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As far as I can tell, using the word cyber to specifically and only talk about security has come from the kind of suits who take Gartner seriously.

I don't know any techies who use the term like that, unless they're in a role that interfaces with the suits.


> Why have any humans at all

Why have humans do work at all? We could have a radically better existence. It would mean that the few at the top of the pyramid lose their privileged position relative to the rest of us, but we could, actually, have that world of abundance for all.

Work in the current sense arguably isn't even desirable

Maybe I've just read too many Culture books.


Seems like Sam was angling for that with some of his China vs USA rhetoric

Why would they need a bail out? Their assets can be sold off, they can be taken over or be absorbed by another American entity.

Absolutely no reason for a bail out.

It may hurt the ego of Altman and Brockman - but that's their problem.


If DoD systems are running on OpenAI infrastructure, you can't just pause them for 6 months during an acquisition. This gets far more complex than just "liquidation of assets".

Because their assets would have been vastly overvalued. The bailout is when the government buys those assets at as close to that fictional valuation as they can, and likely then sells them back at their actual worth.

> Absolutely no reason for a bail out.

There's never been any reason for a bailout. It's just handing tax money to wealthy people who have made bad decisions.


The contract with the Pentagon is a good first step. Being a government contractor is pretty fail safe.

In Australia the court ruled that they can only sue for the cost of renting the movie, so they don't bother trying to recoup their ten bucks

That's interesting. Do you have further reading? I've seen AFACT v iiNet, but that doesn't look to be the source of "cost of renting", just that the ISP isn't responsible for their users.

Yep, check out Dallas Buyers Club v iiNet

Here's some commentary on it:

> Justice Perram discussed the idea of speculative invoicing within Australia

> Representing to a consumer that they have a liability which they do not may well be misleading and deceptive conduct within the meaning of s 18 of the Australian Consumer Law and it may be equally misleading to represent to someone that their potential liability is much higher than it could ever realistically be. There may also be something to be said for the idea that speculative invoicing might be a species of unconscionable conduct within one or other of s 21 of the Australian Consumer Law or s 12CB of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 (Cth).

> Further, even if speculative invoicing was deemed to be lawful within Australia, the damages that the individual may be liable to are often calculated differently to that of the United States. In Australia, damages are compensatory in nature, meaning to compensate the plaintiff for the loss suffered. One Intellectual Property Lawyer has been quoted as saying, ‘If a film costs $20, the damages would ordinarily be expected to be $20.’

https://www.kells.com.au/insights/business/dallas-buyers-clu...


Canada is capped at $5k for noncommercial infringement, and even at that amount it still isn't worth it for the copyright holder to go to court.

Microsoft are saying it's because those accounts didn't undergo verification for the Windows Hardware Program

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/microsoft_dev_account...


I understand it's because it's a device driver, but why should a pure software publisher which has no hardware product of any sort be required to go through a "hardware program" gatekeeper of what binaries a person can choose to install and run on their own computer?

They started it because the drivers people used to use from hardware vendors would routinely blue screen windows, which made MS look like the reason windows would crash. Hardware vendors are notoriously inept at software.

> They started it because the drivers people used to use from hardware vendors would routinely blue screen windows, which made MS look like the reason windows would crash. Hardware vendors are notoriously inept at software.

But hardware vendors also want Windows licenses to include with their hardware, so it's pretty easy to say "do the hardware program certification if you want the discount" and that's exactly what they did in the early days, and it worked fine. Even the peripherals (which are increasingly rare now anyway) still want to be able to put the Windows logo on their product.

At which point we still have the same question: Why are they harassing the WireGuard developers, who have their own reputation for not being inept at software and therefore shouldn't need a Microsoft certification program to assure their users that their code is trustworthy to install?


> Why are they harassing the WireGuard developers, who have their own reputation for not being inept at software

I would guess this is just large organizations Seeing Like a State whereby they "seek to force administrative legibility on their subjects by homogenizing them".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State


At which point we're back to, why is Microsoft acting like a government and treating their users like property of the crown instead of autonomous adult human beings who should be free to choose what software they want on their own PC?

all five letters of that answer are in your username :)

So that narrows it down to about 300 possibilities. https://gist.github.com/jes/bbdad4c6e54ffa120f62cd443ded8d8f

Plausible candidates include "asset", "enemy", "homes", "mates", "moats", "money", "nasty", "state", "stunt".


Awesome

(467 on macOS Sequoia it seems)


Are you thinking of a single five letter word, two words of three and two letters, or an entire sentence that only uses 5 distinct letters?

Consider being less cryptic, for the sake of those with English as a fourth language.


