One of the things Snowden revealed was that the NSA routinely spy on their "allies" as well as on their enemies. Anything that goes through an American server. They even hacked Angela Merkel's email!

Yep, ally, enemies... welcome to the real world hey! Very believable.

They also spy on their own love interests too from what I've read. I mean the love interests of the NSA agents themselves, I believe they call it some thing like LOVEINT or something similar. As in, the NSA themselves do that, not just another country's intelligence agencies.

You're assuming to know where I am coming from and what I do or do not know. How prescient of you, jsbjsb01! Perhaps the 02 version took cues from the 01 version of jsbjsb?



Just looking for intelligent replies to add to my ignorance, thank you.



Please continue, non-trolls!

Grow up TorC.

It's not hard to know where you come from if you put it in your Location field of your user profile, ie. "Location: Southern Rockies".

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

BTW, exactly where was I wrong in what I said before ?

PS: At least you admit that you're "ignorant", I'll give you that.

Just to be clear I despise Microsoft and in no way am I buying the whole "kinder, gentler" crap... BUT, to call Windows "a gaming OS" IMHO is just narrow-minded, inaccurate and silly. ALL operating systems play games and all operating systems, with the exception of unmodified console systems and other "embeddeds", do other work besides play games. So how and why does any one OpSys get to be "a gaming os"? IMHO this is a feeble attempt to discredit Windows and it's feeble because it's non-specific when there are actual specifcs available to properly and deservedly discredit Windows!, starting right from the jump with that incredibly invasive Win10 EULA and the ability to "phone home" on unsecured wifi connections, side-stepping even an encrypted file system and that's just for openers !

I think the point being made is that most games were written to play on Windows, more still play on Windows than on any other OS, and many play only on Windows. So the best reason anyone might have to use Windows is that he wants to play games that aren't playable on Linux.

Turbocapitalist probably meant that he can't think of any other reason why someone should install Windows on any computer, so why put it on a server?

Actually, they were using Windows. I know because I have seen them use the system when I was handing in the candidate list for my party at the last local elections.

The one responsible is our mayor so any responsability will be a political thing. There sure is blame, the local council is mandated to have an isolated and adequate backup - and they did not have that. Would they have had it, we would only have had some message about "a small interruption of service".

Right now our mayor is nominated as "best governmental administrator of 2020" - I doubt whether she would accept it :rolleyes:

And they did not make it too difficult for the attackers. They did have remote access but from what I heard from two councilors it wasn't secured with two-factor authentication. I guess one keylogger on a strategic place would definitely provide quick access to the whole system.

And I really don't get it. Even at home I have an isolated backup server.

I know there are lot of good coders and software developers in Russia. Not only troll factory. They work for company, but also for government. Cyber spying. I think the same as in USA.
It is a problem but maybe Russia dont want to destroy USA, and USA dont want to destroy Russia.

Well what other large, rich and developed countries are there besides Russia and China?
That's not what I said. I said your post's tone is.
And I looked at the article. It seems mostly concerned with how badly US government network intrusion detection failed - probably as a result of 4 years of incompetence governing - and how they need to fix it.
Voicing "specific concerns (...) on transportation -- railroad and shipping disruptions -- ultimately affecting agriculture and food supplies and prices" means letting your emotions & fantasy run lose with the facts offered by the article.

...

OK, part of that article is alarmist.
I don't like how this paragraph is phrased:
If you don't read carefully, "nuclear arms talks" can quickly turn into just "nuclear arms", followed by more scary verbiage: "beyond reconnaissance", "gun to our head"... That is fearmongering IMO.

I am still a NY Times subscriber but I have my doubts. From time to time they provide quality journalism, however

1. in the case of online censorship, while the enemy of democracy, they actually seem to condone this practice. There are always hoaxes and there is always fake news. You really need to trust the majority of people to think for themselves and try to convince them of your beliefs. If one tries to persuade people by suppressing other opinions you are doing democracy a disservice and in the end, yourself as well.
2. And for the whole BLM thing: although I can appreciate that some people are still mistreated due to their physical appearance and everybody should actively try to stop that, they really should stop raking up this thing and even use a capital B when describing a specific group of people. The best thing to get this over with is to stop pointing at skin color to be a differentiator. In my team of 13 we have to people who are obviously not originating from Europe. However we have never talked about this when doing their job interview, it just was no issue. And it still isn't. And it will never be. And I even feel bad describing this, because they are my colleagues and they are just as dear to me as any other colleague. In contrast at one time on the NY Times online front page HALF of the stories was about this.

