tal

Yeah, that's true -- that's a risk. You'd have to structure the system in such a way to minimize that. But...you gotta also remember that the existing government also has access to a lot of things like wiretapping capabilities and such; this isn't our first rodeo with potential for an incumbent to try to abuse government powers.

I can think of legal and oversight structures that can help mitigate risk of an incumbent trying to abuse the US government being responsible for providing that sort of service...but it's hard to do much about state-level foreign intelligence services otherwise.

Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes.

As Gizmodo deduced, the trend seemed to start on the r/London subreddit, where a user complained about a spot in Borough Market being “ruined by influencers” on Monday:

"Last 2 times I have been there has been a queue of over 200 people, and the ones with the food are just doing the selfie shit for their [I]nsta[gram] pages and then throwing most of the food away."

So, I don't know what the situation is in London.

But COVID-19 really clobbered a lot of commercial establishments, and particularly eateries. I'm guessing that at least some traffic might be a return of the public to restaurants, with the supply of restaurant capacity at a low due to having gone through hard times over the past our years or so.

kagis

Ah, right. This is Europe, and while the US got hit by higher energy costs too, the Ukraine invasion really dicked up energy prices in Europe for a while. And then you have the hangover from the COVID-19-related spending happening, as inflation bites, and reducing spending on restaurants is an easy thing to cut on one's budget. And this points out that restaurants are a labor-intensive industry, and Brexit has driven labor costs up by cutting the labor pool.

https://www.ft.com/content/a36ad5fd-db20-4ba8-89ea-e185838c8aa0

UK restaurant sector hit by cost of living and Covid legacy

Stuart Devine thought his chain of fish and chip restaurants in Aberdeen had survived the worst when the UK government lifted Covid-19 lockdowns for good in spring 2021 and customers returned to enjoy the classic British meal.

But before the Ashvale could fully recover it was dealt another blow, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted global supply chains and sent energy and food prices soaring.

Devine’s struggles are shared by roughly 40 per cent of UK restaurant owners, who are operating at or below break-even point, after the sector was hit by a perfect storm of pandemic shutdowns and the cost of living crisis, according to data from UKHospitality.

The trade body estimates that up to 30 per cent of businesses in the sector have closed since Covid struck. About 1,169 restaurants shut in the past year alone, equivalent to more than three a day, according to UKHospitality and consultancy CGA by NIQ.

“The money coming from the front door is just not enough to offset the significant cost of doing business that the restaurants are facing,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality.

While energy prices have fallen from their peak over the past 12 months, restaurants continue to bear the brunt of elevated food costs. The particularly labour intensive industry has also struggled with staff shortages, worsened by Brexit, and to keep pace with the statutory minimum wage. It stands at £10.42 an hour and will rise to £11.44 in April.

Devine said “the hardest thing is that the only thing you can do is put your prices up”, noting that there was a limit to how much lifting prices could help at a time of already weak consumer confidence and tight household budgets.

So the combination of all those things would tend to have squeezed the supply of restaurants, and it might be that if there's enough demand to consistently fill restaurants in London, expand existing or open new ones, that things will tend to return to a more-normal state.

Oh, yeah, not saying that it's a contest or that Ukraine (or Russia) should stop using FPVs or loitering drones. I mean, if there isn't a better alternative, then there isn't a better alternative. Just that it's an unfortunate aspect of having lots of electrically-powered things that both need lightweight, high-density batteries and need to explode, when we're lithium-constrained.

Wasn't even principally thinking about the pollution aspect, just the "that's more lithium that probably isn't going to be recoverable" aspect.

Our entire government has played like it cared about infosec for years, but has always made weird exceptions for high-up officials.

This isn't the government, though. Like, this is Trump being hit on campaign, not as a sitting president, and Vance has never been a sitting VP, just a candidate.

Trump and Vance, as of today, are just private citizens.

When Trump was President, or when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State or something like that, okay, yeah, I get you. I'm not saying that we always do the right things for government officials -- like, I'm not saying that your broader concern isn't valid.

But for this particular Trump/Vance compromise, I don't think that that's what's driving the situation -- I think that it's the vulnerability of political candidates, people who are not yet officials.

I mean, Russia and Iran have broken into campaign sites. I suppose China isn't going to want to miss out on the fun.