(also a non-native speaker here, mildly annoyed by the obscure joke from GP)

Wordplay are exactly the kind of stuff that LLMs excel at, so I asked Gemini flash, and I got

> snarky play on words by suggesting that the answer to AnthonyMouse's question is "Money."

> Here is the breakdown of how they arrived at that:

> The Username: AnthonyMouse

> The Letters: The word "Money" can be formed using the letters found in M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e

(Gemini's answer is actually longer, I just kept the interesting bit)

Amusingly, this answer exhibits a similar problem to the "how many r in raspberry" problem (it forgets how to spell correctly), since

AnthonyMouse != M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e

But it seems that it got to the correct answer (or an incorrect but plausible :) ) despite that


LLMs give you the boring (i.e. statistically probable) answer. You could probably get it to say "money" almost regardless of what the original question was because it's so generic. It might even say that for a name without all the right letters.

Let's save a tree and ask bash:

$ grep ^.....$ /usr/share/dict/words|grep -i ^[AnthonyMouse]*$

From the more than 300 possibilities we can then consider the context. We're talking about Microsoft here, and the problem suggests we're the sort of people who expect anagrams to have secret meaning, so we should prefer an answer implying some kind of conspiracy or kabbalistic nonsense. The obvious candidates are therefore mason and Satan. Between these, Satan would require reusing a letter the candidate set only has once, and one of the other words on the list was stone. We can form two five letter words if we're allowed to reuse letters and thereby get stone mason.

This is the most irrefutable possible proof that we're being pointed to a masonic conspiracy rather than Microsoft's usual popular association with the antichrist.


>it's so generic.

Can only be one root of all evil, I suppose :)


Come on now. We all know that time is money. It stands to reason that time is equally the root of all evil. They don't want you to know that this is actually the original method used to derive the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Thanks for doing the legwork :) my b

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47735828


Sorry, that was yesterday's HN Wordle! (that's the New York Times-acquired wordplay game Wordle, quite the popular wordplay game--just joking that I created a word game of my own)

Useless reflection to ignore below (forewarned!)

I hesitated to post; in the end, the value of the comment was so low, I expected non-wordplay-fans to scroll past and lose nothing, so I left it in the hopes at least one person would find the answer themselves and be pleased about it.

thanks


No drama, I don't mind a puzzle or oblique reference. I'm also a grandparent and spend too much time on pointing out that what one person is thinking of isn't always the same as what another is, and that there's often yet another way of looking at a statement.

I liked your comment, I guessed the word, and had fun pointing out ambiguities at play.


:D u gr8

I'm guessing they're thinking of the word 'money'.

yeah, but, .. Barrett Strong or Flying Lizards money?

Í think their point was that Wireguard has no physical hardware, so it’s strange as a software project they’d be forced to go through verification for a hardware program.

Because it's a kernel driver anyway?

Then the program should have been named the kernel level driver verification program.

Mate this is Microsoft. We're lucky it's not called Azure Copilot Verification Program (New)

Okay. So they can call it the “hardware and WireGuard” program for all I care. The reality is that MS requires this sort of approval / verification process for whatever WireGuard is doing. In true HN fashion everyone loves getting distracted by utter meaningless semantics.

Those meaningless semantics are part of how this got missed in the first place, and why it caused such an issue. Microsoft is a large company, and a poorly named program created requirements that were missed.

It's a virtual network interface. So it's not really hardware, but the computer treats it like it is.

It sounds more like a "driver program" gatekeeper so you are arguing about semantics. I'm not claiming that there is no problem, just that an argument based on the distinction between "hardware" and "driver" is void.

Outside of these unfortunuate situations, a lot of people are quite happy for developers of eg kernel anti cheat to have a difficult time.

We do need to recognise, a long history of "windows always bluescreens" was somewhat reigned in by this policy with a lot of crashes coming down to third party drivers.


> No emails, no warnings, no humans – just bots, catch-22s, and a 60-day appeals queue

Hmmm


If a provider wants to be in the identity business, I don't understand why it has to be tied to a piece of hardware.

Security and attribution is great, but the default assumption of everyone will sign up and do what we want doesn't work.


Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks

I believe they are referring to the dumpster support model. The hardware is so cheap that, if it fails, you toss it in a dumpster and buy more by the gross. Using Kubernetes to spread loads across your less reliable nodes ensures high availability. Sometimes this can be even more reliable because you are regularly testing your recovery and backup features and your hardware is more varied.

The downside is that if some piece of firmware or hardware has a vulnerability you have a larger attack surface.


There's a ton of out-of-support enterprise gear racked up in data centers. It can be done if you have a plan to handle failures.

