People shouldn’t be expected to give up their privacy and anonymity and put themselves at greater risk of identity theft because big tech can’t be bothered figuring out a different way to solve spam.
Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.
I think you're misplacing your annoyance here. A lot of the world is not constantly affected by Sim swapping. Your phone number is not a secret either. The problem is the minimal verification that allows sim swapping to exist in the first place.
These companies don't expect you to give up privacy and anonymity. They expect you to pay $1 to rent a phone number. To these companies, a phone number is an externalized reusable proof-of-stake in the PSTN NFT market — nothing more, nothing less.
> More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers
Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.
And you can't use many from those services to actually register an account for a meaningful service. E.g. have you created Instagram account with them?
Seems like there is a determined will to blacklist as many as possible.
I believe you're thinking phone numbers from legitimate VoIP services like Twilio, or the "texting app" service-providers that build on top of them.
The GP is talking more about phone numbers from purpose-built (usually Russian) "secondary market for other people's credentials" marketplaces, where people sell the use of their own personal phone numbers (usually through cloud remote-control software they run on an old Android device with the SIM in it.)
A great example of how NOT to write Java. You say absolutely nothing with a whole lot of extra words.
For example:
//==============================================================
// Ajqvue Constructor
//==============================================================
public Ajqvue()
The constructor definition is already clear, I don’t need a big header telling me what a constructor is.
Instead, use comments generously where needed - for example, if you have a piece of business logic, a comment explaining the intent behind it can help the maintainer (likely you) a year down the road. What I mean by this, is that what your code DOES should be self evident - but documenting the business decision behind the implementation has done wonders for me.
We came to the exact same conclusion. EventBridge time triggers a Fargate task. The job automatically terminates the process after execution, so the container shuts down and all is good.
MS is probably pricing this into their model — GitHub was acquired for 7.5b. If they get fined a couple b over this, it’ll probably have been worth it for the customer acquisition onto Azure.
We need much much more military spending, not less. We’re currently only spending about 3.5% of our GDP. It should be at least 10%. The threats to the free world have never been greater - we must ensure peace through strength.
We spend more than the next 8 to 10 nations *combined*, and all but two of them are allies. Who are we defending ourselves against? Eurasia? Eastasia? The Boogie Man? Or Santa?
Furthermore, we clearly out spend Russia - approx 10 to 1 - and that didn't stop them from going into Ukraine. Keep in mind, Russia has a massive border to defend so 10 to 1 in a way conservative.
We have so called strength and then some. We don't have peace, and things (with China) are getting less stable. But you want to triple-down on what isn't working? Why?
Unfortunately I don’t know much about the Dutch perspective on this. As an American, this is the kind of thing that gets America to go to war - why didn’t the Netherlands decide to intervene after MH17?
The U.S. shot down an Iranian passenger airliner and promoted the Navy captain who was in charge of the ship that did it. U.S. fighter pilots accidentally killed 20 people in Italy because they wanted to showboat. The Soviet Union shot down a Korean passenger airliner.
One does not go to war over such incidents unless you are already looking for an excuse to do so.
That said, we took responsibility for the Vincennes accident and paid reparations, as I recall. I wonder if Russia will ever do that much to compensate the Dutch.
A typical American reaction is to feel less outrage or feel absolved so long as we gave victims money. I say this as an American. The DOD initially lied about the events. We did not in any meaningful way take responsibility. We didn’t court martial any of the officers involved and the Vincennes received a combat action ribbon for that day.
Lots of societies around the world have a tradition of 'blood money' in the sense of financial compensation for killing or other serious harm. It's not surprising to find that kind of thinking in America since it is a society comprised of migrants from all over the world.
That said, we took responsibility for the Vincennes accident and paid reparations, as I recall. I wonder if Russia will ever do that much to compensate the Dutch.
I wonder if the US will do the same for their adventures in the middle East in the last few decades.
In a serious culture we could discuss these things using spreadsheets and data using strict epistemology, but in this culture we mostly discuss them in simplistic, cherry picked, "just so" stories, and pile on anyone who dares to step outside the Overton Window of consensus "truth".
They shot the plane down on purpose, they took smiling pictures amongst the wreckage, and they prevented the Dutch or anyone else from picking up the bodies.
They shot a plane down on purpose, not the plane. Then they went full CYA mode, as at that time Russian involvement in the conflict was all about barely plausible deniability. Coming out and saying, "yes, we have sent a Russian SAM into Ukraine to shoot down Ukrainian airplanes and accidentally shot down a civilian airliner" was technically an option, but Russia preferred to deny everything and flood the infospace with a hundred conflicting theories.
I just heard this story on NPR a couple weeks ago, it seems that there is unfortunately no conclusive evidence and likely will never be, but they do have strong evidence (intercepted audio recordings) suggesting that Putin was directly involved in supplying the BUK missile system to the separatists that shot down the plane.
I would have agreed with you had Russia accepted that it made a mistake. In the absence of something small as an acknowledgment and a formal apology (followed up by large monetary compensations for the victims’ families), it isn’t obvious to me how anytime can assume it was an accident.
The apology should have come immediately after the incident, without anyone asking for it.
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. - Epictetus
Mate, it’s democracy vs dictatorship. Russia didn’t invade the US, it invaded Ukraine. We would keep fighting even without US support. Freedom is non-negotiable.
I fought mostly with the TDF and SSO - all of us were volunteers or professional military. I personally haven’t met anyone who said they were forced to fight. Except for Russian POWs who claimed they were forced.
There wasn’t much support in the very beginning - sure, some javelins and NLAWs. Whether they were the difference maker is unclear.
I see a lot of American “free thinkers” (who all think the same) push the argument that it was US provocations that lead to the war.
While there are many many many (many…) counters to that, I will let the russians themselves offer their counter. Check out Putin’s essays on Ukraine - he (and the majority of russians) hold a deep belief that Ukraine is just part of russia, and that it should be returned to russia.
As far as picking friends - who is giving military aid to help repel an aggressor, and who is killing, raping, torturing civilians?
Can you detail what you mean by "US-instigated provocation". As far as I understand the only provocation is helping show with Ukraine that ethnic/cultural Rus people can live and indeed prosper in a democratic society, so the ills of Russia are demionstrably Putin-mafia induced.
Street 14, Kharkiv. I remember battles in that area. I remember when some of the houses there got hit. One night specifically, I was on a base a ways away, and I heard one of the loudest explosions I’d heard during the war. The curtains in our room even lifted, halfway to the ceiling.
I heard from the people close to the frontline (medics, soldiers) that you're supposed to tightly tape all the glass in the windows so that a nearby explosion cannot blast you with glass fragments.
Actually while planning one SSE operation, we heavily debated the best way to break glass windows. One guy on the team wanted to tape around the edges, attach a suction cup to the center, and break the window with a spark plug. While that would work, and be the quieter option, I decided it would be too slow and too complicated. I was expecting to break a lot of windows, and we only had 2 hours for SSE. So in the end, I decided to just smash the window with a crowbar, and run the crowbar violently along the edges to clear out any big broken glass still not detached from the window frame. Then make entry.
>One guy on the team wanted to tape around the edges, attach a suction cup to the center, and break the window with a spark plug
What does the suction cup do? The way you described it only the edges were taped, so as soon as the glass pane breaks, the center will shatter and the suction cup will lose suction.
Prevent shattering into multiple pieces. Remembering now, you had to hit the window in all corners. It was something complicated like that. Then you get the glass on the suction cup and place it down gently.
I didn’t like this idea, not just because it was complex, but also because it added a bunch of different gear I would have to carry.
