My company's security training tells me to carefully verify any URLs in received emails, but then they have some security software that rewrites all the URLs in incoming emails - presumably as a way of screening them themselves.
This might be a reasonable trade-off for centralising monitoring, but it significantly hampers the ability to judge the legitimacy of emails myself. At least update your training!
Our last round of security training was roundly mocked by our software division, especially around the subject of one of the rules emphasized over and over being to "never click URLs in emails" and the sign-in process for the website alongside the distribution of lessons was done exclusively through magic links... in emails.
Our CEO is actually a developer himself on our core product (and a bit of a paranoid fella on the cybersecurity front to boot) and he was absolutely furious about this vendor being chosen...
My company does that too, it's really annoying. They also sometimes send out mass emails for things like surveys but link to some third party service. I've even seen them put, in the email, things like "the link goes to a trusted third party and is perfectly safe". Why should I trust that if I'm already suspicious of the emails legitimately?
M365 has an option to rewrite URLs in incoming emails. It's horrible, at least for people that can actually read URLs. Every link turns into a 300 character mess that I have no idea if its valid or not. The only way to tell is to click it. Maddening!
In a Blackhat talk several years ago Adam Shostak had a clever term for companies interacting with you in ways that were indistinguishable from scammers.
He used the term "scamicry": legit communications that mimic scams. For example when a company calls you directly and asks for your security details, but offer you no way to verify who they are first.
> scripts are supposed to be small simple programs that run in sequence and terminate. I shouldn't need to deal with concurrency primitives at all in that particular situation.
I suppose bash pipes are a concurrency primitive, but I don't object to them. I think it's more about appropriate primitives.
If podcasting is truly distributed, then by definition it should be able to survive Apple podcasts going away. It's an interesting thought experiment.
In what way does the ecosystem rely on Apple's infrastructure? Do listeners on Android, or even a third-party apps on iOS, use Apple's podcasts directory for search and discoverability?
The fact that Apple haven't attempted to squeeze podcasting is perhaps an indicator that the ecosystem doesn't really depend on Apple (and they know it).
> In what way does the ecosystem rely on Apple's infrastructure? Do listeners on Android, or even a third-party apps on iOS, use Apple's podcasts directory for search and discoverability?
Depends on which client you use. Google Podcasts has its own directory. However, it's approximately-true that any third party app on iOS / Android that aren't run by a big company (Spotify, Google, Amazon) use Apple's directory for their podcast-search. (Pocket Casts, Castbox, etc on Android all definitely use it.)
It is distributed, but the problem comes in, what if everyone is using the same mechanism to distribute it. I guess a good, more clear example might be, using bitcoin as an example, Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency where anyone can run their own node. Cool. But what if everyone runs their bitcoin node on AWS's infrastructure. Sure, bitcoin itself is distributed, but it has a single point of failure of if Amazon's AWS goes to shit.
Or think about Cloudflare. When Cloudflare has an outage, it feels like half the internet goes down. There is no requirement for all these people use to Cloudflare specifically, but a sufficiently large portion of the market has converged on utilizing Cloudflare.
Those aren't podcasts, in my opinion.
When things I subscribe to become not-podcasts (which has only really happened once - looking at you BBC), I spend a few minutes looking for something new to try out instead. I always have too much in my queue anyway.
My understanding (and I might be wrong here) is that the BBC not-podcasts are for folks within the UK, since the globally available ones have ads, right? I'm not in the UK, and am subscribed to several BBC podcasts, none of which have been not-podcasts.
Not sure to be honest. A couple of years ago someone at the BBC decided they wanted to push listeners to their app (which has live "radio" as well as shows on catch-up). They chose a few of their most popular podcasts, including The News Quiz, and made the appropriately surreal announcement that (great news!) this _topical_ comedy panel show would now be available six weeks sooner via their app.
The RSS feed still doesn't have ads last time I checked (at least for me, accessing from the UK), but now aggregates six-week-old political satire. I do have BBC sounds on my phone, but I never remember to listen to it. I always just go to my podcatcher out of habit, and end up listening to something else.
You get ads outside the UK, which is always weird for me when i get back from holiday and have a bunch of shows i downloaded while I was in another country and haven't listened to yet. Actually, I say bunch - but I've deleted everything except In Our Time. Australian Broadcast Company does more better podcasts than BBC these days.
The distribution pipeline is invisible because of the open, distributed ecosystem.
As soon as a podcast announces it is going platform-exclusive, the pipeline becomes extremely visible for everyone except those already subscribing via that platform.
How is the 3:2 13" with vertical splits? This is my typical layout.
I cancelled my Framework 16 order when I saw quite how big it was was even without the GPU. Would love to support Framework but like your parent comment I think something in the 14" to compact 15" range is my sweet spot.
> The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly;
I mean what are political parties under FPTP other than alliances to form a government? Bickering is rather common within them.
Democratic politics always requires a broad coalition of different interests and groups to assemble a majority. I'm not convinced voting system changes that much, but tensions may erupt in different ways under different systems.
"Within" being the key word. It's a completely different level, believe me.
The last 6 years of UK political life have been exceptional, and the overall sentiment is that they were pretty bad. They were also absolutely run of the mill from a PR perspective: a new executive every few months, elections every 3 years or so, a constant fight to reconcile fundamentally un-reconcileable positions, extreme public brinkmanship, etc etc. PR will fix nothing of that, it will only make it worse.
I would point out that some of the issues you've called out are particular to a parliamentary system. The USA forms executive governments differenty. The closest analogy would be the speaker of the house, where the USA has already seen significant infighting recently.
Where I think a broader range of parties would benefit the US system is reducing the degree by which measures and bills are passed and opposed along consistent party lines. With more parties, there would be coalition building that would encourage more negotiation and cooperation.
The US House Speaker was voted out primarily by Democrats, not Republicans. There were only a handful of Republicans that voted to remove McCarthy. It took the Republicans a while to get enough voted to replace him. Certainly plenty of infighting in both Democrat and Republican parties, but the Speakership contest was the entirety of the House Democrats allying with a very few extremest House Republicans.
Yes, that's useful information to those who aren't familiar with the situation but I would say that the way the Democrats voted in lockstep is a great example of the partisan lack of compromise that a two party system encourages.
Indeed and it’s also good to not look at the grandparent comment and draw any sort of false equivalence here. The sort of problems grandparent describes certainly do exist in PR systems, but GP is describing a system that gets it something like 90% right vs FPTP which is completely and utterly broken beyond repair
> - Representatives can't focus on representing a smaller geographic area, including field offices, outreach, constituent services, etc as easily, because they have to represent a much broader geographic area.
There are lots of practical reasons why geographical constituencies make sense. But nobody ever questions them as the natural way to group voters in elections. I've always wondered what politics would look like if constituencies were based on other criteria. For example, age group, profession, gender, marital status & number of children, or income-bracket.
I am also in favour of proportional voting systems.
But with a party list system, there can be a perception that the party machine has more control over who gets elected. If a party can realistically expect a vote share of 20-30%, and ten candidates are being elected proportionally, then the top two candidates on the list are pretty much guaranteed a seat, whether or not they work or campaign very hard. This puts a lot of power in the hands of the people who decide the party list.
But to be honest, FPTP has a very similar problem with safe seats.
This might be a reasonable trade-off for centralising monitoring, but it significantly hampers the ability to judge the legitimacy of emails myself. At least update your training!