Maybe. However some very large percentage of games also run on Apple computers even without WINE and WINE plus Vulkan fills in a HUGE percentage of any "stragglers". The business of gaming has exceeded the business of Hollywood for around a decade so even phones not only play games but have some written especially for them. My point is that different operating systems appeal to different niche markets and the appeal of Windows didn't start with nor continue with only gaming as it's "Ace in the hole" or raison d'etre.

The reason that Windows still holds somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of Desktop users is it's appliance nature. Users don't have to be bothered by those pesky nuts 'n bolts, and the support and applications that MS maneuvered into being all but essential like MS Office and of course a sprinkling of killing off most of their rivals.

AFAIK almost all motor vehicles of the masses come with radios or some sort of music playing system and calling Windows "a gaming os" is as meaningless, in my mind, as saying Volkswagon is a music vehicle and for that reason unworthy of being called a serious automobile. Furthermore I find the reference using gaming as trivial biased and mistaken.

Games are used in medicine to train micro surgeons and by the military to train soldiers brains in strategy and teamwork as well as in equipment tutorials just to mention a few serious applications. Perhaps most importantly Gaming is the main reason by far that your PC, all our PCs, are as powerful and cheap as they presently are. Nothing else has even come close to providing the impetus and money fueling hardware and software development that games have. This is indisputable. It's History. So I see naming Windows "a gaming os" just wrong on several levels. One might just as well call it or any OS a "Chat OS" at least back in the day of AOL.

There are Drivers and there are Mechanics with some overlap but the vast majority of Drivers are not also Mechanics. A similar pattern is the reason for Windows. I happen to agree that it is at least a bit careless to use an OpSys that has always been plagued by real security issues and while some improved still is that way, in Mission Critical situations but it is not because of gaming.

Hazel, in another thread you and I both pay some attention to, the Faith and Religion thread, there are several non-believers and non-Christians who blame Christianity or even Religion as a whole for past violence like the Inquisition and Honor Killing. I think that is mistaken, that Religion has sometimes provided false justification for People who would have been violent and intolerant regardless but the Prime Mover is the people so inclined, not their beliefs they use as justification.

They would've found something to justify such horrid behaviour just as the Nazis and others used "survival of the fittest" as justification for genocide. That genocide and mass murder has existed since time immemorial is at the core, not belief systems adopting dogma that can be promoted or twisted as support for such a nature. To focus on the possibly apparent commonality is like curing the symptom instead of the cause.

Being black in the US of NA is very, very different from being black in NL.
I won't say more about it, not to take this thread OT.
But if you or anyone want to continue the discussion, let's do it elsewhere - separate topic, or maybe here.

Indeed. When I talk to people about their home systems, if they are still on Windows then the official excuse given is almost always some big name title being Windows-only which the home's main Windows support person plays heavily. In such cases it is always some specific, triple-A game which is named as the excuse for keeping the whole household on 1980s technology despite there being better platforms for games. There is no excuse to run Windows on a server, and only feeble ones for the desktop.

Yes, M$ is already a political matter, it begin a cult and all, and involvement with a politician of that stature will ensure that all technical points are deflected. However, that should not become a vehicle to absolve him of the inherent wrongness of using M$ products in production, especially on servers. Again, see the earlier comment about server-side snapshots.

As for the SolarWinds crack, that just goes in the file of case studies for why proprietary software is unsuitable for both the public and private sectors. The presence of M$ is not a technical problem, it is merely a symptom of staffing problems. The attribution of an attack to any particular government is merely a distraction from the need to eliminate the staff who have pushed M$ products into critical infrastructure, and the managers which put them up to it.

Turbocapitalist, last year MS revenues hit an all-time high of just shy of 150 TRILLION US DOLLARS! (what's a measly $7 trillion ;) ;) ?)... in one year. Take a moment and let that really sink in. That is immensely powerful, beyond comprehension really. There are 213 global nations and Microsoft, one corporation, had greater revenue in one year than over 175 of those entire nations.

What percentage of that do you suppose was Games vs/ Office? Remember, MS wisely (and ruthlessly) pursued getting Word, Excel, etc. the required standard in schools as low as Elementary School. We have to "give the Devil his due" or we risk underestimating the enemy. Even if I misunderstand your conclusions, such claims that single out any one aspect like games, run exactly that risk. Windows and Microsoft is far more than just Games and I seriously think you should reconsider. Just because who you've talked to or read about claims games are the reason is anecdotal at best and "has blinders on" toward the true scale that MS operates on.

Bill Gates always said that his aim was a computer on every desktop and Windows running on all of them!