But that's still a lot easier than managing laptops, which are unwieldily in a DC for a lot of other reasons.


We didn't have support, and we didn't need it, as the hardware was essentially EOL, probably would've been sold for like 20% of new price. We just chucked Selenium grid on them, locked them in the storage room, and if they died, they died (they didn't die a lot tho, which is surprising, as we had quite a few cheap sketchy in there as well)

I can deconstruct my workflow to the point where the benefits of plugging outdated hardware into the project are calculable. Info, transformation, etc I don't need in near real time feels like it's trending towards the price of electricity.

Since I've been looking at this situation from a resource point of view for a bit I see obvious savings in slowing down certain accepted processes. For example, an entity that continuously updates needs to be continuously scraped while an entity that publishes once a day needs to be hit once a day.


Seems like they'd have to find another 5 year old Thinkpad.

If they're buying the same amount elsewhere then the buy pressure equals the sell pressure, might make an arb opportunity across the currencies

> the buy pressure equals the sell pressure, might make an arb opportunity across the currencies

The arb means you’re still suffering a price difference. You’re just paying “the market” to solve it for you.


Yes, you're paying arbitrage instead of shipping fees. Which is not unreasonable for commodity markets with different settlement locations.

Yeah and in theory they should be equal.

> in theory they should be equal

Related. Not equal.


No, equal. If the profit gained from buying/selling gold in New York and doing the opposite in London is not equal to the cost of physically transporting the gold across the Atlantic then there is and arbitrage opportunity and in a perfect market it would be eliminated until those costs are exactly equal.

In reality markets aren't perfect, and also you'd have to take into account the benefit that doing things digitally is much faster, so it won't actually be equal. But in the magic world that economists live in it should be.


I can see that gold settled in London is worth more than gold settled in NYC given trust in both nations right now.

From a user point of view there's no real reason for it, from an admin point of view if your team is already using Github Enterprise then deploying it is basically hitting a toggle switch, and it has some more fine grained controls about what it can or can't do compared to Claude Code.

You laugh, but thanks to those critical minerals ads during cartoons, my kids are now begging me for praseodymium and scandium. Prices for rare earths are through the roof but my 10 year old just won't accept that she can't refine advanced alloys in this economy.


If she wants to refine advanced alloys then should look into the environmental regulations first, there's a reason nearly all such processing is done in China, or South East Asia.


It's fine, but it's a design decision with tradeoffs, and gamers are prepared to make different tradeoffs (bigger and noisier are ok if they deliver a big enough performance jump).


Is that the tradeoff they make with the Nintendo Switch? I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch and it’s a very compact device. My Nintendo Switch 2 is also very compact, smaller and lighter than a MacBook Neo, and it can play AAA games at high frame rates (e.g., Resident Evil: Requiem) while the MacBook Neo struggles with 5 year old titles like Cyberpunk.

This is a very comparable device considering it’s also an ARM-based computer essentially.

We need to stop making excuses for Apple’s unwillingness to include a basic form of cooling for their low end devices. It’s just price segmentation. Make the cheap stuff artificially slow, push you up to the MacBook Pro.


If you cannot hear the fan in a Switch, I implore you to get your hearing checked. It’s not a noisy fan, it’s not a problem the fan is there, but it’s not silent!


I don’t believe I ever said it was silent.

Do you not agree that having a fan in the system was a good design trade-off?


> I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch.

If that's not saying it's silent for you, you don't only need to get your hearing checked.


I listen to the game audio, which is why I don’t hear it.

I still never said it’s silent. I merely implied that it’s quiet enough to satisfy the design parameters, where it is so quiet it’s forgettable. My ears might hear it but my brain doesn’t notice it. Maybe you need to dust out your Switch, it’s not a loud system.

I have no idea why you’re arguing this so hard, but I guess people just go crazy to defend trillion dollar corporation Apple. Enjoy your fanless computer that gives up 15-30% performance just to save a few millimeters and $3 on the BOM.

I bet Mac zealots would be surprised to find out that almost every PC with a fan comes with configurable modes so you can decide how loud or quiet you want your system and trade off performance. Crazy right? The user gets to choose for the situation rather than having to choose at time of purchase.

I would rather own a system that doesn’t slow down after 7 minutes of sustained activity. MacBook reviewers act like this is no big deal since they don’t play any games like the other 900 million PC gamers in the world. “Oh, your video exports will be done by the time throttling starts, so it’s not big deal.” These reviewers also only know about video editing since it’s their job to edit videos. But playing games is by definition dependent on sustained high performance. If I lose performance after 7 minutes I’m losing performance for most of my session.


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