I commented earlier that I think that perhaps the government should provide IT services to secure presidential political campaigns. That isn't a full counter to espionage; poking around in someone's stuff before they have actually kicked off a campaign might well itself be interesting. But it seems like kind of low-hanging fruit, given that candidates on the campaign trail are clearly being actively, repeatedly, and successfully targeted by foreign intelligence agencies. And those are only the cases that we know about -- it's probably a safe bet that penetrations have occurred that we haven't been able to pick up on.

And I'm skeptical that political campaigns have the resources and expertise to secure themselves against national intelligence agencies.

I think that this is probably a general issue for democracies. Governments will typically have counterintelligence agencies and policy in place to protect incumbent leaders against espionage. They may or may not be successful, but at least they put the best tools they have on the job. But...in democracies, power can change, candidates are not protected in the same way, and targeting candidates may be a potent way for a foreign intelligence agency to either swing elections or obtain information and leverage useful for down the line, when a candidate has become a new leader.

In a column published on The Post’s website Friday, Post Publisher William Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post only began regularly endorsing presidential candidates in 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time.”

Hmm.

On one hand, I frequently complain about media partisanship.

On the other hand, I care much more about bias -- especially willingness to distort a situation in the name of that advocacy, or mislead readers -- being inserted into articles. I really don't have a problem with a newspaper writing a single endorsement and clearly explaining their case for doing so. In fact, I suspect that it's probably got potential to be one of the more-articulate places to make a case for someone.

I ended a subscription to The Atlantic, years back, because I was tired of reading preaching for Obama in every couple of articles, years back. I didn't have a problem with Obama. However, I was exasperated over having political advocacy constantly being inserted into everything I read.

Speaking for myself and what media I'd rather read, that is what I'd rather have changed, rather than the presence of an endorsement, something which only really occurs once during election time and is clearly marked.

I don't think that the problem is 2FA itself so much as poor UX on existing systems.

Let's say that I have a little USB keychain dongle in my pocket with an "approve" button and a tiny screen. When I sign in, at the time that I plug my password in, I plug the dongle in. It shows the information for whom I am approving authentication. I push the "approve" button.

It's got a trusted display (unlike a smartcard, so that a point-of-sale system can't claim that I'm approving something other than what I am).

It can store multiple keys, and I basically use it for any credentials that I don't mind carrying with myself.

I then keep another, "higher security" dongle at home with more-sensitive keys.

Does that add some overhead relative to just entering my password? Yeah. But is it a big deal? No. And it makes it a lot harder for someone to swipe credentials.

I agree that using phone-linked SMS 2FA authentication is problematic (for a number of reasons, not just because it locks you to a phone, but because there are also privacy implications there).

I have to say that one minor but unfortunate aspect of this conflict is that we're not doing a great job of recycling an awful lot of lithium batteries.

EDIT: One thing I have been wondering about is the practicality of an FPV carrier -- like, a reusable winged drone, maybe with a deployable chute for landing or something, or a larger quadcopter -- that can launch an FPV quadcopter to do the actual hit. That provides range, possibly slashes time-to-target, and lets more parts be reused. The less that has to go on the vehicle that actually explodes, the better.

It is also likely to be unwelcome news in China, which has long been North Korea’s main ally but whose influence over the reclusive nuclear-armed state is being eroded by leader Kim Jong Un’s growing relationship with President Vladimir Putin.

Ehhhh.

On one hand, yes. North Korea plays Russia against China, and during this war, North Korea can provide things that Russia really wants, so China probably has less direct pull in North Korea than normal.

But...the flip side of that is that China's influence over Russia is also probably at an all-time high, in part as a result of this conflict.

And my guess is that the China-Russia effect is much-more-likely to be a long-lived effect than the Russia-North-Korea effect, due to things like economic and technical ties being established. Just the other day, I read an article talking about how it was expected that North Korea's relationship with Russia would probably do quite a bit to head back in the direction of normal after the war.

My expectation is that China can probably afford to play the long game.

Here's a Smerch being hit last year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/16lxkzh/ukrainian_spotter_drone_captures_a_precision/

I wonder what that yellow smoke is? Burning propellant?

Yeah it's probably from the solid rocket propellant. Apparently nitrogen dioxide is a common oxidizer in rocket engines and creates yellow smoke.

