nyan

Part of the problem here is that too many people live to work, instead of the other way around. Once they retire, they have no idea what to do with themselves and take the least-effort path to occupy their time. Which makes them perfect targets for the addictive aspects of social media.

Maybe what we need to do is flood Facebook and Instagram and all the rest with material about the rewards of volunteering for charity.

(Sometimes I'm almost thankful my mother is a technophobe.)

The first two were patched last year sometime. Not sure about the third, but it's the least dangerous (local data corruption only, like the flaky RAM I really ought to replace one of these days).

$120K spent advertising a kid's Minecraft channel is suspicious. The initial flag should just have been for "card not normally used suddenly spending a shit-ton of money—does this look legit?" After that, a ten-second check of what was being advertised would have shown that something was fishy.

Seems to me that this is a dual fail. The father should have monitored his kid more closely and not used his company card for this, but Google should have noticed the unusual spending pattern and flagged it somehow—I mean, it looks like something someone might do using a stolen card, in which case Google might never have gotten its money, if you need a self-interested reason why they should have been keeping a more careful eye on this.

We don't know what kind of company it is or what kind of job this guy does. It's unlikely-but-possible that researching a gaming platform aimed at kids is a reasonable business activity for him.

Y'know, it's funny, but I can't recall ever having heard even one thing I would consider positive about fraternities in the US, and now I discover them tangled up in this matter too. Why are they allowed to continue to exist, when their whole purpose seems to be manslaughter, rape, defamation, and alcohol abuse?

So instead allow Cloudflare to take over the Internet? I do not consider this an improvement.

One is under your control. The other is being passed through a script on the server that may be doing who-knows-what in addition to redirecting you.

(Better if you just drop Google altogether.)

You realize what this suggests about Trump's hair . . .

I have the cables I might conceivably need again some day sorted into labeled plastic bins (USB, ethernet, etc.) The serial cables and other stuff I doubt I'll ever touch again unless something odd happens are coiled, bound neatly with twine, and stuffed in a cardboard box in a semi-inaccessible corner where I don't have to worry about them.

This is one of the few times I've thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.

So once it's bankrupted you, where does it ship you off to?