Oh fuck off. This happened 10 years ago. He was arrested, sentenced, made to serve his sentence, put through therapy and rehabilitated. He makes constant efforts to avoid being with young girls (alone or otherwise), despite him believing he wouldn’t reoffend anyway. He exhibits an abundance of caution to make sure he won’t do that shit again. He has repeatedly publicly stated that what he did was wrong and that he should never have done it. The NOC-NSF has extensively researched him and found he matches all the stricter criteria for participating as an olympic athlete after a conviction. There’s zero reason to believe he’s still a risk.

What message are you sending by claiming he’s irredeemable? That we don’t care if a pedophile makes one victim or if he makes 100? Not giving these people a way back to society and allowing them to safely rehabilitate puts more people at risk due to a higher chance of recidivism.

It’s ridiculous how tabloid media has dug up this case and claimed sudden moral outrage. Said outrage has been mostly met in the Netherlands by confusion. Almost no one cares here.

You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.

You jest, but we all know the damage you could do with a 5oz bottle of shampoo is incalculable.

North Korea started lobbing missiles again, Putin built up his invasion force for Ukraine, his dismissal of Palestinian concerns and emboldening of Israel led to Hamas attacking Israel again, Afghanistan was overrun by the Taliban because he decided to pull US troops out.

The world wasn’t very peaceful under Trump. Rather it geared up for war.

A single server not booting should not usually lead to a loss of service as you should always run some sort of redundancy.

I’m a dev for a medium-sized PSP that due to our customers does occasionally get targetted by malicious actors, including state actors. We build our services to be highly available, e.g. a server not booting would automatically do a failover to another one, and if that fails several alerts will go off so that the sysadmins can investigate.

Temporary loss of service does lead to reputational damage, but if contained most of our customers tend to be understanding. However, if a malicious actor could gain entry to our systems the damage could be incredibly severe (depending on what they manage to access of course), so much so that we prefer the service to stop rather than continue in a potentially compromised state. What’s worse: service disrupted for an hour or tons of personal data leaked?

Of course, your threat model might be different and a compromised server might not lead to severe damage. But Crowdstrike/Microsoft/whatever may not know that, and thus opt for the most “secure” option, which is to stop the boot process.

Trump was officially nominated by the RNC as their candidate. Biden hadn’t been nominated by the DNC yet, that was supposed to happen at the conference in a couple weeks. But now that he has pulled out, he will not be nominated and thus not be the official candidate.

Nah, but there were some Linux evangelists claiming this couldn’t possibly happen to Linux and it only happened to Windows because Windows is bad. And it was your own fault for getting this BSOD if you’re still running Windows.

And sure, Windows bad and all, but this one wasn’t really Microsofts fault.

I don’t think we are, at all.

I mostly say it because SMS is so ancient. Not encrypted, messages are storied by the carrier and can be requested by the government, etc… In that sense, even a corporate-controlled messaging system that offers E2EE would be a step up. After all, SMS is pretty corporate-controlled too, just different ones. But again, this is very much a European perspective, I can see why in the US this might be different.

iMessage is by far and away the most popular chat platform here, and is largely responsible for Apple’s local dominance in the smartphone market.

Ah true, iPhones are much more popular in the US. Quite interesting actually how that happened, iPhones aren’t all that popular here at all and Android phones dominate the market. I wonder why Apple hasn’t managed to copy their dominance here as well?

I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Looks like Tello, Cricket, MobileX, US Mobile and T-Mobile can offer it at least. Apparently it’s often marketed as a Tablet plan, which I suppose makes sense, but it seems a lot of carriers allow you to disable SMS in their web portals these days. I thought it’d be more niche in the US but it seems a more common option than I thought.

It’s been interesting to hear from you about your perspective on this, thanks!

I personally occasionally experience delayed sending/receiving of messages, or messages suddenly coming in in bulk. Only very rarely do messages not come in at all thankfully, but mostly the occasional delays in sending/receiving I think led to the reputation of poor reliablity for SMS. But it makes sense that the US would try to keep those issues to a minimum if so many people still use it, whereas in Europe perhaps it’s less of a priority?

Ah, I see. Your point isn’t necessarily reliability but availability. It’s an interesting perspective to hear that the US appears to be so behind (at least from a European perspective of course) when it comes to messaging apps. As far as SMS reliablity goes, I have occasionally had messages not send, or have messages come in delayed considerably. Or stuff like 2-factor auth texts not coming in, requesting a new one and then suddenly receiving 3 at a time. Not deal-breaking or anything, just the occasional annoyance.

I don’t think WhatsApp allows you to send a message to someone who doesn’t have the app. So WhatsApp would just inform you. Although I don’t recall the last time someone did not have either WhatsApp or Signal installed. But again, that appears to be far more common in the US?

Do you ever miss the extra features that web messaging brings, like in-chat polls, voice messages, etc…? I’m not sure how much of that RCS supports (because almost nobody uses that here). To me it seems like the convenience of web messaging outweighs the “does person x have app y” question, but that’s probably because I never really have to ask myself that question.

I also just realised that you state that everyone has SMS messaging. There are phone plans available here that don’t offer SMS messaging anymore. You can still receive them, but sending them either doesn’t work or costs a high premium (obviously this disadvantage is offset by a lower price for the rest of the plan). I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if SMS eventually just gets phased out.

If you send someone an SMS you know with great certainty that it will be received.

Not to get too bogged down in this debate or anything, but this European is surprised you say that SMS is reliable. One of the great motivators to use web-based messaging apps is because SMS is so notoriously unreliable, with messages occasionally not receiving or sending. Has SMS reliablity been improved much in recent years? Or is web-based messaging less reliable in your experience?

Genuinely curious btw, I’m not in the same party as the troll elsewhere in this thread.

The 3rd party service is AV. You do not want to boot a potentially compromised or insecure system that is unable to start its AV properly, and have it potentially access other critical systems. That’s a recipe for a perhaps more local but also more painful disaster. It makes sense that a critical enterprise system does not boot if something is off. No AV means the system is a security risk and should not boot and connect to other critical/sensitive systems, period.

These sorts of errors should be alleviated through backup systems and prevented by not auto-updating these sorts of systems.

Sure, for a personal PC I would not necessarily want a BSOD, I’d prefer if it just booted and alerted the user. But for enterprise servers? Best not.

And what guarantees that that “last known good config” is available, not compromised and there’s no malicious actor trying to force the system to use a config that has a vulnerability?

If AV suddenly stops working, it could mean the AV is compromised. A BSOD is a desirable outcome in that case. Booting a compromised system anyway is bad code.

Windows assumes that you installed that AV for a reason. If it suddenly faults, who’s to say it’s a bug and not some virus going ham on the AV? A BSOD is the most graceful exit you could do, ignoring and booting a potentially compromised system is a fairly big no-no (especially in systems that feel the need to install AV like this in the first place).

Better rebrand to Clownstrife I guess.

In the Netherlands 112 is fine, most critical systems are. It’s mostly airports that are getting fucked by this it seems.

Banks and PSPs are fine here too.

If Microsoft is unable to verify ownership of the account, they shouldn’t take ownership of your files.

Kickstarter does share it with the projects you back iirc, and those projects do occasionally sell that data to 3rd parties.

Could be an attempted Slovakian flag.