, whoever wrote the patch should have done the full job, not a half-assed incomplete job.
KB5034441: Windows Recovery Environment update for Windows 10 which patches a flaw in could allow attackers to bypass BitLocker encryption by using Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).
This patch is an example of a bad patch rushed out. While it should ignore machines that have WinRE disabled & don't have a recover partition, instead it generates a Windows Recovery Environment servicing failed error in the form of "CBS_E_INSUFFICIENT_DISK_SPACE" or "0x80070643 - ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE".
It's done this on every machine I've seen that doesn't have a Windows Recovery partition & has WinRE disabled. There are boatloads of posts about this patch failure all over the Internet.
If someone wants to make a bundle, they'll make motherboards with a connector that can go to a mechanical switch on the laptop or desktop case that disconnects the AI chip(s). Kind of the reverse of the "Turbo" switches of decades back.
Bigger problem will be "AI" rubbish embedded in the CPU/GPU.
"...a widespread threat could involve spoofing CEOs' voices to impersonate them and instruct the finance department to wire money to an attacker's account..."
Any company that has such poor fiduciary controls that a CEO on their own has the authority to order this deserves to go out of business.
Neither was the fact that many of the AI generated SI articles had basic facts wrong in their stories.
The solution, of course, isn't to fix the AI or use real humans and fact check everything. The solution will be to make the use of the words "wrong" and "fake" socially unacceptable.
I agree entirely.
I actually use one of these for 2 AAA batteries at home that, instead of using a USB output wall wart, uses a more standard wall wart. ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0873Y5MQ5/?th=1 ) Having said that, I would advise one to do their due diligence and make sure the power supply is quiet, stable and at the correct voltage.
In a 'battery operated" stationary critical piece of equipment like a battery powered radio time clock, you use an ac adapter that interfaces to the equipment through dummy batteries.
I first used the 1970's version of this in, surprise, the 1970's. A modern version can be bought off Amazon for next to nothing.
https://www.amazon.com/Lenink-Power-Supply-Battery-Replace/dp/B09YTVTZ1V
I have some PC's, isolated from the network of course, running dedicated machinery that have NT 4.0 on them. When one PC died a couple of years ago, we went to these guys who build new "legacy" PC's so we could keep going. Spending a few $k to keep something going that would cost north of $500k to replace makes total sense. https://nixsys.com/#
Yea, like the Windows 11 upgrade program doesn't work, and doesn't generate proper error logs.
<rant>I've upgraded a boatload of machines (& VM's) from Windows 10 to 11, and Microsoft has done an absolutely shit job handling the situations where it does not work perfectly.
One of my systems, a 2 year old Origin PC AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system (TPM 2 chip, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB graphics, 4TB Western Digital Black SN850X SSD) with fully updated Windows 10 Pro , modern up-to-date bios, etc) as of last week still goes through the entire Windows upgrade, gets through a couple of boots, and then reverts back to Windows 10 Pro. The various setupact.log files (& setuperr.log, miglog.xml, BlueBox.log...) show nothing about the revert or why. Yet I have a couple of Win 11 instances installed & working in Virtual Box VM's on the same machine.
And I know a bunch of other folks with similar upgrade failures on modern machines that Microsoft's "PC Health Check" is happy as a clam to pronounce "This PC meets Windows 11 Requirements". If Microsoft wants people to upgrade, they need to supply an upgrader that actually works & logs the fail trigger cause if the upgrade reverts. And if the issue is a driver incompatibility, should not require digging through the upgrader log files to ID it.
The lowest hanging fruit for improvement would be for PC Health Check itself to scan for Windows 11 incompatible drivers so they can be dealt with BEFORE the upgrade attempt. (And Microsoft, a friendly user interface hint: Scanning isn't enough - you should tell the user the specific problematic driver files, not just generate a typical Microsoft-like vague message of "You have incompatible drivers.") </rant>