The emSign was bad, but not super critical. It created a lot of problems with trust and could lead to some MitM attacks. But, it was something that didn't need to be fixed now, Now, NOW!. The PHP stuff, on the other hand, that was an absolute "oh, fuck!" revelation. So much of the web still runs on PHP. WordPress is still common. And PHP shows up in lots of fun places, like PAN-OS. So, it's one of those things that really does need to be fixed NAO!.
Of course, I have little doubt this will be ignored by a lot of places and we're going to see botnets expanding rapidly.

There have been efforts to do this in the past. DEF CON's Voting Village spent a lot of effort to get second hand voting machines and provide them for hackers to try to compromise. The voting machine companies hated it, because it often demonstrated pretty terrible security practices. Since fixing security is expensive, they often adopted a "security through obscurity" mindset and refused to have anything tested. DEF CON still has a Voting Village, though I'm not sure if they still offer up machines for direct attack. Though ya, why States are satisfied with machines which don't come with some type of standardized testing (including Red Teaming) is beyond me. The AVS WinVote's security was so atrociously bad that it was finally decertified in a lot of States.

That said, hacking individual voting machines would be of little use if your goal is to change the outcome of an election, especially Statewide races. Polling in the US is really distributed, meaning that any effective attack would need to have multiple people all working in concert. And hacking on a machine by machine basis would take time and possibly create a lot of noise (statistical anomalies and the like). Big shifts would really come from pre-election tampering with things like voter rolls and propaganda/influence campaigns. That's where CISA could (or should have) helped. Showing up now is way too little too late. It's just the Trump administration trying to build up a bullshit case of "those silly States didn't let us help them. Now look at how badly they were all HACKED!" With, of course, Democrat wins being the only "proof" of said hacks.

Court case incoming in 3...2...

While I don't have a lot of faith in the SCOTUS, I somehow doubt even Roberts is going to be able to invent an argument which gives the President this sort of control over the H1B program. But, who knows. The Court has been deep-throating that "Unitary Executive" cock pretty hard.

Also:

The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro.

I'm pretty sure Infosys's and Tata's entire business model is H1B visas and hoping their customers will just revert and do the needful when those two companies' attempts at anything completely shit the bed. A lot of companies are going to be forced to discover that nothing might actually be better than a contract with one of those companies.

Nice to see "better lighting" showing up in the fixes. The game could be almost as dark as a Game of Thrones episode, even with half a dozen lights in your house. I'll have to give the game another run though with all the content now unlocked.

Even in a relatively empty RF environment, Wi-fi just can't seem to match the latency and reliability of a cable. I use a SteamLink to stream my PC to my living-room TV. While a wireless connection technically works, it's just not a good experience. I've move all of that over to a wired connection and the experience is very good.

Good. Tying aid to cuts in IRS funding was absolutely asinine. Failing to fund Ukraine, which is actually fighting for it's continued existence as a political entity is also asinine.

Yes, Hamas is a horrible organization; but, the Israeli Government isn't facing an existential threat and has not been an innocent actor in the situation in Gaza. Aid and support should come with strings attached to ensure the protection of civilians and property rights of the people being displaced.

If we could harness the energy of Regan spinning in his grave, we'd have a limitless supply of energy.
Imagine telling any conservative, during the Cold War era, that we could completely fuck Russia's military power and readiness, for years to come, by sending weapons to a relatively small country. They would be rushing to arm anyone and everyone they could, unintended consequences be damned. And yet, here we are with the GOP blocking exactly that sort of activity. And even better, there is a very real possibility that we aren't arming future terrorists this time around. Maybe that's the GOP's problem, Russia losing in Ukraine won't create an excuse in 20 years to kill more brown people.

The hacks target internet-facing programmable logic controllers (PLCs)

Why the fuck
is your PLC
facing the fucking internet!

Jesus Zombie Christ an a pogo stick. Has no one been paying attention for the last two decades? Seriously, we learned this sort of lesson in Two Thousand and fucking Three. Your critical assets do not get public IP addresses.