Some context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard

Goddard eschewed publicity, because he did not have time to reply to criticism of his work, and his imaginative ideas about space travel were shared only with private groups he trusted. He did, though, publish and talk about the rocket principle and sounding rockets, since these subjects were not too "far out." In a letter to the Smithsonian, dated March 1920, he discussed: photographing the Moon and planets from rocket-powered fly-by probes, sending messages to distant civilizations on inscribed metal plates, the use of solar energy in space, and the idea of high-velocity ion propulsion. In that same letter, Goddard clearly describes the concept of the ablative heat shield, suggesting the landing apparatus be covered with "layers of a very infusible hard substance with layers of a poor heat conductor between" designed to erode in the same way as the surface of a meteor.[47]

Publicity and Criticism

The publication of Goddard's document gained him national attention from U.S. newspapers, most of it negative. Although Goddard's discussion of targeting the moon was only a small part of the work as a whole (eight lines on the next to last page of 69 pages), and was intended as an illustration of the possibilities rather than a declaration of intent, the papers sensationalized his ideas to the point of misrepresentation and ridicule. Even the Smithsonian had to abstain from publicity because of the amount of ridiculous correspondence received from the general public.[21]: 113  David Lasser, who co-founded the American Rocket Society (ARS), wrote in 1931 that Goddard was subjected in the press to the "most violent attacks."[50]

On January 12, 1920, a front-page story in The New York Times, "Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon", reported a Smithsonian press release about a "multiple-charge, high-efficiency rocket." The chief application envisaged was "the possibility of sending recording apparatus to moderate and extreme altitudes within the Earth's atmosphere", the advantage over balloon-carried instruments being ease of recovery, since "the new rocket apparatus would go straight up and come straight down." But it also mentioned a proposal "to [send] to the dark part of the new moon a sufficiently large amount of the most brilliant flash powder which, in being ignited on impact, would be plainly visible in a powerful telescope. This would be the only way of proving that the rocket had really left the attraction of the earth, as the apparatus would never come back, once it had escaped that attraction."[51]

On January 13, 1920, the day after its front-page story about Goddard's rocket, an unsigned New York Times editorial, in a section entitled "Topics of the Times", scoffed at the proposal. The article, which bore the title "A Severe Strain on Credulity",[52] began with apparent approval, but soon went on to cast serious doubt:

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even highest, part of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising device. Such a rocket, too, might carry self-recording instruments, to be released at the limit of its flight, and conceivable parachutes would bring them safely to the ground. It is not obvious, however, that the instruments would return to the point of departure; indeed, it is obvious that they would not, for parachutes drift exactly as balloons do.[53]

The article pressed further on Goddard's proposal to launch rockets beyond the atmosphere:

[A]fter the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that. ... Of course, [Goddard] only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.[54]

Thrust is however possible in a vacuum.[55]

Aftermath

A week after the New York Times editorial, Goddard released a signed statement to the Associated Press, attempting to restore reason to what had become a sensational story:

Too much attention has been concentrated on the proposed flash pow[d]er experiment, and too little on the exploration of the atmosphere. ... Whatever interesting possibilities there may be of the method that has been proposed, other than the purpose for which it was intended, no one of them could be undertaken without first exploring the atmosphere.[56]

In 1924, Goddard published an article, "How my speed rocket can propel itself in vacuum", in Popular Science, in which he explained the physics and gave details of the vacuum experiments he had performed to prove the theory.[57] But, no matter how he tried to explain his results, he was not understood by the majority. After one of Goddard's experiments in 1929, a local Worcester newspaper carried the mocking headline "Moon rocket misses target by 238,799 1⁄2 miles."[58]

Though the unimaginative public chuckled at the "moon man," his groundbreaking paper was read seriously by many rocketeers in America, Europe, and Russia who were stirred to build their own rockets. This work was his most important contribution to the quest to "aim for the stars."[59]: 50 

"A Correction"

Forty-nine years after its editorial mocking Goddard, on July 17, 1969—the day after the launch of Apollo 11—The New York Times published a short item under the headline "A Correction". The three-paragraph statement summarized its 1920 editorial and concluded:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.[60]

In total, there were 118 false positives — a rate of 4.29%.

Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing company executives of overstating the devices’ capabilities and claiming that “Evolv does not reliably detect knives or guns.”

I mean, in terms of performance, I'd be more concerned about the false positive rate than the false negative rate, given the context. Like, if you miss a gun, whatever. That's at worst just the status quo, which has been working. Some money gets wasted on the machine. But if you are incorrectly stopping more than 1 in 25 New Yorkers from getting on their train, and apply that to all subway riders, that sounds like a monumental mess.