What character encoding do they use? ASCII is 7-bit, all those characters use 1 byte in ASCII, and of course email addresses were originally (and until recently?) restricted to ASCII.
There have been many articles on the subject, but this is an excellent, deep dive into techniques and technology, including a lot I haven't seen elsewhere.
Does anyone know how much of libraries' out-of-copyright content, including rare books, is now available online? A tiny fraction? The important stuff?
Speaking more generally, despite the promise of the Internet it seems like the more valuable knowledge is inaccessible to the public - knowledge in books and scientific journals. The public is left with the dregs.
People complain about how easily bad information and deliberate misinformation spread and are accepted. In the context of my point above, is that a surprise? Remember the old saying about management and accounting systems or really any application: GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out.
The article doesn't say activities in Africa are new, but that they are significantly expanded. From the article:
> In 2006, just 1 percent of all U.S. commandos deployed overseas were in Africa. In 2010, it was 3 percent. By 2016, that number had jumped to more than 17 percent. In fact, according to data supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command, there are now more special operations personnel devoted to Africa than anywhere except the Middle East — 1,700 people spread out across 20 countries
Some surprising evidence. Per the article, the factory employs ~10,000:
> Ambulances have been called more than 100 times since 2014 for workers experiencing fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing and chest pains, according to incident reports obtained by the Guardian. Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues.
EDIT:
I wonder how it compares to other factory workers. To what extent is the problem factory work (which so many are anxious to bring back) and to what extent is it Tesla's factory.
And Musk seems to have a bit of a tin ear, which is surprising:
> The CEO said his desk was “in the worst place in the factory, the most painful place”, in keeping with his management philosophy. “It’s not some comfortable corner office.”
> In early 2016, he said, he slept on the factory floor in a sleeping bag “to make it the most painful thing possible”. “I knew people were having a hard time, working long hours, and on hard jobs. I wanted to work harder than they did, to put even more hours in,” he said. “Because that’s what I think a manager should do.”
> He added: “We’re doing this because we believe in a sustainable energy future, trying to accelerate the advent of clean transport and clean energy production, not because we think this is a way to get rich.”
Even if Cloudflare wants to use the extreme libertarian justification of enabling all speech no matter what it says (which I strongly disagree with, but that's another discussion), AFAICT they don't address why they are giving people's personal contact information to the hate groups. It wouldn't make sense anyway, and at least some of these groups openly threaten and practice harassment. What does that have to do with supporting freedom of speech?
Working fine on FreeBSD 10 for me, but it's not default yet as far as I know.
My thoughts on the matter are, this is all a pointless waste of time/effort, or otherwise said, an arms race of exploits/bugs that will go on and on and produce nothing of value, except justifying a military budget in various govs.
If they truly were doing their jobs and being of benefit, we wouldn't have the corruption we do, the paedo rings, the drug cartels etc.
To be secure, you have to beat the smartest people on the planet I would have thought, and unless you have a nation's resources, that's tricky. Tightening laws I'm not sure is the answer either, it feels like human nature expressed in Internet terms.
There is no way to know for sure, because we have not embedded telemetry / spyware in open source operating systems.
One of the problems here, is that large organizations are reluctant to update software across a large population of computers. If those updates were smaller, more transparent, and could be separated based on whether they are a security fix, a new feature, or a new tool that allows a 3rd party to monitor user activity, then the sysadmins would be empowered to close security issues quickly, while introducing minimal risk.
That's my point, as I type this on fully patched Win 10 Pro.
Certainly Windows has its issues, but it's biggest 'flaw' when it comes to malware isn't that it's closed-source, but that it's ubiquitous and therefore a highly attractive target.
Linux is ubiquitous in the data center. We are not a low-value target. Also, corporations with cloud-based infrastructure are more likely to pay large ransoms for their data, especially if it is the backup/archive system that is attacked.
Data centers are dwarfed in size by the consumer and business markets, while also being much less vulnerable due to their more specialised nature and therefore ease of update. Case in point: there are plenty of windows data centres out there, but its not likely any of them were effected by this incident.
Tip: Don't spend time trying to remove malware and undo its effects. You'll never know if you succeeded; most malware is designed to hide itself, and likely this particular malware is well-written.
Wipe the laptop and reinstall. It's more certain, and probably won't take much longer than trying to remove the malware. If the malware infects firmware or other subsystems below the OS, and thus won't be removed by a reinstall, buy a new laptop if that's an option.
