nyan

You can't stop the state from committing violence with a handgun, for crying out loud. Or even with a million handguns. The state will always have better equipment than you, most of which doesn't require anyone to get within handgun range if they don't want to. Granted, big missiles make a tremendous mess and they'd rather not use them, but the possibility is always there.

Expecting citizen violence to overthrow a modern government that's dead set on preventing it is, to put it politely, unrealistic. Unless you can convince the military to take your side or at least bow out, removing the government's ability to exert force, but you aren't going to accomplish that by directing violence at the military.

1. Wrong country. We don't do that up here. Overall, we find this results in fewer unnecessarily dead people.

2. Let's say he'd had a gun, and used it against the police. He would just have gotten hit with an additional charge that could have been anything from resisting arrest to first-degree murder, depending on how good a shot he was. So he'd still be in prison even after being proven innocent of the original charge. Real smart.

Uhhhh this seems to imply that the fuselages aren’t normally checked for cracks.

They are checked. On a schedule. Sometimes it's discovered that the original maintenance schedule was too spaced out, and the aircraft should be checked more frequently. This means that any that have exceeded the new length of time between checks have to be checked right away or be grounded until they are, which may be what happened here.

That doesn't mean that even the new schedule for this particular aircraft is frequent enough, just that in general, someone does examine aircraft for structural damage and metal fatigue from time to time.

Boeing doesn't actually want the aircraft to come apart in the air. That's the kind of thing that makes airlines buy Airbuses instead. Their goal is to try to figure out what the cheapest, least-frequent maintenance schedule is that will still keep the planes from catastrophically self-destructing. Too bad they suck at it.

The thing is, a lot of websites don't need to be interactive, or only need to present interactivity to a minority of visitors. Consider Wikipedia, for example. Only a small percentage of people visiting the site are interested in editing anything. The rest shouldn't be burdened with massive quantities of extra downloads for a feature they don't need, want, or use.

Furthermore, you don't need a "modern web framework" to have an interactive site, and most of them seem to be pretty bloated.

The level of technology a site displays should be appropriate to what the site is trying to do. If your site is about services that you need an appointment for, then yes, there should be a booking setup on the site. If you're running a store, you should have a shopping cart. Add as much of an interactive layer as is necessary to do these things, and do them well, but no more than that.

Most of us just want pages to render quickly, stop tracking us unnecessarily, and stop choking our connections and stealing our electricity for stuff that isn't useful to us (or to anyone except depraved corporations).

sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents?

Given the volume of requests that have been semi-DDOS'ing a lot of servers? 5% is probably an underestimate.

the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.

"Surely" is like "assume"—it says more about the speaker than the entity being discussed. They almost certainly don't use completely distinct strings (no one does—they all start with "Mozilla/5.0"); at most they might have tacked an additional bit on at the tail. And that's if they're being aboveboard.

and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?

Why not? But actually, this may be due to an incorrect assumption on the part of the stats collectors. Typical strings for bots that admit to being bots don't specify an OS: "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot" as opposed to, say "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0" or "Mozilla/5.0 (Android 15; Mobile; SM-G556B/DS; rv:130.0) Gecko/130.0 Firefox/130.0". If they're dumping anything without OS markers into the "Linux" bucket, that might do it.

Crawlers—even the honest ones—have been spoofing browser User-Agent strings (partially or completely) since the beginning of the commercial Internet. Why would they do this? To dodge bad browser-sniffing scripts, which I still run into from time to time.

Thing is, "Cloudflare identified this as a normal browser used by a human" doesn't mean it actually is a normal browser with a human in the driver's seat. There are going to be both false positives and false negatives (a browser puppeted by Selenium is still a human-usable browser, after all, and could even be taken over by a human in mid-session; by contrast, a browser whose settings have been chosen by a privacy advocate may make some expected indicators unavailable). So it's hard to make any useful inferences.

You're pretty much only at risk on this one if you're doing Javascript development or running a server. The popular Javascript and Python library repos seem to get successfully attacked a couple of times a year each.

Linux main distro repos haven't been reporting any significant breaches. You should be okay to update your system (but if you're on Arch or one of its downstreams, maybe steer clear of AUR packages for now).

Not quite the same thing, because back then, each wire had to be listened to by a human being in order to see if there was anything actionable passing along it, making surveillance a scarce resource that had to be deployed selectively. Now we have machines listening for keywords on all communications passing through a system, and the resource is no longer scarce: they can listen to everyone, and do.

Unfortunately, people's expectations are still stuck in the phone-tap era.

Only if the Marx they're talking about is Groucho.

Discourse is kind of a moving target at the best of times, and I wouldn't bet on any precanned command older than a couple of months working properly.

The server may have flagged your wget command as an unacceptable bot—as written, it's ID'ing itself as a bot, can pull a new page every half a second if you get unlucky with --random-wait, and isn't respecting robots.txt

The thing with the local index page pointing to the forum threads on the server matches what the wget man page says about --convert-links where the target file wasn't actually downloaded. Is it pulling any files at all other than the index? Do the files' names and extensions match what shows up in the index if you don't pass --convert-links?

Also, I'm pretty sure there's no way to get those images if they aren't hosted on the same server. (This is just common sense, or an offsite link could result in wget trying to mirror the entire Internet.)

A hobby, apparently, and one she isn't very serious about, since one local used book store is quite happy to put together 6-8 banker's boxes of books for my family a couple of times a year and then hold them for pickup. (Needless to say, we don't destroy them to feed to AI.) Even if you don't keep an electronic invertory, finding the books should be as simple as following the authors' names in alphabetical order along the appropriate genre shelf. Putting them in boxes isn't difficult.