Ford Motor Co.'s second-quarter profit more than tripled to $1.92 billion versus a year ago (source)
Revenue rose 12% to $44.95 billion

Kinda hard to drum up sympathy for the company when it's raking in almost $2 billion in profit per quarter. Yes, Ford is burning about $1billon per quarter on EVs right now. That's not something the workers should be financing. That's money the company is investing to be viable in the future. That sucks for the shareholders; but, they are the ones who will reap any benefits of that investment and they should be the ones eating the cost.

If something requires an "app" and a connection to "the cloud" for basic functionality, don't buy it. This sort of abandonment by the manufacturer will always happen. Maybe it will last longer. Maybe it will be next week. But once the company has your money, the last thing they want to do is to spend any of that money providing you with support.

UI's for movie streaming services are not designed to help you find something to watch. They are designed to keep you "engaged", which means in the platform and not realizing that the pool of actually interesting things is about as deep as a puddle. Everything about streaming sites' design is user hostile and this is a classic example of that.

Seems like MS is trying to run afoul of anti-trust laws, again.

I think it's pretty telling that so many of the people they talk to and a lot of the focus of the article isn't really about older gamers, it's about their money.

The opportunity is substantial. The 40+ segment in the US is on track to grow from $19 billion in 2022 to $43 billion by 2030, a 132% expansion at a moment when the rest of the industry is shrinking. These are players with the most disposable income, the longest gaming literacy, and the highest brand loyalty.

I'm in that "40+ segment" and I suspect part of the "problem" these companies face is that older gamers have seen the enshitification of so many of the brands we love. Our tolerance for bullshit is basically gone at this point. Micro transactions, season passes, fucking ads in games, all of that bullshit is a quick way to not get our money.

I also suspect "brand loyalty" is basically gone for the same reason. As a kid, I looked for the Electronic Arts logo. If I saw this logo on a game package, I knew I was looking at a good game. I haven't bought an EA game in years. I don't expect to buy an EA game any time soon and I basically ignore everything they do. Sure, if a trailer for Starflight 3 dropped, I'd sit up and take notice. I'd also expect it to be an enshitified mess wearing the skin of a beloved series to sucker me in, before pouncing on my wallet.

So ya, maybe just make good games and older gamers will inevitably buy them. I mean, Larian can pretty much say, "hi we're making..." and I'll have my wallet out and be pulling bills before they get any further. And maybe that's your "brand loyalty". Game companies who make good games and aren't private equity firms wearing the dead skin suits of brands we used to love.

The investigation report is going to be interesting. While bridges can only take so much punishment, they are usually designed to survive some collisions with their pylons. I wonder what the state of the bridge was, prior to the collapse. If it's anything like the rest of the infrastructure in the US, it was probably not good. Though, this may also be a case that the designers in the 70's planned for a collision with a cargo vessel of the times, which were tiny bath tub boats compared to the super container ships we have now. The Dali was built in 2015 she is a 300m ship capable of carrying 116851 tons. That's a lot of mass for the pylon and it's barriers to stop.

Time for The Satanic Temple to open Satan's Elementary School and apply for charter funding.

I work in cybersecurity for a large company, which also uses the MS Authenticator app on personal phones (I have it on mine). I do get the whole "Microsoft bad" knee-jerk reaction. I'm typing this from my personal system, running Arch Linux after accepting the difficulties of gaming on Linux because I sure as fuck don't want to deal with Microsoft's crap in Windows 11. That said, I think you're picking the wrong hill to die on here.

In this day and age, Two Factor Authentication (2FA) is part of Security 101. So, you're going to be asked to do something to have 2FA working on your account. And oddly enough, one of the reasons that the company is asking you to install it on your own phone is that many people really hate fiddling with multiple phones (that's the real alternative). There was a time, not all that long ago, where people were screaming for more BYOD. Now that it can be done reasonably securely, companies have gone "all in" on it. It's much cheaper and easier than a lot of the alternatives. I'd love to convince my company to switch over to Yubikeys or the like. As good as push authentication is, it is still vulnerable to social engineering and notification exhaustion attacks. But, like everything in security, it's a trade off between convenience, cost and security. So, that higher level of security is only used for accessing secure enclaves where highly sensitive data is kept.

