Thanks for the links, it’s interesting background. In that article from February 2021, The Artlantic states “There was also never a default”.

There was indeed no default as of February 2021. The default occured later, in April-May 2022, so we can’t expect a past article to include that information.

All major lenders need to take part in restructuring the debt indeed. That occured in 2023, and multiple lenders asked for a restructuring deal similar to the first one signed with China. I don’t know about the US, but Japan/India/French lender were looking for a similar restructuration terms. That sounds fair to me.

A debt rework between Sri Lanka and countries including Japan, India and France was also expected this week, but news of the EXIM deal took them by surprise. The three nations request comparability of debt treatment with China.

“As far as the information we have is concerned, conditions set by China are comparable to ours,” Kanda said.

The country’s default is clear evidence the overall debt wasn’t sustainable. Both Sri Lanka and its lenders have a responsibility on this. China is often the first mentioned because it was (still is?) Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign lender, although it would be good to have transparency of the country’s debt and interest rates on a per-lender basis, to see which ones are the most sustaonables.

The 2022 bloomberg article you cite first state:

It didn’t provide details on the value of the loans which it said matured at the end of 2021, nor did it state which nations owed the money.

I couldn’t read much further due to the paywal.

The Bloomberg article has too few details to make conclusions. We don’t know if AP and Bloomberg articles are referring to the same countries, nor whether it’s a significant portion or that country’s debt toward China.

The Reuters 2021 article has more details, and cite write-offs, as well as specific countries benefiting from deferrals: Angola, Pakistan, Kenya, the Republic of Congo. It’s good to read there’s some willingness to accomodate some countries.

Sadly that didn’t prevent Zambia and Sri Lanka from defaulting. China has lended hundred of billion of dollars with unsustainable terms, and this contributed to countries defaulting. That’s a bad situation for everyone involved.

I hope Tanzania and Zambia read the fine pints on the loan/inversement agreement.

Knowledge of the account is an obvious caveat. Yubikey-based MFA is an added layer of protection for accounts, so any kind of attack against MFA assumes the attacker already knows which account to target.

It’s like saying “our door lock is flawed, but the attacker would need to have knowledge of the door”.

The cost and complexity is what’s noteworthy and is more relevant. Although attack cost and complexity usuallu goes down with advances in tooling and research. So it may be a good idea to plan a progressive retirement of affected keys.

Better late than never.

Scientists don’t have to explain why they’re leaving twitter. The reasons should be obvious to anyone familiar with Twitter.

Journalists need to explain why they’re still on Twitter, given that platform has so much bots, trolls, hate and lack moderation.

Once the war in Ukraine is over, weaponized drones won’t just vanish. They’re already made by companies with different level of ethics and any country able to pay is or will be able to buy them. Sooner or later, like many weapons, organised crime will get their hands on them, and use them outside of battlefield.

There’s no way to completely prevent it, but we could at least limit damage by regulating the shit out of drones.

🎻

A call for resignation may only be the first step, or a way to confront him and calling out his failures.

No need to look very far. The answer is within the subheading of the article being discussed here. You don’t even need to click the link nor to read the article, since tartigrada included this information in the quote that’s part of this post’s text:

Donald Trump is reportedly advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would be a violation of the Logan Act.

If that happened, I sincerely hope there is proof, and that it’s on its way to a capable prosecutor.

Nice.

Does Forgejo support Git? I’m not familiar with Forgejo, and it’s not obvious in this announcement or their homepage.

Forgejo does support Git, I didn’t read carefully enough.

There miners robot don’t exist yet, but they would probably require high tech components and manufacturing capabilities for all these different components (motors, electronics, batteries, sensors, …).

Self replicating robots is still science fiction. If we wanted to build such robots in space, we’d need to build and launch manufacturing facilities in space before we can actually build robots in space.

Hypothetically, it would only make sense to mine rare materials in space, and it would only have environmental benefits if we return significant amount compared to the mass of rockets we send into space.

There is no coal/gas/oil in space, and even if extracting these resources were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.

Space mining would be at best viable for very niche uses for a few material. It won’t bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.

I was about to say people can walk and chew gum. But this kind of miss the point.

This is not space exploration, this is not for science’s sake. This is about extracting resources, and making a profit. I heard one of these companies perpetuate the idea that there’s virtually infinite resource, which imply we can continue with humanity’s exponential growth without negative consequences. That mindset landed us in the inextricable mess we’re in.

GIMP 2.99.99.1.5-final-reallyfinal-rc64-proper

These integrations have big limitations which I would consider deal breakers. To quote this blog post :

❌ Files are not stored on the local disk like a proper Cloud service app

❌ Cannot be used without internet

That’s better than nothing, but definitely not a good option.

It sounds like Google Drive isn’t a very good option for Linux users. Better look for another provider which support Linux, or to do it yourself with syncthing.

If all you need is 15 Go, it’s something which can easily be stored on another device and synced with syncting. If you need more you’d have to pay anyway, go pick anything but Google.

That’s unfortunate.

Technically this hasn’t been approved by the General Assembly yet, and then individual countries would need to ratify it. But press coverage suggest it’s a done deal.

For the treaty to go into force, 40 nations have to ratify it.

UN approves its first treaty targeting cybercrime

In many places, ratifying a treaty requires parliament approval, so it’s not going to be quick. Talk to your representative once this treaty comes up in your parliement’s agenda.

Bitcoin is not practical for small purshases, because transaction takes several minutes, and have around 50USD per-transaction fee. Note the cost of fees and value of bitcoin vary wildly, so the same amount of bitcoin may be enough to pay rent in August, but not in September.

On a more ethical level, it’s also quite bad because of the insane energy cost of bitcoin transactions.