astronaut_sloth

then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

I don't know why, but this made me really sad. Remember when we, the "New World, with all its power and might" fought for "rescue and liberation"? Really makes you want to stand up and fight for who we were and can still be again.

Correct. For criminal acts. As Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend." (Yes, I know corporate personhood makes no sense, but this is the messed up world we live in.)

Can't pardon a lawsuit. Lawsuits are civil; pardons are for criminal cases. Those staffers could be bankrupted, which would be hilarious.

Honestly, of all the things he's doing, not releasing the results of his physical are the least worrisome. Anyone with eyes and a brain can see he's not healthy.

I see both points. You're totally right that for a company, it's just the result that matters. However, to Bradley's, since he's specifically talking about art direction, the journey is important in so much as getting a passable result. I've only dabbled with 2D and 3D art, but converting to 3D requires an understanding of the geometries of things and how they look from different angles. Some things look cool from one angle and really bad from another. Doing the real work allows you to figure that out and abandon a design before too much work is put in or modify it so it works better.

When it comes to software, though, I'm kinda on the fence. I like to use AI for small bits of code and knocking out boilerplate so that I can focus on making the "real" part of the code good. I hope the real, creative, and hard parts of a project aren't being LLM'd away, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a mandate from some MBA.

As far as I can tell, it boils down to some combination of three reasons: they're bigots; they're stupid; or they're selfish. Bigotry is self-explanatory. If they actually believed that he would do good things and help the country, then they're clearly stupid. If they didn't care how his actions hurt others but thought they'd help them financially, then they're selfish. Now, if they're selfish and not wealthy (wealthy being not like two houses and a couple millions in savings but rather own a couple yachts and an island) then they're also stupid on top of being selfish.

The United States has a good deal of cultural rot. As a culture, we're sick and have been for decades (and that's not even getting into the nation's original sin of slavery/racism). Carter rightly pointed it out in his "malaise speech." A large number of Americans are simply incapable of thinking about others outside themselves. We are incapable of taking on large projects for the collective good. And because of that, we defunded education for decades leading to the stupid, selfish population of today.

Zog yes? Zog no?

In short, yes, sort of.

However, I don't want it come off that Signal is bad by any means. It's the right choice for most people. I use Signal, and I really like it, in fact, but I know it's limitations. I'm not as familiar with SimpleX, but after a quick look at their GitHub, it does have extra privacy over Signal. The kicker is that it looks like an open network (if I misunderstood something in the code, please someone correct me) that anyone can join. While that's great for accessibility, it opens up attack surface. Even still, that will work for most people.

The key issue in this story is that the cabinet was using an open network with known vulnerabilities. They should have been using secure government comms. Is the encryption any better than Signal? Probably not (like I said above, NSA itself designed a bunch of our encryption algorithms). But it's a closed network where only authorized users can be on it.

In the end, for most uses Signal is good, SimpleX is a bit better. Matrix can also be good if proper precautions are used in accessing it. The government, though, shouldn't be using these open networks for classified communications; it's really poor OPSEC for them. Also, a resistance group is not the government, so operating more clandestinely on more common messaging platforms is a good choice. When a resistance group may want to rethink that communications strategy is when they get large, powerful, and organized enough to operate more or less in the open with impunity. If a resistance group can be a de facto government, then it may be time to migrate to a closed network that is fully under your control. Most groups never get to that point, though.

ETA: Choosing a communications system can seem tough, but it's really just a matter of knowing the capabilities and limitations of the tool. You'd think the government would be better at that.

Bester is by far one of the best characters in sci-fi, and some of Walter Koenig's best work.

https://thehackernews.com/2025/02/hackers-exploit-signals-linked-devices.html And this is just the latest. I'd imagine there's information that is closer held about other vulnerabilities.

It's really not as secure as one would want for government communications. It's good enough for activists because for most, there is security through obscurity. Governments, though, are targeted and known quantities with very public facing people. An adversary can pop an official's phone with relative ease. An activist, though, is generally mostly anonymous, so if the government wants to go after that individual, they have to find them first, which is harder.

And that's just looking at message content. Even without the content, metadata is insanely valuable. You can infer a lot just from who is in a chat and the frequency of messages. Just seeing that cabinet officials were in a chat that started getting that much activity would put any adversary on guard.

All that is to say that while Signal's encryption is good (hell a ton of modern encryption algorithms came from NSA itself), the app itself is not good enough for a government. If an activist group gets enough power, it would be prudent for them to move to a different, more secure platform if they're worried about the full weight of the nation-state coming down on them. That is to say, a police department doesn't have the resources to do anything meaningful with even just metadata, but the FBI is a whole different story.

TL;DR: Signal is good, but not great, and it is certainly not up to the task of protecting actual government communications.

I get the sentiment, but depending on the particular activity, not breaking the law is an advantage. A peaceful protest in front of a government building following all laws makes it harder to justify breaking up, especially breaking up violently. It's a PR game just as much as it's a social action game. To be clear, though, this doesn't cover every instance, but there are times where following the rules to the letter is beneficial...just not always.

It's strange. Then again, the actual Nazis kept meticulous records. These images and videos will be played for generations alongside the images and videos of other atrocities throughout history.