As for the "why do they pick only this app", it's likely some combination of picking a perceived more secure option and "picking the easiest path". For all the shit Microsoft gets (and they deserve a lot of it), the authenticator app is actually one of the better things they have done. SMS and apps like Duo or other Time based One Time Password (TOTP) solutions, can be ok for 2FA. But, they have a well known weakness around social engineering. And while Microsoft's "type this number" system is only marginally better, it creates one more hurdle for the attacker to get over with the user. As a network defender, the biggest vulnerability we deal with is the interface between the chair and the keyboard. The network would be so much more secure if I could just get rid of all the damned users. But, management insists on letting people actually use their computers, so we need to find a balance where users have as many chances as is practical to remember us saying "IT will never ask you to do this!" And that extra step of typing in the number from the screen is putting one more roadblock in the way of people just blinding giving up their credentials. It's a more active thing for the user to do and may mean they turn their critical thinking skills on just long enough to stop the attack. I will agree that this is a dubious justification, but network defenders really are in a state of throwing anything they can at this problem.

Along with that extra security step, there's probably a bit of laziness involved in picking the Microsoft option. Your company picked O365 for productivity software. While yes, "Microsoft bad" the fact is they won the productivity suite war long, long ago. Management won't give a shit about some sort of ideological rejection of Microsoft. As much as some groups may dislike it, the world runs on Microsoft Office. And Microsoft is the king of making IT's job a lot easier if IT just picks "the Microsoft way". This is at the heart of Extend, Embrace, Extinguish. Once a company picks Microsoft for anything, it becomes much easier to just pick Microsoft for everything. While I haven't personally set up O365 authentication, I'm willing to bet that this is also the case here. Microsoft wants IT teams to pick Microsoft and will make their UIs even worse for IT teams trying to pick "not Microsoft". From the perspective of IT, you wanting to do something else creates extra work for them. If your justification is "Microsoft bad", they are going to tell you to go get fucked. Sure, some of them might agree with you. I spent more than a decade as a Windows sysadmin and even I hate Microsoft. But being asked to stand up and support a whole bunch because of shit for one user's unwillingness to use a Microsoft app, that's gonna be a "no". You're going to need a real business justification to go with that.

That takes us to the privacy question. And I'll admit I don't have solid answers here. On Android, the app asks for permissions to "Camera", "Files and Media" and "Location". I personally have all three of these set to "Do Not Allow". I've not had any issues with the authentication working; so, I suspect none of these permissions are actually required. I have no idea what the iOS version of the app requires. So, YMMV. With no other permissions, the ability of the app to spy on me is pretty limited. Sure, it might have some sooper sekret squirrel stuff buried in it. But, if that is your threat model, and you are not an activist in an authoritarian country or a journalist, you really need to get some perspective. No one, not even Microsoft is trying that hard to figure out the porn you are watching on your phone. Microsoft tracking where you log in to your work from is not all that important of information. And it's really darned useful for cyber security teams trying to keep attackers out of the network.

So ya, this is really not a battle worth picking. It may be that they have picked this app simply because "no one ever got fired for picking Microsoft". But, you are also trying to fight IT simplifying their processes for no real reason. The impetus isn't really on IT to demonstrate why they picked this app. It is a secure way to do 2FA and they likely have a lot of time, effort and money wrapped up in supporting this solution. But, you want to be a special snowflake because "Microsoft bad". Ya, fuck right off with that shit. Unless you are going to take the time to reverse engineer the app and show why the company shouldn't pick it, you're just being a whiny pain in the arse. Install the app, remove it's permissions and move on with life. Or, throw a fit and have the joys of dealing with two phones. Trust me, after a year or so of that, the MS Authenticator app on your personal phone will feel like a hell of a lot better idea.

Viruses had only been discovered a few decades before this picture was taken. It's very likely that the family (and most of society) had no understanding that the virus was unlikely to jump species and so took the same precaution to keep the cat from spreading the disease that they themselves took. I'd rather people made this sort of mistake than the willful idiots we had this time around refusing to believe in viruses at all.

Good for them. If we're going to live through all the stupid of an AI bubble, it's good to see some of the insane profits making their way to the people who actually build the part and not just management and shareholders.

Yes, yes it has. And it's directly because Russia engaging in exactly the type of expansionist wars NATO was set up to stop.

They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn't producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It's really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.