Long ago, Canonical did some shady stuff with the now-deprecated apt-key "net-update" signing validation for updating of GnuPG keys over the network, an exclusive Ubuntu "feature" Debian didn't even adopt that in theory allowed the same thing.
First I thought CVE-2012-3587 was incompetence... but then seeing CVE-2012-0954 after it, I couldn't help think something more was at bay as something connected to a nation state. It does not surprise me in the least to see nation state attackers exploiting N++. Because I've also on very sensitive enterprise PAM systems in F500/research/academia, and about 10% of the time it felt like I'd see Notepad++ on internet-connected systems used for security tooling because vanilla notepad is indeed garbage. It does not surprise me at all this has been used as an attack vector.
If you cannot tolerate “Russian bots” or “Chinese bots,” then you do not truly stand for free speech. It really is that simple.
Free speech, by definition, exists to protect speech that someone finds offensive or objectionable. If everyone only said things that others agreed with, there would be no need for free speech protections at all. In a genuine marketplace of ideas, it is astonishing that anyone would claim the right to censor others, or to strip them of their humanity by dismissing them as mere robots or agents rather than people with sincere views.
Yet we are increasingly binding ourselves (and even “authorized” bots) in chains of verified identity, deliberately suppressing anonymity. Imposing a “zero-trust” architecture on society inevitably leads to totalitarianism.
The right to express ideas without personal attribution has always been a cornerstone of free speech and a free society. It is now being redefined and demonized as mere “bot activity.” While real bots certainly exist (as they have since the days of spam) many accounts labeled as bots are simply human beings who choose anonymity because they hold controversial opinions they do not wish to have traced back to them.
Companies like Cloudflare are among the leaders in this shift by building frameworks ostensibly to monetize AI bot traffic. The consequence, however, is the effective end of online anonymity. When anonymity is forbidden, freedom itself disappears.
This isn't new at all - MajorBBS/Worldgroup had a module called Hoteleconference that did this, which if I remember correctly, you could do "world building" to design rooms, descriptions, actions, etc. much like a mud but with a more social context.
That's not the point. The point is making Ukraine pay off the defense contractors rather than the American taxpayers. Trump made a campaign promise to end the war, and was overwhelmingly reelected on those promises, and has so far kept them.
I wonder how many people went to icq.com and first provided their phone number thinking it was mandatory, then realized there was a "Login with password link", then went back, put in their ICQ UIN, and tried every last password they've used for the past 20 years before finding the one that worked?
Neat trick, Russia!
In any case, I've actually logged in from time to time and only 1 of my 9 friends from the late 90's as nerdy and nostalgic as I actually logged in the past decade and left me a message.
I live in an old furniture factory converted into lofts. LEED certified of course, with mini splits instead of forced air in each unit. This is in the midwest.
For the past 11 years, every season it's failed to maintain minimum temperature of 68 degrees when it hits below 5 degrees outside, or maintain cooling in the summer. Another adjacent building built 2 years after this one with the exact same setup, same story. The complex had resorted to providing residents temporary space heaters up until this year where now they are prohibited by the city from using it to maintain minimum temps thanks to changing the code.
The sheer amount of costs associated they've dumped into the maintenance of this mini split system, along with the electricity costs (electricity is included with rent) is mind boggling and certainly will offset any gains.
Emergency heat was under-installed. In the midwest, you have to have it, and it will suck down a ton of electricity for the handful of days a year you need it. Being entirely reliant on mini-splits without resistive emergency heating is a very strange choice, and it's not what heat pump advocates are recommending.
The idea behind heat pumps is to eliminate the need for the natural gas distribution infrastructure. As the infrastructure ages, more pipes will crack (emitting greenhouse gasses, not to mention blowing up), and the cost will go up. Meanwhile, more renewable electricity is coming online, driving the cost down. (It is a much harder problem to replace every gas furnace in the US versus replacing every power plant in the US. That's why the process is starting early with "hey, maybe you don't want to replace your furnace".)
Right now, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to have a heat pump for the average midwestern house unless you have a pretty big solar installation. But in the future, the day will come where "we're going to pipe explosive gas into your house" is simply not done anymore. That will come in the form of gas companies not being able to maintain their infrastructure at the prices they charge, declining fossil fuel reserves, international demand to lower emissions, etc. It's not a crisis today, but today is not a bad day to start looking towards the future.
(I'm looking forward to replacing my gas stove with an induction stove. CO2 levels are through the roof whenever I cook to the point I have to open windows. I don't need to be breathing all of that.)
