I’d say the Pizzagate and birther movement did backfire to some extent, some moderates alienated by how ridiculous they were. Ultimately it wasn’t enough to stave off the Trump presidency, but if not for Pizzagate and birther movement, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Trump managed to even get the popular vote in 2016, for example. I didn’t even recall the ‘hilary has a penis’ thing at all, so I can’t speak to that.

Not true, sometimes it’s DNS.

I remember this sort of stuff a long time ago. There were wifi drivers that were either linux, but closed source, or horror of horrors having to resort to ndiswrapper…

Of course, the Ubuntu derivatives made this easy enough by just including it, but Fedora was much more purist about open source and so wouldn’t even tell you about rpm-fusion, let alone enable proprietary drivers for basic network access.

Now Fedora has edged a bit more practical and proactively let’s users know about how to add proprietary stuff and the wifi industry takes Linux seriously, if not for desktop use then for all the embedded use cases they would be left out of without good Linux support. Fedora is still a bit far on the ‘purist’ side still (try to play a lot of media using dnf provided software, it will tend to break), but not as hard as it used to be)

the TLS-ALPN-01 challenge requires a https server that implements generating a self-signed certificate on demand in response to a specific request. So we have to shut down our usual traffic forwarder and let an ACME implementation control the port for a minute or so. It’s not a long downtime, but irritatingly awkward to do and can disrupt some traffic on our site that has clients from every timezone so there’s no universal ‘3 in the morning’ time, and even then our service is used as part of other clients ‘3 in the morning’ maintenance windows… Folks can generally take a blip in the provider but don’t like that we generate a blip in those logs if they connect at just the wrong minute in a month…

As to why not support going straight to 443, don’t know why not. I know they did TLS-ALPN-01 to keep it purely as TLS extensions to stay out of the URL space of services which had value to some that liked being able to fully handle it in TLS termination which frequently is nothing but a reverse proxy and so in principle has no business messing with payload like HTTP-01 requires. However for nginx at least this is awkward as nginx doesn’t support it.

Difference there being everyone knows that’s a mockery and not genuinely intended to be true.

For the ‘allegedly true’ stuff that is actually realistic and realistically knowable but is on dubious grounds in actual facts, that can backfire without much upside.

Not speaking to this specific bit of information, but generally speaking when they give you just so much easily provable material to work with, it’s just silly to go far into speculation over trivialities that actually distract from the big and real issues going on.

And what disturbances do you mean?

This very article seems to be a prime example. Yes, NATO spending is up, and because of Russia conducting a violent unprovoked invasion of a sovereign territory in their area, and a general reduction in confidence that they can rely on USA and must fend for themselves. Trump’s schtick is mostly ‘America shouldn’t help so much, fend for yourself’. Even with somewhat elevated spending, would that offset the loss of capability that would come with the US just failing to live up to their NATO obligations when the time came?

Why would Putin kick off the Ukraine war immediately after his “agent” leaves office?

Because things were going to be as good as he could get them and the best opportunity was before the new administration could reverse course? In the most favorable Russia outcome, Trump might have followed through on threats to further reduce NATO contributions, but with Trump gone and a more NATO-friendly admin in place, things were going to get worse for Putin before they could get better. I vaguely recall some non-US situations that similarly could have greased the wheels for an easier annexation of Ukraine, so it’s not like the US is the only factor in such timing anyway, but don’t recall what specifics made me think of that.

Trump is not a Russian asset. He’s an easily-manipulated businessman

I will agree that it’s not a straightforward “Trump is a Russian agent”, but an “asset” is not an agent. He’s a convenient “friend” that is easily manipulated/bribed. He doesn’t have loyalty or anything like that to Putin, but he is plainly easy to manipulate, and Putin’s circle has been consistently in position to do that manipulation for decades. Others may be no saints, but Trump is comparitively easier to mess with because of just being terrible at the things he purports to be good at.

Broadly, I agree.

I would still worry as while they might not actively attack, they may happily just nope on out of helping any NATO allies. NATO allies are more self-sufficient than before, but NATO without US forces and equipment would be much weaker than an active US.

However, he might just go and pick up Greenland if things pop off. If NATO were chewing on a fight with Russia, I think it would be a safe bet that europe would barely spare the time to shake their head disapprovingly if US just went and occupied Greenland. I don’t think they’d actually do a hot war with western european nations, but could easily see them just ‘declaring’ ownership of Greenland and no one stopping them.

Frankly, another choice virtually forced by the broader IT.

If the broader IT either provides or brokers a service, we are not allowed to independently spend money and must go through them.

Fine, they will broker commercial certificates, so just do that, right? Well, to renew a certificate, we have to open a ticket and attach our csr as well as a “business justification” and our dept incurs a hundred dollar internal charge for opening that ticket at all. Then they will let it sit for a day or two until one of their techs can get to it. Then we are likely to get feedback about something like their policy changing to forbid EC keys and we must do RSA instead, or vice versa because someone changed their mind. They may email an unexpected manager for confirmation in accordance to some new review process they implemented. Then, eventually, their tech manually renews it with a provider and attaches the certificate to the ticket.

It’s pretty much a loophole that we can use let’s encrypt because they don’t charge and technically the restrictions only come in when purchasing is involved. There was a security guy raising hell that some of our sites used that “insecure” let’s encrypt and demanding standards change to explicitly ban them, but the bearaucracy to do that was insurmountable so we continue.

No, they are appealing to MAGA folks that are picturing getting rid of all the dark skinned people they don’t like.

The people that consider that nuance have already been against the ICE crap, you don’t have to convince those. The only people that can be convinced are those that you need to get their racism aside before they’ll join you. It’s distasteful, but it’s a way to grow the voices condemning this behavior.

They in fact refuse to even do a redirect… it’s monumentally stupid and I’ve repeatedly complained, but ‘security’ team says port 80 doing anything but dropping the packet or connection refused is bad…

Ours is automated, but we incur downtime on the renewal because our org forbids plain http so we have to do TLS-ALPN-01. It is a short downtime. I wish let’s encrypt would just allow http challenges over https while skipping the cert validation. It’s nuts that we have to meaningfully reply over 80…

Though I also think it’s nuts that we aren’t allowed to even send a redirect over 80…

I concur that a fight against EU is just completely unlikely, I do think Venezuela is possible since his administration has pretty much been giving free reign and seems to have their heart set on it…

I don’t think having the US attack them is in the cards, but I could see them sitting such a conflict out.

Hey, he earned that purple heart when that skateboard viciously injured him

When they get all melodramatic about flour, eggs, sandwiches being tossed at them, don’t they realize how pathetic they sound acting like these acts are in and of themselves just horrible violance?

Was never going to happen. The most efficient plane uses way more fuel than even a “gas guzzler”. The common driver is dangerous enough with a land vehicle between mistakes operating and slack maintenance, imagine if that population were all flying around.

Might be nice to make that distinction, and have caps.

Millions to move an executive around makes no sense. Even if the route and timing can’t work using commercial, you can still fly a cheaper turboprop for people moving.

A freight company needing millions to move packages, ok, sure.

Whole it could provide some premium features (I’m imagining more like massage type features), the equivalent of 400 thousand USD seems near impossible to see that much value. Maybe 40 thousand for a luxury item for rich people could work more.

It’s just a limited run publicity stunt that will be forgotten within a few weeks.