Other than the crazy horoscope stuff, a job wanting you to sign an NDA and a Non-Compete likely know they are a shitty place to work and won't to keep you there so you can't go somewhere else and also not able to tell anyone how shitty it is. They probably already know Non-Competes in California have been unenforceable for a long time but they don't want you to know that.

The problem historically isn't that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.

Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they'd specifically throttle them if they didn't pay a premium which also undermined Level3's peering agreement with Comcast.

Peering agreements are basically like "I'll route your traffic, if you route my traffic" and that's how the Internet works.

Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company -- so decades now.

This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we've seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming -- they promise!...one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it's going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.

How about adding speed limit without a destination, showing house/building numbers around you, traffic overlay without a destination, allow voice response to if reported hazards/speed traps/whatever is still there, better lane assistance, turn or which side the destination is on preview on the turn before so you know which lane to be in? Maybe a Recents list that doesn't seem like it's just a shuffle of a few random locations you've been to maybe once in the last 6 months?

Maybe some of that has been added somewhat recently?

You can tell this was probably illustrated by an older person or for older people because what kids actually watch TV and what kids even know what rabbit ears are in the US? And that screen is poking out like it's an old CRT with it's big ass hanging out like its trying to exhaust enough heat to cause the heat death of the universe by itself.

If someone told me this came out in the 70s or 80s I'd believe them.

NAT provides some measure of security as pure coincidence to how it works. It is not designed or intended to provide security. It does not inspect packet payloads in order to filter them for security. It looks at the header and attempts to route it to an internal IP address (your devices on your LAN) and if it cannot, it will drop the packet because the header will only have the external IP address -- the packet has no idea which device it is supposed to go to. Forwarding a port is telling the NAT to assume that when a packet hits a certain port, if it doesn't know the destination internal IP, forward it to some internal IP anyway.

The reason you can connect to websites, ssh outside, FTP, whatever, is because your connection comes from your internal IP first to some other IP and therefore, NAT knows which internal IP to route those packets to.

Take for example this scenario:

You download some software. It has malware that provides command and control (C2) to someone else outside of your network. A firewall and/or antivirus may be able to stop this and hopefully notify you. NAT will not help here. Furthermore, if you have uPNP enabled (usually it is by default on your router) the malware can forward any ports through your NAT to the compromised device opening it up to bot attacks and the like.

Another scenario:

You want to play a video game with you and your friends and you're going to host it. So either you manually forward those ports or perhaps uPNP just does it for you. That game has an exploit known by attackers, or perhaps it can just be DDoS'd. Your NAT isn't going to stop that. Hopefully a firewall will help you here. It definitely will if you set up explicit rules so that if they aren't your friend's IPs it will drop them. Though it is possible the game is exploitable and your friend's are compromised.

Take for example malware has been known to spread via Minecraft.

Yeah I'm so tired of hearing that "We can't build the pyramids even with the technology of today" because that's just a bullshit statement with nothing supporting it. It is just to try to dismiss actual reality in order to prop up "It was aliens obviously" that has zero evidence.

Don't forget about Meta somehow committing mass copyright infringement of books but playing the 'information should be free but only for this specific instance of rocketing our AI training' bullshit.

Remember when Tucker Carlson's text messages were released and he called his fans 'especially dumb....cousin fuckers'? Remember when they still revered him anyway?

Trump could probably be at a rally in the deep south in a factory and call them all a bunch of good-for-nothing lazy losers and they'd still vote for him. They'd probably say "He speaks his mind and doesn't care what anyone including us thinks. He's so badass!" or like I've actually heard more than a few times "He says dumb things that I don't agree with but I agree with his politics" which is ridiculous but it doesn't matter.

More rage bait:

• built it on land belonging to the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe
• tribal land and the tribe created a Cannabis Control Commission
• However, the sheriff's office was informed by members of the tribe that they were not authorized to conduct the raid on their land. In turn, members of the sheriff's office said the tribal members "didn't know what they were talking about," the lawsuit said.
• during the raid and officers confiscated $300,000 from the tribe's safe.
• McCormick's "family home 'mysteriously' caught fire, after the sheriff's office ordered power and water to his property to be turned off, resulting in the home "being completely burned down," along with much of his personal belongings.

In my opinion Dan Goodin always reports as an alarmist and rarely gives mitigation much focus or in one case I recall, he didn't even mention the vulnerable code never made it to the release branch since they found the vulnerability during testing, until the second to last paragraph (and pretended that paragraph didn't exist in the last paragraph). I can't say in that one case, it wasn't strategic but it sure seemed that way.

For example, he failed to note that the openssh 9.6 patch was released Monday to fix this attack. It would have went perfectly in the section called "Risk assessment" or perhaps in "So what now?" mentioned that people should, I don't know, apply the patch that fixes it.

Another example where he tries scare the reading stating that "researchers found that 77 percent of SSH servers exposed to the Internet support at least one of the vulnerable encryption modes, while 57 percent of them list a vulnerable encryption mode as the preferred choice." which is fine to show how prevalent the algorithms are used but does not mention that the attack would have to be complicated and at both end points to be effective on the Internet or that the attack is defeated with a secure tunnel (IPSec or IKE for example) if still supporting the vulnerable key exchange methods.

He also seems to love to bash FOSS anything as hard as possible, in what to me, feels like a quest to prove proprietary software is more secure than FOSS. When I see his name as an author, I immediately take it with a grain of salt and look for another source of the same information.

or even basic product management.

Googe Wallet (2011) became Android Pay (2015) became Google Pay (2018) became Google Wallet (2022), except in some places. Also, except in the US (and maybe elsewhere?) where Google Pay is still around but just to send money between people.

Google Talk (2005) and Google+ Messenger (2011) sort of became Google Hangouts (2013), which was part of Google+ (2011) which became Hangouts (2013), which became both Duo (2016) and Allo (2016) but then during both Duo and Allo became Hangouts Meet (2019) and Hangouts Chat (2019) which became Google Meet (2017 -- Yes, Hangouts Meet was still around) and Google Chat (2017 -- Yes, Hangouts Chat was still around). Google Allo died in 2018 and Duo died in 2022.

Inbox (2015) became a better gmail Android app than gmail actually was. Inbox discontinued in 2019 with the advertisement that gmail integrated Inbox's features (it didn't add most of them). This spawned other 3rd party gmail handling apps to take its place.

Google Play Music (2011) podcasts split into Google Podcasts (2018) stopped having releases in 2021 and rolled up/is rolling up into YouTube Music (2015). Google Play Music became YouTube Music in 2020.

Right now there's even Android Auto and Android Automotive simultaneously to pretty much do the same thing but are not the same. Android Automotive itself exists as Android Automotive with Google Automotive Services and also as Android Automotive without Google Automotive Services.

Android Auto for Phone Screens was replaced with Google Assistant's driving mode.

There are many, many, many more crazy branding issues but I just don't feel like continuing. Google has also killed at least 54 hardware lines, 59 apps and 210 services.