Our system wasn’t quite as critical, thankfully, but the app owners failing to respond to “Hey, by the way, your service account for your data base is gonna be closed” is just gross negligence. My condolences that you had to take the brunt of their scrambling to cover their asses.

For all the complaints I may have about certain processes and keeping certain stakeholders in the loop about changing the SQL Views they depend on, at least I acknowledge that plenty of people did heed the announcement and make the switch. It’s just that the “Oops, that mail must have drowned in my pile of IDGAF what our sysadmins are writing about again. Can’t you just give me the new password again, pretty please?” are far more visible.

They probably have to recite a standard company line, gritting their teeth as you both know it’s bullshit.

I don’t envy customer service reps. Most of them probably didn’t apply for the job because they love Microsoft or enjoy the prospect of fielding frustrated customers’ calls.

We had that some time ago with a service account for a specific system where individual personal accounts weren’t (yet) feasible. The credentials were supposed to be treated with confidence and not shared without the admins’ approval. Yeah, you can guess how that went.

When the time came to migrate access to the system to a different solution using personal accounts, it was announced that the service account password would be changed and henceforth kept under strict control by the sysadmin, who would remotely enter it where it was needed but never hand it out in clear text. That announcement was sent to all the authorised credential holders with the instruction to pass it on if anyone else had been given access, and repeated shortly before the change.

The change was even delayed for some sensitive reasons, but eventually went through. Naturally, everyone was prepared, had gone through the steps to request the new access and all was well. Nobody called to complain about things breaking, no error tickets were submitted to entirely unrelated units that had to dig around to find out who was actually responsible, and all lived happily ever after. In particular, the writer of this post was blissfully left alone and not involuntarily crowned the main point of contact by any upset users passing their name on to other people the writer had never even seen the name of.

Bet you think you’re a real expert on Dunning-Kruger, huh?

Boycott pronouns to help us fight against transgenderism.

Hate to break the news, but that sentence already broke the boycott. Better luck next time!

Maybe it will be enough to alert some of them to those issues? If the effects of corruption are felt more strongly, people may be more vocal about it and realise how many like-minded people there are. Then they may come to wonder how these bills keep getting passed if so many people oppose them.

Or they may keep their heads low for fear of sticking out and becoming the next target, or become dog-in-burning-house impersonators: “This is fine :)”

Leverage paranoia to fight ignorance. At least it’ll be good for something then.

I had to fall, to lose it all

Reddit went from “I append site:reddit.com when querying google for well-founded and nuanced info” to the opposite.

Open another terminal killall vim

You’ll have to be more precise on the definition of God. There are quite a lot of them.

The existence of an abstract concept is provable by thinking of it. If there exists an idea that you call God, then a God exists. However, that proves nothing about its properties beyond its mere existence as an idea, including whether it pertains to any real thing. Likewise, all attributes you ascribe to that idea become part of the idea, but do not automatically prove anything about reality.

Thus, the question whether there is an idea called God is trivially answered by asking it at all, but has little bearing on anything at all.

What makes ideas useful is that they group properties, and what makes them real is that there exists an actual thing having all those properties.

Thus, the question whether a real thing exists depends on the properties of that thing, so let’s tackle one:

Do I believe that there can be an omnipotent entity? No. The typical argument here is “Can God create a rock so heavy, They cannot lift it anymore?” Either answer contradicts the premise of omnipotence, unless that entity can create logical contradictions, in which case all argument and reasoning is moot anyway.

In particular, do I believe that some variation of the Abrahamic God exists? No, or at least none of those I’m aware of. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to being shown otherwise.

However, the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving God runs decidedly counter to the existence of suffering, even if we ignore (or exclude) the contradiction about omnipotence.

That sounds like a blockchain with signature verification against a previously established and acknowledged set of keys as consensus mechanism. Pretty reasonable, as far as use cases go.

However, it doesn’t solve the issue of disagreements and community splitting. If one part of the mod team decides to add another mod, but the rest doesn’t, what’s to prevent that part from splitting off and continuing their own version of the moderation chain? How is abuse of power handled? And in case of a split, how are community members informed?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a poor idea, I’m just saying that it won’t solve the issues of community splits, and I’m not sure anything ever can.

I didn’t think that kind of joke would ever :q

BTW, if anyone doesn’t know, but wants to know the point behind the fish, it’s supposedly an acrostic that produces the greek word for “Fish”: Ichthys (ἸΧΘΥΣ), composed of the words " Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ", transliterated “Iesous CHristos, THeou (h)Yios, Soter”, meaning “Jesus the anointed, son of god, saviour”.

Early christians used the symbol to mark meeting places and the like when they were being prosecuted by the Romans.

Medieval people: Prohibit Christians from making business with money because that’s a sin

Medieval people: Create an economy where moneylending is lucrative

Medieval people: Begin to exclude Jews from other lines of work

Medieval people: Why are the Jews making their profit with moneylending?

This guy: Jews are enriching themselves from wars they never chose by providing a service that only they could to kings that started wars they needed that service for.

Me, if the goats use me for parkour exercise

Disturbed - Legion of Monsters

You made sure the world will remember the name
But didn’t the thought even enter your mind?
You′d give a new legion of monsters
A reason to take your life

The song originally is about a school shooting, but the point is the same

The only winning move is to just offer a better solution and ignore him.

You’d think a better solution would be easy to find, but they spent so long indoctrinating their own followers to be loyal to names rather than concepts that they now fear these followers may attach to the Trump name.

“And this is why US-centrismis such a big problem in the internet. Everybody speaks Engliah, and the United States are the biggest in terms of English speakers. And through that a situation occurs where most users are seen as Americans, unless stated otherwise”

About right?

I can’t comment on the general trend, but this specific one seems a bit too circumstantial to be of use for a serious spying effort. You’d have to have the spyware running parallel to the apps usong passwords you want to steal in a specific way.

The risk exists, which is bad enough for stochastic reasons (eventually, someone will get lucky and manage to grab something sensitive, and since the potential damage from that is incalculable, the impact axis alone drives this into firm "you need to get that fix out asap), but probably irrelevant in terms of consistency, which would be what you’d need to actually monitor anyone.

If you manage to grab enough info to crack some financial access data, you can steal money. If you can take over some legit online account or obtain some email-password combo, you can sell it. But if you want to monitor what people are doing in otherwise private systems, you need some way to either check on demand or log their actions and periodically send them to your server.

It would be far more reliable to have injection backdoors to allow you access by virtue of forcing a credential check to come up valid than to hope for the lucky grab of credentials the user might change at an arbitrary moment in time.