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Remember during the pandemic when a bunch of these people realized they absolutely could not afford to be unable to work but were unwilling to reconcile that with their ideology and started saying only the elderly and genetically inferior were at risk? This is basically the same thing: if you’re...

USIP did, but DOGE illegally threatened their private security contractor with loss of ALL of their federal contracts if they didn’t switch sides: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/breaking-doge-strong-armed-usip-security-contractors-to-switch-sides

There were older parables in Judaism which predated it, both using elephants instead of camels but logically similar in expressing impossibility: “Are you from Pumbedita, where they push an elephant through the eye of a needle?” or “They do not show a man a palm tree of gold, nor an elephant...

A great example is Luke 18:25, where he very clearly tells his followers that it would be easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. This is in line with his other injunctions to wealthy followers to give their riches to help the poor, but since...

To be fair, his serious followers figured out the broad strokes. What’s been taking the right-wing so long is looking for loopholes in what he said about taking care of the poor, disabled, elderly, immigrants, etc. and, most importantly, how rich people can still be on top.

That information has been public for years. There are multiple websites where you can search for people by name, department, job title, etc. What’s different here is that they demanded access to the private data like home addresses, banking accounts, social security numbers, etc. AND access to...

I think it’s especially telling that the CIO & CISO don't appear to have said no but attempted to get Secretary Burgum to officially accept the risk. If he was convinced that DOGE was acting responsibly in good faith, why hesitate to sign off on their work?

Right-wing business interests have been trying to roll back the New Deal programs since they were enacted. A lot of the libertarian “Christianity” was promoted as part of that effort – http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/ will have a lot of familiar names connected in ways I hadn’t...

One thing to remember is that lines of code are a very crude measure, and it’s not suitable for comparison between languages because code density varies a lot. This is especially important for COBOL where every data structure, display or input field will spread across at least a line each, and...

To expand on this, COBOL doesn’t have magic around 1875 because it doesn’t have a date type at all. COBOL has fixed-length numbers and characters which you can combine to specify a field’s structure which is used for both file storage (indexed data access is a core language feature) and...

I’ve had similar experiences: often the most valuable thing is talking to your experienced users since they can tell you how it really works now or, especially valuable, where they know there’s a problem and are working around it outside of the developers’ sphere. I’ve had a few times where...

Yeah, we exactly how that’s going to go: anyone who calls for woke ideas like testing critical software is going to get canned, or death threats after the co-President name drops them on X.

This seems especially dangerous given their effort to remove the people with experience with how the existing system works and especially their aggressive approach to clawing back money any time they believe an overpayment has been made. It’s bad enough when their boss lies about millions of...

DC voted against him 94:6, don't punish us because half of the country is running a reverse scavenger hunt to find the worst people to represent them.

As a fellow long-time member, I think you should remember that ArsTechnica has always covered political topics (remember DeCSS?) but the stakes used to be a lot lower and the political instincts from our youth are outdated. In the 90s, it was somewhat possible to ignore politics because the...

This fits well with the general profligacy everyone sees with traffic (you care a lot more about load if you have to pay for it) and I think it’s also very plausible as a liability shield. These companies know that they are going to be sued many times, and they want a lot of data which is...

It’s a fairly substantial difference because one of those scenarios is public and highly visible. If the NSA hacks OVH or a CIA black team visits Hetzner, it’s an international incident which will be heavily covered in the news for months. If someone calls Bezos and tells him that if he wants...

Unfortunately, it’s not true outside of a very narrow view. AWS customer-managed keys let you set custom access policies and you can rent dedicated HSMs. However, they’re not easy to set up pervasively and those protect against things like a rogue administrator or compromised app, but not a...

You know why we don’t forget these? Because Google apologists trot them out every time they tell people not to expect parity from equivalently-priced devices, hoping that you won’t know each of those was grossly exaggerated. It’s like watching American conservatives tell people that healthcare...

Anyone else remember what it was like here in 2016 when every thread was filled with self-ordained government IT policy experts saying that even though technically there wasn’t even a policy against it at the time, Clinton’s email server was a capital offense? I’m sure they’re going to be back...