Posts by Brad Ackerman

Re: The Financial Times piece put the deadline at 2027.

A lot of people inside Intel would need to know about such a deal; the odds of nobody deciding to guarantee their own freedom by being the first to drop a dime to OFAC would be less than zero.

Re: A simpler solution…

Existing sanctions would be more than adequate when combined with requiring affirmative identification of the recipient of cryptocurrency transfers and correcting any lack of whistleblower commission. If you can identify the recipient and it’s a sanctioned entity, the transfer has to be blocked. If you lie about it and the US takes an interest, say hello to several years of prison¹ for everyone who signed off on that transaction; and probably several more people who didn’t directly participate, but commit misprision by deleting communications about it.

The odds of any cryptocurrency industry surviving a regime with that level of AML enforcement border on nonexistent; but if cryptocurrency can find a legal use² and environmental concerns are addressed with a carbon tax, it should be allowed to continue existing.

¹ Conspiracy to fund a sanctioned entity is a big-boy federal offence, so state parole policies do not apply. You serve the sentence you get, and by “several years” I'm assuming your C-suite has no previous record and the gratuity paid to attackers isn’t more than a megabuck. More money is more jail, possibly getting into double-digit years — not that it’s likely to happen more than once with a 10% whistleblower commission.

² Stranger things have happened.

Also, only matching 4% is incredibly weak. They're probably paying under market since their employees apparently don't mind the 3 year vest and 4% match.

Re: Stabby stab

Let's ban motorcycles, cars and trucks! Won't all y'all think of the children?

Banning Chelsea tractors would be a quick win. Cars need a weight tax. But what's needed for safety in the US (unless leftpondia has seen a recent influx of monster trucks) are German driving education requirements, actual safety standards that consider people outside of the vehicle (this one is in progress, but slowly), and a fsckton of bollards.

Re: General question

The ransomware group has the data. It's already been released and legal liability has been incurred. The choice is strictly whether or not to provide a gratuity to them and potentially win a long vacation at His Majesty's pleasure.

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

Oryx has photos of all the assets they count so it would be easy to eliminate decoys. But yes, both sides are using them; albeit cardboard isn't AFAIK used for that. (They're wooden or inflatable; cardboard is used for drones, however.)

Pity the story from WWII about the UK dropping a wooden bomb on a group of wooden German decoys is likely fake.

Re: ZFS... pls explain

To enlarge a ZFS pool by replacing drives, you need to replace each drive in a zvol with a larger one. Assuming your zvol is composed of one or more 2-wide mirrors, you would add the new drive to a mirror, wait for resilvering to complete, drop one of the two existing drives from that mirror, and repeat for the other. Here, you created a new 1-wide mirror, which is indeed a pain to recover from and not an uncommon error (especially when attempting to add a cache disk).

If you don't actually have any free drive bays, you can use an external dock to resilver the new drive or YOLO drop one of the existing mirror drives to add the new drive in its place.

Dan Langille has written up this procedure on his blog.

Re: Pay

Everything's backwards in the US - the more you make, the less you pay for healthcare.

Re: Kernel design

The stupidly short MAX_PATH is correctable with a registry setting; I have no idea why it's not turned on by default at least in 2022, but I'm not particularly wise in the ways of WNT heavy wizardry. (I'm a MS employee, but my attempts to parse the os.2020 repository typically end in a headache.)

It seems a bit of a stretch for cutting coffee and doughnuts to be in any way responsible for Carly Fiorina buying Compaq and spinning off Agilent.

Re: Top-up

Even in the US, police officer doesn't make the list of most dangerous occupations. The paperwork might bore you to death, though.

IOW they can frak up as well as the US DoD. Congratulations. I think.

Re: Good!

It would generally be illegal for a private entity to put that sort of reward up, yes. But the government could do it. (Whether they should is more complicated even if we can all agree that they deserve it.)

Indeed, the Australian government is currently providing lethal aid for Ukraine; doing in Russian ransomware operators is a third-level effect of doing in the Russian Armed Forces and not a direct goal, but it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.

Re: Yeah the fog was disappointing

Jewish space lasers are USAF (or USSF?) assets, not NSA. DoD takes its turf wars very seriously, possibly even more so than actual wars.

I never figured out how a laser manages to be shomer kashrut, but that's a different story.

Re: The "ECB penguin"

That's why ECB stands for "Electronic Colouring Book".

Re: water

That should be "the free-market capitalism that Texas claims to support". They'll happily send men with guns to stop Safeway from selling whiskey on Sunday morning; and forget about opening a card room that competes with the state-run numbers racket. Even the gun laws aren't very permissive compared to hard-core red states like (checks notes) Washington.

Control of a cryptocurrency wallet is irrelevant to whether a transfer of ownership has been perfected. The government doesn't give a flying toaster what a smart contract does when deciding if someone has broken the law.

Re: Seen this poo before

867-5309. The area code is unimportant; Jenny is omnipresent.

Re: RE: Simple question: if knowledge is so completely lost...

I'm being nibbled to death by cats.

666-HWHY gets you the St. Judas Church of Holy Tribulation and Tax Evasion.

Re: Back in the early 90's

Emacs still calls them frames, and the thing most applications call a tab is what Emacs calls a window.

Re: As a Californian, all I can sat is "Who cares?".

If the GOP weren't lying through its teeth about wanting small government, TX would indeed be a libertarian paradise. Make sure to try the unicorn brisket when you go there, because we don't have that stuff in the real world.

Re: Offshoring destination…

I suspect the scammers don't exactly care about following either the current or previous rules, since, y'know, they're not following the (unchanged) laws that prohibit wire fraud.

This change is about allowing multinational companies to not run a totally separate PBX with reduced functionality for their users in India; the previous law was an own-goal that the Union government has finally fixed.

Re: "has retained many satisfied customers"

Three could reasonably be described as "many".