https://alison.legislature.state.al.us/files/pdf/SearchableInstruments/2026RS/HB511-enr.pdf doesn't seem to limit who the prayer is to.

I don't remember for sure, but I'd guess late 90s at the latest, for smaller files where it wouldn't make sense to burn a CD-R and uploading it somewhere (especially since I didn't have a CD-RW until later) and downloading it wasn't a viable option.

With most data transfer to friends being via BBS or later IRC DCC over the Internet, and software becoming available on CDROM, and Zip drives for backup, and CD-R and CD-RW becoming available for larger files, the use cases for floppies were already becoming limited by mid-90s.

With a bit of luck it might be clearing up or at least only light rain though.

Dodgy app developers make dodgy apps, and convince naive users to install them.

The dodgy apps make the naive user's Internet connection available to some partner the dodgy app developer has done a deal with - and since the naive user is typically using a residential network, and it lets their connection be used by someone else, it's called a residential proxy.

The partner sells access to a huge network of residential proxies to scrapers, often those wanting to do AI scraping against the wishes of the owners of the site being scraped. This is valuable to the scrapers because they appear to be coming from large numbers of different residential addresses. Cloud / hosting provider addresses are usually the first thing people block if they don't want scrapers, and they also block how much each address can access. So the scrapers scrape a little bit per address, making it hard for the victim sites to detect what is scraping and what is legitimate traffic.

This creates a security risk for the naive users, because as well as connecting out to the Internet, usually the proxy customer can connect to and maybe exploit things on their home network. The naive users usually don't know their connection is being used this way.

So the headline here is that one of the affected naive users is someone in the White House, and one of the 'residential' networks being sold is in fact the White House's Internet connection.

You can do this cryptographically as an interactive zero-knowledge protocol without a third-party.

This is easiest done by splitting it up into separate problems: For any arbitrary interest, a protocol to check if Alice and Bob share that interest. Doing the whole set is then a matter of repeating the protocol across a finite set of possible interests. So we'll deal with the simpler problem of checking if they share interests.

Let's assume that Alice and Bob already have an authenticated channel set up (i.e. Eve can't pretend to be Bob) - e.g. because they've previously exchanged public keys through a secure channel.

Zero-Knowledge (ZK) protocols come in Interactive and Non-Interactive flavours. Here, we'll need an interactive protocol, because otherwise Bob could run the same protocol twice, once saying he does have the interest, and once saying he doesn't.

This problem is almost identical to the Socialist Millionaire Problem, except you don't want to leak information if Alice and Bob don't share the interest.

Alice and Bob calculate their respective x_ij values (where i=0 for Alice, i=1 for Bob), such that x_ij is 0 if participant i has interest j, and a large random number if not.

They then use a Socialist Millionaire Protocol (e.g. the one from the OTR messaging protocol in the above linked article) to check if x_0j is equal to x_1j. If they both picked 0 (have the interest), the protocol tells then their values are the same. If one of them has interest j and one doesn't, the one with the interest learns the other does not have the interest, while the other party learns nothing (except that the other party didn't pick the same large random number). If they both don't have the interest, they only learn that the other picked a different large random number or zero, but can't tell between the two. Assuming sufficiently large numbers, it is vanishingly unlikely they'd pick the same number.

The interactive protocol can be run in parallel for each interest j, but has a few sequential steps per interest (ensuring neither party can cheat and have more than one choice per interest).

To be Kafkaesque is to not know what you are accused of and/or to have no real mechanism to defend the accusations. The Kafkaesque part is the private network of 'justice' that makes judgements which impact someone's access to basics like food based on an opaque algorithm with no recourse.

These private systems are worst when they are networks across multiple stores - you could imagine a future where, if left to the devices of late stage capitalism (i.e. not effectively regulated), it could become virtually impossible to buy food and other essentials once you are on a privately held denylist that retailers pay to access, where those on the list have no insights into how they got on the list nor any mechanism to correct any inaccuracies that unfairly led to them being on the list.

TL;DR: I think Kafkaesque is correct here.

Also when Raspberry Pi started, it was a not-for-profit. In a way, they went through the same transformation as OpenAI (which started not-for-profit too) but slightly earlier.

Russia has used their surface-to-air missiles to attack ground-based targets (particularly when short of other missiles), so just because that's not their primary purpose doesn't mean they can't be used for that.

That said, missiles are very expensive and their benefit to an attacker is their long range, so insurrectionists would likely only use them for long range attacks when they can't get close to their targets.

That said, it's definitely putting nearby civilians at risk - and so is highly inappropriate as opposed to moving Trump somewhere else, like the White House where he should be anyway, rather than a club that's been repeatedly mentioned in relation to Epstein. It's prioritising something other than public safety for sure.

It's ironic given Labor's name that they are so anti-labour, but the Greens are really the true left / for the people party.

I wish people would stop repeating without evidence the idea that Luigi M did anything other than get harassed eating at a fast food restaurant. The official story makes no sense - someone apparently recognised him from a blurry CCTV release that is likely another person albeit of the same build and hair colour, and phoned it in with absolute certainty, and then the police happened to find a 'manifesto' on him, and then later, not even straight away when he was searched, an improvised weapon. If the real killer could do the crime and get away to a completely different state, they'd have had numerous opportunities to dispose of everything - it just strains credibility.

Consider on the other hand that the powers that be were eager that someone take the fall for this - they couldn't have the perception that such a thing will go unpunished (see also: the extreme push for the death penalty, and the involvement of very senior political appointees). They can achieve that by picking any random approximately fitting the description off the street and framing them.

An early Slashdot meme: Can you Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These (usually about things other than computers).

Searching Slashdot comments seems hard now that search engines aren't what they used to be, but I found a post referencing the by then pre-existing meme from the 14th of July, 2001: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/Can-You-Imagine-a-Beowulf-Cluster-of-These

This was probably one of my earliest exposures to Internet joke memes (before they were commonly in image form).

Of course, in Dawkin's original sense, any knowledge passed from human to human is a meme, so if we are being hyper-literal about it, I'd say it's actually how to talk - we all may have mutant variants of the meme and some may have multiple copies (multilingual), but without have caught some variant of that meme, no one would achieve much! But to meet the 'dead' part, I guess it would have to be a dead variant of the meme (possibly still and ancestor of modern languages). Proto-Indo-European is one such (although hard to choose just one).

If these are relatively inexpensive to set up and dispose of, corporations could even set them up automatically for individual consumer transactions and between individual employees and themselves.

For example, you go to a fast food restaurant, and you are actually being served by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, founded 2 seconds ago, and leasing the right to operate in the building amongst other similar AI companies, as well as the part-time services of McGermKing Employment Services fd176cc4-bb95-4c1b-80e7-2aec39f02917, who hires a human to take your order, and McGermKing Employment Services 5336b4f1-0594-4df1-8387-5ec9b638db77, who assembles your GermBurger (TM used under licence by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd).

If you pay them and they make money, it goes back to the owner. If you get food poisoning and sue McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd (since the parent company is totally innocent and some other subsidiaries are just honest suppliers), it comes out of the money they made selling you the burger, and if their liability to you was higher than the cost of one burger, well, the AI corporation tried its honest best at business, but you can line up for your share of the payout - keeping in mind they also owe franchise fees to the parent company out of that burger, so the AI liquidator will divide up the assets, and if it doesn't cover liabilities, the parent company loses its 50c investment into McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, and how sad it was a bad outcome for you as a creditor.

Likewise if an employee gets hurt, same story.