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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time

    Wow… Such shock… Much surprise.

    Yeah, they basically were sending XSLs,CSVs of everyone’s shit over non secure channels like Cloudflare shares, that had unknown people in it who didn’t work for the Government.

    Because they’re all fucking amateur idiots who think they know what the fuck they’re doing and they don’t. So shit like “Hey brah, pass me that sheet you were working on. NP, posted the link in the Molon labe Discord channel, hey you should check the meme BindensProstate6969 posted LOLOL.”

    I mean why did anyone think anything different was ever going to come of this? And now a bunch of private citizen unknowns who are a loose collective fringe group and believe crazy shit has everyone’s details.


  • Yes, this has a name. Asymmetric warfare. Anyone at the other end of the US military has to engage in it at the present time and considering that the United States will likely vote a Trump 2.0 President down the road is what is driving a lot of these countries to begin ramping up domestic weapon production.

    All this will do is take resources that have long since been something given to the people and redirect it to building weapons until the entire world is armed to the teeth and we are exactly where we were just before World War I. However, this will make those who profit from war even richer along the way and thus the people are robbed of a world we could of had of shared opportunity, just because some rich assholes in the United States wanted more money.








  • That’s super underselling it. Open Financial Exchange OFX is still the go-to for markets and banks to exchange information with various end user devices. ISO 20022 is a standard used in banking that is XML based. Fedwire, the platform that moves money between the central banks completed transition to XML in July… of this year.

    Credit reporting agencies, insurance agencies, hospitals, medicare, medicaid, massive amounts of the entire global logistics industry are heavily using XML with no plans in the near future to move off of it. Like the network that handles auto insurance claims and reporting them to people like LexisNexus is all XML.

    Like it’s impossible to cover just how much of this planet runs on XML.


  • The 300% increase is because of Republican cuts from OBBBA. Republicans continually do things to reduce the quality and deliverablity of care from these markets. That’s the thing, every “failure” can be traced back to Republicans enacting law that greatly affects the overall success of the program.

    What’s even more interesting is how flexible the market has been in spite of Republican meddling. But the ACA has offered new avenues for people to have insurance when their situation wouldn’t have qualified them for such. This has provided a much needed peace of mind to a large segment of the population.

    For all the things that Republicans tend to throw to deride the program, it continues to provide coverage for people in ways that lawmakers don’t always foresee. And that has provided care to people who usually would not have care. Allowed people to go on to make small businesses that would not have otherwise taken the risk. Allow people to get regular checkups and routine care that would have otherwise gone without.

    Republicans have a funny definition of success in the medical domain. Once that circles around dollars to care, when the goal should be amount of care. Or at least in my most humble opinion, we should look at the amount of care we provide to the population as a metric of success. To then toss dollars on top of that metric really begs the question of what is the worth of a person’s life? Yes, the ACA lacks a single provider negotiated benefit. Republicans have sought to never allow that to happen. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a very clear loss for the ACA program, but again, that’s at the behest of Republicans.







  • European e-waste campaigners are calling on EU leadership to force tech vendors to provide 15 years of software updates, using Microsoft’s plan to end Windows 10 support next month — which may make an estimated 400 million PCs obsolete — as a textbook case of avoidable e-waste.

    Windows 10 has already had 10 years of support. ESU extends this one extra year. If you have hardware that cannot meet Windows 11’s requirements, there are other OSes available that will happily run on that hardware. Which is what brings us to the real issue.

    Microsoft’s near monopoly on consumer grade PCs and Apple’s vendor lock in. This is the core issue.

    Companies can do this because there are no regulations to stop them. We call on European Commissioner Jessika Roswall to introduce EU Ecodesign requirements for laptops, guaranteeing at least 15 years of software updates. No more devices designed to break or become obsolete before their time

    Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS. Apple does good to keep Macs made in the last five to seven years still able to run their newest OS. They are some of the worse offenders on this. But even with a different OS, there’s still a limit to how far you can take hardware. You could put the best optimized software on really old hardware and that won’t change that the underlying CPU is old.

    The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

    Ten year old machines are doing alright for the time being, but we have to move on. TLS 1.3 is here, has been here since 2018. The stricter requirements for security, require more advanced hardware.

    And I just mention TLS as a single example of what we’re talking about here. Modern hardware advances and attackers and users get those at the same time. While software security schemes do ensure security long after the hardware has become dated, there’s a point where it won’t matter anymore what software you toss onto the machine. It’s just so out dated it doesn’t matter, no software is securing it. Now that’s usually a lot longer than ten years, but it’s not much longer.

    You can take a very lightweight Linux distro and pop it onto a Pentium 3 machine. It will technically run. But you are lacking SSE2 and even if you recompiled to remove SSE2 optimizations and strictly held to 586 ISA, you’re not going to enjoy the performance on the machine. For even the most simple tasks like unpacking a 7-zip. You will fare very unwell to some attacker who has a modern Threadripper machine.

    I love old machines but the rest of the world is moving forward. Yes, software could technically cover for more than ten years, but not much more. But it’s silly to think that a Athlon 64 (2003), the oldest CPU you can technically get working on Windows 10 because of the NX bit requirement, would be able to keep pace on today’s multi megabyte sized website. Hell even the X2 models that were the first to be “dual core” would have issues with how modern web browsers handle things because Athlon 64 X2’s model for multiple processors is vastly different than how modern CPUs do it. It wouldn’t take anything for someone to feed it a website that would bring the system to it’s knees.

    The thing is 15 years a very long time in the world of technology that’s ever evolving. Software can only go so far. 15 years is absolutely you need a different OS if that’s your requirement territory. But when you start hitting 20 years, your going to see breakage no matter what software you throw at it. It might be very slight at the 20 year mark. but each year after that it’s going to become more pronounced.