We have natural gas running into the building but not for the residents. All the first floor commercial tenants, and the hallways have the luxury of forced air. Just the apartment units that are cold.
There's several apartments with broken mini split head units, and last I heard the other adjacent building, they've been working to connect the apartments to the forced air ducts in the hallways they think will take the load off.
> Being entirely reliant on mini-splits without resistive emergency heating is a very strange choice, and it's not what heat pump advocates are recommending.
If you'd followed the topic long enough you'd know that what the heat pump advocates are recommending is suffering. It sounds like the OP's building has that covered.
> it's not what heat pump advocates are recommending.
sure seems like someone is. could it possibly be the heat pump salesmen? the idea behind heat pumps is to sell heat pumps.
In the event you're cold, maybe you should get a furnace too. But that wasn't part of the sales pitch. Regardless, there are now two appliances you have to maintain. Tell me again how much money this saves?
The builder of the apartment complex likely just undersized the unit, they'll do this with the normal kind of heat pumps-- air conditioners-- too, and hope its not so undersized that it becomes an actual problem.
I rented someone's condo circa 2004 that did this with the air conditioning. Hot summer day? Just warm air coming out of the AC. (It was the kind where the cooling is done centrally and you just have an air handler in your unit.)
Now that I think about it, that happened in both apartments I lived in in Chicago. I remember going for a bike ride one summer afternoon with a friend. Got home, AC didn't do anything, so I went to the grocery store and bought a bag of ice, poured it in my bathtub, and rolled around in it until I was numb. I was cold the rest of the day. Very effective but do the math correctly when you install building-wide air conditioning systems.
Aren't space heaters and emergency heat essentially the same thing? It seems strange for the city to ban space heaters when they really ought not to be worse than any other resistive heater
I imagine the ban on space heaters refers more to their fire risk, since emergency heat would be permanently installed in a location where there’s not any flammable materials but a space heater can be placed right next to any number of flammable things.
It's one step better than people turning their stoves on.
And hilariously, if too many people artificially heat their apartments, it actually crashes the system somehow because if too many zones in the mini split have heat, it flips to AC mode.
They’re exactly the same efficiency (100% electrical power to heat), with the caveat that space heaters tend to be more of a fire danger as they’re temporarily connected.
Resistive baseboard heating is the permanent option.
I've had the same issue with an apartment complex, the AC it could never properly maintain <80F during a summer day.
The issue was that builders didn't properly size the AC unit for the amount of heat it needed to reject in a 5th floor apartment when it was 100F outside.
> or maintain cooling in the summer
Here's the key phrase.
This isn't an issue with a heat pump. They just undersized the unit.
Sounds like some pretty poor planning. Modern heat pumps including the ones that I'm familiar with work down to around -5F. They aren't very efficient obviously at that low temp but mine also has a resistive backup that fires up if needed.
This building opened 11 years ago and I've been a tenant since then. The HVAC is 2013. Each floor has ~20 apartments and each floor connects to a rooftop unit. The hallways are forced air and stay toasty, it's just the apartments that are on mini splits.
A split system has two parts, an indoor air-handling unit (the thing on the wall you point the remote at) and an outdoor compressor, connected to each other with a hose. Mini- because it's small.
I assume you meant generic fallacies, but since neither one makes sense I will go with genetic because it sounds more fun. Could be a fun plotline in a biotech dystopia psychological-thriller film.
SCOTUS has already ruled that for first amendment purposes, if the government hires a contractor to censor, it is still censoring and violating the first amendment.
The FBI does not enforce supreme laws to which they are subject to, they have throughout their pathetic existence continue to routinely break laws largely with impunity.
Ya. The government cannot pay twitter to do what the government itself could not do. That says nothing about twitter voluntarily doing something to appease authorities. The police normally cannot force people to cooperate with thier investigations, yet millions of people still do. If everyone exercised thier rights to non-cooperation in each and every cicumstance they could, criminal justice would grind to a halt.
First I thought CVE-2012-3587 was incompetence... but then seeing CVE-2012-0954 after it, I couldn't help think something more was at bay as something connected to a nation state. It does not surprise me in the least to see nation state attackers exploiting N++. Because I've also on very sensitive enterprise PAM systems in F500/research/academia, and about 10% of the time it felt like I'd see Notepad++ on internet-connected systems used for security tooling because vanilla notepad is indeed garbage. It does not surprise me at all this has been used as an attack vector.